Riding the Snake (1998) (22 page)

They walked across the street, and Fu Hai noticed that they were walking across hundreds upon hundreds of old human teeth.

She saw him looking at them in horror and smiled. "From the unlicensed dentist shops that line this street," she explained. "They like to show off their workmanship."

They crossed the road and were standing in front of the wall of buildings when suddenly a huge United Airlines jet, with its wheels down, came low over the Walled City, ready to land at Hong Kong International a mile and a half beyond. Fu Hai was startled at the noise, looking up as the jet thundered overhead, throwing a black shadow over him. Fu Hai wondered if the shadow was an evil omen.

"A flight from America," she said, smiling. Then she took him inside the dentist shop and out the back door and into one of the pitch-black, dank alleyways inside the Walled City. The stench in the garbage-strewn alley was unimaginable. She led him a short distance to a door. They went inside and she turned to him.

"You will wait here," she said.

He looked around the room in the dim light from a dull hanging bulb. An octagonal mirror hung on a wall above a small red-and-gold shrine to Amitabha, the Buddha of the Hereafter.

"The mirror keeps out evil spirits," she explained. "The spirits cannot stand to see their ugly faces." Then she turned and left him there, closing the door behind her.

Fu Hai leaned against the damp wall and sighed with relief. He had journeyed clear across China, from the Domes of Wrath to the edge of the South China Sea. He would do whatever they asked of him to earn his freedom.

Fu Hai didn't know he was standing in the same ghetto where Willy Wo Lap was born.

He didn't know that inside the huge airliner that had thrown its shadow over him were two Americans, who were on a course to change his life forever.

*

Chapter
19.

Hong Kong

Like a Dowager Empress, the Peninsula Hotel sat on Tsim Sha Tsui Point, its top-floor picture windows staring indolently out on Victoria Harbor. Its carved stone back was turned to the hustling cacophony of Salisbury Road, ignoring the ugly commercial squalor behind her.

The world-famous hotel was known by its guests as "The Pen," and that Tuesday it was almost completely full. Wheeler discussed this with a polite woman at the reservation desk and finally booked the two-bedroom Mandarin Suite in the new central tower on the twentieth floor, using his American Express card. It was more than he wanted to spend and he and Tanisha would have to share a sitting room, but it was the best he could do. Since they had no luggage, he told the room clerk that he would see himself up, then crossed the ornate marble-floored lobby to the rust-colored antique sofa where Tanisha was seated. When he told her that they were going to share a suite, she just looked at him, her beautiful black eyes pinning him mercilessly like a bug on a board.

"Paucity of rooms," he said nervously, using a canned British accent.

"Bear in mind I'm combat-trained," she replied.

They crossed the lobby adorned with massive Elizabethan antiques, found the elevator, called a lift, and rode silently in its polished mahogany splendor to the twentieth floor.

The Mandarin Suite was magnificent. It was on the next-to
-
top floor of the hotel and had a commanding view of Victoria Harbor. Louvered doors and ceiling paddle fans paid homage to its colorful past. The hotel was owned by Hong Kong Shanghai Hotels, Ltd., one of the largest companies on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The Pen had a rich historical background and had even once been the headquarters for the Japanese Imperial occupation forces in 1943. Recently it had been refurbished to bring out the original neoclassical design. From their windows, they could look south across the bay to Hong Kong Island. Tanisha moved to the plate glass and stood there for several minutes, her right hand up to her face, stunned by what she saw.

Multicolored Chinese junks seemed poised, motionless, on the bay. Heavy oatmeal-colored clouds were just sweeping in off the South China Sea, partially blocking the late-afternoon sun and throwing shafts of filtered light down on the blue-green water. Across the harbor, high and commanding, were Jardines Lookout and Victoria Peak. To the west, they could see all the way up the coast to the Macao Ferry Terminal in Sheung Wan. Water taxis zipped across the bay, throwing out frothy wakes in disappearing wedges. Wheeler thought it was as beautiful a view as there was in the world, remembering how it had stunned him the first time he'd been here with his mother and brother.

He and Prescott had been twelve and ten. His father had business in Sydney, Australia, and was supposed to join them, but something came up and he never made it. Even at the age of twelve, Wheeler had trouble deciding whether he was angry that his humorless father didn't make the trip or glad that he would be free of the relentless judgments. Wheeler never seemed to be good enough to please him. It was in this very hotel, when his mother announced that Wheeler Sr. wouldn't be coming, that he decided to stop competing for his father's love. That same night he'd flooded the hotel bathroom, causing a leak that swamped rooms two floors down. It was right here at The Pen where the Prankmeister made his first appearance.

His mother had taken them sightseeing, cramming their heads with Eastern culture and guidebook literature. Back then, they'd been staying in the Presidential Suite, which was just one floor above. He and Prescott had sat by the window, looking at the timeless and colorful junks tipping precariously with cargo. He had marveled at the mysteries of this place, the endlessly throbbing beat of Hong Kong. The Colony was now in the hands of the Chinese Communists, but from their window twenty stories up, very little seemed to have changed.

After a moment, Tanisha turned away from the view and looked at him. "My God," she said, her voice like a reverent whisper in an empty church.

"Pretty amazing, isn't it?"

All the way in from the airport, along South Chatham Road, through the teeming, overpopulated outskirts of Kowloon, to the Peninsula at Tsim Sha Tsui, Tanisha had remained silent, looking out the window of the Mercedes-Benz taxicab at streets overflowing with humanity and bright neon signs. Now she seemed to finally be digesting it.

"It's so beautiful," she said, "so different than I thought it would be." It was hard for her to imagine that this incredible place shared the globe with the ugly, graffiti-scarred four square blocks in South Central that had been her Crip turf. While she and her homies were shedding blood to protect those desolate street corners, all of this exotic beauty and splendor was half a world away, unknown to any of them. It made her sister's death seem all the more tragic. What had they all been dying for? What made them treasure a place so dangerous and ugly?

"We're prisoners of our environment," Wheeler said, reading her thoughts like a psychic.

She was surprised by the direct hit. "How did you know I was thinking that?" she asked.

"Because it's what I thought the first time I saw this."

"How the hell is somebody a prisoner in Beverly Hills?"

"You can be trapped anywhere, Tanisha. We make our own prisons. They're in the mind. You don't have to be from South Central to be a captive."

"Maybe," she said, but knew they weren't talking about the same thing.

Later that evening, they called Detective Julian Winslow's number and got him on the first ring.

"Why don't you pop over to the police headquarters in the A
. M
.," he said pleasantly. "I'd buy you a spot of supper, but I've got my Black Watch tonight. I play the pipes for the old Scottish regiment. We used to wear the kilts and tartan ... march in parades and the like. The detail was disbanded by the Commies, but we still hold practice once a week to remind us of the old days, then we head off to some bag a' nails for hops and mischief. I think I should bring in Johnny Kwong to help us." He continued, changing subjects without taking a breath, "He's a right copper and he's got the juice we need with the new Police Department. What say we make a diary engagement for ten o'clock tomorrow?" His voice chirped through the line with high-tenor English cheer.

"We'll be there," Wheeler said.

"You know the which-way?" Julian Winslow asked. "It's at 2600 Harcourt Road in Wan Chai--any livery driver will know it, only we don't call it the Hong Kong Royal Police Headquarters any longer. It's now the bloody People's Police Building. These Commie blighters got damn little sense of color, I'll tell you that much," he complained. "I'll leave your name. Have the lad knock me up when you're in the lobby," he instructed before he hung up.

They had dinner in the Felix, the top-floor restaurant in The Pen, which was the vision of the world-famous interior designer
Philip Stark. Since it was during the week, they got a table by the window. Wedgwood china and sterling silver cutlery glittered on Danish linen. The room was framed with dark mahogany and crowned by chandeliers that hung above them like huge crystal mushrooms. Wheeler ordered French goose liver with truffles and the house trademark dish of roasted milk-fed veal on a ragout of baby potatoes, carrots, and pearl onions. Tanisha wrinkled her nose in thought and finally ordered a cheeseburger.

"Why did you become a cop?" Wheeler asked unexpectedly, jerking her thoughts off food and the princely decor, snapping her back like a ball on a rubber band to bang against dark childhood memories.

"You mean, instead of pursuing my short, ass-puckering career in gang warfare?" she said, dodging him deftly, not wanting to discuss Kenetta . . . Kenetta with her wide smile and nappy braided hair, Kenetta with the ugly, bubbling hole in her chest.

"You still don't like me much, do you?" he said. "I usually overcome that attitude with women well before this."

She sat there, looking at him for a long moment, not sure how she really felt about him. It was true, of course, she had hated him on sight, but it had been an unfair value judgment and she'd set it aside. She had come to a place where she actually respected him. For somebody who grew up rich and pampered, he had some unusual attributes. ... He didn't kid himself. In fact, he was brutally honest. . . too honest. She had learned that a little self-deception, applied carefully on social or psychic wounds, stemmed emotional hemorrhaging. And he was brave. He had "come from the shoulder" when he'd faced down the three Chinese Tong gangsters in his brother's house. She wondered what exactly it was she was feeling about him. "We're not . . . compatible," she finally said.

"Funny way to put it." He was feeling strange with her now, unable to connect.

Time slowed as waiters scurried to clear dishes. Out the picture windows on the bay beyond, the listing Chinese junks moved in lazy disrepair.

"Why do I feel you judging me?" he said.

'Tm not judging you. The few things we have in common are nothing compared to the things that separate us/' she continued. "Even though we're the same age and were born just a few miles apart, we aren't even from the same universe."

"What makes us so different?" he challenged. "People are people."

"Not to your Confederate great-grandfather. To him, people were property."

"What hopeless bullshit," he flared. "You want me to write his checks? I didn't even know him. He was dead seventy years before I was born. He's a name in a history book."

"It's okay, Wheeler," she said. "Calm down. We both still know you wouldn't trade skin with me. I'm not pissed off about it, but it's a fact. . . . You can't change it. It's still the main thing that defines us."

Again, they sat in silence. The sun was setting, dipping below the green sea, lighting the bellies of gray storm clouds with colors from some godly spectrum. Against her better judgment, she finally tried to explain her feelings to him. She hoped to hell it wouldn't sound like whining.

"While you were going to Sandy Hill Academy or John Dye Prep, or wherever your nanny chauffeured you every morning, I was at Walker Jones Hundred-and-third Street School. My friends started dying on me in the first grade. I was Crippin' when I was seven. Most of my friends were hooked to dope rides before sixth grade and off-line by high school."

He cocked his head in a silent question.

"Dead," she explained. "My first sexual boyfriend was Bobby Hughes. He was a Kitchen Crip from a Hundred-and-ninth Street. A tiny gangster whose street handle was 'Li'l G-Rock.' Bobby was already on State paper when I met him. We were only thirteen when he got me pregnant. He'd been busted a bunch for selling seams--that's crack or heroin in foil packets. He couldn't take another fall or he'd get sent to a C
. Y. A
. Farm. He got careless selling rock to help pay for the baby we had coming. The Crash Unit rode down on him and he took off running to avoid the bust and got faded by two cops in a cruising Z-car. It was on Halloween. 'Trick or treat, motherfucker.' Month after that, I miscarried. I had my first Department of Corrections appointment around then. My Doc-man was a boned-out redneck named Boyd Jeeter who always wanted to meet with me after work. He told me I could skip some of the appointment dates if I'd put out. He meant business, too. He seemed constantly on the edge of jumping me. I was so scared of him I kept a clean spout in my purse whenever I met with him."

Again, Wheeler looked confused.