Bull Running For Girlsl (17 page)

“I have something else, Mr. Molk.” Lian gave him the photo of Man Mo Temple.

Molk’s leather chair squeaked as he leaned forward to take the photo. He looked at it, puzzled.

“I don’t see how this can help. Where did you get it from and why do you think it is connected to your father’s death?”

“It was given to me in the street. We could go there. I think I need someone to go there with me. I can pay.”

“It’s not about the money. You are too young to employ a detective.” Molk sighed. “Okay, look—I’ll go there tomorrow, ask a few questions and look around a little. It’s the best I can do.”

“One more thing, Mr. Molk.”

“Yes.”

“When you go to look for Suki, I am coming with you.”

Molk shook his head. “I can’t take you with me. Give me one good reason why I should.”

“Because I’m afraid, Mr. Molk. I think that the men who took Suki will take me too. I need to be looked after as well.”

Lian explained that there was no one to take care of her, and that her mother would be all right for the next twenty-four hours or so. Reluctantly, Molk agreed to take her with him and before he could ask, Lian held up her passport for him to see.

Molk rang his friend Remmy, who was steadily climbing his way up the ranks in the police force. With every new promotion it was getting harder to get information out of him.

“Remmy, what do you know about the disappearance of Suki Lee, the girl whose father jumped in Sheung Wan.”

“Not much to say, really. I was surprised a Hong Kong girl was taken as that usually happens on the mainland.”

“Do you have any leads at all? A note demanding the ransom was left on a seat in a church. You got nothing from that?”

Remmy seemed hesitant to reply but he owed Molk a few favours and perhaps could be useful to him again. “In my opinion the case was closed too quickly and there was some falling out with the police in Macau. There was some reason to think that is where she was taken. Initially.”

“Initially?”

“China is a big place. She could have been taken anywhere after that. There are plenty of families that would pay for a bride—but to take a Hong Kong girl, that’s unusual. And it would have been easier for them to kidnap a girl from the countryside. Why come to Hong Kong?” Remmy paused, “…there’s another thing.”

“What?”

“In a similar case, but where the parents were rich, the ransom demanded was one million HK dollars. Why would kidnappers only demand twenty-five thousand? Why not chose a really wealthy family? Was she kidnapped for that little amount or kidnapped to sell elsewhere, or both? It doesn’t make sense. Why go to all that trouble?”

“Mmm…I know. Right, thanks anyway, Remmy.” Molk put the phone down. “Well, Lian, it looks like we’ll be going to Macau. It seems to be as good a place as any to start.”

Whilst Lian slept fitfully on the hydrofoil, Molk thought about his own views on life. Evil dwelt in the world, of that Molk was sure. It was all black and white to him though, with no shades of grey. There were those people who would sacrifice life and limb for others: the war heroes, the doctors and nurses whose very lives were threatened giving succour to others. Then there were the thugs who would cut your throat as soon as look you in the eye. There were no grey areas for Molk. His own father had been killed by a vicious psychopath. The psychopaths were all bad. He felt sorry for Lian—he would try harder to find the girl’s sister, harder than on any other case he had worked on before.

Molk began to read the book he’d brought with him.
Film Noir
by Andrew Spencer. He flipped through the first few pages. Molk had always wanted to be a policeman or a detective—ever since he had sneaked his father’s pulp fiction books and read them in the park on the way home from school. He had sat under the ornamental trees in Victoria Park, when it rained or when the heat was too much for him to bear, and he had worked through his father’s collection, one by one. They had taught him about sex (there was always the woman who paid her detective’s fee with sexual favours), and he had watched, many times, movies such as
Double Indemnity
and
A Touch of Evil
. He had fallen in love with the melancholia and disenchantment of the characters in the movies. All the women were stereotypical blondes: double-crossing, beautiful, unreliable—and part of him believed in the stereotype. His girlfriend Xue (the name meant snow in Chinese) had left him for another man, who ran an antique centre in Kowloon. Molk had finished the relationship after a somewhat cold encounter one afternoon on the Star Ferry.

The crossing was short and soon they were on the waterfront in Macau; the gaudy casinos with their façades and designs looking as if they had just come out of a Hollywood backlot, or from Disneyland. Molk hailed a taxi and they went to see the contact that Remmy had finally given him, An Nguyen. Molk politely asked if a female police officer would look after Lian for a short while.

Once she was safely in the hands of the female detective, Molk tackled An Nguyen. He had very little to say to Richard Molk.

“Look here, I know you’ve come a long way but there’s very little to tell. The case went cold and we think that the Yakuza have got hold of her. You know the score with them; nobody, and I mean nobody, messes with them. It’s bad enough to be harassing the Chinese Mafia. But the Japanese too? No way.”

Molk took a deep breath and left the police station. The Yakuza weren’t greatly different from the Chinese gangsters, in that they were both into smuggling, gambling, money laundering, corporate extortion, and sex slavery.

Molk couldn’t, especially with a child, hang around the streets—and so he booked into a hotel for the night, although he felt uncomfortable sharing a room with Lian. But it was a matter of necessity. He had the couch and she the bed. The child was truly afraid that whomever took her sister would come back for her. Molk was going to ensure that didn’t happen.

The next morning came soon enough, with Molk wondering what to do next. It wasn’t until they had breakfast, and he a strong, sugared coffee, that his brain began to function properly.

Once out on the street he picked up a newspaper at a corner stall and read the headlines.

“Cop committed suicide.” The cop in question was An Nguyen, whom he had left in good health the day before. He didn’t seem the kind of guy who would take his own life; quite the contrary in fact, for he seemed to Molk the kind of person pretty keen on staying alive. Nice suit, no sign of neglecting himself.

Molk returned with Lian to the office where he had met An Nguyen a day earlier. A cop was mooching around and had just cleared the desktop. Molk asked to see Nguyen’s superior, with little result, and when the cop left the room to get Lian a cold drink and Molk some coffee, he searched a box that was sitting on top of the empty desk. He found a small notebook amongst some personal possessions and placed it inside his jacket pocket.

The cop returned and handed Lian her drink.

“Thank you,” she said.

Molk drank his coffee and both policemen exchanged a few comments about how Macau had changed over the years. Molk and Lian then left the building. She said little, but instead took his hand and clung to it as if she would never let go.

Once back on the street Molk took the notebook out of his pocket and saw that it was, in fact, a new address book made of smooth leather. He thumbed through it, but there was only one entry: 27 Travessa De S. Domingos. Macau was busy enough to get lost in, but Molk was no tourist. He knew how to get about through the streets, where each twist and turn brought you to houses of a Portuguese or Chinese influence. Once at the right address he rang the bell and the door was opened by a pretty young woman in an ice-blue dress.

“Yes, what do you want?”

The Pinkerton detective was tired and in no mood for a long introduction. “Do you know An Nguyen?”

“Who are you? You’d better come in.” The woman looked surprised to see the child and hear Nguyen’s name mentioned. She seemed anxious to get away from the front door too.

“Why are you here about that person?”

Molk noted the luxurious décor of the apartment whilst Lian made herself comfortable on the couch.

“What’s your name?” said Molk.

In her nervousness she spoke too eagerly. “My name is Lin Young. The person you mentioned, he is someone I was seeing. My brother disapproves of him. My brother and I—we don’t get on very well—we disagree over many things.”

“Have you seen the papers this morning?”

“No. I was up late last night.” Lin tilted her head to one side and her black eyes looked puzzled. “Why?”

Molk had never been one to hang around. He threw the newspaper onto the coffee table so that she could see the front page.

For a moment there was a shocked silence as the headlines sunk in. Choking back the tears, she placed her hand over her mouth and whispered. “An Nguyen—suicide? No—never.”

“I believe he knew something about the disappearance of Suki Lee—have you ever heard of that name?”

She shook her head. She was shaking uncontrollably.

“Look here, I’m sorry to bring you bad news.”

Lin was still shaking a few moments later when he added Suki’s photograph to the newspaper on the table.

She stared at the photo. “I have known for a while that my brother was quite capable of harming An, but I never thought he would go through with it—”

“You know the girl, don’t you?”

“She is a foolish girl who staged her own kidnapping. She wanted money to go away with some boy somewhere, and then she fell into the hands of my brother. He has no honour. He used to sell drugs, and now he sells anything.”

“Including girls?”

Lin nodded and started crying again.

“Do you know where my sister is?” Lian asked her. “Will you help me find her?”

At that moment Molk heard a door open in another room. He placed one hand inside his jacket and frowned at Lin. A girl came into the room, dressed in a kimono covered with gold dragons. She took a few feeble steps and Molk had to rush to steady her.

“Suki!” Lian stood up and ran over to her sister. She threw her arms around Suki and nearly knocked her over.

Suki looked as if she were fighting off the effects of some drug or other. Molk sat her down on a chair and turned to Lin, waiting for an explanation.

“My brother is working with the Yakuza, trading young girls between countries. There is much money to be made. But for some crazy reason Suki has not been passed along. Chen has taken quite a liking to her. I told him he would bring down the police on our heads, and then I met An Nguyen. I was going to tell An about her but I never found the courage.”

“He knew who you were though?”

“Even policemen have weaknesses, Mr. Molk.”

Black and white; that’s how the world had always been for Richard Molk. Until now there had been no shades of grey. A Chinese mafia man who kept a girl in his own home because he was obsessed with her? A policeman in love with a gangster’s sister? A gangster’s sister in love with a policeman? And, craziest of all—a young sixteen-year-old girl who had paid (out of her own parents’ ransom money) for someone to kidnap her, until
that
all went wrong. Molk needed to make some quick decisions.

“Get her dressed, we’re leaving. Have you got passports?”

“There was a new passport made for Suki. I’ll get it.”

It took two hours to get Suki into a reasonable state to travel. Molk had to get her out of Macau and back to Hong Kong using the false passport: any explanations to the police would have to be made once he was on home ground in Hong Kong. The trip back took place without incident; with immigration having some sort of temperature sensor malfunction (the authorities were more afraid of bird flu than checking passports properly). However, instead of waiting for the problem to be fixed, immigration officers waved people through. Suki was well in control of herself by then, for she began to understand that she was on her way home. Lian held tightly onto her sister.

For now, Molk decided to take the girls back to his own place, just around the corner from the Pinkerton office. Suki was constantly exhausted and said very little, giving him just a faint smile when he helped her on and off the ferry. There had been no sighting of Chen Young; his sister had not seen him for a few days, since before her lover’s death.

At a quarter past ten in the morning Molk was about to leave the girls sleeping peacefully in his apartment. He had not been able to get the image of the Man Mo Temple out of his head all night. As he was about to go Lian grabbed hold of his hand.

“The Man Mo Temple?”

“I won’t be long. You stay with your sister.”

“No. I want to come too.”

Molk thought about refusing but decided that, as Lian had suffered so much already, she perhaps was meant to see this through.

They hurried to the temple and once inside were astonished to find a badly burned human corpse. There was no evidence of damage to the temple. Molk felt heat on the back of his head and turned round quickly, putting his hand up to his neck. But he hadn’t been burnt and there was no pain. There was no one there but Lian. It was then, as he looked down at the corpse, he realised that he didn’t need a positive identification. The body would be that of Chen Young.

Lian smiled.

On returning home with her sister, Lian Lee felt better. When they entered the apartment their mother rose from her bed, put on her best red cheongsam that smelt of jasmine perfume, and whilst her sister slept and recovered in the dreamlands with her ancestors, mother took Lian down to watch the dragon parade. Mai wore a sorrowful yet resolute smile on her face.

The undulating dragon came closer, thrusting its head this way and that, as if seeking out someone in particular. When the dragon men passed Lian and Mai they paused and Lian thought she saw something more than her own reflected image in the dragon’s glazed eye. Then the dragon men bowed and held the head of the dragon proud and high. Lian Lee was thankful that she had dedicated the prayer. The coconut candy her mother then bought for Lian, tasted of nothing but coconut candy.