PART THREE
HONG KONG
———
BANGKOK
———
DUBAI
Yesterday upon the stair
I met a man who was not there.
He was not there again today.
Oh, how I wish he’d go away.
—William Hughes Mearnes,
“Antigonish”
TWENTY-TWO
IT WAS JUST after dawn when Jello drove Shepherd back to the Grand Hotel. In less than an hour, Shepherd had showered, packed, and gotten himself a cab to the airport. A few more hours and he was dozing in a business class seat on a Cathay Pacific 777 halfway back to Hong Kong. He felt good to be headed home again, whatever home actually meant for him these days.
Back when he and Anita had been married they lived in one of Bangkok’s tonier apartment buildings. They had a large and airy unit, the walls of which were covered with the colorful paintings that had made Anita modestly famous as a painter in European art circles. The apartment was halfway around the world from where either of them had been born, but it still felt like home to Shepherd. When he went to the refrigerator and made himself a ham on rye, he felt like he was making himself a ham on rye at home. And that was a good enough test for him anytime.
Now he lived by himself in a Hong Kong apartment loaned to him by a guy he knew from law school. A few months ago, Freddy had abruptly resigned from his firm, bought a thirty-eight foot ketch, and pointed its bow south toward Bali. He told Shepherd he wasn’t coming back until he had all the adventures he had been putting off since he was twelve years old. Shepherd wasn’t entirely sure what those adventures actually were but, whatever it was Freddy was looking for out there on the ocean, he hoped Freddy found it. As for him, what he needed was a place to live and a way to earn a living, and that was why he was staying in Freddy’s apartment while Freddy sailed his sea of dreams. The problem was that still didn’t make it home. When he went to the refrigerator in Freddy’s place and made himself a ham on rye, it felt like he was doing it in Freddy’s kitchen, which of course he was.
All of Shepherd’s recent dislocations had left him feeling pretty fuzzy concerning the whole concept of home thing. He wasn’t absolutely sure he knew what it meant anymore. From time to time, a line from Robert Frost drifted through his mind. “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” If that really was the definition of home, then Shepherd figured he was pretty much screwed. He was a homeless man. Simple as that. Maybe he should just buy a shopping cart and be done with it.
Still, Shepherd liked living in Hong Kong well enough, and Freddy’s apartment was pretty nice. It was in a district called the Mid-levels, not a particularly romantic name for a neighborhood perhaps, but the designation was at least nicely descriptive since the Mid-levels was the area midway up the hillside between Hong Kong’s famous harbor and the top of Victoria Peak. Back in the 1990s, in a highly imaginative but ultimately unsuccessful effort to ease Hong Kong’s chronic traffic congestion, they built a half-mile long outdoor escalator running down from the Mid-levels, cutting through the center of SoHo and ending at the financial district in Central near the harbor. It wasn’t actually a single long escalator, but rather a ladder of about twenty escalators tied together by short, glass-roofed walkways and moving belts. In the mornings, the whole Rube Goldberg contraption ran downhill and then, late in the morning, it reversed and everything ran uphill for the rest of the day.
What Shepherd liked most about Freddy’s apartment was that the Mid-levels escalator was just outside its door. He loved to ride on it down the hill into the heart of the city. Instead of jostling through the crowds packed into Hong Kong’s steaming streets, he could stand quietly and contemplated his surroundings while he was towed at a comfortable pace straight through the heart of the bedlam. The Mid-levels escalator turned the mayhem of Hong Kong into a Disneyland ride. It was all he could do not to hum It’s a Small, Small, Small, Small World every time he used it.
Shepherd liked the Mid-levels escalator so much that he rented a small office about halfway down the hill from Freddy’s apartment right in the middle of SoHo, which was an acronym for south of Hollywood Road. Hong Kong’s SoHo, like its New York namesake, tried hard to be the hippest and most pretentious neighborhood going. In the blocks around Staunton and Elgin Streets, a cool new restaurant or bar either opened or, more likely, closed almost every week.
In spite of the stylishness of the neighborhood, Shepherd’s office was pretty utilitarian. It was a single, averaged-sized room on the second floor of an old shophouse just above a noodle shop. It had very little to recommend it, except for one thing really. The Mid-levels escalator ran right to its front door. That was the real attraction of the place for Shepherd. He could commute to work every day by escalator. How cool was that?
***
WHEN SHEPHERD GOT to Freddy’s apartment, he dropped his bag in the entry hall and walked around pulling back drapes and pushing open windows. Then he unlocked the balcony door and walked outside. The view was one he never tired of. Straight downhill over the towers of Central, out to the harbor, and all the way to the mountains of China, wispy and ambiguous in the distance. He could smell Hong Kong down there, too: that peculiar mix of carbon monoxide, raw sewage, duck mess, and burning incense that was like nowhere else in the world. Shepherd didn’t care what anybody said about the smell of Hong Kong. He liked it just fine. He even had to admit the whole disgusting stench was beginning to feel a little like home to him.
The rest of the day Shepherd did very little but catch up on his sleep, watch sports on TV, and hang around Freddy’s apartment. During the preceding week, he had been shot at by hired assassins, beaten to the ground by an old lady wielding a folding chair, and dragged out of bed in the middle of the night to identify a headless corpse. Even for Shepherd, that amounted to a pretty full week. He figured he deserved a little down time.
By the next morning, of course, he was already bored. He made coffee and toast and ate it standing at the sink, then he packed his briefcase and headed downhill to the office. He wasn’t much of a decorator, but he had fixed the office up enough to be comfortable and he liked being there. He also liked the fact that no one else ever came there. He doubted Charlie even knew where it was. His office was his place, the only one he really had anymore.
The shophouse was old, as old as anything in Hong Kong was, and the interior walls were brick with some kind of white glaze over them. They had been troweled smooth on some long ago day and even now still glistened like porcelain. On the north side of the room, three tall windows looked down into Gage Street, a narrow roadway just below Hollywood Road that was so overhung with Chinese-language signs suspended from long metal brackets poking out from the shop fronts that Shepherd could barely see the street through the tangle. It seemed like half the buildings on the street were covered in bamboo construction scaffolding, but then buildings were always being torn down and rebuilt in Hong Kong. It was a city in which a building was hardly finished before it was torn down and something bigger built in its place. Shepherd wasn’t sure how his little shophouse had survived the onslaught, but he was glad it had.
Perpendicular to the windows he had placed a long library table he had found in a used furniture shop up in the New Territories, and behind it he had put a new Aeron chair he had paid far too much for. He kept the desk largely bare. There was nothing on it at all except for a large leather desk pad, two computers, and a telephone he used so seldom he generally had to look up the number when somebody wanted to call him on it.
The wall behind Shepherd’s worktable was lined with three horizontal filing cabinets, each five drawers high. Locking bars had been welded to the fronts of all three of the cabinets and formidable looking padlocks dangled from the handles of each of the bars. On the wall to his left was a line of tall bookcases. They were half-filled with mostly out-of-date law books and legal journals while the rest of the shelve
s held the kind of accumulation of items that men seemed to amass when they were left to their own devices. A green gym bag, a broken coffee maker, a coffee maker that worked sometimes, a half dozen ceramic coffee mugs, a large bag of potato chips, some magazines, a burlwood cigar humidor, a couple of ashtrays decorated with beer logos, and stacks of old copies of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times.
The wall in front of Shepherd, the one on which his eyes rested whenever he lifted them from what he was doing at his big table, was bare except for a single large oil painting hung in the exact center that was at least five feet on each side. The painting didn’t actually depict any recognizable form, at least no form that was recognizable to Shepherd. Instead, it was a riot of primary colors that swirled and swooped and splashed over the canvas in a way that seem at a glance to be random, but on closer inspection began to look as intricately interwoven as the fabric of an English tweed jacket. It was the only one of Anita’s paintings he still had. She had taken all the others, but she had given him this one for his birthday and so it was his and he had kept it when she left. He had brought it with him from Bangkok and hung it in his new office. Almost immediately he decided that had been a very bad idea. But he had never gotten around to moving it and it was still there.
***
SHEPHERD SPENT HIS first day in the office catching up with the mail and returning a few calls that had been left on his voice mail while he was away. It was all routine stuff, but after recent events he found a certain comfort in routine stuff.
On the second day, reasonably well rested and pretty much caught up, he brewed a large pot of coffee and turned his attention to the new work he had created for himself in Bangkok. First, he sorted through all the wire confirmations that had come in to make certain Charlie’s funds had been moved out of Thailand as they were supposed to have been. When he was sure all the wires had gone where they should have, he distributed the proceeds in the receiving accounts to the offshore investment trusts through which he managed Charlie’s money.
He bought some short-dated T-bills in London, established new currency positions in Frankfurt, acquired a pile of Australian government bonds, and even placed an order with one of the brokers he used in New York to take a large position in an exchange-traded fund focused on gold futures. Shepherd wasn’t very enthusiastic about gold as a long-term investment, but Charlie was Asian so naturally he loved it.
All in all, Shepherd managed Charlie’s investment portfolios with a bias to the stodgy side. He would be the first to admit that there was nothing particularly imaginative about his asset allocation strategy, but all of the portfolio holdings were extremely liquid and that suited Charlie just fine. Charlie wasn’t the kind of guy who liked to have his money tied up in shopping malls in New Jersey. What he liked were the kind of investments he could turn into cash at a moment’s notice: refugee money, Charlie called it. So that’s just what Shepherd gave him.
Shepherd worked later than usual trying to sort out the accounts for some of the offshore trusts, but he just couldn’t get them to balance. Finally, around 7:00 P.M., he decided he’d had enough and the problem would keep until the next day. He locked up the office and headed to Jimmy’s Kitchen for dinner. An old-time Hong Kong expat hangout down at the bottom of Wyndham Street, Jimmy’s was one of Shepherd’s favorite places to pull up a stool and have dinner alone at the bar.
He was about half a block from Jimmy’s when his cell phone rang.
“We found the head,” Jello announced without preamble. “You need to look at it.”
“You going to FedEx it up here?”
“I was thinking more along the lines of emailing you a picture.”
Shepherd was reasonably sure no one had ever called him before on his way to dinner to tell him he was about to receive a photograph of a severed head. Maybe, he thought to himself, it would be better just have a martini.
“We’ve cleaned it up,” Jello said, “but it was in the water a long time. It isn’t in very good shape. The crabs got to it.”
Maybe even two martinis.
TWENTY-THREE
JIMMY’S KITCHEN IS all dark wood paneling, wall sconces with red cloth shades, elderly waiters in black with starched white aprons, and booths that are either tufted red leather or pretty good vinyl imitations. It’s the kind of a place where you can easily imagine Frank Sinatra sauntering through the door, throwing a two-fingered salute to the bartender, and breaking into a couple of choruses of ‘My Way.’ And it is unquestionably the last restaurant on earth with both Beef Wellington and Baked Alaska on the menu. Shepherd liked Jimmy’s for three reasons. The food was pretty good; the prices were generally reasonable; and he was almost always the youngest person in the place.
He took a stool at the bar and ordered a Hendricks martini, then he pulled out his phone and checked his email. Nothing but an offer from a Canadian drug store to sell him cheap Viagra. Another couple of weeks like the one he’d just had and maybe he would check that out.
It felt a little cool to Shepherd there at the bar, but he couldn’t decide if it really was cool or if he just felt that way because he was waiting for a picture of a severed head to show up in his email. Hong Kong was probably the most over-air-conditioned city on earth so the sensation of being cold on a sticky tropical night was anything but unusual. Air-conditioning not having been invented until 1902, every saloon in Hong Kong had been laboring single-mindedly ever since to make up for lost time.
Shepherd laid his phone on the bar and glanced around. At a table across the room, a middle-aged Chinese couple sitting opposite each other were both talking on cell phones, their drinks left untouched in front of them. Shepherd doubted they were talking to each other, but maybe they were. In Hong Kong, anything is possible.
The bartender placed a coaster in front of Shepherd and carefully positioned a large martini glass on it. Even in the dim light of the bar, he could see the rim of the glass sparkling with a necklace of tiny ice crystals. The bartender lifted a silver shaker in both hands and with a half dozen economical snaps of his wrists blended the martini and strained it into Shepherd’s glass.
Before Shepherd could take even a single sip, a low-pitched buzz sounded from his phone and it vibrated against the polished bar top. He glanced down and saw the numeral one superimposed over the email icon. Had the picture from Jello arrived, or was this just another junk mail promising to improve his sex life? He reached for his martini first, just in case. He took a long sip, paused a moment to savor it, then he picked up the phone and opened the email. The message contained no text, only an attachment, but it was from Jello so he had no doubt what it was.
Shepherd put the phone down on the bar and went back to his martini. It wasn’t just the prospect of looking at a picture of a severed head that had spent several days on the bottom of the Chao Phraya River that gave him pause, although under most circumstances that would have been quite enough. What really bothered him was that the head was quite probably going to belong to someone he knew. Why would anyone have been carrying a cell phone with his number programmed into it and notes about his travel schedule if they weren’t planning to get in touch with him in Bangkok? And what were the chances someone would have been planning to contact him in Bangkok if he had no idea who they were?
Shepherd took his time finishing the martini, but eventually he did. That was when he took a deep breath, picked up his telephone, and tapped on the icon attached to Jello’s email. There was a pause as the phone located whatever it needed to display the file. Then the picture expanded quickly until it filled the little screen.
The horror of the image was tempered somewhat by the small size of the cell phone’s display, but there was still more than enough horror to spare. The head was hardly recognizable as something that had once sat on the shoulders of a living human being. Both eyes had been torn out of their sockets, both cheeks had been eaten away to the bone, and all of the flesh of the nose was gone. Shepherd had no
doubt he would see that picture in his mind for the rest of his life. Then and there he vowed never again to eat in another restaurant that served crab.
In spite of the mutilation, Shepherd recognized the man immediately.
Oh crap.
What in God’s name had Adnan, Charlie’s Lebanese assistant, been doing in Bangkok? And, probably more to the immediate point, why had somebody cut off his head and hung the rest of him under the Taksin Bridge?
***
SHEPHERD ORDERED ANOTHER martini, but he had pretty much lost his appetite, so that was all he ordered. When he finished the second martini, he left Jimmy’s and just aimlessly wandered the streets for a while. More by accident than design, he walked through Lan Kwai Fong, past the Central District Police Station, and ended up on Hollywood Road at the foot of Ladder Street just in front of the Man Mo Temple. There was a small park across the road from the temple, not much more than some pieces of brightly colored children’s playground equipment scattered over a few dozen square yards of concrete with a few wooden benches here and there. A night breeze had come up and the din of traffic from Hollywood Road had faded away, so Shepherd took a seat on one of the benches.
An elderly Chinese woman caught his eye as she pushed through a crowd of Western tourists and entered the temple across the road. She was stooped nearly in half and gripped a bundle of incense sticks as though they were cylinders of gold. He watched through the open doors as she lit the sticks and distributed them methodically among the brass pots filled with sand that were scattered throughout the building. When she was done, she stood for a long time before the main alter, her hands pressed together in front of her chest. She could have been praying for health, or long life, or even world peace, Shepherd supposed, but then this was Hong Kong. That made it far more likely she was asking the gods for a couple of winners at Happy Valley.
World of Trouble (9786167611136) Page 13
