Blue Lantern (16 page)

A week of riots, then a halt; fear hanging in the turgid air; almost deserted grey streets with a few people slinking past. The remnants of the strife waited the attention of the clean-up services; littered leaflets; peeling posters; broken windows to be boarded; the burnt out husks of cars and buses.

The riots had been in the most westernized parts of the city. The old Chinese streets were the same; signs creaked in the breeze, piles of garbage mounted on the corners, the faded facades as glum as ever. The Chinese shops opened cautiously in the period of pause; the grain merchant, the herbal medicine shop, the rope-seller, the fruiterer, the vendor of dried meats. The shutters were pulled back a little, the doors ajar. The street vendors were more courageous than the rest; hawkers loaded up their carts, and the pavement tables appeared with the same flashlights, radios and comic books. The old woman who sold postcards from a board leaning against the wall of the Mongkok Station was back. But there was a tightness and fragility in the scene. People still huddled out of the sunlight, upstairs, behind shutters, watching. The children caught the hush from their parents like a virulent germ.

Helen was undisturbed by the tension. Brodie borrowed Marsden's car, and drove her for a day out in the New Territories. Helen had vetted the route and only agreed when she was satisfied that they would walk in a relatively unpopulated area. She refused to have lunch at the Shatin Hotel, and while Brodie thought she was over-concerned, having lunch at a roadside stall saved a lot of expense.

They sat for a while in the car, parked under a tree in a secluded place, until the heat, and their restlessness overcame them. Then they walked up the hill toward the Buddhist monastery near Wong Chuk Yeung. Helen was wearing a floral summer dress, tennis shoes, a white straw hat and a big pair of dark glasses, Brodie a t-shirt and white cotton slacks. Helen didn't mind holding hands and kissing as they mounted the deserted path through scrub and stunted trees.

Brodie told her about Paul Sherwin; how he had been railroaded into the bomb squad.

“It sounds unfair, Mike.”

“Did you read about the trial in the newspapers?”

“I did. Including the allegation that he was corrupt himself. As I told you, I think he's a good man. It's tangible. Something you can feel.”

“Do you think he shouldn't have reported the gaming and the brothel, Helen?”

She was silent for a while; they were both breathing heavily and wiping sweat from their brows. She said, “I think Paul was right.”

“Why did you hesitate?”

“Because his career was at stake.”

“That's the unfair part. It's disproportionate, isn't it? His job against a couple of vice dens on a small island. Not big sins in a sinful world.”

“It's easy for me, Mike, because I'm not under any threat. What Paul did won't change what people want. But when you have a duty you have to do it. Duty is tough.”

“What if you shut up and take the money?”

“Then you live with your failure, and suffer. Paul Sherwin is free, Mike. He's walked on beyond it.”

She stopped, and looked at him to see if he understood. Her glance strayed across his features as though she was expecting he could only have refined thoughts. They were at the top of the path approaching the weathered red and gold façade of the temple, with its fiercely carved upturned eaves. The structure sagged, rotting in the damp heat. Helen stopped on the steps, uncertain of Brodie's thoughts.

“It's simple to say but hard to do,” she said. “You can only avoid suffering if you face it, realize the ache for money is in your mind. You have the choice of doing your duty, or living with the pain.”

Brodie, not really convinced, laboured on. “Suppose graft doesn't make you suffer. You don't care. Three hundred a month?”

She darted a quick glance at him. “Then you're a monkey, not a human being.”

Brodie assented for appearances, but still thought it was a small point on which to end a career. He didn't argue with Helen. He didn't want her reassessing him. He didn't want those rich lips to pucker with disapproval. He followed her into the deserted temple, and she sat respectfully on the gritty wooden floor in front of the Buddha figure. He sat beside her. Her eyes were closed. He looked around; it was dusty and dark. The fruit offerings were mouldy, the flowers artificial, and there was a dank smell of decaying vegetation.

When they came out into the sun, brushing the dirt off their clothes, Brodie said, “paper roses?”

“It's the same act of devotion, Mike, whatever you give.”

Brodie's bomb squad duty began in the afternoon, and he went into the mess to have a beer with Paul Sherwin before lunch. Sherwin hadn't arrived, and he settled down in an armchair with a pint of draught lager, and picked up an old copy of
Newsweek
.

Within the high walls of the station the police machine laboured on, despite its tired men. Vehicles moved in and out of the yard, carrying cargoes of helmeted police; prison vans unloaded belligerent prisoners; cells were filled and emptied; recruits drilled in the yard; squads paraded with riot guns and gas masks. The officers wrote their reports and filed charges and attended courts. And the echelons behind worked too; the armourers checking guns, mechanics servicing engines and the cooks sweating in the twenty-four hour kitchens. Upstairs, in a spacious air-conditioned room, maps dotted with flags covered the wall; there were frequent meetings at the long polished tables between men with numerous silver pips on the shoulders of their black uniforms.

The Force churned without pause day and night, and Brodie had passed beyond the barrier of tiredness into a stark and gritty awakening. The foundations of the Force were trembling. In his mind, in all their minds, was the question – how long could this go on before the police and the army were stoned and bombed into a rout? How long before the rioters could roam where they chose, unchecked? How long before the simple Chinese constable decided he was on the losing side, tore off his uniform and melted into the crowd?

While the riots flickered like forest fires, dying suddenly where most heat was expected, and then bursting out fiercely in unlikely places, the Force was held back from all but the most violent rioters, dogs on a leash. The police were spat upon, stoned; fists and posters flaunted around them, and the air curdled with abuse.

Parker was standing over Brodie, moving his shoulders in his jacket comfortably, inspecting the toe of his brown suede shoe. “I hear Sherwin has resigned,” he crowed.

Brodie looked up in disbelief, took in the arrogant composure of the man.

“I'm not surprised he didn't tell you. To back out of bomb disposal you need rather a good excuse, unless you're going to admit you're plain scared.”

Parker stood back to appreciate the fall of shot. Brodie put down the magazine. He scrabbled his thoughts together to make a defence. Why hadn't Sherwin told him? “Sherwin isn't scared,” he asserted, and then Sherwin came into the bar, the blue hollows under his eyes permanent now, and the pale skin tight on his triangular skull.

“Parker says you've resigned,” Brodie said scowling, piqued.

Sherwin put his hands in his pockets casually. Parker waited like a vulture.

“I've given notice, but I'll go on doing my job for another three months until the notice expires.”

“Couldn't take it, eh? Mind you, I don't blame you,” Parker said, and walked away.

“Oh, clear out!” Brodie said to the departing form.

He thought Parker's criticism was washed out by Sherwin's determination to work his notice. Three months would surely see the riots out.

“He's insufferable!” Brodie spluttered, as he and Sherwin breasted the bar. “And you haven't told me a thing,” he added, when he had ordered a lager for Sherwin and another for himself.

Sherwin waited until they were seated, and he had taken a pull on the beer and wiped his mouth. “It's a decision I had to take on my own, Mike. I didn't want to influence you. I thought maybe you had a decision to make, and I didn't want mine mixed up with yours.”

“U-huh,” Brodie said, accepting this, “But what's behind it? I thought you were a twenty year man.”

“It's very simple. I've learned you have to close your eyes to things you don't like. If you don't, two things can happen. You get shunted into a siding. Or you get bad marks which affect your promotion, perhaps enough to justify them asking for your resignation. I thought it through, and decided it was pointless, and dangerous to go on risking my life out there every day for a zero career. But I appreciate it's a tough time right now, and everybody's under stress, so I'll work out my notice.”

“That's fair,” Brodie agreed. “Are you sure you want to work? I don't think I would, if I'd decided to go. The next few weeks look like being the worst.”

“I don't want to, Mike, but I have to.”

Sherwin searched him with the same kind of look he had had from Helen, to verify that they were at one, but Brodie couldn't give that reassurance. Sherwin hadn't turned a blind eye to crime; he hadn't pocketed squeeze to save his career. He wasn't running out on the bomb squad to save his skin, as he could. Helen had described him as a free man. At first, Brodie could see the point, the importance of Sherwin's stand, like a distant mirror flashing in the sunlight, and then it was gone.

Sherwin continued calmly, “Freddie Hudson took me aside, said he'd seen my reports. The Lantau affair is on file in such a way as to imply that I may have been involved in corrupt practices.”

“They are shits. It's a hundred per cent wrong.”

“Hudson said he thought I was unsuitable for the Force, and in a fatherly way told me I was wasting my time and ought to get out.”

“He didn't believe the reports did he?”

“No, he said he thought they were unfair, but they were opinions by senior officers, and not open to question.”

“Freddie's OK, but he's one hundred per cent wrong about you being unsuitable, Paul. Hell, you're one good cop!”

“Maybe Freddie's right. Do you remember Andy Marsden saying you have to bend or break? It's true. You might end up leaving the Force, Mike.”

Brodie was warmed by what seemed to be Sherwin's assumption that he would leave rather than go on the take.

“I need time to work it out. I can't leave Helen. We'll take a few days in Manila, think things over.”

“I'll be in Aussie then,” Sherwin said. “I thought I'd go down there for a while. It sounds like a fine country. I don't know what I'll do. Next to the army or the police, I've always fancied doing something with music.”

Brodie was looking into the future too. “Yeah, I had an eye on Australia. But we'll see.”

“Stay in Hong Kong permanently?”

“I haven't worked it out. Helen's quite a cosmopolitan person. We could go anywhere there's English language culture.”

“If you stay here long enough, you'll begin to believe the whole muck-heap is justifiable. Corruption justified by expediency.”

“Maybe expediency is right sometimes,” Brodie said, floating the idea gently.

“I don't believe it. The lesson for me has been that the people seem to be able to get used to any indignity, any excess, and imposition; they burrow out a little hollow to live in, a shanty or a concrete cell, four million on a rock, crawling on each other like lice; nothing is too humiliating for them. Once you get involved in the web of interests which hold this place together, you forget what's good or bad.”

Sherwin was withdrawn for a moment with his vista of ruin.

“You see, Mike, I'm not sure whether I should be defusing the bombs, or planting them.”

St John's Road was on the Island, and had a view over the city to the harbour and Kowloon Peninsula. Plane trees with thick blotchy trunks shaded the road, leaning across. The single footpath followed a yellow wall, piled with purple bauhinia. It was a road of decaying town houses, each of several floors.

Brodie found the ground floor apartment easily. It was noon. The front door was open. The rooms were dark. An amah emerged into the light, asked him to enter, and then disappeared into the kitchen. Brodie went into the lounge; it contained the debris of the previous night – bottles, glasses, full ashtrays, scattered phonograph records, a brassiere on the arm of a chair. The amah rattled pots in the kitchen. He picked up a guitar from the stained carpet, and rested it against the wall. The place smelt of cigarette ash, flat beer, burned sesame oil, and women's makeup. He walked through the hall and looked into a bedroom. A pair of men's shoes were by the open door. The body in bed revealed a fluff of golden hair on the pillow. Brodie moved to the next doorway. A man clad only in a t-shirt came out before Brodie could look inside.

“Where's the john?” the man asked in a phlegmy voice.

“Damned if I know,” Brodie said.

Then he heard Greta's voice from another bedroom. “You're too early, Mike,” she giggled, “but come in anyway.”

Greta was sitting up in bed, a freshly lit cigarette angled from her lips, sending up a thin tube of smoke. Her greasy hair hung in straight lines to her shoulders. Her face looked crumpled, as though loose lumps underneath the skin had moved in the night. She hitched up her nightgown to cover her breasts; it slid down. Her nipples rose like two dusty African suns over the edge of the sheet. She smiled, but her facial muscles had half forgotten that exercise. She patted the bedcover for him to sit.

The room held another bed; it contained a couple. The girl was awake, her face turned away from Brodie, urging the man to get up. He climbed wearily out of bed, blond, pale, and narrow chested. He picked up a pair of greying Y-fronts from the floor and pulled them on. The girls watched him dully, while he dressed at his own pace in jeans and a t-shirt from the floor. He spoke to nobody. He looked at nobody save himself, in the mirror, as he carefully combed his thin, scurfy hair. He threw the comb down on a dresser cluttered with bottles, jars, tissue, swabs and brushes, and left the room without a word or a glance.