Jade Woman

32

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THE Mologai seemed more somber, Ladder Street steeper, the heat worse, and the gloom ineffective as shade. I made it to Caine Road, headed east for a hundred yards or so, and labored back down to where Hollywood Road bends into the politer districts of Central. This way I came upon the temple with better vision fore and aft. Nobody seemed to follow this time, but with so many people everywhere, who could tell?

The temple was a quiet oasis in a turbulence. Once accustomed to the gloom I could see the two house-shaped chairs, the four gilded insignias waiting to be carried in procession. A couple of old ladies were igniting incense sticks. I paid for three and copied their actions, sticking them upright in the brass earthpot with the others. Then I waited.

People came, did their stuff, went. I knelt a bit, stood, walked a step or two, knelt. For respectability’s sake I did the incense bit once more. An old lady was selling them. As I paid, I asked her to give a message. I scribbled a few words on a paper scrap, labeled it “Titch.”

“For the little bloke, please.” I mimed pushing poles on roller skates and showed Titch’s height so she’d understand, gave her a few dollars. She gazed back, lovely old eyes in a mat of wrinkles. Not a word.

Well, worth a try. I walked into the sun glare, down through that eerie area to my studio.

Marilyn still wasn’t there. I did more dabs of sky, and began to fill in the foreground.

The pigments were great, every one straight out of the 1870s. I stuck at it for several hours.

The space where Marilyn would have been sitting in her old-fashioned dress seemed spoiled, silent. Early evening and word came via a goon that the hit would be about eightish. I went to a bathhouse, then noshed at the Luk Yu. She wasn’t there either.

“We go to an opium divan for a foki, Lovejoy.”

Just Sim, me, and a sampan lady embarked on a journey across the typhoon shelter to where the lighters were moored. I said nothing, couldn’t stand being near Sim, the murdering creep, so I sat watching the woman’s rhythmic sculling. A beautiful balanced motion, side, side, forward. Lovely, her black garb against the dying light.

These lighters are massive vessels seen close to. Normally they transfer cargo from the big deep-water ships in the harbor. There was always a good dozen not far out near Stonecutters Island. We came against the offshore side of one. Sim motioned me to scramble up onto the deck. It felt metal, inert. The sampan looked a mile down, tiny on the water, the woman’s wicker hat a pale blob.

“This way, Lovejoy.”

We passed hatches, went along a corridor, and walked into a smoky fug. I wished I’d breathed more air outside to bring in with me. It was the nearest thing I’d seen to a medieval prison.

“All these chase dragon, Lovejoy.” Opium smokers.

The place was a huge warren of bunks. Low ceilings hung with paraffin lanterns, their hissing light pocked with flies and moths. Visibility wore itself out after forty feet on account of the dense smoke. Skeletal blokes, all Chinese as far as I could tell, lay on the bare shelving. Most sprawled or were propped on an elbow, many coughing convulsively.

“Playing mouth organ.” Sim grinned, indicated a man sucking at a half-open matchbox.

Its tray was lined with foil, the tiny heap of gray powder inside warmed over a cigarette lighter. Others were heating small balls of brown resin at candles before lodging them with a pin inside narrow bamboo pipes. There was hardly one that couldn’t have done with a good meal, not a spare ounce of flesh anywhere.

A huge sweaty man came to talk in Cantonese. I followed as they walked the length of the divan. It was obscene. The far end stank. I became giddy from the fumes and the airlessness. Sim and the fat man were pointing and arguing.

“Which of these two, Lovejoy?”

One was dozing, the other rocking slowly with his eyes closed. God knows how old they were. Sixty, seventy? They wore raggedy cotton trousers and singlets.

“Him.” I picked the one who seemed the less doped. Neither looked capable of standing unaided, let alone pulling a robbery. Still, all he had to do was set off an alarm and scarper a few yards—anybody could hide in Hong Kong except me—then he could come back to buy more illusion with his rich reward. I left them to get him upright and blundered gasping into the night air.

A group of four men were arriving on another sampan as we left. They were joking and laughing amiably, clambering up toward their bliss. Great if death’s the best life you can dream up.

Darkness had fallen by the time we reached Kowloon. Our robber-to-be was sniffing and coughing. He could hardly make the climb up to street level.

“All right, mate?” I gave him a leg up.

“Mmm goy.” I think it means something like, you needn’t do that. A sort of ta, pal.

“Wait, Lovejoy.”

Naturally I’d started off towards the streetlights. I halted. In the dimness Sim stood beside our hired robber.

“Why? We early?”

The harborside seemed deserted. The only light was an airwash from Kowloon’s hot spots and fleeting reflections from Hong Kong Island.

“No. Dead on time.” He was nervous.

There was something wrong. I squinted about in the gloaming. We were a good hundred yards from street lighting, yet the Kowloon traffic was audible. The sampan had landed us alongside a godown; a pandemonium of commerce in the day, deserted at night. An oceangoing freighter was still and black across the wharf.

Uneasy, I said to our decrepit old robber, “Come on, pal.”

Four slender shadows separated from a loading bay and came about us. I shoved the old bloke in a panic, drawing breath to scream at him to run. Two hard bodies slammed and left me winded. Thuds sounded in a torrent, with one or two sickening cracks. It wasn’t me they were murdering. I was hunched over, trying to recover breath.

Footsteps pattered, a splash, a distant wail of police.

“What the hell?” I said with the first usable oxygen.

“Do jeah.” Thanks. Sim was accepting a cigarette. In the glimpse by his cigarette light I counted us. Total six: four goons, Sim, me. No scarecrow addict.

“Don’t worry, Lovejoy. Those police are only heading to the alarm call at the premises.”

“But—”

Hands took hold and I was walked towards the traffic noise. We emerged at the corner of a hectic dazzling street market. The whole world seemed out shopping. It couldn’t have been half past nine. I was bewildered. The four goons vanished into the crowd.

“Nothing else you wanted, was there, Lovejoy?” And, as I stood speechless, Sim gave me a pleasant nod. “Night, then.”

It must have been about three or four hours later. I realized that I’d somehow ambled into the dangerous Mologai on Hong Kong side. All I remember was stopping at a street hawker’s bikestall for a tin of drink somewhere by Nathan Road and drinking an ale at a Chatham Road booth near the railway station, near the China Emporium.

The rest is a blank. At least, I wish it were. Dazed horror is nearer the truth. The poor old addict’s grin as I’d helped him out of the sampan. His thanks. I’d retched my drink onto the curb before I’d gone a few yards. Nobody gave a glance—only another wassailing tourist rollicking between bars, spewing his way from one bar girl to another.

One thing: If Sim could knife Del Goodman with impunity, how come he’d not topped the old addict himself? And he’d shakily needed a fag to recover after the killing. So had he really done for Del that hungry day?

The temple was in darkness. Few cars took the contoured Hollywood Road at this late hour. Most tore along the posher Queen’s Road West down below among the all-night neons. I sat on the curb. A few matelots came up Ladder Street with their bar girls, brawling and reeling. I heard a couple of ugly scuffles in the night, but stayed where I was. A door or two slammed the silence back in place. The distant harbor pulsed and hummed.

“Hello. You want business, friend?”

Careful how you answer, Lovejoy. Folk die when you express preferences. I’d only to open my mouth and Hong Kong slew somebody at random. Well, not quite at random—

I picked the poor sods out with unerring accuracy. Hole-in-one Lovejoy.

“No, thanks, love” seemed safe enough. The girl was young, gaudy in the gloaming.

But the Cantonese women all seemed sixteen until they reached forty, when they stepped overnight into their crinkled eighties. Other women do it in slow stages.

She went on by, heels tapping. Silence.

They’d beaten the old bloke to death, ditched him in the harbor. His description of course would be handed to the police—a robber trying to nick the priceless Song Ping.

No chance of an investigation. What was one addict among a million?

A faint whirring noise caught my attention. An electric truck? A milk float?—except local Chinese don’t drink milk. It was punctuated by a regular tapping, whir, whir. A child, spinning a lazy top? Hardly.

“Hiyer, Titch.” He trundled to a stop by jamming one of his sticks between his wheels, real skill.

“Good evening. I received your message, Lovejoy.”

“Aye. Sorry I’m late.” I’d written that I’d drop by the temple about six the previous evening.

“Please don’t apologize. How on earth can a penniless leper help a gwailo, Lovejoy?”

“You know everything, Titch. We… barbarians, is that the translation?… we know naught here.” I eyed him, on his level. “I need an ally. There’s a lady, Cantonese, gone missing. Marilyn Shiu-Won Wong.”

“The one forever at the Flower Drummer? Who had old-fashioned clothes made to take to your new flat near Cleverly Street?”

“That’s her.” I wondered if the Triad knew of this sophisticated street trailer—or if they already had a team of them watching and spying everywhere.

“I could look about for her, I suppose.”

“Ta. I’d pay well, if you could find out where she is. But say nothing to anyone else.”

Pause. “Two hundred dollars?”

“Three.” As I nodded, he indicated the temple across the road. “Give an offering to Kuan Ti—he’s very strong. He was mortal once. Since his death he has been promoted several times, for doing good to China.”

“Really works, eh?” I glanced curiously at the temple.

“Indeed, Lovejoy. He was executed in 220 b.c. A grateful China made him a duke about thirteen centuries later. Then he was made a prince, finally a full emperor in 1594 a.d.

Help should be rewarded, ne?” He paused, tilting his misshapen head. “You don’t laugh, Lovejoy.”

“I’m losing the knack. What’s he god of?”

“War. Money. And antique dealers, as it happens.”

He left suddenly, skittering away. I rose and dusted myself off.

“Hey, Titch,” I called. “How much do I offer the god?”

“That’s the problem, Lovejoy,” the darkness called back. “But guess right.”

There was a lot to think of on the return to Steerforth’s place. By the time I reached there I’d worked out how to bubble Sim and Fatty at one go.

As it turned out, it all had to be modified because Ling Ling herself arrived at the studio to model for me.