by John Burdett
The divers turned their attention to the mincer. They had brought down with them two heavy-duty nylon ropes with stainless steel hooks that were capable of being snapped closed at the ends. The ropes were fixed at the surface to the gantry raft. Chan watched them for a moment while they looked for somewhere to attach the hooks. Then he held out his left arm at eye level, grasped his left wrist with his right hand, started to swim north six degrees east.
It was a technique taught at advanced level: In still water every swimmer proceeded almost exactly the same distance for each flip of his fins. Chan knew that for thirty-three complete flips he covered a distance of twenty-one feet. After three complete fin strokes he was out of sight of the two divers. He remained at the bottom, following the direction that the boat must have taken. He gave himself ten minutes, too long for the amount of air he had left but sufficient if he used the spare tank dangling from the bottom of the gantry. Returning to the boat would be simple; he would ascend using the ropes they were attaching to the mincer or the two anchor lines that moored the gantry raft, whichever he saw first. He kept his eye on the compass, continued to swim north six degrees east, following a Chinese hunch.
He didn’t know why every time he dived he had the same thought as though it lurked like a shark waiting to ambush him: Charlie Chan, this is your mind. Just like the mind, the ocean bed fell away under him all of a sudden, leaving a void.
He hung at 120 feet about a yard beyond the submarine cliff edge, looking down into a fertile valley. With his torch he illuminated a steep slope on which purple coral grew. Rainbow fish darted among the coral. Farther down, in the gloom, large shapes moved. Sharks were common in these waters, but their dangers were much exaggerated. More pressing was the diminishing air supply. The needle was creeping into the red zone. He was moving his light in one last farewell arc when he saw it jammed half way down the cliff against a gray coral growth: a large steel traveling chest of the kind sold in the China Products shops in Hong Kong. A corner was badly crumpled, and much of the paint had been scraped off by the slide down the cliff. He calculated. It would take only minutes to get to the fifteen-feet level where the spare air tank hung. True, it was bad practice to leave his companions to sound the alarm for him, but evidence was evidence. He exhaled, dived downward and accelerated with a couple of fin thrusts. As he reached the trunk, the needle on his air gauge moved into the danger zone.
The trunk was not locked but tied with nylon rope. Bright green nylon rope, he noted. Then, when he checked his depth gauge, his heartbeat doubled. Without noticing he had descended to 150 feet, 10 more feet than was permitted for recreational divers. To avoid the bends, he must ascend slowly and wait at specific depths, although he could not remember which. The problem was that he did not have enough air. The needle on the air gauge was in the middle of the red zone. At this depth he had no more than a minute. Panic worked his lungs, using up more air. Charlie Chan, fool, trapped in his own mind. So what was new?
A hundred feet seemed like a good number to pause at. He waited at this depth until the needle struck the black pin at the end of the danger zone, at which point there was nothing left in the tank to suck at. With the last of the air in his lungs he swam upward, exhaling as gently as he could.
Turning, he saw two ropes suspended in the sea about ten yards to his right. He swam toward them. Remembering the golden rule, Never hold your breath, he tore open the buckle on his weight belt, let it drop. Exhaling freely now, he ascended the ropes like a cork. The ropes converged near the spare tank hanging from the boat. By the time he arrived his lungs were screaming; he was at the fatal point of sucking in water. For the split second it took for the mind to process the thought he paused on the brink of dissolving this misfit Charlie Chan in the vast and bitter sea, to have done with his irritating company once and for all. Then he grabbed the mouthpiece to the spare tank and gorged on air, the primal food.
He hung there fifteen feet below the friendly hull basking in sea-filtered sunlight, flooding his starved blood with air. Shock trembled his hands. Oxygen narcosis lightened his head. Underwater he could not stop laughing. Terror had cracked a carapace of anger he’d been carrying for twenty-three years. Whom did he think he was kidding? He loved air, light, life.
He was thinking of Moira when the others joined him. They saw the trembling in his limbs. Systematically they checked him: air tank empty; weight belt missing; heart still racing. The fixed needle on his depth gauge showed that he’d descended to 151 feet. Behavior consistent with hysteria.
They brought down a full tank of air, made him stay an extra forty minutes to burn off nitrogen. When they finally hauled him to the surface, all Chan could do was cough. He lay on the deck spluttering in frustration. He was lucky not to choke to death on old tobacco. He tried to stand up, but they kept him down, allowing him to sit only. When he finally managed to explain about the trunk, Higgins was unimpressed.
“You shouldn’t smoke,” he said.
Higgins called for help on the radio. He insisted Chan go back to Sai Kung on the second launch that was sent out from Tolo Harbor. If he developed signs of the bends, he would need to be airlifted to Hong Kong Island, where the Royal Navy had a decompression chamber.
Higgins promised that as soon as they had hauled up the mincer, they would use the launch to move the gantry exactly sixty-three feet, or ninety-six fin strokes, north six degrees east. Less than fifty yards from the PRC border. The divers would go down again to retrieve the trunk.
“Have you ever seen anyone with the bends?” Higgins said. “It’s distilled agony. One twinge in any joint, even your little finger, and you go into the decompression chamber. You’ll thank me.” He nodded to the two medics who helped Chan onto the other launch. “No point killing yourself over a few murders,” he called out as Chan went below.
Could the bends be worse than English humor? Chan reached for a cigarette. At least he’d be able to make the date with Moira. He had to admit he was looking forward to seeing her.
22
That night Chan wore a white linen suit, an Italian silk tie, brown Italian leather shoes, a silk shirt he’d had made in Hong Kong. Moira wore clothes she’d bought that day: long silk dress, beige with faint mauve stripes; high heels; a new bra. She wore exactly the right amount of lipstick and mascara, but what Chan liked most was the perfume. It was faint, sophisticated, mature. Maturity was a curious thing. Sandra, his ex-wife, had had few vices, worn no makeup, committed no crimes, never drunk alcohol. And he had never fully trusted her. Moira was a thief and a liar, and he would not have been afraid to share his blackest secret with her.
In the womb of trust libido thrived. Sitting next to her in the back of the taxi, he slid his hand between the folds of her dress, tried to reach her nipples but was thwarted by the firm new bra.
Moira took his hand out, held it.
“What happened to you today?”
“Nothing.”
“Just a scratch?”
“What’s that?”
“Something we say in the States, you know, like when a movie hero gets shot to pieces by the baddies and wanders into the saloon with blood pouring from twenty different holes in his body and the sheriff says, ‘What happened to you?’ and the hero says, ‘Oh, it’s just a scratch.’ I mean, why does the blood drain periodically from your face when you remember whatever it is you remember and why is your usual nervous twitch magnified by a factor of twenty and why are you suddenly as horny as a pubescent kid?”
Chan thought it over. Personal directness was not part of Chinese culture. He had to work at it to do better. “Because I nearly killed myself today and I’m so damned glad to be alive if I hadn’t promised to take you out for dinner, I’d be at home fucking you to death.”
Moira looked at the driver’s reflection in the mirror. He didn’t look as if he spoke English.
“We could always turn around and go back. I mean, I’ve got only one more day here, and I would hate to waste even a couple of
hours-”
Chan squeezed her hand. “I’m also hungry, need a drink and want to look at you across a plate of noodles.”
“That’s erotic for you?”
“No, just familiar. Every really good date I ever had started off with noodles.”
“Sorry if we’ve been putting the cart before the horse.”
The taxi climbed from Central up Garden Road to Magazine Gap. Apart from Government House, a white colonial mansion crouching under apartment blocks at every corner, there was nothing left of the Hong Kong Chan had known as a kid. No traditional two-story flat-fronted Chinese houses with yellow walls and green shutters; no British barracks with pillared terraces, mosquito netting and red-faced chaps reading The Times with their feet up and sipping a gin and tonic; no Chinese girls in cheongsams, the long silk dress with splits up to the thigh; no compradors; no taipans; no rickshaws. Sometimes he wondered if he really did remember that old world from his youth or had merely read about it. But it had all happened there on the very slopes where five hundred apartment blocks now soared, each one reaching over the other for a view of the harbor. Harbor views could add a premium of 50 percent to the retail value of a flat; it was a cityscape sprung from a pocket calculator. Yet at night it was beautiful.
At the junction with Magazine Gap Road they turned and climbed more steeply. The driver switched off the air conditioning in favor of more power, Chan opened the window. They were just above the pollution level. Moira breathed deeply, moaned.
“It’s so balmy. In exactly thirty hours I’m not gonna believe this ever happened.”
On the flat saddle under Victoria Peak the driver switched the air conditioning back on. At the Peak Café they were shown to the outdoor table Chan had booked; it was small, round and made of marble from the Philippines. Chan ordered champagne. It wasn’t a real Chinese restaurant at all, although in an earlier incarnation it had been a teahouse for coolies who had dragged Englishmen and women up the ancient paths in sedan chairs. An American entrepreneur had renovated it into a chic international café with international prices and one of the best views in the world.
Moira took it in with a long, slow sweep. “Wow! Is this how Hong Kong detectives spend their spare time?”
Chan screwed his eyes to slits: “Velly old Chinese proverb: Too much workee make Wong dull boy.”
Moira’s eyes sparkled through the meal while Chan ate noodles with dumplings and she ate smoked salmon with warm nan and pesto, washed down with a bottle of Australian white wine between them. Chan wanted to ask if she needed more alcohol but didn’t. He knew she knew he was waiting.
He paid the bill and led her to the footpath that circles the Peak and is walked at least once by everyone who visits the territory. They began at the harbor side. Two thousand feet below a man-made constellation sent light skyward in a million different clusters, a macrofax for extraterrestrials: This is wealth. The show lasted for about a mile, then began diminishing as the path bent around to the less developed side of the island. He found a bench with a view over Pok Fu Lam, held her hand while they sat down.
Moira gripped his palm. “So, is this my moment?”
“I guess.”
She cleared her throat. “I brought some pictures. Telling stories is easier for me with visual backup. Here’s the first.”
She took some photographs out of her handbag, gave him one. It showed a young blond female cadet in the blue uniform of the New York Police Department. He noted the chiseled Irish jaw, the determined posture, the womanly shape despite the ugly uniform.
“And this is me at about the same time out of uniform.”
She was in an evening dress that reached halfway down her thigh and plunged between her full and youthful breasts.
“Great tits,” Chan said, practicing directness.
“Dad spoiled me. He said I could have any man I wanted. Well, girls who can have any man they want generally pick the wrong one. Of all the guys chasing me in the department I picked Mario. He was a captain, the only one who hadn’t been married before, or wasn’t still, but that’s not why I chose him. I fell for him like-oh, like all serious girls fall sooner or later. Can I have one of your cigarettes?”
Chan offered her the open box, took one for himself, lit both.
“Well, I have to backtrack to tell you why I joined the NYPD. I joined because it was the religion I was brought up with. My father was a captain, three of my brothers were already on the force, one of them a sergeant, and we were that other kind of Irish family you don’t hear too much about. I mean honest like an iron girder. So when a year into my marriage I found that Mario was taking money from the mob, I broke with him even though we already had Clare by then. I flipped from violent love to violent contempt in about twenty-four hours. After all, I’d heard my dad preach against corrupt cops every mealtime for as long as I could remember. And I was very young. The young think in black and white; Americans think in black and white; cops definitely think in black and white. Mario was wrong; I was right.
“Italians don’t think in black and white, though. To them it’s all negotiable. I think that was our real point of disagreement, looking back. He was shocked, pleaded with me, told me how much he loved me. But I turned myself to stone.”
She smiled up at Chan, paused to inhale from the cigarette.
“There’s nothing wrong with criminals,” Chan said, “except that they break the law.”
“Looking back, I think I could have saved him. I’m old-fashioned enough to think that a woman can do that for a man. Now let’s fast forward a bit. Clare stays with me, sees her father weekends; I throw myself into my work. Sure, I go through a man-hating period, but it didn’t last that long. I’m one of those women who actually like men. My feminism was the political, economic kind. Still is, for that matter. Equal rights, equal pay. A lot has to do with being a single-parent family and with some frustration I’m getting with my promotion prospects. This is still early days for women in corporate slash institutional America. I honestly don’t believe I was especially strident. It just happens that Clare absorbed the message that men are rotten through and through and just there to be used.”
Moira paused, musing. “The other stuff I tried to instill in her, like respect for others, respect for the law, be a good citizen, work ethic-the more challenging part of my message, you might say-that washed right over. And we were living in the Bronx. In the back of my mind I know she’s doing bad things, but I have a life of my own. Men come and go; I’m losing a lot of my hard edges; I even dream of hooking up with Mario from time to time, although he’s turned into a womanizer pure and simple. Clare still sees him once a week. He gives her money, more money than anyone on the NYPD payroll could afford to give a teenage girl. What does she spend it on? I don’t even dare to ask. All I can do is check her body, her eyes, the color in her cheeks. As far as I can tell, she’s not doing anything real bad. She even goes skateboarding in Central Park. Her coordination is excellent. I take some comfort from that.”
Moira threw the remains of her cigarette on the ground, rubbed it out with her shoe. “Sure is beautiful here, Charlie. Kinda mind-blowing, considering that this trip, this moment, wasn’t even in my thoughts five days ago. Where was I?”
“Clare.”
“Right. So, the first time I find her making love with another girl I’m shocked, I mean shaken to the bones.”
“Another girl?” Chan frowned. There were plenty of Chinese who looked on male homosexuality as a recent Western import. Lesbianism was a vice so exotic it was hardly more than a myth. What did lesbians do?
“Correct. This is not something my Catholic upbringing prepared me for despite sixteen years on the force. I restrain myself, though, tell myself it’s just a phase. But frankly I’m disappointed. I don’t have a problem with gays anymore, it’s not a moral issue for me, strictly speaking, but in Clare’s case it just strikes me as so damn-well, selfish.”
“Ah, yes.”
“Still, what’s
done is done. Fast forward to her eighteenth year, high school graduation. She’s a beautiful young woman. A beautiful young lesbian actually. But cunning. She’s gotten herself a lot of street wisdom growing up where she did, and she sure as hell ain’t going to join the NYPD. She can see the world is more or less still run by men, and being a lesbian isn’t going to get her a whole lot of mileage in most conventional jobs. She goes to her father, who by now is deeply in with the mob.
“I mean deeply. He’s a millionaire captain of the NYPD. It’s only a matter of time before they catch him, but he doesn’t care anymore. He’ll do some time, not too much, and retire. What help can he give a girl just about to enter the real world? He assumes she wants money, but it isn’t that. She wants entry. To the mob.”
Moira paused again. Chan was aware of a diminishing of the intimacy between them as she retreated more deeply into her memories, and his cop’s instinct made him wonder what was coming next. He didn’t want to lose her, though. He wanted that touch of love for one more night, that mature caress. God knew there had not been many in his life. He drew her closer, and she smiled gratefully.
“Of course a lot of this stuff I didn’t know at the time. I’m giving you the benefit of some years of research and a whole decade of soul-searching. Mario explains that the mob doesn’t employ women, at least not on the executive level. It’s a very old-fashioned organization. Now, I don’t know how she got from there to being the mistress of one of the senior members in the Corleone branch, but Mario must have introduced her. For that I’m unable to forgive him. Nor do I know how she managed to fake it in bed all those years because this daughter of mine is very, very gay. I guess it was one of those dirty weekend affairs and she was only too glad when he went home to his wife.”
Moira sighed. “I guess she gets plenty of money to live on and time to decide what to do with her life. One thing about her, she likes to learn. She’s good at it. She reads a lot, and the mob is always on her reading list. She finds out that the way the American Mafia makes most of its dollars these days is by laundering money for less sophisticated operations, especially the Colombians. The Colombians have so much cash from the cocaine boom in the States and in Europe, they actually contract out the laundering to the Mafia, which charges twenty cents on the dollar. So Clare comes up with a proposition: Send me to college; let me learn about high finance; give me something to do, I’m bored. The consigliere shrugs, why not? The mob hires Harvard M.B.A.’s to count their cash; maybe she could be useful.