The water rat of Wanchai al-1

by Ian Hamilton

  “You got it.”

  “So where did the money go?”

  “The British Virgin Islands,” he said.

  “I could have guessed,” she said.

  “How’s that?”

  “Mr. Goldman, the BVI are the world’s tax haven. There are more than half a million offshore companies registered there — that’s about half the world total.”

  “I run a small local bank, that’s all,” he said.

  “I understand, I understand. Now, to which company was the money sent?”

  “S amp;A Investments.”

  “Address?”

  “I have a copy of our wire in front of me. It was sent six days ago to S amp;A Investments, P.O. Box 718, Simon House, Road Town, Tortola, British Virgin Islands.”

  “Care of which bank?”

  “Barrett’s”

  “Account?”

  “Account number 055-439-4656.”

  “Great,” she said. “You’ve been just great.”

  “We don’t like to get mixed up in things like this,” he said.

  “I know, but sometimes it’s difficult to avoid people like Seto.”

  “Never again. I’m closing his account as soon as I get off the phone with you.”

  “Oh no, don’t do that,” she said quickly. “Please leave it alone. I need you to call me at once if Seto comes back to the bank or contacts you in any way.”

  “Ms. Cohen, you do know there was a second wire as well?”

  Ava couldn’t help being surprised. “No, I didn’t.”

  “Yeah, for just over a million dollars, from Safeguard, a retail food chain in Portland, Oregon. We sent it to the same account in the British Virgin Islands.”

  “When?”

  “Two days ago.”

  It looked as if Seto had cleared out the inventory. That was a good thing. Money was easier to repossess than goods, and she wouldn’t have to worry about selling it if she got her hands on it.

  “You’ve been terrific, Mr. Goldman. Let’s hope I don’t have talk to you again.”

  It was just past two o’clock and Ava hadn’t eaten anything all day except a bowl of congee for breakfast. There was a Chinese restaurant on Bloor Street that served dim sum till three. She looked out her window at the street below. It wasn’t snowing but it was cold and blustery, and the few pedestrians who had ventured out were wrapped up tightly and walking as quickly as they could, chins buried in their chests. She called the Italian restaurant where she had eaten the night before and ordered a pizza for delivery.

  Then she called the travel agent she always used to book her trips. Most of her friends booked online, but she preferred having a buffer between herself and the airlines in case she had to make schedule changes, which she often did. She told the agent to book her on a flight to Seattle and to reserve a seat from there to Hong Kong and then on to Thailand.

  Ava called her mother and her best friend, Mimi, to let them know she was getting out of town. The winter was wearing her down, she said, and she was heading to Thailand for ten days or so of fun and sun.

  “Are you going through Hong Kong?” her mother asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Will you call your father?”

  “No.”

  She heard disappointment in her mother’s voice. “So, you are just seeing Uncle?”

  “Mum, I’ll be in transit in Hong Kong. I probably won’t see anyone.”

  Ava travelled light. It took her less than half an hour to pack her Louis Vuitton monogrammed suitcase and her Shanghai Tang “Double Happiness” bag. The suitcase was where she packed her business look: black linen slacks, a pencil skirt, Cole Hahn black leather pumps, two sets of black bras and panties, and three Brooks Brothers shirts in powder blue, pink, and white — one with a button-down collar, the other two with modified Italian collars, and all of them with French cuffs. She chose a small jewellery case to hold her Cartier Tank Francaise watch, a set of green jade cufflinks, and a simple gold crucifix. She then went through the leather pouch that held her collection of clasps, pins, barrettes, headbands, and combs and took out an ivory chignon pin she especially loved, adding it to the jewellery case. Ava wore her hair up nearly all the time and liked to accentuate it. Nothing did so better than the chignon pin.

  Her toilet kit was always packed and ready to go: toothbrush, toothpaste, hairbrush, deodorant, shampoo, Annick Goutal perfume, one lipstick, and mascara. The shampoo was in a hundred-millilitre bottle, as required by airport security. She had four such bottles neatly packed in the plastic bag that was also required. Only one of the bottles held shampoo; the other three contained chloral hydrate.

  The contents of the Shanghai Tang bag were more eclectic: the Moleskine notebook, two fountain pens, her computer, running shoes and shorts, a sports bra, socks, three Giordano T-shirts, a Chanel purse to take to meetings, and two rolls of duct tape. Ava went to the kitchen, took thirty Starbucks coffee sachets from a container, and tossed them into the bag.

  At eight she called Uncle.

  “ Wei,” he answered.

  “I found the money,” she said.

  “The shrimp?”

  “No, the shrimp have been sold already. I’ve located the money.”

  “How much?”

  “About five million.”

  “Where is it?”

  “British Virgin Islands.”

  “That’s not a surprise,” he said. “Half of Hong Kong has bank accounts there.”

  “I’m heading for Seattle tomorrow morning to see if I can find Jackson Seto and persuade him to give the money to Andrew Tam.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I have no expectations. I get into Seattle tomorrow morning around eleven. Both his office address and supposed home address are downtown, within a couple of blocks of each other. Who knows, I might get lucky.”

  “If you don’t?”

  “I’m booked on Cathay Pacific tomorrow night into Hong Kong.”

  “Are you staying?”

  “Maybe a day or two. I want to check out Seto’s Hong Kong address in Wanchai, and I might meet with Tam. I also want to talk to the guy who introduced Seto to Dynamic Financial Services.”

  “Let me know how it goes in Seattle. I don’t care what time you call. If you come to Hong Kong, where do you want to stay?”

  “The Mandarin.”

  “I’ll book it for you just in case.”

  “Thanks, Uncle.”

  “And I’ll meet you at the airport.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I know, but I want to.”

  She usually slept well. Her sleep mechanism was bak mei, the basic moves played and replayed in slow motion. That night was a little different. The core form was the panther, but this time she had a target: a tall, skinny Chinese man with a scrawny moustache and five million dollars in a bank account in the British Virgin Islands.

  (5)

  Seattle was a bust. The office was closed, empty. Seto had moved out of the apartment the month before.

  Ava was back at Sea-Tac Airport four hours before her flight was scheduled to leave, so she killed some time getting a full body massage in the Cathay Pacific business lounge. She called Uncle just before boarding. He again insisted he’d meet her at the airport and she again told him he didn’t have to. She knew how much he hated the new Hong Kong International Airport at Chek Lap Kok. He lived in Kowloon, no more than ten minutes by car from the old airport, Kai Tak.

  Kai Tak had been theatre and drama, the planes approaching Hong Kong precariously through mountains and skyscrapers, crossing Kowloon Bay, their wing tips almost touching the lines of laundry on the balconies of the apartment buildings that pressed in on the airport. Then there was the bus ride from the tarmac to the tired old terminal, which had been built for l950s levels of air traffic, and the long lines at Customs before one emerged into a small, cramped Arrivals hall where hundreds, if not thousands, of people lined the corridor, waving and yelling at the inc
oming passengers.

  Ava wasn’t as nostalgic about Kai Tak as Uncle. To her mind, the Arrivals hall at Chek Lap Kok might be huge and sterile, reducing people to ants scurrying under its soaring roof, but its almost brutal efficiency made up for any deficiencies in its character.

  “I’ll sit in the Kit Kat Koffee House,” Uncle said.

  The business-class section of the airplane was more than half empty, and the window seat next to her was vacant. That was good; Ava wasn’t one for casual conversation with strangers, and now she didn’t have to find an excuse to avoid it.

  It would be a thirteen-hour flight, leaving Seattle at 7 p.m. (10 p.m. Toronto time) and getting into Hong Kong at 11 p.m. the following day, factoring in the International Date Line. Ava hated that, because jet lag was almost inevitable. The only way she could avoid it was not to sleep at all on the plane, and for her that just wasn’t possible. For reasons she couldn’t understand, the moment a flight took off her eyes began to close. On a one-hour flight to New York in the middle of the day, she could sleep for forty-five minutes. During one seventeen-hour flight from Toronto to Hong Kong, she figured she had slept for fifteen hours.

  The Seattle-Hong Kong flight turned out to be not that extreme. Ava managed to stay awake long enough to eat dinner and to watch a Hong Kong action film starring Tony Leung and Andy Lau. Then she fell asleep until the flight attendant woke her two hours before landing, to serve her breakfast.

  When the plane landed, Ava found HKIA its usual ruthlessly efficient self. She was off the plane and through Immigration, Baggage Claim, and Customs within twenty minutes of landing. She spotted Uncle at the back of the Kit Kat, a plain, square box with round glass tables, metal chairs, and posters of coffee beans on the walls. He had a Chinese newspaper open in front of him and an unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth. Even in Hong Kong there were places where you couldn’t smoke now.

  He was tiny, not much taller than Ava, and thin. He was always dressed the same way: black lace-up shoes, black slacks, a white long-sleeved shirt buttoned to the neck. The monochromatic image was part convenience, part camouflage. It made him easy to overlook — just another boring old man not worth a second glance, except to those who knew.

  Ava thought Uncle was somewhere between seventy and eighty, but that was as close as she could come to determining his age. Many people meeting him for the first time guessed that he was younger, and not from politeness. His face was fine-boned, with a small, straight nose and a sharply defined chin with a hint of a point; his skin had not begun to sag, and he had only the faintest of wrinkles around his eyes and on his forehead. His hair was cropped close to the scalp; Ava could see streaks of gray, but it was still predominantly black.

  “Uncle,” she said.

  He looked up from his paper, a smile cracking his face as his eyes fell upon her. She loved his eyes: pitch black pupils and dark chocolate brown irises set in a sea of white that seemed immune to lack of sleep or too much alcohol. They were eyes whose age was indeterminable: lively, curious, probing. Ava had learned rapidly that Uncle’s world was defined through those eyes, not through his words. They could embrace you, mistrust you, detest you, adore you, question you, or not give a damn whether you lived or died. And she knew how to read them in all their subtlety. Ava had seen their many moods, although their darkest intent had never been directed at her. She was part of his unofficial family, after all, the only kind of family he had ever had.

  She leaned down to kiss him on the forehead. “You didn’t have to come,” she said.

  “I was eager to see you,” he said. “You’re as beautiful as ever.”

  “And you look as young as always.”

  He looked around. “I don’t like this place. We’ll go to Central for noodles. Let me call Sonny. I’ll have him bring the car down from the garage.”

  They walked through the cavernous Arrivals hall, Uncle’s hand resting lightly on her elbow. Two Hong Kong policemen watched them as they neared the exit. The older of the two nudged the younger and they nodded their heads in Uncle’s direction. Ava saw the movement, looked sideways, and caught Uncle nodding in return.

  Sonny was leaning against the front fender of the car. It was new, a Mercedes S-Class.

  “What happened to the Bentley?” Ava asked.

  “I sold it. Sonny said it was time to move into this decade.”

  Ava had never known Uncle to be without Sonny, and she’d never met anyone who had. He was technically Uncle’s driver, a monochromatic match to his boss in his black suit, white shirt, and plain black tie. He was tall for Chinese, a couple of inches over six feet, and heavyset. For someone that large he was quick — deadly quick — and he could be vicious when the circumstances required. He was one of the few people in the world whom Ava feared physically. And he wasn’t talkative. If you asked him a question, you got a simple answer with no embellishments. Beyond that he didn’t seem to have any opinions he needed to share.

  When they approached the car, Sonny gave Ava a small smile and reached for her bags. She and Uncle climbed into the back seat as he put them in the trunk.

  It was a quick ride to the city centre. Their route took them over the Tsing Ma Bridge, six lanes of traffic on the upper deck, rail lines beneath. The bridge always took Ava’s breath away. It was close to a kilometre and half long and soared two hundred metres above the water. The Ma Wan Channel, part of the South China Sea, glittered below in the early morning sun as sampans and fishing boats skirted the armada of huge ocean freighters waiting to be escorted into Hong Kong’s massive container port.

  They slowed when they reached the city proper, caught in the last of the morning rush hour. Hong Kong isn’t a city filled with private cars. Finding a place to park isn’t easy or cheap in a place where office and retail space is rented by the square inch, but there are red taxis everywhere, scurrying like beetles. Sonny drove carefully — too carefully for Ava, but he was a cautious man, maybe even deliberately cautious. It was as if he were restraining his true nature. She had seen this trait in him when he attended meetings with Uncle. He didn’t do that often, but when he did, he remained standing off to one side, his eyes flickering back and forth as he followed the flow of conversation. Ava realized that his body language changed along with the tone of the meeting. If Uncle was having his way, Sonny was placid. Any opposition to Uncle’s position caused him to tense, his eyes growing dark.

  The financial and commercial heart of the Hong Kong Territory is divided into two main areas: Hong Kong Island and Kowloon, two dense urban settings connected by the Cross-Harbour Tunnel and the Star Ferry. Ava’s hotel was on the Hong Kong side, in the Central district, set just back from Victoria Harbour and a short walk to the financial sector.

  They reached the Mandarin within forty minutes of leaving the airport. Uncle walked into the hotel with her and sat patiently in the lobby while she checked in. She sent her bags to the room.

  “There is a noodle shop a block from here,” Uncle said when Ava joined him. “We’ll walk.”

  It always took her a day or two to adjust to Central foot traffic — the jostling, the pushing, everyone eager to get to the next corner, where they could wait in a throng before shuffling along to the next intersection, their pace dictated entirely by the mob around them. Ava and Uncle were hemmed in on all sides by a crush of people. Central streets weren’t a place for the claustrophobic.

  The noodle shop was a hole in the wall, ten tables with pink plastic stools. The place was full, but a man in an apron came from behind the counter to tell two young men sitting by themselves to move to another table that was occupied but had vacant seats. He then waved Uncle and Ava to the empty table and bowed as Uncle walked past.

  She ordered har gow — shrimp dumplings — and soup with soft noodles. Uncle ordered beef lo mein and a plate of gai lin, steamed Chinese broccoli slathered in oyster sauce, to share.

  “How is your mother?” he asked while they waited for their food.

  “As l
ively as ever.”

  “A crazy woman.”

  Ava’s mother was highly sociable and made friends as easily as other people changed clothes. Marian and Ava’s friends weren’t immune from her attention. It bothered Marian but never Ava; she saw it as just a natural extension of her mother’s all-consuming interest in their lives. So it had come as no surprise when her mother, in Hong Kong to visit her own friends, called Uncle and said she’d like to meet him, to find out what kind of man her daughter was working for. If Ava had been working in Toronto for a North American firm, she would have been mortified, not because of what her mother had done but more because they wouldn’t understand why she was doing it. But Uncle understood Chinese mothers; they met and got along well enough that from time to time Jennie Lee felt free to pick up the phone and call Kowloon. Just keeping in touch, she called it.

  “She sends her love,” Ava said.

  Uncle shrugged off the lie. “Will you call your father while you are here?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  The two men had never met but they knew of each other, as the wealthy and powerful of Hong Kong tend to do. “Maybe just as well. I hear that the wife in Australia is causing him problems.”

  Ava hadn’t heard that news and the surprise registered on her face.

  “It is smart of him, keeping them all separated. I don’t know, though, where he finds the energy or the time to keep them satisfied.”

  Their food came. She poured tea for both of them. The restaurant was full, a steady flow of people coming and going.

  Uncle ate quickly, hardly bothering to chew his food. For a man who was otherwise outwardly serene and calm almost to an extreme, it was an unusual characteristic. She wondered sometimes if this might be truer to his nature than the bland, confident face he liked the world to see.

  “There isn’t any point in going to the Wanchai address you were given for Jackson Seto,” he said, pushing his empty plate aside. “I sent someone there today. He hasn’t lived there for at least six months.”