Ren was offered a bed for the night. The following morning the men sat down to breakfast of congee and sweet coffee. The old man explained that he needed someone to break into his old house in China to steal documents secreted in the study. They implicated his brother Mo in a money laundering scheme. His brother was alive only because he had been co-opted by the communist regime to sit on industrial development board. The old ledgers put him in peril. The old man also wanted his burglar to kill his aviary of parrots while at the house. Macaws mainly, but other exotics including rosellas and shiny black cockatoos as well. If the old man could not take delight in his parrots, no communist family was going to enjoy them either.
‘Kill every last one of them’ said the old man gravely.
‘And do it quickly, Ren’.
Ren asked how much money he would be paid for securing the documents. A large amount of U.S. dollars was mentioned. It sounded danger money. False identity documents were needed and a backstory. The country areas throughout the south were locked down. He would take medicines with him to get the villagers on-side. Traveling at night, he would break the curfew, sleep in the red sorghum fields during the day.
Snakes like sorghum fields. Communists do not like drifters. It would be dangerous. How do you kill thirty or so parrots without anyone noticing? The parrots would cost extra. The old man agreed to this but insisted Ren take a photo once he had dispatched them. Ren agreed. When would he go? Kill the parrots on the Double Ten holiday the old man had said. The first republic’s national holiday had been wiped off the calendar by the communists. Killing parrots would be an act of resistance. Everyone would get the point.
Ren agreed to go.
The beauty of drifting is that you can go to a place and nothing needs to happen. Or something can happen but the consequences do not really matter. Ren had always acted on feeling. He mostly got away with it during the war. Policing was a system of taxation. For the right price, anyone who turned up dead would be assumed an infiltrator.
Peace has rules. As does exile and trade in a colony. Consequences had begun to pile on Ren in Hong Kong. His modest import business attracted more competition and more out of pocket expenses. His patron fell out with the British. His friends came from the old days and were not squeamish people. But they were scared of his dreams about bodies that would not stop bleeding and had no idea why he kept his wartime loyalties. In Hong Kong Ren had to keep from sight, use fronts, and aliases, and move fast. In Mother China he could not relax either. But it could be a relief to play the role of one person, rather than four.
The old man took a sip of a liquid from a small brown glass bottle. The amah helped him from his chair back into the house to lie down. Ren took his cue. He left the house via the front garden. The old man called out to Ren through French windows.
‘The Double Ten’ he called ‘Let them remember Double Ten’.
Ren had killed gangsters. Quite a few over the years. How hard could a flock of parrots be?
A mile or so down the track, the amah came racing up behind Ren. He gave Ren a box brownie camera. His message: 'Boss said, parrot photos only, no sightseeing photos. Has plenty film inside'.
Ren made his way down to the Repulse Bay Hotel gardens where his friends waited on the verandah of a bungalow in the Repulse Bay Paradise Resort ready to play a farewell game of mah-jong. He had been told to expect someone new at the game.
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