by Susan Lewis
The shock of Penny going off the way she had coming right on top of the crushing disappointment of not seeing his children had hit him hard. The repercussions of what Penny had done were already making themselves felt, but he didn’t blame her for that – she had no idea what her association with Mureau would do to his life. He couldn’t help wondering if it would have altered her decision had she known. He’d often teased her that she was crazy about him and, in truth, there were times when he had almost come to believe it. But, whatever her feelings for him, they obviously weren’t even in the same league as those she had for Mureau, considering she had given up her life for him.
He moved restlessly in the chair. Jesus Christ, what a mess, and there wasn’t a single god-damned thing he could do about it. He knew where Penny was, but to call her would be a madness he’d have a very hard time explaining to himself in the months, maybe years, ahead. Stirling was watching him like a hawk now and, besides, what arrogance was it that made him think she’d even want to hear from him? Yet she’d called just before she’d left: she’d wanted to speak to him then, so why not now?
He sighed wearily. This was a pointless exercise and he knew it. He wasn’t going to call and neither was he going to dwell on what might have been between them when he knew full well there could never have been anything. He had to look out for himself now and the two boys who meant everything in the world to him. His senses were blunted by the pain of not seeing them in so long. They were growing up, finding their places in the world, without him. He felt a moment’s blinding hatred towards Gabriella who was making him suffer this way, who was depriving his sons of their father and threatening to wreck all their lives. But he had only himself to blame, for if he’d managed to stay faithful to Gabriella none of this would be happening. The ridiculous part of it was that he’d loved Gabriella, but even that hadn’t stopped him wandering. He guessed he just hadn’t loved her enough, or maybe he was just one of those pitiful jerks for whom infidelity was an incurable disease.
He turned his head to gaze out across the dismal garden to the murky grey smudge of the sea. The bleakness seemed to reflect what he’d been feeling inside since Penny had gone; it was as though the colour had bled from his life, the light had dimmed and the last echo of laughter had finally died. He’d never dreamt he’d feel the loss as deeply as this, had never, until she’d gone, realized just how much he loved her. Funny how everyone, except Penny, seemed to know how he felt about her.
A quick memory of the day she had flung a tiramisu in his face flashed through his mind and, despite the way he was feeling, a smile curved his lips. God, that seemed such a long time ago now. Was it really only eight months since they’d met? It felt so much longer. Yet in another way it felt like no time at all. So much had happened during that time, things about which she knew nothing. They hadn’t been easy months, but knowing Penny, having her there and sharing what he could of his life with her was what had made them bearable. How she’d laugh if she heard him say that – she probably wouldn’t believe him, but it was true. She had come to mean more to him now than he had words to express and it was feeling this way that was going to make what came next so much harder to bear.
Hearing footsteps, he kept his eyes on the sea until they stopped, then he turned to see Esther Delaney standing at the corner of the house. Her slight, compact little frame was hidden in the sumptuous depths of a full-length mink, her normally immaculately set hair was being tossed about by the wind.
‘They’re still in Hong Kong,’ she told him, her pale, solemn face pinched with unease.
‘Where are they headed next?’
‘We still don’t know.’
David sucked in his bottom lip, sat a few moments longer, then got up from the chair. He walked past the old woman and around the front of the house, to his car.
‘David, I’m sorry,’ she cried after him, her face twisted with misery. ‘David, please listen to me. He made us do it. We didn’t have any choice . . .’
David turned and stared at her. ‘You could have come to me,’ he said.
Esther’s gaze fell away as tears rolled down her cheeks. ‘He loves her,’ she said wretchedly. ‘He won’t harm her.’
David opened the car door.
‘No! Please don’t go like this,’ she implored, starting towards him. ‘He was so lonely, David . . . David, please,’ she cried as he got into the car.
By the time he drove through the gates David had reached Pierre on the phone.
‘Book yourself on a flight to Hong Kong,’ he said shortly. ‘I’ll take care of things this end—I don’t care,’ he roared when Pierre interrupted. ‘I’ve got to find out if this is what she wants. I need to know why she called before she left. That’s all, Pierre. Just get to her and find out or I’ll damned well go myself.’
Chapter 18
IT WAS JUST after eight in the evening. Christian had left the hotel an hour or so ago, saying he would be back by ten to take Penny to the China Club for dinner. Penny hadn’t asked where he was going, though he’d muttered something about Gabriel Lamont, the man who had called the other day. Though Penny remained convinced Benny Lao had said Gabriella, Christian was adamant that she had misheard. He knew no one by the name of Gabriella, he had insisted, and even if he did he didn’t understand why it would upset her so much. Not wanting to explain, Penny had assured him she believed him, but whether his call had come from a Gabriel or a Gabriella there was no mistaking the effect it had had on him. It had taken her a while to persuade him to tell her what the call had been about and why it appeared to be troubling him so deeply, and when he had finally told her she sorely wished he hadn’t. The call, whoever it had been from, had been to inform him that all deals were off now and that if he was caught he would be facing twenty-five years in a federal prison.
The odd thing was that living as openly as they were, though admittedly under false names, Penny had almost lost sight of the threat hanging over him, but hearing that, when she knew that he had given up the chance of a lighter sentence just so he could be with her, had been like hearing the deafening slam of her own prison door.
Earlier, when he had said he was going out, she had simply waited for him to leave, then had turned her eyes to Lei Leen. Lei Leen had looked away, but when Tse Dong had entered the room a few minutes later she had whispered into his ear. As she spoke, Tse Dong’s impenetrable gaze had fallen on Penny; then he had turned back to his wife and dealt her a stinging blow, knocking her to the floor. Penny gasped and started forward, but Lei Leen’s glance stopped her from doing anything to intervene. Lei Leen didn’t fight back but neither did she give up, and in the end, Penny doubted she would ever know how, she had persuaded Tse Dong to do as she was asking. Which was how they now came to be driving through the dark, garbage-strewn back-streets of Kowloon, heading for Mongkok – one of the most densely populated areas on earth and one of the most dangerous.
Gloomy trails of light passed listlessly through the car, illuminating their faces as they crept deeper into the tangled maze of the slums. Tse Dong and Lei Leen were sitting either side of her in the back seat while a man Penny had never seen before drove the limousine through the festering mounds of debris and silent clutches of humanity. Everything outside was shaded in grey – the smoke, the dust, the ragged, meandering bodies drifting like shadows through the opium-drugged night. Penny was as tense as the other two, knowing what a risk they were taking bringing her here.
When they finally came to a halt in a narrow, dimly lit street, Tse Dong opened the car door and Penny instantly recoiled from the ammonia stench of urine wafting from the gutters to mingle with the pungent odour of incense. As she and Lei Leen stepped out into the street, blank, sickly faces turned in their direction and watched them with blurred, desensitized eyes.
Tse Dong’s hand gripped the gun in his pocket as the three of them watched the driver steer the limousine out of the street towards the glaring neon and seething, stall-crammed lanes of the night marke
t. It was where they were headed next, but only as a cover lest Christian should find out they had been here.
As they walked past the blackened holes of alleyways and gaping doorways of squalid, rat-infested opium dens, soft moans of pain and euphoria seeped into the thick, humid air like a muted lament of death. Tse Dong led the way silently across the street towards the crystal gazers, palmists and geomancers whose decrepit felt-covered tables edged a park railing, behind which monotonous pleas for release rolled through the murky night as the stupefied bodies writhed in the needle-littered earth.
Penny had had no idea it would be like this; if she had, she would probably never have come, but now she was here she could only stare in appalled fascination. The sharp, glittering lights of Hong Kong, the soaring, gleaming façades of its skyscrapers, the vibrancy of the bustling, colour-splashed city streets, all seemed an entire world away from this hell.
‘Remember, we not stay long,’ Lei Leen whispered as Penny stopped in front of a fortune-teller’s table and looked down at his long, bony fingers hovering over a cluster of indefinable objects. Did she really believe that this stranger with his sparse, rotting teeth and wart-blemished face could tell her what she had come to find out? As she looked at him she could feel the omnipresent power of ancient beliefs threading a hypnotic circle around her mind. The hallucinogenic substances in the air were casting chimerical fringes over her vision. She looked down as, in the gutter beside her, a foul, disorderly pile of rags shifted and slumped, to reveal the deadened face of a child, eyes rolling vacuously in their sockets, saliva drooling from pale, cracked lips. Penny knew she had stepped beyond the realms of her imagination and felt herself flood with pity and horror and disgust and fear.
The geomancer was speaking, his thin, drooping moustache quivering like weeds in a torpid breeze. His spidery fingers reached out for hers and as he turned her palm to the sluggish lamp at his elbow Penny’s heart started a slow, expectant throb. She turned to Lei Leen, making sure she was there to translate. Lei Leen’s head was bowed as she counted out the dollar bills to pay.
As the money was placed on the table the old man signalled for Penny to sit. The chair rocked as she lowered her weight on to it. The distant screech of sirens and a brief pulsating beat of music stole the sound from the soothsayer’s words. The festering rankness of the street penetrated her throat, making her gag. She glanced up at Lei Leen’s face. It was shrouded in shadow. The whole world seemed to have slipped into a penumbra of timelessness and delusion. Then everything in her began to turn slowly to ice as she felt the old man curl her fingers over her palm, closing her hand in a fist. She raised her head to look at him. His jaundiced eyes were staring past her, glazed and sightless; his trembling fingers were digging hard into hers.
‘What? What is it?’ she croaked, turning back to Lei Leen.
Lei Leen’s eyes were fixed on the old man. She was stooping towards him, trying to fathom his mutterings. Then, looking at Tse Dong, she put a hand on Penny’s shoulder.
‘Come,’ she said. ‘We go now.’
Penny got to her feet. ‘Lei Leen, what did he say?’ she implored, fear shaking her voice.
‘He say he is finished up for tonight,’ Lei Leen answered, guiding Penny away from the table. ‘Sometimes it happen that way. They do not always have the sight.’
Penny’s mind was reeling at the old man’s sudden loss of skill. Though she wasn’t sure whether or not she believed in these unearthly powers she’d needed something to give her hope that this nightmare would end, that somehow she would find a way to disentangle herself from the terrible mistake she had made. And now all she knew was the paralysing fear that the old man had seen no future at all.
Her eyes were blinded by tears of loneliness and defeat. Lei Leen, Tse Dong, even Christian, all seemed like strangers, strangers who were controlling her life, strangers from whom she could find no escape. Coming here had been the foolish, desperate act of a woman who had lost her courage and no longer knew how to retrieve it.
As they rounded the corner, the sudden glare of neon burned into her eyes. Overturned refuse carts, with skeletal dogs rooting among them, lined the way into the bustling night market where cheap toys, lewdly sloganned T-shirts and fake designer watches vied for space with exotic fruits, squawking hens and squealing pigs. As they merged with the crowds the musky scent of sandalwood was obliterated by the stench of frying onions and pungent raw fish. Unwashed tables spilled on to the street, where hungry men crouched, tucking into jellyfish and octopus, swilling it down with San Miguel beer. A path in a crowd opened up and Penny watched in mute horror as a man holding a snake by its throat slit open its belly and sucked the innards into his mouth. As the blood and guts trickled down his chin Penny started to retch.
Lei Leen moved beside her and put a soothing hand on the back of her neck. As she continued to throw up, a space cleared around them. A man rushed forward and sloshed a pail of grey, greasy water over their feet. The sound of raucous laughter and vibrating sex aids rose above the general hue and cry. The rustle of paper bags, the squeaking of wheels, the wailing of sirens, the buzz of battened toys, the shrieks of humans, the barking of dogs, the blare of music, the honking of horns: the terrifying madness of noise pressed into her ears as though to crush her.
Then suddenly there was silence.
An eternal second of perfect stillness elapsed before an ear-piercing cacophony of screams tore through the night.
Penny barely knew what was happening as she hit the floor with Tse Dong on top of her. It was only when more gunshots rang out that she realized what had caused the panic. Stampeding feet raced before her eyes, knocking over stalls, kicking into them, trampling and falling over them. Tse Dong rolled over and, feeling someone dragging her from the mêlée, Penny turned to see Lei Leen frantically begging her to run. Scrambling to her feet, Penny clutched Lei Leen’s hand, and together they plunged into the heaving, screeching mass of humanity struggling to escape. Tse Dong was right behind them, holding tightly to his gun and screaming instructions to Lei Leen. As they entered a side-street they broke from the crowd and dashed into a restaurant, knocking over tables as they went and skidding in the slithery remnants of abandoned meals. Penny yelped with pain as her hip struck something hard, but she was moving too fast to see what it was. The rapid bursts of machine-gun fire were once again audible over the din. She was thrown forward as something hit her in the back, but as she sank to her knees Lei Leen and Tse Dong wrenched her to her feet and dragged her on.
As they burst out of the back of the restaurant the limousine screeched to a halt in front of them. Tse Dong threw Penny inside, pushed Lei Leen in after her, then just managed to leap in himself as the limousine sped away. Lei Leen was crouched over Penny, holding Penny’s head down, while Tse Dong shouted at the driver.
It was only when they had left Mongkok and were speeding through the Eastern tunnel towards Central that Lei Leen finally took her weight off Penny and allowed her to sit up. By then Penny was limp with fear and exhaustion. Her eyes were wide and dry, her heart, her very soul, felt wrung out and drained of all emotion. She was living a Kafkaesque nightmare and didn’t know how to make it stop. Whether those gunshots had been intended for her she didn’t know; nor, right at that moment, did she care. The fact that she’d thought she’d been hit didn’t matter either. Nothing did. It was as though her whole existence had been torn from its roots and transplanted into the empty air of some lawless, dehumanized other world. There was blood on her arm, but as Lei Leen lifted it to inspect it Penny turned her face to the window and gazed out at the passing landmarks.
‘Just scratch,’ Lei Leen pronounced, letting the arm go. ‘I wash and dress it when we get back.’
Dully Penny wondered what had hit her hip and her back, but since there was neither pain nor blood and she could move she dismissed the thought. It was a while before she became aware of the heated argument going on between Lei Leen and Tse Dong and, guessing what it was about, she h
eard herself say in a cracked, toneless voice, ‘Don’t worry about what Christian will say. I’ll be fine. There’s no need for him to know. No harm was done.’
Lei Leen turned to look at her. Her face was drawn and frightened. ‘Tse Dong say that the boss must know.’
Penny looked at Tse Dong, then turned away, not wanting him to see the tears stinging her eyes. ‘Then I’ll tell him,’ she said.
A few minutes later they arrived at the Mandarin Hotel. There was no sign of Christian, but the butler had been in to turn back the bed and draw the curtains. Penny walked through to the bathroom and went to stand in front of the mirror. The woman she saw looking back at her was a woman she no longer knew. Her face was ashen and smudged with dirt, her large, blue eyes appeared colourless and empty. She closed them as the tears threatened to overwhelm her again; then, hearing Lei Leen come in, she turned towards the shower.
‘Can I get you something, ma’am?’ Lei Leen offered. ‘You like brandy or whisky?’
‘No, thank you,’ Penny answered.
Lei Leen hesitated, then said, ‘Tse Dong send driver for boss. He be here soon.’
Penny nodded.
‘You like I stay and keep you company?’ Lei Leen said.
‘Not unless you want to tell me what all that was about,’ Penny challenged quietly, turning to face her.
Lei Leen was silent for a moment; then, shaking her head, she said, ‘Ma’am I not know what it was about. Maybe they not shooting at us. Maybe they shooting at someone else. Mongkok is dangerous place. Lots of gangs.’
‘But if they were shooting at us, why would they have been?’
Lei Leen bowed her head.