OUT OF TIME IN WAN CHAI, page 1
FAN TONG
OUT OF TIME IN WAN CHAI
(Voguant vers l’avenir lumineux)
Translated from the French
by Marie-Hélène Arnauld and Denis Williamson
who also designed cover page
Blue Lettuce Publishing
Published by Boucher and Luo Infodoc Ltd
Room 9–11, 16/F, Tai Yau building
181 Johnston Road, Wan Chai, Hong Kong
ISBN 978-988-15715-4-0
Blue Lettuce Publishing ®
is a trademark of Boucher and Luo Infodoc Ltd
© Boucher and Luo Infodoc Ltd 2013
Chapter 1
In my dream a flower blooms, a tiny wild flower. So tiny I can hardly see it, a scent so subtle I can hardly smell it. And yet, when I wake, it is the only thing I remember.
Every morning a girl in her qipao smiles at him and dances, a cigarette between her lips. Ever since he put her poster on the wall opposite his bed.
God! Ten past eight already. Lethargic because of the air con churning away in the corner of his window, he stretched and wondered why his alarm clock hadn’t gone off, until he remembered Valiant Heart, number 9 in the fifth at Happy Valley the night before. At three to one, he hadn’t made a fortune but it was nice all the same. There it is, stupid, the whole racing programme from last night, on your chair. In big letters: 13th of July.
So today is the 14th, French national day and a holiday. That’s why he hadn’t set his alarm. The 14th of July... the parades on the red hot avenues of Haiphong or Hanoi... “From the steel grey skies they are falling in their hundreds, the red berets who dare and who win...” Tch tch. He hadn’t won much, just the right to die, years later, in his bed or in the street, of a stroke or a heart attack, just like anybody else. Watch your cholesterol, Monsieur Chambon...
He got up and stumbled past the smoker, a present from Martin Mack, a regular at the race course who, when he needed the money, occasionally did a bit of door to door for Lucky Strike. Damp and badly stained, the poor girl looked more and more like an icon in the fight against cancer. She had been hanging there for less than two months... This damned humidity! Tomorrow, get rid of her. Having said that, his wardrobe was in an even worse state; a nursery for mushrooms, a tropical cellar for Roquefort. To wear nothing but polyester; it makes one’s skin itchy but at least it doesn’t rot.
His bathroom already felt like a sauna. The inevitable cockroach fled into the air vent. Cold shower, energetic scrub, teeth and shave... Music, suddenly. A neighbour's radio, next door or below. The latest hit of Anita Mui the queen of canto pop, announced the loud speaker.
The lyrics didn’t mean anything, Cantonese was like double Dutch to him, but the tune didn’t displease him. His blade cut a neat line through the white foam spread on his cheek and, for a brief instant, he was back by the Red River cutting through the mountains of Tonkin.
Oh shit! The phone.
He pretended not to hear and steadfastly attacked the stubble on his Adam’s apple. They’ll soon tire and hang up. But no, they persisted, someone who must have known he was at home, was even annoyed perhaps by his lack of response. It’s all instant gratification nowadays. He went and picked up the phone.
“Hello, is that Roger Chambon?”
“Yes”
“It’s Lavinier... Tell me, you are coming for drinks at the Consulate, aren’t you?”
He confirmed with a grunt which didn’t put off his caller.
“Must talk to you about some business... We can discuss it there, all right?”
New grunt, begrudgingly affirmative. Some business, here we go again... With tips from Captain Lavinier, the military attaché, one had had to be careful. Nine times out of ten they led nowhere.
Chapter 2
Johnny Kwok finished his noodles, put down his chopsticks, forming a poor man’s bridge over his bowl, and found himself staring at the top of the wig of the middle aged man who was sharing his table, and wolfing down his noodle soup like a pig its fodder.
Johnny exhaled heavily in the direction of the synthetic mane, just to see if it was properly stuck on. The man looked up. Seeing Johnny’s ironic smile, he shrugged his shoulders and wolfed even faster. Johnny immediately forgot about him and his attention turned elsewhere: the table of workers producing more smoke than an Indonesian volcano, the bank clerks wearing thick glasses and sprinting through their food, the old guys picking at their plates of tripe, the waitress with her fat bum forcing her way with difficulty through the middle of all these, and the foul-mouthed woman cashier near the door.
The pointless scurrying around of the different human groups always amazed him. Like that of his little lads, whose illusions were already lost. His little lads or his punks or wankers, his arse-holes, his runts, his wretched ones, his nuisances, his lobotomies, his ugly spotty faces, his little pricks, his rat faces, his tofu fuckers and even more permutations of the basic elements of foul language. The deplorable permutations: the wankers of lizard’s pricks; the redundant ones: arse-hole of a tofu fucker; the multi handicapped ones: spotty rat-faced lobotomies; and last but not least, the most-abundant polysemic ones as difficult to recite as a verse of The Peony Pavilion and as complex to predict as the twists and turns of a Louis Cha novel. This is how police inspector Johnny Kwok was inspired to describe this group (whilst his ordinarily sombre imagination grew darker the moment he thought of them) hovering on the fringe of the population of the colony which his superiors had ordered him to watch in these troubled times: college kids and school kids.
“With your cool and your empathy, you’ll soon make friends with them.”
Johnny had not in the least taken as a compliment his chief’s justification for volunteering him. On the contrary, every time he looked at himself in the mirror it was to check that he did not look either cool or empathetic. Argh…!!!
But a job was a job. He had to acquit himself honourably and keep a close eye on these fools who, under the cover of their Committee of Patriotic Schools – my arse – demanded the abolition of the thirteen decrees which the fascist, colonial government had passed to establish its brainwashing education programme. These excitable kids (aping the Red Guards of the cultural revolution who, over the border, were ransacking China) had been constantly demonstrating since the beginning of May, declaiming endlessly from Mao’s Little Red Book. They threw stones at the riot police, set fire to letter boxes and cars, and would do a lot more harm if no one stopped them. Schools had been closed, teachers and even kids had been arrested... a few weeks behind bars would teach these savages a few lessons about life. A few kicks in the arse and a bit of ill-treatment, even better! He and a colleague had grabbed two of them the day before, who were sticking up posters calling for the kidnapping of the Governor. Whoosh! Straight to Pokfulam prison where, with the screws, they had had a bit of fun with them. A bowl of tea with hair floating on it, as an appetizer just to tickle their throats, and then strip off! Thorough search in case they had hidden the complete works of Mao in their underpants. Pity they were not girls, these little puftas. The operation of the following day was more promising in that respect.
Johnny got up from the table, paid for his meal and stepped out of the Lung Mun Restaurant, his local. Outside, the sun was melting Johnston Road. Vehicles and pedestrians moved slowly and he would not have been surprised to see one or two of them being swallowed up by the tarmac.
The adjacent building, China Products, still bore the marks of the recent police offensive: doors smashed in, broken windows and the walls streaked with soot from a fire. No doubt about it the Maoist bandits who had occupied it had suffered a heavy defeat.
A tram went past, unnoticed by everyone else. Johnny tensed up: always be suspicious of calm waters and warm ashes.
Chapter 3
At the Consul’s no one pushes, everyone remains courteous and cordial under the portrait of President Mitterrand, nevertheless there’s a bit of a bottleneck, and the white table cloth of the buffet does not stay white for very long.
Chambon, wisely, has anticipated the situation. Just before the opening of the buffet, he winked at a waiter who brought him a glass of champagne and a plate of appetizers, then settled in a corner, next to a small table where he placed them. Being naturally shy and with a feeling of not really belonging, he always stands to one side at official receptions. He doesn’t join in the conversations and very seldom does anybody talk to him. He doesn’t mind and accepts being thought of as boring with his uncouth face, his wrestler’s physique, his country-squire suits, his after-shave and his ties with the ageing patterns he had bought some twenty odd years ago in Catinat street in Saigon. He doesn’t like shopping and knows he has the imagination of a Neanderthal. It’s a bit like at the club where he occasionally goes. Pastis they don’t have, so what can he order apart from a beer or a whisky?
His injury, his missing hand, puts people off too. They ask about it behind his back, he knows that. They are embarrassed by the explanation: “A grenade, in Indochina. Dien Bien Phu, I think...”
Double mistake. Not a grenade but a mortar shell and not Dien Bien Phu but the Black River, two years previously. Big difference for those who were there, but he doesn’t correct them, why bother? Nothing to be gained.
Rumours abound also, of course, about his profession and his company, SCOMDEF. They don’t help.
His is an unrewarding job. Discretion is key. One gets used to it. It’s enough to follow a few rules of common sense and watch what you say. W
So Hong Kong is not exciting?
Chambon hated to disillusion his occasional visitors, usually he just sighed at their fantasies. Take the commercial manager of the factory in Tulle, for example, who visited a month ago. On the morning of his arrival, he was already excited at the idea of going around the bars in Wan Chai one evening.
“Lockhart Road, you must know...”
“Er... yea...”
“They recommend it in here.”
‘Here’ was a little dog-eared booklet with a picture on the cover showing a topless lady serving a G & T to a tourist: Hong Kong Bachelor’s Guide. This guy had pulled it out of his pocket, his eyes alight.
But ‘bachelor’ means being single, and...
That’s why Chambon had declined to join in the expedition to the road in question which, it’s true, he had visited in the past but which now he found somewhat distasteful. He was not made of wood of course, yet his physical needs – he didn’t talk of love any longer – he satisfied with Jenny, a not so young woman, not pretty anymore, who worked Java Road, in North Point, almost a slum, two hundred and fifty per cent Chinese. With a wink and a provocative smile she had attracted him as he wandered in that area one day. A red heart decorated the door of her small pink flat where the bed squeaked like a rusted expeditionary forces’ half-track after rains. He had tried to make her understand that it didn’t help his concentration. Waste of time, she had not changed it. Sordid maybe, but no more so than Lockhart Road which stank of sad and cowardly virility and only a more cosmopolitan air of misfortune. At least, Jenny was a nice person. Sometimes he brought her flowers, to keep up the illusion. She was touched and amused at the same time by his kindness.
From where he was standing, he could observe Lavinier, graduate of Saint-Cyr with the permanent suntan of a beach-boy, absorbed in a conversation about sports. These gentlemen, four or five of them, were assessing France’s chances at the Olympics, at the end of the month. The military attaché, a fan of cycling, was adamant that ‘our cyclists’ could do it. Morelon was coaching the team, no small potato. The others expressed their skepticism even scorn: “cycling, drugs and all the rest, their medals? No thank you. Fencing, on the other hand, or horse riding, that’s more honest, well, I hope so, who knows, but for the rest, the wooden spoon...”
Captain Lavinier, losing interest and running out of things to say caught Chambon’s eye. A cautious though rather theatrical gesture pointed in the direction of the garden of the residence. A polite conversation, five minutes later, under a bauhinia tree:
“Delighted to see you.”
“And I you.”
“How are you?”
“Well, and you?”
“Your wife and children?”
“Back in France for the holidays.”
“Whereabouts?”
“Royan.”
“A nice town.”
“Peaceful, above all. How is business?”
In any business you need demand but the world was on such a course that there was no risk of that decreasing soon, as long as people could pay. Unfortunately, the latter posed something of a problem, these days.
“I can guarantee that the financial soundness of the project I am about to propose to you is cast in bronze.”
Chambon smiled to himself. For the twenty-five years he had been in this profession, this kind of introduction meant that there was almost certainly a snag.
To this Lavinier objected: “No, I assure you, although I won’t hide anything from you. It is about a Chinese job, but the other one, Taiwan actually.”
Taiwan, he must be joking. This was not merely a snag but a rip.
“The client is inviting us for dinner tomorrow evening. You are available, I take it?”
Paris had already given the green light provisionally, continued the military attaché. On condition, naturally, of total secrecy. At the slightest indiscretion, the authorities would deny all knowledge, and the contractor would be on his own.
Chambon ran his fingers through his hair. Snag... rip... more like torn to shreds.
Chapter 4
The street lights, lit at only half mast, conferred an air of gloom onto Johnston Road, and Siu Fung had the impression that she was waiting for a funeral. Yet the dim light, in a way, reassured her.
At last, the tram emerged from Queensway. It slowly passed the Methodist church and the old pawn shop, rattling along lines which, each time she saw them, she thought were too narrow for its high body: wasn’t it going to topple over?
She screwed up her eyes to read its number: 88, and its destination: Causeway Bay. The very tram she had to take. It reached her and stopped. On its side an advert praised the merits of Campbell’s tomato soup. She took a deep breath and got on.
As planned, Yeung Tak was already on board, downstairs, sitting not too far behind the driver. He saw her too but they pretended not to know each other: also planned. She clambered upstairs, bought her ticket from the conductor and sat right at the front, with her satchel secure between her legs.
As she had hoped, there were not many passengers. Who would risk being caught in the street at curfew, now less than an hour and a half away? And even more, who wanted to be an accomplice to the odious strategy of the transport companies which claimed to keep their service going, but only by replacing striking employees with scabs? Not that they were finding it easy to do, fortunately; hadn’t she waited a good twenty minutes before getting a tram?
With its roughcast wall outside, and its rustic furniture inside, the French restaurant in Happy Valley to which the Taiwanese had invited the two men was trying to imitate a French provincial style. The question was, which one?
Lavinier made the introductions. Mr Kuang occupied an important position in the National Centre for Strategic Studies in Taipei.
“You have before you a perfect francophone and francophile” added the captain.
The person in question, a fragile gnome with a baby face, held out a tiny frail hand that Chambon was scared he might crush, and explained the captain was referring to a period in his life now long gone alas, namely his youth, when he was studying in Paris.
Chambon pretended to sympathize. Youth was a gift that everyone loses eventually. Not worth getting all worked up about: no big deal.
Drinks were ordered, glasses were raised then Kuang introduced his whatever-it-was-called Centre; a respectable academic institute where foreign hosts were regularly invited to exchange ideas, in a friendly atmosphere.
“We would be happy to welcome you.”
“I am not a very good speaker.”
Both true and false: Chambon rarely strung more than six words together at a time, yet, in his profession, this constituted an asset...
Starters. The conversation continued in a courteous manner. One talked of polemology in general: the evolution of strategic doctrines and new technologies applied to the industries of defence.
Main course. Entrecôte marchand de vin for everybody. One took as examples various theatres of war all over the world, working subtly towards Asia. Cheese, dessert, coffee? No, yes, why not? One mentioned certain types of equipment useful in tense situations: ground to air missiles in particular.
Liqueur...
Chapter 5
