by Ian Hamilton
“I’ll make some more calls and I’ll take a few guys out for drinks.”
“Do that, but keep it low-key.”
“I know the ropes. I watched you and Uncle for long enough.”
“Uncle was the best.”
“He used to say you were.”
“That’s a lovely thing to say.”
“Momentai, boss,” Sonny said, sounding embarrassed.
“Call me tomorrow night with an update.”
Ending the call, Ava felt uncomfortable. She hadn’t expected the report Sonny had given her; it had caught her off guard. Was it possible that Lop’s paranoia was justified? It was still difficult to believe. She suspected that Sonny’s explanation would prove to be correct.
“The dumplings are ready whenever you are,” Fai said, appearing in the kitchen doorway. “And I’ve opened a bottle of wine.”
Ava joined her and they managed to eat and drink their way through half an hour without discussing the disk.
“What do you want to do tonight?” Fai asked when they had finished the dumplings.
“I should phone Bai Jing.”
“No, please don’t,” Fai said. “My head needs a break from all this stuff. Besides, if we leave it alone for a while, maybe we’ll create room for some fresh ideas.”
“That’s not a bad thought,” Ava said. “What would you prefer we do?”
“I was thinking about doing something you might find strange.”
“How strange?”
“I’d like to watch The Air We Breathe. I have the DVD, and it’s been years and years since I last saw it.”
“That’s not what I expected. I remember you telling me that you don’t particularly like revisiting your performances.”
“This will be different. I don’t think of the film as mine — it’s entirely Lau Lau’s creation. I knew so little and he guided me the whole way through it. At least, that’s how I remember it,” Fai said. “Seeing him today made me so sad. I’d like to think of him in a different light, at a different time, and nothing could do that better than watching all three hours of his masterpiece.”
Ava thought about how dark and gloomy the film was, right down to its depressing ending, but there was no argument that it was a masterpiece. “Then that’s what we’ll do,” she said.
( 39 )
The ringtone wasn’t familiar, and when Ava first heard it, she thought she was dreaming. Then Fai’s sleep-filled voice said, “Who is this, and why are you calling so late?”
Ava knew she wasn’t dreaming and was instantly awake. She picked up her own phone and looked at the time. It was five past two.
“I’m going to put this on speaker. You can tell her yourself,” Fai said.
Ava moved closer to Fai’s phone. “Are you there?” a man’s voice said.
“I am.”
“Come outside. We need to talk to you.”
“Come outside where?”
“We’re in the courtyard.”
Ava slipped from the bed and walked to the window. She pulled back the curtain ever so slightly at one edge and peered outside. She didn’t have the best of angles and there wasn’t a lot of light, so all she could see clearly was the middle of an empty, rain-spattered courtyard. If someone was there, he had to be lurking on the perimeter.
“I don’t think coming outside is a good idea,” Ava said.
“You’re not listening well. I wasn’t making a request. I’m telling you what you have to do.”
“Both of us?”
“Just you.”
“Why?”
“You’re still not listening well. We need to talk to you.”
“Whatever you have to say, you can say over the phone.”
The line went quiet, and Ava wondered if he was talking to someone else.
“Here’s the deal,” a different man’s voice said. Ava thought it sounded familiar. “You either come outside now or the contents of that disk will be public by noon tomorrow.”
“That’s not our arrangement,” Ava said, now recognizing the muffled voice of the blackmailer, the man on the DVD. “And why would you do that? You’ll lose the money that Pang Fai has agreed to pay.”
“We have other people who are willing to pay as much. We came to her first out of respect.”
Ava looked at Fai, who in turn was staring at her, shaking her head. Don’t go, she mouthed.
“I’ll need a few minutes to get dressed,” Ava said. “Where are you when you say ‘outside’? In the courtyard? On the hutong?”
“Just come outside. You’ll find us.”
“In a few minutes,” Ava said, ending the call.
“You can’t go,” Fai said.
“I don’t think it’s wise to call his bluff about releasing the disk, and I think it would be foolish to think we can avoid them indefinitely. They’re outside now and they might not go away until I come out,” Ava said. “Besides, I’m interested to hear what they have to say. It might get us that much closer to knowing and understanding who’s behind this.”
“It could be dangerous.”
“The way I look at it, it’s as dangerous to stay in here as it is to go out,” Ava said, pulling the curtain open a little but still not seeing anyone. “It’s raining like hell. I’ll put on my running gear and my baseball cap.”
Fai slid from the bed. “I’ll go with you.”
“No, you won’t. He was quite specific about me being alone,” Ava said. “What you can do is come to the front door and keep an eye on what happens. Who knows, you might be able to identify one of them.”
Fai nodded and reached for her housecoat. Ava went to the closet where her jacket and training pants were hanging. She put them on over underwear and a black Giordano T-shirt, then jammed the cap on her head, tucking her hair in at the back. “Let’s go,” she said to Fai. “My running shoes are at the front door.”
They went down the stairs in the dark. When they reached the ground floor, Ava turned on all the hallway and entrance lights. She kneeled to put on her running shoes. “Turn off all the lights after I go outside, and don’t stand near the door until you do. I don’t want them to see you, and it will be easier for you to see them.”
“Okay,” Fai said, reaching for Ava.
As they hugged, Ava realized that Fai was trembling. “Don’t worry. I’m sure they just want to talk,” she said, gently disengaging and reaching for the door handle.
Cold rain was the first thing she noticed as she stepped into the courtyard. The wind was stronger than it had looked from the bedroom window, and the rain hitting her face stung like tiny ice pellets. She looked left and right and saw no one. What the hell? she thought. Then the main door that led from the hutong into the courtyard opened. Three men came through it and started to walk towards her.
Only one was of any meaningful size, while the other two were about the same medium height and weight. They walked in a cluster, the largest lagging slightly behind, his head constantly turning as if he was looking for someone else. As they drew near, Ava saw that one of the smaller men was wearing brown jeans and a dark blue hoodie, which fitted Fan’s description of the man who’d delivered the package. The large man also wore a hoodie, and they both had the hoods pulled tightly around their faces. The third man wore a black balaclava like the one she’d seen on the disk.
Ava walked slowly towards them, away from the front door.
“You can stop right there,” the one in the balaclava said when they were about five metres apart.
“Is this really necessary?” Ava asked. “We could have done this over the phone without getting wet.”
The large man shifted a few steps to the left and moved slightly closer to Ava.
“You’ve become a pain in the ass,” the man in the balaclava said. “We had a deal, and all you’ve done since
we made it is to go behind our backs and try to undo it.”
“How did I do that?”
“We know who you’ve been talking to. We know what kind of questions you’ve been asking. You should have left things alone. You shouldn’t have interfered.”
“It was a natural enough thing for us to do, wasn’t it. Why wouldn’t we want to know who was blackmailing Fai?”
“Stop saying ‘we.’ This has nothing to do with her. If you weren’t here, if you hadn’t stuck your nose where it doesn’t belong, there would be nothing to discuss. We wouldn’t have to visit you in the middle of the night.”
“But I am here. I am involved.”
“You need to get uninvolved. Without you, there’s no problem. Without you, Fai will do the right thing and be able to get on with her life.”
“And if I choose not to?”
He turned his head to the left and nodded. “Then we’ll make sure you don’t have any choice,” he said. “We didn’t want it to come to this, but we expected it would. And truthfully, we almost hoped that it would. You don’t have any friends in our circle.”
“This was your intention all along, wasn’t it.”
“I’ve said enough.”
The large man took two steps towards her as the one in the blue hoodie moved to the right and then started forward. It wasn’t hard to gauge which of them on the surface presented the most danger, so Ava pivoted to face the larger man while trying to keep the other one in her line of vision. The footing wasn’t the best, and Ava’s running shoes slipped on the wet bricks. She swore and then steadied herself.
“Get her,” the man in the balaclava said.
The big man grunted and lunged, his right hand reaching for her hair. She stepped back and the hand clawed at air. She moved to the right, her hand forming the phoenix-eye fist. Her target was his ear, but as she gathered the power to strike, she slipped again and found herself face to face with him. He threw a punch that was aimed at her nose. She ducked and his fist scraped the top of her cap. It was her turn to lunge. She went at him head-on, the phoenix eye driving into his upper belly at the exact point where his ribs met, where the tangle of nerves was most sensitive. He groaned and fell back a couple of steps, but he stayed on his feet and didn’t buckle over as she’d expected.
He raised his head and he stared at her with as much anger as she’d seen in any man. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a knife. He pressed a button and the blade hissed into sight. “Get your knife out,” he said to the man in the blue hoodie.
Ava knew time was short. The longer she waited, the greater their advantage. Her choices were to attack or to run. As the word “run” crossed her mind, her body reacted. She leapt at the big man and, as she got to him, extended her right leg and propelled the heel of her shoe into his groin. This time he did buckle, if only slightly, but it was enough to give her a clear shot at his head. She rammed the base of her palm into his forehead, and as his head rocketed back, she moved closer still and drove her fist into his throat. He collapsed onto the wet bricks, both hands clutching at his neck.
Ava saw the man in the balaclava moving away from them, back towards the entrance. As he did, his eyes flickered to the left. Ava swivelled in time to see the other man coming at her with a switchblade in his right hand.
“You don’t want to do this,” she said.
“You fucking bitch!” he said. “I’m going to cut you open and watch you bleed.”
As he measured Ava for an attack, she was measuring him. He was right-handed and his body was turned slightly to the left, another indication that he favoured his right side. His steps were deliberate and he didn’t appear to be particularly agile. Ava knew that if she could avoid his first swipe, it was unlikely he’d be able to gather himself quickly enough for a second.
“Come and get me,” she said, shaking her hips and then sliding her feet back and forth to either side. He took a couple of slow, careful steps forward and then jumped at her, the knife sweeping from right to left, aimed at her midsection. He was faster than he looked. As the knife slashed across the front of her jacket, for a second Ava thought she had miscalculated. But even if he had found flesh, it wouldn’t have stopped her from grabbing his wrist with one hand as it moved by and then gripping his lower forearm with the other. She took a step back, straightened his arm, and then snapped. She didn’t know if she’d broken both his ulna and radius, but it really didn’t matter. She’d done enough damage to make his arm completely useless and to cause him to scream in agony.
At that moment the courtyard suddenly became better lit. Ava turned and saw Fai, Fan, and an elderly couple in their doorways. Fai started to run across the courtyard.
“Let’s get out of here,” the man in the balaclava shouted.
Blue Hoodie tried to gather himself. He stumbled towards the man on the ground and nudged him with his toe. “Let’s go,” he said.
The big man was still gasping for air as he struggled to his feet. Ava thought about knocking him down again, but Fai had almost reached her. The last thing Ava wanted was for the men, injured or not, to turn on her friend.
Ava looked up to see the man in the balaclava leaving the courtyard. The other two followed him, not looking back.
( 40 )
They gathered in Fai’s living room — Fan, Ava, Fai, and the elderly couple. Ava wanted to be alone with Fai, but it was difficult to be rude to the old couple, and they couldn’t let them in without admitting Fan.
The couple wanted to call the police. Ava talked them out of it by arguing that she knew nothing about her attackers, and that as a visitor to China, the last thing she wanted was to get involved in a police investigation. Her last point made a bigger impact than the first, which didn’t surprise Ava; she’d never met anyone in China who trusted the police to do anything but uphold the status quo and look after their own interests. The couple understood that if the attackers had any kind of link to the police, it could be Ava who was charged with assault and not them.
Still, even after that was settled, Ava and Fai couldn’t get anyone to leave. A lot of concern was expressed about the knife that had cut Ava’s jacket, until she took it off and showed them that her skin was untouched.
Then the old woman asked the question that Ava knew was coming, because she’d heard it so many times before. “How did you do that?” It was asked in a solicitous manner, but there were undertones of both fear and excitement, which Ava had also heard before.
The truth was that she couldn’t even think about how she’d done it. She’d reacted as she had since she was a teenager first learning martial arts. They attacked, she defended. Or, more properly, they attacked and she counterattacked. The impulse was so natural to her that it was like breathing. There was virtually no thought process attached to it, and certainly no emotion. No fear, no anger, no elation. Simply, they attacked and she counterattacked.
The hardest thing to learn had been technique. That hadn’t been challenging until she met Grandmaster Tang and was introduced to bak mei. Even then she progressed faster than any student he’d ever taught, because she so readily embraced the demands he made on her in terms of focus and precision.
One day he said to her, “How fast am I?”
“What do you mean?”
“When I attack you, what do you see?”
“I see you. I see a fist, a foot.”
“Do you sense them or do you actually see them? Are they a blur or are they real?”
“I see them, and sometimes it’s like they’re in slow motion.”
“I thought so,” the Grandmaster said. “Do you ever think I’m going to defeat you?”
“No. I don’t think about whether you will or you won’t. I don’t think at all. I just see and I react.”
But Ava couldn’t say that to the old woman, so she said, “I was terrified. Luckily I had some martial
arts training when I was young, and some of it came back to me.”
After a few pots of tea the couple finally left. Fan lingered, which gave Ava a chance to ask him if he knew any of the men who’d been in the courtyard.
“No,” he said.
“But one of them was wearing brown jeans and a blue hoodie, like the one you told us delivered the package.”
“Oh, him. Well, of course I recognized him, but I don’t know who he is. Those are two different things.”
“Don’t mess with me,” Ava said abruptly. “I’m losing my patience with you. I think you know more than you’re telling us.”
“How could you say that?”
“I just did, and let me repeat, I’m losing my patience with you. If I find out that you’ve been playing games, I’ll make your life miserable.”
Fan turned to Fai. “How can you let her say things like that?”
“She can say what she wants,” Fai said. “I’m with her.”
Fan lowered his head. “I think I should be going.”
“A great idea,” Ava said.
Fan pushed himself to his feet and started towards the door, with Fai following him. Ava leaned back on the sofa as the door closed behind him. Fai joined her and started to speak, but instead she just slumped against Ava. “I was so frightened,” she said finally.
“You didn’t look frightened when I saw you running across the courtyard.”
“I was frightened and angry at the same time.”
Ava stroked Fai’s hair. “Well, I thought it was very brave of you. I just wish it hadn’t been necessary.”
“Who were those men?”
“Didn’t you get a good look at them?”
“No. I was more concerned about you,” Fai said.
“One of them wore a balaclava. He’s the guy from the disk, the one who issued the blackmail threat. I recognized his voice when they called,” Ava said. “The other two are thugs. I don’t think they’re anything more than that, just hired muscle, and not very good at that.”
