THE KING OF MACAU (The Jack Shepherd International Crime Novels)

by Needham, Jake

  That was when I realized Pansy was staring at me. She appeared to be waiting for me to acknowledge that I had indeed heard the stories about her father before she went any further. I assumed she meant the stories about Stanley Ho being connected somehow with the triads, the nature of his supposed connection varying wildly from one story to the next. I had indeed heard those stories. Nearly everyone I knew had heard those stories. So I ventured a small nod, not entirely certain what Pansy might think I was agreeing to. But a simple nod seemed harmless enough, and anyway, it looked like the only way I could keep the conversation going.

  The nod seemed to satisfy Pansy, whatever she thought it meant.

  “I want to tell you that those stories are not true,” she continued. “Dr. Ho has no connections whatsoever with the triads. He runs gambling casinos in the biggest gambling market in the world, so it is inevitable that criminals come to his casinos, but that does not mean he himself is a criminal.”

  “A lot of people say your father has cooperated with the triads and that was why he wasn’t a suitable partner for a company like MGM Resorts in Macau.”

  “Yes, I understand that.”

  “They say you’re MGM’s partner here only because your father can’t be.”

  “I understand that, too. But what do you say?”

  “I don’t say anything. I have no idea.”

  “We all have fathers,” Pansy snapped. “Even you, I suspect.”

  That was true, of course, but I doubted it would be polite to point out that, as far as I knew, nobody had ever thought my father might be an organized crime boss.

  “Would you like to be held responsible for everything your father has ever done, Mr. Shepherd?”

  I noticed that Pansy hadn’t exactly addressed the question on the table. I also noticed I was no longer Jack. I wasn’t even Professor Shepherd. Now I was plain Mr. Shepherd.

  “You’ve been in Asia for a long time,” Pansy continued while I was still contemplating the significance of my abrupt demotion. “You of all people must understand that triads are a fact of life here, particularly in Macau. People who say Dr. Ho cooperates with criminals do not live in this part of the world and so they do not understand how this culture works. But that does not stop us living our lives.”

  I didn’t even want to try guessing what that meant.

  WE TALKED ON FOR another ten or fifteen minutes after that, or rather Pansy talked and I listened. I found that an occasional nod on my part was enough to keep things going. When Pansy was done with her pitch, she leaned toward me again and that earnest expression returned to her face.

  “So do you understand what I’m saying, Mr. Shepherd?”

  “I do.”

  “If triad money is being laundered through the MGM and it is not stopped immediately, I will be blamed for it.”

  “You probably will be.”

  “That will be seen as validating all the old stories about my father and I will become a personal liability for MGM.”

  “Yes, I think you’re right.”

  “American gambling commissions have the power to shut down casinos if they suspect they have any kind of connection at all with organized crime anywhere in the world. To save their other assets, MGM will cut all ties to me if stories begin to circulate that triad money is being laundered through this casino. Getting to the bottom of this quickly and quietly may mean my personal survival.”

  “I can see that.”

  “I cannot allow that to happen.”

  “You certainly cannot.”

  “So you’ll help me?”

  “No.”

  Pansy’s head jiggled slightly as if she had been riding a bicycle down a perfectly smooth roadway and unexpectedly hit a speed bump. Which, in a manner of speaking, was exactly what she had done.

  “What?” she asked. “Why not?’

  “The way I see it, there are only two possibilities here.”

  I held up two fingers. I felt a little stupid doing it, but I did it anyway.

  “Perhaps this isn’t triad money at all, in which case you don’t have the problem you’re obviously so afraid you have, and you don’t need me.”

  I paused and now it was Pansy’s turn to nod. She did.

  “Or it is triad money, in which case a lone white guy running around a Chinese city trying to pin down its source is going to feel like a rabbit in a pen full of hunting dogs that haven’t been fed.”

  I figured I was due for another nod from Pansy at about that point, but she remained motionless.

  “It’s a no-win deal for me,” I finished, even without Pansy’s nod. “I don’t get involved in no-win deals.”

  “Please reconsider, Mr. Shepherd. I really do need your help here.”

  “Never kick a cow turd on a hot day. Harry Truman said that. Words to live by.”

  “What?”

  Pansy looked confused again, as well she might have. So for the second time I did the gentlemanly thing and took her off the hook.

  “Look, why me?” I asked. “I can recommend any number of people who can do the same job for you, people who live in Europe or the US and don’t have to worry about the triads getting pissed. I live in Hong Kong. I don’t want to sound like a sissy, but I really don’t want to piss off a whole army of violent gangsters who can easily find out where I live.”

  “I don’t want someone else. I want you to do this.”

  “Why?”

  “I trust you, Mr. Shepherd. I think you are an honorable man.”

  Pansy had only met me a few minutes before, but somehow she had already detected at least one of my many personal virtues that so many people seemed to miss. Of course, I didn’t believe for a moment that my supposedly remarkable character was the real reason Pansy wanted me to do the job, but I paused briefly to savor the concept regardless.

  “You will be very well paid, Mr. Shepherd.”

  “I’m sure I would be, but I’m not going up against the triads at any price.”

  “Oh really? I got the impression a minute ago that you were blaming Dr. Ho for doing exactly the same thing you are doing now: choosing not to go up against the triads.”

  “That’s a different situation.”

  “Is it?”

  No, it really wasn’t all that different. Pansy had me there. So I shut up. I have always believed the first rule of life is this: when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

  “Is there anything I can do to get you to change your mind?” Pansy asked after several moments passed in silence. “Anything at all?”

  “I doubt it, but you could try telling me who recommended me to you and we could see how things work out from there.”

  Pansy’s eyes flicked quickly to Brady, whose sphinx-like expression never wavered.

  “I can’t do that,” she said. “I just can’t.”

  “Then, Ms. Ho, may I say it’s been a pleasure.”

  I stood up and extended my hand.

  Pansy looked at it for a moment as if it were some kind of foreign object, but finally she rose slowly and took it. Her hand felt tentative and yielding as we shook.

  “And if you’re ever in Hong Kong with nothing to do,” I added to lighten the moment, “give me a call. I can show you a place that makes the best tacos in Asia.”

  To my surprise, Pansy smiled broadly at that and her grip became noticeably firmer.

  “I might do that, Jack,” she said. “I really do love tacos.”

  Pansy pronounced it ‘tack-o’s’, but I didn’t bother to correct her.

  Damn, I thought to myself, a beautiful woman who owns about half of Macau wants to have tacos with me? That’s pretty darn cool…

  FIVE

  AFTER I LEFT PANSY’S office, I probably should have tossed the few things I brought with me into my bag and headed straight home to Hong Kong. But I didn’t.

  Truth be told, I wasn’t really all that busy right then. There was a jetfoil to Hong Kong every hour and I had a nice suite in the MGM that Pansy H
o was paying for, so what was my hurry? Even if you do have to duck a few bullets occasionally, Macau is still a pretty pleasant place to hang out for a while.

  Most of the year the humidity on the south China coast is just plain nasty and walking anywhere is a damp, unpleasant experience, but the winter fog made Macau feel air-conditioned so I decided to take advantage of the nice weather to explore the laneways of the old city.

  I cut through the casino at the Wynn Macau, took the pedestrian underpass beneath the broad boulevard called Avenida da Amizade, and surfaced again in front of the Grand Lisboa Hotel. The Grand Lisboa is Stanley Ho’s crowning achievement. It is either an architectural marvel or an architectural monstrosity, depending on your point of view, and mine tended toward the monstrosity end of the scale. Soaring more than fifty stories over Macau, the Grand Lisboa is sheathed in golden glass and shaped like a lotus flower growing out of a silver and gold, egg-shaped dome. As a monument to wretched excess, it’s world class.

  After a half-hour’s wander through the Grand Lisboa and another half-hour exploring its older and dowdier sister, the Lisboa Macau, I turned north along the commercial spine of the Macau peninsula, Avenida de Almeida Ribeiro, known to everybody in Macau as San Ma Lo. At Senado Square, the iconic center of Macau, I bought a Coke from a kiosk and sat for a while on a green wooden bench.

  Senado Square looks authentically Mediterranean. Mosaic tiles form wavy black and white patterns in the pavement, and the low-rise buildings surrounding it are faced with ornate iron balconies and painted in pastel shades of pink, green, and yellow. On the other hand, the square is filled day and night with mobs of tourists and they are almost all Chinese. It is an oddly disorienting experience to sit in a Mediterranean city square completely filled with Chinese faces, so I finished my Coke, tossed the can in a trash barrel, and continued my stroll.

  I passed St. Dominic’s Church, the ruins of St. Paul’s, the old city walls, and St. Augustine’s Square, and eventually I emerged from the narrow, hilly streets at the edge of the inner harbor. The docks of the inner harbor were where the ferries from China used to tie up in the days when a trip to Macau meant half a day on a steam ferry with nothing to break the humidity except whatever breeze the sea might be willing to provide. These days, helicopters from Hong Kong and airplanes from everywhere have turned Macau into just another exotic stop on the international tourist circuit. In less than a generation, the place has been completely transformed. But transformed into what?

  Sometimes people like to say that whenever something is lost something else is gained, but trading the fairy-tale old city of Macau for nothing more than a clutch of garish gambling casinos makes a sad joke of that old cliché. So much had been lost in Macau, and so very little gained.

  When I’d had enough of exploring, I took a cab back to the MGM and treated myself to the luxury of an afternoon nap. Around seven I got up, showered and dressed, and headed out to dinner.

  HENRI’S SITS WHERE IT has sat for generations, on a quiet residential street at the edge of the harbor not far from Government House. Avenida da Republica is overhung along most of its length with ancient oak trees that over the decades have knitted their branches together into a living canopy. It is a neighborhood that feels both tranquil and timeless.

  When I got out of the cab, I stood for a moment and looked across the harbor to where ranks of powerful white floodlights etched the Macau Tower and the Ponte de Sai Van bridge into the velvety black of the night sky. The Macau Tower looked like a gigantic rocket ship all lighted up on its pad for a midnight departure to deep space, and the Ponte de Sai Van bridge looked like the last remaining connection tethering it to earth. A breeze rippled the leaves of the oak trees and in the near silence I could hear them murmuring. It almost seemed as if they were whispering something to me. It was all so beautiful it took my breath away.

  The unassuming little two-story structure that houses Henri’s faces the harbor from across on the other side of Avenida da Republica. The front of the building is covered in blue and white tiles, and the big windows are for some inexplicable reason outlined in garish green and blue neon. I crossed the road, but before I even made it to the front door the guy who runs Henri’s bounded out and began vigorously pumping my hand.

  “Welcome back, my friend,” Raymond boomed. “Welcome.”

  Raymond and I really were friends, but Raymond called everyone ‘my friend’, partly because he thought everyone was his friend and partly because he had a lousy memory for names. He seated me at a window table and got me a Portuguese lager. He didn’t bring me a menu because I never looked at one when I was at Henri’s. Raymond brought me whatever he thought I ought to eat that particular night.

  I sipped my beer and looked across Avenida da Republica to the harbor. There was very little traffic. Occasionally a nocturnal jogger glided past in the darkness along the water’s edge, but not often. The local residents were mostly Chinese, and the Chinese weren’t big on physical activity, particularly activity that didn’t make any money. The empty streets and sidewalks gave Henri’s a lost and abandoned quality I found terribly attractive.

  Before I had finished my beer, a waiter delivered a platter of African chicken, another of grilled Macau sole, a small dish of curried crab, and a plate of steamed rice. Raymond brought over a bottle of wine I didn’t recognize, pulled out the chair opposite me, and sat down.

  He poured me a glass of the wine and, while I ate, we talked about nothing in particular. When Raymond realized he had drunk most of the wine himself, he went and got another bottle, and sat back down.

  “Let’s have a drink when you’re finished dinner,” he said.

  “Isn’t that what we’re doing now?”

  Raymond pulled a face and sloshed more wine into both of our glasses.

  “I’m being subtle, Jack.”

  “No wonder I couldn’t work out what you meant.”

  “I need to talk to you, man.”

  “I knew that,” I said and wiped my lips with a napkin. “So go ahead. Talk.”

  “I don’t want to spoil your dinner.”

  Uh-oh.

  “You want to talk to me about something that’s going to spoil my dinner?”

  “It’s just that I want to ask you a favor. It doesn’t seem fair to buy you dinner and then ask you to do something for me in return.”

  Raymond was buying me dinner? Now I really was worried. This had to be something serious. I chewed thoughtfully at a piece of African chicken and waited.

  “Okay, I’ll tell you what I’m talking about,” Raymond said, “but can I ask you about something else first? I mean, before the favor.”

  I waited a little longer.

  “I heard you were a pretty important guy when you worked in Washington,” Raymond said, lowering his voice theatrically.

  I didn’t know quite what to say to that, and I didn’t want to laugh, so I said nothing.

  “I heard you got involved in some important things, even if you can’t talk about them now,” Raymond went on, entirely undeterred by my silence. “That you knew some really important people.”

  “I wasn’t a spy, Raymond, if that’s what you’re trying to say. I was just a lawyer. Exactly like half the rest of the people who work in Washington.”

  “That’s not what I heard. I heard you were connected all the way up to the White House. I heard you still are.”

  “You shouldn’t believe everything you hear.”

  “Plato Karsarkis hired you to get him a pardon from the President of the United States, didn’t he? He could have hired any lawyer he wanted, but he hired you. He must have thought you were connected. Are you? Connected, I mean.”

  “What is this all about, Raymond?”

  Raymond pushed his wine glass a couple of inches to the left, turned it, and pushed it back exactly where it had been before.

  “I have a friend.”

  In my experience, any story that starts with ‘I have a friend’ almost always ends wi
th some embarrassing revelation about the teller.

  Raymond caught the look on my face and said, “No, really. This is about a friend of mine. He has an immigration problem.”

  “I don’t know anything about immigration law, Raymond.”

  “He’s an important guy. He wants asylum in the United States.”

  “Political asylum?”

  Raymond nodded.

  “Someone from Macau thinks he is entitled to political asylum in the United States?”

  “He’s not from Macau. He’s just…well, visiting.”

  I thought about that for a moment.

  “What you’re telling me, Raymond, is that some Chinese guy you know looted the treasury of the province where he is a minor bureaucrat, gambled it all away in Macau, and now wants political asylum in the States so he doesn’t have to go back to China where they’ll probably shoot him.”

  Raymond shook his head. “I know a few guys like that, too, but that’s not what this is about.”

  “Then what is this about?”

  “So you’ll take my friend’s case?”

  “I already told you, Raymond. I don’t do immigration law. But you bought me a good dinner, so I ought at least to be polite enough to listen to whatever you want to tell me.”

  “Would you at least talk to my friend?”

  “Look, Raymond, I don’t see—”

  “He’s right here in Macau. It won’t be any trouble for you.”

  I sighed. “Who is he?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  I shook my head. First Pansy wouldn’t tell me who recommended me to sort out MGM’s money laundering problem, now Raymond wouldn’t tell me who this friend was he wanted me to talk to. This seemed to be my day for people refusing to tell me things, even when it didn’t make much sense that they wouldn’t.

  “So can you meet with him, Jack?”

  I knew I ought to simply say no and let it go at that, but Raymond was a friend and a nice guy and what harm could it do to talk to somebody for him?