The Fireman (30 page)

He fumbled the telephone and the blowtorch together and held out his right hand. He smiled as we shook hands, his grip firm but warm and wet. The smell of cooked meat was almost overpowering now, and at first I thought we’d walked into the factory’s kitchen but then I heard a muffled whimpering and when Lai stepped to one side to put the telephone and cylinder on a small folding table I saw a man suspended from the ceiling by chains tied to his legs, his head six inches from the ground. His arms were tied behind his back and he’d been gagged with a leather belt which was wet and slimy with saliva and he was swinging to and fro slowly, his hair brushing backwards and forwards through a damp patch on the concrete floor.

His eyes were tightly closed but he wasn’t dead because his chest was rising and falling slowly and his nostrils flared in and out as he sucked in air.

He could have been the guy who’d kicked me in the back in my room at the Excelsior, or the one who’d kicked me in the head. He could have been the waiter who’d poured me a flat tonic water at the FCC. With half of his body covered in third degree burns it could just as easily have been my Uncle Michael who’d disappeared from his office when I was twelve years old taking just his Ford Escort and his secretary with him. Rumour has it they’re running a pub in Benidorm but as he was the black sheep of the family nobody bothered too much about him. Except my aunt, of course, but even she didn’t seem too upset.

The man was naked except for a pair of grubby Y-fronts, navy blue and covered with red sailing boats. Most of the burns were on his legs but for at least some of the time Lai had played the blowtorch along the man’s chest because there were huge blisters bursting from the hairless skin. I suppose Lai couldn’t be bothered to bend down for long so he’d concentrated on the legs, which looked like steak that had been left on a grill for too long, ugly black streaks running from the ankles to the thighs, the skin puckered and burnt, with blood dribbling out from the wounds that hadn’t been cauterized by the heat.

I tried to be cool. I knew Lai was on my side but it was so glaringly obvious that I was dealing with a very, very dangerous man, a man who could smile while he tortured and who was methodical enough to wear an apron so that he wouldn’t soil his suit.

‘Who’s the barbecue?’ I asked.

‘He’s a red pole in the Wo Hop To triad,’ said Lai, gently swinging the blowtorch. He could see by the look on my face that didn’t mean a thing to me so he continued. ‘Wo Hop To is one of the bigger and nastier organizations in Hong Kong, and they’ve spread into Europe and America now. They’re into drug smuggling, prostitution, gambling, anything that turns a quick profit.’

‘And red pole?’ I tried not to look at the swinging body, or the blood that trickled down to the floor and mingled with the sweat and saliva.

‘A red pole is a fighter, one step up from a rank and file soldier. The triad system is based on a pyramid, with a boss at the top. Below him are three under-bosses. Each under-boss has three men directly reporting to him – a fighter, a negotiator and a recruiter.

‘Mr Yip here is a red pole, a kung fu master in fact, not that his knowledge of martial arts is doing him much good at the moment.’ He chuckled at his own joke.

‘He killed Sally?’ I asked.

‘He says not,’ said Lai. ‘But he has an amazing tolerance to pain, as you can see for yourself.’

He brutally punched the hanging man in the groin, the fist buried up to the wrist in the sweating flesh, but there was no scream of pain, just a tightening of the teeth on the gag and a muffled grunt.

‘Why would the triads want to hurt Sally?’

‘He says they didn’t mean to kill her. He says she struggled, ran and tripped and fell through the window.’

‘They? Who was with him?’

‘One of the Wo Hop To under-bosses by the name of Ho Chi-kwong and a soldier called Li Wing-kei.’

‘She got away from three men? Doesn’t seem likely, does it?’

‘My thoughts exactly. That is why I feel it necessary to talk to him a little while longer.’ He toyed with the blowtorch, caressing it like an expensive piece of jade.

‘I still don’t understand why the triads would want to hurt my sister. She wasn’t working on any crime stories other than cocaine-taking amongst the gweilos here. And according to the ICAC she wasn’t getting anywhere with that.’

‘Money,’ he said. ‘You can get practically anyone killed or maimed in Hong Kong for just a few thousand dollars. A bit more if you want to hurt a policeman. But Mr Yip says there wasn’t a contract out on her. If there had been it would almost certainly have been discussed at the last council meeting, and I am sure that if it had been it would have been made clear that she was under my protection. That at least adds credence to his claim that he did not intend to kill her.

‘Also it would be unusual for a triad to do its own dirty work in Hong Kong. When a killing is sanctioned the assassin is usually brought in from China, Taiwan or the Philippines. The triads here hire out their own assassins to gangs in other countries. Free movement of labour, you might say,’ and he laughed again. Jesus, this guy had one hell of a sick sense of humour, but I guess you couldn’t be completely sane and do the sort of things that he’d been doing with the blowtorch.

‘Do we know who hired them?’

‘Mr Yip says no, he says the only one who knows for sure is Mr Ho. And he is apparently playing mah jong in a tea house in Mong Kok, I have just discovered.’

‘Well, let’s go and pick him up,’ I said.

Lai smiled again, and tapped the air with his blowtorch. ‘I have work to do here.’ I obviously looked horrified because he added: ‘Do not feel any sympathy for this filth. He is the cause of your sister’s death and he also helped plant the bomb that killed the American this morning. He has forfeited the right to live.’

He took a gold Dunhill lighter from his trouser pocket and used it to ignite the torch, then he narrowed the flame to a thin cone of blue heat.

‘There is one thing you should know,’ he said.

‘What’s that?’

‘Mr Yip here thinks the orders came from overseas, from Europe. And he says the same connection ordered the American to be killed.’

‘The triads have connections in Europe?’

‘The gangs are no different to anyone else in Hong Kong,’ he said. ‘They are getting nervous about 1997 and what Communist control will mean. Many have already moved to Amsterdam where they mastermind the importation of Golden Triangle heroin through the EEC. Every major city has its Chinatown, and every Chinatown has its triads. It would not be difficult for anyone in a European city to make contact with the triads, believe me. They are a fact of life.’

‘You seem to know a lot about them,’ I said, as he replaced the lighter in his pocket. The blowtorch was six feet away but I could feel the heat on my face.

‘It is impossible to do business in Hong Kong without coming up against them. The larger ones consist of more than twenty thousand people, men and women, bigger than many companies. Very well organized, too. Look at this, for instance.’

He took a radio pager off the table and held it out to me. I took it, a small plastic bleeper with a built-in speaker. ‘Most of them carry pagers, and some of them even have portable telephones now.’

‘Dial-A-Villain,’ I said, but he obviously didn’t understand, so I just shrugged and put it back on the table next to his telephone.

‘There are very few of my businesses that don’t deal with the triads,’ he continued. ‘They’re into construction, distribution, and of course protection. And like everybody else, I pay. On occasions they are even useful.’

A thought struck me. ‘Why did the European connection want Seligman killed?’ I asked him.

‘You miss the point,’ he said. ‘The bomb in the car wasn’t just meant for the American. The idea was to kill you both. They expected you to be in the car as well.’

‘All that means is they knew I’d been into China to see the mining camp. We were making them nervous.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Lai. ‘But Mr Yip here says that before Mr Ho planted the bomb he removed a briefcase from the car.’

‘A Gucci briefcase?’

He nodded. ‘Sally’s,’ he said.

‘What are you going to do with him?’ I asked, and nodded towards Yip, whose eyes were wide with fear now as he tried to swing away from Lai and the torch.

‘What do you think I am going to do?’ Lai replied. ‘I am going to find out everything I can from him. I have yet to find out why they were ordered to kill you and the American. He says he doesn’t know why, but I have yet to be convinced.’

‘And then?’

‘Then I will kill him.’

‘And if the police find out?’

Lai laughed out loud at that, and he spoke quickly in Cantonese to the three men who’d brought me in the Mercedes. They joined in the laughter, their guffaws echoing around the room.

Eventually Lai decided that it was time to let me in on the joke. ‘What on earth makes you think the police don’t know?’ he said, and pointed at Rotten Teeth, who reached into his jacket and pulled out a laminated warrant card which he waved gleefully in front of my face. ‘It isn’t only the triads who have friends in the police,’ said Lai, grinning widely.

‘The best police force money can buy?’ I said.

‘Not money,’ he said. ‘Favours. Favours given and favours owed. That’s why they came to me when they’d traced Mr Yip, and didn’t just throw him in jail.’

‘How did they find him?’

‘Hong Kong is a very small place,’ he said. ‘Sally’s death and the bomb in Central attracted a great deal of attention. A lot of police have spent a lot of time asking a lot of questions of a lot of triads. With all this fuss it has been hard for either side to get on with business. The other triad organizations have been particularly upset at what happened, and it was one of them who tipped off the police, and they in turn came to me. Together we will bring this to its conclusion.’

He turned his back on me, a signal that I was dismissed.

‘They will take you to find Mr Ho,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘Mr Yip here says that he has the case. You will take it, I will have Mr Ho.’

I didn’t wait to hear any more, I fled the room, eager to get away before the screams started and the air filled once more with the stench of burning flesh.

The three coppers followed me into the lift and we were soon back in the car, heading God knows where. Mong Kok, Lai had said, but that meant nothing to me. A hand grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and once again my head was thrust between my legs for five minutes before they allowed me up again. Sometime later the green taxis became red so I knew we were out of the New Territories and back in Kowloon.

We parked the Mercedes on a single yellow line and the driver took a handwritten notice out of the glove compartment and shoved it on the dashboard where it could be seen from the outside. The four large Chinese characters on the card could have said ‘Doctor on Call’, or ‘Broken Down’, or ‘Back in Ten Minutes’ or ‘For Sale’, but to me they looked for all the world like a man with an axe chasing a three-legged horse towards a thicket of trees. You ought to see me taking the ink blot test – I’m a riot.

All around us there were large open-topped lorries piled high with cardboard boxes. They were being loaded by young men wearing boxer shorts and training shoes, all were marked with tattoos and all had the ubiquitous bleepers attached to their belts. The tattoos ranged from small daggers on their shoulders to huge red and green dragons that rippled and waved as their owners worked, moisture glistening on their bodies. They worked noisily, shouting and cursing in Cantonese, a constant barrage of chatter like monkeys in a zoo. Once the lorries had been loaded as high as was physically possible the boxes were lashed down with rope and then the vehicles would back into the road, the loaders banging the wooden sides with steel hooks to sound a warning. Most of the drivers had their radios on and their windows wide open, and all seemed to be tuned to different stations, so as we walked along the road there was a wall of incomprehensible sound as each programme merged into the next.

While the lorries were loaded the drivers slept sprawled across the front seats of their trucks, feet sticking out of the windows. They even snored at full volume.

The road was a mixture of factories and shops, and at one point we walked past a restaurant with plastic-covered tables spilling out onto the pavement. Most were occupied by men sitting on small stools, shoving in meat and rice with chopsticks from bowls lifted close to their chins, chewing with relish and then spitting the bones onto the table top. Even as they ate they were talking, shouting, and arguing. The food was ladled from huge steaming vats by a lady with a weightlifter’s forearms into blue plastic bowls held by two old men in stained white T-shirts and what looked like pyjama bottoms held up with string. The two were well past pensionable age and could have been twins, the years wiping away most of the distinguishing features and leaving them bald, wrinkled and toothless. They smoked as they worked, ash scattering across the tables as they leant over and clattered the food down in front of the customers.

The shop next to it was a butcher’s, where a team of men with bloodstained T-shirts hacked away at fresh carcasses with cleavers, ripping out the offal and throwing it into wicker baskets where it lay steaming. As they cut off individual joints these were speared on hooks and hung from the ceiling. A young housewife with a small child strapped to her back with a strip of bright yellow cloth poked at a pile of tripe and one of the men wrapped it in brown paper for her. The child giggled and played with its mother’s pigtail.

At the back of the shop was a large brazier and a boy sat next to it with half a pig impaled on a wooden stake, turning it slowly above the flames as it blackened and the fat hissed and smoked. The smell made me want to throw up.