The Kowloon Contract by Philip Atlee

Author:Philip Atlee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2020-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 20

The next afternoon, I did something I didn’t want to do. Just as I had had no choice but to invade Kowloon City, looking for Kelly Wu, I had now to go see the mother of Lewis Huang, George’s nephew, who had been given a quick cremation in the sunken temple. Kelly, who had recovered consciousness but was still shaky and racked with sudden hysteria, was under sedation in the Queen Mary Hospital on Hong Kong Island, being guarded around the clock.

When I stepped from the cab into the courtyard of the palatial, walled house on Waterloo Road, Mrs. Huang was waiting. She was a slender, handsome woman, wearing a tailored suit. White hair, and absolute composure. She held out her hand, with long, coral-tipped fingernails, and caught me halfway through a bow. We both smiled as I straightened and shook hands with her.

Leading me into the drawing room, she poured tea and listened impassively as I told about Lewis’s death. I doctored the story, leaving out the napalm flaring around his screaming figure, and said simply that he had died from triad gunfire. A brave man, I added without emphasis; except for him, both the girl and I would have died. …

Mrs. Huang nodded politely and asked if I wished sugar in my tea. I said no, and sipped from the fragile cup while she stared past me at the afternoon sunlight spilling through the draped windows.

“I went to school in England when I was young, Captain Gall,” she said finally, a brittle smile on her lips, “and I remember a line from your Shakespeare. ‘We owe God a death … and him who pays today is quits for tomorrow. …’”

The coral-tipped hands were on her knees, clasped, and she wore modish shoes with stacked heels. They would be no hardship, I thought; her grandmother probably had bound feet. …

“Yes, ma’am,” I said slowly. “But I feel a trifle conspicuous. For a long time heroes have been dying around me.”

Mrs. Huang smiled a little sadly. She leaned over and touched my wrist, an enormous concession on her part. “It was nice of you to come see me. Now I will turn the rest of my noisy children loose on you, and you can have the drink you wanted all the time—”

She arose gracefully, and I came up with her. As she moved away between slippered servants, I got in the full bow. Three pretty Chinese-Scots girls came in laughing and introduced themselves. In age, they ranged from eighteen to thirty, and the youngest wore tailored jeans. She announced that her name meant snowflake in Chinese, and wow!, wasn’t that heavy? I assured her it was, although she weighed about a flat hundred pounds. They were asking me about Uncle George, “the famous Huang,” when in strolled another George Huang.

He even looked like his uncle. A glistening mop of black hair, much longer than his namesake, and long sideburns framing his handsome face. He wore multicolored sneakers, white sweat socks, white sharkskin shorts, and a scarlet sport shirt.

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