by Mark Dawson
They bounced across the gentle waves to the dock. Danny paid the pilot and climbed ashore, then made his way to Aberdeen Praya Road and flagged down the first taxi that he saw.
“Hoi Sham Park,” he said, settling back in the cheaply upholstered seat as the driver pulled out.
He knew where Beatrix had gone, and he knew that he had to follow. Part of it was selfishness. He needed her. But there was more to it than that. She needed him, too, and he wasn’t ready to give up on her yet.
13
Danny sat back as the taxi delivered him through the throng of traffic that choked the streets of Kowloon. He had been here many times before. Michael had business interests in the area and, lately, he had been here to collect Beatrix several times. He looked out of the windows as they passed through the chequerboard of ruined warehouses and high-end housing developments. He had seen old photos of when this part of Kowloon was home to some of the largest dockyards in Asia. It had once been a prosperous, industrious part of the city until the Japanese had practically wiped it off the map during the war. It had become something of a slum ever since, but now that money was finally flowing into it again, its reinvention was underway. There were still dark nooks that had resisted the tide of gentrification, and it was to one of those that Danny had directed the driver.
The car pulled up behind a derelict loading dock.
“Thank you,” Danny said, paying the man and stepping out into the soupy morning heat.
Danny made his way to the far end of the building. A slender figure was sitting on the dock with her back against the wall. It was Beatrix; she was sitting with her knees drawn up under her chin and her arms enfolding her legs. Ahead of her was a flight of stairs descending into the basement next to the dock. At the bottom was the entrance to the den; at least she hadn’t gone inside yet.
She heard him approach and turned her head to look at him. He heard her groan.
“Beatrix,” he said.
“You couldn’t leave me alone?”
He climbed the steps up onto the dock and sat down next to her. They were within an oblong of sunlight that fell between the buildings on the other side of the road. It was pleasantly warm.
“What is it?” she said.
“They came,” he replied matter-of-factly.
She looked up. “Who? Wang?”
He nodded. “Two of his men. Just after dawn.”
“Shit,” she said. “Sorry. I stayed as long as I could.”
“It’s fine,” he said. “I’m fine.”
“What happened?”
“A speedboat. One of them was up on deck before I even knew they were there. I scared them off.”
“How’d you do that?”
“You left the gun on deck. I fired a warning shot.” He grinned. “He fell over the side.”
Beatrix looked down again. “Good for you.”
They sat side by side on the concrete and, for a moment, neither spoke.
“Look,” Danny said at last. “I know I can’t drag you away. I can’t make you do something that you don’t want to do. If you want to go down in there and smoke, there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“But you’re still here.”
“Because I need you.”
“So you said.”
“And I think you need me.”
She snorted and looked away. “I don’t need anybody.”
Danny pointed at the locket that was hanging outside of Beatrix’s shirt. “You might not. But she does.”
Beatrix winced, and Danny could see what she was thinking; she had often said that she could never look at the photograph without also seeing the look of terror on her daughter’s face as she was taken.
“That’s low.”
“Doesn’t stop it from being true.”
“I’m tired. I’m not getting anywhere. It’s always one step forward, two steps back.”
He gestured down to the stairs. “I know it’s frustrating. But we are trying. And, if you love her, you need to get a grip on yourself. For her, if not for you. You keep going down there, eventually you won’t come back up again. And if we do find her, it won’t make any difference—she’ll be an orphan. Is that what you want? To die?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe. Lucas is dead. I lost Isabella. Michael won’t work with me and I’ve got no options left. The whole thing is hopeless.”
“You’re not listening to me. It doesn’t have to be like that.”
“Why’s that? You going to tell me you know where she is?”
“Not yet. But I can give you something.”
She brought her head up. “What?”
He gestured to the basement. “Dragging you out of there reminded me to follow up on an angle that I’ve been working on. I sent an email when I had you settled on the boat, and they got back to me last night.”
She started to speak, then stopped, then started again. “What angle?”
“Can we go somewhere else? I’d rather not do it here.”
Beatrix stared off into space for so long that Danny was suddenly afraid that—even when offered news about her daughter—she was still going to decline. She bit down on her lip so hard he thought she would draw blood.
“Come and listen to what I have to say. You can come back here afterwards if that’s what you want. I’ll call the taxi myself. But just come.”
“Fine,” she said at last.
He stood and offered her his hand. She took it and let him help her up.
“Where do you want to go?”
“Somewhere safe,” she said.
14
Beatrix told the taxi driver to take them to Tsim Sha Tsui. Their destination took up the better part of a block on Nathan Road in the area at the tip of the peninsula, across the water from the central city. She told the driver to pull over outside the main entrance, beneath the crazed collection of neon signs and vast LCD screens that advertised the businesses within. There was City Chain Jewellery, a candy store beneath a glittering pink sign that read BONJOUR, and, amid the tackiness, the incongruously sober awning with the name of the building spelled out in protruding golden letters.
CHUNGKING MANSIONS.
The wide sidewalk was thronged with people: tourists drawn here by the promise of cheap goods and an experience that would be hard to forget, and locals attracted by the prospect of making money from their gullibility. Beatrix led the way through the knot of young children who had been sent down by their parents to drum up trade for the family businesses on the floors above, and continued into the din of the interior.
“Here?” Danny said, raising his voice above the clamour. “You’ve been hiding out here?”
“Can you think of a better place?”
Jackie Chau had brought her here to recuperate after she had been stabbed. It had been as utterly confounding then as it was now; its insane layout offered no logic or pattern that could assist the thousands of visitors as they navigated their way around it. Each of the five seventeen-storey blocks was identified by a letter. Each block had two elevators, one serving the even-numbered floors and the other serving the odd numbers. It was a maze of narrow corridors, confusing signage and barricades of trash. The air was perfumed with the spices of a hundred cuisines, overlaid with the stench of sweat and rot.
“You hungry?” she asked him.
“I could eat.”
“Good. I know a place.”
The elevator wasn’t working, so Beatrix negotiated the trash and addicts in the stairwell up to the seventh floor. She picked a path between the flops and stores until she saw the sign for Syed Bukhara. By the standards of the outside world, the lemon-yellow banner of the cramped restaurant was food-court ordinary, but here it was an oasis with clean tables and a mopped floor. The food was a sort of Malaysian-Indian fusion. The ingredients came from the same warehouses that supplied the chain’s upscale restaurants elsewhere in the Far East.
“Table for two,” she told the man in the turban who staffed the
counter.
The man beckoned them to follow and took them to the only empty seats.
“What’s good?” Danny asked.
“It’s all good. Want me to order for you?”
He said that he did. Beatrix did not need to look at the brightly lit menu set in the lime-green wall above the counter. She already knew what she wanted.
The lunch rush had not even started, yet the miniature restaurant was already crowded. Their upholstered chairs were at one end of a group table near the entrance. Beatrix would not usually have chosen to sit that close to a door, but she felt safe here. They sipped their chai teas.
“So?” she said.
Danny reached into his duffel bag and took out his battered old laptop.
“So,” he began, “I’ve been handling the search on Michael’s behalf. Most of the people looking for Isabella speak English, not Cantonese; plus Michael knows you want it kept private. It made sense for me to be the main point of contact.”
“You didn’t tell me.”
“He wants the credit when she’s found.”
Beatrix could well believe that. Yeung never missed the opportunity to remind her that it was his money and influence that were responsible for the work that was being done.
Beatrix had initially paid two private investigators to mount the search, and both had found precisely nothing in exchange for the significant amounts of money that she had sent their way. She hadn’t been overly surprised by their lack of success; Isabella was Control’s insurance policy, the one reason that stopped her from flying to London to take him out. Control would change Isabella’s name, bury her so deep in the bureaucracy of the state that there would be practically no chance of finding her by legitimate means. Yeung, though, was not constrained by legitimacy. He had levers to pull that were not available to private investigators. He had money and influence. It was the only reason that Beatrix had agreed to work for him.
Danny opened the laptop and fired it up. “Michael has developed a contact in the body that oversees adoptions in London. There’s a woman there, gambles in Chinatown, owes more than she can afford to pay back—Michael bought her debt from the 14K and told her he’d shave the interest if she helped. She’s been looking through national records for girls of Isabella’s age with blonde hair and blue eyes who might have gone to foster care or been put into a children’s home during the last eighteen months.”
“And?”
He tapped out something on his laptop and then turned the screen around.
Beatrix’s mouth dropped open. There was a scanned document on the screen: two columns of text that flowed around a picture of a little girl with blonde ringlets and blue eyes.
“Is that her?”
Beatrix felt a stabbing pain in her heart. She tried to speak, but her mouth was too dry.
“Beatrix?”
She looked at the screen. The girl’s name was listed as Clara Foster. It said that her parents were drug addicts, and that she had been removed under a Care Order by social services.
“Is that her?”
Beatrix managed to nod.
The waiter brought their food: small bowls of coconut rice accompanied by spicy squid in chilli-saturated sambal sauce, served with garlic and lime. It smelled delicious, but, despite her ravenous hunger, Beatrix hardly noticed it. She couldn’t take her eyes off the photograph.
She waited until the waiter had gone back to the counter, and laid her fingers on the screen. “Where is she?”
“We don’t know,” Danny said carefully.
“What do you mean?”
“We thought that the girl—Isabella—was going to be placed with a couple in Edinburgh, but it doesn’t look as if that happened. Michael checked. The couple listed didn’t have any children with them.”
“So where is she?”
“At the moment, I don’t—”
She slapped her palm against the table so hard that the cutlery rattled. The waiter looked over at them, concerned.
“That’s not good enough, Danny,” she hissed.
“I know it isn’t. And we’re looking.”
She stared at him. “Look harder.”
“I am,” he said. “I promise.”
“What about Michael? He doesn’t trust me now—you said. And the two of you aren’t talking. So what does that mean for this—he’ll just let it drop?”
“He won’t,” Danny said. “I know him. He likes to have leverage over people. He knows you’ll do anything for him if he can find her. And he might not trust you now, but things change.” He paused and reached his hand across the table, his fingers resting over hers. “I know it’s frustrating. It’s hard. I know—”
“No, you don’t,” she snapped, pulling her hand back. “You have no idea. You know where your daughter is. All you need is for me to go and get you a passport, and then you can get on a plane and go see her. I can’t do that. Isabella could be anywhere. I might never see her again.”
Beatrix looked down at her food. She picked up her chopsticks, split them apart, and started to eat. Danny ate too, and, for a moment, they were quiet.
She laid the chopsticks in the bowl. Her appetite was gone.
“Fuck,” she said. “Fuck.”
“I’m sorry I don’t have more,” he said. “But it’s something—right? It’s progress. We know we’re on the right track.”
“Maybe,” she allowed.
“That’s why I came to get you. It isn’t hopeless. There’s a reason to keep going. If this is Isabella, she’s going to need you clean and ready to go get her.”
15
They finished their meals and Beatrix led the way down one of the large staircases that offered access to the various levels. The floors had been divided and then subdivided into apartments, studios and flops. There were hundreds of hostels and guesthouses. There were single rooms offering beds to backpackers or migrant workers and more efficient operations that offered clean and modern rooms at a reasonable price.
The Golden Lotus Guesthouse was on the fourth floor. It had plenty going for it: Beatrix rented it by the week, off the books, and, as long as she met the rent, nobody paid her any attention. She could come and go as she pleased. The old woman who ran the guesthouse was watching something on her phone and didn’t look up as Beatrix and Danny crossed the cluttered lobby. They picked their way along a corridor, stepping over a man who was asleep against the wall and then around a pile of black plastic bags that had been dumped next to an already overflowing trash can.
The door to her room was still locked. She opened it carefully and the scrap of tissue paper that she had wedged between the door and frame fell to the floor. No one had been inside while she had been away.
“This is your place?” Danny said.
“That’s right.”
The sun was up fully now, showing just a little light in the street outside the narrow window. In a few hours, the room would be a sauna. Beatrix fiddled with the air-conditioning unit above the bed. It dribbled a trail of brown water and, despite the wheeze of air, the temperature stayed the same.
“It’s lovely,” Danny said sarcastically, looking around.
“It’s safe,” Beatrix retorted.
“It smells.”
“It’s safe,” she repeated. “That’s all you need to worry about.”
“What’s the plan?” he asked as he sat down on the bed.
She flipped on the old Skyworth colour television that sat on top of her dresser. The tube was on its last legs: the image appeared to bow from the bottom and the colour was variable at best. She tinkered with the aerial, but the picture improved only a little. She managed to tune into ViuTVSix, the local English-language channel. They were showing reruns of Fawlty Towers dubbed into Cantonese.
Beatrix indicated the set. “It’s all yours.”
“So—what?” he said. “You want me to stay here?”
“There’s a store on the corridor outside where you can get food and drink, but don’t go a
ny further than that. Do you have your gun?”
He took out the Smith & Wesson and held it out.
Beatrix took it and opened the cylinder to count the load. Four rounds left. She handed it back to him. “Keep it with you.”
“But no one knows I’m here.”
“We don’t think they do,” she said. “We can’t say that for sure. Better safe than sorry. Keep the door shut and locked when you’re in here, and don’t open it to anyone but me.”
She picked up her go-bag, a canvas rucksack that contained money in various currencies, three fake passports, a first aid kit, a burner phone, and a Ruger SR9 9mm with three spare magazines. There was also a small vial that contained the remainder of the powdered ricin she had used in the abortive assassination of Jimmy Wang.
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to see about getting you that passport. But there’s one thing I need first.”
Danny looked up at her. “What?”
“I’m going to need your photo.”
16
Beatrix took a taxi to Carnarvon Plaza. There were a number of stores inside, including Lily’s Wigs, which featured a sign declaring that the store had been proudly trading since 1978. Beatrix had used the business during her last operational visit to Hong Kong and then again when she had gone to the Agency for information on Wang. She went inside and was relieved to find that they still had a line of wigs similar to the ones she had used before. She selected two: one was a short black bob and the other was a spiked crop. She asked for the wigs to be bagged up, paid for them and made her way to the thrift store that was deeper inside the mall.
The place had all manner of clothes, and Beatrix bought a new outfit: second-hand Doc Martens with nine eyes and red laces; a pair of tight black jeans, the fabric distressed and torn on the knees; a leather jacket with a Tool patch on the back; and a black T-shirt that bore a picture of Malcolm X. There was a tray at the front of the store next to the cash register with cheap jewellery, and she added a collection of rings and a necklace. She paid for the items and then went back outside, picking up a pair of shades from Sunglass Hut and some make-up from a concession in the aisle.
