night they pick on someone else. They pick on us a lot. That’s why we stick together on this landing. They don’t dare take us on together. Like little rats they watch all the time. They wait. They whistle up and down the corridors, calling to each other. It wasn’t always this bad.’ He shook his head sadly, looked down at his glass and then out at the corridor. Outside life had returned to normal. The sound of laughter and music returned. David’s face clouded with thought, his eyes filled with a faraway sorrow. ‘This place has been my home for six months. I came here looking for my brother. He’s been missing for a year now. I ask everyone here. I show them this photo.’ He took out a photo from his shirt pocket and slid it across the table to Shrimp. ‘This is my younger brother, Ishmael.’ It was a sunny photo of David with his arm around the younger man’s shoulders, he was taller than David by a few inches. He was less bulky, his young face was full of laughter. He had a baseball cap on his head. On the right side of his face he had a scar that sliced his face from his ear to his mouth.
‘Somewhere in the Mansions there is the answer to where Ishmael has gone. If I cannot find him alive, I will find his body and have something to take home to our mother. Ishmael was a peaceful man. He liked his women, but he didn’t like to get into fights. I want to know what happened to him. Do you understand?’
‘Yes. Can you get me a copy of this photo?’
‘Yes. Take it. I have many.’
‘Do you think it has anything to do with the kids in the Mansions?’
‘Yes. I do. Someone here knows something. One of these kids knows what happened to him. Now I have watched them grow these last few months. They have lost their minds. They are out of control. They have become their own masters. They run around the roof like rats. They are always watching. They kill whoever they want to. They show no mercy. They care for no one or nothing. They are Satan’s children. I will show you something.’
They stood and David led Shrimp through to the kitchen. The smell of rotting meat was intense. Sections of a skinned goat’s carcass were hanging from the ceiling and crawling with flies. David led Shrimp into a room off the kitchen. In the corner a mattress had been laid out on the floor. A black man lay on it, on his side. His breathing noisy, his body very still. He had large wounds, pink in his dark flesh.
‘What happened to him?’
‘He was drunk. He laughed at them. They came after him with knives. The attacked him for no reason. They cut him to pieces.’
‘He needs a hospital.’
‘No. He is an overstayer, an illegal immigrant, and he is dying. He will be dead before dawn. It is better that you go.’
They left the dying man where he was and went back out to the corridor.
‘Here’s my card, David. You find out everything you can about who’s controlling these kids, who’s at the heart of it and I will do everything I can to find out what happened to your brother.’
Shrimp looked at the black men and he saw their faces. Each one homesick, sad and scared of dying.
David gave Shrimp his card in exchange and he held on to it with two hands and looked Shrimp in the eyes. ‘We will meet again, Shrimp. Remember my face and I will remember yours.’
Chapter 30
Mann left Victoria in the Oceans bar and headed back to Nathan Road. He needed a drink. He walked through the lobby of Vacation Villas.
In an overcrowded town where there often wasn’t room to walk on the pavements it was strange to feel lonely. Mann didn’t recognize the concept of loneliness. He just didn’t like going home. Home was where he had things to face. Out on Hong Kong’s streets is where he belonged. He walked through the lobby and up the sweeping staircase into the large lounge area. It was all deep, cushioned sofas and leather armchairs, low wooden, glass- topped coffee tables. At the far end was a massive TV screen relaying the latest sport coverage from around the world. He said hello to the hovering waitresses in their unattractive cheongsams that looked like they had been made by the same tailor who made the sofa covers and curtains, and walked straight through to the bar: a twenty- foot rectangle. People sat around it like bored guests at a dinner party, trying not to make eye contact with one another.
As he walked in, Mann gave a discreet nod to one of the three Filipinas singing on a stage at the end of the room. They wore matching dresses and had the same hair extensions. But only one had a good voice – that was Michelle, the oldest on the far right. She clocked him and gave a nervous nod of the head back as she kept up her pretty good rendition of Dolly Parton’s ‘Nine to Five’whilst the other two, Cindy and Sandy, practised their synchronized hip movements. A Filipino named Trex banged out the tune on the drums and a Chinese named Tim played the keyboard. They worked right through the night every night, as long as the bar was open so were they. Michelle looked tired, thought Mann. Her face was rubbery, her features barely registering the changes of emotion from one line of the song to the next. Her eyes kept flicking back to him.
Mann made space at the bar, ordered a large vodka on the rocks and checked out his other inmates around the rectangle. They were the usual suspects – forty-somethings, lonely men staring into their drinks, flicking the odd peanut into their mouth. Next to him three men in their late forties were huddled around a young Chinese hooker in her early twenties. They were transformed from boardroom ball breakers into beaming schoolboys. What was it about Western men and Asian hookers? Unlike Asian men, who were the biggest users of prostitutes in their own countries, the foreign man liked to believe he was getting a girlfriend for his money. He took her on holiday, walked hand in hand along moonlit beaches.
Mann didn’t have any moral high ground to even teeter on. He had paid for sex himself, but only the once. It had been as sexy as taking a crap. Mann liked to please his women. He liked to feel they were both in the same sexed-up space. For him any sex was definitely not better than no sex. He liked to take his time, it gave him pleasure. He didn’t feel like it when there was a meter running. He looked across at Michelle, she was getting more nervous. She looked about to leg it. If Michelle was looking shifty, she had a reason.
He took his drink from the barman and was about to take his first sip when it was almost knocked out of his hands.
‘I do apologize,’ a man next to him spoke. He was English, in his mid-forties, with black curly hair, large light-grey eyes. ‘Let me get you another.’
‘No need.’
The barman handed Mann a napkin to wipe his arm.
‘Please, I insist.’ He signalled to the barman who replaced Mann’s glass with a fresh one. ‘Cheers.’ He raised his glass. ‘My name’s Peter Thorne.’
Mann raised his. ‘Johnny Mann. Thanks for the drink. You passing through?’
‘Yes. Here for three nights then on to the mainland. What about you? You live here?’
Mann nodded. Two girls walked past and gave them the eye. He grinned at Mann. ‘Temptation everywhere you look here. How does a married man cope with it?’
Mann shook his head. The alcohol had reached the spot, he began to feel mellow.
‘I’m not married; I can get tempted all I like.’
‘Clever man. Stay single. I try to be good but it’s a lonely world on the road. I’m away from my family for eight months of the year altogether. I sometimes wonder what I’m doing it for. Like tonight – I ring home,’ he picked up his phone, looked at the screen and then dropped the phone back on the mat, ‘no reply. My wife texts me. She’s out, of course, having fun.’ He shook his head. ‘Don’t get me wrong, she’s entitled to a life. It’s not her fault I have to work so hard.’
‘Yeah, this looks like hard work.’ Mann glanced around the busy bar at the businessmen on expense accounts.
Peter Thorne grinned sheepishly. ‘I suppose you’re right. What do you do?’
‘This and that. Import export. Excuse me.’ Mann looked back at the stage – Michelle was gone. ‘I’ll be back.’ He put his drink on the bar and went after Michelle.
