Adeline started to grow irritated at the sound of laughter. Tian would introduce her as “our newest Butterfly,” which at least upgraded her from set dressing or lost puppy at Tian’s heels, but what did she have to add to the conversation? She merely listened, studying the person and watching the space around them.
Desker Road, they said, had gone dark. Until recently fairly well known for its beckoning Vietnamese and Filipina girls, as well as for Three Steel’s more chemical distributions, it had now pulled all its girls off the street and shut the doors. This was not a tradewhere wares could be hidden. Yet the paraphernalia peddlers on the street selling various tinctures for pleasure and enhancement, who observed the comings and goings even when the girls took customers inside, had begun talking of men leaving awestruck and hungry, men rushing back with stacks of cash, men pleading with johns and madams for another night with their girl. It was bizarre, they said. Not least because barely anyone ever saw these girls, and so couldn’t explain what had these men so enthralled. Some absence was also typical of foreign girls—lacking the languages and wherewithal to navigate the city, their needs were usually handled by their bosses—but usually they were seen hanging laundry, going to the sundry shop across the road, that sort of thing. Now, nothing. They went in and did not come out.
Then there was the Act. It had a longer official name, but around here that was all it was called. The police were dangling a carrot, before they doubled the sticks. Pardons for informants, cleaned records for kongsi willing to give up their magic and turn to legitimacy. The incentives were good enough that all Tian’s friends spoke of paranoid gangsters, tensions between former allies. It was among these fracturing loyalties that Three Steel was shoring up their numbers. A last bastion of the old ways—or perhaps, potential weaknesses to probe.
Around five in the morning, Tian and Adeline ended up at a streetside dessert seller. As Adeline was looking around, trying to figure out who they were here to talk to, Tian brought back two bowls of sweet bean curd and asked, “So what do you think?”
The full force of Tian’s attention was back on her, sly and excited, as though they’d both just participated in a long game only the two of them knew they were playing. Adeline’s annoyances dissipated. She tried the tau huay; it was delicious. What did she think? She didn’t think she’d be asked. She desperately wanted an impressive answer, but only had an honest one. “They’re not what I expected.”
“What did you expect?” No judgment, just open curiosity, maybe the slightest edge of teasing.
“Don’t they pay you money? They seem really friendly.”
“Some of them,” Tian allowed. “And they know what happens if they don’t. But it also means we’ll protect them, if anything happens, and things happen a lot around here. They don’t hold it against me.”
“So why don’t they join Red Butterfly themselves?”
“You think we last that much longer?” Tian laughed. She picked up Adeline’s hand, ran a thumb over Adeline’s fingertips. Adeline had to suppress a shiver. “Fire doesn’t come to everyone. It has its own desire and it has costs.”
“Like what?”
Tian paused. “It’s hard to give it up, even if you know it might kill you.”
The silence stretched on a beat too long. Tian set Adeline’s hand down and they both returned to their bean curd.
“I like your friends,” Adeline said finally.
“I wouldn’t be able to tell.” Relieved, Tian was definitely teasing now. “I like having you around, Adeline. That’s good enough for me until you get tired of us.” Tian glanced at her watch, glanced at the sky. It was near dawn; the hawker was already packing up, for the spot to be taken over by the daytime vendors. “How do you feel? Can you put up with one more person?”
Adeline leaned against a grille and pretended to smoke, mostly letting it trail between her fingers as an excuse for her loitering while the argument raged inside.
Tian had clearly overstated her relationship with Wan Shin, the waitress who worked late shifts here at her family’s restaurant, whom they’d surprised as she was locking up. Something about owed money or another. Tian had very shortly asked Adeline to step outside so they could shout at each other in private.
The restaurant was at the junction where Desker Road T-bonedSerangoon Road, so from here Adeline could look down the entire stretch. It certainly was quiet now, compared to the buzz they’d been surrounded by the whole night. She spotted a couple of Steels exiting a coffee shop, but they didn’t look her way. If there had been red lights on earlier, they were dark now, and everyone else was preparing to open: a Pools bookie, a barber, a tailor, a fruit seller, a launderer, a Tamil grocer. Adeline rubbed her eyes. Tian had swept her through the night. Now she was feeling the hours catch up to her.
One of the doors down Desker Road opened. A door that had a now-dimmed lamp beside it, she realized, only because Tian had pointed some of them out before. A straggling customer remembering he had a life to get back to? He was coming this way, so Adeline got an approaching view of him. He came from money. He’d taken care to dress casually, a white singlet and nondescript trousers, but they were well-fitted and of sturdy materials, his shoes were polished and of a good quality, and he had a silver watch that his general grooming suggested was real.
She noticed all this before she noticed he had started coming far too much her way—he had seen her, across the road, and was coming right toward her.
“I’m not a prostitute,” Adeline started to say, but then she finally recognized him. She had glimpsed him periodically over the years, usually across the hall or courtyard at prize ceremonies, but he hadn’t seen her since she and Elaine stopped being friends ten years ago.
Well, well. Mr. Chew clearly didn’t recognize her. She swallowed her initial dismissal, instead propping one elbow on her other hand coquettishly. “Long night?” Something she’d observed, when the call girls or the waitresses switched between talking to Tian or talking to customers. They took on a slight affect in their voice, shifted into a persona of sorts before tossing the mask aside again in the manner of a conspiratorial eye roll:anyway, back to real business.
“I haven’t seen you here before,” Mr. Chew said. Despite her ownact, his roving eyes made her skin crawl. She wasn’t even dressed revealingly, but it was apparently enough that she was a girl standing out here alone at dawn.
“No point, when you’re all going in there.” She jerked her chin down Desker Road. She blinked at him, looked through her lashes, playing the collection of characters Tian had put before her. He didn’t seem enthralled by whoever he’d spent the night with, like the rumors said. It could be that that was all they were, rumors. Or maybe it was something else about him that set him apart from the usual clientele. Mr. Chew was not a man that needed to beg. “What’s so special about those girls, huh?” she teased. “They’ve got you all addicted. It’s unfair to the rest of us.”
He smiled. “I’ve got time for a quick one, if you want to take a drive. My car’s over there.”
This startled her. Shouldn’t she have noticed that one of the cars parked along the road was his? But of course he was using a less flashy car, and not the Rolls-Royce that Elaine was chauffeured around in. Suddenly he was too close, reaching over to take the cigarette from her. In the same motion he closed his hand around hers.
Her fist clenched instinctively. He frowned, his grasp only tightening. “I’m sixteen,” she blurted.
The comment flicked past him. “Is that a no?”
“Let me go,” Adeline said, her throat suddenly dry. It wasn’t fun anymore, this act.
Fortunately, he released her, but he leaned in ever so slightly. “They don’t say no,” he said, in the manner of giving her advice, “that’s why they get the money.”
