A Woman of Courage

by J. H. Fletcher

  As it was Eagle Eye would probably have a heart attack when he saw the bill but had Martha not told her they would be meeting influential people whom they would have to impress? Eagle Eye could take a hike.

  They ate in the hotel that night.

  ‘What food would you like?’ Martha said. ‘Western or Cantonese?’

  ‘I think Cantonese,’ Sara said. ‘When in China…’

  ‘I agree absolutely,’ Martha said. ‘You want me to order?’

  They had the food sent up from the restaurant: pan-fried bird’s nest and crispy eel in cinnamon flowers, with sugar peas and Chinese spinach in a garlic sauce. And rice.

  ‘There’s always rice in Cantonese cooking,’ Martha said.

  ‘You want wine?’ Sara asked, then looked at the wine list. ‘My God!’

  ‘Import tax makes the prices too much,’ Martha said. ‘Maybe we should stick to jasmine tea.’

  ‘I would say you’re right,’ Sara said.

  ‘How are you enjoying the food?’

  ‘The food is exquisite,’ said Sara, her chopsticks snaking out to claim another piece of the delicious eel.

  She wondered whether Andrea Chan would contact them in the morning. She thought about the risk the Chinese woman was running. Sara had always known you had to be tough in business but the thought of people putting their lives on the line had never occurred to her. I pray she is safe, she thought.

  They were getting ready for bed when Martha’s telephone rang.

  4

  ‘I have to go out,’ Martha said.

  ‘At this hour?’

  ‘No need to trouble yourself. I’ll go alone.’

  ‘No you won’t,’ Sara said. ‘What’s going on? Who was that on the phone?’

  ‘That was Andrea Chan.’

  ‘She is not in any trouble?’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘Then tell me.’

  ‘She wants to see me.’

  ‘Tonight?’

  ‘Tonight.’

  Hilary had put Martha in charge on this trip and Sara had been happy about it. She also understood that Martha wished to protect her boss’s daughter, but there were limits. They looked at each other and Sara’s eyes were steady.

  ‘We came together. We go together.’

  ‘You’d better put on the clothes you travelled in, then. Where we’re going is no place for smart clothes.’

  ‘And where is that?’

  ‘You’ll see.’

  Rain was misting down when they left the hotel and the streets were shining. Behind them the tower was brilliant with lights which were repeated all the way along Harbour Road. Vessels in the harbour were also lit up while the Kowloon shore was gaudy with neon, red and blue and gold. Cars hooted as they followed each other down streets that formed golden tunnels between the dark shapes of office buildings. Somewhere music blared from a karaoke bar.

  Ignoring the rain Martha turned right and set out along Harbour Road. After a hundred yards she turned into a narrow street, then again into another, even narrower, one. Soon the glitter of Harbour Road was behind them. Here the moist air created haloes of light about the street lamps. Another turning led into a narrow lane. Shabby buildings crowded hunch-shouldered on either side. The lane was rutted, water shining in puddles: this was a different world from the luxurious hotels not fifteen minutes’ walk away, or the bright lights and jam-packed markets of Kowloon. Martha pressed on purposefully but Sara, lacking any previous knowledge of the city, had lost her sense of direction by the time they arrived at a tiny dilapidated house, little more than a hut, with a single light burning in the window. The stink of waste, animal and human, tainted the air.

  Martha stopped. Eyes alert, she turned her head as she stared around and behind her. Sara did the same. The lane, thick with shadows, seemed deserted, yet Sara sensed the night was full of eyes.

  Martha knocked on the door of the hut. At once it opened. After the darkness of the lane the light from the kerosene lantern was dazzling. A hand gestured urgently. They went in and the door closed behind them.

  The tiny room was sparsely furnished and redolent of cooking oil and garlic. In one corner an old Chinese woman sat in a bamboo chair, her wrinkled face a yellow skull, her slanted eyes cloudy with cataracts. She did not move and seemed unaware of the newcomers’ arrival.

  The woman who had let them in was very different. About twenty-five, Sara judged, and smartly dressed, she seemed out of place in what was little more than a hovel.

  A rattle of Chinese as Martha and the young woman spoke to each other.

  Martha turned to Sara. ‘This is Andrea Chan,’ she said. ‘She say she has a flat on the Kowloon side but asked to meet here, at her aunt’s place, so there will be less danger of anyone seeing us together.’

  ‘Less danger?’ Sara said. ‘Not no danger?’

  ‘No one can give one hundred per cent guarantee.’

  Sara spoke to Andrea Chan in English. ‘I believe you have cautioned us about the activities of your employers. That must have been very difficult for you and we are truly grateful.’

  ‘Nothing,’ Andrea said and then turned to Martha, speaking once again in Cantonese. Sara, watching, saw that her lips were trembling. Martha had been right; the young woman was frightened.

  ‘She thinks her bosses are watching her,’ Martha translated. She turned back to Andrea Chan. ‘Better we speak English,’ she commanded.

  ‘Of course. I am sorry.’

  ‘Tell her what you just told me,’ Martha said.

  ‘There are bank statements in Lennox offices showing where money has gone,’ Andrea said. ‘Both Hong Kong and Channel Islands banks. These will provide proof of what has happened to your funds.’

  ‘Then we need to get hold of them,’ Sara said.

  ‘Of course. But copying so many statements impossible during office hours. Can be done only at night.’

  ‘You have keys to the offices?’

  ‘Have.’

  ‘So what are you suggesting?’

  ‘We drive there now. You leave me there. Do not wait outside or police may notice and ask questions. Half an hour later you come back. By then I shall have copied all the statements.’

  ‘There will be nobody else there at this hour?’

  ‘There should not be. I hope not.’

  ‘Security? Alarm systems?’

  Andrea shook her head but her lower lip was caught in her teeth, her hands were shaking and Sara saw that she was not happy at all.

  ‘Are you certain you want to do this?’

  ‘Only way. I have car. We drive there now. You leave me there, come back in one half-hour, I shall be waiting.’

  ‘Good,’ Martha said. ‘We agree.’

  ‘No,’ Sara said.

  The two women looked at her.

  ‘No?’ Martha said.

  ‘It is too dangerous.’

  ‘How dangerous, if nobody else is there?’

  ‘You told me Andrea thinks they may suspect her. You said yourself that a suspicious man is a dangerous man. How can we be sure no one is watching us now? What happens if her bosses turn up while she is copying the statements? What do you think they will do to her?’

  ‘Then what do you suggest?’

  ‘I go in with her.’

  ‘Impossible!’

  ‘Not impossible at all,’ Sara said. Her certainty was a warm tide. ‘It is the only way of ensuring her safety.’ She turned to look at Andrea. ‘As a citizen of Hong Kong you are more vulnerable. My mother is one of the richest and most powerful women in Australia. She also has influence in Asia. I do not believe they would dare harm us physically if I am with you while you are doing this.’

  ‘Too risky,’ Martha said in a decided voice.

  ‘Too risky for me but not for Andrea?’

  They stared challengingly at each other for what seemed a full minute before Martha gave ground.

  ‘Then maybe we should all go.’

  ‘Somebody has to look
after the car,’ Sara said.

  ‘I do not like it,’ Martha said.

  ‘None of us likes it,’ Sara said. ‘But that’s the way it has to be.’

  5

  The building housing the Lennox Brothers offices was dark.

  Martha looked at them from the car. ‘Half an hour,’ she said.

  Sara checked her watch. It was five past eleven. ‘Agreed.’

  The rain was heavier now. The two women watched the car drive away then turned to the building. Andrea Chan produced a key and unlocked the door. Sara’s nerves were as tight as wire as she waited for the clamour of an alarm but there was nothing. They stepped inside and Andrea locked the door behind them. The foyer, marble-floored, was a vastness of silence in which their feet echoed like gunfire. Shadows hung dark. Sara listened but all was still. They walked to the bank of lifts and Andrea pressed the call button. The sound of the descending lift was gigantic in the stillness. The lift door opened. They stepped inside; Andrea pressed the button for the fourteenth floor. The lift door closed and the cage swept them skywards.

  Sara looked at Andrea. The Chinese woman was beautiful, her ivory skin unblemished. She looked calm now but Sara felt sick with tension.

  The lift sighed to a stop. The door opened. They stepped out into darkness. Andrea had brought a torch; they walked down a corridor to the end suite of offices with a glass-panelled door. Lennox Brothers and Associates.

  Andrea sorted through her keys.

  The silence pressed about them and Sara’s skin was clammy with sweat.

  Come on, come on…

  The lock clicked and Andrea opened the door. Sara held her breath. Again there was no alarm.

  ‘Wait here!’

  Sara obeyed. Close to running, Andrea went swiftly to a bank of monitors behind a reception desk and pressed a series of switches before coming back. All smiles now.

  ‘OK. I have switched off the alarm.’

  She locked the office door. She did not switch on any lights but, guided by the torch, walked confidently into an office that opened off the reception area.

  Sara went to follow her then stopped abruptly, blood curdling, as she heard the whir and sigh of a lift moving in what they had thought was an empty building.

  1967

  AN END AND A BEGINNING

  It was a do or die effort, the only way Hilary could think of saving her marriage. With the first shopping mall nearing completion and a hundred other ideas on the drawing board the timing was diabolical but it couldn’t be helped. If she didn’t do something now it would be too late because Sean, backed by an increasingly ferocious Mrs Madigan, had had enough.

  Hilary didn’t discuss her plan with Sean but did it anyway. Sex had become a rarity between them but she had always been able to get him going when she was in the mood and did so now. And again the following night.

  Sean didn’t know what was going on. ‘Something got into you?’ he asked.

  ‘Other than you, you mean?’ She smiled. ‘No such luck.’

  But two months later she had news for him.

  ‘A baby?’ Sean said. ‘You sure?’

  ‘Aren’t you pleased?’

  Because although she’d been putting it off for years, although she supposed she’d cheated him by not telling him she’d stopped taking precautions, it was still important that Sean should be pleased about it. Unfortunately the way he reacted made it hard to tell whether he was pleased or not.

  ‘I’d stopped thinking about it, tell you the truth.’

  ‘You can start thinking about it now,’ Hilary said.

  While Mrs Madigan – who had been bitching for years about the absence of a grandchild – now complained even more bitterly, wouldn’t you know it, how Hilary had trapped her darling son all over again.

  For the first few months it made no observable difference to Hilary’s life at all. She still wrote deals at every opportunity. She drove up and down the coastal strip, north and south of Perth, tying up blocks of land for more development, sweet-talking councils, making deals with builders, never forgetting the new shopping malls that she and Haskins Gould had inked in for all the major towns. She still climbed the scaffolding to check on the progress of their first mall: she had promised the bank six months and it was important they kept to the timetable. Haskins climbed with her, which was unsurprising because Haskins was everywhere, gesticulating, running, above all yelling.

  ‘Get moving – I got a deadline even if you haven’t! You wanna be paid, you got to work. OK? So get with it!’

  She looked down at what seemed chaos: the air thick with dust with electricians and cables everywhere, plumbers and labourers having to hop over wires waiting to be embedded in the walls, everywhere the roar of drills and voices, the clatter of hammers.

  ‘Those wires… They’re not live, are they?’ Hilary said.

  ‘Some clown trips over them we’ll soon know,’ Haskins said.

  He couldn’t have cared less and Hilary saw what she had already known, that he was not a man to worry about such things.

  ‘And we’ll have the unions on our back.’

  ‘Not a chance. Every man jack on this site is self-employed. I spelt it out from the beginning. You want a union, go someplace else. This is a non-union shop.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And there they are. We pay the best and we’ll get the best or I’ll know the reason why.’ He leapt forwards, clutching the scaffolding by one hand, the other waving frantically. ‘Carry it, you lazy bastards! Don’t drag it!’ A foghorn voice from a giant man. He returned to Hilary’s side. ‘Jesus!’ he said.

  ‘Every construction site I’ve been on,’ Hilary said, ‘they’ve brought in one group of tradesmen and then another. That way there’s less confusion.’

  ‘It also takes a hell of a lot longer.’

  ‘How can you keep track of what’s going on?’

  ‘Like I told you, I done this sort of thing a dozen times before.’

  And, once again, he started yelling.

  Haskins’s antics were unrelenting but they worked. The mall went up like Jack climbing the beanstalk, the giant at the top being the question that repeated itself endlessly in Hilary’s nightmares. Would the shopkeepers buy the concept? She had held endless meetings and most had sounded cautiously interested but words were cheap and so far no one had signed up. Without shops the project was nowhere but everyone was waiting for someone else to take a lead. Hilary sat down with representatives of two major supermarket chains, trying to talk one or other of them into leasing a big chunk of the ground floor, but it was the same story: neither was willing to take the lead, and without a major store being involved the smaller shops would not commit either.

  And time, as the bank kept saying, was running out.

  ‘We need action and we need it fast,’ said Haskins Gould.

  Hilary had kept him out of the talks, afraid his abrasive manner might scare not only the bank but potential tenants. She still wanted it that way but welcomed his input too. ‘How did you handle this type of situation in the States?’

  ‘We put sugar on the table.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘We got to offer them something they can’t refuse. We tell the big boys we’ll discount their rent by fifty per cent for the first twelve months of a five-year lease and twenty-five per cent for the second year but only if they sign up within a couple of weeks. If they ask can they afford it, you say can they afford to be left out of what is going to be the way of shopping for years to come. Those guys will have done their homework. They’ll know it worked in the States and will work here. Offer them a discount like that and they’ll bite. Tie one of those guys up, the sheep will follow. And if you can get a big name to open the mall when it’s ready it’ll be us for the stratosphere, baby.’

  First things first. Hilary followed Gould’s advice and went back to the two big boys, talking discounts, and signed up one of them within a week. The other crowd were miffed at missing out but she
told them there’d be plenty of other opportunities since plans for the building of shopping malls were being finalised – as we speak! – in every major population centre in the state. A lie but it tended to focus the negotiator’s mind.

  ‘On the same terms?’

  The men in suits spoke as though that was a reasonable assumption but Hilary laughed. ‘That was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Next time it’ll be the going rate.’

  They didn’t like it? Tough.

  ‘The mall has to have a name,’ Hilary said to Haskins Gould. ‘What are we going to call it?’

  ‘The first one in the state?’ Haskins said. ‘Maybe the Virgin Centre.’

  With Haskins it was hard to know when he was being serious and when he wasn’t.

  ‘I doubt that would go down well,’ Hilary said.

  ‘I don’t know. I know guys who’d pay a big premium to get their hands on a real virgin.’

  ‘Don’t they have enough troubles in their lives without that?’ she said.

  ‘On the other hand,’ he said, ‘belly like yours, I guess you don’t look that virginal.’

  Sometimes he was just begging for a poke in the puss, as she’d heard a Yank say once. ‘There is a precedent,’ she reminded him.

  ‘I’d say one virgin birth is enough,’ Haskins said. ‘In any case I’m Jewish, if you’ve forgotten.’

  ‘So was she.’

  They settled on calling it the Majestic Plaza.

  ‘You know anyone who’s high profile?’ Hilary asked Dave.

  ‘The state premier’s chairman of our footy club.’

  ‘If we guarantee him lots of favourable publicity, you reckon he’ll open Majestic?’

  ‘Is the Pope a Catholic?’

  MOVING ON

  1

  The Majestic Mall was nearing completion. Now what Haskins Gould called the tarting-up process had begun, the process by which, he said, they would turn a shed into a palace.

  ‘Flowers, chandeliers and sweet background music turned real low but audible, you know?’ he told Hilary. ‘Classy restrooms. And clean, real clean. We got to make the ladies think it’s a privilege to step inside the door. Make love to them, right? Put them in the mood to spend big. That way everyone’s happy.’