Hawaii (78 page)

"What's the job?"

"I've got a girl tied up in the little room. Been planning to ship her to Manila. We can't use her here, as you'll see. Will you deliver her to my friend in the Fragrant Tree Country?"

"I will. Which room?"

"The one where the Russian girl used to be."

Mun Ki forgot his gambling for a moment, walked down a narrow hall, and kicked open the familiar door. Inside, the blinds were drawn, and in the darkness, on the floor, lay a trussed-up girl,

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knees lashed to chin, almost unconscious from hunger and kck of water. With his foot Mun Ki rolled her over and saw that she was dressed in a cheap blue cotton smock and trousers; her big feet proved that she was a Hakka. In disgust Mun Ki slammed the door and returned to his employer.

"Who wants a Hakka?" he demanded.

"Nobody," the brothel keeper agreed. "I paid some of General Wang's soldiers to kidnap half a dozen girls, and they brought back this one. I was going to send her to Manila. Over there they don't know the difference."

"How much for me if I take her to the Fragrant Tree Country?" Mun Ki asked.

"Twenty Mexican dollars," the proprietor replied.

"Paid now? I'd like to double it in the gambling rooms."

"Half paid now," the canny brothel keeper agreed.

He gave Mun Ki the ten Mexican dollars, and the young man was about to dash over to the gambling, but the proprietor suggested, "Maybe you better feed her. She's been tied up for two days. The soldiers seem to have treated her rather badly before they turned her in, and I was afraid she might run away after I had paid for her."

"Did you give much?" Mun Ki inquired.

"For a Hakka? That I couldn't use?"

The young gambler returned to the room, yelled for a maid to bring him some hot tea and rice, and then parted the curtains. He saw at his feet a young Hakka woman of about eighteen. Even when her face healed she would probably not be a pretty woman, and the manner in which she was gagged and trussed did not permit any estimate of her general appearance. Therefore, more in a spirit of investigation than humanity Mun Ki kneeled down and started to untie die merciless ropes. As he loosened one after the other, he could hear the girl groaning with relief, but he noticed that even so her limbs did not automatically stretch out toward their normal position, for they had been constricted so long that some of their muscles had gone into spasm. Again motivated by investigation, he started gently to unfold her hands and pull her arms down along her body. He pushed her shoulders back and could hear joints creaking in protest. She groaned deeply and fainted, but then the maid brought the tray, and he applied tea to her lips and gradually she regained consciousness and began to drink. She was so desperate for liquids that even Mun Ki was impressed, and he sent for more tea. As its warmth circulated through her body, the girl began to return to an awareness of where she was, and she looked in terror at the man who held her, but the manner in which he started to feed her the rice, waiting until she had chewed each grain lovingly, lest someone steal it from her . . . this made her think that perhaps he might not be like the others who had captured her that night before the Ching Ming festival. The things they had done in the three weeks they had dragged her and their other captives through 'the

countryside she had already forgotten, for they were too terrible to remember. Instinctively she felt that this man would not treat her so.

Char Nyuk Tsin was the first Hakka the young gambler had ever touched, and it was with instinctive loathing that he now did so, and yet it was a strange fact that her response to his kindness moved him and made him want to be kinder yet. He held her shoulders in his left arm and fed her warm rice with his right, and when the maid brought in some cabbage broth, he gave her the spoon and encouraged her to eat, but her wrists were so swollen from the ropes that she could not do so. He therefore started to massage them, and gradually blood circulated to her fingers and she could hold the spoon, but she could not operate her shoulders. So he massaged her back and neck, and instinctively his hand slipped forward over her shoulders and he felt her hard little breasts. Almost against his will there came a moment of awakening, and he felt memories of his soft young wife from the Kung village come flooding over him, and he lifted away Nyuk Tsin's smock and caressed her body, and then he slipped off her trousers, and when her knees and ankles remained in their rigid, muscle-locked condition, he gently massaged them until they relaxed, and he saw with increasing pleasure how slim and beautiful this girl's body was. Reminded of his bride, he quickly slid out of his clothes and threw them against the door, saying to the Hakka girl as he did so, "I will not hurt you."

When he had been with her for some time the proprietor came back to the little room to advise him on how to deliver the girl to the brothel keeper in Honolulu, but when he pushed open the door a little way and saw what the young people were up to, he advised in Punti, "Use her as you wish, but tie her up again when you're through."

The voice of the boss awakened Mun Ki to his responsibilities, and with real fright he grabbed at his pants to see if while he had been engaged with the girl some clever man had stolen his gambling money in the way that he, Mun Ki, had sometimes picked the pockets of preoccupied customers in the Brothel of Spring Nights. His money was secure, so he quickly dressed and said to the naked girl, "I must go to the gambling. Put your clothes on."

And as he waited for her to do so, he picked up the cords, and when she turned to face him she saw the cruel, biting cords and tears came into her eyes and she pleaded with Mun Ki and took his hands and promised, "I will not run away."

He held the ropes and studied her, and something in the manner in which she looked at him convinced him that she would not flee; so, still grasping the ropes, he led her to his room in a hovel in back of the brothel, where he sat her upon the floor. Dangling the ropes before her terrified face he seemed to ask: "Am I required to use these?" and she looked at him as if to promise: "You do not need the cords." Against his better judgment, he started to leave, but to do so with the girl unbound was obviously ridiculous, so he decided

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upon a sensible solution. With one end of a fairly long rope he tied the Hakka.girl's left wrist; the other he attached about his own waist, and when this was done he said, "Come."

When he passed the desk of the brother the proprietor saw what he was doing, and said, "A good idea." Then the man asked professionally, "Will she make a good girl for my friend?"

"Yes," Mun Ki assured him, and he led his captive to his favorite gambling hall. But when they were in the street he stopped and asked her, "What is your name?" and she answered, "Char Nyuk Tsin," and he replied, "Perfect Jadel That's a good name." To himself he thought: "In a brothel it's a very good name. A man can remember it when he comes back the next time."

The gamblers were playing fan-tan, in which from a large pile of snowy-white ivory buttons the dealer withdrew a handful, whereupon the crowd bet as to whether the number to be left over at the end was one, two, three, or none. Or, if the gamblers wished, they could bet simply on whether the ivory buttons would turn out to have been odd or even. When the bets were placed, the amazingly deft dealer started to pull his buttons away from the pile in lots of four, and it was striking how skilled the players were in discerning, while the pile of burtons still contained fifty or sixty, what the number left over at the end was bound to be.

Using his own and other Punti money, Mun Ki had a satisfactory run at fan-tan, and he felt that perhaps the fact that he had been kind to the Hakka girl had brought him good luck, so he took his earnings to the mah-jongg room, where the clattering ivory tiles evoked their perpetual fascination. When at the beginning of each game the players built their wall, it was customary for them to slam the tiles down with maximum force, creating an echo that accentuated the natural excitement of the game, and likewise, when a player scored a coup and exposed his pieces he slammed them onto the noisy table. Mah-jongg as played in Macao was a wild, exhilarating game, and now Mun Ki decided to test his luck at a table where real gamblers played for high stakes. Placing Nyuk Tsin behind him, and twitching the cord now and then to be sure she was still tied, he joined three waiting men. Two had long, wispy beards and costly gowns. The other was more like Mun Ki, a young, aggressive gambler. At first one of the older men protested, "I do not wish to play in a room where there is a woman," but Mun Ki carefully explained, "I am taking her to a brothel in the Fragrant Tree Country and am responsible for her." This the men understood; in fact, the man who had protested thought: "Probably he will have his mind on the girl and will lose more quickly."

But Mun Ki had not entered the game to lose. Mah-jongg, unlike fan-tan, did not depend so much on luck as on the skill with which one played the pieces luck sent him; and the young gambler, thinking that this might be his last day in a big mah-jongg contest, breathed deeply as he used both hands to help mix the 144 tiles at the start

of the game. With loud energy he banged the pieces down to make the wall and then watched carefully as he rolled his dice to help determine where that wall should be broached to begin the gambling. With intense excitement he grabbed his tiles in turn and remembered Nyuk Tsin only when he leaned forward to reach the tiles ami felt her rope tugging at his waist. When his tiles were arranged�and he had long since learned to keep them in haphazard formations from which his clever opponents could deduce nothing�he was ready to play, but the bearded man who had originally protested against Nyuk Tsin, said, "She has got to sit on the floor where she can't spy." So before the game began in earnest, the Hakka girl sat on the floor, but this was not entirely satisfactory to Mun Ki, who was afraid that she might slip away, so he forced her to sit under the table, against his feet, and there she remained for the long hours during which the four players slammed down their tiles with great force.

From her position under the table Nyuk Tsin noticed that she could detect when Mun Ki was attempting some daring coup, holding back tiles in hopes of building them into some fantastic combination that would win him much money, for then his ankles became tense, the little bones stood out and his feet began to sweat. At such times she prayed for his success, and she must have been attuned to some powerful god of good fortune, for her man won. At dusk he tugged on the rope and said, "We'll go home." But as they returned to the dusty streets of Macao, hawkers swarmed about them, attracted by the rumor: "The young fellow from the brothel was a big winner." They brought flowers and bits of cloth and steaming kettles of food, and Mun Ki found real pleasure in playing the role of a generous winner. Fingering the torn cotton fabric of his girl's smock he said, "This one needs a new dress, believe me." And with grandiloquent gestures that all could admire, he announced: "We will have four lengths of that!" He was even more generous when it came to food, and hungry Nyuk Tsin had black eggs, dried fish, noodles and crystallized ginger. As they lounged beneath a dentist's sign he announced to the crowd: "I am really a very lucky gambler. I can see what's in the other man's mind."

As the night wore on, he drew the cord tighter to him, so that Nyuk Tsin could not stray, and he bought bits of food for worthless characters he had long known in the Portuguese city. When the civil guard passed by, he nodded to them, and when one asked, "Why do you have the girl tied up?" he replied in the patois of the port city, "I am delivering her to a brothel in the Fragrant Tree Country."

The police nodded approvingly, and then one stopped. "Are you sailing on that American ship in the bay?"

"I suppose so," Mun Ki replied.

Instantly the policeman grew confidential, and whispered, "I'd better warn you, then. The American who bought you in the village came to us today to have you arrested. You'd better hide."

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"I'm reporting in the morning," Mun Ki assured him. "But thanks." And he gave the policeman a coin.

"Thank you, Mun Ki!" the official bowed. "That's a nice girl you're taking with you."

"She's only a Hakka, but she brings luck," Mun Ki replied.

Finally he led his captive back to the Brothel of Spring Nights, where he showed his former boss how he had multiplied the ten Mexican dollars eight times. "This girl brings luck," he said.

"Are you going to tie her up again in the little room?" the proprietor asked.

"She'll sleep with me tonight," Mun Ki explained.

"All right," the prudent businessman replied, "but remember what you learned here about breaking girls in. Feed them and beat them."

"I'll take care of her," Mun Ki assured him. "Were the police here for me?"

"Of course," his boss replied. "Your ship's sailing tomorrow."

"I'll be there."

Tugging the cord, he led Nyuk Tsin down the narrow hallway, out the back door of the brothel and on to the hovel where he slept. Locking the door, he untied the rope from his waist, but fastened it even more securely about Nyuk Tsin's wrist. She explained that she needed to attend to her bodily functions, so he opened the door and allowed her to go outside while he lounged in the doorway, testing the rope now and then to be sure that she was still secured. When she returned he said, "Now we must pack for the journey."

He had provided a wooden tub into which he jammed his accumulated treasures: a teapot, five bamboo cups, two good rice bowls, a metal pot, a porcelain tea set with a small copper strainer, a bamboo tray for steaming vegetables and a large knife. The incense burner, the kitchen god and the ancestral tablet which proved who he was were tucked into place, followed by his extra clothes and a pair of good sandals. Over this tub he now tied securely a piece of canvas stolen from a Dutch ship.