Riding the Snake (1998) (25 page)

A gunshot ripped the silence and the young man froze.

About twenty yards away, Tanisha was in a Weaver stance, her legs spread wide for balance, the ugly square-barreled Glock aimed right at the young man's chest. Wheeler picked himself up slowly as Tanisha moved in, holding the gun on the Chinese man. Blood oozed from Wheeler's mouth and leg, staining his new Gap clothing.

"Who are you?" Tanisha asked, her voice quivering. "You speak English?"

"I'm Chan Chak," he said. "I'm Miss Puilinger's nephew."

"She's English, you're Chinese. Get a better story, sugar," Tanisha said as she moved close, still holding the gun on him, aiming for his midsection, where she had the largest target for the inaccurate short-barreled automatic.

"All of us, her students, her helpers, she called us her nieces and nephews. I loved her," he said.

"And that's why you were going through her things?"

"She promised me this," he said and held up a simple gold crucifix. "She said when she crossed the bridge of clouds, I should come over straightaway and fetch it. She wanted me to have it. She said not to wait for the State Solicitor General because the Chinese death taxes will take it." He was still breathing hard. Wheeler reached out and took the cross, looking at it carefully.

"There's something written on it. If she promised this to you, you should know what it is," he said.

"P-ll-21," Chan Chak said, his chest still heaving as he struggled to catch his breath. "It's from the Bible; Proverbs 11, Verse 21: Though hand join in hand, the wicked shall not be unpunished: but the seed of the righteous shall be delivered.' That was her message. It was what her life was about. It was why she lived. To prove to all of us that we could be delivered. She gave it to me, it's my inheritance, my memory of her." He looked at Wheeler defiantly.

So Wheeler handed it back to him.

Wheeler had his pants off and Tanisha was looking at the week
-
old bullet wound in his thigh. "It doesn't look that bad," she said. "It's already healing on the inside. This slug musta had eyes
-
missed the bone and all the major veins and arteries. Just tore a hole in the fleshy part. Couple stitches and you'll be ready to rumble."

They were sitting in Jackie Puilinger's room. Chan Chak wouldn't tell them where he lived, so they had opened his wallet and copied his business address off one of his cards. The young man was now standing nearby, looking at them with a strange, fearful expression on his face. After a minute, a Chinese nun arrived with bandages and some disinfectant. She started to wash carefully around Wheeler's wound. It had puckered slightly at the edges as it began to pull together and heal. After painting on a disinfectant, she wrapped it tightly with a bandage and clipped it with fasteners. She spoke no English, so Chan Chak conversed with her in Chinese.

"She's a medical nurse and says you should have a doctor look at it, but she says it seems to be healing."

Wheeler pulled his pants on.

"You took off like an N
. F. L
. running back," Tanisha grinned. "Not bad for a guy with a bullet hole in his leg."

"You probably didn't see me soak up all that shoe leather Mr. Chan was delivering."

"Doesn't count," she smiled. " 'Cause technically, you're still on injured reserve."

Chan Chak closed the door after the nun left. "I have to go. I have things to do. Thank you for letting me keep the crucifix," he said and turned to leave.

"Did Jackie ever talk to you about Wo Lap Ling?" Wheeler asked.

Chan Chak froze, then slowly turned back again.

"Why?" he asked warily.

"I just wondered."

"She thought he was a devil, the nastiest sort. She thought he needed to be stopped." Chan Chak had no British accent. His English still rang with the singing lilt of Chinese.

"She wasn't crazy at all, was she?" Wheeler said. "When the police came, she only pretended to be nuts."

Chan Chak hesitated, started to answer, then stopped. It was as good as an admission.

"Why didn't she want to help the police if she felt Wo Lap Ling was such a devil?" Wheeler continued.

"I don't know. She was old and frightened. She had given her life to others. She deserved a little peace before she crossed her bridge."

"And you were one of her nephews?" Tanisha asked. "You were a disciple of Miss Puilinger's?"

"Yes. I was chasing the dragon by the time I was ten. She got me off drugs, taught me English. She named me 'Chauncy.' "

" 'Chasing the dragon' is heroin," Tanisha said to Wheeler.

"Wo Lap Ling had also been one of her nephews," Chauncy Chan continued. "She prayed for him because she had once loved him, but he went bad. He became one of the Triad devils. He sold poison in the Walled City and joined the Chin Lo. He ended up being the Shan Chu, the worst of the worst. 'A dreadful piece of mischief,' she called him. And she devoted her life to stopping him and others like him, but she also had to co-exist with him. There is no way an English woman alone can destroy the mighty Chin Lo or its most powerful Shan Chu. She had to swim in their ocean and avoid being devoured."

They looked at him, both thinking Chauncy Chan could be a valuable resource. Tanisha finally stood and moved closer.

"You were raised in the Walled City. You lived there, didn't you?"

He looked frightened for a minute, then the look passed and he nodded.

"We need your help, Chauncy. If we brought you a partial map of the Walled City, could you tell us if it is accurate and correct, and complete it for us?" she asked him.

"Anybody who draws a map of the Walled City of Kowloon will die the Living Death." His voice was stretched tight with fear. "The Living Death takes three days. They keep you alive with medicines, they use acupuncture needles to awaken the dying nerves so you can feel the pain more clearly. They cut your muscles and tendons a strand at a time so they snap back against the bone. They feed you to rodents who crawl up your anus and devour your insides while you are still alive. It would be better to set yourself on fire."

"We're at the Peninsula Hotel," Wheeler said after a pause. "If you can help us . . ." And he stopped because Chan Chak looked away from them, casting his eyes down.

"She was very brave," he finally said, his voice reverent in memory, soft as a rustling wind. "She could somehow swim in their water and avoid the stinging fish. I am just a shoemaker. I work with leather. I have two children and a wife who is very sick from malaria. I am not as strong as Miss Pullinger, I am only human. She was the Lord Buddha's child. I do not have her courage. I never will have. I cannot help you." And then he turned and left them there, alone.

Chapter
22.

The Mucky Duck

The Black Swan restaurant was on the second floor of the Corral nightclub in the Wan Chai district of Hong Kong. The music vibrations came up through the floorboards from the strip club below. Wheeler and Tanisha sat in a booth in the small back room, which the restaurant reserved for VIPs like Johnny Kwong, and watched in fascination as the famous scarred inspector spooned cooked brains out of the skull of a dead tree monkey. The furry head of the primate had been severed, the top of the skull cut and removed at mid-forehead; the brains were cooked at the table. Julian Winslow was eating another traditional dish called pork-ball soup, which emitted a strong, pungent odor in the hot, enclosed back room. Tanisha and Wheeler had both lost their appetites when the monkey head had been sawed. On the table in front of them was uneaten fish-ball soup and a copy of Quincy's map. It was a baffling drawing that showed a hundred or more crisscrossing lines, some dead-ending, others wandering aimlessly and turning back on themselves like a spilled plate of spaghetti. There was Chinese writing all over the map, which
Johnny said indicated approximate distances. The map was incomplete, confusing, and almost impossible to read. Worse still, Johnny explained, it only depicted the front two blocks of the Walled City, which stretched for ten, in all directions around the central park where the temple sat.

"Bloody shame," Johnny said between spoonfuls of monkey brains. "If I coulda got the whole thing, we might have run a raid on Willy Wo Lap and caught him on the glimmer."

Wheeler was still looking at the map, distressed at the myriad of transecting, wandering lines. "Who designed this place?" he finally said.

"Nobody did," Julian said. "It grew like a jungle fungus, one floor over another, took whatever shape it wanted. If a block of flats tumbled down, the people would scavenge for what was usable, bury the dead, and just build right over it. Reeks in there from garbage and rot. Got no proper sewage."

"I understand Miss Pullinger is no longer with us," Johnny said as he finished the last bite and wiped his napkin across cracked yellow lips.

"Yes, but we met a man named Chan Chak," Wheeler said. "He was one of Jackie Puilinger's disciples, if that's the right word for it. A man about twenty-five. He was raised inside the Walled City. He's a shoemaker. We got his business address."

Johnny put out his hand, and Wheeler dug the address out of his pocket and handed it to the detective. "I know this place. It's in Kowloon," Johnny said, handing it back. "He won't talk. The peasants are even more scared of Limpy Liu than they were of Willy. Evil, skinny, limping bastard's got a complexion like lunar lava, and a heart yellow as piss. If anybody goes up against him, he'll have their guts for garters."

Tanisha had remained silent through most of this. She was looking at Julian Winslow and Johnny Kwong, using her cop's instinct to see into the dark corners of their complex relationship. Something wasn't right. There was too much intrigue in Hong Kong. She could already tell that there was almost no fraternal trust among the police. Everybody was a potential spy. Julian ate with his eyes down, not looking at them. Something unhealthy was going on, but she couldn't pin it. It was a feeling she had learned to trust. Her instincts had saved her more than once in the street. Now they were screaming at her, but she couldn't figure out which way to look, or even what was going on. She didn't know the rules here. She was lost.

After dinner, they went downstairs to the Corral nightclub. It was a grind joint with nude Philippine and Thai dancers, slithering onstage and humping brass poles. A loud band played American rock-and-roll badly, slots rang, and mah-jongg tiles and dice clicked on twenty green felt tables. They moved to a game room and watched through an atmosphere thick with cigarette smoke, while Johnny Kwong stacked the little tiles in front of him and made a large bet. His scarred features revealed nothing. The fire had done him one favor--it gave him the ultimate gambler's face.

Johnny Kwong seemed to be well known at the Corral. People waved to him and shouted greetings while he played. Julian led them to the bar and ordered for them in Chinese. Tanisha had a wine cooler, Wheeler ordered a cola. She looked over, surprised at the choice. She had been mildly aware of the fact that he hadn't been drinking since they left Cleveland. At dinner, he'd passed on the wine list; he hadn't opened the mini-bar in the suite or even had a free drink on the plane. She looked down at his hands to see if they were shaking but he had them tucked safely in his pockets.

"This is one of the big clubs in the Wanch," Julian said. "The Wanch is the whole tenderloin district in Wan Chai."

"It's also a Ho-tel," Tanisha said matter-of-factly.

"Beg pardon?" Julian asked.

"Those are the Ho's over there," she said, pointing to a string of B-girls lounging on stools at the far side of the room. They were wearing fuck-me shoes and lacy see-through tops, with slit skirts that showed they wore no underwear. "The grind rooms are back there, behind the curtains," she said, just as two girls got off their stools and approached some Chinese men. Then they accompanied the men across the room and through the curtains. "Cha-Ching," Tanisha grinned.

"You're right," Julian nodded. "This is a bit of a knocking shop. Prostitution is illegal in Hong Kong, but everybody looks the other way. The girls take the customers back to the plastic-lined rooms and manipulate them to orgasm. A while back, one of our British legislators, Dame Lydia Dunn, inspected this place for the Health Ministry. She insisted on looking back there. They didn't have time to freshen up the stalls, and when she looked down and saw all the tissues on the floor, the Lady said, Tt must be very unhealthy here, because the poor girls all have colds.' Bloody true story," he grinned. "But the Black Swan, upstairs, is one of the best Chinese restaurants in the city. Johnny calls it the Mucky Duck, 'cause the illegal proceeds from downstairs help fund the restaurant overhead. Johnny also likes it because he can pop down here after and get his oil changed. Lookin' like he does, it's his only play with the ladies."

Julian looked over at Johnny, who was winning now, a small fortress of chips in front of him. "You should have seen him before the fire," Julian said reflectively. "What a figure of a man he was, like a cinema star. Women everywhere. He certainly paid his dues to the Crown, that one has." There was a tinge of anger mixed with the remorse. "The only way to get inside Willy's temple is a full-on police raid. Be a big operation," Julian continued. "Johnny has good connections with the Independent Commission Against Corruption. There still are straight coppers on that detail. If we can get a map drawn, you can bet Johnny will find a way to put a raid together."