Dead and Kicking (14 page)

I shrugged. ‘Sounds like beans and franks on toast to me,’ and for a moment I thought she was going to call the nice cabin attendant and have me sent back to cattle class.

A lot of people claim to miss the good old days of landing at Hong Kong’s legendary Kai Tak Airport, but I’m not one of them. With its unfortunately numbered Runway 13 sticking out like a long, skinny finger into the harbour, flying in over the water was rather enjoyable. It was the land approach, coming in through the downtown Kowloon high-rises, that was something else. An old 747 pilot told me he could check out what Mrs Kwok was cooking for lunch in apartment 6J through one side window and the racing results in Mr Wong’s newspaper through the other.

Four kilometres out, and 300 metres in the air, you came to a chopped-off mountain top with a helpful turn arrow where you hung a hard right, dropped a couple of hundred metres quick sticks and then suddenly you were on the ground with all engines thundering in reverse thrust, both feet on the brakes and 3000 metres of runway going by very quickly. If you came to a stop with dirty brown water up to your chest, a cormorant circling the co-pilot and a couple of fishermen in a sampan looking in through the window, you’d probably misjudged it. This bloke always reckoned part of any pilot’s pre-landing checklist for Kai Tak was making sure his life insurance payments were up to date.

Chek Lap Kok, the new airport on the tip of Lantau Island, replaced Kai Tak and is pretty white bread – you fly in over water, you land, you get your bags, you leave. It’s ultra-clean and whisper quiet, with automated trains connecting the various terminals, shiny escalators and complimentary luggage trolleys, and when you get to baggage claim and immigration the process is incredibly calm and efficient. Even the white-uniformed and face-masked nurses using heat scanning to check for possible bird-flu carriers look welcoming.

On landing, I tried to keep well clear of my travelling companion in case her legendary hotness set off the scanners and had the medical staff running in all directions. In the main concourse I bought myself a pass for the Mass Transit Railway system while Jezebel rounded up her film crew in her usual style, causing mothers to cover their children’s ears and a team of Pommy rugby players to blush. I gave her a quick goodbye kiss and she told me she’d be staying at the Peninsula, registered under the name Barbara Ganoush, if I fancied a workout. I pointed out that my hotel had its own health centre, and we both smiled and left it at that.

Twenty-five minutes after wheels-down I was in a fast, clean, quiet train heading for Hung Horn on the Kowloon side of Victoria Harbour, on the site of the old Whampoa dockyards. The dockyards were built in the 1860s, and for more than a hundred years they were amongst the largest in Asia. In the 1990s they were levelled and turned into a massive housing development. If nature abhors a vacuum, Hong Kong abhors any space big enough for a housing development that doesn’t have one.

The Harbour Plaza on Tak Fung Street was right on the water, with panoramic views across to Hong Kong Island. I liked the fact that the hotel was located in the middle of a neighbourhood of residential high-rises, schools and local shopping centres. For Hong Kong it was pretty laid-back, but still convenient. Central was just fifteen minutes away by Star Ferry and the retail insanity of Kowloon’s Nathan Road was far enough away that I didn’t even need to think about it.

Hong Kong is a great place for mixing business with pleasure, and with Jezebel already having spilled the beans on the barrana on the plane, I figured I might squeeze in a couple of days of R and R Maybe a frantic, noisy, old-school yum cha at the Lin Heung Teahouse on Wellington Street in Central, which offered elbows in the ribs along with your pork buns and dumplings, or perhaps a more sedate, fine-dining experience at a private kitchen like Da Ping Huo, where, after passing through the unmarked steel door, you got exquisite red-hot Sichuan cuisine followed by after-dinner Chinese opera from the lady who ran the stoves. I like a city with options.

After checking in to the hotel and dumping my backpack in the room, I walked down Tak Fung Street to an internet café to grab a coffee and send an email to a photographer mate, Jimmy Yip. Jimmy was the official WorldPix representative in Hong Kong and D.E.D.’s man on the street when required.

Being on suspension meant my access to the D.E.D. databank was blocked, so I asked Jimmy to dig out everything he could on Peter Cartwright, Peter Tranh, Detlef Fischer, the Peng casino interests in Macau and the Honourable Vaughan Crockett, Ambassador to Australia. I also set up a dinner date. Then I ambled back to the hotel for a quick nap and a shower and a shave.

Exactly why five-star hotels consider a phone in the bathroom a necessity is beyond me. I had a face full of lather when mine rang. The phone was on the wall next to the toilet and if I’d had any sense I would have dropped the handset in the bowl and flushed. After I heard who was calling, I almost did.

‘Felton here,’ the voice on the other end snapped brusquely.

Bugger, I said to myself, this is all I bloody need.

Gwenda Felton AO had recently started answering her calls with a gruff, ‘Felton.’ I think she really wanted a codename, like Eagle or Alpha One or Red Dog Leader. Maybe we could call her Sausage Dog Leader, after the psychotic miniature dachshund she kept with her on a leash at all times.

‘Murdoch here,’ I said, in a clipped voice that I hoped made me sound like a World War II RAF Spitfire pilot.

‘I’ve seen your signal, Murdoch, and I want to know what the hell you’re playing at.’

You’d think the Director-General of a spy agency like D.E.D. would have better things to do with her time than eavesdropping on internal communications, but given Gwenda’s style of micro-managing, perhaps that was expecting way too much.

‘I’m not playing at anything,’ I said. ‘Something came up and I just asked for all the background we have on Peter Cartwright, a couple of fish farmers and the American Ambassador.’

‘Well, as I see it, Murdoch, you are just wasting the government’s valuable time and money. Cartwright died in Vietnam. End of story. And the United States Ambassador, who I might tell you is a close personal friend, is a decorated war hero and successful businessman who also served his country in Congress and is in line to be nominated for vice-president.’

It sounded like Gwenda was reading from a press release, maybe one written by Brett Tozer’s successor at MB&F.

‘And Ambassador Crockett has kindly consented to officially open the WorldPix photographic exhibition in Canberra and I’d like you back here for the event.’

The exhibition in question was a collection of some of the best images taken by the WorldPix team over the last twenty years. Sponsored by Nikon and the US-Australia Friendship Alliance, it was scheduled for a six-week showing at the National Portrait Gallery in the Old Parliament House building. I’d helped put the show together, but after the barney with Gwenda I’d figured I’d still be in Vietnam and
persona non grata
when it opened.

I hadn’t been too fussed about missing out on the speeches, the wine, the finger food and the opening-night backslapping. I got my buzz from hanging out at exhibitions anonymously and seeing the reactions on people’s faces when a really powerful image leapt out and hit them right in the face. And as powerful images go, this show had some doozies.

The WorldPix team shoots anything that moves and anything we can make a profit from. This exhibition, though, was mostly portraits, from potentates, prime ministers and presidents to beggars, orphans, refugees and other people damaged or broken or displaced by the actions of those same potentates, prime ministers and presidents.

The people in power have teams of photographers dedicated to making them look good, and for the rest of us there are the world’s photojournalists, risking and sometimes losing their lives to show the ugly reality. The images were being printed bigger than life-size for the exhibition, so you couldn’t avoid being confronted by the joy and misery, relief and despair, beauty and ugliness, and the arrogance that the camera can capture so well.

Although only 10 per cent of the WorldPix photographers are covert agents, our work was well represented in the show. To maintain cover, we tend to shoot a lot more WorldPix photos than covert ones and the eternal question for us Dedheads is: are we spies playing photographers or photographers playing spies?

‘Did you hear me, Murdoch?’ Gwenda snapped.

‘Roger, that,’ I said.

‘Roger who?’ Gwenda said. ‘Stop fooling about, Murdoch. I’m suspending your suspension and I want you back in the office ASAP.’ She pronounced it ‘a-sap’, like the Yank military on TV shows.

‘I’m just tying up some loose ends here,’ I said, ‘and then I’ll be on a plane.’

‘There are no loose ends, Murdoch, I just told you. I want you on a plane now.’

‘Roger, Wilco,’ I said.

‘Stop doing that Murdoch or I’ll …’

‘Un-suspend my suspended suspension?’ I suggested.

‘Forty-eight hours,’ she said. ‘And make sure you fly economy. We’re all trying very hard here to demonstrate fiscal responsibility for the new government.’

‘Why don’t we try for actual competence and really impress people?’

‘Forty-eight hours, Murdoch,’ she said again, coldly.

‘That’s a big ten-four. Murdoch over and out.’

My evening began with a stroll from the hotel to Whampoa Gourmet Place, where some of Hong Kong’s best restaurants are clustered together over three levels in a building they share with cinemas, a bowling alley and a bus interchange. Opening a joint in this foodie mecca is by invitation only and one of Hong Kong’s top gourmets does the inviting. And unless a restaurant maintains consistently high standards, it gets the elbow. So the standards stay high and the lines stay long, and the longest lines are outside Wing Lai Yuen.

Started by a former Imperial Palace chef who fled to Hong Kong in 1949 after the Communist takeover, Wing Lai Yuen is renowned for its spicy Sichuan
dan dan
noodles. The original restaurant, with its 1950s décor, was in Tai Hom Village in Diamond Hill, and the queues often extended from the shopfront right down to the Diamond Hill MTR exit. Still family-run and maintaining the founder’s standards, they’d relocated to Whampoa, where they continued to make eighteen hundred servings of the signature noodle dish by hand each day, limiting portions to strictly one serve per customer.

The Chinese usually eat early, so the queue wasn’t impossibly long outside Wing Lai Yuen and I waited patiently as befitted my lowly
gwailo
status. Jimmy Yip, my dinner companion, was Hong Kong born and bred, and he shook his head sadly when he saw me standing outside the restaurant. After a brief chat with the maître d’, we were shown to a couple of empty chairs at one end of a table occupied by a family of five. They smiled politely and went back to attacking what looked to be enough food to feed an army. Jimmy ignored the offered menus and after a discussion with the waitress ordered for us. I heard the words ‘
dan dan mein
’ somewhere in his rapid-fire Cantonese so I was happy.

Jimmy Yip was around thirty, and devastatingly handsome. He tooled around town on a beautifully restored Triumph motorcycle and lived the playboy photographer lifestyle to the hilt. You’d generally bump into him on the street with a camera bag, hanging off one shoulder and some gorgeous young kung-fu movie actress hanging off the other. It was always the same camera bag, but the actresses changed on a weekly basis. My gender-sensitivity training at WorldPix told me such behaviour was decidedly inappropriate, but my envy went right to the bloody bone.

‘No cameras, Alby?’ Jimmy asked, as he tucked his Lowe-pro bag under the table.

I took the Leica from my pocket. ‘Just the standby.’ I still found it hard to believe that this little camera had been the catalyst for so much trouble.

Jimmy pulled a thick envelope from his camera bag.

‘Maybe you want to put your head into this before the food arrives. Gwenda blocked me using the D.E.D. database for you so I used some outside resources. The Cartwright bloke came up as “Deceased” on the Oz Defence Department records, plus I found some reasonable background info on Fischer through online newspaper archives. Ambassador Crockett comes up so squeaky clean he’d make Mother Teresa look like a part-time callgirl and full-time hit woman for the Mafia.’

The food came quickly, but not before I had time to flick through the pages and study a couple of the photographs. There was a lot of background on ANL Fischer Seafoods and the founder, Eugene Fischer, Detlef’s father, a poor but honest postwar immigrant made good. From peeling spuds in a chip shop, Eugene Fischer had worked his way up to become the owner of an empire of fish and chip cafés. He’d even made enough money to be able to send his son to Fairbrothers, the ultra-exclusive and outrageously expensive Melbourne boarding school.

Fairbrothers was the school of choice for disgustingly rich people who didn’t want their sons associating with the riffraff at Scotch College, Trinity or Melbourne Grammar. Fairbrothers offered no scholarships to the deserving poor, on the basis that the poor were getting exactly what they bloody deserved for the sin of being poor. The school had a rugby team known for its bone-shattering brutality and a reputation for bullying amongst the students that made Guantanamo Bay look like a Hyatt resort, without the beach umbrellas and deckchairs.

Detlef had taken over the business on the death of his father about five years ago, and had rapidly expanded ANL Fischer into a multimillion-dollar seafood-importing business. His hobbies were fast cars and faster women, so he and Jezebel were a great match.

A waitress appeared with a bowl of steamed Shanghai dumplings wallowing in a sea of glowing red chilli oil and we dug in. The noodles arrived moments later and the bloke sitting on the other side of the table nodded approvingly and gave me the thumbs-up. Jimmy and I entered a non-speaking zone as we savoured the
dan dan mein
’s thick and amazingly flavoured broth – sweet, sour, salty, spicy, smoky – with hints of dried shrimp, fermented bean paste, chilli, shallots and garlic, and the wonderfully textured handmade noodles topped with wok-fried minced pork and crushed peanuts.