Hungry Ghost

by Stephen Leather

  Lin pushed them apart and looked left and right before he realized they were alone. He opened his mouth to speak but could see that the two men were as baffled as he was. He’d expected the gweilo to be in the water, probably with diving equipment, but there was no way Ng could be under the water. There was no blood, there had been no gunshot, no sign of violence. Nothing.

  Suen picked up the briefcase and flicked the catches open. He showed the money to Lin.

  ‘What is happening, Elder Brother?’ he asked. Franc Tse and Ricky Lam arrived then, followed by more of the Red Poles in ones and twos until there were a dozen men standing together, all of them armed with nothing to shoot at. They looked at Lin for guidance and he knew with a sickening surety that he had no idea what to tell them.

  Ng struggled at first, making it difficult for Howells to make any progress through the murky water. He kept low and kicked the flippers hard, wide scissor-kicks that made his calf muscles ache. Ng’s free hand, the one that Howells hadn’t handcuffed, groped around, throwing them both off balance, then his head jerked from side to side in panic. But soon he began to calm down, and reached up to hold his nose shut against the water. Howells let go of the small cylinder and allowed Ng to hold it at the same time as pinching his nostrils. At least that way Howells knew that both of Ng’s hands were occupied. He rolled Ng over so that he was underneath him, which made it easier for him to swim in a straight line, though it meant that Ng was continually banging against the sea bed. Howells’ ears began to hurt and he squeezed the soft rubber either side of his nose and blew gently to equalize the pressure until the pain eased. If Ng was smart he’d do the same, or burst an eardrum. Ng’s feet dragged along the sand, clouding the water even more, and first one shoe slipped off, then the other. They were about twenty feet below the surface now so Howells began to level off and the sea bed gradually fell away. The visibility began to improve as they stirred up less sand and in the distance Howells could see the hull of a yacht. He steered Ng towards it.

  ‘Give me your radio,’ Lin told Suen. The two launches came round the headland a mile away in a shower of spray. Lin called them up but couldn’t make out what they were saying.

  ‘Don’t talk, just listen,’ he said. ‘Head for the pier. Head for the pier now. He’s wearing scuba gear, he’s under the water. I repeat, he’s under the water and he has Lung Tau.’

  Tse and Lam were kneeling at the bottom of the steps, shading their eyes and trying to peer through the water but the light reflecting off the surface obscured everything. Lin handed the binoculars to Suen and told him to stand at the end of the pier and watch out for telltale bubbles.

  ‘The rest of you come with me,’ he said, and he led them towards the boatyards and one of the small wooden piers where there were several dinghies tethered together like goats.

  As they got close to the yacht Howells began to dive down, clearing the pressure from his ears again. The anchor was lying on its side, a thick chain leading up from it to the white hull above. He moved towards it, the two men scuttling along the seabed like a crippled starfish. Ng’s eyes had become more used to the salt water and he was looking around, his right hand still pinching his nostrils closed and holding the small cylinder. His suit was floating grotesquely around him and his tie had come loose and was drifting over his shoulder. Howells pulled him down hard, closer to the heavy anchor. The motion turned Ng on to his back and his legs rose above his head. He kicked in an attempt to right himself and then Howells tugged him again and locked the handcuffs to the metal ring at the top of the anchor. Howells let go of the cuffs and drifted away from Ng, using his arms and slow kicks of his fins to keep himself standing virtually upright a few feet above the sand. Ng saw him and began trying to swim up to the surface, but realized he was fixed to the anchor. He pulled himself down to it and tried to get free, panic obvious in his movements. He began to breathe faster, his head shrouded in bubbles. Howells doubted if there could be much air left in the cylinder now. There was hate in Ng’s eyes, and fear. He put his shoeless feet either side of the anchor and grabbed it with his hands, then heaved up. He managed to get it up to his waist and then tried to push himself up to the surface and its life-giving air. It was too heavy, and dropped back to the side, plumes of sediment scattering around his feet like escaping snakes, while the cylinder swung to and fro from his mouth.

  Howells watched, and waited. Getting a gun in Hong Kong would have been difficult, and he hadn’t been certain of getting close enough to kill the triad leader with a knife. But here, thirty feet under the waves, he’d know for sure that the man was dead. That’s what he told himself, anyway. But in his heart of hearts, in the dark place in his mind where even he was frightened to dwell too long, Howells knew that he wanted to watch, to see the man run short of air, to see water rush into his gasping lungs and to see the eyes milk over as he died.

  Ng’s chest heaved and Howells knew it would soon be over. He steadied himself with small circular movements of his hands, eyes fixed on Ng’s face. Ng bent double, his hand going for the knife strapped beneath his trouser leg. On dry land maybe, just maybe, he’d have managed to do it, to have grabbed the knife and slashed and cut before Howells could have reacted, but with Howells’ reactions it would have been a million-to-one shot. Under water it was a non-starter. Howells had all the time in the world to watch as Ng brought out the knife and tried to slash him across the stomach. Howells drifted back in the water, kicked once lazily to move out of range, and then righted himself.

  It was better when they fought. Sometimes, when they knew death was inevitable, they gave up, they relaxed and just let it happen. Sometimes they closed their eyes and pretended it was a bad dream and that by wishing hard Howells would go away. Sometimes they called on God for help. Sometimes they called for their mothers. And sometimes they fought to the very end – they were the best. Animal against animal, eyes bright with the fire of life and teeth snarling, one on one. To the victor the spoils, and life. Howells knew how the gladiators of ancient Rome must have felt in the arena, and he knew too why those who were prepared to die gloriously often had their lives spared, while cowards always got the thumbs-down. There was a nobility in dying well that deserved to be rewarded.

  Ng tried hacking at the chain with his knife but it was useless. His whole body was heaving as his lungs fought for air, his cheeks blowing in and out as he tried to breathe. He lunged again but the anchor held him back. He turned away from Howells, knowing that it was futile, knowing that it was important to conserve what little air was still in his lungs. His shoulders sagged and then he looked at Howells, straight in the eye. It was impossible to see the look on Ng’s face because of the mouthpiece and the cylinder that hung from his face like an elephant’s trunk, but it seemed to Howells that the man was smiling. Then the contact was broken as Ng sank to his knees on the sand, as if in prayer.

  Even before the knife rose in the water in Ng’s fist, Howells knew with a tremor of anticipation what was going to happen, and he moved closer. The knife fell again and again as Ng hacked away at the wrist that was keeping him prisoner, until the water was cloudy with his blood. Howells groaned to himself as he watched.

  ‘Can you see anything?’ asked Lin. The men all shook their heads. There were four of them in the wooden dinghy, two rowing while Lin and Kenny Suen knelt at the prow looking down into the water. There were two other rowing boats moving clumsily and noisily through the water in a ‘V’ formation, gradually moving further and further apart as they splashed away from the ramshackle wooden pier. Out in the bay the two motor launches carved lines through the water, but Lin could see that they were going too fast to be of any use. He called them up on his radio and told them to shut off their engines and drift with the tide.

  ‘How long have they been under?’ Lin asked.

  Suen checked his watch. ‘Fifteen minutes,’ he said.

  ‘Anyone know how long a cylinder of air lasts?’ said Lin.

  Nobody did, and Lin knew
it didn’t matter anyway. Nobody had seen the diver so they didn’t know how many tanks he had or how many more he’d stashed away on the sea bed. One thing was for sure, fifteen minutes was a long time. More than enough time to cover half a mile at a slow walking pace, and a diver with decent flippers and equipment would move a lot faster. But calling off the search would be as good as admitting that the Dragon Head was dead and Lin wasn’t prepared to take that responsibility.

  Howells watched the triads as they searched, safe inside the main cabin of the junk. Once he was sure that Ng was dead he had swum quickly away, keeping low, hugging the contours of the sea bed, shallow breathing to keep the bubbles to a minimum. Without Ng to slow him down he coursed through the water like a shark, arms loose against his sides, head moving from side to side, all the power coming from his thigh muscles. He’d only slowed once, to check the gauge that told him how much air he had left. He’d made it with plenty to spare.

  When he surfaced close to the junk he spent a full minute using the dinghy as cover while he checked that he was in the clear before he slid out of the water and on to the wooden platform at the rear of the junk. He stowed all the gear in the engine-room and wrapped himself in a bathrobe before kneeling down on one of the seats in the dining area and scanning the bay with a pair of binoculars. The men who had been on land were rowing their boats about half a mile away, and there were two powerful launches bobbing in the water a few hundred yards in from the entrance to the bay. Howells knew they’d call off the search before too long. They wouldn’t know if he’d swum to a boat, or simply gone ashore at any one of a hundred places around the circumference of the bay and made off in a car. And even if they decided that a boat was the most likely hiding-place, there were still more than a thousand in the bay. Marina Cove alone had spaces for 300 vessels. It would take weeks to search every one, and as it was midweek most of them would be securely locked. All Howells had to do was wait.

  ‘It’s ten o’clock, Elder Brother,’ said Suen.

  ‘I know,’ snapped Lin. ‘What do you think we should do? Abandon him? Do you want to explain to his father and his brothers that we left him to die beneath the waves? Do you want to do that?’

  Suen lowered his eyes, shamed by Lin’s outburst, but knowing that he was right and that he spoke for others. They had been rowing round and round in circles for almost two hours and seen nothing but rotting vegetation, mouldly driftwood and plastic bags. If they were still under water then they were surely dead. If they had left the water then they had done so unnoticed. Either way they were wasting their time.

  Lin used his walkie-talkie to talk to the men in the launches and his teams on land. Nothing. He stood at the prow of the boat, his hands on his hips, his chin up defiantly as if daring the frogman to come up and fight him, man to man.

  Dugan was reading the Standard with his third cup of coffee when the phone rang.

  ‘Good morning, Patrick Dugan.’

  ‘Hiya kid. What’s new?’

  ‘Nothing much. Business as usual,’ said Petal.

  ‘What’s the view like from the tallest building in Hong Kong?’ he asked.

  ‘I wish I had a view,’ she said. ‘I’m nowhere near important enough to warrant an office with a view. Or a high floor. You’d laugh if you saw my cubby-hole. How are you this glorious morning?’

  ‘Knackered,’ he said. ‘You’ll be the death of me.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean, Patrick Dugan. I hope this isn’t going to turn into an obscene phone call.’

  He laughed, and spilt his plastic cup of coffee across the paper.

  ‘Fuck,’ he said angrily, and leapt to his feet.

  ‘I was wrong,’ Petal giggled. ‘It is an obscene phone call. I suppose you want to know what colour underwear I’m wearing?’

  ‘I spilt my coffee, all over my God-forsaken desk,’ he said. ‘Why does this always happen to me?’ He lifted one corner of the paper and carefully poured the brown liquid off and into the waste-paper bin. Luckily it hadn’t soaked through to the two files underneath it.

  ‘It’s not my day,’ he said.

  ‘Cheer up,’ said Petal. ‘It can only get better.’

  ‘Are you free tonight?’ asked Dugan. ‘Some of the guys in the anti-triad squad are having a party at Hot Gossip to celebrate a big drugs bust. You can read all about it on page three of the Standard.’

  ‘Sounds great. What time?’

  ‘Fairly late, I’ve got a stack of paperwork to get through. Say about eleven o’clock. We can eat in the restaurant there, they serve food practically through the night.’

  ‘OK, I’ll see you there at eleven.’

  ‘Hey, before you go, can you give me your number at the bank? I’ve tried to get you a couple of times but the switchboard girls never seem to know where to get you.’ Dugan felt that she hesitated, but after a second or two she brightly gave him the number. He wrote it down on the first page of his desk diary. ‘One more thing,’ he said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Just what colour is your underwear?’

  ‘That is for me to know, and for you to find out,’ she laughed sexily, and hung up on him. God, thought Dugan, the night felt like a lifetime away.

  Lin eventually called off the search at one o’clock. He radioed the launches and told them to wait at the entrance to the bay and check any boats that left. Wherever possible they were to search the vessels, but if that proved impossible they were to make a note of the name and identification number. He left two Red Poles at Marina Cove and a handful of men scattered around the circumference of the bay, but in his heart of hearts he knew it was too late. The gweilo had been well prepared. He was either safely on board a boat or he’d long since swum to the shore and escaped.

  They left the three dinghies tied where they’d found them and walked in disconsolate silence back to the cars. Howells watched them go before allowing the girl out of the toilet.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ she pouted.

  ‘Me too,’ he said. ‘Ravenous. What do you want?’

  ‘I want to go home.’ She stamped her foot as she spoke and Howells smiled. Any man who got stuck with this young lady was going to have a hard life.

  ‘To eat,’ he said. ‘What do you want to eat?’

  The look of deviousness that flashed across her face was so transparent that Howells laughed out loud.

  ‘Can I have a look in the galley to see what there is?’ she asked as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. This was obviously a girl who was used to getting exactly what she wanted from her doting parents.

  ‘No,’ said Howells patiently. ‘You stay here.’

  ‘A woman’s place is in the kitchen,’ said Sophie, toying with a strand of her blonde hair. Howells gave her a mock growl and she glared at him. ‘You’re going to be sorry when my father catches you,’ she threatened. Howells said nothing.

  The convoy of cars moved slowly up the approach road to the compound like a funeral procession. Lin and Suen were in the lead car, Ng’s Daimler. They saw Jill standing at the front door as they crackled to a halt on the gravelled drive.

  ‘Shit, Elder Brother. Who’s going to tell the gweipor?’

  ‘You want to do it?’ asked Lin, savagely, and snorted as Suen shook his head. ‘I’ll tell her. And then I’ll speak to Master Cheng. Keep the men by the guardhouse. I’ll come and talk to them soon.’

  He stepped out of the plush interior of the car and walked towards Jill, his arms out to the side, shoulders low. He found it impossible to meet her eyes as he got close. He had little respect for the white woman, she shared the Dragon Head’s bed but not his office and he tried wherever possible to have nothing to do with her. He was certainly not afraid of her, but now she was a stark reminder of his failure, of his failure to protect his boss, her husband.

  It seemed to Lin that the closer he got to her, the more his guilt grew, until he could feel it as a heavy weight pressing down on the back of his neck, compressing his spine and mak
ing his legs buckle. He tried to straighten his back, to thrust back his shoulders but the pressure just intensified. He stopped, some ten feet in front of her, and looked at her shoes, bright red, the colour of blood.

  ‘Where are they?’ she asked quietly. ‘What has happened?’

  She spoke to him in Cantonese, and as always Lin marvelled at how well she spoke the language that defeated so many gweilos. But when he answered it was in halting English. She was a gweipor and there was no way he could bring himself to speak to a gweipor in his own language. The difference would always be there and in Lin’s mind it was a difference that had to be highlighted.

  ‘I am sorry, Mrs Ng,’ he said. He forced himself to look at her face. ‘The man grabbed your husband and took him into the water. He was wearing diving equipment. We do not know what has happened to him.’

  Jill sagged on the doorstep as if Lin had punched her in the stomach. She wrapped her arms around her middle and bent forward, making a low moaning noise like a wounded animal.

  ‘And my daughter?’ she asked, still in Cantonese.

  Lin shook his head. ‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘There was no sign of her.’

  Jill collapsed in a heap, legs splayed as she slid down the door frame, hugging herself. Lin didn’t know what to do; he took an uncertain step forward and then stopped, embarrassed by her show of grief. He was saved by the amah who ran down the corridor and crouched next to her mistress, talking to her softly before helping her to her feet and into the shadows of the house. Lin sighed with relief and turned his back on them. Telling Master Cheng would be no easier, but at least he would take the news better, and he would know what they should do next. He walked around the right-hand side of the house, his feet crunching on the stones. The right-hand wing of the H-shaped house contained the bedrooms, and though it was early afternoon the curtains were drawn. It looked like a house in mourning. The path narrowed and then forked into two, one winding to the left around the back of the house, the other curving away to the right, through a sprinkling of fruit trees and past a small goldfish pool to Cheng’s small one-storey house surrounded by its shady palm trees. It was cleverly landscaped so that there was no sign of it from the main house, and Lin heard the songbirds long before he got there. Cheng was sitting on his front doorstep holding a wicker cage in his lap, head on one side as he listened to the deep-throated warble of the yellow and brown bird within.