‘Then just before the family and their bodyguards take communion, make sure the front door is unlocked. Can you do that?’
‘Of course.’
‘Good. And thank you for this.’ Carver jerked his head towards Zalika’s simple canvas shoulder-bag, which now contained the envelope. ‘It’s very important.’
‘No problem. OK, enough sightseeing. It is beneath my dignity to look like a tourist.’
Wong left as casually as she’d arrived.
As she walked away, Carver asked Zalika, ‘Are you sure you want to go through with this? You understand I’m not questioning your ability to do the job. It’s just that this could get messy. You’ve had enough violence and death in your life. Are you sure you want more?’
There was no hesitation in her answer, not a flicker of doubt in her voice. ‘Yes, I want more all right. I want to see what you’ve done. I want to spit on their dead bodies. Every single one of them.’
‘All right. But you play it absolutely by the book.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And I’m getting you a phone with a tracking system, so if we get separated for any reason, I’ll know where you are.’
‘Whatever you say.’
‘And if anything happens to me, you don’t wait around to see if I’m all right, understand? Go straight to Hong Kong International. There’s a fifteen-oh-five flight direct to London. Just get on it and go.’
‘Absolutely.’ She wrapped her arms round his waist and examined him thoughtfully. ‘Thanks for having faith in me. My uncle was right. You’re a good man, Samuel Carver.’
53
The Aberdeen fish market was deserted, the last traces of the previous day’s catch all washed and swept away, yet the smell of fish still filled the air, as though it seeped from the polished concrete floor, the painted steel columns and girders and the corrugated iron roof. Zheng Junjie, the man once known as Johnny Zen, was standing beneath the bare neon lights of his family’s stall, nervously sucking on a cigarette. He looked as though he’d grown a little soft around the middle since Moses Mabeki had last seen him. Maybe he’d been eating too much of his wife’s home cooking or, more likely, having too many dinners out with his mistress. A sweet young concubine had always been considered an essential accessory for any Hong Kong businessman on the way to the top.
Mabeki had taken a cab down from Tai Po. He’d told the driver to drop him a few minutes’ walk away from the Aberdeen Harbour fish market, at the foot of one of the high-rise apartment blocks that crowded into the narrow space between the hills of Hong Kong Island and the sea. They housed most of the local Tanka and Hoklo tribes, people who had for centuries inhabited floating villages of junks and narrow-boats, working and living almost entirely on the water. Now their descendants were pasty-faced property developers whose pastel-coloured Ralph Lauren polo shirts stretched across their bosomy chests and flabby guts. But then, Mabeki reflected, how different was he? His people had been cattle-herders and warriors, going where they wanted across the southern African savannah. Now most were happy with a cold beer and a Manchester United shirt. The white man’s cruellest trick was not to conquer or even enslave, but simply to soften, weaken and corrupt every culture or people he encountered, until they lost the will to be themselves any more.
Mabeki made his way unobserved to within thirty feet of Zheng. He watched him take his cigarette out of his mouth, throw it down and grind it under his heel. Zheng looked around, checked his watch, then looked again. He did not look like a powerful man about to take charge of a tough negotiation. He looked like a frightened man wondering how he was going to explain to his superiors that he’d just let them down.
Mabeki let him sweat for a moment longer, then stepped out of the shadows and made his way between the large blue and yellow plastic containers from which the following morning’s fish would be sold. He deliberately let his right foot knock one of them as he walked by. The noise made Zheng spin round and catch sight of his old university friend.
Over the years, Mabeki had become a connoisseur of people’s reactions to his appearance, and Zheng’s was a classic example. In the space of a couple of seconds his face registered alarm at the unexpected noise, relief that it came from Mabeki, shock and revulsion at the first sight of his face, and finally, after an all-too-evident internal struggle, a bland mask of impassive self-control.
‘Hello, Johnny,’ Mabeki said.
‘Moses.’
They shook hands. Mabeki took a perverse pleasure from watching Zheng’s attempts to find a safe, polite place to look. He had seen it so many times, the way people could not help themselves staring at the scars, craters and distorted flesh of his face, no matter how much the sight disgusted them. He knew, too, the questions they all wanted to ask and the mental contortions they went through trying to find the right words with which to frame them.
Zheng did better than most. ‘I see what you mean,’ he said. ‘You have changed. May I ask what happened?’
‘I was shot. A nine-millimetre parabellum round fired at extreme close range passed right through my mouth from one side to the other. I was left for dead by the man who shot me. His mistake.’
‘Did you ever find him?’
‘He is about to find me.’
Zheng nodded thoughtfully. ‘I see. He is the problem you referred to?’
Mabeki gave a fractional nod of assent.
‘Then you’d better follow me,’ Zheng said.
They made their way out of the market and down to the water’s edge. A flight of stone steps with a polished metal handrail led down from the quayside. A square-bowed boat whose sturdy wooden hull was buffered with old tyres bumped up and down against the bottom steps in the swell of the water. The deck, sheltered by a canvas roof stretched across a metal frame, was scattered with plastic buckets and boxes. An old woman in loose grey pyjamas with a large mushroom-shaped straw hat on her head was standing barefoot among them. When she saw Zheng she rattled off a high-pitched, hectoring volley of incomprehensible Chinese, pointing at Mabeki as she spoke. Zheng bowed respectfully and replied in a far more conciliatory style. The old woman spat disgustedly on to the deck, glared at Mabeki, then made her way to the stern of the boat.
A second later, the boat was reversing away from the steps. The old woman turned it round, miraculously avoiding all the other boats clustered by the quay, then set off across the bay. The fishing boats were crammed so tightly that Mabeki could barely see the water, yet the woman steered between them with an ease that came from a lifetime’s practice, squeezing between hulls that seemed barely a hand’s breadth apart and heading straight towards apparent dead ends that miraculously opened up at her approach.
They passed under a road bridge across the harbour and saw, not far away, the dazzling strings of fairy- lights and gaudily painted hull of the Jumbo Kingdom floating restaurant, where four thousand customers could dine at a single sitting, rise in tiers into the night air, a huge temple of gastronomy and greed.
‘Impressive, isn’t it?’ said Zheng. ‘I’m afraid our destination is much more modest.’
That, Mabeki soon realized, was an understatement. The old woman brought their little boat to a halt by the rectangular, barge-like hull of a far smaller, dingier restaurant, moored on the far side of Aberdeen Harbour, connected to the shore by a red-painted walkway. A rusty metal ladder hung down from the side of the hull. The old woman nestled the blunt bow of her boat against the foot of the ladder and gave a dismissive gesture in its direction.
‘This is where we get off,’ said Zheng.
‘One moment,’ said Mabeki.
Turning his back on Zheng, who was already stepping gingerly on to the ladder, he took a few paces towards the old woman and, speaking quietly but with infinite menace, told her in Ndebele that she was a dung- eating whore of a baboon with shrivelled-up breasts and a closed-up cunt as dry as an old gourd. He revelled in the fear that spread across the crone’s incomprehending face as he loomed over her and let the poison of his
