by Jason Y. Ng
Ling rose to visit the bathroom. On her way back, she tried putting her hands back on his thigh, but in the dark she fumbled and “accidentally” brushed his crotch. Ling had proof he was highly aroused.
She cut to the chase, whispering, “I am as aroused as you are. Take me somewhere, now!”
Chubby was too overwhelmed to think straight. Ling took control and suggested they go to the tin hut with the toilet. The restaurant had closed, no one would be using it, and he had the key.
Chubby had experience with sex, but only with hookers. He only knew the wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am kind of sex. Ling pretended she was a virgin. She lay down on the cot naked with her eyes half-closed, hoping he knew what he was doing.
Foreplay was a concept alien to Chubby. He tried to mount her right away, but he wasn’t the suave and graceful sort. In his eagerness, he overshot her body and almost fell to the other side of the cot. Ling had to grab his arm to steady him.
He managed to get himself into position, and immediately started to move frantically atop Ling. She could hardly breathe. Good thing it was quick.
As soon as he was done, she pushed him off her. She pulled a tissue from her purse and cleaned herself with it, then dropped it back in her purse. Seeing Chubby’s puzzled look, she said, “We don’t want anyone to find the tissue in here, do we?”
When they were leaving, Chubby asked, “When can I see you again?”
Ling waved and said, “Yeah.”
* * *
One down; one to go.
Ling had already talked to Uncle Cheng a few times in the restaurant. He always looked her over, and his eyes lingered at the two swellings on her chest way too long.
He had a wife, but catching him alone wasn’t difficult because he was the one who locked up the joint every night.
She showed up around closing time.
“We’re closed,” Uncle Cheng said. “I can make you something myself, but it will cost you.” He was flirting with her.
She looked at him innocently, batting her eyes. “But how much?”
“A million dollars, ha-ha-ha.”
“I am not like you—you are rich, I am poor. But I’m young.”
“How young are you?” Uncle Cheng couldn’t help himself.
“Eighteen.”
“You look younger.”
Jenny had said, The younger the better.
“Okay, just this once, I won’t charge you anything.”
“Can I go in the kitchen so I can see you cook?” Ling asked.
While he was making the noodles, Ling watched him admiringly. She complimented him on his physique, making it plain she liked men with muscles and not fat. Uncle Cheng, at the age of fifty-three, had a paunch and a receding hairline, and was not exactly a specimen for GQ, but compared to his son, he was a hunk. Besides, what men wouldn’t like compliments from a cute girl?
Uncle Cheng was more of a schemer than his young son. He told Ling to carry the bowl of noodles to the tin hut to eat there, because he had to close the shop.
Ling was about done with the noodles when he entered the hut with a bottle of rice wine. He plonked down two glasses and said, “Have a drink with me to celebrate the opening of my new restaurant.”
“How much does it cost you to open your new restaurant?” Ling asked.
“I’ve already bought the shop, and it’s going to cost me another million dollars to renovate it, but it’ll be perfect,” he boasted.
“Waaah. So much money!” Ling stuck out her tongue. “I’ll celebrate with you, but I get drunk easily.” She batted her eyes at him again.
“All right then, I’ll give you a handicap. You take half a glass; I’ll have a full one.”
“That’s still not fair; you are ten times bigger than I am.” Ling put her small hand around his biceps and barely covered half its girth. “Waaah,” she said, rolling her eyes.
Uncle Cheng laughed heartily. He felt big.
Ling took a gulp of the wine, then another. Her cheeks soon turned red, and she looked prettier than ever in the dim light. They were sitting side by side on the cot when she leaned over and rested her head on his chest. She didn’t have to do much after that. Uncle Cheng pulled her into his lap, kissed her, and undressed her.
It took him awhile to get done. He was older and more experienced, and the alcohol numbed him somewhat. She had to make noises she’d learned from watching porn with Uncle Xia to finish him off more quickly.
Every man who had violated her carried a distinct odor. Uncle Xia smelled like engine oil, Chubby smelled like fried chicken, Uncle Cheng smelled like sweat and tobacco.
Jenny was spot on: Men are pigs.
Uncle Cheng was vain. While they were putting their clothes back on, he said, “That felt good, didn’t it? You can’t get any better than that.”
* * *
Ling spoke with Jenny again on the phone, and together they planned the coup de grâce. Ling called Chubby to meet.
“I have something for you to show your parents,” Ling greeted him, handing him a photocopy of her ID card.
Chubby examined it closely, and after noticing the date of birth, he got the message. “You are not yet sixteen, oh my God.”
“You are going to jail, loverboy.”
“But you said you were eighteen.”
“Tell that to the judge.”
“What do you want?”
“Your family is rich, we are poor; you got compensated for being evacuated, but my mother gets nothing. How about you pay us a million dollars to buy a flat to live in?”
“I’ll deny everything.” Chubby was almost in tears.
“You are fat and stupid. Remember how I cleaned myself with a tissue? It has your semen on it, and a test can confirm it’s yours. You can’t deny it in court. Talk to your lawyer, loverboy.”
“My parents won’t pay.”
“Then you go to jail. I’ll give you seven days.”
She left it at that.
* * *
For the following two days, Chubby struggled with the thought of killing Ling, or himself, or both. On the third day, he went to his mother and told her the kind of trouble he was in. She flipped out, screaming bloody murder. She rushed toward the door, threatening to go to the police station in her pajamas and flip-flops. Chubby blocked her exit.
“Going to the police is what she is threatening to do, Mom.”
She returned to the living room, still in hysterics. “The moment I laid eyes on her, I knew she was wicked!” she yelled. “Such an evil slut, a mainland prostitute, a no-good scum of the earth, cheaper than dog turd, filthier than kitchen tiles!” When she got tired of cursing, she turned to her son. She put a finger to Chubby’s temple and savagely pushed it. Chubby stumbled but managed to keep his balance. He kept his head bowed.
“How can you be so stupid?” she spat. “We’ll wait for your father to come home. Maybe he can think of something.”
“I wish you wouldn’t tell him,” Chubby mumbled.
“We don’t have a choice, do we? I can’t get hold of such a large sum of money without him.”
“He’ll go berserk, Mom. He’ll say no, and he’ll throw me out of the house.”
Mom finally calmed down. She ordered her son to go take a shower.
“You smell like fried chicken. And go to your room after the shower. Let me talk to your father alone. ”
She made herself a cup of tea, and began to mull over how to talk to her husband about this mess.
Uncle Cheng arrived home in a good mood that night. Business was good. The bag of money he was carrying was bursting at its seams.
“You are going to the bank to deposit the cash tomorrow, right?” she asked casually. “How much money do we have in savings, anyway?”
“More than a million,” he said. “More than enough to renovate and equip our new restaurant.”
She began to weep. Uncle Cheng chided her for always spoiling a pleasant evening. He lit up a cigarette, and poured himself a
small dram of double-distilled rice wine. He sat next to her on the settee and asked, “What now?”
“It’s your son. He is in loads of trouble,” she said. “Remember that mainland girl who went to the movies with him last Tuesday? They had sex that night, in the tin hut we’re renting for its toilet.”
“So?” said Uncle Cheng, who blushed, though his wife didn’t notice. She was busy wiping tears.
“Three days ago, she came to him with a copy of her Hong Kong ID card, asking for a million dollars.”
Uncle Cheng sat straight up, eyes wide, mouth agape.
“She is under sixteen, and she is threatening to go to the police.”
Uncle Cheng turned ashen. He took a big swig of the firewater, and sucked furiously on his cigarette. “How do we know her ID card is genuine?”
“Chubby saw the original, it’s real.”
“How can she even prove they had sex? “
“This is where you can help me understand. She wiped herself with a tissue after the sex, and she kept the tissue. She told your son it could be tested for something called DNA to confirm it was his semen. Have you ever heard of something like that?”
Uncle Cheng slumped back onto the settee. He closed his eyes because he was afraid they would betray him. Even with his eyes closed, he could recall the young girl using a tissue to wipe herself, right after he pulled out of her. He had joked, “Keeping it as a souvenir?” while pinching her nipple playfully.
He rose to pour himself a full glass of double-distilled. He took a few quick quaffs.
“Basically, she is extorting him for a million dollars in exchange for that lousy filthy piece of tissue,” the wife said.
Two pieces, Uncle Cheng thought.
She started to cry again. “We need the money to open our new restaurant. The government is going to raze the rest of Diamond Hill, and our restaurant will go within months. What are we going to do? Maybe we’ll just let Chubby go to jail—serves him right.”
Uncle Cheng poured himself one more full glass of double-distilled and sat there quietly for a long while before he spoke. “I think we can manage to open our new restaurant without the money in the bank. We can borrow from my sister and some of our loyal employees, giving them shares of the new company,” he said in a monotone, like a robot announcing a death sentence. “We cannot let our son go to jail. It’ll ruin his whole life.” And mine, he thought. “We’ll go to the bank tomorrow and withdraw a million dollars in cash.”
He swallowed the rest of the glass in a big gulp, then staggered out of the room.
* * *
Ling called Jenny. “I’ve wired you your 30 percent. By the way, how were you so sure they’d pay up?”
“Because no one in the family could object to paying,” Jenny said. “The son doesn’t want to go to jail; the mother will do anything to save her son; and the father has the most to lose—the publicity alone would ruin his marriage and business. Tell me again: how many more months before you turn sixteen?”
“Four.”
“Okay, I want you to move to somewhere more upmarket, right away. I’ve heard the Mid-Levels on Hong Kong Island is where rich people live. We’ve got work to do, to make real money. It’s time to say goodbye to Diamond Hill.”
PART IV
DEATH & THEREAFTER
BLOOD ON THE STEPS
by Shannon Young
The Pottinger Steps
The old man assembled the skeleton on the steps. Ribs laid out, one by one. Joints clicking and clacking as the pieces fell into place. The skull sat a few feet down, perched on the same worn step where the old man squatted. He focused on his task, switching around the mismatched ribs as if solving a jigsaw puzzle, occasionally reaching for another bone from the pile beside him.
The other vendors paid little attention. The old man had kept his stall along the Pottinger Steps for the past fourteen years. Bones and bloodied limbs and ghastly masks always hung from his racks. The rest of the macabre wares were covered for the night now, hidden away beneath a plastic tarp as the October sun slipped behind the tower blocks.
The old man chewed on his lower lip, mumbling curses befitting his grisly task.
A long shadow stretched across the skeleton as it neared completion. The click-clack of the bones ceased.
“You have come again,” the old man said.
The shadow did not respond.
“Will you speak to me this time?”
Again, no answer.
The woman who sold paper lanterns across the steps glanced at the hunched figure squatting above the skeleton. Her customers, backpackers, were whispering to each other about whether or not her pretty painted lanterns would survive their journey. They fell silent, catching sight of the man mumbling to no one over the bones.
“What is the price?” the old man said. “I know there must be a price.”
The woman gave an overloud laugh and dangled another lantern before her customers, drawing their eyes to the red-and-gold shimmer. It wouldn’t be the first time the old man had scared away her business with his mutterings. His own shop had done uncommonly well in recent years, but his mannerisms had become increasingly unsettling.
“I cannot pay unless I know the price.”
The spectral presence seemed to laugh, though there was no sound but the grumble of the city. Then it was gone, taking any chance of absolution with it.
The old man sighed and bent lower to begin wiring the skeleton back together. This one would hang from his stall come morning, ready to draw the eye of the crowds that shuffled up and down the steps each day, playing at bartering, giggling at his grotesquery. The crowds had flocked to his stall these past few years. For his masks and costume limbs. Blood paint. Bones.
Plastic clattered in his shaky fingers as he secured the final rib in place. Just another bag of cheaply made bones. The skeleton would sell, as always, for far more than it was worth. But that came at a different kind of price. There was always a price. The question was when he would have to pay.
His task complete, the old man reached for the skull.
* * *
Amanda Choi hurried along Queen’s Road Central, dodging shopping bags and skirting around charity peddlers. She was going to be late, even though she’d left the instant she’d recieved the text. She was always just a little too late.
She charged up the Pottinger Steps, taking the uneven slabs two at a time. The steps were at their steepest where they met Queen’s Road and climbed past the old Pottinger Hotel, which had recently been renovated to welcome yet another luxury shop. The crisp windows winked at her as she ducked around a wedding photo shoot, passed the juice stand smelling of mango, and reached the first crossing.
A large lorry blocked her view of the second section of the historic steps, which climbed another two lengths through Central to Hollywood Road. The Saturday-morning bustle surrounded her, as more tourists climbed the first row of steps and waited for the lorry to pass. The blare of taxi horns to her right announced trouble brewing between the drivers, but Amanda didn’t bother to investigate. She finally had a real story to cover.
The lorry lurched out of her way, revealing the crowd gathered behind a double row of yellow tape blocking off the rest of the steps. Above them, the market stalls lining both sides of the steep lane rose in multicolored layers. Flags, lanterns, and decorations hung from the stalls like banyan vines. Costumes of all shapes and varieties—extra stock in preparation for the holidays—spilled from plastic tubs and swayed from racks on the walls. As Amanda crossed the street, a stiff breeze tore down the steps, making the colorful wares flutter like tropical birds.
Amanda squeezed through the crowd, grateful for her slight stature for once, and ducked under the yellow tape.
Her new boss, Hugh, was waiting for her.
“You’re late.”
She wasn’t. “Yes sir. Sorry.”
Hugh gave a wet, throat-clearing harrumph and gestured toward the steps with sweaty hands.
> “What do you make of this?”
Amanda was already wheezing from charging up the slope, so she hoped he didn’t notice her gasp at the sight of the blood pooling on the steps. No, it didn’t pool—it flooded. Crimson spread from step to step in grim rivulets. Blood threaded outward through hairline crevices, some already turning brown. At the bottom, the tide turned into a culvert beside the road, where the evidence drip-dropped into the sewer.
“It’s a lot of blood.”
Hugh snorted, and Amanda tried to gather her thoughts, to say something intelligent. But the question that sprang to her lips hardly seemed any better. “But . . . where’s the body?”
The great flood of blood splattered over half a dozen steps to the left side of the lane, but there wasn’t a corpse in sight.
“No body.”
“At all?” Amanda struggled to keep the disappointment from her voice. “The text said it was a murder.”
“This is enough blood for two murders.”
“But there’s no body?”
Her boss gave another sticky cough.
Great impression you’re making, Amanda.
“So we’re here to report on a murder without a body? Were there any witnesses? Any idea who the victim might have been?”
“No word yet on if it’s even human.”
A uniformed police officer bustled over to shoo them back behind the caution tape before Amanda could respond, but she dismissed that suggestion at once. It couldn’t be animal blood. That would be no story at all.
She stood her ground at the front of the crowd, jotting down any information she could glean from the bystanders. No one had seen anything unusual. The pool of blood had been reported by the first vendor to arrive at the steps that morning, a paper lantern maker whose stall was about ten steps up from the crime scene.
“I thought it was red paint,” the woman said when Amanda approached her for a quote. “But then I noticed the smell. Blood doesn’t stink like paint.”