CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER TEN

This was in Paris.

“She was small,” they’d say. “Chinese or Japanese. Asian, definitely. I think.”

“Her hair was sort of dark, maybe,” the other witness would remember, the officer jotting the useless tidbit down.

“Was she younger? Older?” he’d say, pen in hand. “What age range would you say she was? Any idea?”

A shrug.

Twenty years after Hong Kong, twenty years after the leaders of The Triad had fallen in one fell swoop, twenty years after Lucky had entered the warehouse a victim and emerged a legend, she’d become the woman seen, but never remembered.

“Yes, it was a woman,” one witness after another would say before stopping in confusion. “But I just can’t . . . I don’t . . . ” and they’d give up, unable to clearly recall the assassin who’d stabbed and sliced and slaughtered in broad daylight.

Back in Hong Kong, the Triad was in chaos. Uncles on mainland China, in Canada, even in the United States and as far away as Eastern Europe were all angling to be Father now,