by Jake Needham
“And they want you find it.”
“Which is why I’m asking about Eddie Lo. I don’t need to know about the companies he controls or the deals he’s made. That’s all public. I need to hear the gossip, the part of the story that’s not public.”
Uncle Benny pursed his lips and thought that over.
I was pretty sure Benny would tell me what he knew about Eddie, at least some of it. Young upstarts who threw money around and got their faces on the covers of society magazines seldom had many friends among the old guard like Benny. Scrimping, saving, and keeping a low profile was who they were. Still, when you’re dealing with Uncle Benny, nothing ever comes easy, so I was guessing he would make me work for it.
But for the second time in our short conversation, I quickly realized how wrong I was.
Benny simply leaned back, folded his arms, and started talking.
“Eddie Lo is arrogant shit. Full of himself. No respect.”
Uncle Benny gave me a hard stare to make certain I appreciated what he was saying, and I nodded.
“There is way to do things. There is way not to do things. Chinese people must respect tradition!”
I arranged my features into a sympathetic look and nodded again.
“Nobody know Eddie Lo, then suddenly Eddie Lo is big man. He buying property. He investing in racehorses. He taking over whole companies. Like that. Nobody know Eddie Lo. Then everybody know Eddie Lo.” Benny snorted. “He buy red Ferrari. There no place in Hong Kong can drive faster than can walk. Who want red Ferrari in Hong Kong? Nobody but loudmouth fool.”
“There must be stories about where Eddie’s money came from.”
“Always stories.”
“Such as?”
Benny hesitated, and then offered up a half shrug. “Some say Eddie investing for triads.”
“Is that what you say?”
“I think no.”
“Then where was his money coming from?”
“I figured he laundering bribe money from people in China government.”
“There couldn’t be that much bribe money floating around.”
Benny snorted. “More than you can imagine.”
The door to Benny’s office suddenly opened and the Chinese man in the white nylon shirt walked in and dumped another pile of gray ledger books on the desk. He ignored me and bent toward Benny, muttering in Cantonese. He kept his voice low so I wouldn’t hear what he was saying, but it wouldn’t have mattered if he had shouted to Benny from the other side of the room. I didn’t understand a word of Cantonese.
Benny nodded a couple of times and waved the man away. After the door closed again, Benny opened the ledger on the top of the stack the man had delivered and ran his finger slowly down a column of figures. Abruptly, his finger stopped moving. He frowned and pulled a wooden abacus toward him. It was an open rectangle of dark bamboo with perhaps a dozen metal dowels running from one side to the other, each of which held a stack of even darker beads stained from the oil of no doubt hundreds of fingers reaching back for generations.
I knew what an abacus was, of course, but I had no idea how to use one nor did any other westerner I had ever met. The Chinese had used them to do mathematical calculations for thousands of years, going back to before there was a written numerical system. It seemed unbelievable to me that abacuses were still in use in an age of microchips and smartphones, but they were in Hong Kong.
“You ought to get yourself a computer, Uncle Benny.”
Benny didn’t even bother looking up at me. He snapped beads up and down the metal dowels while glancing back and forth between the abacus and the ledger and occasionally muttering to himself. There was something Zen-like about the rhythmic clicking.
“You got computer, smart guy?” Benny eventually asked, but he kept his eyes dancing between the ledger and the abacus.
“Sure. I’ve got several.”
“Good for you. And who you think make more money? You and your computers, or me and my abacus?”
Benny had me there.
I WAITED PATIENTLY until the clicking stopped and Benny closed the ledger. When he pushed the abacus away, I picked up our conversation more or less where we had left off.
“So you think Eddie Lo has been laundering bribe money from China?”
“Maybe,” Benny shrugged. “Maybe not.”
“But you’re sure the funds he’s investing aren’t legitimate investment funds?”
“Somebody would give that fool money to invest?” Benny snorted again. “Bullshit.”
“Do you know anything about how Eddie Lo has structured these investments he made? How his companies are organized, what company owns what?”
Benny gave me a tight shake of his head, but said nothing.
“Do you know anybody who does know? Somebody who dislikes Eddie enough to tell me?”
I expected another headshake, but Benny just sat and looked at me.
“You do, don’t you?”
Benny’s eyes drifted away and he reached out with his left hand and played with beads on the abacus, sliding them slowly up and down on the metal dowels. He was thinking about what to tell me. I sat quietly and let him decide.
“I hear stories,” he said after a few moments.
“Stories?”
“Eddie hire computer guy to set up systems for him. Then he cheat computer guy out of money he promise and computer guy fuck him.”
“Do you know how this computer guy fucked Eddie?”
Benny looked back at me and raised his eyebrows. “I hear he make copies of all kinds of shit and tell Eddie he put it on internet unless he get paid.”
“Copies of what?”
“Accounts, company records. Like that.”
“And did he get paid?”
“Don’t know,” Benny shrugged. “He disappear. Maybe in the wind. Maybe dead.”
“Dead? Are you saying that Eddie Lo has enough juice to make people dead?”
Benny just looked at me.
“Shit,” I said.
Benny nodded.
“Shit,” I said again.
Benny shrugged. “But I think no dead. I think hiding. I hear 14K looking for him.”
14K was one of the two largest and most powerful triads in Hong Kong. Trafficking heroin from Southeast Asia was their primary business and that generated most of their income, but they had tens of thousands of members worldwide and were also involved in gambling, loan sharking, money laundering, murder, arms trafficking, prostitution, human smuggling, extortion, counterfeiting and home invasion robberies. I didn’t mess with the 14K, and I didn’t know any white guys who did.
“Are you saying Eddie Lo is connected to the 14K?”
“Eddie Lo not triad. He Malaysian, not real Chinese,” Benny snorted. “He hire 14K to find this computer guy.”
I thought about that a moment.
“Are you real Chinese, Uncle Benny?”
“You know I not triad.”
“But you have friends who are.”
Benny said nothing.
“And I’ll bet, if you want to, you can find out what 14K knows about the computer guy before they tell Eddie Lo anything.”
Benny still said nothing.
“How about it, Uncle Benny? Will you tap your contacts for me and see if 14K knows where this guy is?”
“Why I do that?”
“To help out a friend?”
“We not friends.”
“We will be if you help me find this guy.”
Benny just looked at me, his face as flat as a dinner plate.
“You’re killing me here, Uncle Benny.”
Benny looked at me some more, but he still didn’t say anything.
“Then how about this?” I said. “If I can find this guy before Eddie does, and if he has the dirt on Eddie and gives it to me, I’ll expose Eddie Lo as a thief and a fraud and I’ll ruin his life.”
The muscles around Benny’s mouth began to twitch again. I was pretty sure now. It really was a smile.
I nodded.
“Okay,” Benny said. “Now we talking. I make some calls.”
FIVE
A WARM MIST was falling when I emerged from Central Station onto Des Voeux Road.
I ducked under the orange awning of a Hermès boutique and cast a wary eye at the sidewalks filled with Chinese slamming the canopies of their umbrellas into each other. Even if I were willing to plunge into the raw urban combat that walking in the rain in Hong Kong entails, I didn’t have an umbrella with me. I would be defenseless.
I glanced at my watch. Five-thirty. Too early for dinner, but not a bad time to settle down at a nearby bar until the rain stopped. Jimmy’s Kitchen was only a few minutes’ walk away at the bottom of Wyndham Street, and I could even avoid most of the rain by cutting through Wheelock House and those other two buildings connected to it whose names I could never quite remember. After that, I just had to duck across Queen’s Road, trot fifty feet up Wyndham Street, and I’d be pulling out a stool and waving at the bartender to bring me a martini.
What an absolutely wonderful idea.
JIMMY’S KITCHEN IS all dark wood paneling, wall sconces with red cloth shades, elderly waiters in black wearing long white aprons, and booths that are either tufted red leather or pretty good vinyl imitations. It’s old-time Hong Kong, at least as seen through the eyes of Hong Kong’s British expatriates, and it is unquestionably the last place on earth that offers both Beef Wellington and Baked Alaska on the same menu. I like Jimmy’s for three reasons. The food is pretty good; the prices are quite reasonable; and I’m generally the youngest person in the place.
The bar was quiet, and I took a stool around on the end from which I had a clear view of the front door. Whether it made any difference or not, and it never actually did, I didn’t like sitting anywhere with my back to the door. I’ve heard it said that Billy the Kid, the legendary gunfighter, always refused to sit with his back to the door. Then one day he did, and someone came through the door and shot him. Whether the story was true or not, I’d never quite forgotten that lesson it contained.
The bartender at Jimmy’s is a short, thick-bodied Chinese guy of indeterminate age who is baldheaded and wears oversized glasses with heavy black frames. His name is Dingbang. Really, it is. As you might imagine, the temptation to call him Dingbat nearly overwhelms me, but he’s one of the few decent bartenders in Hong Kong and I really don’t want to piss him off.
Without saying a word or otherwise expressly acknowledging my presence, Dingbang filled a martini glass with chipped ice, sloshed the ice around quickly, then dumped it out and positioned the empty glass in front of me. He then produced a silver shaker from underneath the bar, filled it with more chipped ice, poured in a generous measure of Hendricks gin, and added about half a teaspoon of dry vermouth. Dingbang lifted the shaker in both hands, blended the martini with a half-dozen economical snaps of his wrists, and strained it into my glass. He added a spiral of lemon rind so perfectly whittled it looked like some kid’s science project, gave a single crisp bob with his head as if to acknowledge the perfection of his own performance, and walked away to the other end of the bar without ever having spoken a word to me.
“Who was that masked man?” I muttered under my breath, feeling really old even as the phrase crossed my lips.
Dingbang’s production was worthy of a standing ovation, but the effort would have been lost on him so I didn’t bother. Instead, I sat quietly on my barstool, sipped at my martini, and mulled over what I had learned, and had not learned, from Uncle Benny.
My first thought, of course, was that Uncle Benny knew more than he was telling me, probably a lot more. Still, I had to keep in mind that I was just a gwailo. Sometimes it amazed me that Benny told me anything at all.
White guy lawyers are in a strange position in Hong Kong. It isn’t a matter of the Chinese not having any respect for us. On the contrary, they have a ton of respect for us. That’s why there are so many of us here. As far as the Chinese are concerned, white guys are the gold Rolexes of the legal world. The way a Chinese businessman signals he’s a player in international commercial circles is by the number of white-guy lawyers he has on retainer.
But that doesn’t mean they trust us. Not by a long shot. After all, we aren’t family. We aren’t even Chinese. We’re… well, we’re white guys.
Americans and Europeans are uncomfortable dealing with cultures that define themselves by race. After all, haven’t we spent a couple of generations in America banging the drum for the idea race doesn’t matter? Do not judge a man by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character. Martin Luther King said something like that, and ever since then Americans have been reverentially quoting the sentiment whether we live it or not.
So what to do then when we have to deal with a culture like the Chinese in which the first thing that matters, frequently the only thing that matters, is your race? At first, most Americans generally take the same tack: we pretend not to notice. After all, we’re guests in Hong Kong, aren’t we? Noticing our hosts’ racism, let alone commenting on it, would be a bit rude, wouldn’t it? Better to pretend we don’t notice and then we don’t have to respond. It’s rather like being a guest in somebody’s home when they fart. What do you do? You pretend you don’t hear it, of course. Even when it isn’t just a little squeak, but a really spectacular foghorn of a fart, you still pretend you don’t hear it.
The older hands in Hong Kong, and I now counted myself in that circle, had a different way of dealing with Chinese ideas about their racial superiority. We don’t pretend not to notice. We take it straight on. We get in their face and we stay in their face until they cut that shit out.
Does that work? Not often, but it’s still fun, and it’s a hell of a lot better than looking at our shoes in embarrassment.
With Benny, I generally tried to take something of a middle road. I gave him a pass on the little farts, but the really big blasts got my back up and I let it show. That tactic seemed to have won me a degree of grudging respect from Benny. I still wasn’t Chinese, of course, and that was always going to be the final card in every game, but he cut me a little slack in the early rounds.
I might still be only a gwailo, but I was a gwailo Uncle Benny had decided he could do business with. At least sometimes. And that was about the most I could ever hope for in Hong Kong.
So was Uncle Benny going to help me? Maybe he would come through with something, and maybe he wouldn’t. If he did, it wouldn’t be as a favor to me. It would be because there was something in it for him.
Perhaps he would just see it as his chance to stick it to Eddie Lo like he said he wanted to. But he could have another motive, one I wouldn’t have a hope in hell of finding out about, or understanding even if I did find out about it.
I was a white guy in a Chinese city. Understanding almost nothing that was happening around me went with the territory. I thought of the experience as a lot like downhill skiing. You could deal with it rationally only to a certain point, and that certain point was when you pushed off and the tips of your skis turned downhill. After that, all you could do was try to stay on your feet and somehow avoid busting your ass until it was all over. Being a white guy in Hong Kong was exactly like that.
The more I thought about what Uncle Benny told me, the more certain I became that there was only one sensible thing for me to do.
So I raised my hand and waved at Dingbang to bring me another martini.
SIX
BACK IN THE 1990s, in an imaginative and somewhat quirky effort to ease Hong Kong’s chronic traffic congestion, somebody proposed building a half-mile long outdoor escalator down the hillside on Hong Kong Island. I’ve always admired the guy who first came up with the idea, whoever he was. Can you imagine the mockery that must have initially greeted his suggestion? Still, he persevered, and eventually Hong Kong actually built the damned thing.
The escalator begins at a point on the hillside in a d
istrict unimaginatively named the Mid-Levels, descends right through the heart of trendy SoHo, and ends in Central a few hundred yards from the harbor. It isn’t really a single, long escalator, but rather a ladder of about twenty separate escalators all joined together by walkways and moving belts and covered by a narrow glass roof that casts most of its length in cooling shadows. In the mornings when people are going to work, the whole Rube Goldberg contraption runs downhill. Then, later in the day, it reverses and runs uphill to carry them home again.
I absolutely love riding the silly-looking thing. Instead of jostling through the crowds that pack Hong Kong’s narrow streets, I can stand quietly and contemplate my surroundings while I am towed at a stately pace right through the heart of the bedlam. The Mid-Levels escalator is nothing less than a Disneyland ride through the mayhem of Hong Kong. All it needs to complete the effect is a loudspeaker blaring It’s a Small, Small, Small, Small World. Fortunately, there isn't one.
My borrowed apartment is in the Mid-Levels only a short walk from where the escalator begins, and my office is on Hollywood Road about two-thirds of the way down to the harbor. I commute to work by escalator. How cool is that?
It was Tuesday morning, the day after my excursion to Mongkok to see Uncle Benny, and the ride down the Mid-Levels escalator to work was even more entertaining than usual. When I got on at the uphill terminus, two well-dressed young women who appeared to be on their way to work stepped on right in front of me. One was short with a pleasant face and a warm smile, but the other was absolutely spectacular: tall and slim with impossibly big eyes and straight black hair that fell to her waist. Both wore skirts that stopped about three inches above their quite nice knees and I felt a momentary twinge of regret that we were all going downhill rather than up.
I left the escalator at Hollywood Road and watched a bit sadly as they both continued on without me. I gave them a friendly little goodbye wave, but neither seemed to notice. That hurt. Boy, that hurt. And up until then I thought we were getting along so well.
Ducking into the Pacific Coffee Company, I grabbed a coffee and a cherry Danish to go and strolled up Hollywood Road toward my office. I worked there alone as I lived alone, although occasionally I did think about hiring a secretary. It would have been handy to have someone to do a little filing or bookkeeping now and then, and I figured I could use the company, too, but somehow I just never got around to finding anyone.
