Jade Woman

18

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TRUTH to tell, it wasn’t such an invasion. I just became conscious that somebody else was in the room. Still dark, but the door was ajar and light cut in from the corridor. If it’s ever happened to you, you’ll know that instant nausea, how your heart bangs.

“Who is it?” I spoke feebly, pulling the sheet up like a surprised matron.

The door clicked shut. Lights came on. Leung and Ong were standing there, Ong with a stubby shotgun. That was okay—they looked incredibly neat, dark suits, ties. Uneven bookends, except for that gun. What scared me most was their gloves. I’ve never yet met an honest man wearing black leather gloves, and that’s the truth. They’re all criminals.

“You’re ready to come, Lovejoy.” Leung was telling me, not asking. I decided he was right.

Babbling assurances I scrabbled on my gear and went. People calm as this pair never experience palpitations like us cowards. They don’t need to.

Three in the morning. The hotel foyer was curiously empty, the night outside hot. The streets were calm, a few people walking to work, some sleeping in doorways of cinemas, the odd car, bar girls brightly tumescent in neon-stenciled doorways, trucks collecting rubbish. We drove to a place that was strangely familiar, a high-rise block with balconies. The queasy feeling returned. The place where Johny Chen lived?

We were let in on the eighth floor without knocking. Fatty was colossally there, almost filling the room, his piggy eyes maddened. A small table, one armchair, television set, American posters plastered everywhere. A pungent stench sickened me further.

Something was smeared down one wall near ground level. Paint, or not? A long bundle was blanketed on the floor.

“Lovejoy,” Fatty piped. He was smoking, wheezing, quite crazy. “You disobeyed!”

“Me?” I’d done every bloody thing I’d been told by everybody. “No, er, sir. Honest.”

Something blackened the world with a whoomph of excrutiating pain in my belly. Little Ong had crumped me with a single blow. He belted me down onto hands and knees.

More blows came. I retched from the vast ache. His fist must have gone through to my backbone. Thank God it wasn’t his huge partner, Leung. Thrutching emptily, I gaped at my hands propping me up. Blood. That paint smear was blood. It was puddled on the floor and down the table leg.

“Uncover it, Lovejoy.” Fatty nodded at the bundle.

With effort I stood. The room careered about for a bit. I retched it to a groggy standstill, went and gently pulled off the blanket.

Johny Chen had been battered to death, hideously so. He was almost unrecognizable.

He’d been flung against the wall by prodigious force before sliding to his final indecent sprawl. In his terror and pain the poor lad had filthed himself. Only God has polite agonies; for folk like Johny Chen and me, existence is a choice of degradations. By Johny’s body was lot 463, the white mug with its maidens and trees.

“You disobeyed!” Fatty shrilled. I don’t know what he was smoking but its stench was cloying.

“Yes, sir,” I said, bending in the gale. “I’m sorry.”

He took a step and lashed me across the face. It was evidently too much for him because he wheezed louder and made a defeated gesture to Ong, who hardly moved but made my face sting and my head flop about like a doll’s. Six clouts and I crumpled, on my back.

“You sorry?” Fatty shrieked.

I said upwards, “I am extremely sorry, sir.” A foot kicked my side so pain spasmed through every other muscle, quite a knack. God, but these goons must have practiced.

Maybe Hong Kong’s locals did torture like we do football. “Most sincerely. I was very stupid and thoughtless, sir. I’ll obey everything in future. Honest.”

Fatty rose and waddled off, his huge haunches hunching up and down in his long garment. Laurel and Hardy kept their faces towards me as they followed. I was left alone with Johny.

It took me five whole minutes to creak into action, climb erect. I did a deal of whimpering. First I shut the door onto the corridor, went and washed my hands in the sink. Then I returned to Johny and removed lot 463. I said “sorry” to him and it, like a fool.

“Johny,” I said, covering him, “I pray God has the sense to make heaven like California.”

Why had nobody come to anybody’s aid—mine, Johny’s? Surely somebody must have heard? I went out and slowly started down the stairs at a funereal limp.

If I’d had any sense, I’d have realized exactly what Johny’s tour and Marilyn had tried to tell me. A few groups of people ruled Hong King—not police, law, any of that. By accidentally losing my possessions at Kai Tak Airport, plus my divvying skill, I’d fallen in with them. At the time I’d thought it a rescue. But rescue had been at the cost of Del Goodman’s life, and now Johny Chen’s. Some rescue. Like being plucked from a fire by the Hindenburg. No more.

Lot 463 was in my hand.

The night’s humid heat swamped me as I made the street. I leaned against the doorjamb. I’d had it. Johny had done sod all except obey, and still he finished up murdered, exactly as I’d… well, arranged. I blotted my face with a sleeve and managed to flag a cruising taxi. Escape time. With one bound I’d be free…

“Kai Tak Airport, please,” I said and just sat with my eyes closed. I had money enough to reach Singapore, Taiwan, maybe with luck Australia. Hong Kong could get stuffed and… the taxi had stopped at my hotel.

The driver’s grin was reflected in his mirror. I drew breath to ask if he’d misunderstood, but gave up. The weight of the world was on me as I descended. I didn’t offer to pay.

That was my escape attempt, so brilliant it had lasted six minutes, during which I hadn’t even got a yard.

The one hotel guard didn’t look my way as I buzzed the lift. Wise man, I thought. If questioned, he’d swear I’d never left my room.

The trouble with nights, as far as I’m concerned, is that I sleep fast. Nights are hardly worth the bother. Lying on my back watching the ceiling, from four o’clock onwards, I thought of being here in Hong Kong and the plight I was in. Thinking, it seemed to me that antiques here too were a notorious game.

Take Ariadne, for instance.

Ariadne was extraordinary. By that I mean she was so way out, she was a phenomenon. Schooling? In Russia, though her folks were English. Talents?

She played every musical instrument, just like Richard Lionheart. Degrees? Oxford and Cambridge, naturally, and enough languages not to need earphones. Now, it’s well known that antique dealers have a hard time learning the alphabet, so you can understand how she stood out among us nerks in East Anglia. To boot, she was a nun, so she stood out even more. You get the picture: clever, wise, holy, and pretty. She couldn’t fail. Plus, she was in the game for profit whereby to fund an orphanage. We were all helplessly in thrall to Ariadne for as long as she cared to flutter her eyelashes under her wimple.

Enter Gargoyle.

Gargoyle was grotesque, a great shambling ox of a man who came into antiques via boxing. He’d been a fairground fighter through years of incompetence and looked it. His clothes fitted worse than mine. His shoes flapped their soles like a panto clown’s. He was an addled wino. He turned to antiques because he’d once learned a curious but true fact: King Edward I lashed out eighteen silver pence, total, to buy 450 decorated Easter eggs to give to members of his household. (Decorated eggs only entered England after the Crusades, though they were a feature of ancient Rome and China.) Well, Gargoyle had Edward’s eggs endlessly faked by Doggie, his deaf-and-dumb partner on East Hill. No detailed record of the king’s eggs exists, so it was easy. Any medieval pattern would do, and did for this pair of amiable rogues scratching a living by selling their ancient but brand-new eggs. Doggie wasn’t too bad; he used the right natural dyes and earth colors, and copied his patterns off Books of Hours. A good scam.

Until Sister Ariadne heaved in and explained that, having unwittingly come across a batch of King Edward’s millennium-old eggs in a state of incompletion, she was reporting them to the law. On that fateful day she glared righteously at the repellent gormless Gargoyle—and fell in love. Truly. The first we heard of it was when the kindly Margaret had a whip round to pay for Doggie’s lawyer, Gargoyle having flown with Ariadne the flying nun. Bereft of his front man, Doggie did a year in clink. The orphans were left in God’s tender care which, it is well known, is rough on infants. But the clever, wise, holy, et cetera, Ariadne was away in Marseilles learning life’s sordid facts with Gargoyle. We heard later they’d been arrested for touting fake Russian icons in Naples.

See what I mean? Antiques make men mad. And women too. But why? Is it the money they represent? Or is it the magic that lies in them, that clue to immortality, that glimpse of artistic perfection?

My problem was this: Fatty was solely concerned with the money, keeping us all in order. That’s why he had Johny Chen killed. And Sim also knew the score, that Goodman had to go—how else to keep his own share of the forthcoming antique deals high? Sim was probably only a mere peddler.

Dr. Chao? An organizer, maybe the learned adviser to the Triad’s money men. Ling Ling? I didn’t know. Marilyn? A harmless assistant. James Steerforth? Gigolo, a China Coast pimp living on his wits and any other bits of him women would pay for. Add numerous soldiery and enough money to pull any scam you cared to name, and that was the team as listed. Fatty was head of the execution squad, of course. Who was boss, though?

Came seven o’clock, I was still staring out, thinking what an evil game antiques was.

And Ariadne, going off her trolley over a Neanderthal like Gargoyle, who’d chopped his lifelong friend Doggie. And poor Johny Chen, falling a whole life short of Dream America. And Del, RIP, another innocent short of his percentage. Lovejoy next?

Escape was now out of the question. Try a secret dash to Macao and I’d be delivered trussed like a four-penny rabbit at the Digga Dig or some other honky-tonk. Anyway, Macao was a cul-de-sac, with Hong Kong its only exit. Yet I had to survive, avoid that gruesome death by battering, by stiletto.

What were their terms? Utter obedience, the sort crooks the world over call loyalty. Yet don’t they say that a man creates the evil he endures? Tolerate evil and you are responsible for it. But what could I do? This vicious lot insisted I ponce about with Steerforth. Presumably this kept me gainfully employed, so to speak, until I was needed for an antiques scam.

Which left me still remembering Ariadne. Maybe because antiques are all I know, I decided I’d have to pin my hopes on antiques to keep breathing. Antiques send people off the rails. So antiques had to be my road in, and my way out. Lorna had heedlessly left money in my jacket pocket, silly cow. Well, I’d use my bit of it in a good cause. Six o’clock I rose, walked out due east, along Lockhart Road to Victoria Park. I went and stood among the Chinese at their slow ritual exercises—you see folk at this stately art early on every open space, quite unselfconscious. Not really knowing why or what I was doing, I copied an elderly bloke. Maybe forty of us, like somnambulistic chessmen. An hour, and I felt more at peace.

Eight o’clock and I’d had breakfast, signed out of the hotel. Eight-thirty I barged in on Steerforth, woke him from his stuporous kin, told him selected details about my night’s activities and Johny Chen’s fate—he nearly infarcted but I made my part quite innocent.

He recovered somewhat when I left him his percentage, then left saying I’d be around later because I’d a special job on.

An hour in a bathhouse made me years younger. I bought a pricey box of Belgian chocolates and made my way to the Flower Drum Emporium in a state of humility. I traveled in an air-conditioned taxi so the chocolates and I wouldn’t run in the heat. I was grovelingly ready to comply. I was also full of novel suggestions to further everybody else’s interests but my own. I’m at my best as a helpless and willing helper.

Same as all traitors.

Respectfully, I asked for Shiu-Won Wong, aka Marilyn.