THE KING OF MACAU (The Jack Shepherd International Crime Novels)

by Needham, Jake

  The moment Brady got the call, he would call me and give me the location of the cage and repeat the physical description of the smurf his cashier had given him. If we were in a position to pick up the smurf without being spotted, we would try to cover him until he cashed in his chips and follow him back to wherever he was taking the Hong Kong dollars he got for them. If we weren’t in a good position to cover the smurf, we would let him go and wait for the next one.

  See, a deceptively simple plan. Some might say simple-minded.

  The problem, of course, was that when a cashier alerted Brady we had to be in a position in the casino to get to the right cashier’s cage before the smurf took his chips and melted into the crowd. If we weren’t close enough, we would never pick him up. And three white guys could hardly hang around the cashiers’ cages of a casino for twenty-four hours a day without being ridiculously conspicuous in a sea of Chinese faces.

  In other words, we were going to have to get lucky. Very lucky.

  WHEN BRADY AND I were done, I went back to the suite to call Archie and read him in on the plan. After I told him about Pete and where we were meeting at the Venetian at noon, Archie thought about it for a moment. ”What the fuck is a Fat Burger?” he asked.

  “It’s an American hamburger place. They’re all over. They make great burgers, and their onion rings and milkshakes are—”

  “This place is actually called the Fat Burger?” Archie interrupted before I could go all rhapsodic on him.

  “Really. It is.”

  Archie grunted. “That’s way too American for me, mate.”

  “I don’t care. Be there at noon. It’s on the third floor of the Venetian, in the far back corner of the food court. We’ll be the two white guys in the middle of about a million Chinese.”

  “Fat Burger,” Archie muttered again, and hung up.

  I assumed that meant he would be there.

  THIRTY ONE

  THE VENETIAN’S VAST CASINO is located at the center of a ring of indoor canals lined on both sides by enough designer shops to make Fifth Avenue quiver with jealousy. A huge domed ceiling that looks eerily like a real blue sky with puffy white clouds blowing across it rounds off the illusion. The hallucination is real enough to be seriously disorienting until you stop shaking your head and treat it as if it actually makes all the sense in the world.

  Naturally, the Venetian’s canals are all plied day and night by serenading gondoliers in full costume, although the gondolas are actually run by concealed electiric motors and the gondoliers only pretend to row. It’s like almost everything else you see Macau. The real story is always somewhere below the surface.

  The Venetian’s food court is tucked into the back of another, less distinguished wing of shops that branches off from the Grand Canal. It is a considerably less atmospheric area than where the designer shops preen behind their imitation seventeenth century shop fronts. It is actually little more than an enormous open area filled with black Formica tables and white plastic chairs, surrounded on all sides by at least fifty small food stalls. Almost all of the food is Chinese, as are almost all of the customers, and the Fat Burger’s red and yellow neon sign in the far back corner stood out to me like a beacon of hope in a desert of flat noodles.

  I realized right away that Pete’s selection of a meeting place had been shrewd. The food court was packed, the noise was overwhelming, and the crowds were in constant motion. It wasn’t a place for relaxation, it was a place to eat as quickly as possible and get back to the tables or the slots. No one would be paying the slightest attention to three white guys munching quietly on burgers among a mob of hyperactive Chinese gamblers.

  Pete was waiting at a table right in the middle of the whole hubbub, and I made my way toward him through the masses of Chinese carrying red plastic trays piled with odd-looking animal parts. I could only assume the stuff was edible, but I did my best not to think about the suspicious smells in the air. I wondered if most of those Chinese felt the same way about a thick, juicy cheeseburger crammed with lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, and onions.

  When I got to the table, Pete had almost finished his burger and was slurping on what appeared to have once been a vanilla milkshake. I pulled up a plastic chair and said, “I’ve got one more guy coming.”

  Pete raised his eyes to ask the obvious question and I started telling him about Archie.

  “Archie Ward?” Pete interrupted almost immediately. “You know Archie Ward?”

  I stopped talking and nodded. I should have guessed. Archie knew everybody in Asia who mattered and Pete mattered. Of course they would know each other.

  I WENT TO THE counter of the Fat Burger and got myself a cheeseburger and a Diet Coke. By the time I got back to the table, Archie had arrived and he and Pete were yucking it up about something, but they stopped laughing and fell silent as I sat down. Apparently I didn’t have a need to know whatever it was that they thought was so funny. I certainly hoped the object of their levity wasn’t my plan, such as it was.

  Between bites of burger, I gave them the details of what I had in mind. I related the arrangements I had with Gerald Brady to be alerted when one of the cashiers spotted somebody buying chips with an unusual number of $50 bills or €100 notes, and I explained how, with a little luck, we would pick up the smurf and stay with him as long as he was in the casino. We would watch him cash in his chips in for Hong Kong dollars and follow him through Macau back to wherever he was delivering the freshly laundered currency.

  When I finished there was a little silence and I caught Archie and Pete exchanging a glance.

  Pete gave one more pull at the straw in his now empty milkshake glass and asked, “That’s your plan?”

  “Well…yeah.”

  Archie shook his head. “You got two chances, mate. None and Buckley’s.”

  Now I was getting confused. “Who’s Buckley?”

  “Never mind, Jack,” Pete jumped in. “It’s a thing Aussies say. He means you’ve got no chance at all to make that work.”

  I chewed the last of my burger and wiped my mouth with a napkin. ”Okay, smart guys, then tell me what your plan is and we’ll do that.”

  Nobody said anything.

  “Archie? Pete? Anybody?” I shook my head. “No, I didn’t think so. So here’s where I come out. Until you’ve got a better idea, shut the fuck up and do what I tell you to do. Agreed?”

  Still nobody said anything so I decided to take that as agreement.

  “We’ll start at three today,” I said, looking from one to the other. “We’ll spread out through the casino and cover it until midnight. When Brady calls me, I’ll call both of you and give you a description and location. If one of us can get on the smurf before he’s lost in the crowd, the other two can catch up and we’ll set up a surveillance net.”

  “What do we do when he leaves the casino?” Archie asked. ”What are you going to do if the target gets into a car or onto a motorbike? What if he goes to the ferry terminal and catches a helicopter to Hong Kong?”

  I shrugged. “I told you we’ll need a little luck.”

  “A little,” Pete snorted. “Sounds to me like you need a whole shit load of luck.”

  “What if none of the cashiers pick up anybody and Brady doesn’t call?” Archie asked.

  “We’ll do the same thing again tomorrow and, if necessary, the day after that. According to the cash management reports, since this started there’s never been a three day period without money being moved.”

  “Okay, Jacko,” Pete said, “we’ll do this your way. But I sure hope the little fuckers turn up before I lose all my money. There’s no way I’m hanging around a casino for nine hours without playing a little blackjack.”

  Archie made a face. “Do whatever you want, Pete, I’ll be in one of the bars.”

  “Wonderful,” I said, shaking my head. “I’ve only got two guys to pull this off with and one of them is a gambler and the other is a drunk.”

  “Sounds okay,” Archie said.


  “No problem,” Pete said.

  NOTHING HAPPENED THAT NIGHT. I called Archie, twice, to make sure he was still sober, and Pete once to try to keep his mind on my game rather than his, but not a single cashier spotted any unusual quantities of $50 bills or €100 notes.

  I walked around the casino for a while and peered at faces as inconspicuously as possible, but when everyone I saw started looking a little Korean to me and more or less like all the security photos, I gave that up as hopeless.

  The baccarat tables were the most crowded area on the casino floor, of course. The Chinese were crazy for baccarat, and I had always suspected that was because winning at baccarat was the result of pure luck. Skill didn’t come into it at all. Blackjack, on the other hand, actually required at least some minimal knowledge and attention so it wasn’t nearly as popular. The slots were a big draw, too, possibly for the same reason the baccarat tables were. Then there were those purely Chinese table games like Pai Gow, Sic Bo, and Fan Tan. I didn’t understand any them, and I didn’t know a single westerner who did.

  Every time I made a circuit of the casino floor I passed Pete working the blackjack tables and Archie sprawled out on a comfortable looking sofa in the Lion Bar. They both looked like they were having a lot better time than I was so by nine o’clock I gave up my pacing, plopped down on the couch next to Archie, and ordered a Diet Coke.

  “You ready to call it a night?” he asked.

  I shook my head, but before I could say anything my phone rang. I looked at Archie. This could be it…

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, I’m up over $1000 and I figure I ought to quit while I’m ahead,” Pete said.

  Archie raised his eyebrows at me in a question. I shook my head and he went back to sipping his drink.

  “So you want to pack it in?” Pete asked.

  “I said midnight and that’s still more than two hours away.”

  “Yeah, but I’m ahead.”

  “You could always quit playing.”

  “That’s what I’m telling you. I want to quit playing. I’m ready to leave.”

  “You can’t quit playing blackjack unless you leave the casino?”

  Pete didn’t answer me, which was pretty much an answer right there.

  “Oh man,” I said, “I can’t believe I’m stuck with these two clowns.”

  THE AFTERNOON HAD BEEN so quiet on the casino floor that I thought it was unlikely any of the smurfs would hit the place until it was more crowded. That was usually from the early evening on into the early hours of the morning, and so the next night we set up at six, intending to stay through until well after midnight.

  Pete had managed to lose all but about $100 of his winnings back to the house before I finally called things off the night before, and he was more than a little pissed with me about it. He brushed aside my observation that he had been free to stop playing anytime he wanted. Rather he saw it as my personal responsibility that he was about $900 lighter today than he could have been. If I was going to take the blame for his losses, I figured the least Pete could do was give me credit for his winnings, if not actually split them with me, but he didn’t think much of that argument.

  The three of us met in the Lion Bar about six and I bought Pete a beer to smooth things over. Archie had his usual whiskey and I ordered…yes, another Diet Coke. The drinks hadn’t been on our table more than a couple of minutes when my phone rang. Both Archie and Pete’s heads swiveled toward me as I took it out and answered.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s Brady, Jack. The cashiers in position 9 at Cage B just took in $10,000, all in $50 bills. Where are you?”

  “We’re in the Lion Bar. Right under that big chandelier in the middle.”

  “Okay, here’s what you do. Walk straight ahead to the second marble walkway. It’s got big number 8s laid out on it in a mosaic design. Turn left. There will be blackjack tables to your right and Sic Bo tables to your left. Walk all the way to the end of that walkway and to the left you’ll see a line of cashiers’ windows in the back wall. There are numbers over each window designating the cashier positions. I’ll tell number 9 you’re on your way and to stall the smurf as long as possible.”

  “Do you have a description?”

  “Female, mid-thirties, about five foot four, short black hair, wearing jeans and a yellow t-shirt. Large black purse over her shoulder.”

  “Got it. Thanks.”

  I stood up and dropped some money on the table.

  “Let’s kick some ass, guys.”

  THIRTY TWO

  WE WALKED AS FAST as we could without attracting attention and I filled Archie and Pete in on what Brady had told me. I had plenty of time to do it. It was a long walk to the cashier who had raised the alarm.

  “Female, mid-thirties, five foot four, short black hair, jeans and a yellow t-shirt,” Archie repeated like a man memorizing his part in a play.

  “She’ll be long gone before we get there,” Pete said.

  “Let’s spread out and go in from different directions. Maybe she’ll pass one of us coming back this way or we’ll spot her at a table.”

  Archie went left between two Sic Bo tables and was quickly swallowed up in the clouds of cigarette smoke rising from the mob of Chinese gamblers. I turned to say something to Pete, but all I saw was his back disappearing off to the right behind a roulette table. That left me to continue along the walkway and follow Brady’s original directions to the cashier.

  I noticed that all the tables I passed had plenty of comfortable-looking upholstered chairs around them, but not many people were sitting in them. Instead, the players were standing around the tables, peering intently, even grimly at the progress of whatever game they were trying to outwit. Comfort and relaxation isn’t really part of the Chinese view of gambling. Gambling is serious work, a way to get rich, not a pastime. What did being comfortable have to do with anything?

  I was walking past a casino worker pushing a teacart at a stately pace when I saw a flash of yellow off to my left. I stopped so abruptly that the elderly man walking behind me stumbled into the teacart and knocked two empty cups onto the floor. He muttered something at me in Mandarin as he brushed past. I had no idea what he was saying, but somehow I doubted it was Welcome to our country, foreigner!

  I turned in the direction where I had seen the flash of yellow and moved as quickly as I could. The casino was so crowded I didn’t have a clear line of sight for more than twenty feet in any direction so I kept my head and eyes moving back and forth in front of me, peered into the crush of bodies as well as I could, and hoped for the best.

  It was only a minute or two before I spotted her.

  SHE WAS SITTING IN front of a video poker machine. Yellow t-shirt, jeans, middle-aged, short black hair. She didn’t look particularly Korean, and I didn’t recognize her from the security photos I had seen, but that didn’t really mean much. She clearly met the description the cashier had given Brady.

  I walked past the woman without turning my head, moved quickly up another aisle of video poker machines, and came around behind her. I sat down on a stool about a dozen machines away and pretended to study its operating directions while watching her out of the corner of my eye. She was attractive enough, slim and feminine in her movements, and she sat primly on the stool, legs crossed, playing slowly like a woman more interested in killing time than in winning money. I took out my phone to call Archie, but before I could dial him it buzzed in my hand.

  “I’ve got her,” Archie said when I answered. “She’s at a slot machine.”

  “I’ve got her, too. But it’s a video poker machine, not a slot.”

  “I thought she was supposed to be by herself.”

  “She is by herself.”

  “Doesn’t look like that to me. That guy on the next stool looks awfully friendly.”

  I swiveled my head back toward the woman in the yellow t-shirt who was still playing her video poker machine without much apparent interest. There was nobody on the
stool next to her.

  Oh shit.

  “We’re looking at two different women, Archie.”

  “But mine matches the description perfectly.”

  “Mine, too. Where are you?”

  “I’m standing in front of a platform with a red Bentley on it. Do they sell cars here or something?”

  “Nope. They’re giving it away.”

  “They’re giving a Bentley away?”

  “It’s the grand prize this week in some sort of progressive slot machine deal. Don’t ask me how it works.”

  “Well fuck me dead. A free Bentley? Bloody hell.”

  I stood up and walked out of the aisle of poker machines into a relatively open area and looked around until I saw the red car up on a platform.

  “You’re about two hundred feet from me, Archie, back in the direction of the Lion Bar.”

  I listened to Archie exhale heavily on the other end of the phone. “Okay, mate,” he said, “what do you want to do now?”

  I mulled over Archie’s question while I walked back toward where I had been sitting. Could we possibly keep both women covered until we figured out which was the right one? I was thinking so hard about how we might be able to do it that I didn’t notice for a moment that the woman wasn’t sitting in front of her video poker machine any longer. And when I did notice, my first thought was I must have gone into a different aisle of poker machines by mistake.

  But I hadn’t. The woman I had been watching wasn’t where I had left her.

  “She’s gone, Archie. Call Pete and get him to come to your position. I’m going to try and find this one again.”

  “Roger that.”

  I disconnected, shoved the phone into my pocket, and walked over to the stool where the woman had been sitting. When I got to it, I wondered why I had bothered. What was I going to do, collect DNA or something? I needed to know where this woman was going, not prove she had been here. I looked around. Not a sign of her. She couldn’t have gone far. I hadn’t stepped away to look for Archie for more than a minute, probably less. So which way? Right, or left? I flipped a mental coin.