Howells was sitting at a bar some two miles south of Hot Gossip, in a Wan Chai dive called the Washington Club. The brash signs above the head of the aged doorman who sat outside on a wooden stall promised topless dancers, but it had been many years since the place had seen a naked breast. The main drinking area was a circular bar surrounding a small raised dance floor where two girls wearing identical black and silver swimsuits and high-heeled shoes did their best to keep in time with the music. Between the dancers and the bar a group of middle-aged women in long evening dresses either served customers or sat on stools with faces like thunder.
When Howells had walked in through the door and past the large ornamental fish tank an hour earlier a woman old enough to be his great-grandmother led him to a stool and asked him what he wanted to drink. While she fetched him his lager two of the overweight women moved towards him like menacing bears. One of them reached for his hand and held it, rubbing the flesh gently. She felt like sandpaper, thought Howells. ‘How long you been Hong Kong?’ she asked, smiling with twisted teeth.
‘Two days,’ he answered. His drink arrived and he used it as an excuse to get his hand back. A white bill was folded into a plastic tumbler which the great-grandmother placed in front of him.
The second woman, plump with loosely permed hair and a prominent Kirk Douglas dimple on her chin, blinked and said: ‘Where you stay?’
‘Mandarin Oriental,’ lied Howells.
‘Good hotel,’ she said, nodding. ‘What your job?’
‘Salesman.’
‘What your name?’ said the other woman. Bargirl was not the right description. Barwoman? Barhag? Howells wondered how she listed her profession in her passport.
‘Tom,’ said Howells, using the first name that popped into his head. The women introduced themselves, each formally shaking his hand.
‘You buy me drink?’ asked Dimple.
Howells could see a price list fixed to a pillar to the left of the dancers showing that his lager was about the same price as it would be in a five-star hotel and that the cheapest hostess drink was about three times as much.
He shook his head. ‘Not tonight, thanks.’
‘Not expensive,’ she said.
‘No,’ said Howells, and pointedly ignored them. They spoke to each other in Cantonese, gave him a filthy look each and then walked off. Howells nursed his lager and concentrated on the dancers. One was short with long black hair and a small, upturned nose; the other was taller with a frizzy mane of hair and a curvier figure. Both had skin that was a darker brown than the middle-aged couple who had just tried to mug him. As he watched they moved into a synchronized dance routine, legs kicking and shoulders shaking. They’d obviously done it many times, no need to watch each other’s steps. Real troupers. Another four girls with skin the same colour as the dancers’ sat together at the back of the bar eating shelled peanuts. They were wearing Tshirts over their swimsuits and chattering in a bird-song language, probably Filipina.
There were a dozen or so customers drinking at the bar, all of them male. Three of them were drinking with hostesses, and they had blue slips in their tumblers alongside their own white receipts. One, a balding guy with horn-rimmed spectacles and the downtrodden look of a man who’d escaped from his wife for a few hours, was being given a real working-over by four of the hags, two in front of him and one either side. They were all drinking from champagne glasses and there was a wad of blue chits in his tumbler. They laughed at his every word and the women on his side of the bar took it in turns to massage his neck.
The two dancers came to the end of their routine and stepped off the stage, their places taken by two other girls. The one with the cute nose rubbed herself with a blue towel and shrugged on an orange shirt and sat on a stool opposite a tall, cadaverous man with slicked-back brown hair and a thin moustache. The great-grandmother placed a hostess drink in front of the girl without waiting for the man to agree. Obviously a regular. Probably in love.
Howells sat with both hands cupped around his lager, head slightly bowed but eyes taking everything in – the TV set suspended from the ceiling showing an Olivia Newton-John video that bore no relation to the Cantonese pop song to which the girls were dancing – the two tall and hefty-looking Chinese men standing together by the gents, obviously on standby in case there was trouble – the small Filipina girl in a black strapless dress whose large eyes switched to the door every time it opened – the bags on the floor behind the bar containing the girls’ going-home clothes.
The dancing girls stood back to back, wriggling and rubbing their arses together, laughing as if they meant it. Olivia Newton-John was prancing around in jogging gear and a white headband. A girl came out of what Howells reckoned was probably a staff restroom at the far end of the bar, about five foot four with hair that curled under her chin, and eyes that were big and wide and more Western than Asian. She was wearing a clean white blouse with a lace collar and sleeves, a black string bow and a black skirt that reached to the floor.
Her eyes scanned the bar professionally and she smiled when she saw Howells. She seemed to have too many teeth for her mouth, the lips curled back like a horse about to neigh and they gleamed like ivory tombstones in the flashing lights above the dance floor. Howells raised his eyebrows and lifted his glass to her in mock salute. She laughed, her lips curling back even further showing even more teeth and she lifted a slender hand to cover her open mouth. She should have been taken to an orthodontist when she was a child, thought Howells. Maybe her parents didn’t know better. Maybe they didn’t care.
She walked over and stood next to him. ‘Hi. What’s your name?’ The teeth flashed white.
‘Tom,’ he said, sticking to his first story.
She held out her hand and he shook it. It felt cool and dry. ‘My name is Amy.’
‘Pleased to meet you, Amy,’ he said. ‘Can I buy you a drink?’
She looked taken aback, surprised at the offer. Probably taken all the fun out of it, thought Howells. Maybe he should have played hard to get. She walked over to get her own drink and put a blue chit into Howells’ tumbler.
She clinked her glass against his. ‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘You’re welcome. How long have you been in Hong Kong?’
She looked confused. ‘I was born Hong Kong,’ she said, her brow furrowed.
‘Where do you live?’
‘Tsim Sha Tsui,’ she answered.
Howells kept a serious look on his face. ‘What is your job?’
Now she really looked confused, and bit her lower lip. She didn’t answer.
‘You buy me drink?’ Howells asked her, and suddenly she got the joke.
‘You joking me,’ she said, and pinched his forearm, hard. ‘You play at bargirl. You very bad man.’ She was attractive rather than pretty, her nose slightly flattened, her lips a little too thick, but her eyes were bright and mischievous and her skin was good. She could have been anywhere between twenty-five and thirty-five years old, which put her in a different generation to the rest of the barhags. ‘You work in Hong Kong?’ she asked.
Howells nodded. ‘Salesman,’ he said.
‘Selling what?’
Death, he thought. ‘Fridges,’ he said, and she looked at him quizzically. ‘Fridges,’ he said again. ‘To keep things cold.’ He drew a box in the air with his hands and mimed opening its door.
She got it and smiled. ‘Fridge,’ she said, and repeated it a few times, committing the word to memory. That was probably how she picked up her English, thought Howells, talking to customers and getting them to explain the words she didn’t understand. Her English wasn’t that bad; she had no trouble understanding him so long as he didn’t speak too quickly and he wondered how much was the result of pillow talk.
Amy earned her money. She listened carefully to his every word, her eyes never leaving his face, answered all his questions politely and took an interest in him; where did he live, where were his family, how did he like Hong Kong. Occasionally sh
e’d reach across and run her fingertips along his arm and when he flattered her she’d lower her eyelashes and almost blush. She made her small drink last twenty minutes, but as soon as she’d sipped the last drop the great-grandmother sidled up and picked up the empty glass. She showed it to Howells like a detective producing evidence of a murder.
‘You buy girl drink?’ she asked, tilting the glass from side to side as if to prove that it really was empty.
Howells nodded. ‘Sure, why not?’
‘Thank you,’ said Amy, and put her small hand on top of his as if he’d just done her a huge favour and it wasn’t simply a business transaction. Howells wondered how many thousands of times she’d done that, whispered thank you and held hands. Her drink arrived and so did another blue chit.
‘What about buy me a drink?’ said the old woman.
‘Not tonight,’ he said. ‘Next time.’ He turned away from her and concentrated on Amy, asking her about her life.
‘My story very sad,’ she said.
It was too, a story about a big family and a drunken father who’d assaulted her when she was twelve years old. She’d run away and been befriended by a sixteen-year-old drugs dealer who encouraged her to start chasing the dragon – smoking heroin – and then put her to work in a fishball stall, an underage brothel. She’d escaped from him the day before her fourteenth birthday and fell into the arms of a money-lender who lent her money, set her up in a one-room flat and supplied her with half a dozen customers a night to pay off the interest. She’d eventually met a businessman, a plastic bag manufacturer, who’d promised to marry her but dropped her as soon as she got pregnant. She’d had an abortion but he still wanted nothing to do with her. Now she lived alone and had worked in a succession of bars, on Hong Kong island and over in Kowloon.
She told the story in a flat monotone and Howells wondered how many times she’d told it, and how much of it was true.
She told him how much commission she got from each drink, how many drinks she got a night, how all the girls had to work double shifts – fourteen hours a day – whenever there was an American ship in town. Howells asked her why she didn’t dance and she scowled.
‘Only Filipina or Thai girls dance,’ she said, scornfully. ‘Chinese girls not do that.’
That was rich, thought Howells. Mugging drunken tourists for drinks was respectable, going back to their hotels was a legitimate business transaction, but dancing in a swimsuit was beneath her. Amy seemed to have no feelings of shame or regret about her job, it was just business. He asked her how often she left with customers, and she shrugged.
‘Depends,’ she said. ‘Sometimes one month four times, sometimes one month and I not go.’
Again, she had her own set of values. Americans were out ‘because they not clean’, and she didn’t like Germans because a German had once beaten up her friend and stolen her purse. She was wary of tourists and never went with policemen because they wouldn’t pay. What she liked best, she said, were married men who lived and worked in Hong Kong. ‘They very careful because they not want wife to get sick, and they not stay all night,’ she said. You couldn’t fault her logic, Howells realized.
‘You want to buy me out?’ she asked Howells, finishing her second drink. The great-grandmother was by her side before she’d even had a chance to place it on the bar. Howells said yes to the drink, but no to the buy-out offer.
‘I’ve very little money tonight,’ he said. ‘Maybe another time.’
‘No problem,’ she said. ‘You can use credit card. And we give you receipt.’ She pouted and pinched his arm gently, pulling at the hairs. ‘I like you, Tom.’
Howells knew it was an act, an act she’d put on thousands of times before, but he was still half convinced that she thought he was special.
He shook his head, firmly. ‘I like you too, Amy, but not tonight.’
Her drink and chit arrived, along with a fresh lager for Howells which he hadn’t ordered but which he accepted anyway. Amy gently clinked his glass. ‘Nice to meet you,’ she said. Then she went back to work, talking and laughing and touching.
The dancing girls continued their rota, twenty minutes on and forty minutes off, taking drinks from customers during the rest periods. They seemed to have a different approach to Amy, greedily gulping down their hostess drinks whenever the customers looked away, pouring them into the sink when they went to the gents. Amy was as good as gold, making each drink last a full twenty minutes.
‘Do many police come here?’ asked Howells.
Amy shook her head. ‘No. They go Club Superstar sometimes. It is a disco and you not have to buy girls drinks there.’
Howells smiled. ‘Where else do they go? Where Kowloon side?’
Amy pouted again. ‘You want to go? You tired of me?’
‘No,’ he laughed. ‘Don’t worry.’ They touched glasses again. ‘Where in Kowloon do they drink?’
‘Rick’s Café, Canton disco, Hot Gossip,’ she said, ‘many places.’
Howells remembered the names in the same way that Amy had memorized the word ‘fridge’. He left her half an hour later, promising to see her again but not meaning it. She looked mournful as he said goodbye but he looked over his shoulder as he reached the door and saw that she was already on another stool talking to a bearded tourist wearing Union Jack shorts. Just business. Fickle cow, thought Howells.
Dugan was pleasantly surprised when Petal agreed to go home with him. He’d half expected her to play coy but she’d seemed eager and clutched his hand tightly as they sat in the back of the taxi, and when he leaned forward to kiss her, her lips parted and she moaned softly, her small hand gently caressing his thigh.
His luck was obviously in. Even getting the taxi had been fortuitous; normally late at night you had to fight the masses, every man for himself, but tonight one had pulled up just as they walked out into the night air. The gweilo in the back seat had even held the door open for them before disappearing into the disco.
Petal had laughed at all his jokes on the way back to Hong Kong island and she leant against him in the lift. Dugan’s heart was pounding and his hands were actually shaking as he slotted the key into the lock and opened the door for her. She grinned as she walked past him, and he was suddenly ashamed of the smallness of the flat. He wanted to impress her and he knew that his shoebox of a home wouldn’t impress anyone. God, the bedroom was a mess – and then with a jolt he remembered the unflushed toilet. He pushed past Petal and dashed into the bathroom. He took a deep breath and pushed the handle, sighing out loud as he heard the water flush. When he walked back into the lounge Petal was sitting on the sofa, smiling.
‘You seemed in a hurry,’ she said. ‘Problems?’
‘No,’ said Dugan. ‘When you’ve gotta go, you’ve gotta go.’ Oh Jesus, had he really said that? ‘Can I get you a drink?’
‘Hmmm, that would be nice. Do you have any wine?’
Dugan couldn’t believe the way things were going. Hiding at the bottom of the fridge was a bottle of Californian white that he’d never got round to drinking. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘white OK?’
‘Fine,’ she answered.
Even the cork came out smoothly and for once there were no bits floating on the top when he poured it into two matching glasses. Their fingers touched when Dugan handed her the glass and she smiled again. Dugan sat next to her. The flat was so small there was nowhere else to sit, unless he went into the bedroom.
‘Very convenient,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry?’
She nodded out of the window. ‘Very convenient,’ she repeated. ‘If you get bored watching your television you can always watch the neighbours.’ From where they were sitting they could look right into next door’s lounge, which was at right-angles to Dugan’s. His face fell and she realized she’d hurt his feelings. ‘It’s a lovely flat,’ she said.
‘No it’s not,’ he said, and his voice had a brittle edge to it. ‘It’s small and it’s noisy and if I could afford somewhere
bigger I’d move but on an inspector’s salary …’
She pressed her finger against his lips. ‘I love it,’ she said. ‘Show me the bedroom.’
Howells held the door of the taxi open, not out of politeness but because he found it difficult to take his eyes off the girl who was waiting to take his place, a mixture of small-girl vulnerability and obvious sexuality that he found a little disturbing. She looked like a child but moved with the easy grace of a woman, and her face was that of an angel, albeit an Asian one. He envied the heavily built white guy she was with. She smiled at him as she moved past and murmured a thank you. He breathed in her perfume, the fragrance of jasmine, and then the taxi was gone.
He stood for a moment and then entered Hot Gossip and went upstairs to the bar, where he took an empty stool and ordered a lager. He drank it and looked around with the hungry look of a man on the make looking for a single girl, his eyes flitting from face to face. He made eye contact a couple of times as he checked out the whole bar, hopeful girls without dates, but they weren’t what Howells was after.
He watched one of the television sets mounted on the wall, an old black-and-white video of the Beatles, a fresh-faced John Lennon shaking his head in time to the beat. Howells raised his glass to the screen. ‘You’ll go out with a bang, John,’ he said. ‘At the top. The best way to go.’ He drained the glass and paid his bill and walked down to the hard driving noise of the disco.
He shouldered his way through the sweating crowd, helped by the fact that he was a few inches taller than most of the clientele. His gaze swept back and forth like a fighter pilot on patrol, and he found what he wanted standing by the bar: two Europeans, short haircuts, fit-looking with restless eyes. Howells stood about six feet from them as he ordered another lager, straining to hear them over the music. They looked like coppers and after ten minutes or so Howells had heard enough to know that they were. One was a big bastard, the other was tall and thin with a moustache. They each had a Chinese girl hanging on to their arms but they ignored them, talking over their heads as if they weren’t there. They were joined by a third man, also a policeman, and they began discussing another man, something about wanting a transfer. Office politics.
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