by Nick Macfie
“You own him money?”
“I owe everyone, Blue Nose.”
“Can I help?”
“Not unless you’ve got thirty thousand lying around.”
“How come you owe so much?”
“Ex-hubby took the lot, didn’t he? He borrowed it from the bank, my bank, and put it in some dodgy forestry scheme. When that fell apart, he did a runner. Left me and the baby to pay it off. So I borrowed more money. People say it’s drugs. Well it isn’t. I don’t do drugs, do I, Blue Nose? You’re lovely for offering though.” Her phone rang in her bag. “Don’t you go worrying your head about it. I have plans. Financial plans.”
I thought about my modest three acres of “recreational” woodlands on Exmoor. “Well good luck, Scout,” I said.
“You too.” She answered the phone and told the caller to hold on. “I’m going away for a bit, Blue Nose. I’m going to try my luck elsewhere.”
“Where to?”
“Not a hundred percent sure, yet. Still working on it, getting advice. I’ve got to take this call. Maybe I’ll go to Hong Kong after all. My mum says it’s the best place on Earth.”
Scout lifted her hand in a quick wave and turned away talking into the phone.
I WAS READY to leave London too. A couple of the Shrubs bureaux had hot tips on illegal casinos on their patches. Right under their noses, in fact. One was in Singapore and the other in my stomping ground of Hong Kong. Why would they have an illegal casino in Hong Kong when Macau was just an hour away by jetfoil? And Singapore had two spanking new, legitimate casinos. Anyway, I said my farewells after four weeks of solid dealing at the Silver Star. I felt I knew a lot of the tricks of the trade.
Some of the chavs were hanging around Archer Street when I left the Silver Star for the last time. They looked moody and had designs I didn’t want to even think about. I wouldn’t joke about something like this. It was worse than moody. They were solemn and angry. What were they up to, these foppishly dressed morons with the metal eyes? Something anti-social and risky as the drizzle hid the razzle-dazzle and turned to heavy rain and Soho showed itself up for what it was by day: joyless and threatening.
Stone, wearing a grey, man’s cardigan with holes in the elbows, briefed me before I left.
“We’re sending you undercover, as you know.”
“Yes. Very exciting.”
“It’s a great story. How do you feel?”
“Great. It’s an exciting story.” My mind was on a glass cabinet behind Stone containing a new bottle of Beefeater’s and expensive-looking cut-glass tumblers which were genuinely exciting. That was what was great about drinking on planes. The thin-rimmed plastic glasses. And the industrial-strength measurements thanks to an eager-to-please cabin crew. The excitement over the Beefeater’s spilled over into the story. This was often the way.
“Hadley?”
“Sorry, Harriet. It’s a great story, I agree. This is ground-breaking stuff. I’m going to be doing something investigative.”
“Yes, I believe you are.”
“Reporters these days make a living just writing about business. Worse than that. Narrow bits of business. Like chips, cars, telecoms, banks. Who gives a toss?”
“Well, we haven’t exactly given up on those sectors.”
“But they become telecoms ‘experts’ and talk to telecoms analysts and write totally boring stories about telecoms companies. What does any of it matter in the bigger scheme of things? What is a telecoms company?”
“Hadley, we do cover telecoms.”
I looked around for a fridge for the tonic. “I know, but it’s barely a word. Telecoms. And what is a telecoms analyst? Don’t talk to me about telecoms. If you had talked to someone about telecoms two hundred years ago, they would have locked you up.”
“I suppose you…”
“They would have locked you up and thrown away the key. Imagine if you had talked about telecoms three hundred years ago…” I could see which way I was steering this conversation and it was all downhill. Which wouldn’t have been so bad with a stiff G&T in my hand. “But now I get the chance to do some real journalism, to uncover a story, to go out and get the bad guys.”
Stone smiled weakly. “To go out and get the bad guys. Exactly.”
“Imagine if you had said the word telecoms in 1643…”
Stone’s phone rang. She picked it up and listened but said nothing. I could hear a man’s low murmur the other end. It sounded like individual words in a deep bass. Stone was looking at me all the time, a conspiratorial smile making her eyes shine. After about a minute, she put down the receiver.
“I’m sorry, Hadley. I don’t want to be mysterious.” She looked at me silently and I looked back, with the occasional glance at the glass cabinet. “I’m waiting for the man,” she said. “That’s what that call was about.” Another unnecessarily long pause. “Many journalists are babies.”
All I wanted was a drink. “I’m afraid I don’t understand, Harriet. Do you want me to go?”
“Most journalists buy into what people are saying as if it’s the most important thing in the world, as if it makes a difference. Cute, earnest and solemn.”
She was waiting for the man. Journalists were babies. Cute, earnest and solemn. What did she mean? Was she having a stroke? “There’s certainly no need for some TV presenters to be so earnest,” I said.
“Exactly.”
“Or solemn. Or unctuous.”
“Mmmm. I like that.”
“I… Where was I?”
“You were back in 1643, trying out the word ‘telecoms’ on a passing Roundhead.”
“Right, right. It’s a great story. I just want to say I will run with it.”
“I’m sure you will. Go to the casino. Get trained up.”
“Done that, actually.”
“Good, Hadley. You’re a good man in a tight spot. Baxter of course will be your first port of call on this. My advice is to get good at the gambling stuff. Get comfortable and good at it. Then let’s take it from there.”
The great thing about the story was the mysterious North Korean connection. At Heathrow, sitting at an expensive seafood bar with a bottle of chilled white at my elbow, I joined a teleconference with Baxter, Stone and the Shrubs bureau chiefs in Seoul and Beijing. Shrubs did not have a bureau in North Korea, a recalcitrant child of a country which starved its people and tortured and banged up in jail anyone who didn’t burst into tears every time they passed a statue of long-dead “eternal president” Kim Il-sung.
“We must not forget that there is a serious side to all this,” Baxter proclaimed. “We are not talking merely about cross-border crime, but also about poverty-stricken, isolationist, reclusive North Korea’s failure to feed its own people, its defiance of the western world by pushing ahead with its nuclear weapons programme, and China, its only major ally, refusing to rein in its neighbour. Hadley, have I missed anything out?”
The wine was a speculative Chablis. Ruminative and, like the North Koreans, showing more than just a hint of defiance. It was inquisitive and diffident at the same time. Self-effacing. A couple of degrees colder and…
“Hadley?”
It was a crime not to be allowed to drink this with a cigarette.
“I think you’re absolutely right, Rodney.” I signalled to the waiter to bring me another bottle. Laconic. It was a laconic wine. Of course it was laconic. Who ever heard of a talkative wine? On the other hand, if this wine could talk…
“Hadley?”
“And it’s a great story.”
“It’s a great story.” There were a couple more crackly affirmations that it was a great story.
“I think the North Korean involvement is key,” I said. “There is the possibility that these casinos are money-laundering operations.” A few oohs and ahs from around the world. “Yes. And that all the dirty money the North Koreans earn from drugs and nuclear-arms proliferation and prostitution is laundered through these casinos.”
“Boy,
that’s a great story.”
“It’s a great story. And there are heavy indications that one of the North Korean leader’s brothers is involved. In the laundering.”
I watched the waiter uncork the Chablis, the bottle covered in thousands of tiny blobs of condensation. Everyone around me was eating very, very slowly and just sipping their wine. The food was costing them a week’s wages and they wanted to make it last.
“How does that work, Hadley?” This was the Beijing bureau chief.
Pips and squeaks from orbiting signals bounced off satellite debris. I watched the waiter pour the wine into a fresh glass. It was like a Scottish mountain stream. Bubbles bounced off each other like the orbiting pips and squeaks. It was a fine, fine wine. I have to say here that I get distracted very easily, especially in teleconferences, even without a drink. I started thinking about the Bee Gees singing ‘Nights on Broadway’ and that serious stuff going on with the hi-hat after they come back from the slow middle bit. It’s worth waiting through the whole song just to…
“Hadley?”
“Sorry? The money laundering. You asked how it works.”
“Yes. Is this the money going into North Korea, in terms of U.S. dollars or Chinese renminbi? Or is the money coming out?”
I coughed. “Excuse me. One second.” I took a swig from the glass, closed my eyes, leant my head back slowly, concentrated on the cold at the base of the tongue and in my throat and swallowed. But for the teleconference, this would have been a sublime moment. Not very biblical, but sublime, and I would have made some sort of congratulatory noise. A long “waaah”, for instance. I made the noise anyway.
“Sorry. Went down the wrong way. How is the money laundered?”
“Yes.”
“Boy that’s a tough one. If it’s anything like the laundrettes in London, you put a week’s wages in and… and… Seriously, if I knew the answer, the CIA would want a quiet word I expect.”
Another super-quick chance for a swig. Bang down went the glass. A woman sitting opposite me at the oval seafood bar jumped up from her book and put a hand over her heart.
“It’s a great question,” I went on. “And I hope, with Seoul’s help and Beijing’s help, we can get to the bottom of this pretty soon. I suspect there are many facets. Diplomatic and criminal and cross-asset facets. And between you and me, I can’t help imagining what would happen…” I coughed again. “I can’t help imagining what would happen if you had said the words ‘money laundering’ a hundred years ago.” There was silence around the world. A few more telegraphic crackles and hums, but no one spoke. Everyone was being laconic. “I mean, imagine if you had said it two hundred years ago. Or the word ‘teleconference’, for that matter. To a passing Scottish engineer. In a cotton mill. Next to a cold stream. Having a wee snifter of a single malt.”
An insincere and automated American voice announced: “… has left the conference”, meaning that whoever it was who had hung up had had enough. The way the voice said it sounded like a prompt for applause. So I clapped. Fuck ‘em all. It’s a pity you can’t bang down a cell phone like you can a land line phone. Well you can, but you might not be able to use it again. I turned it off as viciously as I could with my thumb and put it in my pocket. I waved across at the woman with the book and smiled and turned my attention to the Chablis.
Half an hour later I badly needed something to eat on top of the caviar and salmon. I needed something filling. Preferably filling and disgusting to make me doubly happy about leaving England. There was a new fast food joint in the terminal serving English breakfasts all day. What a treat. Sodden fried bread kept warm under a spotlight, two sausages wallowing in oil, congealed bacon, shrivelled, black-edged fried eggs over uneasy, overheated baked beans, black pudding, which was black and…
“You want fresh tomatoes or tinned?”
I looked at the troughs of food through a sheet of Perspex spattered with grease, then up at the questioning face of the woman behind the aluminium ware, and back at the selection. Tomatoes fried in halves, in a greenish, watery base, or ghostly, bobbing, red jelly-fish shapes in thick, bubbling robes of blood sauce. In what other country would this be a reasonable choice? What was the matter with the English? Did this woman expect a serious answer?
“Sorry?”
“Your toms, my love. You want fresh or tinned?”
“Toms?”
“Fresh or tinned?”
Memories of school lunches overwhelmed me. I didn’t hesitate.
“Tinned.”
CHAPTER THREE
I TOOK MY FAVOURITE AIRLINE to Hong Kong, the one that insists that the stewardesses wear ball-point pens in their cleavages and that they serve gin and tonic in equal measures and come back with a refill without having to be asked. It gives multiple choices for where your life jacket is (Under you seat? Beside your seat? In the overhead locker? Seventeen rows back, next to the emergency exit, in a cupboard marked “pens for stewardesses only”?); you have to assemble your headset yourself with soft, sponge-like covers too small for the ear pieces; and the breakfast of omelette and white sausage triggers ferocious wind. I settled into a window seat with a notebook and four recently borrowed ball-point pens in front of me. I reviewed the situation.
One: I was to investigate illegal casinos, as a dealer. Undercover.
Two: I hadn’t a clue where any of these casinos were but there may be one in Hong Kong.
Three: I had a really silly fake name which may be more of a hindrance than a help.
Four: I had managed to get no specific, serious information out of anyone at the Silver Star about colleagues being whisked off to Asia and I suspected George from Bratislava was full of it.
Five: Every time I thought of Scout, my heart leapt and I smiled and she may have gone to Hong Kong. And I thought about her all the time.
There is no feeling like setting out on a big story as a wire agency reporter. It is you against the world. It is the feeling that you have been chosen above everybody else and that there are major news organisations eager for your story in a matter of hours when you may not even know what the story is. There are holes in newspapers and on websites waiting for whatever you have to say. A remarkable leap of faith. Sometimes it involves getting on an empty plane to a place everyone is trying to get out of. Air stewardesses, five to each dishevelled journalist and with a lot of time on their hands, pause with the gin and tonic to ask (not in exact words): “Everyone is flying out of (fill in the space for any one of many danger zones). Why are you flying into it, you crazy, brave fool?” My answer was always along the lines of: “I may look like some crazy fool, but someone has to go in there and tell the world what is happening.”
At this point, the air stewardess would put her hand over her mouth and give a short, high-pitched giggle. Then she would retreat, walking backwards bent double and shaking, to the galley. I struggled with the headset, making little sighs, groans and tutting noises until it was assembled, after a fashion. I flicked through the channels and stopped on Patsy Cline singing “I Fall to Pieces”. I hoped the headset wouldn’t fall to pieces. It had grown dark and started to rain. Under the wing of the Cathay Pacific plane next door, a man appeared to be telling a friend a joke. They were both wearing ear protectors and the man telling the joke was doing a lot of mime and gesticulation. If I had to guess what the joke was about, from this distance, I would say it involved an orang-utan with very fat cheeks hanging in a tree and pissing on anyone who walked underneath.
Someone tapped me on the shoulder. It was my neighbour who was getting my attention on behalf of the stewardess. I took off the headset.
“Sir, could you please open the blind in preparation for takeoff?”
I looked at the blind and turned back. “It is open.”
“A little bit more, I think.”
“You mean… you want it a little bit more open? Like this?”
“That’s it, thank you, sir.”
Off she went down the aisle, fussily checkin
g everyone’s seat-belt and making sure things were stowed in the upright position with a prim, smug turning of the head from side to side. But she had a lovely bottom which was also stowed in an upright position. I put my earphones back on and looked outside the window. The man was still gesticulating his joke. It appeared everyone the orang-utan pissed on first felt his hair, looked at his hand with a frown and then made a threatening fist to the poor orangutan in the tree above. It didn’t appear to be a very sophisticated joke, but the man listening, or watching, was pissing himself. My neighbour tapped me on the shoulder again and offered me an apologetic grimace. I turned and took off the headphones.
“What did I tell you about your window blind?” the stewardess said.
“What?”
“What did I tell you just now? About the window blind?”
“You asked me to stow it in an upright position.” I looked at the blind. It had slipped all of one inch, hardly interfering with the line of vision from the pilot’s rear-view mirror. I pushed it up again with a snap.
“Thank you,” she said.
“No, thank you,” I called after her. “However would we have got airborne?”
She stopped in her tracks and turned.
“I’m sorry, sir?”
“Nothing.”
“No, you said something.”
“Please, it was nothing. You are just doing your job.” She stared at me a while. “Soon after take-off, I will return to your seat with a large drink. What would you care for?”
“A large gin and tonic,” I said.
“Very well.”
Off she went down the aisle. Either she realised she had lost it a bit, or she liked me. I wasn’t sure myself. My phone beeped an SMS. Oh boy, quick, read it and stow the fucking phone upright somewhere before you’re really in trouble.
“You’d better stow your fucking phone somewhere before you’re really in trouble,” my neighbour said.
“I hear you man,” I said, quickly putting my earphones back on. I wasn’t going to spend a twelve-hour flight talking to some mind reader.
“Would you like to come over and learn how to build a bat box out of willow bark? The message was from Sparky , of the Small Woods and Amenities Society. Hmm. Tempting. There was a second message. “Would you like to come round to learn how to erect a fortress against the world using nothing but pine coppice and extraneous stinging nettle leaves?”
