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

by Needham, Jake

  I stood for a moment in front of a round lattice window through which I could see inside the structure. Dozens of giant, conically-shaped coils of red incense hung from the ceiling, each of them burning slowly and giving off tiny tendrils of white smoke that spread the musky fragrance of the incense throughout the temple. The drifting haze gave the whole place a mysterious, otherworldly air, which I suppose was really the whole idea. I rubbed at my eyes with my fingers. Incense made my eyes water. How spiritual was that?

  Another thirty yards up the stone staircase, I found the Hall of Benevolence perfectly aligned with the entry gate and the First Palace of the Holy Mountain. Built of faded red granite and white brick with Chinese characters painted on it in yellow, the Hall of Benevolence was much smaller than the other pavilions. Its roof, too, was covered in green glazed tiles and elaborately upturned ridges, but it incorporated into its design a natural recess in the rock of Barra Hill. It looked like a small, if extravagantly decorated, shed built in front of a cave.

  There were no crowds of Chinese imploring the deities for riches at the Hall of Benevolence and, blessedly, no drifting clouds of incense. Apparently benevolence had nothing to do with accumulating riches. But then I already knew that.

  I stood before the cave with the little shelter in front of it, not sure what to do next. The Hall of Benevolence was very small and a waist-high fence of wooden pickets blocked the only entry. I turned slowly through a full circle. There was no one else near me, and no one who appeared to be waiting for me. After the bedlam below, it was all remarkably peaceful and I rather liked that.

  I sat down on a large grey boulder right in front of the Hall of Benevolence and glanced at my watch. Two minutes before noon.

  Okay, I was here.

  Now what?

  NINE

  THE MAN WATCHED WHILE Shepherd ate his ice cream. He was a few yards up a narrow street at the far end of Barra Square, leaning against a maroon Toyota van and pretending to talk on his phone. He moved his lips occasionally to make sure the picture was complete. Just one more Asian talking on a cell phone.

  When Shepherd stood up, tossed away his ice cream wrapper, and started toward the temple gate, the man ambled into Barra Square behind him. His eyes quartered the area around Shepherd, looking for other people moving at a similar speed and in a similar direction. He found none. He didn’t expect to, but he was a careful man by nature and he was being even more careful under these circumstances than usual.

  Shepherd strolled through the temple gate and started up the stone steps. The area was so crowded with Chinese tourists that now the man was able to move up very close to Shepherd without any concern that he would be spotted. One more Asian face in a crowd of hundreds wasn’t going to attract the slightest notice from a Caucasian. The man got very close. He was now no more than twenty feet behind and a little to one side of Shepherd. The man studied him as they climbed the stairs.

  There was nothing particularly remarkable about Shepherd physically. Average height, average weight, average age. He looked to be somewhere in his mid-forties and his dark hair was a little long for a lawyer. He was wearing round, rimless sunglasses that didn’t look like they belonged to a lawyer either. Dressed as he was in a plain white long-sleeve shirt with the cuffs rolled up over his elbows, khaki pants, and dark brown loafers, he looked less like a lawyer than he did an architect inspecting a project.

  The day was hot and the man began to sweat as he climbed the steps. Where was the damn fog when you needed it? He liked Macau well enough, but it was too hot most of the year and the humidity broke his back sometimes. He didn’t spend any more time outdoors than he absolutely had to. Nobody did in Macau, except for a few crazy Americans he had seen jogging the streets in their expensive running shoes. If they could afford such nice shoes, couldn’t they afford to take a cab wherever they were going? He wiped at his damp forehead and studied Shepherd’s face.

  His eyes were an unnerving shade of blue and they looked like they could pin you to a wall. His nose was slightly crooked, as if it had been broken, and the rest of his face had the same quality of hard wear. The man hadn’t expected Shepherd to seem so beaten up, but he looked tough, too, like an old boot that had been left out in the rain for a long time. He also looked like a man who had given as much as he had gotten. Maybe more.

  The man was glad to see that Shepherd hadn’t turned out to be a fat guy in a blue suit. He needed an American lawyer, but he didn’t need a fat guy in a blue suit. He needed a fighter, a guy who could handle himself in a barroom brawl. Once he committed himself that was what this was going to be: a barroom brawl.

  SHEPHERD REACHED THE FIRST Palace of the Holy Mountain and paused to look through the big round latticework window at the Chinese tourists frantically shaking incense sticks and praying for wealth. The man smiled to himself. Every westerner tourist did that. The drifting incense, the flickering candles, the murmured prayers for prosperity. It was everything they had heard about the mysterious east, all in one room.

  When Shepherd rubbed at his eyes, the man smiled again. He couldn’t stand incense either, and the incense here was particularly unpleasant. It had a musty, old wood smell with something peppery in it. He tried to hold his breath when he walked by without being too obvious about it. If he didn’t, he would taste the foul stuff in his mouth for the rest of the day.

  Shepherd reached the top of the next set of steps and walked directly to the front of the Hall of Benevolence. He stopped and turned all the way around to see who might be watching him. The man felt Shepherd’s eyes slide over him, but they didn’t stop. He was anything but surprised at that. He knew that people didn’t notice him. Even when they were looking for him, they didn’t notice him. He had that kind of face and that kind of body. He was just one more middle-aged Asian guy. A little chubby, losing his hair, not important, not a threat to anyone. It wasn’t very flattering but, under the circumstances, it was usually for the best.

  Shepherd, on the other hand, did stand out, and not only because he was white. He stood out because he looked like a man who had everything under control. He looked like someone you went to for directions when you were lost. Which, now that the man thought about it, was exactly what he was doing. He was lost, and he needed Shepherd to show him the way home.

  The man walked past the Hall of Benevolence without stopping and began to climb the next set of steps. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Shepherd sit down to wait on a big rock at the end of the walkway. Shepherd wasn’t going to wait there forever. He had watched Shepherd eat his ice cream, dump the wrapper into a trash barrel, and start into the temple after only a few minutes of checking out his surroundings. Shepherd was not a particularly patient fellow.

  The man figured he had about five minutes to decide. After that, Shepherd would get annoyed with waiting for him and leave. Probably call Raymond before he got to the bottom of the steps and chew him out for wasting his time.

  It was now or never, wasn’t it?

  Now or never…

  TEN

  I HAD NEVER REALIZED how much sitting on a rock hurt your butt, and I’d about had enough of it when I spotted the man climbing slowly down the steps from somewhere above the Hall of Benevolence. Since his eyes were locked onto mine, I was anything but surprised when he turned and walked straight toward me. I was clearly about to meet Freddy.

  Something about him seemed vaguely familiar. He looked like someone I had seen before, not personally maybe, but perhaps in the newspapers. The idea scratched at me, but I couldn’t bring it into focus.

  The man was a middle-aged Asian who was round-shouldered and carried more weight than he should for his height. His hair was thinning and what was left of it was cut extremely short. He wore plain, rimless glasses and was dressed in a black, long-sleeved shirt, black chinos, and black loafers. The weight and the glasses made the man appear soft. He made me think of a very large stuffed toy. He looked exactly like the fat kid in elementary school everybody made fun
of during recess when the teacher wasn’t looking.

  Was Freddy Chinese? I couldn’t quite decide. The guy certainly wasn’t Japanese. Korean? That was a possibility.

  It always embarrassed me a bit that I wasn’t able to distinguish one Asian nationality from another with any certainty no matter how long I lived in that part of the world. It wasn’t that Asians all looked alike. Well, the truth was they do look a little bit alike, but I wouldn’t be caught dead uttering that old racist-sounding canard. It was just that I simply couldn’t tell them apart. There’s a difference there, but it’s hard to explain.

  The man marched straight up to me and held out his hand. His clothes smelled like a damp wood fire. It was the smell of the clouds of incense drifting around the temple. I probably smelled the same way to him.

  “You are Mr. Shepherd, are you not?”

  Thank Christ the guy spoke English. I had forgotten to ask Raymond about the language thing. If the guy hadn’t spoken English, this would have turned into the shortest conference with a prospective client I had ever had.

  I pushed myself off the rock and we shook hands.

  “Yes, I’m Jack Shepherd,” I said. “Do you really want me to call you Freddy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay,” I shrugged. “It’s your dime.”

  A puzzled expression slid over Freddy’s round face. “My dime? What is a dime?”

  “It’s…an American expression. Has to do with pay telephones.”

  “You want me to talk to you on a pay telephone?”

  “No, that’s not what I meant.”

  “Then what do pay telephones have to do with this meeting?”

  “Nothing.”

  Freddy seemed to consider that for a moment, but he nodded his head very slowly without saying anything.

  “Forget the pay telephone thing,” I said, “but let’s get something straight right now. I’m only here as a favor to Raymond. I don’t normally meet prospective clients like this. Usually they’re happy to come to my office.”

  That wasn’t exactly true, I had to admit to myself. Not many of my clients called meetings at temples, that part was true enough, but damn few of them wanted to be seen going in or out of my office either.

  “I’ve got a lot to do,” I said, cutting off that particular course of introspection before it went too far. “So let’s get to it. Why are we here?”

  “I wish to apply for political asylum in America.”

  “Then you’re talking to the wrong guy. I’m only a lawyer. I can give you the name of a Foreign Service officer at the American consulate in Hong Kong. You should be talking to him.”

  “I do not wish to sound arrogant, but I have something very big to offer in return for asylum. You do not offer something this big to a clerk at a consulate.”

  I chewed at my lip and studied the guy. He didn’t seem like a nutcase, and anyway I doubted Raymond would have sicked an out-and-out screwball on me. My gut told me Freddy was sincere, but…well, it didn’t really matter, did it?

  “I don’t know anything about immigration law,” I said. “I don’t know anything about political asylum cases. I’m the wrong man for you to talk to.”

  “You were the right man for Plato Karsarkis.”

  Christ, was there anyone on the whole planet who didn’t know about that?

  Plato Karsarkis had for a while been the world’s most famous fugitive. He even became a cause for some people, a sort of international version of O.J. Simpson. Karsarkis had hired me to cut a deal for a presidential pardon. He had something to trade, too, something big enough to be worth the deal, and I tried to help him make it.

  Things hadn’t worked out particularly well. Not for Karsarkis, not for some of the other people who got involved, and certainly not for me. Johnnie Cochran walked O.J. out of the courthouse and Cochran became a hero for a whole lot of people. My association with Plato Karsarkis was less successful. All it got me was sacked from the university where I was teaching.

  The outcome may not have been my finest hour, but dealing with Karsarkis forever changed the way I saw the world. I had never trusted governments, but I had always believed there were limits to how far they would go to protect themselves. Now I knew differently. Now I knew there were no limits at all to how far they would go.

  “Plato Karsarkis isn’t a reference I use very often. Never, actually.”

  “He needed you because you could take his case right to the White House. That’s why I need you, too.”

  “Even if I could, what do you have that’s worth taking to the White House?” I asked.

  “If I tell you, I will have given up everything and gotten nothing in return. Would you do such a stupid thing, Mr. Shepherd?”

  No, of course I wouldn’t.

  “YOU’VE GOT TO GIVE me something,” I said after the silence stretched almost to the breaking point. “Tell me who you are. Tell me what you have that would make you important enough to be worth someone’s attention. You can’t ask me to buy a pig in a poke.”

  “What is—”

  “Never mind. Just give me something.”

  Freddy’s eyes rolled around for a moment as if they had suddenly become untethered from his face, and he smiled slightly.

  “Within a week,” he said, “the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea will announce that it attempted to arrest an American who was posing as a journalist but who actually entered the country as a spy. They will tell the world that this person was shot while trying to escape and is now dead. That will not be true, of course, but that will be what they say. This person is very much alive and being held captive in North Korea.”

  “North Korea?”

  Freddy kept smiling.

  “Are you Korean?”

  He said nothing.

  “Are you North Korean?”

  He still said nothing.

  I knew Macau had connections with what was fancifully known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Several DPRK banks operated in Macau, their only window on the west, and from time to time stories surfaced about them in connection with international arms sales or drug smuggling or one of the other black businesses that North Korea dabbled in to raise hard currency. I had also heard tales that the North Koreans trained their western spies in Macau so they could learn to mix with westerners before they were sent off to the United States or Europe, but I was less certain those stories were true.

  Was this guy a North Korean spy who was offering to come over and bring his knowledge of North Korea’s arms, currency, and drug smuggling with him? If he was, and if he was trusted enough to be posted here in Macau, he could well be the big fish he seemed to be claiming to be.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “I want to go to Hawaii.”

  “Doesn’t everyone?”

  “And when I am safely in Hawaii, I will tell you everything.”

  “Everything about what?”

  Freddy shook his head, but he didn’t say anything.

  “Look, Freddy, or whoever the hell you really are, that’s not the way this works. Nobody can do anything for you unless they understand what you have to offer. Nobody is going to set you up in Hawaii on the come. And telling me some bullshit that North Korea is going to announce anyway at some time in the future isn’t going to get it.”

  “I know that. I just told you to prove I have access to information.”

  “Yeah, well, but—”

  Freddy held up one hand, palm out like a traffic cop.

  “Wait until you hear the announcement. If you are satisfied after that I am important enough to be worth your attention, please call me and we will meet again.”

  He dipped into one trouser pocket and produced a white card about the size of a business card. When he handed it to me, I saw it wasn’t a business card at all. Only a plain white rectangle of cardboard with what appeared to be a telephone number written on it in black ink.

  “That is a mobile phone that has never been us
ed and cannot be traced to me. But please be discreet. Leave a message saying you will be back in Macau at a certain time. We will meet here again exactly twelve hours after whatever time you give me.”

  “Is all this cloak and dagger stuff really necessary?”

  “Oh yes, Mr. Shepherd. All this and a lot more. I am taking a grave risk talking to you today. I have already put my life in your hands.”

  “So you can go to Hawaii.”

  Freddy smiled. “I hear it is very nice there.”

  “Nice enough to risk your life for?”

  Freddy seemed to think about that for a moment. Then he nodded. “Yes, I think it probably is.”

  He nodded again for good measure, turned away, and walked down the steps to Barra Square. I noticed he never looked back.

  ELEVEN

  IT WAS A LITTLE after one when I got back to the MGM. I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast other than an ice cream bar, so I went looking for a sandwich and some coffee.

  The area between the MGM’s main tower and its casino is a vast vaulted space the hotel calls the Grande Praça. I have no clue how to pronounce that and my guess was almost no one else does either.

  One end of the Grande Praça is said to be modeled on Lisbon’s nineteenth century central train station and the other is composed of a vast sandstone staircase rising what looks to be fifty or sixty feet. In between is a tiled area that’s supposed to look like a European village square. It’s filled with park benches and huge potted trees and lined with shops, sidewalk restaurants, and the false fronts of narrow Mediterranean-styled houses. Above it all soars a curved glass dome supported by graceful white arches.