Black heart, p.40
Black Heart, page 40
'Oh?'
He smiled. 'I've gotten all the information I can out of it.'
'What kind of information?' Khieu said casually. 'Is it anything I may be able to use?'
The old man put his arm around Khieu's strong shoulders as he led him down the long foyer hallway. 'Possibly. Just possibly. But Tracy's already running down the lead.'
Khieu's eyes caught Lauren's and that same sense of personal danger to her rose again within him, more powerful this time. For just an instant, he was frantic, seeking the knowledge of its origins.
With a wrenching effort, he brought his attention back into the proper focus. 'Tracy will soon tell me where he's gone.'
The old man laughed. 'Not likely.' He enjoyed having the edge on this man who he had heard so much about. He was feeling good. Energy flowed through him like electricity and for that moment he was whole again, thoughts of the disease slowly eating its way through him dissolved in the happiness and well-being of being born again. He opened the front door for the man he knew as Kim. 'He's already on his way to see Mizo.' So it was a breach of security. So what? He was drunk on the energy flow; he wanted this man to understand that he, Louis Richter, had the information at his fingertips. And how d'you like that, my dear Kim? he said silently, jubilantly.
Khieu almost stumbled over the doorsill. His stomach heaved
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precariously, sending bitter bile up into his mouth. In a. daze, he turned, shook the old man's outstretched hand. Ah, he thought, Mio. Buddha protect me.
'Be sure to give the Director my regards... and thanks.'
'Yes,' Khieu said mechanically, 'I will.'
It all seemed to be slipping away from him; the entire fabric of the angka his father and he had worked so hard and long to weave. One tiny rent now tearing at speed away from him. He must stop it immediately before it got too big for him to handle.
His gaze slid across Louis Richter's smiling face, to light on Lauren standing halfway in shadow in the foyer hallway. She seemed to be staring at him unflinchingly now as if she felt that with her gaze alone she could flay away his skin and flesh, burrowing into the dread secret locked away like a pale and sightless worm within the marrow of his bones.
Then he had recovered fully. All fear fled him as, silently he recited the prayers of centrism. Feeling returned to his legs, his stomach quieted. He was whole again. Free of fear; free of malice. His mind was perfectly clear. All emotion had been leached away. Free of its interfering dazzle, his resolve returned stronger than ever.
With a flash of insight he recalled the astrological chart he had cast. That moving flux a hidden force, powerful and deadly. Tracy Richter? He must find out. If it was Richter, he'd have to deal with him. But he must say nothing to his father, taking matters into his own hands, seeking only his own council.
And he looked at them both as if for the last time.
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BOOK THREE
The Angka
AugustSeptember, Present
Hong Kong/Stung Treng/Kenilworthj
New YorkfCambodia/Shanghai
It was already Wednesday for Tracy, flying thirty thousand feet in the skies, high over the Pacific. Twenty-five hundred kilometres after crossing the International Date Line, leaving Midway Island far behind them, the 747 ran into a storm filled with blue fire and precipitous air currents as it slid across the Tropic of Cancer.
There had been nothing to see out the window but a sea so far away that it appeared to be a sheet of glass. Once the black silhouette of the freighter was out of sight, there was nothing but a curving horizon, blackening as night swept in more swiftly than it ever could have on the surface.
The plane jumped and dived like an elevator with its cord being controlled by teenage hooligans. Passengers moaned, refusing their fresh shrimp appetizers, preferring to reach for the white paper bags discreetly secreted in the pouch of the seat back in front of them.
Staring out the Perspex window at the shuddering drops of rain holding on for dear life, Tracy thought of the clouds beyond; clouds of the Far East.
He had jumped into those clouds just once, the wind rushing in his ears like sirens, the air split with the sound of gargantuan engines and the misty ground, filled with the new dangers of tangled treetops, coming up faster than he could have imagined.
Then the fierce but reassuring tug of his chute opening and he began drifting over southeastern Cambodia, breaking the heavy cloud cover into a light so perfectly pellucid it took his breath away. For just that instant the war, the killing, the mission itself, passed from the realm of existence and he was
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merely a tourist regretting the stupendous blunder of leaving his
camera at home.
Then he was among the first of the treetops, pulling strings like a master puppeteer just as they had taught him, manoeuvring himself towards the small clearing ahead and to his right. Around him, the four men comprising his unit used the air currents, following him in.
An early mission, that had been the only time Tracy had used a chute, preferring copter transportation because it was more precise and gave him better protection until he could melt into ground cover. It had been the time he had been asked by the organization to use strict Special Forces personnel in infiltrating a specific Khmer Rouge encampment. Snoop around, they had told him. We're getting reports that a renegade Japanese is working with them. If so, we have to know about it. Tracy had wanted to know why all the fuss. What was one Japanese to the foundation?
The man is purported to be Musashi Murano, they had told him, and if so he cannot be allowed to function for the insurgents. He is a self-styled martial arts master. If he's there, he's teaching them more than we want them to know. Mother, they had warned him, he is a very dangerous man, indeed. Take him out with a fusillade and make certain. Under no circumstances are you or one of your team to approach him one-on-one, hand-to-hand. He'll eat you up alive. Is that clear? It was very clear.
The mission had not been a total failure. They had, after perhaps ten days - as usual, information was snafued and he had been given the wrong encampment - they had come to the right place, arriving just in time for a funeral of considerable pomp and circumstance. That in itself was unusual and Tracy had ambushed a Khmer Rouge, bringing him back to base camp, working on him for more than half a day before he got what
he wanted.
Musashi Murano had indeed been at this camp - as he had been at others over the past two years. Here he had stayed for perhaps eight months, training the Khmer Rouge and Viet Cong in what he knew best: unarmed combat, infiltration and assassination using small-bladed weapons. Tracy did not like the
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sound of that. It reminded him too much of one training session at the Mines. Ninjutsu was only something they had talked about, giving broad outlines because not even Jinsoku had fathomed its secrets. Though he had joked about it, saying, 'There are so many sub-disciplines of the martial arts. How can you expect me to have mastered them all? That is not the Way,' Tracy had been certain he had seen a sliver of fear distort the sensei's face for just an instant, a wisp of gauzy cloud passing before the face of the moon.
However, all that speculation came to naught, for the stricken Cambodian revealed that the funeral had been for this same Musashi who had recently perished from malaria, drugs being unavailable in the jungle. Sjo that threat was at an end. But still, Tracy had been cautious. Because his services were needed elsewhere, he withdrew all but one of the Special Services team, a hard-as-nails individual who did not mind being on his own. Tracy set him in place for two weeks just to make certain of Murano's death. He had always been a man to doublecheck every story he picked up in Southeast Asia. He had found, through bitter experience, that tales seemed to be automatically distorted in the leaden atmosphere so unutterably alien to the Westerner.
The 747SP banked crisply and he craned his neck to catch a glimpse of the magnificant sight of Hong Kong, divided by Victoria Bay, as they began their descent.
Bright towers shot from bedrock, climbing in layer upon layer up the steep peaks. Beyond the thick cluster of the Central District on Hong Kong Island, Tracy say the white shoots of the Mid-Levels, groups of high-rise housing sprouting like a forest of bamboo from the slopes of Victoria Peak.
Tracy debarked from the jet liner's air conditioning to the debilitating heat and humidity. A mini-bus was waiting for them, to ferry them to the terminal proper. During the fiveminute ride, his thin shirt managed to plaster itself to his damp back. His lungs already felt saturated with moisture.
Kai Tak Airport was on the China coast, the Kowloon side of Hong Kong. The first time Tracy had been here on leave during the war, he had been told that Kowloon, freely translated
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from the Chinese, meant 'Nine Dragons', referring to the nine hills on which this part of the city had been built. Since then he had learned to speak not only Cantonese, which was the prevalent language here, but also Mandarin, the official language of China per se, and the odd Tanka dialect which seemed dissimilar
to both tongues.
He passed through Immigration, waited by the creaking carousel for his bags. Customs was no problem at all; they looked at nothing, merely waved him through.
The Princess was one of the oldest hotels in Hong Kong. It was also the best run. In the manner of the Colonial days, it had the feel of the old Empire in its groined and mullioned lobby ceiling, the great width of all its doors which were half again as wide as the typical American one, in the splendour of its thickwalled, wood-panelled rooms and marbled baths.
Though other, more modern and to many an American, more splendid hotels had sprung up over the years, it was to the Princess he would always come. He took a quick shower and, changed into loose, light clothing more suitable to the environment, ventured out.
The Princess had been built in a superb location sixty-odd years ago and, though Hong Kong had been frantically expanding in the interim, it was just as well situated now. Overlooking the bay and Hong Kong Island, it had been, when new just a stone's throw from the railway station. Since then, of course, a new station had been erected to the northwest. Now that old husk with its famed clock tower had been turned into the Star Ferry terminal, the Princess was within walking distance of the city's major public carrier.
After twenty-four hours travelling time and a time difference of eleven hours, he felt lightheaded, his inner clock struggling
to adjust.
The short walk helped a bit. Crimson doubledecker buses zipped by him, jammed to the windows. He passed the massive structure of Ocean Terminal with its seemingly limitless arcade: filled with countless shops selling antiques, jewellery, fabrics food, watches and electronics. Just as Las Vegas was built on th< concept of non-stop gambling, so this city ran on non-sto] buying and selling.
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He got change of the HK dollars by buying a Chinese newspaper at the terminal. He paid his forty cents, went through the second-class turnstile. He needed to seep in, to return to the sights, smells and sounds to the Asian shore. He needed to be with the Chinese. Up above, on the Evening Star's first-class deck, the tourists and businessmen sat. Here he was that much closer to the filthy oily water and the real residents of the city.
At the rail he shed thoughts of New York, Washington, of Western impatience. A fisherman in a small boat poled across the bay, staring blindly out across the expanse.
And Tracy, in the middle of Victoria Bay, with the jam of Kowloon behind him, where two-and-a-half-million people resided, with the steeply layered skyscraper-festooned cityscape of Hong Kong Island in front of him, felt alive again. A profound sense of peace drifted over him like a languorous tide. The fingered high-rises were pink in the setting sun, hazed like a master photographer's fine print.
Perhaps, he thought, it was a question of time. History itself had no real function here because the Colony was such a cornplex interweaving of Eastern and Western cultures reacting and resounding one upon the other. Here, there could not be the one without the other. But, oddly, the commingling had not produced anything new, merely a humpbacked hybrid which belonged to neither world yet was an integral part of both. It was as if Hong Kong had become by unspoken tacit agreement a crossroads trading territory, a no man's land full of pleasure and disarray, housing beauties and sharks without discrimination.
Just over eighteen-hundred-foot Victoria Peak loomed up behind the light-smeared towers' faces, like the forbidding backdrop of a doom-laden play. To starboard, Tracy could see the swaybacked outline of Stonecutter's Island, a nineteenth-century prison. Hidden just beyond to the west, he knew, lay the sunken remains of the burnt-out Queen Elizabeth, sunk in 1972. But further south, it was impossible to miss the enormous bulk of a US aircraft carrier, anchored out in the deep water channel just north of the Green Island lighthouse.
Hong Kong was approaching fast and Tracy moved down the rail to where a cluster of Chinese were shouting at each other in their normal tone of voice. He wanted, before he set foot on
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the island, to get used to the speed and inflections of the tongue, so difficult to pick up once you've been out of the environment for any length of time.
A duck had just been purchased, he heard, in honour of Uncle Pei's birthday. What a fine time the family was going to have! Tracy moved away, wishing them well in the silence of his mind. Low-slung junks with sails furled against the winds of night wallowed in the small wavelets tossed up by the ferry's lugubrious passing. Mahogany-hulled ketches, brass fittings agleam, conglomerate's launches, low-lying cargo vessels, preparing to be off-loaded, one from Brazil, another from France, a third from England. And always, the ubiquitous police and customs patrol boats. Not a day went by in Hong Kong harbour when at least a score of smuggling pipelines were not at work. That law-enforcement battle was never ending and, more often than not, frustrating for those not on the inside.
The brief gurgling clatter of a wallah-wallah, the water taxis powerful businessmen used during the day in lieu of the Star Ferry and which, after the ferry stopped running at eleven, was the only way back and forth across the bay, interrupted his train of thought. Three brush-haired Japanese sat huddled together in the aft section, discussing price futures and godown rentals.
The ferry slowed and the engine died. There came the creak of thick hemp lacing vertical pilings, the squeak of peeling wood against old tyres strung along the dockside. The soft sensual slap of waves against wood and a brief bump, one, two. Hong Kong.
Up the ramp in the terminal as those making the return journey were let through on the other side. The walls filled with primary-coloured billboards extolling the virtues of Audemars Piguet watches, Daimaru, the Japanese department store, and such diverse films as 'Sex Boat' and 'Shaolin Brothers of Death'. The Central District was criss-crossed with elevated walkways and Tracy used one of these to the far side of Connaught Road Central and down into the heart of the island. He turned up, heading into the old Western District. Every street was lined with shops, every alleyway filled with clothing stalls and, in the lobbies of office buildings more tiny shops tucked away against
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a wall, selling carved plastic for ivory, bogus 'Casio' calculators, used Canon cameras for new.
Everywhere one looked, the commerce of the city was in evidence, turning unwary tricks like a ten-dollar whore.
The scents of the Orient came to him, strong and thick on the humid air: a conglomerate of spices that was impossible to unravel. He paralleled Hollywood Street, where some of the best antique bargains could often be found, moving into the produce district with its streets filled with lines of identical shops all selling dried fish products. Skates, octopus, whole squid, prawns and sea scallops as well as garoupa and carp hung from cords at the open entrances.
Old Chinese women bent, pawing through the barrels and wooden cases of sea food to find proper presents to bring to friends' houses. The stench was unbelievable.
Near Jervois Street he came upon the snake shops. This was not their season. In winter, when the serpents were somnolent and slow from the cold, you could pass along here and pick out a likely candidate, then watch as the proprietor held the thing between thumb and forefinger just behind its jaws while he slit its head. The resultant black bile was squeezed in a thin stream into a cup which was then filled with yellow rice wine. The mixture, it was said by herpetologists, was most healthful.
Slowly, he felt engulfed by the inexorable pull of the city. To his left, the hills and houses of Hong Kong rose steeply in a mixture of concrete and raw earth. Dust laced the air; construction was all around him, everywhere the skeletons of the barnboo frameworks within which chrysalid high-rises were beginning their climb. As he watched, Chinese workers scrambled over them like kids on an oversized jungle gym.
At length, he came upon the restaurant he had been seeking far from the gaudy neon-scented tourist traps of Tsim Sha Tsui. He carried no maps, preferring to rely on memory, rusty but working, getting the island's geography set in his mind again.
Beside the restaurant's entrance, an elderly Chinese lady sat, dressed in traditional black trousers and mandarin-collared blouse. Black sandals were on her scarred feet, a single bangle bracelet on her left arm. She wore the large flat-topped hat
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r
Wlth Us black veil, tied with pink string around her chin that mark<^ her as one of the Hakka, originally from the Northern Secti°n of mainland China, emigrating to the New Territories m** sixteenth century. Below, her placid, lined face stared
* him, only her eyes moving with his passage. Tracy stopped, bent down, said something to her in Cantonese to make her smile.
Kle the restaurant, Tracy was seated amidst the clamour
3nd' fey raising his voice, was able to order. He looked around ?*w he was the only occidental present. He dined on cold ,d^nW chicken, in its pungent yellow rice wine marinade, llo^ed by fish that was brought out raw, cooked at his table by Pacing it on a sizzling hotplate. All washed down by steam« c>
