The Devil to Pay

by Harold Robbins

  What I immediately discovered walking down the street was that the younger Chinese generation had adopted Western culture in a big way but added a big dose of Shanghai-ness to it.

  I stepped inside a disco just down the street from the hotel. The dancers dressed pretty much like they did in Seattle or New York discos, the music was similar, but the atmosphere was different. It wasn’t just the color of skin; there were plenty of people of Chinese ancestry in San Francisco and Seattle, even some just off the boat, but a disco in Chinatown there was just like a disco in other parts of town. A disco in Shanghai was an East Asian experience, because the music, drinks, clothes, hairstyles, and of course the verbal noise had a slightly exotic flavor.

  What wasn’t different was blaring music that could knock down ordinary walls, and the tariff wasn’t cheap. The place catered to the city’s middle-management yuppies, which told me that there was some real money in the city, besides whatever the old commies hid in their mattresses.

  There were also high-priced sex joints popular with male yuppies and the foreign crowd. The most popular were “bathhouses” in which a man could have a spa, a meal, maybe some karaoke or billiards, and a “date” with a pretty woman. That was traditional Shanghai, with a few modern amenities.

  As I wandered down the street and popped my head in bars and restaurants, shaking my head at inquiring glances from doormen and come-ons from men, the secret of selling coffee to Shanghai suddenly struck me.

  36

  After a restful twelve hours of sleep, the next morning I called the telephone number I had been given for Mr. Feng’s office. The report I had commissioned on Mr. Feng said he spoke English, but I fell into the Anglo-American mental trap of believing that everyone speaks English. What I soon discovered was that the person who answered the phone at Mr. Feng’s office didn’t understand a word I said.

  Through a series of phone calls between the hotel concierge, who was a woman, and Mr. Feng’s office, I managed to get an appointment. Mr. Feng’s intermediary had demanded to know the exact nature of the business I wanted to discuss with her boss. I had the concierge tell her the simple truth—I had come to show him a product that would increase sales at his tea shops.

  From the concierge, I learned that the tea shops were in high-end areas—major skyscrapers and expensive shopping areas.

  She offered to hire a car with driver and an interpreter to accompany me and I requested them for the next day. Today I wanted to pick up the flavor and tempo of the city—and Mr. Feng’s tea shops.

  She gave me directions to the nearest one, a shop in a high-rise that I could visit on my way to Feng’s office.

  My contact in Seattle had said that Mr. Feng was known to be associated with a tong with branches in San Francisco and Honolulu. I wasn’t exactly sure what a tong was. I asked the concierge.

  She shook her head. “I believe tongs are beneficial organizations of Chinese businessmen mostly. They occur in America, but they may have members in China, too. I really don’t know much about them. They are old-fashioned, something that was around before our People’s Republic. I don’t believe they are legal now, at least not in China.”

  “I seem to recall that in the past some tongs were associated with crime, importing opium into the States, stuff like that. Isn’t that kind of what triads do?”

  “I’m sorry, I’m not familiar with that term, either.”

  I didn’t know if she was being evasive or if “triad” was an English word and the Chinese had a different word for the gangs.

  “We call them triads,” I said, “but you may call them something else. Gangs, organizations of criminals to run rackets, drugs, prostitution, smuggling, mafia, that sort of thing.”

  “Yes, we did have such gangs in the past, but our leaders have rid society of such social evils.”

  I didn’t want to mention that she had a couple of those social evils upstairs in a room just down the hall from me, not to mention the gang members who drove us in from the airport. I thanked and tipped the concierge, and was about to walk away but thought I ’d try another question on her.

  “Who is the Master of the Mountain?”

  The concierge reacted as if I had slapped her. She looked around anxiously to see if anyone had heard my comment.

  “Where did you hear that expression?”

  “From a friend. What does it mean?”

  “It’s from the old days; the big boss of each triad was called the Master of the Mountain. He was given that name because meetings were held outside of town, usually on a hillside where they were able to keep watch for police or attacks from other gangs.”

  “Do they still have triads in Shanghai?”

  “Of course not. I told you, the government has forbidden them.”

  Sure, just like the American, Italian, and Russian governments have forbidden the mafia. And the Colombians have outlawed the cartels.

  Just as she had first claimed ignorance of the word “triad.”

  Before I left the hotel, I took my one large piece of luggage down to the bellman on duty and checked it in. It contained my coffee samples and grinder. It was too big to haul with me and I wanted it on the bottom floor readily available in case I had to rush back to grab more samples.

  I had already ground several pounds, including one I took with me in my shoulder bag. Also inside the bag was a two-cup coffeemaker. I figured water and cups would be found on all business premises, considering how much tea got consumed in the country.

  * * *

  I STEPPED OUTSIDE the hotel and paused for a cab. As I waited for a VW Bug taxi to pull up to the curb, I noticed a man about fifty feet away reading a newspaper. I pretended not to look at him but was struck by the fact that he bore a superficial resemblance to a guy I had dated a few times in Seattle.

  Joey Chin was his name, and he was a stud. I met him at a disco. He was a great dancer, and had even greater moves in bed—the only problem with him was that after he gained carnal knowledge of me, I found out he had a wife and two kids, a small detail he forgot to mention.

  The building where Mr. Feng had one of his tea shops was located a few blocks down the street. With sign language, I got the taxi driver to understand that he was to wait for me when I went in to check the shop.

  Located on the first floor, it had a counter where tea was served, a little standup counter space along two sidewalls for people to stand and drink their tea, and some small round merchandise display tables. It reminded me of a coffee bar in Italy. The shop was wedged between a shop that sold newspapers and one that sold bowls of noodles.

  Mr. Feng owned eighty of these tea shops, all located in business and tourist locations.

  It wouldn’t take much to add coffee to the menus. Better yet, to stop selling tea and start selling coffee.

  Like tea, making and serving coffee did not take up a great deal of space. Basically little more was needed than a back counter where coffee drinks and add-ons were prepared and a small front counter to pass purchases to the customers.

  When I came back out and got into the taxi, a man came out of the same building and jumped into a car a few feet back from the taxi.

  I forced myself not to do a double take but keep looking straight ahead.

  Okay, I could buy the fact that the man who looked like Joey Chin was staying at or near the same hotel as me. And that he had a very brief appointment, the same amount of time it took me to check out the tea bar, at the same building I did.

  Coincidences happen.

  But chance stopped and design became apparent when he followed me to another destination down the street.

  I didn’t know who was behind me or what to do. Stay calm; you’re being followed. That much I knew. Was it someone sent by the Master of the Mountain? I doubted it. After seeing triad gangsters in Hong Kong and Shanghai, I knew that the man didn’t fit the mode—the gangsters went for black suits, colored shirts, slick hair, and carried arrogant mannerisms.

  This guy faded into
the woodwork, an office type more likely to pull out a pen than a machine gun. I wouldn’t have even noticed him if he didn’t look a little like Joey the Rat. His white shirt, black tie, conservative brown business suit which looked plain and inexpensive, reminded me of the wrinkled polyester suit worn by the Seattle cop who wanted to lock me away.

  That was it. A police officer. That’s what he had to be. The only other possibility was that he was hired by the tea-growing industry of China to keep out a coffee invasion from Colombia—and that theory didn’t fly.

  Why would I be followed by the police?

  Why not? I came to the city with a woman who had organized crime contacts from Asia to South America.

  What had she gotten me into?

  I reminded myself that I had brought nothing into the country except a couple changes of clothes, and a suitcase full of coffee. Whatever was going on, it had to be that I was the subject of police surveillance just because I had traveled with Lily.

  I hoped.

  We stopped at another building and I popped in to look over the tea shop. It was a duplicate of the last one. My shadow in the car to the rear didn’t follow me inside. He must have figured that I was only doing a quick look-see like the last place. But he did follow me to my ultimate destination.

  Mr. Feng’s office was located in a warehouse at a dock along the river. The car shadowing me went by slowly as I got out and walked into the warehouse, resisting the temptation to challenge them with a look.

  Even though the tea shops I’d seen were modern, the warehouse had the look of something from the last century. Sacks of tea had that Chinese logogram script that looks so mysterious—and incomprehensible—to Western eyes painted on the bags. Sweet and pungent tea aromas filled the air.

  I loved the elegant enigmatic look of Chinese writing. European-based languages were based upon the “sound” of words, using the letters of the alphabet to create words. Words with similar sounds usually shared some similarity in spelling. My guidebooks said Chinese writing was based upon how a “character” is drawn, a character being a combination of what appeared to my untrained eye as slash marks. Each character represented a word or thought, and because the characters were not based upon sound, two words sounding exactly the same did not have a similarity in spelling. That meant you had to do a lot of memorizing. Lily told me that to be literate, one had to learn the meaning of at least two thousand characters, and to be considered educated, you needed to know about four thousand. Westerners only had to learn their ABCs and a bunch of rules for using the twenty-six or so letters.

  Inside the warehouse, I introduced myself in English to a clerical worker at a front desk, who replied in Chinese—but she got the idea. There couldn’t be that many American women visiting each day. She disappeared for a moment and came back to indicate I was to follow her.

  As I came into his office, Mr. Feng stood up before an old-fashioned rolltop desk. He was short, pudgy, had a round face with several moles, and a large, unruly mop of hair that was pure black, with not a strand of gray in it. He wore a gray three-piece suit of good wool made many years before.

  He struck me immediately as not just a conservative businessman but a traditional one. He and his cluttered office would not have looked out of place in Victorian times. I could see him as the head of the traditional tea company but had a hard time envisioning him as the head of modern tea shops, much less a place that I anticipated would soon be selling sugar-free decaf lattes with low-fat milk and an extra shot of espresso.

  The report I’d obtained about the potential coffee marketeers recommended I have business cards made up, English on one side, the reverse side incorporating as much Chinese script as possible. Lily had done the translating for the Colombian printer. The report also suggested bringing a small gift to the meeting, nothing ostentatious—unless a bribe was needed.

  I brought a coffeemaker to brew a sample of the coffee. When I left, I would leave the coffeemaker and two pounds of coffee with Mr. Feng.

  He stood up and bowed. I handed him my business card, extending it with both hands, Chinese script up, as the report advised.

  He extended his card the same way, except with the English-language side up. He indicated a wood chair that faced his.

  “Please be seated, Miss Novak.” His English was excellent, with just a slight accent. He did not offer to shake hands. He did offer tea.

  “Actually, I was going to offer you coffee,” I said.

  He raised his eyebrows. “Doesn’t it need to be brewed?”

  I pulled the coffeemaker out of the bag. “If you can provide a little water and two cups, plus an electrical outlet, I would be happy to quickly brew a pot.”

  In the States, I might have been shown the door, but the Chinese are much more tolerant and civilized. I had coffee brewing in no time.

  As it gurgled—with modern coffeemakers, coffee no longer perks—we exchanged pleasantries. I decided to be perfectly honest—stopping short of telling him I was a fugitive from American justice, rubbing shoulders with triad gangsters, and had lately been associating with the world’s most notorious drug trafficker, all the while having a murder charge hanging over my own head.

  I didn’t know all the rules and etiquette for doing business in the city, but with the police on my tail, I decided to jump right in, because on my way over I had already decided after I left Mr. Feng I’d stop just long enough at the hotel to collect my carry-on bag and passport and my next stop was going to be the airport.

  The fact that I knew I was being followed had spooked me. Combined with Lily’s remark about meeting the Master of the Mountain, being followed by the police was exceptionally ominous, especially in a country where I suspected the justice system had yet to adopt the theory and practice of “due process.”

  I was certain the police were following me, but I was puzzled. I could understand triad gangsters following me. Whatever Lily, her “father,” Cesar, Don Pablo, and the rest of the cartel were up to, it probably involved profits of crime, and as was sharply pointed out by three gunmen in Hong Kong, the gangs were competitive. But the police were a different matter—I personally hadn’t done anything criminal. At least not that I knew.

  It was time to cut and run, another retreat burning bridges behind me, making sure there were no bread crumbs to follow.

  We kept up the pleasantries, without discussing business, until I poured coffee for each of us. As we sipped the fresh brew, I said, “I have come here to persuade you to sell coffee.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “You Americans are so impulsive. And move so quickly. I’m afraid that I am a product of an ancient culture that moves at a more leisurely pace.”

  “I know, I’m here out of the blue, but I have an urgent need. It’s inevitable that a great deal of money is going to be made off of coffee in Shanghai in the near future, and throughout China in the long term, and I want to be a part of it.”

  “I wish you good luck in obtaining your fortune. Many foreigners are coming to Shanghai to get rich. It reminds me of what I have read about gold rushes and oil booms. This week I have been contacted by a German company that wants to sell me a computer, an American company that wants to sell me a program to use in the computer, a Swiss company that says they can make my inventory control work a thousand times better…” He raised his hands. “I bought none of their products. I am in the tea business, a business that my father and his father were in before me. As you Americans say, it would take much for this old dog to learn a new trick.”

  “Not as much as you might suspect. Your warehouse is already set up to handle and store coffee, because it’s packed and handled the same as tea. Your shops just need to devote a little counter space to coffee and some training to learn to brew coffee drinks. Until the operation is going well, we can roast the beans before shipping them. It is not a complex operation, because it fits comfortably in the business organization you already have. Coffee and tea are not adverse; they complement each other.”
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  “You are not the first person to come here and offer me coffee products. A man recently offered weasel coffee from Vietnam. He says that it is made from coffee excreted from weasels. They also offer a variety processed through cats. These exotic drinks sell for a great deal of money.”

  I knew the process, disgusting as it was. Feed the animals coffee beans and sell the excrement as coffee. People would pay a fortune for the stuff. Especially traditional Chinese who believed in a wide range of herbal remedies. I’d heard of people paying ten thousand dollars for a bite of tiger liver.

  “Coffee made from cat and rat shit?” I asked. “That may work with old people who believe a tiger’s liver is an aphrodisiac, but they’re not the ones who will pay several dollars for a cup of designer coffee.”

  “I have been offered coffee from Vietnam that sells for half of what your Colombian coffee sells for—and with a fraction of the transportation costs.”

  “People in Shanghai aren’t going to pay good money for coffee from Vietnam. Besides the fact your country and the Vietnamese have been enemies for a couple thousand years, the upward, financially mobile people in Shanghai want products from the West, not Vietnam. And they want the best. If you are going to use inferior Robusta beans, you might as well just save the money and put dirt in the coffee cups; it would be even cheaper and tastes about the same. Coffee means Colombian. Our shade-grown, organic, mild Colombian Arabica is the finest coffee on the planet.”

  “But does it fit the taste buds of a nation of tea drinkers is a more serious question.”

  “People keep saying that tea is East and coffee is West,” I said.

  He nodded. “Exactly. We are a nation of tea drinkers. Coffee is foreign to our palate. And that is why you will not find doors opening for your product. It is not just a matter of marketing, but getting people to adopt something new. As I told you, China is a very old country. We do not race to change.”