Once upon a time in Chinatown

by Robert Ronsson

  ‘We should take a look. Hand it over to the police,’ Mick said.

  ‘I told them it wasn’t working; that it wouldn’t be any help.’

  He raised his eyebrows. ‘Why did you do that?’

  ‘Dunno. Just a feeling. Something about the two guys, their height, the way they ran. I don’t know what made me think it but maybe they were Chinese.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘I know it’s a big leap. But when we look at the film, maybe you’ll feel the same way. Do you think it could be Nancy’s dad sending you a warning?’

  We stepped through the open frontage, our shoes scrunching the glittering jewels of glass. Ignoring the smell of spilt petrol, we entered the back office and I rewound the tape, watching as two men ran backwards to the car and Fosbury flopped into their seats. The building frontage rose back into place when the car reversed out and sped backwards up the hill towards Richmond Park. When it was out of the frame I pressed play.

  The car, a black VW Golf, sped into view and immediately swerved right, then left, straightened up and speared into the building. Nothing about it was accidental. The car’s doors opened and, simultaneously, two men, both short and in baseball caps, ran to the corner and waited for two or three seconds. One of them was wearing hi-top gold trainers that, reflecting the light from the street lamps, flashed like the lens of an Aldis lamp as he hopped from foot to foot. It confirmed what I thought I had seen.

  ‘What are they doing?’ Mick said.

  The answer became clear immediately. The second car drove up from the south side of the junction and the men ran off in the same direction. I appeared on the corner a second or two later but by then they must have been out of sight over the top of the hill.

  I pressed the ‘stop’ button. ‘See what I mean. Something about them…’

  Mick was thin-lipped, pale. ‘They could have been joy-riding kids.’

  ‘But the other car came for them. It was all deliberate – planned. Didn’t you think, the way they ran… they had sort of bandy legs—’

  ‘Oh! And Chinese men have bandy legs.’

  ‘I’m not saying that. What I am saying, though, is that someone did it deliberately and maybe it was a warning from Nancy’s father. Maybe he knows you and she are still in touch. He’s telling you to keep away.’

  ‘Let’s sleep on it. But it’s probably best to put another tape in the machine and we’ll tell the police we forgot to turn the system on or something.’

  It rained on Christmas Day. I woke late after the disturbed night and looked out of my window. The pale boards covering the gap in the glass were streaked where the water had dripped down from the broken guttering.

  When Mick arrived we were of the same mind, agreed without words, that the best reaction to the previous day’s events would be to find drunken oblivion as soon as possible. By the end of Christmas dinner we’d had three pints in The Duke’s Head, Champagne while I cooked the veg and a bottle of Rioja with the meal. We sat side-by-side in front of the television that was showing the opera La Bohème. The sound was turned down so that we could continue chatting about the The Film Factory and our plans for building the business in 1996. We were both slumped down in the sofa cradling half-full tumblers of Glenlivet on our chests. Mick had said as he poured them, ‘I’ll make them big ones so we don’t have to keep getting up.’

  The subject of the cinema ran its course and in the silence that followed, I felt my eyes closing. I couldn’t remember feeling this settled. It must have been before Mum had been ill. Could that be nearly twenty years ago, when I was in my late twenties? Meeting Mick and building the business together had come to my rescue. I took a swig of the whisky and wiped my eyes with a tissue.

  ‘Tell me about your family,’ Mick said.

  With the rain battering against the window and the television now merely flashing images in the background, I slurred my way through the story: my mother on the Barnardo’s doorstep, my parents in the war, my father’s death, my upbringing by a mixed-race, single mother and how I cared for her until she died.

  ‘And how are you connected to my family? Run that by me again.’

  My rambling account culminated with how our grandparents shared the same paternal DNA because their fathers were twins and how this made us direct cousins.

  ‘You’re the only family I have, then,’ he said.

  ‘And you’re the only family I have.’

  He raised his glass. ‘Cheers!’

  ‘Cheers, cousin!’ I said

  The television took centre stage again and we watched Mimi singing the tear-jerking aria Donde lieta uscì in which she tells Rodolfo that she is leaving him but still wants to be friends. Mick was deploying a discreet tissue. ‘Something about meeting Nancy made me think it was meant to be, you know it was our fate to be together,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He recounted the uncanny events leading up to his arrival in Ipoh. ‘When I got there, I was primed for something momentous. It made me feel out of kilter. I was listing – like a boat about to capsize. I met Nancy and she straightened me up…’ pause ‘… yeah, you could say that she straightened me up…’ pause ‘… figuratively and literally.’

  We both exploded into our whiskies, snorting and giggling like two old topers in The Duke’s Head.

  Mick’s voice wavered as he described their time together exploring our ancestral home and his subsequent disappointment when Lang-ren turned up at their ‘date’. ‘And I’d spruced myself up like a Christmas tree. Even put talcum powder down my underpants.’

  We spluttered again.

  ‘You were optimistic,’ I said.

  ‘If you’d been in my shoes, you’d have done the same.’

  I couldn’t even remember the name of the last woman I’d slept with. In that moment, it didn’t seem as important as having a friendship that meant you could sit alongside someone, watch something on television that neither of you understood, and guffaw at each other’s feeble innuendos.

  Later, when I stood at the door watching Mick stagger down The Vineyard, the boarded frontage of our cinema triggered an image of Sammy Lee running his hotel in the borough next-door and a shiver of fear for Mick’s safety tickled my back. I reassured myself that not even a heathen would attack a man on the evening of Christmas Day and closed the front door reassured.

  Washing up in the warmth of the kitchen, drinking the last of the champagne, I considered my friendship with my business partner and cousin and realised that if something happened to him, or even if Nancy came back into his life, it was my mental cargo that would be in danger of shifting. I wasn’t sure I could face that prospect again.

  The police were right about one thing. The VW was stolen. Without the benefit of the film showing the second-car pick-up, they concluded that the crash was the work of teenage joyriders. They based this on my comment to the attending officer on the night that I had seen ‘small men’ run away. I doubt whether they bothered checking the car wreckage for evidence, forensic or otherwise. It was another case best filed away and forgotten.

  Next time we met in the pub, Mick told me that he had mentioned the crashed car to Nancy in one of his secret e-mails. She had said that, if it was a message from her father, it would have been delivered by the Lee family in Kingston, the same people she had stayed with when she studied at the polytechnic.

  ‘I’m going to see them. Find out for myself,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to give her up.’

  I didn’t know what to say.

  He sighed. ‘Look, if you really are my cousin don’t you think you should be on my side here?’

  What was he implying? It felt like I was in the dock and that anything I said would have sounded incriminating.

  ‘There has to be something I can do to make her father accept me. I’m not a bloody waster. I can look after her as well as any member of her bloody family. I have to persuade him somehow.’

  3

  There’s no doubt about it, Mic
k’s heart would have been thudding and his underarms pumping as he pulled onto the frontage of the Number 8 Hotel. It was on the main road that linked Kingston with its neighbour, Surbiton. It was so unprepossessing that he had driven along this road many times during his selling days and never noticed it.

  He had telephoned in advance and made an appointment to see the General Manager, whose name, unsurprisingly, was Lee. Mick didn’t know how senior this Mr Lee was, but was hoping to find out.

  Mick wore a suit and, as he approached the front door, he imagined himself as a James Bond character entering the evil mastermind’s den. In the books, this direct approach to the enemy was usually the only way for Bond to bring resolution, save the world and, incidentally, the girl. But it was never without danger and Bond usually had to survive torture and other trials at the hands of Dr No or his equivalent before winning through.

  The reception door opened automatically and the bell press on the unattended counter sounded an innocent ping. A Chinese youth with a toothpick between his lips slouched in. So far so good.

  Sammy Lee wore a blazer over light-grey trousers. With cut-glass accented, public school assurance as he asked Mick to be seated and whether he would like tea or coffee. The office was a small room cluttered with box files. The acridity of stale cigarette smoke was knitted into the room’s fabric.

  After he had used a grubby, white intercom machine to ask for two coffees, Sammy Lee asked Mick why he had come.

  It had been a long time since Mick he had been on the road representing Kellie’s Janitorial Products. He had failed to prepare an opening and felt vulnerable relying solely on his wits. ‘I’m not sure that you can help me. But if I explain how I became connected to your family, perhaps it’s a start.’

  Sammy Lee made space on his desk for the coffee cups that appeared from behind Mick, carried on a tray by a sullen youth. Mick wondered whether this had been part of Nancy’s role – how many years before? He drew a deep breath. ‘Mr Lee, I went to Malaysia recently and I met and fell in love with a relative of yours. Her name is Nancy Lee and she lives in Ipoh. Her father is S Y Lee. He too runs a hotel – The Leeyate Plaza.’

  ‘Of course. Nancy Lee is my niece.’

  Mick was disarmed by the man’s honesty. ‘You don’t seem surprised.’

  ‘My step-brother S Y Lee has told me about you. He was most disturbed when Nancy ran away from home.’

  ‘She hardly ran away. Nancy is not a child.’

  Sammy Lee bowed as if accepting the point. ‘We remember Nancy from her time here. She was an exemplary student and a good worker in the hotel. How did you know about my connection to her – to her father?’ His eyes had narrowed and he placed his hands flat on the table as if he was preparing to react in some way to what Mick said next.

  ‘Nancy told me about her time at the polytechnic and how she had lived with her extended family at the Number 8 Hotel in Kingston. It wasn’t difficult.’

  Sammy Lee’s shoulders relaxed. Apparently, Mick had passed a test he hadn’t recognised. ‘So how can I help you?’

  ‘I would like Nancy and I to be together. Perhaps even to get married. We are, neither of us, young. We feel that, left to ourselves, we can decide whether it is a realistic prospect. Unfortunately, though, Mr Lee – S Y Lee – has set himself against the idea of us being together. So much so that he kidnapped… detained his daughter in Lisbon, where we planned to spend some time together, and now forbids her any contact with me.’

  ‘This is most unfortunate for you. I can see the problem. Mr S Y Lee is very – what you and I would call – “old-school”. He is set in his ways.’

  ‘I have no way of letting him know that my intentions towards his daughter are entirely honourable. He is so set against me that I believe he warned me to stay away from Nancy by sending men to crash a car into my premises.’

  The eyebrows on Sammy Lee’s mobile face almost disappeared beneath the dyed-ebony of his hairline. ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘Christmas Eve.’

  ‘Are you sure it was him?’

  ‘I’m sure it was something he could have arranged.’ Mick felt as if the air had been sucked out of the room. The temperature dipped and the only sound came from under the table as Sammy Lee tapped out the seconds with his toe. It was as if the taint of old cigarettes had consumed the room’s oxygen.

  Finally, Sammy Lee nodded. ‘Perhaps it was.’ He smiled showing small, pointed teeth. A shark’s smile. ‘But I still don’t know why you have come to see me.’

  ‘Because, I have no way of communicating with S Y Lee. He refuses to accept anything from me. Nancy can’t speak to him on my behalf. I was hoping that you could pass on a message.’

  ‘What message?’

  ‘That I am no threat. In fact, quite the opposite. I am genuinely in love with his daughter. I am a man of means. She and I could live independently. I’m prepared to live in Malaysia with her, if that’s what it takes.’ He leaned forward, realising that this would be his only opportunity to press his case. ‘The only thing wrong with me as far as being a suitor to his daughter is concerned is that I’m not Chinese. I’m a good man. I’m a relatively rich man. If I came to Ipoh to live permanently I would sell up here and be able invest in business there. But this can only happen if he lets Nancy and I work things out. We feel strongly for each other, but who knows? We need S Y Lee to give us time and space.’ He leant back, suddenly aware of the sweat trickling down beneath his shirt.

  Sammy Lee smiled his orcan smile. ‘You are a very persuasive man, Mr Kellie. I can see why my niece admires you.’

  ‘Does this mean you’ll do something?’

  For the first time, Sammy Lee engaged Mick eye to eye, his dark irises and rictus smile pinned an invisible text behind his words. ‘Of course. I will tell S Y Lee about our meeting. I can tell him what you have said. I’m not sure that it will make any difference. I can see that you could be the right man for my niece. But S Y Lee – who knows?’

  There was no more to be said. Mick leant across the desk and offered his hand. ‘Thank you so much, Mr Lee.’

  ‘I hope we can resolve things to your satisfaction, Mr Kellie. Who knows, we may meet again as family.’

  Mick was smiling as he returned to his car. His smile faded when he remembered Nancy’s warning in her letter that Sammy Lee was from the same branch of her family as her fiancé Tommy. He shook his head to spin the thought away. His visit couldn’t have made things worse than they already were.

  4

  Mick was buoyant when he told me about the meeting, convinced that Sammy Lee would contact his step-brother to put Mick’s case. I was more circumspect, by no means certain that Sammy Lee was the urbane ‘Englishman’ he would have us believe. The golden trainers were irrefutable proof as far as I was concerned. Not for the first time, Mick had been seduced by the inscrutability of the East.

  As I anticipated, nothing happened to give Mick hope over the next few weeks. It seemed that, even if Mick’s case had been put to S Y Lee, it had bounced against a Chinese wall.

  The insurance company paid up and we repaired the cinema’s frontage in time to cope with the big freeze that swept in from the east towards the end of January. Despite the sub-zero temperatures and snowstorms that made Vineyard Passage impassable on three evenings, our audiences were big enough to maintain The Factory’s profitability. Mick and I had our management meetings and he would bring me up to date with his clandestine e-mail correspondence with Nancy. S Y Lee was still resolute in his opposition to their spending any time together. Then came the breakthrough.

  We met that cold February morning in the lobby at The Factory. A 25-metre stroll for me but a stiff-kneed skid along the compacted-snow alleyway for Mick. He shook melting snow petals from his coat. ‘Bloody brass monkeys out there.’

  ‘I’ll get the coffee,’ I said, hurrying to the refreshment counter. When I returned to the table by the window, Mick was looking up into the pregnant sky. ‘Looks like more
on the way.’ When he turned back, his face was animated by a wide smile.

  ‘Wow! You won the lottery?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve had some great news. Nancy has persuaded her Dad to see me! He’s had a change of heart.’

  ‘That is good,’ I said. ‘Sammy Lee came through for you, then.’

  ‘Nothing to do with him apparently. But, when I emailed Nancy about my conversation with Sammy Lee, I mentioned how I was prepared to sell up in the UK and find something to invest in over there.’ He grinned. ‘Apparently, she had no idea how much money I have. She’d always thought every penny was in the cinema.’

  This was news to me. What did he mean ‘sell up in the UK’? What did it mean for The Factory, for me? I let him go on.

  ‘She didn’t tell me everything but it seems that she’s worked this up into an idea that might get her dad onside.’

  ‘What idea?’

  ‘She said it was to do with the castle; something I said to her in Ipoh about how it should be a tourist attraction.’

  ‘And she’s definitely persuaded him to see you?’

  ‘So she says.’

  ‘You’d better get out there before he changes his mind then.’

  ‘I know. I’m going to book the flights this afternoon. But I wanted to talk to you first. To make sure it’s okay with you.’

  ‘You should go. Go get the girl.’

  Mick booked a flight leaving two days later. I didn’t want to spook him by reminding him about what had happened to Luis, but I thought he should have his affairs in order, as they say. If S Y Lee had been responsible for Luis’s fall, might Mick meet the same fate? His share of The Factory partnership would probably come to me, but what about the rest? There was his flat in Richmond, his car and the money from the sale of the company. I’d looked up the rules and if he died without having made a will, without any known relatives, his money would revert to the state. He wouldn’t have wanted that to happen.

  In the end, I decided on what I hoped would be a sufficiently robust solution that wouldn’t spook him. I found a local calligrapher through an advertisement in the Surrey Comet and commissioned him to do an urgent job for me.