Blue Lantern (20 page)

Brodie decided to try harder. He knew a comfortable restaurant where the food was choice; he had gourmandised there with Marsden. Marsden had chosen the place, the food and the wine; it had been as good as he said it would be. Now, Brodie was to play host. Greta accepted the invitation casually, as though it was nothing.

He called at Greta's apartment at seven-thirty. She was alone. Her hair was pale cream in contrast to her tanned shoulders. She wore a skimpy indigo mini-dress which Brodie thought looked classy. They kissed. Her bare thighs pressed against him. She mixed him a drink, a gin and vermouth, and merely smiled when he touched her though the dress. His kisses fell to the breast that he could slip out from the low bodice of her frock.

They went by cab as Brodie planned, to the Pelican, on the Zetland Steps. He noted to his distaste that the place was nearly empty, but he steered Greta to one of the intimate cubicles where it would matter less. The riots had choked the restaurant trade. As soon as he sat down, he felt uneasy. Slivers of fading daylight came through the drawn blinds. The air conditioning was freezing. He offered Greta his jacket, and she took it. They gulped a gin and vermouth. Brodie gave up trying to explain to the waiter that he wanted the air-conditioning turned down. He concentrated on the menu, and gave the order instead.

Greta seemed pleased. She had another drink, talked about her acquaintances, and the parties she had been to. He had to say ‘no' to the many people she asked him if he knew. But the evening was going passably well so far. He was the only one who was cold. After an unacceptably long wait, and two complaints by Brodie, the food arrived. Instead of the chicken dish Brodie had ordered for Greta, she received liver and mushrooms. This was complicated by the waiter's insistence that this was what Brodie had ordered. The trio did not have the necessary Cantonese or English skills between them to deal with this thrust. While the debate continued, Greta sucked a cigarette heavily, not concealing her exasperation.

Meanwhile, four young men in gold-spangled dinner jackets were preparing the band-stand. Brodie heard the phut of a brush flicked on a drum, then the tang-tang of a guitar, suddenly becoming deafeningly loud. He sent Greta's dish back, and re-ordered for her, putting his finger on the menu item, and showing it to the waiter. His own steak had solidified in the gravy during the delay, and he sent that back too. His first reaction to the noise of the band, was that it was something to fill the chilling void, but after a few minutes the sound swerved off into an electronic thunderstorm of drums. Brodie called the waiter to protest, and got smiles and nods of agreement; but the golden boys were there to be endured.

When the meal finally came, wrinkled and suppurating on the plates, Brodie could not believe it was from the same kitchen as the delicious meal he had shared with Marsden. They forked the food around without conversation. The band was too loud for normal chatter. Greta rejected most of her chicken and all the vegetables, heaping them ostentatiously on the side of her plate.

Near the end of the meal, the management for some reason drew the curtains temporarily, to let in the relative brightness of dusk, a swell of dying sunlight and orange sodium street lights. The thin mist of glamour in the interior evaporated. Light pried through the grit spattered windows to show the food-stained carpets and dusty drapes. Brodie paid the bill hastily, a huge sum which in other circumstances he would have disputed.

In the taxi, Greta said she felt ill. Brodie's wallet ached, and he would have been indifferent if she had vomited. When the taxi stopped in St John's Road, Greta alighted with clipped thanks, as if he had stage-managed the whole evening to disappoint her. Their eyes never met.

Brodie was on afternoon bomb squad duty when a report came in of a suspicious package in a bus shelter at the eastern end of Nathan Road. There would be crowds and heavy traffic, and the superintendent nominated two squads to deal with the call, Bravo 2 and Paul Sherwin's unit.

Brodie felt the usual constriction in his intestines which would not go until the mission was completed. The foreground was dominated by a mechanical task, to be handled with caution and calm; the background by his wild imagination about possible consequences. And his mind darted ahead to what it would be like when the job was done; a discarding of heavy weights. He had become hardened to many aspects of physical danger, but nothing could eradicate the eery uncertainty of bomb disposal. In reality, the casualty list in the bomb teams was small. In recent weeks a British Army sergeant had been killed, and a Chinese inspector had had his hand blown off. Most of Brodie's bomb duties had been spent playing cards at the station. He knew the types of bombs being used, how they worked, the likely effect of a blast, and the options for disarming and detonation, but textbook knowledge couldn't tell you what was inside an innocent looking handbag or parcel. The work was lonely.
He
had to take the risk, and make the decisions. His men performed crowd management, and carried sandbags, and built shelters, but he was the one who had to disarm the mechanism when his men had retired.

Brodie travelled in the Land Rover with his squad in silence, and met Sherwin and his squad in Swan Street. The offending package was a brown cardboard shoe-box on the seat of a bus shelter near the intersection with Nathan Road. The intelligence briefing from HQ said the package had been reported using the name of a terrorist group; that didn't necessarily mean the package was armed. Behind the bus shelter, across the footpath, was the façade of a building with the entrance to a shopping arcade. Across the street was a bank, and the Metropole Hotel. Brodie and Sherwin first cordoned off a wide area of surrounding streets, and made sure the shopping arcade was cleared. Brodie began to don his protective clothing of chain-steel and Kevlar, and his helmet with its thick visor of perspex. Sherwin, armour-plated, lumbered past with the wave of a gloved hand, and approached the box. Some constables from each squad unloaded sandbags from a backup vehicle, and Brodie conferred with Sergeant Lam about the shape and height of the protective shield which they would build around the bomb. Then he moved forward to join Sherwin; their men remained behind. The first step was to take a close look to see whether there were any wires, or other dangers in the placing of the package; at thirty yards it looked like an article of shopping left on the seat by a traveller. Brodie swayed forward, the gladiator before a silent audience. Inside his visor, the breath was burning up from his lungs. Sherwin was a matter of a few feet away from the box, looking at it carefully, but not using the probe he carried.

The image of Sherwin bending over, peering at the box like a schoolteacher examining an experiment in a science lesson, was Brodie's last memory before he had the sensation of being hit by a moving wall of scorching air. At first, the impact seemed to come slowly, to rush inside his armour and scorch his skin, and then solidify into a hardness which swept him into blackness.

15

Brodie thought at first that he was flying over the headland at Castle Peak, and swooping over the sea. The sun threw the pattern of window panes on the white walls of the room, and fired threads of gold in the dark hair of Helen Lau. The hospital ward was long, and almost empty. He was on his back, tucked firmly in a hard bed. The starched counterpane crossed his chest like a strap. His nerves ran frantically to the end of his limbs, trying to feel his toes and fingers.

Helen, sitting beside the bed, saw him stir, and understood. “You're fine, Mike. Nothing broken. Don't worry.”

He reached out and grasped her hand, but couldn't speak. She removed her hand after a moment and became a doctor.

“The blast blew you for several yards, I'm told. You came round quickly. You probably won't remember. When the doctor knew you were OK, he gave something to relax you, and you've been sleeping ever since.”

“Paul?”

“I'm afraid Paul is dead, Mike. Such a good man. I feel I know him from what you've told me.”

“Oh, no!”

“Yes, say a prayer for him.”

She reached for his hand this time, and although dressed for duty seemed content to stay. Brodie's half-drugged mind wrestled with the death. He had no idea how long he and Helen were silent before Andy Marsden came in. Helen withdrew her hand from Brodie's and walked out of the ward with a distant nod to Marsden.

“Well,” Marsden said, “She's a stunner. Never let up, do you? Tell me about her some time.”

“Why
Paul?”

“Could have been you. Count your blessings,” Marsden said, as he thumped down in the chair by the bed.

“He got ahead of me, Andy.”

“It wouldn't have helped if you'd got there in time to get killed.”

“In a few days, Paul would have gone.”

“Neither of you could have done anything. The bomb was on a time fuse.”

“I might have …I don't know.”

“Worry about yourself. You're off bomb disposal I hear. Get your act together with Vanessa. Enjoy.”

“Paul was…”

“Who was the chick holding your hand? Not a nurse. A physio? An X-ray tech? Come on, you've been holding out on me,” Marsden said, unable to stifle a lecherous grin.

Brodie could see the cogs turning in Marsden's mind. The hospital was a whole new unexplored territory of immense sexual potential. Marsden, impatient and unsentimental, soon tired of the silence. He put a box of Swiss chocolates and a bottle of Courvosier on the side table, and walked out. In the bright, quiet room there seemed to be a taint to Paul Sherwin's death.

Brodie was released from hospital that night, and returned to the emptiness of the station barracks, the reverberating corridors, the eternal electric lights, the tramp of boots, and the remote consolation of his men, whom he could not really speak to, or reach. He lay on his bed in the darkness. The reverberations of the bomb were live in his head. Suddenly the telephone hammered.

“I've been so worried about you, Mike,” Vanessa said. “I've been trying the hospital, everywhere. Are you all right?”

“Not hurt at all.”

“I'm sorry about your friend, Paul. I'm at the Lotus. I'll come over later, if you like.”

He felt the satin body yielding to him. “Yes, come over.”

“And Mike, don't forget the money, will you? I need it so bad.”

Vanessa left the Mongkok station by taxi at six the next morning. Brodie had a breakfast of bacon, eggs, fried bread, and tomatoes in the mess, and sat down afterwards in the lounge to skim the morning papers. His adventure was yesterday's news. He got the impression from the papers that the worst was believed to be over, and the Colony was settling down again.

Parker came in and asked how he was feeling. “And what do you think of the Hong Kong Express story? Damn disgusting if you ask me.”

Brodie didn't know what Parker was talking about, and Parker riffled through the old papers lying on the couch. He found a soiled copy of the tabloid Star newspaper, and thrust the front page at Brodie. “This'll do. All the tabloids got it.”

It was a full page photograph, shot at the scene of the bombing, by one of Hong Kong's ubiquitous paparazzi. For Brodie, it was like seeing beyond the shock wave which hit him. His own body was on the road in the foreground, like a hideous broken insect. Beyond, in the middle ground, were the scattered remains of Sherwin; a hand, an unhelmeted head on which the camera had caught the sheen of blood, body fragments framed in the broken steel poles of the bus shelter. In giant type, the headline was,
Bombers' Kill.

The Force held a parade of a hundred police in Statue Square, lines of gleaming black belts, and caps and set faces. The padre moved pregnantly along the column in his long purple gown. The handles of the coffin sparkled.

The Assistant Commissioner, from a small portable dais, said Paul Sherwin was a young man who had decided that his career lay elsewhere than in the Force, but had continued to do his duty in an exemplary way up to the last moment, in the finest traditions of the Hong Kong Police. The AC's words were short, fitting and impersonal. He seemed to Brodie to be saluting an idea rather than a person.

Brodie was one of those nominated to bear the coffin. Sherwin's remains were to be flown back to Britain for burial. Brodie thought how concerned families were with the formalities of death, when all they could manage in life was the occasional postcard. Marsden capped the ceremony off neatly when they were having a beer in Wanchai afterwards, “Just a publicity stunt to show the police are cool in the face of disorder.”

Brodie returned to Kowloon, and his room, to try to compose a letter to Sherwin's parents. He had in mind the officers in the First World War who had to write not one, but dozens of such letters; it was more than a duty, it was a memorial. He sucked the end of the pencil, and then began a draft.
Dear Mr and Mrs Sherwin, I was a close friend of Paul's and I thought I should write to you to give you some idea of how he was regarded here. I have never met any finer man in my life. He will be remembered...
Brodie was not saying what he wanted to say. He poured a whisky. He couldn't find the words to express Paul's gentleness, or Paul's belief that the Colony festered in corruption. He couldn't say that now he regretted concealing himself from Paul. He sipped the whisky, and endured the unwritten thoughts, bare needles probing inside his forehead.

Brodie was reading on his bed when Flinn came in unannounced, scouring the room with small eyes.

“You're off night duty as well as the bomb squad. You've done your share. We're looking after you.”

“I can look after myself,” Brodie said, realising, at the same time, how little control he had.

“I've brought you a present,” Flinn said, ignoring the rebuke. He pulled a white packet from his pocket and waved it. “See?”

“I don't want it.”