Opium (13 page)

“Both.”

Bonaventure was startled by the candour of the reply. He hadn't expected that.

“Well, it seems you have dazzled her with your charm and your foolish antics. I have decided to make the best of the situation.” After all, he did get my opium, he thought. Perhaps I underestimated him. “I could use a pilot with guts as well as some ability. Especially as it appears I will be forced to accept you into the family.” He reached into his jacket pocket and handed Baptiste a heavy gold coin. It was embossed with a Napoleonic eagle and a Corsican crest. “This is your passport to the Union Corse. It may be perverse of me, but I believe you have earned it. Come to dinner tonight. Nine o'clock.” He got up to leave. “By the way, I assume you plan to have children?'

“Of course.”

“A word of advice, then. Don't have daughters.”

Chapter 22

Hong Kong

H
O KUAN-LI realised that freedom would not be as easy as he had imagined. When he had first been brought to the hospital he had been confused by the language: in his own province of Swatow everyone spoke a
chiu chao
dialect of Mandarin, but here in the hospital the nurses and his fellow patients spoke Cantonese or English.

He lay there in a crowded ward of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, listening to the babble of voices around him, and did not understand what had happened to him. He and stared at the tent of sheets over the lower half of his body and whispered his supplications to Kuan Yi, Goddess of Mercy.

Finally, one of the Chinese doctors told him, in halting Mandarin, that the shark had taken a piece of muscle the size of a baby's fist from his thigh. He would keep the leg, but he would be left with a permanent limp. In other words, he would be a virtual cripple for the rest of his life.

We'll see about that, Ho had thought.

While his leg healed, he watched the slow ceiling fans and battled the pain and the isolation and planned his return to a world that remained just out of view beyond the hospital walls.

***

But he never realized just how difficult that return would be until the day he limped from the hospital on Nathan Road and surveyed his new world.

Kowloon was a marriage of colour and noise, of slender, expensive women in sheath tight red and gold
cheongsams
, bowed
amahs
in black
pongee
tops and trousers, businessmen in western suits. He could smell garlic, barbecued pork, raw fish, kerosene, sweat and sewage, all in one breath. The streets were crammed with scaffolding and people and traffic, a blur of commerce and construction and hurry. On Hong Kong island, the pinnacles of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation and the Bank of China stood guard over the harbour like sentinels.

He wandered along Nathan Road, gaping like a country boy. It was a teeming, noisy sprawl of tenements and skyscrapers. There were still a few ancient stucco and wood shop houses with awnings of oiled rice paper, the balconies crammed with potted plants and caged birds. But they were quickly disappearing. They were being extracted one by one, like rotten teeth, the ugly brown gaps quickly replaced with concrete towers that seemed to sway dizzyingly overhead.

People jostled him in the street, did not spare him a second glance. He felt like a cork bobbing on the ocean.

A sixteen year old boy could get swept away in this place, he decided, gobbled up in some tenement or factory. But Ho Kuan-Li knew he would be saved because he had a direction and a purpose. In Swatow, when he had first begun to plan his night swim over the border, his mother had told him where to go. She told him about her brother-in-law, Ho Chan-Fu, who lived in a place called the Walled City.

“But if Hong Kong is such a big place, how will I find one man?' he had asked her.

“You'll find him,” was all she had said.

***

The Chinese called it Hak Nam:
Darkness
.

The Walled City of Kowloon was an ugly, tenement fortress off Tung Tau Tsuen Road, on the north side of Kai Tak airport. To get there Ho followed a street of glass-fronted shops, which were the surgeries of unqualified dentists that plied their trade along the street. They announced their business with the gold and silver teeth they kept in bottles in the windows, by the pickled abscesses they had removed, and by the ornamental goldfish that were supposed to be beneficial to their patients' nerves.

This was the southern rampart of Hak Nam, the city within a city. According to the original treaty governing the New Territories made over a hundred years before, the old walled village, which originally took up the site, was supposed to stay under Chinese Imperial control. But the British traders had challenged the concession and in the impasse that followed the mandarin who lived there had imposed his rule. but on his death the six acres he had governed fell to anarchy.

For over a century it had remained disputed territory with both the British and the Chinese claiming sovereignty. The walls had long since disappeared, the stone used by the Japanese during World War Two as core material for the runway at Kai Tak. A tenement slum had grown on the site like a malignant tumour, home to thirty thousand people who, by an aberration of international law, remained beyond the reach of both British and Chinese rule.

Ho wandered the street for almost an hour before he found a way inside. The entrance was a slime covered alley, reeking of rotting food, offal and ordure. Daylight barely penetrated the street.

A
tin man toi
, a weatherman, sat on an old wooden crate in a soiled T-shirt, picking distractedly at filthy toe nails. He looked up as Ho approached. “What do you want?'

“I am here to see Ho Chen-Fu.”

The man snorted with derision and went back to picking his toenails.

Ho was not afraid of him. Was this really one of his uncle's sentries? If he wanted he could have snapped the idiot's neck with one kick. “Ho Chen-Fu is my uncle.”

He could feel the man sizing him up. This scrawny little kid with a limp, Ho's nephew? “Get out of here.”

Ho stood his ground. “Ho Chen-fu is my uncle,” he said. “I bring him greetings from his family in Swatow.”

The guard got up slowly. He hesitated, then grabbed Ho's arm and pushed him into the alley. “All right, you'd better come with me. But if you're not who you say you are we'll cut out your liver and throw it down the sewers.”

***

No light could penetrate far into the alleys of Hak Nam. Even though it was early afternoon it might as well have been the middle of the night. And it was filthy, filthier even than the squalid streets of the village where he had been born,
lap-sap
- rubbish- lay everywhere. As they made their way through the gloomy maze Ho had to take care not to step in human waste. Twice someone threw refuse from a window in a tenement high above them and it splattered into the street, missing them by inches.

The further they went in, even the alleyways disappeared. Unencumbered by government planning regulations, Hak Nam had become almost a solid mass of buildings. They had to walk crouched over inside a concrete tunnel, inches the low ceiling a jumble of knotted electricity cables tapped illegally from the main supplies in the street outside. Water dripped continually from overhead pipes, hissing and sparking on the wires.

Gloomy wooden staircases led off in every direction, littered with broken slabs of concrete and mounds of mouldering garbage. They passed a wooden sign that said, in Chinese characters,
“Rat's Piss Street.”
There was certainly no shortage of rats, the biggest Ho had ever seen, their eyes bright and orange in the shadows. The
tin man toi
clapped his hands at them but they turned their heads in disdain and continued to feast on the devil's banquet arrayed in the gutters.

The look-see boys dozed on their haunches in the urine-soaked dirt outside the gambling dens and the opium divans. Ho recognised these places from the look and the smell coming from inside. He had been a look-see boy, too, in Swatow.

And there were the prostitutes. They sat on orange crates, their faces powdered to the colour of corpses, the backs of their hands scarred with needle marks.

Ho moved to one side to allow a child to pass on a tricycle. Barefoot children played in the dirt, babies strapped to their backs.

The slippery, stinking maze ended in a flight of concrete steps, mossy from the dripping water. They climbed to the twelfth floor. The weatherman told him he had reached the Eyrie of the Dragon Fist.

Chapter 23

T
HE Eyrie of the Dragon Fist was a one room tenement on the very top floor of the building. There was a door with peeling red paint and the
tin-man-toi
knocked. It opened a fraction and eyes peered out at them. Ho was pulled inside and the door slammed shut.

Some men were arguing. There was an impromptu court in session. Dragon Fist sat at a table, drinking tea from a small porcelain cup, surrounded on either side by his fighters. A boy was shouting and pleading with him. To Ho's relief, everyone spoke in the same
chiu chao
accented Mandarin that he spoke.

The young man was begging. He kept repeating, over and over: “I didn't take the opium,
tai lo
. I swear it. I didn't take the opium.”

His uncle was dressed in black jacket and black sunglasses and jeans that were much too tight for him. He was fast approaching middle age. He doesn't look so fearsome to me, Ho thought.

Dragon Fist gave an imperceptible nod of his head and two of his fighters picked the boy up by the arms, dragged him across the room and pushed him out of the open window. They grabbed his ankles at the last moment.

The boy was screaming.

Dragon Fist said, without turning around: “Ask him again if he took the opium.”

“I didn't take it! I swear! I didn't!'

“Black Mai - ask him who has my opium,” Dragon Fist said, in a tone that suggested he was getting bored with these proceedings.

“He says he doesn't know, Tai Lo,” one of the interrogators answered.

Dragon Fist sipped his tea. “Wash him anyway,” he said.

The two men let go of the boy's feet and came back to the table, laughing.

“Who's this?'

The
tin man toi
propelled Ho further into the room. “He says he is your nephew, Tai Lo. From Swatow,”

Dragon Fist appeared to be only vaguely interested. “My nephew?'

“My mother told me to come here, uncle,” Ho said, choosing his words with care. “She said you were the brother of my father, Ho Wen-Fu.”

“Where do you live?'

“Tsinwen, in Kwangtung province in Swatow.”

Dragon Fist lit a cigarette and studied him carefully. “And how is my brother?'

“But he is dead, uncle. The communists killed him.”

“How?'

“They executed him for being a triad. A People's Guard officer took off his head with a sword.”

Dragon Fist nodded slowly. Of course he had known the answer to the question, it was merely a test. “What happened to your leg?'

“Two months ago I tried to swim across from Shenzhen side. A shark attacked me.”

“Bad luck for you. Or perhaps it was good luck since you are here. What's your name, nephew?'

“Kuan-Li. But I call myself Douglas.”

“Why Douglas?'

“After Douglas MacArthur. He commanded a great army. I want to control a great army one day.”

Everyone seemed to think this was a good joke.

When they had all finished laughing, Dragon Fist said: “What do you want from me, Douglas?'

“I have nowhere to go, and no work, uncle.”

“Do you have any money?'

“No, uncle.”

Dragon Fist reached into his pocket and brought out a thick wad of Hong Kong dollars. He peeled off two one hundred dollar notes and tossed them carelessly across the room. Douglas scrambled to pick them off the floor.

“What can you do, Douglas?'

“I can fight, uncle.”

More laughter. Black Mai found this so amusing he had to sit down on a chair.

“A skinny pole like you?'

“My father taught me to fight from when I was young. He was still instructing me when the communists came for him.”

The only one who wasn't smiling now was his uncle.

“Then perhaps I can use you,” he said. “Your father was a good fighter. A good fighter but no brains. If he had been clever, he would have got out of China with me, twelve years ago.” He pointed to one of the men in the room, a man of about fifty with blackened teeth, thinning hair and a big, moon face. “Go with Tse-Ping. He needs a look-see boy for his divan. His last little bird flew out the window.” The men laughed again. “Perhaps you can be of some use, Douglas. Or shall we call you Sharkfin?'