Crown 2, page 5
part #2 of Crown Series
‘What happened here?’
Crown was still crouched on the ground, using the firelight to examine the contents of the dead man’s wallet. The voice which asked the question held a note of authority which made the query a demand rather than a request for information. The Australian craned his neck around to look up at the man. Tall and uniformed. A British army officer. Insignia showing he was a captain in the Gurkha Infantry Brigade.
‘Car crash,’ Crown replied as he straightened up.
‘I can see that, man!’ the officer snapped curtly. Then he saw something else, as Crown stepped to one side. The squashed torso with the entrails spilled out from the ghastly wound. ‘Oh my God!’ he managed to rasp before the nausea hit him and he turned away, falling down on to all fours to be sick.
‘Am I glad we’ve got the Pommy army here to protect us,’ Crown muttered sardonically as he swung away to force through the half circle of ashen-faced watchers.
Chapter Five
HANS DE JONG staggered along neon-lit Lockhart Road feeling very drunk and exceptionally horny. It was a condition that had cost him a lot of money and a great deal of time. Time he had plenty of, but his money was running out.
The drinking had started five hours earlier, de Jong and three shipmates of assorted nationality celebrating the end of a long trip. Their Greek-owned, Panamanian-registered cargo steamer was berthed at a pier in the Kowloon Docks and the quartet of merchant seamen were content to remain in the fetid heat of the tiny cabin as long as the ice-cold beer held out. All hard drinkers, the seamen were steady on their feet when the refrigerator offered up its last can of cold beer and they were driven ashore. A Pak Pai transported them to central Kowloon and they left a trail of empty San Miguel bottles along a zigzagging route through the bars of the Tsimshatsui district, the frosting on the dark glass hardly having time to evaporate before the seamen moved on to the next place.
They lost the Frenchman when he bought a girl out of a discotheque on Cameron Road. The three seamen remaining in the group went looking for action up town in Yaumati. Here the American dropped out, not prepared to listen to warnings of the consequences from his shipmates. He went with the sampan girl, his drunken mind reeling with the promised pleasures aboard one of the floating brothels in the typhoon shelter.
Hans de Jong and the Swede continued to drink, moving from place to place, their conversation morose as they discussed the harrowing cases of venereal diseases each had known about or seen. They became complete women haters as they were ferried across the harbour in a walla walla boat. So much so that the Swede hit the boatman when the hapless little Chinese suggested the best girlie bar in town was on Connaught Central between the Queens Hotel and Statue Square.
The seamen beat it fast without paying the fare and took a bus into Wanchai. The Dutchman had been faking misogyny to keep up his end in the conversation of contempt for the female sex. But two hours later the Swede showed that he had meant every word he said. After some low voiced questions of a young Eurasian boy in a Jaffe Road ballroom, the Swede disappeared. The Swede knew the international signs, but de Jong didn’t. However, the boy had just enough English to be able to tell de Jong that his shipmate had been directed to a gay set bar in the basement of a hotel on the waterfront.
The Dutchman was gripped by alcohol-edged melancholia for the second time that evening. He had genuinely liked the Swede. But he hated all fags. Alone, he began to stay longer and drink more at each bar. Eastwards along Jaffe, down Marsh and then west on Lockhart. He saw a lot of girls and many of them did more than merely return his disinterested glances. In the smoky, dimly-lit, music-throbbing bars the offers entailed a promise of sex in return for the purchase of an unspecified number of drinks. Outside on the traffic-noisy, pavement-thronged, neon-splashed streets the prostitutes tried to make more straightforward deals of sex-for-cash. At one point he staggered by mistake into a jerk joint. With no liquor license, the finger bar served only coffee, Coke and Seven-Up. The girls were hampered, too: confined to unzipping a man and working with their hands with only a table top to keep private practice from becoming indecent exposure.
The Dutchman got out of there fast and sank four San Migs in the regular bar next door. No girls offering any service of any kind. Just a place to sit and drink: in silence, even, if nobody wanted to feed the juke-box. It was while sitting there, out of range of a single girl who was for sale, that Hans de Jong began to feel horny. And when he rose from the table and reeled out of the door, he was going cold-bloodedly in search of relief. He did not want to sit drinking with a girl and he could not afford to buy one out of wherever she happened to be working. He never used streetwalkers. Not that he had anything against them. It was just one of his idiosyncrasies. So de Jong looked for a brothel and found the Stardust Hotel.
He was a man of forty-five, an inch over six feet and broadly built. Had he been inclined towards vigorous exercise he might have developed a fine physique. But he was a lazy man and this combined with over-indulgence in food and drink—especially the latter—had clothed his frame with a great deal of flabby fat. He had a pleasant enough face, with widely spaced, deep-set eyes, an unprominent nose and lean cheeks which sloped in to form a squarish chin beneath a gentle mouth. He wore his black hair long at the back and sides, but it was receding heavily from his forehead.
He had been a seaman all his working life and there were few major ports of the world where he had not got drunk as a prelude to buying a woman’s body. Kowloon City was his usual hunting ground when in the Colony of Hong Kong and he knew four places over there where he could get what he wanted. But in fresh pastures his instinct was invariably reliable. Thus, when he saw the Stardust Hotel, he sensed it was just the kind of place he was looking for.
It was sited on the corner of Lockhart Road and a narrow alley running south towards Hennessy. Red neon tubing spelled out the name above the door which was set at an angle to cut off the sharp point of the corner. The A and R of Stardust were not illuminated and looked as if they had been dark for years. The building was three storeys high with a great many windows overlooking the main street and the alley. Less than a quarter of the windows spilled pale light. The door was closed but showed multi-coloured light from a stained glass panel to hint at some kind of welcome.
The Dutchman’s hands were unsteady and he fumbled a great deal to turn the knob and enter. The light level inside the lobby was not high and de Jong’s alcohol-fuzzed eyes relished the contrast after the garish brightness of the advertising signs on the street outside. A large ceiling fan was turning slowly, stirring the fuggy air without cooling it. The fat woman behind the reception desk was waving a plastic imitation ivory fan in front of her ugly face. Her dark eyes glinted hungrily from between puffy eyelids.
‘You want room and broad, sailor boy?’ she asked, and cackled with tired laughter. She called every strange man sailor, from a habit picked up in younger days working the waterfront bars of Singapore, Yokohama and Hong Kong.
‘How much?’ de Jong wanted to know, his English thickly accented.
‘All night two hundred dollar Hong Kong. Short time twenty dollar. We take any money. No traveller’s checks.’ She laughed again.
The Dutchman dug an expensive leather bill-fold out of the hip pocket of his denim trousers. He walked unsteadily across to the desk where the light was brightest—and the fat madam’s bad breath was strongest. She was as interested as de Jong in the contents of his wallet. But gave a grunt of disappointment when the slim stack of bills totalled only fifty dollars. He pushed a ten back inside and extended the forty towards the woman.
‘Two short times and I change girls if I like?’
‘You mean if you don’t like!’ the madam shot back with more laughter. She snatched the offered money with a fat hand clawed like an eagle’s talon. She dropped it into an open drawer and slammed it shut. The gesture and her abruptly hard expression was more vocal than a thousand words in indicating that the Stardust gave no refunds.
‘Where?’ de Jong asked, his pleasant face contorted as the nearness of available women heightened his lust.
The madam jerked a thumb towards the stairway in a corner of the lobby. ‘Up there, sailor boy. Knock on any door that ain’t got the sign on the handle. You don’t like, you turn around and try another door.’ She delved a meaty hand into the front of her dress and hauled out an ancient and battered Hunter watch on a silver chain. ‘Hey!’ she called as de Jong started up the stairs between the dusty-leaved rubber plants flanking them. ‘You ain’t down here in thirty minutes, I’ll personally come up and toss you outa this place.’
She dropped the watch back into her dress and it made a moist, sucking sound as it fell between the sweaty flesh of her slack breasts. The Dutchman continued up the stairs, in no doubt that the ugly old madam was capable of carrying out the threat. So he went as quickly as his drunken legs would carry him, anxious to get his money’s worth.
The stairway and landing were as frugally lit as the lobby. Unshaded, low wattage bulbs shed just enough light for him to see the stair treads, then the eight doors—four on each side of the first floor landing. Only one had a fly-specked cardboard sign strung from the handle: DO NOT DISTURB, with a Cantonese translation underneath. He opened the first door he came to. A young Chinese girl sat cross-legged against the headboard of a bed. She was naked and picked her nose with deliberate concentration as she listened to a transistor radio through a single earplug. She smiled at de Jong and cupped her small breasts in her hands, offering them towards him.
The Dutchman shut the door on her and went in search of a girl with a few more years and a lot more body. He examined a Negress with an Afro hairstyle, a Eurasian with good hips but a flat chest and a Malay girl who could be no older than fourteen. Then he found what he wanted, in the room next to the one that was already engaged. She was Chinese, about thirty, with a full-blown body. Her features were almost bovine, but it was not the face that interested de Jong. Her enormous breasts and flared hips with the bulging belly between combined to form de Jong’s ideal of what the female figure should be. And, what was even better, the woman was not entirely naked. Her dark skin was banded at breasts and lower belly by the white strips of bra and panties.
‘You like me, feller?’ she asked, and rose to stand on the bed, turning full circle to display her voluptuous body from every angle.
‘You got what de Jong wants, baby,’ he answered tightly, and stepped into the room, closing the door behind him.
‘First must do something,’ the whore yelled excitedly. She leapt down from the bed and de Jong thought she was rushing to grab him. But instead, she went around him and pulled the door ajar. She unhooked the DO NOT DISTURB sign from the inner knob and transferred it to the outer one. Then she closed the door and leaned against it in an attitude of allure—hands behind her back and belly thrust forward. ‘There, now everybody know we engaged,’ she said happily.
‘But you ain’t going to make me wait until we’re married, are you, baby?’ the Dutchman muttered, stepping towards her. His unsteady hands clawed and the fingers hooked over the top of the bra. He jerked downwards and the enormous breasts spilled out of the insecure cups.
‘Beautiful,’ he gasped, his eyes blazing as they drank in the sight of the sagging half spheres.
‘You stay with me all night, feller?’ the whore encouraged huskily.
‘Perhaps,’ he replied, turning to nod towards the bed. It was always better to let them think they were going to earn a lot of commission.
She smiled her belief in him and moved across to sprawl on her back on the bed. A truck reversed into the alley below as de Jong stripped off his shirt, jeans and underwear. As the whore arched her back to allow him to slide the panties down her thick thighs, the truck’s tailgate slammed open.
‘I can see you are ready, feller,’ the whore murmured, beginning to generate her professionally false passion as she reached out both hands, to cup and stroke him.
‘Save that for the next time, baby,’ de Jong growled, knocking her hands away and climbing on to the bed between her parted thighs.
She guided him into her and there was plenty of room. Both their bodies were tacky with sweat and their flesh ground together with moist sounds. The whore started to groan dramatically as she writhed her body beneath his driving lust and de Jong panted with the exertion. But the noise they made was unimportant. The whore’s happiness at drawing a customer on a slow night and de Jong’s enjoyment at spending his lust was sufficient to block out all extraneous sound. Thus, the copulating partners failed to hear the heavy tread of Ju and Willie on the stairs and along the landing: the footfalls heavy because the two men had the sheet and blanket-wrapped body of Mu Li slung between them.
The Dutchman reached his climax with a shudder that quivered his flabby body from head to toe. The whore chose the right moment to go limp beneath him. Then she smiled a dreamy smile.
‘Good, no?’ she murmured, taking her hands away from the claw marks on his pale back to cup his face.
‘The first one is always just an aperitif,’ de Jong told her gruffly. It was the wrong simile to use: reminding him that a long time had elapsed since he last had a drink. He rolled off the whore’s spread body. ‘Anything to drink in the house, baby?’
The door of the next room was unlocked and the two men carried the body across the threshold. The door closed and there was movement without conversation. Not unusual in a brothel.
‘I can get some Jasmine tea,’ the whore offered.
‘And you know what you can do with it,’ de Jong retorted. ‘I mean a drink with a kick, baby.’
‘Rice wine?’ she suggested.
The Dutchman groaned, but on the premise that beggars cannot afford to be choosers, he altered the tone to make it a sound of assent. The whore turned on to her side and stretched out a hand towards the dressing table wedged between the bed and the wall. This presented de Jong with an uninterrupted view of the whore’s fleshy buttocks. The sight renewed the heat in his jaded loins and reassured him that he would have no trouble in meeting the ugly old madam’s deadline.
The wine she took from a drawer was in the usual ceramic container printed with Chinese characters. There were no glasses and de Jong sucked from the neck of the bottle. The wine, as always, tasted like thinned-down furniture polish. It burned his tongue and throat but the initial effect when it mixed with the San Miguel in his stomach was extremely pleasant. It was even better when the alcohol content began to feed into his bloodstream. The liquor and the proximity of a naked woman stirred him physically and emotionally. The whore saw his renewed arousal and prepared herself to be taken again. But de Jong continued to suck from the bottle for although he felt drunker and more horny than any other time tonight, the rice wine seemed to parch his throat rather than slake his thirst.
But, when the whore began to trail her fingers lightly across his stomach and leaned her head over him, her mouth opening on his nipple, her tongue working, lust became the stronger want. He allowed the bottle to drop to the floor beside the bed, then rested both hands on the whore’s head to pressure it down his body. When her gently moving tongue found a more sensitive area of throbbing flesh, the nausea hit him.
‘Toilet!’ he yelled in alarm, knocking her head away from him and rolling off the bed. He landed on all fours, then threw himself erect, covering his mouth with both hands.
Shock, then anger showed on the whore’s bovine features. But the Dutchman’s clutching hands, his white and sweating face and his heaving stomach provided a vivid explanation of what was wrong.
‘Upstairs!’ she said. ‘I wait. You come back to me, feller?’
The Dutchman gave a frantic nod, then lumbered to the door. Willpower held the sickness back down his throat as he fumbled with the handle and jerked it open. Like sounds with no voices, a naked man was not abnormal in a whorehouse. But, as it happened, there was no one to see the flabby nudity of de Jong as he rushed along the landing, up the stairs and crashed into the bathroom. He made it to the toilet bowl before the malodorous deluge started. It lasted a minute and then there was another minute of dry retching while the nausea protested the lack of raw material. After that, de Jong washed himself and swore once more that he would never again touch Chinese rice wine. He still felt very drunk, and his reflection in the flaked mirror over the washbasin showed him that he looked the way he felt. Horny, too. Even the relative coldness of the basin pressing against him did not detract from that.
He lumbered back down the stairs and along the landing, his lusting mind filled with a vivid image of the whore’s curving buttocks with the purple, horseshoe-shaped birthmark at the base of her spine. Need of the woman and the alcohol polluting his bloodstream blocked out all other considerations as his hands fumbled at the doorknob with the DO NOT DISTURB sign hung from it. The fact that he had not closed the door when he rushed out of the room was lost in the back of his memory.
When the knob turned, he opened the door fast and staggered through: certain he would explode if he did not get relief from her willing body within a few moments.
It was like a nightmare! Or some ghastly hallucination conjured up by the foul-tasting wine. The room looked exactly the same, but the whore was dead. Evilly, brutally dead. Cut open from throat to belly and stabbed a thousand times. But no. It was not his woman. This one, sprawled carelessly across the crimson-stained sheet was younger and slimmer: paler skinned and with different hair. His clothes were not heaped on the floor at the side of the bed.
