White Devil - A Beatrix Rose Thriller: Hong Kong Stories Volume 1 (Beatrix Rose's Hong Kong Stories) (8 page)

She crossed the street to the entrance. There was a small lobby with an open door, obscured by a curtain of beads, to the right. There was a flight of stairs straight ahead.

The big man pushed himself away from the wall and blocked her way inside. “What you want?” he asked.

“Mr. Ying sent me.”

“For?”

“Donnie Qi.”

“You?”

“That’s right.” She stared him out. “Problem?”

“He didn’t say—”

“He didn’t say it would be a woman?”

“A
gweilo
. You have no place here.”

“You want to call Mr. Ying about it?”

The man grunted, his hostility adapting to a kind of lazy distaste. “Upstairs,” he said.

She climbed the stairs and reached a waiting area. A
mamasan
, dressed in a cheap leather miniskirt and smoking a cigarette, was negotiating with a potential customer. A girl had been brought out for him. She was Asian, and pretty, but he was not impressed.

“White girl,” he said, in English, speaking slowly and deliberately. “Not Filipina.”

“Russians all busy. One hour. You wait.”

The man shook his head. He turned, saw Beatrix, and, as if suddenly embarrassed, he scurried down the stairs.

The
mamasan
looked angrily at Beatrix. “You make customer go. You make him ashamed.”

“Mr. Ying sent me.”

She harrumphed.

“Donnie Qi.”

Recognition dawned, and then bled into surprise.

“Where is he?”

The woman assessed her, wrinkled her nose, and pointed down the corridor that led away from the waiting area. “Room with red door.”

Beatrix nodded.

The
mamasan
stepped aside.

Beatrix took the corridor.

DONNIE QI stretched over so that he could reach the crystal meth that he had left on the stool that was next to the bed. He took the baggie and his glass pipe and rolled onto his side. It was good shit, manufactured in an underground lab in the Philippines and smuggled to Hong Kong by the triads. Donnie had bought a pound of it, and, before he handed over his money, he’d had it tested. It was ninety-nine per cent pure. Some of his more old-fashioned colleagues had a problem with selling drugs. But, he knew, with ice as good as this, pure enough to bulk out and sell for a serious profit, they would come to accept it.

His woman, Chuntau, reclined on the bed next to him, naked, a sheet covering her from the waist down.

“Got some for me, baby?”

He ignored her, putting a small pile of ice into the bowl and placing his lips around the slender stem. He took his lighter, thumbed the flame, and held it underneath the bowl. The meth liquefied and then began to smoke. He moved the lighter quickly back and forth beneath the bowl, playing the flame across it, and inhaled. He removed the heat, but the meth continued to smoke. He inhaled until his lungs were full, and the meth had started to recrystallise.

He waited for the hit, gazing with absent-minded interest at the 1980s porn that was playing on the TV. It came on him quickly, a dizzying rush that prickled his skin and sent a spasm of delicious energy around his body.

“Donnie?”

He handed her the bowl and his lighter. She was a fine girl. She was nineteen and had run away from a life in Shenzen where the height of her ambition would have been to work in one of the big Foxconn factories, making electrical goods that she would never have been able to afford. Her name meant spring peach and that, he thought, was about right. Big tits, nice arse. Donnie could have taken her away from here, and he had considered it many times. It wasn’t as if she had never asked him. He had declined. There was something about the nature of their relationship that gave him particular pleasure. It was no more than a commercial arrangement. He paid, she performed. There was no emotion and no attachment. That, it seemed to him, was one of the reasons why he found such enjoyment in visiting her here. He could make her do whatever he wanted, just by taking out another note from his wallet and tossing it onto the floor with all the others.

There was more to it, of course. It was squalid and cheap and that, he knew, was another reason. It was a ready reminder of his upbringing in the slums not too far from here, and of all the girls like her who had looked down their noses at him. He had been a runt of a child, skinny and nervous, and he knew that they had looked at him and had come to the conclusion that he would amount to nothing. They would not have looked at him that way today. He had money, more than they could imagine. He had power. He had respect. He could buy and sell them, and he did. It did him no harm to be reminded of where he came from. It whetted the edge of his ambition. It made him hungrier to succeed.

Chuntau was quiet. He looked over at her. She was asleep, snoring loudly.

The meth hit his brain and his eyes rolled back into his head. He slumped down into the embrace of the sweaty sheets, listening to the frantic sounds of the street outside.

He heard the creak as the door to the room was pushed open. He blinked, trying to focus. He saw the white woman with blonde hair and blue eyes, standing there. She was lit by the flickering naked bulb in the hallway, an on and off glow that alternately silhouetted her and then cast her in darkness.

“Who are you?” he said. It was an effort to speak through the torpor of the drug.

She said nothing.

“Wrong room. Get out.”

She stepped inside.

Something was wrong, but the cloud in his brain was so thick and cloying that he couldn’t think what it was.

She closed the door.

What was it? His thoughts were scrambled, and he couldn’t make sense of them. A white woman. He knew there was something that he needed to remember. What was it?

She took another step inside and unzipped the leather jacket that she was wearing.

He smiled then, propping an elbow beneath him so he could raise his head a little. He grinned, hungry and lascivious. “Maybe not wrong room. Ying sent you?”

“Yes,” she said, in slow and heavily accented Cantonese. “But not for what you think.”

Yes, this was Ying’s doing. Donnie and the older man had clashed lately. Ying was too conservative, almost constitutionally unable to grasp the scope of the opportunities that the new modern world had made available to men like them. He was obsessed with staying below the surface, better to avoid the attention of the authorities on the mainland. Donnie knew that the Chinese were corrupt. He had politicked for the triad to open direct lines of communication with them. Ying and his cronies in the old guard had shouted him down, the same way they had tried to stop him from selling meth.

Perhaps Ying had changed his mind. Perhaps this was a peace offering?

He patted the bed. “Come over here.”

She did.

Donnie pressed himself into a sitting position. He caught sight of himself in the cracked mirror that was fixed to the wall. He was lithe, muscled, his skin covered in tattoos that were themselves daubed in a sheen of sweat.

The woman drew closer so that Donnie could see her more clearly. She was very beautiful, with porcelain skin and cool eyes. He grinned at her. The ice fired his appetite. He was ready to go again. He saw her looking at the glass pipe on the stool.

“You want?”

“Sure,” she said.

As he turned away from her and reached to the stool, he realised what it was that was bothering him.

Chau.

The bar where three of his men had been shot.

The hotel where another three had been killed.

The blonde white woman.

Fuck.

He tried to get off the bed, but the meth was thick and sticky in his brain. His legs became tangled in the damp sheet. He kicked the sheet off, but, his balance gone, he fell off the edge and landed on the bare floorboards between the edge of the bed and the wall.

He scrambled his feet beneath him, his back pressed against the peeling paint. The woman had come around the bed. He looked down at her hand. She was holding a syringe.

He was naked now that the sheet had fallen away. He picked up the lamp from the floor and threw it at her, but she deflected it with a sweep of her arm.

He backed up, into the corner, with nowhere to go.

The woman stepped up and thumped her right fist against the fleshy part of his thigh. He felt the prick of the needle and then the sensation of something cold, working its way up his leg and into his groin. He felt woozy. His balance deserted him and he tumbled down onto the bed. He tried to roll over, to look up, but he couldn’t. All he could see were a series of circles in an ever tightening spiral. The last thing he could remember was the feeling of taking a deep breath of cold sweet air.

THERE WAS a place to park the van at the back of the brothel. Chau got out, pulled back the sliding door and collected his bag. He suspected that he would need to make more than one trip, but the large leather satchel contained the things that he knew that he would always need. He made his way across the uneven ground to the alley that ran between the buildings, opening out onto Portland Street at its other end. There were entrances to the buildings on either side, and he opened the door to the Kimberly and climbed the stairs to the top floor.

A woman in a tight leather skirt was waiting there. The
mamasan
pointed down the corridor. Chau followed her directions.

He rapped quietly on the last door.

It opened, and Beatrix Rose let him inside.

Donnie Qi was on the floor. He was naked save for the plastic bag that had been tied around his head.

“Are you…?”

“I’m fine.”

“And…?”

She pointed at the body. “What do you think? It’s done.”

“And?”

“Relax, Chau. It was easy.”

He came inside and shut the door. He had promised Ying that he would make a good job of this. Donnie would disappear. This was a very good start.

“He was alone?”

“There was a girl with him.”

“Where is she now?”

“The
mamasan
took her away.”

“Did she see what happened?”

“No.”

“We should be sure—”

“No,” she interrupted. “She was asleep. Doped to the eyeballs. She won’t remember anything.”

“I said no witnesses—”

“No, Chau. She didn’t see anything. You’ll have to trust me. Nothing happens to her. Non-negotiable.”

He could see that there was no point in arguing with her. And he was relieved that she was so firm. He really had no wish to hurt anyone else. “Fine.”

Chau opened the leather satchel, took out the folded plastic sheet and spread it over the floorboards. He took out his butchery tools: a meat saw, a bone saw, and two heavy cleavers. He had bought two large rucksacks from a trader he knew back at Chungking Mansions. They were in the van. They just needed to get Donnie into the bags, and then he could be taken out of the brothel, back to the van and then disposed of. Chau had a contact at the Goodbye Dear Pets Cremation Centre in Yeun Long San Tin. For a thousand dollars, he could have the body parts incinerated at the same time as the remains of a dog or cat.

He took out his disposable plastic coverall and started to put it on. “You can go,” he said to her.

She took off her jacket and dropped it in the corner of the room. “We’ve got to be quick, right?”

“I said we would be.”

“Then I’ll stay and help. You got another of those?”

“Yes.”

She went into the satchel, took the suit out and unfolded it.

“You don’t have to help me, Beatrix.”

She put the suit on, pulling the hood over her head. She took one of the cleavers. “Ready?”

JACKIE CHAU parked his van in front of his warehouse on Kai Hing Road, got out and looked around. Caution was habitual now. He had been careful before, but the experience of the last few weeks and the attention from Donnie Qi and his men had made him even more aware of his surroundings and the threats that could be hidden within them.

He undid the padlock, pulled back the hasp and gave a firm upwards yank, sending the roller door up toward the ceiling. He went back to the van and drove inside.

He heard the sound of a motorbike as soon as he killed the engine and stepped out of the cab. He went back to the open doorway and looked out into the street. It was a Triumph Bonneville T100, a beautiful big-throated 865cc classic and, as he watched, it peeled off the road, negotiated the short driveway and rolled inside the warehouse, pulling up next to the van. The bike was all in black. Black-rimmed spoke wheels, a black-cased engine with machined fin highlights, black bars and mirrors. The rider was slender, dressed in a black leather bomber jacket and black leather trousers. The helmet, too, was black, with a smoked visor that made it impossible to see the face inside.

He knew that it was her.

The rider switched off the engine, removed the helmet and shook out her hair.

“Chau.”

“Hello, Beatrix.”

He guessed that she must have been watching him. He had thought that he had been careful. But he had quickly come to learn that if she didn’t want to be seen, then she would make herself quite invisible. He knew what she was capable of, too, those expressions of controlled violence, and the thought of her hiding in the shadows was not one that was likely to make a man sleep easily at night. It was the reason that he had instantly dismissed the notion of welching on their deal. Thirty thousand was a lot, but there was no amount of money that would have made him comfortable with the prospect of her as his enemy. It would take every last cent that he had, but he was prepared to pay it.

Besides, he had a proposal to put to her.

She rested the bike on its kickstand, put her left foot on the floor and swung her right leg over the seat.

“Have you got it?”

“Yes,” he said. “In the office.”

She followed him to the iron stairs. Chau went up first, unlocked the office and held the door open for her. She went inside and he went in after her. The money was in a counterfeit Hello Kitty rucksack that he had bought in Chungking Mansions. It appealed to his sense of humour, thirty thousand US stuffed into a counterfeit bag that he had bought for ten Hong Kong dollars.