Jade Woman l-12

by Jonathan Gash

  “Man,” Johny said, bopping and finger-snapping as we alighted outside the hotel. “Ah really pities yoh.”

  “Pity?” I yelped, alarmed.

  He did a sympathetic break dance. “Yoh godda study a load o’ crappy antiques now, man. Fo’ hours! Not one’s American. Only foreign crap. See you roun’.”

  Marveling, I watched him boppaloo across the concourse to where the trams did their sleepwalker’s turn towards Des Voeux Road. What he saw as servitude I saw as release.

  “You’re late, Lovejoy.” The lovely Shiu-Won, aka Marilyn, was being all impatient beside me. “Five minutes. Don’t let it happen again. The American women have arrived. Do the antiques immediately, reassuring them that all the items are genuine, whether fake or not. You shall be overheard, so please ensure accuracy.”

  “Raat own, lady,” I said. “Incidentally, Shiu-Won. Does your Yankee assistant ever shut up?”

  She paused, eyeing me with that non-smile women do. “Johny has never been to America, never even left Hong Kong. And call me Marilyn. Foreigners pronounce Cantonese wrongly. Inside.” She went to the sliding doors and stood aside to see me in.

  I sighed and did as I was told.

  “Nice tour of Hong Kong, Marilyn, ’kyou.”

  “It was to show that Hong Kong is not a tiny backwater, Lovejoy.” She paused a second. “Here, everything is possible. Seven thousand ships a year. Very big exports.

  Without a single resource, Hong Kong makes every world currency shake in its shoes.

  We give more for the dollar. Of everything. Anything.” She gave me her frankest stare.

  “What you have seen is less than one percent of our business. I was instructed to make sure you understand that.”

  One thing still narked. “Why nearly drown me in that sampan? It scared me to frigging death.”

  “I’m glad.” And she wasn’t joking.

  “I’m glad that junk was one of ours.”

  She smiled at that. “One? Lovejoy, Ling Ling could have ordered a hundred junks out, a thousand even. But she knew that one would frighten you sufficiently.”

  Did she now? “Okay, I’m affrighted. Any more orders?”

  “Yes. You must attend a cocktail party in one hour exactly. The Thousand Diamond City suite.”

  “Okay. But—”

  Marilyn turned on her heel before I could ask any more. I saw why. Steerforth was mincing up the foyer in his camp mode, with Lorna and Mame. I didn’t know then that I was now about to kill my second murder victim. Like all my other sins, it honestly wasn’t my fault. I advanced at Lorna, hands outstretched and smiling.

  15

  « ^ »

  I don’t know about you, but formal gatherings make me nervous. If anyone’s going to spill his wine or spray gravy, it’s me. Mr. Clumsy. And I’ve no conversational sense.

  Where others are graceful, I’m your stupid blurter. Most can let discussions flow, I crash-bang-wallop in. Joe Incongruity. You can imagine the state I was in, heading from visiting the antiques view to a jade-woman’s party, the supreme of all feminine artistry, beauty, training. Not only—only!—that, but some vast antiques scam was brewing and hung on the meeting’s success. As did my own survival. Nearly forgotten that.

  In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a golden pleasure dome decree okay, but it can’t have been a patch on the Thousand Diamond City, part of HK’s pricey complex. Bellboys milled, super-duper majordomos strutted, pretty waitresses flitted. Plush carpets, gorgeous tapestries, gilded balustrades, fountains—it was a palace of delights. It was costly opulence so clever, it could have looked ordinary. I was ushered into a private room, without having to open my mouth, and given some dry white wine in a glass that wobbled in my hand.

  Some thirty people stood about, mostly visitors. The few Chinese included Dr. Chao, Marilyn, one of Leung’s thin unsmiling men, two bonny girls in tight cheongsams who did instant job-lot introductions, Sim with a pudgy jokey shipper everybody seemed to know called Ramone, and a quiet middle-aged smiler with an old-fashioned winged collar called Sun Sen. And Ling Ling.

  She was exquisite, a superb butterfly. Of course she was surrounded by blokes, all striving to make an impression. I stood shuffling, desperate to leave, but her eyes transfixed me.

  “Good evening, Lovejoy. Marvelous of you to come!” She passed nearby, making me breathless.

  “Hi, there!” people said during introductions, but beaming at Ling Ling. Everybody jostled in her wake, one or two tourist women circulating defeated nearby. I mumbled something or other, tried to duck aside and bumped into the smiler they’d introduced as Sun Sen.

  “Evening, Lovejoy.” His voice was a mere whisper. “You will observe Ling Ling.”

  “Will I?” I was narked. Even incidental nerks were giving me orders now. “Who says so?”

  “I do.” He paused, smiling still. I took him in. His smile was a non-smile. The skin had an odd sheen. His fingers were spindled, askew. His ears were knobbly somehow. You got the impression of someone assembled from spare parts, a kit. “I’m Dr. Chao’s deputy.”

  My throat constricted. The Triad’s vice king of vice. “Okay, er, sir. Right.”

  “You will of course stay for dinner… ?”

  Sweating despite the conditioned air, I nipped into the melee surrounding Ling Ling.

  He’d said “observe,” and humility’s my strong point. Ramone (“Head shipper for BG, y’know?”) with company logos on his tie, cuff links, buttons, talked incidentals as a way of filling time while Ling Ling talked with the mob mothing about her lovely incandescence. I pretended to listen to his Californian accent but homed in on the jade woman’s words.

  She was being attended in double shuffles by Marilyn and Dr. Chao alternatively. She was brilliant, never at a loss. It was a lesson in total knowledge, quintessential skill. I was awed by her brains.

  “A neurosurgeon!” she exclaimed to one shaky old coot. “How wonderful! But aren’t you the ones who refuse to admit that the significance of computational neurosciences for cognitive theory has been exaggerated?”

  He was delighted. “Well, my dear…”

  He lasted a second before another groveling fawner shoved in. A Polish shipbuilder, after a graceful interchange about where exactly in Poland he was born, got “Isn’t that near the Niepokalanow monastery? How very original! Don’t they run the only monk-operated fire brigade in Christendom?”

  “Why, yes!” He was over the moon. “You must visit—”

  A Canadian politician got the next zinger: “How I sympathize with your language predicament. Your Bill 101, the Charter for the French Language, has such reverberations, has it not? Easy for Premier Levesque’s Parti Quebecois government to enact in 1977, but doesn’t guardianship of one language imply suppression of others…

  ?”

  More delight, more awe, while I thought, Christ, I’m out of my league here. She spotted without even looking the emblem of a Papal Order on an Italian merchant’s tiepin. To his effusive greeting—“I greet the most virtuous…”—she responded, “Virtutem verba putes?” adding for us serfs, “You suppose virtue consists merely of words?” The sweet put-down modestly included herself; she could have been yodeling for all any of us cared. Scintillating, wittily, she constantly shifted ground as different businessmen made it through the scrum to grab a word. She was instantly into cinema history for a movie critic: “Why was that makeup artist Maurice Seiderman omitted from the screen credits of Citizen Kane? A rift between him and Orson Welles?” She even captivated a Filipino magnate fresh from Singapore who was compiling a report on Asian tourism.

  “You will find that we are not like Singapore, welcoming tourists by the throat,” she said, touching his arm confidingly. “To Hong Kong currency is a blessing, so anyone is welcome.”

  “Not paupers,” I muttered aside to Ramone.

  “We have our own supply of those, Lovejoy.” Ling Ling smiled at me. I reddened.

  Hearing like a bloody bat too.


  The thrash went on for an hour while adulation ran amok. Eventually the main group were smoothly given the sailor’s elbow. I dithered, wanting out, but Sim was observant and nasty, and two of those thin goons were hovering ominously by the doorway. We were down to Ling Ling, Sun Sen, Marilyn, Sim, and Dr. Chao.

  Sim and Dr. Chao stayed behind as we went through to a subdued alcove in a large nightclub restaurant. Our—well, Ling Ling’s—arrival was a sensation. The applause and exclamations of wonderment were noted with significant glances exchanged amongst the visitors.

  The rest of the evening was superfluous. The Triad’s two purposes were accomplished: to impress the guests with the syndicate’s affluence and organization, and to let them in on the fact that Ling Ling belonged.

  For myself, I had two purposes of my own. They too were achieved. One, to be absolutely certain that Ling Ling had no divvying gift—she hadn’t even quivered at a delectable gold Renaissance ring worn by the Italian merchant. Two, I had finally established the hierarchy of the Triad: Dr. Chao No. 1; Sun Sen No. 2. Fatty was about No. 3, the lieutenant in charge of local affairs. Sim, through Marilyn, ran the lesser hoodlums, including me. I put Ling Ling as probably co-regent, head of the women.

  The meal was about twenty dishes, brought one after the other. Each guest helped himself from the central dish into his own bowl. First the dreaded thousand-year-old egg to herald a pricey occasion, then the succession: shark’s-fin soup, a huge carp cleverly boned and reassembled as new, hot mixed vegetables, “rice birds”—cooked whole in a potatolike vegetable scooped out to accept the poor mites, snake, a duck disturbingly made to a lifelike look after boning and stuffing so your chopsticks met only cooked meat, seafoods with mild elusive tastes and runny sauces, different fruits…

  Amid the nosh a light bantering talk went on. Only money, percentages, general stuff.

  Not a single antique was mentioned. I got on with the food.

  It’s hard not to gorge, but I was starving. To my shame I finished up the lone eater, with other guests jesting away but Ling Ling gently encouraging. She kept pointing out the history of each dish, which historic poet had liked what—she’d somehow sensed my innate queasiness about raw grub and steered clear.

  “Finally, millet soup, Lovejoy,” she said when I was replete.

  “No more, please.” I was bulging.

  “Please. May I insist? There’s a reason…”

  If you’ve never tried this trick, have a go. One bowl, reluctantly forced down, miraculously restores you to normal. It’s astonishing. Two minutes and I felt sated but not uncomfortably so. She smiled her approval.

  “We love to see appetites, Lovejoy. It is a pleasure to see a man eat so. You have given this poor restaurant great esteem. I am indebted.” Even Marilyn was smiling.

  “Oh, ta.” Done something right for once. Oddly, we were given an orange to end with, in a brown paper bag. I felt daft, but took mine because Ling Ling took hers. No coffee, strange to say. And the instant the last dish was done we all rose and said so-long. No after-dinner chat’s the local rule. I was deflected from walking back with anyone in particular by Sun Sen, who asked if I’d accompany him instead. It was a ruse. As soon as the visitors had left, grinning and waving, Sun Sen turned to me and said unsmilingly, “You may go now, Lovejoy.” I wasn’t to talk to the visitors alone. I was narked. What the hell had I been made to go for?

  Class dismissed.

  16

  « ^ »

  THE Mologai. The sun shines less in the Mologai, but heat gathers there in the shade and smoke. Steep cramped dwellings, shops oldish. Oddly, smoke pervading the whole area. The streets cling to contours. You clamber up steps from one narrow alleyway to the next, among the stalls. It’s an antique hunter’s paradise—or rather purgatory, because the promise of heaven takes time to realize.

  Sweating into dehydration, I stood in Upper Lascar Row and gaped about. God, the Cantonese can use space like the Georgians. In a hundred yards there were as many businesses. Some were no more than a few pots or carvings on trestles under green canvas canopies. Others were crammed into shop fronts. You have to struggle through the mayhem as best you can. A few tourists were battling bravely, and I even saw one couple buying bowls of steaming congee from grub stalls on the lower steps. Braver still. Rescued by a couple of tins of cola, I eeled up Cat Street, conscious of dark doorways, a prickling feeling of being watched in that relative quiet. A lot of people stood about. Eyes seemed stiller, harder.

  Yet it was bliss. Delicate chimes of genuine antiques thrilled me here and there. I instantly befriended a luscious wooden scroll box complete with hinges, just less than a couple of centuries old but wonderfully preserved— the elderly stallholder gave me his broadest gold-toothed grin as he recognized my lust. And a brush pot, humble russet wood but sweetly chiming its genuineness. I asked the price of both, and got laughter and nods. I should have recognized this as the start of barter but was hot and edgy by the ominous sense of threat. On the way in, a couple of thin blokes eyed me and strolled after me.

  Well, it was broad day. I could just afford the brush pot. Only seven inches high and slightly splayed, it was magic. Conscious that time was passing, I drew breath to say I’d have it, hand in my pocket for my wad, when I noticed a familiar figure within a few feet. The crowd made space around his stubby little frame. Titch, knee-high, staring up at me from his roller-skate trolley. He glanced pointedly at the brush pot, and shook his head.

  “Hey,” I said, pleased, made to go and say hello, but he gave a quick shove with his short poles and vanished behind the next stall.

  I looked at the brush pot. It was a genuine antique, luscious. And I could afford the price. So where was the problem? But the little leper had oh-so-deliberately told me no, don’t buy. I muttered something to the stallholder and thrust my way out, up steep ginnels to the main contour road, having difficulty fending off importuning girls and declining nudged offers of drugs. I knew enough of the little geezer’s disappearing tricks to know I’d never find him. How the hell did he manage to get up and down the stepped alleyways? The sun placed its weight full on me as I made the narrow road where cars ran.

  A temple stood across the opposite side of the road. I entered simply to get away from that odd nervy feeling. As I entered, the two blokes following me leaned against the wall opposite and lit cigarettes. I couldn’t see in the temple’s gloom but was conscious of incense, the clack of sandals, a chant, a gong, people. So I stood to one side of the bright entrance letting my vision accommodate.

  When it did, the altar was nothing new. Red and brassy gold were everywhere. I watched an old black-garbed lady enter to pray. It seemed the thing to buy some incense sticks, ignite them and place them upright in large brass sand scuttles before the altar. I copied her, bought my sticks, did the fire bit and bowed there a bit. It’s only fair to pay for shelter.

  As I stood beside the door steeling myself for a return through the baking heat and that dour threatening area where malign blokes dogged your every move, I could see a skeletal old man sitting across the road, his back to a wall. He lolled somewhat, smoking at an enormously wide bamboo pipe the length at least of a walking stick.

  “Opium, I’m afraid,” somebody said. “One of our evils.”

  Mistake to have glanced out. My eyes were unable to pick out the speaker, who seemed to be sitting low among the folds of red curtains. “I’ve heard,” I said.

  “Hasn’t everyone,” the voice said dryly. “In Hong Kong junkies are classed according to the daily cost of sustaining their addiction. So we have ten-dollar addicts, twenty-dollar addicts, hundred-dollar addicts. They total five percent of the population. We Chinese say, He who carries fire in bucket needs iron hands.”

  “Ballocks,” I said. “You made that up.”

  “Well spotted.”

  I’d met minds like his before—slick as a fish, with morality an irrelevance that would spoil the game. “He looks a thousand-dollar addict.” My visi
on returned. Not seated but small, meaning low down. Friend.

  “Addicts needing more than a hundred dollars a day have to be criminals,” the little leper said. His English was nigh-perfect after all, the sod. “To get the money. They can’t work, doped most of the day.”

  “Here, mate,” I asked. “You tipped me against that brush pot. Why?”

  He smiled. “You were about to pay the asking price. A stupidity. Haven’t you been told to haggle? Always bargain. It’s Hong Kong’s main entertainment.”

  “Ta,” I said. “Which way’re you going? Want a lift?” After all, I had Johny’s taxi.

  “No, thanks. I have my own transport, as you see. But be careful out there.” He indicated the bright world. I fell for it, daft as ever, giving the glare a glance and dazzling myself. I heard a soft trundle, then silence. I stepped back, looked round the curtain. Nothing. The gong sounded, the incense sticks glowed, smoke stung. “See you then,” I said lamely in the direction of the temple’s interior, and struck down into the Mologai.

  On the way I didn’t bother to look out for glimpses of him. If he wanted to be seen, he’d show. If not, there was no chance.

  Nobody followed me on the way out. I was glad. Less chance of being knifed, robbed, kept from any honest pursuits.

  17

  « ^ »

  THIS is the other gentleman, Irwin. Lovejoy, my husband.” Husband? Two men, cheerfully pumping my hand. Lorna was pink in the face over introductions, saying twice over how we’d “quite accidentally” met up in the viewing session.

  “So you’re the expert who knows everything, huh?” Irwin had a hotel belly and a way of speaking down to managers. Beside him, giving out assurances, Lorna had the boned look of the dieter, her skin that golden frailty of premature senescence from too many afternoons watching sunlamps.

  “Not really, Irwin. Just guesswork.”

  “He lies”—from Steerforth.