"Zhè dàodǐ shì shuí de bī?! Érqiě tā shì zěnme lái dào zhèlǐ de?!"
Now my Chinese is still very basic. But I could tell he wanted to know how I was here.
"Ń... Wǒ cǎoxié... Lái zì dà lǎobǎn."
Beside me, Fanu let out his barking laugh, before he stepped forward and grabbed the gun lightly, pulling it away.
"Bié jǐnzhāng, yuēhàn ní, tā hé wǒ zài yīqǐ. Xīn zhāomù de 432."
I vigourously nodded, hoping it would make the fat man understand. Slowly like the dawn, a smile crept over his face and he grinned showing proudly a set of dirty, tobacco-stained teeth.
Ugly fucker, isn't he?
"Yīgè zōngsè pífū de cǎoxié! 432 Zhēn de zhīdào rúhé xuǎnzé tāmen."
I smiled nervously at that. The fat-man, Johnny Tito had called me a 'brown-skin', which was pretty much my new name amongst the Triad. Started by that bastard, Fanu, the name quickly caught on and whether I liked it or not, had become sort of my calling card. Today Money had sent the two of us to meet Tito, in order to collect the monthly income from his sector.
Johnny Tito was a Red Pole, an enforcer for the Triad. It wasn't his real name, but he chose it, thinking people would respect him more with an American name. The funny thing is, that he was right. It was his job to make sure the Triad stayed safe, and its enemies dead. So far, he'd done a good job, rising to one of the 426 and becoming an enforcer from a lowly soldier just a year after joining the Triad, soon establishing his reputation as one of the most ruthless enforcers in Hong Kong. But he always paid his dues, and never wavered in his loyalty. Almost a year later, highly drunk and stoned, he showed me the bullet wounds he had taken for the previous Mountain Master, Money's father.
"Three of 'em, Monki! All in the chest! Now that is loyalty, eh?" He said, before proceeding to cover the floor in another layer of vomit.
Okay, maybe that wasn't a good idea.
Tito didn't like strangers smiling. I didn't know it at the time, but a stranger smiling at you often meant that a bullet in the head was soon to follow, and Tito took that norm very seriously. It took a lot more coaxing from Fanu before he let me go.
Half-an-hour later, as we exited Tito's apartment, Fanu was still trying hard not to smile.
I looked at him and grumbled. "I'm sorry, but if that wasn't amusing enough for you, I'm sure Mr. Tito would like to go for a round two."
"No, no, that would be too much. As it is, we have spent to much time with Tito. We must hurry for our next appointment."
Like me, Fanu was also a Straw Sandal, but he had been with the 432 for almost four years now, and was an experienced hand at the job. Which was why Money assigned me to work under him, a task he took with no hesitation or regret. While he did have his fun here and there, Fanu was a good man.-Hold on, how can you have good men in the Triad?- He treated me with respect, and always answered whatever questions I had. It was Fanu's job to make sure I had a home, I had money, I had help.
He'd got me a little apartment on a road in the Kowloon City District, as well as a bike to help me travel. Three thousand Hong Kong Dollars found its way to my doorstep every Monday in an unmarked envelope, enough to live comfortably. And five days a week, we did the rounds.
Now working for the Mafia should be fun, right? Well, 'fun' may not be the most accurate way to describe it, but it certainly wasn't boring. It had been almost a month since Fanu and I did our first round of the city, and so far I hadn't been attacked, chased or shot at. Our rounds were simple, we collected cash from the enforcers and collectors, passed on messages between the districts, and Fanu would occasionally take us down some road, find a guy, shoot him in the head, and then carry on with his day.
Certainly not boring.
But even though I had seen quite a few deaths, I was yet to fire my own weapon. -Pussy- Whenever the need arose, by the time the gun was in my hand the other guy was already dead, and Fanu would be quickly walking away, tucking his gun back into his belt. Fanu was a good shot, I'd never seen him miss even once.
We met Money quite often, though only for a few minutes at a time. Only to report, and to receive further instructions. Sometimes we met him in his high-end mansion, other times in the back of a car, an alley behind some building, anywhere private. Business through phone was forbidden, strictly. -Well duh, jackass- You never knew who might be listening. I hadn't seen Mei even once since our first meeting, but not a day went by without me thinking of her. I asked Fanu about her once over a sandwich. He chewed away and gave me a long look before he spoke.
"She's in the Triad against her family's wish. Only her brother, Moni-san allowed her to join. But she's cold, that's what she is. Too many she's killed, she likes it you see. Dangerous. Very Dangerous."
His eyes narrowed. "Stay away from her. I think she wants to kill you."
I'm going to mount her like a stallion.
I swallowed the last of my meal. "I'll keep that in mind."
Of course, there were then those days. Days when the entire Triad was on high alert, either because a rival gang had hit one of our locations, or cops had busted one of them. During this time, I could see a change in every member, even in Fanu. His hand was always near his gun, and every time we were on the streets, his eyes were constantly looking around, searching for any kind of threat. This had happened three times since I had joined and was practically a weekly issue.
One time I did ask Money about it, and he sighed in displeasure.
"At the end of the day, Monki, no matter what we do, or how we do it, it is still 'illegal'. So the cops will always try to stop us, and the other gangs will always try to beat us to it, by hook or crook, through mainly the later. It is a city of thieves and lies, Měi tiān sǐwáng. At the end, we just have to chalk it up to collateral damage."
A bullet in the head. Collateral Damage. That's one way to frame it.
And there were times when we had when we had to take the first step ourselves. Whenever, intel on a rival Triad was received, Moni would send a force to take it out. Normally, the task always fell on to one of the enforcers to put together a team and deal 'justice', guns blazing. In time, I would be asked to fall into a crew as well. In time, I would be leading my own.
Unlike popular belief, there is no one 'Triad' in the world. There are hundreds. Each with it own hierarchy, family, and fight. From big bad-asses like the 14k group that had connections across the globe, to small-fires with retarded names, like 'White Tigers' or 'Asian Power'.
Please.
I was under the Wo Shing Wo, the oldest Triad in Hong Kong -Been here since 1931, bitch-. We controlled the drug trade, we controlled the secondhand market. We had politicians on pay, we controlled businesses. There was little in Hong Kong that we did not own. That automatically won us a lot of respect amongst the other Triads in the city, but just as many wanted to take our place as top dog. As the Mountain Master, Moni had more attempts on his life than he bothered to keep track off. I've lost count of the times when I've had to duck for cover under a hail of bullets, simply because I was standing next to him. Going to a restaurant, at a meeting, even in his own home. Moni was always a marked man. The 14k, the Shui Fong, the Big Circle Gang... all had it in for Moni.
And Mei as well. As the sister of the Mountain Master of Wo Shing Wo, she was always under the cross-hairs as well. But while Moni almost always traveled with an army by his side, Mei almost always traveled alone. The other Triads knew this, and had sent many men after her. None had come back alive. After that, few were willing to take the contract on Mei's head.
Do I know how to pick 'em, or what?
The first time you kill a man never leaves you. The memory will always stay fresh, despite the other killings just fading away. But never the first.
He had a piercing in his right eyebrow and two in each ear. Short hair, spiked. He couldn't have been more than 5"5', and I still remember the feel of the recoil in my hand as the first bullet flew from my colt and straight into the base of his neck, followed by another in his chest. He fell backwards, the gun dropping out of his hand before he could have even raised it. I just stood there, staring dumbly at his falling body, until Fanu crashed into me from the side, sending us sprawling behind some cover before a hail of bullets could have done the same to me.
"Good shot!" He grinned as he shouted above the gunfire. "But you need to learn how to duck Monki, or this will be your last shoot-out as well as your first!"
I blinked dumbly. This was the first time he had called me Monki. Not brown-skin, but Monki. Just that was enough to snap me out of my daze. I nodded, then looked around the overturned table to catch a sight of the fight. There were three of them left, all armed with SMGs that let out with a burst of gunfire. The bullets whizzed over our heads as they were firing blind, none daring to expose themselves.
The reason for this was the ear-splitting booms of Tito's pump-action, that was rapidly turning the Pawn shop into a unrecognizable battlefield. Above it we could hear him roaring abuses at the enemy, as though his curses with do as much damage as the lethal three feet of metal in his hands. I looked again at Fanu, who looked the happiest I had seen him in his entire life. With a pistol in each hand, he was laying down covering fire for Tito, catching one of the enemy in the shoulder while doing so.
Bullets flew like mad hornets, smashing and breaking through everything that could be smashed and broken. My first kill did it for me, and I rose from cover as well, screaming abuses in German, Spanish, French, and even a bit of Danish that I had picked up from a Dutch girl I had dated in college. Time flew. My gun cocked empty and I blanched, but then I looked around and saw I wasn't the only one. Tito leaned against the wall, his shotgun propped up against his meaty thigh as he wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. His other two men were standing where the enemy had been, checking their corpses for anything important.
Remembering what Fanu had taught me, I quickly reloaded my weapon, still fumbling a bit with the magazine before I took a long, deep breath.
"That wasn't so bad, was it now, Fanu?"
No answer. I turned around and there he lay against the wall, a little trickle of blood falling across the bridge of his forehead from the bullet-wound in his head. His eyes were lifeless, but his mouth was still locked in that very same devilish grin, as though he knew something really funny about death. Something that still made him smile.
This may not be the right time, but did you realize that 'Monki' sounds a lot like 'Monkey'? I'm just sayin'
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