The Dragon Head of Hong Kong

by Ian Hamilton

  Also in the Ava Lee Series

  The Water Rat of Wanchai

  The Disciple of Las Vegas

  The Wild Beasts of Wuhan

  The Red Pole of Macau

  The Scottish Banker of Surabaya

  COMING IN FEBRUARY 2014

  THE

  DRAGON HEAD

  OF HONG KONG

  THE AVA LEE PREQUEL

  IAN HAMILTON

  Copyright © 2013 Ian Hamilton

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Distribution of this electronic edition via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal. Please do not participate in electronic piracy of copyrighted material; purchase only authorized electronic editions. We appreciate your support of the author’s rights.

  This edition published in 2013 by

  House of Anansi Press Inc.

  110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801

  Toronto, ON, M5V 2K4

  Tel. 416-363-4343

  Fax 416-363-1017

  www.houseofanansi.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, and events are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Hamilton, Ian, 1946-, author

  The dragon head of Hong Kong : the Ava Lee prequel / Ian Hamilton.

  (An Ava Lee novel) Electronic monograph in HTML format.

  ISBN 978-1-77089-813-4 (html)

  I. Title. II. Series: Hamilton, Ian, 1946- Ava Lee novel.

  PS8615.A4423D73 2013 C813’.6 C2013-907048-6

  Jacket design: Gregg Kulick

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

  For La

  ( 1 )

  SHE SAW HIM when she stepped out of the elevator. He was at the far end of the hall near her office, a small figure sitting on the floor, his arms wrapped around his legs and his forehead resting on his knees. He didn’t seem familiar until he looked up in response to her approaching footsteps.

  “Mr. Lo?” she said.

  His eyes were bloodshot and had dark circles underneath. There was dry saliva at the left corner of his mouth, and it appeared as if he hadn’t shaved for a few days. She thought he had been drinking or crying, or both.

  “I needed to see you,” he said in a hoarse voice as he struggled to his feet.

  Ava Lee unlocked the door to her one-room office. “Come in,” she said.

  He followed her and sat in one of the two chairs she had for visitors. She sat behind the metal desk, which was next to a filing cabinet. That was all the furniture she had. There was no pretence that this was anything but a small business. Her accounting firm was only five months old, and the few clients Ava had were either friends of her mother or people attached to them. Mr. Lo’s wife was a frequent mah-jong companion of Jennie Lee.

  “You seem troubled,” Ava said.

  “I’m ruined,” he said, shaking his head, his eyes averted.

  “Mr. Lo, things can’t be that bad.”

  “I can’t get the guy in Hong Kong to pay me.”

  “Kung Imports?”

  “Yes, him, Johnny Kung.”

  “I thought you had stopped shipping chicken feet to him when he fell behind in payments. And, when he did pay you, for making all those deductions from your invoices for what he claimed were quality issues.”

  “He talked me into sending another three containers.”

  “Good grief. So how many does he owe for now?”

  “Nine.”

  “What is he giving you as his reason for not paying?”

  “I don’t know. He won’t talk to me. He isn’t answering emails. He isn’t taking my phone calls. I’m not even sure if his office is still open.”

  “Two months ago you expressed some reservations about him, when the quality claims kept increasing.”

  “I did.”

  “But you still sent him another three containers?” Ava asked, and then saw the pain her words caused flash across Lo’s face. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to second-guess you.”

  “That is something I’d better get used to — I’m going to hear enough of it from my wife. Kung owes me a million dollars, and half of that money was loaned to me by my brother-in-law.”

  Ava knew of Mrs. Lo only from her mother, who described her as a ferocious mah-jong player. Her mother didn’t use words like ferocious lightly. Ava felt a twinge of sympathy for the small middle-aged man sitting across from her.

  “Is there nothing you can do?” she asked.

  “Like what?”

  “Have you thought about getting a lawyer, or going to a collection agency?”

  “A lawyer would take too long and I don’t have that kind of time. I did contact a collection agency in Hong Kong, but when I mentioned Kung’s name, they backed off.”

  “What did they offer as a reason?”

  “They said they had done the dance with him before and that it was a waste of effort,” Lo said, his voice breaking.

  “Why a waste?”

  “He’s slippery. He moves money in and out of different company accounts and banks.”

  “And you had no idea he operated like that when you started doing business with him?”

  He grimaced. “He was recommended to me by the brother of a friend.”

  “Mr. Lo, I have tremendous sympathy for you,” she said. She didn’t want to deride the Chinese tendency to value even a tenuous family connection more than proper due diligence when it came to doing business. “What I’m not sure about is why you have come to see me.”

  “When I was thinking about becoming a client, one of the things that convinced me to go with you was that my wife told me you weren’t just an ordinary accountant,” he said.

  “She was paying too much attention to my mother,” Ava said.

  “So you aren’t a forensic accountant?”

  “Actually, I am trained as one, and I did work as one for a while, but all I provide here is more traditional, straightforward accounting services.”

  He slid forward in the chair until his knees were touching her desk. He stared at her. “But you know how to track money, right?”

  “Yes, that was part of my training.”

  “So help me, please,” he said in a rush. “Find my money. I’m sure Kung has sold off the containers. The money is somewhere.”

  “Mr. Lo, even if I can locate the money, how do you expect we’ll get our hands on it?”

  His chin slumped onto his chest and he stared at his feet. “I don’t know, but I can’t just do nothing. I can’t leave things the way they are. The pressure at home from my wife and from my brother-in-law is going to be unbearable. But I know that if I tell her you’re looking into it, it will buy me some time.”

  “I honestly don’t know enough about how things operate in Hong Kong and China to be of much help.”

  “Please.”

  Ava sighed. “Look, I’ll make some phone calls tonight to some people who do know how things work there. I can’t promise you any more tha
n that.”

  “So you aren’t saying no?”

  “Or yes.”

  “That’s good enough.”

  How desperate is this man? she thought. “Okay, so we’ll leave it at that. I’ll contact you sometime tomorrow and let you know what I’ve decided to do.”

  ( 2 )

  AVA WAS WALKING home to her one-bedroom apartment on Leslie Street, just south of Highway 7. She lived in Richmond Hill, a northern Toronto suburb with a large Chinese population. She would have preferred to live in the city centre, but when she had returned to Canada after graduating from Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, her entry-level salary from the multinational accounting firm that hired her couldn’t support a downtown lifestyle. So for practical reasons, Ava had located in the north. It wasn’t entirely a hardship. She was spared the agony of what would have been an hour-long commute from the city to the office; there were at least fifty Chinese restaurants within a fifteen-minute walk from her apartment; and her mother’s house was only a slightly longer walk away.

  Her mother had asked Ava if she wanted to move back into the family home. Ava thought about that for less than ten seconds before saying no, and her mother seemed relieved. The two were close but they were different, and they both understood that living together for prolonged periods of time wasn’t healthy for their relationship. Among other things, Jennie Lee was a night person who thought nothing of dusk-to-dawn mah-jong games. When Ava was growing up, it wasn’t unusual for her mother to be coming home as Ava headed out for her daily morning run.

  Ava’s job with the multinational had lasted for just over three months. Her resignation was mutually agreed upon. She had a strong mind and found it difficult to take instructions blindly from people who knew less than she did. Even when working alone she found it tough to follow corporate guidelines and regulations that she found inflexible and often wanting. And the firm wasn’t about to let her operate as she saw fit.

  She interviewed for other jobs and was offered several, but she immediately got cold feet at the thought of being locked into another bureaucracy. And the jobs that wouldn’t encumber her independent nature tended to be mundane, involving more bookkeeping than accounting. Jennie Lee had come to her rescue. Not only did she suggest that Ava set up her own company, she had already lined up a handful of clients, including Mr. Lo, whose business was the most interesting.

  Mr. Lo had been quite cocky when Ava first met him. He had found a poultry farm in rural Ontario that wasn’t exporting its chicken feet and had no idea of their real value. Lo was able to buy them at about half the going market rate. He had been doing this for six months before Ava became his accountant. Lo had managed to talk the farmer into signing a one-year contract, with a right-of-first-refusal clause for a second year. Lo wasn’t stupid; he knew the farmer would eventually be contacted by other buyers and that his price would go up. His aim was to ship as much as he could in that first year.

  Lo had started slowly and carefully. At first he had three Hong Kong–based customers, but it turned out the supply wasn’t large enough to meet their demands. Any one of them could have taken all the production, and they each agitated to do exactly that. Kung Imports finally offered him a premium above his price and convinced Lo to drop the other clients. In the beginning, Kung paid by wire transfer upon receipt of the bills of lading. Those terms were modified to payment after customs and health department clearance, and that’s when the trouble started. Every shipment seemed to be held up by the health department, which refused to release the products to Kung for sale — or so Lo was told by Kung. Eventually some shipments were released and paid for. But because Lo kept shipping more product and because those shipments were being tied up by the health department, the unpaid invoices began to accumulate.

  Ava had advised Lo to stop until the accounts were settled, but his contract with the farmer was nearing the end of its first year and he was anxious to export as much product as he could. When she asked him what kind of man Kung was, he replied, “I met him in Hong Kong. We had several dinners and he took me to his club on the Kowloon side. He showed me around his warehouse and his office. It’s a big operation. He looked like a guy I could trust.”

  “What about your friend’s brother, the one who recommended Kung to you? What does he have to say about this?”

  “He said he met Kung socially and never did business with him.”

  “Will he call Kung for you?”

  Lo shook his head. “He said he didn’t want to get in the middle.”

  It was six o’clock when Ava opened her apartment door. It was about eight hundred square feet and furnished with old couches and chairs from her mother’s basement and garage, and a few items she had cared enough about to bring back from Wellesley. She went into the bedroom to change. She slipped off her white button-down shirt and a pair of black cotton slacks she had bought at the Brooks Brothers store on Newbury Street in Boston. She had never worn Brooks Brothers before going to work, but now it was basically all she ever wore for business. She thought the clothes imparted a professional image. She also didn’t have to tax her imagination every morning when it came to clothing choice.

  She hung the shirt and slacks on the closet door to air and put on her Adidas training pants and a plain black T-shirt. When she returned to the living room, she saw that the message light on her phone was blinking. That surprised her. Her mother and most of her friends called her cellphone. She dialled the access code, expecting to hear a sales pitch.

  “Ava, this is Mummy. Call me when you can,” Jennie Lee said. “I tried your cellphone. It’s off.”

  Her mother sounded upset, and it was with some nervousness that Ava dialled her number.

  “Wei,” the familiar voice said.

  “Mummy, is everything all right?”

  “Your cellphone is off.”

  “I know. I just realized that I turned it off during lunch with Mimi and left it in my purse all afternoon. Is that why you’re calling?”

  “Of course not, Ava. Did you meet with Hedrick Lo this afternoon?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Did you make him any promises?”

  “Like what?”

  “Did you tell him you would help him get back some of the money he is owed?”

  “No. He asked me to, but all I said was that I would have to think about it.”

  “Well, that isn’t what he’s telling Jessica Lo.”

  “That son of a bitch is twisting my words,” Ava said and then paused. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude about a client.”

  “Jessica is saying worse things than that about him,” Jennie said. “Jessica says he’s an aggravating man at the best of times, and right now she says the times are not very rosy. How bad are his problems?”

  “Mummy, I’m not sure I should be sharing that kind of information with you.”

  “You aren’t a lawyer or a doctor. I didn’t know accountants had to swear an oath of secrecy.”

  “We don’t, but there are ethical boundaries.”

  “Jessica sent him to you, and all the money that he’s been using to finance his business is from her and her family.”

  Ava heard her mother take a deep breath and pictured her dragging on a cigarette. “What has he told her?”

  “Not much, and that’s the problem. He came home this afternoon looking worried, and when she pressed him, he told her there were some issues with the client in Hong Kong. He said he was having trouble getting fully paid but that she wasn’t to be concerned because you were looking after it.”

  “Good God.”

  “So it isn’t true?”

  “Some of it is.”

  “Ava, how much money is involved?”

  “Enough.”

  “Poor Jessica,” Jennie said. “Ava, do you think you could actually help Lo?”

  “I’
m trained to find money that’s gone missing, but finding it and getting it back are two different things. In Canada I could take someone to court. He was shipping to Hong Kong. I have no idea how their law works.”

  “I can tell you one thing,” Jennie said. “There’s no such thing as bankruptcy there.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you can declare bankruptcy, but that doesn’t mean the people you owe money to will just go away,” Jennie said. “Beyond that, I don’t know. The person you should talk to is your father. There isn’t much that he doesn’t know about doing business in Hong Kong and China. I’m sure he would love the chance to discuss it with you.”

  “Maybe I will. If not for Mr. Lo, then for future reference.”

  “Oh, Ava, please do it for Lo if you can,” her mother said suddenly. “Jessica’s family is high-powered and successful. They’ve been looking down on Lo for years. This little venture of his has improved his status with them, and it would be a shame if it fell apart. If he loses the money they put into the business, they’ll make the rest of his life a living hell.”

  “Did Mrs. Lo tell you that?”

  “Yes. Despite her complaints, she does care about him, almost more than about the money. And her reputation — her face — is tied up with his.”

  “I’ll tell you what, I’ll call Daddy. I’ll make up my mind about what to do after I talk to him.”

  “Normally he leaves the house after eight o’clock. Don’t call him until then. He won’t be able to have a conversation.”

  “I understand,” Ava said.

  ( 3 )

  MARCUS LEE WAS the father of Ava and her older sister Marian. He was also the father of four sons from his first wife, and the father of a son and daughter from a third wife. The marriage to the first wife was legal; his second and third were traditional and more form than substance. He still lived with the first wife in Hong Kong. Jennie Lee had been shipped off to Canada when Marian was four years old and Ava was two. The third wife had appeared much later, had given him two more children, and was now living in Australia.