Blue Lantern (12 page)

“Yes, but the world isn't just you two kissing on a lonely beach, on a sunny afternoon. She knows that.”

The words were a cold breath in Brodie's face; there were practicalities although he would have liked to have forgotten them. He and Helen were like two pieces of a jig-saw puzzle which seemed to fit, and nearly did; but when you actually tried to press them together, they didn't quite interlock. And what did he really expect? A clever Chinese doctor from a prosperous family, and a half-trained cop, with no family, no money, no real skills.

“You can make it if you both want to,” Sherwin said softly, “It could be a rich relationship, because you bring such different experiences to it.”

Brodie looked at the floor. “Oh shit!” he said, his invective aimed at the situation rather than Sherwin.

Brodie went with Sherwin to the Central District courthouse; they waited in the gloomy corridors. When the court resumed they pushed inside; the room was crowded and hushed. The barristers talked amongst themselves flapping their robes like magpies on a lawn. The puce-faced judge entered, wrapping his red robe about him, and took his seat on the high bench at the end of the room. The proceedings were quickly convened, and the judge began to address the jury. He gulped and pondered, then darted from fact to fact, correcting himself, discarding one phrase for another; but he made a catalogue of the inadequacies in the case.

“He's hinting to the jury not to convict,” Brodie muttered.

The judge said, “Inspector Sherwin was probably well-meaning, but he may have been confused. His grasp of Cantonese, as he has admitted, is superficial.”

“How could I have been mistaken or confused!” Sherwin hissed. “It happened in broad daylight in my office. In English!”

“He's trying to be kind.”

The judge said, “Inspector Sherwin's evidence is unsubstantiated; in view of the experience and exemplary records of the two accused, you the jury could think it unacceptable for that reason. You have to concentrate on whether it has been proved, beyond reasonable doubt, that the two men offered a bribe to the Inspector.”

“I've lost,” Sherwin whispered bleakly.

The jury, mostly Chinese with a few Filipinos, an Indian, and one elderly white man, filed out and returned in ten minutes with a verdict acquitting the two policemen. The jury stayed out long enough to have a cup of coffee.

Brodie and Sherwin went outside under the columned entrance, facing the gardens of Statue Square. Marsden approached out of the press of people, and put a hand on Sherwin's arm.

“Not a startling result, Paul,” he said

“It had to be done,” Sherwin said resignedly.

Marsden turned on Sherwin. “If it had to be done, then you should have done it in a lot smarter way. You have to have evidence that will stand up.”

“I'll remember for next time.”

“There won't be a next time for you, Paul.”

Marsden gave Brodie a friendly salute, replaced his dark glasses, and marched into the glaring light.

Sherwin had anticipated the result long before it came, but he turned to Brodie in concern. “Do you think this could affect my career, Mike? The judge made a lot of nasty implications.”

“It couldn't,” Brodie said, but privately he wasn't sure.

Sherwin said, “You're looking at me as though I'm some kind of freak. What's wrong with you? And what's wrong with this place?”

“I just don't think I'd have the guts to do what you did.”

“Why not? This place seems to undermine us. I can't understand why. These are the pillars of justice. Over there, banks and government offices. We are a few yards from a war memorial with a wreath on it. Everything we trust is around us. Why do men here become greedy and corrupt like the pair on trial – and Marsden for that matter?”

“This place is…different, I guess.”

“It sure is. It might be 1967, but here it's still 1867. All the laws and flags are in place, but in reality it's one great seething market, secured and leeched on by a police mafia.”

Brodie didn't disagree, although he couldn't see that picture as clearly as Paul Sherwin.

“Marsden's not that bad, Paul. Selfish, egotistical… but who isn't to a degree?”

“You're blind, Mike. The man is coldly full of himself. His mentality is the same as that pair of cop-crooks on Lantau. He's on the dark side of the Force.”

Brodie was saturated with desire for Vanessa. It was six thirty in the morning. His head was full of the ugly images of the past night's work. He would never sleep. He was not hungry, although it was hours since he had a hamburger, and an inky cup of coffee, in the canteen.

The equivocations of Helen Lau, and the tension of their encounters made Brodie contrast the soft incoherence of his time with Vanessa. A meeting with Helen left him uncertain of himself; afterwards he replayed every word and gesture; he felt the impact of his behaviour sometimes agonisingly; he found himself falling short. Helen was at the edge of his mind all day; she was like a fever. A tryst with Vanessa, in contrast, renewed him; when he left her, he never thought much about her again until his body began to tell him he wanted her.

He had already decided, and then decided again, and later again, to put all of himself into his relationship with Helen, and stop seeing Vanessa; but he could not. He was driven to return gluttonously to the sticky toffee pudding he should perhaps have rejected.

He took a taxi to Vanessa's apartment. His intention was to ask her to come out and have a cup of coffee with him, or breakfast, and after that, perhaps he would entice her back to Mongkok. At this hour of the morning, there was little activity around the building. The single elevator was a rattling cage, and slow; he decided to walk up the stairs. On each floor as he ascended, there was an opening in the concrete wall to ventilate the smells. He had an increasing view from here of the alleys at the rear, and the squatters' hovels spreading up the hillsides like a favella. The building, a tall concrete finger, was small windowed; the corridors barely lit. The wooden door of each apartment was covered with a steel grating, and locked, cell-like, for security. Urine and vegetable water stank in the air.

Brodie hammered at Vanessa's grating. First, the father gave him a long look through the spy-slot. The old man did not understand. The fat boy's eye appeared. He looked down at Brodie's uniform. The door opened, and then the grating. When Brodie stepped into the room, the old man in his pyjamas, and the children, stood back against the walls. Brodie realised how much he was intruding.

Vanessa came from the bunkroom wearing a thin dressing robe which revealed her svelte figure; she rubbed her sleepy eyes and looked worried.

“What's the matter, Mike?”

“Nothing,” Brodie said, trying to be affable to cover the lewdness which he imagined must have been written on his face. “I've been working all night. I thought I'd like to see you before I went to bed.”

Vanessa yawned, and smiled in spite of the inconvenience; it was nice to be wanted.

Suddenly, Brodie heard an urgent howl; it was like the cry of a bird or a puppy or a baby.

Vanessa ignored the sound. “I'll put some clothes on, and come down. Why don't you go down and wait for me?”

The cry again; it
was
a baby. At first Brodie thought the noise could have come from the balcony outside, but no, he was sure it was a baby in the next room.

“I won't be a moment dressing, Mike.”

“Whose baby is that?” Brodie asked.

“My friend's. I'm looking after it,” Vanessa said dissmisively. “I must say you look very striking, very smart,” she added, putting the palm of her hand flat on her chest, and opening her mouth in a little ‘o'.

What had crawled into Brodie's mind like a serpent, was that perhaps there was even more than a baby in the next room. His blood was beating.

“Mind if I have a look?”

He slipped by her without waiting for an answer. The father and children had lost interest in the scene; they fussed over the stove. Vanessa stood haughtily by the bunkroom door. She made no move to resist. Brodie was conscious of his arrogance as he pushed past, and saw the untidy bedclothes, smelled the sour-milk odour of bodies. Belted and booted, he was the Gestapo, entitled to violate this privacy. A baby, about a year old, trussed in a quilted jacket, lay in a crib; another little Mandarin. And then he looked more closely. The child had a rare whiteness to its skin, and round eyes. Even the tiny nose was straight, and pinched at the bridge. Baby clothes were drying on a stick poked out of the window. Vanessa followed Brodie into the room, and closed the door.

“The baby looks very much at home to me.”

Brodie could see the quick rise and fall of Vanessa's breasts, the burning darkness around her eyes. “So. You told me a long sad story about yourself, saying a man ought to know his woman. Looks like you missed an episode out.”

Vanessa took a deep breath. “OK, Mike. It's my baby.”

To Brodie's surprise she didn't attempt to embroider her first somewhat guileless lie. She bent her head, shamed. He patted the small bundle, and the child wrinkled its face.

“Who's the father?”

“Does it matter? I was going to tell you. I thought if I told you too soon you wouldn't like me so much,” she said, pressing herself against him.

He could feel the curve of her belly against his arm. His arm was at his side, and if his fingertips moved an inch they would find her clitoris beneath the thin material. She closed her eyes, anticipating.

“Who?” he insisted.

“An American. An American I thought was going to marry me. He's been gone for a long time.”

She put her arms around his neck, and threw her head back, her lips partly open, her skin still puffed with sleep, and wet pink lines from the corners of her eyes across her cheeks.

“Mike, I love you. I want you. Now. Here. Don't worry about the others. They won't come in while you're here.”

She drew up the hem of her dressing gown over her naked thighs. He sweated with an angry wanting that was fuelled by his sense of outrage. The baby cried out, a short, infuriated scream, that chilled desire.

“No, get away!” he said, pushing her away, and striding out of the bunkroom, out of the apartment, and down the dark stinking corridors with the baby's screams in his head.

He sat in a café a block away and drank beer, sickened at his discovery, while lust for her pumped his veins hard.

Brodie found it difficult to sleep. The station reverberated with every voice, every footstep, every slammed door. At seven, after only two or three hours of sleep he was usually awake, too tired to rise, and too disturbed to return to sleep. In this comatose state, the soldier in the alley lunged at him; his head echoed with the screams of the child; Helen was there, calm, unreachable, and Marsden's scented blue jaw was pressed to his cheek. He could feel Flinn's covert glances like the pricking of a knife-point at the back of his neck.

Brodie had not followed Flinn's advice precisely. He had made some unsanctioned arrests where the offence was blatant. He was peeved that the Thai morphine shipment, and the Jimmy Wey prosecution, had been removed from him. His unsanctioned arrests were received in the duty room without comment, but there was a hostile atmosphere. Brodie's colleagues agreed that arrests for organised crime had to be made on a planned schedule. Brodie's latest arrest was the boss of a big tse fa game in a storage shed at Yaumati market. Sergeant Lam had tried to stop him by saying the men could be picked up at any time, but Brodie had pressed on.

Flinn was watching in real life as well as in Brodie's fantasies, and seemed to be about to speak on a number of occasions. One morning he steered Brodie into a corner of the duty room with his big belly. “Come outside for a walk, Inspector Brodie.”

They walked around the station yard under an oyster coloured sky. The air was cool but cloyingly damp. Everybody who cared to look could see them, the podgy NCO with the tall young inspector, but nobody could hear them. Flinn had his head down, as they marched in step, speaking out of the corner of his mouth.

“I told you how necessary it is to cooperate with people here. I asked you to follow my instructions. Each of us has our duty as we see it. What's up?”

“I'm only doing my duty. If an offence is staring me in the face, I have to act, don't I?”

Finn gave a spurious sigh, rocking from side to side as he walked, like a man with sore testicles. “Let's make sure you understand this time.” He adopted the tone of imparting a truism. “Sonny, order is maintained by a payment system. I pay criminals and other riff-raff for information. I can't get information unless I pay. And unless I get the information I can't make an arrest. That's how the system works, and that's why it works. The Government doesn't give us money. We collect it ourselves from criminals. And there's always enough left over to be shared between those who take the risk of keeping order. Don't forget the risks you take.”

“I don't forget the risks, believe me,” Brodie said.

“Good, every time you go into the street you could get a shaft in your back. Your career finished in one night. You deserve something for that.”

“So this is the answer. Licence crime. Collect the funds. Pay informants. Bring charges that bypass the licensees. And pocket the balance.”

“Fellows in your job usually get as much as two thousand a month, on top of their pay. By the way, what's your pay?”

“You know it well.”

“Can you understand, now?” Flinn said, turning sideways with his sunken, opaque eyes.

“How far up the tree does this go?”

“Are you going to accept? Two thousand a month, regular.”

“What would I have to do?” Brodie asked cautiously.

“Do as you're told,” Flinn said, fixing Brodie with a gimlet look, his features crimped together.