Kowloon Tong (15 page)

Yet that was not the way Mei-ping seemed to Bunt. In just two days Mei-ping had become beautiful. It was the effect of her sadness. Grief inhabited her and made her attractive. Bunt was ashamed of his tremulous interest, seeing her gaunt face and the depth of her dark and tearful eyes. Sorrow gave her a compliant posture, and a slight limp, and Bunt could not resist clutching at her when she appeared in his office lamenting the disappearance of Ah Fu. She was fragile and sweet and unresisting, too bewildered to be suspicious. Bunt wanted to lick her tears off her hollow cheeks and kiss her sadly pouting lips.

On the pretext of comforting her, Bunt held her and stroked the soft flesh beneath her thin blouse. His fingers pressed to her bones, and he snorted with desire and murmured, "Everything's going to be all right. Trust me."

Terror had stripped her of her manners and given her nerve. She was oddly bold one moment and cowering the next. The other workers at Imperial Stitching seemed afraid of her, the way she approached Bunt, slamming the gates of the elevator or hurrying up the stairs to his office without an appointment. She stared at him, sometimes calling out, "Ah Fu!" She looked radiant.

Bunt kept seeing chicken feet and kept replaying the ridiculous monologues of Mr. Hung.
This is delicious because it has been strung up ... Truss it well and hang it for days. Let it air dry. Just dangle there ... It becomes tender and fragrant.

And his gloating red-eyed moan,
I want to eat your foot.

Four days after the dinner at the Golden Dragon—four days since Ah Fu had vanished—Mei-ping met Bunt
on the
stairway when he arrived for work. She had a pair of scissors in her hand. She had leaped from her work table as he had passed the open door.

"I want to go to the police station," she said.

He could see that she did not want to do this at all, but that she was terrified and desperate.

"That won't help," he said. "What will the police do?"

"I will make a report," Mei-ping said, her voice breaking. "For the files."

The word "report" made Bunt see a useless sheet of official note paper, bearing the seal of the lion and the unicorn, blown out of Mei-ping's helpless hands and boosted into the Hong Kong sky by a gust of wind and sailing away as it tore apart. Couldn't she see it too?

"They will put it in the window," she said.

What was she talking about?

The incomprehension on Bunt's face seemed to goad her to greater insistence, but a moment later she broke and began to cry. She cried miserably, screwing up her face, pressing her swollen eyes with the backs of her fists. The scissors in her hand made her seem harassed and distracted rather than violent, though Bunt wished she would put them down and cry more compactly. There were tears on the scissor blades, tears on her chin, a snail trail of snot on her sleeve.

"Please go to Mr. Hung," she whimpered.

Bunt was moved. There was nothing subtle in her weeping and the drama of it shook him, whipped at his desire and cracked his heart and roused him. Her body was contorted, crippled by the seizure of her tears. The whole business seemed urgent now—the thought of his mother saying, "I'm not bothered," annoyed him. His mother would never understand. She did not know enough of Mei-ping, and would never know.

A sad passion had also been part of his memory of their secret meetings: in his office or in the stock room, where they had lain on bolts of new cloth; once in the Pussy Cat, where she had been shocked by the topless Filipinos; and many times in the blue hotels of Kowloon Tong. After some of those trysts her face had been smeared in tears, out of confusion or panic or the shame of her own desire. And though she had asked nothing of him, she made love to him in a number of ways, even sitting on him and pretending to make him submit. It was her begging postures that drove him wild.

"I will see Mr. Hung," Bunt said.

***

It strengthened him to know that in seeing Mr. Hung he was defying his mother. The rebellion was something new in him, seemingly triggered by Mr. Chuck's death and the agreement to sell the company. It was related to Hong Kong most of all: all this business in Kowloon Tong meant that he would soon be homeless in the last days of the colony. He was angry. Lately, disobeying his mother filled him with conviction, because it isolated him and forced him to be cautious.

Had his mother allowed it or encouraged him or even taken a mild interest, the inquiry would have been casual. But she wanted him to obey her. She disliked Mei-ping. She had a contemptuous regard for Mr. Hung:
He's someone I can do business with.
Her disapproval made Bunt secretive and intent, and he guessed in advance that opposing his mother might help him to be effective. It made him fonder of Mei-ping, as though in demanding the obedience his mother had forced him to choose.

Long ago, as a skinny and self-conscious pupil at Queen's—his mother always lingering by the gate after school—he had a friend named Corkill who was just as disliked and bullied by the others as Bunt. The two boys sat together in the schoolyard, listening to the clang of trams on Causeway Road and whispering, sharing fantasies, usually sexual. Their joint fantasy was to be rich and to live in a big country house in Wessex (they were reading
Jude the Obscure
) with a Chinese nymphomaniac, who had long red fingernails and a see-through nightdress, drinking champagne and rutting by the hearth fire and licking her "amplitudes" (that was in the Hardy novel too).

Illicit and luxurious, it was Bunt's secret dream for many years. Corkill, small and spotty, was ashamed of his father, who was a policeman, while at the same time pitying Bunt, whose father was dead. All that term in the schoolyard they added details of the Chinese nymphomaniac, who was a princess and a whore. They tantalized each other, imagining tickle fights and forbidden words and perversities. It was a vision of paradise. Corkill said,
Spy on her when she's in the bog, Nev!
and Bunt said,
Pull down her knickers, Corky!

Later, as an adult, Bunt sometimes found himself searching for this woman in the Pussy Cat or Jack's Place or Fat-Fat Chong's, and he wondered what Corkill was thinking. Corky was back in the U.K., probably married, with kids, and pretty miserable, while Bunt still dreamed.

"Jumper weather," his mother called out as he bolted down his breakfast, setting off to see Mr. Hung. She clapped his raincoat into his hand and poked an umbrella at him—her umbrella, he saw, and was irked. She said, "Gamp. Don't leave it on the ferry."

But the day that had begun foggy and wet and cooler than normal turned humid by the time he reached the harbor. As the temperature rose so did the smells of Hong Kong: the gritty air and bus fumes, the stewed steam of the mottled sea water sloshing against the ferry pier, the foul dust from the land reclamation, all these stinks clawing at his face. Gray haze became yellow haze, and after half an hour—the length of time it took him to reach Hung's neighborhood, moving slowly in the heat—the din had worked deep into his ears. Street noise tumbled inside his head.

Crossing Waterloo Road he saw a Union Jack flying over the police station at the corner of Argyle Street. He smiled at it, as though at a circus pennant. Even now the flag seemed like an anachronism, and it was a foreboding of his own imminent departure. When it was gone, would the big red Chinese flag be run up the pole, or would it be the Hong Kong flag with the bauhinia blossom on it? "A bright, sterile hybrid," Monty had called the colony's flower.

As he glanced up at the flag again he felt a rush of anger. He didn't want the likes of Mr. Hung pulling the Union Jack down. The indignity of it! He would lower it slowly himself, fold it carefully like a napkin, and tuck it into his suitcase when he left.

On the police station notice board, in large letters on three placards, one to a window, were signs reading
WANTED PERSON
and
POLICE REWARD NOTICE
and
MISSING PERSON
. The last one was the category that Mei-ping must have meant when she had said, "They will put it in the window." But
POLICE REWARD NOTICE
was the one that caught his eye, because in addition to the rewards—sums of up to $100,000 were offered—the crimes were described in precise detail. They were peculiarly Hong Kong crimes, desperate, cruel, often comic, sometimes meaningless. He was reminded of the disfigured woman:
Your face belongs to me ... I must take back your face.

In one notice he read of an army officer who had returned to his quarters at a certain time to pick up his briefcase, and on opening it was blown up by a bomb that had been slipped into it. A Gurkha soldier was wanted for questioning. Fifty thousand dollars was offered for information leading to the conviction of the person or persons responsible.

Another was recent:
At about 7:50 a.m. on 13 January 1996, a woman, Mrs. Cheung Yee Chan, was attacked on the 3rd floor balcony of her apartment house on Lai Chi Kok Street while taking her small child to school. The child was also slashed. Mrs. Cheung fainted. When she woke she saw her gold jewelry was gone and her child bleeding. He was taken to hospital, where he later died. Anyone with information should contact...

Sad, violent, unexplained. Was Ah Fu a candidate for the stories in these windows? Trying to imagine her in the list under the heading
MISSING PERSON
, he saw
Woo, Francis Mau Yung,
and thought of his own Mr. Woo. This missing person was conceivably his own janitor, Frank Woo, who had not shown up at work for days. He scribbled
Mau Yung
on the back of one of his business cards; he would ask Miss Liu if that was Woo's full name.

He walked on to Hung's apartment house, but still slowly, because he did not know where to begin. It was no help to him to notice that Hung's building was on Waterloo Road where it ran arrow-straight north-south before it twisted past Argyle and Fat Kwong. It seemed no more than a coincidence that Hung's building lay in perfect alignment with Bunt's own building. He derived what he knew was pointless satisfaction in seeing, framed by Hung's stairwell window, in a canyon lined with buildings and stuck-out bamboo poles of drying laundry, the old-fashioned tower of Imperial Stitching.

On the eighth-floor landing, Bunt tapped Hung's telephone number into his cellular phone.

"
Wei!
" Hung snarled, sounding startled and irritable.

"It's me, Neville Mullard."

"How wonderful to hear your voice."

Bunt hated him for recovering so quickly.

"Cheers," Bunt said, at a loss for words.

"Where are you?"

"I am on the landing outside your door," Bunt said, smiling at the fold-out flap of the phone's mouthpiece.

Hung did not speak, and in that silence Bunt rapped hard on the door of the apartment.

Looking naked and slug-like and ambushed, Hung appeared surprised as he opened the door a crack, peering out. He wore baggy pajama bottoms of a sort that made Bunt avert his eyes. Hung's undershirt was frayed and his plastic sandals were as worn and cracked as Wang's—Bunt had heard them scuffing to the door. Hung was the picture of a Chinese man interrupted at home: mean, frowzy, damp, rumpled, dozy, like someone tipped out of bed.

"Yah?"

Even his English had become scruffy.

The way Hung slowly opened the door and kept it creaking, checking it when it was the width of his skinny head, suggested he might have been expecting trouble. He seemed anxious, his fingers gripping the door, his yellow fingernails pressed against it as he held it like a shield.

It had bothered Bunt from the first moment of their meeting that Hung was taller than he. He imagined it to be a fraction but was perhaps as much as an inch. That seemed unnatural—wrong, anyway, as Wang's height also seemed wrong—because the Chinese were supposed to be small. Today it bothered Bunt again, because he could not see past Hung into the apartment.

"Have you forgotten something?" Hung asked, finding his proper voice.

"I happened to be passing by. I thought we might talk."

"If only you had called."

"I jolly well did call," Bunt said, and waved his cellular phone.

"This is not a convenient time," Mr. Hung said.

The Chinese newspaper in Hung's free hand showed a photograph of a Chinese official wearing an insincere smile and standing next to the governor of Hong Kong. The flashbulb dazzling the lenses of the official's glasses blanked out his eyes. It was a frightening picture. Somewhere in the room behind Hung a television was on, quacky voices and zany music exploded from it—a children's program, the violent and silly cartoons that were broadcast all day long.

"I need to see you."

Hung looked unprepared for this. You could not drop in on them, Bunt knew that. Nothing was more menacing to a Hong Kong Chinese than a sudden knock on the door. Nothing was more menacing to a Hong Kong English person either. No one except Americans ever dropped in. But this was the only way of answering Mei-ping's question.

"I am very busy at the moment," Hung said. Watching kiddie shows? Reading the newspaper? "We can meet somewhere."

"Here is fine."

"I do not entertain at home."

"You entertained me the other week," Bunt said. He remembered it clearly, because he had found it unusual at the time to have an invitation to the man's home.

"I mean in business matters."

"This isn't business," Bunt said, clinging to the argument, going closer to Hung, who was still squeezed between the doorframe and the partly opened door. "It's man to man."

With a sigh that was almost inaudible, Hung said, "All right then, come back in an hour."

Another glimpse of a Union Jack; a stack of cages in which frantic twittering birds leaped from perch to perch; a gaudy shrine with a statue of a crazed red-faced devil goddess and a string of fairy lights, this in a glazed-fruit shop where a clerk howled into a cellular phone; the squeals of doomed pigs in a passing truck; a family eating a large meal in the middle of a welding shop, the dainty white tablecloth thrown over a table saw; big gleaming passenger jets flying low overhead into Kai Tak (it seemed the whole of Kowloon was on the flight path)—all this occupied Bunt's idle hour.