‘Your driver’s name is Ricotta? Like the cheese?’ Harley gaped, following the old man down to the car park where a large, shiny black car was waiting for them.
‘Ricotta’s mother was very fond of Italian food,’ Mr Hong Kong smiled.
Harley had never seen a car like this before. He noted with interest that the limousine had two back passenger doors that met in the middle and opened outwards, away from each other.
A huge, white-gloved man in a peaked cap and black chauffeur’s uniform – who resembled a muscular cube more than a person – held the doors open for the elderly gentleman first, then Harley, before closing them. Harley faced ‘Mr Hong Kong’ – which was what he had taken to calling his mysterious benefactor in his head – across the tan, leather-lined interior of the limo. He was astonished to note an array of bottles and glassware lining one of the doors of the car. The limo even came with its own drinks!
Just as Harley looked up from studying the minibar, the limo stopped outside a narrow singlestorey shop faced in dark granite and square rosewood panels carved in complex Chinese patterns and symbols.
Like the restaurant, the entrance to the shop was shuttered by heavy steel security gates which the driver, Ricotta, now unlocked and pushed apart with his beefy hands.
Mr Hong Kong flicked a switch near the front entrance, and a long line of old-fashioned green pendant lights came on down the length of the store, dimly illuminating the polished dark wood floors and walls of the narrow interior. Through the glass front door, Harley saw Ricotta lock up the accordion gates again from the outside and take his position directly in front of them. Harley heaved a silent sigh of relief, feeling safer than he had done for hours.
To get to the old man’s office, they had to pass shoulder-high open sacks of dried grain, legumes, spices, rice, and other intriguing things like salted whole fish and cuttlefish, dried seaweed, wrinkled-up mushrooms, dried shrimp and small, flattened parcels of leathery tofu skin. A stainless-steel scoop poked out of the top of each sack. Seeing Harley staring around in fascination, the old man murmured, ‘We run a modest import and export business. Life’s necessities, you understand. But, occasionally, we also deal in those little things that can sweeten one’s existence and make its passage infinitely more … bearable.’
Harley hardly took in what Mr Hong Kong was saying. He picked up a scoopful of brown, star-shaped spice pods and let them trickle back down into the sack they’d come out of, then poked another scoop deep into a sackful of what looked like preserved tangerine peel piled up in small, irregular curls, which gave off a lovely smell.
Out of the corner of his eye, Harley caught sight of a fat, pale caterpillar – as long as one of his fingers – inch up and into a sack of salted dried fish standing nearby. He shuddered, hurrying to catch up with Mr Hong Kong as the old man entered his backroom office and settled in behind an ornately carved rosewood desk inlaid with small discs of iridescent mother-of-pearl. When Harley looked closer, he was startled to see that these discs formed the eyes of carved dragons that ran across the surface of the desk and around the legs.
The walls of the windowless back office were lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves full of cloth-covered books in a variety of languages. There was no way out of the slightly claustrophobic space other than the door they’d come in through. A single green pendant light hung over the old man’s desk, casting strange shadows across the looming bookshelves.
‘Sit.’ Mr Hong Kong indicated the chair across the desk.
Harley sat gingerly, his movements stirring the tops of neat piles of invoices and bills of lading gathered on the glass-topped surface of the desk, all executed in spidery Chinese script or printed in harsh black characters.
Then Harley began to recount the strange tale of the azure vase he’d found in Melbourne only days ago, with the bright blue, golden-eyed dragon painted on it that had seemed alive. ‘I couldn’t help taking it off the footpath near my house. It was like I was meant to find it! And once I touched it, I couldn’t let go of it. Mum had to break it to free me.’
The old man leant forward on his elbows, his eyes narrowed. ‘The relic of the blue dragon! Said to awaken only to the hands of someone capable of freeing the creature imprisoned inside. Someone of good heart, so they say. So it was real.’
Harley told the old man everything he knew about the girl who had somehow materialised out of the fragments of the vase; about the innocent mistake his dad had made in offering the vase not to Grandmaster Chiu Chiu Pang first, but to Garstang J. Runyon at Antediluvian House; and how there was a near-identical green dragon vase in a private collection in Singapore, but it had shattered, releasing a young male warrior who wanted to rekindle an ancient blood feud. Harley’s voice trailed off into an exhausted whisper as he added, ‘Me, Dad, Qing and Schumacher have been on the run ever since. We were supposed to go to the Wudang Mountains together…’
‘Where is this Qing now?’ Mr Hong Kong enquired pointedly, his gaze sweeping around the silent shop before settling again on Harley’s face. ‘Girls who are able to defy gravity and eat copious amounts of tuna preserved in oil,’ the old man made a face at the thought, ‘are rare indeed.’
‘I lost everyone in Macau,’ Harley said, deflated. ‘But I swear it all happened, although I’ve got no proof of anything I’m saying.’
Mr Hong Kong frowned. ‘Apart from your striking resemblance to the one black-and-white surveillance photograph in my possession of a certain Ray Spark, taken seven years ago on a street in Brussels,’ the old man replied, ‘you, young man, might just have spun me an elaborate web of lies …’
Then, from beneath the glass-topped surface of his desk, Mr Hong Kong whipped out a compact black pistol. He pointed it straight at Harley’s chest and barked questions at him in a range of different Chinese dialects, none of which Harley remotely understood.
Harley had fully stopped breathing by the time the old man ended his interrogation with a question that Harley thought he’d heard before. ‘Nǐn shì shuí?’ the old man roared. ‘Who are you? How did you get here?’
Harley shook his head, sticking his hands high up in the air. ‘Please!’ he gasped. ‘I don’t know what else to tell you! I swear I’m telling the truth!’
Mr Hong Kong said sharply, ‘I have to warn you that there is no way out – I have an armed man stationed at the front and at the back of the shop. You will never get out of my presence alive.’
Harley closed his eyes. The old man had seemed so nice. Who fed someone a plate of French toast before they whacked them?
This time, he felt sure, it really was curtains.