The Badlands by Paul French

Author:Paul French [French, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2013-01-15T05:00:00+00:00

Hatamen Street – the border between the Badlands and the Legation Quarter

Advertising hoardings close to the Badlands, 1930s

The Dealer

Bad Joe Knauf’s Business and Blades

American-born Joe Knauf was short and squat and hairy, with a pronounced Roman nose that everyone commented on behind his back. He lived in a dump of a lodging house on the eastern edge of the Badlands, from where he traded in dope and women, and he was universally disliked.

The lodging house was a shithole. Ripped paper in the window frames let in chilling breezes in winter, and it was stiflingly airless in the humid summer months, but it didn’t seem to bother him. Visitors would often find him dressed in nothing but a silk kimono, and at other times he’d stand naked and high as a kite in the building’s courtyard, not a stitch on and waving a big Bowie fighting knife around. He had been arrested for this behaviour several times.

The internal courtyard, onto which the back rooms of the building faced, was permanently plunged into dank shadow. From it emanated the stink of rotting vegetables and human waste, rising up from the collective midden. In the summer it was overpowering. Who knew when or how it ever got cleared.

Despite its rundown state, the building was perfectly located for Knauf’s business – close to Chuanpan Hutong and within minutes of every major venue in the Badlands. Inside, it was a rabbit warren of more long shadows and dark corridors, where the doors were locked and unlocked constantly, where people were always coming and going. Whispers, mutterings, deals done, packages delivered, parcels removed, occasionally a shouted argument, the constant banging of doors. The sound of Chinese, English, Korean and Japanese being spoken, all mixed up. In the rooms, curtains were permanently drawn to block out the street outside; dust mites were visible in the occasional shafts of light.

Dirty bare floorboards, peeling paint, long-dead light bulbs – the place was in such a severe state of disrepair that some people dreaded going in there. Nobody knew who actually owned it, but it was said the Chinese landlords had let Knauf take control of the whole building, so scared were they of his violent outbursts and his connections with the Japanese. His little Korean girl – his ‘slave’, as he liked to call her – doubled as the building’s skivvy, emptying the chamber pots onto the midden, carrying water, and bringing food from the nearby Fu Sheng Restaurant.

Joe Knauf was a dedicated knife man and he liked to display his blade. He would remove it from the scabbard on his belt, wipe it on his sleeve, on his thigh, then hold it up to his face and twirl it, letting everyone know what he was carrying. People rightly feared Knauf and his knife. The man was a former US Marine, sticky and solid. He might have been short but that gave him a low centre of gravity, and he had reach, with arms like a monkey’s. He was

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