by Paul Theroux
"Who said anything about the triads?" Monty said. "It was the Chinese army who killed him. They own half the massage parlors in Shenzhen. Next year they will be operating here. I am speaking of your Mr. Hung."
Bunt was silent, and then he remembered how they had first met. He said, "How did Hung become a member of the Cricket Club?"
"I proposed him," Monty said, and before Bunt could respond, added, "You've got to move with the times."
Bunt nodded. He gave the impression that he was not overly concerned. Yet he was convinced. Monty had told him enough. Bunt said nothing more so as not to reveal that he was terrified.
Soon Mrs. Brittain arrived at the Garden Lounge and was escorted to their table by the waiter. She was a tiny, brittle-looking, fastidious woman. She said Helew! in a Home Counties neigh and said she was parched and would have a glass of drai wait wayne, and how was Betty Milliard? Bunt replied, but distractedly, for he could not get over the fact that her husband had made Mrs. Brittain an Austrian, for goodness sake. He saw the little woman in leather pants, among steins of beer and chunks of cheese, as a band played among garlanded tanks.
Lunch had left him dazed—the salad, the pork chops, the pint of beer, the rich dessert, the news that Hung was powerful. The food at first had filled him up and made him complacent, and so when Monty told him about Hung he was confused. Then it sank in. He now needed solitude to reflect on what Monty had said. The heavy meal put him in a stupor—he was anxious but helpless.
Standing at the Star Ferry terminal, he remembered the small child that morning chanting See you letter and counting One, two, fee, fo, fi, sick. The useless English lesson.
On the Kowloon side he walked past the buses and taxis and wandered the maze of streets near Hankow Road as far as Haiphong Road, where he cut through the park, still fretting and swallowing the bad air. All the while he looked into shop windows and at people's faces thinking that the answer to his dilemma might lie on this route. But he felt nothing except greater unease, almost despair, when at last he boarded the MTR and rode from Yau Ma Tei to Kowloon Tong.
It was late, almost four-thirty, when he got off the elevator to enter his top-floor office. Mei-ping stood at the elevator door. How long had she been there? He had never seen her waiting like that.
She was expressionless. Bunt invited her into his office. As soon as the door was closed she lost her composure and began to speak, her voice distorted by a screech of panic.
"Ah Fu never came home last night!"
He motioned with his hands for her to lower her voice. Next door Miss Liu had to be listening. Lily and Cheung were not far away either.
"She was with her friend Mr. Hung, wasn't she?" Bunt was cross. Mei-ping had disturbed his anxious reverie, making him even more anxious. How could he think with her screeching like this?
"I wait last night. I wait today. Ah Fu not come to work today," Mei-ping said. Her face was pale and swollen with grief, the bloodless color of a steamed bun.
Bunt said, "I think she is where she wants to be. Excuse me."
Trying to get past her, to enter his inner office, he remembered his resentment at seeing the two women arriving at the Golden Dragon. It was a cruel trick for Mr. Hung to invite them. And they had cooperated, oblivious of the embarrassment they had caused Bunt. They had helped Mr. Hung remind Bunt that he had no more secrets. They had sat and listened to Mr. Hung calling him Neville.
Though she looked abject, Mei-ping stood her ground, blocking Bunt's way, and said, "I worry."
She seemed to him obstinate and devious and he wanted to push her over.
"Go back to your machine," Bunt said. "Surely there's some stitching that wants finishing."
That was all it took to make her sag and drop her head and turn away. Bunt watched her go. He heard her descending the stairs. He heard the blare of the machines' clacking as the stitching room door opened and shut. In his office Bunt looked at the sales figures again. He held the paper to his face but could not read them. He felt demented. He was now angry with Mei-ping—her insolence, her useless grief, her interruption. Another problem, another omen.
Then something took hold of his mind and pinched it, as though a pair of claws had pierced it and hung on where it was the most tender. He began to murmur Yes, yes. The vanishing of Ah Fu was not an omen. It was the dreaded event of his bad dream.
He called the floor supervisor and asked for Mei-ping to be sent to his office.
"I am sorry to make you angry," Mei-ping said.
"I am not angry," he said. He was calm as he spoke, and for the first time that day he felt he was not going insane. "Tell me why you are worried."
Mei-ping paused, took a breath, exhaled, and said, "After you left us last night I was feeling so bad. I want to go home and forget." She paused and breathed a little. "Mr. Hung say he want to take us to dancing. I say no. Ah Fu say no."
She was silent a moment, not stumped, just pausing, going at her own speed. She was confident of what she wanted to say.
"Mr. Hung say to me, that, 'Go.' Mr. Hung take Ah Fu."
All these misters and he was such a beast.
"Dancing?"
"I don't know. She never come home."
"Don't worry," Bunt said, thinking again, This is what I needed to know.
"I worry."
Bunt said, "She might be very happy."
There was not the slightest indication in Mei-ping's expression that this could be the case.
"I'll find out," Bunt said. "I'll call him."
"Maybe call the police," Mei-ping said.
After what Monty had told him of Hung's influence, Bunt knew that this idea was to be resisted. Bunt ceased being a sympathetic listener and assumed the role of Mei-ping's employer.
"I will handle it," he said. He stood up to indicate to Mei-ping that it was time for her to leave. "You can go home."
Was it the word "home"? Whatever, it triggered a flood of tears, sobs that convulsed her. It was as though she were giving birth to a monster and, frantic with the pain, staggering away in the midst of her labor. Her small body heaved as she carried her grief out the door and down the hall. Her weeping was audible from inside the elevator, and Bunt could hear her sobs descend to the street; soon they were out the window where, after a moment or two, they were extinguished by all the other howling in the din of Kowloon Tong.
Bunt had woken that day with the inarticulate suspicion that something was wrong, and now he knew what it was. He was not happy, but he felt a sharp sense of relief, a new vitality that had been brought on by a significant disclosure: he had found the thing he had searched for the whole day. Ah Fu was missing. That was the event that had unsettled his mind, that he needed to be told. It had been like a bad smell. He had now found the source of the odor. He was proud of himself.
Though it was a matter of concern that Ah Fu had not returned home, and even more serious from his point of view that she had not come to work, Bunt was relieved to know this was the obscure revelation at the edge of his consciousness that had puzzled him all day. He had not been hallucinating. Hong Kong was more tranquil to him now, and now he was sure it had a hole in it.
He mentioned the disappearance of an employee to his mother that evening.
She dropped her knitting into her lap, then sucked at the surface of the tea in her cup. She said, "We managed to live here as long as we have by not asking about matters that didn't concern us."
Bunt said, "And she didn't show up at work."
"There was always something," Betty said, still generalizing over her teacup. "The bally war. The Mao business. The bally students when they didn't want the British here. The first lot of riots. The second lot—just Chinky-Chonks flinging dustbin lids, but there it is. How many murders? How many busts? And the police—nancy boys, blackmail, backhanders, drugs, packets of beastly photographs. We kept out of that, too. Let them get on with it. The boat people and now this bally Hand-over. We got through it all because we didn't want to know."
Bunt said nothing, and yet his mother knew that his mind was teeming.
"If you don't want to know, you're not bothered," she said, and seeing that Bunt was about to speak, she added quickly, "Don't tell me her name."
Bunt sat down to dinner—Wang's shepherd's pie and baked beans, sprouts, trifle. Ruminant, he seemed on the verge of speaking, but he was holding back.
From her chair, where she had resumed knitting, Betty said, "And don't go to the police."
He slept badly. In the morning, once again the Rover would not start, but that was no longer an omen, nor was the ferry rolling in the wake of a freighter, the oil slick in the harbor, the buoyant garbage, the staring passengers—none of it was ominous now. He knew what was wrong, but how to fix it?
Mei-ping was waiting at his office door, wearing a pious look of suffering.
"You call the police, mister?"
"I made some inquiries."
Mei-ping seemed to know instantly that it was a lie.
"Why you not call police, mister?"
"Because Ah Fu might be with her family."
"She have no family here. Only me. You can go see Mr. Hung?"
Bunt said, "We can't go around accusing people of crimes."
He did not want to speak with Hung. He could not dial the number. He held back, not knowing what it was that was keeping him in check. Was it fear? Monty's story of cruelty and revenge on the Hong Kong lawyer, the man's chopped-up body in a steel drum, cautioned him.
There was the possibility, perhaps the certainty, that the Imperial Stitching deal would be soured by any inquiry. Even asking Hung about Ah Fu's disappearance would be a mistake. The Chinese were not subtle, nor were they casual in anything they did. One word would spoil everything, and his mother, who had not only mentally moved out of Hong Kong but had also mentally moved into a substantial double-fronted Edwardian house on the promenade at St. Leonards-on-Sea, would blame him for the deal's failure, if it failed.
His fear that Mei-ping was right, that Mr. Hung was responsible for the disappearance of Ah Fu, also kept him from wanting to know more. If there had been a crime, what then?
10
HIS MOTHER was no help—Bunt put it down to insecurity and envy. Saying "Leave it alone," she seemed to be challenging him to defy her. As the years had passed—he blamed Hong Kong, her isolation on the Peak—she had begun more and more to use such occasions as tests of her son's loyalty.
Although as a final flourish she lifted her meddling head like an empress, she had an old woman's turtle face, all stringy neck and beaky in profile, which gave her the strangely vulnerable and pathetic look of an endangered species.
What was implied but remained unspoken was the suggestion If you are true to me, you will obey.
"Mr. Hung," she said, apparently thinking out loud, and she smiled and squinted as though summoning up his face. "Even if someone tells you in a lot of fiddly detail what a Chinese person has on his mind, even then you will never understand."
Bunt stared at her, hearing only Obey me.
"When I was a girl we always used to say, 'He's out of his tiny Chinese mind.' That means something, Bunt."
It meant she never became involved with anyone in Hong Kong. Indeed, though she descended the Peak to gamble at Happy Valley or Sha Tin, or to shop, bank, or have tea in a hotel lobby or lunch in the Red Room at the Hong Kong Club accompanied by someone like Monty, her circle was English and she would not take the Chinese seriously. The Chinese were successful in business because they kept their shops open until midnight and because they were desperate refugees. Unlike the British they had no hobbies, no recreations, no pleasures. Their gambling was purely self-destructive. They were "too weedy for sports." The British held to their custom of civilized hours and early closing, half-day on Wednesday, weekends off. The British were rulers, the Chinese were their subjects. When had the subject peoples of the British Empire ever been anything but riddles? The Chinese were a supreme and slitty example of that. They were always out of focus, and the nearer you got to them, the harder they were to see.
"I'm not bothered," Betty said.
After almost fifty years the Chinese in Hong Kong had receded, becoming more numerous and more difficult to understand, until they were now a total mystery.
"Chinese fire drill. Chinese checkers. It's all Chinese to me," she said with a crooked smile that said, And you should not be bothered.
Mei-ping's straining at his other ear at the factory, demanding to know why Ah Fu had vanished, was another burden for Bunt. She said she was afraid of the police.
His mother had perhaps suspected that there was something romantic in his relationship with Mei-ping—she knew much more than she said, it was her way of dominating him, he knew that. But he imagined her refusing to think about it, except as a reckless accident for which there could be no apology or explanation. If anyone was to be held accountable it was Mei-ping. They were all opportunists, Chinky-Chonks. Panicky Chinese were capable of any excess, and as they hunted for a passport, or a meal ticket, or a way out, they were all reaching hands and twitching fingers.
Yet that was not the way Mei-ping seemed to Bunt. In just two days Mei-ping had become beautiful. It was the effect of her sadness. Grief inhabited her and made her attractive. Bunt was ashamed of his tremulous interest, seeing her gaunt face and the depth of her dark and tearful eyes. Sorrow gave her a compliant posture, and a slight limp, and Bunt could not resist clutching at her when she appeared in his office lamenting the disappearance of Ah Fu. She was fragile and sweet and unresisting, too bewildered to be suspicious. Bunt wanted to lick her tears off her hollow cheeks and kiss her sadly pouting lips.
On the pretext of comforting her, Bunt held her and stroked the soft flesh beneath her thin blouse. His fingers pressed to her bones, and he snorted with desire and murmured, "Everything's going to be all right. Trust me."
Terror had stripped her of her manners and given her nerve. She was oddly bold one moment and cowering the next. The other workers at Imperial Stitching seemed afraid of her, the way she approached Bunt, slamming the gates of the elevator or hurrying up the stairs to his office without an appointment. She stared at him, sometimes calling out, "Ah Fu!" She looked radiant.
Bunt kept seeing chicken feet and kept replaying the ridiculous monologues of Mr. Hung. This is delicious because it has been strung up ... Truss it well and hang it for days. Let it air dry. Just dangle there ... It becomes tender and fragrant.
And his gloating red-eyed moan, I want to eat your foot.
Four days after the dinner at the Golden Dragon—four days since Ah Fu had vanished—Mei-ping met Bunt on the stairway when he arrived for work. She had a pair of scissors in her hand. She had leaped from her work table as he had passed the open door.
"I want to go to the police station," she said.
He could see that she did not want to do this at all, but that she was terrified and desperate.
"That won't help," he said. "What will the police do?"
"I will make a report," Mei-ping said, her voice breaking. "For the files."
The word "report" made Bunt see a useless sheet of official note paper, bearing the seal of the lion and the unicorn, blown out of Mei-ping's helpless hands and boosted into the Hong Kong sky by a gust of wind and sailing away as it tore apart. Couldn't she see it too?
"They will put it in the window," she said.
What was she talking about?
The incomprehension on Bunt's face seemed to goad her to greater insistence, but a moment later she broke and began to cry. She cried miserably, screwing up her face, pressing her swollen eyes with the backs of her fists. The scissors in her hand made her seem harassed and distracted rather than violent, though Bunt wished she would put them down and cry more compactly. There were tears on the scissor blades, tears on her chin, a snail trail of snot on her sleeve.
"Please go to Mr. Hung," she whimpered.
Bunt was moved. There was nothing subtle in her w
eeping and the drama of it shook him, whipped at his desire and cracked his heart and roused him. Her body was contorted, crippled by the seizure of her tears. The whole business seemed urgent now—the thought of his mother saying, "I'm not bothered," annoyed him. His mother would never understand. She did not know enough of Mei-ping, and would never know.
A sad passion had also been part of his memory of their secret meetings: in his office or in the stock room, where they had lain on bolts of new cloth; once in the Pussy Cat, where she had been shocked by the topless Filipinos; and many times in the blue hotels of Kowloon Tong. After some of those trysts her face had been smeared in tears, out of confusion or panic or the shame of her own desire. And though she had asked nothing of him, she made love to him in a number of ways, even sitting on him and pretending to make him submit. It was her begging postures that drove him wild.
"I will see Mr. Hung," Bunt said.
***
It strengthened him to know that in seeing Mr. Hung he was defying his mother. The rebellion was something new in him, seemingly triggered by Mr. Chuck's death and the agreement to sell the company. It was related to Hong Kong most of all: all this business in Kowloon Tong meant that he would soon be homeless in the last days of the colony. He was angry. Lately, disobeying his mother filled him with conviction, because it isolated him and forced him to be cautious.
Had his mother allowed it or encouraged him or even taken a mild interest, the inquiry would have been casual. But she wanted him to obey her. She disliked Mei-ping. She had a contemptuous regard for Mr. Hung: He's someone I can do business with. Her disapproval made Bunt secretive and intent, and he guessed in advance that opposing his mother might help him to be effective. It made him fonder of Mei-ping, as though in demanding the obedience his mother had forced him to choose.
Long ago, as a skinny and self-conscious pupil at Queen's—his mother always lingering by the gate after school—he had a friend named Corkill who was just as disliked and bullied by the others as Bunt. The two boys sat together in the schoolyard, listening to the clang of trams on Causeway Road and whispering, sharing fantasies, usually sexual. Their joint fantasy was to be rich and to live in a big country house in Wessex (they were reading Jude the Obscure) with a Chinese nymphomaniac, who had long red fingernails and a see-through nightdress, drinking champagne and rutting by the hearth fire and licking her "amplitudes" (that was in the Hardy novel too).