After that, I killed time waiting for Ringo Chen and Helen Wong and wondered why Dawn had lied to me. The whole business was beginning to stink from all the lies.
30
There was a stink of fish and sewage as Ringo pulled off the highway onto a feeder road that night. Most of the day, I’d done what I could, but it was scraps. Scraps from cops and bankers I talked to. Some from Chris Roy. Names of enforcers and errand boys, most of them in China beyond our reach. Anecdotes. Everyone was polite but distracted. Like Tolya said, Hong Kong was a town on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
In these godforsaken suburbs and villages around the border, hide-and-seek would be real easy for the creeps. You could almost taste the corruption that already leaked over that border, like fall-out from a nuclear melt-down.
“Christ, it really does reek,” I said to Ringo who was driving a snappy red BMW roadster.
Pollution was suspended on the air like a layer of grease and Ringo put up the top of his car. Helen Wong was in the back seat. “She does good work, but she offends a lot of people,” Ringo had said when I told him Helen was coming with us. I didn’t care. Helen Wong knew her way around the New Territories.
Ten miles north of the hotel, the village of Tai Po was close enough to the coast to account for the fishy stench. We bumped around muddy roads looking for the address on Sonny’s fax. Hulking jerry-built apartment buildings stood on tracts of raw ground so barren there weren’t even weeds, only empty cans, dead dogs, and sewage. Forests had thrived here a few years earlier, Ringo said. It was the ugliest place I’d ever seen.
Leaning over my shoulder, Helen peered through the front window at a group of buildings. “I think this is it,” she said.
Ringo stepped on the brakes, I snuffed out my cigarette. We all got out of the car and I looked at my watch. I had lost all sense of time and place. Millions of people inhabited these buildings: they had kids, got married, went to work, celebrated their birthdays. They aspired, lived, died, but I couldn’t see it. All I could see was air so thick you could chop it up with a meat cleaver. My own paranoia, the feeling things had gone off the rails, made it feel like a dead zone. The three of us walked towards one of the buildings. Only the whine of traffic kept us company.
“Tell me about the illegals at this end,” I said to Ringo.
“There’s a million stories.” Ringo walked faster, eyes clicking right, then left. “Some go overland to the old Soviet bloc. Some go in container ships to America, which means six months at sea, packed in like sardines, or slaves. There’s big unemployment on the mainland now. In certain regions, the government encourages the smugglers. It’s an old story here,” Ringo said. “When the communists took over China, in ’48, ’49, the bravest boys would jump into Mirs Bay and race the sharks to Hong Kong. Later on, when there was bad famine, the Chinese let people go if they could bribe or finagle their way out. So they walked to the border. The Hong Kong guards played another kind of game. If you could make it through the barbed wire and avoid the guns, you could stay. Mirs Bay is a few miles from here,” he said, pointing into the dark. I thought of Henry Liu in Chinatown, who had raced those sharks.
“Hong Kong has always been a gateway, the first stop on an illegal’s route to paradise. Look, we deal a case at a time, when we can; we try to put some connections together. It can take years.” He looked at the building in front of us and then at me. “We haven’t got years any more. We’ve hardly got months. We haven’t got anything.”
“But who’s the money in Hong Kong? Where’s the beef? Who’s the Debt Collector?”
Ringo grimaced. “I don’t know.”
“Quiet! Quiet!” Helen put her finger over her mouth as a pair of men passed us. Then she stopped. “It’s here. I’m sure this is the building.”
The apartment was on the nineteenth floor, and while the elevator slipped and shuddered on its cables, I jammed my hands in my pockets, sweating.
Helen Wong found the door and knocked and an old man opened it. The two of them talked rapidly, gesticulating, pointing. Helen shook his hand and turned to me. “Come on. I know where to go,” she said and I had the chilling sense that it was all too easy, too smooth. Everyone was too accommodating. The old man shut the door but not before he took a good hard look at us.
“We’ll walk.” Helen was in charge. We walked away from the building. Ten minutes later, we reached the site of a half-demolished building. Next to it was an old silver Windstream jacked up on concrete blocks. It must have been someone’s vacation home once; now the trailer was webbed with dirt, rust, dead bugs.
“Let me go first.” She knocked on the trailer. Her knuckles made a hollow metallic noise. “I’m going to have a look.” She went inside, then stuck her head back out.
“It is the right place. Give me five minutes, then you come in.”
We squatted on a pile of tires near the trailer, me and Ringo, and smoked. From the near distance came the sound of sirens. “Your guys?”
“When there’s trouble, like the riot yesterday in Central, we show our colors. We put up roadblocks. Papers get checked. But this never was a democracy.”
“How far to the Chinese border?”
“Five miles. About five.” Ringo tossed me a fresh pack of cigarettes, the Dunhills that his cousin Jerry always smoked.
“Sonny Lippert thinks he can pin something on Jerry, that he’s screwed.”
Ringo looked at the sky, then at me, and said, “Good.”
On that pile of used tires on a piece of waste ground somewhere near China, we sat, smoking and staring out into the dark. A stray puppy leaped at us suddenly, but Ringo caught it and held it between his hands.
“I fixed it about the gun for you, Artie. For now.”
“Thanks. Thank you.”
“I wouldn’t stick around too long. They know your name. If there are more riots, and there will be more riots, things will get very tough. Less than half of us Hong Kongers want reunification with the mainland. It’s an empire of corruption over there.” He waved his hand in the direction of the border. “We are very skittish. We have to show our new masters we can police ourselves, or they’ll do it for us. I won’t be able to help you much after tonight. Certain Chinese dignitaries are expected. Cops like me are required, so my boss says. He already suspects me.”
“What of?”
“A touch of sedition, you could say.” He laughed bitterly. “I can’t help you, Artie. I can’t even help myself. I’m a lame duck.”
“How’s that?”
“I’ll be heading to Sydney before July.”
“With Mrs Chen? Is there a Mrs Chen?”
Ringo’s tone turned scathing. “There is no Mrs Chen. That’s why I’m leaving. Did you know that criminal sanctions on homosexuality were only lifted in 1991? That’s why I came back from London. You know how the People’s Republic treat gays? Do you?” He tossed his cigarette away. “God knows why I’m telling you this. Just don’t stick around Hong Kong too long, Artie, not if things go bad. They have your name at headquarters.”
“I am Mrs Moy. My daughter was murdered in New York City one month ago plus one week.” The woman in the trailer sat on a ragtag sofa that obviously doubled as a bed, Helen Wong at her side. Helen did the translating and she was very deft. After a few minutes, I forgot she was there.
Mrs Moy held out her hand. In the other hand, she held a cigarette stiffly between two fingers. In jeans and a yellow T-shirt, Mrs Moy looked about forty. She would have been handsome if she ever smiled, but she never did. The trailer itself was cramped, the window covered with a dark plastic shade, the air stuffy, thick with exhaust fumes and fear.
I noticed Ringo’s eyes were fixed on the door. “Please go on,” I said to Mrs Moy.
She was from the southern part of Fujian Province, she said. Her husband was a mechanic and she herself sewed when she could get the work. Sewing, she could make about fifteen cents a day.
She had had one child, but it was a daughter
and she wanted a boy, so she tried again. She miscarried late and had to go to the hospital, she said, so it became known that she had defied the one-child policy and she was sterilized. Then her husband died of cancer.
The suffering seemed medieval and I said I was sorry for her troubles, but Mrs Moy said it was normal. There were tens of thousands of women like her. There were many women much worse off, she added, and put out the cigarette, then took another one from the crumpled pack in her lap.
In her village, several of her cousins had gone to America. Everyone saw how much money came back to the village. Mrs Moy’s daughter had been married when she was very young and her husband had died. Now, the daughter wanted to go to America. Mrs Moy helped her put out the word that she was looking for a passage. In a matter of days, the snakeheads showed up and offered to deliver the girl to America for $35,000. With help from some relatives and from a money-lender, Mrs Moy raised $10,000. The moneylenders took forty per cent a year, but Mrs Moy said she had accepted that it was the down-payment for her daughter’s journey to the Golden Mountain.
“We knew it was possible,” said Mrs Moy. “The snakeheads spread news of the Golden Mountain and how, if you went, you would find money almost on the streets. Girls who went sent back pictures of themselves with big cars. It was well known. We believed. There was nothing in the village, no work, nothing.” She paused. “We had to believe. And there were the pictures.”
It took six months. She took the bus to Fuzhou with her daughter and saw her leave for the airport for a flight to Guangzhou where she was to receive a passport with her name and picture in it and then to board a ship. “After eight months, I became desperate,” said Mrs Moy. “Then I heard she had arrived. I was called to the home of a wealthy cousin who had a telephone and she was on the phone. ‘Hello, Mommy,’ she said. ‘I’m in America.’ She was at the Golden Mountain.” For the first time, Mrs Moy smiled. Very softly, she said, “I was happy.”
Ringo stayed at the door. I sat. Helen produced Cokes and passed them around and then Mrs Moy resumed her story.
From America there were phone calls from time to time. And although her daughter sent less money than she had hoped for, Mrs Moy believed she was doing well. Until one morning, she was summoned to her cousin’s to take a call from a man in New York City. Her daughter had been kidnapped and was being held.
“Four hours,” Mrs Moy said. “They gave me four hours to raise ten thousand dollars. Or they would kill her. They put her on the phone and she cried, ‘Help me, Mommy.’ How could I help her? Where would I find so much money so fast?”
Miraculously, the girl was released and Mrs Moy received several phone calls from her to say she was well and happy and that she had, in fact, met a man. But Mrs Moy had a premonition. It would happen again. It had happened to other families. The snakeheads had become greedy. The price was going up.
“I had to do something. My brother had come here to Tai Po years ago, he had fled the communists and he offered to help me. So I became an immigrant, too.”
For ten dollars, Mrs Moy got herself smuggled into Tai Po in a fishing boat. She kept house for her brother who was prepared to help with money if it became necessary. She let her daughter know how to find her, but no one else.
“One evening my brother’s phone rang suddenly. I wasn’t expecting it, It was the news that she was dead. No one even called for the money. I had the money ready this time, but no one called me. They killed her without even calling me.” Silently, she wept. “After that I still had to pay the moneylenders. Even after she was dead they came to me for the money. They came to collect.”
I didn’t ask because I already knew, so it was Ringo who said, “What was your daughter’s name?”
“She was called Rose. Her name was Rose.”
For a few minutes, Mrs Moy sobbed. Then, from her pocket, she took a picture and handed it to me. It was a duplicate of the picture of Rose I knew by heart—smiling face, pink jacket, the white car. The story that began on Hillel Abramsky’s floor on 47th Street ended on the other side of the world in a rusty trailer on a derelict tract of land in China.
Even through her tears, Mrs Moy watched me. When she spoke again it sounded like a script. “But there are bad people everywhere. Rose met some bad people in New York. I thought to myself, if only the officials back home had known, if only they knew in time. At least she made it to the Golden Mountain,” she said.
I turned to Helen. “Is that Mrs Moy’s brother in the apartment?”
“Yes.”
“Why doesn’t she stay there?”
“She says she’s frightened of being trapped on the nineteenth floor. She is scared of heights. She feels safer out here. But she can’t stay.” Helen helped Mrs Moy gather up her bag and the picture of Rose. “They’re tearing all this down. I’ll take her back. I’ll talk to her. I’ll meet you at the car.”
The women set off from the trailer before I could stop them.
“What’s her brother’s job?” Ringo called out.
Helen turned around. “He’s a local official. Quite rich. Quite important. I won’t be long,” she added, and disappeared into the dark wasteland.
Something was wrong with the whole set-up.
“Ringo?”
He fastened the door of the trailer with a padlock.
“Ringo, she’s told that story before. More than once.”
“That’s what I thought. You got this address from Sonny Lippert, didn’t you?”
“Yeah?”
“How did Sonny get it?”
“I don’t know. How did she expect to help her daughter if she didn’t tell anyone else? How did the money-lenders know where to find her? What’s going on here?”
We were already running. “Didn’t you wonder why she’s still a believer? Why she laid the blame off on bad men in America? I thought, if only Stalin knew. They used to say it on the way to the Gulag. If only Stalin knew . . . when Stalin had ordered the whole thing.”
“Or Mao. Christ.” Ringo ran faster. “She had told the story before. It’s an old Chinese trick. And it only makes sense if the smugglers and the officials are complicit.”
I tried to catch my breath. “What trick?”
The soft terrain pulled at my feet, the mud and shit pouring into my shoes as we ran.
Ringo was breathing hard, talking fast while we ran. “In the story the officials are good. It’s only a few bad people who are to blame. Usually foreign dogs. Say some Western reporter is nosing around, or a cop from New York like you. You wheel in Mrs Moy. She pours out her heart. Who wouldn’t believe her? She is telling the truth, more or less. The foreigners are satisfied. The reporter writes the story, people in the West are shocked, but nothing happens. The story goes away. You’re right. She has told it before and her brother is an official. It’s a set-up.”
“So people know we’re here. Us. Helen.”
“Christ, yes!” was all Ringo said. Gun in hand, he reached the apartment building ahead of me. “Where is she? Where’s Helen?”
When we found Helen Wong in the playground behind the building, she was hardly breathing, her face covered with blood.
“Mrs Moy said she would go upstairs alone.” Helen spoke haltingly. “Mrs Moy. Said her brother didn’t like strangers. I let her. I came out. They were . . . waiting . . .”
“Stay with her. I’ll get help.” Ringo ran.
I was alone with Helen, her head in my lap. “Animals. Waiting. Held my arms,” she gasped. “Used my face . . . a punching bag. Bare hands. A knife. Knives.”
“Don’t talk.”
“Have to tell you . . .”
“Later.”
There was blood everywhere. Helen’s white shirt was sodden with fresh blood.
“Artie?”
“What is it?” I leaned down. Her breathing became more irregular as she whispered, “Unstable . . . Dawn . . . dangerous,” and then it stopped completely.
All I could do was sit on the raw ground in the
dark, the ugly buildings looming over us, and hold her hand, but by the time Ringo appeared and an ambulance came, Helen was dead.
“She’s dead, Sonny. You happy? She’s fucking dead.” I was yelling into the phone from my hotel room. I told him about Rose’s mother and Helen’s death. “Who gave you the address? Who?”
“Pansy gave it to me.”
“Where is she?”
“She’s still in the hospital. But she’s started talking. That’s what I was waiting for. As soon as she started talking, I got the mother’s phone number and we traced the address. So we know that the contacts run from Fuzhou into Hong Kong. We know that for sure now. We got Pansy’s brother, too. He was the enforcer, he ran the errand boys in Chinatown.”
“Yeah, and I bet he’s already got one of OJ’s lawyers on the case. Was it really worth it, Sonny? Was it worth another woman dying?”
31
In the morning, the invitation was under my door. It was from Alice Wing for the races and a cocktail party beforehand. I had promised and then I forgot. It was Wednesday. I called Alice Wing and thanked her and asked for Dawn. She picked up the phone. “I’ll see you tonight,” I said.
Flirting, she said she wasn’t sure and did I really want her; I could barely keep from snarling. “Be there. OK? Dawn?”
Then I did the one thing I had resisted. I called the Taes. I almost fell off the chair when Ricky answered.
“Ricky? Rick, is that you?” I was shouting.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m better, Artie. I’m getting better. It shook me up, Dawn leaving, you know? It really got me that I wasn’t here for her. She’s OK, isn’t she? You’re there for her if she needs you, aren’t you?” he said and so I couldn’t ask him what I needed to ask. I couldn’t ask if he knew what his sister really was.
“Good,” I said. “Everything’s good. I’ll be home soon. You take care, Rick. I’ll be back soon and we’ll go raise some hell.”
The races would be perfect. I wanted a confrontation with Dawn in a public place because I didn’t trust myself alone with her. I had to know if it was her—the Debt Collector. Then I could leave her to her husband or Ringo Chen and I could go home. There was a late flight out of Hong Kong. I reserved a seat on it. Then I packed.
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