“A bowl, please.” I offered him a note. He shook his head, grinning. I offered him both notes. Again the headshake. A whole chorus of opinion and discussion started from the crowd. Most were noshing away with chopsticks.
“Please,” I said. “I’m hungry.” I felt like weeping. I’d thought myself safe with money to buy food, and rescue was as elusive as ever. What was the matter with my gelt? It looked genuine Hong Kong stuff. Was it that I wasn’t Chinese? But a small gaggle of American tourists were on the fringe of the opera audience, all merrily eating in fine fettle. So?
Wearily I peered around for Goodman and Sim, but the crowd and the lights and the shadow… My leg was tapped.
“Please,” I said, offering my red notes to someone, anyone.
The scent of the food made my head spin. I seemed to be the center of a small uprising. The hawker was expostulating, enjoying all this attention. Everyone was pressing close, pointing to my money, laughing. I was a sensation; dying in a private famine, but a riot. That tap on my calf, a definite tug.
A stub of a man was by my leg. And I really do mean a stub. No legs, hands almost gnarled into bumps. Age is difficult in Chinese, and in the shadows he could have been anything. He sat on a square of wood. He didn’t look too good, deformed as hell. Even his face was gnarled. A knobbly stub with no real hands.
But he held up a bowl.
It was between his two forearms. He held two chopsticks in his right pudge. I crouched down in the press while the crowd jabbered on round the vendor. The stub nodded at me, the bowl. He was offering me his grub.
“Look, mate,” I said weakly, knowing I was going to take it anyway but doing the conscience bit. “You look as if you’re on your last legs—er, sorry— as if you need it, never mind me.”
He shook his head. No capisco. I offered him my red notes, which puzzled him. I shrugged, took the bowl and stuffed my notes down the little geezer’s singlet.
The next few moments are unclear in my memory. I know I wolfed the grub and that another bowlful came and went. It was hot, oddly tasteless. But I engulfed it, not masticating a single calorie.
Maybe it was the weight of the grub in my belly making me bum-heavy like a budgie’s push toy, but the heat was suddenly oppressively heavy. The stubby bloke took his empty bowl back and, lodging it in a hole cut in his wooden square, went for more. He moved, I noticed, by thrusting at the ground with a stick strapped to each arm, poling himself along. The wood base was mounted on a pair of roller skates. I sat on the ground among everybody’s legs with the opera’s shrilly din and the arguing and the heat and the novelty of grub—and gently fainted.
“You’re not a junkie, Lovejoy,” Goodman said accusingly.
“Me? A dope addict?” I stared at him across the table. The restaurant was too posh, really. They had found some Indian tea, milk, sugar, and I was slowly coming together.
We were across the road from the street opera and its surging mob. I still don’t know how I got there. “You’re off your frigging nut, Del, er, sir.” Sim was enjoying himself debating through the menu with two white-jacketed waiters in voices raised over the hubbub of diners noshing and talking.
“You really were starving back there, weren’t you?” I must have stared because he shrugged apology. “We assumed all sorts.”
It came together. His disgust. And the chewing gum must have been opium or something. My beeline for grub must have seemed inexplicable.
“But why wouldn’t the hawker sell me any grub?”
Del Goodman had the grace to be embarrassed. “Sorry, old fruit. I’d given you two hundred-dollar notes. He hadn’t change. These street hawkers operate on fifty-cent courses.”
“You silly sod.”
“Sorry. I see now we’re in business.”
“Business?”
“The sale. Sim’s my firm’s auction controller. He handles our bids.”
“There is one thing, Mr. Goodman.” I swilled tea round my mouth. “Now I’ve tasted Hong Kong’s version of destitution, I don’t want another dose. So could you, er… ?”
He smiled. “Maybe start afresh, Lovejoy, eh?”
“I gave that little crippled bloke all the money.”
“Yes, well, Lovejoy.” He stirred uneasily in his seat while Sim positively blanched. “It was that which finally convinced us. When we saw you buy the leper’s—”
“Leper?” I closed my eyes, seeing that knobbly face, the tuberose features, the incredible ugliness of that scarring. I thought, Christ, will I start dying again, this time from something else?
“Surely you knew that? Wasn’t it obvious?”
The waiters returned to argue merrily with Sim while other waiters shouted encouraging advice and nearby diners chipped in. I was beginning to get the hang of Hong Kong: whatever’s going on, give it your pleased attention; if it involves money, join in the fracas and express opinion at maximum decibels. Sim marched off towards the bar with waiters in tow, all yakking.
“We’ll give you a health check, Lovejoy,” Goodman was saying.
“Meanwhile, er… ?”
Rather ruefully he passed me a bundle of notes. “That dollop you gave for a few noodles was over the odds, Lovejoy. In future, remember to haggle. It goes against the grain back home, but in Hong Kong nothing has a fixed price. Remember that.”
“Aye,” I promised dryly as Sim returned and the real grub started to arrive. “Except life.
I’ll remember.”
That meal I ate one-handed. I kept the other on the money. I’d learned the hard way.
But not enough, as it happened, for me and my friends.
7
« ^ »
WE left the restaurant, me deliriously happy. Sim and Del were talking animatedly as we hit the market again, probably about the killing they might make in the antiques sale. I was floating, passing the aromatic food stalls with a sneer and strolling between the gold and jade shops as if a full belly meant I owned the place. Still with a hand on my notes, I felt a big spender. Odd how different the world is when you stop dying.
“Wait.”
We were somehow near the emporium window where the Ming red lacquer food case had been. Gone. No wonder I now felt no chimes. I caught a sob. The galaxy of sham cheapos grinned shamelessly back at me. From those who come too late shall be taken away. Well, antique dealers are duds at collecting. And plumbers’ taps drip.
Still, now I was in business, hope returned. I began to notice shapes. “Nice to see birds without the camouflage,” I said over my shoulder to my new paymasters, who were too engrossed even to acknowledge the remark. “Back home even the slenderest girls dress like paras on flak patrol.” Here, shapes were definitely in. All the women managed to achieve a look, as it were. The one European woman I glimpsed wearing a cheongsam looked calamitously wrong.
“This opera a regular show?” I asked, pausing. The opera crowd was still chattering.
The stage still held a couple of characters bedecked with flags, the music shrilled, the actresses with their chalk faces and colored embroidery posturing. “How did it evolve?”
No answer. I turned, smiling pleasantly, on top of the world.
Gone. Sim and Del were gone. No harm done, though. They’d paused for a drink at a hawker’s barrow, right? I couldn’t see them.
Slightly uneasy, I strolled back along the edge of the crowd and paused, not wanting to stir too far from where I’d seen them last. The actors’ din continued, the audience noise. In fact the racket was so loud that the new tumult failed to register. Self-satisfaction is the downfall of actors and antique dealers, it seems, for we stayed oblivious as disorder spread through the crowd. People rose from their improvised seats, peering towards the cluster of tourists. I thought nothing of it, for people were calling out questions and trying to see the cause of the disturbance.