Blue Lantern (10 page)

Brodie let his corporal out of the Land Rover to help the injured man, and ordered the driver to pursue the truck. In a few moments they were behind the truck, but unable to pass on the narrow tarmac. The truck driver didn't respond to the siren and flashing lights. When Shun Ho road widened, Brodie's driver pulled alongside the truck, grinning and enjoying the contest, while Brodie crouched in fear. Brodie thought they would be jostled off the road, but his driver got the Land Rover ahead of the truck, slowed down, and blocked it.

Brodie got out of the Land Rover in a smoke of burnt rubber, oil and exhaust gases. He pulled his gun, and ordered the driver to dismount. The driver was a young man, well muscled, in a white t-shirt with spiky hair. He gabbled truculently in Cantonese.

“Let's get the details on him,” Brodie said to Sergeant Lam. “Dangerous driving causing injury, maybe death.”

“I will see it is done.”

The truck driver was shouting at Brodie's men.

“What's eating him?” Brodie asked.

“He's a bully boy, expects to go anywhere, any time. Doesn't like being stopped,” Sergeant Lam said.

“Who the hell
is
he then? Who does he think he is? Let's have a look at his licence and transport documents,” Brodie exploded.

The sergeant seemed to think that this was unnecessary, but the documents were retrieved after fierce argument with the driver, and Brodie pored over them with a flashlight on the bonnet of the Land Rover. The driver's licence, the vehicle registration, and the cargo manifest for chemicals from Thailand were in order.

“Let's take a look inside,” Brodie said, annoyed at the behaviour of the driver, who had been handcuffed, and was still muttering threats.

“I think it is not necessary, sir.”

“I want to see. What's so important that it has to be driven through the streets at two in the morning with the urgency of a fire engine?”

The sergeant ordered the men to open the tail gate. Brodie climbed aboard with the flash-light. The cargo was stacked in cages with an access-way down the centre-line; it looked orderly, and in order to Brodie. At the end of the access way, near the cab, were cartons of detergent and disinfectant. He split a cardboard container with his pocket knife, and drew out a cake wrapped in paper. He withdrew the cake; it had a smell that prickled his nostrils, and on one side had been imprinted with the numbers 999. He saw Sergeant Lam watching him anxiously from the road. He held up the cake.

“Morphine bricks. Quite a load. On the way to a processing laboratory, I should think.”

Brodie gave orders for the truck to be closed, and radioed Mongkok with details of his find. “I think we'll probably find processing chemicals when the truck is properly searched,” he said to Sergeant Lam.

Mongkok dispatched an arrest wagon, and when it arrived, Brodie and his squad returned to the station with one of his men driving the truck. When they pulled into the yard, Brodie was astonished to find Deputy Assistant Commissioner Almodar, the Portugese number two at the station, waiting, fully uniformed in black with his silver epaullettes. Brodie recognised him although they had never spoken. DAC Almodar was by the door of Brodie's vehicle when he alighted. The DAC had bloodshot eyes, a man roused from his bed.

“Heard about your exploits tonight Brodie. Opens up a lot of lines of enquiry. I'm going to get two more experienced officers to take the case over, Wichell and Ullman, and I want you to cooperate with them. Leaves you free to perform your routine duties. They'll do the initial reports too. You're off the case from now.”

“But sir, it was my collar.”

“You'll get the credit, Brodie.”

“A man was seriously injured tonight, and…”

“Wichell and Ullman will deal with the charge involving the rickshaw man, as well as the other enquiries.”

Brodie had progressed far enough with Helen Lau to know that there were no physical restraints between them, and he could talk frankly with her on the telephone about where they might meet to be alone. It was only a matter of meeting Helen's strictures about secrecy; but he had more patience with these now, believing she was as keen as he was to find a meeting place. His first casual thought was that she could come to the station on one of his nights off.

She refused quickly, and categorically, in a voice which hinted that it was an absurd suggestion. “I'd like to be with you, Mike, but I'll never come to your room because I'll be seen, and I might be recognised.”

“Surely you're not
that
well known. And the chances of seeing somebody who knows you are almost negligible, even if you were the wife of the general manager of the Bank of China.”

“I'll have to be the judge of how well known I am.”

It was a final pronouncement. Brodie knew there was no chance of persuading her.

“What about your room at the hospital?”

“The building is full of the people I work with every day. Friends and colleagues look into my room at all hours. It's out of the question, Mike.”

He asked her about hotels, pointing out with faint irony that the big western ones were a little expensive for him.

“Then hotels are out. I could go to the Mandarin or the Hilton or the Peninsula, but I can't go into the backstreets.”

“Isn't this a contradiction, Helen? You're unlikely to be noticed in one of the lesser hotels.”

“There are a lot of reasons for a respectable woman to be in one of the big hotels, but there is only one reason to be in a backstreet hotel.”

Brodie's options were reducing fast. “We could go to Lantau on the ferry and stay for the weekend. Or to Macao.”

She refused this too. “I'm likely to see friends on the ferry or the hydrofoil, or see people in Lantau who might know me. I know it's difficult Mike. We'll just have to go on our vacation together outside Hong Kong.”

“You're definitely on for Manila, aren't you?”

“Sure.”

But Boxing Day was a long time ahead, and they eventually agreed that the only immediate solution was for Brodie to borrow the apartment of an absent friend, if he could. Brodie ended the conversation frustrated, but excited. He started to make careful enquiries amongst his colleagues, and he began to realise that his chances were not as remote as he had thought. Expatriates had generous rights to leave, and were usually inveterate travellers, anxious to get out of the Colony for a while. There was hope.

8

Brodie would have liked the Vanessa of his first meeting on the beach to remain as an image, quickly dashed in light colours on a blank canvas; no background. But his successive meetings with her produced actual colours and shapes, and they were necessarily different from what he might have imagined.

On their second or third night out, eating noodles under the orange lights, Vanessa began to talk about herself. She began to emerge as the daughter, the sister, usurping the image of the passionate girl on the beach who dined, and later slept with him on that first night. Eventually, she invited him to her apartment, and gave more substance to her words. She said she wanted to be very frank with him; she would tell him everything.

The Chans lived on the tenth floor in a two-room apartment of a building in a cramped corner of Sham Shui Po. The exterior walls of the block were raw concrete, pitted with scaffolding marks. The structure looked unfinished. A tiny balcony in the apartment held two flower pots, and a caged canary. One room was lined with bunks, bearing bundles of clothing and personal possessions in the daytime. At night, the bundles were placed on the floor when the bunks were occupied. The other room had a flimsy folding table, folding chairs, and a thinly upholstered couch. On the couch there was a mat embroidered with a tiger; on the wall above, an outdated calendar with a coloured picture of Yee Lin the famous Cantonese film star who committed suicide. A twelve inch black and white television sat in one corner; in another, the family's cooking implements were piled around a spirit stove. There was little room to move. The walls dripped with moisture; the Chans had no water tap or lavatory; they had to go down a windowless corridor to a communal washing area. By the dexterous use of plastic buckets, they provided their water, washed, and removed their slops.

The apartment was occupied by Vanessa, her father and two younger brothers. One of the boys had a goldfish bowl on a side table; beside it was a red cardboard shrine with a candle. An orange, and a few paper flowers in a vase, had been offered to the shrine. The odour of burning joss sticks overlay the smell from the communal toilets. One of the children, very fat, aged about fourteen, was the messenger boy and cook. The father, a peaceful old man said nothing. Frail, he sat near the balcony, nodding. He was sixty but looked ninety. Brodie recognised the emaciated body and dreamlike state of a heroin addict. Vanessa had lived with this fact for a long time and did not conceal it. The fat boy fetched his father a packet each day. Every few hours the father chased the dragon over a piece of silver foil, heated by a candle; these needs were at his elbow on the table. Vanessa said he was a good man. It seemed absurd to Brodie that technically he ought to arrest both the boy, and the father.

Vanessa began her story. She had named herself at the School of the Sisters of the Sacred Heart; she was sixteen when her mother died. Her uncle, Starboard Chan paid for her education, and he now paid for her two brothers; and her father's drug needs. She had not had to take anything very seriously until the day she came home from school, and found her mother prostrate and vomiting. She saw in her mother's eyes the gravity of the illness. She could not get help from her father who dreamed by the balcony then, as he did now. She ran down ten flights to the manager's office and implored him to call an ambulance. At the Queen Elizabeth hospital her mother was left in a side room with others, and Vanessa's entreaties for attention only brought rebukes from the medical staff to wait her turn. As Vanessa waited by the stretcher, the room was full of cries and moans and tears of forgotten people, and the floor spotted with blood. Vanessa found a telephone and in desperation rang Uncle Starboard. In three quarters of an hour, he was at his sister's side. The place brightened at his presence. He chatted with a doctor and joked with a nurse. Then he patted Vanessa on the shoulder and disappeared, but Vanessa's mother was taken immediately to a large quiet room on an upper floor. While her mother was being examined, Vanessa waited on the balcony. The hospital hovered high over the sea, and the sun was moving to hide behind the islands. All the doctors and nurses went away, and only one amah was left in the sickroom. Mrs Chan was unconscious. The amah said Mrs Chan needed special care, which she would give in return for tea money. Vanessa said they were poor and had no money. The amah looked doubtfully round the spacious room, and said it was too bad. Vanessa dreamed that night of the flaring nostrils of the old woman. She thought perhaps she should have told Uncle Starboard, but surely the nurses would look after her mother. A day later, her mother died without recovering from an operation to remove a tumour in her stomach.

Vanessa was left to look after the two children and her father. She left school. Uncle Starboard called at times, observing that housework was boring and unprofitable. After three months, he had tea with her one afternoon, and explained his thoughts. He could get her a job in a bank but what would she earn? Five or six hundred a month for the first couple of years while she trained, and after that, probably not much more. In an office, uncle said, her one important asset would be wasted. He said she had something which could enable a poor girl to become rich – not only rich, but perhaps famous. He had a confident paternal smile.

This talk puzzled and confused Vanessa who was not sure of herself, and too shy to question her uncle. She was pretty; a little bigger than average with a pale skin, a prized quality; but she didn't think she was more beautiful than most of the girls she knew. Uncle Starboard explained that she should work in a ballroom. Vanessa had heard about ballrooms. Chinese men went there to meet girls; they danced and drank tea. The ballrooms were said to be elegant and the girls exquisite. Vanessa had had ballroom hostesses pointed out to her on the street, and they
were
beautiful. Sometimes they married rich men; always they were given money, and treated with respect. Vanessa felt it was a very ladylike life, and somewhat above her. What she was used to was school, housework and Sunday picnics on Lantau with her classmates.

Uncle Starboard bought a wardrobe of evening gowns and cocktail dresses, and Vanessa went to work at the Majestic, one of the most expensive ballrooms in Hong Kong. She worked only three evenings a week, starting at two in the afternoon, and finishing at ten. All she did was talk to the men who cared to sit with her, and dance with them if they asked. She was quick to learn the dance steps, which she had already practiced with her friends. She was not only proficient but she loved dancing – although her partners were often rather awkward. On several occasions in the first few months, men asked her to dine with them, and Vicky Ho, who was their mother at the ballroom, insisted that she go home directly by taxi. European men came to the Majestic only rarely; they were not excluded, but they were not encouraged. Once Vanessa met an Englishman, and they were able to talk in the sketchy English she had learned at school. But Vicky soon approached them, and led her away to a Chinese man on the other side of the room. Vanessa realised she was being protected and was grateful.

Vanessa found she was engaged with customers most of the time and had little opportunity to get to know the other girls; they were proud and unfriendly. The youngest ones seemed the proudest of all. She thought they were probably very rich, because she was getting three thousand a month for herself; it was more than the Chans needed at home, and her thoughts were moving toward a new apartment. Vicky told her that she must be especially attentive to the three men who became her regulars. Two were fat old businessmen. She found out all about their work, their wives and concubines, their travels, their cars and villas – it was all they talked about. After a while this information ceased to be very interesting, and Vanessa had to force herself to listen and remember. Occasionally she asked her client the same question twice, and this was embarrassing. It caused offence when she confused the import business of one in Manila, with the timber business of another in Brunei, or remembered being told of a house in Singapore which was actually in Macao.