* * *
The two men slipped from bright, noisy day into a subterranean darkness, weirdly quiet considering its many occupants, as if it were a cave they had entered. Or, as Kot had described it, hell. Cheung felt like Dante to Kot’s tour guide Virgil.
They moved down an alleyway that stretched high above them like a deep riven canyon, disappearing into utter blackness, but the alley itself was only as wide as their shoulders. Here and there a bare lightbulb hung down from the nest of wires and cables bundled above their heads like twisted jungle vines. Water dripped on the cables from crazy makeshift plumbing, and in one place some wires were sparking. Garbage was thick under their feet, and they passed through the smoke of cooking. The alley stank of human sweat, human waste and animal guts.
At last and with uncanny suddenness, the sounds of humans burst upon them: chattering voices, radio songs, laughter, babies wailing. The chorus of the damned. Light poured from little factories above them, reached only by ladders. Kot told Cheung that they had now entered the main “street” of the Walled City, called
Pak Fa’an Gai…which meant White Powder Street, in reference to heroin. The source of Kot’s wealth.
As they negotiated this squalid human termite nest, Kot said, “Men tremble at my anger, Cheung. I have given them reason to. Men follow my orders. But my mother isn’t frightened of me. My mother won’t listen to commands from me. I can’t force her, today. All I can do is beg her…”
They broke off down an off-shooting alley, the chaos of sound dwindling somewhat behind them, and came to a flight of stairs nearly impossible to ascend for all the trash and garbage heaped upon it. They picked their way up a narrow path that others must regularly kick or shovel through the debris. In the claustrophobic hallway above, they stopped outside a tiny flat, its threshold covered only by a dark curtain. Still, Kot politely rapped his knuckles on the doorway. “Mother?” he called. “It’s your son.”
At the end of the hallway, a little boy stood watching them. On his temple there was an open festering sore that almost made Cheung wince to look at it. But the boy gave him a lopsided grin, turned and darted off out of sight. Cheung thought he heard a fading laugh.
A few moments ticked by. Cheung kept glancing up and down the corridor, watching for trouble, conscious of the gun inside his jacket. It was not a police issue, but the same pistol Kot favored; a semi-automatic Model 77B, manufactured by the People’s Republic. It could be cocked and fired with one hand only; squeezing back on what was merely the trigger guard on most handguns chambered the first round.
“Mother?” Kot called again, and this time parted the curtain and thrust his head into the flat.
Cheung heard him gasp. Without further hesitation, he tore his 77B from its holster and pushed past Kot into the tiny apartment.
He expected a scene of horror, from Kot’s reaction. His mother lying murdered, perhaps. Or a number of enemy Triad men, lying in ambush. Instead, he found only a withered little doll of a woman, looking like some ancient monkey garbed in human attire, her tiny black eyes glittering in shock.
“What’s wrong, Kot?”
Cheung said, baffled.
“This is not my mother!” Kot entered the room fully, and loomed over the living mummy. “Old woman, where is my mother?”
“The woman who lived here before me is dead,” came the frightened creature’s reply.
Cheung shot a look at Kot, and the expression on the gangster’s face actually made him frightened, as well. It was seething, volcanic. “Dead? I don’t believe you!”
“I am sorry…your mother took her own life, over a month ago. She…slashed her wrists, and died in this room.” And with that, she pointed toward a corner where there was a ratty scrap of rug across the floor.
Kot flashed to the comer, whipped back the rug, then went rigid with shock as if he had uncovered his mother’s month-old corpse underneath.
He had not, but there was still a great dark stain that could not be erased. Like the shadow of a ghost, of a life departed.
Kot’s facial muscles rippled, spasmed. “Why?” he managed.
“They came here. They told her she had to leave. She told them she wouldn’t…that this was her home. They insisted. They were forceful. She asked them to wait until her son could come for her, at least, but they would not listen. And so she told them to leave her alone while she gathered her belongings. And when they came back…she had …killed herself ”
Kot now turned to the wall, denying Cheung the opportunity to see tears in his eyes for the first
time
“I was moved out of my flat,” the old woman continued apologetically. “So I moved in here instead. I don’t want to leave this place, either. This is my home…”
Cheung moved up behind the gangster, gently touched his shoulder. “We should go…”
Kot whirled, pushed his hand away, and burst through the curtain with such force that he tore it half away.
Cheung dashed after him. “Kot! Wait! Where are you going?”
Within moments the gangster had already escaped him in the labyrinth, and Cheung only succeeded in getting himself hopelessly lost. Moments became minutes. Cheung blundered into a corridor clotted with garbage heaped like moldering bodies, impassable, and one of his shoes filled with a gelatinous slime. “Kot!” he bellowed. Two little boys with their arms around each other’s shoulders, dangling their legs from a honeycomb above, tittered down at him.
And then, some distance ahead, he heard the thunder of gunfire.
Cheung used the sounds as his compass. There had been three reports, a second of silence, then three more.
Now he followed a commotion of anxious voices, and he turned an alley to see a knot of teenage boys huddled over something of interest. They scattered like roaches when Cheung appeared, his pistol in hand, and in scattering revealed the bodies of two dead men, slumped against a wall. Though they had been stripped of some of their uniforms, it was obvious they were constables.
Cheung did not recognize them, not only because of the sheer number of officers in Hong Kong, but because his department covered Hong Kong Island, and these men would be with the Kowloon unit, each division of the RHKP being an entity unto itself. One of the men had been shot in the chest and throat, the blood still flowing heavily out of these wounds, forming pools and channels in the folds of his trousers. The other was missing an eye and his nose gaped like a skull’s from where bullets had crashed into his head. Thinner ribbons of gore trickled from his ears and over his lip. The remaining eye seemed to gaze at the partner whose head rested against his shoulder as if he’d fallen asleep beside his lover.
“Kot!” Cheung yelled, spinning around. “Damn you! Listen to me!”
He heard running. Growing nearer. Triad men, coming to see what was happening in their section of the Walled City? Or Kot, heeding his call?
Cheung pointed his handgun, sweat running down his face. He squeezed the trigger guard back. His hair was plastered to his forehead…
A policeman with drawn pistol, then another, appeared around the corner. And as they appeared, they opened fire.
Cheung dropped his gun and began to raise his hands, but even as he did so a bullet plowed into his shoulder. Another pierced an upraised palm…exited through the top of his hand…a crimson flower bloomed on the wall behind him. He fell back against it, blood spreading across his white suit, pierced and half-crucified like some modern, debased saint. He was a fallen angel…fallen into hell. He was Orpheus, and had failed to rescue his Eurydice from the underworld…
“Don’t!” he cried weakly at the approaching men, still holding out his streaming hand to ward them off. “Don’t! I’m a policeman, too!”
He was struck across the temple with the butt of a pistol, dropped to his knees. “Liar! “ one of the constables shouted at him. “You killed these two men!”
“It wasn’t me,” Cheung groaned, his eyesight having become a rippling red haze, as if he were submerged in a deep pool of blood. “It was a Triad man…”
He felt a hand inside his jacket. His billfold was examined. “Liar! Where is your badge?”
“Undercover,” Cheung muttered, beginning to lose consciousness.
“Take him,” one man said to the other.
“Not me,” Cheung mumbled once more, the red haze becoming a black one. “Kot…Kot…”
He didn’t know if he were calling out to his lover, or betraying his name.
* * *
Cheung filed
his reports. He was told he would eventually be called to testify at the trial of the murderer/heroin trafficker Kot Si Fu when he was apprehended. And he would be caught, the policemen swore, so that the brutal killer of their brothers might answer for his crimes.
And then Cheung retired, with honors, his promising career ended. His shoulder wound had been clean and not serious, but his right hand had been smashed. It was still too early to tell to what extent physical therapy might restore it, but the outlook did not seem promising.
Cheung had been offered office work. He had declined. It was not so much that he felt such work would represent a sad decline after his former duties. It was that he felt unworthy of wearing a badge at all, unworthy of his service awards, after having fallen in love with the murderer/heroin trafficker Kot Si Fu.
He lost himself in his apartment, hid there like a wounded animal, for weeks. He had been away from it for quite a while, and after having lived in Kot’s apartment for over a month, this humble flat seemed like something from the Walled City.
Most nights,
he drank himself to sleep.
This night he had finished off the dregs of a bottle, all he had left until he could will himself to venture out again. His mind was unbearably sober. He lay naked on his belly on the sheets, his hard-on pinned beneath him. For lack of another’s flesh, he took comfort in the feel of his own skin against the hungry organ. He joked bitterly to himself that he should masturbate by fucking the hole through his right hand. There was a downpour outside. The sound made him lonelier even than the straining yearning of his cock, which seemed to reach out from him hopelessly, like an arm with its hand hacked off.
And then, as if a telepathic beacon had been answered, a knee depressed the bed beside him. Cheung’s eyes opened, and he began to lift his head…but his movement was halted by a gun muzzle that pressed against his scarred temple.
“I’ve been looking for you,” came a soft, familiar voice.
“And I was looking for you,” Cheung replied.
“Your friends still are looking. They have bloodlust in them.”
“You should leave Hong Kong,” Cheung said.
“This is my home,” replied Kot Si Fu.
The bed was depressed further. Cheung felt the other man stretch upon his back, and realized that Kot had disrobed after breaking into the apartment. Their combined weight pressed his erection more deeply into his own belly, as if it ached to tunnel through him if it must in order to reach the subject of its craving.
Kot did not remove the muzzle of the Model 77B from against the former policeman’s head. His former lover’s head.
“Are you going to hurt me?” Cheung whispered. He felt Kot’s hard prick nestle in the crevice of his ass. Almost imperceptibly, Kot began rubbing his shaft along that dark channel.
“I’m a cop killer. A monster. You expect me to kill you, don’t you?”
Cheung swallowed. “I don’t know what to expect of you.”
“And I don’t know what to expect of you. I trusted you. But after those two bastards shot you, I heard you. I was still close by. You told them you were one of them, and I felt as if a bullet had been fired into my heart. You told them my name, as well. You betrayed me.”
“I was doing my job.”
“I loved you,” Kot rasped, grinding the cold gun muzzle more firmly against Cheung’s head.
After a moment, Cheung said, “And I loved you, too.”
Kot reached his free hand between them, and helped guide the head of his prick to Cheung’s pursed hole. He urged the plump head inside roughly, and Cheung cried out, squirmed under him. Kot held the gun steady, and once he was more fully inside the former policeman’s pinned body, wrapped his other arm around Cheung’s neck. His thrusts continued to be rough, but were not violent. Kot panted in Cheung’s ear, and the bed squeaked rhythmically, and the rainstorm pounded against the windows.
“You don’t need the gun,” Cheung choked between his own panting. “You don’t need to rape me. I want you to fuck me, Kot.”
“I’m not sure I believe you, Cheung.”
“Believe me,” Cheung said, hating himself for
the truth. “Believe me.”
Kot bit Cheung’s shoulder, and then moaned and rubbed his stubbled cheek against it, as if torn between brutality and tenderness. He rotated his hips, churning his cock inside Cheung. He began a series of rapid staccato thrusts before reverting again to longer, deeper, more pummeling lunges.
Cheung kissed the arm around his neck, ran his tongue along it, as if to demonstrate his sincerity. “I want you, Kot. We can go away together.”
“Ahh, Cheung, how can I trust you? You aren’t a criminal. You aren’t like me. But even if I could trust you, I won’t leave Hong Kong…I won’t leave my home…but I won’t go to prison, either. I was a boy in the Walled City. I told you. At last I was able to escape that prison. I won’t end my life in another one. I won’t let your friends take me away.”
Cheung heard the Model 77B slide and click, as Kot depressed the trigger guard and chambered its first round.
His throat convulsed, tried to seize up. “Kot…please don’t…don’t hurt me…”
“I wouldn’t hurt you,” Kot panted, more breathless, his thrusts getting closer together, pace quickening as he approached climax. “I told you, Cheung…” he removed the pistol’s muzzle from Cheung’s temple “…I love you.”
And then there was an explosion, a blast so loud that it blanked Cheung’s mind, robbed his hearing. All at once he felt Kot’s body violently spasm as he shot his load deep inside him…and at the same moment, the pillows of the bed were spattered with a glittering red constellation. Cheung felt a hot wet spatter across his neck and shoulders, like ejaculate.