The Trail to Buddha_s Mirror nc-2

by Don Winslow

  Li Lan paid the driver and gestured for the men to get out.

  “Where are we?” Neal asked.

  “Wong Tai Sin Temple,” Li answered. “We are coming to thank Kuan Yin.”

  “Who’s Kuan Yin? Your case officer?”

  She shook her head and laughed. “Kuan Yin is goddess of mercy. She has been very kind to us tonight.”

  “Goddess? What kind of communist are you?”

  “A Buddhist communist.”

  “And this is a twenty-four-hour temple?”

  “Gods do not sleep.”

  “Mao wouldn’t like hearing this.”

  “The Chairman is dead. He has met the Unpredictable Ghost.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “The Unpredictable Ghost guards the next world. He guides souls to the next world.”

  “Which next world? Heaven or hell?”

  “You don’t know. That is why he is called unpredictable. I will show him to you in the temple.”

  “No thanks.”

  She laughed again. “Sooner or later you will meet him. Better to know him sooner.”

  “Better later.”

  “As you think. Come. First we get our fortunes told.”

  “You really do make a shitty Marxist.”

  She led to them to where an old man sat behind a tiny, ramshackle booth on the outside of the temple. She handed him some coins and he handed her a bright red cup with holes in its cover. She held the cup up to her ear, tipped it upside down, and shook it. A stick fell out. She caught it in her other hand and gave it to the old man, who studied it intensely and then began to talk to her in rapid Chinese. She smiled broadly and answered. Then she bought another cup and handed it to Pendleton.

  “Do one, Robert. Prayer stick. It will tell you your fortune.”

  “I know my fortune. I’m going to live happily ever after with a beautiful woman whom I love very much.”

  “Thank you, Robert.”

  Neal thought he might throw up, and it wasn’t his ribs.

  “What’s your fortune?” he asked.

  “To go inside the temple.”

  “Listen, we have to get hold of Simms. He’s probably at the Y right now, going nuts.”

  “Just quickly thank Kuan Yin.”

  “Quickly.”

  They went up the steps past elaborately carved railings. A large screen was set in the middle of the entrance, leaving a narrow passage on either side.

  “What’s this for?” Neal asked.

  “Bad spirits can only move in straight lines,” Li Lan explained. “Therefore they cannot get into the temple.”

  Every bad spirit I know is absolutely incapable of moving in a straight line, but never mind, Neal thought.

  They stepped around the screen, presumably leaving any bad spirits behind, and into an enormous chamber. Dozens of shrines lined the two side walls, each shrine an altar presided over by a statue of its particular spirit. Even at this hour of the day, some pilgrims knelt at the altars, praying, and other devotees had left burning sticks of incense, small piles of apples and oranges, or coins as offerings or invocations. Rich red fabrics hung from the walls and large rectangular lamps hung from the ceilings, which, combined with the burning candles and sticks of incense, cast the room in a dark golden light.

  The shrine at the front wall dominated the room. A large statue of a young woman sitting in the full lotus position occupied a broad platform. Her face was alabaster white, her eyes almond-shaped, her smile beatific. She wore a diaphanous gown slung over one shoulder, a headpiece of gold laminate, and black-lacquer hair piled high on her head. The effect was a strange combination of garishness and benevolence.

  “Kuan Yin,” whispered Li Lan.

  Li Lan knelt at the railing below the platform. She touched her head to the floor three times, then repeated the series twice more. She stayed hunched over, and Neal could see her lips moving. She was speaking to her goddess. Neal and Pendleton stood awkwardly behind her.

  When she got up, she went to Neal and said, “We must see to your injuries.”

  “We must call Simms.”

  “How can we call him if he is at the Y, going nuts?”

  “We call the Y and have him paged.”

  “I am not waiting out in the open for your Simms to arrive. Too dangerous.”

  She had a point. A five-year-old kid can keep a secret better than a cabdriver who’s offered cash, and it was a safe bet that Chin’s gang, and maybe Ben Chin himself, were strongarming the neighborhood to find the cabbie that had driven off with Li and the two kweilo. And it wasn’t exactly rush hour-the cabbie wouldn’t be that hard to find.

  “Where do you want to go?” Neal asked.

  “It is arranged.”

  It’s arranged. Swell.

  “By your handlers. No way.”

  “Not by my handlers. By them.” She waved her arm impatiently around the temple.

  “By who?”

  “By the monks. Do you really think I stopped to get our fortunes told? Do you think I am a superstitious idiot? I stopped to arrange a hiding place.”

  “You know these people?”

  “These people are all the same every place.” She looked at him stubbornly. “Long before there was a communist party, there was Kuan Yin. Now… let’s go!”

  “I don’t know.”

  Pendleton grabbed his elbow. “I do. I don’t want to hang around here waiting to get blasted to bits by a machine gun. You can trust Li Lan with your life. I have.”

  Terrific, Doc. Every time I’ve trusted Li Lan, I’ve just barely gotten away with my frigging stupid inane life. Nevertheless, the good doctor has a point, and I don’t much fancy going back out on the street.

  “So let’s get going,” said Neal.

  “Finally.”

  She knew just where she was going. She strode to the corner of the room and knelt down at the shrine, beneath the statue of an old man wearing a torn robe, a hideously mocking grin, and carrying what looked to Neal like a gold ingot. She performed the nine bows, and then took a small bell from the altar railing and rang it just once. Then she turned to Neal.

  “Neal Carey,” she said, pointing at the statue, “meet Unpredictable Ghost. Unpredictable Ghost, Neal Carey.”

  “Pleasure,” Neal muttered.

  A monk appeared from behind the shrine. He was tall and thin. His head was shaved and he wore a plain brown robe and sandals. He returned Li Lan’s bow and motioned for them to follow him.

  There was a red curtain behind the shrine, and behind the curtain was a wooden door. It opened to a stairway that took them down to a basement, which looked like a maintenance shop for the temple. Wooden lathes, jars of paint, brushes, candles, and parts of lanterns lay scattered about in no discernible order. Here and there a head or a hand or a trunk from a statue was set on a small worktable. Body Shop of the Gods, Neal thought. The monk led them through this room into a boiler room, through a plain, functional metal door, and into a corridor. Down two more steps and they entered a corrugated metal tube.

  It was as narrow and dark as a walkway in a submarine. Every thirty feet a naked light bulb dangled from the low ceiling. Moisture dripped from the seams in the sides and tops of the tube. Neal could hear traffic noises above them and realized they were going underneath the street.

  “Are we in the goddamn sewer?” he asked Li Lan.

  “Quiet.”

  He turned around to Pendleton. “Are we in the goddamn sewer?”

  “Looks like a goddamn sewer to me.”

  “Christ, I didn’t like reading Victor Hugo, never mind living it.”

  “Quiet.”

  They went up two steps and then through another door. They were in a basement of sorts, a small, musty, dirt-floored chamber. The monk stepped onto a short ladder and unlocked a hatch. Then he stood at the bottom and gestured for them to climb up. This was as far as he went.

  Li Lan went up, then Pendleton. He took his sweet time about it, Neal though
t, impatient to get above ground again. He followed Pendleton up the ladder and was instantly sorry.

  He was in hell.

  It was an alley, maybe four feet wide, maybe a little less. A sliver of daylight revealed filth-encrusted walls, on which moss, urine stains, and dirt competed for space. The ground beneath him was a mix of mud, shit, broken glass, and some cracked and broken planking.

  Neal covered his mouth and nose with his hands, but the stench was overwhelming. His eyes teared and he fought back retching.

  Tenements loomed above him, so high and close they looked as if they were about to topple over. Homemade bridges crossed the alley, veritable villages of hammocks were strung from one side to the other, tangles of wires and cables looked like jungle vines.

  Here and there holes had been punched in the lower walls, and people were burrowed into them. Neal could see them peeking out at him through iron grilles and bamboo screens.

  He heard Pendleton mutter, “Jesus. Jesus Christ.”

  And the sounds, the sounds were horrible. Amid the din of thousands of voices just talking, Neal heard babies crying, children screaming, old people moaning. In the distance ahead he could hear a pack of dogs growling, and from inside the walls around him he could make out the scurrying feet of rats.

  Neal reached ahead and grabbed Li by the shoulder.

  “Where are we?”

  “The Walled City.”

  “What is it?”

  “It is what you see.”

  She brushed his hand off and started ahead. He pushed Pendleton aside, grabbed her by the collarbone, and spun her around.

  “What is it?” he asked again.

  “It is the Walled City!” she screamed at him. “People-you would call ‘squatters’-live here. The gangs rule it. It is drugs, it is prostitutes, it is sweatshops. It is rats, it is packs of rabid dogs. It is children gang-raped and sold as slaves, it is people living in holes! It is filth. It is when nobody cares!”

  “I never knew a place like this existed.”

  “Now you know. So what?”

  “What are we doing here?”

  “We are hiding.”

  “For how long?”

  “Don’t you like it here?”

  “For how long?”

  She calmed down. He hadn’t seen rage in her before, and it scared him. Pendleton stood aside like a frightened, overgrown child.

  “Until you can phone your Simms.”

  “Can he get in here?”

  “With the people he knows.”

  “Gang people, Triad people?”

  “Of course.”

  “Are there telephones here?”

  “There is everything here.”

  She turned around and went ahead. She turned left into a slightly wider alley where people sat slumped against the walls in a doped-out haze. Then she turned right into a concrete tunnel, where they walked through muck, stepped over sleeping bodies, and ducked under dangling light bulbs and power cords. They stepped into another alley, narrower and filthier than the last.

  “Jesus!” Pendleton gasped.

  A pack of rats was feeding on the bare feet of a human corpse. Neal hunched over and finally vomited, trying hard not to touch the walls.

  “Come on,” Li Lan hissed. “We are there soon. It is better.”

  The alley led to a T-junction. They went to the left, then through a series of zigzags, then straight on and made two more rights.

  We’re in a goddamn maze, Neal thought, and we can hardly see the sky. He suddenly realized that he wouldn’t stand a chance of finding his way out of there. Not a chance.

  They came onto a small circular patch of bare din that formed a hub for five alleys.

  Four teenage boys, dressed in sleeveless white T-shirts, baggy khaki slacks, and rubber sandals squatted in a circle, smoking cigarettes and rolling dice. It was clearly their turf. The boys stared at the newly arrived trio with amazement. An unexpected bonanza of rape and pillage had been dropped in their midst. The biggest one, the leader, rose to his feet and approached Li Lan. He gazed at her with frank sexual interest, stretched his face into an exaggerated leer, and made a comment to his buddies. They chirped with amusement and got to their feet. The leader pulled a knife from his pants pocket and held it up to Li’s face.

  Pull the gun, Lan, Neal thought. This is no time to be a Buddhist.

  She didn’t pull the gun, but said what sounded to Neal like two words. The boy’s grin crumbled into a frown of concern and his hand dropped to his side. He barked an order to the others and they took off running down one of the alleys. Then he launched into a monologue of obsequious friendliness. Neal didn’t understand a word, but knew shuffling when he heard it, and this kid was tapdancing for his ass. Li wasn’t buying it. She stood looking at him sternly, not throwing him as much as a crumb. The kid started to shuffle harder.

  Ten minutes later, Neal saw why. The two errand boys came back escorting a guy who had “honcho” written all over him. He was older, maybe in his early twenties, and sported a gray pinstriped suit, a blue shirt, a plum tie, and a charcoal fedora. A lit cigarette was jammed in the corner of his mouth. He didn’t show any fear toward Li, but he was polite and respectful, bowing slightly to her as he approached and then nodding to Neal and Pendleton.

  He listened to Li for a minute, nodded again, and quietly issued orders. The three boys started to run off, but he stopped the leader, then gave him a vicious backhand to the face. The boy fell into the dirt, picked himself up, bowed to Li Lan, and ran off. The honcho shook his head, then reached into his jacket and produced a pack of Kool Lights. He offered one to Neal and Pendleton, who declined with polite smiles and shakes of the head.

  “He’s a stupid boy,” he suddenly said. “Useless. I will kill him if you wish.”

  “Thank you for the courtesy, but no,” Li answered.

  He’s a clever bugger, Neal thought. Making the offer in English to give Li tremendous face in front of her guests.

  He turned to Neal. “Don’t worry about White Tiger. They are big men in Kowloon. This is not Kowloon.”

  This isn’t Kowloon, thought Neal. This isn’t even the fucking earth. The honcho’s appearance had attracted an audience. The local kids were gathered around them in a wide circle, and Neal looked up to see people looking out the windows of the ratty concrete and wooden buildings that surrounded the circle. The alleys were filling with wishful gawkers.

  “Mr. Carey will need to use a telephone,” Li said. Neal got the idea she said it just to fill a silence.

  “Sure… anything,” the honcho said casually.

  Yeah, okay, how about a helicopter?

  The honcho’s acolytes pushed their way through the crowd and apparently announced that they had accomplished their mission.

  “Will you come with me, please?” Honcho asked Li. The crowd parted in front of him as he led them up one of the alleys, into a courtyard ringed by shacks full of sewing machines, through one of the shacks and out a back door into another alley, and then into a cul-de-sac.

  At least it looked like a cul-de-sac. When Honcho led them down a stairway into what appeared to be a basement building entrance, the steps ended in a concrete wall. Just to the right, however, there was a narrow crack in the wall. Honcho turned sideways and squeezed through, motioning his guests to follow.

  Neal could just fit through the crack, and he shuffled along sideways for about ten feet, trying not to scrape himself on the walls, which pressed against his back and his nose. The walls were home to about ten thousand strains of exotic bacteria, and Neal figured that one open wound would be good for about twenty-five different blood tests. He could feel slime rubbing off on his shin and pants, and was grateful for once that he couldn’t see up or down. He didn’t want to know.

  This alley, if you could call it that, ended in another wall. This time the crack led off to the left, and Neal endured another twenty feet of rising claustrophobia before they reached their apparent destination. He had to
hand it to old Li Lan: She couldn’t have found a better place to hide.

  Some jerry-rigged wooden steps rose straight up from the alley into a dark hallway. They passed by two closed doors before knocking on the third.

  Neal followed them in through Door Number Three, not really thinking he’d find Monty Hall, the patio set, and the trip to Hawaii. What he did find was a bare, low-ceilinged eight-by-eight room. In the right corner a homemade ladder provided shaky access to a primitive loft that had been literally carved out of a wall. The loft was just large enough for a stool and, incredibly, a telephone. Maybe it was for running a book, maybe for taking drug orders, maybe it was for calling up local shops and asking them if they had Prince Albert in a can, but there it was. A stubby black rotary telephone. Neal wasn’t sure he had ever seen anything so beautiful in his whole life.

  An old man and a boy squatted on the floor of the main room. They held rice bowls to their lips, and their chopsticks were flashing furiously, scooping the dirty white rice into their mouths. The old man wore a sleeveless T-shirt that may have been white sometime during the Sung Dynasty, and a pair of khaki shorts that came down to his calves. His white hair had been shaved close to the scalp, and he had a wispy white beard. His eyes were dull and yellow and showed the resentment he felt at being interrupted in his meal.

  The kid, on the other hand, was delighted. He stared unabashedly at Neal, and dropped two or three grains of rice onto the black sports shirt he wore over denim cutoff and rubber sandals. His grin showed bad, crooked teeth, and his eyes looked milky and runny. Infected. Neal figured the kid to be maybe twelve, the old man about a hundred and twelve.

  The kid reached under his shirt and came out with a comic book, which he held up to Neal’s face.

  “Hulk!” he screamed, then screwed his face up and hunched over, growling and showing teeth. “Hulk! Hulk!”

  “That’s pretty good,” Neal said, trying to be friendly.

  He reached for the comic book to express admiration, but the kid snatched it back. Then he pulled himself up, threw out his chest, put his hands on his hip, and flashed a confident, macho smile.

  “Superman?” Neal asked.

  The kid shook his head, then hit him with the smile again.