“I’m long on favors, Hannah. And please remember that identifying the priest’s killer was in my best interest. Little Asia functions best outside the glare of the spotlight. The last thing we needed was more ranting and raving from the Brothers Grimm.”
Hannah laughs. “The Brothers Grimm” is Dr. Cheng’s pet name for Mayor Welby and Chief Bendix.
“It seems to me, though,” Cheng continues, “that we both still have a problem. When dealing with insects, identification is never a substitute for extermination.”
Hannah’s smile fades. She tries to make herself speak slowly and maintain a friendly demeanor.
“Then we do have a problem, Doctor. I’ve got a source that says this guy was a Fed. Now, he was bounced eighteen months ago. But I still can’t let you pop a Fed—”
Cheng interrupts with an even, low voice. “You saw the remains of the priest, Hannah—”
Hannah knows where he’s heading and cuts him off. “That’s exactly right. That’s why we need him breathing. We need him squirming on the courthouse steps, sweating for the Spy cameras. Everybody needs closure on this. I swear, it’s best for business to do this my way.”
“This Speer,” Cheng says, pursing his lips and hesitating as if the name had caused a sour taste to form on his tongue, “attempted to incriminate my people—”
“Doc, this is the Hyenas we’re talking about. My people? Back at the cathedral, you were the one who said Uncle Chak was trying to squeeze out from under your thumb. For six months you’ve been telling me the Cambodians want to splinter.”
“Certain traditions are never ignored, Hannah. You know this.”
“Doc,” Hannah says, trying to cover her exasperation, “you’re contradicting yourself here. This bastard was a Federal cop. You whack him Asian style, you’ll have the press down here for a decade. This is exactly what the Colombians want. Don’t give it to them.”
“The Colombians are the least of my concerns, my dear.”
The words my dear have an odd ring, somehow more threatening than endearing, but still a mix of both. She ignores the tone and presses on.
“I need to make myself clear here. I’m not sure you understand me. I need to speak with the man. I need to sit on him for a while. I need to do things to him in order to know what he knows. I need to know exactly what happened at St. Brendan’s. Why this guy popped the priest. And why he did it the way he did it. What’s his bitch with the Hyenas? How is he tied into Bangkok? Did he have a connection with Uncle Chak that hasn’t come clear yet?”
Cheng opens his thin lips to speak, then appears to change his mind. The coin disappears back into the folds of his gown. He clears his throat and in a brand new tone he says, “Would you care for any more tea, my friend?”
There’s no threat now, but also no intimacy. It’s suddenly as if she’s some tourist who wandered into the wrong noodle shop. The discussion has ended and the patriarch, at least in his own mind, has won out.
Hannah shakes her head slowly for a long moment and then whispers, “No more tea.”
They start to rise from their seats. And from downstairs comes the sound of glass shattering. Instinctively, Hannah draws out her gun and turns toward the spiral stairs.
She glances back to see a slightly confused look on Cheng’s face.
“It could just be a glass,” he says, and she’s shocked at his words.
Call them, she mouths.
Cheng composes himself, then cranes his head toward the staircase and yells, “Kuhn, Lui, are you all right?”
They wait for an answer and when none comes Hannah crosses into the kitchen, her Magnum up parallel with her head. She steps slowly onto the ancient tile floor and leans until she can barely get a view out the window in front of the sink.
It’s the landscape she had feared and expected: Across the street from the Herbarium, sitting on the roofs and hoods and trunks of their Trans Ams and Shelby Mustangs and customized Firebirds, she counts eighteen Angkor Hyenas. Pulled prominently in front of all of them is a metallic-blue Corvette convertible. Loke leans against the passenger door. In the moonlight, his face seems to glisten a bit, as if he were overheating in the cool of this November night.
Hannah thinks the whole scene resembles some glossy, stagy performance piece, more suited to the Canal than Bangkok, some baby-boomer dream of ethnic, urban thuggery, all ready to be set to music. She turns back to the doctor and says softly, “Looks like Uncle Chak is making his move, Doc. He’s got a dozen and a half boy scouts outside.”
He nods to her, his face showing nothing.
She wants to say, I’m sorry, but settles for, “You’ve got a piece in here?”
Dr. Cheng can’t help but smile. The warmth and feeling flow back into his voice and he says, “Fifty years, Hannah. I never had to carry a gun.”
Before she can stop herself she blurts out, “The myth has lost some power, Doc.”
With her free hand she reaches down to her belt, grabs her backup piece, and extends it toward him butt-first. Cheng is shocked and wildly amused. He waves the weapon away and says, “Will you never learn a sense of tradition, daughter?”
Hannah’s touched by the term, but annoyed by his passivity.
“I’m not going to just hand you over to these dicks. They’re errand boys. They’re wet punks, for Christ sake. They’re not worthy of sweeping your walk.”
Cheng is looking at all the books and herbs that line his walls. He says, “Remember, Hannah, in the end, it’s always your own that come for you.”
She despises his acceptance of the situation.
“These bastards aren’t your own, Doc. I knew Chak was scum the first time I saw the little shit. I should’ve popped him then.”
“Go now,” Cheng says.
“Like hell.”
“They know who you are. They’ll let you leave.”
“If they know me, they know I’ll never let them whack you. They know they’ll have to go through me.”
Cheng shakes his head. “I tried to tell you not to come. I tried to—”
“I can’t believe you don’t have some shooters on standby. Just those two downstairs?”
Cheng crosses to her and puts an arm on her shoulder and she realizes the old man has not only been expecting this but maybe even imagining how it would take place, what the schematic of the assault would look like, which direction his enemy would come from, what time of the night they’d choose to visit.
More glass shatters on the floor below. Hannah tucks her.38 in her rear waistband, shakes her head at Cheng, slips out from under his arm, and moves for the stairs. She keeps her back to the curve of the rail going down. Before she reaches the bottom she can see the two meat-boys on the floor, sprawled at awful angles, their heads both wrapped in green trash bags, suffocated just like it spells out in the Tuol Sleng torture manual. The bodies are covered with broken glass. The front display window and the glass pane in the front door have been shattered, broken inward, and in the midst of the splinters and shards covering the shop floor, Hannah sees two silver ball bearings, slightly larger than gum balls. It’s a favorite Hyena signature, normally used as a warning flare to shopkeepers slow to pay their protection fees.
Outside, the street is sickeningly quiet and motionless. The Hyenas stand rigid, staring at the storefront as if posing for some painfully slow sculptor, as if caught by some Canal Zone artist’s Hasselblad, a full-color frozen epic on the nature of looming threat. Hannah would like to toss off some demeaning comment about how they resemble bony-faced male models, beef for hire recruited for a retro music video, ready to prance and sneer and insinuate ideas of teenage sexuality and ego and half-understood romance. But the fact is that the figures momentarily paralyzed in the artificially deserted street are the real creatures, true gangster meat, more than capable in the ways of murder and vengeance, sadism and power. They’re the advance guard, Uncle Chak’s psychotic marines, proud and honored to strike the first blow against the old order of Little Asia, replaying in their born-cynical brains every promise Loke has made to them concerning status and money and their place in the future of Bangkok Park.