Breakfast arrived and I ate the eggs and toast and drank coffee out in the living room while I watched the New York market wrap on CNBC. When it was over, I shut off the television, poured the rest of the coffee out of the pot, and unfolded the copy of the South China Morning Post that had been left outside my door. I read for a while and was wishing I had some fresh coffee when, at exactly nine o’clock, the suite’s doorbell rang. I folded up the paper and opened the door.
“I’m Gerald Brady, Professor Shepherd. Welcome to Macau.”
“Call me Jack, huh? I haven’t been Professor Shepherd for quite a while.”
We shook hands and Brady nodded slowly. Something close to a smile slid over his face and was gone. I was left with no doubt Brady knew the story of my hasty and slightly undignified exit from the academic life. At least now I wouldn’t have to tell it myself.
“I’m a vice president of MGM Macau, Jack. I’m in charge of security for the company.”
I guess that explained why I had such a nice suite.
When I stepped back and invited Brady in, a room service waiter wheeling a cart followed closely behind him. The cart was covered with a crisp white tablecloth and held a silver urn, a silver tray with a cream and sugar service, and two cups. The cups rattled against their saucers as the waiter pushed the cart across to the two love seats upholstered in dark green velvet that faced each other across a large glass coffee table.
“I hope you don’t mind,” Brady said. “I had some coffee brought up.”
“I never mind coffee.”
Brady and I sat opposite each other on the two love seats while the waiter fussed about, drawing us coffee from the urn. I examined my prospective client while the waiter worked. He was wearing an obviously expensive grey suit with just a bit too much sheen to it, an expensive gold watch that was just a bit too chunky, and an expensive haircut that was just a bit too perfect. Brady’s face also had that curious perma-tanned look everyone associated with Las Vegas and Hollywood. I had always wondered why chemically induced tans inevitably come out as an odd shade of color never seen in nature. How hard can it be for a nation that has sent men to the moon to come up with a cream that turns people’s skin brown instead of orange?
After the waiter finished, he bowed slightly toward Brady and slipped out without hanging around for somebody to produce a tip. It was obviously good to be vice-president.
I took a sip of coffee. It was a lot better than the room service coffee I’d had for breakfast. Maybe the executives at the MGM got classier coffee than the guests.
“Is this a corporate matter?” I asked to get the ball rolling. “Your email left me with the impression that it was personal.”
“I don’t like to be too specific in emails. You never know who’s reading them, do you?”
I thought I knew who was reading my emails and, hysterical claims aside about how NSA is watching us all, I was pretty sure it was the people to whom I sent them. But then I wasn’t running security for a major casino in Macau. Maybe that was a whole different deal.
So I nodded, drank some more coffee, and waited. When in doubt, I have always believed, drink more coffee. And wait.
“YOU COME WELL RECOMMENDED, Jack.”
“By who?” Or was it whom?
“He asked me not to mention his name.”
Okay, I thought, at least that narrows it down a little. Brady said ‘he’, so both of my ex-wives were out as the source of my testimonial. Not that I was hugely surprised by that.
“Why did he tell you not to mention his name?”
“I don’t know. You’ll have to ask him that.”
“Which is hard to do if I don’t know who to ask, don’t you think?”
Brady gave a tiny nod that appeared to concede the point, but he said nothing else.
I thought about that for a moment. Then I put my coffee cup down, leaned back on the love seat, and laced my fingers together behind my head.
“Okay, Mr. Brady. I’m listening. Why am I here this morning?”
BRADY RAMBLED ON FOR at least ten minutes while I listened and drank coffee. I didn’t really mind because it was good coffee, but the story Brady told was pretty simple and needn’t have taken nearly that long.
The casino at the MGM Macau had recently experienced an unusual spike in its drop, the gambling industry term for the total amount of money the punters throw on its tables and push into its slots every day. I nearly went to sleep while Brady explained how they recognized the spike was unusual and not merely a matter of business getting better. I was willing to assume Brady, since he was head of security, recognized unusual when he saw it. I didn’t really need for him to persuade me.
The bottom line was that Brady suspected the MGM casino was being used for large-scale money laundering. Only he didn’t know quite how or, naturally, by whom.
“I understand, Jack, you’re pretty good at getting to the bottom of things like this.”
I was, so I didn’t say anything. I think modesty is tedious, and false modesty is downright obnoxious.
“We want you to find out what’s going on. If we’re being used to launder money, we want you to find out who’s using us and what the source of the funds is.”
“That’s all you want?”
“That’s all.”
Brady didn’t seem to realize I was joking, and I didn’t bother to tell him that I was. When you have to explain irony, it’s no longer particularly ironic, is it?
“Do you have any suspicions?” I asked instead.
“Of course. We always have suspicions.”
I said nothing and, after a moment, exactly like I knew he would, Brady told me exactly what those suspicions were.
“The triads aren’t as powerful in Macau as they once were,” he said. “But they’re still very much here.”
“So you think this is triad money?”
“It’s certainly a possibility that has to be considered.”
I gave him a look.
He cleared his throat.
“I guess it’s a fairly strong possibility,” he murmured.
MOST WESTERNERS THINK OF the Chinese triads, if they think of them at all, as something out of a Bruce Lee movie. Just a bunch of crazy Chinese guys, mostly fictional, and even a little comic. The truth is that there’s nothing fictional about the Chinese triads. And absolutely nothing about them that is even slightly comic.
The triads have been established in Macau for at least four hundred years. The Sun Lee On, the Dai Huen Jai, the 14K, and the United Bamboo are the biggest players, but there are others, too. They’re all involved in drug trafficking, extortion, kidnapping, loansharking, smuggling, gambling, prostitution, and most every other form of criminal activity that anyone has been able to think of.
Officials in Macau routinely deny that the triads are active there, but nobody even pretends to believe them. Macau is the biggest gambling city on earth. It floats on an ocean of cash. Get serious.
In the 1990’s, Macau was a sanctuary for gangsters, gunrunners, pimps, corrupt officials, and spies of almost every nationality. It was a mixture of Chicago in the 20’s, Shanghai in the 30’s, and Casablanca in the 40’s. The Chinese triads controlled the streets, and everybody else kept their heads down. Most locals were smart enough not to go out after dark.
Then, on December 20, 1999, the first day of Chinese sovereignty over Macau, heavily armed convoys of PLA troops rumbled over the border in trucks and armored personnel carriers. They were greeted with cheers by thousands of Macanese. The message was clear: the Portuguese had been hopelessly inept in dealing with the violence and lawlessness in Macau, but the Chinese would impose order because order was good for business.
I thought back to what my bobble-headed friend had said the night before when we were sharing the shelter of that Rolls Royce. He said that the Chinese hadn’t stopped the triads at all. They had just stopped people from talking about them.
“SO YOU WANT ME to investigate the triads,” I said to Brady.
> “I didn’t actually mean—”
“You said you wanted me to get to the bottom of a spike in your drop, you think is money being laundered through your casino, and you think it is triad money.”
“We want you to find out the source of the spike in funds, Jack. Perhaps it’s triad money, perhaps it’s not.”
“You know it’s triad money, Mr. Brady. In Macau, what else could it be?”
Brady looked down at his shoes, which pretty much answered my question.
“There’s no way I’m going to get involved with the triads,” I said. “I was outside the Wynn last night when somebody plinked a few shots in my direction, apparently for grins. I’d hate for them to be serious about it next time.”
“We’re not asking you to get involved with the triads, just to—”
“You’re asking me to finger the triads for washing dirty money through the MGM casino and to find a way to stop them from doing it anymore. How is that not involved?”
Brady looked away. He didn’t say anything.
“Forget it,” I said. “I’m not your guy.”
“Will you talk to someone else before you make your final decision?”
“That is my final decision. I’m not going to change my mind.”
“We paid you a substantial retainer for this meeting, Jack. It seems only fair to ask you to give us just a little more time. If you don’t want the job at the end of the day, we certainly can’t make you take it.”
I had to admit that was a reasonable point of view. I could always give Brady his ten grand back and go home to Hong Kong, of course, but the idea of returning money I had already been paid wasn’t very appealing. The other possibility was that I could stick around a little longer and listen to somebody else try to persuade me to investigate the triads in Macau.
One way, I was out a fair amount of dough. The other way, I would have a few laughs.
“Who do you want me to talk to?” I asked.
I COULDN’T HELP BUT smile when Brady told me, although I tried not to be obvious about it. I knew who Pansy Ho was, of course. Anybody who read the business papers in Hong Kong knew who Pansy Ho was.
Pansy was a daughter of Stanley Ho Hung Sun, one of fifteen or twenty children the old man was willing to admit to, and she had become quite successful in her own right as MGM’s local partner in Macau. Recently she had been keeping a low profile. Some of the gambling regulators in the US had begun pressing MGM Mirage to explain their involvement with Pansy in connection with MGM’s licenses in New Jersey, Nevada, Maryland, and other places in the United States. It wasn’t really Pansy who was making American gambling regulators nervous. It was her father.
Stanley Ho was at least ninety now and he had never been charged with any crime in Macau or anyplace else, but the stories about his supposed triad connections wouldn’t die. Ho and his companies held an absolute monopoly over all the gambling in Macau for nearly two generations, and he still controlled a couple of dozen major casinos as well as Macau’s whole transportation infrastructure. How could that be possible, people wouldn’t stop asking, without, at the very least, Ho making a few deals with the triads along the way?
American gambling regulators are particularly sensitive to anything that smacks of organized crime, even if the crime is Chinese, half a world away, and not actually all that well organized.
So Brady wanted me to meet Pansy Ho and talk to her about investigating the triads, huh?
That was worth hanging around for.
FOUR
BRADY AND I WENT down to the third floor and were shown straight in to Pansy Ho’s office, which caused me to feel uncommonly important. I was pretty sure that was the whole idea.
I was a little surprised to see that Pansy’s digs were on the modest side. I suppose I expected something more Las Vegas, but what I found was an average-sized room that looked out on the Wynn Macau right next door. There was an antique wooden desk on one side and four wingback chairs upholstered in a bright red print sat around a mahogany coffee table on the other. Steve Wynn’s driver probably had a fancier office.
“Professor Shepherd,” Pansy said, coming around her desk and offering her hand. “Thank you for making time to see me.”
They weren’t going to quit with the professor stuff, were they?
“It’s just Jack,” I said.
While we were shaking hands I tried to look Pansy over without being too obvious about it. I could remember when men looked at women without risking indignation or a lawsuit, but that was a long time ago. These days, frank appraisal can get you in trouble. My guess was that Pansy was accustomed to appraising looks and wouldn’t mind, but I was about to tell her to shove her job offer so I figured a bit of caution was probably in order.
Pansy was a petite, good-looking woman who wore her jet-black hair in a neat, no-nonsense bob. On her left wrist was what looked like a Cartier tank watch with a brown alligator strap, and on her right were three tortoiseshell bangles that click-clacked together when she moved. I remembered reading somewhere that Pansy was over fifty, but I would never have guessed it. In her crisp white blouse, knee-length Dolce & Gabbana tweed skirt, and gold spike heels, somewhere around forty was far more believable.
“I’m told you had a very distinguished academic career, Jack. Your expertise in banking and money laundering seems to be internationally respected.”
“Who told you that?”
I saw Pansy’s eyes flick to Brady, who remained expressionless. It was obvious that she didn’t want to come up with a name, or couldn’t come up with one so, being a gentleman, I took her off the hook.
“I taught international business at a university in Bangkok for a couple of years, that’s true, but I’m not sure you could call my academic career distinguished. I got fired because the university didn’t like the kind of people I hung out with.”
The welcoming smile on Pansy’s face never wavered.
“What kind of people were those?” she asked carefully.
“I represented Plato Karsarkis. He wanted me to get him a presidential pardon so he could go back to the United States. The university didn’t particularly want to be connected with a notorious international fugitive,” I shrugged, “so they sacked me.”
Pansy nodded slowly and studied a spot on her desk that didn’t seem to me to be all that interesting.
“Did you think Plato Karsarkis was guilty?” she asked after a moment, her eyes still on her desk.
It sounded as if this was going to turn into one of those ‘how-can-you-represent-a-man-like-that’ conversations. I hated conversations like that.
“To get a pardon you have to admit you’re guilty,” I said.
“Or at least you have to be convicted.”
“As he was,” I nodded.
“But do you think he was really guilty?”
I smiled. “You don’t really expect me to answer that, do you?”
Pansy smiled right back, and it was a very nice smile indeed. Warm and ironic at the same time.
“Let’s sit down,” she said, gesturing toward one of the wingback chairs. “Shall we?”
THE THREE OF US made small talk about Macau while an assistant fussed around with another coffee service. I guess that’s one of the advantages of being in the hotel business. You got all the coffee you can drink. When the assistant finally left and closed the door, Brady got straight to the point.
“Jack says he’s not interested in our proposition,” he told Pansy.
“I never heard your proposition,” I corrected him. “We didn’t get that far. What I said was that I wasn’t interested in taking a job investigating the triads.”
“I didn’t ask you to investigate the triads.”
“You asked me to locate the source of money laundering activity that you admitted might be triad related. It’s the same thing. Any white guy who accepted a job like that in Macau would have to be out of his mind.”
Pansy made little patting gestures in the air with her h
ands. And very nice hands they were, I couldn’t help but notice. Her fingers were slim and tapered, and her nails were carefully manicured and finished in a deep red polish, a shade that fell about halfway on the scale between librarian and party girl.
“I think we’re getting ahead of ourselves here, Professor Shepherd.”
“It’s Jack,” I reminded her.
“Yes, okay, Jack. I understand you’ve been very successful in tracing funds for all sorts of people, including agencies of the US government. You’ve come highly recommended to us as an expert in international money laundering. All we want you—”
“Recommended by who?” I interrupted. “Or is it by whom?”
Pansy looked confused. “What?”
“You said I came highly recommended. I want you to tell me who highly recommended me.”
Pansy looked distinctly uncomfortable, although I couldn’t see why. It seemed to me to be a simple enough question, so that’s what I said: “It’s a simple enough question.”
“Yes, I see that. But I can’t tell you.”
“You can’t tell me who recommended me?”
“No.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“I can well understand how you might come to that conclusion, but he asked me not to use his name.”
Still not one of my ex-wives, then.
“Why not?”
“You’ll have to ask—”
“Never mind,” I interrupted. “I’ve already had that conversation with Brady.”
Pansy and Brady once again exchanged a look. This time I didn’t even try to guess what it meant.
“PLEASE, JACK,” PANSY SAID, “would you at least hear me out here?”
I nodded and she leaned toward me with an earnest expression on her face. I was sort of hoping she would stare deep into my eyes and place a hand on my thigh, but her eyes focused somewhere above my head and her hand stopped on my arm. I was left disappointed all around, but I nodded again anyway. It seemed to be the polite thing to do.
“I’m sure you’ve heard the stories about Dr. Ho,” she said.
Dr. Ho? Not ‘Dad’ or ‘my father’?
What Pansy chose to call her old man was none of my business, of course, but it did seem curious. And what was Ho a doctor of, anyway? I tried to imagine someone referring to Steve Wynn as Dr. Wynn and almost burst out laughing.
THE KING OF MACAU (The Jack Shepherd International Crime Novels) Page 2