Chapter Three. the White Orchid
CHAPTER THREE
THE WHITE ORCHID
The White Orchid turned out to be a cabaret club. Three girls in tight, sparkling dresses were doing a sultry number, and more weaved through the dimmed floor serving drinks and chatting to customers.
As Adeline made her way to the bar, an anonymous hand grazed her thigh.
She fantasized, again, about just grabbing hold and starting a fire.
She rubbed her thumb over her fingerpads, but let it go.
Too many witnesses, her mother would flay her, and fires were too dangerous in dense places like this, buildings and bodies pressed shoulder to shoulder.
The bartender was attending to some loutish gangster as Adeline approached—tattoos all down the arms, and the sort of choppy hippie hair well past the chin that the government had banned.
Staying clear of the man, Adeline veered to the other end of the bar, making the bartender come over to her.
“Tiger,” she said, cash already extended.
The bartender gave her a shrewd glance, but turned away without statement.
Low lights and dolled-up confidence had yet to lead her wrong.
This wasn’t the discos at the Shangri-La or the Mandarin, where the clientele required more discernment.
Places like these wanted more girls in them.
The managers wouldn’t look closely until the police came knocking.
“That group’s gotten a bit rowdy,” came the bartender’s continued conversation at the other end of the bar, as he rummaged in a fridge for Adeline. “Might have to cut them off.”
“Keep an eye on them,” came the response, and the distinctly female tenor of it turned Adeline’s head.
The tattooed man was not a man at all, but a tall and particularly striking girl dressed in loose trousers and a white singlet, which exposed leanly muscular, colorfully inked arms propped on the counter as she chatted to the bartender and occasionally watched the show.
Her tanned face was bare, revealing her youth—she couldn’t have been much older than Adeline—but there was a certain wolfishness to her eyes and the way she pushed her tongue against the inside of her cheek at something the bartender was saying, exposing her teeth.
She raked her short hair out of her face and happened to catch Adeline’s eye. She raised her eyebrows with an aggressive jerk of the head: What’s your problem?
Adeline looked away as the bartender handed over her beer and change. “Thanks.” She grabbed the bottle and coins and left quickly, getting all the way to a table in the corner before realizing she should have tried asking the bartender about this contact of her mother’s she’d come all the way for.
But she was distracted now—from this corner she could safely observe the girl at the bar behind her back.
Adeline had never seen anyone who looked like that before.
A thick copper ring sat on the girl’s right hand; Adeline almost wondered if it was a wedding ring before realizing it was on the wrong finger.
The girl didn’t wear any other jewelry except plain black studs in her ears.
Adeline wondered if she could get close enough to the girl to pocket her ring.
She wouldn’t be an easy mark, but perhaps with the right distraction… ?
Probably some gangster’s girlfriend, Adeline reminded herself, and not worth the risk.
Chinatown and its adjacent areas were divvied up by the unofficial lines of the kongsi brotherhoods.
Queenstown, where the Hong Lim cemetery used to sprawl over the swampy hills; Tanjong Pagar, where the railway station rolled out its arteries to the Malaysian hinterlands; Bugis Street, with its debauchery and oozing red signs promising flesh.
If you didn’t go looking for the gangs, the gangs usually wouldn’t look for you.
But they were recognizable—each inked with the symbols of their loyalty.
The girls that hung with them might wear some of these symbols as well.
Adeline tried to make out the shapes on the girl’s arms and connect them to stories she’d heard.
But it was too dark to distinguish most of the icons, and it was stupid to trust that Killerwatch had any real information.
There was one tattoo that was clear, however, even in the dark and from a distance: a large butterfly just under the girl’s left shoulder.
Eventually, however, the girl caught her staring again. Their eyes locked across the bar; Adeline turned rapidly back to the stage, only to find the performance had just ended. She was left without an excuse as the girl set her hands on the table, looming over Adeline.
“You got a problem?”
Adeline froze. “No.”
“Then what are you looking at?”
“Who said I was looking at you?” She was dimly aware that this probably wasn’t someone she wanted to provoke, but couldn’t seem to help herself.
Fortunately, the girl seemed faintly amused by the bald-faced lie.
She did that thing with her tongue again, lips curving, and glanced around at the unoccupied chairs.
“Your boyfriend stood you up?”
“No.”
The girl looked even more amused now. “I’ll take that back for you,” she said, indicating the empty bottle, but Adeline grabbed it before she could.
“I’m not done.”
It was clearly empty. “You want another one?”
“No.”
The girl’s mouth twitched. “Okay.” She started to walk away.
“You work here?” Adeline blurted.
The girl looked over her shoulder, over that arm with the butterfly. “No,” she said, in the same tone Adeline had used, but her lips curved wider.
Adeline watched her go, mutinous and irritated for reasons she couldn’t place. She’d been sitting here too long achieving nothing, she decided. She had never been good at staying still.
She looked for a distraction and saw one building. One of the men at a nearby table had grabbed one of the performers as she left the stage. His three friends were calling out, trying to persuade her to sit and sing for them.
“Don’t be like that, chiobu. Your job is to entertain us, isn’t it? Then sing for us, come on.”
Their table was littered with bottles and glasses; they must have been properly drunk already.
As the performer protested, trying to pull away from them, Adeline wondered whether those men would catch fire if she simply wafted an open flame under their stinking, liquor-soaked breaths.
Could her mother really punish her, then, if it was to help someone else?
Adeline was restless, and everyone else seemed to be steadily ignoring what was happening.
They wouldn’t notice her. She could do it.
Like picking a pocket, except instead of slipping something carefully out, she’d be dropping a flame onto the tablecloth.
Onto one of the men’s collars. Onto the back of their hair.
Adeline was still hesitating over this heroic conviction she’d never before had in her life when she noticed—as though her irises had trained themselves to lock onto the merest phantom of this figure—the tattooed girl from earlier reappear from the bar and make a beeline toward the struggle.
If she’d been talking to Adeline with some amusement, that amusement was gone now. She twisted the ring on her finger as she came up behind the man who’d grabbed the performer, and she brought that hand down hard on the man’s wrist.
The man exclaimed in pain and let go of the cabaret girl, who scampered out of his reach. Either he sprang to his feet, or he was dragged up—now he was face-to-face with his assailant, who wasn’t at all fazed as she dropped his arm with no small amount of condescension.
“You know the rules, Wai Peng. You don’t screw around with the performers. Now leave.”
Five small puncture wounds had opened on his wrist in a circle, as though a creature had latched on to bite.
Adeline saw that the girl’s ring had prongs, but no stone attached—the five hooks had been pried straight to form a mouth of spikes, and this was what the girl had slammed into the man’s wrist.
“Don’t touch then don’t touch. We paid to be here, we’re not going anywhere.” Wai Peng paused for support, but his friends remained warily silent. Undaunted, Wai Peng made a rude gesture and turned to sit back down.
He didn’t get that far. The tattooed girl grabbed his wrist again.
The next second, bottles leapt onto the floor and shattered as the girl wrenched his arm behind him and slammed him into the table, more glass crunching beneath his weight.
She glared at his friends. “Don’t make me call my own friends. Get out!”
If they had wanted to, the four men could have overpowered her.
But whoever she had on call seemed like a big enough threat: Wai Peng’s friends abandoned him with a flurry of scraping chairs.
The girl turned her attention back to the man himself.
Her free hand was angled under his chin, holding a weapon of some sort.
“You shouldn’t drink so much,” she said. “It makes you stupid.”
Adeline half rose out of her seat, convinced she was seeing things. She hadn’t seen the girl pull a weapon, but he was straining away from it, and the movement of his head allowed Adeline the glimpse of an orange glow buried in the crook of his throat.
The girl finally let Wai Peng up. He stumbled away, but Adeline’s eyes darted right to the girl’s hands, like trying to catch a magician’s trick before it disappeared.
A glow winked away from the girl’s fingers—so quickly Adeline might have believed she imagined it, if not for the new, shiny red spot on Wai Peng’s neck.
Adeline knew a burn when she saw it. And the girl hadn’t been holding a lighter.