by Andy Maslen
As it would, because Zhao Xi never brought his phone into the dojo. The first few sallies came from Sasha as she probed the teacher’s defences. She was careful not to reveal the full extent of her skill and made sure her attacks and feints were well telegraphed and occasionally clumsy. He parried them all easily and landed a few admonitory smacks on the top of her helmet as if to say, “You need to try much harder than that.”
With a yell, she launched herself at him in a furious combination of blows that he parried or deflected. Then the blow she had planned all along: a slashing overhead move that missed Zhao Xi’s helmet. Rather than pull up, she increased the force behind the blow, bringing the shinai down with such force onto the hard wooden floor outside the four mats that the bamboo shattered into razor-edged pieces.
She took her helmet off.
“Forgive me, that was so clumsy.”
He shook his head, without removing his own helmet.
“No matter. Would you like to borrow a shinai?” he asked, gesturing at a rack of identical bamboo weapons behind him.
“No thank you, Master Zhao. I have a spare.”
Turning, she walked the short distance to the bench on which she’d left her gear and unscrewed the lid from the black plastic tube.
Gabriel climbed into a taxi, having endured an agonising fifteen-minute wait in another long queue, and gave the driver Zhao Xi’s address. He buzzed the window down, inhaling that characteristic aroma of the city: traffic fumes mixed with incense from the many roadside shrines, and the wild, swirling blend of cooking smells from cuisines stretching from Ethiopia to Italy. People were everywhere, crowded onto the narrow pavements that themselves were interrupted every dozen yards or so by building works or an inspection tent over an open manhole. And above them all, the glass-and-steel skyscrapers loomed, bouncing the sunlight around like a hall of mirrors.
As the car dodged and veered in and out of the traffic, the driver keeping the heel of his right hand over the horn button, Gabriel tried to remain calm. He’d alerted Zhao Xi, and the man was no pushover. He might even be able to capture Beck if she were to approach him.
Sasha Beck pulled the shinai from the tube. Another long, slatted bamboo construction identical to the ten or so ranged behind Zhao Xi. She stood and turned to face Zhao Xi, who was standing still, watching her. Then she pulled a second weapon from inside the shinai. This was very different. It was the weapon the shinai had replaced in the transition from war to sport: a katana, or Samurai sword.
Through the horizontal metal bars guarding the old man’s face, she saw his eyes widen in surprise.
“It is you,” he said. “The one Wolfe Cub warned me about.
“Oh, that’s so sweet,” Sasha said, abandoning her New York-inflected accent for her own, a voice that swung between country-house drawing room and London council estate as whim dictated. “You gave him a pet name. And, yes, I am she. Though I had no idea he’d warned you.”
She raised the katana in front of her and swished it from side to side a couple of times, finding the balance of the blade.
In a flash, Zhao Xi attacked, catching her unawares, and clattering the bamboo shinai against the side of her head hard enough to disorientate her for a second.
She staggered backwards and counter-attacked, dancing forward and cutting at his right arm with the viciously sharp edge of the katana.
Gabriel’s taxi driver had escaped the hurly-burly of the city and was making good progress up Stubbs Road towards Zhao Xi’s house. Gabriel leaned forward.
“Can you go any faster? I’ll double the fee on the meter.”
“Sure thing,” the driver said.
The engine protested as the driver slammed his foot down on the accelerator, but the raging motor under the bonnet had clearly been worked like a farm horse. Despite the influx of extra fuel, it only managed to make extra noise and put on maybe ten miles an hour extra.
With a deft inside-out manoeuvre, Sasha Beck brought her blade inside Zhao Xi’s guard and cut deeply into his right bicep. He staggered back, dropping his shinai and grabbing for the spurting wound with his left hand. His right heel caught on the edge of the mat and he tumbled onto his back.
She leapt forward, both feet off the ground, katana held in front of her and then, as she landed, drove the point of the sword forward and down towards his heart.
With a noise like thin twigs snapping, the blade penetrated his lacquer armoured breastplate and plunged on between two ribs into his chest.
His eyes popped wide and his mouth spasmed open. No sound emerged beyond a hissing outbreath.
Sasha withdrew the sword, wiped it on his trouser leg and turned to sheath it in the protective bamboo outer. When she walked back to the body it was perfectly still. A trickle of bright-red blood had escaped his lips and was pooling beneath his left cheek on the polished wooden floor. She pushed the tips of her index and middle fingers – not roughly – into the space beneath his jaw where the carotid artery is found. She left them there for a count of five and discerned no pulse. Blood had soaked his clothing and was spreading out beneath his torso.
She straightened and went to the bench against the back wall to retrieve her gym bag.
A noise made her stop. A car engine, out of tune, by the sound of it, was thrumming at the front of the house. She took one final look at the body, regretting that she wouldn’t have time to leave her message, and then spoke one final time to the man who had invited her to call him Master Zhao.
“I’m sorry, darling. But your Wolfe Cub royally pissed off my client. And when Erin Ayers is pissed off, people get hurt.”
Then she slid the plate glass door to one side and sprinted through the lovingly tended garden and disappeared into the thick foliage beyond.
“Hello? Master Zhao?” Gabriel called from the kitchen. After paying the taxi driver, he’d rung the bell, but after Zhao Xi had failed to materialise, he’d kicked the back door down.
He ran through the house, throwing doors open and glancing inside each room before going on to the next. He knew he was being irrational, that Zhao Xi might simply be out, shopping perhaps, or walking, but he was held by a terrible fear that he was too late. That he was about to lose someone else precious to him.
Finally, he reached the dojo. Seeing the prostrate form of his mentor, he ran to him and knelt by his side. The blood had spread into a wide irregular shape beneath the old man’s body. He checked for a pulse. Nothing. Then he placed his ear against Zhao Xi’s lips, hoping, praying for a breath.
He was rewarded.
Client Confidentiality Removed
“WOLFE Cub, is that you?”
“Yes, Master. But you’re hurt. Badly. We have to get you to a hospital.”
Zhao Xi’s voice was riven with pain. “No, Wolfe Cub … My time on Earth is at an end.”
“No! You’re alive. You’re breathing. They’ll fix you up.”
“Remember how I taught you … to slow your heartbeat?” Zhao Xi’s voice was barely audible and Gabriel had to lean right over him to make out his words. “You were good but … our training ended before I could take you to the limit.” He paused to take another slight breath. “After she killed me … I slowed my heartbeat down far enough that she … that she detected no pulse. I prayed you might find me.”
Gabriel’s face was wet with tears and he crouched over his mentor, willing him not to be dying.
“No, Master. She didn’t kill you.”
“Listen to me. I must give you … one last piece of advice. You know the assassin. You told me that before.” He drew in a shuddering breath, then continued. “Look for … for Erin Ayers. She is the person behind this.”
“Erin Ayers? I’ve never even heard of her. Who is she, Master? Where should I look?”
But Zhao Xi didn’t answer. Couldn’t answer. That last, shuddering breath he’d drawn in now escaped his parted lips in a whisper like a faraway wind through the bamboo growing on the hillside.
Gabriel didn’t
try to revive his old master. The man who had raised him, changed him from a surly, rebellious teenager into a man, was dead. Instead he sat with his back to the wall and stared at the body, letting the tears flow down over his cheeks and into the collar of his shirt. He hammered his fist into the floor.
“I failed you, Master!” he shouted, and he slammed his fist back down again. “I let her reach you and kill you. Why didn’t I see it?”
Finally, after half an hour had passed, Gabriel got to his feet and called the police and an ambulance. While he waited, he went through to Zhao Xi’s study, hoping to find some sort of guidance on what to do.
The room was sparsely furnished. It contained just a plain wooden desk and a simple chair, made of bamboo with a rattan seat. The top of the desk was pale, sanded wood in which the grain was visible, the wavy pale and dark bands like the intricate patterning on a damascened sword blade. At the rear of the desk top were three small, green figures carved in what Gabriel knew to be jade: a monk in a robe, walking with a long pole; a man fishing, wearing a wide-brimmed hat to keep the sun off; and a dragon, its sinuous body undulating behind a snarling head.
In a daze, Gabriel pulled open the drawer beneath the desk top. It contained several large brown envelopes. He spent the next ten minutes opening them and sorting through the documents each contained. In the last envelope was a smaller envelope headed:
In the event of my death.
He was about to open it when he heard sirens outside and went to let the police and paramedics in.
Gabriel showed the two detectives, a man and a woman, where Zhao Xi’s body lay. They introduced themselves as Detective Inspector Danny Lu and Detective Sergeant Rachel Tan. The dojo smelled of incense and, he realised for the first time, blood. Then he stood back, while they circled the body, taking photographs on their phones. The male detective turned to him.
“You know this man?”
“He is, was, my mentor.”
“You see who did this?”
“No. I arrived by taxi and he was dying when I found him.”
“Anyone come the other way?”
Gabriel watched the way the detective was studying him, eyes narrowed, looking for a tell of some kind.
“No. But look,” he said, pointing at the sliding glass doors that led onto the garden. “There are foot prints in the moss.”
Zhao Xi’s lawn was composed entirely of moss. In the Surrey town that was Gabriel’s home before he came to Hong Kong with his parents, the suburbanites would have raked it out to encourage the grass. Xi had done the opposite, plucking out individual blades of grass to ensure an even, springy carpet of the bright-green moss. Now, though, the carpet was dented by widely spaced footprints, showing as darker, shadowed ovals on the otherwise smooth surface.
“OK, we’ll have those photographed and checked.”
The female detective, petite and wearing rectangular tortoiseshell glasses, spoke next.
“Any idea who’d want the old man dead?”
What do I say? Yes, it’s an assassin, and go through the whole rigmarole I did with the detective in the UK? Or plead ignorance and chase her down myself?
“Sorry, no.”
She paused for a second, as if expecting him to say more. When he didn’t, she resumed her questions.
“Are you here on business, Mr—?”
“Wolfe. Gabriel. No, I came out to see Master Zhao on a whim.”
As soon as he said it, he realised it was a misstep. The detective pounced.
“A whim? You flew to Hong Kong from the UK?”
“Yes, but like I said, he brought me up. I lived here as a teenager.”
“You didn’t say that. You said he was your mentor. And it’s a long way to come on a whim, isn’t it? Supposing he was out when you called. What were you going to do, fly home again on another whim?”
Gabriel could feel his pulse banging in his temples and at the base of his throat. He was fighting to stay calm when all he felt like doing was screaming at the detective.
“Look. I have money, OK? I can fly where I want, see who I want. Why are you asking me all these questions? I called you, didn’t I? You don’t think it was me, do you?”
The male detective had returned from the garden, where he had been kneeling beside the footprints.
“Keep cool, Mr Wolfe. At the moment, we don’t think anything. Detective Tan and I are just following basic procedures. And you’d be surprised how many killers think calling it in is the best way to throw us off the scent. Would you come to the police station with us, please? I’d like to ask you a few more questions, maybe get your fingerprints and a DNA sample, just to rule you out.”
Gabriel felt trapped. This wasn’t a steaming jungle or an arid mountain pass where he could fight his way out against insurgents or terrorists. This was a city. With a police force. Two of whose finest were standing in front of him, with pistols on their hips and suspicious expressions on their faces. He could refuse and risk being arrested or comply and get snarled in the Hong Kong justice system while they interviewed him.
He had an idea. A high-risk idea to be sure, but when had playing it safe been a part of his makeup?
“Yes, fine. Let’s go in.”
Twenty-five minutes later, having been spirited through the traffic in a police car with blue lights flashing and sirens wailing, Gabriel sat opposite the two detectives in a small interview room. The walls were bare, painted a flat, battleship-grey. The furniture consisted of a rectangular metal table and three chairs. No mirror, no obvious cameras or recording equipment.
It was the woman’s turn to speak.
“This is just a standard witness interview Mr Wolfe. Or may I call you Gabriel?”
“Gabriel’s fine,” he said with a smile, feeling jumpy as he contemplated the risk he was about to take.
“OK, so, Gabriel,” she smiled, and he noticed she had very small teeth, “to recap, you came to Hong Kong, as you say, on a whim, and travelled straight from the airport to your mentor’s house, where you found him dying on the floor of his dojo. Is that about right?”
Gabriel nodded. “Yes, it is.”
“And you say you have no idea who did it.”
He paused. “Actually, I do have an idea who did it. In fact, I know who did it.”
Both detectives leaned forwards, placing their elbows on the scratched surface of the table. Lu asked the obvious next question.
“Who?”
“An assassin named Sasha Beck.”
Gabriel leaned back and waited.
“OK, first, why did you say you had no idea who killed him when we asked you the first time?” Lu asked.
“Because I thought you wouldn’t believe me.”
“What changed your mind?” Tan asked, her pen poised over her notepad.
“I know someone who can corroborate it.”
“And that person would be—?” she asked, eyes widening.
Gabriel inhaled deeply; spoke on the outbreath.
“Fang Jian.”
Detective Tan put her pen down on the table and closed her notebook. She looked at Gabriel and he could sense those dark-brown eyes trying to drill into his brain.
“You know Fang?”
Gabriel thought back to his meeting with the Triad leader. How long ago was it? A few weeks? More? “We met last year.”
“On a whim?”
“It was a social call. Zhao Xi knew him, and he introduced me. In the course of our meeting, Sasha Beck turned up. Mr Fang …” he scratched the back of his neck, searching for the right words, words that would earn him a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card without sending “Ricky” Fang in the other direction. “ … met Sasha Beck and extended her his hospitality.”
Lu spoke.
“Funny. People to whom Ricky Fang offers hospitality,” he laid heavy, ironic emphasis on the last word, “tend not to reappear.”
“She’s a professional. She escaped. Ask Mr Fang.”
Tan opened her mouth to speak when
a double knock at the door stopped her. A man wearing a white lab coat poked his head through the gap.
“Detective Lu, I’ve got the preliminary findings for you.”
He handed Lu a typewritten sheet and disappeared.
Lu looked down at the sheet, pursing his plump lips as he read.
“The footprints on the lawn. They were running away from the house. Shoe size, thirty-eight. That’s a UK size five. What size are you, Gabriel?”
“Ten.”
“No fingerprints or body fluids, but one long, red hair recovered from the dojo.”
Gabriel ran his fingertips through his short, black hair.
“Wrong colour, wrong length.”
Lu stood. “I’m stepping out to make a couple of calls. Gabriel, do you want a coffee or tea? Water?”
“Tea would be good, please. Milk no sugar.”
Lu turned to Tan. “Rachel, would you make Gabriel some tea while I check out his story?”
Gabriel noticed the way the female detective’s lips tightened and a frown flickered like lightning across her otherwise smooth forehead. Maybe she resented being the tea girl every time they had a witness to interview.
“Of course. You want one, Danny?”
He shook his head. “I’m good.”
She looked at Gabriel. “Don’t go anywhere,” she said with a smile.
Ten minutes later, both detectives were back. Tan handed a white china mug of tea to Gabriel, which he sipped gratefully.
“I just spoke to Ricky Fang,” Lu said. “He confirms your story, more or less.”
Gabriel wondered whether the young detective inspector enjoyed calling a Triad leader by his old nickname. Perhaps he was just asserting his authority.
“Then I’m free to go?”
“Yes, but please stay in Hong Kong for the next few days. We may have further questions for you.”
