John Burdett - The Last Six Million Seconds

“Okay, no.”

“Well, I have. I’ve heard of someone very naughty who over-charged someone very powerful for delivery of a certain commodity because they thought that very powerful someone was a typical PRC jerk who didn’t know his ass from his elbow. And the story I heard is that the powerful PRC peasant in question got very, very angry.” Lee smiled. “That’s as far as I’ve got. When I know more, I’ll tell you.”

Once outside the garage, Chan hurried down the street. He could not escape his imagination that insisted on reproducing the fight, however: It’s party time in Mongkok, the major triads declare a truce for a few hours before dawn; shadows move under the street-lamps that line the park; senior men post lookouts; huge sums of money change hands; rough hands of killers grab free beer from crates near the entrance; a hundred men or more, flattered to have been invited, hush and jeer in a sadistic rhythm; the 14K bosses goad the man they’d decided to waste: “He’s a cripple in a wheelchair; you’ll rub him out in five minutes.”

The homicidal freak called Lee, mad as a dog with anticipation, wheels in tight circles in his corner. In the opposite corner the triad slips off his thongs; he’s proud of those killer feet. Someone hits a Buddhist gong, the triad tries a jump-kick, contemptuous of the half-man they’ve given him to kill. Lee grabs a foot in one hand and throws him to the ground. The triad tries again, more cautious now. Lee toys with him to entertain the troops. Too late the triad realizes he’s been set up. Lee’s speed in that chair is amazing: his tactics are outlandish; the power in his arms is unbelievable.

The fights were all over when Lee succeeded in grabbing his opponent around the waist. After breaking his back, he liked to make a circuit in front of the audience, still hugging the victim while dead legs dragged on the chair’s wheels. He would keep his opponent alive for twenty minutes or so, a paraplegic now, just like Lee. When the money had changed hands and the party was nearly finished, Lee buried his teeth in the jugular.

It had taken Chan years to understand why the 14K, Lee’s sworn enemies and the very men who had mutilated him, did not simply kill him. Graduation came when he realized that they loved him. The triads were about violence, and Lee was an extreme example of the genre, an icon. It was part of the magic to produce him every few years at a prizefight, an example of unrestrained ferocity.

After each fight Chan wrestled with his conscience. If he scrupulously gathered evidence, he would probably find enough to charge Lee with manslaughter. Lee sensed his struggle and would become unusually forthcoming with useful information.

Sometimes even in hot weather Chan had to walk to think, but it wasn’t easy. He had taken the tram up to the Peak and walked down footpaths to Pok Fu Lam. Now, at Connaught Road he was forced by construction hoardings to walk on the inland side of the street.

It seemed they had been reclaiming the harbor near Kennedy Town forever. Dredgers dragged up gushing buckets of sand, mud and gravel from the seabed; cylinders of waterproof cement higher than houses stood guard over a site of rolled steel girders, heavy lifting gear, mobile cranes, men in construction yellow plastic hats.

On the other side of the street Chan was forced to step into the road while a rice truck unloaded. Apart from the Toyota vehicle it could have been a street scene from Manchu times. Male Chinese bodies, naked except for black baggy trousers that stopped at the shins, shuffled in and out of two wholesale rice shops. On the return from the truck they bent under an impossible load of rice sacks, their faces gnarled with hate. A life as hard as that ground down every morality. Any one of them might have been induced for a small fee to hold a victim steady while someone else turned the power on. In Asia ad hoc executioners had always come cheap. But who had paid? And why? A PLA general angry about having been overcharged? Was anything from China that simple?

“Out of his depth” was an understatement. Chan felt like a piece of debris edging near a giant vortex. Just a little closer and the current would pick him up and suck him at an accelerating speed into the black center. Already he was aware of a fatal symptom: He couldn’t stop.

He took a side street to avoid the direct glare of the sun. Off Connaught Road the streets were shadowed canyons where rivers of people ambled past pawnshops, stereo stores, Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club betting shops, five-table restaurants selling only pork, duck and rice, cooked-food stalls on the street with collapsible metal tables, open-air hairdressers, one-man stalls specializing in business cards and rubber name stamps (English or Chinese), branches of Chinese banks that had no existence outside the territory.

As he drew closer to Central, the banks expanded and took over. From small shops with single electronic tellers in the wall they grew into great palaces with banking halls as lofty as railway termini. At the heart of it all rose the futuristic Hong Kong Bank with construction tubes all on the outside like a person clothed in his own intestines. And behind it, soaring above all else, the Bank of China with its sharp angles designed by the Chinese-American I. M. Pei. People who believed in fung shui (Chinese geomancy) said that the sharp edges were a Chinese thorn pressing into the heart of Hong Kong.

Chan turned left down an underpass leading to the waterfront. At the machines with the steel revolving bars he inserted some coins, joined a small crowd waiting for the next Star Ferry to Kowloon.

He sat at the front of the boat with the island and its manic skyline behind him. On Kowloon side the buildings were much lower because of the flight path to the airport. A familiar advertisement for Seiko watches was obscured by the top deck of a Viking Line cruise ship that had docked for a shore visit and refit. Sampans swarmed at the bottom of its steep walls; women with gold smiles and gold Rolex watches worked like mountaineers from flimsy platforms suspended by ropes from the decks. For speed, efficiency and economy there was no better place to repaint a large ship. Even the QE2 underwent a refit whenever she visited.

On the second floor of the Ocean City complex, under a layer of congealed sweat, he finally arrived at the Standard Bookshop, one of the few well-stocked English-language bookshops in the territory. Chan went to the travel section, tried to find authors beginning with P.

Western tourists favored glossy picture books about China featuring the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, the underground army of Xi’an, but the serious China section was the most active; there was a new book about Chinese history, economy, politics almost every week. Everyone wanted to know what China would do next, not least the Chinese. Marco Polo was not there though. An assistant found him in the classics section.

He liked to handle books before he bought, dipping here and there, guessing what kind of person it was who had had the gall to commit his or her thoughts to print. In the present case he had to guess too at the kind of modern young American woman who would buy such a book. Not your average drug-and-sex Bronx street kid, or a typical corporate woman either. Ever since Moira had left, he’d been having trouble with Clare, her life and times. To lay siege to the Mafia as the last bastion of male privilege was certainly quixotic, if not suicidal. Could an eight-hundred-year-old Italian help?

“Several times a year parties of traders arrive with pearls and precious stones and gold and silver and other valuables, such as cloth of gold and silk, and surrender them all to the Great Khan. The Khan then summons twelve experts, who are chosen for the task and have special knowledge of it, and bids them examine the wares that the traders have brought and pay for them what they judge to be their true value.”