The Mystery of Yamashita's Map

Chapter Two

It was strange how the city seemed alive some nights, the breathing of its people combining to form one great mass that moved in and out with mechanical regularity; the lights in the harbour blinked like its scales. The professor poured another drink into a glass that was already half full and took a gulp. He had always said to himself that at moments of extreme stress one needed to be at one’s best, not fall apart or fall into drink. In this case, though, none of that seemed relevant and all he wanted to do was get smashed, absolutely smashed. Fortunately, Lisa was on hand. She pulled the glass gently away from his lips. He barely noticed, and rested it on the table. Then she straightened his collar and kissed him on the forehead. ‘You should go to the police, uncle.’ The professor stared ahead making no sound. ‘They have gone too far doing this, whoever they are. Do you know who they are, uncle?’ The professor shook his head absently-mindedly, not wanting to re-join the world — not yet. Fraser brought Lisa a coffee from the kitchen. ‘It’s a mess everywhere,’ he said. ‘Even in there. Were they looking for the book?’

Lisa nodded. ‘I think so, don’t you, uncle?’

‘The book,’ the professor answered.

‘Uncle, you really must get some sleep. Fraser and I will stay here tonight, if you want.’

The professor stood up. ‘No,’ he said, kindly, drawing what little strength he had left back into his heart and mind. ‘No, they won’t be back tonight; they have done what they came here to do. They have terrified an old man — that was their intent.’

Lisa patted his shoulder, then hugged him. ‘Are you sure you don’t want us to stay?’

‘Yes, yes, you go. Be careful. I’ll go to bed. I’ll go to bed straight away.’

Lisa and Fraser left, leaving the professor alone in his apartment. Outside, the city hummed and throbbed, its dark shadows closed in around it, its winds encircled anyone walking along its streets. The lights, pink and orange neon, shone brightly against the black background of the night sky and the cars moved eerily along the roads.

Silently, a wisp of blue smoke twirled around the street lamp and spiralled up into the light. Quickly and quietly, it made its way along the horizontal of the lamp and, as if carried by some invisible internal force, flew into the air with languor. It weaved and swirled on the thermals of the night sky until it reached the professor’s window where it crept through the crack between the glass pane and the wall. It moved through the apartment until it found the professor, asleep in bed.

All was black and he was unable to breathe. There was no light anywhere. He scrabbled with his hands and felt only cold hard mud. The walls seemed to be closing in and there was a smell of iron in the air. Reaching down, he felt, on the floor, something hard, something brittle — it snapped as he picked it up and fell into shards in his hands.

He guessed it was bone he was touching and he guessed that this was a place where death had happened, where death had been invited. Gradually, his eyes began to become accustomed to the light and he groped about and felt the artefacts of the dead, shoes, clothing, hats, hair. He was glad that he could barely see, as his fingers drifted over partially recognisable objects that had been left by those who had perished here.

Suddenly he felt a wind on his cheek and turned, expecting to see light, but caught only a glimpse of a bright blue smoke that seemed to contain its own luminescence as it flitted through the black air of the cave. He thought to follow where it was going, hoping that it would lead to the outside, assuming that it was the smoke of some cigarette or camp fire that burned in the open air. He found that he was in a tunnel. Feeling with his hands he made out the distinct rounded construction of a military design. Still he followed the blue smoke; he felt by now as though it were leading him somewhere, although where he didn’t know. Then he heard a ringing. He turned his head. The ringing was incessant, constant. He placed his hands over his ears to stop it but it carried on. It got louder and louder until he thought he could bear it no longer. He closed his eyes and held them shut for minutes.

When he opened them again he was in bed. The sun was streaming in through the window. The professor looked at the alarm clock with disgust, reached an arm out and flicked the small switch on its side. Mornings were the worst part of the day. He got out of bed and remembered suddenly the events of the night before. Ignoring the chaos in his apartment he pulled on his trousers and shirt, took the book from his jacket and headed out of the front door. He had decided the night before that he would visit the University library and research the name Amichi as it related to cartography or Chinese Buddhist temples. He knew he didn’t have much to go on but libraries were his place, they were his territory and he knew he would be safe there, at least.

By the time he got there Lisa was already at one of the tables surrounded by books and opened newspapers. The professor sat down beside her and whispered, ‘How are you getting on?’

Lisa shook her head. ‘Not very well. Not one mention of Amichi in any of these books on Chinese Buddhist temples.’

She pointed to a stack of books a metre high. The professor laughed. ‘Have you left any books for anyone else?’

Lisa continued: ‘There is an Amichi mentioned in this volume by someone called Carter, but it’s far too early, probably two hundred years off, no way would this Amichi be our one.’

The professor sat back and thought a while. He pressed his hands together in a manner that suggested prayer; Lisa thought perhaps he was praying, but for what she did not know. Slowly, he began to speak.

‘What if… what if he is not connected with Buddhist temples at all, what if the book was merely a way of hiding the map? Wouldn’t that make sense, to hide a map inside a book that has little relevance to it? Perhaps the Buddhist temples were just a red herring to take us, and anyone, off the scent.’

‘But uncle, that takes us further away from finding an answer. How do we even start to look for someone called Amichi?’

The professor thought. ‘The girl,’ he said finally. ‘The television said that the girl was from a small island off the mainland. We have to find out which island. Perhaps she was related to this Amichi. Perhaps she is Amichi.’

‘Uncle, how do we even go about finding which of the islands we are looking for? There could be dozens of possibilities.’

The professor smiled. ‘The television also said that they were driving her body back tonight.’

Lisa asked, ‘How does that help us? We can’t follow them. We don’t know where she is or when she might be leaving.’

The professor tapped his forehead. ‘Listen, Lisa, they are driving her back tonight.’

‘Yes, but I still do not see how that helps us, they could drive her anywhere.’

‘To an island?’

Lisa stopped for a moment. ‘If the police are driving her to an island it must have a bridge. Why would they not say, be flying her back, or sailing her back. How many inhabited islands are connected to the mainland via bridge?’

Lisa stood and rushed off to the reference section to see if she could find a detailed map of Hong Kong, while the professor sat back in his chair. The smile on his face gave something of his satisfaction away and the slight tapping of his fingers on the desk suggested the rest.

Lisa came back with an arm full of maps and booklets.

‘There are five main bridges to inhabited islands. There are smaller ones but I guess records there would not be up to date anyhow. There is the Tsing Ma Bridge, of course — we can discount that, the Kap Sui Mun between Ma Wan and Lantau, the Ting Kau that connects the airport with Lantau, the Tsing Yi bridge that connects Tsing Yi and Tsing Chau and, lastly, the Ap Lei Chau bridge.’

The professor looked impressed. ‘Good work,’ he said. ‘Out of all those only the last leads to a small island off the mainland, Ap Lei Chau. It would be obvious that the police could use the bridge to take her home. There is a large population there and it is an easy place to hide if you wanted to. I am sure, however, that they would keep records of births, deaths and such like.’

‘Shall I get their number?’ Lisa asked.

‘Yes,’ the professor replied.

Lisa returned with the number for the small police station that was housed on the island of Ap Lei Chau. The professor looked at it quizzically. ‘Good job,’ he said. ‘Very good job indeed.’ Outside the city bustled and the air was thick with smoke and exhaust fumes. In amongst the traders that floated by the docks sat a man, thirty-five, one of those people that you find difficult to place. He looked Caucasian, yet there was something distinctly Oriental about him. His face had the easy grace of someone who had once had money but had had to come to terms with losing most of it in needless ways. On his head was perched an American air force cap that jarred with the dirty white shirt that he wore open to the waist. It was early in the morning and already Joe Hutchins had been drinking.

He was finding it hard to sleep these days. It was too noisy for one thing, this big city; there were too many things going on that he wanted to be a part of. Every time he closed his eyes he would think of something and have to get out of bed, but that wasn’t all. There were the visions. He called them visions but they were dreams, really — strange, weird dreams that seemed to come out of nowhere — that had suddenly started to affect him. Dreams of being trapped, of being in the dark, of smoke and flame and of death. He knew the dreams were leading him somewhere but he didn’t know where. So he drank and he drank heavily. It was barely midday and he had already finished a healthy bottle of bourbon, an American drink if ever there was one. Daddy would be proud! He raised the bottle and gave a toast to the brave boys of the American air force of which his father had been part. ‘Here’s to you, Pops,’ he said to no one and swigged another mouthful, gulping it down, trying not to bring it back up again. He was seated at one of the small stalls that grow like mushrooms about the Hong Kong waterfront. In front of him was a bowl of noodles that he had no intention of eating. Every now and then to appease his stomach he would buy a bowl of noodles and stare at it for a while before taking another sip of bourbon and throwing the whole bowl away. His stomach was fooled for a while and he didn’t have to go through the indignity of actually eating anything. There were some who might argue that Joey Hutchins’ life had hit a point of no return. He drank to keep out what was already inside his head but the more he drank the easier it was to sleep and the more he slept the easier life got. His father had been a US airman and his mother a dancer from China, not an unusual combination of nationalities in modern day Hong Kong but it had left him feeling out of place and alien. He was, it seemed, an alien in a land of aliens. He had wanted, of course, to follow in the old man’s footsteps, dear old dad, the brave US pilot, but since the ever increasing paranoia of Americans in the 1980s, neither country wanted to claim him for their own and he ended up working a small Cessna out of Hong Kong delivering packages to the more remote of the islands.

That was until his brush with the local law. It had been a tough time. The increased amount of traffic had slowed the flight paths down to the outer islands and besides he had no idea what was in any of the packages he couriered. He just picked them up and delivered them but, as he also knew, everyone hates the mailman. He should have known, though, he should have seen it coming, he had been in enough bars, enough gambling dens, enough dives to smell the smallest, sweetest smelling rat in the world. Money was tight, though, so he had taken the job.

There were three of them, in big expensive suits, with bulges in their pockets. Each of them wore enough gold to fund a small revolutionary army and had tattoos, in Chinese and English, on their hands, indicating which Chinese gang they were affiliated with. Up until then Joe had made a point of never accepting a job from anyone who smelt of cordite or who had tattoos on a part of their anatomy that couldn’t be covered up by a shirt but, as you already know, money was short.

It was the smallest of the three men who spoke: ‘How much do you want for taking this over?’

Joe replied, ‘The usual rate — five hundred dollars.’

The man slammed a handful of bills on the table. ‘There’s a thousand, do you want to take it on?’

Joe gulped. OK, he thought, let me weigh up the situation. I have never seen any of these guys before, all of them look as though they have one muscle too many, they are obviously packing guns, they are wearing suits that Trump would die for and they lay double the amount of money on the table. He looked at them again. He felt a trickle of sweat running down his neck. These were the moments his mother had warned him about before she killed herself. These were the type of men she had said his father was — a louse, losers, criminal. But then again so was he. These were the type of men who paid you in dollars and gave you your change in teeth — your own.

‘Hell, yes,’ Joe said with a smile. ‘Why not?’

So, he knew it now. He knew now it had been a ridiculous thing to want to do. Now he had the knowledge, now he had learned because if there was one thing you could say about Joey Hutchins, he learned from his mistakes. Mistakes were like women — it was never a good idea to visit the same one twice. Now it was easy to see he should have said thanks but no thanks and taken a beating. That would have been it, that would have been the end of it and he would still have had his plane. He would never have taken their money; he would never have delivered their parcel. He would never have flown over to some shit-kicking island and he would never have found the Hong Kong police waiting for him as he landed.

They searched his plane, found what they were looking for and impounded the Cessna ‘for further investigation’. It was only because he had known the arresting officer through a certain acquaintance of his mother’s (who it must be said knew a great many of the arresting officers of the Hong Kong police intimately) that he avoided being slung into jail and forgotten about. It was a bad time to lose the tools of your trade, just as the tourist season meant that the bars were opening. He had a lot of time on his hands and a lot of bars that would help relieve him of the thousand dollars that was burning a hole on his leg. He now also had a couple or three unknown thugs after him, eager to either get their property back or exchange it for one of his arms. He was rather attached to his arms or rather they were rather attached to him. That was when the dreams had started.

He could not remember exactly what day it was but it was definitely shortly after the bust. At first he had put them down to the drink. The type of bourbon they sold in the bars around Hong Kong could blind a normal man at thirty paces. Numerous times he had seen shiny faced tourists wandering through the dock with a sign saying ‘Drunk and foreign, please steal from me’ written on their backs or so it seemed to every petty thief and criminal that came their way. Hong Kong bourbon was made of the squeezings of old Kentucky liquor, the dregs that were left behind in the barrels. If Jack Daniels ever rose from the grave and wandered abroad he wanted to stay away from Hong Kong bars lest he end up crying in his sweet Southern whine: ‘What have they done, ma, what have they done to my wonderful brew?’

Soon, though, the dreams happened whatever state he was in. If he drank harder to forget them, there they were; if he went on the wagon to see if they would stop they would continue right over. It always started the same. The smoke, blue smoke swirling through his head then suddenly he was in blackness, a tunnel, he could barely see his hand in front of his face but he knew he was in a tunnel because of the walls, they bore down on him and threatened to crush him at any moment. He could smell the staleness of air that had been trapped for years and feel the oppressive atmosphere of a place of pain, fear and death. There was only the smoke that seemed to lead him in a direction that he had no choice but to go.

As he stepped he could feel his feet catching on stones and material but he could still see nothing. He stumbled and reached out to the wall of the tunnel — it was damp and cold. Treading carefully he made his way along the tunnel, running his hand along the wall for stability. Suddenly the wall on one side of him gave way to nothing and he realised he was standing in a large space in the tunnel. There was a presence here; the smoke got thicker around him. It smelt now of burning fires, hot and choking; the smoke got worse as he tried not to breathe it in. He put his hand to his mouth and nose and tried not to breathe but he could feel himself getting woozy. His head began to spin, he began to fall, a strange slow motion fall as if inch by inch, centimetre by centimetre.

Before he hit the ground he always woke up. He would jolt up, the sweat running down his forehead and into his eyes. He was more scared and lonelier than he had ever been since these dreams had started. There was something in them, an immense sadness that could not be expressed in any other way. Somehow he knew that something terrible had happened, something that had changed the balance of the world forever, something that was unforgivable — but what? He could not say. So he drank, he did not mind telling you if you asked. If you bought him a drink and asked: ‘Say, Joe, are you a drunk?’ he would look right back at you and nod his head. ‘You know?’ he would say. ‘I am drunker today than I been all my life and that’s saying something.’

He raised his bottle to the sky and gave a toast to whatever god was looking down on him. ‘Whoever you are up there, can you be sure to fill my bottle and empty my head for the night? Thanks.’

He drank heavily from the bottle, drained it of its contents and tossed it into the harbour. He looked up. There was a commotion, somewhere in the docks someone was making themselves known. Without looking round Joey Hutchins knew who it was: the guys in the suits who could crack heads for the Chinese Olympic team. Quickly he pushed his way through the crowd that had gathered outside the small café where he had bought his noodles. These places were on the dockside and very often had a back way to the harbour where the owners would unload essentials like rice, flour and illegal relatives.

He could hear the thugs behind him as he pushed his way to the back. Only this place hadn’t got a back way and unlike most of the shanty buildings round here this was built like the Hoover dam. He looked around him — nothing. Nowhere to go and nowhere to hide. This place must have just recently been taken over; there was very little in the way of weaponry about, just some old chopsticks, a pan and a huge bucket of fish heads that was waiting to go out with the trash.

Joe heard the thugs outside. They had seen him come — at least that’s what they thought they saw. Without thinking Joe climbed into the bin of fish heads. It stank like nothing he had ever experienced before. As he felt the juice slurping into his shoes, he could feel his stomach turn and he retched slightly as his shoulders hit the wet fish. Their eyes stared at his as he lowered his head under. He was glad he never ate now, he would hate to do this on a full stomach. It was hard to hear in the barrel but he could just make out voices and the scuffing of feet on a damp wooden floor.

Joe held his breath, more through the smell than any anxiety about being heard. There were voices, sharp and angry. The men stamped on the floor and thumped the walls.

‘Are you sure you saw him come in here?’

‘Yes, I told you, he pushed past everyone and came in here.’

‘These waterfront places all look the same from a distance.’

‘It was this one I tell you, the guy out front with the one tooth pointed in here.’

‘He could’ve been pointing next door as well.’

Suddenly the voices stopped and Joe guessed they had spotted the barrel. Quietly but easily audible through the wood and the wet fish heads, Joe heard footsteps inch over to where he was hiding.

There was silence for a while. Joe could almost hear the cogs in their heads working. Neither of them was blessed with brains, he thought to himself, neither of them was over-endowed in the head department.

One of them spoke. ‘What do you think?’

There was a pause. ‘Smells like tuna.’

Then the sound of a head being slapped with an open palm.

‘Is he in there?’

Joe could feel one of the figures closing in on him.

‘If he is,’ the voice said, ‘I don’t want him. Maybe you’re right; maybe he did go next door.’

There was a scuffling of feet and Joe heard the men barge their way out of the small space. He sighed with relief and breathed deeply again. All of sudden he remembered where he was and coughed as the thick smell of the fish hit the back of his throat. He fought his way out of the barrel and stood, soaking on the floor of the hut. His clothes were covered in fish guts and fish brains but he felt as if he had achieved something, something that he didn’t think was possible anymore — he’d outwitted someone. OK, so that someone was two rather dim hoods who were after his blood but he had still done it. He had proved to himself that he could still do it.

‘Let’s celebrate,’ he said aloud to no one and jangled the change in his pocket for effect.