The Devil to Pay

by Harold Robbins

  I still had my doubts about the familial relationship between Dr. Soong and her. It wasn’t just the lack of resemblance, but the body language didn’t connect, either. She not only didn’t ever touch him or speak to him, but she didn’t really even look at him. She paid no more attention to Dr. Soong than she did to his partner, Dr. Sanchez. And the only looks she got from “her father” weren’t the type of looks fathers usually gave their daughters, not unless they wanted to sleep with them.

  I couldn’t help but wonder what Lily’s game was. I couldn’t buy the idea that she was so supportive of my dream of saving the plantation that she was willing to accompany me to China. I was being steered to China for reasons other than opening a coffee market; that was a no-brainer.

  Lily—along with Cesar and maybe even Josh—had her own agenda. That was okay with me, since the trip suited my purposes, too. But I felt uncomfortable with her. I had the feeling that she knew something I didn’t—something that could hurt me. Sometimes it seemed like it amused her, that she was secretly laughing at me, but I had to admit, she seemed that way around Cesar, too, as if she knew something funny that he didn’t know.

  Not that Cesar was showing his cards. Juana had made one slip about Cesar: She said he had met Lily in Shanghai. I tried to follow up on the comment, but by the time I got the chance, she clammed up. She seemed to only give me so much and then caution set in.

  I asked Cesar later if he had ever been to China and all I got for an answer was that it was none of my business.

  I was reasonably sure I was being used as an excuse for a trip to Shanghai. But what Lily’s—or their—plans were escaped me. I certainly wasn’t being lured into white slavery—I wasn’t sexy enough for the trade.

  Not that Lily’s motives were all that important to me at the moment. Life is all about options—and at the moment the only alternative I had was to play along in the hopes that whatever she was up to would work to my advantage in the long run.

  I turned back to reading the guide books on Hong Kong and Shanghai I’d bought at the airport. They pretty much read like the conversation I had with Lily—business, sex, and crime were the three big commodities of Hong Kong and Shanghai. I hadn’t been that interested in world politics when I was a struggling businesswoman in Seattle, but I figured I’d better know a little of how the game was played in the Far East, even if that meant digesting a little history. I didn’t expose my ignorance of Asian history to Lily by telling her how aghast I was at reading how shabbily the Western powers had treated the Chinese.

  I learned that in the nineteenth century the Chinese were forced to turn over concessions to Britain and other countries as a result of the Opium Wars. The wars were “trade wars” that began when the British insisted that the Chinese government permit its merchants to market opium to the people of China. The drug trade had turned millions of Chinese into opium addicts. It was a time in the world during which imperialistic greed was a stronger driving force than human kindness. Trade and other concessions in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and other places were forced on the Chinese when they lost the wars.

  The British initially obtained Hong Kong Island, and increased the size of the colony over the years. In 1898 the British leased for ninety-nine years a large area adjoining the colony. That lease was due to expire in 1997, four years from now. The British agreed that when the lease was up, all of the area that now comprised Hong Kong would revert to Red China.

  Opium smoking didn’t get substantially eradicated until after World War II when the Red Chinese attacked it. They managed to reduce it but were unable to completely stamp it out.

  When the communists took over mainland China in 1949, many of Shanghai’s moneyed elite—which included triad gangster bosses—packed up their money and moved to Hong Kong but kept their fingers in the Shanghai pie. As communist attitudes about Shanghai’s contacts with the Free World softened, many of these wealthy business and criminal expatriates began once again to take large slices of the pie.

  Nowhere in my reading did it say that the Chinese were chomping at the bit for a chance to drink coffee.

  I sighed and laid the book down in my lap. Like Lily, I could handle only so much knowledge at a time. “Coffee or tea?” I asked. Lily had gone to the bathroom, so my comment was thrown to the wind.

  A white-haired gentleman of Chinese ancestry on the aisle seat across from me gave me a quizzical look.

  “I’m a coffee grower,” I told him. “I’m going to try to open the Shanghai market.”

  We started talking and he told me he was a history professor from Hong Kong.

  “You will find selling coffee to China a difficult proposition, what you Americans call a tough row to hoe. Tea has long been part of the culture of the Far East. That’s not as true in the West. In Britain and many other European countries, tea was the preferred drink not because of taste, but because it was available.

  “The British were once coffee drinkers, but when they began to grow tea in India, the government forced the British public to buy it instead of coffee by making coffee too expensive to import. It was simple economics—the government and business made more money from tea than coffee. As you know, the rebellion of the Americans against the British arose partly from the monopoly and tax on tea.”

  “Boston Tea Party,” I quipped, “taxation without representation. So it would have been the Boston Coffee Party if the British had cultivated coffee in India instead of tea?”

  “Yes. Tea was drunk because it could be grown in British colonial possessions. After your revolution, another drink was needed because tea was grown so far away. Had the temperate zones of Latin America cultivated tea instead of coffee, Americans today would be tea drinkers.”

  “But have the Chinese always stayed with tea?”

  “Always. In the days when China had a near monopoly on the cultivation of tea, it was such an important product that the Chinese government attempted to keep the secret of cultivating the best blends under heavy guard. The monopoly was broken when a Dutch tea taster named Jacobson risked his life to infiltrate forbidden Chinese tea gardens and smuggled out tea seeds.

  “The most important thing you must realize about tea versus coffee is that tea is not drunk in China just because it is grown there, but because it has become part of the culture. We Chinese have been drinking tea for at least five thousand years, perhaps even longer, though we don’t have records going back further. We became tea drinkers initially because it was available, and now it not only suits our taste buds, but over the centuries tea has also come to have medicinal and ceremonial roles in our culture.”

  “Coffee is being introduced successfully in Hong Kong.”

  “Hong Kong has long been exposed to Western culture. Perhaps coffee has made inroads there, but Shanghai has had its doors closed for almost half a century. That means it has not been exposed to the coffee revolution that has been taking place in Europe and America.

  “You must understand our Chinese culture to get us to drink your coffee. That is the secret you must learn to be successful. Show how coffee fits into our culture and you will succeed.”

  He shook a bony finger at me. “Remember this, young woman. Tea is East; coffee is West.”

  32

  The Hong Kong Mandarin Empress was a small, superluxurious hotel. It was all three-room suites and all overlooked Victoria Harbor. The moment I saw the tropical hardwood floors, Italian marble, and brass railing, I knew it was designed for the Rich and Famous and we couldn’t afford the tariff.

  “Don’t worry,” Lily said. “My uncle is paying.”

  Uncle was also treating us to dinner at a restaurant she said he owned. Somehow, Lily having an uncle with big money didn’t fit my mental image of her scheming with Cesar for the plantation.

  I dressed for dinner in my only outfit for going someplace respectable, a two-piece business suit. I waited an hour on the couch in the living room, surfing TV channels that appeared to come in enough languages to accommodate
the United Nations General Assembly, while Lily dressed.

  When she came out, she had on a lot less clothes than I did and looked a whole lot better in them. She wore a traditional Chinese tunic dress over silk pants—but the dress was golden silk that left the impression it might be transparent, which the pants certainly were. She wore shoes with heels so high I would have appeared to be on stilts if I’d worn them.

  Jewelry, makeup, attitude, made her dynamite sexy. And I looked like her old-maid aunt.

  I stood up and smiled. “Any chance I can just stay at the hotel and do room service?”

  “My uncle wants to meet you. Maybe he will invest in your coffee business.”

  Yeah, and maybe hell will freeze over.

  A pleasant surprise was waiting out front for us—a black Rolls-Royce limo. Outrageously elegant and ostentatious, unlike the stretch limos that kids rode around in on graduation night.

  “Your uncle must be really rich,” I said.

  She smiled and said nothing.

  The second surprise came when we pulled up at our destination. It wasn’t a restaurant but a nightclub in the Lan Kwai Fong district. My travel book called it the colony’s nightlife district. As we walked in, my eyes started popping. It began with the picture gallery of past acts along both walls of the long, narrow entryway. The pictures weren’t of a smiling restaurant manager shoulder-to-shoulder with a celebrity. As I hurried along beside her, I saw pictures of mud wrestling, erotic striptease, and physical sporting competitions, some of which were performed naked.

  We entered the nightclub proper and I almost gasped. It was built in amphitheater style, a circular interior, with a large center stage at the bottom that could be used for dancing or show acts. Tiers rose from the bottom, each crowded with tables and chairs.

  The nightclub was interesting enough, but the act on the stage was a showstopper—Chinese acrobats performing on bars, wiggling down and around the bars with the fluid, tree animal movements of Cirque du Soleil performers. Only these performers were women—and their “costumes” were painted on, leaving not much guesswork about their anatomy.

  I looked up at the people sitting at the tables on the tiers. A couple hundred Lily Soongs were in the room, one or two at each table, enough sex appeal to fuel a NASA rocket.

  Shit. I really did look stupid in my business suit. I felt like crawling under a table.

  Most of the women were East Asian, but like on the TV channels back at the hotel, the whole spectrum of nationalities was represented, feminine beauty covering the whole spectrum of planet Earth, from ebony goddesses and olive-skinned Mediterraneans to blond Norse beauties.

  The men at the tables also represented the world’s spectrum, businessmen and tourists of all nationalities. And none of them were there for the circus act.

  “What is this place? A high-class whorehouse?” I asked.

  “A hostess club.”

  I recognized the phrase. My guidebook described a hostess club as a nightclub where women with night heat acted as companions to “lonely” businessmen. The women kept time cards and the men paid for their companionship by the minute. It also mentioned that besides the girl’s time and the cost of the booze, a man could order “extras.”

  As I followed Lily to an elevator, I heard an American, a middle-aged business type holding a nightclub bill in his hand, complaining that the bottle of champagne he’d ordered had cost the equivalent of two thousand dollars—U.S.

  “Two thousand dollars for a bottle of champagne,” I said to Lily. “Wait till he finds out what sex will cost.”

  “Sex is cheap; it’s included in the cost of the drinks. A man can get a fuck anywhere in Hong Kong, but it can’t go on his expense account. Champagne can.”

  A large, dangerous-looking bouncer type guarding the elevator nodded at Lily as we came up. He indicated we could enter.

  The elevator took us to the highest tier, four levels above the main floor, where Lily’s uncle was holding court at a large, round table. I never did get his name; Lily merely said, “This is my uncle,” to me in English and he gave me a half nod.

  He looked a little like the white-haired historian I met on the plane, same modest business suit and conservative tie, but there was something aloof about him. Like Escobar, he had the impersonal persona of a stone killer. I had the impression he was sizing me up and analyzing how he might make use of me someday—or get rid of the body.

  His tastes also ran toward very young women. The China Doll at his side didn’t look much older than Josh’s Colombian Lolita. And he liked jewelry. The diamond on a middle-finger ring was smaller than a golf ball but definitely in the category of gems you find in the queen’s crown jewels.

  Three other men were at the table. Like Uncle, each had a pretty hostess at his side—sex toys for old men who had snow on top, a fire still going in the furnace, and money to burn.

  I was ignored. All attention went to Lily. The table conversation was entirely in Chinese and rapid-fire to my ears, which weren’t tuned into the language.

  After sitting down, I picked out a spot on the wall across the way and stared at it, resisting the impulse to leave—or at the very least, to stand up and ask why everyone was pretending they didn’t know enough English to at least say, “Hi.” I know that I have that ridiculous Anglo-American misconception that everyone in the world is supposed to speak English, but I also found it hard to believe that not a single person at a table full of adults in a place that had been a British colony for nearly a hundred and fifty years didn’t know enough English to say hello—or have enough courtesy to acknowledge my presence with a smile.

  While the Chinese words may not have been intelligible to my untrained ear, the body language wasn’t. Lily was being grilled by Uncle, and she had to defend herself. And once again, there was that complete lack of familial warmth that one would expect from close relatives who met after being apart for some time.

  I hadn’t asked her which side of the family this uncle was on, but he looked nothing like Dr. Soong.

  The act on the stage below ended and a couple skinny kids came out and began kickboxing. No one seemed to pay them much attention and I took them to be the intermission act.

  My mind was floating around the room, taking in the intense discussions between horny men and sexy women who made a profession of ratcheting up male testosterone, when my eye caught three men coming into the club from the same public entryway that Lily and I had used. They were young, Chinese, and dressed in black.

  And each of them had a gun that looked like those modern machine guns they call Uzis.

  I stared stupidly at the men as they raised their weapons toward us and sent a blaze of lead up. I’m not sure whether I dove off the chair or just fell off it, but I was soon on the floor with everyone else at the table as the shocking-explosive sound of rapid gunfire filled the air.

  Chips and chunks of ceiling rained down.

  And then it was over. Just a couple of seconds of gunfire that seemed to last an eternity. The roar of the guns had stopped, leaving behind the silence of the grave. Then the club was filled with screams, tears, shouts, and the scrabble of feet. The people around me got up, chattering to one another. I was the last one on my feet.

  I stared around. No one at the table was bleeding. I looked down the tiers—many people had headed for the exits while others were standing around or hiding under tables, but I didn’t see any evidence that anyone was killed or even wounded.

  My ears were ringing; my nostrils were filled with the acrid smell of gunfire.

  I met Uncle’s eye. “What happened?”

  He pointed up at the ceiling over their table and grinned. “Warning shots.”

  His English was perfect.

  33

  The Rolls limo took us back to the hotel. This time the driver had someone riding shotgun.

  Lily said, “They will drop us off in back. It’s been arranged for us to go through the kitchen and use the room service elevator to get
to our suite.”

  I said nothing. I had stopped shaking before we left the nightclub, but I hadn’t stopped being angry. One of the things that made my blood boil was the way everyone at the table simply sat down and began talking again as if nothing had happened. I’m sure that if I hadn’t told Lily I was leaving, we’d still be back there—waiting for the next volley.

  Lily said absolutely nothing about the fact we were part of a group sprayed with bullets. That added to my blood temperature.

  I kept my mouth shut in the limo because I didn’t know if the driver spoke English. It was obvious that Lily’s “uncle” was a gangster, and I didn’t want to say anything that would offend him. But the moment we got back to the suite, I wanted answers.

  “What happened back there? I want the truth.”

  Lily stared at me as if she was calculating how much of the truth to tell me. “They were warning shots. No one was killed. This time.”

  “What do you mean, warning shots? Warning about what? Who’s your uncle? If he is your uncle.”

  “He’s triad. Some other gangs want something he has, maybe a piece of the action.”

  Triads were Asiatic gangs, like mafias were gangs in the States and Europe.

  “This whole planet has gone crazy. How can there be so many criminals in the world?”

  Lily shrugged. “Maybe if you went hungry, you’d—”

  “I’d work at an honest job before I’d harm other people.”

  “That depends. Maybe the only job available is to kill or be killed.”

  I went to my room and slammed the door behind me. I threw my hands up to the ceiling. “Jesus. I can’t believe this is happening.”

  My knees were still weak. For a brief moment at the nightclub, I had stared at what appeared to be my own sudden, violent death.

  I was now reasonably certain that whatever Lily, Cesar, and Uncle were involved in, it had to be about drugs. Cocaine was Colombia’s cash crop, cash cow, whatever they called it. Pablo was a drug cartel boss, Lily’s so-called uncle was a criminal gang boss, so it all added up to a drug connection.