The Nicholas Linnear Novels (186 page)

Later he had been sure that he dreamt the episode, but the next morning his sister had awakened from her high fever. Her eyes were clear, the marks upon her skin already fading. Liang, still clutching her daughter’s hand, had slept through that entire day.

So-Peng took a deep breath, exhaled it slowly. He needed time to comprehend the merging of past and present, to let the scattered pieces fall gently into place.

“You recognized how the two merchants were killed,” So-Peng said after a time, “because of your father.”

Liang opened her eyes. “Your grandfather,” she said, and it was as if that were a veiled reminder. She nodded. Her eyes seemed luminous, reflecting not only the streetlights, but the last of the pellucid light in the sky far above.

“Tau-tau,” she said. “Those throwing stars are made only by tanjian. The other things, the days on which the merchants were killed, the pigs’ feet in their mouths, were nothing more than ruses meant to confuse the authorities. Traditional tanjian tricks.”

“Is my gift…” So-Peng paused because this was difficult to ask; an affirmative answer would hurt him deeply. He began again. “Is my gift part of Tau-tau?”

“No,” Liang said at once. She felt the tension drain out of him. “That was handed down from my mother, who was not tanjian born.”

“What are tanjian doing here in Singapore?”

“Tanjian are by nature wanderers,” his mother said. “Many emigrated to Japan three hundred years ago. Tanjian are never satisfied, always hungry for new territory. Perhaps that is because they have nothing of their own.”

“What do you mean?”

Liang sighed. “Tau-tau is in a way a nihilistic discipline. Tanjian are pitiless, incapable of feeling emotion as you or I know it. As a result, they have no possessions, and are envious of those who do. Also, they are infiltrators. They hire themselves out to do the dirty work others are too honorable or too cowardly to perform themselves. This Tau-tau teaches them.”

Perhaps So-Peng heard something in his mother’s tone, or again in the cast of her features. In any event, he felt compelled to say, “None of these are the reasons that the tanjian are in Singapore.” He knew that this was the truth as soon as he said it.

Once again he felt the expansion of her spirit, witness to its breathing, as enormous as if the earth itself were inhaling and exhaling.

“So-Peng,” Liang said at last, “when you came to me in my dream before your birth, this was what you said to me, ‘None of these are the reasons that the tanjian are in Singapore.’ Your father and I were not in Singapore then. We were outside Kuala Lumpur, at the tin mines. I had had no thought of moving to Singapore, and after the dream, I had no intention of ever coming here.”

“What happened?”

She smiled. “Life happened, So-Peng.” Her eyes seemed limpid, as if they had somehow taken on a quality of the water beside which she and So-Peng sat. “And, in time, I realized that I was not to be merely a creator of life, but a transmitter of knowledge as well. I realized almost as soon as I got here that it had not been coincidence that I had been born into a tanjian family and that years later I would give birth to you. It became clear to me that the two were connected. I feared that connection, dreading the moment when you would say those words to me, ‘None of these are the reasons that the tanjian are in Singapore.’”

His mother put her head down. Years later So-Peng would remember that the city seemed to have grown still all around them. As familiar as he was with Singapore, he found that an impossibility. Yet this is what his memory told him.

“No,” Liang said, “none of those are the reasons the tanjian are in Singapore. The reason they are here, So-Peng, is to bring me back to my family in Zhuji.”

So-Peng was silent for a long time, and Liang said nothing in order that he might best absorb what she had told him. At last So-Peng rallied his spirit from the shock it had received. He said, “But why would the tanjian kill two merchants? You did not know them.”

“Don’t make the same mistake that everyone else has made,” Liang said. “It isn’t
who
the tanjian have murdered, but
how
they have been killed. The method announces the tanjian presence here. It is a warning to me to obey or die.”

“You mean they took two lives merely to frighten you?”

“That is the tanjian way,” Liang said.

So-Peng was now so stunned that he opened his mouth, shut it without having said a word. His mother looked neither directly at him nor away from him. She seemed waiting for him, reluctant to continue until he had gathered himself.

From some hidden inside pocket Liang produced a small, black velvet box. She held it in the palm of her hand as if it were a star from heaven.

“Open the box, my son.” She intoned this as if it were a religious act, part of an ancient rite that needed completion.

So-Peng, his heart hammering in his chest, did as she bade. Inside the box he saw rows of gems.

“Sixteen emeralds,” Liang intoned in the same peculiar, almost singsong tone of voice, “one for each principle of the Tau-tau, one for each founding member of the tanjian. It is said that their essences have been contained in these stones, sealed away at the moment of their deaths.”

So-Peng looked at the gems as if they were alive, as if at any moment they would bite his head off. He said, “These are what the tanjian want.” It was not a question.

Liang nodded. “They want me back, they want the emeralds back. It is one and the same. The emeralds are mine; we cannot be separated. They are sacred. Their care is my sacred trust. They have power beyond mere monetary value. Here is the very essence, the heart and the spirit of Tau-tau. Here is good and evil, my son. Look upon the varied faces, learn to differentiate between the two. With these stones in your possession you cannot help but live the life of the righteous.”

“But what do the tanjian want with them, Mother?”

“As I said, both good and evil are contained here: the spirits of the original tanjian monks. Some were good, others evil. The current tanjian, corrupted by their poverty, warped by their own shifting sense of morality, seek to loose the evil, use its ancient power for their own ends. In so doing, the good would be destroyed forever.”

Liang’s face had grown dark, disturbed as if by a flux only the two of them could detect.

“You see, there exists within these mystic sixteen gems a kind of equilibrium. Should their number be depleted, fall below nine, the equilibrium would begin to erode, and the evil, no longer held in check, would begin its ascent to power.”

In the tiny flames from the streetlights the stones looked dull and black, or devoid of any color at all, so that there was about them an air of brooding menace.

At length So-Peng tore his gaze from the emeralds. Looking into his mother’s face, he said, “The tanjian would actually kill you, one of their own?”

“I renounced their way of life when I ran off with your father,” she said. He listened for a hint of sadness in her voice, found none. “He is still handsome, your father. In those days, how much more so he was! He was a high-liver. He must have just made an important deal, because he threw money around. I liked that, I suppose. But I liked the idea of getting out of the temple even more. I felt stifled there; I was never born to be a tanjian woman. And your father was completely unlike the tanjian men I had grown up around, whom I had grown to despise. He was so kind, so genuine—of course, that’s why he continually loses all the money he earns.”

Her smile was wistful, as if she looked upon her husband as an overgrown child, a delightful blessing who, like a tender flower, nevertheless required constant attention. “But I was afraid of my father’s wrath—and rightly so. He would not have allowed me to go had I asked him. So I didn’t; I just left with your father, who knew nothing of this, of course. I have made certain that he still doesn’t. Poor man! What would he make of it?”

Liang looked at her son, saw not herself but her beloved husband mirrored in those features, as the moon is reflected in the water. “What I did was unheard of. How many laws of Tau-tau have I transgressed? In the back of my mind I knew that I would have to pay for those sins. But another, stronger, part of me hoped that that day would never come. Now it has.”

“Which is why you must go.”

“I cannot endanger my family,” she said simply.

So-Peng said, “If you go there will be no family.”

She was silent for some time. “But you see, my dearest, I have no other choice.”

So-Peng thought, She is right. But I do have a choice. He was also dimly aware that she was withholding something vital from him. “Tell me everything you can about the tanjian,” he said.

Liang gave him a small, sad smile. She shook her head. “What I have already told you is far too much. The danger is too great.”

“What if you go and the danger is still present?” So-Peng said.

“Impossible,” his mother said. “As soon as I return to Zhuji, the danger will no longer exist.”

Then, with the direct prescience of youth, So-Peng said, “What if you are not all the tanjian want?”

Liang had begun to tremble. “We will not speak of this!” she said sharply. And then, in a softer tone of voice, “Do not allow your imagination to get the better of you. If you rely overly on your gift now, it will surely fail you.”

So-Peng bowed in obedience. “I am sorry, Mother,” he said. “Nevertheless, I still believe that knowledge is strength.” He lifted his head at what he judged to be just the right moment. He had learned this trick from her, and it worked. Their eyes locked, but there was more that passed between them.

In a moment Liang nodded. She began to speak, telling him every bit of lore and strategy she knew of the tanjian and Tau-tau. It was quite late when she was finished.

As children, So-Peng’s brothers and sisters always obeyed their mother. So-Peng did more: he listened to her. So it was that when she revealed the background concerning her past and the philosophy of Tau-tau, So-Peng decided that in order to save both his mother and the family, he needed first to explore the dark. Because there is where he would find the tanjian, the harnesses of the night and of every evil thing that made its home in the darkness.

The way into darkness, he quickly discovered, was twilight, and twilight was synonymous with deceit, within which were always elements of the truth. One could not be truthful and explore the dark, rotting corners of the world. Truth was not the currency of evil, which inhabited the darkness like a bed of thorns in a woodland glade. Neither were lies. In order to negotiate these treacherous byways one needed to speak neither one, but like an incantation, an arcane combination of the two.

So-Peng went to see his cousin Wan, who cleaned the floors in the offices of the British chief of police. Wan, needless to say, knew everything that went on within the police precinct, which was quite a bit more than the chief of police knew.

Wan said, “Why do you ask about these murders, cousin? They are very bad business. Even the British are reluctant to investigate. They would prefer to let the past be the past. The British are afraid. Now I am afraid.”

Nevertheless, Wan let So-Peng see everything the police had amassed concerning the incidents. So-Peng concentrated on his reading so as not to allow Wan’s extreme anxiety to affect him.

“It mentions weapons called, for a lack of a better term, throwing stars,” he said to Wan. “Are the police holding them?”

Wan nodded, showed them to So-Peng, who gave them only a cursory look, though he was extremely curious about them. He returned to the report, asked Wan several meaningless, misleading questions, then gave him back the report. As Wan went to put it away, So-Peng palmed one of the throwing stars.

Now that he knew as much as the police did about the murders, So-Peng felt he was as prepared as he ever would be for Nightside.

Nightside was only an approximate translation of the patois word, part Malay, part Hokkien dialect. It was an area of town shunned by the ruling British, rarely frequented by the Babas, as the Straits Chinese born in the settlement of immigrant parents were called. The Babas, with an eye to the future, were far more respectable than were their forebears, who had endured unimaginable hardships, being brought to Singapore in the holds of clipper ships, being imprisoned there until the cost of their passage was paid for by those who promised to employ them. Subsequently, they toiled eighteen hours a day to pay off that heavy debt whose amount increased with each day’s interest.

Nightside was the province of the
samsengs,
professional criminals breeding in the dark underbelly of Singapore. These unwholesome denizens were utterly contemptuous of Western law. They committed murder, extortion, robbery, and burglary with such regularity that these crimes were to them the equivalent of a nine-to-five job.

Because So-Peng knew all this, he determined that Nightside would be the logical place to begin his search for the tanjian. Nightside was a place along the docks. It was filled with go-downs—warehouses—bars, and clubs open until dawn. Here liquor and opium vied for prominence among a population that had little thought of tomorrow. They were a godless bunch, the Nightsiders, the concept of belief in anything excoriated by a life without either hope or purpose.

Into this pit of evil stepped So-Peng, weaponless save for his quick wits and the knowledge he had gotten from his mother, the facts he had gleaned from the police files.

At first, at bar after bar, he was left alone, as if he were some dimwitted Baba who had wandered into Nightside by mistake and would soon disappear of his own accord.

When this did not occur, he garnered somewhat more attention, and when he began asking questions concerning the whereabouts of the men who had murdered the two merchants, he became the object of considerable curiosity and speculation.

A
samseng
named Tik Po Tak, the leader of one of the innumerable Chinese tongs, took particular interest in So-Peng. Tak was a thickset man in his early thirties, a former
sinkeh—
an indentured immigrant—who had seen his two older brothers die of cholera in the hold of the Chinese junk that had brought them to Singapore on the wings of the monsoon winds.