Femme Fatale

by Dominic Piper

  And now we come to Caroline Chow. Who the hell is she? Mr Sheng referred to her as an associate (which is how he’d referred to Rikki) and then he referred to her as his liaison officer. Meaningless titles: more smoke and mirrors. I’m usually good with accents, but I can’t place hers. The way she enunciates certain words make me think that she’s had extensive elocution lessons, unlike, say, Annalise, who speaks with an altered, educated version of a recognisable accent.

  Another baffling thing was the dynamic between her and Mr Sheng, which seemed to change from second to second. Sometimes he deferred to her and other times she deferred to him. Are they equals? Who are they?

  I decide to give Doug Teng a call. Doug runs a company called Marton Confidential, which is actually just him. I’ve used him in the past for electronic counter surveillance, or ‘bug sweeping’ as it’s known. He’s also a skilled computer hacker if you can afford him, but that particular talent isn’t advertised on his website. The reason I want to talk to him right now is that he’s Chinese, or at least London Chinese. It may be a waste of time, but you never know. I take a look at my watch: it’s eleven fifty-one. Maybe I can book him for lunch. I call him. He answers immediately.

  ‘Hi there, Mr Beckett. I have to tell you before we go on that I’m extremely busy this week. Working my bollocks off.’

  This is his sales scam. He always makes you think he doesn’t have time for you, so you have to bung him an extra few hundred quid for the pleasure of employing him and paying him. It’s ridiculous, but I put up with it. I’m sure there are others who get worse, like the big corporations he sometimes works for and tirelessly fleeces.

  ‘Hi, Doug. Listen. I don’t require your professional services. I need to talk to you. It won’t take long. Where are you now?’

  ‘Cock Lane. Pretty funny name, huh? Near St Bart’s Hospital. Big financial analysts. Pretty big job. You know Cock Lane?’

  ‘Yes I do. There’s a wine bar that does food in Giltspur Street. You’re probably three minutes away from it. It’s called The Charles Lamb. They do great food if you’re hungry. I thought maybe we could have a drink together. I just want to pick your brains.’

  ‘What – you having a drink with me like normal guys? What’s the angle?’

  ‘There’s no angle. I just want to ask you about stuff.’

  ‘So it’s just like we’re kind of friends or something. Just two guys having a few drinks together and shooting the breeze. Cock Lane. I can’t help laughing when I say it. Cock Lane.’

  ‘Yes. Two guys having a drink together. I’m in Wardour Street. I’ll get a cab. I’ll see you there in about ten minutes if you’re free.’

  ‘Ten minutes? Sure, Mr Beckett. I can stop here any time I like. Hey…’

  I cut him off and after four failed attempts manage to hail a black cab.

  *

  I haven’t been in the City for some time, but I’m not surprised to see that Giltspur Street is a disaster area of noisy construction and roadworks. The Charles Lamb is an enormous place which used to be a furniture showroom and it’s already starting to fill up. It’s changed since I was here last and has had a major overhaul. There are solid oak floors, a new bar with big chalkboard menus at the back and a variety of retro-looking chain-hung white lampshades covering the ceiling.

  I can’t see Doug straight away, but then I hear his voice. He’s sitting at the bar wearing a charcoal grey suit, chatting to two women in their twenties or possibly thirties. At a guess, they’re local office workers, maybe secretaries, maybe not. He sees me and waves me over. We shake hands. I can see him glancing at my Pret bag and Chinese candy box. I’ve got to get rid of all this stuff.

  ‘Hey, man. I want to introduce you to these two lovely ladies. But first, what would you like to drink?’

  ‘I’ll have a double vodka and soda. Thanks.’

  The women, one dark and busty, the other blonde and appealingly plus size, turn their attention to me as Doug orders the drinks.

  ‘Do you work with Doug?’ says the dark one. ‘Are you MI5 as well?’

  ‘Uh, yeah. In fact, Doug and I are going to have to have a confidential chat in a moment. I hope you don’t think we’re being rude.’

  ‘Of course not,’ says the blonde, looking me up and down. Her eyes are amused, wicked and very sexy.

  ‘He’s suffering from stress,’ I say. ‘Pretty near a total breakdown. I’ve got to try and sort him out before he has his yearly medical profile. Stress, security – the two don’t mix.’

  Doug returns from the bar with my drink and whatever the bright red thing is that he’s drinking. In the split second that everyone’s attention is off me, I slip one of my business cards into the blonde’s Love Moschino tote bag. You never know.

  ‘OK!’ says Doug, grinning. ‘This is my friend Daniel Beckett. Daniel…’ he says, waving a hand towards the dark and busty woman, ‘This is Grace and this is her colleague Daniella. They both work in The Bank of America. Grace is a reporting analyst and Daniella here is a cryptographic consultant.’

  ‘We’ll leave you two to it, then,’ says Grace, smiling sympathetically. ‘Good luck, Doug.’ She and Daniella drift away and start talking to a small group of women who seem to know them. Doug looks baffled.

  ‘Shall we sit down and order something to eat?’ I say.

  ‘What happened there?’ says Doug. ‘That was going really well. Why did she say good luck?’

  ‘No idea. Come on. Like the suit, by the way.’

  Doug laughs good-naturedly. He knows this is the first time I’ve seen him in anything other than jeans and t-shirt. ‘Yeah, yeah – I know. Well, you have look the part for some jobs. You have to fit in, you know? I hate wearing suits.’

  We find a table and sit down. Waitress service is speedy here. I tell Doug to get whatever he likes and that I’ll pay. I order Eggs Florentine while Greg goes for chunky salmon fishcakes with shoestring fries.

  ‘I need to talk to you about something that’s happened with a job of mine.’

  ‘Okeydoke. One of your cases? Wow. Why me?’

  ‘Because the people who are employing me are Chinese. They’re London Chinese, like you. Or at least I think they are. I felt that a lot was being kept from me and I didn’t fully understand what was going on. I’d just like to bounce the whole thing off you, as much as I can, anyway. See what your take on it is. Confidential, yeah?’

  ‘Sure, man. You know you can trust me. Go ahead.’

  I take a sip of my vodka and soda. ‘I was out last night about eleven. There was a Chinese girl, fifteen years old as it turned out. She was being attacked by three drunk pricks. I think it was a rape attempt. No. I don’t think. It was certainly a rape attempt.’

  Greg nods. ‘You fuckin’ killed them, yeah?’

  ‘Hospitalised. I was in a good mood. She ran away. In all the excitement, I lost my wallet. This morning I get a call from this old Chinese guy calling himself Mr Sheng. He’s got my wallet. Some people he knew went to the scene of the attack in the early hours and found it. Apparently, the girl overheard the woman I was with mention that I was a private investigator. The girl, by the way, turned out to be his grand-niece.’

  ‘So he wanted to hire you.’

  ‘Yes. I met him in this Chinese restaurant in Newport Place. It was called The Blue Lantern.’

  Doug’s eyes widen at this. He looks like he’s about to say something, then signals for me to continue.

  ‘This young guy that works for him – he first described him as a business associate and then as an employee – has been missing for three days. This is very unusual, it would seem. The guy checks in with Mr Sheng every day without fail. They’ve tried his mobile and checked his flat. Nothing.’

  ‘And there’s some reason why they can’t look into it themselves?’ says Doug. ‘Very unusual to hire a gweilo. No offence. It just is. There are about half a dozen Chinese-run detective agencies within a stone’s throw of where you were.’

  ‘That many
? OK. I think this guy hangs out with the gweilo. The old guy thought Chinese detectives might get alarm bells ringing where silence would be the better option.’

  The food arrives. Doug spoons some Cilantro-lime cream sauce over his shoestring fries. The thought of what that must taste like makes me feel slightly queasy.

  ‘OK. So what’s this guy do?’ he says.

  ‘That’s where it gets weird. The old guy couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me. He was quite open about his reluctance to talk about this guy’s work; apologetic, even. He called him a facilitator. He said he brought about outcomes. I’m assuming his work is illegal. It might even be connected to why he’s vanished. I have no idea.’

  Doug eats a mouthful of his lime fries. There’s an amused expression in his eyes. He takes a sip of his red drink and licks his lips.

  ‘What was the old guy like? Mr Sheng, was it?’

  ‘That’s right. A neat, smart dresser: suit, shirt, tie, well-polished leather shoes, expensive wristwatch. Very business-like, but not too formal. Cheery, avuncular, quick to laugh: but I felt like it was an act, you know? I felt like he was scoping me out. He was very grateful for me rescuing the girl. Kept saying I didn’t have to do the job if I didn’t want to. He said he was already in my debt. Oh – and that’s the other thing. He wanted detailed descriptions of the guys that attacked the girl and precisely what their injuries would have been after I’d dealt with them. Who knows – maybe he was going to send them flowers and a bunch of grapes.’

  Doug looks serious for a moment. ‘I don’t think so. Anything else about him? Any gut feelings you may have had?’

  ‘Apart from his distaste from having to involve me at all, I felt he was quite a scary guy underneath it all.’

  ‘Not the cheery old and respected man that he seemed to be,’ says Doug. He has a quick laugh to himself. ‘He wasn’t going to take you out fishing with him.’

  ‘No. But there’s more. I then got introduced to the person he referred to as his associate and then as his liaison officer. This was a drop-dead gorgeous Chinese woman of about thirty. Sort of like a cross between Maggie Cheung and Liu Wen. Sexy, provocative, flirtatious, confident, and dressed for the boudoir. Peacock feather bra over a black bodysuit. Black stockings, suspenders, five-inch heels, long black hair, well-groomed, fit, expensive-looking. No accent. I’m guessing she’d had elocution lessons. Had an educated vocabulary. Wore expensive French perfume.’

  ‘She got a name?’

  I finish eating a portion of Eggs Florentine. The Hollandaise sauce is delicious. I’ll come here again. Maybe I’ll bring Anastasija here. She had a hot body, from what I could tell.

  ‘He called her Fan Mei Chow, but her western name was Caroline Chow. She thought it sounded like a movie star. I couldn’t tell if she was taking the piss.’ I suddenly feel tired. I rub my eyes and yawn. ‘Even though he called her his liaison officer, I couldn’t quite tell who the boss was, you know? She’s meant to be helping me with the missing guy. I’m seeing her for dinner tonight.’

  He smiles. ‘Any gut feelings about her?’

  ‘Nothing I’m going to share with you, but after we left the restaurant, a really odd thing happened. We were walking down Lisle Street. Every time any of the local Chinese people saw her they crossed over to the other side of the road.’

  Doug raises his eyebrows, nods his head and sticks a forkful of chunky salmon fishcake into his mouth. ‘D’you want to have another drink, man?’

  ‘Let me get these,’ I say. ‘What’s that drink you’ve got there?’

  ‘It’s an Absolut Royal Fuck,’ he laughs. ‘It’s OK. They know at the bar. They won’t throw you out.’

  I fetch the drinks and sit back at our table. ‘So what do you make of it all?’

  ‘I have to hand it to you, Mr Beckett,’ he says, laughing. ‘You sure are an exciting guy to be around.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, I wasn’t a hundred per cent totally sure when you were talking about the old guy, you know? He was sounding like a small-time crook of some sort, as was the missing guy. But this woman: she was the thing that clinched it for me. When you said about people crossing over the road to avoid her?’

  ‘So what’s going on?’

  He takes three rapid sips from his Absolut Royal Fuck, places it on the table and folds his arms across his chest.

  ‘You’re working for the Triads, man. You’re working for the fuckin’ Triads.’

  6

  LETHAL AND GORGEOUS

  It had crossed my mind, of course. From the moment that young guy smoking the cigarette pointed me in the direction of The Blue Lantern, alarms bells started ringing, but the idea had just seemed so unlikely that I’d dismissed it. The Triads? Hiring an outsider? Ridiculous.

  Both Rikki and Mr Sheng came across as dodgy characters who were probably involved in illegal activities of one sort or another, but that didn’t necessarily mean they were part of an organised criminal fraternity, did it? Maybe it did. Either I wasn’t expecting it or I was too dumb to see it.

  OK, they knew I was coming, they knew roughly when I’d be there and they probably had a rough description of me from Li-Fen. But that might have been caution on their part, as far as I knew. I was someone who’d been involved in a violent altercation. They might have been concerned friends or colleagues, looking out for Mr Sheng.

  Who was he, that young guy? Another ‘associate’? A bodyguard? Was he the only one keeping an eye on me? Probably not. But if there were more, they were good. I give myself the excuse of a mild hangover for not being fully switched on, but it’s no excuse at all. I must raise my game. I can’t afford to slip.

  I try to think what I know about this organisation. Criminal, definitely, but at the same time, almost like a myth: something you might read about in a book. This is because historically they don’t interact with people outside the Chinese community, wherever that may be: at least not in the UK.

  In America it’s different, though. I remember reading that the Triads had virtually supplanted the Mafia as the main supplier of heroin in the US. I think it was something like every single gram of heroin sold in New York was supplied by the Chinese in one way or another.

  Drugs, prostitution, gambling, contract killing, extortion, loan sharking and vice. Ruthless and merciless. That’s the Triad image nowadays. But its history goes back a couple of thousand years and it originated in patriotic secret societies, from what I can remember. There’s a lot of mythology surrounding their origins, too: it even involves the monks of the Shao Lin monastery.

  ‘So what’s going on, Doug? Any tips?’

  He runs a hand through his hair and exhales loudly. ‘I was born in Hong Kong, you know? My family came over here after the changeover in ’97. I was thirteen. People liked Hong Kong as it was, yeah? Most of the people that ended up over here are just ordinary people. Law-abiding, educated, some not so educated but hard-working – all sorts, yeah? And of course you got a big exodus of Triads, too. They weren’t particularly keen on the Communists and that’s putting it mildly. They came over here, they went to the States, they went to Australia, they went to Canada. There’re lots of different lodges, you know? Sometimes the Hong Kong lodges will have contacts in the UK, sometimes they won’t. It’s all pretty malleable.’

  ‘I didn’t know about Australia.’

  ‘Oh yeah, man. They’re everywhere. It’s a worldwide thing. Everywhere there’s a Chinese community you’ll find Triad lodges. Australia, France, Japan, Russia, South Africa – you name it. It’s an international business. It’s like McDonalds or Coca Cola, except, obviously, it’s a secret society. But they don’t like that term nowadays. They prefer to call themselves a society with secrets. Sounds less sinister.’

  ‘They’ve been here in the UK for a long time.’

  ‘Oh yeah, yeah. Early nineteenth century. I’m not saying there was a big explosion in Triad activity. Just giving you a bit of a background groove. Wherever there’s any so
rt of Chinese community, like in Soho or wherever, you’ll find at least one Triad society making a living from it. They call it squeeze. Putting the squeeze on.’

  ‘What does that mean? Extortion?’

  ‘Yeah, sure. You know – protection rackets, gambling, service industries, vice – the list goes on. If you’re Chinese and you’re doing something that makes money, then they want some of it or else. In a kind of way – my dad – my dad knew about them and he used to tell me about them. Back in Hong Kong, I mean. He could point them out in the street. Discreetly, though, yeah? He called them parasites. They’ve got this big mythology and like to think they’re Robin fuckin’ Hood or something, but he said that was all in the past. They’re just crooks now, he said. They shake down hard-working people who can’t afford it. It’s immoral as well as illegal.

  ‘It’s why – I mean – it’s why he did what he did and in a way it’s why I do what I do. Not what I do, but the way I do it, yeah? My dad used to repair household electronic stuff that had gone wrong. He could fix anything from your kettle to your stereo to your refrigerator. But he never had a shop. It was a way of avoiding attention. It was a way of avoiding squeeze. He used to say No premises – No Triads. In other words, be a freelance. If you didn’t have somewhere where they could come and put the squeeze on, they sort of didn’t see you. You became invisible. You became too much trouble. I guess it’s why I’m a freelance, basically. You keep a low profile here if you’re Chinese and in business. I mean – it’s why I call myself Marton Confidential instead of Crouching Tiger Anti-Bugging Services or something.’

  ‘Lotus Panda Happy Counter-Surveillance.’

  He laughs. ‘Hey, that’s good! I might use that. That’s bigtime inconspicuous.’

  ‘Lucky Wok Bug-Sweeps.’

  He thumps the table. ‘That’s the one! It’s a toss-up between that and Red Buddha Temple Computer Hacking Incorporated.’ He sips from his red drink. ‘I’m not too worried about them, though. And I’ve made some good contacts here if they ever looked in my direction. I mean, I think if I ever got in trouble, or my dad for that matter, I’d hire you.’