The Water Rat of Wanchai

by Ian Hamilton

  The driver left the highway, turned right, and cut uphill through a series of narrow streets lined with houses and shops only a sidewalk away. It was a bumpy ride. Many of the streets were cobblestoned, and the driver had to come almost to a complete halt to navigate deep V-shaped trenches cut across the roadway.

  At the top of the hill the road opened onto a broad expanse and the driver began to circle what was obviously a park. There was only a half-moon and not all the street lights were working, but as they drove along Ava was taken aback by the scale and variety of architecture they passed. “This is the Savannah, the Queen’s Park Savannah,” he said, meaning the park. “Used to play cricket here every Sunday, but now I just come for Carnival.”

  “What about these buildings?” Ava asked.

  “That’s All Saints’ Church, and over there is the American embassy.”

  “No, I mean those,” Ava said, pointing to a row of mansions that looked as if they belonged in a Victorian-era London neighbourhood.

  “The Magnificent Seven, we call them. They were built over a hundred years ago by European businessmen who were all trying to outdo each other. That one there is now the president’s house, and the rest I really don’t know,” the driver said.

  They continued around the circle to get to the Hilton, which was adjacent to the Savannah and close to the Royal Botanic Gardens. The hotel’s curious hillside structure was reflected in the interior. The lobby at the front of the hotel was on the ground floor, and Ava’s room at the rear, which still had a view of the lights encircling the Savannah, was two floors below. Aside from the architectural eccentricity, when she opened the door to her room she found herself in a classic Hilton hotel room: clean, middle-class, dependable.

  She ordered a Carib beer and a club sandwich from room service and then called Hong Kong. It was just past ten in the morning there, and Uncle, as usual, was at breakfast. “I’m in Trinidad. I leave for Guyana tomorrow.”

  “We don’t have anyone there,” he said.

  “I didn’t think we would.”

  “The closest we have someone is in Venezuela.”

  “I’ll handle it myself.”

  “Ava, if you think you need help I’ll call Venezuela.”

  “I don’t need help,” she said. “I’m staying at the Phoenix Hotel in Georgetown. I don’t know if my cellphone is going to work there, so if you can’t reach me that way, call the hotel. I don’t know how long this is going to take, so don’t get worried if you don’t hear from me for a few days.”

  “You are sure he is there?”

  “As sure as I can be.”

  “My friend saw me last night. We were at massage and I couldn’t avoid him. He said you talked to Tam.”

  “He caught me by surprise.”

  “Well, nothing we can do but finish this project.”

  “How many haven’t I finished?”

  “A few . . . but then they were usually dead by the time we got to them.”

  On a previous case the client had assigned more than one group the job of recovering their money. Twice she had been in meetings with targets, easing them towards repayment, when the competitors intruded, blood in their eyes. She convinced one set to leave by promising to share part of the commission with them. The other had to be neutralized more forcefully.

  “Do they have anyone else working this job?”

  “No, no, no, it is just us. I am very careful about that now.”

  “All right, then I’m off to bed. I have an early start tomorrow.”

  Ava showered and then shampooed the smell of airplane out of her hair. She pulled on clean panties and a T-shirt and then sat on the bed to watch the local news. The lead story was about how Trinidad had become a major part of the South American drug pipeline to the U.S., which was reported with a mixture of shock and pride. The opposition leader, who was black, came on the screen to charge four cabinet ministers, who were all East Indian, with corruption. Lifelong politicians who had never made more than thirty thousand dollars a year, they had each somehow amassed a personal net worth in excess of ten million dollars. One of the cabinet ministers was interviewed in front of what appeared to be a local school. He looked directly into the camera and claimed to have gotten lucky in the stock market. It’s amazing, Ava thought, just how many politicians get lucky in the stock market.

  She turned off the television and crawled into bed, her mind randomly flitting ahead to Guyana. She had no idea what to expect when she got there, in terms of either the country or Seto. She knew well enough from trips to hinterlands in India, China, and the Philippines that her life’s usual amenities might be in short supply, but it would be another thing entirely to experience deprivation of clean water and food she could actually identify. Guyana, from what she’d read, certainly held that potential. She could only hope she was wrong.

  Then there was Seto. All he was right now was a passport picture, a fragment of a voice, and an address in a neighbourhood she didn’t know in a city and country in which she had no connections. She could land tomorrow and find him gone. Maybe Antonelli had figured that keeping $2.5 million was worth a little — no, a lot of — humiliation. Or maybe when she got there she wouldn’t be able to find a way to get to Seto. But when has that ever happened? she thought. Not often. Actually, never.

  There was always a way; it just depended on what level of risk was warranted by the money at the other end. The risk and the reward weren’t always in balance, and Ava liked to think she was pragmatic enough to recognize when that was the case and to make the appropriate decision. Five million dollars, though . . . her commission share of $750,000 was an awful lot of money, an awful lot of reward.

  ( 16 )

  AVA’S WAKEUP CALL CAME AT SIX. SHE BRUSHED HER hair and teeth and put on her Adidas training pants, a clean bra, and a T-shirt. She pulled a copy of the Trinidad Tribune from underneath her door and left it on a table near the window. There was a kettle in the room; she turned it on and then sat down to read the paper while the water boiled.

  There was a rehash of the television story from the night before, with pictures of all of the accused cabinet ministers. They looked like half a cricket team gone to fat. Ava skipped that story and read about the government’s concern over the rising crime rate and their search for a new police chief. A Canadian from Calgary was one of the candidates. Ava thought that had to be a bad idea. How could a Canadian understand the social dynamics and financial imperatives of a place such as Trinidad?

  She poured hot water into a mug and made herself some instant. She had drunk one coffee and was halfway through the second when the room phone rang to tell her the car had arrived. She took the elevator to the lobby and was greeted by a different driver, who looked East Indian. As he drove away from the hotel and onto the road that circled the Savannah, she asked him what he thought about the corruption charges against the cabinet ministers.

  “The blacks,” he said, as if that explained everything.

  She asked about the drug trade.

  “As long as the drugs don’t stay here, who cares? It could be good for the economy.”

  Ava turned her attention to the passing city. The Magnificent Seven looked almost decrepit in the daylight, the bright morning sun exposing faded paint, chipped bricks, and raised roof shingles. The Savannah had lost some of its allure as well. She noticed that there was less actual grass than patches of bare ground pocked with clumps of crabgrass and weeds. Ava thought about something Uncle had said about older women in the morning light without makeup, then pushed it aside.

  They rode quietly along the main highway. The factories and warehouses looked less oppressive now, and Beetham Estate seemed even more shabby. When they got to the intersection that took them to the airport, the car stopped for a red light. As it sat idling, a scrawny woman, her naked body streaked with mud and dirt, her hair matted, her breasts lying flat against her torso, jumped out and began pounding her fists on the hood. Her face pressed against the glass of Av
a’s window as she screamed obscenities. Ava recoiled.

  “No worries,” the driver said. “She’s here every day. Just a mad woman.”

  “She needs help,” she said, still alarmed.

  “No money, no help,” he said. “This is Trinidad. Go downtown at night, there are a lot more people like her. Maybe not so crazy, but crazy enough.”

  “Shit,” she said.

  “So where are you going?” he asked as the car pulled away from the intersection, leaving the screaming woman behind.

  “Guyana.”

  “Why?”

  “Business.”

  “The only business in Guyana is monkey business.”

  “That’s not my business.”

  “Just don’t drink the Kool-Aid,” he said, and laughed.

  “What?”

  “Kool-Aid — don’t drink it. You don’t remember Jim Jones?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “An American preacher. He brought his entire church to Guyana and set up a commune. It didn’t work out well.”

  “How so?”

  “They had troubles. The entire group drank Kool-Aid laced with poison. They all died. There were nine hundred of them, as I remember, maybe more. The joke around here is that if you had to choose between Kool-Aid and living in Guyana, Kool-Aid would win out most times.”

  ( 17 )

  AVA WALKED OUT OF CHEDDI JAGAN AIRPORT INTO an atmosphere that even in the morning was fetid. She looked for a sign with her name on it. She noticed the person holding it before she actually saw the sign: a lone white man with blond hair, towering above a sea of black and brown faces.

  She waved at him and he burst through the waiting group. He was wearing a red polo shirt with PHOENIX sewn over the heart, brown cargo shorts, and white socks pulled up to his knees. He walked awkwardly, with his knees almost locked, and his upper body was also stiff, biceps pushing out his sleeves, broad chest, thick neck. Weightlifter, she thought. Steroids.

  “Welcome to Guyana,” he said, reaching for her bags. He had a big, loopy smile on his face, and bright blue eyes that were nothing but friendly.

  He led her through the crowd with his elbows stuck out to help clear her path. He threw the bags into the rear seat of a black Jeep with a gold phoenix stencilled on all four doors. Ava guessed she was expected to ride up front.

  The car was running and the air conditioning was going full throttle. She shivered and sneezed. Some of the worst colds she’d had in her life had been the result of going from heat and humidity into freezers posing as retail stores. When she asked him to turn the air conditioning down, he looked at her as if she were demented but did what she asked anyway.

  “I’m Jeff,” he said.

  “Hi, Jeff. How far is it to the hotel?”

  “About forty-five kilometres,” he said.

  “Half an hour?”

  “You haven’t been here before, have you?” he said. She detected a New England accent.

  “No.”

  “Didn’t think so. We’ll be an hour, maybe longer.”

  “That much traffic?”

  He laughed. “Yeah, sort of.”

  They hadn’t travelled more than a kilometre when they ran into a line of cars slowly bobbing and weaving from one side of the two-lane road to the other. Jeff joined the conga line. “They’re trying to avoid the potholes,” he said. “There are a few stretches of road between here and Georgetown that aren’t riddled with them, but not many. So we’re going to go as fast as the slowest car ahead of us. That’s the way it is. Sorry.”

  “I’m glad you have a Jeep.”

  “There are some potholes even the Jeep couldn’t get out of, especially in town.”

  Some of the holes cut across both lanes, and that caused extra delays as the incoming and outgoing traffic sorted out who had the right of way. Ava tried not to feel nauseated, focusing her attention on the scenery. It was mainly country, low-lying land dotted here and there with what looked like rice paddies. In the distance was the familiar sight of a sugarcane field. Sugar and rice — the agricultural staples of the poorest countries in the world.

  The monotony of the landscape was punctuated every couple of kilometres by a village or, more often, a group of ten to twelve shacks. They were built almost right up against the edge of the road. There wasn’t a brick in any of them. Most of them had some kind of wooden frame, the walls an interlaced mixture of planks of different woods, tarpaper, and corrugated tin. The windows were covered with strips of cloth.

  Some residents stood leaning against the houses, watching the cars slalom past. Others sat outside on stools, goats tied to pegs bumping against them, children and chickens running around freely. Ava jumped a few times when she saw a child come too close to the road, but Jeff didn’t flinch or slow down his twenty- to thirty-kilometre-an-hour crawl.

  The area reminded Ava of parts of the rural Philippines where no one worked and each day was spent watching life drive by. She wondered how many of the people living in these shacks had travelled more than ten kilometres from where they lived.

  The road began to improve a little after an hour, and Ava guessed they were getting close to Georgetown. Jeff had been quiet and intense during the drive, and Ava hadn’t wanted to disturb his concentration. Now she said, “I don’t mean to be nosy, but I thought I detected a bit of a New England accent.”

  He didn’t take his eyes from the road. “That’s smart of you.”

  “I went to school in Massachusetts for two years.”

  “I’m from Gloucester.”

  “How did someone from Gloucester find their way down here?”

  Now he looked towards her, hesitated, then said, “I’m — I was — a fisherman. I came down here on a shrimper out of Florida. We were buying our catch at sea, paying cash to Guyanese boats. What the skipper didn’t tell us was that those boats were financed by local gangsters, and they weren’t too thrilled about our little black market, about us stealing from them. We were in the middle of a deal when two speedboats came out of nowhere and put us out of business.”

  “How did they do that?”

  He glanced at her again. “They shot the captain and the other two men on the Guyanese boat and threw their bodies into the sea. They took our boat, scuttled it, and set us adrift in a lifeboat.”

  “Shit.”

  “Big-time shit. We somehow found our way to Georgetown. The skipper went to the cops and they acted as if what had happened was the most natural thing in the world. They told us we were fucking lucky to have made it to shore and maybe we ought to let it go at that. The skipper and the rest of the crew flew back to Miami, but I decided to stay here a while. That was five years ago. It ain’t Miami but the work is steady, the beer is cheap, and the women are slutty.”

  “Those sound like great reasons to stay.”

  Jeff shrugged. “I didn’t mean to sound like an asshole. It’s just the way it is here.”

  “I didn’t take any offence,” Ava said. She noticed they were driving through larger concentrations of housing.

  “Georgetown,” he said.

  The driving began to occupy him again as the potholes expanded in number and size. As they manoeuvred their way into the city, Ava was immediately taken by the fact that nearly every building was made of wood. A lot of the houses were ramshackle affairs two or three storeys high, with three or four apparently boxed together and some on stilts. Most of the wood was grey, bleached, weather-beaten, not unlike houses she’d seen on Cape Cod, except the houses on Cape Cod had glass windows, not wooden shutters or strips of cloth. In New England there had been flashes of colour as well, something Georgetown was almost devoid of, aside from a wall that had been painted in red with GOD IS IN CHARGE. ALL IS WELL.

  The storefronts were a bit more colourful, their wooden exteriors decorated with hand-painted signs advertising a variety of wares and services. Their windows and doors were protected by thick metal screens, and inside it looked as if the service counters and cash reg
isters were separated from customers by a metal fence that extended from countertop to ceiling. People were passing money through one slot in the screen and getting goods back through another.

  “If they didn’t do that,” Jeff said, motioning to a string of storefronts, “they would be getting robbed every other day.”

  They were driving through the middle of the city now. Large white edifices began to appear, and they passed a building that housed various courts of law. From afar it looked elegant, but as they came closer Ava saw that paint was peeling off its exterior and some of the window shutters were broken and hanging at odd angles. There was a patch of dry, cracked earth between the sidewalk and the building, with a statue of Queen Victoria sitting on it. Both of the hands had been cut off and the torso was covered in graffiti. Ava looked away. There was something particularly depressing about public institutions — symbols of a nation — that were allowed to fall into such disrepair. It said as much about the people they represented as the structures themselves.

  Ava next saw a wooden church spire soaring above the city’s skyline.

  “St. George’s Anglican,” said Jeff. “It’s forty metres high at the peak of the spire, the tallest wooden cathedral in the world.”

  “And what is that?” she asked, her attention now caught by a clock tower in the other direction.

  “Stabroek Market, the bizarre bazaar. You name it, you can buy it there — everything from pineapple to shoes to furniture, jewellery, and even a whole pig.”

  “The clock tower, what is it made of?”

  “Corrugated iron. The whole building is made of iron, some corrugated, some cast. What would you expect when it was designed by an engineer and built by an iron company?”

  “Interesting,” Ava said.

  “Interest wears off soon enough.”

  They reached the end of High Street. Jeff turned right and then did a quick left. “The hotel is straight ahead,” he said.