“You’re forgetting they found us after we left the Night Market, when they ambushed us in the pedicab.”
“They were following me, not you. You could have been anyone. And no one who got a good look at your face that night lived to tell.”
Gabriel thought back to the brutal firefight in the street. It was true enough. “So what, exactly, do you have in mind?”
“We can both return to the Night Market, Gabriel Hunt. I as a vengeful ghost. You—you as a bidder.”
“A bidder,” Gabriel said.
“A wealthy foreign guest,” Qi said, reaching out with one hand to stroke along his cheek, “with a taste for young Chinese flesh. Cheung will probably pour you a drink himself.”
Chapter 11
Quite abruptly, Gabriel found himself back in the world. Clean clothes, wired cash, at least semilegitimate to all outward appearance but for the recent scars on his head and neck. Michael Hunt was in the air over the Pacific Ocean, racing to pick up the lecture series where it had so unceremoniously been abandoned. Gabriel had e-mailed him a brief, discreet summary of everything that had happened, using carefully veiled language on the theory—hell, the certainty—that all outbound e-mail sent from the complimentary terminal in a five-star hotel’s business center would be read by the authorities. He’d sent another even briefer message to Lucy, at the anonymous e-mail address she’d given him before getting on the plane for Arezzo: Am still in China, L, but M is gone—I’m sorry. Her response: Gone missing or gone dead? To which he replied, Don’t know which. Doesn’t look good.
She hadn’t written back.
Meanwhile, Gabriel prepared for his visit to the Night Market and his meeting with a contact called Red Eagle. Earlier in the day Qi had pulled together an assortment of goods—galvanized steel pails, tensile wire, firecrackers and cherry bombs, several large jute bags of money all in coins. She did not specify their purpose. But she had pointed out several other things to Gabriel as they toured incognito, both their faces hidden behind the popular surgical-style paper masks many pedestrians wore and shaded by wide-brimmed hats.
“Nine corners,” she had said, indicating the zigzag bridge to the Tea House. “Nine turns, so that evil spirits will become disoriented and cannot pursue you.” Gunmen, Gabriel knew, might not be as likely as spirits to get disoriented, but the nine turns could still help break up lines of sight—and of fire.
Qi’s combat access to the Night Market was via tunnels beneath the Tea House, part of the old aqueduct system, and she’d showed him the exit she would use tonight. “Tuan has all the best maps,” she noted, adding that on auction nights, Cheung would have all the surface entrances and exits heavily fortified.
She had stopped next to a stand whose sign read CRISPY FRIED ANTS—MARINATED SCORPION—TURTLE SHELL GELATIN and ordered a vile-looking beverage from the vendor, a tiny man in an Edwardian suit with the obligatory status-symbol label sewn to his outer left cuff.
“God—what is that?” said Gabriel, his throat constricting at the sight of it. The stuff looked like deep red cough syrup with a floating skin of herbs.
“Double Penis,” she replied. “Deer and bull. Good for bones, circulation, heart, memory.”
“Also is excellent aphrodisiac,” said the vendor with a sly wink. He pointed out the source organs, hanging from a drying rack. The deer members looked like rawhide doggie treats two feet long. The bull penis was the size of a Louisville Slugger.
“Drink,” Qi said, as though sealing some covenant between them. “It’s expensive.”
Gabriel downed the viscid brew, keeping his eye on a Tibetan spinning a prayer wheel in the distance. He swallowed twice, then swallowed again. It seemed there was now a smoldering lump of raw lead between his lungs.
Qi had moved on to a small shrine with an urn for burning money. She lit joss sticks, bowed and offered some bills to the pot.
“Now you,” she said, gesturing for Gabriel to do likewise.
“But I don’t believe in—”
“You must believe in something,” she said, eyes flashing.
That had been their afternoon. Now it was nighttime.
Showtime.
The Iron Fist was exactly what its name implied: an under-the-table combat venue hiding in plain sight, where human beings tried to beat each other to death for money. Gabriel passed through several dining rooms and then a billiard hall before he found the grand stairway for which he was looking. It swept upward into a well appointed—and well guarded—amphitheater from which he could already hear the flat, meaty sounds of flesh battering flesh, lubricated by blood.
But no crowd noise. No jeers or cheers or frantic yelling.
Gabriel was admitted through a curtained foyer. The central focus of the room was the fighting pit, an oval thirty feet across at its widest point, girdled by a chain-link barrier. Two gigantic urban predators, steroidal nightmares, sought to terminate each other in the pit. They were collared together by eight feet of chain. Each wore a spidery leather mask and a studded bludgeoning glove on one fist.
The room was opaque with cigarette smoke and crowded with bettors wall-to-wall, standing room only. They stood in total silence, like the spectators at a chess match. They wagered with nods and winks and raised fingers. Their manner was of banking, not bloodsport.
One of the fighters finally fell like a chopped oak and stayed still. He was dragged out of the ring by his feet. Then the onlookers came unglued, jabbering in fifteen languages, waving money, offering critique.
Two new opponents entered the ring. It was not obvious at first due to their masks and squarish figures, but they were both women.
“New fighters are always cause for excitement,” said a voice behind Gabriel. “Their odds are not known.”
“Do I know you?” said Gabriel.
The newcomer was a classically handsome Chinese man who looked like an executive or playboy, clad in an expensive tailored silk suit and obviously packing at least one sidearm in a shoulder rig. There was a fine-cut tightness to the material across his back that suggested body armor. His hair and eyes were jet. He smiled at Gabriel like a matinee idol.
“I am Longwei Sze Xie. Please call me Ivory, Mr. Hunt.”
This was the part where Gabriel would discover whether any of his hasty fabrications would hold an ounce of water. They shook hands in the Western fashion.
“Do I stick out that obviously?” said Gabriel.
“Forgive me,” said Ivory. “Part of my training. I always index newcomers…is ‘index’ the correct word?”
“I know what you mean.”
Ivory pointed to the fighter on the far side of the pit. “That is the fresh fighter. Called Jin Huáng, for our purposes.”
“Chinese for ‘yellow’ or ‘golden’?”
“Very good, Mr. Hunt. Of course there are a hundred character variants for ‘yellow’ in traditional Chinese. Depending on the usage, jin huáng could be an expression for mulled rice wine, pornography, an eel, Hell, or…”
“Or, if you reverse it to huáng jin,” said Gabriel, “it refers to the Yellow Turbans peasant uprising at the end of the Later Han Dynasty.” Gabriel silently thanked his brother Michael for this tidbit from his lecture notes, hoping he would not be called upon to discuss the matter in any more depth.
“Outstanding!” Ivory clapped his hands together. “Full marks. But then, of course, you are a man who knows his history.”
“That’s why I’d like to speak with Mr. Cheung.”
“Mr. Cheung is available later this evening, and has expressed great interest in what you may be able to tell him about Kangxi Shih-k’ai. You understand his need for a considerable degree of discretion and personal security. After we complete this diversion—and please don’t feel rushed in any way, if you are enjoying yourself—I should advise you in advance that I will have to search you, although I’m certain it is quite unnecessary.”