We closed up on the lady in black a bit so we wouldn’t miss her if she suddenly dodged into one of the stores lining both sides of the street. But she didn’t. She crossed Senado Square, passed the Leal Senado Building, a graceful Mediterranean styled building that had been Macau’s seat of government since the eighteenth century, and kept striding purposefully northward.
It was a pleasant evening for a stroll. The fog had returned with the evening air and it gave the old city a gauzy, timeless feel. Once we crossed Senado Square, the crowds thinned and we dropped back a bit. We did our best to look like three pals out for a stroll between sessions at the tables.
“I think she’s headed for the Sofitel,” Archie said. “There’s not much else down this way.”
“Maybe not, but I doubt the North Koreans are laundering money out of the Sofitel.”
A TOWERING PILE OF yellow stucco far newer than anything around it, the Sofitel is directly on the inner harbor, the old waterfront that was once Macau’s front door. I had stayed at the Sofitel a couple of times and liked it a lot. It’s a fine hotel, although a little out of the Macau mainstream, both because of its location and because it doesn’t have a big, flashy casino attached to it. Come to think of it, those are probably the two things I liked most about it.
The inner harbor isn’t much of a waterfront these days. It’s certainly not the front door to Macau anymore. It’s not even a decent back door. The Chinese mainland is directly on the other side, and decades of aggressive landfilling by the Chinese have narrowed the harbor to not more than a couple of hundred yards of open water. Now it looks less like a harbor than it does a lazy, not particularly important river. There isn’t much shipping activity there anymore either. A few ferries and some private boats come in from time to time, but that’s about it. All the real shipping has moved out to the new container port by the airport.
Regardless of all that, the old waterfront and the Barra district that surrounds it are still my favorite part of Macau. It’s almost all that is left these days of the exotic south China port of the fifties I first learned about in black and white noir thrillers on late night television. The Macau in those films had a seedy glamour that I would associate with Asia for the rest of my life. European men in wrinkled white suits, sloe-eyed local women wearing tight fitting cheongsams, and creaking ceiling fans slowly stirring the heavy, humid air.
Except for the Sofitel, the old waterfront is still pretty seedy, which is what I like about it. Some people preferred their world scrubbed, tidy, and vacuum-sealed. I like mine with a little dirt and a few odors. It seems more real to me that way, more worthy of being lived in.
We were less than a hundred yards from the Sofitel when the lady in black made an abrupt right turn off of San Ma Lo into a tiny lane. Breaking into a trot, we rounded the corner in time to see her disappear into a building a few doors down.
The lane was no more than ten feet wide with narrow sidewalks on both sides. Flush up to both sidewalks were unbroken ranks of four and five story buildings. They were all painted in pastel shades of yellow, pink, and blue, and they had balconies on most of their floors that were railed with intricate black ironwork.
The wispy fog had turned the ambient light bluish-white and it rendered everything in soft focus. The little street didn’t seem quite real. It could have been a flat-fronted replica of a Portuguese village constructed in some slightly off kilter Florida theme park.
“Let me walk down and back by myself and grab a look,” I said. “The three of us are way too conspicuous in this neighborhood.”
They both nodded and it seemed to me that Archie looked amused. I couldn’t immediately see what I had said that might have amused him, so I let it go.
THE BUILDING INTO WHICH the lady in black had disappeared was neat and attractive. It was only about fifty feet up the narrow lane and sat on the corner of another even narrower alley. The building was constructed of what looked like slabs of rose-colored granite, but probably weren’t, and the only entrance door that I could see was around the corner on the alley. Like the other buildings in the neighborhood, it had a lost and abandoned quality to it.
I strolled by, trying to look as nonchalant as possible. The windows were all dark and not a glimmer of light came from inside the building. I passed without slowing and walked another fifty yards or so. I turned around in the shadows and walked back on the opposite side of the street.
Going in that direction I found myself looking directly at the entrance, which was modest and nondescript and consisted of nothing but a small awning fixed to the face of the building and two glass doors underneath it. I could see clearly now that the glass in the entrance doors had been painted over with black paint. It was possible the building wasn’t simply dark. All the windows could easily have been blacked out for some reason, too.
To the left of the door were half a dozen Chinese characters, each about six inches tall and made of something shiny like aluminum, but right below them was a small sign in some language that looked as though it might make sense, even to me. I slowed down and turned toward the entrance. In case anybody was watching, I tried my best to look lost and confused. That turned out to be embarrassingly easy.
I had to get almost all the way up to the doors before I could make out the words on the little sign. Pensao Ruby.
Pensao? Was that Portuguese? Was it like pensioné? Was this some kind of cheap hotel?
I veered away and walked on up the alleyway toward where Pete and Archie were waiting on San Ma Lo. I glanced up at the building again as I passed, but I still couldn’t see any light anywhere at all. If it was a hotel, it certainly wasn’t doing very well. On the other hand, we had seen the lady in black go inside and she sure as hell wasn’t sitting in there in the dark, so the windows had to be all blacked out. But what kind of a hotel has blacked out windows?
WHEN I GOT BACK to San Ma Lo, I was puzzled to find Pete and Archie looking at each other and snickering.
“What?” I asked.
Pete pointed down the lane toward the pensao or pensioné or whatever the hell it was.
“Did you see the name of that place?” he asked.
“Pensao Ruby.”
That brought on a new round of snickers. I waited patiently for it to subside.
“Do you know what a pensao is, Jack?”
“Not really. A hotel? Something like a pensioné?”
“Yeah,” Archie nodded slowly, “back in Portugal that usually what it means, but not here in Macau.”
“Okay, guys,” I said spreading my arms wide, “lay it on me.”
“Well, Jacko, I think it speaks well of you that you don’t know. I really do.”
Archie leaned forward, cupped his hands over my shoulders and flashed a wicked grin.
“In Macau,” he explained, “a pensao is usually a whorehouse.”
THIRTY FIVE
WE WALKED OVER TO the Sofitel looking for a comfortable bar where we could sit for a while and figure out what to do next. Naturally, we found one.
It was called the Rendezvous, which seemed appropriate. It was fitted out with leopard print upholstered chairs, gold tables, and red drapes, and it looked like a French cathouse, which also seemed appropriate. Well, to be honest, I had never actually been in a French cathouse but, if I had, I was certain it would look exactly like the Rendezvous Bar. The tent card on our table recommended a cocktail they called a So Sofitel that was described as a Fresca and rosemary martini. After reading it I gave my stomach a moment to settle down and ordered a beer. So did Pete and Archie. The waitress looked annoyed that we weren’t ordering something more interesting than that, but she brought us three Heinekens anyway and disappeared.
“Okay, boss,” Archie said after sucking down nearly half his beer in one pull. “Now what?”
“I want to get inside.”
“You want to get inside a whorehouse? If you’re wondering what they’re doing in there, I’m pretty sure I can explain—”
“Look, we followed a woman we know has been moving money through the MGM back there and she didn’t strike me as a hooker on her way to work. Whatever people may think that place is, my guess is it’s where they’re running the money laundering operation.”
I also thought there was a pretty good chance that it was where they were holding Freddy, but it seemed unnecessary to mention that part at the moment.
“What do you have in mind doing about it?” Pete asked. “We’re not exactly a SWAT team, you know.”
“Can you get me a SWAT team?”
“Nope.”
“So there you go. We figure something out among the three of us. What else are we going to do?”
That question seemed to stump everyone so we all sat and drank our beer in silence for a while.
When Archie finished his, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said, “I think I ought to go in and check the place out.”
Pete just laughed.
“Get nicked, dickhead,” Archie laughed right back. “I’m the one to do it because you both look like cops. I look like some Ocker tourist who’s full of grog.”
I had to admit Archie had us there.
WE HAD ANOTHER ROUND and nobody came up with a better idea, so about ten o’clock we paid our tab and headed back to Pensao Ruby. The fog had thickened considerably while we were drinking in the Rendezvous and the little lane didn’t look so romantic to me anymore. Now it looked less like a theme park in Florida and more like a setting for a horror movie, one of those where the good guys never see the fellow with the axe until he is standing right behind them.
Archie walked up the lane past Pensao Ruby, turned around, and walked back. When he emerged from the fog, he said, “Still dark. The place looks deserted.”
“We know it’s not,” I said. “We saw that woman go in.”
“That was a couple of hours ago. They could have cleared out since.”
“Don’t see why,” Pete said. “These are peak hours for the brothel business.”
Archie and I both looked at him.
“That’s only an assumption on my part,” he added quickly.
We watched Pensao Ruby for another minute or two, but nothing happened.
“Okay,” Archie finally said, “no guts, no glory.”
He hitched up his pants and headed for the front door.
PETE AND I WATCHED Archie try both doors, but neither one opened. He put his ear against first one door and then the other and listened briefly. Apparently hearing nothing of importance, Archie pulled his wallet from his back pocket, took something out, and went down on one knee right where the handles for the two doors came together.
“Best lock man I ever saw,” Pete said before I had a chance to ask him what Archie was doing.
“He’s picking the lock? How long is that going to take him?”
Pete didn’t answer. He pointed over my shoulder and I looked around in time to see Archie disappearing through the doors into Pensao Ruby.
WITHIN FIVE MINUTE, MAYBE less, one of the doors opened again and Archie leaned out and gestured to us. As Pete and I walked toward him, he put a finger to his lips.
“Who’s here?” I whispered when we got to the door.
“Nobody. I’ve checked the building all the way up to the top floor.”
“So why are we whispering?”
Archie shrugged.
The light was dim, but it was bright enough for me to see that the first floor of the building was a single large space with blacked out windows and a scratched brown and white linoleum floor. It was empty. Not only empty of people, empty of everything.
“Then why the hell did that woman come into—”
“Look at this,” Archie interrupted. He squatted down, rubbed the palm of his hand over the linoleum, and held it up for me to look at.
“I don’t see anything.”
“Exactly right. No dirt, not even any dust. When was the last time you saw an empty building with no dirt or dust on the floor?”
“You’re telling me somebody cleaned it up?”
“There was something going on here, but they cleared out. They cleaned the place when they went.”
“Why would they do that?”
Archie shrugged again. He seemed to be getting into the habit.
“You think they spotted us when we followed that woman here?” I asked.
“That can’t be it,” Pete said. “To clear out a place like this and clean it would take time and preparation. We only found it a couple of hours ago. Most of this was done before that. Had to be.”
“Why would they suddenly clear out if they didn’t know we were on to them?”
“Maybe it wasn’t sudden. Maybe they were simply done with whatever they were doing here.”
“What was that?”
“Well,” Pete shrugged, “that’s the real question, isn’t it?”
Archie produced a tiny Maglite from somewhere and switched it on. A bright beam of cold white light shot out of the little flashlight.
“Lock picks and a flashlight?” I asked. “What have you got under your shirt? Batman’s utility belt?”
Archie didn’t answer, but he flicked the beam over some narrow concrete steps at the back of the main room. “Let’s go upstairs.”
“What’s upstairs?” I asked.
“The third and fourth floors are divided into small bedrooms. Four on each floor with one toilet. Pretty much what you’d expect to find in a whorehouse. They’ve all been stripped and cleaned like this floor. Nothing left behind except some basic furniture.”
“What about the second floor?”
“Come on up and see for yourself,” Archie said.
ON THE SECOND FLOOR there were more blacked out windows and there was more brown and white linoleum, but in the beam of Archie’s Maglite I could see something else, too. Archie hit a wall switch and two weak bulbs on the ceiling flared to light, casting the whole room in pale blue light.
Stacked almost to the ceiling on the wall opposite the staircase were piles of dark green and brown boxes that in another life I had once known as banker’s boxes. Generally used for storing documents at law firms or other places that accumulate large amounts of paper, banker’s boxes are thick walled cardboard containers with lift off lids and push in handles that are big enough to hold a lot of paper but small enough for one man to carry.
“They left these behind,” Archie said, playing his Maglite over the stacks of boxes.
There were a lot of boxes. I counted twelve across and eight high stacked that I could see and I had no idea how far back the boxes went. There were obviously several hundred.
“Why would they leave all these files?”
“Go ahead.” Archie gestured at the boxes with the Maglite. “Take a look.”
I reached up and braced myself to lift down the top box on the stack nearest to me but, by the time I had given the handle on the end a tentative tug to test the weight, I knew what the answer to my question would turn out to be.
They hadn’t left a lot of files behind.
I pulled the oddly light box down and shook it. Holding it in one hand, I pulled the lid off with my other.
Empty.
I OPENED A HALF dozen more boxes and checked each of them. They were all empty, too.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “What happened to the files they kept in these boxes? Why take all of them and leave the boxes?”
“Maybe they repackaged them somehow,” Pete offered. “Took them out in something else?”
“Why would they do something like that?”
Pete shrugged. Now he was doing it, too.
Archie picked up one of the boxes I had already checked and flashed his Maglite into the interior. He lifted it up, examined the sides for markings, and turned it upside down to see if there were any markings on the bottom. When he did, a small piece of paper fell out and glided to the floor.
“Must have been caught under the flap,” he said as he bent down to r
etrieve it.
Pete and I stepped over as Archie straightened up and looked to see what he had. The piece of manila-colored paper was about six inches long and an inch wide, and it showed jagged ends where it had apparently been torn.
“A currency strap,” Pete and I said at almost the same time.
Archie turned the strap over in his hands and examined both sides. One side was completely blank. The other had wide yellow borders and across the strap, also in yellow, was printed ‘$1000’. There were no other markings.
“It’s not a bank strap,” Archie said. “If it were a bank strap, the bank’s name and logo would be on it. This looks like the kind of money strap you buy at an office supply store.”
I looked at the money strap Archie was holding, looked at the pile of boxes, and looked back at Archie.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” I asked.
“Probably.”
“These weren’t any files in these boxes, were there? They were used to bring in the $50 bills and the €100 notes that the smurfs exchanged at the MGM.”
“But what did they do with the currency they were exchanged for?” Pete asked. “Why not use the same boxes to take it back out?”
I didn’t have a clue, so I shook my head.
“I’m more curious about why there are no bank markings on the strap,” Archie said. “Banks don’t deliver currency in plain straps. They deliver it in straps marked with an ID.”
“Does that mean the currency didn’t come out of a bank?” I asked.
“That’s the way I see it.”
“There was a hell of a lot of currency here,” I said, waving an arm at the pile of boxes. “Where else could that much currency have come from other than a bank?”
The question hung there in the air for a moment and I thought about the possible answers to my questions, and all of a sudden I thought…
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
An idea.
I PULLED OUT MY phone and flipped through the address book until I found Gerald Brady’s cell number. I glanced at my watch. It was late, but guys in the casino security business were probably up to all hours anyway, weren’t they? I hit the call button.
THE KING OF MACAU (The Jack Shepherd International Crime Novels) Page 22