their problem.
Or so I thought. Hong Kong was to teach me very, very different to much of this.
At Heathrow Airport—“Thiefrow” to regulars—I bade a most sincere farewell to Janie, quickly reminded her to cable Algernon, and darted in to book a flight. I didn’t know it then but it was my nth mistake. I should have been tipped off by my reception at the booking desk, where a bonny girl shook her head.
“Macao, sir? There are no flights to Macao.”
“You’re mistaken, love. My friend’s just flown there. It’s in the Far East,” I offered helpfully.
“Hong Kong, sir. You change to a boat in Hong Kong.”
“Eh?” This was unnerving. She finally convinced me with a map and checked with cronies.
The second doom hint was catching sight of Toby the Motorman. He collects car keys left by bona fide travelers at the issue desk, nicks the cars and drives them to Wolverhampton to be resprayed for sale by his cousin. I should have been on the lookout for friends, those ultimate hazards, but was sure he hadn’t spotted me as I slid among the dispirited shambling crowds into the departure lounge to wait out the eight long hours.
Just like air terminals, all flights are a drag. When finally aboard, I was stuck in the umpteenth class next to a noisy kitchenette, which didn’t help. Why do designers let us down so? I’ve never yet seen a modern aerodrome that looked individual. Anonymity’s no hallmark. And as for airplanes, you might as well be inside a bog roll’s cardboard tube. I suppose things might improve if ever airships get going. Anyhow, in a stupor I left Heathrow—that plastic-chrome-polyethylene horror zone where refuse collectors shuffle forever among soiled tables—with relief. At least Big John Sheehan’s goons hadn’t outguessed me. Heading out of danger. I thought.
Flying’s a waste of traveling, I always find. You sit, eat plastic gunge until you’re stuffed as a duck. No wonder air hostesses call passengers “geese.” I was obedient, noshed my cubes when called upon, watched the films—endless car chases, crashes into piles of boxes, and knocking over that same weary old vegetable barrow before somebody confronts somebody in a warehouse shoot-out. All I can remember of the flight is that this bloke in the next seat bored me about Hong Kong. He called it Honkers.
“Honkers,” he said, in what I call an immediate voice, a posh drawl uttered loudly through a half-closed larynx. “Great. You’ll find it jolly pleasant, not cheap, messy, hellish hot.”
I waited for more. “Is that it?”
“Eh?” He dwelled for a second, then brightened. “No. It’s crowded too. Going on business?”
“Business?” My mind clicked: threadbare, disheveled, but traveling. “No. I’m, er, an artist.” Well, almost true. He was a lanky bloke with huge teeth and a prognathous jaw, a sandy-haired Hapsburg. He kept totting up numbers in a leather folder with matching everything.
“An artist, hey?” He was delighted. “Successful?”
I said modestly, “Just sold one to the National Gallery. I do antiques too.”
“Indeed.” He gave me a card. “That’s me. Del Goodman. Investment, sales. We’ve an antiques sale coming up in Honkers. Anything—buying, selling—give us a ring. Once knew an artist years ago. Nice chap…” I dozed fitfully as he prattled on and kiddies ran up and down the aisle.
Naturally, I was dreaming of finding antiques galore in Hong Kong—the eggshell porcelains that reached perfection in 1732; the bowls decorated in five colors by Tang, the greatest in all history, who represented fruits and flowers so naturalistically during Ch’ien Lung’s eighteenth-century reign.
My only artistry lately had been that Franz Unterberger. I slept because I could foresee no real problems now. Being thick helps optimism, because it’s unreliable stuff at the best of times. I’ve always found that…
The flight was forever, until at unbelievable last the stewardess woke me to strap in, the captain was yawning through some urgent announcement, and ships’ funnels and riding lights were sliding past the windows, frightening me to death.
Twenty minutes more and we all stumbled down the gangways into the world’s soggiest and most unbreathable air. I halted on the aircraft steps, stunned by the oven heat, then went forward into catastrophe.
4
« ^ »
KAI TAK International Airport’s runway stretches out into Hong Kong Harbor. For all that, the aerodrome has the same sterility that adorns these terminals. So why was I bewildered? Tired. Deafened by the din, I blundered through presses of tour couriers with stick placards. It was pandemonium. I’d never heard so many people talk so loudly. Everybody seemed to be shouting in Chinese, laughing, hurrying. Signs were in English and Chinese, with me peering and reeling, out on my feet. Jet-lagged or dying didn’t matter anymore. In that first moment Hong Kong established itself irrevocably in my mind: brilliant colors and indescribable noise. Somebody asked was this my only baggage, slurring r’s in staccato English. Then I was through. I started staggering about the melee looking for Algernon, but the idiot was nowhere.
After an exhausting hour of this, my stunned brain asked, since when has Algernon ever been on time? So get your head down, lad, search later. I trudged round in the turmoil among a zillion passengers swirling as baffled as I was.
In my delirium I tried to work out possibilities. I could stay here in the clamor, or go to Macao and search for him and his lunatic motor-racing pals there. But where the hell was Macao? I decided to give the nerk one hour more, then make my own way as best I could. I slumped against a wall—even that was burning hot—and gaped blearily at the throngs of milling Chinese.
My eyelids flickered as fatigue took hold. No real need to nod off, I told myself, not really, because hadn’t I just survived a year-long flight dozing and noshing? Yet the draining heat and drugging air reduced me to a dazed, baffled robot. I thought, well, Lovejoy, no harm to shut your eyes for a couple of seconds, eh? Algernon’d find me when he arrived.
All doubts and cautions logicked to extinction, I rested. Delirium passed me to oblivion.
People may have pushed by me now and again but I wasn’t having any and slept determinedly on, safe, for wasn’t I practically at the ends of the earth? Once I dimly felt somebody give my shoulder a shake, but my stunned brain knew that importuners can’t be trusted. My neurons vanished me, and I was glad.
