Hiroshima Joe (3 page)

Sandingham backed up three steps. No one could see him except the bellboy, who was still preoccupied counting his small change.

The manager came out from behind the desk and walked towards the main entrance, his back to Sandingham. His highly polished shoes clicked on the floor, and then softened on the carpet that ran from the large, sunken main doormat to the stairs.

As soon as Heng’s back was to him, Sandingham went smartly down the remaining steps, turned left and walked as quickly as he could along the ground floor corridor.

It was cool there, for the corridor was bordered on one side not by a wall but by flower beds in which grew an assortment of small frond-like palms and broad-leafed bushes. He reached the rear door of the hotel unseen. It was open and he noticed that the dustbins had been taken out into the street and were now piled alongside the tea chests upon which he had earlier stood.

The street at the rear of the hotel was deserted. From over a high stone wall opposite drifted the chanting of school children learning mathematics by rote, in Cantonese. The flag above the gate of the playground and basketball court indicated that this was a Communist school.

Within fifty seconds, he had reached the end of the street and disappeared around the corner.

He was now in Soares Avenue. The buildings on either side were mostly pre-war and he could vaguely remember some of them. They were made of grey concrete in the blunt style of the thirties with small shops giving directly on to the pavement. Between the buildings lay dank alleyways, down the centres of which were gutters running with slow trickles of stinking water. When the typhoons came in the late summer months, these alleyways were awash with garbage.

As he passed the shops, he looked in them. One was a sweet-shop, its window displaying a varied assortment of Chinese confectionery in shiny paper with blue, red and green printing on the wrappers. Another was a fruit and vegetable shop. Outside this, he paused and rummaged in his pocket for a coin. A hand-painted cardboard notice, stuck vertically into a box of tangerines, stated in Cantonese that the fruit was five cents each. Sandingham understood the characters. From his pocket he drew a ten-cent coin and the woman in the shop came out from the doorway to serve him. He gave her the coin and helped himself.

This was not a shop where a European would normally go – it was in a back street, halfway up the Kowloon peninsula. Europeans shopped at the southern end of Nathan Road and even then seldom bought food. They purchased clothes, consumer goods, jewellery, curios of soapstone, jade or ivory. The buying of food was invariably left to their servants.

However, the shop owner was not surprised. She had seen Sandingham before, wandering the streets, standing by the bus stop, reading the previous day’s issue of the
South China Morning Post.
She assumed that he was a poor White Russian.

The tangerine was small even for such a fruit, and the peel stung when he wedged some under his fingernails. He had discovered recently that the quick on his thumbs was raw under the nails and, on occasion, it wept a straw-coloured liquid. Once, the previous week, he had woken to find the nail badly bruised, but he could not recall having caught or banged it.

He reached Argyle Street and crossed over through the mid-morning traffic to the bus stop going east. Behind him, up a low hill, Kadoorie Avenue and Braga Circuit wound through trees and past the houses of the very wealthy. He looked along the street to see if there were a bus in sight, and saw instead a large American convertible come to a halt at the junction leading up the hill. At the wheel sat a beautiful Eurasian girl in her mid-twenties. Her cheekbones were soft, her skin the cool cream so common in such a mixture of races and her deep brown eyes shone. Her auburn hair was short and she was wearing a blouse of sky-blue cotton. As she spun the steering wheel, Sandingham could see her gold ladies’ Rolex wristwatch catch the bright sunlight. He pondered how much such a watch, not to mention the girl herself, might fetch where he was going.

The bus, with its red sides and off-white roof, was not long in coming. He put his hand out to hail it and the conductor yanked on the silver grid gate at the front entrance of the vehicle. Sandingham boarded the bus and sat down on a wooden slat seat. The conductor pulled twice on the thin cord rope that ran the length of the vehicle and the bell dinged by the driver. He paid the ten-cent fare and received a flimsy ticket made of something very like thin greaseproof paper. He folded this once and put it in the breast pocket of his shirt. He would need it later.

After it had circled a roundabout, the vehicle slowed down and stopped at Kowloon Hospital where at least half the passengers alighted. This took several minutes, for the bus was full.

It was a section of the route that Sandingham did not like. As the bus pulled away from the kerb he looked at the floor between his shoes to avoid seeing anything out of the window. But there, in the rubbish under the seat, was something that rudely jarred his memory. Such was the connection with this road in his mind that even garbage on the floor reminded him of it. He smiled ruefully. It was perhaps fitting that it was such trash that did cause his brain to think back. That was what it had all been about, really. On the floor was the screwed-up silver lining of a chocolate bar.

The bus halted for an amber traffic light. He looked up from his feet and automatically from right to left. A few houses with deep-set balconies now stood where gardens had once been laid out. But the soil was poor and vegetables had found it hard to gain sustenance. So had men.

An elderly Chinese in black baggy trousers that seemed to be made of tarred cloth, and a loose-fitting jacket of the same material, was crossing at the lights. Ahead of him he was pushing a home-made wooden trolley mounted on four pram wheels, and piled high with Chinese cabbages.

Bemused, Sandingham watched the man advance slowly across the road. Once, that could have been him: except that they had had their trolley made out of the chassis of a wrecked Baby Austin from which anything worth salvaging had been systematically removed and spirited away.

His eyes followed the pedestrian to the entrance of the Argyle Street camp, outside which stood a young British soldier. His rifle was at the slope and his knees were pinkly sunburnt. He was sweating profusely and had dark semi-circular stains under his armpits. He could not have been more than eighteen or nineteen. For a split second Sandingham thought he was wearing a soft, khaki peaked hat but then he blinked as a quick flash of sun came off a black Humber staff car, turning in through the gates, and he realised that the hat was actually the squaddy’s hair.

No longer able to watch, he looked at the floor again. The silver paper was stirring in the breeze. Squeezing his hand down between his legs, Sandingham picked up the foil and smoothed it out carefully on his thigh, taking great care not to tear or cause additional creases in it. Once flattened out, he held it up to the bus window. There was a pin-prick of light shining through it. Someone must have trodden it on to a sharp rivet on the floor. It was no use. Even a miniscule hole invalidated the whole sheet. If there were the slightest hole it would never have done for the condenser for the radio.

The huge open space by the fence to the airport at Kai Tak was surrounded on three sides by the intersection of three main thoroughfares – Prince Edward Road, Argyle Street and Ma Tau Wai Road. Sandingham looked at the area of dust and scrubby grass. Through the centre of it ran a depression, once a deep ditch, the sides of which had now been eroded smooth: he had been one of those who’d dug it.

Dotted around the area were small groups of people sitting or standing by low hovels made of cardboard boxes, plywood scraps, hessian sacking and splintering planks. They were the occupants of the lowest spoke on the refugee wheel of fortune – squatters who had nothing and who lived by petty crime, begging and the hardest of labouring jobs. By many of the makeshift shelters, cooking fires were smoking under oil cans and broken plates upon which the most basic of foodstuffs was being prepared. He remembered how he, too, had once cooked with empty tin cans and not all that far away, either.

Kowloon City was walled not merely by an actual structure but also by history and atmosphere. Out of the jurisdiction of the Hong Kong Police, unmapped and with no published street plan, it was like a tiny sovereign state of its own in which the monarchs were the leaders of the Chinese criminal fraternity. Secret society bosses – the Triads and the Tongs, the Chinese ‘mafia’ – ruled with hands of iced jade and the assistance of well-trained thugs and a cast-iron oath-taking system which no one, once sworn in, dared ever violate. No European would think to enter Kowloon City, yet Sandingham did. In a manner of speaking, one of the local bosses knew him. They had met for the first time a decade before and there was, he felt, a mutual bond of shared experience between them.

He stepped down from the bus and began to walk up Lung Kong Road, weaving through the throng of shoppers who were purchasing vegetables from a large group of street hawkers. Then, looking about cursorily to make sure he was not in sight of a policeman, he crossed into the walled city. Word of his arrival, he knew, had travelled ahead of him down the narrow streets and passages, carried by small urchins operating under the orders of lookouts posted in the surrounding streets.

He was heading towards Mr Leung’s house, a building at the end of a narrow alleyway that was a cul-de-sac and therefore easily guarded.

‘What you name?’

The demand came with a firm thrust into his chest from a bunched fist. It wasn’t a punch, only a hard push, yet it momentarily took his breath away. His chest was not strong.

‘Joseph Sandingham,’ he said, adding in Cantonese, ‘Mr Leung is waiting for me.’

‘Mr Leung wait for no one,’ replied the Chinese firmly and in English, stepping from the shadows into a thin shaft of sunlight that had succeeded in reaching down into the alleyway. He wore a modern American-cut suit with an expensive cotton shirt under the lightweight jacket. The hand that had not pushed against Sandingham’s chest held a small calibre pistol. He knew enough about small arms to recognise it as an Imperial Japanese Army issue weapon and he wondered what rank of soldier had been garrotted with piano wire for it to be ‘liberated’, as they had put it. Guns were a rare sight in Hong Kong unless they were attached to policemen’s lanyards; but then this was Kowloon City. Hong Kong was a hundred and fifty yards away.

A peephole in a door at the end of the alleyway opened and a voice, muffled by the wood, spoke through it. The minion lowered his hand but not the barrel of his pistol.

‘Okay. You go to door. No turn roun’.’

The door opened and Sandingham entered. He had not been in the building for over six weeks and he had forgotten how its interior fragrance differed from the odours of the open
nullahs,
rotting vegetables and overcrowded streets and tenements outside. It was cool, too. As soon as the door closed he felt chilled, partly because of the efficient Westinghouse air conditioner mounted in the wall, partly because of the sense of oppressive foreboding that permeated the rooms.

The man who had opened the door asked him to remove his jacket. He did so. He was then searched, despite the fact that he now wore only trousers and a shirt. The guard felt up the insides of Sandingham’s legs as far as his testicles and gently fingered around his groin. He also checked inside his socks. Satisifed that the visitor was unarmed, he opened a second door and Sandingham passed through it.

He found himself in a large room furnished in a curious mixture of modern New York and ancient China. A steel writing desk, bearing a black telephone and a vase of frangipani blossoms, stood next to an antique bronze urn; a standard lamp with a pendulous shade of garish green plastic hung over a wicker settle covered with Thai silk cushions; a cocktail cabinet against one wall was adjacent to a camphorwood chest with a relief depicting dragons entwining on the front and lid. Through the hasp on the chest, in place of the traditional lock, was a modern padlock with a brass face, reinforced steel loop and a combination wheel. The floor was covered by deep-piled Chinese carpets.

‘Hello, Joseph.’

He turned round quickly.

‘Hello, Mr Leung, how are you?’

‘After all this time, you still don’t call me Francis,’ replied the Chinese ironically. He had no trace of an accent: if anything, there was a slight American twang to his words.

‘Francis,’ said Sandingham.

‘Take a seat. Tell me how you’ve been keeping.’

Leung sat on the settle and studied him intently. His glances seemed to be merely passing over his visitor but they were far from being that shallow. He was a shrewd observer of all that he saw: to have survived in his world for as long as he had, he had been forced to be continually alert and aware.

For his part, as he spoke, Sandingham took in all that he could about Francis Leung. His fawn-coloured suit was smart and deliberately unostentatious. His tan shoes were hand-made but conservative in style and highly polished. He wore a dark brown silk necktie over a cream shirt. If Sandingham had seen him crossing Hong Kong harbour on the Star Ferry he would have assumed Leung to be one of the well-off Chinese middle class, a manager of a small firm, perhaps, or an executive in one of the European shipping offices where it was now becoming common practice to take on Chinese staff to other than menial positions. Leung was in his mid-thirties but still had the smooth skin of a young man.

‘So things are not so good for you,’ he commented as Sandingham came to the end of his statement of his current affairs. ‘That is bad, very bad. Time you had a job.’

Leung laughed and Sandingham joined in, knowing that that was what he wanted. This Chinese had it in his power to give him employment, albeit part-time.

‘I’m ready when you are,’ he said, feigning humour, yet he meant it.

Leung became serious and leaned forward, elbows on knees, hands spread open. He looked like a Taoist priest about to give a benediction.