‘Nineteen-seventy-five? Was that the year of “Bohemian Rhapsody”? No, it can’t be that. A Day at the Races? I know—“You’re My Best Friend”.’
He raised a thumb at her.
‘This is crazy. We’re playing Obcom when you are about to be charged with murder. You have to fight back. You have to talk to the lawyer. That Abel guy. You have to give yourself a chance.’
‘Billy Joel, 1976.’
‘I’m not playing any more.’
‘Billy Joel, 1976.’
‘Can’t we just talk normally for a minute?’
‘Billy Joel, 1976.’
‘“Only the Good Die Young”. I want you to answer this question for me. Everyone says you are a Talking Heads, 1978. Are you?’
He thought for a second and then shook his head.
‘So you’re not a “Psycho Killer”. Did you shoot—did you Bob Marley and the Wailers, 1974?’
He shook his head again.
‘You didn’t shoot the sheriff. That’s good. At least we are making a start. Was it self-defence? What actually happened in that room?’
He said nothing but looked away briefly.
‘Can’t think of a song?’
The guard approached. ‘Time’s up.’
‘Please, Paul, say something.’
‘Jimmy Buffett, 1977.’
‘What? I don’t know that one. It’s too obscure. Paul. Paul.’
A guard grabbed Paul’s arm and started to hustle him away. ‘Finish,’ the man said.
Paul called out: ‘Jimmy Buffett, 1977.’
‘James Taylor, 1971,’ she shouted as he disappeared. ‘“You’ve Got a Friend”, Paul. “You’ve Got a Friend”.’
Wong sat in a dream on the top deck of the tram as it trundled slowly towards Central. He loved the trolley-cars of Hong Kong island, which moved only slightly faster than the walking speed of an averagely impatient Shanghainese. And it was cheap. Just a couple of Hong Kong dollars, flat fare, to anywhere you wanted to go. Even then, he was always tempted to go further than he needed to and walk back a bit—flat-fare journeys always made him want to do that, keep on going, get more money’s worth, even at a cost of inconvenience to himself.
Having said that, trams were not easy vehicles on which to relax. They trundled slowly through the busiest parts of town, and often skimmed close to busy building sites and factories—top deck passengers were frequently in danger of being skewered by pipes swung languidly across the road by half-asleep crane operators. There was no air-conditioning, so the upper windows were left open, allowing a cacophony of jackhammers and road diggers to reverberate through the seating. Yet despite the pandemonium on both sides, Wong was a happy and relaxed man.
Things were looking good. Manks clearly wanted him to do the feng shui of a huge mansion owned by one of the richest families in the world. The aircraft job had been quickly finished, and would also prove lucrative. The two jobs together would push him well into profit for the year, even after paying Arun Asif Iqbal Daswani.
The only bad thing is that he would have to go to London. He had never been out of Asia and had no desire to visit the West. Oh, he knew all about the West. He had seen it on TV enough times to realise that it was a place best avoided. From his understanding of Western life, gained largely through accidentally watching bits of American sitcoms and Hollywood movies on televisions in Chinese cafés, the West was highly dangerous. It was a place where:
(a) police cars crash into each other and explode on a daily basis;
(b) women are tall and beautiful and like to wear torn clothes while firing machine guns with one hand;
(c) all moving trains have two men grappling hand-to-hand on top while approaching tunnels;
(d) people are rich and live in huge houses but argue all the time, and the more they fight, the more the audiences laugh;
(e) there are many tall buildings, but they all have something strange at roof level: caped men in red costumes, giant animals, gangs fighting, or men chasing each other and jumping from roof to roof;
(f) at street level, cars generally contain one person driving and another who shoots at vehicles in front or behind. Westerners frequently jump from one fast-moving vehicle to another, and they often chase each other in the wrong direction down expressways;
(g) everyone is beautiful, tall and slim—ugly women are beautiful women with glasses and their hair in a bun;
(h) helicopters usually have a person clinging to a landing strut;
(i) it is the norm to drive vehicles into buildings through shop windows.
Similarly, weddings climax with espionage agents driving cars through the wedding cake. And so on, and so on. In short, he had become convinced that the West was a violent, unpredictable place full of explosions and drama—much too much excitement in every way.
But the grim screen images suggested that there were a few things he would recognise. Police officers in the West were usually corrupt, he noticed, and could be bought off with a wad of cash. This gave him comfort—at last, something a person from China could understand.
Joyce was also sitting on a tram. She called Jason McWong on her mobile.
‘Yeah?’
‘Jace, it’s Jo. I’ve just been to see Paul. I have a really, really important question for you.’
‘Hit me.’
‘Did Jimmy Buffett have a hit in 1977?’
‘Er. I don’t know. Probably.’
‘Called?’
‘Er, not sure. Was it something called “Attitudes”? Lemme think. I might need to look it up on the internet. Give me five minutes.’
He worked at a computer and didn’t need five minutes. He phoned back in less than two. ‘“Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes”. It was the title of an album released in January 1977, got to number twelve in the Billboard pop chart. A single too. What does it mean?’
Joyce said nothing, her mind ticking over at high speed.
‘Jojo?’
‘“Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes”: I think it means Paul was on the top deck of the plane, not on the lower deck, where that guy was killed. This is some sort of set-up by the Skyparc people. I’m going to report them to the police.’
She was thrilled. ‘This is a breakthrough, Jace. At last, we’ve got something to work with. Paul’s innocent.’
‘Cool.’
Wong was jarred out of his reverie when the tram he was in pulled level with a tram going in the opposite direction. Someone inside waved to get his attention. It was Joyce.
‘Hey! CF,’ she called. ‘It’s me.’
‘You going wrong way. Hotel this way.’
She leaned out of the window of the tram. ‘I’m not going to the hotel. I’m going to the police.’
He jerked upright. Now what was the mad mui-mui up to? ‘What police? Why police?’
‘It’s Paul. I went to see Paul.’
‘Paul is who?’
‘Paul Barker. He’s the guy they said killed someone on Skyparc. He didn’t do it. He’s innocent. Totally innocent. He was upstairs, not downstairs where the guy was killed. I’m going to report all this to the cops. I mean, they’re charging him with murder. I think it’s some sort of frame-up. I think the Skyparc people are doing the dirty on him. Maybe even Robbie Manks is involved.’
‘No, no, no. Do not make trouble. Skyparc is paying us plenty big bucks. I think you should not interfere. Very important. We need the money. Manks has not paid yet. Will pay in a few days, I think.’
‘This is murder, CF. He’s been charged with murder. He’s innocent. He could get sent down for life. I don’t know the laws here. He could maybe get executed or something.’
Wong was furious. ‘You cannot do this. Very important we receive this payment from Mrs Elizabeth Queen Windsor. We cannot risk this. Maybe after one-two week, you can go and see if you can get your friend out of jail.’
Joyce was angry. ‘This is a murder charge, CF. We can’t risk wasting time. I’m going t
o the police station now and you can’t stop me.’
Wong stood up, his face thunderous with rage. ‘Yes I can. I am boss of CF Wong and Associates Private Limited. You are forbidden from doing any assignment to help your friend. Must keep low profile until the Queen job is finished.’
‘I quit,’ shrieked Joyce, her face turning red and her eyes filling with tears. ‘Keep your stupid frigging job. I’m going to the police and you can’t stop me.’
Wong was horrified to hear the trolley car doors click shut on the lower deck. In seconds, he would be whisked westwards, unable to escape, while Joyce would be taken to the east—in the direction of the police station, where she would pour out slanderous thoughts about the company associated with his soon-to-be paymaster, Robbie Manks. This could not be allowed to happen.
He leaned out of the window and tried to shout down to the driver. ‘Stop, stop.’ He switched to Cantonese: ‘Ting che! Ting che!’ But he couldn’t be heard above the rumble of the traffic and the racket from the nearby building sites. From below he heard the heavy click of the tram driver engaging the engine. Trams had no steering wheels and the only action the bored drivers did was to pull or push a flat lever that made the vehicle move forwards.
What to do? Wong pondered for a moment whether there was any way he could stop Joyce’s tram leaving. If this was the West and he was a Western person, he would leap out of the window of the tram in a single bound, landing squarely in Joyce’s tram. That’s the sort of thing everyone did over there. But no way would an intelligent man such as himself ever contemplate such a dangerous move.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that the tram was close to a building that was in the process of being covered with green netting and bamboo scaffolding. Impulsively, he stretched his body as far as he could out of the window and reached out with both hands. He grabbed a piece of bamboo and tugged with all his might. It barely moved. He pulled again, his skeletal but wiry limbs aching. This time the thick stick budged and came loose from its position. It had not yet been securely tied into place. He jerked the head of the rod into the tram and kept pulling.
The people around him started shouting at him in Cantonese: ‘Mutyeh se?’ What’s happening? Why was this mad man pulling a piece of bamboo into the tram?
He kept pulling until the long strand of bamboo went into his tram window, right out of the other side, and in through the window of Joyce’s tram. She ducked just in time to stop it from braining her. The look on her face showed that she realised what he was doing. He was using the bamboo to bind both trams together.
Wong, using his anger to give himself strength, tugged at second and third pieces of bamboo and yanked them from the building site: these, too, he threaded through both trams.
Some of the passengers on his tram started to laugh. The man was crazy, but entertainingly so. Why was he so angry with the foreign girl? And would he really manage to skewer the two vehicles together with long bamboo scaffolding rods?
At that moment, both tram drivers clicked their levers into gear and the trams started to move apart.
The bamboo rods that united them creaked and splintered against the window frames. The passengers on the upper decks of both vehicles shouted at the drivers to stop. With multiple voices working at once, a curious physical resistance, and strange cracking noises from the wooden window frames on the top deck, the drivers got the message and yanked back on their levers. The trams ground to a halt.
Joyce grabbed hold of the bamboo rods and tried to push them back out of the window. ‘Don’t try and stop me, CF, I have to tell the police what I know.’
‘Do not tell the police. You tell police and cause trouble for Skyparc. This will be big trouble for me. I need this money.’
‘I don’t care about your money. That’s all you care about, is money. You can have all the money in the world, for all I care. I gotta tell the police about Skyparc before Paul gets locked up for murder or hung or something. Murder is serious, CF.’ She bashed ineffectually at the rods.
‘You tell police to get Skyparc in trouble and you will murder me,’ Wong complained, pushing the sticks further into Joyce’s tram.
The construction workers on the building site, realising that someone was stealing parts of their bamboo scaffolding, started to yell.
‘I’m gonna tell the police and you can’t stop me,’ shouted Joyce pushing at the rods again. A powerfully built young man on Joyce’s tram stood up and started to help her push them back out of the window.
‘Thanks,’ she said.
‘I’m doing it for myself,’ he replied. ‘I’m late for work.’
Wong could hear shouting from downstairs: the driver of his tram was hanging out of the window, looking up and complaining in loud Cantonese: ‘Get those sticks out. Get them away.’
Now the men from the building site had clambered spider-like down to the level of the tram and had grabbed the ends of the stolen pieces of bamboo. Far more muscular than Wong, they effortlessly started dragging them out of the trams. The feng shui master ducked out of the way just as the rods flew free and disappeared back into the green scaffolding nets.
‘I quit,’ Joyce screamed.
‘You fired,’ shrieked Wong.
Even though they were no longer sewn together with bamboo poles, neither tram moved. This was typical Hong Kong traffic accident behaviour. Any incident on any road, even if it caused no damage, would be followed by all vehicles concerned stopping for twenty minutes until police came and took photographs from every possible angle.
Knowing they were going nowhere for a while, the impatient passengers surged downstairs and raced out of the vehicles’
front and back doors—Wong, sneaking out with them. He crossed the tracks as quickly as he could, but his newly sacked assistant was younger and faster. She had also left her tram and he saw that she was already more than one hundred metres away. She was light on her feet: he would never be able to catch up. Fortunately for him, she did not have his sense of direction or his familiarity with Hong Kong: she was running as fast as she could in the opposite direction from the police station.
The feng shui master looked around. They were in Wan Chai. An idea struck him and he turned towards Lockhart Road.
The door of a taxi which had been hovering behind the tram swung open. A heavy, dark-skinned man climbed out and followed.
The Village of Seven Pines was a peaceful mountaintop settlement most of the time.
But four or five times a year, typhoon winds would strike and threaten to send villagers over the edge of the cliff.
The wisest men in the village could never guess when the next typhoon would come.
One night, the old dog man who lived with animals in the poorest part of the village started shouting: ‘The winds are coming.’
The villagers raced down to the safety of the valley just before the typhoon came.
From that day on, the dog man always gave a successful warning of the approach of a typhoon.
One day, the leader of the village asked the dog man how he knew when the winds were coming.
‘The early winds whistle at a pitch that only dogs can hear,’ he said. ‘When the wind starts to blow, the dogs hear the whistling and wake me. And I wake the rest of you.’
Blade of Grass, messages from the highest of the high are often delivered to the lowest of the low.
From ‘Some Gleanings of Oriental Wisdom’
by CF Wong.
J Oscar Jackson wondered why anyone would be insane enough to open a sauna in Asia. Surely it contravened the whole supply-and-demand principle? The whole damn place was a sauna, wasn’t it? Asia was the world’s biggest, free of charge, open-all-hours, outdoor hothouse. The air was unbearably hot and humid from morning until night, so why would anyone assume that people would pay hard cash to enter a man-made indoor re-creation of the horrible climate outside? But apparently people did.
Perhaps they didn’t go in these places for the hot air. Perhaps it was a
sex thing. Lord knows that sort of thing was reputed to happen often enoughin Asia. The scary thing was that this was apparently winter in Hong Kong. Which meant that the air was cooler and less humid than normal. Yet to him it was horribly uncomfortable. How could people live like this?
The man he was tailing had just entered a large building bearing the name ‘Diamond Lotus Sauna’ so he dutifully followed. He couldn’t wait outside. The sauna appeared to be part of a large collection of services sharing an ugly rectangular building the size of a city block, close to where Wan Chai blurs into Causeway Bay—there were clearly going to be myriad exits. It was almost time, anyway.
The tall African–American strode through frosted double-doors and found himself in a rather gloomy, under-lit reception area, manned by two women who would have been pretty, had they been wearing an eighth of the amount of make-up they had on their faces.
One of them immediately shot around the counter and raced to where Jackson was standing. She took hold of his arm. ‘Come this way, sir,’ she said.
‘Er, no, thanks, I’m just having a look,’ he stuttered.
‘Come, have a look-see, no problem. Sauna, massage, we have everything.’ She pulled him through a pair of double-doors into the main massage centre.
He saw a large room lined on one side with temporary curtains—hospital-style screens that had been wheeled into place around raised beds. On the other side were extra-heavy armchairs and footstools. Several men were sitting in these, having their feet massaged. At first glance, it seemed legit.
‘Your friend is getting changed. He will be on massage bench number six,’ she said, pointing to one of the curtained-off areas.
‘My friend?’
‘You came with Mr Wong? We will put you in number seven,’ she said. ‘Next to him.’
‘Er. I don’t think so. Look, thanks, but—’ Then Jackson made a snap decision that surprised even himself. He would go for it. Why not? ‘Okay. Just for a while. A quick massage. Short one only, okay?’
Mr Wong Goes West Page 11