Meaner Things

by David Anderson

  “Nurmi & Associates, how can I help you?” It was her voice.

  My brain froze. I opened my mouth but couldn’t get a word out.

  “Hello?” Her tone was insistent now.

  I sat there, immobile, as if time had stopped for me.

  “Hello?” She waited another couple of seconds then the line clicked dead.

  I put the phone down and stared into space. My heart was pounding, my chest heaving. I found it hard to breathe, as if the room had suddenly emptied of air. Sweat trickled into my eyes. I sucked in an enormous breath and lay back on the bed.

  Eventually my chest calmed and my breathing became normal again. My body cooled and the sweat dried on my forehead.

  I would go there, confront her. That’s what I’d do.

  *

  I didn’t, of course. Somehow hearing her voice took all the fight out of me. I stayed another day but kept well away from Fort Street. By now I had no money left to stick around any longer and no reason to do so, if I wasn’t going to take the next step.

  I realised that I no longer had the stomach for it. I was tired, broke and terribly depressed, and all the tramping around Oak Bay had hurt my ankle so much that I was limping badly again. She was gone from my life. Accept it, I told myself, accept it.

  Truth was, I was scared too, scared of what might happen if I pushed any further, dug any deeper.

  It was time to move on.

  8.

  SOB STORY

  Present day

  The address she’d given me was for a high-rise building on Alberni Street in the West End, very close to Stanley Park. As soon as I saw the luxurious exterior I knew that my hunch that she was loaded was one hundred per cent correct. She buzzed me up and welcomed me into her half of the ninth floor. I stepped inside and immediately became two hundred per cent sure that she was loaded.

  I undid my shoes and took my time examining the layout. There was a small bathroom right beside me, its door slightly ajar. Past this, I noticed a long, narrow kitchen with a bedroom to its right and a dining room to its left. A cosy book-lined den led out to, what I guessed would be, a spacious patio. Directly ahead of me everything seemed open plan. She led me past a massive oak dining table, big enough to seat at least twelve people, and the living room area opened out in front of us. On the wall to my right, above the fireplace, hung a massive Alex Colville painting of a cat staring up at some crows perched on an ancient stone cross. I gave it a closer look and couldn’t see any print numbers.

  “Is this an original?” I asked, thinking I sounded a bit silly.

  “Yes,” she said, but didn’t elaborate.

  On another wall were some Native carvings that I bet she hadn’t needed to climb on to a roof to obtain, and there were more paintings all over the place. The living room was bright as day, full of natural light due to the fact that the entire end wall was floor to ceiling window. I moved from the painting to the window and peered through large curved panes at the million-dollar view. Stanley Park’s Lost Lagoon lay to the left, the Vancouver Rowing Club directly ahead, and luxury yachts were moored in the waters of Coal Harbour; the whole scene was framed by the grey stone of Grouse and Cypress Mountains in the background.

  “Quite a view,” I said, always the master of understatement.

  She pointed out the window. “The grassy strip out there is called Devonian Park. I used to walk there all the time. Until recently.”

  The cryptic remark made me turn and look at her, but she didn’t elaborate. She wore a figure-hugging, cream-coloured dress, her bare shoulders and arms gleaming smooth and perfect in the light from the windows. We sat opposite each other on two of the many finely carved chairs. As she crossed her slim legs the short dress rode up to mid-thigh level. I had trouble looking away.

  “Nice place,” I said, continuing my exercise in stating the obvious.

  “Glad you like it,” she replied. “Can I offer you something to drink?”

  “If you have a cold beer, that would be great. In a glass please.”

  She fetched it and I did a bit more semi-discrete ogling of my surroundings. I felt out of place in an apartment like this, where every single object I was looking at probably cost more than I made in a year. But since our encounter yesterday I’d had time to calm down, and today I felt more in control of myself. I decided to go with the flow. After all, I had nothing to lose by seeing where this encounter led.

  She handed me the beer and sat down. I took a mouthful and watched as she drank some sparkling water and put her left hand up to her ear to brush back a strand of hair. She held her hand there for a moment and it was then that I noticed the wedding ring. I’d come here thinking I could handle whatever she might have to throw at me, but this sent a dart through my heart.

  I instantly hated myself for that reaction. It was a natural enough development, wasn’t it? I hadn’t seriously expected her to retire to a nunnery for a decade, had I? More to the point was: had she been wearing the ring yesterday? If so, I hadn’t noticed. She could have been. But I was pretty sure she hadn’t.

  Suddenly I didn’t feel so composed anymore. I looked up at the Native art again and wondered about the backpacks that had taken so much effort to fill in the museum warehouse. Had she really run off with them? I swallowed hard and decided not to ask her. Not yet.

  “Did you come to the café yesterday to find me?” I spat the words out, but a small part of me wanted the answer to be ‘Yes.’

  The question seemed to surprise her. “No, of course not. I noticed you when you were leaving with your friend and thought I could catch up with you in the street.”

  I didn’t believe her, but decided to let it go. “You were going to fill me in on what you’ve been up to these last few years,” I said.

  She nodded. “Just the usual stuff, really. When my father got real sick I took over his accountancy business.”

  “What? From philosophy to accountancy?”

  “At first it was mind-numbingly boring. But I seemed to have a knack for it. After both my parents died I came back to Vancouver.”

  “And then you got married,” I said. It sounded more accusatory than I’d intended.

  “You noticed.” She moved the ring-hand, held it up. “I don’t always wear it.”

  “Why not?”

  She sighed. “I know this must be difficult for you, Michael.”

  “It is.” I could never hide emotion, so it was pointless lying.

  “I’m sorry for bringing up painful memories.”

  “It was all so long ago,” I replied feebly, still staring at the ring. I didn’t trust myself to say anything more.

  She shrugged. “Yes, that’s true. We’ve both moved on, but I thought we might catch up.”

  I should have told her I wasn’t interested. Instead I said, “I can see there’s a lot to catch up on.”

  She looked at the gleaming gold band again, and sighed ruefully.

  “Let me tell you about that, Michael.”

  *

  It all came pouring out. His name was Jonathan Zheng and he was filthy rich. She’d met him at an art gallery two years ago, where they’d both gone after attending a business conference about Pacific trade deals. Three months later they were married. Honeymoon was on a private island in the South China Sea near the Philippines. Mercifully, she didn’t linger on that bit too much.

  “So what was the attraction with this guy?” I heard the bitterness in my voice and instantly regretted it.

  She seemed embarrassed by the question. “We shared an interest in modern art, especially Canadian artists,” she explained. “I guess I was attracted to the aura of the man. So knowledgeable and confident. And back then he was always perfectly mannered, polite. I liked that. Sounds corny, I know.”

  “I guess it counts for a lot.” I tried hard to be neutral, to let her talk.

  “We read the same books; enjoyed the same restaurants; had long conversations in the Teahouse in Stanley Park and West on Granville
. He was always so complimentary back then. Very different to the kind of man I’ve been involved with in the past. More mature, sophisticated.” She looked up, realising what she’d said. “I don’t mean you, of course.”

  I ignored that. It sounded to me like she had wanted a father figure and had become infatuated by this Zheng guy’s slick manners and sophisticated tastes. A sort of ‘co-ed marries her professor’ story except with millions of dollars and lots of fancy artwork thrown in.

  I asked what exactly Zheng did. She said a whole lot of everything; he had several different businesses based in Hong Kong and Vancouver, most of them involving imports and exports. In recent years he’d got involved in the diamond trade, highly successfully, to the point that he’d set up his own diamond bourse in one of downtown Vancouver’s skyscraper buildings. Obviously, a real mover and shaker.

  “Any kids?” I made myself ask.

  She shook her head. “No, Jonathan’s been married twice before. He has a daughter from the first marriage and two sons from the second. They live in Hong Kong. He doesn’t want any more and I was OK with that.”

  She didn’t sound okay anymore. There was an awkward pause.

  “Anyway, he’s a lot older than me.”

  “Really?” I wasn’t going to make it easy for her.

  She put her glass down with a thunk on the table and I knew I’d rattled her.

  “Jonathan is nearly twenty-five years older than me. Maybe you find that disgusting?”

  I assured her I didn’t, although of course I did. She went on about it for a while: how he performed thirty minutes of Tai Chi every morning, had his own acupuncturist, ran up the backstairs of tall buildings, skied a mean piste at Whistler, blah, blah, blah.

  From her entire demeanour so far, I could tell that things had gone downhill fast. “So what went wrong?” I interrupted.

  “What went wrong, Michael, is this. I made a massive mistake.”

  “How come? Sounds like you shared a lot of personal and professional interests.”

  Again her hand went up to her hair in a nervous gesture. “I was wrong on both those counts. Things changed soon after we were married. He’s cultured and mannered alright but it’s all on the surface. In private he’s a different man, arrogant, brutal even. I realised I was only one of his possessions, something he’d spent a lot of effort to acquire.”

  “And professionally?”

  “After we got married I assumed I’d become involved in his businesses. I had experience and wanted to develop it.”

  “Naturally enough,” I replied. Emma definitely wasn’t the stay at home and bake cookies all day kind.

  “I was surprised when he didn’t sound keen on the idea. He wanted me to stay at home and entertain guests at dinner parties. Eventually he agreed to let me manage his main business, at the Zheng Building on Burrard Street. It’s well known for diamond trading among other things. You’ve probably heard of it.”

  I shook my head. “Not too well up on corporate buildings.”

  She seemed genuinely surprised. “It’s an older building, but prestigious. He occupies the twenty-third floor and rents out the rest to various importers and exporters, diamond dealers, all kinds of smaller fry than him.”

  All this corporate talk was making my eyes glaze over. She must have sensed it and hurriedly added, “Anyway, it’s the biggest diamond bourse in Western Canada and he said I could run it. But I quickly discovered he’d put me in charge of the office secretaries and that was it. I’d no access to anything important.”

  I shrugged. “So, he’s a control freak. Lots of high flying business types are.”

  “Sure, but I was expecting to be managing director, not head of the typing pool.”

  It was beginning to make sense to me now. She’d married this guy thinking she could take over his businesses, just like she’d taken over her dad’s. In due course old Johnny would pop his Chinese clogs and she’d inherit the lot. Then she’d discovered it was nothing doing.

  “What did you do about it?” I asked.

  She smiled and gave a little shrug. “I checked out what was publicly available on his companies. That’s when I discovered that none of them are publically traded; he holds sole proprietorships for every single one.”

  “So?”

  “These are big companies. There are boards of directors for some of them, but they’re his aged relatives back in Hong Kong and mainland China. I doubt that any of them ever reads an annual report, or even receives a copy. Most of them probably can’t read them; they’re only issued in English.”

  “And you didn’t stop there.”

  “Even head of the typing pool has some privileges. I looked into exactly what his businesses do. That’s when I really got worried.”

  Now my ears perked up. I knew zero about big business, but this was getting interesting. “How come?”

  “I found out why he doesn’t want anyone to know what he’s doing. Because, it’s totally illegal.”

  “What kind of illegal? Not declaring all his imports or something?”

  “It’s a lot worse than that, Michael.”

  I was getting frustrated at having to play ‘Twenty Questions’. She was better at that game than me. I tried one more time. “Smuggling?”

  She finished the sparkling water before replying. “Sort of.” She looked straight at me. “It’s not just illegal, Michael. I’m no angel myself, I could handle that. It’s immoral too. He’s using people, abusing them. I’m talking about human trafficking.”

  *

  That kept me quiet for a while. I really didn’t know what to say. Fortunately I didn’t have to say much, just nod my head a bit and murmur a few affirmative sounds. The floodgates opened even wider and what came out was pretty pathetic. Zheng was involved in people smuggling, from south-east Asia to North America, via Canadian ports. A typical enough story, promising young Asian girls jobs as housemaids and nannies to rich North Americans. In reality it was forced labour and commercial sexual exploitation, the international sex trade in all its sad, sordid glory. Emma wouldn’t come straight out and say it, but she was obviously talking about underage girls: child prostitution.

  Afterwards she got up and fetched a box of tissues.

  I was wondering how much of this to believe, but didn’t want to come straight out and say so. Maybe it was all gospel truth but, as the saying goes, once bitten, twice shy.

  “You’re absolutely sure about this?” I asked her when she came back.

  She nodded.

  “I’m still not clear how you found out.”

  “He has an office in our home in West Van. There’s a small safe behind one of the paintings. He’d never admit it, but sometimes he gets a bit absentminded so he keeps the combination written in the back of his diary, in the top drawer of his desk. The office is locked when he’s out of town. I hired a locksmith and took a look.”

  I could imagine the kind of look. “And you found . . . what exactly?”

  “Letters, faxes, his personal financial records. My dad trained me to read that stuff. It didn’t take me long to figure out that his biggest assets are coming from undeclared imports – smuggling – including people smuggling.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “I confronted him. That was an even bigger mistake.”

  “How come?”

  The apartment was at a perfectly air-conditioned temperature, but she physically shivered. “He already knew what I’d done. The housekeeper must have blabbed. I’d never seen him like that before; he was usually just smug and belittling. This time he raged, out of control. He got violent, Michael. Hit me. I threatened to leave him.”

  “What did he say to that?”

  She twisted a soggy tissue between her fingers and looked up at me. “He laughed. Said he owned me and he’d never divorce me.”

  For the first time since we’d met again, I felt sorry for her. She went on to explain that he’d thrown her out of his West Vancouver mansion and she�
�d been living in this luxury apartment of his ever since. She’d begun legal proceedings against him, but he’d immediately contested them. Fighting an ongoing legal battle was using up all her savings from her father’s business.

  “Can’t you just divorce him anyway?” I asked.

  “Normally, yes. It’s a bit complicated. We got married in some little village about fifty miles north of Beijing. So that all his relatives could attend, he said. Basically under Chinese divorce laws, husbands get everything.”

  “But you can still get one?”

  “Sure, I’m divorcing him under Canadian law. But he’s contesting it, arguing that he hasn’t lived here for twelve months prior to separation as our law requires. That’s a lie, of course, but he can easily fabricate Chinese documentation, and his family will back him to the hilt.”

  “Will that matter?”

  She smiled ruefully. “Over there, bribing government officials is a way of life. Jonathan has an endless supply of poor officials eager to stuff residency documents into his hands. He can keep this going until he bleeds me dry.”

  “What’s he hoping to gain by that?”

  “He thinks I’ll come around to his way of thinking, knuckle down and play the dutiful little housewife.”

  “At least you’ve got this apartment,” I said, as if I knew anything about it.

  She shook her head. “The contents are all itemised. His lawyers sent me a letter about it. He insists I stay here because of some honour thing. But I’m just a tenant. Like the saying goes, a bird in a gilded cage.”

  “If you do eventually divorce him, you’ll get a chunk of his Canadian assets under our laws, right?”

  Again, the little head shake, her hair tumbling softly. “I signed some prenuptial stuff his Vancouver lawyer gave me. Claimed it was just for business reasons. I’ll get nothing.”

  “The relatives in China probably insisted on it,” I ventured.

  She gave me the ghost of a grin. “You could be right there. Anyway, prenups are watertight. He was smart; I was stupid.”

  By now I was pretty sure she was telling the truth. It seemed too bizarre and embarrassing a story to be pure invention. I could now see the full state of her predicament. Her fall had been a steep one. There wasn’t anything I could say to help her, no comforting words that really meant anything. But she was resilient, she could adapt. If anybody knew that, I did.