Over the last day or so, Mrs Pa had been busy, haunting the go-down markets and buying presents, flowers, and food. All the money she'd saved over the years went toward the wedding, but Mrs Pa didn't care. It was worth it, to see Mai settled at last.
On the designated evening, she visited the Kungs, as arranged. They lived in Murray Town, not far from Sulai-Ba, in a small shuttered house on the Taitai waterfront. Both parents were lab assistants, not for Paugeng, but for Somay. However, this did not affect their religious affiliations, Mrs Pa noticed. During the devotions before the celebratory meal, Mrs Kung ceremoniously opened the doors of the little kitchen shrine to reveal not only the disgraced Senditreya, holding her compass and theodolite, but also, on either side of the major deity, the severe, pretty face of Paugeng's Jhai Tserai and the pudgy features of the Somay heirs, acolytes in the home-made triptych. Worship fell where it could these days. Mrs Kung lit candles and set them in the slots at either side of the icons. The gods, old and new, disappeared in a light pall of smoke. Mrs Pa sat back and nursed her jasmine tea. She liked this family: they were sober, respectable people. She liked their pleasant, moon-faced daughter, soon to be her own daughter's sister-in-law, and the studious younger son. And, of course, she liked the bridegroom, Ahn, who unfortunately could not be here just yet; such a well-respected young man, the same age as Mai. Things had worked out very well.
"We were so pleased to receive your daughter's name from the broker," Mrs Kung confided. "My father remembers your husband well; they worked together on many occasions."
The two families fell into reminiscing about the past, the old days. The Kungs were from Beijing, a place which had become no more than a story, bright as neon in memory: the parks and the restaurants and the old city. Mr Kung had left when he was a boy. Mr and Mrs Pa had come later, from Guangzhou, traded between the mining companies who were then expanding their operations to the east of Singapore Three. They shared stories, shared experiences, and then at last the two families strolled down to the dock, to wait with anticipation and excitement, and behind it all a little fear, for the wedding boat.
The sun had long set in a last rosy burst of light, and now the blue dusk was filled with the mast lights, at anchor in Ghenret and beyond, riding the evening tide. It was a mild, damp evening. That afternoon, Mrs Pa had sat in her kitchen and listened with increasing anxiety to the rain humming on the corrugated iron roof of her house. But early in the evening, the rain had stopped and the washed sky had cleared. The two families waited nervously for the arrival of the wedding boat.
"When do you think it will come?" Mrs Kung whispered.
"I don't know," Mrs Pa replied.
Along the edge of the wharf the marriage broker and her assistants had placed long tubes of incense, which flared and smoldered in the damp air. They had lit a fire in a stout iron brazier, sending a stream of sparks into the water. The broker pranced and stamped about the wharf, wheeling and clapping her hands to ward off undesirables, and occasionally striking a small, fringed drum. The amulets tied around the edges of her shawl danced with her.
"Such a lot of energy!" marveled Mrs Kung. A few faint stars rose above the city mists. There was no moon tonight. Water lapped against the wharf, loud in the sudden silence. The broker fell silent.
A junk was sailing up the sooty waters of the harbor, stealing into port. Its sails were as red as a hibiscus blossom, ragged and burning in the ship's own light. Phosphorescence trailed in its wake, a black lantern hung from its prow. From the wan illumination that it shed, the junk's name appeared briefly on its side:
Precious Dragon,
just as Mai had said. Next to Mrs Pa, the broker threw back her head and gave a long, thin cry. Mrs Pa craned her neck, trying to get a glimpse of her daughter, and then the junk was sidling against the dock. The broker threw a sudden handful of firecrackers onto the brazier. There was a series of startling explosions, and as the fire flared, Mrs Pa saw her child's pale face smiling over the edge of the deck. Mrs Pa had not actually set eyes on Mai for thirty years, since the cholera epidemic that had taken, in one long night, her husband and her three-year-old daughter, but she would have known Mai anywhere. She jumped up and down, calling excitedly, and beside Mai, the bridegroom beamed.
"Hurry!" cried the broker, and Mrs Pa and the Kung family hastily bundled all the wedding presents from their scarlet envelopes and threw them into the blaze. The little gifts went first: sweets, crackers, and cookies vanished into the fire before raining down on the deck of the junk. Then as the fire caught, the proper gifts followed. Flat paper chairs and tables, a handsome parchment bed, the paper stove and pots and pans, everything for the young couple, were consumed by the flames. They would go to the new house, to which Mai and her husband would return. Then the two families threw the money onto the fire, each note bearing the smiling face of the demonic banker and a fine representation of the Bank of Hell. The people on the junk were briefly obscured in a shower of banknotes, falling like leaves around their feet. At last it was over. The broker clapped her hands and banged the little drum. Mrs Pa saw Mai wince, and gave a sympathetic wave. The tide began to turn.
"Goodbye, Mother!" and "Phone me!"
Mrs Pa and her pale daughter cried, and then
Precious Dragon'
s silhouette crew cast off and the sails of the junk caught the incense wind and streamed out, carrying the dead beyond the western darkness, out of sight.
Chen sat toward the end of the table in the restaurant, trying to catch Zhu Irzh's eye. The demon, who sat opposite, was concentrating on the dissection of his squid. At the head of the table, Captain Sung droned on, reciting endless statistics about the decline in the crime rate, what a success the previous year had been, how the murder rate had dropped by fifteen percent . . .
Mind numbing. And also wrong, because the city's crime stats were massaged
ad nauseam
depending on the requirements of Singapore Three's governor, and in any case, all the data had been hopelessly skewed over the course of the last few months as a result of the disasters that had hit the city. With so many dead, a few of them
had
to be criminals. But here they were, with Zhu Irzh along as well in order to demonstrate the success of the police department's equal ops policy, for Sung to show off in front of the governor.
Without the equal ops fad, neither Chen nor Zhu Irzh would even be here. Chen had grown used to being the department's embarrassing little secret, but since he had, effectively, saved the world, Sung had reluctantly recognized that some acknowledgement of his services needed to be made.
And a demented goddess rampaging through the streets in a chariot drawn by fiery-eyed oxen tended to convince even the most hardened atheist of
some
evidence of the existence of deity.
Unable to attract Zhu Irzh's attention, Chen glanced at the governor. Ling was a saturnine, depressed-looking man—although, admittedly, he had plenty to be depressed about. Not quite as humorless as Chen had always thought, however, the governor had already made two quite amusing jokes. Chen wondered if they'd been scripted.
" . . .and our outreach liaison has been immensely successful," Sung was saying. "Isn't that so, Detective Chen?"
What "outreach liaison"?
"Absolutely. A tremendous success."
Better agree with him now and sort it out later.
"Chen's leading the team," Sung said, beaming like a shark. "Of course, the inspiration for it came from your own pioneering ideas in equal opportunity."
What?
Chen smiled politely and willed himself not to shout. What a waste of time this was—excellent food, to be sure, but he really needed to be back at the station. He had a mountain of paperwork, several phone calls to make, and besides all the official cases, several of which were quite urgent, there was this odd matter of the young actress who'd gone missing at Paugeng's party. Chen wanted to discuss this with Zhu Irzh, but the demon had been off on a case of his own these last few days and the opportunity hadn't presented itself. Chen didn't want to phone Zhu Irzh, because what with the demon's relationship with Jhai Tserai, security had suddenly become a bit of an issue. Chen did not put it past Jhai to have Zhu Irzh's phones bugged. And anyhow, if he had to go out to dinner, he'd rather do so with his wife, although options for dining out with a female demon were admittedly a trifle limited.
Sung and the governor were both beaming at one another in mutual admiration. Chen forced himself to attend to what Sung was saying.
" . . .leading a small group down to Hell on a fact-finding mission, after a very kind invitation . . .current exchange has gone so well that we're thinking of making it a permanent post."
That
made Zhu Irzh look up from his squid. Chen saw his lips move behind his napkin.
Chen? We need to talk.
Now he tells me.
Back at the station, Chen focused on plowing through that paperwork. As soon as he got rid of one piece, another appeared to take its place: incorrectly filed visa applications for Heaven, a whole slew of Hell-based internet scams. Zhu Irzh had disappeared the moment they'd left the restaurant, called away on some urgent piece of business, apparently. Chen felt frustration mounting and eventually he went down to the locker room and sat in meditation for a few minutes. It helped, but not a lot.
When he came back up to the office, however, he found Zhu Irzh perched on his desk, waiting for him.
"Hi," the demon said. "Sorry I had to rush off."
"Not a problem," Chen said, although it had been. "Sung's evidently got a bee in his bonnet."
"About this outreach thing," Zhu Irzh remarked. "First I've heard of it."
"You're not the only one. I looked up a few policy statements when I got back. It's tied in with this equal ops thing. Increased connectivity between the worlds. After that episode with Heaven, the governor apparently started thinking that improving links with Hell might not be a bad idea. There's a Western saying: better the devil you know."
The demon grimaced. "I thought Governor Ling already
had
improved connections with Hell. They've been giving him kickbacks for years."
"No surprises there."
Just for once,
Chen thought,
I'd like to be taken aback by proof of someone's innocence.
And strangely, proof was not long in coming.
The demon suggested going for a quiet beer, to talk things over. It sounded like a fine suggestion to Chen, after the end of a long, sticky, tedious day, but as he was on his way out the door with the demon, Sung hurtled out of his office like a human torpedo and stepped into Chen's path.
"Chen. Sorry, I can see you're leaving. Have you got a moment?"—in that tone that suggested it was not optional.
"Both of us? Or just me?" Chen asked. The prospect of a peaceful beer was receding glumly into the distance.
"Both of you."
Chen and the demon followed Sung into his cramped office and Sung closed the door behind them. To Chen's surprise, they were not alone in the office, though he had seen no one wander past for the last hour. Someone was seated in the chair on the other side of Sung's desk.
The person was small and slight and pale, smiling beneath a fall of white hair. It was hard to tell at first whether it was male or female, but then it shifted position and Chen glimpsed breasts.
She still wasn't human, though. An unmistakable, and rather sickly, waft of peach blossom floated across the room from the personage's pink and white silk robes.
"This," said Captain Sung, "is Mi Li Qi. She's from Heaven." An expression of fleeting alarm crossed his features as he spoke, as if he couldn't quite believe what he'd just said.
"Delighted," Zhu Irzh drawled.
Oh dear,
thought Chen. The demon's last trip to Heaven hadn't been an unmitigated success. He couldn't smoke, for a start, and although they clearly tried very hard to be non-discriminatory, Zhu Irzh was, after all, demonic.
"I'm very pleased to meet you, Miss Qi," Chen added.
"And you," Miss Qi said. She had a voice like a breath of wind, light and airy and slightly tinkling. Chen, seeing that Zhu Irzh was about to say something further, cut him off at the pass.
"To what do we owe the pleasure?" he said.
"This equal opportunities policy," Sung said. Chen had heard a number of ominous statements in his time (
"the assassin is on his way," "the goddess has gone mad"
) but few of them were beginning to strike such fear into his heart as
"This equal opportunities policy."
"Chen," the captain went on. "You don't have much on at the moment, do you?"
"Yes," Chen said.
"So," Sung continued as though Chen had not spoken, "I thought this was the ideal time to strengthen connectivity, think outside the box in developing our links between the worlds . . ."
The management course that Sung had been obliged to attend last month had had disastrous results, Chen thought. Prior to that, Sung had been one of those fierce northern steppe people, with a low tolerance rating for bullshit. Now, he was all about ballparks and blue sky thinking. How did they do it? Did they brainwash attendees?
"Miss Qi is here as part of a team," Sung said. "The governor would like you to go to Hell as part of a fact-finding mission, work closely with the Ministry of War. The original invitation came through them, for Miss Qi, but Heaven's insisting that she be escorted and the Ministry has been really very helpful, extending the invitation at once." He nodded at Zhu Irzh. "Seneschal? How do you feel about a trip home?"
Zhu Irzh shrugged. "I can cope. As long as we don't have to visit my relatives."
"Family is
most
important," Miss Qi said, in a little disapproving breath.
"Exactly. My family
is
most important. Just not to me."