floating, passing the aromatic food stalls with a sneer and strolling between the gold and jade shops as if a full belly meant I owned the place. Still with a hand on my notes, I felt a big spender. Odd how different the world is when you stop dying.
“Wait.”
We were somehow near the emporium window where the Ming red lacquer food case had been. Gone. No wonder I now felt no chimes. I caught a sob. The galaxy of sham cheapos grinned shamelessly back at me. From those who come too late shall be taken away. Well, antique dealers are duds at collecting. And plumbers’ taps drip.
Still, now I was in business, hope returned. I began to notice shapes. “Nice to see birds without the camouflage,” I said over my shoulder to my new paymasters, who were too engrossed even to acknowledge the remark. “Back home even the slenderest girls dress like paras on flak patrol.” Here, shapes were definitely in. All the women managed to achieve a look, as it were. The one European woman I glimpsed wearing a cheongsam looked calamitously wrong.
“This opera a regular show?” I asked, pausing. The opera crowd was still chattering.
The stage still held a couple of characters bedecked with flags, the music shrilled, the actresses with their chalk faces and colored embroidery posturing. “How did it evolve?”
No answer. I turned, smiling pleasantly, on top of the world.
Gone. Sim and Del were gone. No harm done, though. They’d paused for a drink at a hawker’s barrow, right? I couldn’t see them.
Slightly uneasy, I strolled back along the edge of the crowd and paused, not wanting to stir too far from where I’d seen them last. The actors’ din continued, the audience noise. In fact the racket was so loud that the new tumult failed to register. Self-satisfaction is the downfall of actors and antique dealers, it seems, for we stayed oblivious as disorder spread through the crowd. People rose from their improvised seats, peering towards the cluster of tourists. I thought nothing of it, for people were calling out questions and trying to see the cause of the disturbance.
Then a woman tourist screamed and my heart turned over. I thought oh, Christ, no.
Not now. I saw Sim—not sure, only possibly—duck into the shadows by a pearl shop. A man shouted in English, “Somebody call an ambulance.” Another called for the police.
The tourists were in uproar. The Chinese, in what I eventually learned was a local quirk, were laughingly intrigued. Nervously, I worked my way across trying to look a casual bystander.
A couple of those smart police were already there by the time I’d pushed close enough to see. The tourists, all apparently American, were explaining, pointing. Two women were in tears. One had blood smeared down the front of her dress. She was hysterical.
“He fell out of the audience.” She made a two-handed falling gesture. “He caught hold of my dress.”
Del Goodman, my salvation, lay partly upturned, his face macabre in the patchy light.
There was blood everywhere. A policeman—God, but they’re calm in Hong Kong—
moved away to control the traffic. The other gave serene instructions to his talkie, gently wafting everybody back with a hand. I felt sick, almost spewed up my tasty supper onto the corpse. Del, my savior, knifed. I tried to eel away but another policeman came beside me, gesturing with that languid motion towards the tourists, thinking I was one of them.
“Er, no,” I said, trying a convincing smile, striving for out. The crisp money—
Goodman’s—suddenly burned in my hand, and terror gripped. Once they got down to names and statements they’d pin me as the corpse’s erstwhile con-merchant associate.
They’d find Del’s money on me. Then they’d hear of my feeble attempt with the airport police…
The policeman’s gaze reverted from the middle distance and focused.
“Tourist,” he said. That one word said it all. Either I was a suspect or a tourist.
“Er.” I tried to edge off. His hand indolently chopped the air. Sickened, I halted, trying for that confident grin, knowing I’d had it. Then rescue came, of a kind.
“He’s with me, officer,” a familiar voice said. Yet how could I recognize a strange voice a million miles from home?
He was elegant and ponging of scent, outrageously dressed in a pink suit with matching trilby, his jacket slung over his shoulders. Bishop sleeves, gold rings winking on most digits, he was an apparition. I gaped. It was the Hooray who’d told me to get lost in the street market, who I’d tried to milk over that nephrite jade. The policeman’s attitude instantly changed to a faint disgust and I was free. Everybody found me disgusting.
“This way, wretch,” the oddity said. Warily I moved in his wake through the mob as an ambulance howled its way into the press. I was justifiably apprehensive, because a hundred percent of all my allies had just got himself stabbed to death.
An American lady said to my rescuer, “But Wayne, darling—”
“Not now, dear,” he said with irritation. “In Hong Kong we go home when bodies simply litter the streets.”
“What about tomorrow?” the lady complained. She was attractive and oppulent. A mere killing was incidental.
He paused, working up to repartee. Obediently I also paused. “Tomorrow you can be even naughtier.”
She simpered. “Promise, Wayne?”
“What’s the point?” he said, flagging taxis. “You know my promises are utterly worthless. Seven o’clock precisely. Digga Dig.”
“Good night, lover.”
He pointed her into one taxi, and got into the next. I stood bewildered. He beckoned imperiously.
