Kiss & Die - Lee Weeks [16]
He resisted for a second and then with a half laugh, half sigh, he gave in and lay back heavily on the mattress. Ruby ran her fingers through his hair, soothing him as he slipped further into unconsciousness and she moved around in the darkness tightening the restraints.
Chapter 12
In the morning Mann dropped Miriam back at the Cantina and he drove to Tammy’s school to give his talk.
The hall was darkened for the slide show projecting onto a screen behind him. He stood to one side. Three hundred children sat in front of him, in rows. A sea of white shirts and blue ties. They were hushed as the first ten images flashed up one after the other. Each image stayed up for three seconds unless he clicked to halt it: a girl dying with a needle in her arm, a boy whose face was badly disfigured from a chopping.
‘Triads deal in death,’ Mann continued. ‘In some form or another, it’s all about death. Whether its drugs, people trafficking, robbery, kidnapping. They aren’t fussy. They will make money any way they can. They don’t care who gets killed along the way. They use their members to fight battles just because they can. They don’t care how many get killed. Why should they?’
Mann stopped at the eleventh.
A young woman lay face down, a rope around her neck. Her hands were tied behind her back. ‘This is Zheng,’ Mann said. ‘She was on her way to study in England. She was looking forward to it. She was going to come back here and take her university entrance. When she arrived in London she was met by her contact but he didn’t take her to the school, as promised, he took her to this bedsit you see in the photo.’ Mann waited as all eyes studied the image of the girl lying face down. The room was in complete silence. ‘They cut off her little finger.’ Mann pointed to her left hand in the photo. ‘They sent that back to Hong Kong to her parents and they asked for ten million Hong Kong dollars.’ The hall gave a collective intake of breath. ‘Zheng’s parents couldn’t raise that kind of money so they raped and murdered her.’ The next photo to flash up was of a boy lying in a pool of blood, his chopped body twisted in death.
‘This is Zheng’s brother. He was an addict. He sold the Triads the information about his sister: which flight she’d be on, how much he thought his family would be able to find. They tricked him of course. They asked for ten times the amount his parents could pay and so, when they couldn’t pay, they killed him too. Nobody wins with the Triads. If you want to be somebody in Hong Kong society you have to stand out from the crowd, not just be another 49, another number.’ The lights went back on.
He looked along the rows. The front ten rows seemed to be solely occupied by girls, all looking up at him.
‘Any questions?’
About ten hands went up from the front. Mann pointed to the first hand. It was a girl from the fifth row back. She was mixed race. Part Chinese, part Filipino. She had come off well with the mix. She was striking looking, fair skinned. She had a touch of Spanish about her from the Filipino side, fair skinned, black haired. Mann realized he knew her, but he couldn’t place her.
‘Sir, do you give this talk to all the schools?’ she asked.
‘Pretty much.’
‘Even the schools where the parents have money and there aren’t any immigrants like there are here?’
The headmaster stepped forward to the mike to intervene; Mann waved him back.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Lilly.’
‘Lilly what?’
Lilly was a pretty girl with bags of attitude. ‘Mendoza.’
Her mother Michelle was a part-time hooker; Lilly must have slipped past the condom. The father looked like he must have been Chinese. Hong Kong was not a great ambassador for mixing the races. The Chinese liked to keep to their own kind. But something else was bugging him: he’d seen Lilly last night. She was one of the two girls who ran from the building just as he got there.
‘Okay, I know what you’re saying. You feel like this is a problem for kids from poorer backgrounds. Yeah, well I agree. The Triad organizations