The woman that swept into the room was in her forties or fifties, in a black Peranakan kebaya and with her hair in a chignon. She wore pearls, seemingly real, and looked for all purposes like awoman who knew how to keep herself. Yet her age next to her girls’ was evident, the gulf of twenty or thirty years all the more stark for the fact that all the women that had come to occupy Adeline’s new world were fairly young. The Butterflies, the dolls, the tough-looking long-nailed girlfriends that occasionally hung around other kongsi coffee shops—there was not an image of older women, as though they simply ceased to exist.
“Stop getting in my girls’ way,” the Buaya said. “Follow me.”
She led them to a room on the second floor clearly used for entertainment. There was a sideboard for drinks and platters, a gramophone, several carved teak chaises, a hanging of Javanese batik, and an erhu propped up in the corner. Almost fondly, Tian plucked a couple of its strings.
“You play?” the Buaya said incredulously.
“I was raised for a time as a pei pa zai.”
“Hard to believe, looking at you. With who?Tiger Aw?That bitch. No wonder you ran off.” But then the Buaya peered closer at Tian, and a realization clicked in her slightly rheumy eyes. “Oh. You’re her runaway. What was it, a few years ago? Madam Butterfly claimed you.”
Tian looked wary. “I didn’t know that was well known.”
“Well, we had to close ranks, didn’t we? Couldn’t have all our girls thinking that Butterfly woman would free them from their debts.”
“That’s in the past. I’m not trying to fight with the Crocodiles now.”
“And yet here you are, poking at Three Steel’s business.” The Buaya rang a handbell on the sideboard, summoning a girl of maybe thirteen to come running in. “Get us the baijiu, Mui.” Tian watched the girl bow and head off.
A lacquer box on the sideboard was opened, a cigar removed. “You have a knife?”
Tian did; at the Buaya’s offering, she took the cigar and cut the end with a swift clip, then lit it with two fingers before returning it. The mamasan looked satisfied. “Maybe youweretrained properly. And you,” she said, taking Adeline in with a rapid, professional assessment. “Where did they find you? Your skin is like a lily.”
She poured them cups of wine when Mui returned. “I heard about the business with the Desker girl and the fire. Nasty. You having a lot of problems with that these days?”
They were certainly having less. As Adeline grew comfortable, the goddess’s power felt more reined in. It was clear that the girls around Adeline became more stable, which perhaps also accounted for why they so often hung around her. But truth was a currency, and Tian didn’t need to tell her any of that. “You have a reputation for being good to your girls,” Tian responded instead. “They tell you things, don’t they. About Desker Road?”
The mamasan smiled like she knew she was being flattered and had accepted the offer. “Oh, yes. Something Tiger Aw would know nothing about, and that’s where she’s weak. You have the girls to your ear and you have the secrets of all the men they see—and some of those they don’t. I’m sure you know. Little Mui has overheard secrets the police would give their arms to know, and all she does is serve drinks.”
“So what have you heard? Or seen?”
“You know there are habits around here, Ang Tian. Certain men patronize certain houses in certain numbers. In my thirty-five years, I have never truly seen that change. Now I am losing regular customers. I do not know who runs the houses on Desker Road any longer. They do not solicit, they do not open their doors, and yet wealthy men are emptying their wallets there. Something is unnatural. Girls are girls; some are prettier or younger or more charming than others, but in the end they have never been that unique.”
The woman spoke as if she were not one of those girls, or at least had not once been. Adeline wondered if this was what it wasto manage to grow old around here—to have to become something else entirely. There was this woman, there was Pek Mun’s infamous mother, there was perhaps even Adeline’s mother. They must have begun as one of many, easily interchangeable. To become irreplaceable, to be known for a name of their own, to wield power, they had to set themselves apart. It was, it seemed, lonely.
“We see them in the windows sometimes. The superstitious ones are calling them faeries, but I don’t believe that kind of thing. Sometimes new girls are brought in. Only three types come out.” The Buaya held up three long manicured fingers, painted a deep green. “Three Steel, bodies, and the Needle.”
“Bodies?” Tian asked, the same time Adeline said, “The Needle?”
The Buaya looked smug, some assumption vindicated. “You are new around here, aren’t you? We need to be sure our girls are constantly in good health, and when women’s accidents happen, the problem needs to go away, quietly.”
Of all the clans deriving blood power from the gods, most were like Red Butterfly: their god flowing through the hot blood of a single conduit, whose power was then disseminated through oaths and tattoos, and who gathered members of need and loyalty. But there were other unjealous and less territorial gods, who allowed their power to be cultivated through dedication to individual practice. Their followers had developed their own forms of inheritance. The Sons of Sago Lane, for example, had been led by the same Yang family for generations.
The Needles were a similarly neutral society of healers that barely constituted a society any longer—pupils were inducted into lineages by individual teachers, and they were governed by their human masters, their own principles, and their own bargains with the god. Big kongsi like Three Steel kept a Needle on retainer. Red Butterfly often went to a Needle called Ah Lang, but without any exclusive arrangement, the confidentiality of their injuries rested solely on the fact that he was afraid of Tian and Pek Mun.
“All the brothels pay a Needle,” Tian said. “That’s normal. But the dead bodies are not. They’re not going to the Sons?”
“No, unless they’re paying one off as well, but you know how uptight the Dead’s Uncle is about private dealings. Anyway, twice now in the early morning, my girls saw Three Steel load a body into a cart in the back alley. They mistook them for night soil workers, at first. We only saw the two; there could have been more.”
“Their illnesses were being treated, if they saw the Needle,” Tian said slowly.
“And they would have called the Sons if they had nothing to hide,” Adeline finished.
“Angry johns?” Tian guessed. “Angry handler?”
“In all your wisdom, Ang Tian, do you think Three Steel would care to keep that a secret?”
They lapsed into silence, all of them thinking; the Buaya smoked and coughed. Slightly swayed by the wine, Adeline’s mind returned to her original question and settled there, spiraling in. “The Needle who visits them, do you know who it is?”
