The Wardens of Punyu (The Handover Mysteries, Volume I)

by D. L. Kung

  Or could they?

  Claire reflected on another clue to MacGinnes’s empire. The plaque had told her Brainchild’s computers reached Western markets via Singapore, a deep-water port that rivaled Hong Kong but where controls on goods were subject to even murkier influences.

  For years, Singapore, that self-proclaimed bastion of upright social codes and rigid anti-Communism, acted as the hub for weapon shipments to anti-Khmer Rouge forces in Cambodia, for illicit trade between Israel, South Africa, and China with so-called enemies, and for Indonesian and Malaysian commodities evading government regulation. So MacGinnes’s tainted computers arrived in the US as Singaporean exports—another twist in his maze to confound American import regulations.

  How had Vic, of all reporters, discovered MacGinnes’ reptilian underbelly?

  Of course. Lo-man. He’d served time in a Guangdong prison and he supplied small parts to Guangdong manufacturers.

  Lo-man had known all along where Vic was.

  Joop’s bike slowed ahead of her and the other two. This wasn’t his bucolic Oriental vision. Claire figured they must be somewhere in the vicinity of the Brainchild factory, but she realized she now knew with much more certainty what might have happened to Vic and Cecilia. With each passing minute, she doubted whether she would find either one in the vicinity of Brainchild’s production lines.

  When Joop turned his bike around and sped toward them, she knew she’d have to write off the factory for the second time. At least the ride had kept her out of harm’s way for a little while.

  She saw a black sedan in the far distance, heading straight towards them—an official car that might well be Chen’s.

  ‘Let’s try another way back?’

  Joop agreed, happy to avoid Punyu bustle for the open country lanes and they all pointed their wheels over the tarmac on to a narrow path. Joop was rewarded with the sight of a small boy urging his enormous water buffalo across an irrigation stream. Getting their bikes across the stream was a little harder.

  A vendor sold squid in a sweet red sauce from a stall near another fork rejoining the main road. They sat behind a low wall in the shade safe from passing cars, and Joop haggled with the vendor for the recipe. Claire never entered in, although watching the Cantonese struggling with Joop’s tiny English-Mandarin dictionaries made her more than once want to get it over with. She realized, however, that Joop’s little party was a godsend to her mission. Only when she’d secured a private driver and escaped from Chen’s tentacles spread across Punyu town could she break from cover.

  The Dutch returned to the Lucky Inn Hostel after returning their bikes but Claire dreaded seeing Chen’s car in the Lucky’s driveway. Left to avoid Chen’s searchers on her own, Claire realized just how small Punyu was—she’d walked the width and breadth of the enclave in twenty minutes of skirting official buildings and main roads. As dusk settled over the streets, she was lucky to find another bolt hole: a small dress shop with a changing room. She bought a cheap scarf, drank a cup of tea and asked to rest.

  She compared her maps with Fresnay’s verbal directions. Although he couldn’t give her the road addresses, he listed the line of villages in the postal directory; she could trace along them to reach beyond East Peony Hill to an invisible spot not on her map . . . Cha Ling.

  She couldn’t dare think about getting back to Hong Kong. The point was to bring Vic and Cecilia back from Cha Ling. The rest would have to take care of itself, somehow. She was going on adrenaline and three pieces of squid and felt both hungry and sick to her stomach with nerves.

  She started out of the shop, but two PAP officers strolling only twenty feet away were chatting to vendors, one by one, and working their way down the lane. The gun nestled in her pack. She shot out the back door and walked quickly into the choking maze of factories and lorries. The evening shift, of Power Rangers and jean zippers had resumed. As she saw a black sedan with shaded windows cruising past a junction only fifty feet ahead of her she thought that she might be safer at the Lucky Inn than exposed this way on Punyu’s byways.

  She found Joop and his companions drinking beer in the lobby. Questioned more closely, she told them she was a colonial expat housewife fed up with life in the Midlevels and determined to see a bit of China on her own. They invited her to join them at the disco. She was of two minds, knowing that The Punyu Hotel was the first place Chen might have checked for her, but that she couldn’t risk breaking away from the Dutch again. She couldn’t even take off her cap for fear of her red hair giving her away. The dark and crowded disco might be the best place to find the kind of driver she needed.

  She recalled from her previous visit with relief that the disco, although belonging to the same complex, stood separately behind a weedy back garden and the cracked and empty basin of a swimming pool. The disco entrance was festooned with a string of colored Christmas-tree bulbs flashing bravely: ‘Dance, Games, Music’.

  Young hookers wearing odd mixes of Hong Kong and local fashions loitered around the front steps. Their permed hair ranged in styles ranging from the 1930’s to the 1960’s. Some were pudgy girls new to Punyu’s mini-Gomorrah from the countryside but others were wire-thin with drug addiction and sallow-skinned under a mask of powder and blusher. Two lanky pimps in tight black pants and polo shirts leaned against a rack jammed with bicycles.

  The atmosphere was predatory.

  The posted entrance fee in Chinese said ten yuan, but the Dutch paid fifty each, a ransom exacted from European faces with no apology. They settled on low-slung red velvet cushions around a small table. Claire’s eyes slowly adjusted to the dark interior. She scanned the tables for security types, on or off duty. The room filled up with factory workers, freshly showered at work. Heavy Canto-pop pounded on their ears. It was hard to spot anybody in the deeper shadows behind the banquettes and tables ringing the dance floor.

  By Punyu standards, the joint stank of raw new money. A Hong Kong factory manager still wearing his bunch of keys and clearance badge on a neck chain massaged a hooker’s buttocks under a miniskirt as they shuffled back and forth in a circle, completely out of step with the deafening bass.

  Claire spent almost an hour sipping warm beer in the shadow of the even taller Dutch girl. She was thinking she had to make a move—Chen’s spies could be anywhere—when Joop’s new local acquaintance bounced over to their table.

  ‘Hi, my name is Albert!’ A roly-poly Chinese sporting a few wisps of beard shook hands with all of them. Around thirty, he was a walking billboard for the mainland’s new consumer society—air-cushioned Nikes, Giordano jeans, fake Rolex, Fila windbreaker, and a full pack of Marlboros tucked into his sports shirt pocket. Joop untangled his long legs from the low seats to introduce Albert and placed the newcomer right next to Claire.

  Albert looked a real fixer, but he might be a local snitch. He was already asking too many questions for Claire’s comfort. How long were they in Punyu? What did they want to see? Did they want to meet some girls? Or boys?

  He laughed hysterically at his own ribaldry, glancing curiously at strands of Claire’s red hair straggling out from under her cap. Everyone laughed along with him, carried by the goodwill needed to launch the evening. Albert suggested maybe dancing, maybe more drinking—maybe even some gambling?

  ‘You like to gamble, Albert?’ she asked.

  ‘Better than sex! Horses in Hong Kong, dogs in Macau!’

  Claire resisted the urge to rush Albert, but Albert was speedy enough. He might turn her in within the next ten minutes or . . . Albert just might be her first step tonight in the direction of Cha Ling.

  Joop was unstoppable in his conversation, leaving Claire free to consider how she might approach the subject of departing Punyu with Albert in the lead.

  Instead of worrying about any lurking underside to Albert’s psychology, Claire resolved to give him a chance. His gambling joke gave her an idea.

  ‘So, Albert, you say you’re a real gambling man?’

  ‘Sure. I lost $5,000
Hong Kong in Macau on a business trip to see my cousin. To me, that’s fate. We Chinese laugh at our destiny. That’s how we survive for two thousand years.’

  ‘What kind of gambling? Horses, you said?’

  ‘Horse races in Hong Kong, I like very much on TV. Robin Parke, he is a very smart man,’ said Albert, naming Hong Kong’s most visible, very Irish racing expert.

  ‘What about cards?’

  ‘Ohhhhh, very unlucky, very bad. My mother, she loves mahjong and she make more money than my father!’

  ‘I like bets,’ said Claire, sipping her beer.

  ‘Bets? On horses, yeah?’

  ‘No. I like a wager.’

  ‘I challenge you, or you challenge me?’

  ‘Yeah, a competition to see who is right, for money. Or a dare? Do you ever take a dare?’

  Albert blew cigarette rings into the disco fug. ‘Like I say Deng Xiaoping dies this year, and if he dies, you pay me money. If he doesn’t die, I pay you?’

  ‘That’s right. You can bet on the news.’

  ‘But that guy never, never dies!’ At this, Albert threw his head back, laughed himself silly for a minute, and ordered himself another beer on Joop’s tab. Claire was starting to warm to him.

  ‘Or, you know, I’ll bet you can’t run a mile in a minute—‘

  ‘I can’t run a mile in ten minutes!’ Albert patted his paunchy little stomach.

  ‘Okay,’ she continued. ‘Suppose you have a car but I guess you don’t have a car—’

  ‘No, no, I have a car!’

  ‘You do?’

  Albert nodded.

  ‘Okay, let me see . . . how could we go a good bet with a car? Let me think about it.’

  Albert looked at her shoes, trying to gauge how much money Claire was worth. Clearly, he wasn’t impressed with her bulging backpack.

  ‘Okay, I’ve got it. I dare you to drive me where I want to go and you name your price without knowing where it is. You get one guess and write it down on the napkin and I name one place near here and I write it down. Then we look and we have to do it. Wherever I say, you have to take me. Whatever you bid, I have to pay.’

  ‘Funny game, I never heard of it,’ frowned Albert. ‘In advance? Any money? Big money?’

  ‘Big money, provided I have it on me.’

  ‘So there’s a limit,’ Albert scowled.

  ‘Of course there’s a limit, Albert,’ she laughed. I’m not carrying a million dollars on me, and I wouldn’t expect you to drive me to Moscow, would I?’

  ‘Noooooo,’ Albert’s eyes were starting to shine again with imagined dollar signs. ‘When would this game be? I brought the car to take you guys on big tour of Punyu. I promised Joop.’

  Claire shook her head mockingly. ‘You’re not a real gambler, Albert. Some excuse. Of course tonight! It’s just for a joke. You’re chickening out.’

  Albert’s jovial features turned curious. ‘I’m thinking. I write down money, and you gotta pay. You write down town and I gotta drive. And back.’

  ‘That’s another gamble?’ Claire joked.

  ‘Aha, return journey separate! That’s the kind of bet I like better! Second time, I know the odds!’ He offered her a cigarette as a sign of his growing interest.

  ‘What do I have to pay you if I lose? How can I lose?’

  ‘Nothing. You just have to drive wherever I said. You’re right, it’s a stupid game, but I just felt like moving. Okay, we’ll just sit here and get drunk like the others.’ Claire said. ‘Punyu is so boring.’

  She leaned back, absorbed in her beer and lit up her cigarette. She’d laid her fishing line and now she watched her fish circle around the hook.

  Claire knew well that the average Chinese had three fatal weaknesses; sex came a distant third. Food was the first obsession and gambling was a mainstay of life from youth to old age.

  Albert broadcast his weakness for expensive foreign accessories better than a TV ad. But freedom in its truest sense eluded Albert. Claire sensed that he responded to the boundaries of his gimcrack life by dancing along the perimeter as often as he could.

  Yup, Albert could be her man.

  ‘No ma fann? No hassle? Just driving?’

  ‘Just driving,’ Claire lied, smiling at his bewilderment with as much enjoyment as she could muster for his benefit.

  ‘How far we going? Back tonight, too?’

  ‘You’re cheating . . .’

  ‘No, but I work tomorrow. I can’t go too far.’

  ‘I understand. Absolutely back for work,’ she said. ‘It was just a dare. Just for the fun of it. Forget it.’

  ‘OK. I do it,’ said Albert, grabbing Joop’s napkin out from under a beer mug and pulling out his fake Dupont fountain pen.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah, here you write down place. I know the whole west coast of the river. No problem.’

  Claire wrote out in Chinese the name of one of the last towns on Fresnay’s chain of little burgs leading to Cha Ling. She tried to remember the characters for the words ‘East Peony Hill,’ but the peony character wouldn’t come. Anyway, Albert would get suspicious if she could write Chinese. She scribbled it out in letters instead.

  Solemnly they traded and opened each other’s cocktail napkins. Albert’s read ‘HK 3,000 dollars.’ He grinned. ‘Wah. This way maybe I make back what I lost in Macau, O.K.? I figure out that you probably have a credit card, so maybe you have that much, but not more. My bet makes you broke, OK?’

  He was chortling as he opened her note, ‘OK, let’s see, where are we going?’

  His expression turned to simple confusion. He held his napkin closer to the red glow of a small lamp on the cocktail table.

  ‘East Pony what?’

  ‘East Peony Hill,’ she said. ‘Past Golden Stream and someplace called, uh . . .’

  ‘Dong Fu? That’s not so far! That’s your big dare? Nooooo problem!’

  He stood up and adjusted his designer jeans. He told Joop. ‘I’m back before eleven. You wait here or tell hotel desk in front where you go and I meet you. She’s hiring me for big, big money for veeery personal tour! Hah!’ He wiggled his eyebrows at Claire in comic lasciviousness.

  Joop was now immersed in a linguistic lesson, his long nose stuck into his little dictionaries with one of the less venal-looking girls from the dance floor. His two companions were playing pinball in a side room.

  ‘Yah, yah. I shall see you here. This is a good experience for me of learning Cantonese variations on standard Mandarin.’

  Albert happily bounded toward the disco’s exit, then stopped short, his eyes clouded with doubt. Albert lived in a world where everyone skived.

  ‘Hey, first, you show me your money.’

  ‘Here, Albert.’ Claire carefully fished in her backpack past the hidden gun for her wallet. ‘We’ll count it out in the parking lot and put it on the dashboard as a sign of good faith between two gamblers. You sure got me. I didn’t know you could count so high.’

  ‘Hah! Good,’ said Albert. ‘I get the car. You wait here while I drive it from parking. I think you are a very bad gambler,’ he sighed happily.

  ‘Just as long as you’re a good driver,’ she said to his retreating back. ‘Something tell me it’s going to be a long night.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  —Saturday night—

  ‘I worked like taxi driver for two year,’ Albert claimed, as his battered Toyota lurched out of the parking lot. In China one normally sat behind a hired driver but Claire took the front seat.

  Unfortunately, her egalitarian gesture uncorked Albert’s life story. He had one married brother and a female cousin who had become his adopted sister when one of his aunts had three girls. The aunt had off-loaded the littlest on Albert’s mother, who needed help around the house.

  ‘I was going to get married last year. Local girls want me for my money.’

  ‘And not your good looks?’

  ‘Ha! Because I’m rich guy. I had a taxi in Dongguan County for s
o many years, but now I have my business—three delivery trucks. Punyu factories need so many trucks! So my brother drives taxi and I am in the big transport business!’

  Albert adored Deng’s Open Door Policy. For him, it meant open wallets.

  ‘Now everybody, every family in business.’ Albert’s hands flew off the steering wheel to make his point. ‘Even little children make things at home. Everybody is going to get rich. My little nephew, he doesn’t go to school. He says he will make a lot of money doing business. I tell him he has to go to school to learn many things for business too. He says, “No way, José”!’

  ‘Where did he learn that?’ Claire checked the road behind them, but no one seemed to be following them.

  ‘A cassette—Sam Ting’s Secrets of Selling. You a quitter? asks Sam. No way, José! We watch Sam many times. Very inspirational.’

  Claire worried the inspirational Sam would accompany them for the entire drive. ‘What will happen next year when China takes over Hong Kong?’

  ‘China take over Hong Kong? No way! We want Hong Kong take us over! We want everything like Hong Kong— only bigger houses, no little rooms! And we don’t want beach water like in Hong Kong. My Hong Kong cousin lives on Lamma Island. He went swimming and you know what bumped him right in the nose? You guess! You guess! I tell you what! Not a shark! It belong in toilet! Yeah, too many people in Hong Kong. Very dirty place.’

  Albert took his tour guide responsibilities too seriously. He pointed out every new villa and every expensive piece of farm equipment parked along the way. Claire leaned her head back on the seat, but the road was too bumpy for her to get any rest.

  Albert noticed she was trying to find a more comfortable position. ‘You wanna relax? Nooooo problem. You enjoy the countryside. See how rich the farmers are. I stop talking.’

  He slammed a U2 cassette into the car stereo at full volume and managed to beat his hands on the steering wheel in counterpoint to the bumps in the road. The noise flew out of their windows as they jounced through the rutted rural fields, but Claire preferred this to more selling tips from Sam. The weather was turning chillier as night took over, holding off the rain clouds.