I said only that an excessive number of $50 bills and €100 notes were coming into the casino, and I asked Brady to arrange to collect security camera pictures of everyone who used more than twenty bills of either denomination to buy casino chips anytime within the next week. I was guessing that a week’s worth of pictures would collate into not many more than a dozen different faces, and then I would know for certain that MGM was being smurfed.
What I didn’t tell Brady was that nothing about that made much sense, even if it turned out to be true. Why would anyone bother doing what it certainly appeared they were doing at the MGM?
The point of smurfing is to convert dirty cash into clean bank deposits. No matter how compliant a bank might be, the time had long passed when you could wheel a couple of million dollars of currency into a bank and deposit it in an account without the bank asking exactly who you are and you giving them a damn good explanation of where all that currency came from. If this really was a smurfing operation, all that was being accomplished was to convert stacks of $50 bills and €100 notes into stacks of Hong Kong dollars. It was still cash and the smurfs still had to deposit the cash somewhere to get it into the banking system. Why not just deposit the $50 bills and the €100 notes in the first place? Why do all the work of running the money through the casino and still end up holding cash?
There was something else, too.
Why was all the currency that was being laundered solely in $50 bills and €100 notes? That didn’t make sense either. If the triads were moving drug, prostitution, and extortion money into the banking system, it wouldn’t all come in two neat denominations. It would be in all sorts of denominations and in all sorts of currencies. And if it originated from the triad’s activities in Hong Kong and Macau, a good chunk of it would be in Hong Kong dollars already, not in euros and US dollars.
Whatever the reason, somebody was still doing it. There was no doubt about the appearance of all those extra $50 bills and €100 notes in the cashiers’ cages of the MGM casino on a regular schedule. And it sure as hell wasn’t being teleported in. It had to be coming in through a smurfing operation. It had to be. But yet…
Something was all fucked up here.
The only thing I could think of to do was to wait until Brady had collected the security camera pictures and see what was on them. Maybe that would solve the mystery. Might turn out to be simple as that.
But probably not.
UNTIL BRADY HAD A week’s worth of security camera pictures, there wasn’t much more I could do. So when I left Brady’s office I went back up to the suite and got my stuff together to go to Hong Kong.
If MGM really was being smurfed, perhaps I could get Pete to find me enough manpower to mount a surveillance operation on some of the smurfs until we figured out who they were working for. If MGM wasn’t being smurfed…well, I guess it would be back to the drawing board, wouldn’t it? All those $50 bills and €100 notes had to be coming from somewhere. It wasn’t a coincidence they were turning up so consistently in such numbers. And if they weren’t being smurfed, there was another reason that was happening and I would have to figure out what it was.
I started to toss my cell phone into my briefcase, but on a whim I dialed Pansy’s office and asked to speak to her. She was out, so I left a message that I was going back to Hong Kong until Brady had collected some more data I needed and that I would return to Macau in a week or so. I told Pansy’s secretary to let her know that she could reach me in Hong Kong if she wanted me. I thought that had a nicely ambiguous ring to it.
TWENTY MINUTES LATER I was at the Macau Ferry Terminal and ten minutes after that I was through the immigration check and sitting in a Super Class seat on the top deck of one of the hourly jetfoils that runs back and forth between Macau and Hong Kong. The cabin was nearly empty. There were no more than half a dozen people scattered around in something like a hundred seats that looked and felt like economy class seats in an old and out-of-date airplane flown by a not very prosperous airline. I closed my eyes and listened to the shouts of the Chinese sailors as they cast off the mooring lines
The jetfoil moved smoothly down the Macau channel, out between the two thin rock jetties marking its edges, and passed under the high bridge called Ponte de Amizade that connects the eastern end of the mainland with Taipa. When we cleared the bridge and reached the open ocean, the pilot revved the engines and we rose up on the hydrofoils and skimmed rapidly east over the surface of the South China Sea.
It was a windy morning and the swells in the Pearl River estuary were unusually heavy. The rhythmic porpoising motion of the vessel rising up the faces of the waves and sliding down into the troughs left me with only two alternatives. I could get sick and make a grab for one of the seasick bags the jetfoil company had conveniently placed on each seat, or I could go to sleep.
I decided to go to sleep.
THIRTEEN
I LIVE ALONE IN an apartment in a Hong Kong neighborhood called the Mid-Levels that is roughly halfway up Victoria Peak above the streets of the financial district, streets that are packed day and night with people making money.
It isn’t actually my apartment. It belongs to a guy I knew in law school and he’s letting me live there for a while. On not much more than a whim, one I have always suspected was almost certainly powered by substantial amounts of alcohol, one day he abruptly resigned from his firm, bought a thirty-eight foot ketch, and sailed out of Hong Kong harbor in the general direction of Bali saying he intended to have some adventures while he was still young enough to enjoy them.
I was in a bad way right then – I had just been fired by the university where I was teaching and Anita, my wife, had decided she would rather live with someone else – so I asked my law school friend if I could use his apartment until he got back. He said sure, and I haven’t heard from him in six months.
It’s a nice apartment, and I’m happy to be living in it. There’s only one real problem. It’s not really home. To be completely honest, I’m not even sure I understand what home is supposed to feel like anymore. My life has been in such upheaval the last couple of years that I’ve become untethered from the whole concept of home. It doesn’t seem quite right to say that somehow, but I am.
From time to time a line from Robert Frost drifts through my mind. Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. If that really is the definition, I figure I’m pretty much screwed. I’m homeless. Simple as that. It’s time for me to buy a shopping cart and be done with it.
What I like most about my borrowed apartment is that the Mid-Levels escalator is just outside the building. Back in the 1990s, in a highly imaginative but ultimately unsuccessful effort to ease Hong Kong’s chronic traffic congestion, the city built a half-mile long outdoor escalator running downhill from the Mid-Levels, cutting through the center of SoHo, and ending near the harbor in the financial district everyone calls Central. The thing isn’t actually a single long escalator, but rather a ladder of about twenty escalators tied together by glass-roofed walkways and moving belts. In the mornings the whole Rube Goldberg contraption runs downhill and, later in the day, it reverses and runs uphill for the rest of the day.
For me, the Mid-Levels escalator is like an amusement park ride through the mayhem of Hong Kong. Instead of shouldering my way through the dense crowds packed into Hong Kong’s steaming streets, I can stand quietly while I am transported slowly downhill into the heart of the city. I love it. I even love smelling Hong Kong as I ride: that peculiar mix of carbon monoxide, sewer gas, rotting food, and stagnant water that is like nowhere else on earth.
I like the Mid-Levels escalator so much that I rented a small office in SoHo about halfway down the hill from my borrowed apartment. It’s a stylish neighborhood, but my office is pretty utilitarian. A single, average-sized room on the second floor of an old shophouse above a noodle shop. It doesn’t have much to recommend it, except for one thing really. The Mid-Levels escalator runs almost to its front door. I can com
mute to work by escalator. How cool is that?
WHEN I HEADED DOWNHILL the next morning, the sky was a drab grey, and so was everything else. I got off the escalator at Hollywood Road and went into a Pacific Coffee Company where I got the biggest to-go coffee they would sell me and a couple of Danish pastries, and after that I walked the fifty yards or so to my office. The skies opened as I reached the door. I ducked inside one step ahead of the rain and climbed the two flights of narrow wooden steps to the second floor.
I worked alone just as I lived alone. I had thought about hiring a secretary once. It would have been handy to have someone to do a little filing and bookkeeping every now and then, but I had to admit honestly that it would have been more for the company than anything else. Whatever my motivation, it hadn’t happened. Somehow I never got around to it.
My office is in a shophouse as old as anything in Hong Kong is allowed to get. The interior walls are brick with some kind of white glaze over them and they glistened like porcelain even now, generations after the work had been done. On the north side of the room three tall windows look down into Gage Street, a narrow roadway below Hollywood Road that is so overhung with Chinese-language signs dangling from long metal poles that I can barely see it.
Half the buildings on Gage Street are covered in bamboo construction scaffolding, but probably half the buildings in Hong Kong are covered in bamboo construction scaffolding. It’s a city where buildings are always being pulled down and rebuilt. A building is hardly finished before it’s torn down again and something bigger built in its place. I had no idea how my little shophouse had survived the onslaught, but I was happy it had.
My principle workplace is a long wooden library table I found in a used furniture store. It sits perpendicular to the windows so I won’t be too distracted by the chaos outside. The wall behind my table is jammed with five-drawer horizontal filing cabinets that have locking bars welded to their fronts and formidable padlocks dangling from each of their hasps. On the wall to the right, a line of tall bookcases is half-filled with out-of-date legal journals and the items that men accumulate when they are left to their own devices. A green gym bag, a broken coffee maker, a coffee maker that sometimes works, a half dozen ceramic coffee mugs, an unopened bag of potato chips, some magazines, a burl-wood cigar humidor, a couple of ashtrays decorated with beer logos, boxes of matches, and stacks of old copies of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times.
The wall in front of me, the one on which my eyes rest whenever I lift them from whatever I am doing at my big table, has nothing on it except for a single very large oil painting. It is square, about five feet on each side, and doesn’t actually depict any form that I can put a name to. It is simply a riot of primary colors splashed over the canvas in a way that seems at a glance to be entirely random, but on closer inspection is as intricately woven as English tweed. It is the only one of Anita’s paintings I still have. She took all the others when she left, but she had given me this one for my birthday so it was mine and I had insisted on keeping it. I had brought it with me from Bangkok and hung it in my new office, but almost immediately I realized that really hadn’t been such a good idea. Regardless, I had never gotten around to taking it down, and so it was still there.
I COLLECTED THE MAIL that had been pushed through the slot in the door while I was away and dumped it on one end of my worktable without even glancing at it. Nothing important ever came in the mail anymore. I couldn’t even remember the last time I had gotten a real letter.
I drank some coffee and read the online edition of the New York Times for a while, then caught up with my email while I ate the two Danish and finished the coffee. After that, I wiped my hands on a napkin and got to work.
For the next hour I wrote case-status reports and looked through my pending matters to make certain nothing required urgent attention. When I was done with the routine stuff, I turned my attention to Raymond’s pal, Freddy. I logged into LexisNexis and poked around a little to see what I could learn about the legal concept of seeking political asylum in the United States. I knew less than nothing about American immigration law, and I hardly had any idea where to begin.
I was far from certain I would ever hear from Freddy again, but if I was going to spend a week or two in Macau running down the source of MGM’s unexplained money flows for Pansy Ho, I sure as heck would be eating at Henri’s a few times and Raymond was going to ask me what was going on with Freddy. It would be nice to have something halfway intelligent to say to him. Raymond always took good care of me, and a friend was a friend, always.
Besides, what if this guy did turn out to be some big time North Korean spy and I was being presented with a chance to reel him in? The idea of it was entirely too romantic to be believed, but I supposed it was at least possible. Freddy hadn’t seemed like a nut case, and he had come with Raymond’s endorsement. That had to mean something.
And then there was that stuff Freddy had tossed out about the North Koreans announcing soon that they had shot an American spy. I guess he thought that would scratch my curiosity enough to get my attention, but suppose it actually happened? What would it prove?
Okay, so it did seem unlikely that Freddy could know something like that unless he had connections in North Korea, that is if the whole story wasn’t a steaming pile of horse manure. But even if it turned out to be entirely true, that still didn’t mean that Freddy was a particularly important guy in North Korea, did it? Maybe he just knew somebody who was important there.
After an hour of reading immigration law and case reports, I was a little wiser, but not much. Apparently the concept of political asylum only applies to people who are physically present on US soil. You can’t go down to an American embassy or consulate somewhere and apply for political asylum. You are required to make your claim when you arrive at a port of entry into the United States and then you have one year to file a formal application for asylum. After that, you receive a hearing from an immigration judge and your application is either granted or denied.
There’s the catch, right there…
If your application is denied, you are immediately deported. And depending on where you’re deported to, the consequences of deportation could be fatal.
I wondered if there was a way to avoid that risk in this case? If Freddy actually turned out to be a good catch, I supposed I could pitch him to the CIA, but my track record with the CIA really wasn’t all that good. To tell the truth, it was terrible. I wouldn’t be surprised if I was on an enemies list over at Langley, and I had no doubt at all that they had an enemies list over at Langley.
The FBI? The FBI didn’t have anything to do with granting political asylum in the United States, of course, but Pete was leaning on me to do this job for Pansy Ho. Perhaps I could hold out on Pete and refuse to tell him anything about what I found unless he did me a favor in return.
I realized, of course, that I was getting way ahead of myself. Okay, I was curious about Freddy. Anybody would have been. But my curiosity had gotten me into trouble too many times before and I had learned to control it.
At least I did most of the time. And I was damn well going to control it this time.
FOURTEEN
THE NEXT MORNING I spotted Pete Logan waiting for me the moment I stepped off the Mid-Levels escalator. He was about fifty yards up Hollywood Road, leaning on the wall in front of my office and playing with his phone.
Fleeing was a possibility, of course, but I hadn’t yet had enough coffee to manage a decent flee so I kept walking. When I got to where Pete was waiting for me, I gave him the hardest stare I could manage before breakfast.
“How did you know I was back in Hong Kong?”
Pete smiled.
“And even if you knew I was in Hong Kong, how did you know I was coming to the office this morning?”
“Look, Jack, I’m the fucking FBI,” he grinned. “You got no place to hide. We see all and know all.”
“And tell all.”
&nbs
p; “That hurt. That really hurt.”
“Tough shit. Coffee?”
“Sure, why not?”
We walked back down to the Pacific Coffee Company together and stood in line behind two drop-dead gorgeous Chinese girls who couldn’t have been a day over thirty. They were engaged in an animated discussion about price options trends on the Hong Kong commodity exchange.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with young people today,” Pete said.
When we both had firm grips on large take-away cups of black coffee, Pete stopped and took another long look at the two women, now sitting at a table and bending earnestly toward each other as they continued their conversation. He sighed and shook his head.
“How do you talk to women like that, Jack?”
Pete sighed heavily again, and we started walking back to my office.
“SO WHAT’S GOING ON?” Pete asked as soon as we were upstairs.
“I thought the FBI saw all and knew all.”
“Well…sometimes the picture is a little foggier than we’d really like. You want to clear it up for me?”
So I drank my coffee and told Pete about the MGM’s cash management reports and the river of $50 bills and €100 notes flowing through their casino.
“It’s got to be some kind of smurfing deal,” I finished, “but I won’t know for sure until I see a few days’ worth of security pictures. If it is, that puts the triads squarely in the frame, regardless of what you say.”
“It’s not the triads.”
“Get serious, Pete. Who else could organize a big-time smurfing operation in Macau? The girl scouts?”
“It’s not the triads.”
“And this you know exactly how?”
“I just know.”
“What is it you’re not telling me here, Pete?”
THE KING OF MACAU (The Jack Shepherd International Crime Novels) Page 8