Authors: Martin Booth
* * *
All that Sandingham noticed as they were disembarked was that it was night and the docks alongside which they had tied up were sparsely lit. A fleet of Toyota KB trucks stood in the shadow of the godowns and the prisoners were pushed towards these and told to climb over the tailgates. Canvas flaps were then tied down on both the inside and the out, two guards positioning themselves in each truck with their charges who were made to kneel, squat or sit cross-legged on the floor.
The trucks moved out at what Sandingham reckoned was just after midnight. They drove through the dark hours, unable to sleep or even nod off because of the twisting and bucking of the vehicle and the road upon which it was travelling. The guards prevented anyone from standing up. By the time the trucks halted, every prisoner on board them was stiff and aching.
The canvas flap of Sandingham’s vehicle was untied and tugged to one side. A cold air brisked into the truck. Sandingham shivered, though from the drop in temperature or as a premonition he could not judge.
In the vague promise of light from an imminent dawn he saw that they were in a compound. Before them were wooden barrack buildings, along the fronts of which ran arcades supporting overhanging roofs on wooden pillars. The windows were a pale creamy colour, though not because of illumination from within: they were made of paper.
More clothes were issued, all of them the civilian Japanese khaki drill garments of the factory workers. Split-toed canvas and rubber
gomugutsu
were handed out, along with one thin cotton-and-fibre blanket for each prisoner. Finally, each man was given a creosote pill and told to swallow it. The idea was that this would cure any disease they might have brought with them.
A camp guard counted them off into unequal groups and they were led away by a sentry to their allotted building.
Behind the newer barracks were older buildings. Some had been small warehouses, others civilian quarters for the workers of a local factory. As at the docks hours before, the lighting was minimal.
Another guard with a key wired to a carved wooden block appeared from the shadows, shone a dim torch across their faces and counted them quickly prior to unlocking a door in the overhang of an arcade. A warm air billowed out and wrapped Sandingham in its arms, driving off the chill of the wind that was now rising in readiness for daylight.
He was pushed inside, ahead of the others. The rest of his group followed and the door was slammed shut. They were in utter darkness.
‘Right, here we are,’ someone commented in the darkness. ‘The Land of the Rising Sun.’
As if to mock his irony still further, a very weak, peanut oil flame spurted into life far down the room.
‘Well the hell!’ said a dozy voice from the vicinity of the flicker. ‘If it ain’t limeys!’
P
ART
S
EVEN
On board SS
Takshing en route
to Macau and Hong Kong: September, 1952
‘I
NOW HAVE
that little job I mentioned some months ago for you to do,’ Francis Leung had said.
He had not called Sandingham to the building in Kowloon City, for that might have attracted the attention of the police; instead, he had had him summoned to a small but very comfortable house set in pine trees above the Castle Peak Road just beyond the eleventh milestone.
Alighting from the bus, Sandingham had followed the directions he had been given over the telephone – he had received the call at a specified hour on a telephone in the rear of an apothecary’s shop by the railway bridge in Waterloo Road – and found himself at a pair of wrought-iron gates hung on stone pillars and leading on to a curving concrete driveway set with pebbles. It had rained in the night and water was sluicing down the culvert to the side of the gate. The pebbles shone.
In a tin box screwed to the left-hand pillar was a button. He pressed it. What he supposed from his dress to be a gardener came to the gate and asked him his name. He gave it. The man surveyed the world outside and Sandingham realised that the gate was so constructed as to give a good one-hundred-and-seventy-degree view of the Castle Peak Road along which afternoon traffic was steadily flowing. From the beach off to the left came the sounds of children splashing and playing. In a layby was parked a Royal Naval bus: obviously, the beach was a regular favourite with service families. All seeming clear, the gardener opened the gate and admitted him. Sandingham, on the watch for such things, noticed the man was carrying an automatic pistol, tucked well into the top of his earth-soiled trousers.
Tea was served in tiny cups without handles.
‘What do you want me to do?’
Leung’s attitude towards Sandingham had changed in recent months. He had become more distant, more deliberate in his statements and less inclined to accept items Sandingham had filched or otherwise ‘acquired’, as he put it. Sandingham could not understand Leung’s changing relationship with him; in truth, Leung was rising fast in the crime circles in which he moved, but there was no way Sandingham could have discovered this for himself. The Chinese organised crime world was far removed from that of even the European gangster.
‘Collect something for me. From Macau. Do you have a good set of clothing, Joseph?’
‘Not really.’
‘Then we must get you a suit. You’ll be staying in a good hotel once you get there.’
He snapped his fingers and one of his men detached himself from the shadows of the living room and appeared at Leung’s side holding a fat manilla envelope. Leung passed this to Sandingham.
‘In here is enough money to buy a lightweight suit, some new shirts and a pair of better shoes.’ He looked at Sandingham’s feet where his present shoes were worn at the heel and scuffed. ‘It should leave some spending money – about a hundred Hong Kong dollars. Also in here is your ticket to Macau. Return. Your hotel bill will be settled by my – my representative. You are booked out on the
Takshing
on the morning of the twenty-fifth. Be sure you catch the sailing, Joseph. Tickets are non-transferable.’
He might have been a tour guide. In a way, he was. The trip, however, was his own.
‘When you get to Macau you will be met and taken to your hotel. The Bella Vista. One of the best.’ He laughed shortly. ‘Maybe the only one. I never go to Macau…’
Leung looked pensive for a few moments. It was rare for him to let his feelings show so.
‘What do I collect?’
‘You’ll be told. Just a package. Not very big. About one chek … fourteen inches long and – about as big as a building brick. It will reach you. Don’t worry. It’s not too heavy. Four cattys. About five and a half pounds. All you must do is get it back to Hong Kong.’
‘Why don’t you have one of your men collect this parcel?’
‘That is not possible. Not this time,’ Leung replied with a surprising candour that he was quick to disguise by looking hard at Sandingham as if to discourage further enquiries in that area.
‘Where do I take it?’ Sandingham asked, to change the subject.
‘Nowhere. It will be taken from you.’
‘How do I know it will be the right man I give it to?’
‘It will be,’ Leung answered, with quiet emphasis.
Sandingham sensed that he was expected to leave and stood up. He did not ask how much he was to receive. He knew better.
‘Do you not want to know how much you will be paid?’
‘Yes.’
‘Five hundred Hong Kong dollars. A lot of money for a messenger boy.’
Sandingham looked Francis Leung straight in the eye. Just for a split second. He seldom did that. In the man’s pupils lived a demon of malice. It flitted by and Sandingham knew then that this was not a favour for an old friend from the war, an old compatriot from the trenches of Kai Tak. This was business. This was the post-war Leung, patronising capitalist, currency hoarder, Triad secret society boss, gangster, smuggler and who knew what else. Sandingham deferentially lowered his eyes again.
‘One more thing,’ Leung said. ‘Don’t try anything, as they say in cinema films.’ He laughed drily. ‘And don’t go to the whore called Lucy any more. She belongs to me now, not the bar owner. She is going to be more up-class.’
From the tray on the bamboo table, Leung picked up Sandingham’s tiny tea cup and dropped it on to the marble slabs of the patio. It clinked as it hit the ground, rolled over and split in two. Fragments, sharp and thin splinters of china, flicked out.
It wasn’t a rice bowl and it wasn’t full of the blood of a cockerel or whatever it was that Triad members shattered in their ceremonies, but it didn’t have to be.
* * *
He left the hotel with his case at six o’clock, hailing a rickshaw to take him to Ah Moy’s. It was a bit of a risk going there in daylight, but he had to take it. There was no way he could face going to Macau without having a pipe first to calm his nerves: set him up for the trip.
He was well aware that whatever it was he was doing for Francis Leung it was not carrying an oblong moon festival cake through the Hong Kong customs. From the description Leung had given him he knew what he was bringing back. Size of a brick; five pounds in weight. Five hundred bucks for doing it. It was raw opium he was to carry. Obviously, Leung’s pet carriers were being watched. Few narcotics squad or customs officers would suspect an Englishman of running opium.
It was a risk. Like going to Ah Moy’s. Like dodging bullets. One got hit or one did not. It was up to the gods.
Later, lying on the planks of the bed, he did not dream as vividly as he was wont to do. Some flowers insisted on pressing themselves upon him. Bob appeared once and sang a sea-shanty, of all things. Or it might have been a psalm. It didn’t matter.
He left the opium den after dark and caught a bus to the Jordan Road vehicular ferry pier. This would take him to within walking distance of the Hong Kong-Macau ferry berth on Hong Kong-side.
He had bought himself a tropical-weight suit as Leung had ordered, with two cream cotton shirts, at a small tailor’s shop near the Alhambra cinema in Nathan Road. It was an off-the-peg, light brown suit originally made as a window display to entice passing sailors in to buy more expensive made-to-measure garments. The material was slightly faded from the sunlight, but this allowed him to buy it cheaply and therefore have a little extra left over to spend at Ah Moy’s. His new shoes were polished tan and matched his clothes. He felt strangely and unusually dignified. Just as a European should.
As the ferry steered its way through cargo ships lying at buoys in the harbour, Sandingham sat on one of the passenger deck benches and pondered his mission. He had seen blocks of opium before – not often, but memorably so. They were indeed brick-sized, hard and dull brown. Often they had trademarks imprinted upon them just like real bricks. He recalled one that had stamped upon its surface ‘
THREE AAA BRAND
’ and, below it in smaller lettering ‘Bewar of imitaations’. It had reminded him of an ingot of silver he had once seen in a jeweller’s shop in Nathan Road.
He reached the SS
Takshing
with plenty of time to spare. Across the side of her superstructure, under the bridge, was emblazoned a huge Union Jack. The flag was illuminated both by the lights of the Macau ferry dock and a spotlamp mounted on the ship herself.
‘Passpor’ an’ ticke’, plees.’
Sandingham handed them over the desk top to the Hong Kong immigration official, noticing as he did so that there were two European police inspectors standing in the background with several Chinese constables, one of whom, unusually, was holding a rifle.
‘What you reason for goin’ to Macau, sir?’
‘Holiday. I’ve not been there for many years. Maybe’ – he added to give a more genuine-sounding answer, make a joke of it – ‘to gamble.’
The official showed no sign of acknowledging this standard cause for Europeans’ journeys to the neighbouring Portuguese colony across the other side of the mouth of the Zhu Jiang.
‘W’ere you stay in Macau?’
‘Bella Vista.’
‘You lugg-age?’
‘Just this case. I’m only going for a few days.’
As he spoke, he felt rather than saw the police inspectors look at him, absorb his details.
He was waved through and climbed the steep ramp of the gangway. The tide was high and slopped against the waterline. At the top of the gangway a steward took his ticket and ushered him towards a cabin on the next deck up. The cabin door was of varnished wood with highly polished brass handles and, in place of a window, there was a fixed series of angled slats. The steward unlocked the door. Sandingham entered, took the key and handed him a tip. He felt very good, giving a tip. When the steward had gone, closing the door quietly behind him, Sandingham dropped his case on the floor and, removing his new jacket and trousers and sleek new shoes, lay back on the bunk. The white sheets smelled clean and the air was sharp with the tang of polish. The wash-basin was pristine, as if it had never been used and, on the shelf over it, a tumbler stood upended in a grease-proof-paper wrapper declaring it to be ‘sterilised for personal use and hygiene’. From the vent over the bunk issued a current of cool air slightly tinged with the odour of fuel oil. He fell asleep, to be woken several hours later by the ship getting under way.
He put on his trousers and left the cabin, to stand on the edge of the deck and watch the western approaches to Hong Kong Island glide by. His bare feet were warmed by the scrubbed planking.
It was still dark. The street lights of Connaught Road West slid by. Up the hill, he could vaguely make out the main tower of the university building. Higher still, against the night sky, he could see the flat top by the Hill above Belcher’s. He felt the euphoric calm and good from the pipe still easing through him.
A voice spoke to him from close by.
‘You’re the signaller wallah, aren’t you?’ it said.
‘What?’
He turned. There was no one at hand: he had the deck entirely to himself. The shadows from the rigging, the rails, the companionways and uprights shifted slightly as the ship moved. The dull yellow of the lights behind their storm glasses shone softly upon everything. The warm night breeze wafted over his face and ruffled his hair.