smile. I brewed up and returned to sit by the phone.
Ten minutes later it rang. Surton, excited.
“Solution?” I said, carefully sounding baffled and stirring my tea. “Impossible!”
He crowed. “No problem’s insuperable, Lovejoy! Don’t you see? We simply refashion the lost documentation! Remake that as authentically as possible, like the rest!”
“Good heavens!” I gasped, bored out of my skull and thinking for heaven’s sake, get on with it. “You can’t mean… fakery?”
“Certainly not, Lovejoy! Replication. Labeled as such.”
I said piously, “Well, as long as it’s honest…” Label? Over my dead body. I’d have to arrange to get this innocent old saint out of the way as soon as he’d done his stuff, that was for sure.
We talked, each amicably planning our different versions of mayhem.
The phone down, I cheered up. The Surtons were friends, the first I really felt I’d had in Hong Kong. I didn’t count Steerforth—he was too weird, too hooked on Ling Ling. But even the Surtons were bugged. So wasn’t it time to find a real ally, one even the Triad wouldn’t dream of? I smiled at the idea of me and Titch the leper against the world.
Time to take a risk with Ling Ling herself.
26
« ^ »
LING LING had hostessed a combined Thailand-Japan merchant syndicate, supper and women for a hundred and eighty wassailers. It was three-ish, a few days after Typhoon Emma roared on to wreck western Japan. Leung and Ong’s limo collected me at the Flower Drummer Emporium and transferred me to a junk in Deep Water Bay, a bonny spot looking nicked from the Mediterranean. I tried asking Leung to stop and let me inspect the junk builders at Aberdeen Harbor, but they gestured me to silence. I was heartbroken, because some of these shipyard places make antique models of their vessels. Since famous ship museums—Venice’s, for example—began collecting them, they’ve become unbelievably expensive. Still, worth a try.
The huge craft was decorated with enormous multicolored trailing flags. A few Cantonese on board grinned at me, but I was otherwise left alone to watch the coast as we upped anchor and headed southeast. What with white launches and the lush palms fronting the hotel’s veranda walks, Repulse Bay must be a playground. White villas studded the steep greenish hillsides.
“Nice, Lovejoy.” Marilyn, under a parasol.
“It chills my spine.” I was on the raised stern. “You leave no trace in places like that. In the slums somebody’d at least notice you were gone.”
“That is sentiment, Lovejoy. Slums are terrible.”
“Not as terrible as resorts like that.” I indicated our bare masts. “Why don’t we use sails instead of diesels?”
“Sails are old,” she said contemptuously. “You talk as an old man, though you are not.”
That made me laugh. “I’ve lived centuries, love.” I meant in careworn experience, but she stared.
“Have you? Really?” Her brown eyes searched my face.
“Every second,” I said. “One thing. Why are there no old rickshaws?” Mind you, the gadget was only invented in the 1870s.
“New is best, Lovejoy.”
As she spoke, a woman carrying an infant papoose fashion padded behind me, berating a skeletal old bloke. He was lugging two jerricans of water, being shoved along the deck by a tiny grandson and bawling abuse back. I smiled, loving it. In Western society the old go to the wall from poverty, hypothermia, loneliness. Say what you like, but the old in Hong Kong were part of life’s game until they dropped.
“People keep telling me that,” I said sardonically, “but never say why.”
We chugged across West Bay and made a long eastward loop into Stanley Village.
Behind us lay Lamma Island, its fawny green deepened in silhouette by the falling sun.
The sea was unbelievably calm but an ugly khaki color, showing where the laterite soil had been washed from Hong Kong’s mountains.
Stanley Village was a cheerful low place, not seeming very affluent. I was accompanied across the strand by my two goons, Marilyn staying behind.
A religious procession was going on, a little girl propped upright on a kind of lofty palanquin. She was plastered with garish makeup. Her clothes were an embroiderer’s dream of exploding colors and shapes, phony flowers everywhere. Pity none of the gear was antique. She was carried on the shoulders of a dozen men. The procession to where a tent had been set up for prayers included a straggle of shaven monks in saffron robes. Incense wafted out on the chants. An ancient gong was struck, thank God correctly—in a rapid succession of light taps that crescendoed into truly beautiful sound; not one quick wallop like Bombadier Wells at the start of those old Rank movies.
It pulled at my heartstrings to hear that exquisite antique. You can make a fortune with one gong, so desperate are collectors for them. The goons hustled me into a car for the half-mile drive up Stanley Peninsula.
Ling Ling was in a palatial villa, overlooking a bay and a parallel peninsula from the patio, quite alone except for three lovely attendants, two servants, and a tableau of four bodyguards watching me through glass. Everybody cleared off, leaving me. The view was sheer delight. I’d have believed her if she’d told me she had ordered it specially. A genuine full set of Chinese Tien Jesuitware was laid on the table before her, ready. This giddily valuable porcelain is seventeenth century. Imagine black penciled-looking drawings with pastel colors on the cup bodies, with blue and gold designed squares below the outer rim. The scenes are often deer and tiger hunts. She was about to have afternoon chocolate, but not with me.
