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A slap on my back broke my reverie. “Hi! Johny to you, J. C. Chen to the rest!”
He emerged from the foyer behind me and stood there, a thin callow youth in jeans and a “Los Angeles Is Greatest” T-shirt. Except he wasn’t still. He seemed in perpetual motion. He shuffled, jigged, hopped, even spun round twice from sheer exuberance. To this day I can’t remember Johny Chen still. He didn’t need much in the way of reply.
“Yoh Lovejoy, right? So come on, man! Let’s mo-o-o-ove it!” He’d bopped halfway up the street before he realized I wasn’t sprinting alongside. “Hey, man! Yoh-all taken root, Lovejoy?” He pranced back indignantly.
The accent was grotesque Texas, a kind of voice graft. Like a Liverpool newscaster talking BBC posh. He wore sneakers, a sloppy-band wristwatch crammed with data. He was the phoniest thing I’d ever seen.
“No.” I’d been captured and sold too many times since my arrival to accept this nerk.
“Hey, what’s this explain sheet, man?” He was jiving away, snapping his fingers. “I say come, yoh move yo’ ass, dig?”
About three years back I’d been laid up in hospital from a knife wound. The weeks of convalescence had exposed me to an entire paraculture of daytime television reruns and pathetic quiz chats. No wonder everybody’s thick these days. Johny Chen would have been in his element in any of those creaking forties-fifties B films. He was a cutout latter-day rebel without pause.
“You look like James Dean,” I said, guessing the effect it would have.
He yelped with glee, leapt and bounced, doglegged a buck-and-wing dance between passersby. “Hey, man! Yoh has a class eye, ’deedy-do!”
“The point is, Johny, I stay here until I’m told otherwise.”
Face to face, his grin seemed patchy gold a mile wide. “Thee poind eez, man, Ah tell yoh uth-ah-wise, dig?”
But I refused to budge until he twinkle-toed inside and fetched Sim downstairs to authenticate him. My least favorite killer was accompanied by the lady who had remained standing in the shadows. She asked in ultra-precise words why I was delaying my departure.
“It’s my life, love,” I said patiently. “So I want to know exactly what to do with it for the next few hours.”
“I am Shiu-Won, or Marilyn to you, Lovejoy,” she said. “You will accompany J. C. Chen.
That is all.” She was thirtyish, maybe, a little different from the local Chinese in features. Her dark hair waved naturally, but she wore the cheongsam in style. You wouldn’t notice this woman in Ling Ling’s company, but on her own she was lovely.
“See, man?” The young nerk wasn’t crestfallen in the slightest as he zoomed us into a taxi. “Ah gives yoh plus, man,” he praised. Even sitting down he hand-jived, wagged shoulders, did heel-toe paradiddles. I’d only known him a minute and I was worn out.
“Caution’s what Ah likes, dig-geroo? That woman, Shiu-Won. Eats owda de palm of mah hond, man.”
He was ridiculous, but I found myself smiling. Until his arrival, good humor had been lacking among Hong Kong’s death threats. “You speak Cantonese well for a Yank, Johny.” I’d heard him prattle to Sim and the taxi driver.
He was over the moon. “No sheet, man! I’se a Yank frum way back. Arkan-zaw bo’n an’
bred. Bud Ah’s got relatives heeyah. Ah’ve bin in liddle old Hawng Kawng fo’ years.”
Well, if he said so. There was more of this absurd gunge during the short drive. He’d earned honors degrees in practically everything from UCLA, nearly won Olympic gold medals for the USA in the javelin, mile, marathon, except for a spectacular but unique illness that intervened at the last moment.
Our destination was a disappointment. “Are you sure this is it?” A godown place, hardly a window.
“Am Ah shoowah? Is the Pope Catholic?” He shimmied inside caroling a ditty that had been popular a year ago. I dithered a moment among the pedestrians because nobody had paid the taxi off, but it crawled away without protest.
The godown was oddly unproductive. Johny was along the empty corridors like a waltzing ferret. Twice I got lost, once into a neat office filled with girls hard at work at computer consoles, once into a sort of ticket office with a world map for a wall. It was the weirdest place, a series of stage sets reached by a warren of grotty tunnels.
“Heeyah, man. Hide an’ say nuttin’, dig?”
“Eh?” What had he said? Hide? I looked about. A faded dance hall? Disused school gym? Anyway, a long wide room all the more astonishing because it was empty. Its emptiness testified to somebody’s power. Since landing I’d never seen so large a space without a crowd of hawkers, improvised shacks, mushrooming curbside traders. And it was air-conditioned.
“In the fuckin’ wall, man.” He pointed.
“Where else?”
He had to come and open the wall for me. It was a wooden panel with two spy holes concealing a cupboard- sized space. I went in and stood there feeling a fool. He shot in and pulled it shut, checking the phases of the moon on his pulsar watch.
“Raat own, man.”
He only grinned when I asked what we were up to, and pretended to shoot me into silence. We settled down to wait. He nearly drove me mad with his humming and finger-drumming and talking of how great life was in California, Miami, the Big Apple.
Though I occasionally glanced out of my spy hole, the room stayed empty. Fifteen minutes later still nothing, and me nearly demented by his inanities: how he’d driven the prototype Mustang Radar breakneck from New York to San Francisco in a single day for a bet, fought a bull in New Mexico… But gradually amid this crud I became conscious of a low humming sound. More air-conditioners? No, too up-and-down, a distant playground. Waiting, I might even have nodded off. Then Johny suddenly silenced. This terrified me alert.
