Black Diamond (28 page)

My first move the next morning was to check with the front desk to see if a Mr. Qian An-Yong had checked in. Sure enough, good old Harry Wong. I hardly needed to ask. I had the desk buzz his room. The sleepiness in his voice told me that he couldn't sleep on a plane any more than I could.

“Harry, welcome to the Emerald Isle.”

“Mr. Qian, if you please. Let's not blow my cover before I have one.”

“To be sure. And may I invite Mr. Qian to a sumptuous Irish breakfast downstairs? Good chance to talk over the game plan.”

“Done. Give me fifteen minutes. By the way, do I know you or do we play it like strangers?”

“Excellent question. You were cut out for this work.”

“God forbid. I already miss my maze mice. So?”

“We're old business associates. Two crooked, big-time rollers actually. We'll be under surveillance by a couple of clumsy thugs so don't be subtle. I want them to see that we're old acquaintances.”

I was at a table for two in the Gallery Restaurant off the Gresham lobby when Harry showed up at the door. The maître d' led him halfway to my table when he spotted me. Never one to do anything halfway, Harry threw up his arms and approached me at quick time for what was shaping up as a hug. I was on my feet in a flash with my right hand out to shake hands.

Being a quick study, Harry toned it down to a reserved handshake and a polite Chinese bow.

I whispered, “Relax, Harry. Mr. Qian. We're not strangers, but we're not lovers. Just a couple of old friends.”

With that, he gave me a stage grin and a good-old-boy slap on the
back. If that didn't have the two thugs watching from a corner table totally confused, we were home free—for the moment.

We ordered coffee without getting into anything more touchy than the Irish weather. After going through the breakfast buffet line, I laid out the plan for our one o'clock meeting with Sweeney in a tone only Harry could hear. I figured that if the two in the corner were the sharpest tacks in their box, we had no worries about sophisticated listening devices.

When I outlined the cover story we were going to take into the meeting with Sweeney, I thought Harry was going to lose the part of the breakfast he'd eaten.

“Oh, shit, Michael!”

“Harry. Keep a low profile. Did you have a question?”

“Damn straight! That's all of it? That's the little act we're going to put on for this bunch of killers?”

“No problem. I can ad lib if necessary. Besides, I've already set the scene with them. This is pretty much what they're expecting. Your function is to lend an authenticating air.”

“Terrific. And how do I do that?”

“Just by being your natural Chinese self. Forgive the ethnicity, but you people are supposed to be into high-stakes gambling. It'll go a long way to sell the cover story.”

“That's a myth.”

“So what, as long as they believe it.”

He nervously wiped his brow with his napkin.

“Easy, easy. You're a sophisticated, cool, big roller.”

“I'm going to get my high-stakes Chinese ass sliced up for Irish stew. This is not my idea of a super, can't-miss plan.”

“Not to worry, Harry. My low-stakes ass will be right up there on the block with yours.”

“Oh, that's comforting. Could you at least stop calling me ‘Harry'?”

“Not a problem in the world, Harry. Mr. Qian. We have two
things on our side. Number one is I'll do all the talking. You tend to ham it up. Second, we'll be going in with a gift of twenty thousand euros. Sort of a test I set up to pass. It'll be duck soup. Eat your breakfast, Harry.”

He flinched.

“I mean, Mr. Qian.”

I left Harry to rest up for our matinee performance while I walked down O'Connell Street to the Ulster Bank. I asked for the manager and was escorted to an upstairs office. Mr. Dwyer welcomed me as if there was no need for an explanation. In fact, there wasn't. Apparently Colin Fitzpatrick had set everything up for me in advance. From the tone in which Mr. Dwyer spoke of him, Colin Fitzpatrick was a heavier hitter than even I had assumed. Mr. Dwyer seemed tickled to start his day doing business with him.

In any event, I walked out of the bank with an envelope containing exactly twenty thousand euros in cash. Strangely enough, seeing Sweeney's thug tail me gave me an unexpected sense of security carrying that amount of cash.

At one o'clock sharp, Mr. Qian An-Yong and I stepped out of a cab in front of McShannon's Pub. At that hour, it looked like a funeral parlor compared to the rocking boom box it had been the night before.

One of the men who had been in the upstairs room during my last visit met us at the door. He led us through the pub and up the stairs to Sweeney's office. On the way to the staircase, I could see McGuire hunched over a Guinness at the far end of the bar. He gave me a sideways look with a sneering grin that knocked the crap out of the euphoria I had built up in selling the plan to Harry at breakfast. I was back to full-blown reality.

Sweeney was in the chair behind his desk. He was in a welltailored suit with an open-collared shirt. He stood and extended his hand to me for a handshake with a pleasant “Good afternoon,
gentlemen.” I introduced Harry as Mr. Qian. Sweeney offered a gracious hand to Harry and they exchanged salutations.

I was slightly rattled by the entire opening scene. First, seeing Sweeney in his current attire and manner dispelled any comforting notion that he was a beer-besotted thug with the IQ of a bar brawler. The idea that that mistaken impression might have been deliberately planted by Sweeney the previous day gave me a double jolt.

The second cause for unease was that good old Harry had responded to Sweeney's extended hand with a low bow and worse yet, he'd slipped into a Chinese accent. I gave him a hopefully unnoticed jab in the back to tone down his performance. He jumped just enough to make me wish I hadn't.

I played my best opening card. I placed the envelope holding twenty thousand euros on the desk in front of Sweeney. He eyed it, and looked back at me with either hesitancy or suspicion.

“Please count it, Mr. Sweeney. It's yours.”

Sweeney leaned forward in his seat and simply lifted the flap on the envelope. With one momentary look, he closed the flap and let the envelope sit there between us. The air of suspicion still hung heavy. It had me off balance.

“You seem unhappy, Mr. Sweeney. I believe I've passed the test. I'm sure you know who won the eighth race yesterday. You know I had the winner before the race was run. Unless I misread you, you're still suspicious. I told you three times yesterday, this can only work on mutual trust. If you're not capable of trust, we'll call it a day. I've enjoyed seeing Dublin, and you're up twenty thousand euros. Shall we leave it at that?”

I stood up and gave every indication of walking out the door. Poor Harry was totally confused, but he took his cue from me and stood. The only obstacle to a grand exit was the two-hundred-and-fifty-pound thug standing in the doorway. I thanked God he was there, because if Sweeney had not stopped us from leaving, we were back at ground zero or below.

I turned back to Sweeney and raised my hands in a what's-with-
the-goon-in-the-doorway gesture. Sweeney responded, but the businesslike tone had an unsettling edge to it.

“Please, gentlemen. Sit. Allow me to be curious.”

“About what? I promised you I could get a twenty-to-one return on your bet before the horses even went to the post. I did that. Every dime of it is in that envelope. I assumed that you'd understand that if I could do that with peanuts, I could do it with interesting money. Apparently I was wrong. Is there anything more to say?”

Sweeney smiled from one to the other of us.

“You're a hell of a puzzle to me. Either you're a man I could do business with, or you're—something else.”

I raised my hands again in innocence. “What else?”

“That's what I'm trying to figure. You lay twenty thousand euros on my desk like it's subway change. Then you're going to walk away. No one does that.”

I sat down, and poor befuddled Harry followed suit.

“I do, Mr. Sweeney.”

“Why?”

“Because I said I would. I keep my word. I'm entitled to your trust. I hoped this would prove it.”

He looked at me again with those piercing, questioning eyes. He seemed to be on the verge of something, but just couldn't cross the line to a decision. He looked straight at me.

“I'll tell you what I can't figure out, Yank. If you could make twenty thousand overnight, why do you need me?”

I leaned back in the chair and forced a knowing grin.

“You've finally asked an interesting question. We spread the bets so thinly with betting syndicates across the United States, we can pluck out twenty thousand on a routine fixed race at Suffolk, and no one notices.”

I came forward with the fire of enthusiasm in my eyes and my elbows on his desk.

“What I have in mind is a real killing. High millions. It can only be done once. The kind of fix that was in on yesterday's race would
be suspect to the people who'd have to pay off large sums of money. They wouldn't suffer it gladly. They'd work over the jockeys till they got the truth about the fix. We'd all be dead within a week. Or wish we were.”

“So how is this different?”

He was looking at me like a trout eyeing a piece of bait just before he decides to strike. I had to make the trout want to believe.

“You set it up perfectly with Black Diamond. You just don't know how to use it.”

“Tell me.”

“It's perfect. We don't need to fix the race. There's nothing for the syndicates to detect. Nothing the jockeys can tell them. It's a normal race. It's not uncommon for a horse to run routine races and then break out with a convincing win in one race. Horses are animals. They're not machines. Even the syndicates understand that.”

“But he could still lose the race.”

I sat back and took a breath as if I were looking for the words to simplify it.

“You've got a good grip on the obvious. He could break a leg coming out of the starting gate. He could be hit by a flying meteor at the eighth pole. A sinkhole could swallow him up.”

Sweeney was not taking my last comment kindly. I couldn't let the trout back off the bait.

“Life's full of crappy accidents. But I've seen that horse run. We pick the right race, and I'm willing to bet more of my own money than you've seen in a lifetime that he'll break on top and waltz home. Mr. Qian is willing to put his entire network of contacts and a good bit of his own money on the line. We need you because you control Black Diamond. It's a one-time thing, Mr. Sweeney. You're in or you're out.”

I sat back and made a point of looking at my watch. Sweeney was getting the itches like a man at a major fork in the road. He stood up and swung his chair around. Then he swung it back and sat down again.

“How much are you looking for?”

I scratched my temple and looked at Harry, who, thank God, was keeping his mouth shut. I spoke in a hushed tone to Harry, but just loud enough for Sweeney to hear.

“How much can you handle? I'm in for six million. You? Probably double that.”

Good old Harry refrained from favoring us with his phony Chinese accent. He just nodded in assent.

“So we can let Mr. Sweeney in for what? Remember, it's his horse.”

Harry had no clue as to what number I was looking for. He just squinted as if he was thinking.

I turned to Sweeney. “You name it, Mr. Sweeney. Give us a number.”

Sweeney looked as perplexed as Harry. He may have been the top dog in the Irish Mafia with his bank robberies and extortion and whatever, but he was on the spot and totally out of his element in this game. Thank God. He finally mumbled a number.

“A hundred thousand.”

He looked like he was going to choke just to say it. I just sat there with my mouth open like I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I looked at Harry who was looking equally shocked. I nearly fell over when Harry stood up and started berating me.

“What you get me over here for? You play some kind of joke?”

I tried to calm him. “Please, Mr. Qian. Let's give him a chance.”

Harry had the bit in his teeth. There was no turning him off. He was sputtering staccato syllables in fractured English as fast as he could get them out.

“Chance to what? Chance to humiliate me? My people not take this well. Not well at all. I lose face.”

He was wiping his face with a large red silk handkerchief that he probably bought for the occasion. I had totally lost control. The words kept pouring out.

“I tell you this. I don't know what they do about this man. I try to explain, but I don't know. They not like this.”

I took Harry by the shoulders and placed him back in the chair. I gave him a look that finally put a cork in it. I turned back to Sweeney, who, for the moment, seemed not to know who was on first.

“Mr. Sweeney, let's think this thing through. Some serious arrangements have been made by Mr. Qian on the strength of what I assumed you'd commit to. I was told you were a major figure over here. You never denied it. Representations have been made to people who deal on a commission basis. I don't know how to express this other than directly. We all have a great deal to lose if we pansy out now. I obviously mean more than money. I don't think I have to explain that to you. Let's start again. How much can you put into this, remembering that we're looking for at least a ten-to-one profit?”

He looked no more comfortable than he did a minute ago, but at least he was thinking. He was steering clear of the Chinese firecracker. He looked straight at me.

“How much did you expect?”

I looked back at Harry. It was the right gesture, but I prayed it wouldn't set him off again. Having my right shoe on his left foot helped. He left the ball in my court.