The sea was unbelievably calm but an ugly khaki color, showing where the laterite soil had been washed from Hong Kong’s mountains.
Stanley Village was a cheerful low place, not seeming very affluent. I was accompanied across the strand by my two goons, Marilyn staying behind.
A religious procession was going on, a little girl propped upright on a kind of lofty palanquin. She was plastered with garish makeup. Her clothes were an embroiderer’s dream of exploding colors and shapes, phony flowers everywhere. Pity none of the gear was antique. She was carried on the shoulders of a dozen men. The procession to where a tent had been set up for prayers included a straggle of shaven monks in saffron robes. Incense wafted out on the chants. An ancient gong was struck, thank God correctly—in a rapid succession of light taps that crescendoed into truly beautiful sound; not one quick wallop like Bombadier Wells at the start of those old Rank movies.
It pulled at my heartstrings to hear that exquisite antique. You can make a fortune with one gong, so desperate are collectors for them. The goons hustled me into a car for the half-mile drive up Stanley Peninsula.
Ling Ling was in a palatial villa, overlooking a bay and a parallel peninsula from the patio, quite alone except for three lovely attendants, two servants, and a tableau of four bodyguards watching me through glass. Everybody cleared off, leaving me. The view was sheer delight. I’d have believed her if she’d told me she had ordered it specially. A genuine full set of Chinese Tien Jesuitware was laid on the table before her, ready. This giddily valuable porcelain is seventeenth century. Imagine black penciled-looking drawings with pastel colors on the cup bodies, with blue and gold designed squares below the outer rim. The scenes are often deer and tiger hunts. She was about to have afternoon chocolate, but not with me.
“Your urgent matter, Lovejoy?”
“Er, a studio, please. Air-conditioned. The equipment I’ll need’s on this.” I pulled out a sweat-sogged paper. “Within six days, from these addresses—”
Her hand moved a fraction. A goon nipped in, took my list, vanished back into his aquarium. “And?”
“Help. Somebody neat, precise, trusted.” We waited. A distant junk drew a slow shining line across the bay. I could just hear its chugging bloody engine. Its ancient russet sails would have made a superb picture. Christ, but I was frightened. I asked, “Was that the hill, the one over there?” I knew it wasn’t.
So far she had not looked at me. “Hill?”
“Where they left you.” I discovered you can be terrified and dejected together. “Your mother and father, when you were born.”
She looked then. My existence hung. I swear her face went white as chalk. Life, but not as I knew it. Her voice was almost inaudible.
“You cannot know this.”
“It’s a miracle you survived,” I said helpfully. “Snow in Hong Kong and all. Look on it as a kind of luck. From nothing to everything.” I hesitated. This was no time to remind her of her power over a nerk like me.
“Luck? Cast on a hillside to die? Luck?”
“Certainly, love.” I sat down on the carved chair unasked, eager to convince. “Who succeeds most, eh? Why, the one who starts off with least and gets farthest! Like you.”
“Luck? Existing all my infancy hidden in a hovel by the lowest of the low, fed on stolen scraps? Without parents?”
“Without—? You’re bloody barmy! Sorry, I meant, er, he provided for you as well as he possibly—”
“He?” I got the white visage full on. “He? How can you know these things?”
“Well,” I said lamely. I was going to say that blokes seemed to be the providers in Hong Kong. And I’d read that the man of the family was referred to as See-Tau, the
“Business Head.”
“I’ve a secret crystal ball.”
“Where?” She looked about to faint, her lips blue.
“Just pretending,” I said frantically, scared to death. Was she batty, believing my jokes but disbelieving everything else?
“Leave, Lovejoy.”
“Er, please. Can I have Marilyn for my helper? You see—”
She moved her hand. Three hoodlums hurtled in and dragged me out of the villa backwards and into the limo. Leung for once didn’t offer me any sunflower seeds. We careered down the peninsula and shot westward through Stanley with Ong rabbiting into a radio. I was breathless. What was I supposed to have found out, for God’s sake?
I’d assumed I was being friendly. We slowed to a sane speed by Repulse Bay.
Then a strange thing. They stopped at the junk builders’ slipway in Aberdeen and politely let me see the great seagoing craft being created. No antique models, but I felt it was a sign. Things were possibly looking up.
27
« ^ »
YOUR expensive materials will be in Hong Kong in three days, Lovejoy.”
“Oh, aye.” That couldn’t be right, for most of the stuff was from East Anglia. But I’d learned not to argue.
Marilyn tapped a thick envelope with that laugh I was coming to recognize as Hong Kong’s way of signaling that money had been mentioned. It means anything or naught.
“You will select your studio today.”
We were in the Canton Road jade market noshing some dim sum, the waiters flitting about carrying wicker cylinders full of hot bite-size grub, jubilantly yelling what they’d got. Beats me how they keep going without getting scalded. Marilyn hardly ate anything.
“Some of that’s not jade.” We were watching a jade seller. “It’s Burmese agate.” The old devil was parading a string of lovely translucent green pieces much shinier than jade. “And those other pieces are from a funeral.” Jades in halves have usually been cut from a corpse—bangles especially. In the old days jade was buried with the deceased as an emblem of immortality. “Rotten twister.”
“Say nothing. It’s survival for him.”
That shut me up. He went on his way, offering and boasting. Most of the street jade I’d seen was from New Zealand or the Americas, and carved no earlier than last week.
“Did you get the list of addresses I gave to Ling Ling? Paints, brushes, materials, canvases in special sizes, all that? Only, it’s urgent. I can phone East Anglia. This bloke—”
“Your Tinker is insufficiently fast, Lovejoy.” Which stopped my breath. That’s my trouble. I always think I’m secret.
“Your agents know that everything has to be handmade? The pigments must be ground from natural minerals, made by old processes.” She gave the money laugh. I was all on edge, maybe because I’d had a couple of kai bau tsai, chicken buns steamed to solidity, which slam your belly to the floor. It was a struggle finishing the sweet fungus dumplings and coconut pud.
I shrugged and rose. The waiter came to tot up the bill. The little dishes littering our table were all different shapes—easy to price the nosh, see. Marilyn paid and we stepped outside into the slamming heat.
“Okay, assistant,” I said. “Let’s stop mucking about and go for gold.”
Now to pull off the eighth wonder of the world.
Searching for my studio was an incidental, tiring and of little importance. But something happened which gave me understanding.
We scoured Hong Kong both sides of the harbor. I had a good look at some places Marilyn showed me, and finally decided on a second-floor flat in Wan Chai, big windows, north aspect.
“Ah,” she said. “This one may not be possible, Lovejoy.”
I was narked. “The Triad promised me anything, love.” Just because a woman’s beautiful doesn’t entitle her to welsh on a deal. When my life’s on the line it especially doesn’t.
“Ah Chuen?” We’d collected this old lazaroid bloke who smoked incessantly—cigarettes, I hasten to add—and trailed us in a rickety van. I’d asked Marilyn about him because he was treated with respect by our bodyguards.