The White Pearl (7 page)

‘Hakim?’ Maya said.

The girl nodded. No need to ask why. Hakim could always find an excuse if he was in the mood to use his fists.

‘Are you all right?’ Maya asked.

The girl shrugged. There was something so broken about her that Maya could imagine Hakim being tempted to finish the job.
Like putting a wounded bird out of its pain.

Maya hesitated. ‘You ought to give this up,’ she said. ‘Before he ends up killing you.’

The girl turned and smiled at her, a sweet expression on her pale face that irritated Maya because it was so resigned to her
misery. ‘
Tak.
No.’

‘There are other clubs.’

‘I’ve tried them,’ she said in accented Malay. ‘They’re no different. Anyway none of us will be here much longer.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘They’ll be marching in here soon.’

‘Who?’ Maya tucked her money into her sarong knot, impatient to end the conversation but curious about what the girl meant.
‘The police are paid off by Hakim. Don’t worry, they won’t mess with him.’

The Russian sighed before returning to her mirror and her bruise. ‘The Japanese, of course.’

‘What?’ Maya held her breath.

‘Haven’t you heard?’

‘No.’

‘They’ve been stomping over China for years. Now they’re getting ready for Malaya.’

Maya laughed, relieved. ‘No, you’ve heard wrong. That tiger will never dare to put its claws in the British.’ She started
to move away. She didn’t like what this girl was saying.

‘I’m warning you, I’ve seen them,’ the Russian continued in her soft tones. ‘I’ve seen what they did to people in China. You
don’t want to be here when they march in.’

Maya could hear the catch of tears in her throat. Lightly but firmly she turned the girl around and gave her a smart shake.
‘Stop that! Stop it, you hear me? The British are dog shit, the way they have stolen our country from us, but they have a
giant army. They have guns and hundreds of planes. I see them in the sky. No one can ever beat the British.’ She released
her grip on the girl. ‘Malaya is safe, I promise you.’

Fifty miles south of Palur, in a ramshackle wooden building that clung to the banks of the muddy
Sungai Lereh
river, Morgan Madoc threw a naked man out of an upstairs bedroom window. It was dark outside, the jungle’s nightly chorus
vibrating the sultry air, but the splash was audible as he hit the water.

‘Can he swim?’ a native girl on the bed asked, horrified.

‘Who cares?’

Madoc seized the man’s clothes from the floor, removed a fistful of Malay dollars from the wallet he found in the jacket and
a cheap pocket watch from beside the bed and then tossed the rest out of the window after their owner. The shirt flapped its
arms briefly, then fluttered in defeat down to the waves and, in the smear of yellow light that floated on the surface of
the river, Madoc took pleasure in watching both shoes sink at once.

‘Don’t let me catch you here again!’ he yelled.

There was no answer from the darkness. He couldn’t hear splashing. But maybe the man was a strong, silent swimmer. Or maybe
not. Madoc shrugged his broad shoulders, closed the window and turned to the girl.

‘What happened?’

She was naked. Her slender, caramel-coloured legs were still sprawled across the clean white sheet, her hands rubbing at her
throat. A vicious red mark stretched from one ear to the other like a noose and she was coughing with a soft little bleat.
It reminded Madoc of the newborn lambs on his father’s farm in the Brecon Beacons when he was a child. A lifetime ago.

‘You all right?’ he asked.

‘Me OK. He like it rough.’

He ran an expert eye over her limp figure and nodded to himself. Except for her neck, no harm done. For a twenty-eight-year-old
she still looked good, small and neat with not a ripple of fat on her. Not to his liking. He preferred something with a bit
of solid flesh on it that you could really grab hold of, but his customers liked the girls to look like twigs. Breakable.
With luck, he could still pass her off as eighteen for another year or two, as long as she kept those blasted black eyes of
hers tucked away behind her long lashes. Her eyes carried her whole life in them.

‘I’ll send up your next Johnny, then,’ he told her.

She twitched her shoulders. ‘Something for me first,
tuan
, boss?’

He didn’t like wasting his good stuff on the girls, but her eyes were jumping like crickets and she looked as if she might
not last the night without it. He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a couple of hand-rolled ganja-weed cigarettes
– kept there for special clients – tossed them on the bed sheet and watched her scramble for them. Immediately she lit one
from the oil lamp on the dresser and closed her eyes with secret pleasure as she inhaled, drawing the drug deep into her lungs,
swilling it round her bloodstream like sugar in tea. Madoc snorted in disgust. For much of his forty-four years he had been
smuggling opium in rickety boats up and down the west coast of Malaya, but not once did he touch the poison itself. He’d seen
what it could do. Destroy a man’s life. Rot his mind. Only fools and losers fell into that pit.

‘You’ve got five minutes,’ he said, and went downstairs.

The bar was busy tonight because it was pay day at the logging camp upriver. Madoc stood at the top of the stairs for a moment,
lit himself a Craven A and let his eyes roam over the smoky barroom below. OK, so it wasn’t the Raffles Hotel in Singapore,
but it was his. He grinned to himself. This place felt wild and lawless, packed with men with money in their back pockets
and one thing on their mind: how fast they could spend it.

Morgan’s Bar was more than ready to relieve them of their hard-earned cash. The girls in the upstairs rooms were doing fierce
business, and in the bar the drinks couldn’t flow fast enough. Most of the customers upstairs were Malayans who, as Muslims,
didn’t imbibe alcohol.
But there was a bunch of rowdy Chinese loggers who were stirring up a handful of white men who had rolled in, already well
oiled. Madoc drew on his cigarette and narrowed his eyes against the smoke; it was one of the bull-necked Brits he’d hurled
into the river. He shrugged indifferently. It wasn’t the first white man he’d killed, and sure as hell it wouldn’t be the
last.

He shouldered a path across the wide room, slapping backs and exchanging greetings with his customers in fluent Malay, before
he slid behind the bar where a middle-aged white woman was mixing a lime juice and lemonade for a wiry Tamil with severe pockmarks
on his face. She was a big woman, full-breasted and a behind like a hippo’s, but she stood no nonsense from the other side
of the counter. She filled the small space, and as Madoc edged past her, he couldn’t resist a quick squeeze of her buttocks,
her flesh heavy as a sun-warmed melon in his palm. He could feel her skin moist with sweat under her cotton skirt before she
reached behind and swatted his paw away. She didn’t even jog the bottle in her other hand.

‘Madoc,’ the Tamil logger, moaned, ‘keep your greedy hands off Kitty while I’m talking to her.’

‘Take no notice of the Welshman,’ Kitty chuckled. ‘I don’t.’

Madoc scooped up a good bottle of saké from beneath the counter, brushing the back of his wrist over one of her sturdy calves
as he did so, and headed out the other end, raising the flap of the counter to emerge among the drinkers.

‘Kitty could always complain to her boss,’ he joked over his shoulder.

‘But you’re her boss,’ the logger pointed out.

‘Exactly.’

‘I’ll tell my husband one of these days,’ Kitty threw after him, laughing. ‘Get him to thump you, Madoc.’

‘That will be interesting.’

The woman swivelled her eyes across to where Madoc was heading towards a table at the far end of the bar where three men in
clean white shirts were seated, and then back to him. For a moment their gaze snagged on each other, and she blinked a silent
warning to him.
Be careful
. He tipped her a nod, then sauntered over to the table where the three men were sitting. They were Japanese.

‘More saké, gentlemen?’ he suggested in English, and placed the bottle in the centre of the table. He ousted a nearby drinker
from a chair and
hitched it up to join the quiet group of white shirts. ‘Enjoying your evening?’

‘
Arigato
, thank you, Madoc-san. It is good business here tonight.’

The one who spoke was the youngest of the three, and as Madoc knew from experience, the politest. He was the only one who
seemed capable of a smile. All three were lean and narrow-shouldered but looked fit, with smooth, unlined faces and hair cropped
short. The oldest, a man a little more than Madoc’s own age judging by the shadowy grey stubble on his head, had cold, implacable
eyes that rarely blinked. He spoke little. Madoc wasn’t sure whether it was because his English was poor or because he chose
not to communicate his thoughts. He suspected it was the latter. He offered them his cigarettes but they all declined with
a precise shake of the head, a small gesture of distaste before taking out their own cigarettes and lighting up. It was a
little routine they went through each time, so he should be used to it by now. But still it irked him.

‘You’ve heard, I’d guess?’ he said.

‘
Hai.
Yes.’ The polite one again.

The third one, a man who had the look of someone eager to get the moment over and done with, said, ‘That’s why we’re here,
Madoc-san.’ He nudged his glass nearer the bottle.

Madoc picked up the saké and poured each of them a drink. For the first time they showed a flicker of interest.

‘Down the hatch!’ he said, though he didn’t drink himself.

They knocked back the rice wine, replaced the glasses on the table and regarded him with the faintest shadow of impatience.
He leaned forward, elbows on the table, and the young one did the same.

‘So,’ Madoc began, ‘you’ve heard that our boys in the north are on the move.’

‘It has come to our notice,
hai
, yes. What would be advantageous to our Command Planning is to know how many battalions and …’

At that point, two sailors pushed open the door to the bar. As Madoc gave them a quick appraisal, he felt his table companions
grow tense.

‘Junior ratings,’ he muttered under his breath. ‘Relax.’

The pair had probably come upriver by sampan to taste what the jungle had to offer, in search of wilder women and rougher
whisky. Word of Morgan’s Bar was whispered in the towns on the coast.
You want good girls? Good ganja? Good gambling? I take you.
These sailors were big and
muscular, but next to the Malays and Chinese, anyone looked big. He was tempted to go over and steer them into the back room
with a cold beer in their fists. That was where he made his real money, in the cramped and stuffy back room. On the spin of
the roulette wheel or the turn of a card. Men lost everything in the grim little sweatbox where dreams were crushed time and
again, yet still they came back for more.

These sailors were still wet behind the ears. He could tell that they were new to Malaya by their pink English skins, fresh
reinforcements shipped in as nerves curled tighter in this part of the world. He knew the battlecruiser
Repulse
and the battleship
Prince of Wales
were patrolling the seas. The sailors inspected the bar with interest, but stopped in their tracks when they caught sight
of the Japs. Most Japanese had the sense to withdraw from Malaya because of the worsening situation, the Europeans uncertain
as to whether the Japs would dare risk an attack, and Madoc saw no reason why his saké friends insisted on coming as a trio
instead of just one of them alone. One might pass unnoticed. Three jumped down your bloody throat. But there was safety in
numbers.

‘Gentlemen,’ he said softly, ‘shall we step outside for some air?’

He walked over to the sailors and pointed them in Kitty’s direction. They went like lambs. He opened the door, took a deep
breath of the night air, as moist and heavy as the saké, and walked out into the darkness. The jungle and the
Sungai Lereh
river muttered to him like old friends but he barely noticed the noises, except for the booming call of the frogs, as insistent
as toothache.

Morgan’s Bar sat in a muddy patch at the end of a jetty that led passengers straight into the clearing that Madoc had created
out of densely packed jungle, with no reference to anyone else. He’d chugged up by boat one humid afternoon, avoiding the
mangrove swamps that stretched their grey roots like dead arms reaching out of the jungle, and dynamited himself a space about
fifty yards square. He’d slept that night in a stifling tent in the middle of his crater, and next morning set about taming
it. That was twelve years ago. Too long, far too long.

As he lit himself another cigarette from the old butt and watched one draw life from the other, the three Japanese joined
him. They moved as soundlessly as snakes.

‘Madoc-san,’ the polite spokesman said in low tones. ‘We are waiting.’

Madoc drew them out of the splash of yellow light thrown from the bar’s windows and into the deep shadow of the building on
his right. It loomed up with a jagged profile against the starless night sky, only half constructed, a black shapeless shell.
But at the sight of its unfinished walls, Madoc’s blood kicked hard in a vein at his temple, almost as sharp as a mosquito
bite. Month by month the walls were clawing their way up, but he needed more bricks, more sand, more cement, more lead piping,
more wiring, more … More money. He swallowed a sigh in the guise of drawing on his cigarette, flicked its ash on a passing
moth and told them what they wanted to know.

‘General Brooke-Popham is holed up in Singapore at the moment, in conference with General Heath. They’re putting out propaganda
that we Brits are confident that our defences are strong and our weapons efficient. He scoffs at the Jap Army.’

There was a hiss in the darkness. It came from the oldest of the three.