Free Yellowthread Street by William Marshall Page B

you might as well drink it.’
    Mr Vinehouse shook his head. The Department did not encourage intemperance.
    Mr Lop shrugged. He took up the bottle and drained it. He said, ‘Tell me the bad news.’
    Mr Vinehouse touched at the glass beside the empty bottle. Glasses were to drink things out of. ‘Entertainment,’ Mr Vinehouse said.
    Mr Lop turned the bottle upside down and watched the last drops of beer dribble out on to the table. He jerked his head to where the customers sat in hushed silence watching the silhouette of the stripper dressing behind the threadbarecurtain. ‘That?’ Mr Lop asked with distaste.
    ‘Entertainment,’ Mr Vinehouse said.
    ‘Do you think so?’
    ‘Your customers think so.’
    Mr Lop sniffed. He owned a place like this, he worked in a place like this, he drew his sustenance and the food for his children’s mouths from a place like this, but that didn’t mean he had to be lacking in taste. ‘No,’ Mr Lop said.
    ‘Yes,’ Mr Vinehouse said, ‘and you haven’t paid your tax on it.’
    ‘Entertainment tax?’
    ‘You haven’t registered it, you haven’t advised the Department of it, you haven’t made a note of it in your interim statement, and you haven’t paid it.’
    ‘O.K.,’ Mr Lop said, ‘I’ll pay it.’
    ‘When?’
    ‘Well—’ Mr Lop said. He ran through a directory of possible dates, months and years in his mind. ‘Next.’
    ‘Next what?’
    ‘Next time.’
    ‘Now,’ Mr Vinehouse said. He noticed the stripper finish dressing so she could undress and the assistant barman cock the stylus arm on the plastic covered record player on the bar. ‘Now would be best,’ Mr Vinehouse said.
    ‘Hoh!’ Mr Lop said. He raised his arms and his eyes to Heaven at the suggestion, ‘If only that were possible—hoh!’ He shook his head as the unutterably sad truth about his finances and the health of his children and the temper of his wife and the infirmity of his aged parents swept over him under his mask of host and bon vivant to the world, ‘Hoh!’ Mr Lop said, ‘If only you knew—’
    ‘Arseholes,’ Mr Vinehouse said quietly. The music recommenced and the dancer brought her fat body out in front of the curtain.
    ‘Hoh!’ the barman said, a figure of abject tragedy and the aproned repository of the world’s woes, ‘Hoh!’
    Mr Vinehouse waited.
    Mr Low looked at Tinkerbell Lin Wong. He liked his people intact. He said to Mr Boon, ‘Whatever you decide.’
    The phone rang on the wall near the bar.
    Alice said, ‘Look at what he—’ but Mr Boon raised his hand to silence her and jerked his head at The Fourth Gangster to answer the telephone.
    Edgar Tan’s assistant was named Tommy Lai and he was put out. One of the display counters had been smashed, rings, earrings, cufflinks and assorted items of value lay on the floor covered in blood, Mr Tan lay on the floor covered in blood, there was blood on Tommy Lai’s shoes and in his socks, the policeman knelt down by Mr Tan’s body with blood on the knees of his khaki trousers, there was blood on the walls, and the policeman wanted to use the telephone.
    The policeman stood up from Mr Tan’s blood and said, ‘Hurry up with the phone.’
    ‘It’s ringing,’ Tommy Lai said, ‘I can’t make it go any faster.’
    Constable Cho said, ‘This is murder, I want to use the phone.’ A herd of sightseers crowded at the open door and in front of the glass windows. Constable Cho said, ‘I’m going to clear the doorway and then I want the phone.’
    At the other end of the line, the telephone stopped buzzing. ‘Hullo!’ Tommy said urgently.
    ‘Yeah?’
    ‘Tommy Lai.’
    ‘Who?’
    ‘Lai, Tommy,
Edgar
—’—maybe, he thought, he should have said ‘The late’—
‘Edgar Tan and Company, Jewellers.’
    ‘So what?’ the voice said.
    ‘Tommy
Lai.
They said at the house that I had to ring your number’—Constable Cho was moving the crowd away from the doorway and the window—‘Tell whoever’s there that