off the blanket.
Johny Chen had been battered to death, hideously so. He was almost unrecognizable.
He’d been flung against the wall by prodigious force before sliding to his final indecent sprawl. In his terror and pain the poor lad had filthed himself. Only God has polite agonies; for folk like Johny Chen and me, existence is a choice of degradations. By Johny’s body was lot 463, the white mug with its maidens and trees.
“You disobeyed!” Fatty shrilled. I don’t know what he was smoking but its stench was cloying.
“Yes, sir,” I said, bending in the gale. “I’m sorry.”
He took a step and lashed me across the face. It was evidently too much for him because he wheezed louder and made a defeated gesture to Ong, who hardly moved but made my face sting and my head flop about like a doll’s. Six clouts and I crumpled, on my back.
“You sorry?” Fatty shrieked.
I said upwards, “I am extremely sorry, sir.” A foot kicked my side so pain spasmed through every other muscle, quite a knack. God, but these goons must have practiced.
Maybe Hong Kong’s locals did torture like we do football. “Most sincerely. I was very stupid and thoughtless, sir. I’ll obey everything in future. Honest.”
Fatty rose and waddled off, his huge haunches hunching up and down in his long garment. Laurel and Hardy kept their faces towards me as they followed. I was left alone with Johny.
It took me five whole minutes to creak into action, climb erect. I did a deal of whimpering. First I shut the door onto the corridor, went and washed my hands in the sink. Then I returned to Johny and removed lot 463. I said “sorry” to him and it, like a fool.
“Johny,” I said, covering him, “I pray God has the sense to make heaven like California.”
Why had nobody come to anybody’s aid—mine, Johny’s? Surely somebody must have heard? I went out and slowly started down the stairs at a funereal limp.
If I’d had any sense, I’d have realized exactly what Johny’s tour and Marilyn had tried to tell me. A few groups of people ruled Hong King—not police, law, any of that. By accidentally losing my possessions at Kai Tak Airport, plus my divvying skill, I’d fallen in with them. At the time I’d thought it a rescue. But rescue had been at the cost of Del Goodman’s life, and now Johny Chen’s. Some rescue. Like being plucked from a fire by the Hindenburg. No more.
Lot 463 was in my hand.
The night’s humid heat swamped me as I made the street. I leaned against the doorjamb. I’d had it. Johny had done sod all except obey, and still he finished up murdered, exactly as I’d… well, arranged. I blotted my face with a sleeve and managed to flag a cruising taxi. Escape time. With one bound I’d be free…
“Kai Tak Airport, please,” I said and just sat with my eyes closed. I had money enough to reach Singapore, Taiwan, maybe with luck Australia. Hong Kong could get stuffed and… the taxi had stopped at my hotel.
The driver’s grin was reflected in his mirror. I drew breath to ask if he’d misunderstood, but gave up. The weight of the world was on me as I descended. I didn’t offer to pay.
That was my escape attempt, so brilliant it had lasted six minutes, during which I hadn’t even got a yard.
The one hotel guard didn’t look my way as I buzzed the lift. Wise man, I thought. If questioned, he’d swear I’d never left my room.
The trouble with nights, as far as I’m concerned, is that I sleep fast. Nights are hardly worth the bother. Lying on my back watching the ceiling, from four o’clock onwards, I thought of being here in Hong Kong and the plight I was in. Thinking, it seemed to me that antiques here too were a notorious game.
Take Ariadne, for instance.
Ariadne was extraordinary. By that I mean she was so way out, she was a phenomenon. Schooling? In Russia, though her folks were English. Talents?
She played every musical instrument, just like Richard Lionheart. Degrees? Oxford and Cambridge, naturally, and enough languages not to need earphones. Now, it’s well known that antique dealers have a hard time learning the alphabet, so you can understand how she stood out among us nerks in East Anglia. To boot, she was a nun, so she stood out even more. You get the picture: clever, wise, holy, and pretty. She couldn’t fail. Plus, she was in the game for profit whereby to fund an orphanage. We were all helplessly in thrall to Ariadne for as long as she cared to flutter her eyelashes under her wimple.
Enter Gargoyle.
Gargoyle was grotesque, a great shambling ox of a man who came into antiques via boxing. He’d been a fairground fighter through years of incompetence and looked it. His clothes fitted worse than mine. His shoes flapped their soles like a panto clown’s. He was an addled wino. He turned to antiques because he’d once learned a curious but true fact: King Edward I lashed out eighteen silver pence, total, to buy 450 decorated Easter eggs to give to members of his household. (Decorated eggs only entered England after the Crusades, though they were a feature of ancient Rome and China.) Well, Gargoyle had Edward’s eggs endlessly faked by Doggie, his deaf-and- dumb partner on East Hill. No detailed record of the king’s eggs exists, so it was easy. Any medieval pattern would do, and did for this pair of amiable rogues scratching a living by selling their ancient but brand-new eggs. Doggie wasn’t too bad; he used the right natural dyes and earth colors, and copied his patterns off Books of Hours. A good scam.
Until Sister Ariadne heaved in and explained that, having unwittingly come across a batch of King Edward’s millennium-old eggs in a state of incompletion, she was reporting them to the law. On that fateful day she glared righteously at the repellent gormless Gargoyle—and fell in love. Truly. The first we heard of it was when the kindly Margaret had a whip round to pay for Doggie’s lawyer, Gargoyle having flown with Ariadne the flying nun. Bereft of his front man, Doggie did a year in clink. The orphans were left in God’s tender care which, it is well known, is rough on infants. But the clever, wise, holy, et cetera, Ariadne was away in Marseilles learning life’s sordid facts with Gargoyle. We heard later they’d been arrested for touting fake Russian icons in Naples.
See what I mean? Antiques make men mad. And women too. But why? Is it the money they represent? Or is it the magic that lies in them, that clue to immortality, that glimpse of artistic perfection?
My problem was this: Fatty was solely concerned with the money, keeping us all in order. That’s why he had
