by Liz Jensen
They clap and clap.
Hardwood trees are slow to grow, and prices have skyrocketed in recent years. There were logging restrictions, even before the weak anti-deforestation protocols. But where there’s a will, there’s a loophole. And a panoply of crooks. The fraudulent trading of hardwoods culled from protected forestland is a global business lucrative enough to have spawned countless millionaires. Jenwai Timber’s bosses and their suppliers and shippers among them.
The week before my visit to Taiwan, an anonymous source had sent the Taipei branch of the police’s Fraud Investigation Office a set of documentation relating to the purchase of hardwood for Jenwai’s timber factory from a Malaysian supplier. These impressively produced forgeries had served to whitewash a raft of illegal transactions concerning wood sourced in Laos and marked, for good measure, with apparently legitimate stamps. The paperchase that followed the first police raid triggered further investigations, and within a matter of days, the entire Laos–Taiwan element of an extensive international logging scandal was exposed. Detectives, environmental campaigners and the media were already busy writing up their reports. But my own assessment would be of a very different nature.
As investigators affiliated to a multi-national legal firm, we’d been hired by Ganjong Inc., the parent organisation under which Jenwai Timber traded. At Jenwai Timber, the main players consisted of corrupt NGO staff, Laotian traffickers, Thai middlemen and Chinese factory managers. And one employee with a conscience. My mission was to find him.
In most organisations, whistle-blowing is seen as a form of sabotage. But it’s impolitic to say this publicly. Phipps & Wexman’s brochures delicately classify the phenomenon as ‘a sub-story in a wider David and Goliath narrative of workplace unrest’. Officially, I was in Taiwan to identify the whistle-blower, pronounce him a hero and award him a generous financial package or ‘golden thank you’ for alerting Ganjong Inc., via the police, to the corruption it had – unwittingly, it stressed – presided over. In reality, I was there to do a situation autopsy, as a part of a wider damage-limitation exercise.
The Taipei branch of the national Fraud Investigation Office, a modest low-rise to the south of the city, had the feel of a huge walk-in fridge. Here, over the course of several hours, kept awake by coffee, I heard several theories about the whistle-blower’s identity from the police and a sharp-featured young journalist who had covered the case for his newspaper. Although they were curious about his identity, their main concern was the crime itself, and the domino effect of its exposure. They seemed puzzled that Ganjong should have called in a Western personnel specialist.
‘It’s known as the Outsider Impartiality Effect,’ I tell them. ‘My presence here is Ganjong’s message that it rewards honesty and condemns corruption. Standard strategy.’
The sharp-featured journalist made a face I interpreted as ‘wry’ and said, ‘Cover your ass, right?’ And they all laughed. He went on to speculate that the mystery man was in fact female, and the wife of a Jenwai manager who had been having an affair with a bar-girl. This prompted further theories: a shop-floor grudge, a power tussle between senior managers, a rival company’s attempt to bring Jenwai down, infiltration by eco-campaigners. I spent the rest of the day probing deeper, only to find the actual evidence was either thin or non-existent. It’s often the case, at the beginning of an investigation, that you spend eight hours in an over-air-conditioned office, learning what seems barely one level up from rumour. It’s only later that you might spot a stray detail that’s part of a bigger pattern, and things fall into place. Over 80 per cent of the time, that doesn’t happen.
The next morning I was at the timber plant on the outskirts of Taipei by 8.25 for my meeting with Mr Yeh, the only Jenwai manager untouched by the scandal: at the time of the illegal wood-trafficking transactions, he’d been on sick leave with colon cancer. The air was humid, and pulsed with the heavy, electric heat that heralds thunder. Undulating lines of altocumulus castellanus and altocumulus floccus patterned the sky.
The plant itself was a functional warehouse building in a high-fenced compound. In the office section near the front gates, the skeletal Mr Yeh welcomed me with a dry handshake and we exchanged business cards. I accepted his with both hands according to custom. The skin of his scalp, which was the distinctive yellow-grey of Dulux’s 1997 River Pearl, looked alarmingly thin and desiccated.
‘I am pleased to meet you Mr Lock. You are very tall,’ he said. Then he laughed. In Chinese culture, amusement display can mask embarrassment.
‘One metre and ninety-eight centimetres,’ I told him, pre-emptively. ‘But I’ve stopped growing, I promise.’ This is a joke I have learned to deploy to ‘break the ice’, but Yeh didn’t laugh, as Westerners tend to, so I inclined my head and told him in Chinese that I was honoured to meet him. This worked better: he broke into a cadaverous smile and complimented me on my facility. I told him languages were a hobby of mine, though my Chinese was unfortunately rudimentary.
‘Call me Martin.’ His English was assured and American-accented.
‘If you’ll call me Hesketh.’
‘Hesketh. Unusual name.’
‘Originally Norse. It means horse-racetrack.’
‘Horse-racetrack?’ He laughed. ‘And Lock is a Chinese name. But spelled L-O-K. In Cantonese it means happiness. Joy. Good name. Lucky name. Lucky-Lok.’ He paused. ‘So if you should bet on horses, you win. Ha ha.’ Then his face changed. ‘As soon as the current orders are completed the factory will close. It is a terrible situation, Mr Lock. Hesketh. It pains me.’ He touched his chest, as if to show me precisely where it hurt. In the cottage, five to the left on Shelf Three, I have a book of da Vinci’s anatomical drawings. The valves, aortas and arteries of an ox heart are on page eighteen. ‘By the way. I am sorry for the way I look. I know it is shocking.’
‘No, I’m interested. I like seeing new things.’
There was quite a long pause which I did not know how to fill. Then he nodded towards the door and said, ‘Well, Hesketh. You didn’t come here to talk about death.’
In his office, we settled on either side of a desk littered with wood samples labelled in both Chinese and English. It took half an hour to get through my list of questions. He answered diligently, checking dates and figures on his computer. It all added up, and he appeared clean. As for the four female administrative staff, they had already been eliminated by the police: none of them had access to the relevant files.
‘I’d like to see round the factory,’ I told him.
‘Of course. Our operations manager will be happy to show you.’
He made a call and within minutes, a slight man he introduced as Sun-kiu ‘Sunny’ Chen appeared in a hard hat. I’d been curious to meet Sunny Chen, not least because one of the fraud officers had referred to him as ‘an oddball’, a term which always piques my interest. He hadn’t gone into details, but just tapped the side of his head in the international gesture denoting madness, and said I’d see for myself. The others had grinned.
Sunny Chen’s movements were jerky and puppet-like. I couldn’t tell his age. Mid-forties perhaps. He was diminutive, with much darker skin than Martin Yeh (Monsoon River) and a hectic look. The two men conversed briefly: I missed most of what they said, but their body language told me there was respect between them. Sunny Chen and I shook hands. We began in Chinese, but I found myself struggling, so after two and a half sentences we switched.
‘You know, my father worked here, until he retired. My grandfather too, and four uncles. Jenwai was a good company. Moral. Trustworthy.’ Sunny Chen wiped his brow, which bore a sheen of sweat.
Martin Yeh sighed. ‘If I had been here . . .’ He didn’t finish his sentence, but shrugged and began a new one. This was about needing to go home and rest. I responded that this seemed wise, given his health status. After I’d seen the factory, he said, Sunny would take me to lunch on his behalf. The two of them had a swift exchange in Chinese, about the name and location of the restaurant.
Then we said goodbye and I followed Sunny Chen outside.
The courtyard faced the factory entrance, which was festooned with warning signs and surveillance cameras. In the shade of its concrete flank, Sunny Chen offered me a cigarette which I declined. He lit one for himself and inhaled deeply. His fingers were stained with nicotine. He jerked his head towards the building. You could hear the machinery inside working at full tilt.
‘So what do you make of the whistle-blower?’ I asked.
‘He deserves to die,’ said Sunny Chen. ‘In fact, I would like to kill him myself.’ Then he laughed. His teeth were an ivory colour – somewhere between Silver Birch and Musk Keg.
‘Why?’
‘He has brought us shame.’ This remark indicated he was more bothered by corporate loss of face than by the company’s intrinsic rottenness. Did this make him a traditionalist? I made a mental note.
‘Have you any idea who he is?’
His head gave an abrupt twitch. ‘The police asked me the same thing. And I said yes. But they didn’t listen. Please come in. I will show you inside.’
In an antechamber near the entrance, we put on fibre face masks and overalls. Mine were far too small. Sunny Chen gave me a hard hat like his own with built-in ear mufflers. I like wearing headgear. The skull feels pleasingly cushioned.
‘We will have to shout in there,’ he said, waving me in.
In the vegetable world there’s no real time of death. In the right conditions, flowers can last a week, irradiated strawberries a month, apples or onions a year. Technically, a tree is killed when it is chopped down. But its aroma – of bark, of sap, of dense, massed fibre – lingers for decades afterwards. It is a smell that attracts me in the same way as certain colours, shades of violet and green in particular. Inside the factory, the trunks that were being processed were freshly felled, so it was overwhelming: thick and heady and mixed with machine oil. Parallel rows of conveyor belts fed huge tree trunks into mechanical saws which sliced them as effortlessly as a knife cutting through cheese, then dropped them on to another belt system which bore them to the far end of the warehouse, where they were sorted according to width and mechanically stacked. It was a cleverly constructed system that required minimal manpower. The fifteen workmen I saw ticked off checklists, swept bark and sawdust from the floor, drove forklifts and righted skewed planks on the conveyors. The loading of the trunks and the shifting and transportation of the cut wood, Chen told me, was done outside. Like all manifestations of mechanical efficiency, the process was mesmerising to watch, despite the searing noise. And even that had its merits: it was regular, and it meant something. Everything was powdered in a layer of fine, dark wood dust. Standing there in my comfortable helmet, I felt very content. I was Lucky Lok.
‘Pencil cedar,’ shouted Sunny Chen in English over the racket, pointing. ‘From Indonesia. Over there is Malaysian kauri and teak.’
He indicated another section of the shop floor, where wide planks of a darker wood were being sliced to the narrower width typically used for decking and garden furniture. The offcuts and shavings from the closest sawing machine fell on to a conveyor belt, which transported them to the overhead funnel of the machine in front of us, which stood about four metres high. Sunny mouthed something I couldn’t hear, and directed me to the wide service ladder. By the time we reached the top rung I was sweating and high on the atmosphere. Peering over the metal rim that curved downward like a hanging lip, we gazed far down into the dark whirring hole of its innards.
‘Long way to fall!’ Sunny Chen shouted, pointing down. The pulping mechanism worked like a giant food processor, accepting whatever it was fed and chomping it into a coarse mash of woodchips. ‘Turn you into hamburger!’ His face mask hid his features. I’m not good at second-guessing people’s emotions but his eyes didn’t seem to be smiling. The flayed wood was collected in a vast skip below. ‘We use this to manufacture chipboard,’ he yelled. ‘The sawdust is re-used also, so nothing’s wasted, all recycled.’
I stared at the jostling blur. Repetitive movements snare me. As a child, I would happily watch the washing machine for an entire cycle.
‘So you said you knew who exposed the corruption?’ I yelled at him when we had climbed back down to the bottom.
He didn’t answer directly. ‘I showed the police something important here, but they didn’t take it seriously.’ His brow was beaded with sweat. He pulled off his mask and wiped it with his hand, leaving a smear of wood powder. ‘Messy place.’ Still no smile. ‘Come with me.’
I followed him round the base of the machine to the side nearest the wall, where he pointed to what appeared to be a small, blurred hand-print low down on one side of its steel flank. You had to bend down to see it properly. ‘Evidence.’
‘Of what?’ I asked. But he just shook his head and fiddled with his piece of wood. Perhaps I had misheard him. ‘Mr Chen, Mr Chen, Mr Chen! What are you saying?’ I shouted.
‘It means they come here to wreck things. They hate us! They hate everything we do!’ He seemed agitated.
‘Who do you mean?’ My throat was drying up from the wood dust.
‘The ones that made this mark. The ones you are looking for!’
‘Campaigners?’
‘No! Not campaigners. Just very desperate and naïve people.’
This was making no sense to me. ‘What did the police say?’ I yelled.
‘They say it’s nothing. Just a hand-mark. Can’t get finger-prints.’
This didn’t surprise me: I could picture the detective dismissing it, and see why he called Sunny Chen an ‘oddball’ and made the international madness gesture. What Sunny showed me was nothing more than a crude smear with a bit of wood dust on it, as if someone had slammed a dirty hand against the machine’s steel side.
‘They say the CCTV doesn’t show who made it.’ He pointed to the overhead security camera. This didn’t surprise me either. It might have been there for weeks, and those images are typically on a three-day recycling loop. ‘But it is important, Mr Lock!’
Everything has an explanation. It’s just a question of identifying and deploying the right analytical template. The frustration I felt was with myself.
‘Is it a message?’
‘Maybe. Yes. Yes, a message.’
‘So what’s it saying, this message?’
He shook his head and said, ‘I don’t know. You just need to note this down for doing your job right, OK? I say the same thing to police.’
‘But what do you think it means?’ I persisted.
He shook his head. ‘It’s bad. Like a warning. Like a stop sign. I am telling you, it’s evidence!’
I don’t know much about unbalanced minds, but I do know the importance of meticulousness. I hadn’t travelled all this way to miss something. If Sunny Chen said it was evidence then I’d treat it accordingly. I took out my camera and photographed the little smear of filth on the wall. Since it was only three feet or so from floor level, I had to crouch down to get a decent angle on it. If it was a hand-mark, whoever had made it was very short, or had assumed an odd posture.
‘I’ll take a sample too,’ I called to him, and he nodded vigorously. I scraped some of it off and folded it into some origami paper for analysis. It was crystalline and coarse. A brown close to Cinnamon Stick with a few darker grains. It looked like mud and salt, with traces of fibre. I sniffed it and noted a faint vegetable smell with a touch of iron to it.
When we’d disposed of our protective gear and come outside, the sky was darkening and grumbling with thunder. We walked to the main road where Sunny Chen flagged down a taxi. As we drove, flashes of sheet lightning began to scald the sky. The restaurant was in a square at the edge of a public park: we reached it just as the rain began to fall. Huge, swollen drops, silted with fine grit, hammering the formal flowerbeds. Picnickers, roller-bladers and children with kites rushed in all directions across the concrete prairie. I like to be in countries where everyone has black hair. The running people resembled
matches being scattered by a giant hand. Sunny Chen whipped out an umbrella and beneath its shelter we sprinted towards the nearby park and up some steps into a garish, soy-smelling place with Funfair Crimson tablecloths and matching napkins. The wind coming in from the open balconies set the lanterns overhead gyrating: I had to tear my eyes away from their spin. Sunny ordered for both of us and we sat contemplating the antics of the sky outside, lavishly lit one moment, and dark the next, the deluge lending everything a neon brashness. The greens of the foliage seemed to vibrate.
As we waited for the food, Sunny Chen’s mood shifted. His eyes roamed the restaurant, as though he was expecting someone to appear. At one point he reached for the salt dish, took a pinch of crystals and put it on the end of his tongue. This struck me as strange, and I speculated it was due to a residual nervousness. To reconnect to him, I asked him a few questions in Mandarin which he answered patiently, using simple phrases I could understand. I learned that he had a wife who was a teacher, and three daughters, two still at school and one at university. When he asked about my own domestic arrangement, I told him I had recently split up with Kaitlin (for simplicity’s sake I called her ‘my wife’) and I now lived alone. I told him about Freddy, that I collected foreign-language dictionaries and paint-colour charts (here I used the translation app on my phone) and made origami. At this latter news his eyebrows shot up. People have trouble believing someone big can do something delicate.
