Opium (27 page)

Finally, when the game was finished, Sammy Chen stood up and came to sit in the tiger skin chair.

“I have a job for you,” he said.

Dragon Fist nodded eagerly, Douglas noticed, like a child asked to run an errand.

“I need someone washed. Someone very big, very important. His name is Chen Jia-guo.”

“Of course, Kee Leung.”
Kee Leung
- Fearless Dragon. This kind of respect was only given to a triad boss.

“It will not be easy. Since my brother's death he has been hiding at the Mongkok Typhoon Shelter. No one can get in there without being seen. When I sent our Grass Sandal to talk to him, he fled by sampan across the water.”

“I will do it,” Douglas said. “I will wash him for you.”

Sammy studied him with elaborate care. “You are the one they call Sharkfin? I have heard great reports from your uncle.”

Douglas nodded eagerly. “I can wash him. I can wash anyone you want.”

Sammy gave Douglas a small, chill smile. He reached into his shirt pocket and handed Dragon Fist several prints. “Photographs of my cousin,” he said.

Dragon Fist was staring at Douglas, his face pale. Then he turned and bowed once more to Sammy Chen. “I understand, Kee Leung. I will see that it is done.”

“Good.”

Then the 486 of the Fei Leung got up and went back to the
mah-jong
game. Dragon Fist bowed to their backs. Douglas did the same, and followed him out.

***

“Don't ever do that again!' Dragon Fist shouted when they got back into the car.

“Why are you angry,
tai lo
?'

“You do not say “I can do this, I can do that'! I brought you here tonight to learn. But you don't learn anything, do you?
I can wash anyone.
Maybe it's you that needs to be taught a lesson!'

Douglas was bewildered. “A thousand times a thousand apologies,
tai lo
.”

“You ever take away my face like that again, you're the one who gets washed!'

Douglas bit his lip and said nothing. I am too impetuous, he realised. I want this too badly. They drove through the gates and made their way back to the Walled City in silence. Finally Dragon Fist said: “You think you can do it, then?'

“If there is a secret way in, I will find it.”

Dragon Fist hawked and spat out of the window. After a while he seemed calmer. “All right, then.”

“Why does Kee Leung want this man dead?'

“Chen Jia-guo is his cousin. When Kee Leung's brother died, he thought he should become the new 486. He said that Sammy had come up too fast, he called him an
eye-eye
, an illegal immigrant. This is because he has never lived in Hong Kong, only Saigon.”

“If it's true, why didn't the other bosses support him?'

“Because Sammy Chen and his brother had organised the opium traffic together for so long. Only Sammy has the contacts, knows the supply routes. Everyone is getting richer, and Sammy is the one who brings in the money. Who cares if Chen Jia-guo is right or wrong? He's a fool. He tried to have Sammy chopped, now he has to hide out in Mongkok like a water rat.”

The Walled City appeared ahead of them, the lights of the tenements blazed against the black backdrop of the mountains. Douglas wished he never had to go back there. He was sick of living in squalor, and sick of being his uncle's lap-dog. He wanted a house in Kent Road, like Sammy Chen.

Perhaps, when he had washed Chen Jia-guo, he would see about that.

Chapter 49

D
OUGLAS sat in Dragon Fist's sports car on Ferry Street and stared across the water at the ramshackle sprawl of huts spread over the mud and oil-streaked water. Dragon Fist lowered the Zeiss binoculars and passed them to him.

“Here,” he said.

The Mongkok typhoon shelter was a conglomeration of wooden huts that ventured into the harbour from the sea wall. The huts were built on bamboo stilts, linked by a maze of springy wooden catwalks that could be laid or removed in seconds. The only other access was by sampan. It was the perfect hide-out.

Every walkway from the harbour was guarded by look see boys with an electronic bell push to sound the alarm if they were attacked. Even the sampan girls who plied the waters of the Shelter were paid to give a secret signal if their passengers were police or from a rival triad.

'“You see?' Dragon Fist said, 'he's safe in there. No one can get in, day or night, without him knowing.”

Douglas thought about the problem for a long time. Finally he said: “We could try and get in underneath.”

“Underneath?'

“No one would see us.”

“Who would want to drag themselves through that filth?'

“I would,” Douglas said.

Dragon Fist snatched back the binoculars and studied the typhoon shelter once more. “Perhaps,” he said grudgingly. “At low tide. But you would have to know where he was, in advance, or you would just slither around in the mud all night.”

“Perhaps we could bribe one of the addicts who live there. They will do anything for another smoke.”

“You also need a plan to get out or his soldiers will just cut you pieces.”

“We'll start a fire, create a diversion. Then have a sampan come and pick us up. We can even bring back Chen Jia-guo alive if you want.”

Dragon Fist considered the plan for a long time. He took a manila envelope from under the seat and passed his nephew the black and white photographs of Chen Jia-guo that Sammy Chen had given him. “This is him. It will be dark so you'll have to remember his face better than your own mother.”

“I've forgotten my mother,” Douglas said.

“Okay,
sai lo
. Tonight we'll see if you have what it takes to be a Red Pole of the Fei Leung.”

***

They did not need an opium addict to tell them where he was. Instead, for ten Hong Kong dollars, a sampan girl agreed to moor her boat next to the hut that Chen Jia-Guo used as his headquarters. She painted a yellow cross on the underside of the hull, and left it there when the tide went out. As soon as it had retreated far enough Douglas, Freddy Yang and a dozen
sze kau
set out in the dark, wading through the thick mud from the shore.

The underside of the Mongkok Typhoon Shelter was a hellish swamp of squelching mud thickened and greasy with human ordure, rubbish, and mountains of discarded shellfish. Water rats rustled in the shadows.

They squelched through this fetid swamp for almost an hour before they detected the sweet, treacle smell of opium from above. Douglas searched the darkness with the narrow beam of a pencil torch. It settled on the emaciated corpse of an opium addict, his face set in a death's head grin, rats feeding on his corpse.

They moved on, knee deep in mud. Freddy Yang stiffened as a stream of urine trickled on his head from the darkness above. But he dared not make a sound.

Finally, they saw the sampan, waited to make sure they were unobserved. Douglas carried a rope on his right shoulder, a grappling hook attached to the end. He threw it onto the bamboo decking above and pulled himself up.

He crept towards the hut. The look-see boy was asleep. Holding his meat cleaver in his right hand Douglas took a handful of the boy's hair in his other fist and jerked his head back. The boy's eyes blinked open but he had no time to scream. He was so scrawny it was like cutting the head of a chicken. His feet drummed on the boards for a few moments and were still.

Douglas ran inside. There were three men, all asleep on wooden cots. One of them shouted an alarm. Douglas silenced him by bringing the cleaver down on his skull. By now several of his
sze kau
had joined him, pinned the two other men onto their beds, their knives glinting in the torchlight.

Douglas shone the torch in their faces.

The third man was Chen Jia-guo.

“Wash the others,” Douglas said.

Their throats were expertly slashed with razors.

“Let's get out of here,” Douglas said.

Chen was gagged then bound hand and feet and pulled outside. Two triads dragged him to the edge of the platform and toppled him over into the mud below. There was a wet sound as his body hit the mud, his scream muffled by the rag in his mouth.

Freddy Yang doused the bamboo floors with petrol from a can and scampered down the rope. Douglas tossed a lighted match inside and jumped clear. He felt the rush of heat as the hut exploded into flames. They scrambled through the mud, dragging Chen between them. They heard the panicked screams of the look-see boys as the sleeping villagers woke to the smell of smokes and flames. The flames soon lit them up like daylight but no one was looking their way now. They reached the tide line and saw the flash of a torchlight as Dragon Fist's sampan pulled in to the shallows. The mud reeked and Chen Jia-guo was no lightweight. But they got him there finally and hauled him on board.

***

Douglas, Freddy Yang and two others bundled Chen Jia-guo into the boot of an old Austin they had parked on the waterfront and drove north to the Kowloon reservoirs under Beacon Hill. Their bodies and faces were caked with reeking mud and filth. Even hardened as they were to the stench of Hak Nam, they had to drive with the windows down.

***

It was pitch black.

The Austin's headlamps were the only lights out here. Freddy Yang stopped the car and Douglas jumped out and threw open the boot. He hauled Chen Jia- Guo out, still trussed like a fowl, and between them they kicked him down the slope towards the edge of the reservoir.

Douglas handed the torch to Freddy Yang, he went back to the car and took the pistol Dragon Fist had given him from the glove compartment. He unwrapped it from its oilcloth and followed the others down the slope.

Finally Chen Jia-Guo lay at the water's edge squirming like a beached fish. Freddy Yang shone the torch beam full in his face and put his foot on his throat. Douglas bent down and whispered in his ear:

“I must never cause harm or bring trouble to my sworn brothers. If I do so I will shed blood from the five holes of my body.”

He cocked the pistol, placed the muzzle against Chen Jia-Guo's ear and pulled the trigger. He fired again into the corpse's left ear, then the two eyes, and then the mouth.

By the time he was finished there was little left that was recognisable as a human being.

They walked away and left the body where it was. The police would find it and identify the remains from fingerprints. In a couple of days it would be on the front page of the South China Morning Post. It would serve as a warning to everyone that they must not tangle with the new 486 of the Fei Leung.

Chapter 50

Vientiane, June, 1964

A
T SUNSET the women went down to the river to wash, their children playing and splashing in the water around them. Noelle walked along the high river bank, watched a pirogue with a high-curled prow glide past, its reflection mirrored in the lavender water. The river twitched, choked from the recent rains. Fish sucked tiny pits in the surface.

Noelle loved coming here in the evening. Lucien was a demanding child, and she left him in Chao's care so that she could have this single hour to herself by the river.

***

He was still a hundred yards away when she saw him. He was standing on the riverbank, staring into the milky brown water, hands thrust deep into his pockets. When he saw her he took his hands out of his pockets and turned around. It occurred to her that he had been waiting for her.

“Noelle,” he said.

She knew she should turn around and go straight back to the house. Instead she said: “How long have you been back in Vientiane?'

“I got back last night. I thought I'd take a walk out here. I was hoping I'd see you.”

“I am a married woman,
Monsieur Dale
. No one must see us talk like this.”

“These last three months there hasn't been a minute I haven't spent thinking about you.”

“As I said, it is a sin to think about a married woman.”

“Maybe. But that's the way it is.”

“And where have you been all this time,?'

“I don't think I'm supposed to tell you that.”

“Top secret agriculture?'

He gave her a lop-sided grin. “That's right. Classified rice.”