by Mark Dawson
She exhaled wearily and sank back onto the pillow.
“Yeah,” Danny said. “That’s what I thought.”
She stared up at the polished wooden ceiling. “I appreciate your help, Danny, I really do, but this isn’t your problem.”
“We’ll have to agree to disagree about that, won’t we?”
“You know it won’t make any difference. I’ll tell you that I’ve had enough, that this is the last time, it won’t happen again, and then, eventually, I’ll find my way back there again.”
“And I’ll go and get you again.”
“And if I told you to mind your business?”
“I’d still come to get you.”
She closed her eyes and breathed out. “You’re impossible.”
He put his hand on Beatrix’s shoulder and gently pressed her back onto the mattress. “You need a friend, Beatrix—”
“I really don’t—”
“—and, if I’m honest, keeping you around isn’t entirely altruistic.”
“No?”
“No,” he said. “Not entirely. I need your help.”
He reached down and lightly touched the heart-shaped silver locket at Beatrix’s throat. The cover, inlaid with a delicate daisy design, had flipped open while she had been asleep. She carried Isabella’s photograph there.
“What is it?”
When he finally spoke, the words were heavy with sadness.
“It’s time for me to go home.”
2
Beatrix and Danny had met eleven months earlier.
Michael Yeung—the Dragon Head, the man in charge of the various triad factions that comprised the Wo Shun Wo clan—had helped Beatrix to eliminate a local chieftain after he had abducted a young girl who had come to her for help. The girl had been an innocent victim in the man’s blackmailing of a prominent businessman who came under Yeung’s protection. The chieftain’s temerity in extorting the businessman had meant that his excommunication from the clan was inevitable, and Yeung had seen the good sense in her offer to dispose of him. Beatrix had been waiting for him in his luxury apartment when he’d returned one night, and tossed him over the balcony to his death.
Yeung owed Beatrix after that and, in payment, he had helped her to find Jackie Chau. Chau had been Beatrix’s first friend in the city, but he had betrayed her in order to save his own skin; or so he had thought. Beatrix had poisoned him just as he was about to escape the country for a new life in Canada. He had died—unpleasantly—somewhere over the Pacific. Beatrix read the papers. They said the cause of death was a heart attack, but she knew better. She had laced his drink with ricin.
It was a painful way to go. And it was the least that he had deserved.
Yeung had already been impressed with Beatrix’s work, but these two deaths had added a sheen to her impressive résumé. He was smitten with the prospect of employing her and had offered a proposal: he would help her to search for her daughter in exchange for her help in ‘dealing with’ people who were proving to be impediments to the smooth operation of his business. The euphemism was all his; Beatrix had always found it secretly amusing that a man as powerful and feared as the Dragon Head would find it distasteful to call Beatrix what she was: a paid assassin.
She had no such qualms.
Theirs was a mutually beneficial arrangement. Yeung was rich, with a reach that extended around the world, and with businesses that made a lot of enemies; Beatrix was ruthless, with flexible ethics and a set of skills that had been honed over many years in the service of Her Majesty. She knew, too, that he found satisfaction in employing a Western woman to do his dirty work. The triad was patriarchal, and there was an added shame in one’s death being authored by a woman.
Chau’s betrayal had left Beatrix without local assistance in the city. She had only been there for a few months, and, in order for her to properly acclimatise so that she could work effectively for Yeung, she’d needed a guide.
Yeung had suggested Danny Wu.
Danny had already helped Beatrix, even though she hadn’t been aware of it at the time. He had rescued her from the opium den to which she had retreated following her murder of Chau. She had been intent on smoking herself into oblivion, but Danny had drawn her back from the brink with Yeung’s offer of help in finding Isabella. Beatrix had been in poor physical condition, so Danny had taken on her recovery himself, and then, when she was ready, her introduction to the city and the vast underworld that lurked in its shadows. Danny had taken her to a private clinic—paid for by Yeung—where she was given a room to herself and the time to recuperate. He had sat with her for hours and listened to her talk about Isabella, Control and the others so that Yeung could start the search.
Beatrix had taken the opportunity to sketch out the relationship between the two men. It quickly became clear that Danny was one of Yeung’s most trusted friends. It was an odd arrangement between the two of them: Danny was an amiable, elderly American who wore baggy shirts and cargo pants, while Yeung was a powerful Chinese gangster who wore tailored suits and ten-thousand-dollar handmade shoes. The Wo Shun Wo was nationalistic and suspicious of outsiders, and every other member that Beatrix met—without a single exception—was male and drawn from the same district on the Kowloon Peninsula. Yet, despite this, whenever Beatrix saw Danny and Yeung together, it was clear that the Chinese took the counsel of his American friend.
Beatrix had needed somewhere to stay after Danny had rescued her from the den, and Danny had offered her a berth on the Constance. It had since become a place of refuge: Danny was a private man and he had explained that only Yeung and a handful of others knew where to find him. The fact that he could move his home whenever he needed to was useful in guaranteeing his privacy, too. Beatrix—who knew that Control would be looking for her—appreciated the discretion that the Constance could offer.
Beatrix and Danny had shared long evenings on the deck, two foreigners adrift in a foreign land, and their bond had grown stronger. Danny had become an acquaintance, perhaps even a friend; he was certainly the closest that she had to that now.
3
Beatrix closed the locket and, wincing against the fresh throb of pain that pulsed through her head, she sat up.
“Seriously?” she said. “You want to go home?”
Danny scrubbed his hand through his thinning hair. “It’s time.”
“Why?”
“Long story.”
“Then I’m going to need a beer,” she said, resting her sore body against the bulkhead.
“You sure?” He looked at her disapprovingly and held up the water once more.
“I’m probably not going to stop smoking opium, Danny. I’m definitely not going to stop drinking.”
“Stay there.”
Danny went into the galley and fetched a Lion Rock for each of them. She reached for a bottle opener on the table and popped the lids. He took a sip of his beer and then looked down at the label, turning the bottle in his hand so that he could read all of it.
“So?” she said.
“My name isn’t Danny Wu,” he began, picking at the label. “It’s Daniel Nakamura. My grandfather moved to LA from Osaka.” He took a slug of his beer and gestured out to the skyscrapers on the other side of the channel. “My dad was born in the States. So was I.”
“So how come you ended up here?”
“I was in Vietnam.”
“You never told me that.”
“I don’t talk about it. It wasn’t a very happy time of my life. I did two tours between sixty-five and sixty-eight.” He gazed into the middle distance and a flicker of pain crept over his face.
“What happened?”
His focus drew back in again and he looked over at her, as if expecting to see disapproval. “I deserted. It was a nightmare. The things I saw…” He paused and looked out over the harbour. “It all happened forty years ago and I still get nightmares today. And they’re just as vivid as they were when I first had them.”
“I don’t c
are that you deserted. I’ve seen war, Danny. It doesn’t make any difference to me.”
“I’m not proud of it. But I had a good reason.”
He stared at the bottle in his hand once more, his face pensive.
Beatrix nudged him along. “So why did you come here?”
“I couldn’t go home. I would’ve been court-martialled and locked up. And it wasn’t as if I had anything to go home to.”
“No family?”
He shook his head. “Dad died before I shipped out. Mom died the first year I was out there. Car crash outside Santa Monica. She was drunk. Drove the car into a canyon.”
“Wife? Girlfriend?”
He chuckled, bitter and without humour. “I’ve never had much luck with women. I was married. Her name was Collette. She was half-French, from Quebec. Long hair down her back and these soulful eyes. Man, she was something. I met her on Sunset Boulevard when I was on leave in sixty-seven, and we got married six months later. She said she’d wait for me, that we’d start our lives together as soon as I got out, but that didn’t stick.”
“What happened?”
“She found someone else and I got Dear John’d. God knows I was already having trouble coping with what was happening, but the thought of going home to her kept me sane. Knowing that wasn’t going to happen tipped me over the edge. I started asking myself the same questions over and over again: What the fuck, what the fuck are you doing in this shithole, getting shot at every single day, seeing your friends come back on stretchers or in body bags? What are you waiting for? Just go.”
She nodded, not making a judgement, waiting for him to continue.
He waved a hand, as if dismissing a thought. “It is what it is. I’d been daydreaming about how I’d get out of Saigon, just as a way of giving me something to think about, something to distract me, but then I got her letter and I decided to do it. I hitched a ride here with the Air Force. They were flying VIP hops into Hong Kong every week. I knew the pilot from Vūng Tàu. I had a gold wristwatch my dad gave me, and he’d been trying to buy it off me, so we cut a deal. I went as a cabin steward, me and three Filipino guys. The pilot got the watch. I served sake shots and Kobe beef all the way to freedom.”
“And stayed?”
He nodded. “Ever since. The MPs would’ve found me if I were white. It’s funny; I used to get abuse from the boys about being a gook, but it served me well here. I’d heard about the Walled City, so I headed there. You know it?”
“I know they knocked it down.”
He nodded. “It was a trading post on the salt route. The British never went into it. They left it to refugees after the war. There were fifty thousand in there when they finally pulled it down. The Wild West. Lots of people hiding, and I fit right in. I was trained as a linguist so I could interrogate the VC. Most of the people I met were just peasants who’d run away from the Communists. They couldn’t read or write, so I wrote letters home for them. It filled my rice bowl until I met Michael.” He sighed. “That was sixty-nine. A lifetime ago.”
He took another draw on his beer, and Beatrix did the same.
“So why would you want to go to the States now?”
He smiled. “I have a daughter, the same as you. I probably never would’ve known if we hadn’t met.”
“What did I do?”
“Michael told me about Isabella, and then I started to think about me. About family—what might have been. I started to wonder about Collette, so I looked her up. I found out that she’d had a daughter. I looked at the dates, and she could only have been mine. And then I found her.”
“What’s her name?”
“Melissa.”
“And she knows about you?”
“We’ve been in touch by email. She wants to meet.” Danny gestured to Beatrix’s locket again. “See—that’s something we have in common. We both want to see our girls. It’s blood. And she’s all I have left.”
Beatrix finished her beer and set the bottle down on the floor next to the bed. She looked over at him and saw that he was distracted.
“What?”
He paused, as if considering the best way to proceed. “There’s something else, too. Something that makes it more urgent than it could’ve been. I’m old.”
“Come on…”
“No, I am. I’m seventy, Beatrix. Seventy-one next month. I don’t have long left.”
“You’re as fit as a horse.”
“Physically,” he said. He sighed and tapped his forehead. “It’s different up here. My dad was my age when he started forgetting things. He’d lose his keys; he’d turn up late for appointments or he’d miss them altogether. He started to have trouble remembering how to do small things, like buttoning his shirt or tying his laces. They didn’t diagnose it the same way in the sixties that they do now, and he was too proud to go to the doctor to get help, but it was obviously dementia. He couldn’t even remember my name when he died.”
“And you?”
He nodded glumly. “Same. I have trouble remembering things. Nothing significant yet, but it’s enough that Michael doesn’t trust me like he used to. You’ve seen the difference, right? You asked me about it.”
That was right. The relationship between the two men had changed in the time that Beatrix had known them both. Michael had started to rely upon others when he had previously turned to Danny. The mess with Jimmy Wang had made things worse, but she had noticed the change before then.
“Have you seen anybody about it?”
“What’s the point?” he said. “I know what it is. There’s no cure.” He shook his head firmly. “My dad had a couple of years once it was diagnosed. I’m working on the same assumption. Two years. I want to make sure I squeeze all the enjoyment out of every day I have left. And the thing I want most of all is to meet Melissa. I want to get to know her while I still can.”
4
Edward Navarro made his way back to the house he was renting in Central. It had been another long, hot day. The Chinese had installed outdoor escalators to make it easier for commuters to get up and down the slope as they went to and from their offices. They had fitted nozzles that sprayed fine mists of cold water at the beginning and end of each section, but it provided only temporary relief. Navarro was hot and sweaty, and he was looking forward to a cool shower and then a beer on the terrace while he watched the sun going down.
But there was the small matter of a call back to Langley to get out of the way first.
He opened the front door and went inside, luxuriating in the air-conditioned cool. He fetched a beer from the fridge, took off his shades and rested them on the desk next to his computer. He unfolded the laptop, woke it up and opened the secure videoconferencing facility. The connection with Langley was established, and Navarro waited in the empty virtual conference room for Lincoln to arrive.
He stretched out his legs beneath the desk and rubbed his face. He was getting too old for this kind of shit, but he and Lincoln went back years, and that long association meant that Navarro was the only man Lincoln would trust with something as delicate as this. Navarro had cleaned up his messes for years, and that had often occasioned trips all around the world. He had visited Mexico, Brazil, Russia, and London in the last decade, leaving a series of cold bodies in his wake.
Navarro sometimes told himself that he would rather have left this particular trip to someone else—Morley could have handled it, or Harker, or any of the men and women who worked for him in the Special Operations Group—but, if he was honest, he still got a buzz out of the chase. The thrill was no less potent today than it had been in the seventies, when his work for Lincoln had become a formal arrangement.
The computer chimed.
“Eddie?”
“I’m here,” Navarro said.
Navarro looked up and saw that Dwight Lincoln was staring out of the screen at him. He could see his own image, too, and, as was usually the case, his first thought was how old they both looked. Time had not been particularly kind to either
of them. Lincoln’s face was flabby, with a jowly chin that hung over the top of the black turtleneck sweater that he habitually wore. His nose was wide and flattened against his face, his cheeks were marked with ancient acne scars, and his hair—or what was left of it—was a mixture of whites and greys, arranged rather haphazardly over his crown. Navarro, by contrast, was slimmer in the face, although age had rendered his ears a little too large, and his nose ended in a fleshy bulb that belied the more slender bridge. His skin was deeply lined and tanned, like leather that had been cured in bright sunshine for too long. That was a product of a life spent in the field; Lincoln had been spared that, with his battles fought in the conference rooms at Langley.
“I’m exhausted,” Lincoln exclaimed.
“What’s happened?”
“Just a difficult day. There’s been pushback on my appointment.”
“Who from?”
“The investigation won’t go away, and POTUS isn’t going to appoint me until it does. They’re looking at contingencies. They’re going to be interviewing a couple of other candidates.”
“Who?”
“Symes is one. Don’t know the other.”
Navarro was aware of Symes: a blowhard who had had designs on the Agency’s top jobs for years. “That’s just window dressing. No one takes Symes seriously.”
“I know that,” Lincoln said wearily. “But it means I’m vulnerable until we can get Butcher off my back, get her fucking investigation put to bed once and for all. That’s why I’m looking forward to the good news that you’re about to give me.”
Navarro managed to force out a smile; Lincoln could be a demanding son of a bitch. “Don’t get your hopes up too much.”
“Please say there’s something.”
“There is. The locals have made some progress. Nakamura’s been lying low, but my man thinks that he might have a lead into where he’s been hiding. There’s a harbour—you can’t move for boats here; you know what it’s like—and he’s heard that he lives on a junk out on the water.”
