The water rat of Wanchai al-1

by Ian Hamilton

  Jennie never worked again after Marian was born. Her life was devoted to being a second wife and to raising her two girls. Given her husband’s absence, her life’s focus had narrowed down to the girls. Not that their mother didn’t have other interests. She played mah-jong a couple of times a week, and once a week she took the Taipan bus north to Casino Rama for a day of baccarat. She had also made a semi-career out of shopping. Everything she bought had to be the best. She had a complete aversion to knockoffs; if she wanted a Gucci bag, it had to be a real Gucci bag.

  Jennie Lee was well past fifty, but she didn’t look it and didn’t want to acknowledge it. She loved nothing better than being mistaken for her daughters’ older sister. And she spent money on maintaining that look: creams, lotions, herbs, hairstyling, clothes. Marian had two children of her own, but since they were being raised in Ottawa with their gweilo father, their Chinese was scant. They knew that gweilo means “grey ghost” in Cantonese. The other word they knew was langlei, which means “beautiful one.” That was how they referred to their grandmother. Calling her anything else — such as Grandma — was a no-no.

  In many ways Ava’s mother was a princess, spoiled and self-indulgent. But then again, so many Chinese women were. They made the “Jewish princesses” Ava had known in university look like amateurs. And that thought crossed her mind once more, when she saw a woman in a red silk blouse with a copy of Sing Tao tucked under her arm walk into Lucky Season and survey the room.

  She was tall for a Chinese woman, and made taller still by stiletto heels that looked as if they were made from the finest, most supple red leather. The silk blouse was worn with a pair of black linen slacks and a gold belt with the Chanel logo on the buckle. Her eyebrows were plucked into two thin lines and her face was caked with makeup. And even from a distance Ava could see the jewellery: enormous diamond stud earrings, two rings — one looked like a three-carat diamond, the other was carved green jade surrounded by rubies — and a crucifix encrusted with diamonds and emeralds. The only thing that marred the picture of a perfect Hong Kong princess was her hair, which was pulled back and secured demurely at the nape of her neck with a plain black elastic.

  Ava stood and waved in her direction. The woman’s eyes settled on her, and in them Ava read — what? Disappointment? Recognition? Maybe she hadn’t been expecting a woman. Maybe she hadn’t been expecting one dressed in a black Giordano T-shirt and Adidas track pants.

  They greeted each other in Cantonese, and then Ava said, “I do prefer English.”

  “Me too,” she said. “My name is Alice.”

  “Ava.”

  “I know.”

  They perused the dim sum menu, finally ticking off six boxes. When the waiter took their sheet away, Ava said, “I know this place seems ridiculously cheap, but the food is very good.”

  “I’ve eaten here before,” Alice said.

  “So, Alice, how do you know Andrew?”

  “He’s my brother.”

  “Ah.”

  “That’s why I’m here. Andrew’s trying to keep this problem quiet. He doesn’t want to unnecessarily alarm other members of the family.”

  “Someone else already knows — your relative in Hong Kong who went to my uncle.”

  “He is my mother’s brother, our oldest uncle, and he is very discreet. But even then he doesn’t know that much, only that Andrew needs help collecting some money that is owed.”

  “Three million dollars.”

  “Actually, a bit more than that. Maybe closer to five million when all is said and done.”

  “Is this one of those Chinese deals?” Ava asked.

  Alice looked confused.

  “You know,” Ava continued, “one of those deals where someone needs some money and can’t get it from a bank or other normal sources, so they go to their family, but if the family can’t come up with enough money they go to a friend of the family, or maybe he has a friend, an uncle, and the money finds its way to the person who needs it and there are handshakes all around — not a shred of paper — and everyone in the chain, all the family members and friends, has a share in the responsibility for making sure the money is repaid.”

  “No, it wasn’t like that at all,” Alice said. She pulled a fat manila envelope from inside the Sing Tao. “Everything is in here. There’s a letter from my brother explaining how the deal was structured and how it progressed until it went off the rails. There’s all kinds of backup documentation: the original lending contract, purchase orders, letters of credit, invoices, emails. My brother is quite thorough.”

  “That’s a welcome change,” Ava said.

  The first of the dim sum arrived: chicken feet in chu hon sauce and crescent-shaped chive-and-shrimp dumplings. They both reached for the chicken feet, and the conversation waned as they sucked skin and meat from bone. Then came har gow, spicy salted squid, shrimp and meat wrapped in steamed bean curd, and radish cake. Alice kept Ava’s teacup full, and Ava tapped her finger on the table in a silent thank-you each time the other poured.

  “Are you involved in the business?” Ava asked.

  “No, I have nothing to do with it, but my brother and I are very close.”

  “What kind of business is it?”

  “It’s a company that specializes in financing purchase orders and letters of credit. You know how it is these days. Companies get big orders and may not have the money to finance production. Even if they have letters of credit, the banks can be very sticky. And even if the banks do help, it’s never for the whole amount. So my brother’s company fills in the gaps. It advances the company money for production — at very high interest rates, of course, but the companies know that upfront and build it into their margins.”

  “How high?”

  “Minimum two percent a month, normally three.”

  “Nice.”

  “They’re filling a gap.”

  “I wasn’t being critical.”

  “Anyway, once in a while they have a problem. Normally, because of the amount of due diligence they do — and because they don’t finance anything that seems risky and the purchase orders and letters of credit are typically from blue-chip companies — those problems have been small and infrequent.”

  “Until now.”

  “Yes.”

  “What was the blue-chip company, or is this an exception?”

  “Major Supermarkets.”

  Ava was caught off guard. “That’s the largest food retailer in North America.”

  “Yes.”

  “So what went wrong?”

  Alice started to reply and then caught herself. “I think it’s better if you read the contents of the envelope. If you need more information or any clarification, you should call my brother directly. His cellphone number and private home number are in the envelope. He doesn’t want you to email him or call him at the office. He also said you could call him anytime, night or day. He hasn’t been sleeping much.”

  “All right, I’ll read the documents.”

  “This is very difficult for him,” she said slowly. “He prides himself on being cautious and always acting with integrity. He’s having trouble accepting that this is actually happening to him.”

  “Stuff happens,” Ava said.

  Alice fingered the crucifix around her neck, her eyes taking in the simpler one that Ava wore. “You’re Catholic?” Ava asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Me too.”

  “You live here in Toronto?”

  “Yes, I’m the only one. The rest of the family is in Hong Kong.”

  “What do you do?”

  “We’re in the clothing business, my husband and I. He is Chinese too — mainland — and we have factories there and in Malaysia and Indonesia.”

  “Tough business. My father was in it for a while,” Ava said.

  “We’ve been lucky. My husband decided years ago that the only way to survive was to move into private-label lines. So that’s all we do now.”

  “Are you involved in
the day-to-day activities?”

  The woman looked across the table, her eyes suddenly curious. Ava wondered if her question had hit a sore spot. “I don’t mean to pry,” she said quickly.

  “ Momentai,” Alice said. “I have two sons now, so I spend most of my time raising them and looking after our home. My husband keeps me up to date on most things, and I still have to suck up to the wives of the buyers, but no, I’m not that involved.”

  Ava reached for the dim sum list but Alice beat her to it. “I’ll pay,” she said.

  “Thanks.”

  Ava’s Adidas jacket was draped over the back of her chair. As she turned to get it, she saw Alice’s eyes lock onto her again. “Have I said or done something wrong?” she asked.

  “No, not at all. It’s just that you look familiar to me. Where did you go to school?”

  “York University here, and then Babson College, near Boston.”

  “No, before that. I mean high school.”

  “I went to Havergal College.”

  “I did too,” Alice said.

  “I don’t remember you.”

  “Do you have an older sister named Marian?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was in the same class as her. We were part of the first big wave of Chinese students and we hung around together. You would have been, what, two or three years behind us?”

  “Two.”

  “I remember seeing you with Marian.”

  Ava searched her memory and came up dry, but then Marian had hung out with a gaggle of Chinese girls that reached double figures. “She’s married now and has two daughters and a husband who is a rising star in the Canadian public service.”

  “Is he Chinese?”

  “No, Canadian.”

  “That’s Havergal girls for you: they know how to marry well,” Alice said, and then glanced at Ava’s ring hand. “You aren’t married?”

  “No,” Ava said.

  “A working girl.”

  Alice held up the dim sum list for a server to collect and take to the cashier. When it was gone, she folded her hands neatly in front of her, Havergal-style, and again looked intently at Ava. “How did you get into this kind of work? I mean, it is a bit unusual. My brother told me what it is your company does, and when I was told I was meeting a woman, my imagination certainly didn’t envision you. In fact, I assumed the woman would be more of a go-between than an active participant in the business. You are active, aren’t you?”

  “I am.”

  “I thought so… I wasn’t being condescending. My husband has had to employ companies like yours in the past, so I know something about how they operate and the kind of people who work in them. That’s why I didn’t expect to meet someone quite so young.”

  “And on top of that, I’m a woman,” Ava said with a little smile.

  “Yes, that too.”

  “So how did you get into this?”

  The question caught Ava off guard. She was more used to asking questions than being asked, and she hesitated. “It’s boring,” she said.

  “Please,” Alice insisted.

  Ava poured tea for them both, Alice tapping her finger on the table in thanks. “It really is boring.”

  “I’m not sure I believe you.”

  Ava shrugged. “When I got out of school, I went to work for one of the big accounting firms in Toronto, and I quickly found out it wasn’t for me. I was a crummy employee, really. I found it difficult being part of a big bureaucracy, doing what you’re told without being able to question the effectiveness or efficiency of it. Looking back, I was probably quite arrogant, a bit of a know-it-all, always ready to argue with my bosses. I lasted six months before packing it in. I think they were as glad to see me go as I was to leave.

  “I decided to open my own little firm, so I took an office up here — two buildings over, actually — and began doing basic accounting for friends of my mother and some small businesses and the like. One of them, a clothing importer, believe it or not, ran into a problem with a supplier in Shenzhen. When he couldn’t collect his money, I asked him to let me try, for a percentage of whatever I could recover.”

  “What made you think you could do that?”

  “I’ve always been persuasive.”

  “And you actually went to Shenzhen to do this?”

  “Yes, but when I got there, I found that the supplier had been screwing over more than one customer, and there was a line-up waiting to go after him. Except, of course, he was nowhere to be found. He’d taken off with whatever money he had left. In the course of nosing about, I discovered there was another company trying to do what I was doing. I figured it would be counterproductive to compete against them, so I suggested we join forces. That’s when I met Uncle.”

  “Yes,” Alice said, her eyes averted. “Andrew mentioned Mr. Chow. He has his reputation, of course, and who knows really what’s true or not… So he’s not a blood relative, then?”

  The same question her brother had asked. “No, he’s a Chinese uncle in the best sense of the word,” Ava said.

  “I see.”

  She wants to ask me about him, Ava thought, and then quickly moved on. “I didn’t deal with him directly at first. He had some people working for him who were, frankly, a bit rough around the edges — the kind you’d expect to encounter in a business like that. They agreed to work with me, although I think, looking back, they were probably humouring me, or maybe they thought it was a way to get me into bed. Anyway, Uncle had a great network of contacts and we tracked down the guy in no time. But when it came to collecting, Uncle’s people had no finesse whatsoever. The guy would have talked his way out of returning about two-thirds of the money he owed if I hadn’t gotten involved and done a little forensic accounting work.

  “Word got back to Uncle about what I had done, and he asked me to come and work with him. I said I wasn’t thrilled about his other employees. He told me he’d phase them out, that he thought my style and his were compatible. That was ten years ago, and the business has been just Uncle and me for most of that time.”

  “And you’ve obviously been successful.”

  “We’ve done well enough.”

  The bill came to the table and Alice put twenty dollars on the tray. “Ava, did my brother sound desperate to you?”

  Ava slipped on her jacket. “Not any more than most of our clients do.”

  “Well, let me tell you, he is desperate. That five million dollars represents nearly all the capital our family has accumulated over the past two generations.” She reached across the table, grabbing Ava’s hand and squeezing. “Please do everything you can to help.”

  (3)

  It was almost four o’clock when Ava pulled up in front of her condo, tossed her car keys to the concierge, and went upstairs, the manila envelope, still unopened, tucked under her arm.

  She opened a bag of sour candy, made herself a coffee, and sat at the kitchen table. Her mind wandered. It had been a long time since she had thought about, let alone discussed, how she and Uncle had gotten together and built their business. She had told Alice Tam the truth, but it was the barebones truth. When she thought about how naive she had been when she started and what she was now able to handle, it was as if she were looking at two different people.

  In the beginning she’d been adept enough at the financial side of things, her curiosity, imagination, and training helping her track and find money in places where the thieves had thought it untraceable. And at first that was her main focus. Only gradually did she take on the collection role. She began by working on targets as the soft opener — she had a knack for getting people to talk, especially men, who saw her as a soft-spoken, polite, exotic young thing who needn’t be taken too seriously. By the time they realized the opposite was true, it was usually too late.

  Ava didn’t start closing accounts until she saw the muscle Uncle was using botch projects by going too far. There’s a fine line between instilling enough fear to get someone to do what you want and applyin
g so much pressure that the target figures he’s toast no matter what he does, so he might as well try to hang on to the money. Ava had a talent for finding the tipping point. Uncle would say, “People always do the right thing for the wrong reason.” Ava made that her mantra, striving to pinpoint the core self-interest in her targets, the one thing that was more important to them than hanging on to stolen money.

  Uncle also said, “Once they have the money they forget where it came from, how they acquired it. In their minds, it is theirs. You need to remind them that it has a rightful owner and that the only thing open for discussion is how they are going to return it.”

  Not that they didn’t try to hang on to it anyway. Being yelled at, cursed, and threatened was just part of the job. Knives, guns, and fists weren’t uncommon either, and that’s why Uncle said he used muscle. If there was going to be intimidation and violence, he wanted to have the most firepower. The problem, in Ava’s mind, was that the muscle invited a negative reaction. One look at Uncle’s original crew and the targets would gear up for the inevitable conflict. The violence clouded the process, made the money almost a secondary objective.

  Ava urged Uncle to let the enforcers go, using them only on a must-need basis. His only concern was the potential for physical danger the targets posed. “I can look after myself,” Ava said. And the truth was, she could.

  She had started taking martial arts when she was twelve and had almost immediately shown ability. She was quick, agile, and fearless. In a matter of months she was so far ahead of everyone else in her class that the teacher moved her up to train with the teens; a year later he moved her again, to work out with the adults. By the time she was fifteen, Ava’s skill paralleled his. That was when he took her aside and asked if she was interested in learning bak mei. It was an ancient form, he explained, reserved for the most gifted. It was taught only one-on-one, traditionally passed down from father to son but now also from mentor to student. There was one teacher in Toronto, Grandmaster Tang. Ava met with him several times before he agreed to accept her as a student. She was his second pupil; another teenager, Derek Liang, was the first, and though he and Ava never learned or practised together, over the years they had become friends.