The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

by Ross Thomas

  “How long do you plan to stay there?” he said, coming down hard on the “there” as if he felt that anyone who stayed at a hotel for an extended period of time was either profligate or flighty. Perhaps both.

  “I’m not sure,” I said.

  “You should let us know as soon as you get a permanent address.”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  “Your previous address?”

  “Hong Kong. You want the street number?”

  Littrell shook his head, a little sadly, I thought, and wrote down Hong Kong. He would have been happier had J said Boise or Denver or even East St. Louis.

  “Your previous bank?”

  “Barclays,” I said. “Also in Hong Kong.”

  “I mean in the States.”

  “None.”

  “None at all—ever?” He seemed a little shocked.

  “None at all.”

  This time Littrell did shake his head. I couldn’t decide whether it was a gesture of disapproval or commiseration. “Where are you employed, Mr. Dye?” he said, and from his tone I knew he expected the worst.

  “Self-employed.”

  “Your place of business.”

  “The Sir Francis Drake.”

  Littrell had given up. He was scribbling hastily now. “What kind of business, Mr. Dye?”

  “Export-import.”

  “The name of your firm?”

  “I haven’t decided yet.”

  “I see,” Littrell said, a little glumly, and wrote down unemployed. “How much would you like to deposit?”

  I could tell that if I said fifty dollars, he would be pleasantly sur prised. If I said a hundred, he would be ecstatic.

  “Twenty thousand,” I said. “No, better make it nineteen thousand, five hundred.”

  Littrell muttered something to himself which I didn’t catch and then pushed two cards over to me. “These are the signature cards. Would you sign them the way that you’ll be signing your checks?”

  I signed the cards and handed them back along with the certified check for $20,000. Littrell examined the check carefully and for a moment I thought he might even sniff it for some telltale odor. But he went on examining it, knowing it was good and, I thought, hating the fact that it was. He turned it over and looked for the endorsement. There was none. “Would you endorse it, please, Mr. Dye?” I wrote my name for the third time.

  “Do you have some identification?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I have some.”

  We waited. He was going to have to ask for it. After fifteen seconds or so he sighed and said, “May I see it, please?”

  I produced the passport, newly issued, never used, which said that my hair was brown, that my eyes were hazel, that I had been born in 1933 in a place called Moncrief, Montana, and if anyone still cared, I was a businessman. It didn’t mention that my slightly crooked teeth had just been cleaned by an Army dentist, a major who wanted desperately to get back into civilian practice.

  Littrell accepted the passport, glanced at it, gathered up the forms, and excused himself. He headed for a glass and wood enclosed office a few feet away which barricaded an older man from those who dropped by wanting to borrow money. The older man’s head was pinkly bald and his eyes were colored a suspicious blue.

  Littrell didn’t try to keep his voice down and I easily overheard the conversation, “A hot shot with a certified twenty thousand,” he said. “Regular checking.”

  The older man looked at the check first, riffled through the forms, and then examined the passport. Carefully. He pursed his lips for a long moment and finally initialed the papers. “It’s only money,” he said, and I had the feeling that he was saying it for the four-hundredth time that year.

  Littrell took the check and the forms, disappeared behind the tellers’ cages, and then came back to his desk where, still standing, he counted $500 on to its surface and then counted them again into my hand. He sat down after that, reached into a desk drawer, and produced a checkbook and some deposit forms, which he handed me.

  “These checks are only temporary as are the deposit slips,” he said. “We’ll mail you a supply with your name and address printed on them, if you get a permanent address.”

  I ignored the “if” and put the checks and deposit slips in my inside jacket pocket. The $500 I folded and casually stuck in my right-hand trouser pocket, which seemed to irritate Littrell. That’s probably why I did it—that and because I had no billfold or wallet or anything to put in one other than the $500. No driver’s license or credit cards. No snapshots or old letters, not even a pocket calendar from the corner liquor store. The only proof that I was who I said I was rested with my new passport that, with a few exceptions, allowed me to journey to any spot in the world that struck my fancy, providing I could think of one that did which, as a matter of fact, I couldn’t.

  I said goodbye to Littrell who gave me a final twitch of his mustache. Once outside the bank, I turned right up Sutter Street. I was looking for a jewelry store so that I could buy a watch and it was at least ten minutes before I found one and five minutes before I spotted the man in the brown suit who was tailing me and seven minutes before I came to the pleasant realization that I really didn’t give a damn if he followed me to the ends of the earth—which some thoughtful San Franciscans claimed lay just across the bridge in Oakland.

  CHAPTER 2

  It had all begun, the entire mess, or my fall from grace, I suppose it could be called, when they overheaded the instructions by commercial rate from the home office of Minneapolis Mutual, which was located, for some unfathomable reason, in Las Vegas. The message arrived in Hong Kong on May 20th. It was in an antiquated, one-time code that was keyed that week to page 356 of the thirteenth edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations which turned out to be excerpts from Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village. It took me a good half hour to break it down and I felt that any reasonably bright computer could have made it in seconds and, for all I knew, might already have done so. Decoded, the message was still childishly cryptic, as if whoever had sent it clung to a wistful hope that it would be meaningless to anyone but me. Its four words read: Cipher the Village Statesman.

  It was one of their more asinine orders, a shade dumber than most, so I tore everything up and flushed it down the toilet. I then called in Joyce Jungroth, my Minnesota-born secretary who after three years still clung to her romantic notions about Hong Kong, had a bad complexion, and always smelled faintly of Noxzema. I handed her the Bartlett’s.

  “Get rid of it,” I said.

  She sighed and accepted the book. “Don’t you ever use dirty novels, something that I could read?”

  “You’re not supposed to read them; you’re supposed to get rid of them.”

  I suspected that she took the books home to her apartment. Not that it mattered, because the method—inexcusably old-fashioned, outdated, even juvenile—was used but once or twice a year and always by someone like Carmingler whose inbred distrust of technological innovations caused him to choose kitchen matches over a butane lighter, a bicycle (whenever possible) over a car, and even a knife over a revolver. You couldn’t pay Carmingler enough to travel by subway.

  By then I had spent ten years in Hong Kong as managing director of an American-owned life insurance company called Minneapolis Mutual. During that time I had personally sold three policies, all straight life. I was running six agents, supposedly insurance salesmen, who worked the Southeast Asian territory. They were fortunate that they didn’t have to live on their commissions because their combined efforts over the decade had brought the total number of Minneapolis Mutual policies sold up to an even dozen.

  Two of my own three sales, each with a face value of $100,000, had been bought six years previously by a Ford dealer and his wife from Mobile who were on a world tour and suffering from twin cases of diarrhea which proved uncomfortable enough to convince them that they would never see the heart of Dixie again. Arriving in Hong Kong by ship, and determined to complet
e their tour, they had looked up insurance companies and gratefully spotted Minneapolis Mutual which was, after all, American, even if its headquarters in the States were located a little far up north. Nobody had anticipated drop-in business when they had plunked me into the managing directorship and I still knew next to nothing about insurance. So when the American couple descended on me, checkbook in hand, I had to call in my secretary (not Joyce Jungroth; I had a different one then) who at least knew something about the drill, where the forms were anyway, and she wrote up the policies and dispatched the couple to a doctor, as much for their diarrhea as for the mandatory physicals.

  It was the only drop-in business that Minneapolis Mutual’s tenth-floor island office on Pedder Street ever got, but it bothered me enough to take out $10,000 worth of straight life on myself that afternoon. I even wrote it up under the amused tutelage of my secretary. But since no one ever came around again, other than the odd office-supply salesman, I let the policy expire after a couple of years.

  About the only thing I ever did learn about selling life insurance was that Southeast Asia is a rotten territory.

  After Joyce Jungroth left, the copy of Bartlett’s clutched to her under-inflated bosom, I leaned back in my chair, the one with the moulded back that was supposed to correct posture, and pondered the instructions from Las Vegas.

  For six months I had been trying to convince a plump, fiftyish Chinese agent that he should double. It had been an odd courtship and for my efforts I had been treated to long recitals of random quotations from Chairman Mao. Nevertheless, Li Teh kept all of the appointments. When he finally ran down, I would murmur something inane such as, “How true,” and drop two hundred-dollar bills on the floor or deck or even desk, adding: “Think about it, won’t you?” Li always took the money.

  I learned eventually that Li Teh had been barely thirty years old when he had entered Hong Kong in late September of 1949, virtually indistinguishable from the swarmy horde of Chinese who sought sanctuary in the colony after Chiang Kai-shek boarded the C-47 called Meiling, in honor of his redoubtable wife, and skipped to Formosa, remembering to pack along the $200 million (U.S.) gold reserves of the Central Bank of China.

  The thing that did distinguish Li Teh from his fellow pai hua, or refugees, was capital, a goodly amount in American dollars that Mao’s forces had stripped from a money belt found on the dead body of one of the more corrupt members of the Generalissimo’s personal staff. It was enough to allow Li to open a camera shop in Kowloon on Nathan Road with a franchise from an East German manufacturer who before World War II had been famous for the quality of the firm’s lenses. The shop prospered and Li opened another one on Kimberly Road a few years later, this time specializing in Canons and Nikons from Japan.

  From there it was only a short step to Swiss watches (I’d bought one from him), transistor tape recorders, miniature television sets, and transistor radios—anything that hard currency tourists could tote along with them. Had it been his own capital, Li would have been a rich man by the time he was fifty, but his profits were either plowed back into his burgeoning businesses or funneled to Peking where his backers found ready use for the dollars and pounds and francs and marks.

  I always thought that Li was a better businessman than he was a spy, although he was that too, dealing in information of all kinds, stealing it when he could, buying it when he couldn’t. Once a month he journeyed by train to Peking, a long, hard, uncomfortable trip, bearing a suitcase jammed with as much cash as the profits from his various enterprises would permit. It would have been simpler and more efficient, of course, to have deposited the funds in the Bank of China, but Li also carried along whatever information he had been able to pick up or scrounge and although it was, I understand, welcomed in Peking, it was not met with the same degree of warmth that greeted the hard currency.

  Li was a communist and, I suppose, a good one. He once told me that it had all begun in 1938 when as a student he had managed to escape from a Nationalist Army press gang that had roped him to eleven other students. He made his way to Yenan in North China where Mao had located his provisional command post or field headquarters. Although still a teenager, Li was obviously bright and, for China, well educated. He had been allowed to live in one of the clean whitewashed caves that was the home of a senior officer who assumed responsibility for Li’s military training, party indoctrination, morality, and introduction to espionage techniques and practices. The officer was of middling rank in the communists’ intelligence apparatus and as the officer rose, so did Li Teh, until 1949 when they dispatched him to Hong Kong, his even then widening girth encircled by a money belt stuffed with American dollars.

  As one of Hong Kong’s fairly prominent businessmen, Li had half-convinced his Peking superiors that he should live up to his reputation. They had given him what must have been grudging, reluctant permission, and he drove a Porsche, which he loved, dwelt as a widower in an elegant apartment building not too far from the Bank of China and the Cricket Club, and entertained frequently with a certain amount of grace and even style. He was a member of the Hong Kong Chamber of Commerce, three civic organizations, and one private Chinese club that offered a quite excellent bill of fare. Li did all this with the approval if not the good grace of his superiors, whose tolerance of the high life ran out on the last day of each month when they scrutinized his books to make sure that he wasn’t left with a dime that he could call his own.

  So Li Teh lived a little too well and as a consequence he was broke. Worse, he was in debt, and moneylenders in Hong Kong are even less forgiving than their loan-sharking colleagues in the States. So I corrupted Li Teh with money. It was what I was paid to do and it was what I knew best. In some circles they even said I was very good at it.

  Our last meeting was held in a temporarily vacant godown and we followed the usual script except that Li cut his lecture short by almost six minutes, and even what he did say was delivered in a mechanical, totally uninspired manner. When he was through, he was silent for several long moments. I waited. Finally, in a voice so low that I could scarcely hear it, he said: “Your best price?”

  “You name it.”

  He decided on a moon shot. “Three thousand dollars a month.”

  I tried to counter. “Hong Kong, of course.”

  “American.”

  We were sitting on a couple of empty packing cases. Li Teh leaned back and folded his arms over his bulging belly, which was smoothly cased in a dark green sharkskin suit that must have cost about one hundred and fifty (U.S.) dollars which, in Hong Kong, is a steep price for a suit, even a tailored one. His eyes were half-closed and he sat there, rocking a little, a fat, unlaughing communist Buddha, content in the certainty that he had just set a price which the buyer couldn’t possibly afford to turn down. It was an example of supply and demand at its best. Or worst.

  “All right,” I said. “You’ve got it—if it’s worth it.”

  “It will be.”

  “What?”

  “Verbal reports twice each month. Nothing in writing.”

  “Whose?”

  “My own.”

  “And if they’re worthless?”

  He smiled pleasantly. “Then, Mr. Dye, I seriously doubt that you will pay.”

  I smiled back. “You’ve come to know me well.”

  “Yes, I have, haven’t I?”

  “When do you plan to return?” I said.

  “To Peking?”

  “Yes.”

  “Two weeks from now.”

  “Good,” I said. “That’ll give me a chance to obtain clearance.”

  That troubled Li. To prove it, he arched his eyebrows. “You do not yet have clearance?”

  “I never anticipate good news so I didn’t ask for it.”

  “And bad news?” Li said.

  “I never anticipate that either.”

  “Then you must surely live a rather bland existence, Mr. Dye.”

  I nodded and produced two one hundred-dollar bills and laid
them carefully on the packing case which Li was using as a perch. Never once had I handed money to him directly. He ignored the bills.

  “In our business, Mr. Li,” I said, “a bland existence is sometimes desperately sought.”

  CHAPTER 3

  The jewelry store that I found was near Taylor and Bush Streets, about three blocks from the hotel. It was a small shop, and when I tried the door, I found it locked. Inside, I could see a clerk, or perhaps the owner, hurrying toward the door. He unlocked it quickly. The man in the brown suit had stopped three or four doors down, where he made a careful inspection of some hernia trusses and artificial legs that an orthopedic shop had on display.

  “I keep it locked now,” said the man who opened the door. “I’ve been robbed three times in the last six months, so I keep it locked now.”

  “You probably discourage more customers than you do thieves,” I said.

  “Who cares?” he said. “I’m going bankrupt anyhow. If the punks don’t ruin me, the insurance rates will. You know, I remember when this used to be a fairly honest town. Now take a look at it.”

  He was a thin, short man of about fifty who wore thick-lensed, heavily framed glasses that made his brown eyes pop a little. He looked worn and used up. His thin mouth was an almost lipless, bitter line and his nose kept sniffing as though he could smell his impending economic doom.

  “I’d like to see a watch,” I said.

  “Any special kind?”

  “I want an Omega Seamaster, stainless steel, the kind with the calendar thing on it.”

  “It’s a good watch,” the man said because he had to say something and he probably felt that there was no sense in wasting salesmanship on someone who had already made up his mind. He darted behind a counter and handed me a watch. It was exactly like the one they had taken from me in the prison, except that this one had a leather strap.

  “Do you have one with an expansion bracelet?” I said.

  “No, they all come with the strap, but we can put an expansion on for you in a jiffy.”