Jade Woman

30

« ^ »

USUALLY Marilyn was somewhere around when I was called before the terrible trio—

Fatty, Sun Sen, and Dr. Chao. This time she was absent, though I’d tried to hang about downstairs in the Flower Drummer hoping to arrange more ecstasy. Steerforth could gigolo alone.

“You saw our television leakage, Lovejoy?”

I sat facing them, a partisan under trial from guerrillas. The screen was in its place, of course, but by now I’d given up trying to work out who hid behind it. Ling Ling was odds-on favorite, but why?

“Yes. It went well.” I coughed, shuffled in my seat. My scam was planned in four stages. Would it be safer to dish them out one stage at a time, as insurance? Weakly, I compromised. “We do the next two stages simultaneously. Tomorrow night.”

“Yes?” They leaned forward eagerly. I was fascinated by their different expressions.

Fatty vicious, Sun Sen shifty, Dr. Chao interested at some clinical exercise.

“We need a student protest.”

“Against what?”

“Exploitation of art.” I was getting edgy, wondering why Marilyn hadn’t shown. “Rent a small empty shop somewhere near Jordan Road. Protect it from prying eyes. Then start the rumor that the Song Ping painting’s inside.”

“Why?”

“Art students protest,” I explained. “Placards are in their nature. They never know what for. It’ll help to authenticate Song Ping.”

“Very well.” Dr. Chao raised his forehead in interrogation. God, but I was tired of smiles.

“Second. We hire an art expert. To expose us.”

Silence, utter and impermeable. Fatty broke it by wheezes. The old doctor laughed in the Chinese way when startled to incredulity.

“You wish us accused of fakery, Lovejoy?”

“Correct. He needn’t name us, merely blames the work as an out-and-out repro.”

“How, exactly?”

Suddenly I was so tired. The day before, I’d weighed myself at the Star Ferry terminal in Kowloon, bored waiting for the ferry. Since my arrival I’d lost seventeen pounds.

What with gigoloing all night, working all day, worrying myself flaming sick, I’d had enough. I was knackered. My life-style would be called idyllic by some. Not me, because love is loving and art is art only when you aren’t pushed.

“Why the hell ask me? You’re the all-powerful Triad. I’m a prisoner here, remember?

Let me go. I’ve work to do.”

“You are insolent!” Fatty trilled. His chins fibrillated with anger. “You be punished—”

A handclap shut him up. It wasn’t much, just a tap, and barely audible at that. But it came from behind the screen, and abruptly we were in a silent world. Stalemate.

Whoever sat behind there listening was no serf. He—she? —was the superpower.

Dr. Chao gently snapped his fingers, sort of willco, I suppose. “You may go, Lovejoy. As you say, tomorrow evening.”

Do you ever wonder how many plans actually turn out right? Like I mean, did Michelangelo’s David finish up exactly as he intended? I doubt it. Nothing ever does.

Love affairs, robberies, holidays—they all bend out of true. It’s simply the horrid way the world is.

That evening I was at a loose end. I took a taxi, told the driver anywhere, and found myself started on a tour of the island. It was all standard stuff to me by now. Jardine’s Lookout, the place they fire off the noonday gun, Aberdeen Harbor, the Peak, the oddly remote empty upland area of ang Lei Chung Gap. Finally, in despair at my moroseness, the driver landed me at Amah Rock.

“Amah with baba,” he laughed, fog in his gold teeth. “Look out to sea for boat, not come. So, stone!”

The hunched stone looks down over the Lei Yue Nun channel, the beautiful harbor’s eastern exit. It felt remote there, cold. I shivered. Indeed, the tall stone did resemble a Chinese woman with a baby piggyback. The gods did her this favor, turning her into stone when her man’s fishing boat failed to return. A few red-and-gold Hell Money papers fluttered in the evening breeze. Joss sticks had recently burned in the crevices.

So in Hong Kong everybody honored all forebears’ spirits. The sun was fading, that side of the panorama sinking into dark gray. It was less gorgeous, ominous with spreading darkness.

Abruptly I returned to the taxi and told him the Des Voeux Road tram stop.

The gods would have been kinder to bring her bloke’s boat home.

Marilyn wasn’t at the studio. No sign, no message. For a while I hung around hoping she would appear. I went to the Luk Yu in Wing Kut Street for oolong tea and dim sum—it’s the best traditional teahouse—but no sign. I ended with a few daan tat custards to cheer myself up, didn’t succeed, and was at Steerforth’s within an hour.

We’d drawn a couple of Mexican ladies. The plan was for J.S. and me to arrive at a glitterati party about ten o’clock, where we would “accidentally” meet our clients. Their politician husbands were on a fact-find mission around the Third World, chuckle chuckle. They would spend their Third World funds being entertained all night by six choice girls in Deep Water Bay.

Mine was Eva, quite possibly the most sophisticated woman in the galaxy. Proof: she showed no perturbation when admitting two Chinese maids to our vast bathroom where we were, sort of, resting jointly. They fetched oysters and champagne and grub with seven types of perfume on trolleys. I tried leaping into the bath and sinking decorously below the suds but they brought more trolleys until they were all along one wall. Eva was amused when I played hell.

“That’s the first laugh I’ve had for ages!” She fell about. “You were so funny! Hands over your middle and everything!”

Angry, I stalked to the picture window and stood glaring out at the night sky above Kowloon. We were on the eighth floor.

“Why didn’t you put your dressing gown on, stupid man?”

“Haven’t got one.”

“Really?” She was delighted. “Aren’t all you expatriates in Hong Kong rich?” She waited, a cigarette between her lips. “Light. And vodka orange.”

“No,” I said. “No. And get your own.”

“What if,” she said, fury controlled, “I don’t pay you? I’m not used to refusals.”

“Time you learned.”

There was something going on in the streets below. Police lights, people blurring the illumination in Nathan Road. I opened a window. Distant noises rushed in on the night heat.

“Shut that window, assassin! The heat! My skin!”

“Shush.” I couldn’t hear what was going on.

“I tell you—” She tried to slam it so I clocked her one and stood listening.

We were stark-naked. Breaking glass? Sirens, a shot even. My spine chilled. Some sort of riot was going on.

“Put the telly on,” I said.

“Of all the—”

I advanced on her and she scrambled for the controls. Nothing but sitcoms. I divided my time between the window and telly. She became excited as my growing horror communicated itself. Our naked reflections in the wide window’s darkness were bizarre—a Mexican svelte beauty and a ghastly tousle-healed pillock.

“What is it, doorlink?” she kept saying.

The newsflash came on after twenty minutes. What with the screen’s shambles and the real-life pandemonium down in the streets it was life in disorientating duplicate.

Students had marched on a studio near Jordan Road and were blocked by police. Two companies of Gurkhas had drawn kukris. Cars blazed, blood spilled. Forty students had been arrested. A company of the Queen’s Own Buffs was moving armored personnel carriers down Nathan Road…

Aghast I watched the running street battles, moaning at the demonstration placards:

“Commerce Kills Art!” “Halt Exploitation of Artists!” And, most painful of all: “Set Art Free!!”

The telecaster was babble-mouthed with hysteria. “Seven fires are already blazing in Kowloon. Tonight students erupted in violence. They demand the right to petition the Sovereign to protect the Crown Colony’s artistic integrity,” et horrendous cetera.

Eva pried my hands from my face and fed me glugs of wine. She was panting—with heat, thrills or what, I don’t know. Terror takes women this way. To me, it’s terrifying stuff and naught else.

“What is it, Lovejoy? Why should some silly students… ?”

She gazed at me and gasped, clapping her hands. “It’s you, isn’t it? They’re rioting about something you’ve done!”

Exalting, she dragged me to the bed, slickly sealing off the world with the manual control. “And I’m here! With the East’s chief arch-revolutionary! And my Enrico the right-wing…”

“Look, Eva.” She was all over me, demanding, whining crude exhortations. “Look.” I tried explaining, but it was no good. Truth is hopeless against passion. I’ve always found that.