Bad Traffic (9 page)

Jian examined the gun. It seemed a decent model but the ammunition was a joke: it looked likely to jam or even blow up in his face. He’d have to test it. He pointed it at the old man and rested his finger on the trigger and the man waved his arms and jabbered.

He had worked the story out, it was simple enough – he didn’t need to be told. Some guy tries to be brave and the innocent end up hurt, he’d heard it many times. Everything the old man said was an irritation, it was like having an insect buzzing in your ear.

‘You think I will become the agent of your revenge?’

Jian wanted him to die. He raised the gun. He said, ‘You killed my daughter, as much as anyone. You did. It was you.’

The old man retreated, hurrying behind the counter,
talking
, talking. Jian stalked after him into the kitchen. The man was scrabbling at the back door.

He fired into the side of a freezer. The shot resounded in the small space and, after, there was a ringing silence and a whiff of cordite. He inspected the bullethole. The bullet had passed through the outer layer of plastic but had not penetrated into the interior. So these shrink-wrapped bullets did not have much stopping power – but at least the gun worked.

‘Shut up. You going to help me, or not?’

The old man was talking even faster. Jian had shot the freezer for safety, its plastic surface the only one a bullet would not ricochet off. But let the man think him insane and irrational, it would keep him nervous.

He held the pink phone delicately between two fingers and pocketed it. The gun went into his jacket, along with a chopper and a fruit knife.

‘Let’s go, then. That’s right. You piece of shit. Let’s go.’

The old man locked the place up. Jian said, ‘How fortunate that I should appear, and become the agent of your
vengeance
. You think you are so cunning, don’t you? I hate you.’

The old man smiled and nodded and led him round the corner and into a car.

‘I hope you die like my daughter died. You old coward.’

At the dog end of the Cultural Revolution Jian had joined the army, and had fought in an obscure, inglorious and inconclusive war against the Vietnamese. A sensible lad and a bad soldier, he had kept his head down. He’d learned to hate infested bunkers, and he’d spent as much time as he could developing political awareness, because it happened in a dry classroom.

He had come to know the contents of his little red book, ‘The Thoughts of Chairman Mao’ off by heart. He was taught that, at times of stress, all good communist soldiers calmed themselves with those wise words. Indeed, he had found that, even under fire, by filling his head with the babble of those mantras he was able to function.

Now, in the warm car, woozy with fatigue and anguish, his old survival technique came back to him. ‘Exploitation of the working class for profit constitutes one side of the character of the national bourgeoisie,’ chanted the voice in his head. ‘While its support of the constitution and its
willingness
to accept socialist transformation constitute the other.’ It made him feel like a soldier again.

Jian considered it quite possible that he was walking into a trap. It would have been a simple matter for the old man to arrange an ambush. But instinct told him that the old man hated this tong almost as much as he feared them. He closed his eyes, thinking to rest for a couple of minutes.

When he opened them the old man was shaking him. He had no idea how long he’d been out. It had been more like a blackout than slumber. They were parked on a dark street without lights. The old man pointed at a door and mimed holding the namecard up to the CCTV camera just visible above it. Jian snatched the card and got out of the car with the gun heavy in his pocket and the car was accelerating away before the door had finished swinging closed.

Jian’s breath was juddery and shallow. He was
disorientated
after his sleep, and there was a black pit at the edge of consciousness, but he could not fall into it yet. He reflected that only on one subject was it worth listening to Mao and that was how to win a battle. Fight no battle unprepared, fight no battle you are not sure of winning, and concentrate an absolutely superior force on the enemy’s weak points. He was clearly now acting against the old fraud’s precepts. At the least he should have a plan, he should reconnoitre, he should rest.

But his despair was like a sediment: without movement, it began to settle and clog. He could not stand still.

Paint was peeling on the surface of the door. The window for the address was empty. He pressed it, thinking it was
the door buzzer, pressed the maker’s name, then, third time lucky, got the button.

He had been a bad father. He had not loved the girl’s mother – and then, of course, he had killed her. He had not been there for her when she was growing up, every day he had failed her. He had been guilty of sending her away. And now these people had taken her away from him. Killing these people would be nothing. It would not be so hard. Just carrying on, finding the strength to get up in the morning – that, he knew, was going to be difficult.

He did not care that he was one man and they were four. He did not care for the risk, or if he lived or died. His only anxiety was that he be stopped before he had killed any of them. He was anxious to kill the one who called
himself
Black Fort – the others didn’t matter, they were
followers
, hatchetmen. Even if they had been the ones who… the ones who… his mind wrenched away from that thought, he couldn’t allow himself to complete it as words. If he could just kill Black Fort, then it wouldn’t matter what happened to him afterwards – nothing would matter.

A voice crackled through the speaker. A girl, Chinese, a bark of inquiry.

He held the namecard up to the camera and the door lock buzzed.

The door led into a dark, narrow hallway. The only
decoration
was a print of a bare-chested Chinese girl carrying a vase on one shoulder. He knew the picture, it was popular back home. Her big doe eyes and pert tits brightened up a lot of dingy rooms.

Stairs led up. He noted that his palms were not even sweating, a numb fatalism had stolen over him. Let what was about to happen, happen. He felt the gun in his pocket. The chopper was in his waistband and the fruit knife was tucked into a sock.

In his war he had shot and killed one man, a
stretcher-bearer
. There had been nothing dramatic about it – a retort, a distant figure glimpsed through smoke fell over – and it was a minor event in the great clamour all around, but in
retrospect
it had grown in significance. He had the taint of
violence
, he knew what it was and what it did to you, and he knew that to be successful now, he could not falter before the ugliness of it. He opened a door.

A Chinese girl smiled at him from behind a bar. She’d lightened her face with pale foundation and there was a line around her jaw where the make-up stopped and a darker neck began. In the dim light of the room’s red tinted bulb she almost got away with it, but in daylight she’d look like a ghost. She said something in Cantonese and gestured at a leather sofa.

Two heavily made-up Chinese girls sat there, one massaging the feet of the other. The girl receiving wore a figure-hugging qipao slit to the thigh. Beneath her black
stockings Jian could see blisters on the back of her ankles. Her high-heeled shoes lay on the floor. The other girl, dressed in jeans and a tight T-shirt, kneaded her feet with strong, stubby fingers.

Jian understood. He’d spent enough time in these kind of places, usually in his official capacity, but not always. Aware of the watching barmaid he pretended to be horny and nervous. He sat on an empty sofa and lit a 555. A cardboard cut-out of a half-recognised blonde actress smiled broadly. She was trying to keep her white dress down around her waist as it ballooned up, without much success. On the stale air he smelled cloying perfume,
cigarette
smoke and a faintly sour chemical undertone, a hospital odour. The ashtray was half full, the carpet
peppered
with cigarette burns.

The girl behind the bar said something else, and he replied, ‘
Dui bu qi, wo ting bu dong
… I’m sorry, I don’t understand.’

‘Oh,’ said the girl in the qipao. ‘
Ni shi zhong guo ren
… you’re a mainlander.’ She sat up.

‘Where are you from?’ asked the girl in jeans.

‘The northeast.’

‘Oh, a beautiful place.’ She began to sing a popular song, tilting her head from side to side to mark the rhythm. ‘
Wo shi yige dongbei ren, wo shi yige hao peng you…
. I am a northeasterner, I am a good friend to have.’ She had a good voice. He noticed that there was tissue paper tucked into the back of her shoes, to make them fit.

From her accent, the girl was from central China – he guessed Henan. She had a squat build and a ruddy
complexion
. Like the barmaid, she had tried to lighten her skin with make-up. Though her nails were long, her fingers were thick and calloused. A peasant girl – you could see her in any small Chinese town.

‘We don’t meet many mainlanders. It’s nice to speak real Chinese again. We have to try and learn English.’

The girl in the qipao said, ‘Would you like a massage?’ and the other girl repeated the statement.

‘Yes, please,’ said Jian. He pointed at the girl with the jeans on because she seemed more docile.

‘How much does it cost?’

‘Thirty pounds.’

‘Is that all-inclusive?’

‘One time. Half an hour. Nothing kinky.’

‘Let’s go.’

The girl took his hand and led him down a corridor. The red light here was even dimmer. The floor was tile, and a mop and bucket were propped in a corner. Sliding doors led off.

The girl knocked on a door, then opened it. The cubicle beyond held a fold-up bed. Jian pretended to stumble,
knocking
against the plasterboard division. It didn’t feel very strong: he reckoned he could kick through it if he had to.

‘Have you been drinking?’ she asked.

He looked around for an alarm button but couldn’t see one. He stood in front of the door.

‘Tell me about this place. How many girls are there?’

‘Eight. Give or take.’

‘How many are here now?’

‘Huh? All of them.’

‘And are there men here?’

‘Why? Do you like men? That can be arranged, but you’ll have to talk to the girl at the front.’

‘I want to know how many men are here now and I want to know where they are.’

‘I don’t think I can tell you that. Why don’t you make yourself comfortable?’

She took off her T-shirt, revealing a frilly padded bra. Her arms were bony, with a bluish bruise on the inside of one elbow. It looked like the mark left by an injection. He took her arm and rubbed it. Make-up came off, revealing needle scars. A junkie then. Probably they all were, it would help keep them pliant.

She said, ‘Do you like what you see?’

‘I’ll give you money if you talk to me. Tell me where the boss is.’

‘I don’t deal with money. You’re going to get me into trouble. Please don’t get me into
trouble
. Please, I’ll be punished. I can’t help you. I just do massage. I don’t know anything about anything.’

He guessed that hatchetmen were at the front, and the brains at the back. The building was four storeys high, and now they were on the second. He had to find the stairs.

‘I just want you to be satisfied,’ said the girl. She put a
finger
on the inside of her lip, dipped her head and batted
eyelashes
gloopy with liner.

‘Stay here.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘Stay where you are.’

But she followed him into the corridor. He worried that he was making a mess of this. If he didn’t stop her she’d run straight to the club enforcers. He grabbed her arm squeezed, and showed her his gun.

‘We’re going upstairs.’

She shrieked.

‘Nothing is going to happen to you. Shut up.’

She wet herself. Her eyes were huge with fear and she was gibbering and her legs were trembling so much she couldn’t walk. He let her go. This was not going well.

A cubicle door slid open and a girl peeped out. Jian supposed she could not see the gun, but she could see her colleague being mishandled, and that was enough. She ran lightly on bare feet into the corridor and back towards the bar.

He left the girl and ran the other way, deeper into the building, and found a door at the end of the corridor. It led to a flight of stairs going up. He took them quickly, three or four at a time. He slammed a door open and found himself in another corridor of closed cubicles, just like downstairs. He opened one. A slim girl sat on a fat man. She turned, and gasped when she saw the gun.

‘Where’s the boss?’

The man stopped groaning and raised himself.
Struggling
to sit up, he tipped the girl over and onto the floor. His condommed penis wiggled as he thrashed around.

‘Where’s the boss?’ Jian barked. But either she didn’t understand or was too shocked to speak.

He heard running feet behind him. He turned and a man shouted – some threat or curse, probably. Dragon tattoo on the arm, four gold rings. No leather coat now, just a T-shirt, and the tattoo could be seen curling all the way to his
shoulder
. Yes, he had seen this man before, stumbling along the pavement outside the Floating Lotus.

He aimed and fired. The man looked shocked, then
worried
. He put a hand on the wall. Jian moved close enough to smell the booze on him and shot him again, and the man fell down. He felt a light sprinkle on his face and wiped it
with his sleeve. It was blood. He looked down and saw that his clothes and shoes were similarly spattered. He felt the wooziness of shock steal over him and in his mind babbled to keep from freezing up. Sometimes in the revolutionary struggle the difficulties outweigh the favourable
conditions
and so constitute the principal aspect of the
contradiction
.

A door slid open and a girl peeked out. Her eyes widened. She ran out, naked and squealing. Jian forced himself to focus. He had to find Black Fort, and flashed the two
characters
of the name across his mind. Where the girl had run, there must be more stairs.

He found a dim stairwell with bare tile steps. Yellowish light spilled from the floor above, red from below. The walls were mildewed concrete. He could hear the naked girl
padding
down and now he became aware of more sounds, of pounding feet and shouts and screams. He wondered how long they had been going on for and how he had not become aware of them before. A clanging alarm started to ring.

A portly middle-aged man, naked but for a towel held over his crotch, shuffled in from the corridor. Jian waved the gun at him and he dropped the towel in fright and ran out again. The stairs up led to a dingy stairwell with a normal bulb, not a red one. The shift was abrupt, like breaking out of water into sunlight.

Blinking, his gun raised, Jian banged a door open with his shoulder. The layout of the corridor here was the same as downstairs – plasterboard divisions and sliding doors
dividing
the space into cubicles. But here there was no attempt at decor. Unshaded bulbs lit a scuffed laminate floor and unpainted walls.

Jian slid a door back. The room beyond was the same dimensions as those downstairs, and held two double bunk
beds with just enough space to move sideways between them. Girls’ clothes hung from the metal bedframes and from pipes running along the ceiling. Towels and make-up were scattered over the floor and across the beds.

A window was boarded with rotting planks. Underwear hung from the blunt ends of the nails. A picture of green trees and hills, ripped from a magazine, was tacked to the central board. The place reminded him of a cell, and stank of bodies and perfume.

He closed the door out of instinctive politeness and strode past more cubicles. The only proper door opened into a rank little bathroom. A hose with a showerhead attached ran from a tap on the sink. The porcelain was streaky with brown mould. Lines of drying laundry criss-crossed the
ceiling
. A window was nailed shut and black paint had been slapped over the glass.

This was no good. This was where the girls lived, the boss would be far from here. He should have gone to the front, not the rear. Worrying that he’d missed his chance, he rushed back to the stairs and dropped into the red glow. The clamour of the alarm continued.

Hurtling back along the corridor he almost stumbled on a body and it took a moment for him to realise that he had made the ugly thing. The face was slack, the mouth hung open and the tongue flopped out. Someone had trodden in the pool of blood and now dark footprints led away, partial prints of the balls and toes of small, bare feet. He followed them towards the bar.