No Going Back

by Sheena Kamal

  She says this with the bitterness of journalists the world over. A disgust, but an acceptance, too. I’ve developed a fondness for journalists. They always, always know more than they’re saying.

  “But any of his associates still around? Anybody who could have helped him leave?” Or who knew where he might have gone, I hope.

  “Just his right hand. A guy named Van Nguyen, Fang’s cousin-in-law or some such. He was never charged for anything but was known to police. Nguyen fell off my radar for a while and turned up last year as a private lender of sorts during one of my investigations into money laundering and organized crime. But he’s often out of the country.”

  I know the name from the research Brazuca had pulled up on the gang. “Any idea what Nguyen looks like now? Any way I can find him?”

  “He has a three-million-dollar house in West Vancouver that sits empty, according to the neighbors. He’s never there. But.” She scribbles something on a notepad. Tears out the sheet and hands it to me. “I hear he has a new girlfriend. She manages a casino restaurant in Richmond. Her name is Maggie Miller, a former Miss Vancouver. As for how he looks, much of the same, but older. He keeps a very low profile, and I missed my chance to get a photo.”

  I think about this for a moment. On the paper she gave me is the name of the restaurant. “Aren’t you working a casino angle at the moment?” A few of her recent articles touched on some kind of money-laundering scheme.

  She gets a gleam in her eye that I’m well familiar with from working with Seb. A kind of passion that’s hard to fake. “Heard of whale gamblers?” she asks, then continues before I have the chance to respond. “It’s the high rollers from Asia who want to gamble but don’t want to deal with the red tape of bringing money. So they have arrangements with private lenders over there who they pay and then they show up in Vancouver, pick up the cash in restaurant parking lots here—parking lots, for Christsakes—and they’re good to go. Casinos themselves are in on it. They don’t even make them go to the high-value windows. It’s a mess.”

  “I’m not sure what to do with all that. I just need to find out how Fang disappeared and where he might have gone.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” she says, as though I’m a particularly bad intern she’s been assigned. One with potential but who can’t focus on the real issue. “Australian intelligence is calling this the ‘Vancouver Model’ of money laundering. You don’t need soldiers on the street when money moves like this. I’m saying that these guys are so well-connected and rich that they can go anywhere they want. They’re into all of the respectable institutions in this city, but they’re also into the shady ones, too. Not just money laundering. Human trafficking, human smuggling? Drugs? Et cetera.”

  “Human smuggling?”

  It sounds like a wild conspiracy.

  She can see how doubtful I am. “Yeah, but that’s not how Fang left. He got on a plane, even though he was on bail. It was a failure of the justice system. Remember, this was twenty years ago. But if you’re interested in human smuggling, it’s as simple as forged papers, falsifying immigration documents—that sort of thing. Basically, if you want to get something or someone into or out of the country, there’s an underground infrastructure for that. Just like there’s an underground banking infrastructure.”

  “Through those private lenders.”

  “Exactly. I could send you some information, if you want. I was never able to find Fang, but I wish you luck. Honestly, you look like you could use some.”

  Celine comes back down the stairs. “Always with this Asian connection,” she says to Krista. “You know, I study psychology at the University of British Columbia, and this comes up in the paper—an article saying that Canadians are happier in areas where there are few foreign-born residents. And you know they don’t mean people like me. There is a question you must ask yourself: Are you promoting this bias with your work?”

  “By reporting on criminal activity? That’s what I do!” Krista says. “The reason I do this is so that the government can get their shit together and regulate things properly.”

  Celine shrugs. “But they’re bribed to not. Paid to look the other way. Politicians are just as corrupt here, too. I’m saying the coverage can be taken the wrong way by idiots, and the idiots become uncomfortable with immigrants.”

  I get the sense this is an argument they have often, especially when Krista grumbles, “Well, it’s their fault for being idiots. What are you, some kind of social justice warrior? Who let you into the country?”

  “I don’t know, but you’re the one keeping me here.”

  They kiss in a way that makes me think that perhaps the honeymoon isn’t over yet, and then Celine asks if I want some tea. She puts her hands on the top of the doorframe and falls into a stretch, in a way I’ve only seen athletes do. Krista is equally riveted by this motion.

  I say no to tea but make sure to give Krista my number in case she remembers anything else. “Congratulations on the wedding,” I say to them both.

  Celine beams, argument forgotten. “Thank you!”

  Krista just smiles at me. At the door, she gives me a long, searching look. “Sebastian mailed me a copy of his memoirs before he passed. He mentions you in there. You’ve read it, right?”

  “I haven’t read the final version.”

  “You should. You know when I said you were unpredictable? What I meant was I would never have thought you’d be the person to drop everything and take care of a dying man for a year. Who takes care of you, lady?”

  On that bright note she closes the door on me.

  The phone rings while I’m pulling out of her driveway, but I answer it anyway, hoping it’s Simone. It’s not. Bernard Lam is on the line. He wants to meet tomorrow.

  He’s got a surprise for me.

  23

  The little maid feels fragile underneath him. There are stretch marks on her soft belly. Dao likes the little grooves but finds them distracting. Nothing in her employment file told him she’s a mother. When he asks about the child, she shakes her head and shifts her body, tilting her hips up and into him. Maybe she’s feeling reckless because it’s night and they’re alone.

  Somehow he doubts it, but it’s a nice thought.

  They’ve never been alone at night before, and it wasn’t his intention to manufacture this particular situation when he knocked on the door of the staff house. There are supposed to be two dayworkers and two live-in servants in the compound. The other live-in, Anto, hasn’t been here since yesterday.

  “What’s your name?” he asks.

  She smiles and pretends she doesn’t speak English. It was the same when he asked where Anto was.

  Doesn’t matter.

  He didn’t hire the staff of the villa—compound, really—but he knows who they are. Like Riya, here, who he is pressing into the mattress. Her employment file gave her age as twenty-four. She looks a lot younger until you meet her eyes and see the old soul that lurks behind them. Which he’s doing now, maybe for the first time.

  He knows she speaks English, because it is a requirement of their employer that all staff need to understand when they’re shouted at in a common language.

  Looking down at her, Dao feels no desire. The flare of initial heat is gone, replaced with nothing. In this void of sexual excitement, he wonders about her reason for bringing him to her bed. When he started asking about Anto, she had taken off her dress.

  Why doesn’t she want him asking about the resident landscaper-slash-handyman?

  It’s clear the sex is supposed to be a distraction, but all things considered, it isn’t very distracting.

  Dao rolls off her and puts on his clothes. “Where’s Anto?” he asks again.

  It’s too late for this shit. He’d come back to slick floors and a burst pipe under the kitchen sink. He could fix it himself, but it isn’t his job. And he’s got too much on his mind to be doing other people’s work. Like this lazy bastard Anto.

  What, is he taki
ng a nap or something?

  Dao goes to the door and looks down the narrow hall. There’s another bedroom on this floor and two more upstairs. Nice digs. Maybe a little too nice, and maybe Anto got a little too comfortable.

  Well, that’s about to change.

  He goes to search the next room, but the little maid grabs his hand and tries to pull him back into bed. There’s a sudden stitch in his side, a flash of pain, and he finds himself collapsing next to her. She takes the opportunity to straddle his hips and press her naked body against him.

  “Wait,” he says, trying to catch his breath. The pain in his belly is unbelievable, and he’s fresh out of the pills that take the sharp sting of it away.

  She sees him gasping, struggling. She gets off him for the moment it takes to pour him a drink from a bottle of expensive brandy. He wonders if she stole it from the main house. He drinks it in one straight go and holds the glass out for another. She pours even more this time. Looking around the room, he thinks that maybe it isn’t hers after all. The room is furnished, but there are no woman things around. No clothes, jewelry, or toiletries. Not even an attempt at making it personal.

  A skint room with a bottle of brandy on the bedside table?

  Yeah, a man definitely lives here. He’d bet any money this is where that fool Anto sleeps. Or used to, anyway, before he fucked off to wherever he went.

  He turns to Riya to give her hell about Anto, but there’s that look in her eye again.

  And look at that, he’s drunk enough for another try.

  Afterward, he rolls off her. She seems glad to get rid of his weight. He’s exhausted. Feels like he could sleep for a week straight, maybe even longer. He turns over and closes his eyes. He really shouldn’t stay, but what’s she going to do, kick him out? Soon enough he’s off to dreamland. Thankfully, without the actual dreams.

  He wakes up to discover that he’s still in the same shitty backwater that he went to sleep in. A shitty backwater, yes, but at least he’s got a roof over his head and seems to be in a nice bed. There’s supposed to be somebody beside him, but he can’t remember who because his head is shaking. Or is it the bed? Wait, no. The walls are moving, rumbling. Actually, it’s the whole fucking room.

  Realizing where he is, and the specifics of living in this particular cursed place, Dao remembers his earthquake training. He throws an arm out to grab the little maid but finds her long gone. So he rolls off the mattress and underneath the bed.

  A moment later the room tilts and a part of the wall comes crashing down around him. There’s another rattle, a tremor, the feeling of the ground under him being ripped apart.

  It feels like he’s in hell, but it’s really the Ring of Fire. This goddamn, blighted backwater nowhere cursed with frequent volcanic eruptions and earthquakes.

  He’d be safe if he was in his own room, not the staff lodging. The main house is reinforced and would have fared better, but of course nobody really gives a damn about the servants. This building was never properly addressed. This house of death, where the expendables live.

  He remembers the staff house is backed onto the hills of the region, and what he’s hearing is the hill behind him collapsing as the earth slides down around them, and on top of them, too. The bottle of brandy he’d drunk from earlier crashes to the ground, not far away from his face. He curls his body tightly into himself, tries to protect his head and his face.

  Somewhere above his head a woman screams. Dao thinks it’s the little maid, Riya. He can’t see much, but it doesn’t seem like she’s in here with him. So she’s upstairs, then. Or what passes for upstairs now that the whole structure has crumbled.

  The bed breaks, and Dao is pinned there underneath, gasping for breath.

  It feels like the end of times. The end of him.

  It feels like—

  24

  I can’t believe what I’m feeling. I think it’s attraction, but that can’t be right. I’m trying not to like Peter Vidal, but it’s hard because, up close, there’s something undeniably magnetic about him.

  We’re sitting at Café Villaggio, just steps from the harbor, and he’s stirring honey into his tea. He gives it a sip, braces, and then drinks again. Lam is late, and Vidal is unsure of why I’m here. He’s too polite to ask me to leave outright, but I can tell he wants me to. He’s dressed in a pair of dark trousers and a black turtleneck sweater that looks so soft I wonder what it would feel like on my skin. Maybe it’s all the talk of getting into bed with people that has me thinking like this, or maybe I just want to be warm and cozy, too.

  “How long will he be?” Vidal asks, in dulcet tones. Which I also find pleasing. I’m having a hard time reconciling the man in front of me with the man Joe Nolan had pointed out on the yacht. Though it must be him, and our meeting in this café in Coal Harbour is a nod to his tastes, because of its proximity to his pretty boat.

  “Who knows?” I say. “You know how unpredictable billionaires can be.”

  This isn’t the conversation starter I’d hoped it to be. Vidal frowns into his sweet tea. He takes a delicate sip.

  The door opens, and Lam comes striding in, in a different three-piece suit today. After shaking hands with Vidal, he throws his overcoat over a chair and tells me he’d like an Americano. I stare at him until he goes to get it himself. When he returns, I can see Vidal hiding a smile. I may be growing on him. At least that’s what I think until Vidal says to Lam, “Your associate here refused to tell me who she is. She says you’ll explain everything.”

  Lam blinks, then covers up his momentary discomfort with a smile. “This is my assistant, Nora. I can’t keep track of my life without her, really.”

  Everyone at the table ignores the fact that he’s asked me to get him coffee and I flat-out refused.

  “Even so,” says Vidal, “perhaps we can continue alone.”

  I don’t move. Lam clears his throat. “No, we’re fine here.”

  Now I see it. The power that Vidal embodies is just about equal to the entitlement that Lam projects into the room, at once sweeping over me and bringing me into the circle. I’m here because he wants me to be. It’s as simple as that.

  Vidal isn’t happy about it, but he’s willing to let my presence at the round table slide. “Let’s get to business, then. I’d be very grateful for your assistance. I’m sorry that the development proposal for the Chinatown complex was turned down. Community pushback, you know. It’s my hope that we can . . . make Vancouver more business-friendly. If we can spread the message to the community that more business means more prosperity, then I don’t see things like that happening as much moving forward.”

  It seems like a flaming pile of lies to me, but he says it so nicely, with that gentle voice. I might be willing to give him the permission for his development myself, if I could. This must be what those waitresses see in him before they get onto his boat. Before he sends them home in tears.

  “We think,” Vidal continues, “that a dedicated space for the arts would go over well, especially if it’s backed by your family, given your significant investment in arts and culture. As I was saying to you at the club, the Devi Group was happy to participate in your gallery launch in Seattle.”

  “That was a fun one,” says Lam. “Some of my contacts within the Chinatown business community here might be interested in revisiting your proposal if there was more commitment to the arts. Chinatown has such a vibrant history. It would help if people understood that you’re as interested in preserving and celebrating that history as you are in prosperity.” He neglects to mention that his contacts really belong to his father, whose reputation in Vancouver’s business and cultural circles is iron-clad.

  Vidal seems to be buying Lam as a mouthpiece for his father. “And you’d share them for what price?”

  And just like that, it’s like I’m not even there. There’s no place for me to exist between these two and their egos. They’ve said meaningless words about community, arts and culture, and now are finally getting to the poin
t.

  “Trying to get to the bottom of a private matter, actually. It concerns my family.” Lam spears him with a calculating look, from one shark to another. Designed to make him wonder whose teeth are sharper.

  Vidal smiles. “My lips are sealed. Go on.”

  “You were once connected to a Three Phoenix boss named Jimmy Fang. You worked for his law firm, in fact. That is, before he fled the city. We need to know if any of his associates are still here.”

  Vidal doesn’t miss a beat. “That’s what it takes to get your family to back the Chinatown development proposal?”

  “If I’m happy with the information, yes.”

  “As much as I’d love to make you happy, I don’t know anything about Three Phoenix. Fang, I met. And yes, he was a client at my firm when I was still practicing law. But I have no intimate knowledge of his operation.”

  Peter Vidal lies so well it’s impressive. I’m about to say something to remind them I’m still in the room, but he continues speaking before I can get a word in.

  “I do know that before he left the country in a rather scandalous fashion, I saw him a few times with Michael Acosta.”

  “Acosta’s company just bought a two-hundred-million-dollar mine in Indonesia,” Lam says to me, suddenly remembering my existence. “But they’re into casinos, as well.”

  Vidal nods. “Acosta has stakes in mines and casinos all over Southeast Asia. On this side of the Pacific he’s been more into entertainment, including a major film studio.”

  This makes me think of something Krista Dennings had said. When she’d been running down Jimmy Fang, she lost him in the Philippines. And had said that he’d disappeared in Indonesia.

  The conversation draws to a close shortly after. Vidal and Lam discuss what the Lam family support might entail. They are speaking French to me. I can pick out a few words but don’t understand much. Underneath his soft voice, Vidal is more excited than I’ve ever seen him.