When They Burned the Butterfly, page 18
They also came across a discarded heap of firecracker boxes—there had been more popping up all over Chinatown since the ban; people were trying to get rid of them, and their opium paraphernalia, before the police came knocking. At the far end of the street, however, large boards had been erected, blocking off the rest of the strip. Behind the fence loomed the skeleton of a monstrously tall building. Like People’s Park, it must have been twenty stories at least. (“Everything there got demolished. They’re moving everyone out of the area. The Sons aren’t very happy, I heard.”)
Two large blond men were peering through the door the Butterflies wanted to get into. One had a camera around his sunburned neck, and he lifted it toward Adeline as she approached. She grabbed the lens and glared, pointing at the sign that had been nailed to the pillar, which spelled in red English letters NO PHOTOGRAPHS.
Admonished, the tourists let them pass, going off to try to sightsee the rest of the street. “Learn to read!” Adeline shouted after them.
Chuckling as Adeline explained what she’d said, Tian pushed open the door.
This was not one of the funeral parlors. There were two rattan sofas in the corner with magazines and peanuts to wait. Pictures and framed newspaper clippings hung on the wall above them, and a woman sat at a desk on the other end with a typewriter, abacus, and a stack of envelopes. “Hi, Margaret,” Tian said. “Your mother feeling better?”
The receptionist looked gratified. “She’s doing well. My sister’s with her.”
“While watching the children?”
“Ah, it’s okay. They’re bigger now.”
“Yeah? How’s—”
Adeline cleared her throat. “One of ours was killed last night.”
Margaret seemed startled she was there. “Oh. Yes, I’ll get someone for you.” She picked up the phone, plucking at the cord as she exchanged a few short words with the other end.
“Take a seat,” she said soon after, smiling.
The lounge was so clean; Adeline had forgotten the Sons dealt in more normal business than scraping eyeless gangsters off the ground. She picked at the peanut dish and examined the frames on the wall. Most were photographs of the clan, several purely of the leading Yang family members and others of a wider membership. In one of the family pictures, Adeline recognized a younger version of her mother’s mortician, surrounded by parents, wife, two sons, and two daughters.
One of the sons was particularly well-regarded: two framed newspaper articles, one in English and one in Mandarin, featured the same photograph of a slender, clean-cut boy with round glasses in a white school shirt. His family gave death rites to gangsters. He’s a scholar headed to Cambridge, read the English headline. The Mandarin ran similar.
Both opened with a rather salacious description of death houses and the bloody gangsters that passed through them. Clearly the papers didn’t regard the Sons as cut from the same cloth. Or maybe that fact was inconvenient to the story, which was glowingly aspirational: a boy from a rowdy neighborhood school testing his way into Raffles Institution, racking up science prizes against absolutely all odds, and finally being awarded a public scholarship to read natural sciences in England. His parents, teachers, and army superiors were quoted waxing poetic about his work ethic.
“Yang Sze Feng, the boss’s second son,” Tian said. “I met him once, years ago. I’m surprised bullies didn’t kill him in school. Overseas-educated Son of Sago Lane.” She shook her head, half in awe, half wry. “Mun would fall to her knees.”
After about twenty minutes, a man who looked like a retired boxer instead of an undertaker came to greet them. The Sons’ identifying tattoos of ten circles were split between both his solid forearms. He was followed by a younger boy no older than fourteen who didn’t have tattoos yet, but did bear a clipboard. “You’re too late, Ang Tian. The Butterfly girl isn’t here anymore. Her family claimed her a few hours ago.”
Tian frowned. “That fast? You already called them?” Red Butterfly would have passed along Hsien’s home address, but it was barely after breakfast.
“The sister came and said someone from your side called.”
“Mun,” Tian muttered. Somehow Pek Mun had still gotten ahead of them. “So that’s it? Nothing we can do?”
The Son shrugged. Adeline finally placed him in one of the family pictures on the walls, which would likely make him a cousin or brother of the tang ki ko. Adeline wondered how he and Tian knew each other. There couldn’t be so many people dying that she made a habit of being here.
“Come on, Meng, don’t bullshit me. We didn’t come all this way for nothing.”
He flapped his hand like a dismissive uncle. “Hah. It’s not that far.” He paused consideringly, however, and Tian latched onto it.
“You’re thinking of something. Come on. I’ll buy you coffee.”
Meng sighed. “There is … well, I don’t know what it is.”
He led them through an unmarked door into a morgue. The cold of death hit instantly—the air-conditioning was on full blast. Shrouded bodies lay on low tables that bordered the room like dormitory beds. Five of the dozen were currently occupied.
The Son drew back the nearest cloth. Even having seen it multiple times now, Adeline was still impressed by their work. The dead woman’s skin and limbs were still deceptively supple, the gray pallor the only thing revealing the lack of running blood. Adeline wondered how long the Sons could preserve a body for, how long they let the dead go unclaimed before burying them in some nameless plot. Or perhaps land was too precious these days, with even cemeteries being repossessed, and the Sons just cremated everyone now.
Even death couldn’t obscure the fact that the woman had been beautiful. Despite the bare morgue and the blank white shroud, she somehow managed to look like an empress in repose being borne down a grand parade. “We haven’t fixed this one yet, but look.” Meng paused again, glanced around as though expecting a higher power to be watching, then rolled the woman over just enough to expose her bare back, where her spine had grown through her skin.
Tian cursed. The bone protruded like teeth from gums, a ridge of grimy white running down her back. Adeline couldn’t imagine how it felt. Goosebumps went down her back. “Is that what killed her?” she asked, revolted and horrified.
“Maybe, maybe not. I’ve never seen a deformity like that. She was found dead by some night soil collectors on Hindoo Road three nights ago, next to a cart and a dead Steel.”
“She killed a Steel?”
“Tore his throat out, but you didn’t hear it from me.” Meng flicked the cloth back over the woman. “I expect she wasn’t as dead as he thought. We got to the bodies first, told Three Steel she ran away. We wanted to take a look ourselves. Anyway, Three Steel was busy that night fighting the Storm Men; they didn’t count their bodies carefully.”
They’d heard about this. Three Steel had issued a challenge and won, leaving bodies behind, but they’d suffered losses, too.
“The White Man’s just declared curfew on them,” Tian surmised. “The Storm Men’s tang ki ko is proud and traditional, too. We all know how that will end.”
“Fan Ge’s very proper, you know, with the tang ki ko kills. One cut to the throat and bleeding out the bodies. But in fights, he lets his men be brutal.” As Meng spoke, he began to press his fingertips into the dead woman’s back, a motion like massaging clay. To Adeline’s fascination, the vertebrae began to retract. “There’s more of them now, too, since they annexed those other gangs.”
Tian leaned forward, pressing her palms on the edge of the slab. “He’s bleeding the bodies?”
“To take away their god’s blood,” Adeline said, feeling like they needed to state the obvious. Tian’s head whipped toward her.
Meng sighed. “Yes, messy business, how it’s always been done in the past. No blood, no gods, even when they’re not ours. A gang went after the Catholic converts once, a hundred years ago. Strung them up in the plantations and bled them like their savior. You could get away with so much more those days.” Beneath his palms, the spine had retracted almost entirely, the flesh and skin already starting to seal up behind it. Adeline noticed upward from the spine a blotchy crescent birthmark on the woman’s neck, the size of her thumbnail.
“What does your boss think?” Tian asked, troubled. “Or, actually, what does Yang Sze Feng think? I’ve always heard he had strange ideas.”
“Dai Lou’s second son is studying in England. My cousin is very proud. You want to talk to the older brother instead?”
“Yang Sze Leung wouldn’t know what to do with a thing like this. He’s a businessman. You know he’s still in love with that lancing girl,” Tian said. “I heard he’s there at her dance hall every week.”
“Really.” Adeline could see the wheels turning in Meng’s mind. Family politics, perhaps, storing away leverage; Yang Sze Leung would be the oldest son, presumptive heir to the dynasty, who certainly couldn’t be courting an entertaining girl. By the time Sze Feng graduated, those shophouses cordoned off at the end of Sago Lane would have been demolished; several more kongsi, probably, would be dead. He and his brother would be building the Sons in an entirely new direction, with a mind for business and the imported ink of a Cambridge degree.
* * *
After they confirmed that Lilian had delivered the money, the Needle confirmed he’d received his colleague’s letter, but they had the wake for Hsien first. Without a body, they piled her remaining things together with some offerings and chrysanthemums, and taking it in turns to watch over that for three days. On the third morning, twenty Butterflies gathered to burn Hsien’s things. They trooped down to the river to scatter the ashes, as someone remembered that Hsien had liked the water, and watched the powder disappear beneath the boats.
Adeline and Tian returned to an emptier People’s Park on a Wednesday afternoon, Adeline’s heart somewhere low in her torso with a conspiratorial drum as she let Tian help her off the bike. With Lilian’s money in a packet, secret intact, they headed up to Anggor Neo’s herbal shop.
The grate, however, was down, and shaking it and calling through it produced nothing. Adeline then realized it wasn’t even locked. With an exchanged look, they swiftly dragged the grate up.
The smell hit them instantly. Tian swore.
The door to the back room was slightly ajar, and they followed the smell to find the dead man slumped in his chair. The lights were still on, illuminating the scene in its full relief: the Needle bloated at his desk, head tipped back, flies buzzing around his shoulders. Cause of death was evident: there was a festering gash in his neck, and a knife on the floor beneath his dangling hand, which was cramped and red. It seemed like he’d pulled the knife out and tried to heal himself, but couldn’t work quick enough.
Tian pushed open the small window, but it did little about the smell. “It’s been a few days. This has to be Three Steel.”
The Needle had all but predicted this himself. If he’d tried to cover his tracks, he evidently hadn’t done it well enough. Or had it been the Butterflies who’d accidentally exposed him? Lilian herself might have told Three Steel that Red Butterfly was collecting the Needle’s debts. Or else they’d been asking around; word could have gotten to anyone. Adeline tried to file the Needle’s death away in the logic of things. He was not one of them, they didn’t owe him anything. And yet he had been helping them, and they had threatened his daughter in order to secure that help. The photograph was gone, but there was still the hole in the desk that Adeline herself had shot through.
Her nausea was rising steadily in the dead man’s fumes—one thing to know that flesh rotted, and another thing altogether to have it up your nose, in your mouth, in your throat, in your lungs. Adeline made the mistake of looking Anggor Neo in the face and seeing the white grains moving in his nostrils.
Tian snatched up the dustbin and thrust it under Adeline’s chin as Adeline retched. She pulled Adeline’s hair out of the way and rubbed consoling circles between Adeline’s shoulders even as she steered her back out into the bigger shop, where the air was still fresher. “Happens to everyone,” she said graciously. But when she produced a handkerchief to wipe off the corner of Adeline’s mouth, there was something afraid flitting behind her eyes.
Ever since talking to Meng, Tian had been looking at Adeline like she was imagining her throat cut. Adeline didn’t think she was imagining that Tian had been sticking closer, that the thought had spooked both of them and they had both kept finding themselves next to each other over the course of the wake, fending off the unsaid: they didn’t intend for the next funeral to be Adeline’s.
Of course, there was the other thing—Three Steel certainly hadn’t killed Adeline’s mother, then. They had half known already, of course, but the method was too different. So, who?
Adeline met Tian’s gaze. Tian jerked away, tossing the handkerchief onto the counter. “The letter from the other Needle must be here somewhere.”
Adeline cast an eye into the back room. Anggor Neo liked his records. Besides the bookshelves, there was an intimidating set of file cabinets. She muttered a curse, already seeing the next best step. “I’ll read through the drawers.”
Tian barely suppressed a smile. “I’ll call the Sons.”
“Tell them to take their time,” Adeline grumbled.
Papers upon papers upon papers. Where was Pek Mun when you wanted her? At least they were filed by date, so she was able to skip ahead several drawers to rifle through the recent weeks. There were cards on fevers and headaches, internal imbalances, common illnesses. She didn’t think this was where he would have kept a letter like that. She tried the desk drawer, now revolver-less. There were no letters here either, but she did notice a bullet hole in the wall. He was braver than she thought if he’d tried to shoot at Three Steel.
The second file cabinet had a locked bottom drawer. “Interesting,” she muttered, and cast around the desk and the Needle’s pockets. “No key.”
Tian, who’d been rooting through one of the bookshelves, came over and examined the lock. She slid the bobby pins out of Adeline’s hair, proceeding to efficiently slot them into the lock. After a minute of jiggling, the lock clicked.
Adeline was rarely impressed. “You have to teach me that.”
She plucked the unmarked envelope from the top of the inside pile and unfolded the sheet inside. Scrawled characters covered its surface. Adeline could barely make out what they were, but eventually managed to get the gist. Two words stood out: 魔法.
“He says these girls have magic,” she said, rereading, slower this time. Their beauty will be like that of the spider woman, and no doubt these so-called deformities are simply manifestations of some foreign monster, the Needle had written. Three Steel is endangering us by bringing this magic into our borders. I will seek Master Gan for more advice.
“Other girls with magic?” Tian chewed on the inside of her cheeks. “That must be why Three Steel has been keeping it such a secret. And maybe why the customers are so interested.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, this kind of sex is about power, right? The most successful girls are a fantasy. They let their customers feel loved, desired, charming, handsome, funny, manly, whatever it is these men want to feel. The best girls are those who can identify what a customer wants and change themselves accordingly. These men are led to feel they have conquered a woman they could never have otherwise. Girls with magic? These exotic girls who have abilities they don’t, submitting to them instead? Of course they would pay. Of course they’d keep coming back.”
Her conviction was why she should be Madam Butterfly. At some point, this quest had stopped being about Adeline’s mother. It had even stopped being about Bee. Tian was here now putting herself on the line because she wanted to know, because she cared. These were girls she might have been, the kind of girls she befriended and kept in her never-ending network. Now this revelation of magic had set her doubly on edge. Magic had been what freed her; it had to be twisting her that it might be killing others instead. Tian was taking this personally.
And Adeline was here because Tian’s fervor had hooked her ribs like a fishing line. It didn’t matter where they’d started now, only that they saw it through.
But then Tian remarked, “Christina had a boyfriend once who liked to see her fire when they slept together. He wasn’t scared of it. It turned him on to know he could control her. He was a bastard.”
“What happened to him?”
“They broke up. Mun made him scared of fire again.”
Her voice bordered on reverence. The fight over Hsien, and the politicking leading up to it, had thrown a wrench in Tian’s formerly unquestionable loyalty to the older girl. Yet the hero worship evidently still remained. Adeline had thought Tian was realizing she could be free of Pek Mun, but it seemed now it would be a slow, slow thing.
Adeline turned back to the drawer without a response. Underneath the envelope, stuffed haphazardly in as though he’d been working on it in a rush, were several sheets of paper notating a list.
“It’s a list of names and houses connected to these foreign magic girls,” she realized aloud. “It’s more than just one. He was recording all the symptoms he remembered.”
Tian peered over. She ran her finger down the list, apparently able to read that much, and stopped at the last one. “That’s Tiger Aw’s brothel.”
Pek Mun’s mother. Where Tian and Pek Mun had met. Tian moved past it with no further comment, folding the list into her pocket. They would want to know what these girls could actually do, they agreed, and how Three Steel was finding them. Not to mention how and why they were spreading to different houses now.
Tian said all this with that same earlier conviction, so strongly that Adeline nearly forgot how her voice had strained when she read that last address. Tian took the Needle’s silver ring, to give to his daughter. They exited People’s Park to the thankfully fresh, loamy smell of oncoming rain. Clouds were gathering over the roofs. This monsoon season had been relatively dry so far, but it looked like a storm was finally sweeping in.
