Feeling mild excitement, Chan ordered a car to take him out to the fishing village of Sai Kung on the east coast of the New Territories; an English senior inspector had called with news of a possible sighting of a meat mincer on the seabed.
Once he was out of the vast conurbation that stretched from the tip of Kowloon in the south to Choi Hung, the land was green and relatively free of development. The road expanded into a turnpike that lifted up to the hills on the east coast.
At nine-thirty in the morning sunlight hurt. Behind them Kowloon radiated its usual glaucous haze, but up ahead the sky was the deep blue of glazed Ming. Under the solar onslaught the world wobbled. Silver pools shimmered in hollows in the road. Green tiled roofs undulated. Chan and the driver put on sunglasses, turned up the air conditioning.
Chan flicked the radio on to a Cantopop station and winced. “Please release me, let me go” lost everything in translation. He turned to an English-language information program. “Visibility good, fire risk extreme,” a voice said in a London accent. Chan switched off.
The driver pointed to two large military helicopters racing from a funnel of smoke twisting up behind a hill to the left. Huge buckets hung from chains attached to their underbellies and swayed against the direction of the choppers dashing for the sea.
“Bad one. Started yesterday.”
“By campers?”
“Probably. It’s in the bush, not near any villages. No one’s been evacuated yet, but the bush is very dry.”
At the top of the hill the sea came into view: the Pacific coast of China. There was not much between here and Japan, Chan remembered, and if you missed Japan, America was probably the next stop. Not that the ancient Chinese had seen any reason to go even a fraction of that distance. The Middle Kingdom had been the center of the earth, where everyone wanted to be. Only Europe could have produced a Columbus, a man so dissatisfied his own continent wasn’t big enough. Or a Marco Polo.
They turned right along a coast road called Hiram’s Highway by the British, “the road to Pak Sha Wan” by the Chinese. Nobody knew who Hiram had been, not even the British, but Pak Sha Wan was a tiny fishing village with a large boat club. Each year the boats and the club grew larger and more expensive. Million-dollar sailing yachts hung in the heat next to cigar-shaped speed machines that the Cantonese called snakeheads. As a general rule Europeans owned the sailing yachts and Chinese owned the snakeheads. On a windless day like this the boats faced in all directions, their mooring ropes drooping. Sampans chugged between the floating parking lots, taking swimmers to beaches across the bay.
“You know this area?” Chan said.
“No, you?”
“Yeah. I was brought up near here. In a squatter hut overlooking the sea.”
“That so? You were lucky. You got fresh fish and fresh air. I was brought up in Hak Nam, the Walled City. Nothing fresh there. Especially not the whores.”
Chan laughed. Five years ago the government had knocked down the Walled City, a square mile of unplanned triad-built apartments with open sewers, fat rats, prostitution and drug addicts. But some people had loved it, as he had loved his wooden hut.
“You’re right. I was lucky. I lived there with my kid sister. I told her stories about sea-monsters and taught her to swim. We never wanted to go to school. Didn’t seem any reason to.”
The driver nodded.
Chan was on his second Benson when they reached Sai Kung. It had expanded from a village into a town since he had lived nearby, but the covered market and the fishing fleet still flourished. The driver swerved to a halt at the end of the car park near the main pier. Chan got out. Chinese kids in black full-face helmets lying over the fuel tanks of Kawasakis and Yamahas practiced side skids in the center of the new concrete square. To one side skateboarders in silken black leggings with Day-Glo knee pads had set up a ramp from which they launched themselves into space. Opposite, the Watson’s supermarket had risen from the ashes of a wooden Chinese village house where the headman had lived. On either side tinted glass and chrome video and music shops offered relief from the heat and a direct line to the twentieth century. For twenty years he had never been more than ten miles away, but he felt like a man who’d returned after spending a lifetime overseas. He remembered paddy fields that came up to the village square, a banyan tree under which the elders spent their days talking and playing Chinese chess, children so shy that even in early teens they were afraid to leave the house. The West had wrought a cultural revolution more drastic than Mao’s. It took only a couple of decades, apparently, to replace a five-thousand-year-old civilization with the shocking new.
He searched down the length of the dockside where the past waited. Most of the fishing fleet was out; only a half dozen of the trawlers were anchored near to the market; the old ladies in the sampans who brought vegetables, duck and pork to the boat wives were plying between the high green walls of the trawlers that had remained behind, each twisting a long single paddle at the back of the curved sterns, where they stood bow-legged and imperturbable. From the distance he saw they still had permanent hairdos and smiles full of gold.
He walked the length of the pier to where a small police launch was waiting.
He nodded to the captain, stepped on board, immediately fell into discussion with the English senior inspector, who was stationed at an outpost in Mirs Bay. They had always made a point of putting an Englishman into this post, the closest to the Chinese coast.
Higgins showed Chan a marine department map.
“Just here.” He stabbed the map at a point near the line that divided the PRC from Hong Kong. “Pure coincidence, a couple of police diving enthusiasts were near there over the weekend, trying out their ultrabig underwater spearguns, not to mention their Gucci colored wetsuits and their accurate-to-a-thousand-feet underwater Seikos. Youngsters, not long out of training. Sharp, though. They saw extra marine life a little further to the north, and although they weren’t supposed to go so close to the border, they did, hoping to find something bigger to shoot than prawns. The fish were feeding out of what looked like a large industrial mincer. Got a bit closer, and Bob’s your uncle; it was a large industrial mincer. One of them remembered that you were looking for one such, so they contacted me as the officer on the spot. I sent a couple of chaps down to take a look, and the sighting was confirmed. I thought you might like a day on the water to supervise the salvage operation.”
“How big? How old? The mincer, I mean.”
Higgins shrugged. “Not clear. But if fish were finding food in it, I would say it hadn’t been down that long.”
Chan lit another Benson, ignored Higgins’s frown.
“Thought you might be interested in the positioning,” Higgins said.
“I am.”
“Bit of an odd coincidence, seems to me.”
“What is?”
“Well, you find a bagful of heads in the sea at the extreme west of the territory; now you find the mincer at the extreme northeast. Both right next to the PRC border.”
Chan didn’t want to talk about that to an Englishman. “Just a coincidence, I expect.”
Higgins shook his head. “Well, if I were investigating, I would consider it a lead worth following.”
On an inhalation Chan took in Higgins. After four hundred years of empire the British bred Englishmen who would not feel at home unless in a colony organizing the natives. Where would they all go in two months’ time?
“Thanks for the tip. How are you organizing the salvage? Divers to hook it up, gantry, all that?”
Chan counted five emphatic nods from Higgins. “Exactly that. Small floating gantry towed out of Tolo Harbor by a tug we borrowed from the marine department. Couple of police divers on board. We estimate it at about a hundred and twenty feet, so it’s not a problem for the divers. Don’t even need to worry about decompression apparently.”
“That’s right. You ascend slowly after the dive and wait at certain depths. Probably it’s enough to spend twenty minutes waiting at about fifteen feet. Look, I’d like to go down with them; they’re bound to have a spare kit, it’s standard procedure.”
“Go down? You?” Higgins surveyed Chan, the twitch, the cigarette. “I’m not sure-”
“I have a certificate. It’s my hobby. Look.”
Chan took his Advanced Open Water certificate out of his wallet. Higgins inspected it.
“I see. Any particular reason for you to go down? I mean, these men are perfectly competent, you know.”
It’s my case, Chan almost said. Then he remembered the English Way. “Just thought I’d use the opportunity to get in a free dive, I’ve missed it every weekend this month cooped up in Mongkok. And it’s so fucking hot.”
“Ah!” Higgins smiled for the first time. “What a wonderful idea! You know, I’d go down myself, I think, if I wasn’t scared to death.” He laughed. Chan laughed back. You had to if you were following the English Way.
The launch had already backed away from the pier as they were talking and was now clearing the harbor. Chan walked to the rail at the bows, gazed through sunglasses at the green archipelago that surrounded them. Fishing villages older than Britain huddled against the sun, a blinding white hole in an azure sky.
They had chosen the launch because it was the fastest available. The captain eased it up to about twenty knots.
Higgins came to stand by him. “That’s improved the air conditioning.”
The breeze raised the Englishman’s thin straw hair, revealed the bald pink patch at the top. He had plastered his nose and hairline with white zinc.
Chan undid most of the buttons on his shirt, let the wind blow between his skin and the cotton. He never admitted how guilty he felt about his smoking. Fresh air around the chest gave the illusion of cleansing the lungs. He breathed in as far as his abdomen, let the air out slowly, held back a cough under Higgins’s gaze.
There was a laugh from the crew on the bridge. Chan looked up and shared a smile with a square-set Cantonese constable in long blue shorts, bare feet.
He was excited about the dive; it was going to be a long day. He wondered what Moira was doing. He would be lucky to be back for dinner, although he’d promised to try. What did she look like in daylight? Was the Bronx near the sea? Did men his age love women her age? If they were liars, crooks, alcoholics? Who cared? She would be gone in two days. They had discussed that at least.
The wind blew her away.
Chan turned his attention back to Higgins. “Good launch-we must be doing about twenty knots?”
The Englishman gave his brisk, short nods. “Maybe a little more. About twenty-eight is tops, but fuel efficiency goes right down. We’ve a fair way to go. The snakeheads do it in about two hours, of course-all the way to China, I mean.”
“Still a lot of smuggling?”
“Are you kidding? After nightfall it’s like the Santa Monica Freeway here. The latest wheeze is to build hulls that are molded around the car of your choice-or rather your customer’s choice. Literally, the fiberglass is built up around a specific model car so it fits perfectly and doesn’t move around when the boat hits the high speeds. No extra packing required, saves crucial minutes.”
“No chance of catching them at sea?”
“With boats like this? Compared to them, this is a barge, a joke. Their boats can be seventy feet long with four three-hundred-horsepower outboards on the back giving twelve hundred horsepower total. Those babies can reach ninety miles an hour. We have nothing like that. Of course, if they’d let us use force, that would be different. At ninety just forcing them to swerve would sink them. But then you kill the smugglers, write off the car and risk the lives of the cops involved, just to save a rich man’s car. It’s politically unacceptable.”
Chan had heard the complaint before. In the old days the British would have stopped the traffic no matter how many Chinamen they killed. All of a sudden everyone had become so delicate-apart from the crooks and the party cadres who employed them.
“You can see the attraction, though, to a young desperado. Flying across the water at night to China at ninety miles an hour with a stolen BMW in the back, cradling an AK-forty-seven. I bet they queue up to join the gangs.”
Higgins grinned. “You know, if I wasn’t a cop…”
Chan smiled. Despite his bald patch, Higgins was young, maybe under thirty. He was a cop now, but in two months he’d be another expatriate bum with nowhere to go. Nobody was rushing to employ ex-Hong Kong policemen. And it was funny how they never wanted to go home, to the Land of the Setting Sun.
Higgins left him as they were passing Big Wave Bay on the left. Chan turned to rest his backside against the rail and watch the rhythm of the water. I dreamed I was a butterfly. Or am I a butterfly dreaming that I am a man? He’d read that somewhere. He could see the vertical characters floating on a slow wave toward China. He’d hardly slept the night before.
He made his way to the lower deck and lay down on some cushions in the back cabin. I am a butterfly dreaming I am a man. In seconds he was asleep. He awoke to Higgins shaking him.
“We’re coming up to the site now.”