Mabeki made his way unobserved to within thirty feet of Zheng. He watched him take his cigarette out of his mouth, throw it down and grind it under his heel. Zheng looked around, checked his watch, then looked again. He did not look like a powerful man about to take charge of a tough negotiation. He looked like a frightened man wondering how he was going to explain to his superiors that he’d just let them down.
Mabeki let him sweat for a moment longer, then stepped out of the shadows and made his way between the large blue and yellow plastic containers from which the following morning’s fish would be sold. He deliberately let his right foot knock one of them as he walked by. The noise made Zheng spin round and catch sight of his old university friend.
Over the years, Mabeki had become a connoisseur of people’s reactions to his appearance, and Zheng’s was a classic example. In the space of a couple of seconds his face registered alarm at the unexpected noise, relief that it came from Mabeki, shock and revulsion at the first sight of his face, and finally, after an all-too-evident internal struggle, a bland mask of impassive self-control.
‘Hello, Johnny,’ Mabeki said.
‘Moses.’
They shook hands. Mabeki took a perverse pleasure from watching Zheng’s attempts to find a safe, polite place to look. He had seen it so many times, the way people could not help themselves staring at the scars, craters and distorted flesh of his face, no matter how much the sight disgusted them. He knew, too, the questions they all wanted to ask and the mental contortions they went through trying to find the right words with which to frame them.
Zheng did better than most. ‘I see what you mean,’ he said. ‘You have changed. May I ask what happened?’
‘I was shot. A nine-millimetre parabellum round fired at extreme close range passed right through my mouth from one side to the other. I was left for dead by the man who shot me. His mistake.’
‘Did you ever find him?’
‘He is about to find me.’
Zheng nodded thoughtfully. ‘I see. He is the problem you referred to?’
Mabeki gave a fractional nod of assent.
‘Then you’d better follow me,’ Zheng said.
They made their way out of the market and down to the water’s edge. A flight of stone steps with a polished metal handrail led down from the quayside. A square-bowed boat whose sturdy wooden hull was buffered with old tyres bumped up and down against the bottom steps in the swell of the water. The deck, sheltered by a canvas roof stretched across a metal frame, was scattered with plastic buckets and boxes. An old woman in loose grey pyjamas with a large mushroom-shaped straw hat on her head was standing barefoot among them. When she saw Zheng she rattled off a high-pitched, hectoring volley of incomprehensible Chinese, pointing at Mabeki as she spoke. Zheng bowed respectfully and replied in a far more conciliatory style. The old woman spat disgustedly on to the deck, glared at Mabeki, then made her way to the stern of the boat.
A second later, the boat was reversing away from the steps. The old woman turned it round, miraculously avoiding all the other boats clustered by the quay, then set off across the bay. The fishing boats were crammed so tightly that Mabeki could barely see the water, yet the woman steered between them with an ease that came from a lifetime’s practice, squeezing between hulls that seemed barely a hand’s breadth apart and heading straight towards apparent dead ends that miraculously opened up at her approach.
They passed under a road bridge across the harbour and saw, not far away, the dazzling strings of fairy-lights and gaudily painted hull of the Jumbo Kingdom floating restaurant, where four thousand customers could dine at a single sitting, rise in tiers into the night air, a huge temple of gastronomy and greed.
‘Impressive, isn’t it?’ said Zheng. ‘I’m afraid our destination is much more modest.’
That, Mabeki soon realized, was an understatement. The old woman brought their little boat to a halt by the rectangular, barge-like hull of a far smaller, dingier restaurant, moored on the far side of Aberdeen Harbour, connected to the shore by a red-painted walkway. A rusty metal ladder hung down from the side of the hull. The old woman nestled the blunt bow of her boat against the foot of the ladder and gave a dismissive gesture in its direction.
‘This is where we get off,’ said Zheng.
‘One moment,’ said Mabeki.
Turning his back on Zheng, who was already stepping gingerly on to the ladder, he took a few paces towards the old woman and, speaking quietly but with infinite menace, told her in Ndebele that she was a dung-eating whore of a baboon with shrivelled-up breasts and a closed-up cunt as dry as an old gourd. He revelled in the fear that spread across the crone’s incomprehending face as he loomed over her and let the poison of his malice fill her soul. In a louder, much friendlier voice, he switched to English and said, ‘Thank you for bringing us here, grandmother.’ Then he walked up to the bow and sprang with surprising athleticism, even grace, on to the ladder. A few seconds later, he was standing on the restaurant’s deck.
‘Let’s go,’ said Zheng.
He led Mabeki along a narrow walkway running down the side of the hull to the front entrance to the restaurant. There were no strings of fairy-lights here, just a scruffy, dimly lit interior where no more than a dozen tables were filled. The desultory hum of scattered conversations almost faded away as Mabeki walked by.
A white-jacketed waiter gave a respectful nod to Zheng as he walked to the back of the dining area, past the bar and through a door into a kitchen heavy with the smell of stir-fried food. Here, too, the atmosphere was half-dead. A handful of cooks were standing by one of the ranges, talking and smoking with the lassitude of men who did not expect to be taking many more orders that night. Zhen ignored them and led Mabeki to a metal door.
‘Watch your head,’ he said as he opened it and moved into a small store-cabin.
The walls were lined with metal shelves on which huge drums of cooking oil and soy sauce were crammed alongside cans, bags and glass jars of produce, packets of dried noodles and sacks of rice. A porthole, cut into the hull near the ceiling, had been opened to provide ventilation but the air was still thick with the cigarette smoke that rose from the four men sitting around a small wooden table, topped with a plastic cloth, in the middle of the cabin. All were as old as the woman who had piloted the boat. Dressed in a motley selection of sweaty, dirt-stained vests and tatty shirts, they looked like old dockside navvies, or lowly ship’s crewmen. In front of them, the table was covered in ivory mah-jongg tiles marked with Chinese characters, piles of notes in an assortment of currencies, bottles of spirits and cheap plastic tumblers, all illuminated by the single bare bulb that hung above the table.
Zheng approached the oldest man at the table and spoke quietly in his ear. The man looked up at Mabeki, who caught not a trace of discomfort, let alone fear, in his eyes. So this was Fisherman Zheng. Well, he was a tough, cold-blooded old bastard, that was for sure. But Mabeki wasn’t worried. He’d spent the past decade working for the biggest cold-blooded old bastard of them all. He’d fucked Henderson Gushungo’s wife and got away with it. He’d changed their relationship day by day, inch by inch, until he was the real master and Gushungo his puppet. He was entirely confident that he could deal with this old Chinese gangster, too.
Fisherman turned his attention back to his nephew. They spoke for a few seconds, and then Zheng spoke in English to Mabeki: ‘My uncle will hear your proposal. He wishes you to know, however, that nothing happens in Hong Kong without him knowing about it, or that he cannot discover within a matter of an hour or two. There is, therefore, no point in you trying to mislead or cheat him. It is very important, for your sake, that you understand this.’
Zheng lowered his voice. ‘Seriously, Moses, you don’t want to cross my uncle.’