The Code War (52 page)

'Er, yeah, I suppose.'

The beer and tea arrived. Dan took
a large glug of Dutch courage and wiped his lips with his hand. His
expression became more serious as his chat-up brain stood down and
his logical brain reluctantly stood up.

He looked the curious female
stranger in the e
ye.

'OK, here goes. God', he said,
'the first of the 'ones', is the bloke who made the Universe. But
he's too big to fit into it. If he appeared here right now it would
be like an elephant in a matchbox.' Dan made the sound of an
explosion and opened his arms out wide. Nancy's expression didn't
change.

'Then there's the Holy
Spirit.
' He looked down again. Such nice
legs. 'Since God would cause a massive explosion if he came here,
the Spirit's a bit like having God on the phone. He's not really
there with you, not properly, but he sort of is, in your
ear.'

Dan took a big breath, 'And then there's
Jesus.'

He looked at Nancy with a triumphant
smile as though he'd finished.

'Mm hmm?'

'Well you know about him, don't
you?'

'Not really.'

'You don't? You never heard about
him? Even at school?'

'Maybe I wasn't paying attention. My
childhood was a bit..fraught.'

'Oh.'

'So go on.'

'Oh, OK
.' Dan swallowed and looked around the room. Against the
wall a lobster in a fish tank was clawing at the glass, trying to
escape. A plaster mermaid in a sunken ship behind it regarded its
flailing efforts but made no move to help. Above them, sea bass
window-shopped the diners, flicking their tails lazily and waiting
for dinner.

His
mouth was dry again. When his eyes eventually came back to
Nancy she was still looking at him, waiting.

'Well, he was a teacher.'

He
paused and smiled thinly, waiting for Nancy to
respond.

'A teacher.'

'Yes, well, a rabbi. It means
teacher.' He stared at his beer glass, searching for inspiration.
'It's a Jewish word. I mean Hebrew. It's a Hebrew word.' He cocked
his head on one side, looking up. 'Or was it Aramaic?'

'I don't know. Was it?'

'One or the other. Anyway he was in
Israel. Well, I mean, it's Israel, now. But it was different then.
It all moves around.' Dan smiled nervously and rolled his hands in
the air, forefingers protruding.

'Oh?'

'Well, it was part of Rome. I mean, the
empire. The Roman Empire, that is. Not the city. It wasn't part of
Rome itself.'

Tiny beads of sweat emerged on Dan's
forehead.

'Sure? Not the British Empire?'

'No, of course not.' He gasped out a
laugh and looked back into her eyes like a grateful dog.

'Judea, that was it.' He
clicked his fingers. 'It's all coming back.' He
snatched at his beer and swigged it, wetting his parched lips
before replacing the glass on the table.

'So he was a teacher in Judea. What
sort? Maths? English?' Nancy permitted herself the ghost of a
smile.

'No. Not that sort of teacher.'
Dan's eyes searched Nancy's face again. Uncertainty had returned to
his expression. She was teasing him. 'He taught about…being good
and stuff. He was a preacher.'

'A preacher teacher.'

'Yes, I suppose. Good way of
putting it.' His breath was coming shorter and shorter. He flashed
his eyes at the door.

'So what did he do? Why is he one of the
'ones' on your necklace?'

'Well he died and then came
back.' Dan stared at Nancy, nervousness in his
eyes, waiting for her reaction. His upper lip shivered a little.
'So they say.' He picked up his beer glass again and held it close
to his chest.

Na
ncy
crossed her legs slowly. Dan knew fairly certainly that she was
torturing him.

'So they say? You
don't sound very certain.' Her eyes reached out
like tractor beams on a rabbit at night, pinning him.

Dan breathed in deeply. He opened his
mouth to speak but no words came. Nancy stepped in to break the
silence. 'Didn't it all get a bit messy at the end?'

Dan stared down at his glass and
then back at her. 'Well, I suppose saving the world you're bound to
make some enemies.' He rested his arm momentarily on the table
before replacing it in his lap. 'Anyway, it's a matter of faith.
Either you believe or you don't.' His eyes wrenched themselves away
from her face and made a Z across her body. The snug breasts. The
flat stomach. Those legs.

She reeled him back. 'And you
believe?'

'Yes. Well, I guess, well yes, I
do actually. Yes. I do.' He drank again, looking at her over the
glass's rim, half-expecting her to laugh. But she wasn't mocking
him now. There was a warmth in her eyes towards him that wasn't
there earlier. Her long brown hair rested on the seat-back behind
her. He would like to see it resting on his shoulder. 'What about
you?'

'I don't know.' It was Nancy's turn to
pause. 'So Jesus was a Jew?'

'Yes. He was a Jew. Hundred per
cent.'

'Not a Christian?'

'Well, no
. That came later. He was Jewish. All of them
were.'

'Oh.' Nancy began to shuffle her
feet. Dan opened his mouth, searching for something to say.
Anything to keep her there.

But
she
beat him to it. 'One last thing.'

'Go on.' Dan just wanted
this
conversation to end so he could ask
her out on a date.

'Why the dot after the first 'one'?'

'Er, well, that's because although
God, the Holy Spirit and Jesus are all equal, they're all number
one, numero uno -' he winced at his own awful gag - 'God came
first. So the dot separates them.'

Nancy nodded and looked down at
her watch. 'Well, thank you. That was all very interesting.' And
she finished her tea, rose from the table, gathered her bag and
turned to go. 'I'll pay the bill,' she said, throwing some notes on
the table. 'Goodbye.'

And
before he could react she strode to the door, went out into
the street and was gone.

Dan
sat
there holding his beer feeling desperately alone. He stared at her
empty chair amazed at his sudden sadness. He wondered how he'd lost
his heart to a woman whose name he'd forgotten to ask and who he'd
only met half an hour before.

Nancy walked down Nathan Road
heading back towards the Golden Luck. Dinner with Fatty tonight.
Dinner with Frenchy tomorrow. Got to prepare my thoughts. Choose
some clothes. Learn more Cantonese. Are they both really pitching
for my support? Who will make the better leader? What do I want out
of it? Must think of a price. Quite cute that Dan. Shame he's in a
different world from mine.

She thought about their
conversation. 1.11. The Trinity. Really! After all that build-up
over the last few weeks
, seeing 1.11
everywhere. And it just means the Trinity? Is that all?
Underwhelming. Completely underwhelming. And it's got nothing to do
with me anyhow. Well, it's not going to change anything. Anything
at all.

Lining the street were dozens of stalls
selling toys, clothes, trinkets, cheap jewellery, cosmetics,
brushes. Among the buildings Nancy noticed a smart jewellery shop
she had often looked at before. In the window were watches,
bracelets, rings, necklaces, pendants, ear-rings, even tiaras. One
item caught her eye.

She walked into the shop, pointed
out the necklace to the assistant and tried it on in front of a
mirror. There was an odd feeling as she turned this way and that,
letting it catch the
light on its two
triangles of jade inlay, now on one side and now on the other. It
felt like it belonged. She looked at the label knowing the notional
asking price was only the starting point for a negotiation. 'Give
me your best price,' she said to the assistant in
Cantonese.

The woman looked at Nancy a second time,
picked up a pocket calculator and jabbed at it several times,
holding the machine out to show her the result.

Nancy handed over the money and walked
proudly out of the shop and back into the pell mell of Nathan Road,
wearing the necklace. Would the menfolk of Brother know the
significance of her new jewellery? Or the women for that matter?
Maybe, maybe not. But Nancy did and she had a skip in her stride as
she walked along the pavement holding her hand up to her new
necklace and letting her fingers gently test each of the six points
of the small star hanging from it. The Star of David.

Chopper's Apartment,
Ho Tin Girl Friend Bar and Film Club, Yaumati, Kowloon

Nescafé
Mao sat on the edge of Chopper's sofa with both hands
behind his head. He was bowed over almost to the ground while he
waited out the typhoon of terror that thundered around the room,
throwing ornamental plaster warriors to the ground and sending
their bone china spirits back to the earthenware
underworld.

Wolf Smoke lay in his basket under
a table, his dark fur flecked with flakes of ceramic. He raised his
head and chased an itch with his sharp canines, the only one in the
room pretending all was normal. A dust pall swirled gently in the
air, sliced in two by a ceiling light as particles of plaster
ambled into existence from nowhere, lived briefly then turned tail
and vanished again.

Wonton Chiang, door marshal of the
moment, stood still and silent as a saint's statue in a church,
staring down at the powdered loafers on his feet. A ring of glass
from a broken lampshade lay around them like a fallen halo. His
body language warned Nescafé against trying a headlong exit, surely
a temptation for someone who had stirred Chopper's ire to this
degree.

But his mind was in last night's and
next night's conquests, stealing immigrants away from the fate of
good factory jobs that otherwise awaited, sifting the easily led
from the resolute, watching his venomous words as they snaked their
way into homeless heads and worked their poison in anxious hearts
and finally taking his work home mini-skirted, jeaned, zipped or
buttoned and tasting the first fruits of his labour à la horizontal
while pricing it, $50, $70 or even $100 a throw for punters who
cared to throw that much away in five minutes of superimposed
rapture.

By contrast Mars Ma followed every
move of his boss, in part because he worshipped him and in part so
he could see the next airborne champagne bottle or onyx ashtray
before it described its near-straight arc through the plaster dust
and dodge it before it added to the pattern of grooves on his
windscreen-slashed face.

Two other mobsters, drivers for their
deflated bosses, moulded themselves into the walls, wishing now
that they had remained safe and bored playing with the buttons in
their supercharged spoiler-tailed Porsches instead of coming up and
hoping to spill some of their great-boss's Bollinger.

In the middle of the room stood the
blowing volcano of Chopper himself, the psychotic cop-slasher. Hot
lava blew out from him in all directions in the form of swear
words, hatewords and chain-saw words that slashed and maimed his
colleagues' egos unless, like Wonton, they could find a way to blot
them out.

'…and that's what will happen to
you if you ever, ever again do anything so stupid you bean-curd for
brains, mile-high pile of cockroach dung.' Chopper was shaking as
he stared down at Nescafé's bent head. He looked around him at the
jetsam of his apartment, a ghastly assemblage of pine and chrome
perfectly worthy of a cheap gangster. And that was before he
wrecked it.

There was a knock at the door.

150 decibels of 'Come in' threw
themselves past Wonton and made a scientifically measurable concave
indent in the plywood and MDF fabric of the door to the Girl Friend
Bar.

It opened and a Chopper sidekick
came in, treading cautiously on the china shards and staring about
him.

'What?' said Chopper, suddenly
calm at the appearance of one of his own.

'Mr Kwok, sir, you asked me to watch the
ghost detective Dan Kelly, sir.'

'Yes, Ah Leung, what have you found
out?'

'Sir, he had some drinks and talks
with Miss Nancy in the Ho Fook just now for about half an hour.
Miss Nancy was there with Miss Jenny and when she left, Mr Kelly
came over and sat at Miss Nancy's table. She behaved very distant
with him. He did most of the talking. Then Miss Nancy left by
herself and Mr Kelly left a few minutes later and returned to the
police station.' Leung shut up and waited. He had learnt it was not
good to speak while Chopper was trying to think.

'So,' said Chopper in an almost
whisper to contrast with his bombast of moments ago. 'First, a
senior officer in Kowloon Police Headquarters tells me that Kelly
is targeting Brother. Then Kelly arrests Nescafé at the Pearl River
Wholesalers in Wong Tai Sin as though he's been watching it for a
long time. Now we find Kelly is trying to schmooze Nancy who even I
have some sympathy with after her performance the other night.
That's three things against Mr Kelly, one after
another.'

Chopper kicked away some broken plaster
pieces from his feet. He stooped and picked up the head and torso
of a warrior figurine holding a spear and held it up in front of
him.

'Yue Fei,' he said looking into the
fierce eyes. 'This is Yue Fei everyone. There was a general who
knew how to take care of his enemies. No mercy, no quarter, no
prisoners, no falsehood. Yue Fei was a hero in his time and an
inspiration to us now. '