by Jake Needham
I stood up and jammed the passport, the ticket receipt, and the MasterCard into my pocket and smiled when I thought again of the name Jello had used in the passport. There was simply no way I would ever be able to tell anyone my name was John Smith without snickering.
But that was something I really didn’t have to worry about since I wouldn’t be going to Thailand. And even if I were going to go to Thailand, I certainly wouldn’t be going on a Canadian passport under a phony name as stupid as John Smith.
There was just no way that was ever going to happen.
No way on earth.
I went downstairs, left the Mandarin through the back door, and walked up Des Voeux Road toward the bottom of the Mid-Levels escalator.
In the daylight hours, I’ve always thought there is a tenuous feeling to Hong Kong. All those skyscrapers jammed into a narrow strip of relatively flat land between the deep waters of the harbor and the steep slopes of the Victoria Peak look from a distance like toys shoved up against a green wall by an unruly child, a child who could easily sweep them away again with one swing of his hand.
But when darkness comes, Hong Kong is transformed. The big advertising billboards in Kowloon shoot shards of light over the dark water of the harbor in breathtaking zigzags of color and the low, gray clouds swirling around the peak reflect a hundred thousand brightly colored lights from ten thousand garish signs. Up in splendid isolation on the wooded slopes at the top of Victoria Peak the narrow roads that connect a few spectacularly expensive houses are lit with strings of streetlights that glow in the night like lines of orange gumdrops neatly laid out on dark green felt.
Hong Kong looks otherworldly at night. The sparkling lights burning in the darkness forge a dreamy radiance that is fragile, airy, and unearthly. They blur the hard, unpleasant edges of a tough town into a blemish-free hallucination, a scene that is almost, but not quite, beauty.
I had barely stepped onto the moving belt at the bottom of the Mid-Levels escalator when my cell phone buzzed. I fished it out and looked at the display.
Uncle Benny.
I spread my feet and balanced myself cautiously before answering. Carrying on a telephone conversation while being towed uphill on a moving belt is trickier than you might think. I’ve seen more than one person dumped on his ass when he got too caught up in his conversation to pay attention to where his feet were going.
“I find him,” Benny said when I answered. No small talk, no social courtesies. “I find him.”
For a moment I had no idea what Uncle Benny was talking about, but then I remembered. Uncle Benny had told me there was some guy who had set up Eddie Lo’s computer systems and then gotten into a dispute with Eddie about money. The guy took off, but to improve his leverage with Eddie, he presumably downloaded copies of a lot of Eddie’s business records on the way out the door.
If there was any dirt to be had on Eddie Lo’s business operations, this guy probably had it. And since the word was Eddie Lo knew where the billion dollars missing from the Malaysian Sovereign Wealth Fund had gone, getting dirt on Eddie was the best way to start looking for it.
You didn’t find a billion dollars in the wind somewhere by focusing on all the fine things the people who helped take it had done in their lives, assuming they had done at least a few fine things, which quite possibly they hadn’t. What you focused on was the dirt.
“You’re talking about the computer guy who worked for Eddie Lo?”
“Yes.”
“Then he’s still alive?”
“Yes. Alive.”
“And you’ve found him?”
“Not me. Friend.”
That got my full attention.
Uncle Benny had told me when I was in his office that he’d heard Eddie spread some money around 14K to get them to find this guy. I hadn’t asked Benny any questions about that at the time, but I knew full well 14K was about the biggest and baddest of the Chinese triads operating in Hong Kong, which was really saying something.
“Is this friend of yours a member of 14K?”
Uncle Benny said nothing. Which meant yes.
“You know I don’t mess with the triads, Uncle Benny.”
“You will kidnap this computer guy?” Benny asked.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“You will kill him?
“I only want to talk to him. Get him to tell me something about how Eddie Lo’s businesses are organized and how Eddie might have laundered a billion dollars through them.”
“Then you no be messing with 14K.”
Which probably meant 14K did intend to kidnap him and kill this guy, and ending up between 14K and their target was a very unappealing proposition.
“You want me tell you where this guy is or no?” Benny demanded, interrupting my reverie.
“Did your friend tell you where he is?”
“You come to Fo Kee Restaurant tomorrow. You know Fo Kee restaurant?”
Which wasn’t exactly an answer to my question, I noticed.
“No,” I said. “I never heard of it.”
“Best roast goose in Hong Kong. Fa Yuen Street, Mongkok. You smart man. You find.”
“Is this guy—”
“I be there twelve o’clock tomorrow. Okay?”
People in Hong Kong work hard. They start early and eat lunch early. I get that, but it still drives me mad. Who can eat lunch only a couple of hours after finishing breakfast? I’d rather see Benny later, preferably a lot later since he was asking me to make the long trek out to Mongkok again, but when you’re tapping your friends for favors, you meet them when and where they want you to meet them.
“Sure, twelve o’clock tomorrow,” I said. “Is this computer guy going to be—”
Before I finished the question, I realized I was listening to a dial tone. Uncle Benny had already hung up.
I put my phone back into my pocket and mulled over what Benny had told me.
There was something squirrelly going on here. I could feel it.
If Benny knew where the guy was, why didn’t he just tell me? Why did I need to go all the way out to Mongkok for Uncle Benny to tell me where the guy was holed up, doubtless under a fake name? Unless this computer guy was completely stupid, and that certainly didn’t appear to be the case if he had ripped off company documents from Eddie Lo for leverage, he was long gone from Hong Kong, anyway. I couldn’t remember Benny telling me the guy’s nationality. If he wasn’t Hong Kong Chinese, he had probably hightailed it back to wherever he was from and that was probably where he was now. Which brought me straight back to my original question. If Benny knew where this guy had gone, why didn’t he just tell me?
The only explanation that occurred to me was that Benny intended to put the arm on me for payment before he gave me anything. That didn’t sound like Benny, but I had leveled with him about how much money was missing and with all that cash in the wind I’m sure Benny assumed my fee would be pretty impressive. He had probably decided he ought to be entitled to a piece of whatever finder’s fee I was getting in return for pointing me in the right direction. Who could blame him?
I wondered if Uncle Benny would believe me when I told him that I wasn’t getting a finder’s fee, just billing an hourly rate like lawyers did all over the world. I only hoped he didn’t ask me how much I got paid per hour. It sounds so ridiculous it always embarrasses me to tell anyone. I bill the going rate for the highly specialized financial work I do, but every time I have to tell somebody my billing rate is a thousand dollars an hour, I cringe.
That’s one hell of a scam you’ve got going there, boy, I can hear my long-dead father laughing from somewhere. No man’s work is worth a thousand dollars an hour, not for anything.
I have to admit I have a lot of difficulty arguing with that.
It was a nice night, warm and not too humid. I breathed in Hong Kong’s peculiar odors and allowed my mind to wander. As the Mid-Levels escalator dragged me at a stately pace up the steep slope of Victoria Peak, I found myself remembe
ring my father, and smiling.
FOURTEEN
I WENT FOR a run the next morning before heading into the office. I was running less and less since I had moved into Freddy’s apartment and that was beginning to gnaw at me. It wasn’t that I had suddenly gotten lazy. The problem wasn’t with me, it was with Hong Kong.
Hong Kong simply isn’t a pleasant place for a morning run. The city doesn’t have many parks and running on the crowded streets and sidewalks is a scary proposition. One reason there aren’t many parks in Hong Kong is that it is among the most densely populated cities on earth, but there’s another reason, too. Parks don’t make any money and, to the nearly absolute exclusion of everything else, Hong Kong is about making money. Priorities are priorities, right?
This morning I jogged at any easy pace east along Caine Road toward the Botanical Gardens, a tiny postage stamp of green about a kilometer from my apartment. Halfway up Victoria Peak near Freddy’s apartment, the streets are steep and irregular, which makes them poor running territory for an old guy like me who is on his way out. I’ve learned to ignore the stares of the Chinese as I lope past since the locals generally think all white people are crazy regardless of what we do, but the irregular pavement, disappearing sidewalks, and narrow streets are far harder to ignore. They make staying alive and reasonably healthy a constant challenge.
The Botanical Gardens aren’t all that great a place to run either since the modest zoo that’s there is generally full of kids, even early in the morning. Worse, the park is small and surrounded by a tangle of on-ramps and off-ramps from several major roadways that come together there. The area always feels slightly oppressive to me, a tiny lump of vegetation slowly but surely being strangled by an octopus. On the plus side, the walkways are smooth and level; the trees are tall and dense; and the cooling shade is genuinely welcome in the relentless heat and humidity of Hong Kong.
Today I did five kilometers, more or less, showered back at the apartment, and by ten I was in the Pacific Coffee Company picking up a large black coffee and a cherry Danish. Five minutes after that, I was sitting at my desk thinking over what Jello said about Kate.
Were we really talking life or death stuff here, or was Jello working me in some way I couldn’t quite see yet? He was a friend, of course, and I trusted him, at least in the sense that I knew he had integrity, but he was still a cop, and a Thai cop at that, and I understood that he would work me if he thought he needed to. After all, I was just a foreigner.
I moved the coffee to one side, popped the last of the cherry Danish into my mouth, and pulled my laptop toward me.
For the next half hour or so I worked at pulling up whatever news coverage of Thailand I could find from around the time of the coup. There wasn’t all that much. After the first flurry of stories the night the army rolled its tanks into the streets of Bangkok, the world’s interest had waned quickly. The fact the army ousted a female prime minister had kept the story alive for a while, but even that added bit of color didn’t help a great deal. After three or four days, there was nearly nothing about the coup on any of the major international news services.
That wasn’t really that great a surprise to me. Military coups in Thailand are anything but novel, and Thailand is anything but central to the consciousness of the world. It has no natural resources to speak of; its culture is insular and based around a language spoken nowhere else; and even its strategic importance vanished that April day in 1975 when the North Vietnamese Army marched into Saigon and America and its allies fled Southeast Asia.
And there was another thing that shortened the life of the story. The coup had been accomplished without any drama. No one fought back and no one was shot. The army just drove a few tanks into the streets and announced they were taking over. Then they did. One day Kate was the prime minister, and the next day she was home watching television and making a tuna salad sandwich. Where was the drama in that?
I switched back to Google and ran a search about Kate’s arrest, but there wasn’t much news about that either. One story in the Bangkok Post reported she had been charged with corruption of some vague kind, but no details were offered. The story didn’t even mention anything about a trial date. It said Kate had been granted bail, but then it also said Kate had been placed under house arrest. Overall, it was pretty typical reporting for a Thai newspaper: vague, contradictory, and careful to avoid giving offense to the people in power, which these days meant General Prasert. The Post’s story had been picked up by Reuters, but as far as I could tell those few other international news organizations that reported the story at all had just cribbed it from the Reuters wire. Even the BBC, which usually did a better job of reporting from Thailand than anyone else, didn’t add any original reporting.
It wasn’t much. In fact, it was hardly anything at all.
I reached for my coffee and took a sip, but it had gone stone cold and tasted awful.
So what to do?
I didn’t have much hope it would do any good, but I picked up my telephone and tried again to reach Kate on the two numbers I had. Neither of them worked yesterday and neither of them worked today either. What else had I expected?
I pulled the Canadian passport, the ticket receipt, and the credit card Jello gave me at the Clipper Lounge out of my briefcase, contemplated them for a moment, and tossed them on my desk.
If Kate’s life were really in danger, then of course I would try to help, although I had no idea what I could do. I certainly couldn’t lead a commando operation over the border to rescue her. There were two obvious problems with that. First, even Jello had been forced to admit Kate didn’t think she needed to be rescued. And second, I was no commando. I was a middle-aged lawyer with crappy knees. I talked to people for a living.
I was beginning to come around to the view that Jello was bullshitting me. For some reason he wanted me in Thailand, and he had concocted a vastly exaggerated story about Kate being in danger to get me there. But if he was exaggerating to get me to Thailand, what was he really up to? I had absolutely no idea.
I glanced at my watch. It was well after eleven and I needed to leave for Mongkok. I really didn’t want to keep Uncle Benny waiting. He was doing me a big favor, after all, helping me out with what was right now my only big-time paying gig. Finding that billion dollars missing from the Malaysian Sovereign Wealth Fund had to be my first priority, not trying to figure out what was behind the crazy story Jello was peddling.
I walked straight onto a red line train at Central Station and found a seat at once. That had to be a good omen about something. I couldn’t remember the last time I saw an empty seat on the MTR. Probably never.
While the train was still under the harbor, I pulled out my phone and checked Google to figure out how to get to the Fo Kee Restaurant. High-speed internet connections are ubiquitous in Hong Kong. Even a hundred feet under the ocean in a train doing fifty miles an hour you can surf the internet like you’re sitting in your easy chair at home.
I figured out quickly enough that the restaurant was near the intersection of Fa Yuen and Argyle Streets, about three blocks east of Nathan Road and right in the heart of the densest part of Mongkok. According to the pictures on Google, it was a medium-sized place that looked more or less like ten thousand other local restaurants in Hong Kong. A room filled with scratched Formica tables of various sizes surrounded by low wooden stools sat in front of a glass-walled area in the back where fat carcasses of ducks and geese hung from steel hooks alongside a roasting oven.
The Fo Kee restaurant was a place for eating, not a place for impressing your girlfriend or meeting with business associates. Food is like money in Hong Kong. You didn’t need to dress it up for people to know it matters.
When I got off the train at Mongkok Station, by some miracle I found the right exit and climbed the stairs to street level. I paused briefly to get my bearings and then walked briskly east in what I was certain was the right direction. I had covered no more than a hundred feet when I saw Nathan Road up a
head and realized it was actually the wrong direction. I turned around and retraced my steps to the west. I told myself I had only been checking for surveillance.
Yeah, that’s what I was doing. Checking for surveillance.
The streets of Mongkok are an assault on the senses. All the senses. Not only is Mongkok crowded and loud and bright, the cloying odors of frying onions, roasting ginger, grease, and garlic are everywhere. With every breath, you inhale the funk of a thousand meals.
Like most every small business in Mongkok, Fo Kee restaurant was on the ground floor of a shabby concrete tenement building about a dozen stories tall festooned with air-conditioning units dripping water and laundry flapping from its windows. In an unexpected bit of design flair for such a scruffy neighborhood, a polished aluminum frame surrounded the restaurant’s big front window from which large Chinese characters stood out in relief. The place looked more like an art gallery in a newly hip neighborhood in Los Angeles than it did a neighborhood restaurant in Mongkok. Of course, since I had no idea what any of the Chinese characters on the façade or the sign said, maybe it really had once been an art gallery and was only turned into a restaurant when the gallery went out of business. The Chinese never let anything go to waste.
When I opened the door and stepped inside, I was pleased to see all the hipness was confined to the outside of the building. Inside, everything was reassuringly crummy.
FIFTEEN
IT WAS LUNCHTIME and Fo Kee was very crowded. No office groups or loving couples, almost no women in the place at all. Mostly just single men, eyes down, eating fast. Hong Kong is one of the most crowded places on earth, but sometimes I think it is also one of the loneliest.
I was the only white face in the place, of course. Mongkok isn’t a neighborhood where round-eyes eat lunch in local restaurants.
Uncle Benny was sitting in the back at a small table with one other man. That didn’t surprise me. In neighborhood restaurants everyone shares tables and there isn’t much privacy. Actually, there isn’t much privacy anywhere in Hong Kong. The Chinese are used to that and it doesn’t seem to bother them, but it drives westerners crazy. I understood now how strange western concepts of privacy and personal space are to people in Hong Kong, but carrying on a personal conversation in front of a stranger still bothered me, and I was sure it always would.