Riding the Snake (1998) by Cannell Stephen

Author:Cannell, Stephen [Stephen, Cannell,]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2011-01-05T05:41:26.390000+00:00

Chapter 22.

The Mucky Duck

The Black Swan restaurant was on the second floor of the Corral nightclub in the Wan Chai district of Hong Kong. The music vibrations came up through the floorboards from the strip club below. Wheeler and Tanisha sat in a booth in the small back room, which the restaurant reserved for VIPs like Johnny Kwong, and watched in fascination as the famous scarred inspector spooned cooked brains out of the skull of a dead tree monkey. The furry head of the primate had been severed, the top of the skull cut and removed at mid-forehead; the brains were cooked at the table. Julian Winslow was eating another traditional dish called pork-ball soup, which emitted a strong, pungent odor in the hot, enclosed back room. Tanisha and Wheeler had both lost their appetites when the monkey head had been sawed. On the table in front of them was uneaten fish-ball soup and a copy of Quincy's map. It was a baffling drawing that showed a hundred or more crisscrossing lines, some dead-ending, others wandering aimlessly and turning back on themselves like a spilled plate of spaghetti. There was Chinese writing all over the map, which Johnny said indicated approximate distances. The map was incomplete, confusing, and almost impossible to read. Worse still, Johnny explained, it only depicted the front two blocks of the Walled City, which stretched for ten, in all directions around the central park where the temple sat.

"Bloody shame," Johnny said between spoonfuls of monkey brains. "If I coulda got the whole thing, we might have run a raid on Willy Wo Lap and caught him on the glimmer."

Wheeler was still looking at the map, distressed at the myriad of transecting, wandering lines. "Who designed this place?" he finally said.

"Nobody did," Julian said. "It grew like a jungle fungus, one floor over another, took whatever shape it wanted. If a block of flats tumbled down, the people would scavenge for what was usable, bury the dead, and just build right over it. Reeks in there from garbage and rot. Got no proper sewage."

"I understand Miss Pullinger is no longer with us," Johnny said as he finished the last bite and wiped his napkin across cracked yellow lips.

"Yes, but we met a man named Chan Chak," Wheeler said. "He was one of Jackie Puilinger's disciples, if that's the right word for it. A man about twenty-five. He was raised inside the Walled City. He's a shoemaker. We got his business address."

Johnny put out his hand, and Wheeler dug the address out of his pocket and handed it to the detective. "I know this place. It's in Kowloon," Johnny said, handing it back. "He won't talk. The peasants are even more scared of Limpy Liu than they were of Willy. Evil, skinny, limping bastard's got a complexion like lunar lava, and a heart yellow as piss. If anybody goes up against him, he'll have their guts for garters."

Tanisha had remained silent through most of this. She was looking

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