LAUNDRY MAN (A Jack Shepherd crime thriller) (11 page)

Why was it that so many Americans look at offshore banking as some sort of occult wizardry? I had a sudden vision of huge airplanes stuffed with microchip importers from San Francisco whizzing endlessly around the globe in search of a fabled and mystical land called Offshore, a place forever beyond the reach of greedy governments, combative creditors, and vengeful ex-wives. I myself have always pictured Offshore as a land ruled by Peter Sellers, but now that he was dead, I imagine that Rowan Atkinson must have taken over the throne. I wondered what people spend their days doing in Offshore. What do they eat? What do they wear? Do they have sex? Well, I could guess the answer to that one. Not with all that money around. Money is so much more interesting than sex for almost everyone.

My flight landed in Hong Kong exactly on time. Southeast Asian Investments had sent a driver to the airport and the fellow made the trip to the venerable Mandarin Oriental Hotel on Connaught Road in what must have been record time. Still, it was after nine when we got to the hotel. That was too late to do anything in particular, but too early just to sit in my room. Watching Hong Kong television was too awful a thought even to consider.

I stuck my head in the Captain’s Bar off the Mandarin’s lobby, but the place was filled with middle-aged Englishmen entertaining their Chinese daughters. It was a depressing scene and I didn’t go in. I had skipped the meal on the plane so I briefly considered the possibility of a late evening snack in one of the hotel’s restaurants, but eventually I gave up trying to make a decision and just set out walking to see where I would end up.

I liked walking in Hong Kong. In winter the climate was balmy and the humidity was low and in every season the intensity of the place was overwhelming. Bangkok was a tropical city. No matter how busy it might be, there was always a languor in the air you could never quite shake. Hong Kong, on the other hand, was all energy all the time. It was like being inside a pinball machine.

Leaving the Mandarin, I turned right and walked east toward the Wanchai district or, as it had been dubbed by the American troops who took their R&R there during the Vietnam War, the Wanch. The Wanch had a history, but like a lot of history most of it was made up. From the day William Holden first came to Hong Kong, moved into a hotel filled with good-hearted whores, and fell in love with Suzie Wong, it was the Wanch which became the real Hong Kong in the eyes of the world.

Nightlife in the Wanch never attained the status of Bangkok’s, of course, not even at the height of the Vietnam War when thousands of fresh-faced kids from places like Nebraska and Ohio flooded its streets, all of them looking for a Suzie Wong of their own. Most of the bargirls in the Wanch were more like bar grandmothers who put on their make-up with a garden trowel, but maybe that wasn’t so important when you were nineteen years old, it was three in the morning, and the ninth bottle of San Miguel had just gone down so smoothly and, best of all, stayed down.

I circled around the golden glass-clad bulk of the Admiralty Centre, its bronze-mirrored surface twisting and shimmering with the city’s garish nighttime light show. Heading up Queensway, I fought my way through the crowds still jamming the sidewalks even at this hour. Almost entirely Chinese, the throng pulsed and surged as if driven by some otherworldly energy source.

About a half-mile down Lockhart Road, I spotted the dirty brick façade of the Old China Hand pub which was something of a local monument. The Hand had been a Hong Kong expat hangout longer than anyone I knew could remember. I could hardly imagine the deals and schemes that had been whispered of within its dingy interior.

On a whim I cut diagonally across the road and ducked inside the dark wooden door stained black from decades of exposure to Hong Kong’s rancid air. The room was as gloomy as I remembered it, and like most expat bars in Hong Kong it was chilled down to the temperature of a meat locker. The room was mostly empty. I slid into a chair at a table and in a few moments a dumpy Filipina girl of indeterminate age shuffled over. She was dressed in jeans and a man’s shirt and she expressionlessly thrust out a menu that looked dirty and dog-eared.

“A pint of San Miguel,” I said, not bothering with the menu. “And fish and chips if you’ve got any left.”

The girl pulled the menu back and walked away without a word. I gathered they still had some fish and chips. Or maybe not. Welcome to Hong Kong, I told myself.

From a loudspeaker somewhere up near the greasy ceiling, Tony Bennett crooned about leaving his heart in San Francisco. I spotted a table near the door with some newspapers and magazines heaped on it so I got up and rummaged through them for something to read while waiting for my beer. To my surprise, I found some books under the pile. They were mostly dog-eared paperbacks, but a slim, red-bound hardback caught my eye and I picked it up to see what it was.

When I saw the title on the front cover, I chuckled. Normally, you wouldn’t expect to find
A Register of Hong Kong Banking Institutions
among the reading matter in a run-down pub, but this was Hong Kong after all and making money was just about the only thing that anyone thought about. Barry Gale’s banking misadventures with the Asia Bank of Commerce popped into my mind and I flipped the book open to the index. Sure enough, about a third of the way down the first page, I found a listing for the ABC.

When I turned to the page number listed in the index, I found very little there. The ABC had nothing but a restricted banking license in Hong Kong, which meant it had a little capital, but not much, and that it was legally entitled to take only very large deposits and make certain kinds of corporate loans. No vaulted lobby, no cute tellers, no toasters with every new account. At least the book listed an address for the ABC. The Hong Kong office was on Duddell Street, a steep lane that ran from Queen’s Road up to Ice House Street a few blocks west of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank building.

Duddell Street was only about a ten-minute walk from the building where Southeast Asian Investments had its offices and I thought about that for a moment. I would have plenty of time after the board meeting tomorrow. It would probably be a waste of effort, but I might as well check out the address and see what was there. My flight back to Bangkok wasn’t until early evening and I really had no plans for the afternoon other than to pick up some Cuban cigars since they were both cheaper in Hong Kong and better quality than the ones sold in Bangkok.

I jotted down the address. Then I put the book back on the table and picked up a copy of the
South China Morning Post
that was stained yellow with spilled beer. At least I hoped the stain was spilled beer.

Back at my table, I found a pint of San Miguel waiting and I opened the newspaper and took a long pull. Most of my students seemed to imagine that becoming a director of a company in some major financial center like Hong Kong was a ticket to a glamorous life, an express ride straight to the place where the real players hung out. I glanced around at the grimy pub in which I sat drinking beer and reading an old newspaper and smiled. If they could only see me now, huh?

For a moment I thought about the guy who sat next to me on the flight up and wondered if he was tucked up in bed somewhere nearby dreaming of Offshore. Was that really what I was all about now, getting paid to help people and companies hide their business operations and avoid taxes? Like every young lawyer I had started out imagining myself as an architect of events that mattered; but then almost before I knew it, the work-a-day business of making a living had taken over my life and those inspiring dreams had faded. In spite of all evidence to the contrary, I nourished my conviction that those youthful dreams were not altogether dead. Something was still waiting for me out there, I was sure of it, something that was going to count for a lot. I just had to recognize my chance when I saw it and have the courage to grasp the moment when it came.

The dumpy girl shuffled over, her feet making scrapping sounds against the floor.

“No fish,” she snapped and shuffled away again.

Jai yen yen,
I reminded myself.
Stay cool, man.

I GOT TO
Southeast Asian Investments about nine the next morning which gave me time to drink some coffee and eat a few of the pastries heaped on a silver platter in the middle of the board table before anyone else showed up. The board meeting started promptly at nine-thirty.

Directors from outside the ranks of management are generally trivial appendages on any board. Most outside directors are just semiretired old geezers — or college professors, which most people think are more or less the same thing — who have nothing much better to do than show up for meetings a few times a year. We are seldom expected to do anything other than keep our mouths shut, stay awake, and vote the way the company’s management tells us to vote.

After the board sat through a seemingly endless Power Point presentation about a Mekong River hydroelectric project that of course no one understood, we listened to a droning recitation on the future of the shrimp industry in Cambodia that was so dull I think one director may have passed away during it without anyone noticing. We dutifully voted to approve both projects and management rewarded me for my support with a small retainer to review the shrimp farm’s financial structure.

The meeting ended just after twelve and a light lunch was served in the boardroom. I made small talk with some of the other directors and picked at the buffet until a decent interval had passed, then I said my goodbyes and slipped away. Crossing Des Voeux Road, I walked through the Landmark, a ritzy shopping mall that joined the bases of two of Central’s principal office towers, and emerged on Queen’s Road. Across the street, just where Central began to slope sharply up toward the Peak, I spotted Duddell Street.

It was narrow and so steep that the sidewalks were actually flights of stained concrete steps. I watched the street numbers carefully as I climbed and all the way at the end of the street I finally located the address that the book had for the Asian Bank of Commerce. It was an altogether unexceptional office building of no more than a dozen floors faced with black-streaked brick that had probably once been yellow. An elderly Chinese man wearing a dirty undershirt and baggy gray trousers sat slumped on a folding metal chair next to the glass and metal entry door. He snorted and spat as I passed, but I didn’t take it personally.

Inside the building the small lobby was dim and smelled faintly of urine. I examined the directory between the elevators and, sure enough, found a listing for the Asian Bank of Commerce on the ninth floor.

When I got out of the elevator, I saw only three offices on that floor and none of them looked much like a bank. One was a dentist’s office, one seemed to be a sweatshop with an Indian tailor hovering hopefully just inside the open door, and the third was something called Hong Kong Directors Limited. When I spotted the large board at the end of the corridor with columns of small wooden signs hanging from brass hooks, I realized that Hong Kong Directors was the place I was looking for after all.

Hong Kong Directors was apparently a corporate services office, one of dozens scattered around Hong Kong that catered to foreign companies too small or too unimportant to have local offices of their own, but who nevertheless needed a formal address in Hong Kong. Corporate services companies existed all over the world, but they were most in demand in places like Hong Kong, Luxembourg, and the Cayman Islands where countless thousands of companies register themselves as residents for the purpose of minimizing taxes or maintaining confidentiality while conducting their real business elsewhere. Companies fronted by corporate services providers were often referred to as “brass plate companies” since very little evidence of their existence could be found other than the brass plate generally hung somewhere to identify the provider as the legally registered address of its clients. Hong Kong Directors must have been operating in the low end of the market. Its plates were wood.

I realized immediately that my chances of finding out anything about the Asian Bank of Commerce from Hong Kong Directors were pretty slim. No corporate service company would give out any information about a company registered with it other than whatever local law required, and in Hong Kong that wasn’t much.

So, expecting very little, I opened the door and went inside. Very little was exactly what I found.

The reception area was small. It appeared that Hong Kong Directors didn’t receive very many visitors. Three folding metal chairs were lined up along the wall to the left and opposite them was a wooden desk piled high with stacks of paper. A young Chinese girl slumped over the desk. She had badly permed hair, skin blotched with acne scars, and a dimple in her chin deep enough to hide Easter eggs. Perhaps she had a great personality, loved small children, and would make a wonderful wife for someone, but somehow I doubted it. I got the feeling her plainness was more than skin deep.

The girl ignored me as long as she possibly could, but I stood my ground and waited her out. Eventually she squinted up at me through a pair of glasses with lenses that looked like the bottoms of Coke bottles.

“You wait,” she said, and pointed to the chairs along the wall.

“I only have one quick question.”

“You wait,” she repeated emphatically, and started making small brushing movements with her right hand, the sort you would use to shoo a cat away.

I walked over to one of the straight chairs and sat down, folding my arms and fixing the girl with a stare I hoped was unsettling. Apparently it wasn’t. She took her time shuffling through the stacks of files in front of her and never even looked at me. Eventually she extracted a page from a file and for some reason held it up to the light as if she was trying to see through it. Hoping she was about to glance my way again at least, I gave her my warmest smile and crinkled my eyes in a way I thought emphasized what an honest, open fellow I was, but I was wasting my time. The girl lowered the paper, returned it to the file without a glance at me, and went back to plowing slowly through the rest of the folders.