The Year of the Woman (9 page)

“Trust me. I know what to do!”

“I cannot even pay for David’s funeral. Who gives credit for the assassinated cousin of a gambling wife?”

She took the description on the chin without rebuke, sure of herself, thrilled at the gamble she was about to take.

“Where does this KwayFay live?”

Today, KwayFay knew, was a day for being dispirited. It was not her fault, more that of Ghost Grandmother. She must have appeared to her during the night, yet not had the decency to leave memory of what she had imparted.

This spelled misery. Grandmother would come screeching questions that her granddaughter, idle girl, could not answer. KwayFay was in a sulk. How could she answer forgotten questions? It was unfair.

So she went to find out, in the Lantern Market where fortune tellers congregated.

She carefully checked the date: not the Twelfth Day of the Second Moon, famously the worst day for
consulting
fortune tellers. It wasn’t, so she went.

The Lantern Market began at nine o’clock, not always an auspicious hour for everyone’s luck, but she had no time to wait until the tenth hour which was her best. She decided to wander among the hissing paraffin lanterns before the Driving Licence sheds, near where the Macao Ferry arrived soon after eight-thirty, and not select a fortune teller until tennish. That would do.

Street hawkers were already laying out their wares on strips of rugs. Her favourites were the jade sellers. Mere pieces of cloth were laid upon the tarmac where, until dusk, cars parked and police strolled. Now, it was a world of glowing amber lights, crouching men and women hoping desperately to make a sale. Fruit,
vegetables
, but mostly toys, games, clothes, gems, jades
excavated
from burial chambers on the China mainland and illicitly brought in on junks descending the Pearl River, mostly unchecked by the Governor’s water police.

And the fortune tellers.

Fortune tellers had a special place in Hong Kong Island’s Lantern Market. The market was laid out in rows parallel with the harbour road. The best were always nearest the General Post Office. KwayFay let herself drift, as if only casually interested.

She paused by the blackbird. She liked to see the blackbird in action. An anxious man, probably a godown worker from his shabby attire and plastic sandals, approached the fortune teller who crouched by the side of his minah bird’s cage smoking a cigarette, eyes
wrinkled
against the smoke. He shuffled a pile of warped cards, several of them so greasy they stuck together. Not much chance of those contributing to the God of Luck’s selection then, KwayFay thought wrily.

As was polite, she listened closely. Other drifters came to join in the customer’s haggling, the fortune teller’s refusals, everyone chipping in to say if the fee was too little for a decent fortune. KwayFay did not contribute, for she might soon be a customer.

Finally, they settled on HK$ 100, not much but the night was young. The absence of customers was always death to fortune telling, for was it not proof that the spirits had deserted that particular mystic? Hawkers who wanted a particular pitch paid over 10,000 dollars for the right to place their rug down only a few yards further along the waterfront, fearing a bad
Fhung Seui,
the wind/water axis, could destroy chances of good trading.

She waited to see how the nervous customer’s
fortunes
would pan out. A loud “
Waaaaah
!” of approval rose from the crowd clustered about the bird cage as the
anxious labourer stooped and whispered his question to the bored creature. It eyed the customer balefully. Its trick was coming.

The fortune teller settled back on his haunches, then flipped open the cage door. The minah bird immediately hopped out, pecked through the pile of cards, then selected one. It cast it to its master with a dismissive air and hopped back into its cage as if wanting to slam the door on the world. The crowd murmured appreciation.

Some tried to read over the fortune teller’s shoulder. KwayFay knew many of the cards were covered with invented hieroglyphics, meaningless to all except the mystic, and often not even to him.

The necromancer read, murmuring to himself, but not for long since this was a mere hundred-dollar
consultation
and didn’t deserve much of a show. He spat, and told the worried man that he was at serious risk of losing his job, that there was no way of staving off this disaster, but that in five months’ time he would escape a serious chest illness. The woman he wanted would ignore him. He would lose several bets, including five he shared with his brother. He would never own a motor car or be rich. He would not buy a successful shop, and it was pointless hoping.

The crowd remained silent but imperceptibly began to withdraw, until the customer was crouching in a wide space all his own. Nobody wanted to stand near
somebody
cursed with bad luck. Spirits were well known for being sloppy enough to transfer their intentions to
anyone
situated nearby, forgetting their original victim. Even KwayFay, who knew that the man wasn’t going to be as unlucky as all that – he would win a small lottery
prize the week after next anyway – found herself
stepping
away. She waited a decent interval until the man left, the crowd showing him scant sympathy. Sympathy wasn’t much use in Hong Kong, for wasn’t misfortune the result of either failing to propitiate some deity, or in shunning duty? That it might be due to chance was also a possibility, but chance had a way of falling in with those sufficiently powerful to make it behave itself.

She moved to the sand writer. This mystic had a tray of warmed sand and a lantern to heat it, keeping it dry enough for ghost writing. Humidity was dreadful tonight, every stitch clinging and damp.

Most customers wanted to see a ghost actually write characters in the sand. The fortune teller simply did nothing. This was often rumoured, had been seen a
million
times, but in fact had never even been
photographed
. KwayFay herself had never seen it. Either customers could write their question, or have it written in the sand by the mystic for HK$ 100, who would then pore over his scrawl. There was little mystique, no trance or sign of the supernatural. It was a simple money transaction.

The best thing about Hong Kong’s necromancers, KwayFay thought, was their cavalier disregard of the desire to please. Whether news was good or bad,
auspicious
or grim, they trotted out their information with abandon, coughing on their cigarette before moving on to the next customer. Death, wholesale business failure, loss of loved ones or family, ruinous fires or scholastic catastrophes, all were delivered with the same casual nonchalance to the applause of the crowd. Good fortune could never be guaranteed, not even by the payment of
immense fees, sometimes up to HK$ 500. Smaller sums were a risk, for spirits were easily offended. They might take umbrage and see low fees as a mortal insult. Spirits loathed stinginess.

It was also a hazard for the necromancer himself, for ghosts hated a fortune teller who thought so little of the netherworld that he had the unmitigated nerve to charge a mere fifty dollars or even less. On rainy nights, with tourists the only clientele, many mystics faced the choice of going home penniless or risking giving offence to spirits by reducing their prices. KwayFay knew it wasn’t worth it.

The Taoist man she sought sat apart on the kerb beneath two adjacent parking meters. He held a small wooden box. In it were minutely small slips of inscribed paper. He would select one randomly, or, for more money, allow a customer to choose one herself. He would consult the paper and deliver his verdict.

KwayFay considered, for he was alone. He was a small wizened man in the traditional long
cheong saam,
inevitably smoking a cigarette and wearing his skull cap, all black.

She checked the time, close on ten, and said good evening. He looked up.

“I am busy,
Siu-Jeh
,” he said.

She could see he wasn’t.

“Business Head,” she said politely, “you do not want money?”

“Little Sister,” he said, putting down his wooden box firmly, as good as telling her to go. “You have no need of my services.”

“Thank you,” she told him, heart pounding, and went
her way.

Nobody noticed the brief exchange. Disturbed, she moved on along the line of vendors, and found herself inexplicably staring at a plastic sheet on which were
several
small arrangements of gears, chains from bicycles and wheels.

To calm her nerves she bought a small drink of
fragrant
jasmine tea from a stall vendor by the Star Ferry Concourse.

Saturday was tomorrow. HC had been moved to close the office, claiming it was a family holiday. They all knew this was frank deception, for he looked abysmally frightened. Alice said it was on account of some Singapore defaulters. Tony Hung, an ebullient graduate who’d managed to swim the Sum Chun River into Hong Kong and reckoned he knew everything that was bound to happen once the Crown Colony was handed back to the People’s Republic of China, said HC’s wife was finally going to make a killing on her new betting system and the whole firm would receive a bonus. Tony actually knew nothing. His degree in commerce statistics had been bought for him from a diploma mill in Carolina, USA, for US$ 3,000, a loan from a maker of plastic
flowers
. He had it framed on the office wall.

KwayFay knew Tony would come to grief, but liked him. He was a spy for the People’s Republic of China. Only a spy could give her that cold chill when the
air-conditioning
was off and sweat was running down the nape and her blouse was sticking to her back. She didn’t bother with spies, so pretended to like Tony’s crude jokes because a spy with influence was possibly more than a spy,
ne
?

She finished her jasmine tea, truly revolting, thanked the stall holder and went to catch the 5B bus. She would not go to have her fortune told again. They were a waste of time.

Old Man hated the smooth surfaces of Hong Kong’s redesigned harbour, easily the most inelegant façade on earth. What was wrong with the greasy turmoil of the old waterfront (Kowloon side, of course) with its
flotsam
, the seething mess of rubbish the junks and
sampans
had to shove aside with their blunt prows? Now the harbour was clean he missed the floating layer of wood, orange peel, dead rats, decaying fruit, the endless bobbing plastic bags, the whole sorry slick of
laahpsaap
.

Hong Kong was sadly changing, all because the Emperor of China and England had signed some stupid treaty centuries ago. Can you imagine? He was furious. Did kings and emperors not think ahead? Could rulers not simply leave things as they were? He wanted to feel comfortable with life now he was old and felt things slipping away.

He smiled at the reminiscence.

That had
been
a waterfront! Before the mad English decided to make pretty walks where young lovers could admire the cross-harbour view of Hong Kong Island under globes of white electric light of an evening. Too many English, that was the trouble. Not a single
governor
Chinese. And, worse, what was coming would be disastrous to trade – well,
his
trade. These madmen had decided to obliterate the Walled City, that haven for crime and evil. Who could buy so glorious a place?

Now, it would become another housing estate full of dull folk who would pay him a single per cent on his outlay. And yet more shops, paying less than four per cent to his threat-men. He grieved. Three-point-seven
per cent return gross on six-figure investments, in English Sterling pounds, not a cent more. Heartbreaking. Redevelopment was filthy treachery.

And the threat-men!
Waaaaiii!

You couldn’t get good threat-men these days, not at any price, unless you trained them yourself. Who had time for that? Brainless, ignorant know-alls. He felt old and tired.

Look at the last two idiots. They all wanted to be admired, “respected”
bhoh-ngaw
tough guys, when they were about as terrifying as a nettle. He had taken on two youths – gold teeth at the age of seventeen, would you believe – both passed Hong Kong Middle School, both skilled knife throwers, tough, “tearaways” in English slang. They came highly recommended. He had entrusted them with kidnapping that dross David YeePak Huang, cousin to that HC moron whose wife gambled. They’d caught him in the Emporium. Then they’d done something outrageous.

They hailed a taxi.

Old Man moaned. These were the people he had to work with, infants who thought they were Hollywood gangsters. He had twenty-four motor cars on
permanent
stand-by. The fools called a taxi.

He accepted the glass of cold tea from an amah who laid it before him on the old rosewood table and retreated. He gazed after her. Not too bad, but did she have buck teeth? And did her hair grow the wrong way? These were terribly wrong in Chinese tradition. He had not slept with a woman for two weeks now, and that was bad for a man’s skin and fingernails. He knew that much. But risks were everywhere in sex. What if he
discovered some flaw while in the throes, such as a black hair on her chin?
Waaaiii
! He would never live it down. Despite the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong folk were still full of traditions, superstitions, dreams, omens, and the inescapable grief about luck, luck, luck.

He sighed, moved to his emperor chair and lowered himself carefully on its phoenix-embroidered cushions. It was his little joke, to have a coloured red and yellow phoenix writhing on the soft satin. That was the symbol of an empress, more correctly, but at least signified resurgence.

“Ready, Business Head?”

Nothing for it. Work, work, work. “Ready.”

The mirror directly in front of the seated man was unveiled as a curtain hissed back. Lights in the ornate room dimmed. He was looking into a sitting room, set for an interview with a Formica covered table and two chairs. A sofa, side table, and two paintings of Ladder Street as got from any tourist stall, completed the
furnishings
.

A police lieutenant entered as if on cue, and Ah Min, the Triad’s principal negotiator, followed, smiling.

Old Man had never seen Ah Min without that
beaming
smile. Rotund almost, quite like some old Shanghainese roué bent on pederasty or one of those oily meals of snake and onions, Ah Min was devoted utterly to money. Ah Min was a walking pope of money. Once, Old Man had seen Ah Min, walking in Nathan Road, suddenly cry out, holding his arms wide, shouting for all Hong Kong to stop.

And had picked up a cent from the pavement.

A single cent. One.

He’d pocketed it, and walked on beaming. Money and Ah Min were destined for each other. Money and Ah Min were lovers.

Another time, the ledger books had been a day slow coming. Old Man wanted them in his hands at ten o’clock on the due day, no variation. Eventually, fuming, he’d sent for them, punishing the principal messenger by a massive fine from anger. And Ah Min had arrived, waddling in with tears of humiliation streaming down his beaming fat face.

Without a word he had placed the top ledger before his master. He’d knelt, and would have kowtowed as before an emperor had Old Man not snapped for him to get on with it and say what had gone so calamitously wrong.

“Master,” Ah Min had sobbed, resorting to English from shame, “there is discrepancy. I accept full
responsibility
, and will agree to any punishment you decide.”

“Indeed,” Old Man remembered saying in a cold voice, for that was undoubtedly true. “Who is guilty?”

“I am guilty, master.”

“How much is missing?”

“Three cents, sir.”

Three cents, namely nought point nought three of one Hong Kong dollar; current standing, one thousand cents to a Sterling pound? For this Ah Min sobbed uncontrollably. In one week Old Man’s enterprises
distributed
over eight million American dollars in gate money, drops, payments. Such was Ah Min.

Old Man observed the police lieutenant seat himself first, as guest, Ah Min following suit. An amah brought in tea. The policeman did not drink, western barbarian
that he was, and had the insolence to push the cup away with a let’s-deal gesture that made Old Man suck in air. The effrontery of the coarse uneducated loon! Could these people have once ruled the world? It was beyond comprehension.

Ah Min kept beaming, as on the day he’d been
mortified
because somewhere among Old Man’s seventeen million dollars, the Triad’s income for the month, three Hong Kong cents had gone missing. There was no
single
American coin so paltry. That incident had shown Old Man Ah Min’s excellence. At the time of that
confession
, Old Man had remained still, watched Ah Min kneeling there sobbing and beaming.

Finally, Old Man remembered having had the good sense to say, “This once, Ah Min, I forgive you. I allow you this crime for past friendship. I will not tolerate such error again. Go!”

Ah Min had waddled out backwards, carrying his ledgers, weeping and grinning. He had, all unbidden, paid a donation of twenty-four thousand dollars to the master that evening, this being three times eight, for twenty-four was Old Man’s luckiest number. It could have been a simple twenty-four cents, but Ah Min
multiplied
the gift by a hundred thousand. Money was Ah Min’s religion, his reason for being. No one should make fun of religion, spirits being capricious beings,
ne
?

He watched Ah Min, his expert negotiator for money, confront the police lieutenant. The silly youths’
carelessness
during the kidnapping still smarted, but Ah Min would get something out of this.

“The incident is regrettable,” Ah Min said in perfect English.

“Many tourists saw the incident.”

“I understand.” Ah Min beamed, spreading his hands wide to show his lack of duplicity.

“Broad daylight, after all.”

“And so many people saw!” Ah Min added.

“Two youths, bundling a frightened man out of his carpet warehouse into a taxi, well, I mean to say …”

What an idiot language! the Triad master thought to himself, watching through the one-way glass. What did the inspector of police “mean to say”? If he meant to say something, why not say it? Yet these English had the whole world talking the same barbaric tongue, a
babblement
of inferences, hints, evasions, understatements. He thought with bitterness, give me Chinese any time, where the pun was the highest form of slick speech and was always hilarious, instead of this slithery tentative language. What a stroke of luck Americans had never learned nuance!

“True, true,” Ah Min soothed, his beam intensifying. “Your hands were tied! I can see that.”

Even then the moronic uniformed man did not
recognise
the implication, simply kept on nodding, waiting for his bribe.

“I’ve kept the incident under wraps, but sooner or later I’ll have to move on it.”

“That is natural, Inspector! Police procedure!”

“By the end of the day.”

Ah Min seized the allusion. “All days must come to an end, is that not so?”

The inspector seemed uncomfortable, for his own days were soon to end. He would return to run a shoe shop for his cousin in Warminster, where his salary
would plummet like a shot bird. In England,
opportunities
for graft and extortion were rare beyond a man’s understanding. No lost cents in England’s inflexible income tax laws.

Old Man watched the scenario. He shook his head; an impossible world to live in, where greed was detected, suppressed, hunted down. Changes, too many changes.

“And today’s work is no exception, Inspector.”

“Correct.”

“I realise you must make a very awkward decision.”

“I must follow procedure.”

“Of course! Without deviation!”

“To allow any incident to pass without a proper
resolution
would damage my position.”

“It would! Damage severely!”

“There is little I can honestly do.”

“True!”

And Ah Min waited. The policeman waited. Old Man watched.

There was no greater intellectual thrill than seeing money enter an arena. Ah Min might bring money in like a carnival, with trumpets and banners, teams of
cutthroats
and maidens adorned for feasts. Or he might slip in money as no more than a shifty shadow edging onto sand, stepping daintily across blood-soaked ground. It was theatre, as in those puppet theatres that the lovely KwayFay paused to see down Central Street before
surviving
her test of a threatening assassin. Such theatre! How interesting this thought was, that Chinese theatre was the exact opposite of English theatre, the former so immediate and frank, the latter full of meanings
impossible
to excavate.

He dragged his attention back to the arena visible through the glass.

The inspector of police cleared his throat. Old Man’s lip curled in contempt. Greed made whores. This man was revealing himself a whore.

“There might be something, though.”

“Might there be?”

Ah Min had a degree in languages. Six of his tongues were Chinese vernaculars, with two English things and one the sort of French the Swiss spoke. See? Foreigners couldn’t even get their own speech uncrossed. Ah Min’s pretence of pidgin-speak was dropped. His beaming smile widened. He was enjoying this, now he had the upper hand over this man from Yinggwok, the “hero country” of barbarian England.

“I might be able to help you in some way.”

“Might you?”

The hero almost went red, this fighter in the arena, now that money was about to enter. A slither, this time, watching Old Man guessed, money creeping along the walls before the tigers noticed and pounced.

“I could make things easier for you by losing the police records of the incident.”

“Does that happen?” Ah Min asked innocently.

“Very rarely. A file goes missing, there is an
investigation
.”

“Would that not be a terrible risk, Inspector?”

“It would. That’s the point.”

More waiting. Ah Min beamed, relishing the joust. The inspector hesitated, wanting Ah Min to mention payment.

The policeman sat forward on the edge of his chair,
leaning his elbows on the table even though tea had already been poured. See? Barbarian.

“Er, the point being…?” Ah Min murmured, a frown with his grin this time.

“I would need some recompense for taking the risk. I want to be friendly, but it should be made worthwhile. You see that.”

“I do, I do! Yet the incident was a small matter, was it not? Two youths, bundling some man into a taxi. They might have been on their way to a football match at Hong Kong Stadium!”

“Except the man was found dead. Mutilated.”

“Do you think, Inspector, that the tourists could prove that the man they saw was the deceased person?”

The victim’s face had been irreparably changed by knife work on Old Man’s order. At least the idiots, the two new so-clever threat-men, had remembered to do that. He had to think of every little thing these days, not like when he was young. Standards had gone. Old Man blamed the mothers.

“I’m sure they could. The clothes were the same, and the taxi driver could confirm it too.”

“The taxi driver,” Ah Min said, deep in thought. Believe that, you’d believe a politician. Taxi drivers’ memories were written on water.

“We already have his statement.”

“In the file?”

“In the
same
file.”

“The risk, though, to you would be great.”

“For enough compensation I might take the risk. For the sake of friendship.”

“How generous!” Now the frown gone. Money was
in the arena!

“I would expect the money to match the risks I would be taking.”

“Why shouldn’t that be so?” Ah Min asked, hands out again.

Old Man could tell Ah Min was seeing himself exactly like a character from ancient Chinese operas, perhaps KwayFay’s favourite, the Flag Cloth Opera, where astonished nobles cast back their gigantic
oval-cuff
sleeves to show what was about to happen. He smiled. He missed Chinese opera, where the audience noise was so deafening from chattering that actors had difficulty hearing each other. It was totally lacking in reverence, as opera should be. More contrasts to be thought over, with the People’s Republic of China loomed darkening the northern political sky.