Brother Fish (119 page)

Our dinner at the Great Shanghai was a splendid experience at which Nicole selected all the dishes and was plainly to be seen as the hostess. At the conclusion of our meal it was the Countess who paid and left a gratuity for the maître d that if rolled into a bundle would have choked the proverbial horse. She also ordered a bottle of 100-year-old Napoleon cognac. We waited in the reception area while, armed with the brandy, she asked to see the maître d privately.

She returned in a surprisingly short time and, while we said nothing in the taxi back to the hotel, once back in her suite we wanted to know what had happened. Her answer was disappointing. ‘He didn't even glance at the name on the envelope. Its colour may have alerted him, for he simply took it from me, together with the brandy, and bowed. Not a word was exchanged between us.'

It was now a question of hope. As an evening out to dinner it had proved to be the most expensive meal for four people for which the company had ever paid, and I think it probably still holds the record.

Suddenly we were all scared. If there
was
a response to the yellow envelope Nicole would be on her own. Up to this point the mission had involved all of us. I dared not think about what might happen, and the worst part was that we wouldn't be able to do anything to protect her. If she was summoned and never returned, what then? We'd go to the police, but whether or not they'd be able to do anything was another matter. Wendy started to get cold feet and I can't say I was feeling all that good myself about the possible outcome.

Five days passed and no message came, and we'd retired to bed that night beginning to doubt anything would come from our efforts. Our talk at dinner shifted to our appointments with fish importers. Then at seven a.m. the following morning, apparently the phone in Nicole's suite rang. She awoke and answered it, still confused from her fitful sleep but somehow knowing this wasn't her wake-up call. She'd been unable to sleep, feeling acutely the disappointment of what was increasingly looking to be a failed mission. She knew that this was her last and only chance to find her daughter – if this door closed it would remain so forever. Finally, in desperation, she'd taken a sleeping pill in the early hours of the morning, and her head now felt as though it was filled with cotton wool. ‘Hello?' she said sleepily.

‘The bonesetter's shop at the gates of Ling Nam, today at twelve . . . lunchtime. Bring the box.' She was momentarily dumbstruck. ‘
Waieee!
' the voice barked, demanding a response.

‘Yes, yes – today, twelve o'clock, the gate of the walled city. I understand. Thank you,' she replied in Cantonese.

There followed a moment's pause, then, ‘You take taxi. No own driver. You come alone . . . bring the box.'

The fact that the messenger had twice asked for the dragon box filled her with hope – he had obviously been told to stress its importance. She was too overwhelmed to stay in the hotel, so she dressed hurriedly without putting on any make-up, and then scribbled a note and left it at the front desk, instructing the desk clerk to deliver it to me at breakfast. It simply said that she'd heard from ‘our fish contacts' and that while she might be back by mid-morning, not to expect her until mid- or even late afternoon.

She later explained she'd had an urgent need to be alone and that, given the chosen venue of the meeting, she'd realised she would need to dress differently or she would be highly conspicuous in the walled city. She wore a simple cotton dress she could discard and went shopping, taking the dragon box with her in a roughly woven shoulder bag she'd purchased on our first day in Hong Kong, buying one for Wendy as well. The bag had a substantial flap secured with a wooden toggle and, while not very elegant, she'd explained how it stopped
larn jai
, street boys (‘who can steal the gold from your teeth while you're speaking'), from snatching their handbags. She'd demonstrated how it was slung around the shoulder in such a way that no arm would be strong enough to snatch it away.

She left the hotel on foot, immediately finding herself swallowed up in the early-morning press of mainly
amahs
heading for the ladder streets of the Central District. It was seven-thirty a.m., and while this might not seem early in a western city, the Chinese eat late, stay up late and rise late, so the central business areas don't get going properly until mid-morning. Soon Nicole found herself among the mass of pedestrians, the crowd noises mixed with the remorseless screech and whine of Chinese music played over tinny transistor radios. She climbed up a set of steps to a higher level, leaving the throng of jabbering Chinese
gung yun
behind her, and stopped to look over Hong Kong Harbour. She recalled how breathtaking the harbour view had been even to her tortured soul forty-two years ago, coming down from the Peak in the tram on her way to Lantau Island. Back then it had given her hope that she might be successful and be granted an interview with the venerated Wang Po. But now, so many years later, the harbour seemed to have quite the opposite effect – the sky was masked by a dense curtain of cloud, made worse by smoke from the factories of Kwun Tong, behind which a burning sun was already turning the day into a furnace. In the growing heat she was aware of the smells – the food carts in Wan Chai, salt fish from the squatters' camps in North Point and carried on the hot breeze, the reek of Aberdeen. The harbour below her was leaden in appearance, except for a patch across the water at Tsim Sha Tsui, where it gleamed like beaten tin.

She walked on and came to a market of cheap wares, and stopped at a clothes stall. To the surprise of the woman who owned it, she purchased a
sarm foo
– the drab jacket, wide-legged trousers and black canvas slipper-like shoes of a working-class woman. She asked the woman to keep watch while she changed behind the hessian screen that formed part of the stall, then paid the woman and handed her the Australian summer cotton dress she'd been wearing. The woman showed neither surprise nor gratitude, and simply accepted the dress. As Nicole walked away she heard the woman laugh and call out, ‘That one's up to no good!'

She had made a wide circle coming from the hotel and now headed back, but as she approached she decided she didn't want to go in. She'd be forced to explain everything to the three of us, when ‘everything' was in fact a phone call that lasted no more than a minute. The rest had simply been her emotional turmoil. The terminal for the Star Ferry across to Kowloon was only five minutes' walk from the Mandarin Hotel and she decided to have a late breakfast there – it was now almost nine-thirty and she had been walking for two hours. But when she arrived at the terminal the prospect of breakfast no longer appealed, and she decided to take the ferry across the harbour and wait on the Kowloon side until it was time to take the taxi to the gates of Ling Nam.

On the ferry she bought a mug of scalding tea, which helped settle her stomach and nerves. All morning long a single phrase from a Chinese village song she'd learned as a child in Ah Lai's village had been driving her crazy: ‘Bamboo door face bamboo door; wooden door face wooden door'. She remembered it was used to indicate the matching of partners in a marriage – the rich should not stoop to partner with the poor, and the poor should not aspire to partner with the rich. It also referred to racial purity, and served as a folk treatise on social standing and pedigree.

As a White Russian in Shanghai Nicole had always been somewhat intimidated by the rarefied world of the taipans, the upper echelons of big business. Yet she reminded herself that Sir Victor had been among the most powerful of them, and she hadn't felt intimidated in his presence. Big Boss Yu had been the dragonhead and he hadn't frightened her either, except when he'd made her the scapegoat for the opium smuggling operation. If the folk song was indeed a subliminal message from her past, intended to warn her not to attempt to get involved with someone above her station, then it was wrong. She was suddenly angry with herself. The Triads was a secret society of criminals of the worst kind, and while she was frightened by them she told herself she had no reason to feel intimidated. As the chairperson of a fishing empire that was big by any standards, she was a taipan herself. She stamped her foot on the deck in a physical gesture of defiance, spilling some of the hot tea over her trousers, but it drove the silly lyric out of her head.

On the Kowloon side of the harbour she'd found a shop selling expensive silk and bought a sufficient length to wrap the dragon box, and with it a piece of heavy gold cord with a tassel attached to either end. The simple act of wrapping the dragon box, with some help from the proprietor, made it no longer the curse and comfort it had been to the Countess for so long. It signalled that the box was soon to be taken from her, and that this meant a conclusion – although she didn't yet know what this ending might be. She still retained a sense of being Chinese – if not in her blood, it was nevertheless in her heart and a part of her past culture. The return of the box, thus fulfilling the incense master's prophecy, had always accorded in her mind with finding her daughter. Wrapping it finally in the trappings of a fortunate gift, she was wrapping forty-two years of hope into its return. The fact that they'd responded to her offer suggested that Big Boss Yu was still alive or, at the very least, that his family valued the return of the box, and this fuelled her hope of finding her daughter.

She still had an hour and a bit to kill before catching a taxi for the twenty-minute ride to the walled city and she was suddenly ravenous. Not far from where she stood she could see the Peninsula Hotel. In contrast to the Mandarin Hotel's modern deference to the past, the Peninsula Hotel was the opulent past itself, elegant and snobbish, the grand dame of the Far East who welcomed only those who were sufficiently wealthy to pay for her patronage. Now it seemed to beckon, an oasis in the middle of the roiling, jabbering, smelly human struggle around her.

Ignoring the white-uniformed door boy who gawked at her passing, she crossed the lobby to the first-floor elevator to the surprise of several people watching. Perhaps they were thinking that the blue-eyed woman dressed as a peasant was returning late from a fancy-dress party. It was to the credit of the maître d on the mezzanine balcony – probably the most pleasant, expensive place to have breakfast in Asia – that he didn't bat an eyelid and simply escorted her to a table.

At this moment Nicole was about as far from the dirt, sweat and infamy of the walled city as it was possible to be. Ling Nam is often referred to as the dirty footprint of China in the centre of the British colony. All that is vile, brutal or treacherous in the colony is said to emanate from this human cesspool, a walled city withheld by the empress when she had grudgingly and under some duress approved the lease of the Kowloon Peninsula to the British merchants grown rich on the opium trade to China and the subsequent export of tea and silk. Even now it belongs to China and, as a sovereign protectorate, is beyond the reach of British law. Within its verminous and hostile perimeter one is beyond the reach of police protection and said to be even out of the sight of God. It is here that illicit business finds a haven, where every vice and perversion is catered for in the walled city's whorehouses, opium dens and illegal gaming parlours. Triad gangs, illegal immigrants, snake-boat operators, murderers, kidnappers, white slavers and numerous black and devil cult societies, some said to involve human sacrifice, all prosper in Ling Nam, perhaps the toughest and most desperate place on earth.

After a silver-service breakfast of coddled eggs, paper-thin slices of sesame-seed toast and a pot of Earl Grey tea, with slightly less than half an hour to spare, Nicole left the Peninsula, and the liveried commissionaire summoned a cab with a white-gloved hand. The taxi driver glanced in his rear-view mirror as she mentioned her destination, and she was careful to tell him to take her only to the gates and not beyond. Within moments she was headed east along the broad stretch of Prince Edward Road towards Kowloon City.

While she was aware she might never return, she told herself that at least she had finally summoned the courage to try to find her daughter. She was numbed by the prospect of what might lie ahead in the next hour or so, but she knew nothing could change her resolve – there was no turning back. At two minutes to noon the taxi halted a block from the gates of the walled city. She stepped from the cab to be confronted by the last of numerous official warnings they'd passed on the way – a large sign warning the public that entering Ling Nam unescorted and without a permit is done at one's own risk. Once inside the gate, she crossed the swarming street to what could only have been the bonesetter's shop, for a yellow skeleton hung from a beam that stuck out above the entrance to the run-down building. The grimy window was filled with assorted human bones and faded anatomy charts. As she reached the broken curb of the littered sidewalk in front, a tall, emaciated Chinese man stepped from the shop's doorway. He was wearing voluminous shorts cinched around his wasted gut by a leather belt. Heavily veined hairless legs protruded from the shorts, so thin that the veins gave the appearance of thick vines twisting around a yellow sapling. His dirty singlet was rolled up against the mugginess of the day and rested under his chin. His hair was pure Harpo Marx and seemed charged with electricity, which gave him a desperate rather than frightening appearance.

‘You come taxi?' he demanded, his voice hoarse with suspicion, peering left then right as half-a-dozen taxis wove through the incessant honking and roar of traffic. It was the unmistakable voice she'd heard earlier on the telephone.