by Allyson Bird
“What?”
“In a similar case, but where the parents were rich, the ransom demanded was one million HK dollars. Why would kidnappers only demand twenty-five thousand? Why not chose a really wealthy family? Was she kidnapped for that little amount or kidnapped to sell elsewhere, or both? It doesn’t make sense. Why go to all that trouble?”
“Mmm…I know. Right, thanks anyway, Remmy.” Molk put the phone down. “Well, Lian, it looks like we’ll be going to Macau. It seems to be as good a place as any to start.”
Whilst Lian slept fitfully on the hydrofoil, Molk thought about his own views on life. Evil dwelt in the world, of that Molk was sure. It was all black and white to him though, with no shades of grey. There were those people who would sacrifice life and limb for others: the war heroes, the doctors and nurses whose very lives were threatened giving succour to others. Then there were the thugs who would cut your throat as soon as look you in the eye. There were no grey areas for Molk. His own father had been killed by a vicious psychopath. The psychopaths were all bad. He felt sorry for Lian—he would try harder to find the girl’s sister, harder than on any other case he had worked on before.
Molk began to read the book he’d brought with him. Film Noir by Andrew Spencer. He flipped through the first few pages. Molk had always wanted to be a policeman or a detective—ever since he had sneaked his father’s pulp fiction books and read them in the park on the way home from school. He had sat under the ornamental trees in Victoria Park, when it rained or when the heat was too much for him to bear, and he had worked through his father’s collection, one by one. They had taught him about sex (there was always the woman who paid her detective’s fee with sexual favours), and he had watched, many times, movies such as Double Indemnity and A Touch of Evil. He had fallen in love with the melancholia and disenchantment of the characters in the movies. All the women were stereotypical blondes: double-crossing, beautiful, unreliable—and part of him believed in the stereotype. His girlfriend Xue (the name meant snow in Chinese) had left him for another man, who ran an antique centre in Kowloon. Molk had finished the relationship after a somewhat cold encounter one afternoon on the Star Ferry.
The crossing was short and soon they were on the waterfront in Macau; the gaudy casinos with their façades and designs looking as if they had just come out of a Hollywood backlot, or from Disneyland. Molk hailed a taxi and they went to see the contact that Remmy had finally given him, An Nguyen. Molk politely asked if a female police officer would look after Lian for a short while.
Once she was safely in the hands of the female detective, Molk tackled An Nguyen. He had very little to say to Richard Molk.
“Look here, I know you’ve come a long way but there’s very little to tell. The case went cold and we think that the Yakuza have got hold of her. You know the score with them; nobody, and I mean nobody, messes with them. It’s bad enough to be harassing the Chinese Mafia. But the Japanese too? No way.”
Molk took a deep breath and left the police station. The Yakuza weren’t greatly different from the Chinese gangsters, in that they were both into smuggling, gambling, money laundering, corporate extortion, and sex slavery.
Molk couldn’t, especially with a child, hang around the streets—and so he booked into a hotel for the night, although he felt uncomfortable sharing a room with Lian. But it was a matter of necessity. He had the couch and she the bed. The child was truly afraid that whomever took her sister would come back for her. Molk was going to ensure that didn’t happen.
The next morning came soon enough, with Molk wondering what to do next. It wasn’t until they had breakfast, and he a strong, sugared coffee, that his brain began to function properly.
Once out on the street he picked up a newspaper at a corner stall and read the headlines.
“Cop committed suicide.” The cop in question was An Nguyen, whom he had left in good health the day before. He didn’t seem the kind of guy who would take his own life; quite the contrary in fact, for he seemed to Molk the kind of person pretty keen on staying alive. Nice suit, no sign of neglecting himself.
Molk returned with Lian to the office where he had met An Nguyen a day earlier. A cop was mooching around and had just cleared the desktop. Molk asked to see Nguyen’s superior, with little result, and when the cop left the room to get Lian a cold drink and Molk some coffee, he searched a box that was sitting on top of the empty desk. He found a small notebook amongst some personal possessions and placed it inside his jacket pocket.
The cop returned and handed Lian her drink.
“Thank you,” she said.
Molk drank his coffee and both policemen exchanged a few comments about how Macau had changed over the years. Molk and Lian then left the building. She said little, but instead took his hand and clung to it as if she would never let go.
Once back on the street Molk took the notebook out of his pocket and saw that it was, in fact, a new address book made of smooth leather. He thumbed through it, but there was only one entry: 27 Travessa De S. Domingos. Macau was busy enough to get lost in, but Molk was no tourist. He knew how to get about through the streets, where each twist and turn brought you to houses of a Portuguese or Chinese influence. Once at the right address he rang the bell and the door was opened by a pretty young woman in an ice-blue dress.
“Yes, what do you want?”
The Pinkerton detective was tired and in no mood for a long introduction. “Do you know An Nguyen?”
“Who are you? You’d better come in.” The woman looked surprised to see the child and hear Nguyen’s name mentioned. She seemed anxious to get away from the front door too.
“Why are you here about that person?”
Molk noted the luxurious décor of the apartment whilst Lian made herself comfortable on the couch.
“What’s your name?” said Molk.
In her nervousness she spoke too eagerly. “My name is Lin Young. The person you mentioned, he is someone I was seeing. My brother disapproves of him. My brother and I—we don’t get on very well—we disagree over many things.”
“Have you seen the papers this morning?”
“No. I was up late last night.” Lin tilted her head to one side and her black eyes looked puzzled. “Why?”
Molk had never been one to hang around. He threw the newspaper onto the coffee table so that she could see the front page.
For a moment there was a shocked silence as the headlines sunk in. Choking back the tears, she placed her hand over her mouth and whispered. “An Nguyen—suicide? No—never.”
“I believe he knew something about the disappearance of Suki Lee—have you ever heard of that name?”
She shook her head. She was shaking uncontrollably.
“Look here, I’m sorry to bring you bad news.”
Lin was still shaking a few moments later when he added Suki’s photograph to the newspaper on the table.
She stared at the photo. “I have known for a while that my brother was quite capable of harming An, but I never thought he would go through with it—”
“You know the girl, don’t you?”
“She is a foolish girl who staged her own kidnapping. She wanted money to go away with some boy somewhere, and then she fell into the hands of my brother. He has no honour. He used to sell drugs, and now he sells anything.”
“Including girls?”
Lin nodded and started crying again.
“Do you know where my sister is?” Lian asked her. “Will you help me find her?”
At that moment Molk heard a door open in another room. He placed one hand inside his jacket and frowned at Lin. A girl came into the room, dressed in a kimono covered with gold dragons. She took a few feeble steps and Molk had to rush to steady her.
“Suki!” Lian stood up and ran over to her sister. She threw her arms around Suki and nearly knocked her over.
Suki looked as if she were fighting off the effects of some drug or other. Molk sat her down on a chair and turned to Lin, waiting for an e
xplanation.
“My brother is working with the Yakuza, trading young girls between countries. There is much money to be made. But for some crazy reason Suki has not been passed along. Chen has taken quite a liking to her. I told him he would bring down the police on our heads, and then I met An Nguyen. I was going to tell An about her but I never found the courage.”
“He knew who you were though?”
“Even policemen have weaknesses, Mr. Molk.”
Black and white; that’s how the world had always been for Richard Molk. Until now there had been no shades of grey. A Chinese mafia man who kept a girl in his own home because he was obsessed with her? A policeman in love with a gangster’s sister? A gangster’s sister in love with a policeman? And, craziest of all—a young sixteen-year-old girl who had paid (out of her own parents’ ransom money) for someone to kidnap her, until that all went wrong. Molk needed to make some quick decisions.
“Get her dressed, we’re leaving. Have you got passports?”
“There was a new passport made for Suki. I’ll get it.”
It took two hours to get Suki into a reasonable state to travel. Molk had to get her out of Macau and back to Hong Kong using the false passport: any explanations to the police would have to be made once he was on home ground in Hong Kong. The trip back took place without incident; with immigration having some sort of temperature sensor malfunction (the authorities were more afraid of bird flu than checking passports properly). However, instead of waiting for the problem to be fixed, immigration officers waved people through. Suki was well in control of herself by then, for she began to understand that she was on her way home. Lian held tightly onto her sister.
For now, Molk decided to take the girls back to his own place, just around the corner from the Pinkerton office. Suki was constantly exhausted and said very little, giving him just a faint smile when he helped her on and off the ferry. There had been no sighting of Chen Young; his sister had not seen him for a few days, since before her lover’s death.
At a quarter past ten in the morning Molk was about to leave the girls sleeping peacefully in his apartment. He had not been able to get the image of the Man Mo Temple out of his head all night. As he was about to go Lian grabbed hold of his hand.
“The Man Mo Temple?”
“I won’t be long. You stay with your sister.”
“No. I want to come too.”
Molk thought about refusing but decided that, as Lian had suffered so much already, she perhaps was meant to see this through.
They hurried to the temple and once inside were astonished to find a badly burned human corpse. There was no evidence of damage to the temple. Molk felt heat on the back of his head and turned round quickly, putting his hand up to his neck. But he hadn’t been burnt and there was no pain. There was no one there but Lian. It was then, as he looked down at the corpse, he realised that he didn’t need a positive identification. The body would be that of Chen Young.
Lian smiled.
On returning home with her sister, Lian Lee felt better. When they entered the apartment their mother rose from her bed, put on her best red cheongsam that smelt of jasmine perfume, and whilst her sister slept and recovered in the dreamlands with her ancestors, mother took Lian down to watch the dragon parade. Mai wore a sorrowful yet resolute smile on her face.
The undulating dragon came closer, thrusting its head this way and that, as if seeking out someone in particular. When the dragon men passed Lian and Mai they paused and Lian thought she saw something more than her own reflected image in the dragon’s glazed eye. Then the dragon men bowed and held the head of the dragon proud and high. Lian Lee was thankful that she had dedicated the prayer. The coconut candy her mother then bought for Lian, tasted of nothing but coconut candy.
The Critic
The first stage production based upon John Polidori’s The Vampyre appears to be Le Vampire by Charles Nodier performed 13th June 1820 in Paris, at the Theatre de la Porte - Saint-Martin.
Anna Wilding nodded to Paula, her associate, who dimmed the lights and joined her on one of the red velvet covered chairs placed in a semicircle around a table; one of six in their small, private cinema. The small theatre was situated down one of Soho’s narrow, shabby streets. Hardly anyone noticed the place was there and no one ever prised off the old boards that covered the front entrance. Visitors used an indistinct side door. The drab walls inside the establishment were plastered with faded posters of the vampire greats—those whom Wilding admired. She had chosen Max Shreck as Count Orlock, Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee and Lon Chaney.
Paula, with her blonde bob cut, was quite a petulant vampire. “It doesn’t seem entirely fair that we have to watch Jack Palance in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, again.”
“And you would prefer—?”
“Well, I quite liked Mad Monster Party from 1968.”
“Animated vampires Paula—a very poor representation of our kind, as was Draculita in sixty-seven and The Nude Vampire in sixty-nine.”
“You really didn’t like the sixties films, did you?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I had rather a soft spot for The Fearless Vampire Killers in sixty-seven, and then there is nothing comparable to Roger Vadim’s Blood and Roses from sixty-one. Beautiful photography, a fine example.”
“The Fearless Vampire Killers. Agreed. But did you have to kill the whole cast of Billy the Kid vs. Dracula from sixty-six?”
Wilding gave Paula a cool look. “Think about that for a moment Paula.”
Paula settled down into the plush red seat, put her feet up on the table in front of her and sulked a little.
“Cheer up Paula. Tomorrow you can have your choice, so button it down and pass me the popcorn.”
They settled down for the afternoon to watch Nosferatu, this time with Klaus Kinski in the role, followed by a discussion on the allure of silent film versus talkies.
Meanwhile, Nick Grant, who had been up until dawn the night before, slept fitfully, splayed across his enormous bed in his large mansion on Eel Pie Island:
MAGIC THEATRE
ENTRANCE NOT FOR EVERYBODY
It had happened again; Nick saw the red neon sign above the door and took one step closer. He knew the words came from the novel Steppenwolf. Nick’s father, Mathew Grant, had been overlooked for the part of Harry Haller in the film. The part had been given to Max Von Sydow. But that is where the book, film, and the nightmare parted company. He had that nightmare for the last seven nights in a row and now, during the day. Each time when he entered the movie theatre it ended in the same way—in his death. The only difference was the way in which Nick Grant met his demise. No matter how hard he tried to resist, he was condemned each time to face the magician, although he could never actually focus on his visage.
As dreary day blended into restless night, Nick was confronted again by the nightmare. In this instance the magician bade Nick lie down on a bed face-upwards to gaze at the already blood-stained edge of a guillotine. The blade lingered, seemed to jar on its descent, and then it hurtled down towards his throat. His murderer was just a blurred image, and as the blade cut through—he awoke with a scream.
Startled from his nightmare, and soaked in sweat, Nick thought he heard the noise of a boat engine refusing to turn over, close to the island on which he lived. His hands were trembling and his step unsure as he staggered to the bathroom and threw cold water over his face. He stared into the mirror. Frustrated, bleary-eyed and angry, Nick went back to bed, praying that he would be able to get some rest. Just as his head hit the pillow his torment returned, and this time he was incarcerated in total darkness. The room smelt like a damp cellar and he could hear a sharp, scratching sound on wood not far away. Someone switched on a light. It was the magician again, and as each other time, the face was just a blur. Nick felt something uncomfortably close by his left shoulder and a gutter-like reek filled his nostrils, just as a rat bit into his neck.
Once more he awoke from the nightmare, shaking.
&n
bsp; Nick threw the sheet from his sweating body and sat on the edge of the bed with his head in his hands. Something fell crashing to the floor as he fumbled for the bedside light. He switched on the lamp and looked down at the framed photo that had fallen. It was the picture of his wife and daughter, both wearing identical retro fifties dresses of pale blue with the brown poodle pattern. It usually made him smile, but Nick wasn’t smiling now.
He stared at his hands; they were shaking uncontrollably.
Nick put one hand to his throat, pulled it away and then looked down at it. His eyes widened as he rubbed the thin smear of blood from his palm. The blood vanished and he realised that he must still be in part of the nightmare. He stumbled against the bed and rushed into the bathroom to stare into the mirror again. There was no blood, not a speck. Nothing. No blood—that had to be good, right? He had never been so terrified in his life. Sitting down on the edge of the bath, Nick tried to think of anything that would break him free from the terror that haunted him.
“Am I going crazy?” he muttered.
He had to ground himself. He thought of Stella and Alison, of who he was and what he had accomplished. He had two homes: one in Hollywood, and one in London. He had a stunning wife, Stella, and a beautiful daughter named Alison.
Nick could feel the tears welling up.
He spent most of his time in Hollywood. He had a golden rule: if his wife was on one continent, he would mess about with women on the other. No mixing continents and women—or cities for that matter. He might be sexually amoral, but he loved his wife.
Still trying to extract himself from the nightmares, he went into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of water.
Could all these nightmares be manifestations of guilt? he thought. Christ! The women can go to hell if only the nightmares will stop. Keep thinking. Take your mind off the nightmares.