2004 - An Evenings Work - Short Story

[Calder]

An Evenings Work
Suite 3305, Hotel Mandarin Oriental Singapore, Singapore, December 2004

"Do you realize it's been ten years since we started working together?" Conrad looked over to where Angel was sprawled out in an armchair, her legs carelessly hooked over the arms, a glass of Bacardi 151 in her hands. "I was looking at the calendar and it just dawned on me."

"Doesn't time fly when we are having fun." Angel smiled at him, the warm glowing smile that made him feel good inside yet also saddened him because it was so rare. "It has been fun, hasn't it."

"It's an odd thing, Angel, before we first met, I used to pray for just one friend I could share my joys and grief with. I used to think that God had turned a deaf ear to my pleas but now I know he had very specific plans for me that included giving me a very special friend indeed. And yes, we have had some fun together. You've shown me how to enjoy life. I never knew how to do that before."

"I think we taught each other." Angel finished off her glass of rum and walked over to the mini-bar to get another rum for herself and Conrad a refill of his Armagnac. "I never knew that there was such a thing as enjoying life. To me, life was just something that was, here today but probably gone tomorrow. I didn’t enjoy it while I had it and I didn’t care if I lost it. I told you often enough that I am one of the living dead. Then we started working together and suddenly, I believed that what happened to me was important. I came alive. Have you heard from Igrat by the way?"

"Not directly from her but I have spoken to 'Lea. Igrat's out of her . . . ummm . . . rest home but she's still not right. The problem is that her normal human need for novelty and excitement has become an extreme compulsive behavior. Excessive stress and tension have become her normal state so if she doesn’t have them she instinctively either creates them or snaps. The doctors originally hoped that meditation, yoga, or deep breathing might help but it seems the relaxing effect of those activities only minimally transfers into daily life. So, she’s on medication, Prozac I think it’s called, and she has a live-in companion who makes sure she doesn’t get stressed. Apparently breaking adrenalin addiction is a hard job. 'Lea said it's as bad as breaking addition to any street drug. Also, this would have been a lot worse if it hadn’t been for Cristi. The job of bringing Cristi up has been stabilizing Igrat. It’s not a coincidence that this finally happened when Cristi started to live her own life." Distressed at the thought of Igrat being so ill yet him being unable to help her, Conrad tried to switch his thoughts of some of the other people they knew. "Speaking of our friends, how's Ai doing?"

Angel gave no sign of it but Conrad's question shook her. I have friends. I never realized that before. I'm not sure what they are but I have them. I wonder why? "Ai? She's doing very well. She's got a master's in computer science now and she's made some interesting discoveries. Did you know that if we send somebody a comail explaining that we are wealthy Nigerian princes and need their help in getting our money out of the country, the chumps actually respond? Some of them anyway. For those that do, we ask them for their banking details and passwords, so we can use their account as a route for the money. We tell them we'll give them a huge percentage of the loot in return. Incredibly, a lot of the dumbasses fall for it."

"You're kidding me!" Conrad stared at her, shocked but also trying hard to stop laughing.

"No. It's not a large percentage of people who actually give us the information but comails cost nothing to send out. Send them out by the tens of thousands and enough dumbasses respond to make us a great deal of money. She has people working for her now and she's scheduled for promotion." Angel hesitated, not because Conrad was an outsider who shouldn't know any Triad business but because the information might upset him. "The problem is that to be qualified for promotion up the operational ladder, she is supposed to kill somebody on Triad business and we just don’t do things that way anymore. The number of people we liquidate is a tiny fraction of what it was fifty or a hundred years ago. It's an organizational problem; there just aren’t enough victims to qualify the volume of much-deserved promotions we have backed up. Anyway, the requirement is irrelevant to what she does. It comes from another time and place, one that we've left behind."

Conrad surprised Angel by bursting out laughing. "I'm sorry, Angel, but you do realize that is music to my ears, don’t you?"

"Of course. I've always known you hate what I do. Or used to do; for the first time in my life, that sort of thing is a minor part of my income. I told you I don’t do freelance hits anymore. Haven’t for almost six months. Parmenio made it very clear in some of the talks we’ve been having, that's not my job description anymore and I'd be a fool to carry on with it. If it's any consolation, that's down to you. It was our working together that sent me up through the ranks until I made Vanguard. If we'd never met, I'd have stayed a Sai-Lo and probably been killed sooner or later. When we met, I was on borrowed time and knew it."

Conrad was about to say something but he was interrupted by the telephone ringing. He picked it up and acknowledged whoever was speaking. After a few exchanges, he put his hand over the mouthpiece. "Hotel Reception alerting us that a police officer is on his way up to see us. The manager begs you not to shoot him on Hotel property. Anyway, he wants to see me, not you."

"Ahh, either a nice mysterious case or churchie stuff." Angel hoped it would be the former; she and Conrad hadn’t had a nice mystery to solve for weeks but she looked on his 'churchie stuff' the same way he looked on her work as a paid killer.

There was a knock on the door. Conrad went over, picked up a cheap paper fan that was kept there for the purpose, and used it to cover the peephole. Outside, their visitor would see the peephole darken and assume he was looking through it. Conrad reflected that Angel hadn’t been the only person living on borrowed time when they had met. Since changing circumstances meant his collar had ceased to be protection, he'd been as helpless and vulnerable as a baby, made all the more dangerous by the fact that he hadn't realized that times had changed so dramatically. Her lessons in survival, things that were instinctive to her and about which she never consciously thought, had saved him. However, this time it was unnecessary. There was no barrage of shots through the door so Conrad opened it. Even so, he was conscious of the fact that Angel had extracted herself from her armchair and was positioned to cover him without exposing herself.

"I'm sorry to trouble you, Father, but we have a situation in the hotel and need your help. I'm Sergeant Robertson of the Bukit Merah West Neighborhood Police Center."

In the background, Angel was already on the telephone. Robertson took out his badge and warrant card. Angel read out the details over the phone, obviously speaking to the commanding officer. "Describe Sergeant Robertson, please? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Fine. Thank you."

She turned slightly, facing Conrad but standing so that Robertson was still in her field of vision. "He can live. He's genuine."

Conrad gave the sergeant an apologetic smile, knowing her first three words hadn't been a joke. "My friend is very careful. Do you say you have a problem? How can we help?"

"There's a girl on the 16th floor. A jumper. She's on the ledge outside and threatening to jump if anybody comes out. We were hoping you might talk her in; we tried and she just won’t listen."

Angel walked over to the window and looked at the ledge outside. It was barely a foot wide. That made her think for a second and project what was likely to happen. "If you're game, Conrad, we can do this. I'm coming up too, though."

"Shouldn’t you leave your guns behind ma'am?" Sergeant Robertson knew that technically carrying guns were illegal in Singapore unless one was in the armed forces or a law enforcement officer. He also knew that Angel could almost be defined as the latter on two counts, and, in any case, he was also well aware that there were some things a police officer shouldn’t see,

Anyway, Angel's brusque reply solved the problem. "No."

The bad publicity resulting from people jumping off the top floors was a major reason why hotel room windows didn't open. There was always the lurking fear in management that newspapers might conclude poor service had driven the jumpers into ending their lives. In this case, the window had somehow been removed from its frame. Angel reminded herself to find out how after the situation had ended. The information might be useful one day. When she looked out, she saw that the woman in question was standing almost exactly mid-way between the windows of two hotel rooms, balanced precariously on the narrow ledge. Angel noted something else; she had a claw-hammer in one hand. That probably explained what had happened to the window.

"Could you tell me your name, please?" Conrad spoke in the same soft, polite, unassuming voice he always used in interrogations. It was his first and most important rule, always get the subject talking and into the habit of answering questions. Unfortunately, this time, his subject refused to cooperate. There was an added problem, the height, wind, and background noise made speaking difficult. "Sergeant, I am going to have to go out there."

"Oh, no you don’t." Angel was quite firm on that point. This was the point she had foreseen and was determined not to allow. "That ledge is too narrow; you'll go over. You stay put here."

Before anybody could object, she slid through the open window to a small false balcony outside and then swung over the balcony railing to the ledge. Then, she walked toward the woman as normally as if she was on the pavement. Conrad wasn't fooled by the apparent ease; he was well aware that Angel's gymnastics were like her Gun-Fu. The fact she made it look easy didn’t mean that it was. When Angel was about four feet from the woman on the ledge, the potential jumper lashed out with her hammer, hitting the concrete wall a few inches in front of Angel's face and causing sparks to fly into the night. The effort made the jumper stagger on the ledge and for a brief second Angel thought she would topple over. The woman managed to stabilize herself but showed no sign of understanding how close she had come to end her own life. Or the fact she had just put her life into far graver danger than she faced from herself.

"Come closer and I'll smash your face." The woman’s voice was hysterical and ugly yet also laden with grief and despair.

Angle looked at her very coldly. "When people threaten me with deadly weapons I kill them. Do you want half a dozen bullets on your head?"

"I don't care." The woman hesitated, suddenly realizing that the woman she had just lashed out at would kill her without a moment's hesitation or regret. There was no sympathy in Angel's eyes or body language, none at all, and that made death seem very cold, very real, and terrifyingly close. What had been a theoretical, even slightly romantic concept was now an ugly reality. "Don’t try to grab me."

"Why the hell would I want to do that, dumbass? Firstly, if I try, we'll probably both go over and secondly, I have a phobia about touching people. Or being touched by them. As long as you don’t try and paw me, we'll get along fine."

"So, what are you doing out here?" The woman sounded desperate and highly confused. That suited Angel fine. As long as people are confused, they're unlikely to make any decisions let alone stupid ones. Desperate, though, not so good.

"My friend asked your name. You didn’t answer. That's rude. He's a good man and doesn’t deserve to be insulted. So I came out to get an answer."

The woman thought about that. "Mary Ling."

Inside the room, Conrad glanced at Robertson and the latter took the hint. He got on the telephone and started making background inquiries about Mary Ling. Then he returned his attention to the scene on the ledge. Mary Ling was standing against the wall, her back pressed hard against it and her arms spread for balance. In contrast, Angel was completely relaxed and lounging against the same wall. It suddenly dawned on Conrad that the body language was highly suggestive; Mary Ling was terrified she might fall with everything that fear implied. Angel was confident her gymnastic talents meant that she wasn’t in any danger of falling He also noted that Angel had one hand behind her back where Ling couldn't see it. That hand made a 'thumbs up' gesture. Angel had come to the same body language interpretation he had.

Angel was doing her Sherlock Scan of Ling and had noted something else. She was wearing a silver crucifix around her neck. "Mary, are you a Catholic?"

The girl nodded. Angel shook her head in feigned surprise. "You know then that suicide is a mortal sin? You'll go to Hell if you jump. I must admit, Singapore isn't my favorite city, Saigon is, but I suppose Singapore is better than Hell. A bit better, anyway. Usually. On a good day."

"I don’t care." Ling's voice was dull and hopeless. She was also completely bewildered. She'd been looking for sympathy, comfort, understanding, and a deluge of attention. Instead, she was getting cold practical advice from somebody who patently obviously didn’t care whether she jumped or not. It was like a bucket of iced water had been thrown in her face and it forced her to look at the situation she was in from a different perspective.

Angel's next words confirmed that. "I don't care whether you jump or not either. Your life, your decision. All I will say is if you do jump, try and land on your head. It’s quicker. I might be able to help you with the damnation issue though. If you do jump, I'll shoot you on the way down. We're on the 16th floor, I promise you'll be dead by the time you pass the tenth. That has another advantage; most people who jump change their mind as they pass the fourth floor. I'll spare you that fleeting moment of remorse."

"Is that true?"

"Shooting you as you're on the way down? Sure. Look my name is Angel, I have no equal with a gun. For me, it's an easy series of shots. I don’t know if it'll save you from Hell though. Hold one." Angel turned slightly. "Conrad, theological question, stick your head out please?"

Conrad's head appeared through the window. "Conrad, suicide is a mortal sin of course, but if I shoot Mary on the way down so she is dead when she hits the ground, is that suicide?"

Conrad saw Angel's hidden hand make a circular motion with her finger. The Triad hand-code sign for 'stretch this out'. "That's a hard question, it's a matter of intent versus reality. I'll have to take advice on that from higher up. I'll get back to you as soon as possible."

"There you are, Mary, we'll get an official answer in a few minutes."

"No, I meant about people always changing their minds. How do you know that?"

"Not everybody who jumps dies, Mary. You see it doesn’t matter how high one jumps from. Once the jumper reaches terminal velocity, they don’t accelerate anymore. They hit the ground just as hard from fifty stories as they do from ten and sometimes, often, it isn’t enough. That’s why I said to land on your head. A friend of mine in England had her spine shattered when she fell off the roof of a warehouse and pancaked on her back. It was an accident in that case, but she lived although she's quadriplegic, in severe, constant pain, and can't move from the neck down." Sorry, Isolda, for the distortion but it's for a good cause. That thought made Angel pause. Isolda is another friend of mine, isn’t she? Damn, I never knew I had two. Have I got more? Why? Don’t they understand that all I'll ever do is use them? "Mostly the survivors are really badly crippled like that but they do make it. Being a jumper is chancy. Much easier and more reliable just to shoot yourself. I would loan you one of my guns but you'll fall and take it with you. It might get damaged that way and guns are expensive. By the way, you never told me why you want to kill yourself."

As Conrad had always predicted, the trick was to get the subject to say something. Once Ling had started talking, the information poured out of her. "I met a boy, we became friends. Went out together. He wanted me and kept saying that if I loved him, I'd let him. So I did."

"You fell for that old line? Damn." Angel was incredulous. Every time I think I've seen it all where human stupidity is concerned, somebody surprises me.

"And my parents found out and they threw me out of the house. Said I was ruined and they wanted no part of me. I went to my boyfriend and he laughed at me. Told me he didn't care about me anymore since he'd had what he wanted."

"So why are you going to kill yourself? It sounds to me like they are the ones who need killing."

"My life's over, no family, nowhere to go, nothing. Everybody hates me, nobody cares whether I live or die. You wouldn’t understand. Nobody would."

"You're wrong there. That man in there? The one who asked your name? He cares about you, I don't understand why. But he cares about you so much that he wanted to come out here onto this ledge to try and bring you in. A big risk for him; he's not as skilled at this as I am. You're wrong about me not knowing how you feel as well. When I was twelve years old, my father raped me. Violently and very brutally."

"And you didn’t kill yourself?" Ling was aghast and suddenly her own situation was looking very low-key in contrast.

"Never even considered the possibility. I killed him instead. Three bullets in the head. Sounds to me like your so-called boyfriend deserves the same. You should be whacking him, not thinking about doing it yourself."

"I can't do that." Ling gasped and then paused reflectively. "I don’t know how."

"You mean you don’t know how to do it and not get caught. Killing somebody is very easy, you were about to do it to yourself, remember? Not getting caught is much harder. So hire somebody to do it for you. If I took the contract it would cost you 12,500 sovereigns but this would be a simple hit. A bit beneath me to be honest. A basic job like this will probably cost you 5,000 at most. If the killer you hire is a woman, she might even give you a discount out of sympathy."

"I can't afford that." Ling's eyes opened wide as the meaning of Angel's words sank in. "You said . . . you’re a . . ."

"Gangster, yes. A professional killer so I know what I am talking about. What do these mean to you?" Angel pulled down the top of her shirt, exposing the intricate tattoos that covered her shoulder.

"You're . . . . . ." Ling stopped in bewilderment. It was a state so familiar by now that she would have been lost if she did understand what was happening.

Angel helped her out. "We would say that I'm a member of the Hung Family. As to money, we understand these things. You can pay for the hit over time. Say, a thousand sovereigns a year for five years with a hundred sovereign service fee added to each payment?"

"I could manage that." Ling stopped as her hopelessness swept over her. "But my family, they said I dishonored them and their name. They told me I wasn't fit to live. My mother spat on me."

"If you want them done as well, we can offer a group discount. We'd have to negotiate that. Although it would make a good training exercise for people new to the business." Angel looked pensive. "I never knew my mother. I don’t even know what she looked like. I’ve often thought my father might have killed her, he did smash a beer bottle over my head. Fractured my skull and nearly killed me."

Ling was looking at a world she had heard about but never met. Now, she was looking at the truly ugly side of humanity and the sight had driven her back into reality. "I've no family, nobody. I suppose that's better than having parents like yours. It doesn't help me though. What do I do?"

"Don’t ask me, I'm not here to help you. The only reason I’m out here is to stop my friend from risking his life on this ledge. For the record, I use people, they do what I want them to do, not the other way around. Anyway, what you have is a non-problem. All you have to do is join us. Become a member of the Hung family. That way, you'll always have a family and they will always look after you. We never, ever, turn our backs on our sworn brothers and sisters. You'll always have somebody to take care of you when you need it. The Incense Master will always be there to advise you and help you deal with your problems. You'll meet nice boys who will respect you because you are their sworn sister and will avenge you if you are hurt or insulted by others. It's one of the 36 oaths we swear. When any of my sworn brothers or sworn sisters have been assaulted by others, I must come forward and help them. If they have been repeatedly insulted by others I shall inform our other brothers and sisters so we can arrange help for them physically or financially."

Conrad picked his time perfectly when he stuck his head out of the window again. "Sorry, it's no good. The intent is the key factor. If she intended to take her life, being killed on the way down makes no difference. Still damnation."

"Sorry about that, Mary. Although, why should you kill yourself? More to the point, why are you blaming yourself? You did nothing wrong. Other people wronged you. If you want my family to help you, when we're inside, just give me somewhere we can contact you. Write it down on a piece of paper. In a couple of days, when this is all over, somebody from the local branch of the family will come and see you. Talk things over with you, and explain what your options are. There's nothing to be afraid of, whatever you might read in the newspapers, most members of our family have never committed a crime and never will."

Ling nodded and started to edge towards the window. Angel backed up with an apologetic smile and gestured at the street below. "I really do have a phobia about being touched. If I took your hand to help you in, I'd throw up and that would be really bad for the people down there."

She reached the window and stepped back into the safety of the room. A few seconds later, Mary Ling appeared by the window giving Conrad the opportunity of taking her arm and helping her off the ledge. Once she was safely inside, he gave Angel a happy and very relieved smile. "I've never heard a possible suicide being talked down that way before."

Angel shrugged. "She didn't want to die, not really. She just didn't know what else to do. I gave her a few options, that's all. Once she realized there were plenty of things she could do, once she realized she could take control of her own life and not spend it being controlled by others, the crisis was over."

"Angel, thank you. I really will be in touch." Ling gave Angel a tentative smile and a folded piece of paper. She got a complete, but very convincing, fake smile back in return.

There was paperwork to be done, and statements to be taken but Sergeant Robertson guessed that the way things had ended meant the matter would be filed and forgotten. He'd heard a little of the conversation outside, despite his best efforts not to, but guessed he had missed all the important bits. More to the point, he knew that while the Triads might be a prohibited society in Singapore, a surprising number of his superiors were members of the Hung family. The whole event was indeed best forgotten.

An hour later, Conrad and Angel were back in their hotel suite, rewarding themselves with another drink. It was Conrad's third that evening, an unprecedented event. He seemed disturbed about something. "Do you think Mary will hire somebody to kill the ex-boyfriend?"

Angel shook her head. "She'll be mad for a few days and then she'll decide he wasn't worth the effort or the expense. He was just doing what boys that age do. There’s an old Chinese saying, his dick grows out of his forehead and eats his brain. Her family, that's another matter. I don’t think she'll ever forgive them."

Conrad nodded in agreement. "I think that means she will join the 14K. It'll be a replacement for the family that betrayed her."

"I think so too. Probably a Blue Lantern. I don’t think she's cut out for my world." Suddenly something clicked in Angel’s mind. My world is the past as well, a remnant of things that were but are now gone. The words of a song passed through her mind ‘Sing me a song of a lass that is gone. Say, could that lass be I?’ We’re not in that kind of world anymore, we haven’t been for decades. People like me are dinosaurs, if we don’t adapt, we will die out. Our business is making money and Ai’s way is the safest and most profitable way of doing that we’ve found so far. So, we adapt by replacing the requirement to do a hit with one to generate an equivalent amount of business. Say, five thousand sovereigns income for the House per month for a year. Why did nobody else think of that?

"What will she do?" Conrad was looking at her curiously, aware her mind had been focused elsewhere for a moment.

"I don’t know, I'm a gun-crazed psychopath, not an employment agency." Angel looked at Conrad carefully. "Don't sweat it, we'll look after her. She won’t have to do anything she doesn’t want to. We won't sell her or anything like that. It's something else we just don’t do anymore."

That made Conrad much happier. "Thank you for saving her, Angel. I was afraid for you, every moment you were on that ledge."

"No need. I've beam-walked on things that were a quarter of that width. It's just a matter of instinctive balance and I don’t need to think about it. Anyway, did you see where I was standing? I’d already looked over the situation before I stepped out onto that ledge. There was a balcony from the room below just ten feet down. If I'd gone over I'd have somersaulted and grabbed the railing then swung myself in there. Done it before. It's no more complicated that a trapeze act. Easier, in fact, the balcony railing isn’t moving."

Angel carefully didn’t mention that at the time she'd been exiting the scene of a hit while the victim's bodyguards came through the door. Instead, she simply knocked back her rum and helped herself to another. I've made Conrad happy, found the key to solving a problem, located a new recruit, as a Blue Lantern at least, and despite what I told him, probably created some additional business for Singapore House. I think that's a good evening's work.

Author’s note: The problem is that writing these stories is that they sort of come swimming up and almost write themselves and I can't predict which one will do that. This story was keyed off by a very old Dragnet episode (The Big Jump) in which Joe Friday goes out on the ledge to bring in a would-be suicide. I couldn't help thinking how Conrad and Angel would have handled it, realized there was no way Angel would let Conrad go out onto a ledge like that and - suddenly the story appeared.

[clancyphile]

What, exactly, are the 36 oaths?

[Calder]

I didn't copy any of the more datafile-style works that Stuart did. Any posts of that style were ones that I got from Craig. One of the files he gave me had the 10 principals that Angel set up for the Triads after she rose to a more leadership style part of the organization. Here is the link.
Angel's 10 principals


I THINK I remember Stuart posting the 36 oaths but I didn't copy them down. A quick google showed the following.
Redit answer on 36 oaths.

[JBG]

What, exactly, are the 36 oaths?

There is a version of sorts in Ascension.

Jonathan