Brother Fish

by Bryce Courtenay

  We chatted while the waitress went to get the beer – the usual stuff, weather, boats, the fishing season. The beer came. ‘Cheers.’ We raised our wineglasses, Doug his beer. ‘What can we do for you, Doug?’

  I asked, now that the formalities were over.

  ‘It’s about the ab licence with Don Pertano,’ he said.

  ‘We’re out of there, Doug,’ I replied. ‘He may be your lawyer, but he couldn’t lie straight in bed.’

  ‘Yeah, Safcol bloke come in yesterday, same thing.’

  ‘Same thing?’

  ‘Walked out, got in his car and drove off back to Eden, tyres spinnin’.’

  ‘So what are you saying, Doug?’

  ‘The flamin’ lawyer. He don’t know nothin’ about fishing . . . fishermen.’

  ‘Why are you selling? Didn’t you say you had a son in the game?’

  ‘Smashed the ute, broke his leg. I’m too old to dive – asthma.’ Like most fishermen, he was a man of few words.

  ‘Broken legs get better.’

  ‘Yeah, right, but we can’t fish ’til it do. We can’t use all our quota units.’ Then he added the real reason. ‘They say the ab licence price is gunna fall, can’t keep goin’ up.’

  ‘Does your son like fishing?’

  ‘It’s all we know, mate.’

  ‘So you’ll take the twenty grand or so and do what?’

  ‘Dunno – maybe buy a bit of a dairy farm.’

  ‘Know anything about cows?’

  He grinned. ‘If they didn’t have horns I wouldn’t know the arse end from the head until it mooed or farted. But we’re grafters – we’ll learn.’

  We’d seen it all so many times before – three generations of a fishing family scratching their arse in the hope of finding the Christmas-pudding sixpence. The abalone licence was the first opportunity, and probably the last, they’d ever had to make a buck. But they panicked over the imagined possibility of the bottom falling out of abalone, like everything else always does for fishermen. Along comes the smart-arse lawyer or con man: ‘Sell, mate, it can’t last. Give me ten per cent and I’ll do the deal for you, no problems.’ What was on offer was more than they’d ever see again in their lives.

  ‘What’s Pertano on – ten per cent?’

  ‘Nah, fifteen.’

  ‘Did you sign a contract?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He pulled a contract out of the inside breast pocket of his coat, and handed it to me. I read through it quickly. Thank Christ there are still some stupid lawyers around – the contract stipulated that the licence alone was for sale, and made no mention of the quota units. The licence was worthless without them. Admittedly it was a technical point, but a good lawyer would make mincemeat of a careless operator like Pertano. He didn’t know the fishing industry, which was pretty unusual, Bermagui being a fishing town.

  ‘How long’s this Pertano bloke been in town?’ I asked Doug Twentyman.

  ‘New. Come in about two months ago. Says he was in Melbourne.’

  I pushed my chair back and ordered another beer for Doug Twentyman. ‘Okay, Doug, here are your options. Sell the licence and your quota units and go dairy farming – it’s only slightly more risky as an industry than fishing. Don’t sell your licence and keep the number of quota units your son can handle himself when he can dive again, but sell the rest. Safcol will buy them, or we will.’

  ‘Mate, what if the abs go bottom up?’ he asked again.

  ‘The abalone industry won’t – there are a few million Japs who’ll crawl over broken glass to get the stuff, and we haven’t even started with the Chinese. Your abalone licence and quota units are going to increase enormously in value – if you hang on long enough you could end up a millionaire.’

  ‘So, what do I do?’ he asked, looking confused.

  It’s no wonder these poor bastards get taken for a ride. They’re ripe for the plucking. ‘Mate, you’ve got to make your own decisions. Go home and talk to your son.’

  ‘Nah, he’ll go along with me.’ Then he asked, ‘Jacko, will you buy the licence?’

  ‘No, keep the licence and half the quota units – that’s your superannuation,’ I answered, but could see he didn’t know what that was. ‘That’s what will take care of your old age. Sell the other half to us, or to anyone else if you have to. But if you don’t need the money, keep the lot – the price of an abalone licence is not going to go down.’

  ‘What about my son’s leg? It’s broke bad, and he can’t fish for a year.’

  I was trying not to become impatient. ‘We’re bringing a boat up here with divers. Your son can come on the payroll as a deckie until he can dive again. That way we’ll be more or less within the law and we’ll take a small percentage of your quota for the diving operation and buy the rest from him at normal prices. When he can dive again you can make up your own mind what you want to do with your quota units.’

  ‘What about him, the lawyer bloke?’

  ‘Withdraw the sale. If you want to sell some of your quota units in twelve months we’ll buy them from you at the going price at the time.’

  ‘He reckons he’s got expenses over and above.’

  ‘What, Pertano? Greedy bastard. Tell him to sue you. By the time it gets to court your son will be making plenty and you can settle out of court. When that time comes, give me a call.’

  ‘Do yiz want a contract?’

  ‘Later maybe, when you decide what you’re going to do. In the meantime, let’s shake hands on the deal.’

  After he’d gone, Jimmy laughed. ‘Why you gone do dat, Brother Fish? Twenny grand yoh got da whole caboodle!’

  ‘Mate, I kept seeing Alf. My dad died when he was around Doug’s age, leaving us without a brass razoo to our name. He’d worked like a dog all his life and had nothing to show for it. The middle men, the fish merchants in Melbourne, were all driving around in Chevvies and Packards and living in mansions and we could barely put food on the table. Gloria had to take in washing. We’re the bloody middle men now and I’ve got a house on the island big enough to turn into a rest home for the elderly. It’s too late for Alf, but it’s time to look after blokes like Doug Twentyman and his family. The poor bugger even looks a bit like my dad.’

  Jimmy smiled. ‘Dat good. Anyhow, we gonna do jus’ fine wid his abalone quota units.’

  On the plane back to the island we told Wendy the plan to try and find the Countess’s daughter. At first she wasn’t all that enthusiastic about the idea. Let sleeping dogs lie, blah, blah, blah – that sort of argument. But Jimmy got to work on her.

  ‘Wendy, yoh gotta see it from two direction – da chile and da mama. Da chile, she want to know who is her mama. Da mama, she want to know how her chile she doin’ in life. She can’t say dat to no one, but what she thinkin’, every day of her life, is dat she is guilty.’ Then he clinched it, perhaps a bit unfairly, by saying, ‘Don’t one day pass when I don’t think somewhere in America der a black lady who my mama. How she doin’? She lookin’ in trash cans or she doin’ okay?’

  The three of us chose an invitation to afternoon tea at Nicole’s cottage to talk to her about the prospect of exporting abalone to China via Hong Kong. Seated in the garden, she listened carefully as I outlined the potential of the Chinese market, first having done all the sums and worked out the details. Like everything we put to her, I knew she’d think about it before venturing an opinion.

  ‘We’d be dealing with the Triads,’ she said at last. ‘They control most, if not all, of the fish imports to Asia, with the exception of Japan.’

  I was ready for this. ‘As you know it’s the same in Japan, where we’re already dealing with the agents of Yoshio Kodama, the godfather of the Yakuza. It’s either working with them or forfeiting business with the Japanese.’ I shrugged, trying unsuccessfully to look matter of fact. ‘I guess it’s the same with the Chinese. We’d need your expertise – it’s not something Jimmy and I could handle on our own,’ I said.

  A silence followed that seemed to last a
bout ten years. ‘Jack, I’m sixty-seven years old and I woke this morning, as I do every morning of my life, with a knot of fear in the pit of my stomach. It’s always the same waking thought – today they are going to come for me. I’m not even sure who they are. The past? Big Boss Yu? The CIA? The Triads? For goodness sake, Big Boss Yu would be in his mid-eighties by now, if he’s not dead. Whatever happened with the Triads is long past. Even Smallpox “Million Dollar” Yang would be in his late-seventies. I tell myself I have nothing to fear from the Americans. The trumped-up evidence against me would have been long since lost in the Chinese court system, and besides, my case wasn’t ever within American jurisdiction. So why the deeply ingrained fear of being found? When I came to Australia all I wanted to do was to find a safe place to hide. I looked on the map and saw Queen Island, a speck of a place in the middle of Bass Strait. I’ve never been able to shake the original fear. Ridiculous, I admit, emotional nonsense to be sure, but it all amounts to terror at the prospect of ever going back to find my daughter.’

  As usual, Nicole had cut through the preliminaries and gone straight to the heart of the matter, realising that finding her daughter was behind the so-called business proposition to export abalone to the Chinese. I could see Jimmy was about to say something, but she continued. ‘If I’m being honest with myself, it’s the fear of what I might discover. Several times in the past I’ve almost summoned up the courage to leave the emotional safety of the island to try to find her. But I always end up making excuses. I tell myself I don’t even know her name. If she survived she’d be long past wanting to know who her mother was. She probably doesn’t even speak English. She would bitterly resent me. She would have a life of her own that I’d only disrupt, without adding anything to it. I’ve convinced myself we would have absolutely nothing in common.’ She paused, visibly distressed, then said quietly, ‘Or I’d discover she is dead and died in a horrible way. Or worse, she is a prostitute or living in abject poverty. But, in the end, it all boils down to my own innate cowardice.’

  ‘Countess, she gonna want to know who is her mama jus’ the same I want to know who is my mama. That don’t evah go away. That a hunger inside yo’ heart. I ain’t never gonna find my mama to sat-is-fy my hungry heart, but you can try to find yo’ daughter.’ He paused and looked at her almost angrily, and then demanded, ‘Yoh gonna try to do that, or yo’ gonna wake every mornin’ ’til yoh die, like yoh jus’ said?’

  By not comforting or reassuring her but by taking her daughter’s point of view, Jimmy had hit the jackpot – it was precisely the right aggressive approach. Nicole looked at Jimmy, then with her eyes downcast she whispered, ‘Yes.’ That was all. Just the one little word, but it had taken forty-two years to say.

  She rose from her wicker chair. ‘I shan’t be long,’ she said quietly, visibly upset, and disappeared into the cottage. We looked at each other. ‘Well done, mate,’ I said quietly to Jimmy.

  ‘She’s terribly upset,’ Wendy cried. ‘I must go in to comfort her!’

  ‘No! Leave her be,’ Jimmy said firmly. ‘Dis thing she gotta cry out alone.’

  Wendy sat down reluctantly, and for a moment I thought to encourage her to go in after the Countess. But then I realised Jimmy wasn’t being bossy. In order to say what he’d said, he’d had to reveal a sadness and longing within himself I’d never seen before. He wasn’t being harsh – instead he was being sensitive to Nicole’s feelings.

  She appeared half an hour later and we could see she’d tried to conceal the effects of her tears by applying a little make-up. She carried a wooden box about twelve inches long, four inches deep and six inches wide, and placed it on the table among the afternoon-tea clutter. It was made of a light-coloured wood with the head of a dragon carved into the lid. It was the first time we’d ever seen the dragon box.

  ‘Open it, Jack,’ she instructed, and I did as she asked. Inside, it was lined with red satin, upon which a thick blonde plait lay, running the length of the box and then almost all the way back again. It was nearly two feet long and looked as if it had been washed and brushed only moments before to a lovely sheen. Jimmy and Wendy rose to stand behind my chair. Nicole lifted the plait from the box. ‘I washed and brushed it and then replaited it only a week ago. I do so from time to time, though I can’t imagine why – I always end up crying my eyes out.’ Where the plait had lain was a small folded card with the top section of a broken seal of red sealing wax resting on the edge and at the centre of the top fold.

  ‘May I?’ I asked, while Wendy held the magnificent plait of hair. Nicole nodded and I lifted the card out and opened it to see a line of Chinese characters across the centre.

  I knew, of course, what they said: ‘The good joss will return in one generation.’ ‘Will we be taking the dragon box back to Hong Kong with us?’ I asked.

  Nicole smiled. ‘I feel rather foolish saying this, but I’d feel safer if we did. If ever we can return it, I think that might mean something to me.’

  At Kai Tak Airport we were met by a chauffeur driving a Rolls Royce and taken to the Mandarin on Hong Kong Island, at the time a pleasing blend of modern luxury and traditional elegance. We each had a suite that came with its own butler and maid. Even though we were doing pretty well and money was no longer a problem, I remember feeling a little out of place. You never quite forget where you come from, and shaking the poor boy out of your head isn’t all that easy to do.

  When we arrived at our suite the butler asked if he could unpack our suitcases. After freshening up following the long flight I came out of one of the two bathrooms (Wendy had her own) to find my shoes had been polished, my slacks ironed and the creases ironed out of a recently unpacked shirt. The shirt, socks and underpants I had been wearing had been taken away to be laundered, and a new set lay neatly folded on the bed with a shoehorn, for godsake, placed beside my socks.

  We all travelled for Ogoya a fair bit and, now that we could afford it, stayed in good pubs wherever we found ourselves in the world. But the Mandarin was something else. Nicole claimed that although the hotel was comparatively modern, its service felt very similar to that of the Cathay Hotel Sir Victor had built in Shanghai, and she felt very much at home. She was soon chatting away in Cantonese with all the staff and didn’t look a bit frightened now she was here, although Wendy, who’d sat beside her on the plane, said she’d been rather quiet. In a way, considering what had taken place the last time she’d been in Hong Kong, so far this was somewhat of a triumphant return.

  It wasn’t going to be too difficult to get to the local fish importers, as the Australian Trade Commission official had set us up with several appointments. The problem was going to be getting to the right Triad family as part of our other mission to find Nicole’s daughter. It wasn’t as if we could simply pick up the telephone directory and look up Yu Ya-ching. There might be a hundred such names, but Big Boss Yu’s would not be among them. There was only one way to contact a Triad boss, and a rather frightening one at that. If we could get a message to him it would have to be delivered by unseen hand, and if a meeting was arranged it would be at a place and time nominated by the recipient.

  We’d had two photographs taken of the dragon box, one showing the carved dragon’s head and another showing the open box with the plait of hair inside. A separate photograph captured the original note with the calligraphy. Nicole purchased some bright-yellow parchment and had one sheet fashioned into an envelope of sufficient size to take her message and the three photographs. She’d had a chop made – that is, a seal – from a small block of polished granite about half the width and slightly taller than a matchbox, with one end containing the carved seal. Its design was a replica of a simple plait lying within a circle, cut into the granite so that when hot-waxed and stamped the design showed in relief.

  With a message as confidential as this Nicole dared not take the contents of the letter to a calligrapher, and knew she needed to write it with her own hand and that this must be apparent to the receiver. She spent al
most three days composing and preparing the note and used up a couple of dozen sheets of parchment in the process, burning each of her mistakes in the bathroom basin and washing the remains down the drain.

  The message had to be carefully thought out so that it contained not the slightest threat and, at the same time, made it worthwhile for the recipient to respond. This was not an easy task – deception is the mainstay of the Triad secret society, and a message correctly phrased requires a deep knowledge of the culture of the brotherhood. Even Nicole was not familiar with this secret protocol, so she simply had to use the language of respect familiar to the Chinese in the context of such a letter. It was her very lack of deception that she was counting on. Her message was therefore simple, direct and unique.

  My Lord, may the recipient of this message be blessed with many sons to honour and magnify his name. May he be blessed with a long and illustrious life, his luck remain golden and his clan prosper above all others. If the Lord Yu Ya-ching has not departed to take his place in the palace of his forefathers then this message is intended for his eyes alone. If by the grace of all Gods he now resides in the Western Heaven, then this dispatch is addressed with the highest respect to his eldest living son or he who wears the robes of dragonhead.

  The reader does me great honour and receives my humble gratitude for deigning to receive it. I am known by the name Lily No Gin, and it has fallen upon my unworthy shoulders to return dutifully the dragon box according to the two sacred prophecies:

  ‘It is good for now but it will sail away across the seas and return again later to his dragonhead.’

  ‘The good joss will return in one generation.’

  Destiny also allows me to humbly offer great good fortune to the esteemed family of Yu Ya-ching of far greater magnitude than that of the propitious venture of Double Golden Boy raisins.

  In return I ask only moments of your precious time, and to be allowed one question. May all Gods bear witness that the information I seek can in no way compromise or disturb the peaceful virtues of the clan Ching, but only enhance its immortal name.