Dragon Head - A Beatrix Rose Thriller: Hong Kong Stories Volume 1 (Beatrix Rose's Hong Kong Stories Book 3) (10 page)

“What question?”

“I’m awfully sorry. They say that they’ve found something inside it. They’ve had to take it off the plane.”

Chau felt a tremor of apprehension. They’d
found
something? There was nothing in his luggage save clothes and toiletries. Chau thanked the man, folded his napkin and left it on the table, and made his way back to the reception. The woman behind the counter directed him to a telephone that had been left for him on a table. He put it to his ear.

“Hello?”

No reply.

“This is Chau. Hello?”

Still nothing.

He turned to the woman. “There’s no one there.”

“I’m very sorry, sir. Let me call them back.”

He put the receiver down. “They just asked for me?”

“Yes,” she said. “Your luggage. They wanted to check something with you. I’m really very sorry. I don’t know what’s happened.”

He left the telephone and went back to his table. The staff had discreetly cleaned the crumbs away and folded his napkin. He sat and allowed the waiter to arrange it across his lap.

He raised his glass and toasted himself.

Gom bui.

It meant ‘dry the cup’.

To starting over.

Second chances.

Clean slates.

He took a long sip.

His food arrived just a moment later.

Chau was hungry and the food was good. He set about it quickly. When he was done, he finished the champagne and looked at the dessert menu. He wouldn’t normally, but, he reminded himself, this was a special occasion.

There was no way he was going to stay in Hong Kong. Once he had determined that he needed to leave, there had been only one destination. Toronto had a large Chinese community. There had been an exodus north from California during the depression. Chau’s brother, Rickie, lived there with his family. The two of them had never been very close, but Chau knew that he would take him in until he was able to get himself sorted out. He had never travelled outside of China before, but he had always enjoyed the pictures that his brother had sent to him. Clean streets, clean air. A different way of life. Quieter. That, he thought, was just what he needed.

“Hello, Chau.”

Beatrix Rose sat down opposite him.

His feet scrambled beneath him as he tried to get away from the table.

She reached across and grabbed his wrist. “Stay. We need to talk.”

“What…” he began, panicked. He had no idea what to say. “What about?”

“Did you enjoy your meal?”

“Yes,” he said uncertainly. He stammered a little, unable to quench his fear of her. “You were watching?”

“I’ve been watching you for three days, Chau.”

“I didn’t see—”

“Of course you didn’t. I tried to teach you about counter-surveillance, but you were never a particularly good student. I said that it would be the death of you.”

“What does that mean?”

“I told you to avoid routine. It makes things easier.”

“For what?”

“For following you, Chau.”

He looked down and saw that his hands were trembling. She looked down, too, and shook her head.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She smiled at him. “For what?”

“For what happened to you.”

“So why did you do it?”

“What choice did I have?”

“I said I would protect you.”

“By smoking opium? No, Beatrix. You had given up.”

She didn’t answer and, for a moment, there was silence between them.

“How was the champagne?”

“It was…” He trailed off, looking at her questioningly. A void opened up in the pit of his stomach.

She smiled at him. “Celebrating your departure?”

“What have you done?”

“Never mind, Chau.”

“
What have you done?
”

She ignored the question again.

It didn’t matter.

He knew.

“Ying is dead, by the way.”

“I know.”

“He should have killed me the night you betrayed me, but I think he wanted me to suffer. I’m curious. How much did he give you to sell me out?”

“It wasn’t about money.”

“No?”

Chau started to sweat. His mind was racing. “He was going to kill us both. Why couldn’t you have left girl alone? Things were going well. Business was good. You spoiled everything.”

“Leave her?” She looked as if she was about to continue, but then she shook her head. “There’s no point in explaining. You wouldn’t understand.”

He panicked. “Please, Beatrix. I am sorry. What have you done?”

He
knew
what she had done.

“Goodbye.”

She began to stand, but he reached out for her wrist. “I saved your life.”

“It might have been better if you had left me to die. I don’t even think I’m grateful any more. Goodbye, Chau. You won’t see me again.”

THE PLANE had only just levelled off at thirty thousand feet when Chau was sick for the first time. He grabbed a paper bag and vomited into it. It lasted for ten seconds and then, when he thought he was done, another heave brought up a mouthful of sticky bile. The bag was full.

A steward hurried over. “Sir? Are you all right?”

Oh yes, he had known. He knew
exactly
what she had done to him, but he had been too afraid to admit it to himself. What would have been the point? There would have been nothing that could have been done to save him. He remembered what she had done to David Doss, the man working for the HK Commission Against Corruption whom Ying had wanted dead. He remembered the poison that she had poured into his drink. It was too late now. The ricin was in his cells. He knew. He was going to die at thirty thousand feet, wrapped in the luxurious embrace of a first-class cabin.

“Sir? You’re very pale.”

He felt an enervating wave of lassitude. He tried to stand, but the weakness overtook him. He lost his grip on the seat ahead of him and he fell back. The steward looked down at him, saying something that he couldn’t hear. The dizziness got worse, a spinning vortex that was playing tricks with his sight. He tried to pull himself up again, but fell back down a second time.

“Sir?” the steward said, trying Mandarin. “What’s the matter?”

He tried to tell him that he had been poisoned, that the woman he had been talking to in the terminal building had done it to him, but he had no idea whether he managed to form the words. He became aware of a slow pulse of pain that beat in his gut, keeping time with his heartbeat. The pain became stronger, deeper and broader, climaxing in a crescendo so intense that he thought he was going to black out. The man loosened his collar and called for help. The pain was all encompassing, but, in that small part of his brain that was still cognisant and aware, he realised that he had brought all of this upon himself. Beatrix had been wronged, and she deserved her revenge.

BEATRIX WAITED in the observation lounge, watching the jets launch themselves into the night sky. She wondered which one was Chau’s. She wondered which one she would need to take to bring her closer to Isabella. A flight to London? Paris? Somewhere in America? She couldn’t answer the question. She didn’t even know which country her daughter was in.

She left the airport and went straight to the
Hua-yan jian
. The Indian took a lacquered box and removed a solid black square that was wrapped in cellophane. He carefully unfolded the cellophane and put the opium on a tray with a small knife, a pair of thin-bladed scissors, a box of matches, a spindle fashioned from a knitting needle, and an unlighted coconut-oil lamp whose glass chimney had been fashioned by cutting the bottom from a jam jar. And then he brought out an opium pipe.

The process added to the experience. Beatrix had quickly come to realise that burning it on a spoon or in the upturned head of a drawing pin was missing the point. There was a rite to it, at least if you did it properly. It was simple chemistry, but it was alchemy, too. There was a magic to it.

Beatrix watched hungrily as he took a knife and stripped off a piece of the opium. He kneaded and stretched it, slicing it into equal parts. He trimmed the wick of the lamp. He lit the lamp and the scent of the oil filled the air. He stabbed a piece of the opium with the spindle and, over the chimneyed flame of the lamp, rotated the opium with the spindle point until it was transformed into a cone with the consistency of soft, almost melted caramel, and the rich tawny colour of hazelnut.

He scraped the opium from the spindle to the small hole at the centre of the pipe’s solid stone piece. He gave the pipe to Beatrix and she tilted the bowl over the lamp’s chimney, holding it in place and sucking down hard. The opium bubbled, and its perfume filled the room. She sucked until her cheeks were taut and concave.

The delicious oblivion enveloped her. It was a divine indulgence. She thought of Chau for a moment, running from her yet arriving dead at his destination. She felt incapable of regret. There was just the dense fugue of the drug. It made it impossible to take a grip on her thoughts. They slipped from her grasp, squirted away, dissipated. There was no point in fighting it. She closed her eyes and let the opium carry her away.

THE THICK blackout curtains were always drawn, but they had been disturbed in the night and now they had been open just enough so that the junkies could see the sun slowly rise over the city.

“Shhh,” the man next to Beatrix whispered from his dingy mattress. “If you close your eyes, you can pretend it’s not happening.” Beatrix had quickly learned that the morning was a time for ‘getting straight,’ although good intentions were often quickly ignored when the moment of truth came: leave through the front door, blinking into the bright sunlight, or smoke more opium.

Beatrix was lying on the mattress, having collapsed onto her back when her latest hit had kicked in. She had the beginnings of a cold, the most obvious symptom of addiction. She felt sallow and sleepy. The high was the purest luxury, good enough to forget the down and then the vacuum that she would enter that would make her want it even more.

She saw three shadows at the entrance to the room. She blinked, trying to work out what was different about them. They stepped in and she saw them a little better. The one at the front was small. The two at the rear were tall. They were holding handguns, both of them extended with silencers. The short man stepped carefully between the men and women laid out on the rough beds on either side of him. The two men with the guns waited at the door.

The man stopped before Beatrix and crouched down so that he could speak to her more discreetly.

“Your name is Beatrix?”

She blinked. Something was wrong with what he had just said. “Who’s asking?”

“My name is Michael Yeung.”

“Dragon Head.”

“That means very little. An honorific.”

She realised what was wrong: he knew her name. He shouldn’t have known her name. “Suzy,” she mumbled.

“No. I know your name is Beatrix. I would rather begin our relationship in a place of honesty. May I use it?”

She looked up at him, trying to blink the somnolence from her eyes. The man before her was dressed smartly, in a charcoal suit with just the right amount of creamy cuff showing at his wrists and links that glowed in the candlelight. He looked comically out of place among the stupefied smokers arranged in states of disarray around him. Physically, though, he was a little dishevelled. He was old, in his sixties, at least, with a mess of grey hair that was shot through with streaks of silver. His skin was wrinkled, and lines radiated out from the edges of his mouth and the corners of his eyes. He was small in stature, perhaps five foot six, and, as he reached out to help her sit, she noticed that he had delicate manicured hands.

“Call me what you want,” she said.

“I helped you with Ying. Do you remember?”

She looked around for the Indian. She wanted another pipe.

“Do you remember?” Yeung repeated.

“I remember,” she mumbled. “You took too long.”

“What do you mean?”

She knew she was slurring her words, but she couldn’t help herself. “I told Gao I needed to find the girl quickly. Within a few hours. I had a deadline. You took too long. I missed the deadline. The girl suffered because of it.”

“I am sorry to hear that. It was not a simple thing you asked.”

“Not my problem. I don’t owe you anything.”

“But I saved your life, Beatrix. Ying would have killed you. It would not have been pleasant.”

She laughed without humour. “It’s a shame he didn’t.”

She saw the Indian. He was in the corner, watching fearfully. The others, too far gone to realise or care who the interloper was, remained where they were. Some watched with dumb faces, others smoked, others closed their eyes and floated away.

“Beatrix, will you let me help you?”

“I don’t want any more of your help.”

“Ying paid you a lot of money to work for him, and yet I do not see any sign of it looking at you now. You have nothing. I know that you have transferred a large amount to a firm of private investigators in England. What are you looking for, Beatrix?”

His words stirred her, just a little. It wasn’t that he had found out information about her that brought him closer to the truth than anyone since she had fled from Control. It was that the mention of the investigators reminded her of Isabella and triggered the usual sting of longing and the dull certainty that she would never see her again.

“Or is it a person? Are you looking for someone?”

She looked away.

“If you need money, I would pay very well for a woman with your talent. And if you are looking to find someone, perhaps I can help with that, too. My organisation has men and women all around the world. And we have resources that are unavailable to others. I am sure that I do not need to elaborate upon that.”

He reached out a hand and rested it on her shoulder.

“At least let me take you somewhere else. The police will be raiding this place this morning. Soon. Do you want to be here when that happens?”

That registered with her.

“Where?”

“Are you hungry, Beatrix?”