The Trail to Buddha's Mirror - Don Winslow [72]
He listened to Li for a minute, nodded again, and quietly issued orders. The three boys started to run off, but he stopped the leader, then gave him a vicious backhand to the face. The boy fell into the dirt, picked himself up, bowed to Li Lan, and ran off. The honcho shook his head, then reached into his jacket and produced a pack of Kool Lights. He offered one to Neal and Pendleton, who declined with polite smiles and shakes of the head.
“He’s a stupid boy,” he suddenly said. “Useless. I will kill him if you wish.”
“Thank you for the courtesy, but no,” Li answered.
He’s a clever bugger, Neal thought. Making the offer in English to give Li tremendous face in front of her guests.
He turned to Neal. “Don’t worry about White Tiger. They are big men in Kowloon. This is not Kowloon.”
This isn’t Kowloon, thought Neal. This isn’t even the fucking earth. The honcho’s appearance had attracted an audience. The local kids were gathered around them in a wide circle, and Neal looked up to see people looking out the windows of the ratty concrete and wooden buildings that surrounded the circle. The alleys were filling with wishful gawkers.
“Mr. Carey will need to use a telephone,” Li said. Neal got the idea she said it just to fill a silence.
“Sure … anything,” the honcho said casually.
Yeah, okay, how about a helicopter?
The honcho’s acolytes pushed their way through the crowd and apparently announced that they had accomplished their mission.
“Will you come with me, please?” Honcho asked Li. The crowd parted in front of him as he led them up one of the alleys, into a courtyard ringed by shacks full of sewing machines, through one of the shacks and out a back door into another alley, and then into a cul-de-sac.
At least it looked like a cul-de-sac. When Honcho led them down a stairway into what appeared to be a basement building entrance, the steps ended in a concrete wall. Just to the right, however, there was a narrow crack in the wall. Honcho turned sideways and squeezed through, motioning his guests to follow.
Neal could just fit through the crack, and he shuffled along sideways for about ten feet, trying not to scrape himself on the walls, which pressed against his back and his nose. The walls were home to about ten thousand strains of exotic bacteria, and Neal figured that one open wound would be good for about twenty-five different blood tests. He could feel slime rubbing off on his shin and pants, and was grateful for once that he couldn’t see up or down. He didn’t want to know.
This alley, if you could call it that, ended in another wall. This time the crack led off to the left, and Neal endured another twenty feet of rising claustrophobia before they reached their apparent destination. He had to hand it to old Li Lan: She couldn’t have found a better place to hide.
Some jerry-rigged wooden steps rose straight up from the alley into a dark hallway. They passed by two closed doors before knocking on the third.
Neal followed them in through Door Number Three, not really thinking he’d find Monty Hall, the patio set, and the trip to Hawaii. What he did find was a bare, low-ceilinged eight-by-eight room. In the right corner a homemade ladder provided shaky access to a primitive loft that had been literally carved out of a wall. The loft was just large enough for a stool and, incredibly, a telephone. Maybe it was for running a book, maybe for taking drug orders, maybe it was for calling up local shops and asking them if they had Prince Albert in a can, but there it was. A stubby black rotary telephone. Neal wasn’t sure he had ever seen anything so beautiful in his whole life.
An old man and a boy squatted on the floor of the main room. They held rice bowls to their lips, and their chopsticks