by Anna Ferrara
“Where do you think you’re going, pretty girl,” he said in Cantonese.
Right after he said so, The Backstreet Boys’ I Want It That Way began playing in my ears. My body began shaking more than it had been doing before and my office’s glasses started sliding down my nose yet again.
When those things happened, I changed my mind; I decided having my office watch over me one hundred percent of the time was not in the least creepy at all.
The man in my car pushed me back to the ancestral hall, with his gun at the back of my head the whole way, and tossed me onto the dusty dirt ground in front of the bald man at the ancient Chinese desk the moment we got there.
When I looked up, with smarting knees and palms and fear running through every last one of my veins, I saw he was not as old as his voice suggested he would be, nor as calm. His face could be considered ugly, a little like an elderly weatherworn male lion’s, perhaps, with eyes that were cold yet dangerously sharp. He had an eye-catching scar that ran diagonally down the length of his face, from his forehead to his lower cheek; his skin looked sun-damaged and calloused; he also looked way larger and more muscular from the front than he had from the back.
Suddenly, I totally got why Angelo had been having difficulty looking him in the eye. I also developed a new veneration for Milla’s guts, even though she was, like Angelo and the rest of the men in black, standing behind me, staring down at me like I were a ghost or alien or some sort of horrific creature that made their skin crawl.
The bald man picked up the ID my office had given me—which he had on his desk along with my wallet, Discman and earphones—and stared hard at it with his hard, emotionless, lion eyes. “Sandra Sum, Hong Kong citizen, lives in Kowloon?” He lowered the ID, turned those eyes on me and smiled in a way that suggested he enjoyed seeing me on the floor, on my knees, looking up at him.
I dropped my head and kept my eyes away from his at once.
“And you like… The Backstreet Boys?” The bald man laughed. “Do you know what I love doing to the ears of eavesdroppers who like listening to The Backstreet Boys, Miss Sum.”
My entire body began to feel icy. “I was just passing through,” I said. “Just exploring the country. I didn’t expect to see you guys here.” I tried my best to meet his eyes but found I couldn’t do so for more than two seconds before needing to look away.
“So you’re saying it’s a coincidence you appeared right before our meeting and got ready to leave right after our meeting?”
I nodded because that was all I could do.
The bald man laughed again. He sounded to me like he were watching a comedy show all by himself with headphones, the jokes of which only he could hear. “Unfortunately, the punishment is the same, coincidence or not.” He turned to his men and said, in Cantonese, “Tony, chop off her ears. After that you and the boys can do whatever you want with her.”
“Got it, boss!” The long-haired man who had been translating for Milla stepped away from the horde of men in black and ran his eyes down my body.
“Please, don’t,” I whispered. I decided he wasn’t good-looking up close at all. “Please, I beg of you,” I added, when he took a meat chopper from one of the men in the horde and began smiling.
He moved closer. I tried to back away but a really strong man grabbed me by the shoulders and held me in place, with ease.
Where the hell were those reinforcements? Where the fuck were Alpha’s reinforcements?! “I know I was wrong, I won’t do it again!” I said as my entire body began shaking.
Tony didn’t care. He loomed over me like a giant monster and raised his chopper high in the air. The entire hall went dead silent; the bald man sniggered. Milla shouted, “Stop!”
Stop? Everyone in the hall turned towards her, me included.
“I know her,” she said to the bald man, her face a little paler than usual. “She’s an acquaintance. I think she stopped to watch because she caught sight of me.” She turned to me and regarded me with a stern look of disapproval.
“Yes!” I said at once. I turned to the bald man and forced myself to keep my gaze in the direction of his eyes. “And when I realised I was in the wrong place at a really, really wrong time I decided to leave without causing any trouble. I really didn’t mean to intrude or hear what I heard and I swear I won’t tell anybody about what I heard. In fact, I’ll just forget it now. I’ll wipe my brain out, pretend it all never happened, I promise.”
“You think it’s so easy?” he said to me. “Letting you go will be bad for my reputation.” He turned to his men and said, in Cantonese, “Take one ear out at least!”
Tony lifted his chopper yet again.
“Stop!”
Tony stopped. I stopped flinching and peeped in the direction of Milla. Everyone turned too. Milla, who had her eyes on me, was now looking absolutely furious.
“My friend, this is my house,” the bald man said to her. “I need to keep the rules up.”
“I’ll buy another hundred kilograms. You’ll get the money next week. In exchange, you let her go now and keep your men looking for Danny and Carmen for another month. I would also like the same friendship discount as before.”
“Milla, no,” Angelo said. He sounded appalled. “We don’t need it, remember?”
“Now we do.” She turned to the bald man. “You have my word.”
“We have enough product, Milla!” Angelo said.
“I’ll pay for it, don’t worry. The deal is on, my friend,” she said to the bald man.
The bald man laughed like he had just heard the best joke of his private comedy show. “If that’s what you want, I’d be more than happy to oblige. You’re just as good at doing business as your brother is, I see.” He stood up and extended a hand towards her this time.
“It runs in the family,” she said and took his hand with confidence. She looked years older when she did so, like a woman of great power and influence.
Angelo inhaled sharply and looked hell of a pissed but didn’t say a word.
The bald man turned to Tony and offhandedly flicked a hand in his general direction.
Tony lowered his chopper and took a few steps backwards. I felt the man holding on to my shoulders release his grip of me and heard him shuffle backwards too.
“You are one lucky friend, punk,” the bald man snarled. “But remember, if you ever say a word of everything you heard to anybody, I will find out where your mother lives, where your grandmother lives, where your dog, cat, hamsters and baby cousins live, and you ain’t going to be that lucky anymore.”
I nodded right away, my heart beating in my throat. I felt my palms water the dirt floor I was holding on to for dear life.
The bald man threw my Discman and wallet at me but left the ID my office had given me on his desk. “Get the hell out,” he said, once again sounding deceptively calm. “I don’t ever want to see you again.”
I nodded, long enough for him to see how genuinely sorry I was, then jumped up and sprinted towards my car as fast as my legs would carry me.
I didn’t even dare look at Milla on the way out.
Chapter 15
3 Jul 1999, Saturday
I went right back to my apartment on Hong Kong Island after dropping the car back at the rental shop, and once there, went right back to looking at Milla’s apartment through my binoculars even though I was buzzing with adrenaline and had to pause to pace around the bedroom once every few minutes.
My body quivered; I sighed a great deal; my mind raced. The scenes from the afternoon replayed themselves in my head, over and over. I couldn’t decide if I really made it out safe, if my ears were really still on the sides of my head. I kept feeling the urge to touch them to make sure they really were there yet found it hard to believe the answer my hands got. My office’s glasses were slippery from sweat and oil and starting to annoy me so I wiped it clean and put it away.
I thought a great deal about what I heard too. A hundred k
ilograms, Milla had said. A hundred kilograms could be a man and a very thin woman or two slim women, or approximately twenty-five assault rifles, or a hell lot of powder. Which of the above would have made the bald man the most money? Enough money to have made him laugh the way he laughed earlier on?
A hundred kilograms of powder, hands down. Milla and the 81M men were dealing in drugs, I concluded. Just drugs. Drugs were illegal and hurtful, yes, but dealers weren’t terrorists; people were more useful to them alive than dead. So why then was C39, the terrorist, hanging out with them? Did they even know he was a terrorist? Did Milla know?
Milla! My heart now fluttered every time I thought her name. She was a drug dealer, yes, but she saved me! She saved my ears and maybe more. Would Everquest keep me on the job if I didn’t have ears? I doubt so. Milla was a heroine. My heroine.
My heroine returned to her apartment just before evening hit. She went right to her bedroom, drew her bedroom curtains shut and closed the door.
I gave her an hour to settle down, take a shower, perhaps.
That hour felt like forty to me; I lost count of the number of times I walked in circles around my computer or the number of times I glanced at my Nokia and willed myself to leave it where it was for that little bit longer.
When the hour passed, at last, I felt like a bundle of energy, all ready to skip rope all evening long. I was scared again, yet terribly excited; I knew what I had to say but wasn’t sure I would actually dare say it. I found myself chewing on my lower lip as I dialled her number and walked the length of my bedroom’s window forty times while drumming my fingers against my own thigh.
Milla emerged from her bedroom, not in pyjamas but all dressed up and made up with thick eyeliner and mascara. She went to her phone on its charging dock, glanced at the Caller ID machine and immediately began looking as furious as she had been at the ancestral hall earlier. This time, she picked up right away. I hoped she would say something first, but she didn’t.
“Milla, it’s Sandra,” I said when I realised she wasn’t going to speak unless I did. My heart upped its thumping a notch. I couldn’t help but wonder if I would die if it kept on thumping at that pace.
“Were you following me?” she asked. Her voice was flat, emotionless.
“Yes. I’m sorry I just... I needed to do my job.”
“You followed me all the way from Hong Kong Island to the middle of nowhere and nobody—not me, not any of the four men I was with—noticed? You managed to get around professional guards without getting detected? Really? That’s extremely impressive, Sandra. I’m pretty sure no other reporter has the same set of skills you have!”
I squeezed my eyes shut and took a deep breath. “I was just... lucky, I guess... and... really good at my job.”
Across the street, Milla rolled her eyes. “Just stop with the lies. Who are you? Really? How many times have you followed me without my knowledge?”
“Just this once. I’m just a... reporter... from Hong Kong.” My face began to feel all hot and itchy.
Milla snorted. “Who just happens to know how to pick locks?”
I didn’t know what to say to that.
“You know for the longest time, I truly believed we were that lucky. Or that you were incredibly talented. But today, it dawned on me that nobody gets that lucky. Not you, not me. Lucky people make their own luck, don’t they?”
I strained my brain for an excuse but my mind remained blank and quiet, as if it wasn’t even functional.
“I know of another person as lucky as you, Sandra. Do you want to know who she is?”
No. I took another long, deep breath. “Who?”
“A woman named Carmen, who was, coincidentally, Danny’s only other visitor.”
I opened my mouth to speak but couldn’t think of any words to say.
“You know what I think of Carmen?”
My throat went dry. My skin began to crawl. I found myself reaching for one of my bedroom walls and leaning the full of my weight on it because I was afraid Milla would be able to hear how fidgety I had become.
“I think Carmen is an alias created by a woman who already knew who I was when she approached me and pretended to want to get to know me.”
Blood left my face and seemed to gather at the ends of my extremities.
“Yes, I think she’s you, Sandra. Was that why you asked me out to dinner? Why you seem so interested in getting to know me better? You just want information from me, don’t you? Just bloody information and nothing else!”
Think, Fleur! Lie if you have to! I tried my darndest but all I could think of were those animated ‘Under Construction’ GIFs and dancing babies that were all over the internet.
“And I actually thought you were in love with me! Imagine that!”
“Milla, I…” Am in love with you! I wanted to say the words, I really did. I had been psyching myself to say them all afternoon, yet somehow, when the time came, those five words felt like they were stuck on gum at the back of my throat; too stuck for me to push out through my lips.
“Save it. I don’t want you following me ever again, Sandra. Nor do I want to have to see you. Stay the hell away from me!”
“Milla—” I said, but the line had already gone dead. Again!
Through my binoculars, I watched her go back to her bedroom and come out seconds later with an evening clutch in hand. She left her apartment, hopped into a cab and vanished from sight in less than fifteen minutes.
After that, I was all alone in my soundless, monotone apartment, with Milla nowhere close. It was exactly what life would be if Milla forgot about me and never contacted me again, I realised.
I remembered how life had been before I had gotten to know Milla and realised I didn’t want to go back to living that way at all.
Chapter 16
4 Jul 1999, Sunday
I can’t say what time Milla returned home but it must have been after 2am because the last time I looked at my watch, before I fell asleep on the floor, it was 1:54am.
The next time I looked through my binoculars, at 8:32am, she was all dressed up in a different dress, with shades on, and leaving her apartment yet again. Nothing she had on her person gave me any clue as to where she was going or where she had gone the night before.
When I saw her jump into a cab and leave the vicinity yet again, I knew the opportunity to find out had presented itself.
The moment I stepped into her fragrant, candle-scented living room, I realised I smelled, in comparison, of stale sweat and oil. I had a bad taste in my mouth and an unusual furriness over my teeth; my head was throbbing slightly, likely from the immense stress of the day before.
Her apartment looked the same, except maybe slightly neater than normal, as if it had only been packed. Her second bedroom was empty, as it always was—no C39 in there yet.
I moved through her apartment at a snail’s pace because I hadn’t had my morning coffee or even a single drop of water. I felt dehydrated and lost count of the seconds that passed just after swopping the first camera in the living room.
Oh well. I kept going. Just keep moving, Fleur. ‘Be not afraid of going slowly, be afraid only of standing still.’
Despite remembering Benny’s words, I ended up standing still in her bedroom anyway, the moment I noticed how bare her lava lamps were. There were no stickers on them this time; those Neoprint photo stickers we had taken together were gone. She no longer had them to look at before going to sleep.
I found the stickers in a trash bin in the kitchen, along with the two bottles of wine I bought her. The bottles hadn’t been opened and they lay next to an empty bottle of wine I had never seen or touched before.
The stickers had been mashed together and now stuck to each other, crumpled, like tiny pieces of unwanted gum. Our faces were, as a result, distorted and monstrous. Our smiles now looked like snarls. My face was deformed in some. The worst part? Many of the tiny stickers had been ripped down the middle, sepa
rating Milla’s head from mine for good.
Seeing them that way, so filthy, so messed up, made me feel real pain, for some reason.
I felt as if there were a knife in the middle of my heart, slicing down into the depths of my soul.
The footage on the MultiMediaCards told me everything.
Milla returned to her apartment at 4am with a slender Caucasian woman around her waist. The Caucasian woman was taller than she was, with light-coloured hair. She had the face of a runway model, wore a body-hugging dress, killer heels and had a Louis Vuitton clutch stuck under one arm. Milla kissed her the moment they got through the front door and wouldn’t stop kissing her as they spun across the living room with their arms and bodies intertwined. They ended up on Milla’s circular coffee table—the very table I stood on every time I did a camera swop—and Milla ran her hands under the Caucasian woman’s dress right away. The woman’s panties came away and shortly after, both of them were in various states of undress, looking at each other with sleepy, drunken grins and eyes that were half-open and somewhat seductive.
Milla shut her living room’s curtains after that. When she got back to the woman she had left on her coffee table, she sank down onto the carpet and put her head between the woman’s thighs.
I watched the other woman’s face transform, watched her grab at Milla’s head with frantic desperation, and my mouth fell open. I think I was in shock; too shocked to move, too shocked to blink, too shocked to stop the video clip from playing even though I was well aware it wasn’t right for me to be watching more. I felt like a pervert, no different from my boss, yet I didn’t move away or close my eyes. I watched on.
I couldn’t see what Milla was doing to the other woman but I could see that whatever she was doing was making the other woman thoroughly distressed. The other woman had her eyes closed, frowned and writhed and kept her mouth open as if she wanted to scream but didn’t have the energy to. She never made any attempt to move away from Milla though. If anything, she seemed to be pulling Milla towards her or thrusting her lower body towards Milla. The more she frowned the further forward she thrusted.