by Ian Hamilton
“How long have you known him?”
“Twenty years, maybe longer. He used to run a string of moneylenders at Ho’s casinos, and then he managed the massage parlours that double as whorehouses for one of the larger societies. He is a Red Pole.”
“What is that?”
“We have been together so long that I forget what I have told you.”
“About the triad?”
“Of course.”
“Not much. All I know is that you were chairman.”
“An honorary position,” Uncle said, waving his hand. “It had no real power.”
Ava turned her head away, not wanting him see the incredulity on her face. “What is a Red Pole?” she muttered.
“The sharp end of a gang’s stick.”
“I still don’t understand.”
Uncle closed his eyes as if he were conjuring memories. “In the days when I was active, every gang was headed by a Mountain Master or a Dragon Head, as we were sometimes called. Each had three people reporting directly to him: a Vanguard, who organized operations; an Incense Master, who was responsible for ceremonies; and a deputy Mountain Master, who actually executed the plans. The deputy Mountain Master in turn had three people under him: the White Paper Fan, who provided financial and business advice; the Straw Sandal, who liaised among the different groups; and the Red Pole. The Red Pole was the enforcer. He was the muscle who ran the troops on the ground — the 49ers, who were the pledged members of the society, and the blue lanterns, who were like apprentices.”
“49ers?”
“Every position had a number derived from the I Ching. The Mountain Master was 489. The Red Pole was 426. The number none of us wanted to hear was 25. It was the designation for a mole that the police or some rival triad gang had planted, or for a traitor to his own gang.”
“So Lok is an enforcer?”
“Yes.”
“How many men report to him?”
“Somewhere between fifteen and twenty.”
“Uncle, can you talk to him?”
“Yes, though I am not sure what good it would do.”
“Is there anyone else you can talk to, someone who has authority over him?”
He shook his head. “The old structures have broken down. Lok is his own man.”
“But you said he reported to a deputy Mountain Master.”
She saw him hesitate and wondered if she’d slighted him by being so insistent. “Not anymore. Things are different now than they used to be. The old ways of doing business have changed and the need to be interdependent has disappeared. The large societies have moved on from moneylenders, whorehouses, and extortion. There is too much money to be made counterfeiting purses and watches, and even more to be made pirating computer software. It takes a different mentality to run that kind of business, so they have cut themselves off from the grubby stuff, handing it over to small-timers like Lok to run as they see fit. He does not report to anyone; he has no allegiances to anyone other than to himself.”
“So we have to talk to Lok.”
“We do.”
“Uncle, I don’t want to be unreasonable. He can keep some of the money. Tell him it’s my way of apologizing for Wu.”
He shook his head. “No, men like Lok do not think like that. He probably thinks the money is his by now. It will be all or it will be nothing.”
“You know best.”
He stood and walked around the table to her. He put his hand on her shoulder and then leaned forward and kissed her on the forehead. “I will call him. Wait here,” he said.
She had no real expectation that he would be successful; she was just appreciative that he’d try. She prepared herself for disappointment, determined not to show a flicker of it. All Uncle would see was how pleased she was that he’d made the phone call.
The few minutes turned into ten and then fifteen. Ava sat at the little table, occasionally picking at the remaining snow pea tips, and despite herself starting to feel encouraged by the duration of his absence. The longer the discussion, the better her chances, she thought. That was until she saw Uncle walk back into the kitchen.
She’d known him long enough to recognize the signs: the tightening of his mouth, the slightly averted eyes, shoulders that weren’t completely square. “So it was no,” she said, making it easier for him.
“It was no,” he said as he resumed his seat.
“Thank you for trying.”
“We exchanged harsh words. He was always ignorant and he had been drinking, and Wu has been agitating him, so I think he liked the idea of my asking him for a favour. And he liked even more the fact that he could tell me to go and fuck myself without having to worry about the consequences. I was not polite in return.”
“Uncle, I’m sorry now that I even asked.”
“No, I wanted to do it.”
“Now what? What do I do?” she said, more to herself than to him.
“You do nothing,” he said quickly. “You cannot reason with him; you cannot scare him; you have no means, legal or otherwise, to get to him. You have to tell your brother that his investment is gone. He should walk away.”
“Just like that?”
“Exactly like that.”
She sighed. “I think you’re right.”
“So, assuming I am right, what are your plans?”
“I’m having lunch with my brother and his partner tomorrow. I’ll let them know how this ends, and then I’ll get the first plane I can back to Toronto.”
He reached over and took her hand in his. “I am sorry I could not help.”
“And I’m sorry for not calling you earlier.”
“Go home and rest. Spend some time with your mother and sister. This business of ours is hard on all of us.”
She walked him to his car. As Sonny opened the door for his boss, Uncle said, “Wuhan called. They are very happy about the speed with which you retrieved the money.”
“Has it reached the Kowloon bank?”
“Yes, this morning.”
“I’ve prepared a breakdown of who got what in Europe and how our share should be distributed. I’ll email it to you later,” she said, realizing she should have done that the day before.
The art forgery case had been concluded less than three days ago. To Ava it felt like light-years.
( 7 )
Ava wasn’t much of a girl for bars, especially when she was alone, but the day had jangled her nerves and she needed to calm down.
She went to her room first, collected her notebook and laptop, and rode the elevator two levels up to the twenty-fifth floor. She wasn’t overly superstitious, as were many Chinese people, but she still had more superstitions than any gweilo, and one of them was that she wouldn’t stay on or visit the twenty-fourth floor of the hotel; in fact, she closed her eyes if the elevator stopped there. It was from that floor that Leslie Cheung had jumped to his death. Ava wasn’t a huge fan of Cantonese pop but she’d liked Cheung, maybe partially because he was gay, and it haunted her that his sexual orientation had somehow contributed to his suicide.
The M Bar looked out on Victoria Harbour, its lotus-bud–shaped counter positioned so that everyone sitting there had a view. It was early and she had a choice of seats. She took one of the high-backed chairs on the right side. The bar served tapas, Hong Kong style, and she was tempted. There were two restaurants on the same floor: Man Wah, which some people considered the best Chinese restaurant in Hong Kong, and Pierre, a Michelin two-star French restaurant. She was hungry. The snow pea tips and a few scallops were all she had eaten that day. She decided to wait to have a real meal, and ordered just a glass of white burgundy.
She turned on her laptop and made the wireless connection. She sent Uncle the financial summary of the Wuhan case and was about to connect to the Millennium website when her cell rang. It was her father. S
he knew he was still in Toronto and realized it was six a.m. there. Michael must have called him.
“Daddy,” she said.
“How are you?”
“I’m okay. Has Michael been talking to you?”
“Yes.”
“How upset is he?”
“He doesn’t know what to be upset about first.”
“It is a mess,” Ava said, seeing no reason to be anything but honest.
Her father sighed. She could imagine him sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and the morning newspaper, dressed in a pair of the Holt Renfrew silk pyjamas her mother made him wear. He had thick black hair that he still wore long, and in the morning it was always rumpled. She and Marian loved to see him like that, rather than in his normal Hong Kong–slick mode.
“Michael is worried that you think he’s a fool.”
That should be the least of his worries, she thought. “Well, they certainly did a foolish thing.”
“Obviously. And Ava, you are sure about this Lok character, that he is triad?”
“He is, and he’s pulled this real-estate scam before. If they had done any serious due diligence they would have found that out.”
“It is Hong Kong,” Marcus Lee said. “We still do business on handshakes, we trust friends and family. Michael trusted Simon, Simon trusted this David Chi, and that overrode common business sense.”
“I know. A lot of my business comes from people whose friends have screwed them over.”
“Yes, you would know, and now Michael knows. A bit late, of course.”
She heard the resignation in his voice. “Daddy, I’m still working on a few ideas. I’m going to meet with Michael and Simon tomorrow, so let’s not quit just yet.”
“Ava, Michael is clinging by his fingertips to the hope that you can come up with something. I’m a bit more realistic. Don’t try anything silly.”
“What do you mean?”
“He told me about the man Wu. He’s upset about having put you at risk.”
“I know how to handle people like Wu.”
“Obviously you do. What I don’t know is how often you’ve had to do something like that, and how you came to have those skills.”
“You paid for martial arts training for years,” she said, sidestepping the rest of his question.
“Michael found it alarming.”
“Michael hasn’t had to do business with men like Wu and Lok before. I have, more often than I care to remember.”
“You need to be careful.”
“I always am.”
His voice became indistinct and Ava wondered if there was a problem with the phone line. “Excuse me, your mother just came into the kitchen and I was speaking to her. Do you want to say hello?” he asked.
“No, tell her I’ll call later when I have more time to talk.”
“All right.”
“Daddy, I have some work to do here. I’ll meet with Michael tomorrow and we’ll see what we can sort out.”
“Do you really have some ideas?”
“I do,” she said before ending the call. What she didn’t want to tell him was that the only one she thought was viable was to put her own money into Michael’s company so he could get off the hook at the bank.
She opened the envelope Michael had given her the night before and re-explored the financials. They were bare-bones; she was going to have to see more detailed numbers before putting together a final offer. There weren’t going to be any more deals done on a handshake if she was involved.
If the numbers did hold up, though, it looked as if the company could be valued at between US$12 and $15 million, based on a price of eight to ten times earnings. She wanted at least a third of the company, so she figured she could put in $5 million for share purchases and then loan the rest of what they needed at a reasonable rate of interest. She would want their shares pledged to her as collateral, as well as personal guarantees. They’d have to sign non-competes, and there would have to be financial controls in place that gave her comfort.
She didn’t have all the cash on hand, but when she got her share of the Liechtenstein money she’d have more than enough. Investing it in her brother’s company had been the furthest thing from her mind when she came to Hong Kong, and it wasn’t ideal in terms of how she saw her own financial position. The thing was, she didn’t know what other options were available. If she did nothing then Michael’s business would be destroyed by the bank, her father’s business would come under attack, and the whole underpinning of the family’s security — the extended family’s security — was going to be threatened.
Ava had enough money to look after her mother, but that wasn’t the point. Her mother’s life was tied to her relationship with Marcus Lee. However strange outsiders found it, her mother had a husband and a structured family life. If Marcus became unable to sustain it and she was forced to rely on her daughters for support, the loss of face, the humiliation would be catastrophic. Ava loved her mother too much to let that happen, and she loved her father too much to watch him go through hardship that was not of his making. The way she saw it, it came down to a choice between family and money. She had only one family. And there were lots of ways to make money.
She sat in the M Bar for another hour writing in her notebook, trying to detail as much as she could the proposal she’d put to Michael and Simon at lunch the next day. It was difficult to find a balance. She needed to be fair, but it was her money and there had to be checks in place to make sure it wasn’t squandered.
Just after seven she closed the book, thought about food, and left the bar. Man Wah or Pierre? She had often eaten at Man Wah. Their dim sum were superb, but they wouldn’t be serving dim sum at this time. Dinner would be good, she knew — some shark fin soup, a steamed sea bass. She had never tried Pierre, though, and realized she felt like meat.
The restaurant shared the same view of Victoria Harbour as the M Bar. Night was descending and the Hong Kong skyline had begun to light up. She tipped the maître d’ one hundred Hong Kong dollars and asked for a table near the window. If there was a more magnificent view than the Hong Kong harbour at night, she hadn’t seen it.
The menu was skewed towards tasting options. Ava preferred to pick and choose, regardless of the cost.
She had carried a glass of burgundy with her from the bar and told the waiter to keep filling her glass with the same wine. He stood next to the table, pen in hand. “I’ll let you know when I’m ready to order,” she told him.
“They seem to be in such a rush,” a voice said behind her.
Ava turned and saw a middle-aged couple sitting at the next table. The accent was American, the clothes were as well.
“In Chinese restaurants efficiency is valued,” Ava said. “This restaurant may serve French food but the servers are all Chinese. They can’t escape their culture.”
“Why, thank you,” the woman said.
“You’re welcome,” Ava said, turning back to the menu.
Although she loved foie gras, there was a limit to how much meat her system could absorb. It took her five minutes to decide what to have for dinner. The waiter stood against the wall now, trying to ignore her. She snapped her fingers. Her mother would have been upset. One of her life lessons was to never upset a waiter, particularly a Chinese one, as their penchant for spitting in customers’ food was legendary. Ava had long ago decided not to worry about what waiters did with her food before it got to the table.
She ordered a black truffle, mushroom, and spinach tartlet, bouillabaisse mousseline, and a roast saddle of lamb Lozère with oregano, white beetroot purée, and tabbouleh.
The woman at the next table said, “Good choice. I had the lamb last night and it was wonderful.”
Ava looked at them again. They were older than she had first thought, and the man was drooping, his chin falling onto his ch
est as he tried to keep his eyes open. “Do you mind if I join you?” Ava asked.
“Please,” the woman said, introducing herself as Ellen, and her husband as, Larry.
They were from Shaker Heights, Cleveland, and this was their first trip to Asia. They were travelling with another couple who seemed obsessed with shopping, having bought a new suitcase already though they had been in Hong Kong for only two days. They were scheduled to go to Singapore, Bangkok, and Kuala Lumpur. The woman was nervous. Hong Kong was more than she could have imagined, and for the rest of it, well . . .
For once Ava enjoyed the distraction. The husband was out of it, barely able to stay awake long enough to eat, but the woman was smart and curious, and Ava found herself lecturing. She had been to all of the places on their tour and waded into the pros and cons. The woman had a little pad in her purse that she pulled out to take notes as Ava rambled on. Kuala Lumpur was okay; it was too bad they had scheduled Singapore, as Bangkok was worth more time. And how, how could they not go to China?
“Larry wants us to go to Macau tomorrow,” she said, flicking a finger at her husband.
“Do you like Las Vegas?” Ava asked.
“No, I hate the place.”
“Macau is a perverse Vegas.”
“Oh.”
“So what do suggest?”
“Go to Lantau Island, see the Buddha, see the part of Hong Kong that isn’t all concrete and commercialism.”
Their food kept arriving as they talked, Larry waking long enough to taste everything and then nodding off again. Ava ate as if she hadn’t seen food in days. It was all wonderful, the lamb medium-rare and so tender she barely had to chew.