Precious Dragon Read online

  “I think,” Pin said, swallowing hard, “I will do that.”

  He saw the Opera with new eyes: not as a trap, but as a beginning. Somewhere to start, and somewhere to leave. “What time is it?” Pin asked.

  The child gestured towards the heavy curtains. “Go and see.”

  Pin pushed the curtains aside. There was a faint pale light over the city. “Morning’s coming,” the child said. Pin nodded. It seemed a good time to make a move. He looked up at the skyscrapers and saw that the sun was touching their sides. When he looked back into the room, the child was gone.

  Pin opened the door and made his way to the front entrance of the Opera. There was only one person in the foyer, a cleaner, who paid no attention to Pin. He went through the main doors of the Opera and out onto Shaopeng. The café owners were just beginning to put their tables out, setting menus down. Pin made his way among the first trickle of morning commuters, heading up Shaopeng, away from the Opera. He did not look back.

  60

  At Inari’s suggestion, Zhu Irzh held his Earthly engagement party on the houseboat. The Chens had been invited to the version in Hell, but did not know if they would attend. Chen was trying to be diplomatic, but he needn’t have bothered.

  “Don’t come if you don’t want to,” Zhu Irzh said. “I wouldn’t, if I didn’t have to. It’s being held on the lawn of the Imperial Palace. Mother’s hired a marquee.”

  “Zhu Irzh,” Chen said. “Do you actually want to go through with all this?” They were standing on the deck of the houseboat, a little distance from the main gathering which, by necessity, was small: some connections of Jhai’s, Sergeant Ma, Inari and Robin Yuan, who was treating it as her last social engagement before heading up to Heaven in the wake of Mhara, still recovering from what had apparently been a nasty encounter with the kuei, but now Emperor of Heaven.

  “Might as well,” Zhu Irzh said, gloomily. “She’s certainly the most interesting girlfriend I’ve ever had. And I suppose one has to settle down at some point. Besides, I’ve committed myself now. I actually broke down and asked her to marry me. Bit late, admittedly. But it’s done now.” He did not look altogether miserable, Chen thought, despite the air of gloom. “Anyway, we’re staying here on Earth. Jhai’s got a business to run. And I’ve no wish to go back to Hell, not with my mum running things alongside that lizard.”

  “There’ll be a place for you,” Chen said. “The Captain’s over the moon. Thinks there’s a chance of some real possibilities, what with the son of the Empress of Hell working for the police department.”

  “Equal opportunities?” Zhu Irzh asked, smiling.

  “Perhaps.” What an odd visit that had been, Chen thought. He did not feel that they had got anywhere near to the bottom of things. Why had the Ministry of War invited Miss Qi to Hell, to go to so much trouble to bring down a Celestial, then without demur, let her go again? Whatever the rights and wrongs of recent events between Hell and Heaven, it was not like Hell to be accommodating and conciliatory. War had wanted Miss Qi’s presence for a reason, and Chen did not like not knowing what it had been.

  Zhu Irzh had evidently been following a different line of thought. “Not to mention Robin over there as the Empress of Heaven,” he remarked.

  Robin had been standing several yards away, but she appeared to hear this. She wandered over. “Don’t know how much of an Empress I’ll be,” she said. “Mhara’s mother is still the Dowager Empress.”

  “How much of a say will she have in things, though?” Chen asked.

  Robin grimaced. “Not much, if I have anything to do with it. She’s in favour of this detachment from Earth thing. Guess what? I’m not.”

  “I think,” Chen said, “That we’ll all be having a lot more to do with one another in future.”

  He looked thoughtfully down the deck of the houseboat. Three demons, one Celestial (Miss Qi, shadowing Jhai in her new Paugeng uniform and looking not displeased with the way things had worked out), one ghost—shortly to become a major celestial power—and a handful of humans. Three worlds it might be, Chen thought, but who’s counting?

  Epilogue

  A little bedroom in a house by the harbour, with the shutter tightly drawn against the onset of night. Precious Dragon was swinging his legs over the side of the bed.

  “Thank you,” he said at last.

  “Oh, that’s all right, dear.” Mrs Pa was looking distractedly around her. “I just want to make sure that the place is tidy before we go, although it’s not easy to pick things up without flesh … I ought to thank you. I feel as though I’ve done something constructive, after all these years. And of course, I’m so looking forward to seeing your grandfather again.”

  “You’re sure, now?” he asked her and she put her hand beneath his chin, tipping his head up.

  “Yes, quite sure,” she said. She took a last look around. “That should do. Shall we get on with it?”

  *

  A little while later, the old lady gratefully accepted the bowl of steaming black tea.

  “This is a nice house you have here, Mai.”

  “It’s not so bad,” the girl said, deprecatingly. “It’s a lot bigger than the old house in Hell. And now that we have all your wedding presents … you must have gone to so much trouble.” Swiftly, she bent to kiss her mother on the forehead. “Making me feel guilty.”

  “Things always work out,” her mother mused. She had recovered her composure now, and sat sipping her tea. “It wasn’t so bad, after all. Dying.”

  Mai laughed.

  “My son usually seems to know what he’s doing.”

  There was a single rapping knock at the door, like a thunder­clap. The girl hastened to open it, while her mother gazed around the well-appointed room. The winter rains had stopped now. Outside, through the half-shuttered window, the golden light streamed in across the clouds and carried with it the scent of thousand flower, almost burying the tang of gunpowder tea in its sweetness. Mai opened the door to the sunlight and someone came in.

  “My goodness,” Mrs Pa said, after a startled moment. “You’ve changed again.” She put down her cup from a suddenly shaking hand and leaned forward, admiring. “It’s a little difficult to get used to,” she added, after a minute. Her grandson smiled. From the window, the gilded light fell in banners across the floor, illuminating his scales, round as rice bowls and glistening with rain.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Detective Inspector Chen Novels

  1

  Pauleng go ducked as the whisky bottle hurtled toward his head and smashed on the opposite wall. He cried out in anguish.

  “Lara! Sweetheart! Darling! That was a twenty-five-year-old malt!”

  She knew it, too, the bitch. He’d seen her hand pause over an indifferent bottle of Tokyo Gold, before clamping firmly around the neck of the Lagavulin.

  “You can afford it!” Lara shouted, at window-rattling volume. “Take it from the money you’ve cheated me of, why don’t you?”

  “Lara, look. I sorted all this out with Beni, you know I did and I know he told you about the new studio rates. Things are hard, even in Bollywood: you know about the tax thing, Beni explained. Don’t you remember?”

  Of course she didn’t. He’d be amazed if she could remember what she’d had for dinner last night.

  “Lara … put the Chateau d’Yquem down, there’s a love.”

  Sixty dollars a bottle and no doubt that would soon be joining the whisky-sodden wallpaper. It wasn’t the money. It was almost a crime against God. To Go’s surprise, however, Lara did as he asked her. She set the bottle carefully down on the table, turned on her kitten heel, and left, with a glowering ebony glance over her silken shoulder. Go could hear the deathwatch tapping of those heels all the way down the marble hall. With a sigh of mingled exasperation and relief, he picked up his cellphone and put a call through to Beni.

  “The thing is …” Beni was saying, twenty minutes later, for the third time. “The thing is, we can’t get rid o
f her. Audiences love her and you know why, it’s all due to her—”

  “Yes, sure, I know,” Go replied. There were some things he didn’t want discussed over the phone, even though it was supposed to be a secure connection. “I know, I know all that stuff. But she’s seriously nuts, Beni.”

  A pause. “Yeah. I know all that stuff, too. She’s kind of bound to be, man.”

  “You’re saying it’s our fault?”

  “We got her the gig. And the one before that. And the—”

  “—one before that,” Go finished for him. “You’re right. I suppose now we’ve just got to deal with the consequences.”

  That evening, he sat down in front of The Wild and the Blessed. The first gig … It had been the first time he and Beni and Lara had worked together, before he’d really understood about Lara. He knew what the deal was, of course: he’d been there from the start. But he hadn’t really got his head round all the ramifications. And Wild had been, well, wild. How could you not fall in love with Lara Chowdijharee? Stunning girls were as common as beetles in Bollywood, but Lara was … well, Lara was something else.

  Being nearly brained by a full bottle of your best malt tended to put the dampeners on starry-eyed romance, however. It wasn’t the first time it had happened. The rot had started to set in toward the end of the second movie, The Wild and the Damned. Lara had been playing the same character—sweet, selfless Ranee Pur—but somewhere along the line she’d started asking for script changes, and getting them. Character changes, too. Big ones. Go—who had after all been responsible for the initial script—had never really envisaged Ranee as the AK-47-toting kind of girl, somehow. Audiences seemed to have taken it in their stride, however, and Go couldn’t deny that it had seemed to speak to the modern Indian woman. There were Ranee car fresheners and fridge magnets, Ranee underwear and mouse mats. Lara was under round-the-clock protection, though whether they were protecting Lara from the crazier fringes of her devoted fans, or the crazier fringes from Lara, Go did not really care to consider too closely. Given how she’d begun to treat her producer and her agent, God alone knew how she’d deal with some poor benighted stalker.

  Go had been in the industry too long, however, not to recognize the feeling of being held facedown over a barrel, with legs firmly spread. When the last credits of The Wild and the Blessed had rolled over a close-up of Lara’s exquisite face, he dialed her private number.

  “Darling girl? Beni and I have been having a little talk …”

  2

  Heaven hadn’t changed much, Chen thought—at least, not on the surface. As he stepped out of the little skiff sent to him by the Celestial Emperor, all the way across the Sea of Night, onto those by-now-familiar shores, redolent of peach blossom and lined with flowering apricots, he could have been stepping back in time, to when he had come here with a demon by his side. He found himself missing Zhu Irzh, this trip. The demon had been seconded onto a case involving a drug-smuggling ring, one that not-coincidentally concerned Zhu Irzh’s fiancée Jhai Tserai. The industrialist was on the right side of the law, for a change, although Chen knew how difficult it was actually to pin anything on Jhai. She had a tendency to prove elusive when it came to the finer points of legality, and given that Singapore Three’s laws were themselves somewhat mutable, depending on who was breaking or enforcing them, Chen’s sympathies did not always lie to Jhai’s disadvantage.

  Still, there was a definite sense of something missing, whether it was the moral (or immoral) support provided by Zhu Irzh, or simply the fact that the presence of the demon provided a leavening influence upon the endless propriety and pastel glamours of the Heavenly Realm. The late Emperor—now disembodied—might have gone not-so-quietly mad, but the assumption of his son did not seem to have changed things a whole lot. Sighing, Chen walked toward the carriage, pulled by two golden-skinned lion-dogs, that was to take him to the Celestial Palace.

  “It’s not been easy,” the Celestial Emperor murmured, an hour or so later.

  “I can imagine.” Chen was genuinely sympathetic. “When one considers that China itself has been constrained by thousands of years of tradition, and we are in the far more changeable human realm … You’ve got quite a task on your hands, if you’re really considering reform.”

  “I don’t have a choice,” Mhara said. He turned to Chen. The Emperor had changed little since Chen had first met him: the same fall of dark hair, the same tranquil blue gaze. A tall, young man, now dressed not in the massively ornate robes of the Celestial Emperor, but in a linen tunic and loose trousers. He looked comfortable, cool, and above all, un-stuffy. He did not look as though he belonged in this vast chamber, seemingly floating above the cloud-layer of the Palace, its walls decorated with tapes­tries depicting events so long ago that China had not yet been born as a nation. This was a personage who, Chen reminded himself, chose to travel by bicycle when on Earth.

  “There’s always a choice,” Chen said. “You could be everything your father was.”

  “Exactly. How about ‘mad’? The invasion of Hell—a stupid plan, misconceived in arrogance and entitlement.”

  “Kuan Yin had told me that Heaven was planning a strategic withdrawal,” Chen said. “Take over Hell and use it and Earth as a kind of depository for souls.”

  “Yes. Heaven—literally—forbid that any more human souls should come here, cluttering up the place, contaminating it with their still-mortal essence. Father lost sight of what Heaven was for.”

  “I suppose the question that comes most naturally to my mind,” Chen remarked, “is how much support your father enjoyed. Quite a lot, one would think.”

  Mhara nodded, turning back to the window to stare out over the mild airs of the Celestial city. “A lot, yes, but it’s hard to know how much of that was coerced. I don’t mean by force. Heaven’s host was completely conditioned to believe in the rightness of the Emperor’s judgment. I only got away from it because I was living on Earth, and besides, those of us in the Imperial family have more freedom of will. That in itself isn’t very encouraging.”

  Chen shrugged. “It’s a caste system.”

  “Quite so. The ultimate caste system, in many respects.”

  Chen paused. “Emperor. Mhara. It is always a pleasure to see you, and an honor to enter Heaven. But why did you ask me here today?”

  Mhara turned and smiled at him. It was only at moments such as these that Chen was fully aware of Mhara’s divine origins: Mhara played down the whole god-thing to such an extent that most of the time, it was possible to see him as nothing more than a mild-mannered young monk, one who wore the faint and modest glow of enlightenment, perhaps, but a human nonetheless. But now, if only for a second, Chen found himself dazzled, standing in the radiance of his friend’s gaze.

  “Chen. What is your job title?”

  Chen, slightly taken aback, replied, “Detective Inspector.”

  “I know, of course. But what is it that you actually do?”

  “I investigate crimes. Hopefully, I solve them.” I save the world on an increasing number of occasions. But he did not want to say that: it sounded too flippant, and it was hardly part of his job, anyway, unless one took a very wide overview of things. Then it struck him. “I am the liaison officer between the worlds.”

  “Between Earth and Hell and Heaven,” Mhara said. “And that’s why I asked you to come here today. Because if there’s one thing I need, it’s a liaison officer.”

  3

  It was strange for him to go somewhere alone. Usually, one of the Family went with him: Mistress, or the human. Occasionally, he had accompanied the Hellkind to places, but this was a question of duty, not of preference. He had no issue with being alone, or of working without Family; it was simply that it seemed strange. Especially because he had volunteered.

  This was not his own loss. At first, when Mistress had told him of it, he had assumed that this was something she herself had misplaced. Creature of duty that he was, a small, cold planet revolving around the sun
of Mistress’ presence, it was sometimes hard for him to grasp that the affairs of others, including people he did not know, might also concern her. This particular affair, it seemed, was on behalf of the human, of Husband, and that made it instantly explicable.

  The missing thing was small. It hummed, with the human magic, the kind that was unthinking. Husband had referred to it as a “bug,” and at first he had thought that this referred to an insect of some sort, for these—to his secret pleasure—had proved as commonplace on Earth as they had been in Hell. But further explanations had revealed that this bug was not a living thing at all, but a little machine.

  How boring.

  Nonetheless, it had been suggested to him that he might be the ideal person to retrieve it, or at least, attempt to do so. He would not be seen by many humans, and if the person who had taken it was not, in fact, of that ilk, then he could be trusted to deal with it. This pleased him. Since the events of a few months past, things had been quiet. Although not confined, he had kept mainly to the houseboat, accompanying Mistress on her regular forays to the local market, but no further. He did not object to this—Mistress­ was, after all, safe, and as this goal was the primary focus of his existence, then matters were by definition satisfactory—but all the same, they were a trifle dull. It had been suggested on a number of occasions that he might like to accompany Husband to his workplace, and this was intriguing, but regretfully he had felt obliged to turn the offer down. If he and Husband were both absent, then there would be no one to protect Mistress, and he was certainly not going to leave Mistress in the hands of the Hellkind. The demon named Zhu Irzh had a habit of attracting trouble—a child would have noticed this—and Mistress was prone enough to trouble as it was.