Chapter 14

[All arrivals mark a beginning] Ancient Proverb

Kreeger tried to stand up straight and pull himself together: he smoothed down his shirt and trousers; he rubbed at his eyes; and he put on his hat. But it was useless: he still looked as if he had just appeared at the first settlement after spending a week fighting his way out of the jungle, with no food and water, and no sleep. He rotated his case so that it now stood on its end, on the dirty concrete floor; and he kept his right hand on it, as if he expected one of the inhabitants to run off with it, back into the jungle.

He couldn’t have imagined a worse ending to the journey. His mind went back to his arrival at the international airport on that first day in the country. Not to the confusion with the bags (although that was nothing compared to what has just happened to it) but to the chauffeur-driven limousine that had taken himself and Filcher to the Majestic. He wondered what would be waiting for him here and then bent down to rub his knees: fragile saucers of bone that had just spent twenty four hours knocking into the hard back of the seat in front of him. He stood up straight and stretched three limbs (the fourth he hadn’t taken off the case), limbs that had spent those hours squashed into a confined space on a bus that was built for people half his size.

Dishevelled he was, but in fact he was a little better off than the jungle adventurer. He hadn’t slept, but not for a week, just for one night; and he had eaten: peanuts. And drunk: bottle after bottle of pure mineral water, bought at triple the regular price from unscrupulous hawkers who boarded the bus at every town and village between here and the distant capital. Water that had to be relieved in unspeakably filthy toilets, or, if he was lucky, behind a tree or a bush. He gazed out over the sea of heads that milled around him, still moving in sympathy with the now-stationary bus, disoriented.

‘Docta Kreega.’

A black-suited man materialised from the anonymity of the crowd.

‘Please to meet you,’ he said. He stuck out his right hand, too quickly and too low, and then he added: ‘I’m Offica Jon Lee. Pei Lin Police Force. Just call me Jon.’ Peeling off his sunglasses with his left hand, the man grinned up at Kreeger.

Kreeger took the hand and smiled. Locals never did that, he knew, but they all seemed to know it was an American habit, and everyone he met wanted to try out a handshake on him. ‘Pleased to meet you Mister Lee,’ he replied with a limp waggle of his wrist, as much as he could manage. He relaxed a little. At least they had sent him someone who could speak English.

‘You follow me please, Docta Kreega.’

Jon Lee, the host, went for the big leather case. After he had let it down into a horizontal position, he tried to lift it up, but its weight surprised him and he grimaced with embarrassment.

‘You take this one, Jon,’ Kreeger said, handing him a smaller one before heaving up the bigger one himself.

Kreeger was not much of a traveller, but he had been to a few vile places in some strange countries. Usually, however, he witnessed them as a spectator, through a train window from an air-conditioned carriage, or from the safety of a luxury tourist bus. He seldom got his hands dirty down among the seething masses, in those substrata of social hell that fester to the surface in desperate places around the world.

He moved carefully after the small man, along the oil-blackened concrete, through the sweaty goo of bodies.

Grinding diesel engines kept the air thick and grimy and Kreeger could almost feel the particulate carcinogens burning deep into the blood vessels of his lungs. He shuddered at each roar, but his hands were not free and he could not use them to shield his ears or cover his nose.

‘You watch pockets please, Docta Kreega,’ Lee called back, above the din. ‘This is not a good place, so sorry.’

Kreeger stopped and let go of the heavy case; a young mother with a baby swung across her back bumped him from behind then pushed around him. His right hand flew to the seat of his filthy trousers and patted at the bulge. He released his breath as he watched the baby disappear into the crowd. He then quickly moved the alligator-skin wallet up to the breast pocket of his sweat-stained shirt, trying to hide it in his palm as he did so. Everybody around saw what he did.

He quickened his pace to try to catch up with Lee but with his third stride he stepped down on a human limb. He reacted with an outburst of apology, looking down for the owner of the limb. He had wasted his breath: slumped against the wall was a desolate youth, whose greasy arms and legs stuck out of a torn tee-shirt and soiled shorts, postured as if he had been shot dead against the bricks and had slid down in an agonising death. His bulging eyes stared vacantly out, deathlike, into space.

Kreeger had lost sight of his guide and headed towards the daylight that beckoned him from a distance, hoping for some relief on the other side. At last he staggered through the exit and dropped the heavy bag. He swept the foreground with a quick glance then sighed in disbelief: the human crush did not give way outside. He soon realised why: the whole dilapidated structure of the station was besieged by an army of noisy hawkers and vendors whose smoking and steaming carts dammed up the flow of bodies. There seemed to be no way through. Some of the sellers had huge batteries, microphones, and loudspeakers with which to harangue the crowd; most yelled.

Lee was there again, at his shoulder, grinning up through his sunglasses. ‘Let’s get a taxi, Docta’ he shouted.

Lee seemed to seep through the barrage of hawkers and trolleys the way that smoke from a burning room slips beneath the closed door. Kreeger attacked head-on, bulldozing a direct line of escape. Beyond, he stopped momentarily to shake himself then hurried up towards the waiting Lee.

Lee didn’t move; he pushed his right hand back over the comb-marks of his well-oiled hair. He seemed to be distracted, and began to smack his lips. ‘Sorry, Docta, you please wait here for a moment.’

Kreeger watched as Lee returned to the line of hawkers and yelled something at the pink face of a smoke-shrouded woman who presided over a huge, wheeled cart. She lifted the cover of a drum and the two of them immediately disappeared into a cloud of steam. Moments later Lee reappeared into Kreeger’s view, making his way back with a small plastic bag.

‘So sorry,’ he said with a broad grin then headed off again.

Kreeger fell in line behind his guide without enquiring about the bag. They made their way out to what must have been the road, although it was impossible to tell.

A score of crowing drivers left their yellow cabs and closed in around them, all collared shirts and charcoal trousers; floppy hair and perfumed breath. They elbowed and pushed each other, eager for the fare. Kreeger’s case suddenly lost all of its weight; he looked down and saw a bent-over man in a pastel shirt struggling away with it; his gold chain gleamed against the throbbing veins of his neck.

Lee was slow to react, but when it came his anger was shrill and mocking. Even Kreeger jumped. The heavy leather case hit the ground with a thud and the startled drivers backed away.

Lee then shouted at one of them, a shorter, scruffy-looking man, without the collared, pastel shirt. He seemed surprised at first then his face cracked into a toothy grin. He stepped forward and put a chapped hand to the dropped case.

‘Let him do it, Docta,’ Lee said as Kreeger bent to help the small man with the heavy load. ‘We will pay him.’

Kreeger and Lee followed the struggling man as he barely managed to get the case the short distance to his lemon cab. Before reaching it Lee snapped again and was answered with a series of breathy grunts.

Kreeger squeezed into the back of the oven-hot lemon cab, doubling the work of his sweat glands in an instant. He awkwardly removed his jacket (something he should have done a long time ago) and opened a few buttons of his shirt. As he wound down the window he looked up at a huge face pasted over the front of a low-rise building opposite the bus station. Bad printing with strong primary colours had blotched the skin, but the effect was still eerie: it grinned down on the sea of people below. ‘Who on Earth is that?’ he said.

Lee had already slid into the front passenger seat and seemed to be haggling with their driver over the fare; Kreeger thought he could recognise one or two numbers.

‘Him?’ He slapped at the controls for the air-conditioning then fanned himself with the same hand, barking a few more words at the driver. He wound down his window, put his oiled hair halfway out, and spat, towards the badly photographed smiling face. ‘That, Docta, is our spiritual light,’ he said. ‘And I hope you never have the pleasure of meeting him.’ He pulled in his head and turned around to face the back seat. ‘Fang,’ he said, ‘His name is Fang.’

Kreeger looked up again and saw the grinning face disappear as the lemon cab took the first corner.

‘You speak good English, Jon. I did not expect anyone to do so this far out.’

Lee, with his hand in the bag, grinned at the compliment. ‘Well, Docta,’ he said rustling the plastic, ‘I’m not from this city, you know. You are right, few people here can speak English, but that is changing; everybody now wants to learn English.’ He pulled something out of the bag and bit into it then with his mouth full he said, ‘The world is coming here; this place is changing.’ He made a loud slurping noise and interspersed the syllables of his next word with sucking sounds: ‘in-ter-na-shun-al.’

Kreeger winced and looked out of the window at the filth and chaos. If Lee had been talking about progress then he could only humour him. By the look of things so far, this place would need a miracle to even make it onto the first rung in the ladder of progress. He said nothing.

Lee slapped the dashboard again and berated the driver. ‘Wrong direction,’ he called back, as if to justify his temper. ‘Peasant. Just arrived from the countryside.’ He nodded towards the driver, swallowing something as he did so. ‘Many here like him. They bring their old ways to the city and make this place hell to live in. Probably sleeps in this taxi by the smell of it.’

Kreeger nodded in agreement—he had been wondering what the musty odour was.

‘He’ll make it, though.’ Lee’s fingers were back in the bag. ‘Soon he’ll have enough money for a room, then he can start to bring in his family from the village. He might be able to get a better job in a factory, buy a scooter, rent an apartment. That’s if he can stay away from the girls down by the river and the powder.’

‘Powder?’

‘Drugs, Docta, drugs,’ Lee replied, before his attention was taken away again by the pitiful road-sense of the homeless taxi driver.

The man had just swerved into a very narrow street.

‘One way, Docta,’ Lee yelled back by way of commentary. ‘Wrong direction.’

Kreeger put both hands out to the chair in front of him and shifted his position to get a better view through the windscreen. Luckily it was a short road and they met nothing bigger than a scooter. At its end the driver shot the taxi out into another busy street, barely missing a blue delivery van, whose fierce horn chased them up the road.

Lee screeched again and pointed to a corner. The driver ignored the oncoming traffic, crossed to the other side, and pulled up in a pile of refuse. He turned back and grinned at Kreeger, obviously hoping that his first foreign customer was satisfied with his service. If he was expecting some kind of gratitude, verbal or financial, he did not get it. Kreeger backed away and stared at him, noticing for the first time his red-stained teeth and gums and the filthiness of his appearance. He then opened the door and quickly got out, putting his Italian leather shoes into the soggy pile of rubbish.