The Two Sisters of Borneo

by Ian Hamilton

  She had no idea how long she had been there when she heard Sonny say, “Ava, I’m sorry to disturb you, but we have a problem.”

  She pushed herself to her feet. Sonny stood at the entrance of the room with the funeral director, who was looking alarmed. “What is it?”

  “Wreaths. We have too many wreaths,” Sonny said.

  “They started arriving late in the day yesterday and they just kept coming,” the director said. “We’ve filled our storage room and then some. I’ve never seen so many whie chrysanthemums.”

  “How many are we talking about?”

  “At least eighty, and they’re still arriving.”

  “They’ll fill this room. We won’t have space for a single chair,” Sonny said.

  “How many funerals do you have going on here today?” Ava asked the director.

  “Only this one.”

  “And how many other rooms do you have?”

  “Three.”

  “Put five more wreaths here; that will give us four on either side of the coffin. Then put some in the foyer — it’s large enough — and the rest in one of the empty rooms. I’ll pay for any extra space we’re using.”

  “Do we need to transport them to the gravesite as well?” the director asked.

  “Yes,” Ava said. “Rent a truck, do whatever you have to do, but if people thought so well of Uncle as to send him flowers, the least we can do is make sure they’re placed either on or somewhere near the gravesite.”

  “It will cost —” he began.

  “Just do whatever you have to. I’ll pay,” Ava said.

  When he left, Ava turned to Sonny. “Who is sending all these wreaths?”

  “I looked at some of the cards. You have a lot of former clients.”

  “That’s true enough. It’s nice that they remembered.”

  “And many of the societies.”

  “What do you mean by ‘many’?”

  “I saw wreaths from at least nine or ten gangs in the 14K Group and a couple from the Wo Group. Also the Big Circle Gang, the Tung Group, and a huge one from one of the mainland Sun Yee On gangs. The only ones larger were from Changxing and May Ling Wong and Xu.”

  “How did they find out about Uncle’s funeral?”

  “I know he wanted it to be more private, but it was silly of him to think that word wouldn’t get around in an instant.”

  Ava looked at the hundred chairs they had set up for guests. “Sonny, do you think we have enough seats? What if everyone who sent a wreath shows up?”

  “That’s not likely, especially with the triads.”

  “Still, we have to expect that some will come. And there might be more ex-clients than we imagined, so maybe we should ask for another hundred chairs. This room can hold two hundred.”

  “Okay, I’ll go talk to the guy.”

  “Better to be prepared for more rather than not have enough.”

  “I know,” he said, and then hesitated.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “I forgot to tell you that Uncle Fong has hired a funeral band. He did it without asking me. They’ll walk with us to the cemetery. That is, if you don’t mind.”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “You could say no.”

  “Would Uncle have liked a band?”

  Sonny smiled for the first time in days. “Yes, he would have liked a band.”

  “Then I guess we have a band.”

  While the funeral home staff came in to set up more chairs, Ava retreated to the foyer. Wreaths now covered every wall, and she thought it looked splendid. She opened her Chanel bag and took out her phone. She had turned it off the night before, when she went to bed. There had been a number of calls.

  Her mother and Maria had left messages saying that she and Uncle were in their prayers.

  Her father said he was coming to the funeral with Jack Yee.

  May Ling had called to say that she and Changxing had arrived in Hong Kong. Then she had left a second message an hour later. Jacob Smits had taken Ah-Pei’s confession, both written and on videotape, to Meijer, hoping to coerce him into voluntarily returning their money. Meijer had refused. So Smits, with May Ling’s approval, had gone to his police contacts with the information he’d acquired earlier and the confession. He was quite confident that charges would be laid.

  Smits had also given the entire package to the bankruptcy trustee and spent several hours going over it with him. May had just been informed that the trustee had contacted the bank in Aruba and asked them to freeze the account until the legal issues surrounding the bankruptcy were resolved. It was going to take some time, but meanwhile Ah-Pei had returned the money from the Kuala Lumpur account.

  One way or another, their investment would be restored. But at that moment it couldn’t have mattered less to Ava.

  The door of the funeral home opened. Lourdes, dressed in a white skirt and blouse, with a white scarf tied around her head, stepped tentatively inside. Uncle Fong followed. Ava turned off her phone and put it back in her bag.

  Lourdes had been crying almost nonstop since Uncle had died. The funeral director had said to Sonny that he had never heard louder wailing.

  “She has a lot to grieve,” he said.

  She now seemed to have cried herself out, although her eyes were shot through with red. Ava said, “I prayed at the coffin by myself this morning. If you like, we can stay out here and you can have some quiet time with him as well.”

  “I can’t pray anymore.”

  “Then let’s go inside and sit. The guests will be here soon enough.”

  Lourdes stared at the wreaths. Sonny and Uncle Fong circled the foyer, looking at the condolence cards that accompanied them. Ava took Lourdes by the arm and joined the men. There were flowers from her father, Jack Yee, Simon and Jessie To, Tommy Ordonez and Uncle Chang in the Philippines, Soeprapto and his father in Indonesia, the Wo Group from Tsuen Wan, 14K from Guangzhou, and Chi Hsien Pang in Taiwan. And there was an immense wreath from Andrew Tam, a former client whose own uncle had been one of the men who swam from China with Uncle. As she read the card, she noticed Uncle Fong eyeing her.

  “What is it?” she said to him.

  “Sonny told me you approved the band. I’m very happy about that.”

  “I guess I am too. I should have thought of it myself and I didn’t. Thank you for being so considerate.”

  Ava and Lourdes went back inside. The extra chairs on the guest side made the family side look even emptier. Ava didn’t care. Uncle had always respected tradition, and she wasn’t about to dishonour this one.

  Lourdes sat with her eyes closed and her lips moving. Ava assumed she had found another prayer and sat quietly next to her, lost again in her own thoughts.

  At ten o’clock Sonny and the funeral director barged into the room. “We have another problem,” Sonny said.

  “What is it this time?”

  “People have already started to arrive. They’re beginning to crowd the entrance.”

  “Crowd?”

  “There must be fifty or sixty already, and they’re nearly all triad. They’re coming from all over. Uncle Fong says there are some very senior people among them, including the head men from Taiwan, Malaysia, and Los Angeles, he thinks, though he’s less sure about that.”

  “Well, we did put in these extra hundred seats.”

  “It’s just that we have a very small courtyard, and we can’t have people standing in the street,” the director said.

  “What are you suggesting?”

  “That we open our doors early.”

  “How early?”

  “Now.”

  Ava looked at Sonny, who just shrugged. “Then let’s do that,” she said.

  When they turned to leave, it occurred to her that there might be one more problem. “Tell
me,” she shouted after them, “do we have enough white envelopes if we have two hundred guests?”

  “I have boxes of them,” the director said.

  It took them five minutes to lay out on the tables the first batch of white envelopes that Sonny and Uncle Fong would distribute. The candles around the coffin were lit, and Lourdes began to sniffle again.

  Then the door to the room opened and the guests began to enter. Ava and Lourdes remained seated, their heads bent towards the floor. Then Ava heard the first man greet Sonny. His name was Wing, and he identified himself as being from 14K Sai Sing Ton. He approached the coffin solemnly and stopped directly in front of the Uncle’s photograph. He bowed three times, his head reaching his knees, the tattoos on his neck visible as he lowered his body. Then he turned to where Ava and Lourdes sat. He bowed again, just as deeply, but only once. Ava lowered her head in acknowledgement.

  For the next hour they walked in at a rate of about two a minute, bowing three times for Uncle and once for Ava and Lourdes. The early arrivals were nearly all triad, from major groups such as 14K, Wo, Sun Yee On, and Luen, but they also represented a broad spectrum of local gangs from places such as Mong Kok, Tai Po, Tsim Sha Tsui, Macau, Sheung Shui, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou. Some had worked for Uncle. Some had worked alongside Uncle. Some had been colleagues of equal rank, at least until he became chairman. As they identified themselves at the door, Sonny and Uncle Fong helped her classify them by addressing them by title or relationship.

  Not many of them spoke to her, and those who did were the senior ones, the gang leaders. Most of them seemed uncomfortable around her and mumbled their condolences. A few referred to her by name and let it be known that they had heard of her exploits with Uncle.

  They were all hard men, rough around the edges and dangerous looking even when they had no visible scars, missing fingers, or tattoos. Still, with Ava they were unfailingly polite, and as they bowed to Uncle she saw in their faces a respect that verged on veneration. It was, in a way, unsettling. Her relationship with Uncle had existed mainly outside his previous life. Trying to connect the man she had known with the one who had been tough and ruthless and shrewd enough to make his way to the summit of the worldwide triad hierarchy seemed impossible and improbable, despite the fact that she knew it was true.

  Partway through that first hour, with people lined up at the door all the way back through the foyer and into the courtyard, Uncle Fong came to Ava’s side. “I thought this might happen, but I didn’t want to say anything,” he said. “Uncle was so respected . . .”

  “By so many people,” Ava said.

  “And more to come, and more bands.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “They’re telling me. At least three of the societies have hired bands.”

  “You had better go and help Sonny at the door,” Ava said, beginning to feel overwhelmed by this triad outpouring.

  Ava had been holding up reasonably well emotionally. She didn’t know the triads; they didn’t represent any memories or emotional connections to Uncle. But she began to falter when Carlo and Andy walked into the room together just past eleven o’clock. They were triad too, but Ava had worked with them several times, including in Las Vegas and during the Macau raid. Both of them were friends who had shown extreme loyalty to her. They had been equally devoted to Uncle. She watched as they marched side by side up to the photo and bowed so low their heads almost touched the floor. When they turned towards Ava, she saw that Andy, who was small and wiry like Uncle, had tears running down his cheeks. She had to fight back her own.

  Andy tried to speak. All he could get out was, “Boss . . .”

  Carlo, the more confident and assertive of the two, said, “There will never be another man like him.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “And you know that whatever you need —”

  “I know. Thanks to both of you,” she said, her voice cracking.

  Then the former clients began to arrive. Ava couldn’t remember all of them clearly because Uncle had managed the direct contact part of the business, but as soon as she heard their names she was able to connect them to a case. And there were a lot to connect. She had forgotten just how many cases they’d taken on over the past ten years, and as they kept rolling in — interspersed with more triads — the immensity of what she and Uncle had been able to accomplish actually shocked her. He had always said, “We are in the business of getting their money back, but they come to us so desperate and lost that we are as much in the business of retrieving their souls.” The clients seemed to understand that, as one by one they expressed respect and appreciation in terms that, outside the emotion-filled room, would have been excessive by any standard.

  As Andrew Tam and his uncle came into the room, the older man clinging to his nephew’s arm, Sonny left the envelope table and crossed the floor to Ava. “We’ve filled this room. The director is setting up chairs in the room next door. He thought people would pay their respects and then leave, but it seems that most of them are going to stay to walk to the cemetery with us. Do you want to keep any seats in here free for special guests?”

  Ava looked at the other side of the room through a thick cloud of incense smoke — all of the joss sticks were now lit. The triads occupied the back rows, the clients sat in front. It was as if each group understood the natural order of things. “No, everyone is a special guest. Just make sure he keeps adding chairs until he has none left.”

  “And Ava, what will we do about the funeral dinner? We told the restaurant to expect about a hundred people.”

  “Call them and change the number.”

  “To what?”

  “I don’t know,” Ava said. “Tell them three hundred.”

  “I just looked outside at the courtyard. It’s still full. I think we should say five hundred, just to be on the safe side.”

  “Can they handle that many?”

  “Even more, as long as we give them enough notice.”

  “Then book the whole restaurant and tell them to bring enough food to feed every seat in the place.”

  “I’ll call them right away.”

  As Ava was finishing her conversation with Sonny, Andrew Tam caught her eye. He whispered something in his uncle’s ear and the old man nodded at her. When they reached Uncle’s picture, Tam bowed, but the old man fell to his knees and prostrated himself. “My brother, my brother,” he wailed.

  Tears exploded from Ava. It was so loud and sudden that Lourdes flinched and then, looking at Ava, she began to cry too.

  The next hour was a blur. She was aware, vaguely, that her father and Amanda’s father, Jack Yee, had arrived. Marcus Lee seemed alarmed by the intensity of his daughter’s grief, but there was nothing that could be said or done to diminish it. Her head was filled with thoughts of Uncle as a young man swimming through cold, dark water towards Hong Kong, and the words he had spoken from his hospital bed the previous week kept repeating themselves. He had been a man with no family, no connections, no prospects. He had been a man with absolutely nothing, risking his life to get to a place he had never seen, with no idea what he would find or what he would do if he got there. Out of that nothingness he had created a life that had earned him the respect and admiration of all these businesspeople and all these hard men alike, people who had come from all over China, all over Asia, and even from North America to bow before his image.

  At two o’clock Sonny came to her again. “Ava, the building is full. There isn’t any more room, and out in the courtyard people are starting to back up onto the street. The director wants to know if we can leave for the cemetery now.”

  “We still have an hour to go.”

  “He’s really worried.”

  “What about the monks? I don’t want to go until I know the monks are there.”

  “Uncle Fong says they’ve been there since noon.”

 
“And what about the people who haven’t had a chance to pay their respects?”

  “They can join the funeral procession and pay their respects at the cemetery.”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Ava, there just isn’t any more room.”

  She had done what he had asked and tried to keep the affair simple. She knew she couldn’t be blamed for the fact that hordes of people came to pay their respects. But if the day devolved into chaos, she felt that she would be to blame.

  She closed her eyes and thought about what Uncle would have wanted. Not chaos, certainly not chaos. “Yes, all right, tell him we’ll leave for the cemetery now. But Sonny, I want you to go outside and explain to everyone why we’re doing this, and I want you to tell them how much we appreciate their coming and that we want them to join us at the cemetery. And make sure everyone is invited to the funeral dinner.”

  Five minutes later, Sonny returned with the funeral director. “I think everyone understood,” he said.

  The funeral director addressed the people in the room. He told them there would be an early departure for the cemetery and asked them to leave the building by the front door. He said the coffin would be taken through a back door and then into the hearse for the journey to Wo Hop Shek Cemetery. The vehicle would be brought around to the front of the building and would leave from there. It would not leave without them, he promised.

  As people began to file slowly out of the room, Ava, Lourdes, Sonny, and Uncle Fong were taken through a side door. Sonny took the picture of Uncle from the easel and carried it with him. As they stood outside waiting for the hearse, she heard a clash of cymbals, the banging of drums, and the high-pitched melody of flutes. The noise strengthened, filling the air around them. Ava said to Uncle Fong, “Four bands?”

  Before he could answer, more drums began to play, and the cymbals became so loud it felt as if they were in the middle of a thunderstorm. “There are nine bands now,” Sonny said. “Nearly every triad society has paid for one.”