Blue Lantern (17 page)

“He's a chef at the Hilton, and his steaks are divine,” Greta said.

Brodie insisted on waiting outside on the terrace while Greta bathed and dressed. He forced the stink of unwashed underpants out of his thoughts, and breathed in the cool of the bougainvillea. When she appeared, Greta's facial parts had returned to a proper relationship, and she had washed her hair; straight and flaxen, it competed in length with Vanessa's. She was a grey eyed, grey voiced Swede, with a tanned, thick-featured face. Her long-legged and long breasted form exuded lustiness, and vigour.

Brodie and Greta talked, and sipped ice-cold lime juice served by the amah. She was outspoken in the way of a person who does not quite appreciate the nuances of English. The girls at St John's Road all had the same view of life, as Brodie deduced from Greta's rambling explanation of their aims and adventures. They lived for love, although the correct word might have been copulation. They professed not to be interested in marriage, and proclaimed the simple truth that a single woman of thirty could have as much fun as a single man of thirty. Greta hinted that children were a nuisance, and marriage was a prison. Independence was the catchphrase.

Brodie and Greta talked in the shade of the bougainvillea for nearly an hour, seeking and finding an understanding. Greta stood up and circled Brodie's chair, approaching him from behind. She pushed her strong hands down on his shoulders, and said in her deep, burry voice, “I want you, tonight.”

At first Brodie flushed hot, and then quickly cooled. All their talk from now, every word, every gesture, every movement would take place in the private knowledge that tonight would have a certain conclusion. Greta had been crushingly open about men who weren't men. Brodie had never doubted his capability, but this made him pause. How did he feel? He was tired. He had missed a lot of sleep. He thought of the ritual of dining, and dancing, and drinking with Greta, with its perfectly known outcome, always moving in decreasing circles of activity until it reached her orifice. It was inhibiting; destiny rendered less probable by being foretold.

That evening Brodie and Greta dined in town, and as Andy Marsden had predicted, expensively. Afterwards they took a cab to Greta's apartment. She led him to her room. The other bed was empty, and she began to devour him hungrily. Even with his head reeling from Tequila Sunrises, he could see she wanted to forget, and when she found she could not, pushed him away irritably. In her hands, at that moment he was no more than a photograph of a desirable looking male whom she might have liked to date, if her feelings had not been elsewhere. Her fate, Brodie had deciphered from her chatter, had been to meet either boys, or married men, and vigorous as she was about exorcising ghosts, it was the married men who clung to her heart.

12

Brodie was awakened by the telephone at nine am. He had managed just four hours sleep. It was Yulinda Chan, her husky voice uneven, urgent.

“Mike, you must come! Vanessa needs you. Her father. He's been murdered!”

He heard her in the phlegmatic way he received news of all the human disasters that were reported to him by telephone and radio. Yulinda was incapable of giving further delails, but he sobered her enough to ascertain that the police and the ambulance had been called, and he promised to leave immediately.

When he replaced the handset he groped for a way to avoid being drawn further into Vanessa's troubles. The frail old heroin addict had been murdered. Vanessa would be distraught, but Brodie wasn't gripped by the tragedy. He dressed slowly. He was very tired.

He took a taxi to the Chan apartment, which reared up in the morning light, with its companion blocks, ribs from the skeleton of a half-buried monster. He found it impossible to imagine the passions which could lead to murder, which were swirling up there in the Chan's cell. As Brodie alighted from the cab, the ambulance men were removing a body, but not a dead body; the patient was taking fluid intravenously. Brodie climbed up ten flights, and walked along the raw concrete corridor past the iron cage doors. A woman was sitting on a chair outside the Chan's open doorway, cursing loudly. She was a middle-aged Chinese, with a grey bun of hair knotted at the back of her neck. A young Chinese constable stood over her stoically, deaf to her ranting.

Brodie entered. He was not questioned. Even in civilian clothes it was assumed that a European would have some official function. There was blood on the walls, the surprisingly thick, dark blood of a weak old man; it was spattered over the calendar of the Chinese actress, and the yellow tiger rug, it was daubed on the cushions and couch, and splashed in stars on the concrete floor. The woman's yelling dominated the room. Yulinda came up to him in the room full of officials.

“Who's that woman? Why don't they shut her up?”

“It's my aunt. She did it. Beat Mr Chan with a brandy bottle.”

“Mr Chan is badly cut, but he'll live,” a Chinese police inspector said.

“At first we thought Mr Chan was dead,” Yulinda said.

“What happened?”

Yulinda hesitated, and waved the question away, shaking her head.

“If you want any help from me, you better tell me what happened.”

“It's… very silly,” Yulinda said, drawing him close to the wall to talk privately.

“It's been assumed by my family for quite a few years, that Vanessa would marry my cousin. He's unemployed. He has no education. He's a waster with no ambition. It's ridiculous. Vanessa's father gave in to her a long time ago, agreeing that the engagement should be broken. The boy wouldn't accept the break. He used to come to the apartment with my aunt – the one making the noise now – and there would be arguments. Once they were removed by the police.”

Brodie was amazed. “Does the boy know about the baby?”

“No. That might have made Lin more angry. I think it was because of the baby that Mr Chan agreed to the break.”

“It all sounds upside down to me. And as a final piece of persuasion, the boy's mother uses an empty brandy bottle.”

“Not quite. The families agreed the engagement was off – finally. But there were damages to be paid.”

“Damages? Vanessa would pay?”

“Yes, I suppose so. Cake money. Cake vouchers had been sent out to a lot of people.”

The lines on Brodie's forehead deepened as he became more and more disenchanted. “Preparations were made for the actual ceremony, such as a cake?” he asked incredulously.

“Without Vanessa and her father really being consulted,” Yulinda insisted.

“And the violence was about the money?”

“Yes, my aunt didn't give Mr Chan a chance. He intended to pay – at some time.”

“You mean Vanessa intended to pay.”

“Yes. My aunt took the bottle out of her bag, and hit him, and when it broke she cut him with the stump.”

Brodie had been in Hong Kong long enough to understand that the capacity for passionate violence sometimes lingered over broken engagements.

Yulinda drew close. “I hope you can do something to help Vanessa, Mike. She doesn't want to get further involved with her uncle, or she'll have to work where he wants, and do favours for his friends.”

She underlined ‘favours' by turning the corners of her mouth down.

“What a lovely relation he is,” Brodie said, repulsed even more. “The uncle as his niece's pimp?”

“No, you're mistaken. Uncle Starboard knows Vanessa can't marry well because of the baby. But he'll give her a chance to get attached to a man of means. I wish he was my uncle. It's Vanessa's weakness that she wants you.”

“And the boy and his mother are from the squatter area?”

“Yes, they're my relatives,” Yulinda said regretfully.

Brodie and Yulinda moved over to the window of the main room, near the tiny balcony, to keep out of the way of the police. Looking out, Brodie could see the slopes crowded with shanties, rising toward a distant ridge which bore a row of five newly finished apartment buildings standing against the sky. The apartments had yet to be occupied; the windows were blind to the crawling life below, waiting for tenants who could afford their clean, bright spaces.

Yulinda said the hillside had been a no-man's land of crumbling clay and scrub before the squatters arrived, fleeing Mao's China. Now shelters of scrap wood, cardboard, and old roofing iron were propped against each other, crawling up the slope, shanty on shanty, the late-comers condemned to the steeper parts, until with all human ingenuity, they could lodge no higher. Inside the shelters, large families existed in dark hollows and boxes; they lived with their dogs, pigs, hens and rabbits, and the occasional row of flower pots. Tattered laundry dried on strings and poles. Children played with chickens in the dust. When it rained, the water ran down the hillside into the houses, and water poured on the shoulders of the dwellers through cracks in the roofing. The odd TV aerial, or contented dog suggested that all was not hardship.

Vanessa's family, with their two bleak apartment rooms were poor, but the squatters were poorer. Her family could look down from their balcony on the patchwork of tin and tar-paper roofs, held down by stones, and even into the miniature yards where near blind old women made nylon bags at twenty cents a dozen. It was Vanessa as a schoolgirl who first met people here. One day, on taking a short-cut through the area from the bus stop, she found a small boy who was crying and lost. She enquired from nearby shacks, and eventually returned the boy home. She met a Mrs Chan. The coincidence in name was hardly remarkable. Vanessa sat on a three-legged stool, and had a cup of warm water which represented the hospitality of tea. Later, she persuaded her father to give the Chans some old clothing. Her father told her it was foolish to acknowledge unlucky people, but Vanessa took tea with her new friends occasionally, and met Yulinda the oldest daughter of the household.

About a year after the meeting, the water supply in the Colony failed. It was a time of great discomfort for everybody, but the squatters for once had something that everybody wanted; they obtained their supplies from a series of springs in the hillside. The squatter Chans gave Vanessa's family free water, tending to correct the belief that the squatters were the harbingers of misfortune.

The assumption that Vanessa would one day wed the son of the fatherless squatter Chans, originated from jokes made when she was a schoolgirl, and was not fostered over the years, but sustained in a nebulous state by an excess of politeness in both families. Nobody ever said the engagement was nonsense, and a joke, when it was mentioned, until the son of the family, and his mother, claimed it as a fact.

The police completed their enquiries, and Yulinda filled a pail of water and began to mop up the bloodstains. Brodie went into the cramped bunkroom. Bundles and full plastic bags were crammed under the bunks. Gary was sleeping in his crib. A school photograph of the two younger children was tucked in the frame of the mirror. Strings of smoke rose from two joss sticks in a vase. Vanessa was on her bunk sobbing. He put his hand under her chin, and raised her head. Her nostrils were red and distended, and her eyes swollen.

“How are we going to manage?” she said, faintly.

Brodie was disarmed, despite the revelations of the morning. “Don't worry. I'll try to give you something. I've saved some money for a trip I was going to take to Manila. You can have that.”

“You were going to take me to Manila?”

“Possibly.”

She clung to him now, small, smeared, and ugly like a broken bird. His promise to give the money was spontaneous, without reflecting where it might come from, and without seriously intending to abandon the Manila venture; that was a beacon that drew him on, a point of resolution.

“What else haven't you told me? First a baby. Now a fiancé.”

“Nothing, Mike. Nothing, I swear.”

She felt forgiveness in the softness of his words, and was reassured. “Lin wasn't a real fiancé. He's mad, crazy in the head.”

The broken bird perked up, left her nest, and moved toward the mirror to attend to her feathers.

Brodie extricated himself stiffly from his Land Rover in the yard at the station. It was five am, on a cool night. The stars had gone. The sleeping city was breathing through congested lungs.

Paul Sherwin's sudden decision to leave the Force had deepened his uncertainties. Sherwin, like Helen, was a touchstone of enjoyment. Sherwin the choirmaster, the Christian, the humane cop; he had no façade, no games to play with people. Brodie shared neither Sherwin's interest in music, his Christian views, or his dedication to the avowed aims of the Force, but when he was with Sherwin, he felt at least that he was moving toward certainties of his own. Without Sherwin, the current of his own experience would be more treacherous; he would see much, understand little, and perhaps believe nothing. The panic in the streets would be more pointless, the machinations of the Force more irrelevant.

He was conscious of real pressure from Flinn, and Vanessa, and Andy Marsden, each in its different way stifling. He told himself he was tired and overwrought. Yes, he had decisions to make, but no need to imagine a decision was a steel manacle riveted on his wrist. If he made a wrong decision, he'd change it, and make the right one; but however he thought of it, Flinn, the buyer of souls, would play the cards which would determine his future.

Brodie glanced up, and to his surprise saw the neatly suited Parker in the sickly yellow light of the station doorway.

“I though only flatfoots like me worked at this hour,” he said.

“The world of intelligence never sleeps, Mike,” Parker said coming over to him.

Adopting a more confidential tone, Parker said, “The boys are thinking of a farewell gift for Paul. The tentative idea is a woman. For the whole night. A real beauty.”

“Man, I'm still at work, and it's two hours before breakfast. Give me a break.”