Prologue
The man walked, heading into the night. The wind that blew harshly around him was raising a thin, bluish dust, impalpable as ash. He had his arms lined along his body and a white rose in his right hand. Anyone who knew him and had seen him with that flower in his hand probably would have remained astonished at first, and then they probably would have been amused, snickering even.
The man narrowed his eyes. His expression did not change much, but for a moment an almost amused flash lighted in his black eyes.
Well...
Probably anyone who knew him, seeing him with that flower in his hand, would have shot at him, trying to take advantage of the situation while thinking that he had provided for himself the flower for his very own burial. Besides, no one who knew him could be considered his friend.
The last piece of the sun that was about to be swallowed by the sea, shone with an unreal light, and projected the man's shadow far away, like a dark wound that cut in two the bleak clearing. After few more steps, he stopped in front of a building, whose dark profile was hardly distinguishable against the background of the night. If it had been in the day, the sunlight, less merciful than the night's darkness, would have revealed with cruelty to his eyes those walls, scraped by the passing of the time, and blackened by the fire.
Many years before, in fact, the ardent flames have devoured those walls and what they contained, and he almost thought to be able to smell again the acrid odour of the ash and could feel it drying up his throat.
The man walked around what remained of the house: of the main wall face, the entrance of the house. There were left standing only the frames of the entry's door. The door itself was burnt and the walls around, weakened by the heat, obviously damaged beyond repair: then the time had done the rest and now they were nothing but a pile of rubble on the ground.
Almost nine years had passed by, the man thought, since he had been in this place that last, damned time. Or to be precise, since he had been there physically. In the years to come, he had returned there so many times with the memory, especially those nights in which his work had forcedhim to do nothing but wait, for hours and hours in front of a closed door, and watch through the eyes of the night.
"Just like I'm doing now",he thought.Because the night finally aroseand he could only stare at the world through the filter of the bluish light of a nearly-full moon. In front of him was a door in the middle of an empty space.
So ironic.
"And significant", he added.
He went through the "entrance door," because to go through the wall that is no longer there and to walk on the rubble, the pieces of burned beams and the junk that the last nine years had dumped in that place seemed rude to him.
The man headed toward what once was a box room, a hiding place into the cavity of a wall. A hiding place that didn't accomplished its task, unfortunately.
He laid the flower on the ground, white against the black ash and against the black of the night. A sole flower for two people that were no more in this world, two beings that had been a single person. A woman, who had lived too short, and a child who was never born.
His wife and son.
He remained at the spot to watch the rose, or rather to imagine it, now that it was swallowed by the darkness, while his lips began to murmur something, without emitting any sound. It was not a prayer, and anyway, no one would have listened to the prayer of a murderer, especially in favour of two innocent souls which certainly had yet earned their place in an unforeseen heaven, where someone like him could never reach them again.
He was simply talking with QiuYue (秋月= autumn moon), as he had done so many times when she was alive, and as he had never done with no one else since then.
Anyone of those who knew him in those later years could almost swear that he knew little more than the words "Yes, master," and probably they were right.
After the death of QuiYue, a strange torpor had taken possession of him, and only thanks to a man, and to the debt of gratitude that kept him tied to that man, he had been forced to live and had not been sucked in by the black hole that had grown inside of him. That man had given him a task and, thanks to him, he had met a new reason to live, beautiful and terrible. And because of him he had now lost it, terrible and beautiful.
It was about this that the man, swallowed by the dark, was talking to his dead wife: ".. But despite, this time, I tried to act in the exact opposite way compared to the past, QuiYue, in the end I made the same mistake again, and I lost my dream. Again...," He concluded.
After a few minutes of silence, he whispered a few words, and then he took his leave from them, and went back ... although he had nothing to return to.
-
Strands and strands slipped in the air to form a veil of black silk in front of his eyes. FeiLong, with his natural-born gracefulness, moved his long tapering fingers, and almost caressing his own cheek with the fingertips, brushed aside with the back of his hand, his hair behind his back. They hovered in the air for an instant and then, with moves as unrestricting as a whip, they fell down on the shiny white silk of his cheongsam. He raised his eyes from the book he had just opened and laying his chin on the palm of his hand, then turned them toward the window.
In his private apartment, at the top floor of a luxury skyscraper in the pulsing heart of Hong Kong, the windows covered the entire walls: from there his rule on the city not only felt real, it also became physical.
But not in that room, connected to his office.
There, the window was a small piece of late autumn sky lost among hundreds of books.
FeiLong's library was full of old and valuable books, first editions, collectible items, ancient texts witnesses of the past ages: books to enjoy with your fingers and eyes, caressing them in admiration, and smelling the time among their pages. And then there were the paperback versions, to enjoy in reading, underlining, using and consuming them in the little free time that the leader of Baishe could afford.
Especially lately.
Recent weeks were quite convulsed: after Asami and Akihito had left his ship-casino, FeiLong was left with tumultuous thoughts in his heart and a lot of "practical" problems to be resolved, by his hands. The Chinese man sighed, shaking his head.
It was more than a month from that night, and many things were now back in their place: he had identified the last pocket of traitors among the Baishe's men and had returned them in a beautiful package, with a blood-red ribbon, to Mikhail Arbatov. He reorganized the ranks of his organization, replaced the traitors in their roles, and annihilated a pair of competing drug's syndicates: to make everyone aware of his unchanged strength and power in Hong Kong's underworld, that was a real necessity...
But many things still had to be arranged, especially the trust and devotion of his men.
If in the lower ranks of Baishe things were relatively quiet, you could not say so for the higher level: the doubt was about the overindulgence he showed to those who had harmed his honour. If he had wanted to get rid of the heads of two competing groups, namely Asami and Arbatov, and of a traitor, Yoh, it would have been very easy, that night. But he didn't.
FeiLong knew very well that the highest levels of his syndicate, for now, had "stayed the judgement" on his decisions about the three men. But they were laying in wait for him: he could not make any mistake, or he would lose the Baishe.
And the Baishe is everything he had.
The Chinese man sighed... despite it all, the organization was still firmly in his hands: the recent successes, the purges and the show of force were useful to restore the prestige to his command.
FeiLong lowered again his eyes on the book on his lap, and caressed with the tip of his fingers the paper's bookmark, a jianzhi made by Tao, that he had received as a birthday present. A simple lotus flower cutting in red paper. It marked the page in that book , a page that had been opened for the last time the day before FeiLong's trip to Tokyo, from which he had returned wounded, and with Akihito.
Now it was reopened again.
And between those two identical gestures, the end of another phase of his life. It was not so much having to start again that made him feel so lost, but mainly the ruins that were left inside him. The difficulty to find a "reason" to live.
Seven years earlier, the reason had been his hatred for Asami, and now he could see it clearly, his desperate love and his hunger for revenge against the man, that had deceived him and then deserted him.
But now?
Now what?
He shook his head again, to chase away these thoughts like tiresome flies , and lengthen his hand toward the jade pencil case on the coffee table. He had always found it very relaxing to refuge himself in the usual small gestures, to soothe his spirit. Gestures like reading a good book and underlining the most interesting paragraphs with a pencil, or also, a cup of good tea.
FeiLong was going to ring the little silver bell he had on the desk to claim the attention of the man that was always guarding his door, but his hand remained in mid-air. For a moment he had forgotten that now there was no one outside the door.
Not anymore.
He had not yet appointed a replacement for Yoh. Every time his mind went back on the problem, for some reason the resolution was postponed.
Yoh, ".. One whose heart was stolen by you ..."
"What idiocy," he thought, and pushed the button of the intercom.
"Wang, some tea" he said, and without waiting for the obvious answer, he hung up.
