by Mike Coony
I’d only put the telephone down when it rang again. The receptionist said there are two gentlemen in the lobby asking to come up to my suite. Five minutes later William Ling showed Gerry and Earl into the lounge; he helped them to a pair of large whiskeys and handed me my freshly squeezed orange juice.
Gerry put down his glass of whiskey and got straight to business. “Earl, I’ll outline the plan to Finn first. But feel free to jump in if I’m missing anything…it is your deal after all. OK?”
“Good enough,” said Earl with a nod. He saluted me with his glass, stood up from the couch and strolled out to the balcony to enjoy the view over Statue Square.
“Here it is Finn…the Taiwan Bank…you know, the central bank that makes the polices…has a real tight-assed attitude about taking money out of the country. So the rich Taiwanese can’t move enough of their US Dollars out of Taiwan. Earl’s worked out a way they can transfer hundreds of thousands to banks here in Hong Kong. And this is where you come in, buddy. We’ll supply you with everything you need to approach the banks here and open security trading accounts in the names of shelf companies. That’s it bud.”
Earl strolled back in from the balcony with an empty glass, which he carefully placed on the butler’s tray. He shot up the sleeves of his Hawaiian shirt to reveal hairy forearms and turned his attention to me. “There’s ten thousand US dollars with your name on ’em for every account you open. Interested?”
I’m thinking: Where’s the catch? Ten thousand US dollars to open a bank account? Why not do it themselves? I smell a rat…I’m sure they’re going to run scams through the accounts. I bet the Taiwan stuff is just a smokescreen and they need me to be the fall guy. I’m disappointed that Gerry, and therefore Uncle Sui, already think so little of me. They see me as a front man, a disposable gillie. Of course, my fondness for jumping to conclusions has got me in trouble in the past….Then it struck me – I can present my fake passport to banks and open the accounts with that identity, so really, I’ve got little to lose….
“Right lads, bank accounts it is then.”
“Glad to hear it Finn. We’ll get you some walking-around money before you know it!” said Earl.
I call ten thousand dollars a lot more than ‘walking-around’ money, but there you go. How this is going to help me get my heroin to Europe I still haven’t a clue, but I’m much happier to have something to do now. I’m an impatient person, and I’ve been feeling that things were moving a bit slow in what’s reckoned to be one of the fastest cities in the world.
Before Gerry and Earl left I told them I’m going to Plume’s in Two Exchange Square for lunch.
“When did you fix that up?” asked Gerry, with a Cheshire cat’s grin across his face.
“Just this morning. Why? I’m meeting Fran Cooke’s wife, Susie. She’s going to introduce me to some interesting people.”
“Fran Cooke, the financial journalist?” asked Gerry.
“Yeah. So what?”
“I see what you mean about a fast mover,” cut in Earl. “This guy’s a few steps ahead of us buddy. Already he’s gettin’ with the financial movers and shakers. How long’s he been here? A couple of days? Shit!”
“That’s the Paddies for you, charm an’ blarney!” said Gerry.
I didn’t bother to explain, I just showed them out. Gerry passed me a screwed up note as we shook hands goodbye. It’s a mobile number, with the words ‘Call at 4:00 p.m. No later.’
———
Even though Susie told me the restaurant’s within walking distance, I used one of the hotel’s Rolls Royce limousines to get there. The humidity is up around ninety per cent; I don’t want to turn up dripping sweat. And, when in Rome, as the saying goes…use a Rolls Royce.
The hotel limo dropped me at the porte cochère underneath Two Exchange Square, where people queue for taxis and limousines drop passengers. I asked one of the arriving passengers how to reach Plume’s. “Follow me,” he replied.
We rode up in a lift to the second floor. Plume’s Wine Bar and Restaurant is across a vast lobby of polished brown marble.
Thank God Susie is already here. The atmosphere in Plume’s is more like a club than a restaurant. There’s a lot of waving back and forth across the room, the people arriving and departing are exchanging greetings with other diners, and calling out arrangements to phone or meet later.
The place is packed with the kind of people who inhabit the wine bars of the City of London and the smart restaurants around New York’s Wall Street. The uniform is international: loud striped shirts, louder braces – or suspenders as the Yanks call them – and expensive handmade suits and shoes. Every table has an ice bucket holding a bottle of vintage Champagne, or a Chateau Burgundy wine resting in a wicker basket. Most everyone is European, English or American, but there’s a smattering of Australians. There are almost no Chinese, except for the waiters dashing between the tables with fillet steaks, turbot Dugléré, moules marinière, and plenty of dishes I don’t recognise.
Susie pushed her way out from the bar to greet me with a soft kiss and another whiff of sandalwood perfume. She’s wearing a loose-fitting, printed silk frock that stops well above her knees and drapes over her bountiful breasts. Once again, she isn’t dressing to draw attention to her two greatest assets – but she is showing her long, shapely and deeply tanned legs, which I’d not noticed before.
“First things first Finn, let me introduce you to Michael Harrington-Browne. He’s our host.”
Susie turned to face a tall grey-haired man with a lived-in face and ruddy complexion. He’s handsome in an outdoor kind of way. You could imagine him in a bright red hunting jacket – these are curiously known as ‘pinks’ – sitting astride a large grey horse, enjoying a stirrup cup before setting off after a fox. The unspeakable chasing the inedible – according to my fellow Irishman, Oscar Wilde.
Michael Harrington-Browne has a strong, comfortable handshake, and he looked me in the eye. He’s straight forward, uncomplicated – says what he wants to and means what he says. I took to this man; he’s my kind of fellah.
The head waiter appeared at Michael Harrington-Browne’s shoulder. He was told to get us a table by the window, and to bring aperitifs and menus.
As we sat drinking our aperitifs my escort up from the porte cochère approached our table and spoke to Susie. She began to introduce me but was told that we’ve already met, although we haven’t exchanged names. He handed me a business card that reads: Ian Rylett, OBE, Director of Private Banking, Hongkong & Shanghai Banking Corporation, One Queen’s Road Central, Hong Kong.
Realising that I might not have a business card to return, Susie piped up on my behalf. “I’m designing a set of handsome cards for Finn…they’ll be ready in a couple of days.”
When Mister Rylett OBE returned to his own table I thanked Susie for her timely interjection. She explained the ritual of business card exchange in Asia, and most especially in Japan. She said it’s regarded an honour to be handed a card by a Japanese person, and an insult if you don’t offer one in return. I told her I might be moving into an office soon, and she agreed to produce business cards for me when I have the details.
We managed to sip a schooner of dry sherry before we had any food. Susie ordered sole on the bone, I had a plate of lamb’s liver, and we drank two bottles of Chilean wine with the meal. By the time we had a carafe of coffee – along with a large Armagnac each, compliments of Michael Harrington-Browne – I’d collected a pocketful of business cards and three invitations to boat parties for the coming weekend.
I have no intention of taking up these first offers of days out on a junk or a deep sea cruiser; going boating isn’t why I left everyone I know on the other side of the world. Apart from avoiding Interpol, the Swedish and Irish police, there’s only one reason for me being in the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong. I’m going to send enough heroin to Britain to turn on every junkie on the streets of London, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and particul
arly Glasgow. I have a soft spot for the Welsh, and I don’t want that crap ending up in the arms of the Taffies. The Taffies are too good for that kind of shite. No, I don’t give a shite about the English or the Scots – certainly not the Glasgow Proddies – but I don’t want to harm the Welsh. They’re good people you see, good hearts.
Anyway, it’s obvious that Susie’s a people magnet, and well liked. Otherwise, there’s no way I would’ve gotten all the invitations. As expected, she attracts men, but she also draws women to her. Perhaps because she doesn’t flaunt her figure these women don’t feel threatened by her. Or is there more to it?
As we got up to leave, one thing struck me as strange. Almost no one mentioned her husband, Fran. I wonder if all these financial folks are exclusively Susie’s scene. It crossed my mind that it could be she’s the one doing the investigative journalism…and Fran is writing the stuff up and getting the byline.
“How’s Fran doing?” Michael Harrington-Browne asked Susie as he walked us to the marble lobby outside Plume’s.
“Poor Fran, it’s all getting on top of him. He’s rarely home, and when he is he can’t sit still…and he isn’t coming to bed. Not that it means much to me even when he does, because he’s lost all interest in playing hide the sausage.”
Obviously, Susie and Michael have more than the usual patron and restaurateur relationship. Being the suspicious sort that I am, I wonder if they participate in the sex Fran seems to have lost interest in?
Michael shook me warmly by the hand and invited me to drop in any evening. “We close when I go home to my wife, Natasha. And that’s rarely before two a.m.”
As I saw Susie into a taxi beneath Two Exchange Square I resisted the temptation to make a pass at her. I settled for a kiss…but on the lips this time.
Throwing my blazer over my shoulder, I rambled back to the hotel. I’m feeling pleased with meself, and I didn’t notice that I’m sweating like a pig.
I spent the next few hours lying on my giant bed. At three fifty-five p.m. I got up, splashed George Trumper Bay Rum Cologne on my face, and used my new mobile phone to ring Gerry at exactly four p.m. – as requested in his note.
11
ENGLAND, AUSTRALIA and HONG KONG
I met Fran, my future husband, at the Isle of Wight Festival the year Leonard Cohen was headlining. My brother Stuart knew I was crazy about Leonard Cohen’s music, so he went to the Birdcage Club in Portsmouth to do a deal with the festival promoters, Rikki Farr and his partner Robin Best.
Stuart had had his name down for a hand-built Morgan car for two years, and he was only two weeks away from finalising the finer details of the model he wanted. His heart was set on a four by four with a British racing green body, black leather seats and bottle green trim. In exchange for his place on the waiting list for a Morgan, Stuart was able to get Rikki and Robin to give me an ‘Entry All Areas’ pass to the festival.
I never found out if either of them ever took Stuart’s place in the queue for a Morgan. Stuart was in the Queen’s own Blues and Royals Regiment, and he was killed when his horse bolted during a training exercise in Windsor Great Park. But my lovely brother hadn’t hesitated to give up his dream car so that I could make off from Cheltenham Ladies’ College for four days. I’m sure he never imagined that I’d meet a tall, skinny guy from Brighton working as a reporter on the Evening Tribune newspaper – and lose my virginity.
———
I hitchhiked to Southampton and took a ferry across the Solent. Then I made my way to a muddy field in the middle of Robert Condon’s family farm to listen to incredible music.
On the first day I was backstage thanking Rikki Farr for my pass when we were interrupted by a tall, skinny guy who introduced himself as a reporter and asked if he could interview Rikki.
“Not really my thing pal,” Rikki replied. He was looking over his shoulder at Joan Baez sipping a glass of wine and laughing with Jimmy Hendrix. And they were watching Henry McCullough who was balancing one-handed on the back of a chair. “Interview Susie here…she'll give you her perspective. Isn't that right my love?” said Rikki, before he disappeared into the chaos.
Fran had a pup tent that was just about big enough for one, and with the two of us in it his feet stuck out under the door flap. To make matters worse, the blow-up mattress we’d borrowed from some drunken Germans kept losing air.
“Fran sweetie, this isn’t going to work,” I warned him. I was completely ignored, as, at the time, Fran was straddling me with his half-stiff thing between my tits, rocking backward and forward like a rower in the Henley Regatta. He finally fell off me and knocked the tent over before shooting his stuff all over my favourite flower power cotton caftan.
“Fran, all this shagging is divine dear, but I do so want to watch the acts on stage.”
“Huh…what?” he spluttered.
“I want to see some of this festival, and I’d like to join all these glorious hippies…smoking grass and swigging from flagons of cider. But of course I also want you to keep doing what you’ve been doing to me.”
“OK…let’s think about this then,” he said somewhat grudgingly, as he fixed himself back into his trousers.
We came up with a solution of sorts. I wasn’t exactly able to dance around, but I could watch the stage while sitting on Fran’s lap…with his thing inside me. My cotton caftan covered our naughty bits, and I wiggled whenever I wanted to feel him deeper inside me, or tease him until he begged me to stop moving. It was my first time shagging, and already I’d learnt the power of sex to get a man to do my bidding.
Leonard Cohen was OK, especially when he sang Bird on the Wire. Jimmy Hendrix was sensational, The Doors were spectacular and Joan Baez blew me away. But Fran Cooke made me climax again and again.
I told the girls back at Cheltenham Ladies’ College everything that happened at the festival, and they were green with envy. But when my period didn’t come I nearly died. We’d taken no precautions, and the thought of getting pregnant hadn’t crossed my mind. When I was a week and a half late full panic set in. I skipped netball practise after classes, cycled into town and telephoned Fran at work.
“Fran, sweetie…I think we have a problem.”
“What are you talking about? What problem?”
“Well what sort of problem could we have now? Five days, four nights and NO PRECAUTIONS!! What do you THINK could be the problem?!” I screamed down the phone at him.
“All right, all right…I’ll come up to you at the weekend. Don’t panic…everything will be OK.”
“Let’s hope so!” I said, before slamming down the phone – as any panic-stricken teen-age girl would do.
Fran drove up to Cheltenham first thing Saturday morning in his yellow Citroën 2CV with its torn canvas roof and daisies painted on the bonnet. He arrived half an hour after my period started, but I didn’t tell him immediately. I wanted to know what he’d say about me being pregnant.
“Let’s get married,” he suggested. So I received my first offer of marriage at the age of fifteen – from some bloke I’d been shagging for a few days in a muddy field!
Fran had it all worked out. He told me he was going to visit my parents in Buckinghamshire on his way back to Brighton, and he’d explain that he couldn’t live without me. He would tell them he’d been offered a better job with a Fleet Street red top newspaper, and that he wanted to marry me as soon as possible.
The fact that he had technically committed statutory rape didn’t seem to occur to him….Or, I suppose it’s fair to say, he didn’t quite realise that yet.
“Fran darling, Daddy isn’t actually living with Mummy. Nevertheless, one must remember that he is still a Queen’s Counsel…trying zealously to guard his only daughter’s virtue. Even though he’s managed to miss the mark completely on this particular issue, I’m almost certain he’d brief one of his juniors to issue writs against you,” I informed him.
“I see. Oh boy…well…um…I never even thought of that. You mean you’re telling me
you’re not even sixteen?!” he said, sounding more than a little alarmed.
“I will be soon, but don’t worry about that. All is not lost, darling. Fortunately for us, Mummy doesn’t believe much in the holiness of virginity. She thinks it’s something best got out of the way, and frankly, the sooner the better as far as she’s concerned.”
We went for a walk, and I decided he deserved to know that the pregnancy scare was over. “Fran, sweetie, I have something to tell you….My period began this morning. Isn’t that brilliant?” I was positive I saw a flicker of relief cross his face. “Well, don’t look quite so relieved darling…it would have been our child,” I said. I was only teasing him of course; the thought of having a child then was just too horrific to imagine.
“No Susie, you’ve got it all wrong. It wasn’t relief you imagine you saw when you told me the disappointing news…it was regret. Quite apart from the child, I rather fancied watching you feeding young Cooke with massively engorged tits,” he said.
“Is that so? Bastard!”
Fran came to Cheltenham frequently throughout that term. He’d book into a modestly priced bed and breakfast, and I’d slip out of school to meet him for sex. He wore knobbly condoms to stimulate my clitoris…and to prevent the pregnancy he claimed he would’ve so wholeheartedly welcomed.
Fran began working as the London reporter for the New South Wales newspaper, but he was still living in Brighton. I managed to get down to Brighton a few times, and I stayed with him in his grotty bedsit in Bedford Place, off Western Road. It was just across from this trendy Scandinavian coffee bar where sexy blondes served enormous, frothy coffees to oodles of gawking, spotty-faced youths.
My art teacher, Marie-Thérèse Gullet, put my name forward for a place at the Slade Art College in London. That didn’t work out, but I was invited to interview at Brighton College of Art and Design.