Nine Dragons - A Beatrix Rose Thriller: Hong Kong Stories Volume 1 (Beatrix Rose's Hong Kong Stories Book 2) (3 page)

“He came out an hour later.”

“And?”

“He was unwell. Very white. Sick.”

“To be expected.”

“How long will it take?”

Beatrix was uncomfortable with discussing any of her business over a medium that could be intercepted, even if the precautions they took with this particular arrangement made it practically impossible to eavesdrop on them. Still, her caution was deeply rooted and she let the question pass without answer. “When are you speaking to our friend?”

“He will call me when he knows it is done.”

Two or three days, then, she thought. “Very good. Contact me when you know.”

“Beatrix—” he said as she replaced the receiver.

She gritted her teeth in vexation. No names, she wanted to remind him.
No names
. She knew that he was trying as hard as he could, but he could not prevent himself from making stupid mistakes. He wouldn’t have lasted half an hour in the Group, but he was all she had, and, if she wanted to maintain her income, and continue to fund the investigators searching for her daughter, she had no choice other than to work with him.

Beatrix had met Chau six months earlier in Kowloon. He was in his early fifties, and, with the deep creases in his forehead and around his eyes, he had something about him that reminded her of Jackie Chan. He wore the most awful clothes, typically favouring garish Hawaiian shirts, white slacks and pristine white trainers. There was no question that he was an unusual man. His English was passable, but so heavily accented that it was almost a pastiche. He was intelligent, but hid his acumen behind a veil of bad jokes and goofy expressions.

Their meeting had been inauspicious. Beatrix had not long arrived from London. She had received bad news from the investigators and she had decided to drink herself into a stupor to forget the hopelessness of her situation. She had only halfway accomplished that when Chau had introduced himself. Her initial thought was that he was coming onto her and she extricated herself from the conversation, retreating with the glass of sake that he had bought for her. She had been working her way through that when three triads, one bearing a meat cleaver, had come into the bar with the intention of amputating his finger.

It was a punishment to be meted out on behalf of the
Dai Lo
of the Wo Shun Wo clan. He had been recruited to work for the man, the boss in charge of a small part of Kowloon’s clubland. Chau had a profitable business as an industrial cleaner, but allowed himself to be blinded by greed. The
Dai Lo
, a meth addict by the name of Donnie Qi, had recruited him to clean up the bloody messes that accompanied the brutality with which he enforced his rule. Chau was good at making blood and gore disappear, and had graduated soon enough to making dead bodies disappear, too. It was only when Donnie pressed him to kill an ex-lover that Chau had finally reached the point at which he was prepared to go no further. That refusal had offended Donnie, and the three men had been sent to persuade him to reconsider.

Beatrix had often wondered what would have happened if she had stayed at her table, finished the sake and then left the bar. Things would have been different. She would have found the money she needed from somewhere else, most likely, and wouldn’t have voluntarily gone back to her old profession.

That was moot, now, for she
had
intervened.

Normally, the three men would not have stood a chance against her. She had disabled all of them, or so she thought, but the drink had dulled her edge and she had turned her back on one of them. He had taken a knife from the bar and stabbed her in the side. Her own foolish fault. She would have died, but Chau had pulled a pistol and had shot all of them. Then, when he could very easily have run for his life, he had helped her from the bar, taken her back to a dingy flat in Chungking Mansions, and, with the assistance of a doctor Beatrix had never met, he had saved her life.

Their actions had earned the enmity of Donnie Qi. But Chau’s talents were in demand, and he had negotiated with Donnie’s rival, Mr. Ying. The price for Chau’s loyalty was that Ying must provide them with the opportunity to do away with Donnie.

Ying agreed, and Beatrix had killed Donnie.

They had been working for the
Dai Lo
ever since.

She entered the station, descended to the platform, and took the first train that was heading west.

She thought about Doss.

He would shortly be the sixth victim of their arrangement.

The men that had been marked for death at her hand had been a varied group. Most of them had underworld connections in one way or another. Beatrix did not ask for the details, but it was quickly apparent when she started to research the targets to assess their habits and patterns, divining their weaknesses and the times when they were most vulnerable. The first had been a member of the Wo Shun Wo who was informing on his brothers to the police. It had been a difficult assignment. The man had been granted police protection, but Beatrix had been able to gather that he visited his mother on Sunday evenings. She had staked out the old woman’s flat and, with his escort waiting in the lobby downstairs, she had thrown him out of the tenth-storey window into the rubbish-strewn shaft between one building and the next.

Another man had been responsible for laundering triad money. Beatrix guessed that he had been skimming a little from the top, not that the nature of his guilt would have made any difference to her. He liked to go fishing on his private junk every Tuesday afternoon. Beatrix had stowed aboard, drugged him and tipped him overboard.

The last one had been messier. Beatrix had broken into the man’s expansive apartment in Central, but he had awoken just as she approached him in his bed. She had stabbed him, but there had been a struggle, and she had ended up garrotting him with the electrical flex from the lamp on his bedside table. Chau had been involved in the aftermath, removing the body and cleansing the apartment so thoroughly that there was no trace of what had happened there. Chau was clumsy, and gauche, and unsuited to the preparatory work, but Beatrix was prepared to admit that when it came to clean-up, he was the epitome of professionalism.

It was midnight when she alighted again at Wan Chai. She made her way back to her apartment block. She had been on edge for hours, and it was tiring. She was ready for sleep.

HER FLAT was on Lockhart Road, not far from the bar she had been in earlier. It was only a ten-minute walk to the west before she was in the bustling, neon-drenched heart of Wan Chai, but it was a different world. This was the heart of old Hong Kong. The buildings were a hundred years old, and showing their age. Instead of neon, the small stores advertised themselves with weather-beaten signs that hung above their front doors on creaking hinges. It wasn’t the sort of place with any appeal to tourists save those who stumbled out of the clubs and wandered to the east, looking for Wan Chai MTR station and ending up all the way over at Causeway Bay. Skinny cats lounged on windowsills and rooftops, bathing in the light of the moon. Mangy dogs snouted through garbage, competing with rats that were almost as big as they were for the choicest morsels.

The small stores were still open, and the owners sat outside their establishments on plastic chairs, often with pots of tea or bottles of Tsingtao on folding card tables. Others wandered by in traditional Chinese dress. Deliveries were made by handcart and Beatrix had to step aside as one youngster pushed his barrow along, struggling with the sacks of rice that he was delivering to the neighbourhood restaurants.

It was busy and bustling, noisy and alive, and Beatrix loved it.

She could have stayed in one of the shiny apartment blocks in Central or Mid-Levels, rubbing shoulders with the bankers and lawyers and accountants who retreated there at the end of the day, but she had no interest in that. If she was going to have to stay in a place, she wanted to experience it properly. She wanted the dirt and the grit, the stench and stink. She wanted the colour. There was a more practical motivation to her decision to locate herself here, too. It would be harder to find her if she were submerged within this teeming morass of humanity.

She diverted to a late night drinking den that she had visited a few times before. It was off the beaten track and did not welcome tourists. Beatrix nodded to the man behind the rickety bar. They had transacted business before, and he nodded for her to follow him to the small room at the back. It was a storeroom, with stacked bottles of Maotai and Guijing Tribute and Tsingtao, a metal desk with a roller chair, a dirty sofa and a wooden cabinet. The barman was a triad, and the bar had been affiliated with Donnie Qi’s organisation. There were two other triads in the room, one of them sitting on the sofa and the other smoking a joint as he leaned back against the wall. The three men all sported variations on the same basic uniform: tracksuit tops, trainers, lots of bling. Beatrix had found the place by asking around. She had not been concerned that she might be recognised. Only Donnie had seen her face, and he was dead.

“What you want?” the barman asked in harsh, rough English.

“The same as before.”

The barman went to the cabinet and pulled out a drawer. It was full of small plastic bags, each of which was stuffed with a green-brown material. He opened one of the bags, ripped out a handful of buds and wrapped them in a piece of newspaper.

He held up a finger. Beatrix nodded that she understood, took out a hundred dollar bill and gave it to him.

“Want something else?” He looked to his two colleagues, gave a stagey wink, and pulled out another drawer. He took out more bags, but these contained different substances. Beatrix saw fibrous brown opium, white meth crystals, and small tablets of ecstasy.

“I’m good,” Beatrix said. “Thanks.”

She turned to go, but the man clicked his fingers twice and told her to wait. “You like the hashish, yes? It good? You ever try opium?”

Beatrix turned back. The barman had picked up the bag with the stalky brown contents and was holding it out to her. His accomplices were watching avidly.

“No.”

“I give you. As gift.”

She knew that she should leave, that staying here was a bad idea with bad consequences, but she looked down at the opium and found that her reaction to it was more ambivalent than she had expected. Her experience of drugs was limited. She had smoked weed ever since her teenage years. It had been almost medicinal during her service with the Group, easing the pain of the numerous injuries that she had suffered. She had smoked a little more of it these last six months. She had more to forget, more pains to salve, and, when she was high, her troubles receded just a little. But weed was weed, nice but limited, and she wondered whether she might appreciate something more. Something that offered a deeper retreat.

“Come on,” the man urged. “Free sample.”

Beatrix extended her hand and the man dropped the bag into her palm. “Thank you.”

“You like, you want more, you come here, okay?”

“Okay,” she said.

She put both baggies into her pocket and went out into the bar and then into the street beyond.

BEATRIX’S BUILDING was twenty-five storeys tall. She summoned the ancient shoebox lift. The flat was on the penultimate floor. The elevator opened onto a narrow hallway with two doorways on either side. The shaft was in the centre, with the stairs winding their way around it. She doubted if the hallway had seen a paintbrush for twenty years. The floor was cold stone and the windows were empty, with rusting decorative ironwork taking the place of a pane of glass. There was a door that led out onto a balcony and an open archway led to a large recess, into which years’ worth of trash had been stuffed.

She paused, as was her habit, and listened. She could hear the bustle of the street below, and the grumble of a jet passing overhead, but, save that, it was quiet. There was nothing that made her anxious. She had been in Hong Kong for six months and, during all of that time, there had been nothing to make her suspect that the Group was any closer to finding her.

She turned to the other doorway. The flat, which she guessed was identical to her own, was occupied by a woman and her daughter. Beatrix did not pry into the lives of her neighbours once she had satisfied herself that they were not a threat to her, but she had very quickly gathered that the woman was a prostitute. The flat was one of the one-woman brothels that were legal in Hong Kong. Clients would come to the flat, business would be transacted, and then they would leave. Beatrix had seen the woman a few times. She would have been pretty once, but now she was haggard, her emaciated body bearing witness to the meth habit that her hooking funded.

As she stood, staring at it, the door opened.

It was the daughter. She backed out of the door, dragging two large bags of rubbish that were almost too heavy for her to manage. She hadn’t seen Beatrix and, as she half turned and caught sight of her, she jumped in surprise. She lost her grip on one of the sacks and it tipped over, spilling dirty takeout cartons and empty tuna cans over the floor. The girl blushed immediately. Beatrix stooped down and started to collect the escaped rubbish.

“No,” the girl said. “It is fine. I can do it.”

Her English was heavily accented. Beatrix’s first thought was to wonder how the girl had known that she spoke it and not Cantonese. They had never conversed before. It made her a little uncomfortable.

Beatrix smiled at her. “It’s okay.” She collected a chicken chow mein can and dropped it into the open mouth of the sack.

The girl sank down to her haunches and quickly gathered up the other bits of rubbish. “I am sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry about.”

It didn’t seem possible that she could blush any more, but she did.

“What’s your name?” Beatrix asked her.

She started to speak, but bit her lip.

“My name is Beatrix.”

She would never normally have provided her real name, but the girl was young—no more than twelve or thirteen—and Beatrix felt uncomfortable with the prospect of lying to her.