FORTUNE COOKIE

by Bryce Courtenay

  Sex traffickers are invariably criminal gangs (if Chinese, usually Triad) who seldom pay very much for their captives but instead simply promise to place a daughter in a good domestic job overseas where she will earn money to send home regularly. The recruiter then pays the cost of getting the girls to Singapore or any other location in the world and sells them to brothel and bar owners, recovering his expenses and making a large profit. The girls even come with a warranty. Not only does their new owner hold their passports but the sex-trafficking gangs also frequently supply the muscle to keep the girls in line or the drugs to keep them compliant. In this way the owner can’t be accused of physical maltreatment, even though violence is ever-present in the life of a girl sold into prostitution.

  The new owner adds various costs to the amount he has paid for a girl so that she must spend her first three or four years paying off this initial debt as well as returning him a handsome profit. If a bar girl or prostitute eventually repays her debt, she is still trapped, because she is only given a small allowance to live on while under contract and is unable to save money in the interim, thus lacking the means to return home. Her ‘freedom’ – the second stage of her life – doesn’t mean her liberation. She’s broke and knows no other lifestyle, possesses no life skills apart from pleasing men, and has often acquired a drug habit from her owner and now has to find a means to support it. In most Asian countries the usual drug of addiction was heroin; in the new Singapore the supply or possession of heroin carried a death sentence and so amphetamines were the drug most often used.

  Most victims of sex trafficking are ignorant village girls, mostly teenagers without the education, contacts or strength to avoid the deliberate pitfalls placed in their way to keep them captive. In this second stage of their lives, when they are still young and pretty enough to attract men, they usually continue working as bar girls or prostitutes, often for the same owner who previously held their passports, particularly if they relied on him to feed their drug habit.

  In Singapore there is almost inevitably a third stage, when they are too old and no longer useful in a bar or brothel popular with expats or the local rich: they find themselves on the street, compelled to work as poorly paid prostitutes in increasingly downmarket brothels, or, if they are really unlucky, gathered up by a pimp who feeds their drug habit in return for their services to perverts who demand unspeakable acts of cruelty and depravity.

  The dream is always the return of the prodigal daughter, having saved enough to start a new life back in the village. But this is rare. I explain all this because many of us regard Asian sex as a common commodity for sale, which of course it is, just like anywhere else, but the difference is that so many of us secretly see it as involving worthless, even redundant, girls and women. These hapless village girls are somehow dismissed as human detritus. We have been conditioned to think, in the same way as the sex trafficker, that these young village girls are simply part of supply and demand, a commodity, a surplus in one area that is tradeable and highly desirable in another. It’s an age-old business in which human traffickers export an ignorant labour force to foreign lands, cynically using false promises of sufficient reward to allow them to return home with the means to change their original circumstances. Only this time it’s not young blokes with strong backs who labour in foreign fields, on farms or docks, roads or building sites, but young girls with supple thighs intended for the predilections of men. Worst of all, most of them have no say in their fates: it is slavery by another name.

  While I paid for her services, Veronica would have received very little of the money I gave the owner of the girlie bar; only a small amount would have been deducted from her unconscionable debt. Of course, I could have walked away with a clear conscience, and while I don’t want to appear holier than thou, nevertheless I felt I had reasons to be grateful. She had never taken me for granted or simply gone through the motions, but had always serviced me with concern or enthusiasm, good humour or care. Of course she hoped for rescue, but she never put any pressure on me. She accepted that she was there to meet my needs at whatever hour I appeared.

  I was rarely intoxicated when I was with her so I got to know her almost as if she had been my personal concubine. That’s not to suggest that she was exclusively reserved for me. Of course she had other customers to please, some of them the usual drunk, groping, lascivious gwai-lo men, although there were many others – I’d like to think of myself as one of them – who didn’t abuse or take these girls for granted. Women like Veronica repaid sensitivity and kindness by making you feel as if you alone mattered. She never attempted to con me or exploit a hard-luck story. She came from a village in northern Thailand and accepted her family’s right to sell her, a practice common enough in many villages in that part of Thailand. I’d asked her on one occasion how she saw the future, and to my surprise she seemed quite optimistic. ‘Simon, I must not take bad things,’ she brought her fingers to her mouth to imitate swallowing a pill and touched her head, shook it and assumed a cross-eyed, stupefied expression. ‘Then I work hard, make mans happy, and I save tip they gives for me.’ She giggled. ‘One day, enough. I go home, marry, make baby.’ It occurred to me that she couldn’t have been much more than eighteen years old but seemed to be going on thirty.

  To cut a long story short, I paid her debt to the Nite Cap. She’d been with the girlie bar three years and had only six or so months to go, so it wasn’t that onerous. She’d saved, she told me, all the tips I’d given her and no doubt others she’d received, and to this I added a reasonable amount and bought her a cheap plane ticket and her bus fare from Bangkok to her village in the north. Altogether it was quite a large sum, but nothing I couldn’t easily afford. Okay, I would possibly never know if she made it home or if I’d been nicely, politely conned. But if mine was a self-indulgent gesture, a bit of goody-two-shoeing, I nevertheless felt a whole heap better for it.

  Sex for the gratification of the out-of-towner, not to mention the locals, has been around since Marco Polo discovered the mysterious Orient – probably longer – and while there is poverty, hopelessness, lack of opportunity and the concept of bitter rice (a belief that girls and women are worthless, or worse than worthless), the underworld predators who traffic in pubescent girls are going to continue their merciless trade.

  So who could possibly blame the bar girls if they tried to con their clients? Chairman Meow, of course, was right to see them as manipulative and calculating – these are often the only skills of the powerless. Bar girls who have little experience of men other than those in various stages of inebriation and sexual arousal are and always will be alley cats who have taught themselves to purr like pampered pussies, rat-catchers hoping to stumble across a bowl of cream.

  Veronica was free, or so I hoped, and with sufficient funds to allow her to purchase her own house and have enough left over for a dowry to attract a good man so she could marry happily and settle down to life as a village mother.

  With the joy of having Mercy B. Lord share my life, things romantic should have settled down for Simon Koo, Fortune Cookie. But, alas, between the two women dominating my life, my adorable lover and a mother morphing into Chairman Meow, things were not always easy, and my remaining time with Samuel Oswald Wing in Singapore looked as if it might require fairly careful management.

  Mercy B. Lord continued to disappear overnight every Thursday, and while I hated the notion that I didn’t know where she was or what she was doing, we’d made a deal. I know it sounds piss-weak, but I was forced to compromise. Playing the heavy male archetype was pointless, and besides, I’d given my word. Everyone knows the conventional wisdom that love should be about being completely open, but I wonder how often it really is between couples. At least I knew about the forbidden area, so technically we were being open about being closed. I know it sounds dumb, an oxymoron, but my secret hope was that either she’d eventually let me know where and why she went or she’d simply not go there any longer.

  In the meantim
e, whether weak or not, I’d given my word and would try very hard to keep it. The thought of losing Mercy B. Lord simply wasn’t worth it, provided always that what she was doing was safe. And that was perhaps where I might finally slip up. I couldn’t bear the thought of something happening to her, something I might be able to prevent. I clearly remembered Ronnie Wing’s warning on my first day at the Town Club: if I tried to become involved with Mercy B. Lord I would be kicked out of Singapore so fast that I wouldn’t even bounce. If he was right, then she was taking a chance being with me.

  Of course I’d wanted her permanently in my life and equally for her to live with me. But after warning me not to persist after the first night we’d slept together, I hadn’t tried to force the issue. I’d ignored Ronnie’s caution but I hadn’t forgotten it. It was Mercy B. Lord’s decision to move in and I could only hope she knew what she was doing.

  Thursday night was obviously a compromise she’d reached. Whether it was one in her own mind or with others – namely Beatrice Fong and the Wings – I couldn’t say. I’d asked her if she was safe and all she’d said was that she was in control of the situation – not by any means a perfect answer but again it had left me with nowhere to go.

  We’d been together for about three months and we’d fallen into a routine. I made good use of her Thursdays away – to be perfectly honest, it meant I could work back late without feeling guilty – and life was sweet. But then the phone rang one afternoon and Sidney’s secretary said, ‘Simon, Mr Johnny wants to see you in the chairman’s office.’

  I was aware that Sidney was in the States at the time and Johnny was nominally chairman in his absence, but this wasn’t even a one-off event. In the time I’d been at the agency, he’d never summoned me in Sidney’s absence, or at any other time, for that matter. He was a silent presence, even in the boardroom, except when Sidney needed his vote on something Dansford didn’t care about. As I headed for his office I was mildly curious.

  ‘Sit.’ Johnny Wing simply didn’t know how to be polite and had the manners of a pig.

  I sat on one of the yellow Scandinavian chairs. ‘What is it, Johnny?’

  ‘The girl! She goes!’ To my surprise, he brought his fist down hard on the desk.

  ‘Eh? What girl?’

  ‘The one you fuck! Gone!’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘No more! She goes. Dangerous!’

  ‘To whom – dangerous to whom?’

  ‘You! Her also!’ He was sitting bolt upright, with both fists clenched on the desk.

  ‘Is this an order?’ I was trying very hard to keep myself under control.

  ‘Go to China Doll, pick for yourself, she free for one month!’ he yelled.

  ‘I don’t want a China Doll whore,’ I exclaimed. ‘Besides, who the fuck do you think you are? You can’t talk to me like this!’

  Both fists slammed down on the desk again. ‘She goes! No more talk. Go now. Finish!’

  Johnny’s spit-flecked monosyllabic expostulations seemed somehow dated. Unlike Sidney and Ronnie, he lacked an education. This was not quite Singlish, the local patois, but more like the street English the Chinese speak in Malaysia. Normally he spoke better than this. It was almost as if he were translating directly from Cantonese and speaking to me as he might to a member of his staff. I made no move and looked him in the eye. The bad portrait of Sidney behind him seemed to add to the threatening atmosphere. Johnny, who never wore a suit or tie but simply a white open-necked shirt, looked like some evil oriental military captain out of a Sydney Greenstreet movie. If it hadn’t been so serious, it would have made an excellent parody, a funny skit for TV, although I was pretty steamed up and there was nothing funny about it. As the seconds ticked by and I held his eye, I was beginning to realise there was no possible rebuttal and it was I who was going to have to move. My dad would have simply got up and walked out. He’d have done so on Johnny’s ‘fuck’ sentence. I’d left it too late to leave with any dignity.

  The brain plays funny tricks and in my mind’s eye I saw Mercy B. Lord on the night we had made love for the first time. She’d raised her hands and cupped her breasts and still held the toothbrush she’d bought, which had somehow broken through the top of its cellophane wrapper and pressed against one of her breasts. This was what he was threatening to take from me. My anger grew dark and explosive.

  In two bounds I was around Sidney’s desk and had grabbed Johnny by the shirtfront and lifted him bodily from the chair. I dragged him clear of the desk then hurled him across the room. His bum hit the carpet ten feet or so away. He skidded into the far wall and bumped his head hard against it, inches from the ancestors’ cabinet, where he slumped, his chin resting on his chest. He had been too surprised even to yell out. I realised later that he’d beaten his fists against my arms and shoulders but at the time I’d felt nothing. Without a word I left the room, hoping I’d killed the bastard.

  I remained in the agency, waiting for the repercussions and determined to face the consequences. Dansford was away on his usual extended lunch and Ronnie was entertaining a client and by this stage would probably be hitting the first of the drinking holes or girlie bars. If he was conscious, Johnny was in charge.

  Nothing happened. No ambulance or paramedics bearing a stretcher appeared, no fuss and no call from Sidney’s secretary; the agency seemed to function normally. Five o’clock came and the place emptied out. The receptionist, Alice Ho, knocked off at 5.30, so at 5.25 I walked up to her and asked casually, ‘Mr Johnny left yet, Alice?’

  Alice was a past mistress of the inscrutable demeanour but, even so, I sensed she had nothing to conceal. ‘Always ten past five,’ she exclaimed, eyes wide, as if she expected me to know. ‘You want I call him in the morning for you, Mr Simon?’ Then she added, ‘Always ten past five.’

  ‘No. Thanks, Alice.’ Like a lot of the offices of Chinese head honchos, Sidney’s was soundproofed. Snooping is a Chinese artform. Knowledge is power. Sidney’s secretary couldn’t have heard us. Her conversations with Sidney were always via the intercom. Obviously Johnny had recovered and whatever damage I’d done hadn’t been permanent. He looked as if he had a thick skull. I’d replayed the events and imagined what might have happened if he’d crashed into the ancestors cabinet and smashed the priceless jade and porcelain or the fat Buddha. That may have been a better reason to kill me than whatever was behind his order to stay away from Mercy B. Lord: not just the value of the contents, but the anger and retribution of the ancestors, the permanent loss of good fortune, would have marked the end of me. There must be a god in heaven, I thought.

  With the five o’clock rush still on, it took some time to find a taxi and it was nearly six o’clock before I arrived home, half an hour before Mercy B. Lord usually arrived. In Singapore, cooking your own dinner is a particular stupidity, unless you love to cook – it’s the place where all the Asian cuisines meet for breakfast, lunch and dinner. She usually stopped off somewhere and ordered our dinner and brought it home with her in a tiffin box. I was sorry it wasn’t a Thursday, which would have given me a day or so to recover. Frankly, I didn’t know how to react to what had happened. There was obviously something about her I didn’t know – her disappearances on Thursdays testified to this – and it didn’t take a genius to work out that the Wings and Beatrice Fong were involved. Elma Kelly had called Beatrice a despicable creature, so she was obviously a nasty piece of work.

  When there were no repercussions from me losing my temper and manhandling Johnny, I began to wonder if he might be bluffing, simply trying to frighten me; Ronnie first, with a lighter hand, and then, when I’d ignored that, Johnny with a two-fisted frontal attack. Then I realised that even though there had been no immediate repercussions for me, I might nevertheless have endangered Mercy B. Lord. Myself, too, I suppose. But I hadn’t really stopped to think about that.

  Despite my promise to her, this was an extenuating circumstance. As soon as she arrived we would have to talk – that much I knew. I could
n’t ignore this; it wasn’t going to go away. It was tricky, because I didn’t know what I was up against and she did but wouldn’t say – as my dad would advise, ‘Simon, only a fool or a woman places a big bet without knowing the odds.’ I asked myself what problems Mercy B. Lord and I could possibly create for the Wings that would make it worth their while to get rid of her or me or both of us. In my case they’d have some explaining to do and it would need to be worth jeopardising the relationship with New York. I’d achieved success for the Americans. Big Lather, in particular, looked like being a smash hit throughout South-East Asia. The Texas Tiger campaign had been a spectacular success, it was going worldwide and New York had picked up the account, giving us – me, in particular – the credit for the win. I knew the partnership with New York was important to Sidney, so my partnership with Mercy B. Lord would need to be a pretty big issue for him to risk disrupting it. I didn’t even know if Johnny was acting independently.