Opium (14 page)

Douglas Ho bowed his head. “I think Sharkfin is a very good name, uncle,” he said, because even then he realised the value of a good legend.

Chapter 24

T
SE-PING who a
pang-jue
- master of a drug den. Working for him taught Douglas many of the basic lessons of survival in the Walled City.

The first lesson was never to touch opium or heroin. Many of the triad members he met were themselves hooked on raw number three heroin. In this form it looked like brown sugar; they would tip it onto a piece of tinfoil, light a screw of toilet paper and heat the tinfoil underneath. The heroin would melt to a dark brown treacle. Then, using a piece of rolled up paper as a funnel, they would inhale the fumes.

They called it 'chasing the dragon.”

They were useful as soldiers - until the drugs made them so dependent they could not think about anything else - but once a man started chasing the dragon he would never rise any higher in the triad.

The divan was a long tin shed with low, rough tables where addicts could sprawl out while they dreamed. For fifty cents they could buy a screw of toilet paper, a piece of tinfoil, and a cardboard funnel. After that, it depended on what each purse could afford.

He quickly learned to despise their customers. The long-time addicts were thin as stick insects and had the waxy look of corpses. They knew what the drug was doing to them, but they seemed unable to help themselves. They were like oxen, led by the nose, driven by their own craven desires.

Second lesson: people were just like everything else, just commodities, to be bought and sold. They provided the cheap labour that fuelled triad businesses; women bowed over ancient manual sewing machines, working in windowless rooms by the light of a single thirty watt bulb, making cheap shirts for Temple Street; emaciated men in filthy vests moulding hot metal over pit fires in the bowels of a steaming tenement, cranking out bicycle spares for export; toothless old harridans in black pyjamas, crouched in fetid little rooms moulding enormous plastic penises to sell to western tourists in Wanchai.

They lived their lives packed into flats a few feet square, drew their water from a pump in a filthy courtyard, and used the same two street level cess pools shared by thirty thousand other coolies just like them. The paid them less than a dollar a day.

How could they live that way? Douglas felt nothing but contempt for them.

Third lesson: people were not just valuable for labour. If a young girl was considered sufficiently attractive, Dragon Fist would arrange to have her gang-raped by his soldiers - he called it 'stamping the merchandise'. The girl was so shamed by the experience she rarely protested when Dragon Fist paid her family to take this liability off their hands. He would then either put her to work in one of his own brothels or sell her to a 'fish ball stall', specialising in pre-pubescent girls.

There was no shortage of recruits like him. Boys as young as nine years old earned a living as look-see boys in the gambling dens and opium divans or selling tickets to the pornographic film shows. He got no special favours because he was Dragon Fist's nephew. He shared a room with four others, all teenagers like himself, in a filthy tenement in the heart of the Hak Nam.

Still, it was better than making bicycle parts or plastic flowers in some basement factory, and it was even a lot better than Swatow and communism.

But at night when Douglas lay on his hard cot, listening to the never-ending clank of machinery from below - there was no such thing as closing time - he knew the world owed him far more. He did not plan to remain a look-see boy forever. With the talents his father had taught him and a little
joss
he would one day leave Hak Nam and the smell of raw sewage far behind.

Chapter 25

H
AK NAM was in the control of two triads, the 14K and the Fei Leung. They tested their borders regularly, and there were occasional outbreaks of fighting as wars were fought over possession of a stairwell or a garbage-strewn alley no more than a few inches wide.

Tse Ping's opium divan was on Chicken Fat Street, right on the border of 14K territory. A concrete passageway that led off the alley belonged to the 14K, together with a lean-to shed that showed pornographic films - 'yellow movies' - and a restaurant where stray dogs were flayed to death to provide tender dog steaks, considered a delicacy in Hong Kong, but outlawed by the British authorities.

Appropriately, a wooden sign proclaimed it Half Dog Street.

Douglas had been apprenticed to Tse Ping for less than a month and already he was bored and restless. Police rarely ventured into the Walled City, except in large raiding parties, so there was no real need for a look-see boy. The only danger came from the 14K, and Tse Ping told him there had been no trouble in the Walled City for months.

Instead of sitting on his haunches and picking at his toenails - which appeared to be a perquisite of the job - Douglas occupied his time strengthening his injured leg. He was not a cripple, as the doctors had threatened, but his left leg was useless as a weapon now. Still, every day he practised against the wall of the alley, spinning and kicking, building up the remaining muscle, until he could pivot on it at least as well as he could on his right leg.

The prostitutes watching him from their perches on the orange crates further down the alley, pointed and laughed.

“Hey Limpy!' they shouted. “Want to wrestle us?'

He ignored them. One day he would show them.

Every day his uncle came to the divan to collect the takings from Tse Ping in person. He was always accompanied by two of his fighters, the men Douglas had seen the day he first came to the Walled City. The ones who threw the thief out of the window.

Dragon Fist never spoke to him, or even looked at him.

“Is he really your uncle?' Tse Ping asked him one day.

“Yes. He's my father's brother.”

“He often asks about you,” Tse Ping said, seemingly as intrigued by Dragon Fist's behaviour as Douglas himself. “But I notice he never talks to you. I think he is testing you.”

Douglas aimed another kick at the wall. Tse Ping watched, his tight mouth drawn down in a frown. “I think if you prove to be a weakling, he will disown you.”

“I just need one chance,” Douglas said.

The whores down the alley giggled and cat-called; Douglas seethed and waited.

***

When the chance came, it happened suddenly, without warning. Dragon Fist had collected the takings from Tse Ping as usual, and was making his way back up the alley with his two bodyguards, Black Mai and another man Douglas knew only as Benny East Street. Five triads ran screaming out of Half Dog Street waving meat cleavers. Dragon Fist's bodyguards had no time to react. The 14K were expert with choppers, and aimed their first blows at the muscles on their shoulders and back, chopping Benny to the ground before he had even turned around.

Black Mai raised his arms to defend himself, and the choppers slashed down and blood spurted from his hands and shoulders. He screamed once.

Dragon Fist threw his back against the wall of the alley and drew a chain from inside his leather jacket. He dodged a slashing blow from one of the 14K and flicked the chain backhanded, raking it across his adversary's face. The man staggered back blindly, clutching at his eyes, blood welling through his fingers.

Black Mai was now a bloody wreck. The other four triads turned their attentions to Dragon Fist.

Douglas launched himself up the alley in the lop-sided, limping run that he had practised every day under the tormenting gaze of the prostitutes. But this time, instead of the wall, his target was alive and deadly.

Chapter 26

P
IVOT on the left leg.

Strike with the heel of the right.

He rammed his foot into the one of the triad's kidneys. The boy had not heard him. He screamed in pain. Pivoting again, on his right foot, Douglas pushed the heel of his hand into the boy's face as he turned around, landing the blow just below the nose, as his father had taught him. It forced the nasal bones up through the skull, lacerating the frontal lobes of the brain and killing him instantly.

As he fell the triad beside him had already turned and slashed downward with his cleaver. Douglas leaped back, raising an arm to ward off the blow, felt sickening stab of pain as the cleaver slashed into the flesh of his arm.

Another chop, more pain.

He had to step inside the blows. As his attacker raised the cleaver again, he kicked out and connected with the 14K's knee, knocking him off balance. Then he swivelled inside the arc of the weapon and chopped down on his attacker's nose and his left hand darted out like a snake, the fingers extended, into his throat. The man fell back, chopped again, blindly, catching Douglas a glancing blow to the side of his scalp.

Douglas felt as if he might fall, steadied himself against the wall. If he went down he knew he was dead.

But his attack had given Dragon Fist the advantage he needed. He leaped forward, sweeping the chain in a broad arc, pushing the other two 14K fighters back.

There was a shout from the end of the alley and Tse Ping appeared with more of Dragon Fist's own fighters. The two 14K realised the battle had swung against them. They grabbed two of their wounded brothers and fled back into the gloom of Half Dog Street, leaving their compatriot lying dead at Douglas' feet.

Silence. Douglas could hear his own breathing sawing in his chest. His uncle examined the bloodied bodies of Benny and Black Mai. Then he slipped the chain back inside his leather coat and looked up at Douglas.

Douglas slid down the wall.

“You're bleeding, nephew,” he said, and walked away.

The world swam in and out of focus. The prostitutes were still staring at him, and they weren't giggling any more.

He blacked out.

***

When Douglas he opened his eyes again there were shapes floating in and out of his vision, shadows in a milky pool. His mouth felt gummy and dry, and there was a throbbing pain in his skull.

One of the shadows moved in. He made out sunglasses, black, slick backed hair, a double chin. His uncle.

“One hundred and nineteen stitches,” he whispered. “Even I never got that many in a fight. Congratulations!'

He couldn't move one of his arms. One was encased in thick crepe bandage, the other immobilised to the bed, a needle and a long tube sticking into a vein.

“If anyone asks you,” Dragon Fist said, 'you fell through a glass window.”

Douglas nodded his head to show he understood.

“You're a tough little
pi-dog
, nephew. By the sacred pussy of
Kuan Yin
, you've had more meat cut out of you than my grandmother's pig.”

“I can fight,” Douglas whispered.

“Better than Benny and Black Mai, at least. When you can walk again, you can take their place.”

The shadows slipped back into a buzzing, gelatine haze. When he woke again, they had gone. There was only a nurse, barking at him in shrill Cantonese. He wondered if perhaps he hadn't imagined the whole thing.

But then he remembered what his uncle had whispered to him and he smiled through the red mist of pain.
When you can walk again, you can take their place.
He knew he had taken his first steps out of the mire.

Chapter 27

T
HERE was an ancient Taoist temple in the very heart of the Walled City, and around it one of only two courtyards in the whole of the Hak Nam. The area had been netted off to keep garbage from the surrounding tenements from falling onto the temple roof.

They were met at the doors by two triad soldiers, carrying metal cleavers. Douglas was one of perhaps fifty or sixty new recruits who would be initiated that night, and each one was greeted individually. When it was Douglas' turn he gave the men the secret triad handclasp, as Dragon Fist had taught him, and waited for the questions he had learned to answer by rote.

“Why do you come here?' the guard asked him.

“We come to enlist and obtain rations,” Douglas said.

“There are no rations for our army.”

“We bring our own.”

“The red rice of our army contains sand and stones. Can you eat stones?'

“If our brothers can eat them, so can we.”

“When you see the beauty of our sworn sisters and sisters in law will you have adulterous ideas?'