by Jake Needham
“Uncle Benny,” I said as I took the one empty stool at the table.
“Eat,” he muttered through a mouthful of food, and he gestured with his head at the green and pink plastic serving plates scattered around the table.
On one of them, large chunks of bok choy rested on a pile of yellow noodles. On another, tiny white pancakes had been wrapped around something brown I couldn’t see clearly enough to identify. And on a third, thick slices of goose were arrayed, its crispy brown skin glistening with fat. Out of the corner of my eye I glanced at the man sharing our table and saw him eating a bowl of milk-white congee with something floating in it that looked suspiciously like a chicken’s foot.
I took a pair of plastic chopsticks out of the jar in the middle of the table, picked up a blue plastic bowl with a rounded pile of white rice in it, and placed a slice of goose that looked a little less fatty than the others on top of the scoop of rice. Hong Kong people eat by holding their rice bowl in the palm of one hand, putting morsels from the table on top of the rice, and then lifting the bowl and shoveling both the food and the rice into their mouth with energetic scooping motions of their chopsticks. Perhaps it was a little indelicate, but it was efficient, and I had gotten pretty good at doing it myself.
It was too early for me to eat lunch and I wasn’t really hungry, but it would have been a profound insult to Uncle Benny for me not to eat. And Uncle Benny was the one doing the favor here. So I ate.
For a long while, Benny said nothing. He kept his eyes down and his rice bowl close to his mouth and he shoveled in food while I picked at bits of goose and wondered what I was doing there. The din of forty or fifty people all shouting at once in half a dozen different Chinese dialects, interspersed with the noise of plastic plates banging on the linoleum tables and the legs of stools scratching on the concrete floor, was hardly conducive to a quiet conversation about what Benny had learned concerning the whereabouts of Eddie Lo’s missing IT guy. If Benny was about to share with me something he had gotten from his contacts in the 14K, I couldn’t imagine he would be comfortable doing that in front of the stranger sitting at our table. Talking about the triads in public wasn’t done in Hong Kong. Talking about the triads to a round-eye really wasn’t done in Hong Kong.
Then, and certainly not for the first time, Uncle Benny surprised me.
“My friend want see you.”
If Benny hadn’t used his chopsticks to gesture toward the man sharing our table, I wouldn’t have had a clue who he was talking about.
“This is your friend?”
Uncle Benny gave a quick jerk with his head, but he said nothing.
I flicked my eyes toward our companion and examined him for the first time. The man might have been sixty, but he could as easily have been forty. He wasn’t young, but in common with most westerners I was hopeless at determining the age of a Chinese from merely looking at him. He had black hair that was on the long side and slicked back against his head with something that made it glisten in a way that reminded me uncomfortably of the fatty glaze on the goose I had just eaten. His face was round and bland, and he wore a cheap looking short-sleeved yellow shirt hanging out over a pair of rumpled brown pants. He obviously knew I was examining him, but he didn’t look up. His expressionless eyes stared into his bowl of congee and he continued to eat as if Benny and I weren’t even there.
“Are you going to introduce me?” I asked.
Uncle Benny shook his head and cut his eyes at me. I’m sure I looked a little puzzled. This wasn’t making a great deal of sense.
“What does your friend want to talk to me about?” I asked.
“He not want talk. Just see. Anyway, he not speak English.”
Uncle Benny’s English was excellent, but I noticed how it tended to deteriorate when we were speaking in front of another Chinese. Still, even on those occasions when he apparently felt the need to reaffirm his Chineseness, Benny generally made sense, at least after a fashion. This time he didn’t.
I glanced at the other man at our table again, but he continued to eat without paying the slightest attention either to Benny or to me.
“I guess I don’t understand,” I said.
Uncle Benny gave me a look of total exasperation and widened his eyes theatrically, and all at once I realized what was going on.
“Is this your contact from—”
Benny put down his rice bowl and thrust his left hand at me, palm out, like a cop stopping traffic, then he began to speak rapidly to the man sitting with us in a dialect that sounded like Hakka but might have been almost anything.
The man nodded, Uncle Benny said something else, and the man nodded again. He slurped another spoon of congee, put down his spoon, and got to his feet. Without saying a word, he threaded his way through the crowd, pushed out through the door, and disappeared into the crowds on Fa Yeun Street.
“14K?” I asked Uncle Benny.
Benny nodded slowly, threw in a half-hearted shrug, and put down his chopsticks.
“He want to see you before he let me tell you anything.”
“See me?”
“I tell him you are reliable, will not embarrass anyone, but he say he want to decide for himself.”
“But he didn’t talk to me. He didn’t ask me anything.”
“Not need to. He look at you. He read you. He satisfied.”
I understood the Chinese placed inordinate faith in direct dealings and personal judgments, but normally communication came into the process in some way. I felt like Benny had just announced a fortuneteller had read my aura, which perhaps was exactly what he was saying.
“I gather I passed inspection.”
Uncle Benny nodded. “You pass.”
“Good,” I said, although I had distinctly mixed feelings about winning the personal endorsement of a triad gangster.
“So what have you got for me?” I asked.
“I don’t know exactly where Eddie Lo’s IT guy is hiding, but I can send you to somebody who can put you in touch with him.”
“Fine.”
“You will be allowed to talk to him, but not make a recording or take any pictures.”
“Okay.”
“And you must not tell anyone where he is.”
“What’s going on here, Uncle Benny? You said 14K had been hired by Eddie to find this guy. It sounds to me more like they’ve got him stashed somewhere.”
Uncle Benny said nothing, which meant yes.
“14K has got this guy and they’ve figured out a way to use him to extort money from Eddie Lo?” I asked.
Uncle Benny again said nothing, which of course meant for a foreigner you’re not as dumb as I thought.
“I’m not sure I like—”
“Do you agree?” Uncle Benny asked.
My job was to find where Eddie Lo had stuffed the billion dollars that had been siphoned out of the Malaysian Sovereign Wealth Fund. My job was not to protect Eddie Lo’s IT guy who was trying to extort money from Eddie, much less to protect Eddie from being extorted by 14K. All of that involved intramural Chinese sports in which a round-eye had no business getting involved.
A blatant justification for doing what I wanted to do, of course, but I thought it was a pretty good one.
“I agree,” I said.
Benny nodded slowly. “There only one problem,” he said.
Of course there was. There was always one problem.
“He not in Hong Kong,” Benny said after a few moments of silence.
“He’s on the mainland?”
Benny shook his head.
“In Taiwan?”
Benny shook his head again.
“Am I supposed to keep guessing countries, Uncle Benny, or are you going to tell me where he is eventually?”
“I tell you. But you not like.”
“Why would I not—”
And suddenly, just like that, I knew what Benny was about to tell me.
“He’s in Bangkok, isn’t he?” I said.
Benny look
ed away. He nodded, slowly and a bit sadly.
This guy I was looking for was in Bangkok. Of course he was.
This guy was in bloody goddamned Bangkok.
I should have known that was coming.
WHEN I STOPPED cursing my luck and looked back at Benny, he was holding out a white business card, and I reached across the table and took it. It was the card of an accountant named Wang Chou Lee whose office was in a building on Sukhumvit Road in Bangkok.
“Contact this guy when you get to Bangkok. He is expecting you and will arrange for you to talk to Eddie Lo’s IT man.”
I wiggled the card at Benny. “This guy is 14K?”
Uncle Benny shrugged, “I not know.”
I gave Benny my best hard guy look.
“Of course he 14K,” Uncle Benny snapped. “What you think he is? A fucking Mormon missionary?”
On the way back to my office I stopped at the Tai Cheong Bakery to pick up a large black coffee and two egg tarts. I liked Chinese food well enough, but greasy goose coated with a glaze of fat didn’t hold much appeal. I guess you had to be Chinese to see the glory in food like that.
The egg tarts from Tai Cheong Bakery were another story altogether. They had been legendary in Hong Kong for nearly a century, and the little bakery on Lyndhurst Terrace was patronized by governors and billionaires and taxi drivers and construction workers, generally all at the same time. Fortunately for me, I passed the Tai Cheong Bakery every single time I walked between my office and the Mid-Levels escalator. It wasn’t why I rented that office, but it could have been.
I put the bag of egg tarts and the coffee on my library table and sat down. Fishing in my pocket, I pulled out the business card Uncle Benny gave me and examined it again. It still said the same thing: Wang Chou Lee, Accountant, with an address on Sukhumvit Road in Bangkok. When I flipped the card onto the table, it landed next to the Canadian passport Jello gave me. As omens went, that one sucked.
I lifted one of the egg tarts out of the bag and took a bite. I drank some coffee. I did both things quite slowly. I promised myself when the coffee and the egg tarts were gone I would decide what I was going to do about Uncle Benny’s contact who claimed he would put me with Eddie Lo’s IT guy, as well as what to make of Jello’s insistence that General Prasert was going to put Kate in prison and then kill her. I would meet my self-imposed deadline, but I figured I could at least push it as far into the future as possible.
The egg tart was still warm and the soft pastry crumbled pleasurably with every bite. I finished the first tart almost before I realized it, wiped the crumbs off my table, and drank some more coffee. Then I swung my feet up onto the table and leaned back to contemplate what in the world I was going to do now.
SIXTEEN
THE WAY TO think about this, I decided, was to separate the two issues carefully and take them one at a time. I was a lawyer. I was good at doing shit like that.
Jello’s claim that Kate was in danger bothered me quite a lot. Most of all, I really didn’t understand why he had brought it to me in the first place. What in the hell was I supposed to do about it even if everything he told me was true? Jack Shepherd trying to represent Kate at her trial certainly wouldn’t do her any good. Even if my name wasn’t poison in Thailand, it wasn’t going to be a real trial in the American sense anyway. The whole thing would be a sham. General Prasert was going to do whatever he was going to do with Kate. He didn’t need to conduct a public trial to find out what that ought to be.
Yes, I was concerned about Kate, and, yes, I cared about her a lot, but that still didn’t make me Indiana Jones. I was a lawyer, for God’s sake. The only weapons I carried were a laptop and an American Express card. Snatching a former prime minister from the clutches of the Thai army and spiriting her out of the country required a hell of a lot more than a few emails and some dinners at nice restaurants. I couldn’t even imagine how you went about doing something like that. Whatever the techniques involved, they were way beyond my capabilities.
That didn’t leave much for me to think about there, did it? There was simply nothing I could do to help Kate no matter how much I might want to.
I leaned forward, dipped my hand into the bag from the Tai Cheong Bakery, and took out the second egg tart. I nibbled at it and shifted my thoughts from Kate to Uncle Benny and his 14K pals.
I was being paid a lot of money to find a billion dollars, give or take, that was missing from the Malaysian Sovereign Wealth Fund and which had supposedly been laundered through Eddie Lo. Now that I knew where a guy was hiding out who might be able to tell me how Eddie Lo had done that, I should be focusing on the job I had been hired to do instead of going around in circles chasing Jello’s story about Kate. At least now I knew where this guy was. I knew where he was if I could trust Uncle Benny and his source in the 14K. And, well, if you can’t trust one of the biggest and most violent Chinese triads, who can you trust?
Looking at it that way made me a little twitchy.
If Uncle Benny was telling me the truth, the IT man had copied a bunch of Eddie Lo’s files and was threatening to make them public if Eddie didn’t pay him money he was presumably owed. So why was 14K now willing to finger this guy to me? As a favor to Uncle Benny? Not likely. 14K had something to gain from me talking to this guy, but what was it?
I sipped my coffee and thought that one over.
14K knew from Uncle Benny that I wanted to find out how Eddie’s companies were structured so I could understand how he laundered such a huge sum of money through them. And if he told me enough about Eddie’s companies, I would probably be able to figure out where the money was now. That would mean a world of hurt for Eddie, but I didn’t see what it would do for 14K.
And then suddenly I did see.
14K was fishing for something even bigger than I was. They were going to help me hurt Eddie, but only as a warning to him that they could hurt him even more. I was the free sample that showed the customer what he had to look forward to.
But what could possibly be bigger than laundering a billion dollars stolen from the Malaysian Sovereign Wealth Fund? Well… laundering two billion dollars would be bigger. And laundering five billion dollars would be a lot bigger.
Uncle Benny had said there were stories around that Eddie Lo was the primary money launderer for Chinese government bribe money flowing into Hong Kong from the mainland, and maybe that was true. Maybe that much money really did flow through Eddie’s companies. If it was true, and if it did, then Eddie had a lot to lose by his activities being made public. Nobody wanted to find a story about his money launderer on the front page of the South China Morning Post, particularly not if you were a member of the Chinese Politburo.
I took another bite of egg tart, chewed it thoughtfully, and washed it down with coffee.
So if I took 14K up on their offer and backed their play, what would that make me? A co-conspirator with a Chinese triad?
I was overthinking this, and I knew it. But then I’m a lawyer. That’s what we do. We overthink everything.
My job was to find the billion dollars missing from the Malaysian Sovereign Wealth Fund, not to protect Eddie Lo’s health and welfare. Could I refuse to talk to the IT guy just because what I learned might get Eddie hurt? Perhaps I was whipping up a convenient justification here, lawyers were good at doing that too, but I either talked to this guy, or I didn’t. I either found out what he knew about Eddie laundering the money from Malaysia, or I didn’t. I either used that to find out where my client’s money was now, or I didn’t.
Looked at in terms of my obligations to my client, the answer was easy. I would talk to the guy.
Looked at in terms of my personal feelings, the answer was a lot harder. To talk to this guy, I would have to go to Bangkok.
And I didn’t want to go to Bangkok.
I really didn’t want to go to Bangkok.
I GOT UP, picked up my half-drunk coffee, and walked over to the windows. For a long time, I just stood there looking down into Gag
e Street. It seemed like half the buildings I could see were covered in bamboo construction scaffolding, but then buildings were always being torn down and rebuilt in Hong Kong. It’s a city in which a building is hardly finished before it’s torn down again and something bigger built in its place. I wasn’t sure how the little shophouse where my office was had survived the onslaught, but I was glad it had.
While I was looking out the windows, it started to rain. Not one of those tropical downpours that occasionally pounded the city, but big, heavy drops that fell almost tentatively. They seemed undecided whether they should fall at all. I understood exactly how they felt.
I was stalling. Of course I was stalling. I didn’t need to think about the development of Hong Kong or the hesitation of the raindrops. I needed to decide whether I was going to Bangkok, and I needed to decide that right now.
It wasn’t that I hated Bangkok. I’d had some of the best days of my life in Bangkok. When I decided to give up my law partnership in Washington and teach international business at Chulalongkorn University, taking up residency in Bangkok felt like the adventure of a lifetime. And for a while it was. Then I married a beautiful Italian-born artist with whom I had fallen completely in love, and things got a little complicated.
Anita was a true child of the world. She had been born in Paris to an Italian mother and an English father, gone to high school in New York, and graduated from UCLA with a degree in film. After that, she had established an art studio in London and made herself into a painter of considerable note, although when we met at a Sotheby’s auction in Bangkok I had to admit somewhat sheepishly that I had never heard of her. I suppose the truth was that I had heard of very few painters, and most of the ones I had heard of had beards and died in the seventeenth century. Nonetheless, I soon discovered Anita had a huge reputation in Europe as a young artist to be watched. I, too, thought she should be watched, although I was pretty sure what I was watching and what the European art critics were watching were completely different things. At least I hoped they were.
