Jade Woman

26

« ^ »

LING LING had hostessed a combined Thailand-Japan merchant syndicate, supper and women for a hundred and eighty wassailers. It was three-ish, a few days after Typhoon Emma roared on to wreck western Japan. Leung and Ong’s limo collected me at the Flower Drummer Emporium and transferred me to a junk in Deep Water Bay, a bonny spot looking nicked from the Mediterranean. I tried asking Leung to stop and let me inspect the junk builders at Aberdeen Harbor, but they gestured me to silence. I was heartbroken, because some of these shipyard places make antique models of their vessels. Since famous ship museums—Venice’s, for example—began collecting them, they’ve become unbelievably expensive. Still, worth a try.

The huge craft was decorated with enormous multicolored trailing flags. A few Cantonese on board grinned at me, but I was otherwise left alone to watch the coast as we upped anchor and headed southeast. What with white launches and the lush palms fronting the hotel’s veranda walks, Repulse Bay must be a playground. White villas studded the steep greenish hillsides.

“Nice, Lovejoy.” Marilyn, under a parasol.

“It chills my spine.” I was on the raised stern. “You leave no trace in places like that. In the slums somebody’d at least notice you were gone.”

“That is sentiment, Lovejoy. Slums are terrible.”

“Not as terrible as resorts like that.” I indicated our bare masts. “Why don’t we use sails instead of diesels?”

“Sails are old,” she said contemptuously. “You talk as an old man, though you are not.”

That made me laugh. “I’ve lived centuries, love.” I meant in careworn experience, but she stared.

“Have you? Really?” Her brown eyes searched my face.

“Every second,” I said. “One thing. Why are there no old rickshaws?” Mind you, the gadget was only invented in the 1870s.

“New is best, Lovejoy.”

As she spoke, a woman carrying an infant papoose fashion padded behind me, berating a skeletal old bloke. He was lugging two jerricans of water, being shoved along the deck by a tiny grandson and bawling abuse back. I smiled, loving it. In Western society the old go to the wall from poverty, hypothermia, loneliness. Say what you like, but the old in Hong Kong were part of life’s game until they dropped.

“People keep telling me that,” I said sardonically, “but never say why.”

We chugged across West Bay and made a long eastward loop into Stanley Village.

Behind us lay Lamma Island, its fawny green deepened in silhouette by the falling sun.

The sea was unbelievably calm but an ugly khaki color, showing where the laterite soil had been washed from Hong Kong’s mountains.

Stanley Village was a cheerful low place, not seeming very affluent. I was accompanied across the strand by my two goons, Marilyn staying behind.

A religious procession was going on, a little girl propped upright on a kind of lofty palanquin. She was plastered with garish makeup. Her clothes were an embroiderer’s dream of exploding colors and shapes, phony flowers everywhere. Pity none of the gear was antique. She was carried on the shoulders of a dozen men. The procession to where a tent had been set up for prayers included a straggle of shaven monks in saffron robes. Incense wafted out on the chants. An ancient gong was struck, thank God correctly—in a rapid succession of light taps that crescendoed into truly beautiful sound; not one quick wallop like Bombadier Wells at the start of those old Rank movies.

It pulled at my heartstrings to hear that exquisite antique. You can make a fortune with one gong, so desperate are collectors for them. The goons hustled me into a car for the half-mile drive up Stanley Peninsula.

Ling Ling was in a palatial villa, overlooking a bay and a parallel peninsula from the patio, quite alone except for three lovely attendants, two servants, and a tableau of four bodyguards watching me through glass. Everybody cleared off, leaving me. The view was sheer delight. I’d have believed her if she’d told me she had ordered it specially. A genuine full set of Chinese Tien Jesuitware was laid on the table before her, ready. This giddily valuable porcelain is seventeenth century. Imagine black penciled-looking drawings with pastel colors on the cup bodies, with blue and gold designed squares below the outer rim. The scenes are often deer and tiger hunts. She was about to have afternoon chocolate, but not with me.

“Your urgent matter, Lovejoy?”

“Er, a studio, please. Air-conditioned. The equipment I’ll need’s on this.” I pulled out a sweat-sogged paper. “Within six days, from these addresses—”

Her hand moved a fraction. A goon nipped in, took my list, vanished back into his aquarium. “And?”

“Help. Somebody neat, precise, trusted.” We waited. A distant junk drew a slow shining line across the bay. I could just hear its chugging bloody engine. Its ancient russet sails would have made a superb picture. Christ, but I was frightened. I asked, “Was that the hill, the one over there?” I knew it wasn’t.

So far she had not looked at me. “Hill?”

“Where they left you.” I discovered you can be terrified and dejected together. “Your mother and father, when you were born.”

She looked then. My existence hung. I swear her face went white as chalk. Life, but not as I knew it. Her voice was almost inaudible.

“You cannot know this.”

“It’s a miracle you survived,” I said helpfully. “Snow in Hong Kong and all. Look on it as a kind of luck. From nothing to everything.” I hesitated. This was no time to remind her of her power over a nerk like me.

“Luck? Cast on a hillside to die? Luck?”

“Certainly, love.” I sat down on the carved chair unasked, eager to convince. “Who succeeds most, eh? Why, the one who starts off with least and gets farthest! Like you.”

“Luck? Existing all my infancy hidden in a hovel by the lowest of the low, fed on stolen scraps? Without parents?”

“Without—? You’re bloody barmy! Sorry, I meant, er, he provided for you as well as he possibly—”

“He?” I got the white visage full on. “He? How can you know these things?”

“Well,” I said lamely. I was going to say that blokes seemed to be the providers in Hong Kong. And I’d read that the man of the family was referred to as See-Tau, the

“Business Head.”

“I’ve a secret crystal ball.”

“Where?” She looked about to faint, her lips blue.

“Just pretending,” I said frantically, scared to death. Was she batty, believing my jokes but disbelieving everything else?

“Leave, Lovejoy.”

“Er, please. Can I have Marilyn for my helper? You see—”

She moved her hand. Three hoodlums hurtled in and dragged me out of the villa backwards and into the limo. Leung for once didn’t offer me any sunflower seeds. We careered down the peninsula and shot westward through Stanley with Ong rabbiting into a radio. I was breathless. What was I supposed to have found out, for God’s sake?

I’d assumed I was being friendly. We slowed to a sane speed by Repulse Bay.

Then a strange thing. They stopped at the junk builders’ slipway in Aberdeen and politely let me see the great seagoing craft being created. No antique models, but I felt it was a sign. Things were possibly looking up.