Borrowed Hands

Chan Wai-keung had been told twice that evening that everyone else had gone home. First, his assistant had asked whether he wanted anything ordered before she left. Twenty minutes later the cleaner had opened the glass door, seen him still behind his desk and backed out with her trolley. Now the office had settled into the particular quiet of a commercial building after business hours. Somewhere beyond the wall behind him, a lift travelled down through the floors with nobody speaking inside it. Wai-keung preferred the place like this. During office hours there were six people between his room and the main entrance, each able to find a reason to interrupt him. In the evening he could work without hearing about suppliers who wanted paying early or tenants who treated leaking pipes as personal insults. He had spent enough of his life around men who considered shouting a management technique. He was checking figures on a redevelopment proposal when his phone buzzed beside his right hand. The message was from Cheung Kin-fai. You spoke to Lau? Wai-keung finished the line of figures before typing back, Tomorrow. Three dots appeared almost immediately, followed by Tonight would be better. Cheung had always believed urgency could be created by typing fewer words. Wai-keung sent Tomorrow again and put the phone face down. The proposal was for a warehouse conversion nearby: clean offices, retail units and a rooftop terrace where an air-handling plant currently stood. The architect had populated the terrace with tiny computer-generated people holding drinks. None looked as though they had ever had an argument. Wai-keung enlarged the cost summary when something touched glass in the outer office. He looked up. His room sat at the back of the suite behind another glass partition, and from his desk he could see through the open-plan office to reception, although reflections from the windows made the far end darker now. Desks, chairs, the blue light of a charging laptop. Nothing moved. He waited long enough to decide the noise had probably come from the cleaner's trolley in the corridor. The building's security staff were meant to ring before sending anybody upstairs after nine. His assistant had been complaining for weeks that one of the lobby guards had stopped doing it for couriers, and Wai-keung had told her to complain to building management instead of to him. Then the main door made the sound again. The lock released. He stayed seated as the door opened, expecting the cleaner to come back for something she had forgotten. A man entered. Wai-keung's first thought was that the lighting had changed his face. His second was that it was Leung Pak-ho. Pak-ho stood inside the glass door with one hand still close to the handle. He wore dark trousers, a pale shirt and a jacket Wai-keung did not recognise. The shirt sat wrong at the neck, too high on one side, and his hair had been combed flat with a care that did not belong to him. Wai-keung was on his feet before he knew he had decided to stand. "Pak-ho?" The man's gaze found him. Something struck beneath Wai-keung's ribs before his mind caught up with it, a physical warning that arrived too quickly to be called fear. Pak-ho had died. There had been messages and photographs from the hospital, then people talking about the arrangements. Wai-keung had not gone to see the family and had never intended to attend the funeral, but there had been no question that Pak-ho was dead. A stroke, someone had said first. Then an aneurysm. Whatever the correct word was, it had happened quickly, three weeks ago. Wai-keung heard himself laugh once. "Very funny." Pak-ho started across the office. There had been a time when Wai-keung would have recognised his walk from across a crowded room. Pak-ho had broken his left ankle badly in his twenties and never regained the full movement. Even after the limp disappeared, his left foot had continued to turn outward when he was tired. It did that now. Wai-keung moved away from the desk. "Who sent you?" Pak-ho kept coming. His face was neither blank nor angry; blank would have been easier. Tiny tensions gathered around the mouth and jaw, as though expressions were being attempted somewhere too far away to arrive properly. His skin had a flattened, prepared quality beneath the office lights, and one cheek looked smoother than the other. Wai-keung knew funeral make-up when he saw it. He had seen enough dead men. "Stop there," he said, louder this time. Pak-ho crossed between two desks without changing pace. Wai-keung reached for his phone, remembered it was behind him and instead moved sideways toward the cabinet where he kept the heavy torch his assistant had insisted they buy after a power cut. There was a golf umbrella beside it. He grabbed that instead. "Pak-ho. Listen to me. Whatever this is—" The old argument arrived with the name. A back room in Mong Kok years earlier. Pak-ho shouting until spit gathered at the corners of his mouth, repeating his younger brother's name as though repetition could turn accusation into proof. You said nobody would touch him. That had not been what Wai-keung said. It had become what Pak-ho remembered. Pak-ho reached the glass partition. Wai-keung swung the umbrella. The metal shaft struck Pak-ho's forearm with a noise so ordinary that for an instant it made the whole thing worse. The arm moved under the impact, but Pak-ho neither cried out nor pulled away. Wai-keung swung again, this time at his face, and Pak-ho caught the umbrella below the handle. The force on it was not enormous. There was no monstrous wrench, no impossible strength. He simply held on and continued moving forward while Wai-keung pulled backward, and the absence of negotiation in the movement frightened Wai-keung more than brute force would have done. A living man protected his eyes. A living man anticipated pain, shifted his footing, changed his mind. Pak-ho accepted the umbrella shaft against his cheek and kept coming. Wai-keung let go, got around the desk and reached his phone. His thumb slipped twice over the numbers as he tried to unlock it. He had just found the emergency call when Pak-ho hit him from the side and the phone skittered under the desk. They struck the window. For one absurd second Wai-keung noticed the little computer-generated terrace still glowing on his monitor, populated by people holding drinks beneath a blue architectural sky. Then Pak-ho's hand closed around his throat and Wai-keung drove his thumb into Pak-ho's eye. The head moved because he forced it to move. There was no flinch, no shout, no instinctive recoil. Wai-keung made a sound he would have been ashamed of if there had been a later and kicked hard at Pak-ho's knee. The leg buckled. Pak-ho fell against the corner of the desk, his forearm catching the sharp metal edge of a document tray hard enough to split the skin from wrist toward elbow. There should have been blood. What appeared instead was a slow dark wetness along the wound, enough to mark the shirt cuff but nothing like what Wai-keung expected from a gash that size. He stared for half a second too long, and Pak-ho used it. One hand caught the front of Wai-keung's shirt and drove him backward into the low cabinet. Wai-keung clawed at the hand gripping him. His nails took skin from the base of Pak-ho's thumb and he felt it gather underneath them. He twisted free for an instant, seized the heavy glass award from the shelf above the cabinet and brought it down against Pak-ho's temple. The corner opened the scalp. Pak-ho swayed. Wai-keung hit him again and this time he went to one knee. "Stay down." Wai-keung could barely hear his own voice over his breathing. "Stay fucking down." Pak-ho began to rise. There was no theatrical spring to it. One hand went to the floor, then one foot planted, then the damaged leg straightened. The movement had the patient ugliness of something completing a sequence without the part that ordinarily asked whether continuing was sensible. Wai-keung backed toward the office door while Pak-ho's gaze settled on him again, and for the first time he understood that this was not somebody wearing Pak-ho's face. It was not the old gait or the scar through his eyebrow that convinced him. It was the recognition in those eyes, stripped of surprise, embarrassment, anger or any of the other social things that normally travelled with knowing another person. "Your brother," Wai-keung said. Pak-ho stopped. The pause was tiny, perhaps nothing more than a hesitation in the body, but Wai-keung took hope from it because he had nothing else. "That wasn't me. You know that. I tried to stop it. Ask Cheung. Ask Mak. Ask anybody who was there." For another moment Pak-ho remained where he was. Then he moved again. Wai-keung shoved through the glass door and ran across the outer office, knocking a chair sideways. At the main entrance he slapped the release button twice before the lock clicked. He had the door half open when Pak-ho caught the back of his jacket and pulled. The fabric tightened across Wai-keung's throat. He spun and drove the heel of his hand into Pak-ho's face. His palm came away wet from the scalp wound. He grabbed the metal doorframe and tried to haul himself through while Pak-ho dragged him backward. The blood on Wai-keung's hand smeared across Pak-ho's fingers as both of them fought for the frame; for an instant their hands overlapped against the brushed metal, leaving a muddied impression behind. Then Wai-keung lost his grip. He fell shoulder-first and Pak-ho came down with him. There was no gunshot and no final accusation. The rest was close and graceless. Wai-keung tried to get his forearm beneath Pak-ho's chin and make enough space to breathe. He struck Pak-ho in the face until his own knuckles split. Pak-ho shifted his weight, put both hands around Wai-keung's neck and did not stop. The office narrowed to pressure, carpet, the underside of a desk and one wheel of an overturned chair turning beside Wai-keung's head. The wheel stopped before he did. For a while Pak-ho remained kneeling over him. There was nobody there to see what passed, if anything did, across the dead man's face. Eventually he stood and crossed the office at the same uneven pace with which he had entered. At the main door he placed his blood-marked hand against the metal frame, leaving clear ridge detail where the film was thinnest, then went out into the corridor. The glass door swung closed behind him. On Wai-keung's desk, his phone vibrated once against the wood. Cheung Kin-fai had sent another message.