The Nine Fold Heaven. Mingmei Yip

Чтение книги онлайн.

      Prologue

      Three months ago, I was singing to loud applause in a Shanghai nightclub; a few days later, I became unexpectedly wealthy. But immediately I fled Shanghai in a fusillade of bullets to hide out in a run-down apartment in Hong Kong.

      In the British Crown Colony, my days were calm, but my nights were troubled—not by bullets but by dreams. When I slept, my baby kept disturbing me, either running on his chubby little feet or babbling to himself. But I had never met him in this life, my little treasure whom I had called Jinjin, meaning “Handsome Handsome.” In my mind he looked just like his father, Jinying, “Handsome Hero,” whom I had left behind in Shanghai and whose face rose up before me—bleeding, scared, abandoned.

      As I looked back over my life, though I had known only twenty Springs and Autumns, it seemed to stretch out endlessly behind me, filled with treachery and loss.

      I’d led a double life, but not by my choosing. I was the singer Camilla, known to Shanghai’s beautiful people as the Heavenly Songbird. But while admired by my fans for my freshness and innocence, I was secretly a spy assigned to send Shanghai’s number one gangster boss Master Lung to the Yellow Springs. For my real boss was Big Brother Wang, head of Shanghai’s Red Demons gang, who had “rescued” me from the Compassionate Grace Orphanage—but only to prepare me for this fatal mission.

      Orphaned when I was four years old, the word love had been torn out from the dictionary of my life. From my first days with Big Brother Wang, I was trained to charm others but to have no emotions myself, as befits a cold-blooded murderess, assigned to eliminate Wang’s arch enemy, Master Lung of the Flying Dragons gang.

      But despite all the effort put into my training, love had somehow tiptoed into my life. Whether this was heaven’s gift or punishment, I could not tell.

      It happened because of Lung Jinying, the son of the man I was to assassinate and the father of our little Jinjin. Now they had both vanished from my life. Was this heaven’s plan—to give me a taste of the sweetness of life, only to snatch it back? Or was it karma for something I’d done in a forgotten past life?

      Most of all, I was anxious to know the situation and whereabouts of my lover Jinying, and our son, Jinjin—if he was still in this life or already departed for the next. And, too, there was Master Lung’s bodyguard and my other lover Gao. He had taken a bullet for me and, after the shoot-out at Master Lung’s villa where I’d taken the gangster boss’s money, brought me to the ship that had carried me to safety in Hong Kong. Had he survived, or had he lost everything because of me?

      All these events in Shanghai were as in a past life. My twenty-year life now seemed unreal to me, like a movie. Was I about to leave the theater forever?

      But three months after I’d made my escape, I decided to go back to Shanghai to find out.

      In Shanghai, I was a multifaceted diamond glittering before my enthusiastic audiences, but now I felt like a street rat chased by people wielding sticks and knives.... I knew that I had stepped onto a path of no return. I now had not just one enemy, but two, and they were no ordinary enemies, but the two most notoriously relentless gangsters in lawless Shanghai.