Jade Dragon (5 page)

“What’s going on here?” The voice halted both of them. Ko’s anger froze
solid. The man approaching them was a small, wizened figure. In his
youth, the elderly fellow had probably been a big guy, heavy but
dangerous with it. What he had lost to age, he’d replaced with presence.
Rikio’s manner was instantly obeisant.

“Sifu Hung. Sorry, sorry, sir. Just a small disagreement. Nothing
important. ”

Big Hung. Ko’s blood ran cold. This old man was the senior boss of the
entire 14K triad, half of Hong Kong’s criminal enterprises firmly in the
pocket of this dumpy doughball ex-contender. The youth marvelled at the
idea of it; the stories he had heard about Big Hung’s ruthless nature,
of the fear he instilled in other men—and now to look at him, the
mobster looked like nothing more than a fat old geezer in an expensive
suit. The elderly guy leaned closer. Ko smelled cologne and the faint
aroma of tiger balm.

Hung gave Ko a measuring stare, and he made it clear he didn’t like what
he saw. “You don’t belong here, boy. Stop bothering my lads and get
lost.” More men were approaching now, Hung’s personal guard. All of them
held shiny handguns in deceptively casual stances.

“Ko brought a car…” began Rikio, in an attempt to justify himself.

Hung turned his puppy-like brown eyes on the Vector and sniffed like he
smelt something bad. “Corp wheels? Is this boy a fool?” he asked Rikio,
“He won’t earn our graces by doing a stupid tiling like this.” He gave
the car a dismissive wave. “Burn it.”

“What?” Ko blurted. “But—”

Hung eyed Rikio, ignoring Ko so completely that it silenced him. “Torch
it,” he repeated. “And then make the idiot go away.”

For old time’s sake, Rikio let Ko take the bag from the back seat and
leave with just a few bruises and a split lip. By the time he was at the
highway, the night had closed in and unleashed the rain. Feng was
waiting there for him.

“You lie with pigs, you become dirty,” said the swordsman.

Ko made a spitting noise and kept walking.

We are not so blind that we cannot see. Do you understand what will
happen when the sky cuts like SILK and the BEAST pours in?

Do not accept the way of no mind and the CALMNESS of the false
Zen—this is a lie made to entrap you, a coil cast down from the dragons
in the toivers! Turn your face from false IDOLS. Find truth in your
HEART.

The poison of dead emperors taints the Fragrant Harbour! Touch life
and live! Go on and LIVE!

Excerpt from a tract distributed in Temple Street Market. Origin and
author unknown.

He tried the Banana Dog and the Rama-Rama, Club 19NineTee7 and the House
o’ Boots before he found his Toyomazda Ranger wedged poorly between two
light buses in a side street off Waterloo Road. A few doors down, a
shiny chrome elevator led to the Lucky Dot Bar. So, then. His sister was
back there, making a fool of herself, braying that mock nasal laugh she
put on when she faked amusement at the off-colour jokes of rich guys.

Ko approached the car and his face fell. She’d left it unlocked—
again
.
The old familiar bite of that special anger and frustration he kept for
his sibling rose and fell in his chest. He slid into the front seat and
made quick and angry work of gathering up MacDee wrappers and dozens of
tiny vodka bottles, the kind that crowded hotel minibars. He threw them
into a public flash-burner and stomped back to the Ranger, the rain
drumming off the awning of the store next to the parked car, clattering
off the sunroof. He sat and watched the silver doorway. Every so often,
two light strips either side of the elevator would illuminate and people
would blunder out, cursing the acrid rain and unfolding their umbrellas.
Mostly they were identikit corps, men and women with little or no
difference to them. Some were fatter than others, some had better suits,
but they all stumbled around the street like they owned it, pushing
people out of their way or kicking at the slow-moving bots that wandered
past them, projecting holo-adverts.

The evening moved on in slow, unpleasant surges, and Ko took the time to
tape the cuts on his face with a spool of DermFix from the glove
compartment. From behind the steering wheel, in the morose damp, he
glared at the corporates and the gaudy hangers-on who trailed them in
and out of the Lucky Dot. Ko’s fingers dug into the plastic of the wheel
with such powerful, impotent fierceness, it made his eyes tight in his
head. A knot of them slipped and giggled as they moved toward the main
road, at their head a raucous woman in the scarlet kimono of a senior
Paradise executive, dragging a boywhore behind her. Under a
thermoplastic parasol, she led her gaggle of suits right in front of the
Ranger and for a moment Ko imagined the look on her face if he were to
stamp on the gas and ram the lot of them against the flank of the
minibus. He saw it unfold in his head as a colourless manga strip: cut
frames and jagged edges spattered with pools of black ink blood, wheels
spinning on corpses. Screaming. Terrible laughter.

“That hatred will burn you alive one day.” Feng shifted in the back
seat.

Ko didn’t bother to look at him. “You have a bloody proverb for every
day of the week, don’t you?”

“I’m just making an observation.”

He closed his eyes, and when he opened them he was alone again.

The night drew in and the transit company programmer came to load the
routes for the light buses. He gave Ko a sideways look from under the
hood of his acid-resistant rain slicker and did his work. The two buses
came to life in blinks of neon running lights and rumbled away to
service the shift workers massing at the Metro stations. Tubed in from
the outlying shanties across the border wall in Shenzhen, Hong Kong’s
population would swell by a third once the day ended as cooks, cleaners
and prostitutes came in to fill the low-rent gaps in the city’s service
infrastructure. By dawn they would all be gone again, pockets lined with
a few more yuan, the messes made by the suits cleaned up so the rich
could do it again the next night. The migrant workforce was visible at
the edges of every street, edited out of the world that people like the
kimono woman moved through.

The digits on the dashboard display moved with glacier-like slowness
toward closing time, and the higher they climbed the more suits ejected
themselves from the Lucky Dot. In big, splashy steps, a skinny man in a
laser-cut Mirany original lurched over to the Ranger and collided with
it. Ko jerked awake from a clammy doze and cupped his balisong knife in
his hand.

“C’mon! C’mon!” the drunk called to a group of similarly dressed men. “I
gotta car! Let’s play go-gangers!” He tugged at the door handle, but Ko
locked it. The man frowned, his beer-fogged brain slow on the uptake.
“Hey.” He banged on the window. “Geddout. I want this car. I’m driving.
”

“Fuck off,” Ko replied, and showed him the length of the blade.

The guy frowned, unperturbed by the implied threat, and then dug out a
roll of yuan. He waved them around. Paper money was a novelty for a lot
of corporate types who had been raised inside walled executive enclaves,
where wealth only existed as ones and zeros. Hong Kong’s night economy
was still traditional at heart, though, and cash remained a quaint
throwback in many quarters. The suit peeled off hundred-yuan bills and
threw them at the Ranger, one after another. “Gimme the car, street boy.
I can buy you. I can buy anything! I wanna play!” He yelled at his
friends. “I want to be Hazzard Wu!” He slapped the window with the flat
of his hand.
“I promise not to kill you…”
he chortled, repeating
Wu’s signature line from last year’s big hit, the action racer flick,
Spider.

From the back of the group came a man who was decidedly not a drunk. He
reeked of corp security. With gentle force, he guided the other man
away, pausing only to gather up the wet banknotes and throw Ko a slight
shake of the head. “This way, sir,” he heard him say. “There’s a limo
waiting.”

“A limo!” shouted the drunken man, and his gaggle of friends repeated
him with noisy, idiotic gusto.

The lights around the door blinked on again as the lift dropped from the
Lucky Dot on the fourteenth floor. Nikita came out and she listed like a
galleon in high seas, her face puffy and red with drink, screwing up in
irritation at the rain. Another girl came with her—a bottle-ginger
Korean dressed in retro kogal style—and trailing behind a bald fellow
with a simpering, pleading look on his face.

Ko was out of the car in one swift motion, the balisong still concealed
in the curve of his fist. “Niki!” he shouted, and beckoned her toward
him.

Nikita threw Ko a look and then smiled back at the Korean and the man.
“Are we going to have a party, then?”

The faux-ginger girl gave Nikita a sharp prod that was not the friendly
jab she pretended it was. “I’ll take it from here. ”

“He wanted to go with me—”

“Girls, I like you both…” said the bald guy.

“With
me
,” snapped the Korean and this time she gave Ko’s sister a
shove.

Nikita brought up her hand to slap the ginger girl, but Ko was there. He
grabbed her wrist and turned it. Her slow-burning ire instantly turned
on him and she bit Ko where his forearm was bare.

The Korean was already melting away. Ko ignored the pain and dragged his
sister, screeching and complaining, back to the car. He forced her into
the passenger seat and they set off.

Nikita spat and hissed at him on the way back to the apartment. Now and
then she would look directly at him and he could see the dull, doll-like
cast in her eyes that told him she was stoned. She alternated between
ranting and babbling, the coherence of her speech ebbing and flowing. Ko
just concentrated on the driving and tried not to think about it too
much. Every time he did, every time he thought honestly about his
dissolute sister’s self-destructive life, it made his gut tighten and
his temper flare. She worked at places like the Lucky Dot ostensibly as
a hostess, which in real terms meant she was paid to look pretty, and
ply the corp clients who frequented the bar with overpriced drinks while
they pawed at her. It was just slighdy less sordid than being a
sexworker. Nikita wasn’t like the girls in the Mongkok sinplexes –
although Ko often said she was to get a rise out of her—in some ways,
she was worse. It made his blood boil to think that the highlight of her
day would be some suited creep, like baldy back, there making eyes at
her.

“Least I got a job,” she slurred.

Ko realised too late he’d spoken his thoughts aloud.

“Not like you,” Nikita went on. “What do you do, little brother? Play
with your stupid cars—” she smacked the dashboard. “Run stuff for the
triads ’cross the border,
steal
? I’m trying to make something of
myself.”

“How? By playing corp wannabe, by sucking up to every suit that comes
through the door? What, you think one of them is going to fall for you
and make you his mistress, shower you with diamonds and credits? One
day, one of those scumbags is going to take you for games back at his
place and you’ll end up spent and dead!”

“Don’t judge me!” she shot back. “You’re just like Dad—”

Ko stamped on the brakes and the Ranger screeched to a halt in the
middle of Kwun Tong Road. In a low voice, without looking at her, he
said, “Don’t talk about him. ”

Nikita fell silent and after a moment they drove on.

Eventually, Frankie had to use the Penfield beside the bed just to get
some sleep. Half-considered thoughts and strange, ghostly dream
fragments hovered at the edges of his weary mind. Exhaustion and jetlag
struck hard the moment he laid eyes on the bed, the inviting spread of
cream and chocolate-coloured silk sheets open to him in the middle of
the suite. Alice talked about the meeting, but he wasn’t really
listening. He remembered falling asleep in his suit.

Once or twice he awoke with that peculiar kind of disassociated fear
that comes from finding yourself in a strange bedroom. The subtle
electromagnetic aura of the Penfield generator eventually sent him into
deep REM and finally Frankie relaxed. He thought, just once, that he had
seen the Monkey King in the room with him; but that blurred like
rainwater on glass and faded.

A service bot woke him by singing a traditional folk aria. It was a
silver ball balanced on two convex wheels that emerged from its flanks.
A rotating head presented a pair of cute eyes and a sine wave mouth. It
giggled like a child as it did its chores, making him coffee and tuning
the shower. The device offered him a trio of vitamin and nanobooster
tablets as he got dressed, gravely informing him of the dangers of
dehydration on the international traveller. Frankie didn’t argue; his
face felt like old paper. When he was done, the metal ball rolled away
along the corridor and used arrows projected from laser slits to direct
him to the hotel’s rooftop heliport. Alice was waiting for him in an
idling spidercopter, with Monkey King in the cockpit.

“Where’s Ping?” The question popped out of his mouth as he strapped
himself into a seat.

“Occupied,” Alice replied, as the rotodyne drifted off toward the towers
of Central.

Frankie watched the world go by, the glass and steel skyscrapers passing
beneath him, the near-distant glitter of Kowloon across the bottle green
waters of the bay. There was no need to provide a spidercopter to take
him to Yuk Lung’s headquarters—a car would have got him there almost as
quickly—but the gesture was obviously important. Everything about
Francis Lam’s return to Hong Kong was being choreographed with infinite
care and precision. For his part, Frankie could not be sure if it were
to make him feel special or just inferior.