Jade Woman l-12

by Jonathan Gash

  “Time you learned.”

  There was something going on in the streets below. Police lights, people blurring the illumination in Nathan Road. I opened a window. Distant noises rushed in on the night heat.

  “Shut that window, assassin! The heat! My skin!”

  “Shush.” I couldn’t hear what was going on.

  “I tell you—” She tried to slam it so I clocked her one and stood listening.

  We were stark-naked. Breaking glass? Sirens, a shot even. My spine chilled. Some sort of riot was going on.

  “Put the telly on,” I said.

  “Of all the—”

  I advanced on her and she scrambled for the controls. Nothing but sitcoms. I divided my time between the window and telly. She became excited as my growing horror communicated itself. Our naked reflections in the wide window’s darkness were bizarre—a Mexican svelte beauty and a ghastly tousle-healed pillock.

  “What is it, doorlink?” she kept saying.

  The newsflash came on after twenty minutes. What with the screen’s shambles and the real-life pandemonium down in the streets it was life in disorientating duplicate.

  Students had marched on a studio near Jordan Road and were blocked by police. Two companies of Gurkhas had drawn kukris. Cars blazed, blood spilled. Forty students had been arrested. A company of the Queen’s Own Buffs was moving armored personnel carriers down Nathan Road…

  Aghast I watched the running street battles, moaning at the demonstration placards:

  “Commerce Kills Art!” “Halt Exploitation of Artists!” And, most painful of all: “Set Art Free!!”

  The telecaster was babble-mouthed with hysteria. “Seven fires are already blazing in Kowloon. Tonight students erupted in violence. They demand the right to petition the Sovereign to protect the Crown Colony’s artistic integrity,” et horrendous cetera.

  Eva pried my hands from my face and fed me glugs of wine. She was panting—with heat, thrills or what, I don’t know. Terror takes women this way. To me, it’s terrifying stuff and naught else.

  “What is it, Lovejoy? Why should some silly students… ?”

  She gazed at me and gasped, clapping her hands. “It’s you, isn’t it? They’re rioting about something you’ve done!”

  Exalting, she dragged me to the bed, slickly sealing off the world with the manual control. “And I’m here! With the East’s chief arch-revolutionary! And my Enrico the right-wing…”

  “Look, Eva.” She was all over me, demanding, whining crude exhortations. “Look.” I tried explaining, but it was no good. Truth is hopeless against passion. I’ve always found that.

  31

  « ^ »

  EVA left during breakfast. No woman ever finishes breakfast. In fact, most never even start. She left me a blank check, insisting.

  “That bowl you told me about, Lovejoy. For the bride and groom.”

  “There isn’t one available,” I said with a mouthful. “Can’t you understand? They’re antiques, unbelievably rare.”

  Before the horror of the rioting I’d been telling her of a favorite antique. Mazer bowls were drinking vessels. You offered the bridal pair cake soaked in wine in it, then gave it to the local church. Bowls of the 1490 period occasionally come up for auction. They don’t look much, being only ordinary beechwood with a silver-gilt rim, so are often missed or misunderstood, though worth a King’s ransom. You often see a carbachon stone of rock crystal set in the bottom—not mere decoration: it changed color if the wine was poisoned. In a fit of nostalgia I’d waxed lyrical about owning one.

  She bussed me, glancing at her Cartier watch. “You find one, Lovejoy doorlink. And now, until tonight.”

  Gone, in a waft of umpteen blended perfumes. I finished her breakfast, having cunningly made her order two. It was going to be a long day.

  The street folk had also been hard at it. Dust carts were still busy scooping up heaps of glass. A couple of fires still smoldered, but the fire people were slick as ever. The last of the burned-out cars was being removed as I made my way past the police posts. The population was already streaming to work. For the first time I saw British police, four, passing in a Land Rover, by the ferry concourse. Discreet, or vestigially obscure? In Hong Kong you could ask the same question of China herself, or me, or anyone.

  By the time I reached the Flower Drummer I was soaked, beat, and raging. I went to a nearby bathhouse to prepare for war. There, resting after the millionth scrub, I saw the news. Mercifully nobody had died, but eighty-five people had been arrested and thirty were hospitalized. The damage was assessed in millions.

  One of the folks brought me a video tape of the morning news interview as soon as I was through the bamboo curtain. I was given tea and orders to run it. The Great Fake Accusation was first on, a sensation. Carmen Noriego, the great Andalusian art expert, had been hired to denounce us. I was pleased and settled back to watch. The Triad was using its collective cortex.

  “Accusations claim that Hong Kong’s major art find is actually a fake,” the interviewer intoned. “As the world’s leading Impressionist valuer, what is your view?”

  “I saw the very painting two years ago in Kwangtung,” the lady said from between frying-pan earrings with much head tossing. “It is undoubtedly a fake. The brushwork, style, the very quintessential nuance of Song Ping originals have a rapport which…” And all that verbal jazz.

  I was out of the chair like a flash and yelling in the corridor for Sim, Fatty, Dr. Chao, Ling Ling, anybody, raising Cain. Two seconds later I had five goons scampering. I was promised an audience within minutes. I got Ling Ling and three women attendants who were banished as I entered the third-floor lounge. No screens, I noted, but a mirror wall. Same difference.

  “There’s a traitor in the Triad,” I said, seething. I wouldn’t sit down. “The cretins let that woman art critic give Song Ping’s name away.”

  “It was my instruction, Lovejoy.” She gestured. Her hand compelled me to sit. “All Hong Kong knows the expert lady has never been to Kwangtung. The entire Orient now realizes we possess a priceless work of art.”

  A long cooling think. “So a baselessly false denial by dud expert about a fake means a truth?”

  She smiled. “I trust this heung peen is to your liking, Lovejoy.” She poured tea, somehow leaving one jasmine leaf in the Canton porcelain. I’d have given anything for the tiny polychrome cups. Two centuries old, mint as the day they passed through the Canton enameling shops from their pure white birth in the kilns of Ching-te-chen.

  “Forgive me if I suggest that our Chinese tactics might be too duplicitous for your romantic soul. I urge you not to attempt any deceptions without our guidance.”

  “The riot was a frigging mess.” I’d said it before I’d thought. I was seething. She was surprised.

  “But you required it, Lovejoy. Demonstration. Students—”

  “I meant a quiet march, a few graffiti. Not a war.”

  “Hong Kong does not believe in mere scrawls. And a stroll has no purpose. A riot, however, cannot be ignored, ne?”

  “Right. Then I want to be present at the next phase. Okay?”

  “Very well.” She poured more tea. How did she manage to stop the damned teapot wobbling on its wicker handle? I had one at home once and got tea all over the floor.

  “Soon, I trust?”

  “Tonight, please.” She inclined gently. I went on, “The auction’s still some time away, but we must advertise Song Ping’s painting now, in a formal catalog. Have the usual antiques section set up, but I’ll provide a written description of the work for pride of place. Tonight, stage an unsuccessful robbery somewhere peaceful off the main streets.

  I want a chance tourist to be handy with his camera. It must look authentic.” I rose and stood over her. “No deviation from the plan. No armored carriers. No riot police. And no ambulances filled with maimed rioters. Agreed?”

  “It shall be exactly as you say, Lovejoy.” She gave me her direct smile. I melted, but tried
to look ferociously stern. I carefully didn’t wave at the oneway mirror, to show I was still being taken in.

  But where was Marilyn? I hadn’t dared ask Ling Ling.

  Outside in the heat I paused. My hand closed on Eva’s check in my pocket. I thought a minute, then went in search—not for my luscious missing model, but for a little stumpy leper on roller skates.

  32

  « ^ »

  THE Mologai seemed more somber, Ladder Street steeper, the heat worse, and the gloom ineffective as shade. I made it to Caine Road, headed east for a hundred yards or so, and labored back down to where Hollywood Road bends into the politer districts of Central. This way I came upon the temple with better vision fore and aft. Nobody seemed to follow this time, but with so many people everywhere, who could tell?

  The temple was a quiet oasis in a turbulence. Once accustomed to the gloom I could see the two house-shaped chairs, the four gilded insignias waiting to be carried in procession. A couple of old ladies were igniting incense sticks. I paid for three and copied their actions, sticking them upright in the brass earthpot with the others. Then I waited.

  People came, did their stuff, went. I knelt a bit, stood, walked a step or two, knelt. For respectability’s sake I did the incense bit once more. An old lady was selling them. As I paid, I asked her to give a message. I scribbled a few words on a paper scrap, labeled it “Titch.”

  “For the little bloke, please.” I mimed pushing poles on roller skates and showed Titch’s height so she’d understand, gave her a few dollars. She gazed back, lovely old eyes in a mat of wrinkles. Not a word.

  Well, worth a try. I walked into the sun glare, down through that eerie area to my studio.

  Marilyn still wasn’t there. I did more dabs of sky, and began to fill in the foreground.

  The pigments were great, every one straight out of the 1870s. I stuck at it for several hours.

  The space where Marilyn would have been sitting in her old-fashioned dress seemed spoiled, silent. Early evening and word came via a goon that the hit would be about eightish. I went to a bathhouse, then noshed at the Luk Yu. She wasn’t there either.

  “We go to an opium divan for a foki, Lovejoy.”

  Just Sim, me, and a sampan lady embarked on a journey across the typhoon shelter to where the lighters were moored. I said nothing, couldn’t stand being near Sim, the murdering creep, so I sat watching the woman’s rhythmic sculling. A beautiful balanced motion, side, side, forward. Lovely, her black garb against the dying light.

  These lighters are massive vessels seen close to. Normally they transfer cargo from the big deep-water ships in the harbor. There was always a good dozen not far out near Stonecutters Island. We came against the offshore side of one. Sim motioned me to scramble up onto the deck. It felt metal, inert. The sampan looked a mile down, tiny on the water, the woman’s wicker hat a pale blob.

  “This way, Lovejoy.”

  We passed hatches, went along a corridor, and walked into a smoky fug. I wished I’d breathed more air outside to bring in with me. It was the nearest thing I’d seen to a medieval prison.

  “All these chase dragon, Lovejoy.” Opium smokers.

  The place was a huge warren of bunks. Low ceilings hung with paraffin lanterns, their hissing light pocked with flies and moths. Visibility wore itself out after forty feet on account of the dense smoke. Skeletal blokes, all Chinese as far as I could tell, lay on the bare shelving. Most sprawled or were propped on an elbow, many coughing convulsively.

  “Playing mouth organ.” Sim grinned, indicated a man sucking at a half-open matchbox.

  Its tray was lined with foil, the tiny heap of gray powder inside warmed over a cigarette lighter. Others were heating small balls of brown resin at candles before lodging them with a pin inside narrow bamboo pipes. There was hardly one that couldn’t have done with a good meal, not a spare ounce of flesh anywhere.

  A huge sweaty man came to talk in Cantonese. I followed as they walked the length of the divan. It was obscene. The far end stank. I became giddy from the fumes and the airlessness. Sim and the fat man were pointing and arguing.

  “Which of these two, Lovejoy?”

  One was dozing, the other rocking slowly with his eyes closed. God knows how old they were. Sixty, seventy? They wore raggedy cotton trousers and singlets.

  “Him.” I picked the one who seemed the less doped. Neither looked capable of standing unaided, let alone pulling a robbery. Still, all he had to do was set off an alarm and scarper a few yards—anybody could hide in Hong Kong except me—then he could come back to buy more illusion with his rich reward. I left them to get him upright and blundered gasping into the night air.

  A group of four men were arriving on another sampan as we left. They were joking and laughing amiably, clambering up toward their bliss. Great if death’s the best life you can dream up.

  Darkness had fallen by the time we reached Kowloon. Our robber-to-be was sniffing and coughing. He could hardly make the climb up to street level.

  “All right, mate?” I gave him a leg up.

  “Mmm goy.” I think it means something like, you needn’t do that. A sort of ta, pal.

  “Wait, Lovejoy.”

  Naturally I’d started off towards the streetlights. I halted. In the dimness Sim stood beside our hired robber.

  “Why? We early?”

  The harborside seemed deserted. The only light was an airwash from Kowloon’s hot spots and fleeting reflections from Hong Kong Island.

  “No. Dead on time.” He was nervous.

  There was something wrong. I squinted about in the gloaming. We were a good hundred yards from street lighting, yet the Kowloon traffic was audible. The sampan had landed us alongside a godown; a pandemonium of commerce in the day, deserted at night. An oceangoing freighter was still and black across the wharf.

  Uneasy, I said to our decrepit old robber, “Come on, pal.”

  Four slender shadows separated from a loading bay and came about us. I shoved the old bloke in a panic, drawing breath to scream at him to run. Two hard bodies slammed and left me winded. Thuds sounded in a torrent, with one or two sickening cracks. It wasn’t me they were murdering. I was hunched over, trying to recover breath.

  Footsteps pattered, a splash, a distant wail of police.

  “What the hell?” I said with the first usable oxygen.

  “Do jeah.” Thanks. Sim was accepting a cigarette. In the glimpse by his cigarette light I counted us. Total six: four goons, Sim, me. No scarecrow addict.

  “Don’t worry, Lovejoy. Those police are only heading to the alarm call at the premises.”

  “But—”

  Hands took hold and I was walked towards the traffic noise. We emerged at the corner of a hectic dazzling street market. The whole world seemed out shopping. It couldn’t have been half past nine. I was bewildered. The four goons vanished into the crowd.

  “Nothing else you wanted, was there, Lovejoy?” And, as I stood speechless, Sim gave me a pleasant nod. “Night, then.”

  It must have been about three or four hours later. I realized that I’d somehow ambled into the dangerous Mologai on Hong Kong side. All I remember was stopping at a street hawker’s bikestall for a tin of drink somewhere by Nathan Road and drinking an ale at a Chatham Road booth near the railway station, near the China Emporium.

  The rest is a blank. At least, I wish it were. Dazed horror is nearer the truth. The poor old addict’s grin as I’d helped him out of the sampan. His thanks. I’d retched my drink onto the curb before I’d gone a few yards. Nobody gave a glance—only another wassailing tourist rollicking between bars, spewing his way from one bar girl to another.

  One thing: If Sim could knife Del Goodman with impunity, how come he’d not topped the old addict himself? And he’d shakily needed a fag to recover after the killing. So had he really done for Del that hungry day?

  The temple was in darkness. Few cars took the contoured Hollywood Road at this late hour. Most tore along the posher Queen�
�s Road West down below among the all-night neons. I sat on the curb. A few matelots came up Ladder Street with their bar girls, brawling and reeling. I heard a couple of ugly scuffles in the night, but stayed where I was. A door or two slammed the silence back in place. The distant harbor pulsed and hummed.

  “Hello. You want business, friend?”

  Careful how you answer, Lovejoy. Folk die when you express preferences. I’d only to open my mouth and Hong Kong slew somebody at random. Well, not quite at random—

  I picked the poor sods out with unerring accuracy. Hole-in-one Lovejoy.

  “No, thanks, love” seemed safe enough. The girl was young, gaudy in the gloaming.

  But the Cantonese women all seemed sixteen until they reached forty, when they stepped overnight into their crinkled eighties. Other women do it in slow stages.

  She went on by, heels tapping. Silence.

  They’d beaten the old bloke to death, ditched him in the harbor. His description of course would be handed to the police—a robber trying to nick the priceless Song Ping.

  No chance of an investigation. What was one addict among a million?

  A faint whirring noise caught my attention. An electric truck? A milk float?—except local Chinese don’t drink milk. It was punctuated by a regular tapping, whir, whir. A child, spinning a lazy top? Hardly.

  “Hiyer, Titch.” He trundled to a stop by jamming one of his sticks between his wheels, real skill.

  “Good evening. I received your message, Lovejoy.”

  “Aye. Sorry I’m late.” I’d written that I’d drop by the temple about six the previous evening.

  “Please don’t apologize. How on earth can a penniless leper help a gwailo, Lovejoy?”

  “You know everything, Titch. We… barbarians, is that the translation?… we know naught here.” I eyed him, on his level. “I need an ally. There’s a lady, Cantonese, gone missing. Marilyn Shiu-Won Wong.”

  “The one forever at the Flower Drummer? Who had old-fashioned clothes made to take to your new flat near Cleverly Street?”