Hong Kong couldn’t stretch out, so it stretched up. Everywhere you looked, the older, lower tenements were giving way to massive, block-long high-rises that had the unmistakable anonymity of government housing projects. The private sector was on the move, too; when the existing buildings had overflowed, people had simply moved themselves and their belongings out into the side streets and jerry-rigged shacks out of tin, old sheets, and cardboard. A few of these pioneers with a little more cash or some connections had scored some precious wood and built actual walls.
Neal felt as if he had stepped off Nathan Road into a Malthusian scenario in which the eye could never rest. The landscape was literally crawling; there was motion everywhere he looked. Children scampered along the balconies and played the same games played by kids everywhere, but their games of hide-and-seek seemed to encompass hundreds of contestants, and there was no place to hide. Merchants lined the sidewalks hawking an infinite variety of goods. Old women stood at windows or balconies shaking out sheets and towels, while their husbands leaned over the railing and smoked cigarettes or spat out sunflower seeds while they talked with their neighbors.
The noise was incredible: a din of conversation, banter, argument, negotiation, advertisement, and protest all conducted in the singsong but rapid-fire Cantonese dialect. Old women expressed outrage over the price of a fish while their sisters moaned in triumph or despair over the clackety-clack of mah-jongg tiles. Men trumpeted the virtues of bolts of cheap cloth or the undoubted tenderness of a particular chicken, while their less ambitious brothers argued over the chances of a two-year-old filly at Happy Valley that afternoon. Children squealed with unrestrained joy, or giggled at some private joke, or wailed in misery as a mother hauled them by the hand back into a building.
Then Neal noticed the smell-or, more accurately, the smells. The aroma of cooking predominated. Neal could distinguish the smell of fish and rice, and it seemed to him there were dozens of odors that he didn’t recognize, smells that rose from steaming woks in the street shacks and hung over the area like a permanent cloud. There was also the smell of a sewage system that couldn’t begin to cope with the demands placed on it, and the underlying stink of standing human waste permeated the air. The acrid smoke of charcoal braziers, masses of burning cigarettes, and building power plants made the air thick and hazy, and competed with the salt air of the nearby sea.
Yaumatei was a total crowding of the senses. Neal, after spending the last six months as the only occupant of an open moor, could only imagine what it might be like to to inhabit a world where, from the moment of birth to the moment of death, one never experienced a single moment alone.
Chin and his crew moved through the crowd like sharks through the ocean, constantly in motion and serenely calm. Their eyes never seemed to move from a straight-ahead gaze, and yet they seemed to take in everything. Neal noticed that people in the crowd would spot them and then quickly find something fascinating to look at on the sidewalk until the gang passed by. No hawkers or loiterers or curious kids approached Neal, even thought they were several blocks off the main kweilo tourist route. He was sealed off.
It took them about ten minutes to find number 346, which looked pretty much like 344 or 345. The building was mustard yellow and only five stories tall. The typical balconies stuck out like guardian parapets, the colorful laundry resembling pennants.
“You have a flat number?” Chin asked Neal.
The Doorman stood in the building’s foyer, looking up the staircase. An ancient woman, clad entirely in black from her skullcap to her shoes, sat on a stool staring nervously at him between puffs of a cigarette.
“No.”
Chin laughed. “I’ll bet now you’re glad I came with you.”
He approached the old woman and spoke roughly to her in Cantonese. She spoke back just as roughly, and Neal felt relief when Chin laughed, reached into his pocket, and handed her a cigarette. Her eyes showed pleased surprise when she saw the Marlboro.
“Give me the picture,” Chin said.
Neal handed him the brochure, and Chin showed it to the old woman. She stared at it for a few seconds and gave a brief response.
“She knows her,” Chin explained to Neal, “but she wants more cigs to tell us.”
Neal felt a rush of excitement in his stomach. Li Lan might be just upstairs, a few seconds away.
“Ask her if she’s with a white man.”
“This old bag?”
“Li Lan.”
Chin’s face crinkled up in a broad smile as he looked at Neal and said, “I think I get it. You want the guy beat up?”
“No.”
“Suit yourself.”
Chin turned back to the woman and handed her three more Marlboros. She snatched them, then snarled at him and stuck her hand out.
“Gau la!” Chin answered. (“Enough!”)
“Hou!” (“Yes!”)
Chin gave her one more cigarette.
“Do jeh.” (“Thank you.”) She shoved the cigarettes in her jacket pocket and then pointed upstairs and gave directions.
“Mgoi,” Chin said sarcastically. (“Thanks for the help.”) “Upstairs, fourth floor.”
The doorman went ahead of them and two of the crew followed. The third stayed at the lobby door.
When they reached the apartment, Neal said, “I want to talk to her alone.”
“We’ll wait out here,” Chin agreed.
Neal felt his heart racing as he knocked on the door. There was no answer, no scuffling of feet, no cease in conversation. He knocked again. Still no answer. The third time wasn’t a charm. The locked door presented only a momentary inconvenience, and Ben Chin nodded approvingly at Neal’s dexterity with his AmEx card.
“Fuck!” Neal yelled.
The apartment was empty. Not merely unoccupied, but empty. No clothes, no cooking utensils, dishes, pictures, old magazines, toilet paper, toothbrushes… A bare bed and an old rattan chair were the sole occupants of the one-room apartment.
Neal looked out the window at the balcony. Nothing. He turned around to see Ben Chin standing in the open doorway. Chin looked angry, a lot angrier than he should have been, but Neal didn’t notice it. He was too pissed off.
“Go get the Old Mother,” Chin said to the Doorman in Cantonese. Then he turned back to Neal and said, “It looks like you missed her.”
“No kidding.”
“She must have just left. Apartments don’t stay empty long around here.”
“She took the time to clean it.”
Chin laughed. “Maybe. It’s more likely, though, that the neighbors stripped it the second she walked out the door.”
Pretty goddamn inconsiderate of the neighbors. Didn’t they know I’d want to search for clues?
Neal heard the old woman squawking in the staircase. The Doorman brought her into the room. At Chin’s signal he shut the door behind them.
“Are you a ghost?” Chin said to her in Cantonese. He walked across the room and opened the window. “Can you fly?”
Neal didn’t understand the words, but the threat was fairly clear. A thug is a thug is a thug, and his techniques vary little from culture to culture.
“Come on, Ben,” Neal said, feeling more tired than he had for years.
Chin ignored him.
“Answer me,” he said to the old woman. “Are you a ghost? Can you fly?”