Hiroshima Joe (48 page)

By the door, Leung was moving. His free hand was trying to get at the inside pocket of his jacket. Sandingham kicked him hard on the side of his neck.

Sandingham secured the lock on the door, then turned Leung over. In a shoulder holster under Leung’s jacket was a pistol. It was a Webley .455 Mark VI: standard British Army issue in the war. The weapon was in prime condition.

Leung was still breathing. Sandingham pulled the spike free. He would have liked to have used the pistol but it would have made much too much of a noise in the confinement of the room.

Leung’s eyes were glazed with encroaching death. He attempted to say something.

‘Don’t try to speak, you bastard,’ Sandingham whispered.

It would have been good, Sandingham thought, to have left Leung to die slowly, but to do that might have risked him surviving. He had to finish it.

‘The debt’s settled now, you son of a bitch,’ he said. ‘For me, for Lucy, for the whole fuck-up you’ve made of my life.’

Leung’s eyelids fluttered, which Sandingham took to be comprehension.

From Leung’s pocket he retrieved the seventy-one dollars in the tell-tale envelope. He was disappointed to find nothing in his wallet. Rich men hadn’t the need to carry cash, he reasoned.

He held the spike over Leung’s forehead for a moment, then plunged it into the skull. It took three attempts to get it through the dome of bone. At each strike, Leung’s limbs jerked, marionnette-like.

Sandingham returned to the girl and opened her handbag. He took out the money it contained and the opium and tossed what was left on to the fire.

He checked that the patio doors were not locked, then put out the lights.

The drinks cabinet was very well stocked. Good cognac, ordinary brandy, scotch, bourbon, gin, vodka, rice spirit, rum … more than one bottle of most. He started with the white rum and finished with the brandy.

The final bottle he emptied in a stream towards the fire. It ignited and the flames spread in a leisurely flow across the spilt alcohol towards the leather suite and the tables and paintings and the two corpses which Sandingham had replaced in their chairs, close to the fire. For good measure, he had dowsed both bodies with spirits. Looking back, he saw them both aflame but could not bear to stand and watch: he had had enough of that.

He drew the curtains after him, but left the patio doors open by a foot or so. Fires need to breathe.

The garden wall was eight feet high and decorated along the top with broken glass. He climbed a pine tree, stepped gingerly on to the glass and jumped into the street. Still no one in sight. Keeping as much as he could to the shadows, he went down the hill to Argyle Street, crossed over and was in his hotel room, shaking with uncontrollable excitement, within five minutes. He opened the window, but did not hear the fire brigade racing along Argyle Street. By now, they would be too late anyway. It was then he sliced open the opium.

*   *   *

He was not sorry that he had killed Leung. It was his only viable option. However, the act of killing both him and the girl had filled him with disgust. He lamented that the situation had left him only this way out.

To kill was so sordid, so messy, so incredibly irreversible. To destroy life was to eradicate creation and the beauty of existence, totally and irrevocably. His grandfather had once said to him that when you shot a rabbit you weren’t killing an animal but causing a complex machine to cease functioning: you were stopping for eternity a living unit.

The girl had not been in his plans, and he was sorry he had been forced to get rid of her too. In her case, it was real beauty he was removing from the world. It was as bad as setting fire to the Chinnery paintings and the ivory statue of Kuan Yin. They could not be reconstructed from the ashes. The thought of ashes made him shiver. Setting light to their bodies had been the worst thing, far worse than killing them, even. He knew what they must look like by now.

Yet the more he thought over his actions of the evening the more he grew distanced from them. Like killing the guard in the wheelhouse of the
Lisbon Maru
– it was necessary. It was a function that had to be fulfilled. One didn’t question it. One did it as a matter of course. For the python to live, the hare must die. Some Chinese sage must have drawn that conclusion, and stated it so.

The magical fumes from the pipe began to seep into his nerves.

He reassessed his day. A new friend lost through selfish blundering. An old friend lost through hatred and the inner conceit of men always to do better than their peers, regardless of the price. A killing – two killings – that showed to him he was just the same as ever, just as capable of inhuman behaviour as ever.

Drifting into the blissful mist of the opium, Sandingham allowed his regrets to fade. For a moment, though, just before the drug owned him completely, he wondered if the same reasoning hadn’t been logically structured in the mind of Fujihara as he had commanded Willy’s firing squad, or in Mr Hoshigima’s son’s thoughts as the undercarriage dropped away from his aeroplane or in the brain of Captain Parsons, in the belly of the B29, as he gave the last screw its final tweak.

*   *   *

The police did not arrive to arrest him. For three days, Sandingham remained in the hotel fearing that every footstep along the corridor was an inspector and two constables with a warrant and a pair of handcuffs.

The story did not reach the newspapers, either. There was no report of the fire or the deaths. A week later, however, there were a few column inches on an inner page about the remains of two bodies – a man and a woman – being found in the sea off Lau Fau Shan. They had been badly burned and identification was impossible. It was also impossible to discern the date of death. It was assumed they were illegal immigrants who had met with a grizzly fate trying to negotiate the treacherous waters of Deep Bay.

So, in this manner, Francis Leung and the girl were ghosted away by their henchmen.

It did not take Sandingham long after reading the article to realise that his threat came not from the law but the outlaw. Revenge would be sought.

He considered going to the police himself, giving himself into protective custody. They would surely be glad to welcome the killer of a drug runner, major fence and Triad leader. Then he remembered the Happy Paradise Bar and that put an end to that.

His safest bet was to stay as close to the hotel as possible. In a crowd he would be all right. On his own he would be at no small risk.

With the money he had, he paid Mr Heng for another fortnight. Heng, for his part, soon grew concerned by the fact that Sandingham now resided in the hotel all the while. As long as the Englishman was ensconced in his room, or the lounge, or the hotel bar, he was not earning money, no matter how he might obtain it as a general rule.

The owners of the hotel were getting restless about his being a paying guest, never mind a free-loading one. The tale of his inveigling David up to his room had run through the hotel staff and the manager had felt duty-bound to relay it to his employers. They were worried in case the guests got notice of it. Many were on friendly terms with the employees.

Additionally, the end of Sandingham’s fortnight would fall just before Christmas. To turf Sandingham out into the street at such a time would seem uncharitable in the extreme, petty even, and mar the festivities the hotel staff intended to put on for their residents. After all, he was a European.

Mr Heng tried his best to persuade his employers to allow Sandingham to remain until a week into the new year, but they were adamant. He was not to be given any more credit, not so much as a day’s worth.

Sandingham accepted Heng’s information with a calmness that took the manager aback.

‘It’s all right, Mr Heng. I quite understand how things are. I shall seek some alternative accommodation.’

‘If I can help you, Mr Sandingham? I have a friend who manages a cheaper hotel near Jordan Road. I’m sure…’

‘I appreciate that: thank you. But I think I’ll be okay.’

Quite how this move was to be achieved was beyond him.

*   *   *

Even with the opium to act as a kind of restorative to his system, Sandingham did not feel well. Every now and then, even in the middle of doing something like holding a cigarette or a knife and fork, his fingers went numb and prickly. The irritation was not unlike the electric feet from which he had suffered in the war years. His skin, after the summer months of clearing up, once more started to flake. He attributed this to the winter, but he also knew that even in the severe snows of Japan he had not had this trouble.

Worse than this were other symptoms. His urine began to burn again as he passed water and his stomach started playing up. He put this down to eating out of a can in his room. Perhaps he had stannic poisoning or something. However, even after being careful and consuming his stolen food on a plate, the indigestion and diarrhoea continued. He examined the tins in the boxes on the back stairs one night by the aid of a torch ‘borrowed’ from a roomboy. None of them showed signs of rust or deterioration.

It occurred to him that he might have contracted a venereal disease. He studied his penis closely. There were no signs of inflammation, pustules or broken blood vessels. It looked quite normal, yet it hurt like hell to piss.

In the mornings he woke unrested. His back, calves and biceps ached as if he had rheumatism. One of his teeth was loosening in its socket.

A week before Christmas, he awoke one morning to find the pillow under his head streaked with hairs. He touched his head. The hair was loose. He could pull little tufts of it free without feeling any jab of pain whatsoever. He sat up sharply with alarm. He was hit by a wave of giddiness. The light, which he had left on during the night, hurt his eyes as if he had just been freed from the
eiso
cell. He grappled for the chair back, but could not judge the distance to it and missed. His hand fell on to his stomach and his fingers hurt badly where they touched it. Looking through a wave of nausea, he saw that his fingernails were bruised dark mauve beneath the cuticle and one of them was weeping a straw-coloured, plasma-like fluid.

‘Christ!’ he uttered to his swaying figure in the mirror. ‘I’m falling apart!’

It was like a nightmare. Maybe it was a nightmare, induced by going back on to the dope after being half-weaned off it. Or perhaps he had the DTs. He wasn’t aware he was an alcoholic, but what else it could be he could not imagine.

He realised that he had to see a doctor, although he was not registered with one and had not been to visit one since returning to Hong Kong in late 1947. Only, to go to a doctor was to present his addiction to opium, and that would lead to complications both medical and legal. He could do without that.

An idea came to him. If he were to cross to Hong Kong Island, he could present himself to one of the military hospitals, either the Army establishment at Bowen Road or, on the other side of The Peak, the Royal Naval hospital at Mount Kellett. If he were to arrive in the out-patients’ clinic as an ex-serviceman in transit through the colony they might just believe him and treat him. It wouldn’t matter if they found out about his habit because he would not be a resident or one of their regular patients. They might ignore that aspect of his condition.

With familiar skill, he concocted a tale and left in the hotel bus with the guests who commuted daily to Central District.

The Star Ferry was packed and there was standing room only. This was handy, for it not only afforded Sandingham the safety of numbers that he required but also provided him with the opportunity to filch over one hundred dollars from an overcoat hung on one of the seat backs.

He was not as safe as he had anticipated. As he was queueing in the jostle to disembark at the Hong Kong-side jetty a well-dressed Chinese, whom he had noticed was one of the last passengers to board in Kowloon, running down to ramp to the gangway as it was about to be raised, leaned over and spoke to him.

‘Mr Sandingham, good morning. Travelling across the harbour to the office?’

He made no reply. He did not recognise the man at all, but guessed his mission.

‘Perhaps we might have a chat the next time you leave your hotel?’ The man’s voice was urbane, polite and carried a San Franciscan accent. ‘My name is Choy. We have a mutual acquaintance in Francis Lee-Ung. Or, to be more accurate,’ he said with exactitude, ‘we had.’

‘Fuck off!’ Sandingham muttered.

The gangway hit the jetty with a thud.

‘Good morning to you, too, Mr Sandingham. Until we meet again in more friendly surroundings.’

The Chinese got off the ferry ahead of Sandingham who was very watchful when he gained the waterfront.

Here he was at his most vulnerable. A car could pull up to the kerb, he could be bundled into it and it could be away down Connaught Road before anyone could take any action – if, indeed, something appropriate occurred to them. Ten or fifteen minutes’ drive would have the car parked in a secluded sideroad near Pok Fu Lam Reservoir. After a lengthy session of excruciating pain, he would be left to die tied to a tree on the lower slopes of High West, well away from the road so that he was not discovered, his mouth jammed with his shirt and one or two of his fingers and, for good measure, a wadge of his own dung.

There was no sign of ‘Choy’ who had vanished into the rush-hour crowds.

Sandingham allowed three taxis to pull away from the rank before he hailed the fourth. None of the drivers had sought his custom so he assumed that there was no one cab planted there to kidnap him.

‘Bowen Road Hospital,’ he directed and lay back in the rear passenger seat.

A dizziness began to wave over him again and he strove against it like a man fighting nausea. He had to remain alert in case the taxi driver was one of those sent to get him. Being in the rear seat gave him an advantage. The dizziness passed.

The taxi drove round the Hong Kong Cricket Club ground and climbed Garden Road past the Peak Tram station. At the top, by the Botanical Gardens, the driver changed down into second gear and negotiated the left-hand hairpin bend into Magazine Gap Road. As the car went over the Peak Tram bridge Sandingham looked down the hillside to see the roof of the house he and Bob had made love in that day. It seemed a hundred years ago.