Which left me still remembering Ariadne. Maybe because antiques are all I know, I decided I’d have to pin my hopes on antiques to keep breathing. Antiques send people off the rails. So antiques had to be my road in, and my way out. Lorna had heedlessly left money in my jacket pocket, silly cow. Well, I’d use my bit of it in a good cause. Six o’clock I rose, walked out due east, along Lockhart Road to Victoria Park. I went and stood among the Chinese at their slow ritual exercises—you see folk at this stately art early on every open space, quite unselfconscious. Not really knowing why or what I was doing, I copied an elderly bloke. Maybe forty of us, like somnambulistic chessmen. An hour, and I felt more at peace.
Eight o’clock and I’d had breakfast, signed out of the hotel. Eight-thirty I barged in on Steerforth, woke him from his stuporous kin, told him selected details about my night’s activities and Johny Chen’s fate—he nearly infarcted but I made my part quite innocent.
He recovered somewhat when I left him his percentage, then left saying I’d be around later because I’d a special job on.
An hour in a bathhouse made me years younger. I bought a pricey box of Belgian chocolates and made my way to the Flower Drum Emporium in a state of humility. I traveled in an air-conditioned taxi so the chocolates and I wouldn’t run in the heat. I was grovelingly ready to comply. I was also full of novel suggestions to further everybody else’s interests but my own. I’m at my best as a helpless and willing helper.
Same as all traitors.
Respectfully, I asked for Shiu-Won Wong, aka Marilyn.
19
« ^ »
THIS box is a prezzie, love,” I explained to Marilyn. “For the, er, large gentleman.
Please may I deliver them personally?”
I’d been kept waiting downstairs in the nightclub. Nothing as odious as a bar being Hoovered, is there. I’d watched the cleaners scrub and wash. God, they went at it. I now knew why.
Marilyn was interested, quick and smiley as ever. You wouldn’t have guessed that one of her men had been brutally extinguished, that she was an accomplice. For all I knew it happened ten times a week, a day. Even at this hour she was an hourglass in opalescent yellow, high collar and endearingly folded in silk. Mame had tried to wear a cheongsam and looked eccentric.
An hour later I was admitted to Fatty’s presence. He was being oiled on a vast wicker bed by two lovely lasses while I said my piece. I won’t go into details if you don’t mind.
Suffice it to say I was repulsive, fawning and servile, as I apologized for my stupidity. I groveled to be of service.
“You will be, stupid Lovejoy,” he squeaked. The girls’ patting hands sounded like clapper-boards.
“I mean still more, sir, if I may.”
“More?” Until now his eyes had been closed. Now one opened, a wary whale. “How more?”
“The American firm, sir. Brookers Gelman. They are big and famous. Your wonderful expertise makes money from them. Very admirable and clever.” The girls were on him, one treading his spine, the other massaging his pudgy shoulders.
“Yes. Clever.”
“So isn’t it unfair, sir, that you only make money from them when they visit Hong Kong?”
“Unfair?” More oil. The girl trod him slowly, toes pointed.
“Yes, sir. You should own them. Can I make a suggestion, sir… ?” For half a minute I spoke. Then my feet didn’t touch the ground.
“These floating restaurants are not the greatest in Cantonese cuisine, Lovejoy,” Ling Ling said. We were in Aberdeen’s well-nigh landlocked harbor on Hong Kong’s southern side.
“No?” I thought, her team killed Johny Chen.
“But they match our tourists’ notions of difference, culture. It’s the key to all profit.”
I hadn’t thought of that. Certainly the place was distinctive, an enormously tiered boat-house vessel wearing fantastic colored ornamentation, its open balconies overlooking the harbor. We were at a table alone. I was still dazed from the speed at which I’d been whisked out here by Fatty’s minions.
“Er, won’t we be overheard?” The restaurant was moored among junks and sampans so crammed you could hardly see any water. Steep hills rose on one side, a small city on the other. The whole harbor teemed. Cars snaked endlessly along the harbor road.
“No,” she said. That was that. She poured jasmine tea, a mission in elegance. I searched the table but she smiled a mute apology. “Milk, Lovejoy? Your Indian tea probably needs it. Our Chinese teas would drown.” I nodded to show I’d got the message. China is life’s ancient center; the rest of us are suburbia, barbarians even. Of course I was mesmerized, for perfection blinds. In the harbor below our balcony, a score of sampans jostled as tourists were ferried out simply to look at her. Faces gaped up in awe. I was in the presence of majesty.
“Tell me, Lovejoy. Did you enjoy our search?”
She meant the girl parade. “Er, gorgeous,” I said warily.
“But some more gorgeous than others, ne?”
“Yes. The ones picked out.”
“Some of those children were bought.” She laughed, concealing her mouth with her fan. “You are shocked, Lovejoy? One can buy—yes, buy— half a dozen beggar children in Bangkok, Thailand, for a hundred dollars.”
She was simply explaining. “I usually attend only the final screenings. We hold twenty such sessions a year here, over a hundred elsewhere—the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Burma, almost worldwide.”
“To find the prettiest? Some were babies still.”
“Of every hundred chosen, perhaps one has the intelligence, aptitude, the innate skills.
Some come close. One girl who had every attribute of excellence once nearly became a jade woman—only for us to discover she was unable to sing.”
“What happened to her?”
“She is… an assistant, responsible for our Wan Chai bars, Lovejoy. She is rich and happy, but will never be jade.”
My mind went, she means Marilyn.
“But if she’s gorgeous and clever… ?”
“Didn’t your Shakespeare say it, Lovejoy? ‘The dram of bale doth all the noble goodness off and out to its own scandal’?” She frowned. “Though the quotation varies, ne?”
“Oh, aye.” Waiters kept those tall cylindrical steaming baskets of mini food coming.
Ling Ling saw my puzzlement at the constant bawling. “The fokis are calling down to the people what dishes we chose, Lovejoy. It happens in all Cantonese restaurants. We are so interested in food.” She made a signal and the pace of arrival immediately quickened, to my relief. Eight or so goons lurked almost out of sight in the ship restaurant’s interior. Marilyn and two other women were sipping tea at a small table.
“We make a meal out of any part of any animal, it is said.”
She saw me hesitate, swiftly deflected my attention with opinions on the weather, trade, fashion, finally settling on antiques.
“Your scheme is unusual, Lovejoy.” I was halfway through some dumpling thing. My chopsticks were barely up to it, but hunger’s a sharp driver.
“I thought he’d be mad.”
“Angry? No. Business is business, Lovejoy, and money is power. It is also beautiful.”
“Why has Hong Kong so many definite rules, Ling Ling?”
“That’s the visitor’s problem, Lovejoy.” She turned her lovely head a fraction as a small zephyr came and died. Admirers in the sampans below were calling up, a sea of faces and cameras and coolie hats, asking her to look down for photographs. She indicated the hundreds of small vessels wedged in the nearby creek. Over the years they had simply settled into the mud. Gangways crisscrossed the raggedy but static fleet. “You have learned that Hong Kong is no sanctuary for the distressed.”