The Redactor, Chapter 10

I crept up from the Internet cafe and onto a street thick with nightclubbers, and an hour later, into a hotel that didn’t even have an English name. From the number of barely dressed women that approached me on the street, I gathered the hotel was charging by the hour. The receptionist out front took my cash and my name, Steve McQueen (mental note to come up with a fake name beforehand next time), and didn’t ask for ID.

  When I stumped up the stairs and found my room, a cleaner’s cart was still parked in the corridor outside of it. Inside I found a Filipino lady talking into a phone and jouncing a pillow from its cover with one arm. She glanced at me without stalling her conversation, pulled a fresh pillow cover onto the pillow with the phone pinched in the crook of her neck, and exited the room into the corridor, tugging the door shut on her way out.

  It wasn’t clear whether she had actually finished cleaning the room. I took a shower and found a wreath of hair clinging to the drain, but perhaps that was a feature. Like the paper sash they leave over toilets.

  When I exited the bathroom, wrapped in a towel, I lay another towel on the bed. The bed had a spread on it, but its pattern was the kind that masks dirt and stains. The kind that can get away with being washed once a year.

  From the bedside table I pulled the telephone and a slab-like phone book. Pages had been torn from it in many places, maybe for a phone number, maybe for a handkerchief, maybe for a lot of reasons. I flipped through it with only a vague notion of what I was looking for.

  A lot of flipping later I stumbled onto my first pawnshop. It was called Happy Pawn.

  I’d researched the dark side of pawnshops in Thailand and Taiwan for my novel, and hoped it would apply to Hong Kong. As my fingers punched the phone buttons, I couldn’t suppress a shiver of excitement to be calling one up now.

  I called the listed number, and got a barrage of Cantonese. I said, “English?” and the line hung up. I put one finger on the next pawnshop and dialled again, with the same result. On the third I reached an answering machine. The message was in English, and was telling me about a number of businesses, including a pawnshop, when the message cut out, and a dry voice said, “Huh?”

  “Is this the Sing Ping pawn shop?”

  “Huh,” said the voice, using the term now in the affirmative.

  “I was looking to purchase an item, and wanted to know—”

  “Huh,” said the voice again, the word now meaning, ‘Hurry the hell up and tell me what you want.’

  “I wanted to buy a...” I found I had to cross a threshold to finish the sentence, like a hiccup that wanted out. “Passport,” I finished.

  “Uh-huh,” said the voice.

  Progress.

  “What kind?” it continued.

  “Australian,” I said.

  “New or doctor.”

  I gathered he meant an entirely new passport or an alteration to an existing one.

  “I have a passport, but need to alter the details. The name and number.”

  “Doctor, uh-huh. Chip?”

  “What?”

  “It have chip?”

  I had no idea what Mr Huh was on about.

  “I don’t know. How do I tell?”

  “Feel cover. Is it fat or thin?”

  I lugged my briefcase onto the bed beside me and retrieved my passport. I flipped open its blue cover and pressed it between my fingers.

  “Thin, I think,” I said.

  “Ha-huh,” said the voice. “Good. Easy. Cost $12999. Bargain.”

  Thirteen thousand!

  “Look, I’ve only got five grand—five oh-oh-oh—and I need a thousand of that to buy a plane ticket.”

  A pause.

  “Okay, I do you budget.”

  I had no idea what a budget passport was, but I said okay. He asked me if I wanted to courier it over and back, but I said I’d come—I had no way of guaranteeing I ever saw my passport again. He gave me directions and hung up.

  The passport place was nothing like what I’d imagined, and neither was the man to whom I’d spoken. His shop, which was in actual fact for electronic appliances—stereos, camcorders, laptops—was well-lit and polished, glass and chrome, on the third level of a shopping mall. The man himself was clean cut in a grey suit. He wore a red bow tie, and I caught the gleam of gold cufflinks from beneath his suit sleeve. A wisp of grey hair floated above the dome of his head, a failed comb over. He was speaking to customers browsing in the shop, which was how I recognized him.

  When he was done with them, I sidled up to the counter and whispered, “Passport?”

  He said, “MP3?” and walked me through to a booth that formed an alcove in the store for listening to audio devices. He gestured toward a seat, and as I sat, took the passport I held out to him. He disappeared into a back room, and reappeared a moment later to talk to other customers without missing a beat.

  Sing Ping Electronics was utterly unlike the image of passport-forging pawn shops I’d formed from researching the black-market for my novel. Maybe it was just Hong Kong.

  To look the part, I clasped a set of headphones over my head and ramped the volume up on the small device attached. Its buttons were no bigger than pimples, the whole device swallowed in the grip of an anti-theft vice.

  An hour later, having, among other things, been told in song that I couldn’t outrun some guy’s bullet in a crooning, trance-inducing voice, I was getting restless. I crossed and re-crossed my legs, and my gaze kept hunting for the store owner, looking for some sign that my passport was done.

  He ignored me, floating through the room, impeccably dressed, unflappably smiling.

  I thought that by coming here in person I could safeguard my passport. But what if it simply disappeared? I wasn’t about to go to the police.

  As if on cue, a pair of police officers strolled past the shop front. My eyes went to the steel bulk of the gun holstered on the nearest officer’s hip. If it was standard issue, it was probably a Smith & Wesson 10, a six-shot, double-action revolver.

  Guns have always fascinated me in the same way snakes do, and I had researched them for my novel in unwarranted depth.

  So many varieties, but they all boil down to one simple, efficient mechanism. The hammer strikes a combustive powder, which explodes in a pressure wave that is channelled along a (possibly rifled) tunnel to fling a small, dense object or objects through the air and into flesh, which is crushed and torn under the impact.

  Typically the blood leaks out of the target, taking with it the magic that turns the Universe’s most complex arrangement of atoms into pig chow.

  A crude mechanism. But like the combustion engine, wrapped up in shining steel, and made to seem modern, even elegant.

  I realized with a start that I had been staring at the gun. When I glanced up I found the officer’s eyes on me. I swivelled on my chair and attempted to dig the music.

  Forty-five minutes later I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned to be greeted by the benevolent gaze of the pawnshop owner. In his hand was a parcel, which he gave to me. When I had counted out the money—and he had double-checked my counting—he said, “Thank you, sir. Shop here again.” He turned away, paused, and turned back to me long enough to say, “Dress down a little,” and gave me a wink.

  I am dressed down, I thought. I’m not wearing a tie. But I didn’t say it.

  In a toilet cubicle around the corner from the shop I tore open the package—and breathed a sigh of relief when inside it I found my passport. Well, a passport. It no longer claimed to be the passport of Jack Benjamin Griffin. It was still me in the photo, but the name alongside it was Trevor S. Williams. The number had been altered too, and I found a number of immigration stamps for Hong Kong and other cities in Southeast Asia scattered through its pages that hadn’t been there before. Trevor was younger than me by four years—mental note to put a spring in my step. Clipped to the passport was a note in a barely legible hand that said, “Expat in Hong Kong.”

  Back at the hotel I stayed long enough to cut my hair with a beard trimmer I’d picked up from a convenience store near the hotel. When I was done I bowed my head toward the mirror and strained my eyes to check the job. I was shocked to see how pronounced was the horseshoe-pattern baldness creeping across my scalp. A small, white crescent of scar tissue was carved into the left side of my skull. The memory of the fall that had produced it flashed through my mind—a dive into deep snow and the numbing strike of a ski blade. And Jean’s voice, “Jack, are you—”

  I shook it off.

  My cheeks were disappearing beneath a thick, salt-and-pepper stubble, and I touched the trimmer to it before deciding I would leave it.

  In a bag on a bed were a few other items I had procured with my precious cash. A t-shirt, blue jeans, and joggers. I stripped off my shirt and trousers and redressed in the new clothes. When I looked again into the mirror I saw the image of a man who was attempting to cling to a childhood long faded. Fine.

  I tilted my chin up and stared the man down. No, that guy there was a poet-gypsy. A rambler, a collector of experiences, one whose senses were flung wide open to any and every morsel of life that might happen to fall within his reach.

  For a fleeting moment, an urge stronger than the desire to reach Annika Kreider before Hiero took me. I wanted to write. I could feel it in me, deep as my bones. The upswell of the Muse I had so long been without. I knew without a shadow of a doubt that if I could sit at my laptop, or over a notebook, I could knit the sentences that would diagnose my life.

  Strange that I picked that moment to finally come clean on the reason for the embryo of a novel I had brooded over so long: it was not to stake claim to professional kudos, nor even for the creative joy. I wanted to write—needed to write—to work out how the hell my life had run off the tracks, and parted company with a wife and daughter whom I had loved. Did love.