Kipling had it wrong with that bit about East and West never meeting. East and West meet in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong usually gets called an island, which is true as far as it goes. The island of Hong Kong meets the basic requirement, being surrounded by water, but the colony of Hong Kong includes more than 230 islands. However, the largest chunk of the colony sits on the mainland, which is to say it isn’t surrounded by water at all. It’s surrounded by China.
The colony of Hong Kong is more correctly called the Crown Colony of Hong Kong, which is a way of letting you know it’s one of those pieces of real estate the British stole when they were still capable of doing that kind of thing. They grabbed Hong Kong Island itself back in 1841 as compensation for a few warehouses of their opium that the Chinese burned. Seems that the Chinese government had some objections to the British trying to turn Chinese citizens into junkies, and interfered with the sacred principles of free trade by confiscating the dope. So Queen Victoria lent the Royal Navy to her drug dealers and showed the cheeky mandarins that British merchants would peddle dope to anyone they damn well pleased, thank you very much. The navy shelled a few forts, killed a few chinks, and took an empty little island called Hong Kong as reimbursement for the out-of-pocket expenses. The Queen was pissed, though, because she thought she should have gotten a lot more for her money than one stinking rock with no potential customers on it, and fired the guy who inked the contract. That’s the thing about pushers-they’re never satisfied.
Sure enough, the British spent the rest of the century asserting the sacred right-to-deal, teaching the yellow heathen a lesson, and collecting more land as a tutorial fee, and that’s how the Crown Colony of Hong Kong came to occupy some 366 square miles, and the Chinese came to wish that Kipling had been right.
The West had the nifty high-tech weaponry, but the East had something better: population. Lots of it. You can plant any flag you want, but if it waves over a place that has a few thousand Brits and five million Chinese, you don’t need a rocket scientist to figure out that the place is more Chinese than British. And it took the Chinese about five minutes back in old ’41 to decide that there was some serious money to be made by getting in the middle between the West and the East, and that Hong Kong was just the place to do it. Hong Kong became the back door to China, a place from which to sneak stuff in and sneak stuff out, and any time you have a lot of sneaking going on, you have a lot of money going with it. Nothing sweet moved in either direction without Hong Kong getting a taste, and the place became a paradise for people with an aptitude for your basic capitalism with the gloves off.
The Chinese moved there in droves. They walked, they took boats, they swam. They still do. No one really knows the population of Hong Kong, especially since 1949, when Mao took over and made things hot for people with an aptitude for your basic capitalism with the gloves off, and inspired several hundred thousand of them to go for a moonlight swim in the South China Sea.
So Hong Kong is crowded. Now, arithmetic will tell you that five million or so people in 366 square miles isn’t that bad, but long division doesn’t tell you that most of those 366 square miles go up and down. Most of Hong Kong is made up of steep hills, many of them uninhabitable, so the population is crammed into relatively small segments of the colony. When you get a lot of people in a small area where lots of money changes hands, what you also get is great extremes of wealth and poverty, because the fingers on some of those hands are pretty sticky.
The rich tend to live on the tops of the hills, of course, especially on “the Peak,” more properly called Victoria Peak, the oh-so-exclusive neighborhood founded by the early Western drug lords but later dominated by Chinese financiers. Your status on the Peak is determined by your altitude; the goal is to literally look down on your neighbor. In many ways, the Peak is a little piece of England. It has the cultural airs of the English aristocracy fortunately modified by Chinese love of life. The Peak’s inhabitants send their children off to Oxford or Cambridge for college, take four-o’clock tea, play croquet, and complain that the servants get cheekier every year. At the same time, they drive pink Rolls-Royces, the tea tends to be jasmine, they light incense to Buddhist saints to ensure good luck in gambling, and the servants are a part of a hugely extended family.
The poor have hugely extended families, too, and most of them would be thrilled to get a job pouring tea in a mansion on the Peak. That would mean they could get enough to eat and maybe a place to sleep where they could stretch their legs out. A lot of the poor live on the mainland section called Kowloon, where there’s a person for every nine square feet and where the real-estate moguls plowed some of the hills into the ocean and put up huge blocks of high-rise tenements.
Kowloon has a lot of people and a lot of everything else, too, especially neon. The neon proclaims the sale of cameras, watches, radios, suits, dresses, food, booze, and naked ladies dancing for your pleasure. The main street is called Nathan Road-the “Golden Mile”-and walking down Nathan Road at night is like having an acid flashback, a trip through a tunnel of bright, flashing lights with surround sound.
Walking up Nathan Road, on the other hand, is like walking from Europe into Asia, and in the old days that was at least symbolically the case, because the Orient Express began down near the Star Ferry Pier at the bottom of Nathan Road. If you walk north up the road from there, you’re pointed for China proper: the People’s Republic of China, the PRC, the Middle Kingdom. Where East and West don’t meet. So you don’t want to walk too far up the Nathan Road. You get too far up the Nathan Road and you’re not necessarily coming back.
Unless you’re Chinese, that is, which makes all kinds of sense when you think about it. As crowded as Hong Kong is, as rough and tumble in its unbridled, unchecked, unregulated commercial competition, the Chinese keep going there. Sometimes the gatekeepers at the PRC border simply open the gates, and the flood is unstoppable. Other times those agrarian reformers on the mainland lock their people in, so the people sneak down the Pearl River from Canton, or crawl under the fence up by the New Territories, or wade across the Shumchun River, or paddle rafts across Deep Bay.
They come for a lot of reasons: opportunity, freedom, refuge, asylum. But the reason that most of them come can be summed up in one simple, uncomplicated word.
Rice.
Neal Carey didn’t crawl under a fence or wade a river or paddle a raft. He came in a Boeing 747 wide-body on which the Singaporean stewardess handed him steaming hot towels to wipe his face and wake him up. He came on the overnight flight from San Francisco. Mark Chin and his associates had driven him to the airport, and Chin had given him instructions on what to do when he landed at Hong Kong’s Kai Tak Airport.
“My cousin Ben will be there to meet you, right outside of immigration,” Chin had told him.
“How will I know him?” Neal asked.
Chin had smiled broadly. “You’ll know him.”
It didn’t take long for the efficient and unsmiling immigration officials to handle the incoming crowd. Neal told them that he was there as a tourist, and they asked him how much money he had brought with him. His answer matched the number he had put down on the immigration form, and they let him right in. He didn’t tell them he was going to put the Bank’s gold card away for the duration, though, lest he be tracked down via the paper trail.
He didn’t have any trouble recognizing Ben Chin. He had the same thick chest, the same block-of-granite face, and the same short black hair. He sported a silk lavender shirt, white denims, and black tassled loafers. His wraparound reflective sunglasses were pushed up on his head.
Ben Chin didn’t have any trouble recognizing Neal, either.
“Mark said to hide you out and help you find some babe, right?” he asked as he grabbed Neal by the shoulder.
“Close enough.”
“So maybe I should get you out of a crowded airport,” Chin said. “Where’s your luggage?”
Neal hefted his shoulder bag. “You’re looking at it.”
Chin led him through the terminal and out into the parking lot.
“Kai Tak Airport is a very sad place, you know. According to legend, this is where the Boy Emperor, the last ruler of the Sung Dynasty, jumped off a cliff into the ocean and drowned.”
“Why did he do that?”
“He lost a war with the Mongols or something, I don’t know. Anyway, he didn’t want to be captured.”
“I don’t see a cliff or an ocean.”
“Bulldozers. We’d rather have an airport than a suicide launch pad.”
Chin unlocked the trunk of a ’72 Pinto and threw Neal’s bag in. Then he opened the left-side passenger door for Neal. He gestured for Neal to get in and then walked around to the right side of the car and squeezed himself behind the steering wheel. As they pulled out of the lot, he asked, “Aren’t you going to tell me how good my English is?”
“I hadn’t planned on it.”
“I did a year at UCLA.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, but I flunked out.” He patted his belly. “I clean-jerked a few too many brews, you know what I mean?”
“I’ve had those nights.”
“Did you go Greek?”
“Hmm?”
“Which frat?” Ben asked.
“I lived at home.”
“Oh,” said Ben.
He sounded so disappointed that Neal added, “In an apartment. By myself.”
“Cool.”
Help me, baby Jesus, Neal pleaded. Less than a week ago I was happily burrowed in my little hill, now I’m trapped in a ’72 deathmobile in Hong Kong with a failed frat rat. Life is a strange and wonderful carnival of experiential delights.
“So what do you do now?” Neal asked, trying to avoid a discussion of those good old college days of keggers, mixers, and coeds.
“I’m a security guard at the Banyan Tree Hotel.”
Please, baby Jesus, come down now. I’m off the midway and headed for the sideshow tents.
“It’s the family trade. Besides, it gives me access to a gym. And a place where I can conduct a couple of sidelines, if you know what I mean.”
Yeah, I think I know what you mean.
“The security work?” Ben continued. “I have it dicked. The place was a mess when I took the job. Thieves… beggars… little kids swiping handbags. The tourists were really put off. And vandalism that you wouldn’t believe. I came in and brought some of my boys with me. We cleaned it up, you know what I mean?” He showed Neal his enormous fist. “Now the word is out. We don’t have to work much, and the owners are happy to pay us, feed us, let us use the gym-an empty room now and then when the need comes up, if you know what I mean.”
Yeah, I know what you mean. You organize the thieves, the beggars, and the pickpockets. You commit the vandalism. Then you make it stop. It works the same way in Chinatown in New York, or in Little Italy. People pay you to protect them against yourself. It works the same way on Wall Street, on Capitol Hill. On the street it’s called “protection,” in the halls of power they call it “lunch.”
“I think I know what you mean, Ben.”
“I think you do, too.”
Ben Chin eased his way skillfully into the flow of slow-moving early-morning traffic. He stayed in the mainstream moving down Chatham Road for about twenty minutes, then manuevered into a turn lane and onto Tung Tau Tsuen Street.
Chin pointed out the window to a patch of decrepit, filthy, high-rise tenements about the size of two football fields.
“You don’t ever want to go in there, Neal.”
“No?”
“No. That’s the Walled City. You go in there, you don’t come back out. It’s like a maze.”
Neal said, “I don’t see any walls.”
“Torn down. It was a Sung fort. Even the British didn’t want it when they took over in Kowloon. You’re looking at one of the worst slums in the world. No government, no law. It’s the end of the road.”
Ben sped up again and turned back onto Chatham Road.
“Speaking of the end of the road,” Neal said, “where are we going?”
“To the hotel. We got you a nice room.”
Any time now, baby Jesus.
“Ben, didn’t your cousin explain to you that some people might be looking for me?”
“sure.”
“So, a hotel?” Neal asked. No wonder you flunked out.
“Not a hotel, Neal. My hotel. You don’t sign the register, and you have a room we can keep an eye on. Nobody will get to you.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“My boys at the hotel.”
“The other guards that you supervise.”
Ben Chin chuckled. “Sure. We pride ourselves on keeping our guests safe and secure.”
Chin took a left off Chatham onto Austin Road.
“Hey, Ben?”
“Yeah, Neal?”
“Let’s cut the happy-Buddha, Hop Sing routine, and get down to it. You’re mobbed up, right?”
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘mobbed up.’”
The idea sure didn’t make him mad, though. He was grinning with glee.
“You’re a junior executive with one of the Triads. In the management training program, so to speak.”
“Oooohh, ‘Triad’… the man thinks he knows the lingo.”
Yeah, the man thinks he does. You’d have to be deaf, dumb, and stupid to do my kind of work in any major city in America and not know about the crime syndicates that controlled so much of daily life in every Chinatown. Neal knew that the Triads’ high-ticket item was heroin, but the protection racket provided a big slice of the daily bread, and the Triad bosses used this extortion as a training ground for its thugs and up-and-comers. The Triads had spread their fingers over the Asian communities worldwide, but their home offices were in Hong Kong.
“Quit running a number on me, Ben.”
“So you’re from New York, Neal? You’ve had some Peking Duck on Mott Street and you think you’re an expert on the inscrutable world of the Orient? Let me tell you, something, Neal-you know shit.”
He took a left off Austin onto Nathan Road.
“So tell me what I need to know,” Neal said.
“You need to know that you’re in good hands and leave it at that.”
“Am I in good hands?”
“The best.”
The Banyan Tree Hotel occupies a block on the east side of Nathan Road in the Kowloon District called Tsimshatsui-the Peninsula. It’s the major tourist area in Hong Kong, with its “Golden Mile” shopper’s paradise, restaurants, and bars.
“You’ll blend right in here,” Chin assured Neal as they climbed the back staircase, not bothering to check in. “And you’re prepaid.”
They walked up to the second floor and then grabbed the elevator to the ninth. Neal’s room, 967, was large and anonymous. Its furniture and decor could have been in any hotel room in New Jersey, except that the large picture window looked out over Kowloon Park, across from Nathan Road. The banyan trees that lined the park were survivors from the days when Major Nathan first surveyed the lines for the dirt track that at the time led to nowhere and hence got the name “Nathan’s Folly.” The park appeared to be filled mostly with old people and kids. A deformed beggar, his legs bent underneath him, was crawling along the sidewalk, feebly chasing passersby.
“Welcome to Kowloon,” Chin said. “The real Hong Kong.”
Neal sat down on the bed and began to go through the papers in his briefcase. “What does ‘Kowloon’ mean?”
“Nine dragons,” Chin answered as he lit up a Marlboro. He almost looked like a dragon himself, a big, dangerous beast puffing smoke. “The old people thought that the eight hills here were each dragons, and they were going to call the place Eight Dragons. Then the Sung Emperor came, and the Emperor is a dragon, so that made nine. Nine Dragons-Kowloon.”
“It looks pretty flat to me.”
“It is. Most of the hills were ‘dozed to make room.”
Neal took the brochure advertising Li Lan’s paintings from his briefcase and handed it to Chin. “Where is that address?”
“Is this the babe?”
“Yeah. Is it far from here?”
“Good looking. No, not far. Kansu Street is just up the Nathan Road. Yaumatei District. You get some sleep, then I’ll take you there.”
“I’m not tired.”
“She’s a painter?”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe she’d like to paint my picture. What do you think?”
“I think you should tell me how to get to two-thirty-seven Kansu Street.”
The beggar across the street scored some coins from a young woman tourist. Chin offered the pack of cigarettes to Neal, who shook his head.
“I think,” Chin said, “that I better take you there.”
“Why? Is it a dangerous neighborhood?”
“It’s not the neighborhood, it’s the situation.”
“What situation?”
“You tell me.”
Neal got up and looked out the window. The beggar would have been tall if had been able to stand up. He was certainly thin. He moved by supporting himself on his hands as he swung his torso like a gymnast on the bars of the horse. The crowds of pedestrians surged around him, creating an eddy in the stream of traffic.
The situation is, Neal thought, that I’m a renegade from my own company, which may or may not join the CIA in wanting me dead. The situation is that this woman set me up, maybe even set me up to be killed. The situation is that somehow I’m in love with her anyway and I need to warn her that she’s in danger. The situation is that I have to find her to get some answers before I can get on with my life.
“The situation is,” Neal said without turning away from the window, “that I need to talk to the woman at two-thirty-seven Kansu Street. That’s the situation.”
“Mark told me to take care of you.”
“And you have.”
“He said there are people looking for you.”
“There are.”
“So you need protection.”
Neal turned back from the window. If I boot him, he thought, he’ll lose face with his cousin and with his own boys. Besides, this is his turf and I couldn’t lose him if I tried. All I can do is make it harder on each of us.
“I’ll need to speak with her alone,”Neal said.
“Sure.”
“Let’s go.”
One thing you have to say for Ben Chin, Neal thought: he’s organized. As soon as they hit the street, three teenage boys fell in behind them. They all had that lean and hungry look that Caesar was so worried about, and they all wore white shirts over shiny black trousers and loafers. They dropped their cigarettes as soon as they saw Chin, and wordlessly arranged themselves in a fan formation about thirty feet behind Chin and Neal. A bucktoothed boy, smaller and skinnier than the others, ranged ahead of them, rarely looking back but figuring out their intended path anyway.
“Who do we have to look out for?” Chin asked him. “White guys?”
“Probably.”
Chin grimaced, then said, “Okay, no problem.”
“You have a scout ahead of us.”
“You have a good eye. But he’s not a scout. He’s a doorman. If we have to run, he opens a ‘door’ in the crowd for us and shuts it when we’re through.”
Neal knew what he meant. A doorman in a street operation is like a downfield blocker in a football game. When he sees his players running his way, he clobbers a civilian or two to open a hole. Once his own guys make it through the hole, he throws himself in the way of the pursuit. That’s the way it usually works, but if the doorman sees that it’s the opposition in the way instead of bystanders, he uses a knife or a gun or his hands to open the hole. When that happens the doorman is usually a goner unless the sweepers can get up to the action real fast. A doorman is expendable.
So Ben Chin sure knew what he was doing. Having a doorman ready is about the only way out of a net. Which was one of those good-news-bad-news jokes to Neal: good that Chin was ready for a trap, bad that he thought he had to be.
Chin himself seemed relaxed. He moved easily through the crowd, glancing at the store windows and checking out the women. To the casual observer he looked like a Kowloon tough on a leisurely search for some fun. But Neal saw the alertness in his eyes and recognized that each scan of a portable radio or an approachable woman screened a search for potential trouble. Chin was watching out for something, and Neal had the feeling that he wasn’t looking for some white guys. The various kweilo tourists that passed by didn’t earn a second glance.
Neal felt his paranoia come back on him like a stale shirt. Or maybe it was the fact that he had been on all-night flight and hadn’t bothered to shower, shave, or get a meal. It felt like a mistake, but then he remembered that the last time he had stopped to indulge in such human comforts, he had let Pendleton and Li Lan skip out to Mill Valley. He wasn’t going to give them the chance this time.
Chin was staring up and to the left, and Neal braced himself for some action. He turned to follow Chin’s gaze, and saw that it led to a movie marquee. Chin was staring at the poster advertising the current feature. The three sweeps stopped in their tracks, and one of them turned around to cover the rear. The Doorman used the pause to cross over to the west side of Nathan Road, then he stopped on the corner to turn and watch his boss.
Chin didn’t see any of it, but then again, he didn’t have to. He had a well-trained team and he knew it, and this gave him little luxuries like freedom to check out a movie.
The marquee said that the theater was called the Astor, but that was the end of the English; everything else was in Chinese ideograms. The posters showed a brightly dressed Chinese couple in period costume gazing fondly at each other, and another still of the same couple bravely wielding gigantic swords against what looked like an army of grinning villains.
“This place has the latest flicks from China,” Ben Chin explained. He looked at his watch. “Maybe we can go this afternoon.”
The Book of Joe Graham, Chapter Seven, Verse Three: “Everyone has a weakness.”
“Yeah,” Neal said. “Let’s see how it goes.”
The Doorman was doing a quick shuffle-step across the street, like a puppy whose master is taking too long to open the door for a walk. Neal didn’t blame him; the Doorman’s job was a lonely one, especially when he was cut off from his team by a broad and busy avenue. The doorman had a lot of responsibility here. It was his job to give the “Walk/Don’t Walk” signal.
Street crossings are tricky in this kind of work. You have to time it so the traffic flow doesn’t cut the sweepers off from the people they’re protecting. You also have to keep a sharp eye on all the cars that are coming and going. One car might cut off the sweepers while the crew in a second car takes out the target. A street crossing is a vulnerable moment.
They did it flawlessly, the Doorman using subtle hand gestures to call the signals, and the rest of the team coming across in one smooth flow. It was as nifty a job as Neal had ever seen, and he thought he could detect a small look of relief on the Doorman’s face as he led them west on Kansu Street.
Tenement buildings with cheap-looking ground-floor flats made up most of Kansu Street. You couldn’t really call the buildings slums, but they were dirty and in need of a paint job. One of the main landlords must have gotten a great deal on pastel green paint, because the color dominated several buildings on one block. Narrow balconies, open to the street but roofed with corrugated metal, edged most of the buildings. Television antennae poked out over the balcony railings and made a convenient place from which to hang laundry. Beds and hammocks also filled a lot of the balconies, and here and there the tenants had nailed up sheets of tin to provide a little privacy for the family members who lived out there.
Hong Kong couldn’t stretch out, so it stretched up. Everywhere you looked, the older, lower tenements were giving way to massive, block-long high-rises that had the unmistakable anonymity of government housing projects. The private sector was on the move, too; when the existing buildings had overflowed, people had simply moved themselves and their belongings out into the side streets and jerry-rigged shacks out of tin, old sheets, and cardboard. A few of these pioneers with a little more cash or some connections had scored some precious wood and built actual walls.
Neal felt as if he had stepped off Nathan Road into a Malthusian scenario in which the eye could never rest. The landscape was literally crawling; there was motion everywhere he looked. Children scampered along the balconies and played the same games played by kids everywhere, but their games of hide-and-seek seemed to encompass hundreds of contestants, and there was no place to hide. Merchants lined the sidewalks hawking an infinite variety of goods. Old women stood at windows or balconies shaking out sheets and towels, while their husbands leaned over the railing and smoked cigarettes or spat out sunflower seeds while they talked with their neighbors.
The noise was incredible: a din of conversation, banter, argument, negotiation, advertisement, and protest all conducted in the singsong but rapid-fire Cantonese dialect. Old women expressed outrage over the price of a fish while their sisters moaned in triumph or despair over the clackety-clack of mah-jongg tiles. Men trumpeted the virtues of bolts of cheap cloth or the undoubted tenderness of a particular chicken, while their less ambitious brothers argued over the chances of a two-year-old filly at Happy Valley that afternoon. Children squealed with unrestrained joy, or giggled at some private joke, or wailed in misery as a mother hauled them by the hand back into a building.
Then Neal noticed the smell-or, more accurately, the smells. The aroma of cooking predominated. Neal could distinguish the smell of fish and rice, and it seemed to him there were dozens of odors that he didn’t recognize, smells that rose from steaming woks in the street shacks and hung over the area like a permanent cloud. There was also the smell of a sewage system that couldn’t begin to cope with the demands placed on it, and the underlying stink of standing human waste permeated the air. The acrid smoke of charcoal braziers, masses of burning cigarettes, and building power plants made the air thick and hazy, and competed with the salt air of the nearby sea.
Yaumatei was a total crowding of the senses. Neal, after spending the last six months as the only occupant of an open moor, could only imagine what it might be like to to inhabit a world where, from the moment of birth to the moment of death, one never experienced a single moment alone.
Chin and his crew moved through the crowd like sharks through the ocean, constantly in motion and serenely calm. Their eyes never seemed to move from a straight-ahead gaze, and yet they seemed to take in everything. Neal noticed that people in the crowd would spot them and then quickly find something fascinating to look at on the sidewalk until the gang passed by. No hawkers or loiterers or curious kids approached Neal, even thought they were several blocks off the main kweilo tourist route. He was sealed off.
It took them about ten minutes to find number 346, which looked pretty much like 344 or 345. The building was mustard yellow and only five stories tall. The typical balconies stuck out like guardian parapets, the colorful laundry resembling pennants.
“You have a flat number?” Chin asked Neal.
The Doorman stood in the building’s foyer, looking up the staircase. An ancient woman, clad entirely in black from her skullcap to her shoes, sat on a stool staring nervously at him between puffs of a cigarette.
“No.”
Chin laughed. “I’ll bet now you’re glad I came with you.”
He approached the old woman and spoke roughly to her in Cantonese. She spoke back just as roughly, and Neal felt relief when Chin laughed, reached into his pocket, and handed her a cigarette. Her eyes showed pleased surprise when she saw the Marlboro.
“Give me the picture,” Chin said.
Neal handed him the brochure, and Chin showed it to the old woman. She stared at it for a few seconds and gave a brief response.
“She knows her,” Chin explained to Neal, “but she wants more cigs to tell us.”
Neal felt a rush of excitement in his stomach. Li Lan might be just upstairs, a few seconds away.
“Ask her if she’s with a white man.”
“This old bag?”
“Li Lan.”
Chin’s face crinkled up in a broad smile as he looked at Neal and said, “I think I get it. You want the guy beat up?”
“No.”
“Suit yourself.”
Chin turned back to the woman and handed her three more Marlboros. She snatched them, then snarled at him and stuck her hand out.
“Gau la!” Chin answered. (“Enough!”)
“Hou!” (“Yes!”)
Chin gave her one more cigarette.
“Do jeh.” (“Thank you.”) She shoved the cigarettes in her jacket pocket and then pointed upstairs and gave directions.
“Mgoi,” Chin said sarcastically. (“Thanks for the help.”) “Upstairs, fourth floor.”
The doorman went ahead of them and two of the crew followed. The third stayed at the lobby door.
When they reached the apartment, Neal said, “I want to talk to her alone.”
“We’ll wait out here,” Chin agreed.
Neal felt his heart racing as he knocked on the door. There was no answer, no scuffling of feet, no cease in conversation. He knocked again. Still no answer. The third time wasn’t a charm. The locked door presented only a momentary inconvenience, and Ben Chin nodded approvingly at Neal’s dexterity with his AmEx card.
“Fuck!” Neal yelled.
The apartment was empty. Not merely unoccupied, but empty. No clothes, no cooking utensils, dishes, pictures, old magazines, toilet paper, toothbrushes… A bare bed and an old rattan chair were the sole occupants of the one-room apartment.
Neal looked out the window at the balcony. Nothing. He turned around to see Ben Chin standing in the open doorway. Chin looked angry, a lot angrier than he should have been, but Neal didn’t notice it. He was too pissed off.
“Go get the Old Mother,” Chin said to the Doorman in Cantonese. Then he turned back to Neal and said, “It looks like you missed her.”
“No kidding.”
“She must have just left. Apartments don’t stay empty long around here.”
“She took the time to clean it.”
Chin laughed. “Maybe. It’s more likely, though, that the neighbors stripped it the second she walked out the door.”
Pretty goddamn inconsiderate of the neighbors. Didn’t they know I’d want to search for clues?
Neal heard the old woman squawking in the staircase. The Doorman brought her into the room. At Chin’s signal he shut the door behind them.
“Are you a ghost?” Chin said to her in Cantonese. He walked across the room and opened the window. “Can you fly?”
Neal didn’t understand the words, but the threat was fairly clear. A thug is a thug is a thug, and his techniques vary little from culture to culture.
“Come on, Ben,” Neal said, feeling more tired than he had for years.
Chin ignored him.
“Answer me,” he said to the old woman. “Are you a ghost? Can you fly?”
She glared at him with a look that spoke more contempt than fear. She didn’t say anything.
“Why did you make me climb four flights of stairs for nothing? Huh? Why didn’t you tell me she had left?”
Her answer was a variation on the “you didn’t ask” theme.
“Where did she go?”
“How would I know?”
“Let’s see if you can fly.”
The Doorman grabbed her from behind and put his hand over her mouth to stifle her shriek. Neal stepped in front of the window.
“Tell him to let her go,” he said.
“Stay out of it.”
“I’m paying the bill, I give the orders,” Neal answered.
“I’ll give you a refund. Now get out of the way.”
Neal slammed the window shut. He realized his knees were trembling and he knew that if Chin wanted to throw the woman out the window he could do it. Shit, he thought, if he wants to throw me out the window he can do it.
No real witty, intimidating threats came to him, so he settled for, “What could she tell us anyway?”
“Everything,” Chin said. “The old bag has probably been sitting downstairs for forty years. She sees everyone who goes up and everyone who comes down. If she hears someone fart, she knows what he ate for lunch.”
Chin stepped up to the woman and poked her in the chest. “Tell me.”
She broke into a long monologue.
“What man? What kind of man?” Chin asked.
The question inspired another soliloquy. When she was finished, Chin signaled the Doorman to release her. She sank to her knees on the floor and gasped for air, looking up at Neal with an expression of unmitigated hatred.
Chin wasn’t much friendlier when he said, “Okay, Mr. Gandhi. Old Woman Know-Nothing says your babe was here with a kweilo-a white guy-for just one day. Do you think this old hag wouldn’t notice that? Do you think that anybody on this whole block wouldn’t notice that? She says another guy came to visit both days. A Chinese. She says the three of them left together this morning, but she doesn’t know where they were going, and she had better be telling the truth.”
Neal plunked himself down on the windowsill. He was tired and angry and he didn’t like the smug look on Chin’s face.
“Okay,” Neal said, “so you got out of her that they were here, and now they’re not, and they left with a Chinese man. Hell, they should be easy to find now. All we have to do is find a Chinese man.”
Chin looked at him like he was thinking about the window again. Neal looked at the Doorman and pointed to the door. Chin nodded his okay and the Doorman left.
“And something else,” Neal said to Chin. “I don’t like the way you work. You’re on a job with me, there are certain things you don’t do-I don’t care if it’s your turf and your language. One of the biggest things you don’t do is you don’t rough up old women, or any women, or anybody unless you have to. And by ‘have to’ I mean only if we’re in actual, physical danger. Now if you can’t deal with that, fine-walk away right now and I’ll finish the job myself.”
The silence that followed was about as long as a “Gilligan’s Island” rerun.
“You don’t know how things work here,” Chin said quietly.
“I know how I work.”
“If you had talked to me that way in front of my crew, I would have had to kill you.”
Neal recognized a peace offering when he heard one. He had to give Chin back some face.
“I know. That’s why I sent him out of the room. To tell you the truth, I was pretty scared.” He gave Chin his most self-deprecating laugh.
Chin laughed back and the deal was done.
“Okay,” Chin said. “Your checkbook, your rules.”
“Okay. Now what?”
Chin thought for a second.
“Tea,” he said.
“Tea?”
“Helps you think.”
“Then tea it is. I need all the help I can get.”
Chin pulled a money roll out of his pants pocket, peeled a $10HK bill off, and handed it to the old woman.
“Deui mjyuh,” he said. (“I’m sorry.”)
She stuffed the bill inside her blouse and scowled at him.
“Cigarette!” she demanded.
He gave her the pack.
The teashop was more like an aviary. It seemed to Neal that every other customer in the place was carrying at least one cage with a bird in it.
“I feel so underdressed,” Neal said to Chin as they sat down at the small round table. The Doorman had gone in before them, secured the table, and left. The rest of the crew waited outside, patrolling the sidewalk and observing every customer who came in.
“Local color,” Chin answered. “I thought you might enjoy it.”
Neal looked around the large room. The customers were all men, mostly older, most of them accompanied by brightly colored songbirds in bamboo cages. Some of the cages looked like they cost a small fortune. They featured sloping rooflines with carved dragons painted in shiny colors. Some had swinging perches with gilded chains and ivory bars. A few of the really old men had their pets perched proudly on their wrists. The birds-and it seemed to Neal that were hundreds of them-sang to each other, every warbling tremolo inspiring a choral response. As the birds exchanged tunes, the old men chatted happily with each other, doubtless swapping bird anecdotes and heredities. The men seemed to know each other as well as the birds did, and all parties were enjoying their social outing. The teashop was a riot of sound and color, but Neal noticed that it wasn’t really noisy.
“Quite a place,” Neal said.
“They used to be all over Hong Kong,” Ben said, “but keeping birds is dying out with the old people. Now there are only a few Bird Teahouses.”
A waiter came over, wiped the table with a wet towel, and set out two handleless cups.
“What kind of tea do you want?” Chin asked Neal.
“You order for me,” answered Neal, who drank at least one cup of tea a year and was only vaguely aware that there was more than one kind.
“Let me see… you are tired but need to concentrate, so I think maybe a Chiu Chou tea.” He said to the waiter, “Ti’ kuan yin cha.”
“Houde.”
“I ordered a very strong Oolong tea. It will keep you awake. Alert.”
“That would be a refreshing change. So what do we do now?” “Give up.”
“Can’t.”
“Why not?”
Neal listened to the cacophony of birdsong, chatter, and rattling cups for few moments before he answered.
“There are other people looking for her and her friend. I think the same people might have reason to be looking for me. These other people do not have kind intentions-they’ll kill her, her friend, and me if they have to. I don’t know why. I do know that I have to find her, warn her, and find out what this is all about before I can get back to a normal life.”
A normal life. Right.
“How did you get involved in this?”
Neal shook his head.
Chin tried again. “Mark told me it’s a drug thing.”
“I don’t think so.”
The waiter came back and set a pot of tea on the table. Chin took the lid off, sniffed the pot, and put the lid back on. He filled Neal’s cup and then his own.
Neal sipped the tea. It was strong all right, slightly smoky and bitter. But it felt good going down, warm and soothing. It occured to him that he hadn’t really stopped moving since the bullet had buzzed past his head, that he was wandering in the dark without a plan, moving for the sake of motion, making assumptions based on himself, not on the subject.
He took a long draught of the tea. So what do you know? he asked himself. You know that Li Lan and Pendleton have skipped out on you again. Back up. Skipped out on you? Why do you think you have anything to do with it? Maybe they already know about the danger and that’s what they’re running from. Running? Maybe they’re not running at all. Maybe they came to Hong Kong and simply changed living quarters. The one-room apartment was small even for lovers.
So how do you find them? They’ve taken off in the most densely populated area of the most densely populated city in the world, so how do you find them?
You don’t.
You let them find you.
He looked up from his cup and saw that Chin was also sitting back and relaxing. He didn’t seem to mind Neal’s silence or be bothered by it. He was just drinking tea.
You let them find you, Neal told himself. Why would they want to do that? Depends on who “they” are. If “they” are Li and Pendleton, maybe they find you because you’re making such a pain in the ass of yourself that they have to deal with you. If “they” are the same people who almost canceled your reservation in Mill Valley, maybe they find you because they can find you, and they tie up a loose end.
That’s me, Neal thought, the quintessential loose end.
He poured another cup of tea for himself and Chin, then sat back in his chair. He was sitting in a place where old men combined their pleasures by taking their pet birds to tea. He could take a few moments to enjoy it. Besides, the game had changed. The second cup of tea was much stronger, the third stronger yet, and then the pot was empty. Chin turned the lid upside down on the pot and the waiter picked it up and returned a minute later with a fresh pot.
“Maybe I can’t find her,” Neal said. “But I can look for her.”
“True.”
Neal poured the tea.
“Maybe I can make a big show of looking for her.”
Chin took some tea and swilled it around in his mouth. Then he tilted his head back and swallowed. “Then maybe the unfriendly people who are looking for you will find you.”
“That’s the idea.”
If they missed me once, they can miss me again. But I won’t miss them this time.
“That’s a crazy game.”
“Do you want to play?”
“Absolutely.”
Chin got up and signaled for the check.
“You ready?” he asked Neal.
“Not yet.”
“You need something?”
“I need to sit here and finish the tea and listen to the birds sing.”
The birds must have heard him because they launched into an avian symphony of particular virtuosity. Even the old men stopped their conversations to listen and to enjoy the moment. When the crescendo died down, everyone laughed, not in derision but in the joy of a shared pleasure.
Neal Carey was dog-tired, jet-lagged, culture-shocked, and snakebit, but at least he knew what to do next.