by John Burdett
“So, she spends three years at the university and actually enjoys it. Her thesis was money laundering and the effect it had on the national economy. I think the mob really fascinated her.
“So she goes back to the consigliere, massages his ego, pours his favorite whiskey down his throat and talks about her future. We’re in late 1989, early 1990 now, when the Berlin Wall came down and the USSR ceased to exist. There’s a new boy on the block; he’s called the Russian Mafia. In the NYPD we expected war between the mobs when the Russians started coming in with a whole new spectrum of drugs, scams, weapons of all kinds, multimillion-dollar frauds, swindles like Al Capone only dreamed of. But the streets are strangely quiet. There’s no war. Why? Because even the Russian mob needs to launder money, and the local Mafia actually likes staying away from the heat. They’ve taken a few hits from FBI investigations, and anyway, they’ve got all the money they need. They’ve sent their own kids to college and told them crime doesn’t pay. Why not sit back and rake in twenty or more percent on the narco dollar while the other guy takes the risk?
“This news excited Clare no end. After a hell of a lot of cajoling she persuades the don to take her to East Berlin in the summer of 1990, which is a high-level meeting between Russian gangsters and the heads of the five New York families and a few others as well. You don’t have to take my word for it; this meeting was monitored by the FBI. Journalists have written articles, books about it. It sounds like a bad novel, but what happened at that meeting was organized crime from different countries carved up the Western world. The main play was between the Russians on the one hand and the Americans and Sicilians on the other. The Americans had the expertise in laundering, the Sicilians had access to every member state of the European Community and the Russians-well, they had everything that was left in Russia. There was no government there anymore. You could buy tanks by the dozen, rocket launchers, AK-forty-sevens by the truckload, gold, oil, silver, aluminum, copper-just about everything people want and need. Of course I didn’t know at the time that Clare had gone to that meeting. I just remember how proud of herself she was around that time. She looked like she’d conquered the world. Can I have another cigarette?”
Chan took the box out of the pocket of his white jacket. While Moira had been talking, the night had thickened. Lovers strolled past arm in arm, Japanese photographers screwed thousand-dollar cameras into tripods, trying to find an original perspective on one of the most photographed night scenes in the world. Sitting on the bench, he had heard about twenty different languages spoken by the people passing behind their backs. If Moira was telling him that there was a truly international dimension to the murders he was investigating, where would he start? People moved around these days almost as easily as money. Dual, triple nationality was common, and most successful gangsters had upwards of fifty bank accounts.
He lit their cigarettes. Moira took a long pull. “Then the world came to an end for her. It happened all at once. The consigliere finally found her in bed with another woman. There’s a fight, Clare threatens to inform on him-something you just don’t do, right? A few days later she’s busted for marijuana. Ironic, considering what she had been doing for most of her life. She maintained it was the mob planted it on her as a warning. Anyway, she was cut off, out in the cold. Not total excommunication but a punishment. They knew she couldn’t survive without them; they wanted to make sure she knew it too. The message was pretty clear: Shape up, dahlin’, or next time the frame-up will send you to jail for the rest of your life. I don’t think Clare had ever shot up on reality before; she’d assumed she’d survive on street cunning and teenage luck forever. She wasn’t free at all. They owned her, all of her.”
Chan grunted. Enslavement by organized crime was as old as China.
“Worst of all, the smack she’d been using for over ten years was pure, the stuff that arrives in bulk before it’s cut with all kinds of junk. She’d been getting it through her mob connections and was able to pay for it with mob money. When she couldn’t get it anymore, she got real sick. That’s when she came back to live with me. She would lie on her bed most of the day shivering, groaning. Sometimes she would double up with cramps that lasted hours. Sometimes she would lash out at me with her fists. Elegance was only ever skin-deep with her. The best I could do was get her small hits off the street and some methadone to ease the sickness. I took time off work to sit with her. It went on for over a month, and during that month I think I aged inside about a hundred years because it was then that she talked, mostly in a semicoma.
“Little by little I pieced together everything I’ve just told you-and suffered my first clinical depression. I had to accept that even in the depths of her sickness all she could think of was getting back into the mob, shooting up on the best-quality smack, setting up a money-laundering operation bigger than anyone else’s, finding some homeless young girl to seduce.
“Flesh, drugs, power-they were what she lived for. Well, for her the clouds dispersed one day. She’d been right about one thing: The mob wanted to use her services. They figured she’d been punished enough and knew a little more about the lines of power. If she belonged to a made member, she belonged to a made member, no more girls. She got hold of her favorite drugs, started to smile again, forgot about me. She moved out as soon as she could. Last I heard from her was about two and a half years ago. She came around, tried to give me a bunch of money, which I refused. I remember she was talking about China a lot, had been to a bookstore and bought a whole load of books. It seemed to spin off from the book I gave you, The Travels of Marco Polo, that she’d read over and over while she was sick.
“So, Clare was back on her feet, but I wasn’t. I started drinking heavy. And stealing. The first time I did it I was so drunk I couldn’t believe it the next day. On the third occasion I took early retirement from the NYPD so as not to embarrass the force. Crazy the way some of us cling to morality, isn’t it? Why did I start stealing? My probation officer says it’s common, a psychological reflex he calls flip-flop. People who’ve followed one rigid path all their lives when hit by a serious trauma do a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree flip. They act out the very behavior they’ve always deplored. Being a Catholic, I can’t help seeing it as a kind of punishment for pride. I sure don’t despise anyone anymore the way I used to despise Mario. I started lying a lot too, to cover up. I always wanted her to study sociology, to be interested in people. So often as a cop you get to thinking there must be a better way of helping pathetic people than locking them up-you ever think that?”
Chan inhaled. “And you haven’t heard from her at all since she stopped by with the money?”
Moira shook her head. “No. Not a word. I can’t give you any more help, Chief Inspector, because I don’t know nothin’. I guess you’re glad now I’ll be out of your hair tomorrow, huh?”
Chan took her hand, gazed into her eyes. He reminded himself: Directness was a virtue with Westerners. “I’ve got a hard-on,” he said.
23
Chan wanted badly to know if the divers had discovered anything at the second dive site where he had seen the trunk, but he resisted calling Higgins. It was Sunday. Moira’s plane would be leaving early the next morning. He took her to breakfast in a large hotel in Central, then proposed that they check into the Grand Hyatt for a day and a night. Chan’s flat wasn’t designed for full-time habitation by adult humans. Moira agreed on condition she pay half the bill.
The Grand Hyatt was a Chinese impression of Renaissance Rome. Marble pillars soared past two mezzanines to a cupola also of marble. There was a marble font, a marble floor leading to a marble check-in desk. Small and large bronze cupids held up silk lampshades, Cantocamp statuettes slouched on every shelf. Only God was missing. Chan and Moira checked into a room on the executive floor. They spent the day like good lovers, took a swim early evening in the Olympic-size swimming pool with a view over the harbor. Chan said it was like being in an advert for cognac. They had dinner in the Italian restaurant on t
he second floor but raced back to the bedroom without bothering with dessert.
“It’s fun being sixteen again,” Chan said.
“Especially for me. I think I missed it the first time around.”
She didn’t disguise her obsession with his lean body. For him she offered the endlessly voluptuous experience of total acceptance. Nothing kept an erection better than unremitting appreciation by one’s lover. They hardly slept, but the night was over in a flash. Moira took the wake-up call. Chan steeled himself to say good-bye.
At the airport only his twitch gave him away. They were careful not to promise to see each other again soon. Or at all. Nevertheless, in the taxi back to Mongkok Chan carried her with him: those generous breasts, long legs that gripped him close. Most of all, though, he retained a subtle memory of something entirely new: uncritical affection. And by a Westerner at that. To sleep with a woman who somehow knows all about you and forgives everything was-well, a lot better than being called a misogynist by a vegetarian grouch. He could still feel her strong American hands gripping his buttocks just before she slipped away to the security area.
At Mongkok he checked his watch: 10:00 A.M. on a Monday. He was due into work after lunch, but he would phone Higgins as soon as he reached his flat.
His detective’s instinct told him something was wrong as he walked along the corridor to his flat on the tenth floor. Silence. It was as if the corridor had been evacuated.
There was no damage to any of the three bolts on his door. He tried to recall the best karate maneuvers to disarm an assailant; in Hong Kong the favored burglar’s aid is the small meat cleaver. Then he pushed open the door. He had long enough to take in two people in white spacesuits with matching soft helmets and visors passing black instruments with luminous dials slowly around the kitchen before something hit him on the back of the neck and he slammed into the floor.
They were still checking him with the black boxes when he came to. The two spacemen took off their headgear, revealing the blotchy complexions, round eyes, receding hair of Englishmen in their early forties.
“He’s clean. So is the flat.”
“Clean? Well, well, well, isn’t that a coincidence,” a voice behind him said. He twisted to look.
“We thought you’d done a runner, old chap,” the same voice said. “Mind telling us where the hell you’ve been?”
Chan twisted further, ignoring the pain. He had assumed that it was the owner of the voice who had hit him, but he saw that that was a false assumption. The owner of the voice was surely the slim, impeccably dressed Englishman with black polished shoes and sober tie whom he dimly recognized. The owner of the rabbit punch would be the tall and very muscular South African standing next to him whom Chan knew to be a senior officer in the Independent Commission Against Corruption.
24
The ICAC was created in the early seventies, when the Royal Hong Kong Police Force was known to be the most corrupt in the world. Desk sergeants were millionaires with Swiss and Taiwanese bank accounts; senior officers absconded at Kai Tak Airport with suitcases full of cash; outlying islands suitable for importing morphine were nicknamed Treasure Island by the wealthy constables who patrolled them. Questions were asked in Parliament; the governor, Sir Murray Maclehose, responded by creating an organization with powers of arrest without charge, with authority to obtain confidential documents from banks and to interrogate potential witnesses whether they agreed to it or not. It was an organization answerable to no one except the governor. It investigated allegations of corruption in the police force in particular and was loathed by most policemen for its aggressive tactics and envied for its successes. Hardened criminals who never gave statements to police had a way of talking after seven days in ICAC custody at its offices on Queensway Plaza.
It was said that policemen made pathetic defendants, being subject to a form of guilt to which hardened criminals were immune.
“Scum.” The big South African spat a fleck of his contempt into the wastepaper bin. His name was Jack Forte. The other, the slim Englishman, was Milton Cuthbert, the political adviser. Chan had recognized him from numerous appearances on news flashes about the progress of talks in Beijing concerning the future of the colony. Such an honor, to be intimidated by a celebrity.
Forte stood up, walked around his desk, stood very close to Chan, who was sitting in a chair in the middle of the room. Languidly Cuthbert looked at his watch.
It was always instructive to watch a fellow professional at work. Chan had no idea what he was supposed to have done, but fear of Forte induced an ardent wish to confide in Cuthbert, who was always on the point of leaving him alone with the South African. Forte’s nationality helped. In small bare rooms such as this blacks and coloreds had been beaten to a slow death in Forte’s hometown only a few years ago, a fact it was not easy to erase from one’s mind. In Forte’s system Chan was colored. Ironic considering the rainbow of shades that, close up, could be found in the white man’s face. As the South African bent down to breathe over Chan, the chief inspector discerned purple veins and russet blood vessels bursting in a spray of pink and blue under an alabaster membrane, a blue eye set in porcelain flared with orange and mauve; red, gray, white and black whiskers close enough to be counted twitched around the near-lipless rim of a small mouth with a prodigious capacity for loathing.
“I hate you as I hate all bent coppers.”
The big fist slammed into the big open hand two millimeters from Chan’s left eye. Chan knew fists from his karate days. There were fists that no matter how big never succeeded in inflicting more than superficial bruising, others that were weapons of assault capable of smashing rib cages, splintering sinuses, crushing skulls. Forte was proud of his fists.
Cuthbert stood up, stepped across the floor, bent down so that both men were staring into his face.
“Who’s paying you?”
“Paying me?”
“Why?”
“Which agent are they using here?”
“Agent?”
“Where’s the rest of the guns?”
“Guns?”
“What are the weapons for?”
“Is it heroin?”
“Heroin?”
“What do they want?”
“Who?”
“What does it all have to do with the bodies in the vat?”
“Ah!”
“Why did they kill the girl and the two Chinese?”
“What did they know?”
“Where did the other stuff come from?”
“Yes, Chan, the other stuff?”
“The poison, Chan, that kills everything, who owns it?”
“Who owns it?”
“Who told you where to find it?”
“It?”
“Who owns it?”
“I’m lost.”
“Were they delivering or receiving?”
“Were you delivering or receiving?”
“Which one, Chan?”
“Which is it, Chan?”
“Who is Chan?”
“I’m going to leave now, Chan.”
“He’s leaving, Chan.”
“I’m leaving, Chan.”
Cuthbert stepped toward the door. Chan heard it open, then close. He made the mistake of looking behind him with pleading eyes. Cuthbert was gone.
“Oh, yes, Chan, he’s gone all right,” Forte said. He was leaning over him, leering.
Chan felt the twitch opening and closing his left eye. He was glad Moira could not see it. Where was she now? Somewhere over the international date line. Safe from Forte anyway. He drew in both feet under his chair, made sure both heels were firmly planted on the ground, bent his head slightly forward, sprang up, using the power of his thigh muscles to drive the top of his forehead into Forte’s face. The South African stepped back with a squeal, blood spurting from half a dozen broken bones in his small nose. Chan skipped to one side, grabbed the chair, held it by the back with legs horizontal as he retreated into a corner. For
te stared at the blood on his hands. The door sprang open. One by one five large men entered the small room. Cuthbert was the last. Chan waited like a cornered cat.
“Get the chair off him. We’ll take him to the hospital.” The political adviser’s voice wasn’t languid anymore.
Handcuffed in the back of a tall van, Chan could feel a bruise developing at the top of his forehead. Inexplicably he worried that Forte’s blood was matting his hair. He hoped Forte used condoms. The South African was in the front of the van with a white folded towel over his nose. Three other ICAC officers were in the back of the van with Cuthbert. Everyone glared at Chan. It occurred to him that he was surrounded by Englishmen and that smashing Forte’s nose had been a faux pas, like farting at a dinner party. The English never forgave faux pas. Even Cuthbert had grown a layer of sweat across his forehead that seemed to signal a countdown.
He guessed with impeccable hindsight that Forte had never intended to hit him. Now he’d ruined Cuthbert’s choreography, and they were chasing Plan B. Something had happened to threaten the security of the territory and disrupt the relationship between England and China, and it was all Chan’s fault. That much was clear. Only details were missing. Like: What? Where? When? And why the hospital? As far as he could tell, only Forte needed medical attention. Not an observation it was advisable to make, though.