by Don Winslow
“I’m a security guard at the Banyan Tree Hotel.”
Please, baby Jesus, come down now. I’m off the midway and headed for the sideshow tents.
“It’s the family trade. Besides, it gives me access to a gym. And a place where I can conduct a couple of sidelines, if you know what I mean.”
Yeah, I think I know what you mean.
“The security work?” Ben continued. “I have it dicked. The place was a mess when I took the job. Thieves … beggars … little kids swiping handbags. The tourists were really put off. And vandalism that you wouldn’t believe. I came in and brought some of my boys with me. We cleaned it up, you know what I mean?” He showed Neal his enormous fist. “Now the word is out. We don’t have to work much, and the owners are happy to pay us, feed us, let us use the gym—an empty room now and then when the need comes up, if you know what I mean.”
Yeah, I know what you mean. You organize the thieves, the beggars, and the pickpockets. You commit the vandalism. Then you make it stop. It works the same way in Chinatown in New York, or in Little Italy. People pay you to protect them against yourself. It works the same way on Wall Street, on Capitol Hill. On the street it’s called “protection,” in the halls of power they call it “lunch.”
“I think I know what you mean, Ben.”
“I think you do, too.”
Ben Chin eased his way skillfully into the flow of slow-moving early-morning traffic. He stayed in the mainstream moving down Chatham Road for about twenty minutes, then manuevered into a turn lane and onto Tung Tau Tsuen Street.
Chin pointed out the window to a patch of decrepit, filthy, high-rise tenements about the size of two football fields.
“You don’t ever want to go in there, Neal.”
“No?”
“No. That’s the Walled City. You go in there, you don’t come back out. It’s like a maze.”
Neal said, “I don’t see any walls.”
“Torn down. It was a Sung fort. Even the British didn’t want it when they took over in Kowloon. You’re looking at one of the worst slums in the world. No government, no law. It’s the end of the road.”
Ben sped up again and turned back onto Chatham Road.
“Speaking of the end of the road,” Neal said, “where are we going?”
“To the hotel. We got you a nice room.”
Any time now, baby Jesus.
“Ben, didn’t your cousin explain to you that some people might be looking for me?”
“sure.”
“So, a hotel?” Neal asked. No wonder you flunked out.
“Not a hotel, Neal. My hotel. You don’t sign the register, and you have a room we can keep an eye on. Nobody will get to you.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“My boys at the hotel.”
“The other guards that you supervise.”
Ben Chin chuckled. “Sure. We pride ourselves on keeping our guests safe and secure.”
Chin took a left off Chatham onto Austin Road.
“Hey, Ben?”
“Yeah, Neal?”
“Let’s cut the happy-Buddha, Hop Sing routine, and get down to it. You’re mobbed up, right?”
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘mobbed up.’”
The idea sure didn’t make him mad, though. He was grinning with glee.
“You’re a junior executive with one of the Triads. In the management training program, so to speak.”
“Oooohh, ‘Triad’ … the man thinks he knows the lingo.”
Yeah, the man thinks he does. You’d have to be deaf, dumb, and stupid to do my kind of work in any major city in America and not know about the crime syndicates that controlled so much of daily life in every Chinatown. Neal knew that the Triads’ high-ticket item was heroin, but the protection racket provided a big slice of the daily bread, and the Triad bosses used this extortion as a training ground for its thugs and up-and-comers. The Triads had spread their fingers over the Asian communities worldwide, but their home offices were in Hong Kong.
“Quit running a number on me, Ben.”
“So you’re from New York, Neal? You’ve had some Peking Duck on Mott Street and you think you’re an expert on the inscrutable world of the Orient? Let me tell you, something, Neal—you know shit.”
He took a left off Austin onto Nathan Road.
“So tell me what I need to know,” Neal said.
“You need to know that you’re in good hands and leave it at that.”
“Am I in good hands?”
“The best.”
The Banyan Tree Hotel occupies a block on the east side of Nathan Road in the Kowloon District called Tsimshatsui—the Peninsula. It’s the major tourist area in Hong Kong, with its “Golden Mile” shopper’s paradise, restaurants, and bars.
“You’ll blend right in here,” Chin assured Neal as they climbed the back staircase, not bothering to check in. “And you’re prepaid.”
They walked up to the second floor and then grabbed the elevator to the ninth. Neal’s room, 967, was large and anonymous. Its furniture and decor could have been in any hotel room in New Jersey, except that the large picture window looked out over Kowloon Park, across from Nathan Road. The banyan trees that lined the park were survivors from the days when Major Nathan first surveyed the lines for the dirt track that at the time led to nowhere and hence got the name “Nathan’s Folly.” The park appeared to be filled mostly with old people and kids. A deformed beggar, his legs bent underneath him, was crawling along the sidewalk, feebly chasing passersby.
“Welcome to Kowloon,” Chin said. “The real Hong Kong.”
Neal sat down on the bed and began to go through the papers in his briefcase. “What does ‘Kowloon’ mean?”
“Nine dragons,” Chin answered as he lit up a Marlboro. He almost looked like a dragon himself, a big, dangerous beast puffing smoke. “The old people thought that the eight hills here were each dragons, and they were going to call the place Eight Dragons. Then the Sung Emperor came, and the Emperor is a dragon, so that made nine. Nine Dragons—Kowloon.”
“It looks pretty flat to me.”
“It is. Most of the hills were ‘dozed to make room.”
Neal took the brochure advertising Li Lan’s paintings from his briefcase and handed it to Chin. “Where is that address?”
“Is this the babe?”
“Yeah. Is it far from here?”
“Good looking. No, not far. Kansu Street is just up the Nathan Road. Yaumatei District. You get some sleep, then I’ll take you there.”
“I’m not tired.”
“She’s a painter?”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe she’d like to paint my picture. What do you think?”
“I think you should tell me how to get to two-thirty-seven Kansu Street.”
The beggar across the street scored some coins from a young woman tourist. Chin offered the pack of cigarettes to Neal, who shook his head.
“I think,” Chin said, “that I better take you there.”
“Why? Is it a dangerous neighborhood?”
“It’s not the neighborhood, it’s the situation.”
“What situation?”
“You tell me.”
Neal got up and looked out the window. The beggar would have been tall if had been able to stand up. He was certainly thin. He moved by supporting himself on his hands as he swung his torso like a gymnast on the bars of the horse. The crowds of pedestrians surged around him, creating an eddy in the stream of traffic.
The situation is, Neal thought, that I’m a renegade from my own company, which may or may not join the CIA in wanting me dead. The situation is that this woman set me up, maybe even set me up to be killed. The situation is that somehow I’m in love with her anyway and I need to warn her that she’s in danger. The situation is that I have to find her to get some answers before I can get on with my life.
“The situation is,” Neal said without turning away from the window, “that I need to talk to the wom
an at two-thirty-seven Kansu Street. That’s the situation.”
“Mark told me to take care of you.”
“And you have.”
“He said there are people looking for you.”
“There are.”
“So you need protection.”
Neal turned back from the window. If I boot him, he thought, he’ll lose face with his cousin and with his own boys. Besides, this is his turf and I couldn’t lose him if I tried. All I can do is make it harder on each of us.
“I’ll need to speak with her alone,”Neal said.
“Sure.”
“Let’s go.”
One thing you have to say for Ben Chin, Neal thought: he’s organized. As soon as they hit the street, three teenage boys fell in behind them. They all had that lean and hungry look that Caesar was so worried about, and they all wore white shirts over shiny black trousers and loafers. They dropped their cigarettes as soon as they saw Chin, and wordlessly arranged themselves in a fan formation about thirty feet behind Chin and Neal. A bucktoothed boy, smaller and skinnier than the others, ranged ahead of them, rarely looking back but figuring out their intended path anyway.
“Who do we have to look out for?” Chin asked him. “White guys?”
“Probably.”
Chin grimaced, then said, “Okay, no problem.”
“You have a scout ahead of us.”
“You have a good eye. But he’s not a scout. He’s a doorman. If we have to run, he opens a ‘door’ in the crowd for us and shuts it when we’re through.”
Neal knew what he meant. A doorman in a street operation is like a downfield blocker in a football game. When he sees his players running his way, he clobbers a civilian or two to open a hole. Once his own guys make it through the hole, he throws himself in the way of the pursuit. That’s the way it usually works, but if the doorman sees that it’s the opposition in the way instead of bystanders, he uses a knife or a gun or his hands to open the hole. When that happens the doorman is usually a goner unless the sweepers can get up to the action real fast. A doorman is expendable.
So Ben Chin sure knew what he was doing. Having a doorman ready is about the only way out of a net. Which was one of those good-news-bad-news jokes to Neal: good that Chin was ready for a trap, bad that he thought he had to be.
Chin himself seemed relaxed. He moved easily through the crowd, glancing at the store windows and checking out the women. To the casual observer he looked like a Kowloon tough on a leisurely search for some fun. But Neal saw the alertness in his eyes and recognized that each scan of a portable radio or an approachable woman screened a search for potential trouble. Chin was watching out for something, and Neal had the feeling that he wasn’t looking for some white guys. The various kweilo tourists that passed by didn’t earn a second glance.
Neal felt his paranoia come back on him like a stale shirt. Or maybe it was the fact that he had been on all-night flight and hadn’t bothered to shower, shave, or get a meal. It felt like a mistake, but then he remembered that the last time he had stopped to indulge in such human comforts, he had let Pendleton and Li Lan skip out to Mill Valley. He wasn’t going to give them the chance this time.
Chin was staring up and to the left, and Neal braced himself for some action. He turned to follow Chin’s gaze, and saw that it led to a movie marquee. Chin was staring at the poster advertising the current feature. The three sweeps stopped in their tracks, and one of them turned around to cover the rear. The Doorman used the pause to cross over to the west side of Nathan Road, then he stopped on the corner to turn and watch his boss.
Chin didn’t see any of it, but then again, he didn’t have to. He had a well-trained team and he knew it, and this gave him little luxuries like freedom to check out a movie.
The marquee said that the theater was called the Astor, but that was the end of the English; everything else was in Chinese ideograms. The posters showed a brightly dressed Chinese couple in period costume gazing fondly at each other, and another still of the same couple bravely wielding gigantic swords against what looked like an army of grinning villains.
“This place has the latest flicks from China,” Ben Chin explained. He looked at his watch. “Maybe we can go this afternoon.”
The Book of Joe Graham, Chapter Seven, Verse Three: “Everyone has a weakness.”
“Yeah,” Neal said. “Let’s see how it goes.”
The Doorman was doing a quick shuffle-step across the street, like a puppy whose master is taking too long to open the door for a walk. Neal didn’t blame him; the Doorman’s job was a lonely one, especially when he was cut off from his team by a broad and busy avenue. The doorman had a lot of responsibility here. It was his job to give the “Walk/Don’t Walk” signal.
Street crossings are tricky in this kind of work. You have to time it so the traffic flow doesn’t cut the sweepers off from the people they’re protecting. You also have to keep a sharp eye on all the cars that are coming and going. One car might cut off the sweepers while the crew in a second car takes out the target. A street crossing is a vulnerable moment.
They did it flawlessly, the Doorman using subtle hand gestures to call the signals, and the rest of the team coming across in one smooth flow. It was as nifty a job as Neal had ever seen, and he thought he could detect a small look of relief on the Doorman’s face as he led them west on Kansu Street.
Tenement buildings with cheap-looking ground-floor flats made up most of Kansu Street. You couldn’t really call the buildings slums, but they were dirty and in need of a paint job. One of the main landlords must have gotten a great deal on pastel green paint, because the color dominated several buildings on one block. Narrow balconies, open to the street but roofed with corrugated metal, edged most of the buildings. Television antennae poked out over the balcony railings and made a convenient place from which to hang laundry. Beds and hammocks also filled a lot of the balconies, and here and there the tenants had nailed up sheets of tin to provide a little privacy for the family members who lived out there.
Hong Kong couldn’t stretch out, so it stretched up. Everywhere you looked, the older, lower tenements were giving way to massive, block-long high-rises that had the unmistakable anonymity of government housing projects. The private sector was on the move, too; when the existing buildings had overflowed, people had simply moved themselves and their belongings out into the side streets and jerry-rigged shacks out of tin, old sheets, and cardboard. A few of these pioneers with a little more cash or some connections had scored some precious wood and built actual walls.
Neal felt as if he had stepped off Nathan Road into a Malthusian scenario in which the eye could never rest. The landscape was literally crawling; there was motion everywhere he looked. Children scampered along the balconies and played the same games played by kids everywhere, but their games of hide-and-seek seemed to encompass hundreds of contestants, and there was no place to hide. Merchants lined the sidewalks hawking an infinite variety of goods. Old women stood at windows or balconies shaking out sheets and towels, while their husbands leaned over the railing and smoked cigarettes or spat out sunflower seeds while they talked with their neighbors.
The noise was incredible: a din of conversation, banter, argument, negotiation, advertisement, and protest all conducted in the singsong but rapid-fire Cantonese dialect. Old women expressed outrage over the price of a fish while their sisters moaned in triumph or despair over the clackety-clack of mah-jongg tiles. Men trumpeted the virtues of bolts of cheap cloth or the undoubted tenderness of a particular chicken, while their less ambitious brothers argued over the chances of a two-year-old filly at Happy Valley that afternoon. Children squealed with unrestrained joy, or giggled at some private joke, or wailed in misery as a mother hauled them by the hand back into a building.
Then Neal noticed the smell—or, more accurately, the smells. The aroma of cooking predominated. Neal could distinguish the smell of fish and rice, and it seemed to him there were dozens of odors that he didn’t reco
gnize, smells that rose from steaming woks in the street shacks and hung over the area like a permanent cloud. There was also the smell of a sewage system that couldn’t begin to cope with the demands placed on it, and the underlying stink of standing human waste permeated the air. The acrid smoke of charcoal braziers, masses of burning cigarettes, and building power plants made the air thick and hazy, and competed with the salt air of the nearby sea.
Yaumatei was a total crowding of the senses. Neal, after spending the last six months as the only occupant of an open moor, could only imagine what it might be like to to inhabit a world where, from the moment of birth to the moment of death, one never experienced a single moment alone.
Chin and his crew moved through the crowd like sharks through the ocean, constantly in motion and serenely calm. Their eyes never seemed to move from a straight-ahead gaze, and yet they seemed to take in everything. Neal noticed that people in the crowd would spot them and then quickly find something fascinating to look at on the sidewalk until the gang passed by. No hawkers or loiterers or curious kids approached Neal, even thought they were several blocks off the main kweilo tourist route. He was sealed off.
It took them about ten minutes to find number 346, which looked pretty much like 344 or 345. The building was mustard yellow and only five stories tall. The typical balconies stuck out like guardian parapets, the colorful laundry resembling pennants.
“You have a flat number?” Chin asked Neal.
The Doorman stood in the building’s foyer, looking up the staircase. An ancient woman, clad entirely in black from her skullcap to her shoes, sat on a stool staring nervously at him between puffs of a cigarette.
“No.”
Chin laughed. “I’ll bet now you’re glad I came with you.”
He approached the old woman and spoke roughly to her in Cantonese. She spoke back just as roughly, and Neal felt relief when Chin laughed, reached into his pocket, and handed her a cigarette. Her eyes showed pleased surprise when she saw the Marlboro.
“Give me the picture,” Chin said.
Neal handed him the brochure, and Chin showed it to the old woman. She stared at it for a few seconds and gave a brief response.