Chapter Eighteen. Pei Pa Zai
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
PEI PA ZAI
At half past eleven, the red-light district was still stirring. Laundry hung from the windows; girls with bare faces sat on the steps smoking and eating, laughing coarsely. They didn’t pay Pek Mun and Adeline much attention. Without the costumes, any of these houses could have been anything.
Pek Mun had set them off earlier with an emphatic instruction to keep her mouth shut.
It had been entirely silent on the walk since, and it was a rather long walk.
Grudgingly—between fantasies of tearing her hair out—Adeline respected the older girl a little bit more.
No one had ever stood up for her the way Pek Mun had for Tian.
It had surprised her, and surprise was enough for her to follow Pek Mun without a fuss through a street market and out to her mother’s brothel.
The market and the business of Chinatown in the daytime crossed dozens of languages through the ear like passing bees.
Smattered English phrases, sprays of Chinese dialects, Pasar Malay and then Melayu proper; Tamil and Hindi and Punjab; the occasional bits of Tagalog and Thai and other regional visitors.
The city had been woven from different directions for hundreds of years, full of worn holes as much as it was dense with threads.
Adeline adored being between the seams where the loose ends all frayed, even if it was with Pek Mun.
She felt like she could tug on any person they passed and unravel something entirely new.
She had tugged on Tian and that had brought her to the Butterflies, and then following that line further there were more, other, girls with magic now somewhere in the web.
Despite the circumstances, the idea drew her in.
Girls with strange new magic, enough to enchant some and scare others about how they might upset the local balance.
Enough for Three Steel to want to control—if someone wanted to control something, then that something had power.
Her new tattoo—Christina had grudgingly finished it—caught the sunlight as she walked and swung her arm.
It fluttered in the corner of her eye and felt like a new piece of armor.
They were surreptitiously let into the brothel and to a private bedroom.
Pek Mun had warned that her mother was in poor shape—lying in her room with the shutters closed until the sun went down, sickly, her hair falling out—and that Adeline was, once again, to shut her mouth and keep her hands to herself.
Adeline had never actually seen anyone dying of sickness.
It seemed slow for everyone involved. She’d rather someone just kill her.
Yet the woman occupying the room was not only up and about, poking at a caged songbird in the window while the television played, but also looked fresh as a new bride.
She was dressed in a fantastic silk robe with a light blue dress beneath it, and her hair, very much not falling out, was curled under her ears.
There was nothing dying about her. If anything, she was the most beautiful older woman Adeline had ever laid eyes on—regal like a portrait, an almost jarring youthfulness for someone who must have been almost fifty.
“Mother?” Pek Mun blurted, equally shocked.
Tiger Aw didn’t turn from her bird. “Who let you in here? I didn’t ask you to come.”
Pek Mun strode over to the television, picked up the remote, and switched it off. Her mother turned with the sort of idleness Adeline recognized immediately as coy.
“What did you do?” Pek Mun said roughly. “You miraculously recovered?”
“Don’t sound so happy.” Tiger Aw extended her hand.
Pek Mun stared at her for a moment, then returned her the remote.
She switched the television back on, some Taiwanese soap about an amnesiac wife, and turned up the volume.
“Aren’t you glad you don’t have to give your mother anything anymore?
I found someone more useful. My business is booming. ”
Adeline was starting to see where Pek Mun got her personality. As the husband on-screen began an impassioned, melodramatic speech, the older girl picked the remote up again and switched it off with finality.
Tiger Aw slapped her. Not hard, but enough to make Pek Mun flinch.
“I was watching that.” But she didn’t turn it back on.
Instead she crossed over to a lacquer desk and arranged herself in the carved teak chair, turning a mirror and beginning to dust her face.
Horribly, for a second she looked a little like Adeline’s mother. “So why are you here?”
“There’s girls dying on Desker Road. Girls with magic. We know your house is also on the list.” Pek Mun paused. “Is that your cure?”
“I don’t know about dying girls. Do I look like I’m dying to you?”
“You look beautiful,” Pek Mun said blandly.
“More than you do, that’s for sure. You must have loved seeing me fall apart.”
“I didn’t.”
“And what’s your name, little sister?”
It took Adeline a second to realize Tiger Aw had turned a beatific smile on her.
The shift in tone was so abrupt it was hard to reconcile with the same mouth, but once Adeline had caught up she understood exactly what was happening, the exacting shifts of devotion and dismissal being wielded by a master.
She understood, but was trapped regardless, until she caught a glance from Pek Mun that clearly shared the same understanding, and was letting her do it anyway.
“Adeline,” she finally responded.
“How pretty. Sounds so European. I should have one of my girls take it up; it’s easier for the ang mohs to pronounce. So, Ah Mun, I don’t see your suitors, all these other choices you said you had. You’re almost twenty-two, you think you have so much time?”
“Three Steel,” Pek Mun said coldly. “Where are they finding these girls? What treatments did they give you?”
“You won’t get the Kwong son back, but I’m sure there’s a man desperate enough to take you even with that shit on your skin.
” Tiger Aw had a glint in her eye that Adeline thought might have inspired her nickname.
She rattled an enameled tin on her desk; little things clattered inside it, like beads.
“Three Steel makes medicine you can’t even dream of.
This is what a visionary looks like. Not that good-for-nothing Crocodile. ”
“Three Steel makes drugs.”
“They’re all the same thing. Just because you like to see me in the worst condition doesn’t mean that others are as selfish.”
Pek Mun didn’t respond. “I’m leaving.”
“And what did you get out of it?” Tiger Aw snorted. She returned to her powders. Pek Mun rolled her eyes and headed for the door.
Adeline followed, but behind them, Tiger Aw coughed. Adeline glanced over her shoulder in time to see the woman pull a bloodied handkerchief from her mouth.
Pek Mun shut the door. She pressed the tattoo on her throat, briefly, and Adeline suddenly understood it.
“Well, that was as helpful as I imagined her being. I hope you’re happy.”
Far be it from Adeline to have sympathy for Pek Mun, but there were several things that didn’t add up about this whole situation. “Why would Tian ask you to talk to her knowing what she’s like?”
“Tian doesn’t know. My mother was always good at doting on me in front of the other girls. Making everyone hate each other. Didn’t you hear the way she talked to you?”
“So you brought me because…”
“Because I need to make it very clear to you what Tian joined Red Butterfly for. Her father is an opium addict who’s been in and out of prison since she was born.
Her mother sold her off because she owed the Crocodiles thousands in gambling debts and her brother had already joined another gang instead of trying to get a job.
Now he’s sorry, of course, he even bought her that stupid motorbike, but she won’t talk to him otherwise and I hope she never has to.
Red Butterfly is her family. Your mother took her in.
I would never have killed her. I want what’s best for Tian. Always.”
“That just means you would have killed her, if you thought it would have benefit.”
“But it didn’t,” Pek Mun said plainly. “So I didn’t.”
“What am I supposed to tell Tian?”
“You don’t. If you love her you can lie to her.”
Adeline said, “I don’t—”
Pek Mun turned on her heel. “This way.”
This brothel was one of the nicer ones, the wider hallways and more sensuous decor clearly catering to a slightly wealthier clientele.
Still, there were only dim lights in the interior corridors, and it smelled distinctively of bodies and perfume.
They passed several girls with laundry baskets, one of whom registered Pek Mun with faint surprise.
Outside of work hours, without the makeup and costumes, they were indistinguishable from any other boarders.
“What happened in there?” Adeline asked as they passed a room that flared particularly harshly in her.
“A girl got killed by the john. The Sons had to fix her face. Worst I’ve seen in this house.”
“How old were you?”
Pek Mun gave her a look, as though that had been both the right and wrong question to ask. “Nine.”
“What happened to the john?”
“The Butterflies.”
“They used to come here?”
“How do you think Tian got recruited?”
“Did anything like this happen while Tian was here?”
“How do you think Tian got recruited?” Pek Mun repeated. “You’ve felt it by now—there isn’t a brothel that isn’t bloodstained. It all just blurs together. Men don’t need magic to think they’re gods.”
She stopped and rapped on a closed door. “Maggie.”
It opened. “What are you doing here?” came the wary Cantonese reply.