Dictator

48

Faith Gushungo stormed into the kitchen of her Hong Kong property and screamed at the two servants cowering on the far side of the table in the middle of the room, stabbing a bejewelled finger at her underlings. ‘My bedroom is a pigsty! I ordered you to have it spotlessly tidy when the President and I arrived, but the beds are not made! There is dirt everywhere! The bathroom is like an open sewer!’

She leaned forward, placing both hands flat on the table. In her red-soled Louboutin heels she stood over six feet tall, a giantess compared to the smaller figures of the Chinese women in their pale-grey uniforms and white aprons.

‘But… but… I cleaned it, Missy,’ the younger of the servants blurted out between sobs of fear and humiliation.

Faith Gushungo focused the full force of her disapproval upon the poor girl. Her voiced lowered in volume and pitch, but became all the more menacing as she replied, ‘Oh really? You think you cleaned the room, do you? Well, listen to me, you little yellow monkey. You may be used to living in filth and squalor, but I am not. I demand the highest standards and I insist on absolute obedience from my staff. So unless you wish to lose your job, you will go to the room right now and you will sweep and polish and dust every single square inch of it to the standard expected. And you will not go home until I am satisfied with your work. Do I make myself clear?’

‘Yes, Missy, yes… very clear. I will get everything I need, be there in one minute.’

‘You had better be,’ the First Lady of Malemba snarled, stepping away from the table. ‘One minute, and not a second longer.’ Then she turned on a stiletto heel and strode from the room, her heels clacking on the marble floor as she went.

Tina Wong waited until Faith Gushungo was out of sight and hearing, then placed a consoling hand on the back of the crying servant. ‘I am sorry, little sister,’ she said, speaking Cantonese Chinese. ‘It is my fault that you had to endure such a terrible, undeserved humiliation.’

The servant stopped crying as quickly as she had begun. ‘Do not worry, big sister. That evil witch cannot hurt me. It is bad enough to lose face from the shouts and screams of a civilized person, but much worse from a barbarian… and worst of all from an animal like that!’ She gave a snort of disgust and picked up her cleaning things. ‘I will go now and see if I can make that room of hers smell less foul.’

‘Impossible!’ said Wong with an encouraging smile as the younger woman departed.

When she was alone in the kitchen, Wong reached into the plastic bucket in which she kept her bottles of cleaning liquid and polish, her duster and her cloths, and took out a rolled-up piece of clear plastic. She peeled a protective backing layer away from it, then set the plastic down on the table, exactly where Faith Gushungo had placed her right hand. She then peeled it away from the table and covered it again with the protective layer.

After work, Wong took a train from Tai Po to Monkok, the heart of Kowloon, where the population is said to be packed together more tightly than anywhere else on earth. She went to the fourth floor of a rundown apartment building and knocked on a door covered in faded, peeling red paint. It was opened by a thin, bespectacled man wearing a tatty old white lab coat. He grinned when he saw it was Wong at the door and ushered his former Hong Kong Police colleague into the small apartment.

The perfectly maintained equipment inside was worth far, far more than the dingy property in which it sat. There were computers linked to every significant police database, scanners, laser printers, spectrometers, centrifuges – in short, the apartment was a miniature forensic lab.

The man took the plastic sheet Wong handed over to him and placed it on a scanner. Seconds later, a larger-than-life image of Faith Gushungo’s handprint appeared on a thirty-two-inch monitor screen. The man looked at it for a second then turned to Wong with an even bigger smile on his face.

‘Perfect,’ he said. ‘I will be able to give you exactly what you need.’