Honey is Sweeter than Blood

by Jeffrey Thomas

  But such is the patience of immortals.

  Clouds and Rain

  The naked man stood before the plate glass window, its curtains fully drawn back to unveil the nightscape of Hong Kong. The window was like an aquarium through which the naked man gazed into the ocean’s deepest depths…black, but filled with the alluring light of life. The phosphorescence of hungry creatures. Like most great cities, at night Hong Kong looked to be a city made of volcanic glass and scintillating jewels. But that was the glamour of midnight, the painted gloss of a prostitute. By day, the city showed its ulcers and tumors.

  But the flesh of the naked man held no such imperfections. Against the window, he appeared to be floating in space, some serene god. His short black hair was still slicked back from his shower, beads of water still clinging to him like dew. Behind him, Cheung watched one bead wind down the man’s lower back, and vanish at the cleft of his small, hard buttocks.

  It was a testimony to Kot’s trust in Cheung that he would turn his naked back to him, knowing that Cheung had a pistol holstered beneath his jacket. And it was a testimony to Cheung’s skill at his job that Kot would have made him his personal bodyguard, not knowing that Cheung was an undercover agent…a constable with the Royal Hong Kong Police.

  It was beginning to rain. The first drops pattered hard against the glass wall, like bullets attempting to pierce it. They trickled down, resembling the bead of water Cheung had watched run down Kot’s back.

  “Clouds and rain,” Kot murmured in Cantonese. Cheung could see the man’s reflected face, saw him smiling. Clouds and rain was Chinese slang for the sex act.

  A half hour ago, a handsome male prostitute had left Kot’s apartment. Cheung finally spoke up about the man.

  “It isn’t wise to bring…guests into your own home, Kot. You shouldn’t make yourself vulnerable.”

  “What do you propose, Cheung? That I become celibate?” A soft crackle as Kot drew on his cigarette. He took a savoring, almost sensual approach to smoking. “My career has its dangers. But I’m not willing to give up the pleasures of living.” He held his cigarette in front of his face in pointed contemplation. “This could kill me, too.” He shrugged.

  Although he masqueraded as Kot’s bodyguard, Cheung truly was a bodyguard of sorts. He didn’t want any of Kot’s potential enemies to kill him…not until he had used the man to get closer to his bosses in the 24K gang, as it was called…the most powerful of Hong Kong’s Triads.

  “You should at least take just one trusted lover. Not strangers each time,” Cheung persisted. His own voice sounded distant to him. He found his eyes drawn again to Kot’s bare ass, smooth and dully shining with the light of the room. He imagined the flesh was still warm from the hot shower. He imagined the flesh was as soft as a satin pillow. In his trousers his penis had roused, an agitated snake hiding in its den. Cheung wrenched his eyes from the man’s nude figure. He forced them up again to Kot’s reflected face. And his heart flinched when he saw Kot’s eyes on his in the glass. Kot was smiling again.

  “I should take just one trusted lover, eh, Cheung? One man I trust—as I trust you, for instance?”

  “Yes,” Cheung said, and cleared his voice. “One you trust as you trust me.”

  “You’re jealous, aren’t you? Jealous of my guests? Is that the real source of your concern?”

  Cheung felt his face flush with hot blood. “No…of course not,” he stammered. “Like I told you, I’m only…”

  He broke off. Kot had turned to face him. Now his naked front was plainly displayed. Cheung had briefly seen the man without clothing, in recent weeks, as Kot had come to trust him more and more. But never so blatantly. Not like this.

  Kot took hold of his own scrotum and rolled his balls in his palm languidly, running his thumb up over his slumbering penis. “You like to look at me, don’t you, Cheung? You needn’t be embarrassed. I’m not embarrassed, obviously, am I? Do you think I didn’t recognize right away that you like men as I do?”

  Cheung swallowed hard. He felt more naked than Kot was—as if it were not his attraction to men that had been found out, dragged into the light, but his deception. Yet despite his desperate discomfort, he couldn’t help but stare, his heart thudding, as Kot coaxed his prick awake, now concentrating more effort there, stroking it, pulling at it, until it strained alert and eager, a fleshy spike thrusting up from a patch of glinting black hair.

  Cheung’s own cock now tented out the material of his loose-fitting white trousers. He had to reach into them to readjust the painful angle of his erection; there was no sense in further denial of his arousal. But with his hand on his cock, he found it impossible to let go of it. He stroked it as Kot fondled his own, across the carpeted room from him.

  “It feels good, doesn’t it?” Kot cooed, his grin lopsided, boyish and mischievous in a way Cheung had found winning from the start. “Yeah…rub your cock. Make it hard. It feels so good.”

  Cheung swallowed harder yet, and let out an imperceptible moan.

  Kot gave a nod toward Cheung’s body. “Take your clothes off.” He made no attempt to approach the other man across the room. “It’s only fair that I should see you, too.”

  Cheung was beyond questioning the professionalism, the ethics of his actions. He was not celibate, either…like Kot, did not believe in forgoing the pleasures of life. Without further hesitation, he removed his white jacket, tossed it across a chair. He slipped out of the harness of his holster, and carefully draped that across the jacket, his passion too insistent now for him to be alarmed at his own vulnerability. He next unbuttoned his shirt to bare his smooth, hairless chest, unzipped his pants so that his cock dropped free like a heavy tree falling, so anxious was it to point toward the object of its desire. Cheung stepped out of his shoes, the trousers, his underpants, until he stood naked across from Kot like a second reflection of the handsome gangster.

  Gazing at each other, Kot grinning and Cheung’s face slack as if he were the stunned victim of his own craving, the two men continued to work their tumescent organs. But Cheung could take this game no longer. Still clutching his cock in his fist, he at last broke forward and approached the other man. It didn’t matter that the window was unveiled behind Kot, that the whole of Hong Kong seemed to be watching with its myriad, glittering diamond eyes. All that mattered was to touch the naked flesh of the smiling gangster.

  Kot reached out his left hand invitingly, put it on Cheung’s hip and drew him closer. Cheung put both his hands on Kot’s shoulders as if to support himself, his trembling legs feeling as insubstantial as smoke. Now Kot wrapped both his hands around both their veiny poles, and tugged at them, the shafts rubbing against each other even as Kot’s strong hands rubbed them. Tears of clear lubricant wept from the slits in their shiny twin heads.

  “I want to fuck you,” Cheung whispered. “Please let me fuck you. I want to be inside you.”

  “I’m the boss, remember?” Kot replied, grinning. “I should fuck you, shouldn’t I?”

  Cheung wrapped his arms around Kot’s back, and hungrily clamped his mouth over the other’s as if to suck the very life essence from him. Kot let Cheung’s tongue into his mouth, and twined his own around it until the slick organs were joined together like those other organs below.

  Kot at last broke his lips free and pressed them into Cheung’s ear. “You can fuck me this time. Next time I fuck you. Just don’t tell the boys, okay? I’m supposed to be the dominant one here.” His voice had a wink in it.

  And with that, Kot turned again to face out the window. He braced his palms flat against the glass like suction cups, and spread his legs far apart, arching his back to thrust out his rear. To Cheung, it looked unsettlingly as if Kot were allowing himself to be frisked. Cheung blotted the thought from his mind. He blotted the fact that he was a police officer from his mind…and stepped up behind the handsome gangster.

  Kot winced at the first penetration, let out a little grunt and glanced over his shoulder. Cheung was afraid to pre
ss on, almost withdrew, but Kot blurted, “No. Don’t stop. Don’t be afraid.” In more of a whisper he asked, “Have you ever fucked a man before?”

  “Never you,” Cheung whispered back.

  Cheung bored his way deeper into the other’s flesh, slowly and gently, until at last his entire shaft was skewered up into the molten interior of Kot’s body. He was able to withdraw now, press in again, withdraw, press in, as his shaft became naturally moistened. The slick sound of this slow piston action only heightened his intoxication. He put his hands on Kot’s hips and gave the strokes a little more force, withdrew a bit more fully before plunging in again, until his balls were audibly slapping against the other’s.

  Kot’s palms squeaked against the glass but he held his crucified pose. The sound made Cheung look up from the taut, bunched muscles in Kot’s back, out at the city again. What if there were someone out there with a telescope? Tourists with binoculars? Or even other investigators like himself with binoculars, staking out Kot’s apartment on their own?

  It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. Corruption was rampant amongst the Hong Kong police in this year of 1990. It was seven long years before the city would revert to Chinese rule, and the Triads had not yet really felt the challenge of that day of reckoning, still controlled the city like a second government. Or, more accurately, like a linked parasitic part of the government, their power was so deeply rooted and entwined. It was said that at least 35 percent of the police force was either affiliated with the Triads or actual members of the gangs themselves. Cheung was not one of these men. He had never taken money from a Triad. He had never been corrupted. It was why he had been trusted to become part of the dangerous undercover investigation team.

  And yet here he was…stripped naked, fucking a member of the 24K gang in the ass before the whole of the city. And it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered, but the secret heat that sheathed the thrusting sword of his cock. The feel of Kot’s smooth hips in his crushing fingers. The carnal smells rising up from them. The slick sound of their joining. Cheung watched a bead of sweat trickle down Kot’s lower back, become lost in the crack of his spread ass.

  The rain now pounded against the vast window, gaining in force also, until it blurred the whole city into running, melting, multi-colored light. Cheung watched their joint reflections in the glass; Kot squinting in intensity, his cock bobbing crazily with each smacking thrust into his rear…Cheung’s own face, clenched with an almost severe determination. It was as if they were wrestling with each other. Locked in a desperate battle to wring the passion out of themselves.

  Abruptly Cheung dug his fingers harder into Kot’s waist and drove in one last thrust like a killing coup de grace, launching his sperm as if firing a gun into the very guts of the handsome gangster.

  * * *

  “Have you ever been to the Walled City, Cheung?”

  The two men lay in Kot’s wide bed, Cheung bent over the gangster’s belly; with a slow, dreamlike rhythm he sucked on Kot’s saliva-slick cock. Kot stroked the policeman’s head absentmindedly, as if petting a favorite dog. Cheung only shook his head slightly in reply to Kot’s question, not releasing the erection from his mouth as he did so.

  “I was born in the Walled City,” Kot went on. “I fought my way out of it like you would fight your way out of hell. My father died in the Walled City. He never saw me make my success. Never saw this apartment, the way I dress, the places I eat. But neither has my mother, and she is still alive. Do you know, Cheung, that some people never set foot out of the Walled City, not once in their entire lives? My mother is one of those people. As much a hell as it is, it is the only world she knows. She’s frightened to leave it.”

  Cheung wasn’t lying; he had never entered the infamous Kowloon Walled City. For many years, few policemen had. It was a relatively small spot, but a place like all of Calcutta concentrated into a fraction of the space; it was the most densely populated spot on earth. The buildings of this hive-like slum had been added onto and reconfigured over the years so that they formed almost one unified structure, a nightmare fortress, a crazy human honeycomb in which the sky could no longer be seen and day was indistinguishable from midnight. In its single-room factories and miniature sweat shops were manufactured children’s toys for export to glamorous America, and edibles for the posh Hong Kong hotels. For many years, the spot’s ownership had been in dispute between the Chinese and the British, leaving possession of the Walled City open to the Triads, who were its only government as such.

  But finally, an effort was underway to begin cleaning up this blight now before the changes of 1997 arrived in earnest. The police were entering the Walled City, slowly but surely its denizens were being flushed out and relocated. The ghetto was ultimately to be destroyed and a park, by contrast, created in its place. If nowhere else quite yet, the Triad presence in the Walled City was fading.

  “Tomorrow is my mother’s birthday,” Kot said softly. “I want to go see her.” At last Cheung lifted his head, slid Kot’s glistening cock from his lips.

  “That isn’t wise. There are enemy gangs in the Walled City, and now policemen…”

  “The gangs are weak in there, now. And I have been back to see her when that wasn’t the case. I’m not afraid of the police, either. I must see my mother. Not only because it is her birthday. I must try again to convince her to leave the city, before she is forced to do so.”

  “But…can’t you send some other relative?”

  “There is no other. It’s my mother, Cheung. Mind your position. You’re my bodyguard, my assistant…my lover.” He smiled. In the past few weeks, he had invited no more guests, no more strangers, to his bed. Just this one trusted companion. “But you are not my adviser. We are going.”

  “I understand,” Cheung replied quietly, respectfully. But he was worried that danger might befall this man he was using to gain access to more powerful men. And more than that, he was afraid danger might befall his lover.

  * * *

  The two men slipped from bright, noisy day into a subterranean darkness, weirdly quiet considering its many occupants, as if it were a cave they had entered. Or, as Kot had described it, hell. Cheung felt like Dante to Kot’s tour guide Virgil.

  They moved down an alleyway that stretched high above them like a deep riven canyon, disappearing into utter blackness, but the alley itself was only as wide as their shoulders. Here and there a bare lightbulb hung down from the nest of wires and cables bundled above their heads like twisted jungle vines. Water dripped on the cables from crazy makeshift plumbing, and in one place some wires were sparking. Garbage was thick under their feet, and they passed through the smoke of cooking. The alley stank of human sweat, human waste and animal guts.

  At last and with uncanny suddenness, the sounds of humans burst upon them: chattering voices, radio songs, laughter, babies wailing. The chorus of the damned. Light poured from little factories above them, reached only by ladders. Kot told Cheung that they had now entered the main “street” of the Walled City, called Pak Fa’an Gai…which meant White Powder Street, in reference to heroin. The source of Kot’s wealth.

  As they negotiated this squalid human termite nest, Kot said, “Men tremble at my anger, Cheung. I have given them reason to. Men follow my orders. But my mother isn’t frightened of me. My mother won’t listen to commands from me. I can’t force her, today. All I can do is beg her…”

  They broke off down an off-shooting alley, the chaos of sound dwindling somewhat behind them, and came to a flight of stairs nearly impossible to ascend for all the trash and garbage heaped upon it. They picked their way up a narrow path that others must regularly kick or shovel through the debris. In the claustrophobic hallway above, they stopped outside a tiny flat, its threshold covered only by a dark curtain. Still, Kot politely rapped his knuckles on the doorway. “Mother?” he called. “It’s your son.”

  At the end of the hallway, a little boy stood watching them. On his temple there was an open festering sore that almost made
Cheung wince to look at it. But the boy gave him a lopsided grin, turned and darted off out of sight. Cheung thought he heard a fading laugh.

  A few moments ticked by. Cheung kept glancing up and down the corridor, watching for trouble, conscious of the gun inside his jacket. It was not a police issue, but the same pistol Kot favored; a semi-automatic Model 77B, manufactured by the People’s Republic. It could be cocked and fired with one hand only; squeezing back on what was merely the trigger guard on most handguns chambered the first round.

  “Mother?” Kot called again, and this time parted the curtain and thrust his head into the flat.

  Cheung heard him gasp. Without further hesitation, he tore his 77B from its holster and pushed past Kot into the tiny apartment.

  He expected a scene of horror, from Kot’s reaction. His mother lying murdered, perhaps. Or a number of enemy Triad men, lying in ambush. Instead, he found only a withered little doll of a woman, looking like some ancient monkey garbed in human attire, her tiny black eyes glittering in shock.

  “What’s wrong, Kot?” Cheung said, baffled.

  “This is not my mother!” Kot entered the room fully, and loomed over the living mummy. “Old woman, where is my mother?”

  “The woman who lived here before me is dead,” came the frightened creature’s reply.

  Cheung shot a look at Kot, and the expression on the gangster’s face actually made him frightened, as well. It was seething, volcanic. “Dead? I don’t believe you!”

  “I am sorry…your mother took her own life, over a month ago. She…slashed her wrists, and died in this room.” And with that, she pointed toward a corner where there was a ratty scrap of rug across the floor.