CHAPTER TWO

11:48 P.M.:

“All gods bear witness to the foul luck I’m having tonight,” Four Finger Wu said and spat on the deck. He was aft, on the high poop of his oceangoing junk that was moored to one of the great clusters of boats that sprawled over Aberdeen harbor on the south coast of Hong Kong Island. The night was hot and humid and he was playing mah-jong with three of his friends. They were old and weatherbeaten like himself, all captains of junks that they owned. Even so, they sailed in his fleet and took orders from him. His formal name was Wu Sang Fang. He was a short, illiterate fisherman, with few teeth and no thumb on his left hand. His junk was old, battered and filthy. He was head of the seaborne Wu, captain of the fleets, and his flag, the Silver Lotus, flew on all the four seas.

When it was his turn again, he picked up another of the ivory tiles. He glanced at it and as it did not improve his hand, discarded it noisily and spat again. The spittle glistened on the deck. He wore a ragged old undershirt and black coolie pants, like his friends, and he had ten thousand dollars riding on this single game.

“Ayeeyah,” Pockmark Tang said, pretending disgust though the tile he had just picked up made him only one short of a winning combination—the game somewhat like gin rummy. “Fornicate all mothers except ours if I don’t win!” He discarded a tile with a flourish.

“Fornicate yours if you win and I don’t!” another said and they all laughed.

“And fornicate those foreign devils from the Golden Mountain if they don’t arrive tonight,” Goodweather Poon said.

“They’ll arrive,” Four Finger Wu told him confidently. “Foreign devils are glued to schedules. Even so, I sent Seventh Son to the airport to make sure.” He began to pick up a tile but stopped and looked over his shoulder and watched critically as a fishing junk eased past, chugging quietly, heading up the twisting, narrow access channel between the banks of boats toward the neck of the harbor. She had only riding lights, port and starboard. Ostensibly she was just going fishing but this junk was one of his and she was out to intercept a Thai trawler with a cargo of opium. When she was safely passed, he concentrated on the game once more. It was low tide now, but there was deep water around most of the boat islands. From the shore and flats came the stench of rotting seaweed, shellfish and human waste.

Most of the sampans and junks were dark now, their multitudes sleeping. There were a few oil lamps here and there. Boats of all sizes were moored precariously to each other, seemingly without order, with tiny sea alleys between the floating villages. These were the homes of the Tanka and Haklo people—the boat dwellers—who lived their lives afloat, were born afloat and died afloat. Many of these boats never moved from these moorings but stayed locked together until they sank or fell apart, or went down in a typhoon or were burnt in one of the spectacular conflagrations that frequently swept the clusters when a careless foot or hand knocked over a lamp or dropped something inflammable into the inevitable open fires.

“Grandfather!” the youthful lookout called.

“What is it?” Wu asked.

“On the jetty, look! Seventh Son!” The boy, barely twelve, was pointing to the shore.

Wu and the others got up and peered shorewards. The young Chinese was paying off a taxi. He wore jeans and a neat T-shirt and sneakers. The taxi had stopped near the gangway of one of the huge floating restaurants that were moored to the modern jetties, a hundred yards away. There were four of these gaudy floating palaces—three, four or five stories tall—ablaze with lights, splendiferous in scarlet and green and gold with fluted Chinese roofs and gods, gargoyles and dragons.

“You’ve good eyes, Number Three Grandson. Good. Go and meet Seventh Son.” Instantly the child scurried off, sure-footed across the rickety planks that joined this junk to others. Four Fingers watched his seventh son head for one of the jetties where ferry sampans that serviced the harbor were clustered. When he saw that the boatman he had sent had intercepted him, he turned his back on the shore and sat down again. “Come on, let’s finish the game,” he said grimly. “This’s my last fornicating hand. I’ve got to go ashore tonight.”

They played for a moment, picking up tiles and discarding them.

“Ayeeyah!” Pockmark Tang said with a shout as he saw the face of the tile that he had just picked up. He slammed it onto the table face upwards with a flourish and laid down his other thirteen hidden tiles that made up his winning hand. “Look, by all the gods!”

Wu and the others gawked at the hand. “Piss!” he said and hawked loudly. “Piss on all your generations, Pockmark Tang! What luck!”

“One more game? Twenty thousand, Four Finger Wu?” Tang said gleefully, convinced that tonight old devil, Chi Kung, the god of gamblers, was sitting on his shoulder.

Wu began to shake his head, but at that moment a seabird flew overhead and called plaintively. “Forty,” he said immediately, changing his mind, interpreting the call as a sign from heaven that his luck had changed. “Forty thousand or nothing! But it’ll have to be dice because I’ve no time now.”

“I haven’t got forty cash by all gods, but with the twenty you owe me, I’ll borrow against my junk tomorrow when the bank opens and give you all my fornicating profit on our next gold or opium shipment until you’re paid, heya?”

Goodweather Poon said sourly, “That’s too much on one game. You two fornicators’ve lost your minds!”

“Highest score, one throw?” Wu asked.

“Ayeeyah, you’ve gone mad, both of you,” Poon said. Nonetheless, he was as excited as the others. “Where are the dice?”

Wu produced them. There were three. “Throw for your fornicating future, Pockmark Tang!”

Pockmark Tang spat on his hands, said a silent prayer, then threw them with a shout.

“Oh oh oh,” he cried out in anguish. A four, a three and another four. “Eleven!” The other men were hardly breathing.

Wu spat on the dice, cursed them, blessed them and threw. A six, a two and a three. “Eleven! Oh all gods great and small! Again—throw again!”

Excitement gathered on the deck. Pockmark Tang threw. “Fourteen!”

Wu concentrated, the tension intoxicating, then threw the dice. “Ayeeyah!” he exploded, and they all exploded. A six, a four and a two.

“Eeeee,” was all Pockmark Tang could say, holding his belly, laughing with glee as the others congratulated him and commiserated with the loser.

Wu shrugged, his heart still pounding in his chest. “Curse all seabirds that fly over my head at a time like that!”

“Ah, is that why you changed your mind, Four Finger Wu?”

“Yes—it was like a sign. How many seabirds call as they fly overhead at night?”

“That’s right. I would have done the same.”

“Joss!” Then Wu beamed. “Eeeee, but the gambling feeling’s better than the Clouds and the Rain, heya?”

“Not at my age!”

“How old are you, Pockmark Tang?”

“Sixty—perhaps seventy. Almost as old as you are.” Haklos did not have permanent records of births like all village land dwellers. “I don’t feel more than thirty.”

“Have you heard the Lucky Medicine Shop at Aberdeen Market’s got a new shipment of Korean ginseng, some of it a hundred years old! That’ll stick fire in your stalk!”

“His stalk’s all right, Goodweather Poon! His third wife’s with child again!” Wu grinned toothlessly and pulled out a big roll of 500-dollar notes. He began counting, his fingers nimble even though his left thumb was missing. Years ago it had been hacked off during a fight with river pirates during a smuggling expedition. He stopped momentarily as his number seven son came on deck. The young man was tall for a Chinese, twenty-six. He walked across the deck awkwardly. An incoming jet began to whine past overhead.

“Did they arrive, Seventh Son?”

“Yes, Father, yes they did.”

Four Fingers pounded the upturned keg with glee. “Very good. Now we can begin!”

“Hey, Four Fingers,” Pockmark Tang said thoughtfully, motioning at the dice. “A six, a four and a two—that’s twelve, which’s also three, the magic three.”

“Yes, yes I saw.”

Pockmark Tang beamed and pointed northwards and a little east to where Kai Tak airport would be—behind the Aberdeen mountains, across the harbor in Kowloon, six miles away. “Perhaps your luck has changed, heya?”