The Fireman

by Stephen Leather

  He moved out of textiles as the EEC and the United States began to build trade barriers, taking over a string of restaurants and a small construction firm. He was marked out as a coming man then and found the banks were falling over themselves to lend to him and he borrowed heavily on the back of a couple of high-profile contracts he’d managed to snatch from under the noses of the big boys and then he bought a small parcel of Central land at a Government Land Auction and put up his own building, taking over the top three floors as his headquarters and renting out the rest to one of the minor hongs. Dennis Lai, local boy made good. Long before he’d reached the top and got his house on the Peak Mrs Lai had stopped keeping the books, had got pregnant twice – a boy and a girl – had spent three years in Canada to get her citizenship and now devoted herself to charitable works and expanding her wardrobe and jewellery collection.

  She told the story reverently, like she was laying out a treasured dress in front of me, at times looking like a little girl begging for approval, a pat on the head and a smile, yes, you did well, you got out of the fields and away from the insects that scarred your bowed legs with bites that the Chanel skirt couldn’t hide, you escaped from the poverty that you hated so much that you ran away from your family and now wear your wealth on your wrists and round your neck and hang it on the wall so that you always know it’s there. I was starting to feel sorry for the overweight and not particularly attractive Chinese lady with bad skin as her gloss gradually rubbed off but I pushed thoughts like that away and concentrated on her story. There were things I needed to know about her husband, about how he really made his money because the rags-to-riches story she’d paraded in front of me was straight out of Fantasy Island, who his business contacts were, why my sister had his picture on her wall and why one of the same pictures was in a silver frame on top of Mrs Lai’s grand piano.

  It was practically a speech, a story she’d obviously delivered before, and she told it without pausing for breath, refusing to give me a chance to ask any questions. She didn’t even stop while the maid served tea. The Filipina was flirting outrageously, and she leant forward when she handed me the blue and white Wedgwood cup and saucer so that I could see down the front of her dress. She wasn’t wearing a bra, and she gave me a smile that said she knew that I knew she wasn’t wearing a bra. She offered me a tray with a sugar bowl that matched the cup and solid silver tongs but I said no thanks, sweet enough, but she didn’t get the joke. All the time Mrs Lai was speaking, and she didn’t even look round as the girl left the room.

  Eventually she finished and clasped her hands together in her lap. ‘And that,’ she said, ‘is our story. We have had a tough life, but through hard work and diligence we have done well. We have much to thank Hong Kong for. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have many things to do.’ She rose to leave, but I held my hand up to stop her and asked her: ‘Could I just ask you a couple of questions first, Mrs Lai?’ She sat down again and reclasped her hands, fingers rubbing together. The atmosphere was starting to get chilly again, and it wasn’t the air conditioning.

  ‘Your husband is obviously very well-known in Hong Kong,’ I said, trying to appeal to her vanity again. ‘I suppose the newspapers here are forever bothering you for interviews.’

  She gave me a curt smile, a quick flash of teeth and the glint of gold. ‘From time to time, yes,’ she said.

  ‘I was wondering if you could tell me the last time he was interviewed so that I could get a copy, it would help me with the background.’

  ‘But I have given you all the background,’ she said firmly, and I heard the click behind her closed lips.

  ‘It would help me to check that I don’t make any mistakes,’ I pushed. ‘Can you remember when he gave his last interview?’

  ‘I can, but it will be of no use to you, I’m sure. He was interviewed by the Hong Kong Economic Journal.’

  ‘I’ll try to get a copy, what date was it?’

  ‘It won’t do you any good, it is a Chinese newspaper, and I am quite sure you are incapable of reading Chinese.’ She got to her feet. ‘And now, I really must …’

  ‘What about the English language press?’ I said. She shook her head and walked to the door.

  Oh well, all or nothing, I was leaving anyway. I asked her if Sally had interviewed Lai recently and I could see by the look in her eyes that I’d pushed her too far.

  ‘The girl who died?’ she asked quietly, and then realization dawned and her mouth fell open.

  ‘I should have realized,’ she hissed, venom in her voice. ‘I should have realized when you told me your name. You are her husband?’

  ‘Brother,’ I said. ‘She interviewed your husband?’

  She flung open the door and click-clacked across the hall to the main entrance where the maid already had the door open for me.

  ‘I shall inform my husband of your visit,’ said Mrs Lai, and it sounded like a threat.

  ‘Did she come here?’ I pressed.

  Her eyes hardened and the lips drew back in a canine snarl, and for one moment I thought she was about to spit in my face.

  ‘Leave my house now,’ she whispered. ‘You have overstayed your welcome.’ Then she turned her back on me and click-clacked back down the hall.

  ‘Goodbye, sir,’ said the maid, smiling brightly.

  ‘I love the way you roll your r’s,’ I said, and winked. She was still giggling as she closed the door behind me. At least I’d made a good impression on somebody.

  I started walking down the Peak, heading for the harbour. There were no other pedestrians, and as I sweated along the pavement the cheapest car that drove past me was a very large Mercedes with a liveried chauffeur in the front and a child with a BMX bicycle in the back.

  My shirt was soaked and I was dying for a drink by the time I’d gone a hundred yards and after half a mile I leant against a stone wall in the shadow of a leafy tree that wouldn’t have been out of place in Kew Gardens. A taxi dawdled along the road and I plunged back into the sunshine and flagged it down. The shirt felt even damper in the refrigerated air of the cab and I leant back and closed my eyes.

  I’d just about recovered when the taxi stopped at the back of the towering metal edifice that was the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank headquarters. Howard was standing in the middle by two escalators which climbed up into the building. I craned my neck back as I walked over to him. The base of the tower, some fifty feet up, was transparent perspex criss-crossed with grey metal struts, and above that were tier upon tier of offices, illuminated by shafts of sunlight that seared through the huge atrium.

  ‘How did it go?’ asked Howard. He was wearing a light blue safari suit, not the same as the one he’d been wearing when he met me at the airport, this one had short sleeves.

  ‘I didn’t find out much,’ I said. ‘There was nothing in the computer, nothing to show what she’d been working on.’

  ‘Was Healy any help?’

  ‘He gave me a few pointers, but without her notes I’m not going to get anywhere. I need to know who she saw, what she was doing. You’re going to have to help me, Howard. You’re going to have to put me in touch with everyone she was working with.’

  ‘I’ll do my best, laddie. You seemed to have spent a lot of time with Healy and got very little out of it.’

  ‘Yeah, I went for a trip to the Peak.’

  ‘Sightseeing?’

  ‘You can stop fishing, Howie. I went up to see Lai.’

  ‘Where did you get his address?’ he said, and he sounded angry. He flapped his handkerchief out and mopped his brow. Maybe our Howie was starting to lose his cool at last.

  ‘He’s in the phone book, it wasn’t difficult.’

  ‘Damn it,’ he exploded, ‘you should have told me.’

  ‘Why? What the fuck’s it got to do with you? You’re just the hired hand.’ His eyes narrowed when I said that and I could see that I’d struck home. What the hell, he asked for it, but I tried to soothe his feelings anyway.

  ‘It was
a spur of the moment thing, and anyway, he wasn’t there.’

  Howard seemed to relax then. ‘I’m supposed to be looking after you, that’s all,’ he said. ‘This is my territory, and it makes me look stupid if I don’t know where you are …’ he trailed off lamely. I thought it was probably best not to mention the run in I’d had with Mrs Lai in case he threw a fit.

  I smiled and he smiled and I slapped him on the back. Friends again.

  ‘OK, now where are we going?’ I asked.

  ‘Queen’s Pier. It’s a couple of hundred yards away.’

  ‘Let’s go then. It’s some building this.’

  ‘Aye, but it’s a bit of an acquired taste. It grows on you after a while. The staff love it, though inside it’s more like an electronics factory than a bank, sterile and metallic. The only things that they brought from the old building were these two bronze lions.’ He nodded towards two magnificent metal animals lying on blocks of stone. At the base of one sat two girls eating sandwiches from a paper bag as they talked.

  We waited by the roadside until a red-painted tram rattled past packed tight with passengers and then we crossed, stepping over the metal tracks and dodging an open truck piled high with boxes of oranges.

  For the first time I noticed the noise, a high-pitched babble of voices like thousands of swallows preparing to fly south for winter. We walked into a square, green and cool with fountains playing, but the sound of the water was masked by the chattering of hundreds upon hundreds of girls and women, most dressed in brightly coloured dresses, standing in groups or sitting on benches sharing lunch boxes.

  They were Filipina, all of them, skin the same as the girl who’d opened Mrs Lai’s door, the colour of well polished mahogany.

  ‘What is this, Howard? A demonstration?’

  ‘It’s Sunday, most of the Filipina amahs come here on Sunday afternoons to meet their friends. It’s their one day off.’

  ‘I didn’t realize there were so many of them.’

  ‘They’re the biggest expat community in Hong Kong, by far. And generally they’re treated like shit.’

  ‘By the gweilos?’

  ‘No laddie, by the Chinese. The Filipinas are tied to contracts, paid a salary which is about one third of the national average here, and if they quit they have to go back to the Philippines. A lot of them are beaten and sexually abused by their bosses. There was a case a few years back of a lawyer who got locked out on the roof garden of his flat with his maid. He made her climb down the outside of the building to get in through the window.’

  He fell silent then as we weaved in and out of the gossiping groups of women, all dolled up in their Sunday best.

  ‘What happened, Howard?’ I asked.

  He was still silent, and from his embarrassment I knew the answer – she’d fallen to her death. Nice story, Howard, shame about the ending. I let the question lie unanswered, and covered his faux pas by asking about the junk trip.

  ‘We’re on the bank’s number two boat,’ he said. ‘Most of their PR department will be there along with a few of the lads from their merchant banking side.’

  ‘What’s the reason for the trip?’ I asked.

  ‘No reason,’ he said. ‘Just a chance for them to meet the press. But that’s not a kosher reason because they know us all anyway. It’s just one of their social get togethers and they usually turn out to be a right royal piss up.’

  We left the square and the sing-song clamour behind us, and walked to the harbour’s edge to meet a group of gweilos standing by concrete steps that led down to the water. Fifty yards out bobbed a wooden-clad boat, built like an old-style junk but with two powerful engines in place of the traditional sail. Howard did the introductions and I got a series of earnest handshakes from the dozen or so bank staff and uninterested world-weary smiles from the press corps.

  The journalists were a mixed bag. Healy was there, twitching and chain smoking, there was a young stringer from an Australian paper, a Commercial Radio reporter, a spotty English girl from the Standard and a tall, cadaverous China watcher from the Far Eastern Economic Review who looked like an off-duty undertaker. There was a handful of Chinese reporters, uniformly dressed in open-necked shirts, baggy jeans and training shoes, a sharp contrast to the immaculate suits and twin sets of the Bank.

  As we stood around and made small talk another group of a dozen or so wandered along from the other end of the pier, shepherded by one of the suits.

  ‘I think we’re all here now,’ trilled the middle-aged PR lady with too much make-up who was masterminding this little voyage into the unknown. She waved her guest list at the junk and it turned towards the pier in a lazy circle before coasting to a stop. It was held steady by an old woman and a man using long wooden poles, him at the sharp end and her at the back like almost matching bookends. They looked like elderly brother and sister, with lined, weath-erbeaten faces and grey hair and they both wore black trousers and white nautical shirts.

  ‘Mr and Mrs Fong, they’re absolute darlings,’ said the PR lady as she guided me onto the heaving deck. ‘They’ve been with us for years, simply years.’

  I was going to make some crack about it being time the bank bought them shoes but maybe they just preferred to go barefoot.

  I found my way to a drink-laden waiter with the unwavering instincts of a homing pigeon and I had a G and T in my hand before the last guest was on board and we were growling through the waves. The small talk of the bankers held my interest for about ten minutes and I stuck it for another five until the conversation about rising rents, the cost of school fees and the problems of finding a decent amah got too much to stomach. The bar seemed to offer the nearest thing to sanctuary and I made it back there without throwing up. The man standing there ordering a drink had a head of thinning red hair scraped sideways in a vain attempt to cover his baldness. He had the look of a rugby player going to seed, muscle turning to fat, the skin ageing and slackening. He handed me a fresh gin and tonic without even asking what I was drinking. Instinctively I liked him. His name was Dick Graham, he was something to do with security at the bank and this time I lasted twelve minutes before I was bored to tears with his views on why there would always be a place for expats in Hong Kong. Over his shoulder I could see Howard looming over a pretty young Chinese girl with sleek black hair. He was gently stroking her shoulder as she looked up at him, her hand covering her mouth as she laughed at whatever it was that the lecherous old sod was telling her.

  I made my excuses to Dick, telling him I wanted to look at the view, leaving the bar to stand on the deck, savouring the cool breeze that blew in from the sea. The sun was beginning to set and was turning the water blood red. I hadn’t realized it was so late.

  Healy detached himself from the clutches of the PR woman and walked over, a can of Fosters lager in one hand and a half-finished cigarette in the other.

  ‘How’s it going?’ he asked, flicking ash over the side. The wind caught it and blew it back, smearing it across the knees of his trousers. He didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘Not so bad,’ I said. ‘Thanks for your help this morning.’

  ‘I wish I could have done more,’ he said. ‘Sally was a good kid.’

  He took a mouthful of lager from the can, and a thin dribble of amber fluid trickled down his chin. He wiped it with the back of his hand, which he then rubbed on his thigh.

  ‘I’m still not sure what it is you’re looking for.’

  ‘For answers, I suppose. I want to know why.’

  ‘Sometimes people just get to the stage where they can’t take any more.’

  ‘Take what?’

  He shrugged. ‘Life, I guess.’

  I shook my head violently. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not Sally.’

  ‘When was the last time you saw her?’

  ‘That’s not the point,’ I said. ‘I knew her, she was my sister.’

  ‘People change.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe you’re right,�
� he admitted, and dropped his cigarette to the deck, stubbing it out with a scuffed shoe. ‘But be careful you don’t make too many waves.’ He wasn’t looking at me when he spoke, but I could sense that he was waiting to see how I’d react.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said, keeping my voice as level as possible.

  ‘Well, for a start, I understand you gave Simon Hall a hard time yesterday.’

  ‘Where did you hear that?’

  ‘Friend of a friend. I don’t think you appreciate how small a place Hong Kong is. The story I heard is that you had him pinned to the wall and were threatening to castrate him with your bare hands.’ He laughed, and nervously pulled the lobe of his ear. ‘You’ll get yourself a reputation,’ he said.

  ‘I just lost my temper, they didn’t seem to be doing anything.’

  ‘Why should they? To them it’s a clear-cut case of suicide.’

  I snorted. ‘She wouldn’t have killed herself. I know she wouldn’t have killed herself.’

  ‘They’ll need more than a hunch to go on,’ said Healy, and I knew he was right. What I needed was proof and so far all I had was a photograph of a Chinese businessman.

  A couple of suits walked over, earnest young men with army haircuts and fox-hunting voices who wanted to know what 1997 would mean to press freedom. I said I was going on to the upper deck to get some sea air. I climbed the white wooden stairs alongside the main cabin and dropped into a deck chair. An observant white-jacketed waiter spotted my almost empty glass and came over with a refill. There were no Chinese on the upper deck, except for two waiters, and one by one the suits drifted upstairs to where I was, seeking their own kind. Healy and Howard stayed with the Chinese reporters, and both seemed to be drinking heavily.

  The young Chinese girl with shoulder length hair, high cheekbones and large, almond-shaped eyes whom I’d seen with Howard earlier, climbed up the stairs and sat down in the chair next to me, slowly crossing one long leg over the other. She was wearing a knee length charcoal grey skirt and it rode up her thighs. Nice thighs, too. Her shirt was clean and white and she’d turned the collar up at the back. Around her neck was a string of pearls that were so small they had to be real. Her lips, when she opened them, curved upwards in a knowing smile.