“It shall be exactly as you say, Lovejoy.” She gave me her direct smile. I melted, but tried to look ferociously stern. I carefully didn’t wave at the oneway mirror, to show I was still being taken in.
But where was Marilyn? I hadn’t dared ask Ling Ling.
Outside in the heat I paused. My hand closed on Eva’s check in my pocket. I thought a minute, then went in search—not for my luscious missing model, but for a little stumpy leper on roller skates.
32
« ^ »
THE Mologai seemed more somber, Ladder Street steeper, the heat worse, and the gloom ineffective as shade. I made it to Caine Road, headed east for a hundred yards or so, and labored back down to where Hollywood Road bends into the politer districts of Central. This way I came upon the temple with better vision fore and aft. Nobody seemed to follow this time, but with so many people everywhere, who could tell?
The temple was a quiet oasis in a turbulence. Once accustomed to the gloom I could see the two house- shaped chairs, the four gilded insignias waiting to be carried in procession. A couple of old ladies were igniting incense sticks. I paid for three and copied their actions, sticking them upright in the brass earthpot with the others. Then I waited.
People came, did their stuff, went. I knelt a bit, stood, walked a step or two, knelt. For respectability’s sake I did the incense bit once more. An old lady was selling them. As I paid, I asked her to give a message. I scribbled a few words on a paper scrap, labeled it “Titch.”
“For the little bloke, please.” I mimed pushing poles on roller skates and showed Titch’s height so she’d understand, gave her a few dollars. She gazed back, lovely old eyes in a mat of wrinkles. Not a word.
Well, worth a try. I walked into the sun glare, down through that eerie area to my studio.
Marilyn still wasn’t there. I did more dabs of sky, and began to fill in the foreground.
The pigments were great, every one straight out of the 1870s. I stuck at it for several hours.
The space where Marilyn would have been sitting in her old-fashioned dress seemed spoiled, silent. Early evening and word came via a goon that the hit would be about eightish. I went to a bathhouse, then noshed at the Luk Yu. She wasn’t there either.
“We go to an opium divan for a foki, Lovejoy.”
Just Sim, me, and a sampan lady embarked on a journey across the typhoon shelter to where the lighters were moored. I said nothing, couldn’t stand being near Sim, the murdering creep, so I sat watching the woman’s rhythmic sculling. A beautiful balanced motion, side, side, forward. Lovely, her black garb against the dying light.
These lighters are massive vessels seen close to. Normally they transfer cargo from the big deep-water ships in the harbor. There was always a good dozen not far out near Stonecutters Island. We came against the offshore side of one. Sim motioned me to scramble up onto the deck. It felt metal, inert. The sampan looked a mile down, tiny on the water, the woman’s wicker hat a pale blob.
“This way, Lovejoy.”
We passed hatches, went along a corridor, and walked into a smoky fug. I wished I’d breathed more air outside to bring in with me. It was the nearest thing I’d seen to a medieval prison.
“All these chase dragon, Lovejoy.” Opium smokers.
The place was a huge warren of bunks. Low ceilings hung with paraffin lanterns, their hissing light pocked with flies and moths. Visibility wore itself out after forty feet on account of the dense smoke. Skeletal blokes, all Chinese as far as I could tell, lay on the bare shelving. Most sprawled or were propped on an elbow, many coughing convulsively.
“Playing mouth organ.” Sim grinned, indicated a man sucking at a half-open matchbox.
Its tray was lined with foil, the tiny heap of gray powder inside warmed over a cigarette lighter. Others were heating small balls of brown resin at candles before lodging them with a pin inside narrow bamboo pipes. There was hardly one that couldn’t have done with a good meal, not a spare ounce of flesh anywhere.
A huge sweaty man came to talk in Cantonese. I followed as they walked the length of the divan. It was obscene. The far end stank. I became giddy from the fumes and the airlessness. Sim and the fat man were pointing and arguing.
“Which of these two, Lovejoy?”
One was dozing, the other rocking slowly with his eyes closed. God knows how old they were. Sixty, seventy? They wore raggedy cotton trousers and singlets.
“Him.” I picked the one who seemed the less doped. Neither looked capable of standing unaided, let alone pulling a robbery. Still, all he had to do was set off an alarm and scarper a few yards—anybody could hide in Hong Kong except me—then he could come back to buy more illusion with his rich reward. I left them to get him upright and blundered gasping into the night air.
A group of four men were arriving on another sampan as we left. They were joking and laughing amiably, clambering up toward their bliss. Great if death’s the best life you can dream up.
Darkness had fallen by the time we reached Kowloon. Our robber-to-be was sniffing and coughing. He could hardly make the climb up to street level.
“All right, mate?” I gave him a leg up.
“Mmm goy.” I think it means something like, you needn’t do that. A sort of ta, pal.
“Wait, Lovejoy.”
Naturally I’d started off towards the streetlights. I halted. In the dimness Sim stood beside our hired robber.
“Why? We early?”
