by Ian Williams
The waterfront was lined with houses built in old European style.
A few minutes later he reached the Thai restaurant, more than a dozen outdoor tables dominated by two big television screens. There was a small stage, presumably for a band, but not tonight, with only one table taken by a young couple, huddled together for warmth, and looking like they regretted their decision to eat there.
The only thing obviously Thai about it were two life-sized wooden carved figures in traditional dress, hands clasped together in welcome, and standing either side of the main door.
Drayton took a seat overlooking the water and ordered a beer from a tall server in long silk dress and a woollen jacket, her dark hair pinned up. She brought back an ice bucket containing two bottles of Thai Singha beer and told him it was two for one tonight. She opened one and went back inside.
The quiet was broken by the clatter of a helicopter taking off from the roof of the ferry terminal. The VIP route from Hong Kong to Macau, more time on the tables, and a little more discreet.
Drayton finished his first Singha, and gestured to the server to open the next.
“You’re Thai?” he asked her, with what he hoped was his broadest of reassuring smiles.
“Philippines,” she said.
“So you must be Angelika?”
That startled her, and she looked away, fumbling with the bottle opener, spilling beer as the top finally popped off, retreating to the restaurant without a word.
A few moments later, a young Chinese man came to the table, and introduced himself as the duty manager.
“You were asking about Angelika Rosales?” he said brusquely.
“Yes, I think that was her name. A really great server. I met her last time I was in Macau. I think it was here.”
“Not here,” said the duty manager. “We’ve never employed anybody by that name,” telling Drayton that the restaurant would be closing soon.
“Must be my mistake then,” said Drayton apologetically, paying for the drinks.
He left the table and started to retrace his footsteps along the largely deserted waterfront. He crossed over a small bridge and followed a dark path under an awning covering what on a busier night would have been an outside drinking area for several bars.
He turned another corner, heading inland on a wider tree-lined path towards the colosseum. It was then he heard the footsteps. He stopped and pulled out his phone, as if to make a call, turning to look behind him. He saw nothing, and the footsteps stopped.
He started walking again, phone to his ear for effect, to look like he was distracted by a non-existent conversation, but more aware than ever. The footsteps resumed. He turned another corner, and into a doorway, putting the phone back in his pocket.
A tall figure turned the corner.
“Hello Angelika,” he said.
The server was startled and retreated a few paces.
“How did you know?” she asked.
“When your boss came over, a charming man by the way, telling me you don’t exist, and asking me to go away, he referred to you by your full name. I never did that.”
She looked away.
“And anyway,” Drayton said, “it’s on your name-tag.”
She instinctively lifted her hand to her shoulder and ran her fingers over the badge on the lapel of her jacket.
“Are you a policeman?” she asked.
“Sort of,” he replied. “I am a friend of Inspector Acevedo, the man you handed the jacket to.”
She told him she was sorry about what happened.
“You wanted to talk to me? That’s why you followed me here.”
“I have to meet customers by the colosseum, show them the way,” she replied with no great conviction. “The Inspector, your friend, he said he’d be back in touch.”
“The case is closed. The man drowned.”
They stood in silence for a moment.
“There was more,” she said, so quietly Drayton had to ask her to repeat it.
“Tell me, Angelika. Did you see him fall in the water? You said he was drowsy.”
“He didn’t fall in the water.”
She was sobbing now, wiping her eyes with the long sleeve of her dress.
“When I found the jacket, just after he left, I walked along the waterfront trying to catch him, but couldn’t see him anywhere. Then I saw a group of men. Big men. Looked like the men that stand in the doors of the clubs and bars here, throwing people out. Mostly wearing jeans and dark jackets. There were some in uniform too. They were looking in the water. But not just the water, looking everywhere.”
“They didn’t see you?”
“I’m sure. I hid amid the trees down there.”
“You didn’t tell the Inspector?”
“I was afraid. The boss was furious that I’d given him the jacket.”
That’s when Drayton noticed the fading bruises on the left side of her face, disguised, but not completely, by make-up.
“The boss did that?”
“Mister, please understand, none of us, the Thai and Filipino servers, have proper paperwork. I need that job, not for me, for my family.”
“Don’t worry,” he said, moving closer and touching her arm. “I am not the immigration police.”
She looked nervously down the dark street at the sound of muffled laughter from inside one of the distant bars.
She said a lot of people had come to the restaurant asking questions.
“The boss told me never to talk about it again.”
Drayton told her she was brave, that he was grateful and that she should get back to the restaurant before the boss got suspicious.
She nodded.
“What about those customers you are supposed to be meeting?”
“They never turned up,” she shrugged.
“One more thing,” he said, “do as your boss asks, and please don’t mention any of this to anybody else.”
He waited and watched as she walked back down the dark street lined with mock-European buildings until she turned onto the waterfront. Then he left, heading for the ferry terminal.
– 37 –
Macau Rubdown
Chuck Drayton bought a ticket, first class, for a ferry direct from Macau to Hong Kong airport, from where he planned to take the first available flight back to Shanghai. He’d received encrypted messages about a breakthrough at The Facility.
There was a ferry leaving in fifteen minutes, but the woman behind the counter said he was too late for that, even without checked bags. Her look told him not to even think about arguing. Indifferent, robotic. Like the croupiers in the casino. Maybe that’s what you became when you were dealing with psychotic gamblers day-in, day-out.
That gave him an hour and a half to kill.
The dreary ferry terminal was spread over three floors. At the bottom, the pick-up and drop-off area, from which fleets of buses shuttled between the main hotels and casinos, the punters guided by girls with tight dresses and plastic smiles. The sales counters and check-in area were on the floor above, and there was a top floor of unappetising-looking restaurants and shops. All built around a central atrium linked by stairs and escalators.
Drayton headed up an escalator to a small coffee shop and ordered a latte. He’d just taken a seat when his phone buzzed with a short message that said, “Casa do Prazer. Don’t leave Macau without visiting.” It was from a local number he didn’t recognise, and he immediately deleted it, thinking it was a fucking imposition, spam like that, but not entirely sure where they’d got his number.
Then another one: “Really. You should visit before leaving.”
Which got him thinking.
He went back to the coffee shop counter and asked the women who’d served him the latte about the Casa do
Prazer and how he could find it. She ignored him at first, and then shot him a look that made the ferry girl seem friendly.
“I’m sure you’ll find it,” she said, like it wasn’t really a question she cared to answer.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “Is it nearby?”
“It’s on Rue Francisco Fernandes,” she said. “Follow the harbour, then it’s on your right.”
He asked if it was far from Fisherman’s Wharf, whether somebody could walk to it from there, somebody who was unsteady on their feet.
And she said sure, if that’s their thing.
He went back to his seat, which was when he spotted the two men from the bus, sitting in the middle of a cluster of seats at the bottom of the escalator and doing a bad imitation of reading a newspaper.
Drayton finished his latte and walked around the shops, but close enough to the wall of the atrium to be able to see what was going on below. The men were no longer there, and for a moment he thought that perhaps he was deluding himself. That maybe they’d gone to catch their ferry.
There was a long corridor to one side, a McDonalds at the end of it, which was taking a delivery, stacks of blue crates on trolleys being wheeled in. The deliveries were coming through a pair of heavy metal swing doors to one side of the corridor, with a sign saying “Service Area”.
He went through the doors, which led to three battered service lifts. He took one to the ground floor and after a short wait he left by another pair of swing doors to find himself at the far end of a dark delivery area, with giant garbage bins, several cars and two trucks that were servicing the McDonalds.
He saw the flash of light on the blades of their meat cleavers before he saw the men wielding them, the guys from inside, smiling now as they approached. Separating slightly and raising the blades. Eyeing their prey, almost casual. If he’d learned one thing from Acevedo it was that in Macau men bearing meat cleavers were very bad news. His friend had the scars to prove it.
He could still hear Acevedo’s words. “When they chop you, it’s usually to mutilate, to maim. As a warning. They usually leave you alive, if only just”. Some comfort.
Drayton started to back away when the double metal doors burst open followed by a trolley laden with empty blue crates. He pushed the crates, which crashed to the ground in front of the Triads. The delivery guy shouted, but quickly retreated back inside when he saw the meat cleavers.
Drayton ran down a narrow gap between the two trucks, slipping on some slimy leftovers from an earlier delivery. He clamoured over the hood of a car parked behind the trucks and then over a metal fence, tearing his jacket. The fence lined a narrow drainage canal, and he slipped down its bank and into the water.
The water wasn’t deep and he was able to wade across, though it was slow going as his feet sank into the deep sludge below. He glanced back to see the two men pausing at the fence beside the canal. They didn’t follow but instead began to run along the fence and towards a path that crossed the canal at the far end of the car park.
Drayton knew he didn’t have long, but it still took him three attempts to climb the bank on the far side of the canal, over another fence, and into the ferry terminal’s main pick-up and drop-off area.
A ferry must just have arrived because the area was packed, the girls in tight dresses frantically waving signs at punters pushing or pulling their wheeled bags. Drayton wondered if they were full of cash, but mostly he thought about the meat cleavers. He bulldozed his way through, stumbling over cases and sending one woman tumbling into the luggage hold of a bus. Which gave him an idea. He paused near the back of one bus, which seemed about ready to leave, then quickly climbed into the hold amid the bags just before its hydraulic door swung closed.
As the bus pulled out Drayton could feel his heart pounding. His legs were aching. And his toe, the one bitten by that wretched pug, felt like it had been broken in two. He sat against the side of the hold. The bus braked hard and bags slid, pinning him against the cold metal. As the bus moved again, it took all his strength to push the bags away.
It took five minutes to reach the first stop. The door swung open and Drayton found himself face to face with a hotel luggage boy who, after his initial surprise, asked Drayton if he could be of any assistance. Sounding all chirpy, like he regularly found dishevelled passengers in the belly of the bus.
Drayton said yes, actually, and as the luggage boy helped him out of the hold he asked him about the Casa do Prazer, which the luggage boy said was quite close, giving directions and saying, “I think they’ll take good care of you there.”
The bus had stopped at another vast casino, and even with the directions it took Drayton a while to find his way out of the place. He stayed in the shadows, close to buildings, away from the glare of the neon, looking all around him. There was no sign of the cleaver-wielding pursuers.
He was limping badly and he realised that his jacket had been ripped right down the back, almost in two. He was caked in mud.
It was hard to miss the Casa do Prazer, which announced itself in multi-coloured neon and flashing lights, big red lanterns above the entrance, and the sign, Sauna and Massage Casa do Prazer.
Drayton entered through sliding glass doors and into a plush carpeted hallway, with a broad staircase leading to a reception area that would not have looked out of place in any five-star hotel, all marble and dark wood. Except for the pictures lining the walls, which were all of smiling masseuses with movie-star looks.
A young woman in a long, tight cheongsam, hair pinned up neatly, and with a white fluffy scarf around her neck met him at the top of the stairs and said, “Mr Drayton. This way, if you would. Your friend is waiting.”
She directed him towards another door and into a locker room, where a tall, thin, uniformed attendant, a man this time, stood beside him and took his filthy and shredded clothes, hanging his jacket in the locker like it was a pristine Armani. When Drayton hesitated at his underwear, the man gave him a weary look and said, “Everything, please.”
Once Drayton had complied, the man handed him a towel and directed him into another room, this one ornate with a high ceiling and with three giant Jacuzzis in the centre, a sauna on the far side. Several naked men were in the Jacuzzi. Two more were in the sauna. Others sauntered around the edge of the bubbling water.
Drayton took a shower, as directed and then entered another reception area where a young woman dressed him in a robe and shorts, and escorted him to a room full of large leather armchairs, where he took a seat. There were several television screens overhead.
About a dozen girls were lined up down one side of the room, wearing skimpy uniforms of tight black skirt and jacket over a white T-shirt. Drayton guessed they were Vietnamese or Thai. They didn’t look Chinese.
He was then handed two menus. Food and drink, from which he ordered tea, and one for the services on offer, which ranged from a pedicure and ear cleaning to various massages, which Drayton assumed from the price involved different levels of additional service.
Two girls were quickly at his side, telling him they did a very good thigh massage, which he initially mistook for Thai massage, until one of the girls corrected him with hand signals that left him in no doubt what she had in mind.
Drayton said he’d have his ears cleaned, and a bucket of warm water for his foot. He sat back, closed his eyes and as cotton wool started working its way around his ear lobe he heard a familiar voice.
“I guess there are worse ways of spending the evening.”
“Hello Tony. You look very good for a guy that’s just been fished out of the Pearl River.”
They told the ear cleaner to take a break, and Morgan said, “Somebody’s been fished out of the Pearl River?”
Drayton explained how a drowned man, badly cut, had been found and taken to the mainland, without being identified, and how the local cops thought it
was Morgan when they found his belongings in the water.
“Oooh, nasty toe,” said Morgan, looking into the bucket in which Drayton had now sunk his foot. “How did you do that?”
“Old war wound,” said Drayton.
“Iran? Afghanistan? I didn’t realise you served in either.”
“Japan, actually,” said Drayton. “But it’s a long story.”
Then Morgan told Drayton about the summons to Macau from Mr Fang, Sam Ching’s arrest and the call from him. He told Drayton about the Fang meeting at the restaurant that never happened, and Ching’s ace of spades directing him to Fisherman’s Wharf. He said he suspected they’d spiked his tea at the restaurant and wanted him at Fisherman’s Wharf because whatever they had in mind it was more private.
“So they likely did want you to take a dip. How did you end up here?”
“The card, the ace of spades, it was definitely Ching’s writing,” Morgan said. “But there was something else. He’d drawn a figure, a stick alien. I remembered Ching telling me that the alien was all over the place, that it was becoming a kind of symbol of protest. Representing the out-of-touch authorities, I guess. Something like that. So I thought it might be a warning. But by the time that dawned on me I was at Fisherman’s Wharf and could hardly walk. That’s when I dropped my bag in the water. I then remembered this place was nearby.”
Which got Drayton thinking about the alien. It made a lot of things a lot clearer. But he let that pass for now, while Morgan told him he was unconscious for most of his first six hours in the sauna, but that wasn’t a problem since they knew him and saw all sorts of things there.
Drayton said he was sure they did, dismissing another proposal for a thigh massage. He said that Ching might be the least of Morgan’s problems, that the documents about Mr Fang and the Colonel had been leaked on the internet, and neither would be impressed.