The Fireman

by Stephen Leather

  I knew it was Seligman, and I knew then that I was in real danger. They’d tried to make Sally’s death look like a suicide but now they obviously didn’t care, they’d brought it out in the open, killing a man in broad daylight. They’d killed Seligman and now surely they would be after me. And yet I still didn’t know who, or why. That’s what made it so frightening, the fact that they knew who I was and they were just shadowy figures moving at the edge of my vision. I shivered. A fight in a hotel room was one thing, a car bomb in a Hong Kong street was something else.

  Plumes of thick, black smoke streamed into the sky and the burning car crackled and hissed and cracked. The driver’s door was open, sagging on one hinge so I guess Seligman was just about to get in the car when the bomb went off. I wondered about the briefcase, but if the American had had it, it had surely been destroyed.

  ‘What the hell’s going on, laddie?’ asked Howard in bewilderment, his face flushing from the heat of the fire.

  ‘It’s Seligman,’ I said.

  The hoses thickened and twitched like awakening snakes and then the firemen were dousing the inferno with foam as Seligman was rolled onto a stretcher by two young ambulancemen.

  One of the cops holding Howard by the arm asked him who we were and he told them we were the dead man’s friends and they bundled us into the back of a navy blue van and took us to a police station.

  They held us for five hours, maybe six, as we helped them with their inquiries, as they say. Most of the time we sat in a waiting room on a slatted wooden bench and looked at a recruiting poster Sellotaped to a whitewashed wall.

  Who were we, who was Seligman, did he have any enemies, where did he work, how long had we known him, when was the last time we’d seen him, did we know anyone who’d want to kill him? I didn’t tell them about going into China with him, and they didn’t ask. I didn’t know who to trust in this God-forsaken town and I wasn’t going to start baring my soul to Hong Kong’s finest until I’d got my own head straight. The explosion and the phone call from England seemed too close to be a coincidence, like a warning to get on a plane before the going really got tough. It just felt wrong, that’s all, and I didn’t want to complicate matters further by telling them about throwing home-made Molotov cocktails out of the window of a taxi. Howard obviously realized what was going on because he kept quiet too, confining himself to what he knew about Seligman’s personal life.

  They fed us once, a bowl of rice with some meat in a lumpy khaki-coloured sauce. They gave us chopsticks and I asked for a fork. We were given mugs of tea with strange-shaped leaves in the bottom and then the questions started again, each answer meticulously written down on report sheets.

  This time they split us up. I was surrounded by six police officers, all of them Chinese, and they took turns to fire questions at me as I sat there and tried to disguise the fear I felt inside. The questions came thick and fast, a flurry that was designed to confuse rather than to elicit information. Eventually they gave up and one of them left the room, returning five minutes later with Hall. The Chinese inspector sitting behind the one desk in the room gave up his seat to the British copper. There was no look of resentment on his face but I wondered how he felt inside.

  ‘So,’ said Hall, just the one word. I was tempted to add, ‘… a needle pulling thread’ but I didn’t because this was serious. He let the word hang there, reading the report in front of him line by line. He looked up. ‘You were not a friend of this Mr Seligman,’ he said.

  ‘No, I’ve only known him a few days.’

  ‘And the reason you were on the scene so quickly?’

  ‘I was in the FCC, just round the corner. We heard the explosion and went to see what had happened.’

  ‘The natural curiosity of the journalist,’ said Hall, his expression blank. ‘Very well, then. I see no reason to detain you further. Or Mr Berenger. You are both free to go.’ He paused, then added: ‘I think the time has come for you to leave Hong Kong. The autopsy was completed yesterday, and I understand a friend of yours has already made arrangements to have your sister’s body flown back to the UK.’

  ‘I’ll stay for the inquest,’ I said.

  ‘There will be no inquest. Your sister’s case has officially been classified as suicide and is now closed. As such there is no need for an inquest.’

  I stood up, a hot wave of anger coursing through my veins. ‘What the fuck do you mean, closed?’ I shouted. Two of the policemen moved forward and stood on either side of me, ready to intervene if I made a move against their boss.

  ‘The case has been closed. You should now leave Hong Kong,’ said Hall.

  ‘And if I don’t?’

  He gave me a half smile. ‘You will,’ he said. ‘Far better you go of your own accord.’

  And that was it. Two minutes later Howard and I were outside, blinking in the afternoon sun. Howard said he had a meeting to go to but he wasn’t fooling anybody, I think he simply wanted to get away from me. I knew how he felt, I wanted to get away from me, too. He walked off like a galleon in full sail, and I headed down towards the harbour, legs moving on autopilot as my mind whirled. It had been easy to concentrate inside the police station as I mentally ducked and dived and kept them away from the events of the previous two days. Freed from the incessant questioning my mind just ballooned and chased random thoughts like a dog snapping at wasps.

  There were three of them, one to my left, one to my right and one in front of me. That meant I could have turned and run for it if my back hadn’t been against a stone wall. They were all smiling so that anyone who passed by would think we were just four friends, three Chinese and a gweilo chatting on a hot summer’s day, the gweilo sweating in the unaccustomed heat.

  ‘You will come with us,’ said the tall, thin one in front of me, his face so close I could smell his sour breath and count the blackheads on his nose. When he smiled it was through yellowed teeth and when he spoke I felt spittle pepper my face.

  ‘Please,’ he added as an afterthought. He looked left and right as if checking that his pals approved of his English. He seemed satisfied and then pushed his head towards me like a chicken pecking corn, nodding back and forth. ‘You now come, yes?’

  They were all dressed in jeans and expensive training shoes. Rotten Teeth wore a leather jacket over a dazzling white T-shirt with ‘Fit Sport’ splashed across the front in red. The ones on either side wore matching baseball jackets and they could have been twins. All had their arms swinging freely and were close enough to punch or kick or hurt me in a whole host of different ways.

  The twins were nodding now, and the one on the left took my arm and pulled me gently away from the wall. A young boy cycled by on a small bike, whizzing past Rotten Teeth as close as he could without touching. Then my other arm was being held and I was being led gently to a large blue Mercedes. It felt as if I was gliding across the pavement. I resisted once but both twins tightened their grips so I just flowed with them. They sandwiched me into the back of the Merc and Rotten Teeth slid into the driving seat. We moved off, through Causeway Bay where the stink of the junks in the typhoon shelter streamed in through the air-conditioning and didn’t fade until we were halfway through the harbour tunnel. When we came out at the Kowloon side I sat quietly in the back as Rotten Teeth handed over a note at the toll booth to a bored attendant plugged into a Walkman.

  So why didn’t I try to run, why didn’t I fight and shout and maybe scream, to attract the attention of the police, why just let them lead me like a seaside donkey? Because there were three of them and three against one wasn’t fair, or possibly, because I wasn’t getting any nearer to finding out who’d killed Sally, and maybe the three musketeers were a piece of the puzzle. And Rotten Teeth had said ‘please’ so maybe he’d been told to be polite because he’d made an effort when his English obviously wasn’t up to it.

  As we headed into Tsim Sha Tsui I asked Twin One where we were going but he just smiled and nodded and gave me a thumbs up. We drove along Nathan Road and
its lines of jewellery shops and boutiques and its forest of brightly coloured signs clinging to the sides of the tower blocks, red and green and gold.

  I didn’t know Hong Kong well enough to work out where we were going, but I knew we had our backs to the harbour and so we were heading north. Soon we left the upmarket commercial centre behind us, the blocks got closer together, public housing towers with washing sticking out on poles from most of the windows like scruffy flags fluttering in the wind. The road stayed the same, a dual carriageway that could have been in England, but the shops on either side were smaller, none of the big supermarkets or department stores that crowded into Central and Kowloon, small family shops with televisions and fridges stacked on top of each other, cheap and cheerful clothes, and everywhere the cramped housing of the workers who filled the local factories and sweat shops.

  We were overtaken by a green taxi, a Toyota exactly like the ones I’d caught on the island, only the colour different, then I saw another, and soon all the taxis I saw were green so I guess that meant we’d left Kowloon and were now in the New Territories.

  We started driving through an industrial area, past huge towering vertical factories with bulky air conditioning units squatting on the outside like cancerous growths.

  The driver jabbed at the buttons of the telephone in the gap between the two front seats, the electronic tones sounding like a child trying to make music. It started to ring and a voice answered in Chinese.

  Then a hand grabbed the back of my neck and forced my head down between my legs and I was kept doubled up for five minutes or so, the smell of expensive leather and my own fear making me want to retch, until the car bumped over a ramp or something. Then we pitched forward, turned left and stopped.

  The pressure on my neck disappeared and when I sat up, blinking and twisting my head from side to side, we were in an underground car park, fluorescent lights glinting off an army of assorted cars and vans.

  ‘Come with us,’ said Rotten Teeth in unsteady English, and they led me to a goods lift. There was something green and brown and unsavoury in one corner and I tried to keep my eyes off it as we rumbled upwards. They’d pressed the button for the twelfth floor and as a small yellow light counted off the numbers I tried to relax and steady my breathing.

  We lurched to a halt and the doors opened to reveal a long, low-ceilinged room, about as long as a five-a-side football pitch. The windows had all been boarded up and the only light came from a row of bare light bulbs that bisected the room. It was filled with metal tables like school desks, each topped by an old sewing machine, wires trailing upward to sockets in the ceiling like dodgem cars waiting for the music to start. The walls were lined with empty shelves and the floor was littered with scraps of material and lengths of string, an abandoned sweat shop. Sweat was the right word because the room was steeped in the bitter smell of perspiration, an acrid tang that I could taste on my tongue, mixed with the oil that had been used to lubricate the sewing machines. There was something else, the sweet smell of roast pork, the residue of a nightwatchman’s snack maybe, or the leftovers from some long forgotten lunchbox.

  The experts might wax lyrical about the economic miracle that is Hong Kong, about its booming exports and hard working population, but at the end of the day I guess this is what it comes down to – a dirty, foul-smelling factory halfway up a tower block where women slaved away over old fashioned machines under artificial light.

  We walked in single file through the lines of tables, heading for a door at the far end of the room, which had Chinese characters stencilled on it in white. Rotten Teeth held the door open for me and I led the way, to be greeted by Dennis Lai cradling a white portable telephone in his left hand. In his right was a small butane cylinder with a brass attachment on the top, the sort ofthing Hampstead do-it-yourselfers use to strip pine. Lai was wearing a dark blue pinstripe suit but over it he had on a white butcher’s apron that went down below his knees.

  He fumbled the telephone and the blowtorch together and held out his right hand. He smiled as we shook hands, his grip firm but warm and wet. The smell of cooked meat was almost overpowering now, and at first I thought we’d walked into the factory’s kitchen but then I heard a muffled whimpering and when Lai stepped to one side to put the telephone and cylinder on a small folding table I saw a man suspended from the ceiling by chains tied to his legs, his head six inches from the ground. His arms were tied behind his back and he’d been gagged with a leather belt which was wet and slimy with saliva and he was swinging to and fro slowly, his hair brushing backwards and forwards through a damp patch on the concrete floor.

  His eyes were tightly closed but he wasn’t dead because his chest was rising and falling slowly and his nostrils flared in and out as he sucked in air.

  He could have been the guy who’d kicked me in the back in my room at the Excelsior, or the one who’d kicked me in the head. He could have been the waiter who’d poured me a flat tonic water at the FCC. With half of his body covered in third degree burns it could just as easily have been my Uncle Michael who’d disappeared from his office when I was twelve years old taking just his Ford Escort and his secretary with him. Rumour has it they’re running a pub in Benidorm but as he was the black sheep of the family nobody bothered too much about him. Except my aunt, of course, but even she didn’t seem too upset.

  The man was naked except for a pair of grubby Y-fronts, navy blue and covered with red sailing boats. Most of the burns were on his legs but for at least some of the time Lai had played the blowtorch along the man’s chest because there were huge blisters bursting from the hairless skin. I suppose Lai couldn’t be bothered to bend down for long so he’d concentrated on the legs, which looked like steak that had been left on a grill for too long, ugly black streaks running from the ankles to the thighs, the skin puckered and burnt, with blood dribbling out from the wounds that hadn’t been cauterized by the heat.

  I tried to be cool. I knew Lai was on my side but it was so glaringly obvious that I was dealing with a very, very dangerous man, a man who could smile while he tortured and who was methodical enough to wear an apron so that he wouldn’t soil his suit.

  ‘Who’s the barbecue?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s a red pole in the Wo Hop To triad,’ said Lai, gently swinging the blowtorch. He could see by the look on my face that didn’t mean a thing to me so he continued. ‘Wo Hop To is one of the bigger and nastier organizations in Hong Kong, and they’ve spread into Europe and America now. They’re into drug smuggling, prostitution, gambling, anything that turns a quick profit.’

  ‘And red pole?’ I tried not to look at the swinging body, or the blood that trickled down to the floor and mingled with the sweat and saliva.

  ‘A red pole is a fighter, one step up from a rank and file soldier. The triad system is based on a pyramid, with a boss at the top. Below him are three under-bosses. Each under-boss has three men directly reporting to him – a fighter, a negotiator and a recruiter.

  ‘Mr Yip here is a red pole, a kung fu master in fact, not that his knowledge of martial arts is doing him much good at the moment.’ He chuckled at his own joke.

  ‘He killed Sally?’ I asked.

  ‘He says not,’ said Lai. ‘But he has an amazing tolerance to pain, as you can see for yourself.’

  He brutally punched the hanging man in the groin, the fist buried up to the wrist in the sweating flesh, but there was no scream of pain, just a tightening of the teeth on the gag and a muffled grunt.

  ‘Why would the triads want to hurt Sally?’

  ‘He says they didn’t mean to kill her. He says she struggled, ran and tripped and fell through the window.’

  ‘They? Who was with him?’

  ‘One of the Wo Hop To under-bosses by the name of Ho Chi-kwong and a soldier called Li Wing-kei.’

  ‘She got away from three men? Doesn’t seem likely, does it?’

  ‘My thoughts exactly. That is why I feel it necessary to talk to him a little while longer.’ He to
yed with the blowtorch, caressing it like an expensive piece of jade.

  ‘I still don’t understand why the triads would want to hurt my sister. She wasn’t working on any crime stories other than cocaine-taking amongst the gweilos here. And according to the ICAC she wasn’t getting anywhere with that.’

  ‘Money,’ he said. ‘You can get practically anyone killed or maimed in Hong Kong for just a few thousand dollars. A bit more if you want to hurt a policeman. But Mr Yip says there wasn’t a contract out on her. If there had been it would almost certainly have been discussed at the last council meeting, and I am sure that if it had been it would have been made clear that she was under my protection. That at least adds credence to his claim that he did not intend to kill her.

  ‘Also it would be unusual for a triad to do its own dirty work in Hong Kong. When a killing is sanctioned the assassin is usually brought in from China, Taiwan or the Philippines. The triads here hire out their own assassins to gangs in other countries. Free movement of labour, you might say,’ and he laughed again. Jesus, this guy had one hell of a sick sense of humour, but I guess you couldn’t be completely sane and do the sort of things that he’d been doing with the blowtorch.

  ‘Do we know who hired them?’

  ‘Mr Yip says no, he says the only one who knows for sure is Mr Ho. And he is apparently playing mah jong in a tea house in Mong Kok, I have just discovered.’

  ‘Well, let’s go and pick him up,’ I said.

  Lai smiled again, and tapped the air with his blowtorch. ‘I have work to do here.’ I obviously looked horrified because he added: ‘Do not feel any sympathy for this filth. He is the cause of your sister’s death and he also helped plant the bomb that killed the American this morning. He has forfeited the right to live.’

  He took a gold Dunhill lighter from his trouser pocket and used it to ignite the torch, then he narrowed the flame to a thin cone of blue heat.