‘Fuck you,’ Dugan told him.
‘Fuck you, too,’ said Burr. ‘Go home.’ He walked off, leaving Dugan standing by himself at the bar.
‘Time to go, Pat,’ he told himself and then headed unsteadily to the exit, bumping into one of the dinner-jacketed bouncers on the way out.
A cab pulled up in front of a young Chinese couple standing at the kerbside and Dugan grabbed at the handle, getting hold of it a fraction of a second before they did. He yanked open the door and glared drunkenly at them, daring them to argue. They moved away, embarrassed by the open show of hostility, and Dugan tumbled on to the back seat. The driver leant over and pulled the door shut. Dugan lay where he was, face down, and shouted his address in Cantonese. The driver grunted and drove off.
Howells had to stand in a queue outside the Hilton Hotel while a tall, bulky Indian with a gleaming white turban, black and yellow tunic and white breeches went down to Queen’s Road and flagged down taxis, directing them up the slip road. As he stood in line he felt faint, his head filled with the throbbing sound of his own heartbeat. He gasped for breath and rubbed his forehead with his sweating left hand. His right arm and shoulder ached horribly. His legs began to tremble and he had to lock his knees rigid to stop himself falling over. Two cabs arrived, then a third, and then thankfully it was his turn. The Indian asked, in impeccable English, where he was going, and only then did he realize that he had no idea, simply that he had to get away from the hotel before the bodies were discovered. He heard himself say ‘Wan Chai’ before he carefully got into the cab.
The Indian nodded and told the driver, and the driver grinned at him. ‘Another fucking gweilo about to get fleeced,’ he said in rapid Cantonese.
‘They never learn,’ agreed the Indian.
‘Fuck his mother,’ said the driver, slamming the car into gear and lurching back to the road. Howells groaned and kept his eyes shut.
There were certain preparations that had to be made if Dugan was to make it through the night, what was left of it. He made sure the aircon was switched on, and pulled a plastic bottle of distilled water out of the fridge and drank as much of it as he could force down before placing it next to his bed. He took a bottle of orange-flavoured Eno fruit salts and tipped a spoonful into a glass and put that down next to the water. He did it all on automatic pilot, humming quietly to himself, and then he sat down on the bed and undressed, dropping the clothes on the floor before flopping back and passing out. He’d left the light on, but he didn’t notice.
The taxi stopped outside the Washington Club and Howells fumbled with his wallet. He handed over two green notes and didn’t wait for the change. The driver grinned and used a lever under the dashboard to pull the door closed after him.
The aged doorman heaved himself off his wooden stool and opened the door for him, allowing out the pulsing beat of a Cantonese pop song. Howells caught sight of his reflection in the fish tank as he walked into the bar. He looked terrible. Big deal. He felt terrible. He felt like his shoulder had been put between the jaws of a red-hot vice and was being squeezed, hard. The bar was busy but there were a couple of empty seats side by side and he walked to one, being careful not to bump his arm. On the seat to his left was a small man in a crumpled beige suit with sweat stains under the armpits drinking Foster’s lager from a can. He raised it to Howells. ‘How’s it going, digger?’ he asked in a broad Australian accent.
‘Great,’ said Howells. The Australian had blank eyes, a film of sweat over his skin, and a stupid grin on his face. He was well gone.
Howells looked around for Amy. He missed her at first because she was standing on the opposite side of the bar with her back to him, caught between two men in dark business suits, drinking champagne. One of them had his hand on her hip, the other was looming over her, teeth bared like a vampire about to take a piece out of her neck. She laughed out loud and he thought it sounded forced. Wishful thinking, maybe.
She turned to pick up the bottle of champagne out of a battered stainless steel ice bucket and pour the last drop into her glass. She saw Howells then and instantly smiled at him, then followed it by pulling a face and nodding her head towards the man on her left. He grimaced back and she smiled again. She held her hand up, fingers splayed and mouthed ‘five minutes’. She was wearing a lemon-coloured evening dress with white frothy lace arms. Howells nodded and told the barhag in front of him that he wanted to see the wine list.
‘Huh?’ she barked at him.
‘Lager,’ he said.
She screamed the order over the top of his head at one of the waiters behind him.
‘What’s your name?’ she asked him, leaning her elbows on the bar and breathing garlic fumes into his face.
‘Fuck off,’ he said. She glanced at him and cursed in Cantonese. ‘Fuck off,’ he repeated, quietly this time, and she read the menace in his eyes. She backed away, saying nothing.
The Australian was impressed. ‘Jesus, digger, you sure know how to treat a girl.’ Howells ignored him.
He left his right hand on the bar, trying to keep the weight off his throbbing shoulder. Occasionally he lifted the glass of lager to his lips but he only sipped at it. His mouth felt dry but he knew alcohol would only dehydrate him and that would make him feel worse.
It took Amy more than fifteen minutes to drag herself away from the three-piece-suited barracudas, during which she drank two more glasses of champagne and allowed them to fondle her breasts, albeit briefly.
She stroked the back of his neck as she passed behind him, then allowed her hand to move across his right shoulder. Howells nearly screamed and he had to clamp his teeth together to keep the noise in. It felt as if she’d stuck a red-hot poker into his flesh and then twisted it round, deeper and deeper. She pulled back her hand as if he’d bit it.
‘What’s wrong?’ she said.
Howells kept his eyes closed but he could still see a red mist punctuated with flashes of bright yellow light. He waited until the waves of pain subsided before he risked opening them. He saw Amy sitting on the stool next to him, one hand covering her wall of teeth.
‘Tom, what’s the matter?’
Howells kept his voice low so that the Australian wouldn’t hear him. ‘I need your help, Amy.’ The dimpled barhag appeared next to him and demanded that he buy Amy a drink. He agreed and she walked off, a satisfied smirk on her face.
‘What do you mean?’ Amy asked.
‘Can I pay your bar fine?’ he asked urgently. ‘Can I take you out?’
‘Of course. But it is expensive. Are you sure you want to?’
‘Yes,’ he hissed, the pain returning.
‘I’ll speak to the mamasan,’ she said. She slipped off the stool in a rustle of silk and went over to a wrinkled old woman who was wearing an ill-fitting wig and an equally ill-fitting navy blue dress. She had a lousy dress sense, but Howells could see she was wearing a solid gold Rolex and he doubted that it was a fake.
The old woman looked at Howells and he felt as if he was a side of beef being weighed up by a butcher. Then she nodded and Amy smiled and came back over, her hands clasped together across her stomach.
‘Mamasan says it’s OK. How will you pay?’
Very romantic, thought Howells, but he knew it wasn’t romance he needed. It was help, a place to hide and someone who knew what they were doing to take the bullet out.
Howells gingerly took his wallet out and handed it to Amy. ‘Take out what you want,’ he said. She looked through it and pulled out a handful of notes before giving it back.
‘You stay here while I change,’ she said.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Howells. ‘I won’t run away.’
Thomas Ng couldn’t remember exactly when it had happened, but somewhere along the line he’d begun to develop a fear of flying. He could remember the time when he thought no more of making the trip from San Francisco to Hong Kong than he did of driving through the Cross Harbour Tunnel or over the Golden Gate Bridge. The first few times he’d actua
lly enjoyed the flight, relishing time to relax away from ever-ringing phones and the demands of others, time to watch a movie and catch up on some work. Then the trip became a regular chore, something that had to be done to keep the family business running, painless but boring. Not something he gave any thought to. But recently he had started to dread the flight, lying awake the night before, tossing and turning, trying wherever possible to postpone the time when he’d be sitting in an aluminium tube thousands of feet above the earth. He’d begun asking for aisle seats so that he couldn’t see the wings flexing, he’d started taking a couple of Valiums an hour or so before checking in at the airport. And whereas in the old days he’d have sipped a tonic water with his meal, now he’d put away a couple of Martinis. Or more. None of it helped; he could still feel his heart beating, the sweat beading on his forehead, the physiological symptoms of his apprehension. To make it worse, this time he’d had to fly United Airlines, all the Asian airlines had been fully booked. So instead of being waited on by the girls of Cathay Pacific he had to suffer overweight gweipors with fat arses, plastic smiles and too much make-up.
First had been full and half the plane seemed to have been given over to Business Class and the treatment he was receiving was worse than he’d ever got in Economy with Cathay or Singapore or Thai. He’d held out his jacket to a blonde with scarlet-smeared lips and over-plucked eyebrows but she just looked at him with contempt and suggested he put it in one of the overhead lockers. He’d asked for a Martini and been told he’d have to wait. He asked for headphones and was told they’d be issued after they’d taken off. Ng supposed it was to be expected with a Western airline, but he’d had no choice, he had to get to Hong Kong immediately.
One of the ways he tried to dampen his newly acquired fear of flying was to concentrate on work for as long as possible during the flight, and he sat with a Toshiba laptop computer in front of him, checking and cross-checking his accounts. At first he’d had great doubts about trusting the micro-computer with information about the family business, the drugs, the extortion, the money laundering, the dummy corporations and bank accounts that now spanned the world. He dreaded to think what would happen if it ever fell into the wrong hands. But one of his programmers had devised a foolproof security system that would immediately delete all the information it contained if the correct password was not keyed in. And at regular intervals the machine would ask questions that only Ng could know the answers to. A wrong answer, or a delay in keying in the information, would also delete the on-board memory and clear the disk. And one of the control keys had been reprogrammed so that if Ng was ever surprised while using the machine he could press it and render it useless. Ng made regular copies of the files on floppy disks which were stored in safety deposit boxes in banks in Hong Kong and San Francisco. It was an empire that Thomas Ng was proud of, one that he’d created. If it hadn’t been for him the Ng fortune would still be nothing more than money from vice, confined to Hong Kong, and with little or no future after 1997. His father had given no thought to the future other than to ensure that his three sons were well educated at overseas universities. Thomas had studied accountancy at Columbia University and had spent a year at Harvard, and he’d been keen to put his knowledge to good use. Over seemingly endless cups of insipid tea he’d managed to persuade his father that the way ahead lay overseas – overseas property, overseas investments, preparing for the day when the Communists took back Hong Kong. As far as cash flow went, Thomas had realized that it was the drugs business that was the crux of the whole operation, master-minding the export of heroin from the Golden Triangle and distributing it in Hong Kong. Without too much effort that distribution could be extended to the West Coast of America, especially in cities like San Francisco which had bent over backwards to welcome Chinese immigrants. The growth of Chinatowns also allowed the triad to expand its prostitution and extortion activities overseas, and they, too, were good revenue generators. In fact, it was the huge amounts of money generated in the United States that had led to the legitimate side of the Ng business empire.
Whereas Hong Kong banks and deposit-taking companies were quite accustomed, and happy, to handle cash, the US institutions were bound by law to report all cash transactions of over $10,000. But $10,000 didn’t buy much of the white powder, and a half-decent hooker could pull in that amount in one day.
There were a number of ways the cash could have been laundered, and in the early days Thomas Ng had simply used his triad soldiers to pay the money into various accounts in small amounts, but as the criminal empire grew that became too time-consuming. He’d had a team of twelve working throughout the day but it still wasn’t enough.
He put money, again always less than $10,000 at any one time, into tax-free bonds through a number of stockbrokers, and then once he’d amassed a sizeable mountain of cash he had the brokers transfer the balance to their bank account. The bank then cashed the bonds and passed the money through to an account in one of several tax havens the Ng family used. But before long that, too, became time-consuming and involved too many people.
Thomas Ng hit on the idea of setting up legitimate businesses with a high cash flow and pumping the dirty money into them. He started off with video rental shops, big operations with thousands of videos in stock. Nobody ever checked on how many of the videos were actually rented out, and nobody cared, but each year the carefully tended accounts of each shop processed hundreds of thousands of dollars. Then he set up a chain of quality car rental outlets, offering Porsches, Rolls-Royces and Ferraris. Nobody knew how many of the cars were actually being driven around by customers and how many were simply parked in garages. Nobody cared, but the books showed a very healthy profit curve. High class bakeries were next, shops selling overpriced speciality breads and cookies at exorbitant prices.
When Thomas set the businesses up, their main role was to act as a conduit for money pulled in from the illegal sources, but before long they were thriving in their own right. The money, legal and illegal, was funnelled through a daisy chain of companies that spanned the world, from bank accounts in Switzerland to a shell corporation in the Cayman Islands to a discretionary trust in Vanuatu, most of them little more than brass plaques on a wall. Thomas moved into property then, first buying the leases on his shops, but soon moving into hotels and residential blocks. And he’d now got to the stage where the legitimate side of the operation was on a par with the vice activities. In fact, Thomas was now giving serious consideration to pulling out of drugs and prostitution altogether. What he really wanted to do was to move into banking and financial services, maybe insurance, that was where the really big money lay – big and legal. But how to persuade his father that that was the way to go? He was a man who was devoted to tradition, to his ancestors, and to his family. A man who humoured his Number Two son by letting him run his own business in America – except that the Number Two son was now Number One son, as of eighteen hours ago.
Thomas Ng sat in the aeroplane and scanned the columns of figures on the screen in front of him, but his thoughts were miles, and years, away. His thoughts were of his older brother, the man who’d stayed behind in Hong Kong while Thomas made his way in the world with the sanctuary of a United States passport. Simon Ng, who had been unable to get US citizenship, or citizenship anywhere outside Hong Kong, because of a criminal record acquired when he was nineteen years old and Thomas had been fifteen. Simon, who’d stood in the dock in front of a gweilo magistrate and confessed to slashing an 18K Red Pole with a machete and Simon who’d paid the fine, in cash. Except that it hadn’t been older brother who’d lost his temper and pulled out the knife, it had been younger brother. And it had been younger brother who’d drawn blood and dropped the weapon and run away, and older brother who’d picked it up and been caught by the police trying to wipe off the fingerprints. Simon Ng who’d taken the blame and Thomas Ng who’d got the passport. It was a debt that Thomas had never been able to repay, and now he would not have the chance. His older brother would be ave
nged, that much Thomas Ng could promise.
Howells had nearly passed out when he bent down to get into the cab outside the Washington Club. His knees sagged and Amy had moved forward to support him; thank God she’d grabbed his left arm. She moved on to the back seat next to him.
‘Are you OK?’ she asked. Howells nodded. ‘Are you still at the Mandarin Hotel?’
Christ, she had a good memory, even he’d forgotten he’d told her he was staying there.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Look, Amy, I really do need your help. Can we go to your house?’
‘No,’ she said, shocked. ‘Of course not. You are gweilo, you cannot come to my home. What would my neighbours think? Aieee yaaa! You are crazy.’
‘I’m hurt, Amy. I’ve been shot. I can’t go back to the hotel and I can’t go to hospital.’
She looked confused, and frightened, and before he could stop her she put her hand forward and grabbed his right arm to shake him. The pain was excruciating but before he could scream he passed out, his face white. His head pitched forward and banged into her shoulder. She put her arm around him and cradled him. His right hand lay in her lap and for the first time she saw the trickle of blood crawling over his wrist. She wiped it with her handkerchief.
The driver impatiently asked her where she wanted to go.
Amy sighed and told him her address.
Dugan was having a hell of a time, flat on his back with a Filipina each side, one with a mug of warm tea, the other with a glass of cold water. They were doing terrible things to him below the waist, and the alternation between hot and cold was driving him wild, until the jangling bell of the telephone dived down into his subconscious and dragged him kicking and screaming out of his dream.
He opened his eyes a fraction and squinted at his watch. It was six o’clock in the morning. It had to be a wrong number and he was sure that when he picked up the receiver a voice would go ‘Waai?’ and then hang up. Phone etiquette was not something they went a bundle on in Hong Kong, where good manners were not one of life’s priorities. He tried burying his head under the pillow but the phone was insistent. He groaned and rolled over on to his stomach and groped for the receiver. It was Bellamy.
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