Hungry Ghost (36 page)

Cheng left the room and returned with his bag. He carefully closed the double doors and walked to the table behind Ng Wai-sun. ‘I ask you now to join me in the ceremony of Burning The Yellow Paper,’ the Dragon Head continued. Behind him Cheng unzipped the bag and took from it a piece of yellow paper and placed it next to the cast-iron bowl. From the bag came a soft, clucking sound. Cheng handed the Dragon Head a black writing brush and unscrewed the top of a small bottle of blue ink. With careful, measured strokes Ng Wai-sun began to write on the paper, speaking each character out loud as he finished it, spelling out the oath of allegiance and the agreement the Dragon Heads had reached. The men around the table nodded their heads in agreement as he spoke. When he had finished he walked over to the Tan Yee Dragon Head and gave him the paper and brush.

‘If you would do me the honour of signing first, Mok Shih-chieh.’

Mok smiled in acceptance and wrote the three characters of his name below the oath. The paper and brush were then passed clockwise around the table, and when there were twelve signatures Ng Wai-sun added his own before taking it back to the portrait.

Cheng produced a box of matches and a bottle of port from the bag and while the Dragon Head held the paper over the bowl Cheng lit a match and set fire to it. Flames licked at the paper and smoke curled above it, forming a cloud as if it came from the mouth of the Kwan Kung god. The red-faced warrior seemed to glare through the smoke, and his hands appeared to tighten on the war sword he held across his armoured chest. The old man held the burning paper until there was nothing but ash, ignoring the pain, his teeth clenched tightly. The flame flickered and died and he dropped the burnt sheet into the bowl. Cheng uncorked the port and poured it into the bowl, playing the stream of liquid over the ashes. He placed the empty bottle on the table, and from inside his robe took an ivory-handled curved knife, the blade wickedly sharp, which he handed to the Dragon Head. He leant over the bag once more and pulled out a black chicken by its feet. The bird’s wings had been tied tight against its body with string, and Cheng held it out towards Ng Wai-sun so that he could cut the bonds and allow the chicken to flap freely. The Dragon Head seized it by the neck with his left hand and drew the blade across its neck with one firm stroke. Blood splattered into the bowl, some of it spilling on to the table, and then it poured out as the chicken thrashed and shook. Cheng waited until the bird was still before dropping the corpse into the bag and taking the bloodstained knife from Ng Wai-sun. The Dragon Head picked up the bowl and held it close to his chin as he swirled the contents around. With his eyes fixed firmly on the men sitting at the table he raised the black bowl to his lips and drank deeply. When he’d finished he handed the bowl to Mok Shih-chieh. The mixture of blood and wine had given him a red line above his lips like a parody of a smile, a hellish clown’s grin. Mok took the bowl almost reverently and then he too drank before passing it to the man on his left.

The bowl went round the table, as the yellow paper had done previously, each man drinking from it in turn until it returned to where Ng Wai-sun was standing. He took it and walked back to the table and held it up before the framed portrait.

‘Whosoever breaks the oath and betrays the trust of those who signed the yellow paper, may he perish as the chicken has perished,’ he said, before turning to face the men at the table. He threw the bowl down and it smashed into small pieces, the rest of the sickly-sweet mixture spilling on to the floor where it lay in slowly spreading pools, unable to soak into the polished wood.

‘And may their families be broken as the bowl has been broken,’ he said.

The Dragon Heads nodded agreement, as one.

The anchor chain dropped above Dugan’s head at dead on six o’clock, and it was followed by the sound of one dollar coins being dropped into a tin bucket from a great height. For once it didn’t annoy Dugan, not overmuch anyway, because he hadn’t been able to sleep for more than half an hour at a time. Thoughts of Petal kept riding roughshod over his subconscious and he kept playing his last conversation with her over and over in his mind.

The key to what had happened, he was sure, lay with his brother-in-law, but according to the maid he and Jill hadn’t been in all day. The last time he’d phoned, at eleven o’clock at night, he’d left his number and asked that Thomas Ng give him a call. The telephone had remained stubbornly silent all night.

He was in the office at half past seven, drinking coffee with his feet on the desk and he waited until eight before ringing Ng’s house. The Filipina maid answered. No, Jill and Simon Ng were not at home. No, she didn’t know if they had come back last night. No, Thomas Ng was not there. No, she did not know when he would be back.

Some 30,000 feet above Vietnam Feinberg handed a light green file to Edmunds. ‘That’s our boy,’ he said. ‘A real pro. I’m looking forward to this job.’

He was too, Edmunds could see it in his eyes, a manic gleam that he’d seen all too often during his days with Special Forces, when he had been down in the jungle below, killing and torturing and serving his country. He’d believed in what he was doing then; even among the blood and the pain and the shit he knew he was doing the Right Thing, serving God and Country and the President in the best way he could. He’d seen the thousand-yard stare in the eyes of grunts coming to the end of their tours, short-timers who’d seen too much death and lost too many friends, young men who would never be the same again. He’d seen the look and understood it, but he could not fathom how a man like Feinberg, who’d still have been in short trousers when the last helicopter lifted off the roof of the US embassy in Saigon, could have the same cold fury in his eyes. Somewhere along the line Feinberg had just stopped caring. Feinberg would never be sorry for anything he did – no regret, no remorse, no feeling. In a way Edmunds envied him, not for the thousand-yard stare or the eagerness for combat, but for the way he had come to terms so easily with what he did.

Maybe he would change as he got older. Edmunds had. He didn’t have flashbacks or anything the documentary-makers described when they went to interview the Vets living rough in the wilderness or locked up in institutions. He didn’t wake up screaming in the middle of the night and he didn’t flinch at loud noises. It was just that he kept getting overcome with a deep sorrow, a suffocating sadness for what he’d done in the past that dogged him even during his happiest moments. It was there, like a tumour, and like cancer it seemed to grow over the years until now it had almost filled his whole body and was now preparing to burst out of his skin and into the open where everyone would see what he had contained all these years.

‘Are you OK?’ asked Feinberg.

Edmunds nodded. ‘Yeah, I’m just a bit hung-over.’

Feinberg grinned. ‘You should have stayed till the bitter end.’

Edmunds forced a smile. ‘Did you get her in the end?’

‘Who?’

‘The dancer. The girl with the ponytail.’

‘Fuck, no. She left just before the bar closed, ran out and jumped on to the back of a motor-bike. Her boyfriend, I suppose. Or more likely her pimp. Bastard. No, I picked up two really young ones; Jesus, they couldn’t have been more than fifteen, hardly any hair on them at all, if you know what I mean. God, I was up all night with them. Outstanding.’

Feinberg liked using phrases like ‘outstanding’, words that he’d picked up from books and films about the Vietnam War. In many ways it was a pity he hadn’t had a chance to serve in the early Sixties, thought Edmunds. Perhaps if he had he wouldn’t have been so keen to use the jargon.

The two men were sitting in the almost empty Business section of a Thai International Airbus where two Thai stewardesses in long purple dresses were about to serve breakfast from a trolley. Edmunds just took coffee and a plate of fresh fruit, but Feinberg took the works, scrambled eggs, bacon, mushrooms and tomatoes, and three bread rolls spread thickly with butter. Edmunds peeled a banana and began to eat but he had no appetite.

The file lay on the tray in front of him, unopened. It was the same green as the fatigues they’d worn when they went into the jungle at night on the sort of operations that would never get into the history books. Edmunds had killed men, women and children in the name of duty, usually with a knife or his bare hands, often at night, and always with the aim of terrorizing the enemy. Edmunds had been all of twenty-five years old then, not much younger than Feinberg was now, and he had been one of the older ones. They were sent into the tunnels where the North Vietnamese rested up between raids or to the thin jungle trails where they sat for days waiting for a VC patrol. Then they killed. And when they’d finished killing they mutilated the bodies to serve as a warning to the rest. No, not as a warning, there was precious little to warn the VCs about; it was to serve as a lesson. This is what will happen to you if we catch you. So keep away. They gutted children and they castrated the men and defiled the women with their hunting knives. On several occasions they’d been helicoptered into friendly villages that had been attacked by the VCs and told to mutilate the bodies of the civilians, dead but still warm, still bleeding. Then just as quickly they were flown out before the Army took in the Press Corps to show them what it was they were up against.

Edmunds thought now as he thought then, that he had been doing the Right Thing. But whereas then he had gone in hard and cold, now he felt sorry for what he’d done, and he wished he’d just been a grunt fighting cleanly with an M-16 in the mud rather than as an assassin with a knife. He couldn’t remember how many he’d killed, but there were some he could picture clearly in his mind, as if etched into metal by acid. There was a teenage boy with a rifle whose throat he’d slit from behind, only to find that it was a girl with a broom, there was a woman he’d disembowelled who turned out to be pregnant, a toddler who crawled out from under a bed while he was on the floor hacking away at its mother, an old man who had smiled when he stuck a knife through his ribcage and into his heart. He could remember all their faces, and he knew he would remember them at the moment of his own death, when it came. He sighed deeply and picked up the file, hoping that reading about the man called Howells would take his mind off the memories.

Inside the file were three faxed sheets, two of them containing lines of type; the third was a photograph. It was of a man in his thirties, with a thinnish face, deep-set eyes and a hard-set mouth. It was a face Edmunds recognized, a face he’d seen once, four years earlier, in the Lebanon.

He looked across at Feinberg but he had his head down over his plate, concentrating on his eggs. He scrutinized the picture, but there was no doubt. Howells had saved his life. Edmunds had been working out of the embassy in Beirut when he’d been kidnapped by one of the militia groups. They’d locked him away in the basement of a whitewashed house in the suburbs and told the embassy that if they didn’t pay a ransom of US$100,000 they’d kill him. They’d kept him in the room for three months, blindfolded for most of the time, with nothing stronger than water to drink and food out of tins. He’d almost gone mad from the sheer monotony of it all. The threat of death had been nothing new, that he could deal with, but over the whole twelve weeks they had said not one word to him after the initial kidnapping, in any language. They’d refused to give him a television or a radio and the only time they showed him a newspaper was when they ran stories saying that the authorities were refusing to pay the ransom.

Over the three months he had six different guards, with never less than two on duty at any one time. There were three of them in the house the day Howells came. One of them, a middle-aged swarthy thug with a wicked zig-zag of a scar under his left eye that had distorted the skin and given him a permanent leer, was the leader of the group. With him was a girl with long black hair who always had an automatic rifle in her right hand, and a young man barely out of his teens, a good-looking boy with a crew cut and fair white skin. They took it in turns to guard him, two sitting in the room while the other stayed upstairs. The basement had only one way in and out, a sturdy wooden door with a peep-hole, bolted on the outside and inside. All the room contained was a camp bed and a couple of army blankets for Edmunds, a plastic bucket for him to use as a toilet, and two easy chairs for his guards. Every second day they brought in another plastic bucket, this one half full of lukewarm water, and a rough cotton towel so that he could wash himself. Everything he ate or drank was brought in through the door on paper plates or in polystyrene cups. Twice they took photographs of him sitting on the camp bed holding a newspaper. Both times one of his guards stood by his side with a gun pointing at his temple.

He was nearing the end of his tether by the time Howells came on the scene. He was blindfolded so he wasn’t sure who was in the room with him but he’d guessed that one of them was the girl by the way she’d padded across the floor. He heard her walk to the door and pause as she checked the peep-hole. He heard the rattle of the bolt and then he heard the crash of a foot against the wooden door and then a scream and two shots. Edmunds had panicked, rolling off the camp bed on to the floor clawing at the blindfold, scared shitless that at any second he was going to get a bullet in the head. A third shot barked and he heard a simultaneous thud and grunt and he blinked in the light as the middle-aged man slumped to the ground. By the door was the young man, blood pumping from a gaping wound in his chest. The girl was lying at the foot of the bed, her long black hair spreading like a pool of oil behind her head. One of her eye sockets was filling with blood and as he watched he saw red flow among the black tendrils of hair. Her legs twitched as if she was sleeping but the bullet had cauterized most of her brain tissue.

Only then did Edmunds see the man at the door, the man who had done so much damage in a few scant seconds. Lean and wiry with a long face and deep-set eyes, two or three days’ stubble on his chin, he held a large handgun in both hands, moving the barrel slowly from side to side, covering the three corpses in the room. Cancel that. Two corpses. The older man was still alive, breathing heavily and clasping his hand around his groin where he’d been shot. Howells looked at Edmunds and aimed the gun at him, face totally relaxed, no sign of the tension that he surely must have felt. Edmunds realized that he must have forced the young man to stand in front of the peep-hole and then pushed him into the room, probably shooting him in the back. One against three, crazy odds that no one in his right mind would go up against. The man didn’t look crazy, he looked very, very cool. His voice when it came was cold and hard.