Kowloon Tong (16 page)

On his return, Bunt found Hung transformed, looking remote and almost unapproachable in a melon-colored suit with a Pierre Cardin label on the sleeve. It was a formal visit now. To signify it, because he had been expecting something like this, Bunt carried a pound of glazed fruit under his arm in a bright red box. He handed it over to Hung on his way in, as though it were a permit to admit him to a sad little ceremony in a foreign country.

The country was China. Entering the room, crossing the threshold, was like crossing a frontier. The apartment, so far as he could tell in his swift first glance, was substantially the same: stark, Chinese. Hung was ushering him to a chair, to keep him captive, but Bunt walked to the window and saw again, near a winking Belisha beacon at an intersection, the Imperial Stitching Building up Waterloo Road—the upper windows, executive offices, Miss Liu's office, Lily's cubicle, the cutting floor, the old finishing room, Mr. Chuck's office where the shades were drawn.

Turning back to smile at Hung—at having frustrated his attempt to seat him—Bunt realized that something was different in the room, but what?

"Please." Mr. Hung shoved a chair at him.

Seated, Bunt keenly felt the difference, something missing at the periphery of his gaze.

"Tea," Hung said. It was a command. He smiled. He withdrew across the shining floor—the afternoon sun blazed there in the varnish.

Where was the white shaggy carpet that had lain there?

"Notice the flat leaves," Mr. Hung was saying—back so soon and already explaining that this was the rarest tea in China, this batch especially, picked from just a small number of bushes on one hillside outside Hangzhou, and all harvested in the month before the Ching Ming Festival.

"Lovely," Bunt said, deliberately imitating his mother. "Thanking you."

"
Lung ching,
" Hung said.

His bony finger pressed on the teapot lid as he poured, and though the nail was a yellow claw, the finger was as pale as the porcelain.

"Dragon well," Hung said.

"Right you are," Bunt said.

"Perhaps it sounds familiar."

"It's all Chinese to me," Bunt said.

"Oh, yes," Hung said. "
Lung
is dragon in Mandarin, as
loon
is in Cantonese."

"I think I knew that."

"
Kowloon.
Nine dragons."

"Makes sense."

"
Tong
is—"

"Secret society, like a triad."

"Where did you hear that?"

"I've lived my whole life here," Bunt said.

"
Tong
is pond."

"Tong is no such thing," Bunt said. "Tong is the sound a bell makes. Tong is like tongue. Tong is a verb like gather—you can tong logs. Tong is one leg of a pair of tongs—what else?"

"Not English," Mr. Hung said. "
Tong
is pond.
Kowloon Tong.
Nine Dragons' Pond."

"Oh, I see."

"Where the dragons drink."

"Of course."

Hadn't Mr. Mo, the
feng shui
geomancer, said something of the kind? Chinese was Chinese. All the words had the same sound, all the people the same face. But avon meant river, and the Belisha beacon, like the one out the window, was named for Leslie Hore-Belisha, an M.P. and minister of transport, and did Hung know that?

"Everything means something," Bunt said.

Hung stared hard at him as if trying to discern the subtle significance of that statement.

"Green tea has made us healthy," Hung said.

The cup in his hand, brimming, he placed on the arm of Bunt's chair. He had spread the tea paraphernalia on the little table and that too, the clutter of it, evoked the room as it had been, as Bunt remembered it, not so bare as this. Bunt drank the tea, saying nothing. He had remembered the white carpet especially, for its whiteness and its shaggy pile—and more, but what?

"May I use your facilities?"

Attempting to mask his annoyance, Hung looked twitchy and unsure, and it was apparent that he hated Bunt's asking to penetrate the apartment again. Yet there was nothing Hung could do.

"It's all your bally tea!" He liked the travesty of his mother's manner as a way of baffling Hung.

No carpet in the bathroom either. He was certain there had been one, white, shaggy, inappropriate. Strange, these people threw nothing away. The lid was still down on the toilet, to prevent the energy from escaping.

"This tea is brewed with water that has not reached the boil," Hung said as Bunt returned. The man was refilling his cup. "Eighty degrees Celsius is sufficient, unlike the Indian varieties that need to be steeped and brewed."

"My mum says you're well spoken, and that's a fact," Bunt said. He was raising himself on the chair seat to look out the window. "I can see my building."

Hung moved his head in a sliding manner, sideways, as though beginning a dance step.

"
Feng shui,
" he said.

"I know that," Bunt said. He meant the concept. Everyone talked about it, even Mr. Chuck had—the good
feng shui
of the Regent, the bad
feng shui
of the new Bank of China with its triangular thicket of walls and windows.

Hung's head was still sliding, perhaps to capture Bunt's attention, perhaps to emphasize the point.

"They must move back and forth. No obstruction, good
feng shui.
"

"They?"

"The
ch'i
of the elements."

"Mr. Chuck found the site for the factory. He had his reasons, I reckon." Bunt was going to mention the annual visit of Mr. Mo, with his compass disk and his charts and his calculations, but why bother? He had come here to find out what had happened to Ah Fu. "The factory's well situated. You know that."

He reasoned that this was probably why Hung had been so persistent: Imperial Stitching was perfectly sited, in the belly of the dragon.

Challenged, Hung merely tightened his features, as though facing a high wind—the sort of look that came into Miss Liu's face when she adjusted the fan in Bunt's office.

"As for our business arrangement," Hung said, "there is nothing more to talk about. The deal is in place. More tea?"

"I want to talk about Ah Fu," Bunt said, feeling that he was flinging himself upon Mr. Hung.

"Before you do," Hung said smoothly, not reacting to what Bunt had said, "I would like you to see something."

In his odd, loose-jointed household shuffle, so different from the way he marched outside, he hurried to a sideboard, his feet flopping in his sandals, then knelt and opened a small pair of doors and hovered, rattling papers. Canted over to get a glimpse, Bunt still could not see what the man was doing. The Chinese sideboard might have been an altar.

A large noiseless clock stood on the sideboard showing the wrong time, and it was another intimation that Bunt was in China, where he imagined it was always the wrong time. The hands indicated three-fifteen, but it was now four-thirty. China was late, China was slow and inaccurate and outmoded. It was a mechanical clock, imitation French, on gilt feet, in a sun-faded or perhaps fake wooden case the color of a pumpkin. The roundness of the clock was in marked contrast to Hung's narrow skull.

After closing and latching the doors of the sideboard—no, it had to be an altar—Hung got to his feet and hovered over Bunt, passing him an envelope as though dealing a playing card.

"For you."

The red
lai see
packet, stamped with gold Chinese characters, was familiar to Bunt as the sort of envelope Hong Kong Chinese presented on festivals when they offered gifts of lucky money. Mr. Chuck had given him many such envelopes, but always at Christmas and on birthdays. It was more suited to the formality of Hung's apartment, to this whole ritual of unanswered questions.

"Open it, if you please."

Bunt squeezed the edges, then blew on the open end with a puff of breath. The inflated packet revealed a folded piece of paper, which Bunt withdrew and unfolded. It was a Bank of China check made out to him for fifty thousand dollars. That was about forty-two hundred pounds.

"And I've already given one to your mother."

"Thanking you," Bunt said. She hadn't mentioned it.

But it was a check. A Chinese check, like a Chinese everything else, was so much an imitation it was probably unusable, just an exercise in mimicry. This was no doubt rubber, and even if it was not, it was symbolic money, not negotiable, only a tentative promise that might never be fulfilled. They were all paperhangers, the Chinese in Hong Kong, check kiters and price grubbers and pay gougers. The check in the red envelope meant nothing to him, even antagonized him, but so that Hung would be placated, Bunt made all the appropriate noises.

"Not for Full Moon receiving company," Hung said, nodding furiously. "This is a personal gift. A little present between friends. To show gratitude and trust."

Handing over a chunk of money at an awkward moment was another example of Chinese subtlety. As usual, there was no mistaking its purpose: to obligate and encumber Bunt, to distract him—in what?

He was sure that Hung had interrupted him in something, but he could not remember precisely what it had been.

He smiled in confusion and then, wildly looking around, he caught sight of the clock and saw that it was still three-fifteen. The hands had not moved. Not slow—it had stopped. And another disturbing detail: the glass was gone from its face, probably smashed when the clock stopped at that hour. Calculating in this way, Bunt remembered his question.

"Ah Fu seems to be missing."

"Yes?" Hung's way of showing indifference or denial, Bunt saw, was to hold his hands at the level of his waist and shake his fingers in a twinkling fashion as if drying them.

"Ah Fu hasn't been to work for a week."

Hung's mask was his expression of facing a high wind, cheeks sucked in, eyes narrowed to slits, giving nothing away. It was the making of poker faces in which the Chinese were expert.

"So we're wondering," Bunt said to the unhelpful man.

"Obviously she is feeling poorly. She is home."

"Her flat-mate hasn't seen her and she's very worried. So am I."

"And me."

"Good. Because you were the last person to see her," Bunt said.

He got up from his chair. Hung sidestepped as though to obstruct him, but Bunt pushed past him and walked the length of the room to the window. When he looked out and saw his building, he became so absorbed in the harmony of straight lines that linked this window with his windows that he had to reach for the wall and steady himself on a cabinet.

"Careful," Hung said, taking a step towards him.

Bunt had snagged his fingers on a shelf, having reached through the cabinet door. There was no glass in the door. The crockery was gone from inside. Fewer knickknacks cluttered the shelves. A silver spoon, a painted tin cat, and a brass bell, that was all. Where was the porcelain? Where was the glass?

He was standing on a dusty carpetless floor, with bare walls, the glass missing from the cabinet door and from the face of the stopped clock. It was strange and spare, a Chinese apartment that was an experience of China.

Hong Kong people seldom entertained at home, but when they did they gloated over their appliances and their toys: they were spenders, they hated treasures, they loved gadgets. As refugees they valued portable property most of all, things they could stuff into bags and flee with. But Hung's drab place was what Bunt had always imagined China to be like: fiercely frugal, stinking of cabbage and fried noodles and cheesy feet, where people sat upright in hard chairs in their underwear.

"Ah Fu left the restaurant with you."

"Did you observe us leaving?"

Bunt hesitated, and before he could think of anything to say Hung was attacking.

"See?" Hung said. "You are very much mistaken."

Bunt was on the point of telling him that Mei-ping had seen them leave in a taxi, but he thought better of it. Better to keep her out of it.

"Perhaps Ah Fu visited her family in China."

"She was afraid of going there. She wanted to emigrate to Canada."

"That's it then," Hung said. "She has left for Canada. She is young. Young people are not always reliable."

"She worked for me," Bunt said. "She was never absent, never late."

Hung had not stopped smiling, though it was his windblown expression, squinting into a gale.

"Who is inquiring about her?"

"I am."

"But you said 'we're wondering.'"

Bunt stared at him.

"Please sit down," Hung said.

Instead of doing so, Bunt put his hands on his hips and said, "If she's missing, it's a matter for the police."

"That is not a good idea," Hung said. "The police would only make trouble."

It annoyed Bunt to hear Hung say the very words he himself had said to Mei-ping.

"Trouble for you."

"Trouble for us."

"Something might have happened to Ah Fu," Bunt said, and took a step closer to Hung, who did not move.

Hung said, "In the course of a police inquiry they would look into your business. Your records and mine. They would discover that we have started a new company in the Cayman Islands and that money was being transferred in a manner that was highly questionable. You see?"

But Bunt was already protesting. "I don't have to sell to you!"

Still talking calmly, Hung said, "And your mother might find that dreadfully inconvenient."

Bunt was silenced. He hated that tone, its arrogant presumption, hated it most because he was sure that Hung was right. His mother's Chinese nature said,
Don't get involved.

The way in which Hung had peeled the chicken feet and picked out the stringy tendons and gnawed at the yellow shanks; the slant of his lips as he stuffed his mouth with chicken breast and spoke of trussing the birds with string; the
I want to eat your foot
and the tantrum over the bitter melon; the abruptness with which he had poked a piece of cheap jade into Ah Fu's mouth—it all came back to Bunt as he faced Hung, and the logic in it was like a warning prelude to a violent crime.