Johny Chen killed. And Sim also knew the score, that Goodman had to go—how else to keep his own share of the forthcoming antique deals high? Sim was probably only a mere peddler.
Dr. Chao? An organizer, maybe the learned adviser to the Triad’s money men. Ling Ling? I didn’t know. Marilyn? A harmless assistant. James Steerforth? Gigolo, a China Coast pimp living on his wits and any other bits of him women would pay for. Add numerous soldiery and enough money to pull any scam you cared to name, and that was the team as listed. Fatty was head of the execution squad, of course. Who was boss, though?
Came seven o’clock, I was still staring out, thinking what an evil game antiques was.
And Ariadne, going off her trolley over a Neanderthal like Gargoyle, who’d chopped his lifelong friend Doggie. And poor Johny Chen, falling a whole life short of Dream America. And Del, RIP, another innocent short of his percentage. Lovejoy next?
Escape was now out of the question. Try a secret dash to Macao and I’d be delivered trussed like a four-penny rabbit at the Digga Dig or some other honky-tonk. Anyway, Macao was a cul-de-sac, with Hong Kong its only exit. Yet I had to survive, avoid that gruesome death by battering, by stiletto.
What were their terms? Utter obedience, the sort crooks the world over call loyalty. Yet don’t they say that a man creates the evil he endures? Tolerate evil and you are responsible for it. But what could I do? This vicious lot insisted I ponce about with Steerforth. Presumably this kept me gainfully employed, so to speak, until I was needed for an antiques scam.
Which left me still remembering Ariadne. Maybe because antiques are all I know, I decided I’d have to pin my hopes on antiques to keep breathing. Antiques send people off the rails. So antiques had to be my road in, and my way out. Lorna had heedlessly left money in my jacket pocket, silly cow. Well, I’d use my bit of it in a good cause. Six o’clock I rose, walked out due east, along Lockhart Road to Victoria Park. I went and stood among the Chinese at their slow ritual exercises—you see folk at this stately art early on every open space, quite unselfconscious. Not really knowing why or what I was doing, I copied an elderly bloke. Maybe forty of us, like somnambulistic chessmen. An hour, and I felt more at peace.
Eight o’clock and I’d had breakfast, signed out of the hotel. Eight-thirty I barged in on Steerforth, woke him from his stuporous kin, told him selected details about my night’s activities and Johny Chen’s fate—he nearly infarcted but I made my part quite innocent.
He recovered somewhat when I left him his percentage, then left saying I’d be around later because I’d a special job on.
An hour in a bathhouse made me years younger. I bought a pricey box of Belgian chocolates and made my way to the Flower Drum Emporium in a state of humility. I traveled in an air-conditioned taxi so the chocolates and I wouldn’t run in the heat. I was grovelingly ready to comply. I was also full of novel suggestions to further everybody else’s interests but my own. I’m at my best as a helpless and willing helper.
Same as all traitors.
Respectfully, I asked for Shiu-Won Wong, aka Marilyn.
19
« ^ »
THIS box is a prezzie, love,” I explained to Marilyn. “For the, er, large gentleman.
Please may I deliver them personally?”
I’d been kept waiting downstairs in the nightclub. Nothing as odious as a bar being Hoovered, is there. I’d watched the cleaners scrub and wash. God, they went at it. I now knew why.
Marilyn was interested, quick and smiley as ever. You wouldn’t have guessed that one of her men had been brutally extinguished, that she was an accomplice. For all I knew it happened ten times a week, a day. Even at this hour she was an hourglass in opalescent yellow, high collar and endearingly folded in silk. Mame had tried to wear a cheongsam and looked eccentric.
An hour later I was admitted to Fatty’s presence. He was being oiled on a vast wicker bed by two lovely lasses while I said my piece. I won’t go into details if you don’t mind.
Suffice it to say I was repulsive, fawning and servile, as I apologized for my stupidity. I groveled to be of service.
“You will be, stupid Lovejoy,” he squeaked. The girls’ patting hands sounded like clapper-boards.
“I mean still more, sir, if I may.”
“More?” Until now his eyes had been closed. Now one opened, a wary whale. “How more?”
“The American firm, sir. Brookers Gelman. They are big and famous. Your wonderful expertise makes money from them. Very admirable and clever.” The girls were on him, one treading his spine, the other massaging his pudgy shoulders.
“Yes. Clever.”
“So isn’t it unfair, sir, that you only make money from them when they visit Hong Kong?”
“Unfair?” More oil. The girl trod him slowly, toes pointed.
“Yes, sir. You should own them. Can I make a suggestion, sir… ?” For half a minute I spoke. Then my feet didn’t touch the ground.
“These floating restaurants are not the greatest in Cantonese cuisine, Lovejoy,” Ling Ling said. We were in Aberdeen’s well-nigh landlocked harbor on Hong Kong’s southern side.
“No?” I thought, her team killed Johny Chen.
“But they match our tourists’ notions of difference, culture. It’s the key to all profit.”
I hadn’t thought of that. Certainly the place was distinctive, an enormously tiered boat-house vessel wearing fantastic colored ornamentation, its open balconies overlooking the harbor. We were at a table alone. I was still dazed from the speed at which I’d been whisked out here by Fatty’s minions.
