by Jake Needham
Nightlife in the Wanch never attained the status of Bangkok’s, of course, not even at the height of the Vietnam War when thousands of fresh-faced kids from places like Nebraska and Ohio flooded its streets, all of them looking for a Suzie Wong of their own. Most of the bargirls in the Wanch were more like bar grandmothers who put on their make-up with a garden trowel, but maybe that wasn’t so important when you were nineteen years old, it was three in the morning, and the ninth bottle of San Miguel had just gone down so smoothly and, best of all, stayed down.
I circled around the golden glass-clad bulk of the Admiralty Centre, its bronze-mirrored surface twisting and shimmering with the city’s garish nighttime light show. Heading up Queensway, I fought my way through the crowds still jamming the sidewalks even at this hour. Almost entirely Chinese, the throng pulsed and surged as if driven by some otherworldly energy source.
About a half-mile down Lockhart Road, I spotted the dirty brick façade of the Old China Hand pub which was something of a local monument. The Hand had been a Hong Kong expat hangout longer than anyone I knew could remember. I could hardly imagine the deals and schemes that had been whispered of within its dingy interior.
On a whim I cut diagonally across the road and ducked inside the dark wooden door stained black from decades of exposure to Hong Kong’s rancid air. The room was as gloomy as I remembered it, and like most expat bars in Hong Kong it was chilled down to the temperature of a meat locker. The room was mostly empty. I slid into a chair at a table and in a few moments a dumpy Filipina girl of indeterminate age shuffled over. She was dressed in jeans and a man’s shirt and she expressionlessly thrust out a menu that looked dirty and dog-eared.
“A pint of San Miguel,” I said, not bothering with the menu. “And fish and chips if you’ve got any left.”
The girl pulled the menu back and walked away without a word. I gathered they still had some fish and chips. Or maybe not. Welcome to Hong Kong, I told myself.
From a loudspeaker somewhere up near the greasy ceiling, Tony Bennett crooned about leaving his heart in San Francisco. I spotted a table near the door with some newspapers and magazines heaped on it so I got up and rummaged through them for something to read while waiting for my beer. To my surprise, I found some books under the pile. They were mostly dog-eared paperbacks, but a slim, red-bound hardback caught my eye and I picked it up to see what it was.
When I saw the title on the front cover, I chuckled. Normally, you wouldn’t expect to find A Register of Hong Kong Banking Institutions among the reading matter in a run-down pub, but this was Hong Kong after all and making money was just about the only thing that anyone thought about. Barry Gale’s banking misadventures with the Asia Bank of Commerce popped into my mind and I flipped the book open to the index. Sure enough, about a third of the way down the first page, I found a listing for the ABC.
When I turned to the page number listed in the index, I found very little there. The ABC had nothing but a restricted banking license in Hong Kong, which meant it had a little capital, but not much, and that it was legally entitled to take only very large deposits and make certain kinds of corporate loans. No vaulted lobby, no cute tellers, no toasters with every new account. At least the book listed an address for the ABC. The Hong Kong office was on Duddell Street, a steep lane that ran from Queen’s Road up to Ice House Street a few blocks west of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank building.
Duddell Street was only about a ten-minute walk from the building where Southeast Asian Investments had its offices and I thought about that for a moment. I would have plenty of time after the board meeting tomorrow. It would probably be a waste of effort, but I might as well check out the address and see what was there. My flight back to Bangkok wasn’t until early evening and I really had no plans for the afternoon other than to pick up some Cuban cigars since they were both cheaper in Hong Kong and better quality than the ones sold in Bangkok.
I jotted down the address. Then I put the book back on the table and picked up a copy of the South China Morning Post that was stained yellow with spilled beer. At least I hoped the stain was spilled beer.
Back at my table, I found a pint of San Miguel waiting and I opened the newspaper and took a long pull. Most of my students seemed to imagine that becoming a director of a company in some major financial center like Hong Kong was a ticket to a glamorous life, an express ride straight to the place where the real players hung out. I glanced around at the grimy pub in which I sat drinking beer and reading an old newspaper and smiled. If they could only see me now, huh?
For a moment I thought about the guy who sat next to me on the flight up and wondered if he was tucked up in bed somewhere nearby dreaming of Offshore. Was that really what I was all about now, getting paid to help people and companies hide their business operations and avoid taxes? Like every young lawyer I had started out imagining myself as an architect of events that mattered; but then almost before I knew it, the work-a-day business of making a living had taken over my life and those inspiring dreams had faded. In spite of all evidence to the contrary, I nourished my conviction that those youthful dreams were not altogether dead. Something was still waiting for me out there, I was sure of it, something that was going to count for a lot. I just had to recognize my chance when I saw it and have the courage to grasp the moment when it came.
The dumpy girl shuffled over, her feet making scrapping sounds against the floor.
“No fish,” she snapped and shuffled away again.
Jai yen yen, I reminded myself. Stay cool, man.
SIXTEEN
I GOT TO Southeast Asian Investments about nine the next morning which gave me time to drink some coffee and eat a few of the pastries heaped on a silver platter in the middle of the board table before anyone else showed up. The board meeting started promptly at nine-thirty.
Directors from outside the ranks of management are generally trivial appendages on any board. Most outside directors are just semiretired old geezers — or college professors, which most people think are more or less the same thing — who have nothing much better to do than show up for meetings a few times a year. We are seldom expected to do anything other than keep our mouths shut, stay awake, and vote the way the company’s management tells us to vote.
After the board sat through a seemingly endless Power Point presentation about a Mekong River hydroelectric project that of course no one understood, we listened to a droning recitation on the future of the shrimp industry in Cambodia that was so dull I think one director may have passed away during it without anyone noticing. We dutifully voted to approve both projects and management rewarded me for my support with a small retainer to review the shrimp farm’s financial structure.
The meeting ended just after twelve and a light lunch was served in the boardroom. I made small talk with some of the other directors and picked at the buffet until a decent interval had passed, then I said my goodbyes and slipped away. Crossing Des Voeux Road, I walked through the Landmark, a ritzy shopping mall that joined the bases of two of Central’s principal office towers, and emerged on Queen’s Road. Across the street, just where Central began to slope sharply up toward the Peak, I spotted Duddell Street.
It was narrow and so steep that the sidewalks were actually flights of stained concrete steps. I watched the street numbers carefully as I climbed and all the way at the end of the street I finally located the address that the book had for the Asian Bank of Commerce. It was an altogether unexceptional office building of no more than a dozen floors faced with black-streaked brick that had probably once been yellow. An elderly Chinese man wearing a dirty undershirt and baggy gray trousers sat slumped on a folding metal chair next to the glass and metal entry door. He snorted and spat as I passed, but I didn’t take it personally.
Inside the building the small lobby was dim and smelled faintly of urine. I examined the directory between the elevators and, sure enough, found a listing for the Asian Bank of Commerce on the ninth floor.
When I got out
of the elevator, I saw only three offices on that floor and none of them looked much like a bank. One was a dentist’s office, one seemed to be a sweatshop with an Indian tailor hovering hopefully just inside the open door, and the third was something called Hong Kong Directors Limited. When I spotted the large board at the end of the corridor with columns of small wooden signs hanging from brass hooks, I realized that Hong Kong Directors was the place I was looking for after all.
Hong Kong Directors was apparently a corporate services office, one of dozens scattered around Hong Kong that catered to foreign companies too small or too unimportant to have local offices of their own, but who nevertheless needed a formal address in Hong Kong. Corporate services companies existed all over the world, but they were most in demand in places like Hong Kong, Luxembourg, and the Cayman Islands where countless thousands of companies register themselves as residents for the purpose of minimizing taxes or maintaining confidentiality while conducting their real business elsewhere. Companies fronted by corporate services providers were often referred to as “brass plate companies” since very little evidence of their existence could be found other than the brass plate generally hung somewhere to identify the provider as the legally registered address of its clients. Hong Kong Directors must have been operating in the low end of the market. Its plates were wood.
I realized immediately that my chances of finding out anything about the Asian Bank of Commerce from Hong Kong Directors were pretty slim. No corporate service company would give out any information about a company registered with it other than whatever local law required, and in Hong Kong that wasn’t much.
So, expecting very little, I opened the door and went inside. Very little was exactly what I found.
The reception area was small. It appeared that Hong Kong Directors didn’t receive very many visitors. Three folding metal chairs were lined up along the wall to the left and opposite them was a wooden desk piled high with stacks of paper. A young Chinese girl slumped over the desk. She had badly permed hair, skin blotched with acne scars, and a dimple in her chin deep enough to hide Easter eggs. Perhaps she had a great personality, loved small children, and would make a wonderful wife for someone, but somehow I doubted it. I got the feeling her plainness was more than skin deep.
The girl ignored me as long as she possibly could, but I stood my ground and waited her out. Eventually she squinted up at me through a pair of glasses with lenses that looked like the bottoms of Coke bottles.
“You wait,” she said, and pointed to the chairs along the wall.
“I only have one quick question.”
“You wait,” she repeated emphatically, and started making small brushing movements with her right hand, the sort you would use to shoo a cat away.
I walked over to one of the straight chairs and sat down, folding my arms and fixing the girl with a stare I hoped was unsettling. Apparently it wasn’t. She took her time shuffling through the stacks of files in front of her and never even looked at me. Eventually she extracted a page from a file and for some reason held it up to the light as if she was trying to see through it. Hoping she was about to glance my way again at least, I gave her my warmest smile and crinkled my eyes in a way I thought emphasized what an honest, open fellow I was, but I was wasting my time. The girl lowered the paper, returned it to the file without a glance at me, and went back to plowing slowly through the rest of the folders.
Eventually she ran out of things to pretend to do and peered over at me. “What you want?”
“I have a question about one of the companies registered with you: the Asian Bank of Commerce.”
The girl looked puzzled, as if the request was a novel one. Then she made an odd noise. “Whaaaa…”
“I just need some general information about the company,” I went on quickly, hoping for the best. “Who its directors are, where it’s organized, that sort of thing.”
“No information,” the girl snapped. She looked down and pulled another stack of files toward her.
“For Christ’s sake,” I muttered as I stood up and took a step toward her desk, “all I want to know is what’s in the public filings. The company is licensed as a bank in Hong Kong and the registration information is public. I’m not asking you for the damned books.”
The girl spun around in her swivel chair so hard that I thought she was about to corkscrew herself right through the floor. Reaching into a cabinet behind her, she flipped through several piles of paper and then extracted a single sheet. She spun back around and wordlessly thrust it out toward me.
I took the sheet and started to return to my chair to read it, but I needn’t have bothered. There was nothing on it except the name Asian Bank of Commerce, the address of the building where I was, and one other sentence: “Contact Mr. Wang at Hong Kong Directors during business hours.”
I turned back to the girl, laid the sheet back on her desk, and tried my hard stare again.
“I would like to know who the directors are.”
“No information,” she repeated without looking up.
“Is Mr. Wang here?”
“Not here.”
“When will he be in?”
“Not here.”
I took a business card out of my wallet and laid it on the desk in front of the girl.
“When Mr. Wang comes in, would you please—”
The girl ignored my card. Instead, she jerked up the telephone receiver, stabbed at a button, and began to bark something into the receiver in rapid-fire Cantonese, rotating her chair until her back was to me.
I’d had enough. I left.
I stood out in the corridor for a moment wondering if I should have tried to push the girl a little rather than give up so easily. Maybe I could at least have found a way to irritate her enough to force Mr. Wang to make an appearance. My eyes wandered over the rows of wooden signs hanging on the wall while I considered the possibilities, but then I noticed something that suddenly caused me to forget all about the dimple with ears.
Down near the bottom of the second column of signs, stuck among the generic names that sounded exactly like the empty corporate shells they were, was a company name I recognized immediately: Cambodian Prawn Ventures Limited. That was the company vehicle Southeast Asian Investments was using for the shrimp farm investment we had just been discussing at the board meeting, the very company whose financial structure I had just been hired to review.
That was quite a coincidence, I reflected.
The same Hong Kong corporate services office that SAI was using to administer their company engaged in Cambodia shrimp farming was also administering the Hong Kong operations of the Asian Bank of Commerce, whatever they actually were. No doubt several hundred other investment companies used Hong Kong Directors to manage corporate vehicles for them as well, but that was still quite a coincidence.
“Ah, screw it,” I murmured, burying the bones of the conspiracy theories that were rattling faintly in the back of my mind. It really was just a coincidence, I told myself. It had to be.
When I got back to the Mandarin Hotel, I stopped at the cigar shop in the lobby and bought a couple boxes of Montecristos. I didn’t really feel like going up to my room, so I went into the Captain’s Bar and ordered an espresso. Since it was still early in the afternoon, I had the place more or less to myself and I cracked one of the boxes and took out a cigar. The waiter noticed what I was doing and brought me a cutter and some matches when he served my espresso.
I began the ritual of cutting and lighting my cigar, but my mind was on Barry Gale and the ABC. Until Sunday night I’d barely even heard of the Asian Bank of Commerce, but suddenly I seemed to be stumbling over all kinds of connections with it. What the hell was really going on here?
My personal policy for dealing with perplexing questions was pretty simple. I had long ago learned that there was always somebody somewhere who already knew whatever it was I needed to know, and if I asked them nicely, well… sometimes they would just tell me. The problem, of course,
was how to find whoever it was who already knew what I needed to know.
I smoked the Montecristo and tapped my forefinger against my espresso cup.
In this case, fortunately, that problem was easy enough for me to solve. I knew a guy and this guy would know all about the Asian Bank of Commerce, especially the part that no one else wanted to talk about.
I lifted the cup and downed the espresso in three quick sips. It was rich and strong and I savored the jolt as the caffeine hit me.
Even better, the guy was right here in Hong Kong.
The question wasn’t how much this guy knew, it was whether he would tell me what he knew. Try as I might, I couldn’t think of any way to find out but to ask him.
SEVENTEEN
I WENT UP to my room and stashed the cigars I had bought, then pulled out my cell phone and checked the address book. Sure enough he was there. I hadn’t talked to Archie Ward in a long time, but it had been even longer since I’d cleaned out my address book.
I dialed his direct line at the main office of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. The woman who answered told me that Archie Ward no longer worked there, but of course that had been more or less what I’d expected her to say. Brushing aside the woman’s categorical insistence that she couldn’t help me, I gave her my name and told her that I was at the Mandarin.
Archie Ward was a redheaded, pathologically profane Aussie I had met a couple of years before. He told me then that he was a technology security specialist for HSBC and he had hired me to review a series of transactions that the bank thought had an unusually ripe odor to them. Large amounts of money had been moving back and forth between the bank’s main office in Hong Kong and some of its branches in Europe and Asia, and the coordinated way the transfers had been occurring had caused Archie to suspect that the bank was unwittingly facilitating some pretty questionable transactions.