by James Adams
Already dead, the body of the Cho Hai slumped, supported only by the two assistants. Kung moved around to the other side to fire a second shot into the right ear. This was followed by a third and fourth through the eyes and a fifth through the mouth. Only then did the assistants allow the body, its head now a pulpy unrecognizable mass, to slump to the floor. The ritual had been carried out and the body would be dumped in the back streets of Kowloon to serve as a warning to anyone thinking of betraying the White Lotus Triad.
The ceremony over, Kung walked down the room between the rows of his bowing acolytes. Once outside the temple, he turned left, walked down a richly carpeted passage and into a second, more comfortable room. Here, beneath paintings commemorating scenes from Triad folklore, Kung took off his robe and in a few swift movements was transformed back into a prosperous local businessman.
He paused in front of the mirror to check on his parting, his right hand delicately touching a few strands of dark, brilliantined hair back into place. He adjusted the knot in his tie, smoothed his jacket and shot the cuffs on his shirt, small gestures that reassured him that the transformation was complete. A swift glance at either cheek to make sure it was clear of blemishes and blood, then Kung pulled open another door and moved into the quiet of a comfortable, European-style dining room. At the simple mahogany dining table, a legacy of Britain’s Imperial involvement in the colony, there were only two places set. Bowing, Kung advanced to greet the person at the head of the table. Now Kung, who only minutes earlier had been the ruler, was the supplicant, clearly anxious to please and impress.
“Stanley. Come in, sit down.” There was no affection in the greeting or the clear, commanding tone.
Kung was handed a computer printout and his eyes flickered over the figures, his experienced financial brain assimilating the columns and totals and assessing their significance. His brow furrowed as his host began speaking.
“This is a dismal performance. For the first time ever profits are down. Drugs, pornography, smuggling to the mainland; all the mainstays of our business are being hit by the Chinese.
“They hit us again in Guangdong last night and wiped out the Lam Wing Chui Lodge. What the mainland does, the police here imitate and we can expect further trouble soon. This cannot go on. I am not prepared to see all that we have worked for be destroyed as the Chinese try and prepare the ground for their takeover in 1997.”
“But there is little we can do,” Kung interrupted. “We have tried bribes. We have tried intimidation. But the Chinese are determined to come in with their own agenda. You know as well as I do that the Communists in Beijing see Hong Kong as the Golden Child, the source of enough wealth to keep their lunatic policies alive. Whatever we say or do, they won’t want us around taking any of the cash they think should be theirs by right.”
“No solution is not an answer, Kung,” his commander replied. “I will not sit here and watch our business fall apart and then have the Chinese come in and take over everything. We must think about this problem more aggressively.
“What we need is a new home, somewhere we can continue to work and to build on what we already have. We have been expanding all our operations in Europe, particularly in the new Eastern European countries. That is our future and we need to be in a position to exploit it properly. That means moving from Hong Kong to Europe — but to do that we need passports, passports which the British have refused to provide.”
Despite Hong Kong’s colonial status, the British had refused to give residents British passports. Typically, the British Foreign Office had produced a classic bureaucrat’s compromise which satisfied no one. Under a quota system, several thousand residents were allowed to get British passports each year while the very rich could automatically qualify. In fact, until five years before the Chinese takeover, the quotas had not even been taken up since the Hong Kong residents, entrepreneurs to a man and woman, hoped to continue making money. Then, as insecurity replaced greed, the quotas became rapidly oversubscribed. Demonstrations ensued, which had deteriorated into riots as the local people tried to force the British to honour past promises of citizenship to all.
Kung listened attentively as his controller’s voice continued.
“We have tried persuasion. We have hired PR people to lobby Parliament. We have threatened. But the British are too frightened of Beijing to do anything to annoy the Communists. Without the passports our whole existence is threatened. We must have them.
“So, if the only thing they understand is fear, then that is what we shall give them.”
A piece of paper came fluttering down the table to rest in front of Kung. He recognized the front page of the South China Morning Post. The article circled in red ink was headlined “IRA bomb defused in Whitehall”.
A bomb containing 5 lbs of Semtex explosive was defused by police bomb-disposal experts in Whitehall yesterday.
The bomb, which had been left underneath a car parked outside the Royal Horseguards Hotel, would have caused serious damage to the hotel and the nearby Ministry of Defence. However, Scotland Yard confirmed last night that the IRA had issued a warning in time for the bomb to be defused.
The attack is believed to have been carried out by an IRA unit which has been operating in Britain for the past five years.
“You need to be more creative, Stanley,” the voice mocked. “The British have been fighting the IRA for years and will no doubt be still doing so long after we are gone. The politicians and the public accept that terrorism is a part of life and they have adjusted their lives accordingly — although there is a universal hatred of the IRA which we can exploit. When you have a nation that has learned to live with terrorism you have a government that understands the subtleties of compromise.
“Go away and think about that, Kung. Come back to me with a plan that will drive the English to us. And remember what Sun Tzu says: “All warfare is based on deception. So attack the enemy when he is unprepared. Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.””
CHAPTER II
Even after ten years, Jonny was surprised at the energy that seemed to flow off the pavements and into the people. Everywhere people hurried, the taller profile of the Europeans seeming to lope at a slower pace which actually carried them faster than the smaller Chinese. When he had first arrived in the city, this energy had been transferred and he had got caught up in the pace and the excitement.
Now there were too many memories. Where the tourists saw the magnificent fa9ade of the Furama Kempinski hotel, Turnbull remembered the killing of a German businessman who had failed to meet his debts to the Triads. One of his hands had been skinned and the skin stuffed in his mouth with a single dollar bill. It was crude and brutal, but the message would have spread throughout the international crime syndicates: you don’t mess with the boys or you pay. As usual, he had solved the case and as usual he was sure that the two hoods who had confessed to the crime actually had nothing to do with it. They had been offered up by the Triad concerned and the two had volunteered for jail in return for a commitment from the Triads to look after their wives and extended families generously. It was a form of social welfare which had worked well in Hong Kong for generations and to the Chinese it seemed eminently satisfactory: a man had been punished, police honour was restored and everyone had benefited — except for the dead man.
But such crimes were the exception. Mostly the Triads did their work away from the tourists’ gaze, where any fallout would do nothing to damage the business on which they all depended.
The scene changed from the obvious, grasping glitter of the fashion boutiques and tax-free gold shops of Central as Queens Road passed Pottinger Street and the car moved towards the stalls selling bolts of cloth next to others selling live chickens, snakes and pigs. This is the Triad heartland on the edges of Central, the traditional bastion of the organizations that really run the colony.
Turnbull’s car pulled up on the edge of a small crowd, the tourists
outnumbering the locals, who have learned it is better to keep away from trouble, particularly police trouble. Turnbull pushed his way through the crowd, his tall, broad-shouldered body overpowering local and visitor alike. At the front of the crowd, a small knot of police were gathered with the lights, cameras and tapes that mark both a film set and a scene-of-crime unit. The subject of their interest was huddled in the doorway of the Aw Boon Tailor. Turnbull knelt down to look up into the face of the victim without touching the body. There was little left of the head, which had been blown to fragments, but the body told Turnbull all he needed to know. One arm was folded over the bloodied chest, its posture unnatural against the sprawling limpness of the rest of the body. On the thumb a single brass ring rested. Jonny peered at it closely, his lips tightening in disgust as the flies that already covered the wounds scattered. The ring was covered with tiny carvings of donkeys, each nose sniffing the next animal’s tail, a message that used to represent the archer’s method of getting to battle. But The Archer had adapted it to send a message, the donkey’s universal image for stupidity perfectly clear.
He straightened and turned to the sergeant standing next to him. “This is one of The Archer’s men,” he said, the sergeant’s nod confirming his own analysis. “By the look and number of bullet wounds, he has executed one of their own. Probably a Grass Sandal. But why here? They normally bury their men.”
“It’s a message to the Kam Lan Kwan,” the sergeant said. The building over there is one of theirs and this is their turf.” He pointed to the Win Sun Porcelain Co. shop on the other side of the street, the modem shopfront contrasting with the overhanging wooden apartments above, from which laundry, pots, pans and clotheslines hung. “This guy must have been working for them and he’s been dumped here as a warning.”
Turnbull let out a small grunt, part agreement and part anger. The sergeant continued: “It’s one thing for them to settle their arguments among themselves but it’s quite another when they start dropping bodies around the place and upsetting the visitors.”
The lines were well rehearsed, a litany that Turnbull had come to know well over the years. He had learned that another of the colony’s compromises with crime was that a blind eye was frequently turned on Chinese killing Chinese, on protection rackets within the Chinese community, and on other illegal acts as long as they did not disturb the civilized tenor of society as a whole. It had proved a fatally flawed method of law enforcement, because the Triads had developed an independent police and judicial system which made the legitimate police and the courts largely irrelevant. That in turn meant that crime had grown almost unchecked. While Turnbull understood the game, he had never really played it according to the rules the government and the governed had established. There was often little to be done but when it was personal he could still find the energy to go on the attack. And the thumb ring made this personal.
“I think it’s time we paid someone a visit,” he said to his sergeant.
If all the glitz in Hong Kong is London, Paris and New York taken to Oriental excess, then the Mandarin is the hotel that is the ultimate in luxury. Its magnificent opulence, where ancient and genuine Chinese sculptures decorate the walls and each step inside its gilded doors is attended by a servant eager to anticipate the guest’s wishes, attracts the Westerner. The hotel’s proximity to the Star Ferry complex, which connects Hong Kong to Kowloon and the mainland, makes it a convenient meeting point. That, and its excellent pastries, made the hotel The Archer’s favourite place to hold court.
Dai Choi was now the senior Hung Kwan or Red Pole — Enforcer — of the White Lotus Triad. Unlike his Mafia counterpart in New York, Dai Choi was no simple thug but a well-respected member of a feared organization responsible for the training and supervision of some five hundred men who provide the guards, street toughs and army for the White Lotus. The exiling of the Ma brothers had seen the eclipse of the 14K Triad and, as White Lotus gained in influence, they had recruited the best talent from 14K. Dai Choi had been one of the first to cross over, his prowess as an Enforcer already legendary.
He had earned his nickname in the Tai A Chau refugee camp shortly after he arrived from China with his sister eleven years earlier. One of the Gurkha guards had molested his sister who had later contracted typhus and died. Grief and frustration at his own impotence in the face of his sister’s illness had focused Dai Choi’s enmity on the guard and he had determined on revenge. Using wood cut from the walls of one of the huts for the arrow, a cross spring from a bed-frame for the bow and the guts from a camp cat for the string, he made a powerful weapon. The single shot had struck the guard in the neck, severing the artery, and he had died minutes later, his life leaking out on to the filth of the beaten earth of the camp compound.
The camp inmates were united in their hatred of their guards and the later investigation produced no leads and no suspects. But the incident had made Dai Choi famous as a man who had repaid dishonour with courage and regained some control of his own fate in a camp that was specifically designed to remove any freedom of spirit or action. Word of The Archer’s success had naturally reached the ears of the Triad recruiters who drew their men and women from the ranks of refugees.
Squeeze and a set of new papers got him outside the wire and into the secure embrace of the 14K. The violence that had helped propel Dai Choi out of the camp became a way of life, and he had developed a new, darker personality. After eleven years, killing was an accepted part of his work, one that gave him status, money and the chance to enjoy the kind of lifestyle he had dreamed of in China.
Soon after he joined the White Lotus, Stanley Kung had sought him out. It was a time when the Triad was becoming established as a major force, and there was plenty of work for the right muscle and opportunities for advancement for those with the brains to seize them. As White Lotus had advanced so had Stanley and Choi, the one acting as the right hand of the Commander and the other rising to the coveted position of Red Pole, the blunt instrument available to enforce his master’s wishes.
Now, with the struggle to survive far behind them, the two men had consolidated their positions as key figures of power in Hong Kong. Kung attended the Jockey Club races, was photographed at the right society dinners where fluttering European women sought his views and his charity donations and gossiped among themselves at the rumours that surrounded him. Dai did not have such access, but in the highly stratified Hong Kong society occupied the next rung in the social ladder: a dinner here and there but no pictures, and he only gave to Chinese charities. He was a successful international criminal, who had graduated from enforcer to entrepreneur.
Still only 35, he had long ago shucked his Chinese origins and dressed in the Hugo Boss suits, Sulka shirts and Nicole Miller ties of the smarter Western boardrooms in town. In the last couple of years he had taken to working out in the gym in the Mandarin in the mornings and then holding court in the coffee room overlooking the lobby immediately afterwards. He liked the after-exercise rush combined with the feeling of power that the Mandarin gave; a regular reminder of his roots and how far he had come.
He was a good-looking man. Life outside the camps had filled out the hollow cheeks and softened the jawline, although he still retained the thin features so common to the Chinese peasant, which in old age would make his face wither like a prune. His bushy eyebrows, strong dark hair and rather full lips set him aside from many of his friends and made his features attractive to those Chinese who admire hair as a sign of Western culture. To Westerners, he was appealing because he looked more like them.
It was all a sham, of course. But the Orientals greeted him with the deference he had come to expect while the foreigners saw only a fashionably dressed young man who blended perfectly into his cosmopolitan surroundings.
Turnbull found him at his usual table sipping a dark espresso and taking small bites from a Florentine while listening carefully to what his guest, another dark-suited Chinese, was saying. He looked up as Turnbull’s shadow blocked out th
e view of the harbour.
“Inspector, what a pleasant surprise.” The smile was wide, the affection apparently genuine. Turnbull caught the order in rapid Chinese to the guest, who immediately left without a backward glance. Turnbull felt his hand gripped in a firm but perfunctory pump and then he was facing Dai Choi, who looked up expectantly.
“We found one of your men in Central this morning,” Jonny began, his normally soft voice made hard by anger. “A Triad execution. He had been dumped on Kam Lan Kwan territory. So that’s your department.” He waited expectantly.
Dai took a sip of his coffee and dabbed the corner of his mouth twice with his napkin. “My department, Inspector?” The tone of injury was a little overdone, carefully calculated to let Turnbull know that both sides understood the little game that was being acted out. “I’m afraid that kind of thing is not my style. As I’m sure you know, my business takes up all my time. I stay well clear of any violence. Us former street kids value our freedom too much to put it at risk.”
As Dai moved to bring the cup to his mouth once again, Jonny’s hand reached out to grip his wrist, the massed blond hairs on Jonny’s arm contrasting with the smooth brown Chinese skin. Jonny squeezed but there was no give in the wrist and no reaction in the face.
“The body we are currently carting off to the morgue had your hands all over it,” Jonny continued. “One of your thumb rings was on the body. Your signature, your body, your murder.”
Dai Choi smiled slightly, his teeth hardly visible, and used his left hand to free his right wrist. He began to twirl the ring on his right thumb with the fingers of his left hand. It was the beautiful deep rich green of the finest Chinese jade, the intricate carving of hawks made with a delicacy found only in pieces from the seventeenth century. The gesture was a calculated insult, a reminder of their relationship and its origins.
