‘Wei?’ an elderly man’s voice said clearly.
Harley had been expecting a video call, not a phone call in Chinese. Startled, he replied in the only language he knew, ‘I’m sorry, sir, but I need your help.’
His words were met with a long silence. Terrified that the old man might hang up, Harley gabbled, ‘I’m Ray Spark’s son, Harley. We got separated. In, in, a place called Taipa Island, Macau.’
There was another uncomfortable beat of silence, then the old man said in very precise, clipped English with a strong Chinese accent, ‘Where are you now, boy?’
‘On a ferry. I think it’s bound for Hong Kong. At least, I hope it is.’
‘Where is your father?’ the old man queried sharply.
‘I don’t know.’ Harley struggled not to wail. ‘I don’t even know if he’s alive.’
‘An interesting conundrum,’ the old man muttered, almost to himself, ‘seeing as the once-in-a-lifetime favour was quite clearly expressed to be non-transferable and owed specifically to Ray Spark. But no large matter.’
‘Sorry?’ Harley whispered, looking around furtively to see if anyone was watching him from inside the ferry.
‘Your father is a man who raises many ethical conundrums, Harley Spark. Wherever he goes, priceless artefacts and old alliances invariably vanish. While it is well after the time I take my evening meal, and I endeavour not to eat more than two meals a day for health reasons, you will find me at the Lan Fong Yuen restaurant when you disembark the ferry at Sheung Wan. I will be seated at a table for two with a plate of roast duck, a large iced milk tea and a plate of French toast fried in butter before me.’
Then the old man hung up and, baffled, Harley repeated the name of the restaurant to himself over and over until he could remember it without stumbling. His stomach growled at the thought of roast duck and buttery French toast. It had been a long time since his last meal, which had been eaten out of a banana leaf in an entirely different country while the sun was just rising.
The fog, which had hung back while the ferry navigated its way through a bunch of outlying islands and narrow channels, came back in earnest as the ferry docked at the terminal in Sheung Wan and passengers spilled out of the vessel onto a concrete walkway.
Harley, the very last person to disembark, watched in awe as a tsunami of fog seemed to flow from the water, up and over the bridge he was walking across, enveloping everyone and everything in a rush of white.
As soon as the fog hit, the pearl hopped out of Harley’s pocket onto the ground. Aided by the orb – which now seemed to glow far less brightly and move far less quickly than it had before – Harley soon found himself outside the terminal and facing a squat, dirty beige building, about four storeys tall. It was sandwiched between two grey and red highrise office towers, forming a kind of U-shaped complex.
As people stumbled out of the fog behind him, exclaiming and pointing about at the unnatural weather, Harley tugged at the sleeve of a young woman who’d stopped nearby.
‘Lan Fong Yuen?’ he enquired.
She shook her head, put her earbuds in and moved away.
‘Lan Fong Yuen?’ Harley asked a man in a rumpled suit who seemed to have lost both his shirt and his shoes. Not appearing to have heard a word that Harley had said, the man raised his hands to his bloodshot eyes and staggered away in the direction of the car park with shaking shoulders.
The pearl at Harley’s feet tapped once more, tiredly, at the toe of his right sneaker. Its lustre was very dim now and it only rolled a few more metres towards the front entrance of the low building between the two office towers before it seemed to collapse in on itself and disperse in a scatter of pearlescent fragments.
At that moment, the fog that had engulfed the Hong Kong Macau Ferry Terminal collapsed, too, like a dropped theatre curtain, revealing a night sky that was very dark and punctuated by an array of electric lights that seemed extra dazzling. Blinking and startled, passengers all around the concrete concourse seemed to give themselves a shake and move forward more briskly. Harley, who’d never felt more alone in his whole life, entered the beige building in trepidation.
It turned out to be a daggy shopping centre full of shops that Harley didn’t recognise, each dedicated entirely to things like underpants, headphones, suitcases, rice cookers in their colourful dozens or Korean beauty products. Some of the stores were beginning to close, but a few people were still heading up stairs and escalators. Harley followed them.
On the third floor, in the distance, Harley spotted a ginormous white menu sign with red and green English words and Chinese characters as soon as he stepped off the escalator. The menu featured a photo of a plate of glistening roast duck, not to mention a plate of buttery French toast alongside a towering sundae-glass full of iced milky tea.
However, by the time Harley worked out that he had indeed found the Lan Fong Yuen restaurant, it was closed. The waiters had just finished locking up the steel accordion gates surrounding the restaurant and streamed past him on their way home.
Harley rushed over and hung off the gates in desperation, giving them a vigorous shake.
‘Please!’ he shouted through the bars. ‘You can’t be closed!’
Inside the restaurant, a man in a stained chef’s apron shouted back at Harley in Chinese, then returned to the kitchen.
Harley’s shoulders slumped, his fingers still threaded through the diamond-shaped lattice of the accordion gates. He’d called Hong Kong, just like his dad had told him to, and nothing had worked out. The ‘special’ phone wasn’t special in the least – exactly as his sceptical mum, Delia, had predicted. It let you call and text people, just like a regular phone did. And that was that.
Harley’s disappointment was crushing. He turned and sat on the ground, his back to the restaurant and the vanished roast duck dinner. The helpful pearl was nowhere to be seen. He might as well have imagined it.
Harley was stranded in a strange country with no passport, no money, no language, no friends and, worst of all, no dad. His throat felt tight with feelings he couldn’t put a name to, because if he did, they might come true.
‘Young man,’ a voice said, quiet but stern, from behind the steel gates.
Harley looked up into the dark eyes of an old man with very hollow cheeks, wearing black-framed glasses and a tailored three-piece grey suit; his short black hair was combed very close to his scalp and oiled down neatly.
‘Please get up from the floor. Your dinner is getting cold.’
Harley leapt to his feet. ‘Are you Hong Kong?’ he exclaimed with dawning delight as the old man gestured curtly at the chef who’d yelled at Harley only minutes before. Sheepishly, the man bobbed his head and unlocked the accordian gates before relocking them behind Harley and hurrying back into the kitchen.
The old man gave Harley a measuring look from head to toe. Even though he wasn’t much taller than Harley, he exuded an air of steely command. ‘I am indeed Hong Kong,’ the dapper stranger said with a glimmer of a smile. ‘And you’re late. I am reliably informed that the ferry docked quite some time ago. I had to convince the kind gentleman in the kitchen to keep the wok burners burning, just for you,’ he added. ‘Now eat.’
The old man gestured at a table tucked away in the corner, out of sight of the restaurant entrance. The table for two was laden with more roast duck, French toast and iced milk tea than two human beings could possibly ingest.
Harley pulled up a vinyl-covered chair and started to tear into the duck, interspersing it with bites of eggy, buttery French toast and sips of the heavenly, sugar-loaded tea. Finally remembering his manners, he scrubbed at his greasy face with the back of one hand and said, ‘Did you want me to save you any foo—’
The old man smiled and shook his head, the fluorescent light gleaming off his heavy 1950s-style spectacles. ‘I would like you to tell me everything,’ he said kindly, ‘about what has brought you to Hong Kong.’
For some reason, Harley trusted the old man. Just like his mum, who was a senior emergency nurse at a big city hospital and dealt with people from all walks of life, Harley was good at reading people. He knew that the elderly gent could have given him up to the shadowy network of international crims that was after him and his dad already. But, instead, the old man had fed Harley more roast duck than his mum had ever let him eat in one sitting.
Even if this man was a major (alleged) criminal, just like Harley’s dad, he gave off an honourable, unruffled kind of air.
‘You remind me of my great-grandpa,’ Harley blurted, taking one last noisy sip of his iced milk tea as he looked across the table at the old man, who still hadn’t introduced himself.
The old man smiled. ‘If you’re finished,’ he said, rising to his feet and throwing down a stack of notes in lolly-bright colours, ‘let us talk at my shop. My driver, Ricotta, is waiting for us downstairs.’