Jade Woman l-12 Page 5

  “Lovejoy?”

  Somebody was shaking my shoulder. I awoke from a dream, but the jail bars were only the railing and the bottomless sucking pit below the night swirl of Hong Kong’s harbor.

  So much for vigilance. Mr. Goodman, though, was there with a Chinese bloke in the waterfront lights. I scrambled up trying to look worth an investment, smiling ingratiatingly. My bottom lip cracked and bled merrily. I gripped Goodman’s hand and wrung it.

  “Thanks for coming, sir. You’ll not regret it.”

  He gazed at me doubtfully. This boring fellow passenger seemed bigger than I remembered, more vital. Still the same florid bonhomie, only now he was inspecting me with a clear desire to keep his distance. I nodded and beamed at his reluctant companion.

  “I know I must look a mess. But if…” Instinct took over. I’d been about to beg for food, plus a few rubles to zip to Macao or phone Janie to cable some gelt. But a beggar is easily ignored. A bum offering a fortune, on the other hand, is a different kettle of fish.

  That decision kept Algernon out of the reckoning. It also saved my life. “But if you’ll just give me a try, any test, I’ll show you. I’ll divvy for you at that sale you talked of.”

  “You can hardly stand up, Lovejoy.”

  Shame washed over me. In his voice was the stern admonition the affluent always give to the penniless. Starving to death, old chap? Pull yourself together.

  “I told you why. I got dipped.”

  “Right. Sim?” His mistrust still showed. People were passing. Another ferry arrived, churned foam, did its slow spin to disgorge passengers. Sim pulled out of his pocket two small cups, porcelain bowls really. Ch’ien Lung teacups, in those blunt Cantonese colors.

  His companion spoke, his eyes fixed on me. “One genuine. One not genuine.”

  Fit or ill, you have to smile. An attempt had been made to copy the real thing, and believe me, a good fake is worth its weight in gold. The faker had got the glaze right, the scrolled red and green curled right, the design ideal. Lovely work, yes. But modern is always gunge. Only genuine antiques can chime your heart.

  “Which, Lovejoy? Right or left?”

  I took them from him, turned from Goodman and looked the Chinese bloke in the eye. I tossed both cups over my shoulder. They ploshed faintly in the water below.

  “Neither,” I said. “Allow me?”

  They stood there. I pointed to the Chinese bloke’s leather case. It was the sort I’d seen people carrying by a wrist loop. He glanced at Goodman, unzipped it and offered me a bundle of purple tissue. Even the blanketing lights couldn’t disguise the little bowl’s beauty. It was painted with a Chinese version of a European garden scene. They’re almost valuable enough to retire on, after the Hervouet sale in Monaco. In a dying flirt with rebellion I made them quiver by pretending, a quick gesture, to chuck that treasure after the duds. “Sorry, chuckie,” I told the eggshell porcelain. “Joke.” And returned it.

  The pair looked at each other.

  “I can do it again,” I said. “If I live that long.”

  “How much do you want to borrow?” Goodman said. His solemn mate muttered a bit in Cantonese.

  “Enough for one bellyful and a long-distance phone call. I’ll pay it back.”

  Goodman said dryly, “That’s what your sort always says, old chap. What guarantee do we have? The sale’s in three days.”

  “Keep me alive and I’ll do the viewing day with you.” Famished as I was, I felt narked.

  My lot? For heaven’s sake, I only wanted a bowl of those stringly boiled strips everybody in Kowloon seemed to be eating except me. “Look. I must have a couple of quid, mate, or I’ll die.” To me it seemed such a simple problem: Lend me a fiver and he’d have a trillion-percent return on his loan. “Is starvation such a crime here, for fuck’s sake? I’ll sign anything…” I stood abject, hating myself. Despicable.

  “Very well. Come on.”

  As I went along, walking quite quickly though having difficulty with a swaying world, I wondered what that expression was on Goodman’s face. His Chinese pal Sim showed only a shrewd understanding, but… ? Disgust. That was it. If I’d had the energy I’d have seethed. In fact I tried it for a millisec, but the concrete rose from underfoot and slammed my left shoulder. I found myself picked up and hauled into a taxi. My coordination had left me, hunger finally doing its job and cutting my feet from under.

  Instead of indignant, I felt really quite affable and sat looking out at the glittering shops gliding past outside.

  From my experience of later days I realize that we drove along the famous Nathan Road, through Tsim Sha Tsui, and across Jordan Road into Yau Ma Tei, with me smiling quite benignly at the evening crowds, the neon signs kaleidoscoping. The street traders were doing fantastic trade.

  We alighted near my old marketplace, now a clutch city of a thousand lights, paraffin lanterns roaring, every square inch occupied. There was a static crowd, I saw. The sudden astonishing din was an opera, right there in the open market. Still smiling and dying, but ever so politely, I stayed put as the taxi battled off. Each of the male characters on the ramshackle stage seemed to be covered in flags, sticks projecting up from their shoulders. You’ve never seen such decorated costume. And the makeup dead white, a foot thick, with rose cheeks. Fantastic. But the noodle stalls were vending away to the hungry. Bags of fruit were being passed—was it free?—among the audience. It was all very festive, steaming, and deafening, with people chatting irrespective of the stage goings-on. I promised myself to pay Chinese opera a proper visit in my next reincarnation.

  “Here you are,” Goodman was saying. His scorn showed. He shoved a couple of red notes in my hand. He and his oppo lit cigarettes, gazing at me. Tears started, and I’m not ashamed to say it. I clutched those two notes as if my life depended—well, it did, but you know what I mean. I tottered towards the nearest noodle vendor.

  Then the oddest thing.

  A couple of mahogany-skinned blokes came up, grinning. Nobody in the crowd took a blind bit of notice as they offered me a bit of brown chewing gum. They wore the frayed shorts, string vests, and sandals of those porters I’d seen laboring all day between vehicles and harbor lighters. One pressed the gum into my hand. I nodded and smiled. Some local custom? Then I tried it and spat it out. It wasn’t chewing gum at all. Politely shaking my head I pushed past their sudden cries of protest and at the nosh vendor.

  “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.

&n
bsp; “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.

  Then a woman tourist screamed and my heart turned over. I thought oh, Christ, no.

  Not now. I saw Sim—not sure, only possibly—duck into the shadows by a pearl shop. A man shouted in English, “Somebody call an ambulance.” Another called for the police.

  The tourists were in uproar. The Chinese, in what I eventually learned was a local quirk, were laughingly intrigued. Nervously, I worked my way across trying to look a casual bystander.

  A couple of those smart police were already there by the time I’d pushed close enough to see. The tourists, all apparently American, were explaining, pointing. Two women were in tears. One had blood smeared down the front of her dress. She was hysterical.

  “He fell out of the audience.” She made a two-handed falling gesture. “He caught hold of my dress.”

  Del Goodman, my salvation, lay partly upturned, his face macabre in the patchy light.

  There was blood everywhere. A policeman—God, but they’re calm in Hong Kong—

  moved away to control the traffic. The other gave serene instructions to his talkie, gently wafting everybody back with a hand. I felt sick, almost spewed up my tasty supper onto the corpse. Del, my savior, knifed. I tried to eel away but another policeman came beside me, gesturing with that languid motion towards the tourists, thinking I was one of them.

  “Er, no,” I said, trying a convincing smile, striving for out. The crisp money—

  Goodman’s—suddenly burned in my hand, and terror gripped. Once they got down to names and statements they’d pin me as the corpse’s erstwhile con-merchant associate.

  They’d find Del’s money on me. Then they’d hear of my feeble attempt with the airport police…

  The policeman’s gaze reverted from t
he middle distance and focused.

  “Tourist,” he said. That one word said it all. Either I was a suspect or a tourist.

  “Er.” I tried to edge off. His hand indolently chopped the air. Sickened, I halted, trying for that confident grin, knowing I’d had it. Then rescue came, of a kind.

  “He’s with me, officer,” a familiar voice said. Yet how could I recognize a strange voice a million miles from home?

  He was elegant and ponging of scent, outrageously dressed in a pink suit with matching trilby, his jacket slung over his shoulders. Bishop sleeves, gold rings winking on most digits, he was an apparition. I gaped. It was the Hooray who’d told me to get lost in the street market, who I’d tried to milk over that nephrite jade. The policeman’s attitude instantly changed to a faint disgust and I was free. Everybody found me disgusting.

  “This way, wretch,” the oddity said. Warily I moved in his wake through the mob as an ambulance howled its way into the press. I was justifiably apprehensive, because a hundred percent of all my allies had just got himself stabbed to death.

  An American lady said to my rescuer, “But Wayne, darling—”

  “Not now, dear,” he said with irritation. “In Hong Kong we go home when bodies simply litter the streets.”

  “What about tomorrow?” the lady complained. She was attractive and oppulent. A mere killing was incidental.

  He paused, working up to repartee. Obediently I also paused. “Tomorrow you can be even naughtier.”

  She simpered. “Promise, Wayne?”

  “What’s the point?” he said, flagging taxis. “You know my promises are utterly worthless. Seven o’clock precisely. Digga Dig.”

  “Good night, lover.”

  He pointed her into one taxi, and got into the next. I stood bewildered. He beckoned imperiously.

  “In, peasant.”

  I clambered after and sat. He lit a cigarette and settled back. A subtle change came over him as the taxi hooted its way into the melee of downtown Kowloon. Though it was knocking on for ten o’clock, the place was a riot. The world was out shopping, the streets afire with commerce. The signs and lights fought skyward for supremacy.