The Pirate Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘Nice car,’ she observed.

  His long eyes observed her narrowly and she realised that their relationship, such as it was, was one in which everything she said was going to be mistaken, misinterpreted, or misunderstood, almost wilfully. He switched on the engine and hit the lights. The headlights came up and the beams cut across the terminal, revealing great square mountains of containers. He gunned the motor, engaged the gears and they were away.

  They paused only briefly at the gate for a word with the security guard who, Robin was sure, did not even realise that she was there. Then it was a little like a replay of last night’s fatigue-blurred memories as Huuk’s Accord drove her across roads which Andrew’s Aston Martin had driven her along, until they reached the MTR station at Lai King. He pulled up on the bright street, busy even at this hour, and ablaze with garish neon signs. ‘The MTR is just down there,’ he said, pointing.

  ‘I know where it is,’ she said, ‘but I’m afraid I don’t have ten dollars.’

  He gave a bark of laughter. ‘No, of course you don’t,’ he said. ‘Well, never mind. I got you into this, I’ll get you out of it.’

  The bitterness with which he said this really made her sit back but when she looked at him she could see nothing but a slightly self-mocking smile.

  Her thoughts went far beyond the usual calculating, diplomatic approach to face; she really, genuinely wanted to thank this man. It was an impulse undermined only by the fact of his involvement in the arrest of her husband.

  At this point she was not aware of his responsibility for Richard’s current state; at no stage so far had anyone informed her that it was Huuk who had shot her husband.

  ‘No, Captain,’ she said, her voice ringing with absolute sincerity, ‘I got myself into this situation and I’m very, very grateful to you for getting me out of it.’ She stopped, embarrassed, and then added, ‘What is it Shakespeare says? “I am a spirit of no common note, and I do thank you …”’

  ‘It is kind of you to say this, Captain Mariner, but you do not have to thank me. Here.’ He passed to her a crisp $10 note and she took it thankfully. He held onto the end of the note, however, while he pointed out, ‘Shakespeare in fact allows Titania to say, “I am a spirit of no common rate. The summer still doth tend upon my state, and I do love thee.”’ His deep, smooth voice dropped with just a tinge of extra emphasis on ‘love thee’.

  Perhaps it was a corrective against her incorrect quotation; she could not be sure, but she found it unsettling. She pulled the note free. ‘I owe you,’ she said and reached for the door handle.

  Even at this time in the morning, the street was filled with the odour of cooking. The smell brought saliva to her mouth for she had eaten nothing since she had picked at the Chiu Chow lunch she had ordered. And the saliva reminded her of other liquids elsewhere within her; but there was nothing she could do about any of it now. She had to catch the last MTR train or she was walking home. There was no eating allowed on the MTR and there were no toilets down there either.

  The concourse was quite busy but she had no real trouble in getting to a ticket machine. She fed in her $10 note and pushed the button marked ‘Central’. The ticket came out at once and she took it. The ticket itself was like an extremely thin credit card, complete with black stripe on the back. Even had she never ridden the MTR before, the automatic barriers of the London Underground would have prepared her for the system. She joined the quiet queue for the nearest entrance and shuffled forward with the rest. She fed her ticket into the automatic barrier and walked through when it opened, collecting her ticket as it was spewed out at the other end.

  Down on the platform, there was only the briefest of waits before the big silver train pulled in. The doors opened and she climbed in. Luckily there was a space on the long polished steel bench and she got to it first. She half-sat, half-collapsed beside an extremely fat woman — and then all but arrived in her lap as the train pulled away and she found herself sliding helplessly down the seat. She shrugged apologetically and received a long cold stare. Then she settled back and tried to order her thoughts.

  She was too tired for logical thought, however, and all that would come was a swirl of images, dominated by Richard’s stare as he looked at her with no spark of recognition in his eyes at all. That was really terrifying. That upset all her preconceptions and turned her whole life on its head at a stroke. It was as though she had found him dead after all. It was as though she had found him with a mistress. She had never doubted him before. She had always taken for granted his strength and his love. And now they were not there any more. Or, if they were there, then they were buried somewhere under an experience or a medical condition so terrible or so severe that no one could reach them. But that was what she was here for, to reach into Richard’s damaged mind and pull his strength and his love back up into his eyes. Doing that was even more important than establishing his innocence.

  It did not occur to her in her depressed state that establishing his innocence might in itself rebuild his memory and reawaken his love. Instead she found herself glumly rehearsing of Hamlet’s self-pitying lines, ‘The time is out of joint; oh cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right …’ But no, she thought, as Huuk’s long, inscrutable eyes leapt disturbingly into her mind; she had quoted more than enough Shakespeare for tonight.

  As the train pulled through the stations past the Hongs and Tongs of Kowloon towards Tsimshatsui and the tunnel to Hong Kong Island, the people around her came and went, but greater and greater numbers of them stayed. And the age of the other passengers began to fall, and their gender to become dominated until she found herself not only the one Westerner visible in the carriage, but one of only three women. All the other passengers seemed to vary in age from late teens to late thirties. They were dressed in an assortment of clothes but the majority favoured plain slacks and bright shirts with open collars. One or two of them had long hair dragged back into pony tails but most of them wore a kind of short-back-and-sides which spread rapidly into wide mop-like overhangs of thick, lustrous black hair. One or two of them were fat, with cheerfully rubicund faces, but most of them were lean, angular, intense and slightly predatory. They seemed intensely self-absorbed, but even so they were never still. They sat and fidgeted, with hands and knees jumping, elbows tucked in and long yellow fingers frenetically busy. Fiddling with their tickets, endlessly turning their tickets, rubbing their tickets and flicking their tickets.

  It never occurred to her that this was the inevitable result of a total ban on smoking on a network in a city where almost everybody smoked. It did occur to her that almost all crime in Hong Kong was performed by young men aged between their late teens and their late twenties. That almost all of it was related to the vicious Triad gangs who were known for their ruthless brutality, and that the rest of it, with quite an overlap in the middle, was performed by addicts desperate to buy drugs. By the time the train plunged down into the tunnel beneath the harbour, Robin had convinced herself that the nervous ticket-flicking which the MTR board worked so hard to discourage was in fact a kind of code which allowed the young men all around her to plan the robbery and murder they would execute upon her at the earliest opportunity.

  By the time the train pulled into Admiralty, Robin had frightened herself so badly that she was seriously considering making a run for it; but she knew that Central was next so she stayed in her seat and tried to make a plan instead. The seat she was in was near the doors. This fact made her decide to try to get out first and make a break for it. If she could keep ahead of them, she calculated, she stood a chance of getting up into the street. In the street she would summon help if she still felt threatened. Even at this time of night, the streets of Central were likely to be busy, and protection should not be too difficult to come by. It wasn’t much of a plan but it was better than none. As the train began to slow, she tensed. The minute it rolled into the bright station she was in motion.

  She was the first person to the door but it was sl
ow to open and she could feel the weight of people behind her before it parted. More frustratingly, she could see the tide of people from the other coaches begin to thicken and coagulate at the ticket barriers. She half fell out onto the platform and used the stumble in order to give herself a running start. Once she started to ran, however, it was much more difficult for her to see things clearly and it became impossible to plan any further. It also became difficult for her to distinguish any sounds other than her breathing and the beating of her heart, but as she began her flight she thought she heard a sharp cry of surprise and the scuffle of running feet at her back. She ran down the platform, along the line of turnstiles, looking for the shortest queue. The furthest had three people waiting and she chose that because there was nowhere else to go. By the time she joined it, there were only two ahead of her. Then there was only one. She danced with impatience, covering her actions in the eyes of the curious by giving a perfect impersonation of someone with a bursting bladder. The scurry of feet closed in behind her just as her turn came. She slid her ticket into the barrier and waited for the barrier to move in an agony of suspense. There was the sound of laboured breathing immediately behind her but she would not look round. She tried to keep her fists from beating against the recalcitrant barrier. But then it moved. She was in motion at once, dancing through, feeling with enormous relief the shutter close behind her. She looked back over her shoulder as she ran to the escalator, just in time to see the man who had been behind her have his ticket returned as the machine calculated that he had paid too little and the barrier remained closed.

  Beginning to shake with relief and reaction, she walked briskly across the concourse and began to climb up towards the street. Her plan had worked perfectly after all. She was among the first out; and she was certainly the first — the only — person on this escalator. Taking more time now, she looked back over her shoulder down into the busy concourse. People were oozing through the barriers like trickles of oil. No one was looking at her. No one was following her. There wasn’t even any undue ripple of movement among the bodies surging slowly across the concourse towards the empty escalators endlessly uncoiling behind her and beside her. What else did you expect from people coming exhausted off the last train of the night? ‘You stupid woman,’ she said to herself. ‘Scaring yourself for no reason!’

  And she stepped up into the street and collided with a tall, solid man. He turned towards her and there was something shockingly familiar about his face. Before she could turn away his hand fastened onto her arm and she felt herself being swung bodily out of the bright crowd. Her breathing stopped as though she had been winded. She opened her mouth to scream but no sound would come. And in any case, the street was empty and the nearest person to her was still not even on the escalator yet. She tugged her arm fiercely, but he did not slacken his grip. Instead he reached into the folds of his jacket. An instantaneous vision filled her mind: Twelvetoes’ hand coming out of the fold in his jacket, clutching that massive, deadly panga.

  She found that she could scream after all. And she did, at the top of her lungs. No words, just a throat-tearing, terrified animal sound.

  He let her go and she staggered back, falling to her knees on the ground. She did not stay there, she scrabbled feverishly onto all fours, hoping to make a sprint start and get away still.

  ‘Deui mjyuh,’ he said in a guttural gasp. ‘Deui mjyuh!’ Something clattered onto the pavement beside her but she paid it no attention. All her mind was concentrated on the absolute need to get enough grip beneath her feet to run away as fast as she could. She slipped and fell to her knees again, shouting with frustration.

  ‘Missy,’ came a gentle voice, a woman’s voice, from close beside her. ‘Missy, you arright?’

  The sounds which a crowd of people might make suddenly swept over her and she realised that she had been joined on the street by all the other people who had been on the train with her. A group of them were standing around her looking down with lively concern. A young woman with masses of long dark curly hair was crouching on one knee beside her. ‘Missy?’ she repeated anxiously. ‘You arright?’

  ‘I,’ said Robin, fighting for breath and self-control, ‘I slipped.’

  ‘Ah.’ The girl nodded wisely. ‘You take care.’

  Robin pulled herself to her feet and stood, testing her ankle and knee joints. No damage. ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘I’m fine really. Thank you. Thank you all.’

  She looked around. There, hardly any distance away, was the bright tower of her hotel with ‘The Mandarin’ in bright neon at its peak. She began to walk down the crowded street towards it, but once again a hand fell upon her sleeve. She jumped and gasped.

  But it was only the girl. ‘You drop this, Missy,’ she said.

  ‘No, I …’ said Robin automatically.

  The girl held it out towards her and the light fell on it.

  ‘No, I … Yes. Yes I did. Thank you. Thank you very much indeed.’

  And she took it and hugged it to her heaving breast, holding it as tight as tight while she walked back to the safe haven of the Mandarin. It was a package slightly larger than a paperback book, neatly wrapped in paper covered with pictures of Mickey Mouse.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Giuseppe Borelli was still on duty when Robin rushed into reception a few moments later, and her breathless request to borrow a laptop computer caused nothing more than the raising of an eyebrow. The condition of her clothes and person would have raised rather more than that, however, if she had allowed them to; but she was not to be sidetracked by his obvious concern. She must have a laptop computer immediately. Could he oblige her with one at once?

  Of course there was a range of laptop computers available to the Mandarin’s guests. Would Captain Mariner perhaps like to avail herself of the twenty-four-hour secretarial service also?

  ‘No, just the laptop,’ she said with unaccustomed rudeness, dancing with impatience.

  ‘Of course, Captain,’ he capitulated, still frowning with lively concern. ‘Do you have a preference?’

  ‘No.’ Her tone was a little uncertain as she realised that she might in fact have a preference — for a machine compatible with the disk hidden in the package in her hand. ‘But it must take three and a quarter inch microdisks,’ she added.

  ‘And what operating system do you prefer?’

  ‘I don’t know. Anything IBM compatible …’

  ‘We have quite a range. Most of the hard disks come pre-programed with Works or Windows. Unless you want the Apple or the Orange — or the Apricot ranges. The program best suited to your requirements depends on what you are trying to access, of course …’ Giuseppe paused, his eyebrow still raised slightly, his face now expressing the most innocent enquiry.

  Paranoia swept over Robin in a disorientating wave. What did she really know of the charming Italian or of his true intentions? Just because he had a Western face, there was no guarantee that he was honest, trustworthy, uninvolved. She hesitated, her tired mind a whirl, trying to think what to say. She was all too aware that her own expression was changing, losing the open confidentiality which usually characterised it. She began to act — and hoped her performance was convincing. Donning a mask of confusion, she shook her head. ‘I really don’t know,’ she faltered. ‘I just want to access some of my notes and things. It’s whatever system we use at Heritage Mariner …’

  ‘And that is?’

  ‘I really have no idea.’ Not much of a lie there: she really did have no idea.

  ‘A word-processing program then. Not a graphics program or a spreadsheet. I will give you a range of word processing programs and desktop publishing systems on microdisk. Follow the instructions. They will all vary and you will need to pay close attention, as I’m sure you realise. I’m sure one of them will be familiar almost at once and then it will be plain sailing from there on.’

  Giuseppe’s pious hope was ill-founded, Robin discovered during the next hour or so. The laptop computer he had given
her turned out to be an unfamiliar make when she lifted it out of the black zip-top case. She sat it on the table and followed the instructions about how to plug it in. She raised the top and switched the screen on. It offered her a disorientating list of alternative programs and it took her a full fifteen minutes to work out the sequence of commands required to get out of the hard disk and into the mode for drive A. And it was here that her problems really began.

  Robin was as computer-literate as the next person. She did not have the deep passionate knowledge that Helen DuFour possessed. Helen’s desk was a great moulded plastic complex of processors, modems and databases — almost a supercomputer itself, and intimately linked to the Superhighway. Robin’s desk was Victorian, mahogany. But, that said, she used the company’s computers confidently and regularly, taking for granted the kind of programs and systems which had allowed her into the Sulu Queen’s network. But, although she could use them, she had no idea how they were set up or how to make them work from scratch. She was a confident, accomplished driver; now she was being asked to build an engine. She soon found that she didn’t really know where to start. And Helen was in Moscow, effectively out of reach. Robin could think of no one at home in the office to check with further. And, now that she had lost her trust in Giuseppe Borelli, she found that she was also suspicious of international telephone lines in any case. So she plunged on alone and unadvised.