by John Burdett
Wong remembered. So did every other lawyer of his generation. A senior partner who committed suicide after fleeing to London, two other partners arrested and unable to work for two years until the trial, when they’d got off by the skin of their teeth, the loss of major banking and other Triple A clients. All because of an illegal conveyance considerably less sinister than the one Emily was proposing. It had taken Freeman’s ten years to return to genuine profitability, and even now it was doomed to remain in the second league.
She sighed, withdrew her hand. “I see.”
He forced a smile, stood behind her chair, started to massage her neck. She liked that.
“Oh, I know you’re the empress of Hong Kong and not in the habit of being defied, but frankly, you don’t own our firm. You give us a lot of work, you’re one of our most valued clients, but if the partners were forced to choose between ruining our reputation by taking on these conveyances and losing your business, they’d choose to let you go, I’m afraid. You see, if we took it on, we’d be in danger of losing all our other clients. No one would understand, no one. It’s as if Morgan Grenfell were to open a pawnshop; it just doesn’t happen.”
Emily let her head fall back until she was looking directly into his eyes. She pulled the sunglasses down to the tip of her nose. “It’s only your partners you’re worried about-nothing else?”
“I swear, nothing else.” He half smirked. “Except that the whole thing scares me shitless.”
She smiled. “Tell me about it, Johnny. You think just because I’m a filthy rich bitch I don’t wake up in a cold sweat most nights?”
“You? You’re pure Teflon.”
She let her head drop further backward so that she was looking at the awning. “But the terror, my friend, is the cloud that always comes when there’s a silver lining. Those deals where the green balls slide down your back every time you think about what you’re about to do-those deals are the ones that really pay off. Because those are the ones nobody else will have the guts for. See?”
“If you say so. I don’t have your nerve, Emily, we both know that. I don’t even know why you carry on. God knows you have enough.”
“Oh, but you do know why. You once said it better than I ever could. Don’t you remember?”
“No.”
“During your first year at Oxford, my dear. I remember getting a very distressed telephone call-”
“Don’t, Emily-”
“A very distressed telephone call. A bunch of brutal English thugs after a night in a pub to which you should never have gone, wasn’t that it? It was not so much the physical damage, though God knows they really beat you up. It was the psychological scars that remained with you-to this day, I would guess.”
“All right, you’ve made your point.”
“The point is that it was not your daddy or me who persuaded you to give up your dreams. It was racist England. Or simple human reality, whatever. I’ve never forgotten your words: ‘If one must be Chinese, it is important to be a rich Chinese.’ That’s when you changed to law. The terror of big money is nothing compared to the terror of no money-especially for someone like you. Am I right?”
“Probably. You’ve said enough.” He allowed himself to look annoyed. He didn’t want to be reminded of the humiliation or of the deeper lesson that he’d been too ashamed to tell Emily about. After his wounds had healed, he had paid some thugs from a local Chinese restaurant who claimed to be part-time triads to avenge him. He remembered a garage late at night, four big beef-faced young Englishmen squeaking like pigs, actually shitting themselves in terror of the eight yellow men with steel pipes, bicycle chains, knives and, of course, meat cleavers, while he stood shaking with something truly awful: the realization that survival requires power and if you have no natural authority of your own, why, then, you must buy it.
It was after the night of his revenge that he’d told Emily of his vow to be a rich Chinese, leaving out the squalid details that lurked behind it. The whole chain of events lay so far outside his normal, mild-mannered approach to life that he preferred to look on it most of the time as an aberration. But the fact was, he was no different from her. With his back against the wall or his ego threatened he would cut, maim, murder; artistic aspirations were no help at all. He turned back to her and forced a smile. Her eyebrows were raised.
“So, if your partners can be persuaded, you’ll accept?”
“Reluctantly, and with green balls already running down my back, yes.”
“Then here’s why they’ll let you take the case.”
***
When Emily finished, she handed Wong a cordless telephone with which to call Rathbone. True to his work ethic, Rathbone was in his office eating a sandwich. Wong set up the meeting for two-thirty with Rathbone, Savile and Watson, the Australian commercial partner, and Ng, the Chinese litigation partner. Then he had Emily’s maid bring him a Bloody Mary. He took a pad and pen out of his briefcase.
“I’d better write down the names of the companies you mentioned. And those people you talked about-I’d had no idea.”
Without referring to any documents Emily recited the names of more than one hundred companies and personnel without a pause.
“And they’re all owned by or work for these sixteen men who own Zedfell?”
“All of them. I think you’ll find that something in the region of sixty percent of your turnover last year was generated one way or another in the PRC and came through one or more of these companies. You’re right to say that I don’t own your firm. They do.”
As Wong rose to leave, Emily put the tip of her sunglasses in her mouth and said, “By the way, I have a confession. I think I really do fancy the pants off your brother-in-law.”
Wong forced a smile. “I’ll see what I can do.”
19
Lunchtime: Chan sat in his office alone with a laboratory report and two sets of photographs developed by the identification bureau at Arsenal Street. The lab report confirmed that the white contents of the plastic bag had been heroin. He turned his attention to the photographs. On the back of one set he wrote in ballpoint: “Taken after laser enhancement from small plastic bag found hidden in light fitting at scene of crime.” On the back of the other set he wrote: “Taken from The Travels of Marco Polo, paperback book provided by mother of the victim, Clare Coletti.”
Each photograph had been enlarged to three times actual size. Taking what looked like a thumbprint from one set, he set it against a thumbprint from the other. There was no point of identity between the two. Taking an apparently different print from the set originating with the plastic bag, he found again no points of similarity. There was a third thumbprint, quite different from the other two, that had been lifted from the bag by the laser beam. There were similarities even at a first glance; in both cases he noted a convergence of lines in a single delta. At the center of the print was a tight loop, the core. Working on one print, he counted the lines from the delta to the core, wrote: “Ridge count 18.” Other idiosyncrasies of the print included three fragments next to the core, an island, an ending in the middle of the fifth ridge line, two bifurcations, two more islands near the eleventh ridge line, some more ridge endings. Chan put the photograph to one side, worked on the thumbprint from the book. When he finished, he compared the lists. He had found eleven major points of similarity, enough to satisfy even a purist like himself. Clare Coletti had clutched the bag of heroin, perhaps had even hidden it, before she was murdered elsewhere. Then her remains, together with those of the other victims, had been returned in a vat and placed under the fluorescent light where she had hidden her dope. Chan had never come across a case that made less sense. When Aston returned from lunch, he asked him to send another fax to New York with all the prints that had been lifted from the plastic bag.
At least the exercise might have helped identify the other two victims. And Tsim, the technician, owed him fifty dollars.
The four lawyers sat in silence at one end of the huge boardroom
table. Jonathan Wong looked from one to the other, waited. For the chief eunuch to the empress it was a pleasure to watch a ritual castration.
When he had joined the firm as an articled clerk, these men-Rathbone, Savile, Ng and Watson-had already been senior and highly respected. As he had grown older and wiser, he had come to despise them. As lawyers the Englishmen hid behind the pompous postures that had served the British so well. But they had been in the East a long time. Something happened to Englishmen who stayed too long. The country they came from, that little island off the cold northwest coast of Europe, had proceeded without them with its own peculiar modern history, full of football hooligans and royal scandals, as far as Wong could tell, until the mannerisms they had retained and developed had no reference outside their own narcissism.
There was Rathbone, almost fifty with an adolescent fascination with his own musculature, who liked to boast about how many hours he spent in the office. There was Savile, the music hall Englishman with the three-piece suit and the monocle, an intellectual property lawyer. And there was Watson, the prima donna in the bow tie who thought of himself as an international commercial lawyer. His Chinese assistants joked that he was incompetent in nine separate jurisdictions.
Ng was different only insofar as he was Chinese. He was a few years older than Wong, but in terms of postcolonial evolution a chasm separated them. Although Wong spoke English with an upper-class accent, any English person foolish enough to assume that he wanted to be one of them was quickly put in his place. Ng, though, had invested his life energy into growing a British carapace at the center of which, Wong was fairly sure, lay nothing at all.
Each man in his own way defied a basic law of physics, possessing height and width but no depth. But people who wondered how they’d survived so long and grown so rich underestimated the inexhaustible appetite of the very wealthy for sustained groveling. The vulgar said that the four men who gathered around the boardroom table with Wong had the brownest noses in Hong Kong. Little by little, Wong knew, he was becoming one of them.
Watson rudely gestured to Wong to pass over the sheet of paper with the names of the companies Emily had given him. He took it to a computer terminal in the corner of the room, began punching in the names with heavy stabs. The others watched him, glad to have something to wait for.
“Amazing,” Watson murmured.
“What is?”
He continued to punch in more names.
“Quite incredible.” He punched in some more, then hit the top of the screen with his open hand as he stood up.
“Would you believe it? Taken in isolation, none of these companies is remarkable. Taken together, these hundred-odd firms represent stupendous wealth. In terms of assets they could compete with some of our biggest banks. If they really are all owned by the same people.”
“I think you can assume that they are,” Wong said.
“It’s like a cancer.”
“Not a cancer,” Wong said, “an Oriental strategy. Like the game of Go, one surrounds by stealth and strangles. Clever, these Chinks.”
Ng nodded slowly, as if the epithet could not apply to him.
“Why would anyone want to strangle us?” Rathone said, ignoring the irony.
Wong lit a cigarette, his tenth in the past two hours. “Not us, Hong Kong. Or, more likely, Southeast Asia. Whoever they are, they’re taking over.”
Savile glanced at Wong. Wong knew that behind the absurd monocle and the affected manners he possessed the cleverest brain of the three, which was perhaps not saying much.
“I think we’d better admit she’s got us. If this lot took their business elsewhere, we’d be bankrupt. Literally, we couldn’t pay the rent.”
“Absolutely,” Ng muttered.
Rathbone groaned, stood up, flexed his pectorals facing first left, then right, squatted with arms folded, stood, sat down again.
“We’d better move fast,” Savile continued. “This must go no further than these four walls. What we do is agree to take the work but, when it comes in, act surprised that payment will be in cash. Let them bring the money at the last minute. Naturally we couldn’t hold up the transaction, but we say we were assuming payment by check or banker’s draft. We’ll take our fees up front. And then… we’ll see.”
Savile didn’t need to spell out the precautions that he and the others would be making that very afternoon: new numbered bank accounts in the Caymans or British Virgin Islands; vacations moved forward; personal effects, especially houses, put into the names of trust companies based in the Channel Islands. The storm, when it came, would take some weathering.
Rathbone looked around the table. “We’re agreed then?”
“I think we are,” Savile said.
Immediately after the meeting Wong called Emily with the news.
“I thought they might see it our way, Johnny. You did well.”
On putting the phone down on Jonathan, Emily pressed an autodial button. A rough old man’s voice answered in Mandarin.
“He’ll do it.”
“Of course he will.”
“But they want the money exactly one hour before each contract is signed. Not sooner or later.”
The old man answered with a grunt. “And the little detective?”
“Jonathan will set up a social meeting somehow. I might even find a way of bringing you since you’re so interested in Charlie Chan.”
20
Feeling mild excitement, Chan ordered a car to take him out to the fishing village of Sai Kung on the east coast of the New Territories; an English senior inspector had called with news of a possible sighting of a meat mincer on the seabed.
Once he was out of the vast conurbation that stretched from the tip of Kowloon in the south to Choi Hung, the land was green and relatively free of development. The road expanded into a turnpike that lifted up to the hills on the east coast.
At nine-thirty in the morning sunlight hurt. Behind them Kowloon radiated its usual glaucous haze, but up ahead the sky was the deep blue of glazed Ming. Under the solar onslaught the world wobbled. Silver pools shimmered in hollows in the road. Green tiled roofs undulated. Chan and the driver put on sunglasses, turned up the air conditioning.
Chan flicked the radio on to a Cantopop station and winced. “Please release me, let me go” lost everything in translation. He turned to an English-language information program. “Visibility good, fire risk extreme,” a voice said in a London accent. Chan switched off.
The driver pointed to two large military helicopters racing from a funnel of smoke twisting up behind a hill to the left. Huge buckets hung from chains attached to their underbellies and swayed against the direction of the choppers dashing for the sea.
“Bad one. Started yesterday.”
“By campers?”
“Probably. It’s in the bush, not near any villages. No one’s been evacuated yet, but the bush is very dry.”
At the top of the hill the sea came into view: the Pacific coast of China. There was not much between here and Japan, Chan remembered, and if you missed Japan, America was probably the next stop. Not that the ancient Chinese had seen any reason to go even a fraction of that distance. The Middle Kingdom had been the center of the earth, where everyone wanted to be. Only Europe could have produced a Columbus, a man so dissatisfied his own continent wasn’t big enough. Or a Marco Polo.
They turned right along a coast road called Hiram’s Highway by the British, “the road to Pak Sha Wan” by the Chinese. Nobody knew who Hiram had been, not even the British, but Pak Sha Wan was a tiny fishing village with a large boat club. Each year the boats and the club grew larger and more expensive. Million-dollar sailing yachts hung in the heat next to cigar-shaped speed machines that the Cantonese called snakeheads. As a general rule Europeans owned the sailing yachts and Chinese owned the snakeheads. On a windless day like this the boats faced in all directions, their mooring ropes drooping. Sampans chugged between the floating parking lots, taking swimmers to beaches across the bay.<
br />
“You know this area?” Chan said.
“No, you?”
“Yeah. I was brought up near here. In a squatter hut overlooking the sea.”
“That so? You were lucky. You got fresh fish and fresh air. I was brought up in Hak Nam, the Walled City. Nothing fresh there. Especially not the whores.”
Chan laughed. Five years ago the government had knocked down the Walled City, a square mile of unplanned triad-built apartments with open sewers, fat rats, prostitution and drug addicts. But some people had loved it, as he had loved his wooden hut.
“You’re right. I was lucky. I lived there with my kid sister. I told her stories about sea-monsters and taught her to swim. We never wanted to go to school. Didn’t seem any reason to.”
The driver nodded.
***
Chan was on his second Benson when they reached Sai Kung. It had expanded from a village into a town since he had lived nearby, but the covered market and the fishing fleet still flourished. The driver swerved to a halt at the end of the car park near the main pier. Chan got out. Chinese kids in black full-face helmets lying over the fuel tanks of Kawasakis and Yamahas practiced side skids in the center of the new concrete square. To one side skateboarders in silken black leggings with Day-Glo knee pads had set up a ramp from which they launched themselves into space. Opposite, the Watson’s supermarket had risen from the ashes of a wooden Chinese village house where the headman had lived. On either side tinted glass and chrome video and music shops offered relief from the heat and a direct line to the twentieth century. For twenty years he had never been more than ten miles away, but he felt like a man who’d returned after spending a lifetime overseas. He remembered paddy fields that came up to the village square, a banyan tree under which the elders spent their days talking and playing Chinese chess, children so shy that even in early teens they were afraid to leave the house. The West had wrought a cultural revolution more drastic than Mao’s. It took only a couple of decades, apparently, to replace a five-thousand-year-old civilization with the shocking new.