The old woman leaned forward and said, ‘How come?’
The Senator shrugged.
‘It seems that Creasy and Michael rescued her from the slave ring when she was only thirteen. She had run away from home after being sexually and mentally abused by her stepfather. The white slavers had forced her on to heroin. While Creasy went after them, Michael took her away and helped her go cold turkey. When the whole thing was over, Creasy decided there was no way he could send her back to where she came from. Don’t ask me how, but he arranged adoption papers.’
‘Does she work with him and Michael?’
‘No. At first, she wanted to. She wanted Creasy to train her as he had trained Michael, but a couple of years later, she had a kind of delayed reaction trauma. When she came out of it, she decided she wanted nothing to do with weapons or violence. I went to visit with them last summer, by which time her ambition was to become a doctor. She’s very bright and, because of her experiences, much older than her years, I’ve arranged to get her into college here in Denver, and she’ll stay with me during her studies . . . In fact, she’s due to arrive next week.’
The old woman was nodding thoughtfully.
Grainger said, ‘She’ll be company for me, and bring a bit of youthful spirit into this house.’
It was as though Gloria Manners had not heard the words. She was deep in thought. She lilted her head and asked, ‘Where does this man Creasy live?’
‘He lives on an island in the Mediterranean . . . in a house on a hill.’
‘How do you contact him?’
‘By phone. If you like, I’ll phone him tonight.’
Very slowly, she nodded and said, ‘Please do that, Jim.’
Chapter 2
Tommy Mo Lau Wong reached forward and delicately picked up a strip of raw beef. He dropped it into the simmering water that formed a moat around the copper stove. Seconds later, his four lieutenants followed suit.
They were sitting in a private room of a small, exclusive restaurant in the Tsim Sha Tsui district of Hong Kong. The restaurant specialised in Mongolian hot-pot, which meant cooking a variety of raw meats in boiling water, eating them, and then drinking the resultant soup.
Tommy Mo had the face of a cherub and the eyes of a great white shark. He always spoke in a sibilant whisper, but his lieutenants always heard him, even from a distance. He started laughing to himself. It began as a quiet chuckle and ended in a spate of coughing. The others waited patiently. He looked up, his shark’s eyes glittering with mirth.
‘Can you believe that fool, Kwok Ling?’ He sneered as he pronounced the name. ‘Thought himself the best doctor in Hong Kong or the whole of China. Just because he was trained in Europe and America, he took an arrogance above himself.’ He leaned forward, as though imparting a great conspiracy. The others also dutifully leaned forward. ‘He sent me papers with a trusted messenger. Scientific medical papers to show that rhino horn contains a cancer-causing agent.’ He giggled again and the others giggled with him. ‘Imagine,’ he said, ‘the good doctor explained that any old man purchasing rhino horn in order to revitalise his sex life was condemning himself to die of cancer. He sent this to me, perhaps in the hope that I would stop selling it. That I might feel guilty about a bunch of sex-starved old men dying of cancer . . . sex-starved old men who would pay a thousand times more for my powder than they would pay for gold . . . The fool sent his message to me . . . the head of 14K.’
They all laughed.
Chapter 3
Father Manuel Zerafa glanced at the girl at his left. She was in her mid-teens, but already very much a woman. Long straight sun-bleached hair, a golden face with high cheekbones, a straight nose and a wide full mouth. She glanced back at him demurely. Had she winked? Or was he mistaken? No, he was sure she had winked, just in that split second that he had first glanced at her. She had winked at Michael, sitting opposite her. That wink meant she held the ace of trumps and she was signalling such to her partner. The priest looked across the table at Creasy who was his partner.
‘She has the ace,’ he said.
‘Maybe,’ Creasy answered thoughtfully. ‘But she could be bluffing.’ Almost imperceptibly, the big scarred man brushed at the left side of his chest, as if to scare away a fly. The priest picked up the signal. Creasy was telling him that he held the queen of trumps.
They were playing a game of cards unique to the island of Gozo. It was called bixla and was much loved by the fishermen and farmers, who would play it for hours on end in the local bars during winter. The essence was to cheat by secretly signalling your partner what cards you held. With people who had played so many hours together and who watched each other like hawks, these signals became bluffs, double-bluffs and even triple-bluffs. The game was never played for money but with great humour and the slamming down of a card when a particular piece of chicanery had worked well.
The priest looked at Michael, who gazed back innocently. A man in his twenties. Jet-black hair and sharp-featured. Tall and as slim to be almost thin, but with a frame like steel wire.
‘Maybe Michael has it,’ the priest said to Creasy.
Michael laughed and showed two of his three cards to the priest. One was the jack of spades and the other the four of diamonds. His third card was laid flat on the table as if taunting the priest.
Gruffly, Creasy said, ‘It’s a sure bet that Juliet has it. Play your king.’
The priest played the king. Juliet dropped a nothing card. Creasy cursed and discarded his queen and Michael stood up and slammed down the ace with a cry of triumph.
The priest pushed back his chair saying, ‘Liars! A young pair of liars.’ He pointed a stern finger at Michael and said, ‘Get a cool bottle of the white wine from the case I gave you for your birthday and bring it out to the patio with two glasses.’
Michael said, ‘Father, you gave me twelve bottles for my birthday four months ago. There are four left. Of the eight that have been drunk, you’ve had at least six,’
‘Sounds right to me,’ said the priest, and walked out on the patio.
Creasy looked after him through deep-set, heavy-lidded eyes. Eyes without emotion . . . but his ravaged face and body could not easily conceal the scars of anger and revenge. He rose and followed the priest, his menacing six-foot frame seeming to shadow him. He had a curious walk, the outsides of his feet making contact with the ground first.
The old stone farmhouse stood on the highest part of Gozo, looking out over the island and across the sea to the small island of Comino and, beyond that, the large island of Malta. It was a view the priest never tired of. They sat down on canvas chairs beside the swimming-pool.
Father Zerafa chuckled and remarked, ‘There is a saying on the island: “Lead your life as you would play bixla, and the fruit will fall into your hands”.’ He gestured at the beautiful house and the view. ‘But I guess the fruit has already fallen into your hands.’
Creasy said, ‘Father, I disagree with the saying. To play bixla well, you have to cheat. To lead a good life, you have to be honest. To cheat at cards when it is expected and when there is no wager of any kind is just fine. But from what I’ve known and seen, if you cheat in life, it’s not fruit that falls into your hands but a rock on your head.’
The priest sighed and said, ‘You should have been a priest . . . I shall use it for my sermon on Sunday.’
Michael came out carrying a tray with the wine in an ice-bucket and two glasses. He poured the wine ceremoniously and then left them. They drank for a while in silence; two good and old friends who did not require the bond of light conversation.
Finally, the priest remarked, ‘These past few weeks I see an edge of boredom in your eyes.’
‘You see too much, Father. But it’s true, I get restless. But since Juliet’s been going off to the clinic and the hospital and learning all that first aid and stuff, there’s not been much to do. Next week, she’s off to the States and to college. Michael and I are thinking of taking a trip to the Far East, t
o look up some of my old friends. We might even go into China, now that it’s opened up.’ He glanced at the priest and said, ‘You know that in my life I have travelled so much, but when you travel with young people and show them the world, you see it again through fresh eyes. I guess we’re ready to go.’
‘When?’ the priest asked.
‘Oh, in a couple of weeks. We’ll stop off in Brussels first and see Blondie and Maxie and a few others, and then head East from there.’
They heard the phone ringing from inside the kitchen and Michael answering it. After a while, Michael came to the kitchen door and called out, ‘It’s for you, Creasy . . . Jim Grainger from Denver.’
Creasy grunted in surprise and pushed himself on to his feet.
He returned to his chair and the wine ten minutes later, his face thoughtful, ‘A change of plan,’ he said to the priest. ‘We leave tomorrow and we go West not East.’ He turned to Juliet, who was standing at the open door and said, ‘Michael and I are travelling to Denver with you tomorrow.’
Chapter 4
Chinese funerals can be very elaborate affairs. Professional wailing women dressed in white mourning robes; the louder they can wail, the more they are paid. Houses, furniture, cars and money are made out of brightly coloured paper and then burned at the temple, so that they pass on to the other world with the deceased.
Lucy Kwok Ling Fong did none of this. She simply had her father, mother and brother cremated. She put the ashes into a single urn and drove with them to an old building in Causeway Bay, where she paid several thousand dollars to have the urn placed on a shelf, together with thousands of others.
As she left the building, a man approached her, a Caucasian. He had short blond hair, a red, round, perspiring face, and was dressed in a light blue safari suit. He introduced himself as Chief Inspector Colin Chapman. She recognised the name. He was the head of the Anti-Triad Department of the Royal Hong Kong Police Force. He had been away on leave at the time her family had been murdered.
‘I wonder if we could have a talk, Miss Kwok?’ He had a broad Yorkshire accent, which somehow irritated her.
‘I think I’ve told everything I know to your assistant, Inspector Lau.’
‘Yes, you’ve been very cooperative, but I would appreciate just a few minutes of your time.’ He gestured across the road at a tea house. She sighed and glanced at her watch.
‘Just a few minutes then,’ she said reluctantly.
She ordered jasmine tea and he had a San Miguel beer.
‘I must first offer my condolences,’ he said. ‘It was a terrible tragedy for you.’
She took a sip of tea and looked at him. It was noisy in the tea shop. She glanced around the large room. Chapman was the only foreigner in the room and probably within a square mile. She felt her resentment rising and let it come out.
‘I find it very strange, Chief Inspector, that an Englishman should be the head of such a sensitive department. It would be rather like sending a German to Sicily to head the Anti-Mafia department there. Surely, it would be impossible for a foreigner to understand the minds of these people.’ She gestured around the room. ‘Even of these people here. Oh, I’m sure that you passed your Cantonese language examinations and speak it well enough to impress the bar-girls in Wan Chai. How old are you, by the way?’
He appeared to take no offence. She noticed that his eyes were very dark brown.
‘I’ll be thirty-five next week,’ he said, pulling a ball-pen from the breast pocket of his safari jacket. He reached for a napkin and pulled it towards him, and very quickly drew on it with the pen. She watched in puzzlement. He put the ball-pen back in his pocket, turned the napkin and pushed it across the table. She looked down at it. After five seconds, her eyes narrowed in deep concentration. Ten seconds later, she felt her skin prickling. She was looking at six Chinese characters drawn by an expert calligrapher. Her skin had prickled because she could not interpret the characters. Slowly she looked up at him. His brown eyes gazed back.
To read a Chinese newspaper requires the knowledge of approximately seven hundred and fifty characters. A university graduate would be satisfied to know three thousand characters. Luck Kwok Ling Fong was a graduate of the Hong Kong University and was proud of her knowledge of over four thousand characters. She could not read the six characters in front of her.
‘What do they mean?’ she asked.
‘In which dialect?’ he replied in his Yorkshire accent.
She smiled slowly and answered, ‘Cantonese.’
In flawless Cantonese he told her: ‘“Not every stranger is completely stupid” .’
Her smile widened and she asked in the same dialect, is that Confucius?’
He shook his head.
‘That’s Colin Chapman.’ He switched to Shanghainese, which again was flawless. ‘Or would you prefer to talk in your mother dialect?’
She lifted her head and laughed, and said in Mandarin, “Very clever, Chief Inspector, but surely you agree that somebody can be stupid in many languages. After all . . . a parrot is just a parrot.’
For the first time, he smiled. He took a sip of beer and said in English, ‘That’s very true, Miss Kwok, and I don’t blame you for having doubts about a gweilo’s capability to understand a Triad’s mind, but I’ve had more than ten years’ experience. The subject fascinates me and, without any false modesty, I would rate myself as one of the top three experts in the world.’
‘Who are the other two?’
‘My assistant Inspector Lau, who interviewed you extensively, and a Professor Cheung Lam To at Taipei University.’
She was looking down again at the napkin. She tapped it with a long red fingernail.
‘How many?’ she asked quietly.
‘About eighty thousand,’ he answered. ‘But of course, one never stops learning.’
She smiled again and said, ‘May I borrow your pen?’
He passed it over. She wrote something along the bottom of the napkin and pushed it across. He looked down and read: ‘Dis girl vellee solly. She will talk to you.’
He smiled again and said, ‘Perhaps we can do it more privately in my office, this afternoon. I need at least two hours of your time.’
‘You have it, Chief Inspector.’
Chapter 5
The Doberman greeted him like an old friend, despite the fact that some years earlier Creasy had put her into an undignified sleep with an anaesthetic dart. She wagged her stumpy tail and licked his hand.
Senator Grainger gave a firm handshake to Creasy and to Michael, then he kissed Juliet warmly on both cheeks and said, ‘Welcome. I hope you’ll be happy here.’
She looked around the opulent hallway of the mansion and then at the plump Mexican maid, waiting to take her suitcase.
‘I’m sure I’ll be happy,’ she said, ‘It’s very kind of you to take me in.’
Five minutes later, they were seated next to the pool with long cold drinks in their hands. The Senator glanced at his watch.
‘Your flight was a bit delayed,’ he said, ‘and Gloria will be here quite soon, so I’ll brief you right away.’ He took a sip of his drink, absent-mindedly patted the Doberman, and let his mind go back over the years.
‘Gloria Manners came from a poor background. Southern white farmers whose farm was too small and the family too big. She got a job as a waitress in a good restaurant here in Denver. That’s where she met Harry, who was a regular there. He came from a good property-owning Colorado family, which objected strongly to him marrying someone as low down the totem pole as Gloria. He went ahead anyway, and his Pa cut him off without a cent. Starting with nothing, Harry went right on to build a huge fortune in real estate and oil rights speculation.’
‘Sounds like quite a guy,’ Creasy commented.
Grainger nodded.
‘He was a hell of a guy. We had big battles on some real estate deals. He was tough but he was honest. Anyway, he was killed in a car crash about three years ago. Gloria was crippled in that sam
e accident. She’s paralysed from the waist down and spends her life in a wheelchair.’
‘What sort of woman is she?’ Creasy asked.
The Senator took another sip of his drink and answered, ‘I never got on well with her. To be honest, I always thought she was a bit of a bitch who got lucky. Since the loss of her husband and her paralysis, she’s got worse. She has a mean streak in her . . . but she loved Harry . . . and he loved her . . . so me and most of our friends put up with her, I guess, originally, for the sake of Harry, and now for his memory.’
‘Age?’ Creasy asked.
‘Early sixties, but looks a lot older.’
‘Money?’
The Senator thought for a moment and then answered, ‘At least a hundred million dollars. She worked with Harry in his business, and I can tell you that she’s shrewd and tough. They only had the one child, Carole, who was a fine young woman. Not at all like her mother, although strangely, they got on very well together. Carole’s body was flown back for burial in Denver. I went to the funeral. Gloria’s face showed no expression. She just sat there in her wheelchair, as though she was carved from stone, but I guess she was hurting bad inside. She’s determined to find the people who killed her daughter.’
Michael joined the conversation. ‘Jim, if you dislike this woman, why are you helping her?’
Grainger glanced briefly at him and then looked back at Creasy.
‘Two reasons. Firstly, because Harry Manners was a friend of mine and Carole was his daughter as well; secondly, because I happen to be the Senior Senator for Colorado and Gloria is one of my constituents. It’s my duty to help her.’
Creasy had the open file in front of him. It was all too brief. He flicked through the few pages while everyone looked on silently, then he said to Grainger, ‘I have some strong contacts in Zimbabwe. Even now, all these years after independence, and even though I spent some years fighting the present government as a mercenary.’ He studied Grainger and then asked, ‘What will the deal be, Jim?’
Black Horn (A Creasy novel Book 4) Page 2