Jade Dragon (7 page)

“Alan was a good man,” he rumbled. “He had vision and character. He will
be missed.”

Frankie swallowed. “I… Please, sir, I haven’t yet been given the
details of what happened…”

Tze threw Alice a look and she gave a shallow nod. “A bad business,
Francis. I hesitate to speak of it here.” He looked away. “Be assured
that the company is expending every effort in the matter. Your brother
has been granted full honours. ”

“Thank you,” said Frankie. “But if I may ask how–?”

“Alice will brief you this afternoon,” Tze said, with a finality that
ended the line of conversation like an axe-blow. “But before then we
must address a matter that concerns
you,
and you alone.”

“I don’t understand.”

Tze gestured to a portly woman hovering near the door, and on cue she
came closer. Her face was a little too perfect for the body it was on.
“Francis, this is Phoebe Hi. She is a cousin of our corporate clan, from
the RedWhiteBlue group.”

Frankie gave her a weak smile. RedWhiteBlue Inc. was YLHI’s
entertainment division, a hit factory churning out music, vids and home
vircade games across half of the Pacific Rim. Hi gave him a plastic
blink of seamless teeth. “I worked closely with your brother,” she said.
“I hope to do the same with you.”

Tze gave her the slightest of nods and Hi retreated a couple of steps.
“Yes, my boy. I’ve brought you here because I hope you will accept a
gift from us.”

“Gift?” repeated Frankie, his head spinning.

The other man rubbed at his tightly trimmed beard. “I know that nothing
can replace your brother, but it is my hope that you will allow me to
demonstrate the regard in which he was held by Yuk Lung.” He placed a
fatherly hand on Frankie’s shoulder, the other reaching for the metal
box on the table. “I want you to take Alan’s place here in Hong Kong. I
want you to assume his duties and position within our clan, with all the
responsibilities and rewards that entails. Will you join us, Francis?”

As if there was any other answer to give. “Of… Of course, sir. But
I…”

Tze put a finger to his lips. “Ssh. No doubts, lad. We have none of that
here.”

Frankie nodded. “I, uh, accept, sir. It’s an honour.”

“We are a traditional corporation, Francis,” Tze continued, opening the
box. “In this day and age, to some that makes Yuk Lung seem… peculiar
in its practices.” His fist came up and in it was an ornate four-fold
brass dagger. “This is a ghost knife. It is more than two thousand years
old.” He offered it, blade-first.

Gingerly, Frankie took it, feeling the razor sharp edges pulling at the
skin of his palm. Tze smiled a little and cupped Frankie’s hand in his,
pressing the younger man’s flesh into the blades. Where it cut him, it
felt icy cold.

“It is important,” Tze said, tightening his grip, “for men to understand
that the wheel turns only when the axle is oiled by blood. ”

Session #542, resuming at 3. 38pm

DR YEOH:Are you ready, Sally?

SALLY: Okay. Can I get a smoke?

DR YEOH: I’m afraid not. We’ve talked about that before. You can’t
smoke in the clinic.

SALLY: Oh yeah. Right.

DR YEOH: So. Let’s continue. We were talking about your friend, Cynda.

SALLY: Not my friend any more.

DR YEOH:Why is that?

SALLY: I told you. I saw what she had in there.

DR YEOH: In where?

SALLY: Inside her head.

DR YEOH: What did she have in her head, Sally?

SALLY: Worms. Black worms and snakes.

DR YEOH: How did that make you feel?

SALLY: Sick. I thought she was my friend, but she…

DR YEOH: Take your time.

SALLY: All these years and she had worms in her head. I shared a flat
with her, a bathroom. We drank from the same cups. I never would have if
I had known.

DR YEOH: How did you find out about the worms?

SALLY: Yonni brought these geltabs around. New things, never tried
them before. We had some drinks and we dropped a few.

DR YEOH: And then you saw…

SALLY: Worms. Coming out of her eyes and nose. She was screaming at
me, she said I was going to kill her.

DR YEOH: Perhaps you only thought you were seeing worms. Perhaps it
was the tablets, did that occur to you?

SALLY: No. I’ve tripped before. I know the difference. Tliis was real.
As real as you are in the room with me right now. Do you think I would
have? Do you think I would have if I hadn’t known they were real? That
would have been crazy.

DR YEOH: What did you do next?

SALLY: She had a big plaster cat on the mantle. I never liked it. I
beat her skull in with it and killed the worms. I know it worked because
they were all gone after that.

DR YEOH: How did that make you feel?

SALLY: Better.

Session #542 ends.

Fixx saw the taxi-sampan come around the corner on to Decatur Street and
stepped lightly from the balcony and on to the prow of the chugging
boat. The aged fellow at the helm peered up at him from under a woollen
cap, his sunken brown face giving Fixx a sour look in return.

“Give a man a ride?” he asked, as the sampan bobbed in the wake of an
airboat.

The sulky driver jerked his thumb at the people in the passenger
compartment and set off again. Fixx swung himself over the windscreen
and joined the surprised family of tourists in the back. Father, mother,
two boys. Dad was already fumbling for a Day-Glo taser on his belt, Mom
shocked by the sudden arrival of a large black man in a ballistic
kevleather long coat. The boys watched, wide-eyed.

He took off his espex and gave the lady a winning smile. “Joshua Fixx,
ma’am. My most profuse apologies for taking advantage of your boat.” He
kissed the back of her hand with gentle reverence.

Dad had the taser in his fist now. “Just a darn minute, pal! This is our
taxi!”

A SoCal accent. Fixx had the measure of these folks in a heartbeat; some
midlevel whitebread splashing out on a transcontinental vacation to shut
up his bored wife and whiny kids, venturing out from the west coast with
little or no idea how the rest of the You Ess of Ay actually worked
beyond the walls of their gated community in the burbs.

“How are you liking Newer Orleans?” He said the name of the city like
N’Arlens,
because that was how the touristas expected it. “She’s a
peach, ain’t she?” He took in the riverine streets with a casual
gesture, removing a twig from his sleeve. In the distance, a French horn
was razzing the sky at a rooftop cafe deep in the Vieux Carre.

Dad brandished the taser like it was a holy cross against a vampire.
“Don’t make me use this!”

“Ah, hush yourself now.” Fixx snapped the twig right under Dad’s nose
and the man went slack, head lolling forward. A line of drool emerged
from his lips along with a low snore. Fixx gave Mom an apologetic look
and threw the taser into the water as the taxi turned on to Canal
Street. She clucked and flailed over her husband, unable to wake him.

“Hey mister,” said one of the boys, the elder of the two. “Did you kill
my dad?” He wore a
Subburb Sux
screen-T with Mall-ratz gangcult
colours.

The other boy elbowed his brother in the ribs. “Doofus! He’s put him
out, is all.” The younger one had a sunscreen jumpsuit and ghille hat.

Fixx smiled thinly. “Sorry about that. He’ll come around soon.”

“How’d you do that with a piece of wood?”

“Ask a favour of nature, boy. Sometimes she’ll help you.”

The eldest folded his arms. “I know what it is. It’s that voodoo. He’s a
voo-doo man. He’s got what they call them loo-ahs, or something.”

“Loas,” said Fixx absently.

“Naw,” said the younger, and pointed at Fixx’s chest. “He’s an op. I
seen his guns when he got on. ”The kid shuffled forward in a
conspiratorial manner. “You got a pair of SunKing 10-mil longslides in a
cross belt, there.”

“Good eye.”

A smug grin. “I wanna be a sanctioned operative one day. Like that
Timberlake guy on ZeeBeeCee.”

“He’s not a real op.” said the other boy, “He just plays one on TV.”

“Don’t care.” The kid gave Fixx a long look. “You do interdicts?
Takedowns? Highway work?”

“I go where fate sends me.”

The elder sneered. “I don’t like it here. I wanna go back to Oxnard.”

Fixx studied the younger kid. “How about you?”

The boy shrugged. “S’okay, I guess. Sometimes it smells funny. And the
music don’t stop.”

The sampan rode the swell as a cigarette boat rumbled past, a languid
drag queen draped over the twin fifty-cals on the prow. Fixx showed the
tungsten caps in his teeth as he gave them a genuine smile, amused at
the boy’s description. “That’s March’ Gras for you. These days, carnival
never ends. Was a time when you could walk these streets afoot,” he
said, sniffing the air. The ever-present tang of faint rot, azaleas and
curdled petrochem presented itself; but there were alien scents too, ash
and old blood out of place on the breeze. He tapped the driver on the
shoulder and indicated where he should turn toward the Place Benville.
“Back before the Cat Fives and the Big Tides, though, before you were
born. Now there’s no place that don’t live off second floor or higher.
The Venice of the South…” He leaned closer to the younger lad. “Parts
of the city, she sank, you dig? Tempests and floods just kept comin’.
Now the depths belong to the dead and the drowned.” From a hidden pocket
in the long coat, he brought a handful of bleached bones, all of them
careworn and yellowed through thousands of uses. Fixx bent low and shook
them in his hand like dice.

“Maitre Carrefour, are you listenin’?” he whispered. “If it would please
your honourable self to visit your blessing on your worthless son
Joshua, so that along my day I might be obliged to serve the good of
things.” He said something else that the boys could not make out and
turned the bones on to the deck.

“Told you he was voo-doo,” said the older kid.

Fixx frowned and fingered the bones, nudging them a little, considering
the patterns. Things had not improved; if anything, the bones told him
it was worse. Quickly, he scooped them up, destroying the message. Ahead
of the boat, the grey arc of the Hyperdome was becoming visible behind
the buildings and Fixx stood up, scanning the sides of the boulevard for
a place to alight. The original stadium that stood there had collapsed
years ago, brought down by the surge tides fanned by Hurricane Mandy;
the replacement sat like a dark jewel in the heart of Newer Orleans,
cupped in a setting of murky waters.

A hovercraft coming the other way floated closer and Fixx stepped on to
the stern. He gave the boys a look over his shoulder. “I got some advice
for your dad, when he wakes up. You tell him you’ll have more fun over
the Gulf at DisneyCity.”

“You’re going to kill someone?” asked the younger lad.

“Never can tell,” said Fixx, and leapt to the other vessel.

The girl’s face was reflected everywhere he looked. Holos of her dancing
in the evening air over the curve of the ’dome, fly-posters in
fluorescent shades three or four layers thick on the walls, her eyes
winking from video billboards. Then there were the people. Men and women
dressed as her, hair in various imitations of her auburn topknot, the
faux-Egyptian eye make-up from her first album or the gothcore look she
sported for the second disc. The crowds were a funhouse mirror for the
girl, a thousand copies of her tall and short, fat and thin, dark and
light. It was like a net had been cast through the universe, pulling
together every alternate version that could, did or might have existed,
gathering them here to coalesce at the feet of the one true original.
The actual, the real, the genuine article.

At first, the girl seemed to be a hazy idea at the edge of his mind, the
vague concept of a person distant and removed, thin as smoke, fading
whenever he tried to concentrate on her. But as time passed, she filled
in. The sketch of her grew depth and presence, moving slowly from his
deep dreams to moments awake when his mind wandered. She was coming
closer, he realised, and with her she dragged a bleak thread of
something that his conscious mind shied away from. The girl was
connected in a way that she did not comprehend, and Joshua slowly began
to understand that it was his purpose to show her how. He had jobs to
do—real jobs, paying cases and ongoing investigations—but none of those
kept him awake at night, cold and sweating. This was an affair of an
entirely different sort.

Fixx made no eye contact with any of the copies. He found them
distracting, and this matter was of enough seriousness to him that he
wanted nothing to cloud his path. He took a ticket from the pocket of a
person deep in argument with a T-shirt vendor, and pressed on to the
Hyperdome’s entrance.

Over the doors in red neon letters eight metres tall, Juno Qwan told the
world that she was in Newer Orleans for one night only.

The dull reports of the support group’s climactic number built and
built, reaching down through the backstage spaces in hollow, confused
echoes. On the wall inside the wings, the countdown clock to the main
event was inching ever closer to zero, and the tech crew were scrambling
over the last few mike checks and hook-ups. There had already been six
fatalities among the staff on the tour and they were itchy with
short-timer’s fever. Newer Orleans was the last stop, and after they
were done here tonight they would leave America behind.

Heywood Ropé tasted the vibe in the air, the adrenaline scent messages
from the roadies thick about him. They parted before the slim man,
desperate to be seen to be busy, not one of them caught at rest. Good.
These weeks on the road together had bred only more fear of him, and
that was exactly how he wanted it to be. He reached the platform behind
the stage where the band were shaking themselves down, thumbing a couple
of capsules or applying derms inside their sleeves as need be. The
forever-placid cast of his face tightened a little, revealing the hard
lines of the skull beneath.