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Chief Inspector Standing, greying, wired, a little too well dressed, one of the few gweilos left in the Hong Kong police force stood before the old Chinese man, who for obvious reasons, he knew as “The Blind Man.” Beside him was his friend, Lee Qu, a little powerhouse of a man known for his ability as a fortune teller, a talent that had failed him that day. 

“It will make you rich,” said the blind man, “A retirement fund. You just make a meeting. Use the tools you are given. Kill this target of no consequence to you or we destroy you. This service to us, is the punishment for your crime.” 

Chief Inspector Standing’s crime was what? A wasted life, an indifferent life, without love, without anything other than the daily stripping away of everything he thought he ever stood for, a life without any achievement other than sucking his way up to Chief Inspector? What was his crime? It did not matter. The only crime there ever was, was not getting away with it but he could still feel his rage mounting.

He looked around the room at all the witnesses to this. They were “the brothers,” as they liked to be known, dressed in their red silk pyjamas, mopping the sweat from their red pudgy faces. They formed a cordon around the Inspector. There was no escape. Many years before, the brothers would have been youngsters on the fringes of the Triad, skilled in nothing much more than looking fearsome and wielding choppers and knives when called upon. 

“Blood needs to be spilt!” declared Chief Inspector Standing.

“Hou!” grunted all the Cantonese speaking brothers in approval, “Hou! Hou!” 

The Blind Man cocked his head to one side. The Chief Inspector sensed the approval. Blood did need to be spilt. That was their way of sealing a bargain and showing that everything had been understood. Blood needed to be spilt!

Lee Qu, officiating at the ritual, handed the Chief Inspector a long knife, drawn slowly from a sheath hanging in a rack beside the altar to Guan Yu, the God of War, Policemen, and because he did not go cross eyed reading a whole page of Confucius, the God of literature as well, a butcher’s rack of implements that was always there for these occasions. 

“This is the right way,” said Lee Qu, “You’ve learnt.”

“I have,” said Chief Inspector Standing, “I’ve listened hard over the years and learnt as much as I can at your feet.”

Lee Qu, the master, stood proud. His protégé had finally become useful. No longer merely a fixer of parking tickets, no longer a source of information about who was running which investigation, and which judge could be counted upon. No longer merely a man who gave one an edge over the rivals. The Chief Inspector had come of age and after a lifetime of indulgence, now would make the final payment, and take the final risk. If he got away with it, he would be free.

Chief Inspector Standing quickly grabbed the blind man and fish hooked his mouth with his bony fingers. The blind man astounded, struggled feebly as the Chief Inspector reached in his hand, grasped the tongue with his thumb and forefinger and sliced across the flap. The tongue instantly came away with little blood, a pathetic lump of meat, and the blind man, now gasping and choking fell to his knees. Lee Qu and the brothers stared at the Chief Inspector, astounded by the act. This was not supposed to happen. This was not what he was meant to do.

Then the Chief Inspector drew the knife across the palm of his hand and slapped the blind man across the face sending him sprawling before the altar. He held up his hand to show that their blood had mingled.

“We’re brothers!” he announced.

He had gone gweilo, as the Chief Inspector called sudden outbursts of intolerance, but the Chief Inspector knew that he had given everyone face and that was all that mattered. And the brothers led the blind man away: a surprising sacrifice. He would be dismembered and scattered as tradition demanded, each piece to each association, as a sign that among them was now another man who was bound by no laws, a man with no home, a man who could not turn back and so, the one in whose mental drama they all would willingly play their roles. And he too would unknowingly call upon his own assassin one day.

“We are one,” declared Lee Qu, his voice quivering, “The past is gone and we will have our future!”

“And what’s that going to be?” asked Chief Inspector Standing wiping the blood from his hands upon the altar cloth.

“It is written in our past,” replied Lee Qu. “We are but the weapons of our ancestors and they are past shame.”

 

***

 

Earlier that week the Chief Inspector had arrived at a crime scene. It had been a shambles. He had smiled, mustered his police Cantonese, had a few words with the scene of crime officers and discovered nobody was doing much. Everyone was sat around with their lunchboxes eating their noodles, chatting, smoking, and making wild speculations about how the headless skeleton arrived on the roof of the Hui Xun Building. It must have been naked, they scoffed, naked and without a head! Surely, someone would have noticed it climbing up the service staircase like that? But they reckoned it was years ago and so an incident hardly worth pursuing. 

“Hardly worth pursuing!” blustered the Chief Inspector, going gweilo on them, “This was someone’s son or daughter! This was someone’s lover! This was someone who might have contributed to society and you tell me it is not worth pursuing?”

Chief Inspector Standing started blustering about treating the crime scene with respect, about gathering all the evidence, taking photographs, picking over every single speck of dust, and submitting it to laboratory analysis. Then he went on about plain old plod work gathering information as to who was in the building, who regularly had access to the area, and what sort of staff turnover was there? Some one, somewhere, some time would have heard or seen some thing! Then he regained control. He had been allowing himself to go shamelessly gweilo recently. After years of control, his imminent retirement reduced his desire to repress it. 

He was on the brink of a nice pension and a respected place in society for a lifetime of service under colonial and Chinese rule. He should have been Commander! He should have been up for a knighthood! He should have gone a lot further! To say that Chief Inspector Standing resented his situation was an understatement but it was just his luck that one-country two-systems, the slogan of the handover, had not quite meant the old colonial government being left to its own devices. A throw back to colonialism he might well be, but he had his plan: one last great bust before retirement just to show them what they were missing! The clock was ticking and so to speed things on he would solve this case, the old-fashioned gweilo way, without the tiresome need to manoeuvre his way around the new order. He would talk to his snout.

“I’ve got something for you,” he said to Lee Qu. “Headless. Stuffed behind an airconditioner on a roof. Was put there recently. Very little soft tissue. Probably boiled off or picked over by animals. Unlikely that DNA will pull up anything at all. And I want it all sorted out before the plug’s pulled on me.” 

Lee Qu had been an old friend from when the Chief Inspector first arrived in Hong Kong. Years ago, gun at his side, strolling the vegetable and gut strewn passages between the wet market stalls, smelling the ordure, high on the clatter of Cantonese haggling, he had felt himself to be a great adventurer. He had also felt ashamed of his ignorance and had genuinely worried about how to police and be fair under the circumstances. Somehow he had to be one of them, and Lee Qu had offered to be his guide into this world. He knew things; he was a fortune-teller with a stall in Temple Street. He not only told fortunes but acted as a post office for special packages of a certain white powder. The Chief Inspector had never quite worked out whether he would have been better off arresting him, but he had been advised that if he wanted to survive in Hong Kong he had better find someone to help him; in those days a policeman was only as good as his informer and Lee Qu became his prime source of information about the underworld. 

“I think someone is sending a message to someone,” said Lee Qu.

“In what sense?”

“Why did someone look on the roof and look behind the air conditioner?”

“Because the air conditioner broke down.”

“Not a coincidence! Someone wanted the skeleton found. It was not being hidden. It was being revealed.”

“Who to?”

“Someone who would hear of its existence.”

This was the sort of fortune-teller reply half of his conversations with Lee Qu ended in. But there was some sense in what he said. A message was being sent. Someone would know whom the skeleton belonged to. And someone would feel a gun was being pointed at their head. Maybe there was a connection with a public figure? The Chief Inspector hoped so. A demonstration of impartial justice was just the ticket to leave his image pure and clean, a truly British sort of legacy.

As expected, the crime scene yielded no clues. The discovery sequence went thus: the air conditioner broke and eventually was noticed; the engineer finally went to repair the machine, found the skeleton, phoned the police, went home for lunch. There were no prints, no weapons, no pieces of clothing, nothing to identify the skeleton other than the medical officer’s supposition that it was female, probably about twenty-five years old, and maybe dead for quite some time, and that was it. It looked like the case would be filed away, though the Chief Inspector was expected to field any press enquiries with the usual anodyne statements that investigations were under way and that foul play was not ruled out.

It was a mystery, but he scoured the newspapers, convinced that this old crime had some contemporaneous connections. He had his secretary clip and translate things from the Chinese language press that smacked of scandal. There were kidnappings and tragedies, but he could not see the sort of thing that would produce a message of this nature. Looking through the files of missing persons he could see many potential victims. Fillipina maids arrived in Hong Kong and disappeared without their families knowing where. Perhaps they just ran away? Or perhaps, as their families always thought, something terrible had happened and that their employer had fed them to the dog. Backpackers, Indian brides, and an abnormal number of mentally ill women disappeared over the years, but nothing leapt out at him. The dates seemed wrong. The sort of person seemed wrong. The message that could be sent seemed wrong. And he only had another day to work it all out. After that, life would be pointless: a bungalow in Brisbane or a shotgun under the chin, both had their charms. If he solved the crime, he thought he would take the bungalow. If not, then it would be the shotgun. That seemed fair.

As on many previous occasions, Chief Inspector Standing climbed into Lee Qu’s Mercedes, big and stately, a car for gliding among the crowded over-busy streets and making believe all was opulence, pleasure, and calm and nothing unrespectable was taking place. The locks clunked solidly and the seat belt effortlessly slipped into place. Chief Inspector Standing made himself comfortable.

“You’re wrong about this message,” he told Lee Qu. “This is merely house clearing. Someone had an old body lying around and wanted to get rid of it.”

“No,” said Lee Qu. “Why just strip it clean? Why not grind it to powder? Why not break it up entirely?”

“It’s a skeleton used by a Chinese Medicine Man! It’s been bought illegally and it’s made up of boiled down Sri Lankan. Costs sixty dollars instead of a thousand. And that’s the crime solved. And I’m the genius that did it.”

“But I think you know the truth.”

Lee Qu and Chief Inspector Standing laughed. They laughed a lot together. They had grown old together. When they first met, Lee Qu had nervously read the Chief Inspector’s palm, expecting to be arrested, and so predicted a great and glorious future for him.  The Chief Inspector had believed him too, after all, lifelines, heart lines, noses and earlobes were all part of us, and so why should they not tell us our character? And why should not our character dictate our destiny? And in Hong Kong it took a very special kind of character, one that could bend with the wind, and accept certain aspects of the local culture that made all too many go intolerantly gweilo.

The Chief Inspector did a little bit of tolerating at his retirement party that evening. The girls, all well paid, well coked, well stacked, oozed whatever it was they perfumed themselves with. Chief Inspector Standing never quite worked out what it was and wished his Filipina wife still stank of it. It was a special smell, a hot sex sort of smell that came after a few drinks, after a few joints. And the Mamasan was all over him, the older woman pimping for the younger, lying to him about what a nice man he was and how she had a nice girl needing a gentle introduction to the craft. He was doing her a great favour. He liked to do these favours.

“Any of your girls disappeared, Mamasan?”

“All my girls disappear sooner or later.”

This was true. They never gave forwarding addresses. They never gave real names. It was a blessing of a sort. You knew that sooner or later they would stop calling you and blow away as if they never existed. That was the pact one made with them. You bought them a drink; you cracked stupid jokes, slapped their bums and grinned in their faces. Two at a time, three at a time, he had had all permutations, all possible pornographic postures and half the time he was too drunk to do anything so he would watch them fake it. Maybe they did not fake it? He did not care. Now and then there were those that he felt a strange paternal concern for. Better that they be with the likes of him than the likes of half the people that would visit them. But he was glad when they were gone and now he was even more certain of what was happening and the shotgun under the chin was looking preferable to the bungalow. He had complained once, perhaps a little too loudly, about a troublesome woman.

“Troublesome women!” he muttered to Lee Qu, steaming in the bathhouse. Always the best way of finishing a night and ridding one of the smell.

“It is always troublesome women,” said Lee Qu, naked and being oiled by a masseuse in a bikini who knew not to ask the question about the full body rub. It was too late. They wanted to relax, forget the game, return home to bed clean and pure. She would get a large tip.

“Who makes them go away?” asked the Chief Inspector. “Someone might have failed to pay the price…”

“Yes.”

“But this is a very old message. And a very old debt surely forgotten?”

In the stupor of the massage, the Chief Inspector pondered the nature of crime. He wondered how slowly did some one have to be killed for it not to be murder? If someone slipped strychnine into his sandwich then the sudden onslaught on his system would be attempted murder at the very least, but if someone slipped in some extra high fat mayonnaise repeatedly until obesity killed him, who was the culprit then? Slow down a crime and somehow it is not a crime. Take a cent a year, and who cares? A little favour here, a little favour there, and where is the corruption? Or let slip a few small misdemeanours in order to catch a bigger fish, and you become a hero rather than an accomplice. And doesn’t everyone reap rewards from others’ unknown crimes? And they accumulate no guilt, even when the crimes are discovered. They call that discovery, history, and it had sent him a message. 

“Who needs to do the next generation a favour?” he asked Lee Qu. “Who is calling in all the debts, absorbing the crimes, and passing on the power and wealth derived from the crime to the next generation? What old man will take responsibility for a crime so that others can get off scot free with all the rewards?”

Lee Qu and the Chief Inspector laughed. They knew the answer all along. The answer was always the same. Everything they had in Hong Kong had derived from the one source and they knew he would take their soul in return.

“Do you really want to see him?”

“Yes. I think now would be a good time to see the blind man. Because he’ll see me whether I want him to or not.”

“You could walk away free. Or dead… Or neither.”

“I won’t say my goodbyes though. I never say goodbye.”

 

***

 

The Mercedes glided through the gates of the underground car park, past the yellow and black stripes of bollards battered and bent by careless drivers. The concrete depths, hot as hell, had plastic coated concrete floors that squealed like pigs in an abattoir as the tyres rolled over them. Here in the subdued light, stinking of exhaust fumes, un-airconditioned, the blind man’s organisation had its office. It disguised itself as a car wash though nobody ever saw a car being washed by these men. They sat in the glass booth, watching TV, picking their teeth, gnawing on chicken bones.

Chief Inspector Standing knew the men by sight but not by name. He merely acknowledged them and let Lee Qu shake their hands. The Chief Inspector often affected ignorance of Cantonese, which in this case was largely true for they spoke in their own special code impenetrable even to themselves as misunderstandings among this crowd often led to severed limbs and bodies bleeding to death in crowded places. Nobody noticed of course. That was how headless corpses could find their way through crowded streets, up busy stairs, to tops of buildings.

Lee Qu and the Chief Inspector went through the office in through the metal doors at the back, built with metal wheels and great bolts to hold back fires or strangers, whichever came first. Stepping across the metal threshold, Chief Inspector Standing was in the corridor leading down towards the heady pounding machinery that pumped the water, pumped the juice into the shopping mall above them. The rest of humanity lived in the skin whereas Lee Qu and the Chief Inspector lived in the bowels.

These visits to the blind man always put a demonic cast of mind upon the Chief Inspector. Sliced, diced, thriced, cut to the bone, then boned and still aware, he recited to himself the punishments that greeted those who fell foul of the Triad’s elaborate faith in the right of might. The guilty transgressor would be taken to task in the dark to the sound of thrashing metal, rumbling drums. As he walked he could hear the music of hell: The Bomb! The Gun! The War! The Poor! The School! The drains! Late trains! Lame brains! And the chorus, howled by off key sneering harpies: This is the way the world works! This is the way the world works! The younger Triads had abandoned their Cantonese Opera for the Gangsta Rap of LA.

With Lee Qu beside him he knew no harm would befall him, merely another compromise. Was he willing to pay the price? In return for Hong Kong, a city created by drug smugglers, you paid the price.

He heard a toilet flush way above him and he could hear the contents hurtling down through the pipes. He looked up and thought how appropriate. Then he arrived. A door was flung open, Lee Qu ushered him through and there in the grey room, lit with hazy carelessness by neon lights screwed to the concrete walls, was Guan Yu’s altar.

There were a few battered red hassocks for kneeling on and the ashy stench of old incense, reddened the eyes. The harvest festivals of Chief Inspector Standing’s home village church were never far from his mind whenever he saw these shrines ladened with their slabs of meat, mouldering fruits, and burnt out joss sticks. It was a long time ago, a long way away, and here it was almost a parody. Or perhaps it was the Home Counties version that was the parody?

Chief Inspector Standing turned around to acknowledge a blind old man, a squint for a face, being led in by several brothers, their faces red with heat, dripping as they mopped themselves with the sleeves of their silk pyjamas. After all these years, where Lee Qu fitted in the hierarchy, the Chief Inspector did not really understand. Perhaps he was the only one who knew the ceremonies and traditions that made them think that they were more than a bunch of thugs but rather patriots? Perhaps he was the real boss and the Blind Man merely a figurehead?

The old blind man, thin, dressed poorly, his fingernails well kept and polished, calmly sat on a chair brought to him and crossed his legs and listened as Lee Qu announced, as he had on many occasions, the presence of the famous detective. The flattering irony of the Chinese always made Chief Inspector Standing nervous.

“I was wondering,” began the Chief Inspector, “about bothersome women.”

Alarmingly the old man reached up and felt his face. His hands smelt of chicken and cigarettes.

“It’s alright,” said Lee Qu, “He just wants to make sure you are who you are.”

“Sometimes I’m not sure of that myself,” said the Chief Inspector.

“So you go that restaurant?” asked the old man, his Cantonese strange and difficult for the Chief Inspector. 

“What restaurant are we talking about?”

“One of the many problems I solve for you. Remember the table you booked, how it already been used. You already eat and pay bill. You in a hurry. You check your credit card; got cable subscriptions; clubs you belong to that you never attend. The amounts mount up. Someone else using your account.Then it stop. Before it get too much. Before you get really into problem.”

Chief Inspector Standing listened to the monologue. He thought he understood and then thought perhaps he did not but was merely guessing its meaning. Trying to deal with anything in Cantonese was always fraught with this problem. But he recently had had a dining reservation usurped by someone else. And there were strange anomalies on his credit card that he thought for a moment meant another was using his number, but then, it stopped and he forgot about it. These things happened all the time in Hong Kong: a little glitch in the bank account, a little extra off the credit card, a square metre less than the lease stipulated, a little give on the taxi’s receipt.

“I’m not here about Credit Card fraud,” said the Chief Inspector.

“I thought you were here to thank me for stopping them robbing you?”

The Chief Inspector tried to ignore him.

“That’s not what I’m here for.”

“Huh! Lucky we look after you. Lucky we know everything.”

“Very lucky. But I’m on more important business.”

“Let’s reminisce a little,” said the old man, “Was it fifteen year ago?”

The old man grinned and grasped Chief Inspector Standing’s hand.

“You in love with that woman you found in bar,” he whispered. “One day you were there with the girl, who had the child. Was it yours? Looked like yours. But you would not pay for that girl’s child!”

“He’s done you many favours,” whispered Lee Qu. “Stopped many scandals. Protected your family.”

The Chief Inspector and Lee Qu laughed.

“As always,” said the Chief Inspector, “You know everything but never quite tell me everything.”

“You know how it works,” said Lee Qu, “You only need to know what you need to know.”

There had been a girl in Chief Inspector Standing’s life, or several, beside his Filipina wife, but there was that one who wanted to live rent-free in one of the many apartments he hoped would provide him with a comfortable retirement. She had threatened to tell his wife and then, strangely, he never heard from her again and hoped he never would. Now it seemed that he had.

The Chief Inspector began looking for the exit. The incense smoke thickened. And in the reddish glow, the smoky haze, Lee Qu no longer looked like his old friend, but more the enemy he always knew him to be, the man who introduced the girls, the man who helped supply them with whatever they needed, the man who knew his weaknesses.

“Our bodies,” continued the blind man, “dug from shallow graves after our murders, have teeth to give away our identity. And they will tell their tale.”

The blind man smiled and showed that he had no teeth in his head.

“We have more!” he announced. “Her hair. So nice. Her ears. So beautiful. And her eyes. You look into her eyes?”

The God of Hell, eyes red, blazing with justice, fumed before the Chief Inspector, finger pointing and reaching for the judgement stick. He would hurl it any minute and have the Chief Inspector spread over the guillotine and sliced in two. His fingers would be removed; his tongue; his ears; his legs and arms would be hacked off. Every part of him would be scattered to the corners of all creation, bringing fortune or frightening the monkeys, he did not know which. He looked for the exit but in Hell there was nowhere for him to go.

“He has the skull,” added Lee Qu, “He solved your problem. No-one need know anything unless he say so and he wants you to be very grateful, for now is the time for you to make your final payment for your final reward.”

“Final reward?” blurted out the Chief Inspector, “What rewards have I had?”

“You know what rewards.”

Lee Qu had once told him, “You will have great power and authority over the lives of many. Use this power wisely and you will be remembered well.”

The recollection made him boil. He had had little power, though what he had he thought he used wisely. He had done no wrong, merely made a few mistakes. And the problems had gone away. He did not know why or how, but he was glad of it. But now, here was a problem that was back! A pang of regret passed over him. But there was nothing that could be held against him for doing what anyone else would have done, and not returned the phone call of an over-demanding woman! That was not murder! Not understanding the messages that had been left was no crime! Being ignorant of others interfering in his private life was… He did not know what that was! It certainly did not oblige him to anyone. And then, as the Blind Man ordered a murder at his command, imagining the gun beneath his own chin, he went gweilo!

“Blood needs to be spilt!”

“Hou!” grunted all the brothers in approval, “Hou! Hou!”

The knife! The tongue! The blood! This is the way his world worked!

 

***

 

The deed was done and the blind man was dragged away and Lee Qu stared into Chief Inspector Standing’s eyes, as he had all those years before and grinned.

“I see a great future for us all. A great future! Justice is the crime, and always has been. And we are the only people who really understand. We are the judges and now we will judge.”

The world was renewed, the contract signed; Chief Inspector Standing had with blood taken the final step. He emerged from the darkness into the light, walking and wondering who had done this, who had led him to this, and why? But now, he had an army with him, and all he need do was to say the word and from where he was, from where he stood beyond recognition, beyond being known, or found out, he could see that he had achieved his future. What would be the next stage he did not know, what would be the future, he had no idea, but the past was now erased. He was where he was and this was what he was. He had paid his dues and now there was nothing else but to reap the harvest.

Below the shopping malls, outside the air conditioning, deep in the drains, in the warehouses, in the sweatshops and brothels, the base of the pyramid would be firmly ruled so that all others could live in harmony. It had been a long education, a long removal of restraints, for now he was one with the brotherhood. He felt proud as he ordered the skeleton from behind the air-conditioner to be accidentally incinerated in a mysterious fire that would take place at midnight in the morgue. No one ever performed a crime that did not exist, and he decreed what existed or not.

 

THE END