Bad Traffic Read online

  Loudest in their shouts were the three ladies, here to back up wavering husbands. A lot of the men had required a great deal of persuasion. ‘Why do we have to be brave?’ they had complained. ‘We just want a quiet life. Let them have a cut.’ But the gang’s greed had worked in his favour. Someone had made inquiries and discovered that the big tongs usually asked for less.

  ‘We will not let you feed on this community,’ said Mister Li. ‘None of us will give you anything. Not the restaurant owners or the shopkeepers or any of our businesses. We stand united.’

  ‘Get out,’ shouted a lady. ‘Get out, you worms.’ Mister Li had asked that there were no insults. Always it was the women who were quickest with the insults. There was a way to do these things and it would go easier without such talk.

  ‘I ask you to leave this premises, and never to return,’ said Mister Li, projecting his voice to fill the room.

  Black Fort walked back and forth before the line, looking all the men in the eye. ‘I know who you are,’ he said, ‘I know you all.’ He jabbed a toothpick at them.

  ‘And we know you,’ said the lady, ‘you leeches.’

  ‘You will have reason to regret this action,’ said Black Fort. Mister Li realised that he was clamping his jaw and consciously relaxed it.

  He asked that the men with the banner move aside so that the tong could get to the door. The men shuffled, and their banner drooped in the middle, so Mister Li asked one of them to take a few steps to the side to make it taut again. Black Fort yanked the banner down so that it fell to the floor, and trod on it as he left.

  Now, of course, the difficult bit started. It was easy to feel brave in a big group of men when you were facing only four. But the gang might come at them individually. If a few broke then the whole group was back where they started. If he was lucky the gang would decide that this community was not worth the effort, and move on. If he was not lucky they would try and chop him, perhaps burn down his restaurant. He did not mind the risk for himself, but he cared for his family. That night he sent his wife and daughter and elderly mother to stay at an aunt’s house.

  He had bought a gun. It was surprisingly easy, a friend of a friend of a friend had sorted it all out in a couple of days. He’d met the vendor, a young man in a duffel coat, in a suburban pub, in the single cubicle of the gents’ toilet.

  The squat black Italian-made six-shooter cost him four hundred pounds. The six bullets cost more. They were for a smaller-calibre pistol and had been wrapped in cellophane so that they would fit the larger chamber. Your pea-shooters were easy, the man had hissed, but you couldn’t get ammo for love nor money.

  Mister Li suspected that he had been passed unreliable merchandise. He didn’t like touching the cold, greasy thing, so he put it on a bed of tissue paper in a briefcase, which he kept under the bed at night and in the restaurant kitchen during the day.

  He found it hard to concentrate, and swung between trepidation and rage. When he walked into a room he made a mental note of the location of objects that could serve as weapons – ashtray, pen, statuette – and he got into the habit of turning round quickly to see who was behind. Let them come, he would bark at himself. He was ready, he was a tenacious fighter with a will of iron. They had bitten off more than they could chew in daring to challenge Mister Li.

  Nine days after the banquet he was woken by a noise downstairs. He knew it was them and he took the gun out of the briefcase. He decided not to put a dressing gown over his boxer shorts and vest, as opening the cupboard might alert the intruders. He determined to shoot that leech Black Fort right between the eyes. But he could not stop his hands from trembling.

  He took the stairs one at a time, and there seemed to be more than he remembered. The noise came again. Someone was in the kitchen.

  His vision grew used to the darkness. As he approached the bottom step and the point of no return, he wondered if he should not go back to get his glasses.

  But he went on. Perhaps, after all, it was only a stray come through the cat flap – then, wouldn’t he laugh? He tried to remember what the young man had said about the gun and clicked the safety catch. He was sure that he had turned it to the off position, but it occurred to him that perhaps it had been off all the time, and now he had turned it on, rendering the gun inactive. However he reassured himself, the possibility nagged.

  In the hallway he called out, in English, ‘Alright you bastards. I’m going to get you.’ But his mouth was so dry it came out as a series of rasps.

  He kicked open the kitchen door. There was no one there. He went into the dining room, and through to the lounge, stalking with the trembling gun held aloft, and there was no one there. He could not even find how they had got in. He went into the kitchen and drank a glass of water.

  A pink mobile phone lay on the counter, a clamshell, open. It wasn’t his. It was splattered with some dark-red substance. He picked it up. The red stuff looked like blood. He pressed a button. The screen brightened and showed a brick wall. It was the paused start of a film. He pressed ‘Play’.

  (25

  A brick wall. The camera moved to the left, to show more wall and a corner. It was a wobbly picture, handheld, and the light, coming from above, a bright bulb perhaps, was harsh and flattening.

  The camera shifted further and there was Wei Wei cowering, legs drawn under her, arms behind her back, ankles tied with electric cable. The image blurred as the camera was brought closer, then snapped suddenly into clarity. Her lip was split and blood trickled down her chin. Her eyes were bright and damp. She was talking, but there was no sound on the film, her mouth was making the same shapes again and again, she was repeating something over and over.

  She slid back, away from the camera, propelling herself along the concrete floor with bare feet until she was pressed against the wall. The camera came in closer until her white face filled the frame. Because of the lighting, all that was visible was big black eyes and the dark gap between her open lips and the black gap between the two front teeth.

  A gloved hand grabbed a hank of hair and pulled it up and away from her face and yanked her head back. Her nostrils quivered. She was looking fixedly to the side, at something offscreen.

  The hand let go of the hair and it flopped back across the face, and whoever was holding the camera stepped back to widen the frame.

  A figure stepped up to the trembling girl, dressed in baggy black clothes, a scarf across his face, a woolly hat pulled down low over his forehead and wraparound plastic sunglasses over his eyes. A knife blade gleamed. He leaned over and down, and with a rapid underhand motion drove the knife a dozen or so times into her torso.

  The girl’s mouth opened and closed and a shudder passed across her, then she slumped. Blood pooled rapidly beneath her and the knife wielder stepped away.

  The picture wavered, then settled, to show the concrete floor and the dead girl and the spreading blood pool. The blank white face of the dead girl grew bigger as the phone holder leaned in towards it, until it filled the screen. Abruptly, the screen blanked.

  Jian blinked hard and saw that his hand was shaking. The screen was a tiny thing, much smaller than his palm, but it had swallowed him completely. He was aware of a great heat building in his face. He looked up. He was in a darkened restaurant and an old man was pointing a gun with both hands and the barrel wobbled with his nerves.

  He dropped the phone and swept the skinny outstretched arms aside and rammed the little man up against the restaurant wall with one hand and punched the bamboo facing by his head with the other, again and again, until the bamboo crackled and split.

  He dropped the old man among the splinters. He looked inside himself and found his body filling with despair. He looked outside, and it was ridiculous and unfair that nothing was different. Here was a restaurant and here he was in it, here was a pink phone, here a hand with scuffed and bleeding knuckles. It was all the same, but it didn’t mean anything any more.

  The old man was crawling across the floor. Stil
l keeping the gun pointed, he began to fumble with the phone. The film’s last frame was a close-up of Wei Wei’s blank eye. He was blowing up the picture. He stood and thrust the phone at Jian and retreated to the corner of the room and hid behind his gun.

  Wei Wei’s pupil filled the small screen. In the corner of the black iris lurked a blurred and distorted reflection of the bottom half of the face of the man holding the camera phone. Almost nothing could be discerned except a dark patch beneath his lip, a birthmark.

  Jian put his hands on a counter, then on his face, back on the counter, back on his face, now digging his fingers into his cheek. It was good to have the bamboo splinters burning in his hand, it took the real pain away.

  He wanted to think about it. He knew she was dead but he couldn’t accept it, because in his head she was alive. But she wasn’t alive, she was dead, and there was nothing he could do to change it. He remembered her mother, in the glare of a lorry’s headlight, the head lolling, eyes open, blood running down her cheek. In death they were more alike than when they were alive. Mother and daughter – four empty eyes to watch him now.

  The old man approached with faltering steps and put the gun down by the candle. He took a black namecard out of his wallet, put it down next to the gun and retreated nervously.

  ‘Black Fort’ was written there, by an image of lips and a glass. The old man came forward again and pushed the gun towards Jian’s hand, pushed it millimetre by millimetre, until the handle was facing him.

  ‘I get it,’ snapped Jian. ‘I get it. He killed her and now you’ll help me kill him.’

  Jian picked the gun up. The old man tapped the namecard. He was pointing at what looked like an address.

  (26

  Jian examined the gun. It seemed a decent model but the ammunition was a joke: it looked likely to jam or even blow up in his face. He’d have to test it. He pointed it at the old man and rested his finger on the trigger and the man waved his arms and jabbered.

  He had worked the story out, it was simple enough – he didn’t need to be told. Some guy tries to be brave and the innocent end up hurt, he’d heard it many times. Everything the old man said was an irritation, it was like having an insect buzzing in your ear.

  ‘You think I will become the agent of your revenge?’

  Jian wanted him to die. He raised the gun. He said, ‘You killed my daughter, as much as anyone. You did. It was you.’

  The old man retreated, hurrying behind the counter, talking, talking. Jian stalked after him into the kitchen. The man was scrabbling at the back door.

  He fired into the side of a freezer. The shot resounded in the small space and, after, there was a ringing silence and a whiff of cordite. He inspected the bullethole. The bullet had passed through the outer layer of plastic but had not penetrated into the interior. So these shrink-wrapped bullets did not have much stopping power – but at least the gun worked.

  ‘Shut up. You going to help me, or not?’

  The old man was talking even faster. Jian had shot the freezer for safety, its plastic surface the only one a bullet would not ricochet off. But let the man think him insane and irrational, it would keep him nervous.

  He held the pink phone delicately between two fingers and pocketed it. The gun went into his jacket, along with a chopper and a fruit knife.

  ‘Let’s go, then. That’s right. You piece of shit. Let’s go.’

  The old man locked the place up. Jian said, ‘How fortunate that I should appear, and become the agent of your vengeance. You think you are so cunning, don’t you? I hate you.’

  The old man smiled and nodded and led him round the corner and into a car.

  ‘I hope you die like my daughter died. You old coward.’

  At the dog end of the Cultural Revolution Jian had joined the army, and had fought in an obscure, inglorious and inconclusive war against the Vietnamese. A sensible lad and a bad soldier, he had kept his head down. He’d learned to hate infested bunkers, and he’d spent as much time as he could developing political awareness, because it happened in a dry classroom.

  He had come to know the contents of his little red book, ‘The Thoughts of Chairman Mao’ off by heart. He was taught that, at times of stress, all good communist soldiers calmed themselves with those wise words. Indeed, he had found that, even under fire, by filling his head with the babble of those mantras he was able to function.

  Now, in the warm car, woozy with fatigue and anguish, his old survival technique came back to him. ‘Exploitation of the working class for profit constitutes one side of the character of the national bourgeoisie,’ chanted the voice in his head. ‘While its support of the constitution and its willingness to accept socialist transformation constitute the other.’ It made him feel like a soldier again.

  (27

  Jian considered it quite possible that he was walking into a trap. It would have been a simple matter for the old man to arrange an ambush. But instinct told him that the old man hated this tong almost as much as he feared them. He closed his eyes, thinking to rest for a couple of minutes.

  When he opened them the old man was shaking him. He had no idea how long he’d been out. It had been more like a blackout than slumber. They were parked on a dark street without lights. The old man pointed at a door and mimed holding the namecard up to the CCTV camera just visible above it. Jian snatched the card and got out of the car with the gun heavy in his pocket and the car was accelerating away before the door had finished swinging closed.

  Jian’s breath was juddery and shallow. He was disorientated after his sleep, and there was a black pit at the edge of consciousness, but he could not fall into it yet. He reflected that only on one subject was it worth listening to Mao and that was how to win a battle. Fight no battle unprepared, fight no battle you are not sure of winning, and concentrate an absolutely superior force on the enemy’s weak points. He was clearly now acting against the old fraud’s precepts. At the least he should have a plan, he should reconnoitre, he should rest.

  But his despair was like a sediment: without movement, it began to settle and clog. He could not stand still.

  Paint was peeling on the surface of the door. The window for the address was empty. He pressed it, thinking it was the door buzzer, pressed the maker’s name, then, third time lucky, got the button.

  He had been a bad father. He had not loved the girl’s mother – and then, of course, he had killed her. He had not been there for her when she was growing up, every day he had failed her. He had been guilty of sending her away. And now these people had taken her away from him. Killing these people would be nothing. It would not be so hard. Just carrying on, finding the strength to get up in the morning – that, he knew, was going to be difficult.

  He did not care that he was one man and they were four. He did not care for the risk, or if he lived or died. His only anxiety was that he be stopped before he had killed any of them. He was anxious to kill the one who called himself Black Fort – the others didn’t matter, they were followers, hatchetmen. Even if they had been the ones who… the ones who… his mind wrenched away from that thought, he couldn’t allow himself to complete it as words. If he could just kill Black Fort, then it wouldn’t matter what happened to him afterwards – nothing would matter.

  A voice crackled through the speaker. A girl, Chinese, a bark of inquiry.

  He held the namecard up to the camera and the door lock buzzed.

  (28

  The door led into a dark, narrow hallway. The only decoration was a print of a bare-chested Chinese girl carrying a vase on one shoulder. He knew the picture, it was popular back home. Her big doe eyes and pert tits brightened up a lot of dingy rooms.

  Stairs led up. He noted that his palms were not even sweating, a numb fatalism had stolen over him. Let what was about to happen, happen. He felt the gun in his pocket. The chopper was in his waistband and the fruit knife was tucked into a sock.

  In his war he had shot and killed one man, a stretcher-bearer. There had been nothi
ng dramatic about it – a retort, a distant figure glimpsed through smoke fell over – and it was a minor event in the great clamour all around, but in retrospect it had grown in significance. He had the taint of violence, he knew what it was and what it did to you, and he knew that to be successful now, he could not falter before the ugliness of it. He opened a door.

  A Chinese girl smiled at him from behind a bar. She’d lightened her face with pale foundation and there was a line around her jaw where the make-up stopped and a darker neck began. In the dim light of the room’s red tinted bulb she almost got away with it, but in daylight she’d look like a ghost. She said something in Cantonese and gestured at a leather sofa.

  Two heavily made-up Chinese girls sat there, one massaging the feet of the other. The girl receiving wore a figure-hugging qipao slit to the thigh. Beneath her black stockings Jian could see blisters on the back of her ankles. Her high-heeled shoes lay on the floor. The other girl, dressed in jeans and a tight T-shirt, kneaded her feet with strong, stubby fingers.

  Jian understood. He’d spent enough time in these kind of places, usually in his official capacity, but not always. Aware of the watching barmaid he pretended to be horny and nervous. He sat on an empty sofa and lit a 555. A cardboard cut-out of a half-recognised blonde actress smiled broadly. She was trying to keep her white dress down around her waist as it ballooned up, without much success. On the stale air he smelled cloying perfume, cigarette smoke and a faintly sour chemical undertone, a hospital odour. The ashtray was half full, the carpet peppered with cigarette burns.

  The girl behind the bar said something else, and he replied, ‘Dui bu qi, wo ting bu dong… I’m sorry, I don’t understand.’

  ‘Oh,’ said the girl in the qipao. ‘Ni shi zhong guo ren… you’re a mainlander.’ She sat up.

  ‘Where are you from?’ asked the girl in jeans.