The Year of the Woman (26 page)

“The pity is,” he laughed as he explained his
temporary
disappearance to Linda, “I only had time to ask her for the Double Quintella and the Six-Up. She gave me both!”

They discussed the options, Linda thrilled beyond expectations. The Double Quintella – the first two horses home in any two races on the same day – and the impossible Six-Up, where you had to select the winner or the second, in all six races, well, she’d never had enough luck or money for either of those. Santiago had
stories about winning the Six-Up in successive weeks.

“Was she definite?” she breathed.

“Absolutely certain, Linda darling! She described the jockeys’ colours, numbers and everything!”

“Was it a vision?” Linda was breathless. The girl was a gold-mine. Linda could own the world, buy noble houses in every capital city in the world, purchase firms outright in London, New York, estates in California, mansions in Hollywood.

“Yes. She actually
saw
the horses in a string as we came through Happy Valley. We hadn’t passed any! Her second sight. We are in heaven, Linda darling.”

He went to return the hire car and book a room in the Shangri-La for later that evening. He was sick of Linda and her clinging. It would soon be over.

Once this was finished he would ask Business Head Tiger Wong’s permission for a night off. He planned to use a bath-house girl he was fond of. She at least knew how to conduct herself in company, unlike Linda, and had a measure of politeness in her. And Linda was
proving
as sexually enthralling as a plastic doll. He’d had enough of the damned woman.

He went to report.

“She said Dao Nan Tsang?”

Santiago told Ah Min the name of the book. Ah Min’s hand shook. He signalled for rice wine and sipped it, eyes closed. Santiago watched. Ah Min’s fingers never ceased caressing the leather cover of his ledger. It lay before him on the café table.

The whole place had been emptied of customers. Outside, traffic in Nullah Road tried to block cars
coming
down Tung Choi Street. Drivers were out of their vehicles, yelling abuse in a score of Chinese dialects. Ah Min came to, and spoke softly to the Eurasian.

“You know Dao Nan Tsang?”

“No, First Born.”

“Indeed not. He lived centuries ago, Yuan Dynasty. He wrote a book on the mathematics of the abacus.”

Santiago had the world’s best memory and important facilities with women, but wasn’t the brightest button on the Triad’s quilt.

“It can’t be, First Born.” He added, as proof, “She remembered him distinctly. Dao Nan Tsang gave her a sweet plum and the old abacus with the cracked beads. She recalled Dao’s little monkey on his writing table. She liked to watch it mix his ink.”

Ah Min’s headache returned, almost whimpering as it struck his forehead. Ancient scribes in the days of the Emperors truly did train monkeys, it being their conceit to have a pet to mix ink neatly for their writings. They kept them on their desks. The monkeys were highly
valued
. Ah Min knew that the rarest species of this
precious
monkey had died out altogether – except that, a
few months since, two pairs of these rare primates had been rediscovered in the Chinese interior. Dao Nan Tsang was the second-greatest ever exponent of the flowing style of Chinese calligraphy, the exquisite “grass-character” writing, in 7,000 years of history. Miserably, he acknowledged that Tiger Wong must be told.

He opened his eyes to see Santiago’s smug face. How could this idiot, with his impossibly narrow
understanding
of anything, coerce women to do the Triad’s bidding with such success?

“You must be right. Say nothing of this.” Ah Min signed for
fokis
to open some windows and let in the traffic din. Noise flooded the place, almost making speech inaudible.

“Further orders, First Born?”

“Go racing in Happy Valley. She must lose.”

Santiago left the café. He looked back for a brief
second
and saw Ah Min with his head in his hands. Why did so powerful a man, second in the entire Triad, not live in splendour without noise, far from the wretched stew of Hong Kong? And, he thought, mystified, if literally
millions
in Sterling, American dollars, every known
currency
under the sun, passed through the man’s hands every week, why did he always hold court in a tacky café in a Kowloon street? It was beyond him. But he had a job on.

He went racing in Happy Valley.

KwayFay was disturbed to find her desk had been
cannibalised
by Tony, who was back to his usual chirpiness about Futures. Alice was hunched and depressed. Jenny
Lan had sunk into despondency, was tapping feeble guesses into her terminal. A.K. Sau, a girl of august
lineage
and impressive figure, who’d taken the name Elise, came over almost in tears and told KwayFay she felt unwell. KwayFay listened, trying to set up her terminal on the pod ledge, now the only free spare place. Elise’s problems involved some youth in the Land Refill Unit. KwayFay’s mind glimpsed him in a brief flash,
swaggering
in Des Voeux Road West from his job at the Bonham Hotel where he had a wife working in Reception. Bad luck, Elise.

Francis Moy, the oldest employee at thirty-five, moved across. He was innumerate and lowly, because the firm was natually submerged in numbers. He had prematurely greying hair, and helped out some Christian folly at a church. He spoke Portuguese, a hindrance to anyone, and lived from day to day with dull resignation.

“HC is weeping, KwayFay,” he said. “I think today we go bust.”

“No-job day?” KwayFay did not guess ahead. There was a time and place for that.

“For everyone.”

He spoke with no satisfaction. It had simply come for him, as he’d known. The others, Moy understood, were younger, could decipher screens filled with integers. KwayFay knew Moy saw the world as an admix of
feelings
and words, where numbers were simply beyond comprehension. A cripple, but a kind one who normally kept out of the way and did not gossip. She remembered Grandmother’s instruction never to become Christian, for they were incapable of believing in madness.

She did not feel tired, despite having been frightened
by that film-star man, so tall and distinguished yet
looking
false. He was going to kill
Tai-Tai
Ho today in some manner, but there was no saving the woman. KwayFay felt slightly put out, for Ghost Grandmother had given no warning of this. Linda Ho wanted to possess the oily Eurasian, but never could for she was drugged on
gambling
. Just like any opium addict smoking his resin along Hollywood Road or lying stuporose in opium-divans on the lighters floating off Stonecutters Island. Linda Ho would kill to avoid being saved. It was the destiny she craved. She would not risk rescue.

KwayFay went to see Alice. She seemed morbid, almost haggard. KwayFay prevented a host of images from crowding into her mind. “Alice. Did you block my data access?” Her console would not function.

“Yes. HC said to.”

KwayFay looked around. Nobody would meet her eyes, except Elise Sau who only wanted somebody to moan to, about her double-crossing young man.

“If you’re not using yours, can I?”

“HC said no.”

“
Mh gan-yiu,
” KwayFay said as casually as she could. “Not important.”

She plugged her laptop anywhere, resting it on two waste baskets, one above the next. She set to. The FTSE was roller-coasting along behind the Dow Jones, the Hang Seng Index was being bothered by some corporate failure in America. Nothing seemed stable. She almost laughed. It would even out by mid-afternoon and
everybody
would be wondering what the fuss was about. The Almighty Dollar would go off a whole point, Sterling would rise and Europe trail after. She glimpsed a
troubling vision of some European men – a
bottle-blonde
woman drove their Fiat van, wrong side of the road, so it must be Europe – counterfeiting the
impending
Euro, which made her smile. So far, they were only prototypes, but soon that mischief would rock national economies. The forgers would not be discovered until tomorrow, when Italian police …

She realised HC Ho was standing before her.

“What are you doing?”

His face was so pale it was almost green. She felt his waves of distress. He should never have gambled on the new currency. Stains on his jacket seemed to be food. His shirt was soiled, the cuffs sweat-clinging to his wrists. He spectacles were dotted with grime; this was the man forever polishing his glasses and holding them up to the light. The great thinker.

“Working, First Born.”

“Stop now.”

He went to the water-cooler. It was only ever filled with plain tap water. From here important
announcements
were made at bonus times. He clapped his hands for attention. The place stilled. It had come, what they were waiting for. Some stood.

“We close now,” he said, trying to smile. “Only for today. Maybe a take-over. Or a merger! Work no more today!”

“We come tomorrow?” somebody asked nervously.

“Of course! There is always tomorrow!” He gave a hearty laugh, and went round shaking hands. “The Brilliant Miracle Success Investment Company will join an important exchange company.”

“We shut down?”

“Temporarily!” HC boomed, reaching for hands to shake. The employees seemed reluctant and drifted to their desks. “Only temporary, until the merger is signed! Definitely.”

Alice was in tears. Elise looked drawn. Charmian was searching faces for hope, quite lost. She caught KwayFay’s eye but quickly searched on. She’d seen HC speak to her.

“Now we have rest day!” HC was exclaiming, trying to grab hands, a politician working a vanished
constituency
.

Telephones were ringing. No one answered.

People began to take things from their desks. HC was having a hard time finding hands now. He ignored KwayFay, still seated at her improvised work station.

“There will be no job losses!” he cried. “I promise! We work better than ever!”

A few paused, the rest gathered up their drink flasks, always a bad sign.

The office emptied as HC returned beyond the glass door. KwayFay worked on amid ringing telephones as people left. Charmian, bemused into reflex, got out the vacuum cleaner and began to hoover the carpet as if at the end of a long day. KwayFay closed down her laptop and told Charmian the
bahsi
had decided to shut the office.

“What will I do, Little Sister?”

“I shall try to see you get a job somewhere else.”

“You have mirror eye, Little Sister. I starve?”

“No. You will not.”

The woman put away her cleaning implements. KwayFay watched her leave, hearing the wobbling lifts
crash and whine their way down to the ground floor. KwayFay looked round. She heard a door close along the corridor. The next set of rooms was a laboratory, the Health Victory Eternal laboratory, always on the go, wafting gusts of heat onto the staircase, the staff
grabbing
all the elevators at midday. For a moment she thought of going there to ask for a job but she knew nothing about medicine, and diseases frightened her. She went towards the office. Perhaps HC had some influence with the cruel fat man who had trapped the frail Tiger Wong.

HC, she saw, was standing by the windows looking out. No jingling of money, no nervy humming or
tapping
fingers on the glass. She drew breath.

“Ho
Sin-Sang
?”

He did not even turn. “Little Sister. I told you to leave.”

“The old gentleman. Please can’t you help him?”

Now he did look round, astonishment making his features almost recover to normal.

“Me? Help him? You mean …?”

“Yes.” A sense of disorder took her, images and miniature visions cascading across her mind in a torrent, sights so fleeting she could not find any sense in them. “Please.”

He barked a laugh, so incongruous she stepped back in alarm. “For all your mirror sight, KwayFay, you are a stupid bitch.”

“I will see money dreams for the cruel fat man,” she offered. She had nothing else. Even suggesting this she was in the wrong and would catch it from Ghost Grandmother, but what could she do? “I offer to guess
his money in …”

In what? She didn’t know in what, or how to see ahead for somebody else. In fact, she didn’t know how to see ahead for herself, let alone hostage-takers. “In dollar stocks,” she proffered lamely.

“Go home.” He went back to staring out of the
window
. “This building is tall, isn’t it?”

“It is tall,” she answered, wondering.

Was he going to effect the merger, then bid for rooms on the eighth floor, the luckiest place in Princes Building? It had lucky
Fhung Seui,
wind and water
combined
to please the flying dragons who, destined to seek sea water daily, you dared not impede. She hoped so, though he would need monks to exorcise the place before such a move, at a cost of at least HK$ 8,000,
doubled
if he wanted good priests, because some were unlucky.

“Go home, KwayFay.”

“
Joy geen,
goodbye.” She retreated enveloped in a curious sadness.

She stopped in the Ladies to wash one last time. It was halfway down the office. She was quiet in there. She heard voices outside. They were already well into abuse when she finally emerged and stood wondering at the feeling of menace.

The fat man Ah Min’s bulk shadowed HC’s doorway, his back towards her. She moved to see into the room. Two of the threat-men stood by, one of them the tall man she’d given the money. She saw the colour of the room as if newly painted, a kind of horrid magenta and orange combined, sickly and necrotic. She detected a stench. The place seemed to be rotting, worse even than
anything in Central Market after the night abattoirs had been working. She wanted to run.

“…intolerable losses,” the fat man was saying in his beam-sieved whine. “You can repay,
a
?”

“It is difficult.” HC had to swallow to get words out.

“For me, difficult! For you …?”

“I shall know, when my wife …”

“Your wife?” the fat man prompted. “She has the money you borrowed?” He chuckled. He already knew.

“She will win money tonight in Happy Valley. She will bring home a fortune.”

“What money does she gamble with?”

“She borrowed on my firm.”

The fat man did not wait for HC’s answer. “Your wife will win nothing. You repay our money.”

“No. Tonight …”

“Tonight nothing.”

KwayFay could no longer stand the terrible odour and colours. Her senses were overwhelmed. She turned away, frightened lest they punish her too. It was death, the hues and stink of death. She had to leave. She had made promises, so many promises. How now to save Old Man Tiger Wong?

The whole office was empty. She tiptoed to the lifts. Oddly, the laboratory section outside, beyond the fronded plants and the poinsettias, was also silent. The lights were off, the doors locked. Had everyone gone from here too? Beyond, the two chairs for patients were vacant. She became even more frightened. It was as if the whole building was empty except for HC’s horrid
mis-coloured
office. Even the lifts had stopped working.

“Little Sister,” a voice said, so close she almost leapt.

Old Man was seated there in his
cheong saam
and leather sandals.

Outside, she could hear traffic still faintly roaring, the Happy Valley and Shau Kei Wan trams clanging and whirring. Yet it was as if the whole world was more wary than before, complicitors everywhere, while she remained in ignorance. What was coming?