FEARLESS FINN'S MURDEROUS ADVENTURE

by Mike Coony

  I’m standing at the window in my suite, watching the comings and goings of all the inter-island ferries. This is something I couldn’t manage from my suite at the Mandarin Oriental; my view was blocked by Jardine House.

  Hong Kong is surrounded by islands, and there’s one really cool little island about half an hour away from Central. Lamma is groaning under the weight of left-behind hippies – just like the Greek island of Corfu before package holidays ruined the place. I like to get the ferry to Lamma, wander through the village and make my way to the Waterfront Bar.

  The Waterfront’s run by a crazy red-headed fellah by the name of Flick – no one knows his real name. He’s from Yorkshire, but he has a grandmother from Castlebar in Ireland’s County Mayo. Flick is an original. He came to Hong Kong to work in the fashion industry, but he gave up that business the minute he made enough money. He left his luxury apartment in Mid-levels, bought a run-down building on Lamma’s waterfront and transformed it into a bar and restaurant. He did most of the work himself, but he paid the village fishermen to drop large boulders into the sea alongside his building. Claiming these boulders as his own, one night Flick poured quick-setting concrete over them and got himself a sea front terrace.

  The Waterfront Bar is my kind of place – no pretensions. Flick couldn’t give a fiddler’s elbow whether you’re a pauper or a billionaire; everyone gets the same pot luck treatment. Most afternoons or evenings at the Waterfront feature a famous film star, singer or writer. It’s not unusual to see Rolf Harris drawing cartoons, Richard Harris downing jugs of Tsingtao Beer, or his mate Oliver Reed – the film star – reading poetry to an audience of puzzled fishermen. Even some renowned hard-nosed business magnates like to slum it out there.

  I haven’t been to Lamma in a few weeks. I may as well get the ferry over and pay Flick a visit.

  ———

  I rambled off the ferry and over to the Waterfront Bar to join Flick on the sea front terrace. The sun is a huge red ball sinking slowly on the horizon over Peng Chau and Cheung Chau Islands. We’re nattering away, eating whatever delicious side dishes the kitchen sends out.

  Larry Hagman, Victoria Principal and the rest of the Dallas cast just walked in. They were brought over to our table and introduced to the owner, and me, before their party took up the other end of the sea front terrace.

  Flick eased back on his rattan chair and sucked deeply on his spliff.

  “You know Finn…there was a man in his early twenties, from here on Lamma Island, who was sentenced to death in the southern Chinese Province of Guangdong. They sentenced him for attempting to smuggle heroin out of China, but it was a complete crock of shit. Heroin is smuggled into China, not out. Plus, I knew the bloke, and he wouldn’t even touch a spliff. His arrest was a joke, but what happened afterwards was shameful…tragic. The whole thing was a scam.”

  My interest in this poor fellah was piqued. “Well, go on…tell me more,” I encouraged him.

  “The young man’s grandparents were retired property developers in Hong Kong, and after he was put in prison his mother begged the grandparents to help him. Through their business contacts in China the grandparents were able to reach the prison governor. They offered the corrupt governor five grand US, which was equal to about two years’ salary. So the guy agreed not to send their grandson with the next batch of prisoners going to the local sports ground to be shot dead.”

  Flick paused to take another toke off his spliff.

  “This expensive farce was repeated every month for two years, until the grandparents had spent all their savings. Then they sold their investment properties to raise money for the monthly payments to the prison governor…who was already an immensely rich man by Mainland Chinese standards. The grandparents finally begged him to accept one last, large payment, and to release their grandson. The greedy pig eventually agreed on a substantial figure and took the last of their money. Then he let the young man escape on his way to the next sports ground execution.”

  Flick took a long pause, and I thought the story was finished.

  “Well, at least the fellah got away,” I said.

  “He didn’t…I’m not done. The prison governor tipped off the police about the escapee. They arrested the young man again, dragged him back to the sports ground, tied a placard around his neck spelling out his crimes and shot him dead.”

  “Jaysus!” I said.

  “That’s not all,” said Flick, getting up from his rattan seat. He sat back down and resumed his story after organising refills for Larry Hagman’s group.

  “The family only realised the guy wasn’t coming home when they received a bill from the Chinese Ministry of Justice for the cost of the bullet used to execute him.”

  “Fuck me! And I thought the Brits were heartless bastards!” I said, feeling a bit sick to my stomach.

  “The police and the prison governor were working together from the beginning. They found out the young man had wealthy relatives, and they hatched their plot to extract ransom money from them…but he was as good as dead all along.”

  In the end, whether what Flick believes about the prison governor is true or not, the Chinese central government under Deng Xiaoping cracked down hard on corruption. Regional governors were executed, and the likes of the corrupt prison governor and the corrupt chief of police were sentenced to prison and stripped of their ill-gotten gains.

  Two bowls of steaming Singapore noodles were delivered to our table with a newspaper. “I just noticed an article here, in this English-language Chinese newspaper….Another wretched incident, but this one in Xi’an Province. Are you up for it Finn?” Flick asked.

  “Go on, ruin my lovely dinner then.”

  Flick began reading through the article and summarising it for me. “A small girl was playing on a frozen lake when the ice gave way, and she fell in. The fire brigade arrived, but the head fireman demanded tea money from the girl’s father before they would rescue her. Not just that, he wanted tea money for each bit of the job. He told the father so much to get the ladder off the engine, more to carry it to the lake, a larger amount to get the girl out of the water and so on…well, you get the idea. The money they demanded was equal to a whole year’s income for the father. So if he paid them he wouldn’t be able to buy rice seed for the next year…and his family would starve. He chose the family’s survival and stood silently by the side of the thawing lake while the firemen drove away and his daughter slipped below the ice. The bloody bastards!”

  We sat in silence for some time. When Flick spoke again his anger had faded a little, and he continued in a wistful voice.

  “The reporter maintains that if it was the farmer’s son stuck in the icy water they’d have paid the firemen’s price. But daughters, no matter how cute, aren’t as valuable as sons in a one-child only society…even though rural couples are allowed to have more than one child,” said Flick.

  “Jaysus!”

  “The tragedy doesn’t end there. When the lake thawed in the spring the young girl’s mother cleaned her house from top to bottom, left cooked rice on the stove for her husband and son, walked to the lake and threw herself in.”

  I’m silent with disgust, and I can’t finish my bowl of Singapore noodles.

  Flick folded up the newspaper, placed it on the seat next to him and looked over at me. “Come on Finn, don't take it so personal my friend. A giant like you with tears in his eyes? That's life for too many dirt-poor farmers, not just in China either, but at least they're doing something about it. The bastard money-grabbing fireman is in jail where he should be.”

  I get outrageously angry at disgusting, petty public servants. Flick’s haunting stories are so dreadful, and so true, that I know I’ll never forget them. I know it’s a cruel world…but it’s worse when you’re so poor you can’t even feed your children.

  His second story reminds me of the time I was in Rumania with Mac in the early 1970s looking for bomb-making nitrate. We were approached by a woman dragging a beautiful girl of abo
ut twelve or thirteen years of age behind her. The child had raven-black hair, high cheekbones, shapely red lips, and turquoise-blue eyes. She was dressed in a light cotton frock and plastic open-toed sandals…shivering with the cold and whimpering like a scolded puppy.

  We couldn’t believe our ears when the woman offered us her daughter for a hundred US dollars.

  “No! Go away!” I yelled.

  “OK…OK. I take fifty dollars. You take girl. You like, she is virgin. Fifty dollars!”

  “FUCK OFF away from us!” I roared as loudly as I could without completely scaring the shite out of the child.

  The old hag spat and swore at me – at least that’s what I think she was doing. Her English was limited to the words required to sell her child to a stranger for sex…and forever.

  I felt for the poor child and called the mother back. I held out three US twenty dollar notes and she pushed the trembling girl towards me. I shoved the money in the mother’s hand, winked at the girl, and shooed them away. The mother was totally bewildered, and the girl was no longer terrified.

  The look of relief on that child’s face returns to me still. What else could I have done? Bought a child? I don’t think so!

  Mac reckoned that if we had taken the girl her relations would’ve been waiting around the bend in the road to snatch her back. I would’ve liked to have thought so, but I didn’t. With the girl gone to wealthy foreigners it would’ve meant one less mouth to feed.

  Desperate situations call for people to do desperate things. I know I have. Killing my enemies I can handle…but buying or selling a child? As long as I’m on God’s green Earth I will never understand the depths of depravity required to do such an abhorrent, inhuman, thing.

  17

  HONG KONG

  The first four governors of Hong Kong were Irish men, starting with Sir Henry Pottinger who claimed the territory for the United Kingdom. The Scots like to think that their hands were on the Hong Kong tiller right from the founding of the colony…not a bit of it!

  Some of the first western hongs in Hong Kong were indeed founded by Scottish Protestants, but all their business was done through the British East India Company. They exported tea, silk and other treasures – from those parts of China that the Roman Catholic Jesuit brothers had already reached and westernised for the greedy, drug-pushing bastards – and they sold opium to the Cantonese Chinese.

  In 1898, nearly four decades after the last Opium War, The Convention for the Extension of Hong Kong Territory was signed in Beijing. The Convention granted control of Kowloon, Hong Kong Island and the New Territories to Britain. Technically, the New Territories were leased to the British Crown for ninety-nine years, while Hong Kong Island and Kowloon had been handed over forevermore. I don’t think the Brits will ever try it on with China again, or the Chinese – too big, too many of them.

  Everything mostly settled down and stayed that way, until 1941 and the unfortunate arrival of the Imperial Japanese Army during World War Two. It was not an experience the European population would easily forget. The Japanese occupation was just a blip on the radar to the Brits back in Blighty, but it was a really rough time for the Hong Kongers; they were starved and worked to death by the occupying Japanese Army.

  After the war the status quo returned, and fixtures of the privileged life – like the Hong Kong Club – reopened. Once again, the white man lived on the Peak, where the air is fresh and disease free; the Chinese couldn’t go there unless they were carrying out the bidding of their white lords and masters.

  In 1965 China’s Chairman Mao stirred up trouble with the Cultural Revolution, quickly followed by his Red Book in 1968. The Brits knew how to deal with crazy Red Book-waving students in Hong Kong – they smashed their heads in with batons and flung them in jail out in Stanley.

  This was pretty much the same way they treated people in Northern Ireland. In response to Civil Rights marches in the late ’60s, the Brits ordered the B-Specials to break students’ heads, burn down their parents’ homes, and throw their fathers and grandfathers into concentration camps. Eventually, the Brits were shooting innocent Catholics on the streets of Derry, and driving young men into the arms of paramilitaries – myself and Mac included.

  In the 1920s it was the Black and Tans, in the 1960s it was the B-Specials. Our British neighbours never learnt that the more you stamp on an Irish Paddy, the better he gets at resisting you. The lads finally blew up the Grand Hotel in Brighton – the one that Mac and I were to blow the summer we met Anna and Ingrid. They missed the Iron Lady and most of her Cabinet; it was a screw-up, but they tried to make the most of a bad job. The Army Council issued following statement:

  “Mrs. Thatcher will now realise that Britain cannot occupy our country and torture our prisoners and shoot our people in their own streets and get away with it. Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once—you will have to be lucky always. Give Ireland peace and there will be no war.”

  ———

  I can see how pleasant life is for the expat in Hong Kong with enough money to live the high life – and this includes many Irish men and women. I have no intention of joining their ranks at work, rest or play. That’s what I keep telling meself anyway…but it’s not exactly working out. All my nights in Plume’s seem to have consequences. I’ve been put up for associate memberships in the Foreign Correspondents’ Club and the Cricket Club; there’s even talk of proposing me for the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club.

  The ability to talk rubbish, drink plenty, and pay your monthly bar chits are the only qualifications for an FCC associate membership. Turning up at weekends for the barbecues, wearing a Fred Perry tennis shirt, and not ravishing the members’ wives – unless they insist you do – are de rigueur requirements at the Cricket Club. And you’re probably better off not having a yacht, or even a rowing boat, to fit in at the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club. However, a healthy bank balance, to pay hefty bar bills, wouldn’t go amiss…or so they’ve told me.

  I’m far too fresh in the colony to be considered for the Hong Kong Club, or the Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club. Anyway, those retired colonialists on the club committees have the ear of the British Secret Services – to check a man out – and I don’t need anyone checking me out.

  ———

  The New Year’s Eve party in the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club is considered a social highlight of the year. Unfortunately, I managed to put a dampener on it…at least for the vice-commodore and his family.

  I don’t exactly recall the name of the Sloan Ranger I escorted to the party, but she may’ve been called Olivia. Anyway, she’d taken a shine to me on one of the weekend junk forays to Cheung Chau Island. Whoever she was, my date vanished once we were in the door. She was probably off somewhere swapping scandals with her fellow Sloans, or powdering her nose – probably with cocaine – or possibly downing a tray of shots in less than thirty seconds…her party piece.

  Left to amuse meself, I noticed a girl in an outdated dress standing at the wall. She was watching the dancing couples, and I felt sorry for her obvious discomfort.

  “Hello there young lady…would you care to dance?”

  “Me? Yes…please. Thank you,” she said, with a shy smile.

  She’s awkward, and I get the impression she’s not used to being asked to dance.

  “And tell me my beauty, who are you? What do you do? And where did you pop up from?” I asked, as we stepped on to the dance floor.

  “Well, actually, I’m Veronica, Veronica ffrench. Daddy’s the vice-commodore here. He and Mummy are entertaining guests in their private quarters. And I’m far too young to be included in their private party, Mummy says.”

  “I see. Well then, my dear, aren’t I the lucky one.”

  “Lucky, you say…but how so?”

  “Well, for a start, we wouldn’t be having this grand little dance would we, if you were locked away with a gaggle of auld fuddy-duddies. Now would we?”

  At that moment the band struck up a fast danc
e. Trying to keep up with me, Veronica caught her heel in the brass inlays on the floor, and her body turned…but her foot didn’t. She twisted her ankle and fell to the Compass Room floor.

  Before I got Veronica to her feet, the band stopped playing and a steward went looking for her parents. Every pair of eyes on the dance floor followed me as I helped her to a chair by the wall. When the music started again, I waited by her side as the dancers crowded back on the dance floor.

  By the time the vice-commodore and his wife arrived to comfort their sobbing daughter it was almost midnight. I told them Veronica needed medical attention, and I offered to take her. My offer was met with a withering it’s your fault, and you’ve ruined our New Year’s Eve look from Mummy. Evidently, I wasn’t to be trusted to take her daughter to the Adventist Hospital on nearby Stubbs Road.

  The vice-commodore and his sour-faced wife stood on either side of their injured daughter. They lifted her to her one good foot just as the bells, flares, fireworks and clocks of the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club marked the start of a new year. Amidst the bellowing car horns of Causeway Bay and Stubbs Road, they supported Veronica down the steps leading away from the clubhouse and into a waiting limousine.

  When Olivia – or whoever she was – arrived back on the scene, in the hope of a grope and a New Year’s kiss, I told her what happened.

  “Oh dear, that’s a problemo there dear Finn. I’d give this place a wide berth for a while…definitely a very wide berth!” she advised, while checking the crowd to see if anyone had seen her talking to me.

  I happily followed her advice.

  18

  HONG KONG: JANUARY, 1985

  I’m finally meeting Fran Cooke this afternoon, in the Peninsula Hotel – ten months after I arrived in Hong Kong. He’s been called back from Kuala Lumpur to report on a Malaysian bank official whose severed head was found in a sports bag at a Kowloon hotel. The rumour on the street links the gruesome murder to Fran’s Clarrion story. His story’s certainly got legs, and I’m curious to be filled in on what could turn out to be the biggest corporate fraud in the history of Hong Kong.