“Your urgent matter, Lovejoy?”
“Er, a studio, please. Air-conditioned. The equipment I’ll need’s on this.” I pulled out a sweat-sogged paper. “Within six days, from these addresses—”
Her hand moved a fraction. A goon nipped in, took my list, vanished back into his aquarium. “And?”
“Help. Somebody neat, precise, trusted.” We waited. A distant junk drew a slow shining line across the bay. I could just hear its chugging bloody engine. Its ancient russet sails would have made a superb picture. Christ, but I was frightened. I asked, “Was that the hill, the one over there?” I knew it wasn’t.
So far she had not looked at me. “Hill?”
“Where they left you.” I discovered you can be terrified and dejected together. “Your mother and father, when you were born.”
She looked then. My existence hung. I swear her face went white as chalk. Life, but not as I knew it. Her voice was almost inaudible.
“You cannot know this.”
“It’s a miracle you survived,” I said helpfully. “Snow in Hong Kong and all. Look on it as a kind of luck. From nothing to everything.” I hesitated. This was no time to remind her of her power over a nerk like me.
“Luck? Cast on a hillside to die? Luck?”
“Certainly, love.” I sat down on the carved chair unasked, eager to convince. “Who succeeds most, eh? Why, the one who starts off with least and gets farthest! Like you.”
“Luck? Existing all my infancy hidden in a hovel by the lowest of the low, fed on stolen scraps? Without parents?”
“Without—? You’re bloody barmy! Sorry, I meant, er, he provided for you as well as he possibly—”
“He?” I got the white visage full on. “He? How can you know these things?”
“Well,” I said lamely. I was going to say that blokes seemed to be the providers in Hong Kong. And I’d read that the man of the family was referred to as See-Tau, the
“Business Head.”
“I’ve a secret crystal ball.”
“Where?” She looked about to faint, her lips blue.
“Just pretending,” I said frantically, scared to death. Was she batty, believing my jokes but disbelieving everything else?
“Leave, Lovejoy.”
“Er, please. Can I have Marilyn for my helper? You see—”
She moved her hand. Three hoodlums hurtled in and dragged me out of the villa backwards and into the limo. Leung for once didn’t offer me any sunflower seeds. We careered down the peninsula and shot westward through Stanley with Ong rabbiting into a radio. I was breathless. What was I supposed to have found out, for God’s sake?
I’d assumed I was being friendly. We slowed to a sane speed by Repulse Bay.
Then a strange thing. They stopped at the junk builders’ slipway in Aberdeen and politely let me see the great seagoing craft being created. No antique models, but I felt it was a sign. Things were possibly looking up.
27
« ^ »
YOUR expensive materials will be in Hong Kong in three days, Lovejoy.”
“Oh, aye.” That couldn’t be right, for most of the stuff was from East Anglia. But I’d learned not to argue.
Marilyn tapped a thick envelope with that laugh I was coming to recognize as Hong Kong’s way of signaling that money had been mentioned. It means anything or naught.
“You will select your studio today.”
We were in the Canton Road jade market noshing some dim sum, the waiters flitting about carrying wicker cylinders full of hot bite-size grub, jubilantly yelling what they’d got. Beats me how they keep going without getting scalded. Marilyn hardly ate anything.
“Some of that’s not jade.” We were watching a jade seller. “It’s Burmese agate.” The old devil was parading a string of lovely translucent green pieces much shinier than jade. “And those other pieces are from a funeral.” Jades in halves have usually been cut from a corpse—bangles especially. In the old days jade was buried with the deceased as an emblem of immortality. “Rotten twister.”
“Say nothing. It’s survival for him.”
That shut me up. He went on his way, offering and boasting. Most of the street jade I’d seen was from New Zealand or the Americas, and carved no earlier than last week.
“Did you get the list of addresses I gave to Ling Ling? Paints, brushes, materials, canvases in special sizes, all that? Only, it’s urgent. I can phone East Anglia. This bloke—”
“Your Tinker is insufficiently fast, Lovejoy.” Which stopped my breath. That’s my trouble. I always think I’m secret.
“Your agents know that everything has to be handmade? The pigments must be ground from natural minerals, made by old processes.” She gave the money laugh. I was all on edge, maybe because I’d had a couple of kai bau tsai, chicken buns steamed to solidity, which slam your belly to the floor. It was a struggle finishing the sweet fungus dumplings and coconut pud.
