The Fireman Read Online Free PDF Page A

sticking out into the harbour.
    Fifteen minutes later I was standing in one of the immigration queues, waiting impatiently midway down a line of a dozen people. The speed the lines moved varied with the efficiency of the immigration officer who was stamping the passports and our line was being dealt with by a young Chinese girl who gave all the indications of having terminal sleeping sickness. Eventually I got to the head of the queue and she took my passport without looking at me, then scrutinized every page, every visa. My passport is nine years old and I’d spent most of them flying around the world for various newspapers so I had almost as many stamps as Stanley Gibbons. She checked every one, then she squinted up at me through a pair of lenses that looked like the bottoms of milk bottles. The girls in Hong Kong are the prettiest in the world the man in the seat in front of me had said as we’d taxied down the runway to the terminal building. He should have seen this one, with her badly-permed hair and a dimple in her chin big enough to grow potatoes in. This girl was ugly; her eyes were too far apart, her ears stuck out like mug handles and her skin was marked with old acne scars. She probably had a great personality, was an absolute dream with children and small animals and would make someone a wonderful wife and mother, but I doubted it. I think her plainness was more than skin deep.
    ‘How long will you stay in Hong Kong?’ she asked.
    ‘I don’t know. As long as it takes.’
    ‘Business or holiday?’
    ‘Holiday, I suppose.’ I reached for the passport but she moved it away.
    ‘You have been to Hong Kong before?’
    ‘Only in transit.’
    She flicked through the blue and white pages at a painfully slow rate until she got to the personal details at the front.
    ‘You are a journalist?’
    ‘That’s what it says.’ I was starting to get angry at her time wasting. I was in a hurry.
    ‘Where are you staying?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    She looked puzzled and studied the immigration card I’d filled in before landing. The space marked ‘Address in Hong Kong’ was blank. I gave her a warm friendly smile, showed a bit of teeth and crinkled my eyes, the smile that says what a great, honest, open chap I am.
    ‘I’m being met by a friend. He’ll have arranged a hotel for me.’ If I’d been a woman and she’d been more of a man I’d have undone a few buttons and fluttered my eyelashes. I just wanted to get the hell out of this airport.
    She paused, and then she stamped my passport and banged it down on the counter which was level with her forehead.
    ‘Next,’ she said, and I blew her a kiss as I walked past.
    I headed for Customs, past the crowds huddled around the metal conveyor belts awaiting their luggage. I went through one of the ‘Nothing to declare’ passages but a tall, thin Chinese waved me back.
    ‘You must wait,’ he said, and pointed to a thick yellow line on the floor. He was obviously a chief something or other, an organizer rather than a doer. His men were busy checking the baggage of passengers from an earlier flight, opening suitcases and unpacking cardboard boxes.
    ‘I haven’t got any bags,’ I said, and held my arms out at my sides.
    ‘You must wait,’ he said emphatically, and started making small brushing movements with his left hand, the sort you’d use to shush away a cat.
    ‘For fuck’s sake,’ I said and stood behind the line until they’d finished with the family of four holidaymakers in front of me, a husband and wife and two young children complete with four suitcases, three travel bags and a large teddy bear that was examined in as much detail as an illegal immigrant. Swear to God, he looked up the bear’s arse and prodded it. The labels on the suitcase said Bangladesh so I guess they were worried about drugs, but even so.
    Eventually it was my turn, and the chief whatever-he-was walked over to watch his junior question me.
    ‘Anything to declare?’ he