Opium (22 page)

But it had been worth it. The whores didn't tease him anymore, they were as scared of him as everyone else. He was called Sharkfin, as a sign of respect, he even wore a shark's tooth on a gold chain around his neck, a reminder to others that he had already been in the jaws of death once and so he was no longer afraid.

Dragon Fist threw another bundle of Hong Kong dollars - five thousand, Douglas guessed - into the briefcase with a careless flick of his wrist.

“You want me to do it?' Douglas said.

Dragon Fist laughed. “You? What makes you think you can do it, little shark?'

Douglas pointed to the scars on his arm. “Someone has to pay for this.”

He tossed another bundle of notes into the briefcase and clipped the locks shut. Dragon Fist pushed his chair away from the table and folded his arms, looking him over as if he was something he wanted to buy. “I wonder if you could, little nephew?'

“I know I can. Let me do it.”

Dragon Fist thought about it. He stood up. “Come with me,” he said. “I want to show you something.”

Chapter 40

I
T WAS a humid July morning, and after two days of monsoon rains the air was like steam. Connaught Road was chaos. Douglas saw old Chinese launch themselves in front of buses and cars, missing death by inches to ensure any evil dragons that were following them were destroyed by the onrushing traffic. Scarecrow coolies with muscles like knotted rope hauled garish crimson rickshaws loaded with teetering cages of squawking chickens, shrieking curses at anyone who got in their way. Old women in black pyjamas and oyster hats shouldered panniers of ducks, plastic flowers and rice on bamboo poles that bowed across their shoulders; children scrabbled for a few meagre coins, selling newspapers, unloading lorries, cleaning shoes. That's what you are running from, Douglas reminded himself. Any price is worth escaping life in the street.

As they drove up to the Midlevels he saw hundreds of “Chinese flags' on the tenements and the shop houses that lined the streets; it was what the westerners called the bamboo poles draped from the windows with drying laundry.

The Porsche Targa left the fug of the city behind, Douglas and his uncle were cocooned in the plush, air-cooled interior. They wound around the curves of the Peak, the twin exhausts barking like a dragon. Up the mountain, where the poor never go.

***

Dragon Fist owned an apartment in the Midlevels, a true eyrie from which he could gaze down on the squabbling mass of humanity below and congratulate himself on his joss and his choices.

The apartment was polished chrome and leather with full-height windows of smoked glass. Two girls in short silk dressing gowns sat on a sofa, staring at a colour television. When they saw Dragon Fist, they jumped up and switched it off.

Douglas stared at them. They were beautiful, truly beautiful, not like the scarred and hard-faced whores in the Walled City. They wore jewellery, and he could smell their perfume. They wore carmine lipstick. There were no needle marks on the backs of their hands.

“You want to have them?' Dragon Fist asked him. “You can have them both at once if you want, or one at a time. I don't care. Or maybe you just like to watch.” He gave an almost imperceptible nod of his head. The two girls peeled off their silk robes. They knelt side by side on the leather sofa and haltingly began to touch and kiss each other. Douglas was transfixed. Sex was nothing new to him. He had lost his virginity soon after he arrived in the Walled City, when he and some of his uncle's soldiers had raped a fourteen year old girl, on Dragon Fist's orders. And he had seen plenty of yellow films.

But this was different. This was perfumed and sophisticated, a private showing.

“I can make people do whatever I want,” Dragon Fist said. He turned his back on the girls and walked away. “Come on.”

Douglas followed him. It was a massive room, split-level. There was a huge mahogany desk at the end of the room, with a floor to ceiling room that overlooked the harbour. Along one wall was a bar, carved from polished rosewood. Dragon Fist poured two glasses of Dewar's whisky and gave one to Douglas.

"Close your mouth, you'll let the flies in,” he said to him. “I'm a Red Pole in the Fei Leung. Where do you think I lived? In a shack in the Typhoon Shelter?

He threw himself into the soft leather chair behind the desk, swivelled it around so he could gaze at the harbour, spread out below; fleets of junks with patched and tattered canvas sails wallowed in the wash of an armada of smaller motor boats, the
walla-wallas
and sampans. A P&O liner, and several Blue Funnel and Jardine Matheson freighters were anchored in the gage roads. A sleek grey US warship was anchored at Wanchai.

“How much have you learned about the society of the Hung Mun, little Sharkfin?'

“I've learned there's no other way to live.”

“At the moment you're just a
sze kau
, a 49, a foot soldier. But you have potential. Perhaps one day you will become a 426, a Red Pole, like me. '

The girls had dressed and had switched the television back on. For some reason it made him angry. Douglas would like to have shouted at them, made them do what he wanted like Dragon Fist had done.

Dragon Fist showed him another miracle, a bathroom and toilet, with gleaming marble tiles on the floor. Water came when you turned a tap, the toilet flushed, there were no sewer spiders coming out of the hole in the ground.

In the next room there was a bed big enough to sleep five families inside the Walled City. There were red silk sheets.

Dragon Fist led him onto the balcony. It was late afternoon and the sun hung above the hills of Kowloon like a gold coin. The air was clean and cool. This was where the gods would come to live, Douglas thought.

“You can breathe up here. Not living in someone else's stink, eh, Douglas, Isn't that what you want?'

“I'll do anything for this,” Douglas whispered.

His uncle grinned. “I know.” He stared into the distance, at China somewhere out there in the violet haze. “Well, have you been sending the money you've been making back to Swatow like a dutiful son?'

Douglas wasn't sure how to answer.

“Of course you haven't. Why bother, Sharkfin? If they're too stupid and helpless to help themselves why let them drag you down for the rest of your life? The old ways have nothing to do with the new Hong Kong.”

“I want to have an apartment like this too.”

“Perhaps one day. If you are loyal.”

“Let me prove I can do it. Let me kill Tiger Claw.”

“You won't beat him in a proper fight, Sharkfin. He's too quick, perhaps quicker even than me, and he has two good legs. You'll have to use your brain.”

“I'll find a way.”

Dragon Fist pointed across the bay. An airliner hovered over the Walled City, its red and green navigation lights blinking against the darkening backdrop of the hills. “See, that jet is just passing over Hak Nam now. That's your prize and your kingdom, Douglas. Right there. If you can find a way to chop Tiger Claw.”

Chapter 41

T
IGER Claw was young, barely twenty one years old. He had been born in the Walled City, had started work in a factory making plastic flowers when he was nine years old. His father was a opium addict, and both his older sisters had been sold into a brothel. By the time he was sixteen he was sick of working in a cramped, furnace-hot room for a few cents a day. He knew the triad was the only way out, and so he started running errands for the 14K, then got hired as a look-see boy for the local opium den. He volunteered to do a little
pin-mun
- illegal business. The den boss gave him little packets of number three heroin to sell in Temple Street. This brought him into conflict with other junior triad toughs, and he quickly learned to fight. He had snake-fast reactions and he could block and counterpunch while other kids were just standing there gawping.

He also possessed a great talent for viciousness. A childhood of squalor and darkness left him with no more conscience than an animal. You fought to win, and winning was all that mattered. Wrapping barbed wire around his knuckles as a fighting tool was just one of his many inventions. His fighting skills quickly brought him to the attention of the 14K bosses. He was soon initiated as a 49, a soldier and made a Red Pole, an enforcer by his twentieth birthday. Already he was a martial arts expert and a toecutter

But Tiger Claw had one weakness. Like so many of the triads, he was addicted to heroin. It was addiction, and not fear of retribution, that had driven him out of Hak Nam after the fight in Half Dog Street. He had spent months in a rehabilitation ward in a Christian mission run by a Carmelite nun. His sabbatical had ended when he killed the nun's chaplain one night in an argument over a wristwatch that had been stolen from one of the other inmates. Tiger Claw had settled the discussion by slitting the chaplain's throat with a kitchen knife.

Back in
Hak Nam
Tiger Claw used a meat cleaver to get rid of the man who had taken his place in the 14K. He had systematically sliced through the muscles on the man's back and shoulders. The man would live, but he would never be able to move his arms again.

He was disgusted to learn that people thought he had fled the Walled City because he was afraid of Dragon Fist. The only way he could eradicate this stain on his reputation was to confront the Fei Leung once again.

He ordered his soldiers to go into Fei Lung territory and demand protection from the den managers and the brothel keepers on the other side. The challenge had been thrown down. Dragon Fist would have to answer it.

***

The shadow of the BOAC Constellation passed in front of the windows, its engines drowning out the last of Douglas' words to anyone standing outside the room. When he had finished Dragon Fist threw back his head and laughed.

“It might work!'

“It will work,” Douglas said.

One of the other triads frowned. “How do you know he will be where you say?'

“Our spies,” Dragon Fist answered for his nephew. “We know where he is every minute of the day, same as he is knows where I am.”

“It would be easier to take him on his way back to Kowloon.”

“And easier to get caught. Besides, I want everyone in Hak Nam to see this.”

“By tomorrow night Tiger Claw will be dead,” Douglas promised.

Dragon Fist laughed and nodded. “We'll see, Sharkfin, we'll see!'

Chapter 41

T
HEY were known as the Night Soil Women. Every morning they were a common sight in the Walled City, dragging the slopping buckets of excrement through the alleys in large rattan baskets, their scarves wrapped around their noses, their heads down, calling a warning to anyone coming the other way. They were old, nut-brown women with wizened faces and dirt encrusted claws, harridans who were treated like lepers even by the prostitutes and the heroin addicts.

Half a dozen of them struggled up the stone steps of the tenement in Indian file, dragging their noxious loads up to the roof overlooking Beggar Street. It was a long, hard climb and several times they had to stop to catch their breath. Today they had an extra duty to perform, and they were intent on doing it well. After all, they had been well paid.

***

The clatter of machinery echoed down the alley. It came from the one-room factory where men in dusky white vests made the meat balls for the street hawker outside Hak Nam. In the adjoining shop a dozen women worked in a windowless room, bowed over wooden benches, feeding shirts into cotton bobbins in the grimy yellow light of a single bulb. An open watercourse flowed along the centre of the alley, a dribble of greasy water trickled through it. An accumulation of rubbish, thrown from above, mixed with the leaking water to form a grey, matted mess on either side of the drain.

Douglas wrinkled his nose against the stench. How he wished he were back in Dragon Fist's apartment in the Mid-levels.

There were four other men with him; Half Ear Louie, Freddy Yang, Fishball Tak and Jimmy Wong. They were all tense, tight with adrenalin. Three of them had meat cleavers, the choppers that most of the triad fighters favoured. Douglas and Freddy Yang also had bicycle chains. Freddy had his wrapped around the knuckles of his right fist.

A man came out of Beggar Street towards them. He was wearing a red T-shirt. As he passed them he stopped for a moment, and held his right fist in front of his chest.

It was their signal. Tiger Claw was in there.

Douglas led the others down the alley and around the corner into Beggar Street.