Chapter Ten. Queens, Soldiers, and Crocodiles #2
It became clear—in a mix of English, Hokkien, and Malay that Adeline caught the gist of—that as teasing as the smiles were, as bright as the lights and painted faces were, everyone who spent any time out here was too aware of their own fragility.
The women of the night seemed unreal: some who smelled like salt on their long silvery hair, others as long as deer or who seemed carved from the moon.
They changed faces and men and people came here just to look.
But all of them had stories of being hurt by the men supposedly enraptured by them.
Everywhere in the red lights beauty was a paper screen you could put your foot through.
They relied on the power of pimps and mercenary gods to stay safe, or, barring that, be avenged.
Worse, still, for the foreign girls who didn’t even speak the local languages, had no friends and no way to make them should trouble arise.
“And Desker is all foreigners, you know lah. They have always kept to themselves. But you know what I hear?” Candy said.
Her superstition had worn off; she now spoke with the eagerness of someone who wanted to be in on the conspiracy.
“All of them fucking beautiful. Don’t know where Three Steel find them.
But you ask around, the regulars are all talking about the Desker girls. Something’s going on there.”
Tian glanced at Adeline in quiet triumph.
Christina caught the look and seemed torn; she was close to both Pek Mun and Tian, Adeline knew, and was undoubtedly unhappy that Tian’s supposed fun night out had roped her into abetting them.
Clearing her throat, she tried to change the subject.
“That Three Steel guy still sweet on you? What’s he talking about these days? ”
Candy scoffed. “Since when we spend time talking?” Adeline wondered what Christina’s relationship with her was, how long they’d known each other.
It was a little hard to tell under the makeup, but Candy seemed ten or so years older than Christina.
She’d probably known Christina longer than Tian or Pek Mun had.
“I tried to ask him about Lina. But he said he didn’t know what I was talking about, no one keeps track of all the gang’s whores.
Said she probably ran away. How can, when she disappeared going to them? ”
Christina’s expression had unexpectedly shuttered. “Let Lina be at rest, wherever she is,” she said gently. “You know it’s like that. People come and go without warning.”
“Awak tak marah?” Candy snapped. “She was just a girl.”
Christina tucked her hair behind her ears. Adeline was fascinated; it was the first time she’d seen Christina lie. “We all started as girls.”
Candy pursed her lips hard. “My guy says they’re all stressed,” she said, acting like the last few exchanges hadn’t happened. “There’s been more raids on Three Steel joints lately. Don’t know how the police know.”
“Rats,” Adeline said, remembering Mavis’s taunting.
“You couldn’t pay me to rat on the White Man,” Tian muttered. “Fan Ge’s sense of justice is old and brutal.”
“But strict and careful and he does it himself,” Christina reminded her, almost warning. “Not setting fires in the middle of rich people’s houses.”
Now Candy was the one that was lost. Whenever Christina and Pek Mun and Tian were alone, they somehow circled back to this, and how Tian was wasting her time thinking otherwise.
Adeline knew because Tian would vent about it to her; it was the first time she was hearing it in person, which seemed offensive, since it was her mother who was dead.
Pek Mun and Christina were convinced it had been an accident.
Tian, backed by Adeline, still suspected foul play, and had no other suspects but the gang currently trying to take everyone else over.
“People are wondering, you know.” Candy looked between them. “Why you have no Madam Butterfly yet. They wonder if you’ve lost the ways of creating a new conduit.”
“We still have fire,” Tian replied flatly. “Nothing’s changed.”
That was a lie, though, and they all knew it.
As Pek Mun had snapped at Adeline, having the fire didn’t make Red Butterfly.
They needed a conduit with a name and living body, who the other kongsi would look to.
They needed Lady Butterfly visible in vessel form.
No wonder rivals had been growing bolder as of late—just two nights ago a neighboring group called the Boars had harassed some of the girls outside one of the Butterfly bars.
No matter that the girls had managed to send them off.
The hesitation in their leaders was making them all look weak.
But the quandary seemed impossible to work through.
It had become clear to Adeline what the problem was.
Pek Mun was a natural leader, but she didn’t care for the goddess.
Tian was devoted to the goddess, but she would never step over Pek Mun.
It wasn’t a contest of two, as Adeline had initially believed.
Lady Butterfly hung between them, tangling her own succession.
“Nothing’s changed…” Tian insisted, but she trailed off, turning as she noticed something across the street.
The commotion made itself clear to the rest of them a moment later: the crowd flexing and tightening around a diversion, everyone tensed and craning their necks to follow the person in front of them.
Christina frowned. “Fight,” she guessed, rising from her seat to try to get a better look.
“Buaya,” someone around them hissed. Adeline knew enough Malay to understand crocodile, but didn’t grasp anything else before several screams burst from the crowd.
That got Christina and Candy out of their seats, and starting to follow Tian toward the noise. The next ripple of exclamations—“They killed him!”—set Tian ungently shoving people aside, until Adeline had caught up to her and the scene revealed itself.
Three men stood in the alley over a bloodied body.
They all had exposed tattoos. One was patches of white, Three Steel, but the other two, a man and a teenage boy, had matching crocodiles twined around their arms. The boy looked fresh, but the older Crocodile had skin that looked thick as hide, and the tattoos themselves looked rough and tinted green.
The Crocodiles picked up the dead man’s arm, pushed up his sleeve to reveal a large crocodile tattoo, and began to take a knife to it. At this point the adult Crocodile looked up and evidently recognized Tian, who nodded slowly. He nodded back, revealing a sliver of sharp teeth between his lips.
Adeline felt compelled to witness. She didn’t consider herself squeamish, but she felt a little sick.
The men were no surgeons. They flayed the tattoo off with wet, brutish hacks that went too deep.
It seemed the god’s effect held even with the man dead: the skin seemed tough to cut.
When the whole of the tattoo was finally off the arm, in four semi-distinct pieces, the men hurried away.
The youngest of them looked back, the lights catching his horrified face, and then was gone.
It was only then Adeline realized that the dead man’s eyes were also missing. It had been done with similar finesse: his sockets were a lacerated mess. She finally turned away, grabbing Tian to steady herself. “What was that?”
For once, Tian wasn’t listening to her. “Call the Sons,” she shouted at Christina, who darted off.
“Everyone else fuck off before someone calls the police! Give me your cape.” She dragged a gold shawl off a woman’s shoulders and tossed it over the body.
Dark spots instantly began spreading where the blood was, but at the least, they were no longer staring at his mangled arm and gouged eyes.
When the last of the morbid onlookers had finally dispersed, Tian started pacing, and Adeline thought to offer her a half-empty pack of Marlboros she’d swiped from someone earlier in the crowd, along with twenty dollars and a handkerchief.
It worked at least to surprise her. “You’re worse than a crow,” Tian said, but lit one and sucked with obvious anxiety.
Adeline let her have two drags before demanding, “So what was that?”
“The Act, the Act.” Another huff. The smoke smelled more acrid this time. “Everyone’s paranoid as shit and trying to outdo each other. You’d have to be fucking brave or fucking stupid to still be taking deals now. There’s not much honor left around here but you don’t go to the pigs.”
The stains on the gold cloth looked increasingly worse: two dark patches over the face, one over the arm, so wet with blood it was clinging to the shape of the limb underneath.
“How do you know he was a rat?” Adeline asked, but it came to her a moment later.
The police were also known as the mata, but the word hadn’t come from any Chinese dialect.
It had been borrowed from Malay, where it meant eyes.
The Sons arrived fifteen minutes later in a black sedan and took the body away with nothing but a fold of cash handed over by Tian, who muttered something choice about having to track down the Crocodiles for the debt. Adeline was impressed by the Sons’ efficiency. “They’re useful.”
“Yeah, they’re the only kongsi actually cleaning up the streets, and the police don’t harass them.
But from what I hear, even they aren’t doing so well.
Some of our generation doesn’t believe in going to the Sons anymore.
They prefer going to the modern undertakers.
” Tian’s tone made it clear what she thought of that.
More sardonically, she added, “You can’t even rely on death as a business anymore. ”
She was clearly unnerved. Adeline let her smoke through two other cigarettes and continually scanned their surroundings instead, no longer listless.
After a long several minutes, there was movement in the alley behind them. They were still standing here, for some reason, like the ox and horse at the doors to hell, but the alley was open on two ends, and now Adeline realized a girl had come up behind them in the dark.
She was slight, bedraggled and barefoot, and her hair had been shorn off.
Adeline couldn’t make out much of her features, but there was something strange about her skin, her scalp.
The girl looked over her shoulder and watched like frozen prey, as though expecting something larger to follow her from the shadows.
When nothing came, she crept forward again, to where blood still pooled on the ground.
Adeline touched Tian’s back, slowly turning her gaze as the girl dipped her fingers into the blood and brought it to her mouth.
She had sharp teeth.
Too many.
“Hey!” Tian exclaimed.
The girl took off, unnaturally fast. They chased her halfway down the alley, but she had disappeared. Their fire could catch no movement or nothing ahead of them. If Tian hadn’t seen her, too, Adeline couldn’t have been sure she wasn’t imagining things. Not at this time of the year, at least.
“People are insane,” Tian said, blowing through her teeth.
But Adeline saw her an hour later at home kneeling at the altar, praying like they’d just disturbed something they weren’t meant to cross.
They were still woken up the next morning by the gathering tanks in the distance.
The parade was being telecast on both channels, but some of the girls went out to catch the live float procession crossing Geylang Road.
It was bright and loud and hundreds had come out on the streets to wait beneath the colored lights and flags.
The first float bore an arch that read PROGRESS AND PROSPERITY.
They were feasting with the dead, they were celebrating for the future; it was a time of festivals, no matter that Tian still had blood on the bottoms of her shoes.