The First Novels: Pay Off, the Fireman (38 page)

‘Lai Kwok-lee,’ he said. ‘Where did you get this?’

‘The study. Three pictures of him pinned to the wall. What does this Mr Kwok-lee do?’

‘Mr Lai,’ said Howard. ‘Surname always comes first. And Kwok-lee is his Chinese given name, he hardly ever uses it. Dennis Lai is the name he prefers. He’s got fingers in more pies than Sweeney Todd. He’s the boss of one of the big hongs here, property, trade with China, a small film studio, a few very lucrative franchise deals, a chain of shops, a couple of good restaurants, a couple of dozen taxis. It’s easier to list the things he isn’t involved in.’

‘Rich?’

‘He’s not up there with the mega-rich shipping and property tycoons, but he’s well past the stage where he actually knows his true worth.’

‘And what is his true worth?’

‘It would be impossible to pin down at any one time how much money he has. He’s always got two or three deals on the go, opening up a company, shutting others down, taking over, selling off. He’s not actually whiter than white either, there’re whispers that he’s the front man for Triad money.’

‘So Sally was doing a story on him?’

‘If she was I didn’t know about it. But that wouldn’t be unusual, we were both freelancers and Hong Kong is a small patch. We had our own secrets.’

‘How can I find out what she was working on?’

‘If she wasn’t doing it here then she might have been using the system at the
Post
, she did quite a bit of work for them.’

‘Can you fix it for me to meet someone there who could show me round, somebody who wouldn’t ask too many questions?’

He nodded.

‘Do me a favour and fix me another drink while I go through her files,’ I said. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so short with him but he’d spoiled it, now I didn’t trust him because he should have told me about the flat and the car before he’d brought me here.

I spent two hours going through the desk drawers and the filing cabinet but it was all banal run-of-the-mill stuff, most of it background material that might come in useful at some time, cuttings about the political situation, a lot on the property market and financial services. The only thing with any bite was a file marked ‘Drugs’ but even that was just stories cut from the
South China Morning Post
and the
Hong Kong Standard
, nothing startling, nothing to set the hairs on the back of my neck on end, no tickle that would let me know I was on to something.

There were some typewritten sheets in the top drawer of the desk, a feature on a new shopping centre being built in Kowloon which judging by the way it was written was linked to some pretty heavy advertising, and underneath it was a brochure from the Diamond Bourse and some photocopies from a reference book about Hong Kong’s importance as a centre for the sale of precious stones, and a swathe of Trade Development Council press releases bound up with a thick rubber band. The bottom drawer of the desk contained her cheque book, a scattering of keys, her bank books and a plastic file of invoices from the various newspapers and magazines she’d filed copy for. Assuming she’d kept them all, I calculated that over the last twelve weeks she’d been earning an average of $16,000 a month. Not bad, but not great. Certainly not enough to pay for the flat. Or the Porsche. Or to account for the $120,000 she had in the bank deposit books. Howard was lying back in the chair, eyes closed and breathing heavily through his nose but he wasn’t asleep and he opened one eye as I pushed through the louvre doors.

‘Nothing,’ I said in a quiet voice before he could speak. ‘Let’s go.’ I held out my hand and Howard returned the flat keys.

‘Where?’ he asked.

‘A bar,’ I said. ‘With people. And noise. And drink.’

Howard had said something incomprehensible to the taxi driver and there were three letters over the entrance of the red brick and white roughcast building where we pulled up, but it wasn’t until I saw the brass plate set onto the wall to the right of the wood and glass doors that I realized he’d taken me to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club.

The air inside was cool and I sucked it in as we walked past man-size green plants and turned left into the tile-floored bar. A wire service printer click-clacked and a couple of guys in suits were looking at share prices on a TV screen set into the wall, muttering to each other.

The walls were white, with framed copies of newspaper and magazine covers dotted around, the ceilings were high and fans slowly turned above the heads of the fifteen or so people standing at the bar. The bar wasn’t circular, oval, or star-shaped, more a combination of all three, like a vandalized bicycle wheel, surrounded by tall stools with brown plastic bucket seats. There was a dining area to the right, square tables with cream-coloured cloths, but it was the bar that was the obvious focus of the club. I’d heard stories about the old Hong Kong FCC, when it was thirteen floors up in Sutherland House, where the war correspondents refuelled before going back to Vietnam or Cambodia or wherever their foreign editors decided there was a fight worth covering. Where stories were told and arguments and old scores settled, where friendships and expenses sheets were forged. That it was a working club, where papers left threatening messages for errant reporters and herograms for star ones, where a journalist could be sure of finding someone who’d offer a bed for the night so that he could put in a claim for a hotel bill without letting go of his hard-earned money. I’d heard stories. I hadn’t seen it, but the picture I had in my head was the sort of bar I’d have felt at home in.

This bar seemed to be aimed at expat civil servants. The only Chinese faces I could see were serving drinks, dressed like Cinderella’s footmen in black trousers and dark orange waistcoats. At the far end were three gweilos in dark suits laughing like public school prefects at a caning, waving their half pints of lager and watching each other as they drank, verbal boxers waiting for a dropped guard, obviously colleagues and not friends.

To their left were three young women, Sloane Rangers a long way from home, with their shirt collars turned up in unison, regulation strings of pearls, pleated skirts and pumps. When they laughed they laughed together with their heads tilted back and it was the sound of wind blowing through a crystal chandelier.

‘Welcome to the FCC,’ said Howard, and we moved to the straightest part of the bar, to be met by a waiter who’d already poured Howard a whisky and placed a pink chit held by a black bulldog clip in front of him.

‘Gin and tonic,’ I said to the unsmiling barman. ‘Let me get these,’ I said to Howard.

‘I’m afraid you can’t,’ he replied. ‘Private club, only members can sign for drinks.’

My drink arrived and the tonic was flat but I didn’t complain, just raised my glass to Howard and said ‘Cheers,’ and drank half of it. I was hot and thirsty, OK?

On the opposite side of the bar, perched on a stool like a vulture, was a hunchback with a greying beard nursing a pint of beer as he read what seemed to be a Chinese newspaper. Next to him was a barrel-chested balding giant of a man, drinking whisky and reading over the hunchback’s shoulder.

The rest of the evening drinkers were uniformly middle-aged men with suits and ties, briefcases sitting at their feet like well-fed Labradors.

‘So where are the foreign correspondents, Howard?’ I asked.

‘Long gone,’ he said. ‘No wars left to cover so they’ve all gone home. Few British or American papers keep anyone out here full time.’

‘So who are the members of the club?’

‘Local hacks, the wire services, journalists who write for the heavy magazines that nobody reads, the odd freelance. I guess they make up about ten per cent of the membership. The rest are civil servants, lawyers, accountants, bankers. A few public relations people. The beer’s cheap and it’s easy to get in – we’re not as selective as the Hong Kong club, and nowhere near as expensive. ‘Do you fancy another?’

I hadn’t realized I’d finished the gin, so I said yes and the barman took the empty glass.

‘How about a fresh tonic this time?’ I asked him and he nodded curtly, just once, face impassive. Howard was sipping his whisky slowly. He raised his glass to the hunchback who nodded as curtly as the barman. The giant by his side grinned and growled. ‘Evening, Howard.’ Together they looked like bit players in a Frankenstein movie.

‘Who are Igor and Quasimodo?’ I asked Howard.

‘Two of the best journalists in Hong Kong,’ he said. ‘They used to be with the
Star
but now they freelance for one of the heavy magazines here. Old China hands, both of them.’

He told me their names but I didn’t recognize them and that was hardly surprising – big fish in a small pool. Cancel that, small fish in a tiny pool and they weren’t going anywhere because if they did they’d be eaten alive.

Hong Kong is not a journalists’ town. There are precious few major media centres in the world – London, New York, Sydney – cities crammed with journalists fighting and clawing their way to the top of the pile and drinking each other under the table, competition sharpening wits and knives in the battle to be first with the news. Once you move away you’re in the sticks and the pack soon forgets you, so you either leave for a short while and return or you forget about going back. The ones that stay away didn’t belong anyway, so anyone who had been in Hong Kong for more than a couple of years was looking for a place to rest, or to hide. Burnt out hacks living on memories or chancers looking for a break. Or middle ranking nobodies who wouldn’t get a job anywhere else. Yeah, all right. So I sound bitter and twisted. I’d had a rough couple of days, and being in the FCC made me realize how much I missed being a fireman. High salaries and ludicrous expenses put paid to most full-time overseas correspondents, it just wasn’t cost effective to keep a man in a far-off country filing a couple of stories a week, so one by one they were called home or chopped. It started with the Far East, and then Africa, then Europe, and now few of the nationals even bother with an office in the States. The wire services do a fair enough job of covering the world, and they can be topped up with local colour from stringers like Howard. Sometimes the stringers are paid a retainer, but usually they are on lineage plus expenses and they can make a reasonable living if they churn out enough copy. They’re happy, they’re earning, the readers are happy, assuming they’re in the twenty-five per cent that bother to read the foreign pages, and the papers are happy because they’re saving on salary, accommodation, school fees for the kids, flights home, medical fees and the rest of the bills that have to be paid to keep a full-time correspondent in place.

The system works for most of the time, but every now and again the big one breaks – a plane is hijacked, a hotel fire kills a couple of dozen people, a British teenager is raped, a dictator is deposed – and a stringer isn’t enough. That’s where the fireman comes in. The wire services don’t provide personalized copy, there are no short, punchy stories for the tabloids or long, worthy in-depth profiles tailor-made for the broadsheets. They don’t cater for individual styles, they push the same story out to everybody over satellite and through wires and into identical terminals in identical offices all around the world. And while the stringers can cope with the day-to-day news stories they’re usually simply not up to covering the big ones. If they were that good they wouldn’t be sitting in the back of beyond being paid by the word.

So on every national newspaper there are firemen, at least one, usually two and sometimes more. They’re reporters who act as trouble shooters ready to be sent anywhere in the world with next to no notice. They’re usually in their late twenties to mid-thirties, male, single, and first class operators, the best in the business. They move into a situation stone cold, get the story, sometimes stay for a follow-up feature, and then move out, fast, clean and efficient. They can be covering anything, from a war to a miracle at Lourdes, they spend most of their time in planes and hotels, and when they’re back in the office between assignments they drink and pick arguments with the subs. They also have a flight bag in their locker, with a clean shirt, razor, washing kit and anti-diarrhoea tablets. They go to the company doctor every six months to keep their inoculations up to date. They tend to have two passports because some countries are stroppy about where you’ve been before. Taiwan doesn’t like tourists who’ve been to mainland China, the Arabs don’t like Israel and nobody likes South Africa. They carry their passports in their jacket pocket and credit cards in their wallet because sometimes they’ll be out on a job when the shit hits the fan and they have to go straight to the airport.

Most journalists would kill for the chance of being a fireman on a national newspaper, of covering the big ones and getting splash after splash, of roaming the world’s trouble spots and collecting visas like stamps, but eventually it’s the job that starts to kill.

In the field you’re on your own except for the local stringer, you’ve got to get the story while competing against the best in the world and then you’ve got to get the copy back to the office, and that’s no pushover when you’re with the paras in the Falklands or covering student demonstrations in Peking. After a while flying loses its glamour and one five-star hotel is very much like another. Soon the stories begin to look the same too, only the number of dead varies, along with the initials of the morons behind the latest atrocity.

The constant travelling starts to get to you, then you begin to get lazy, you take short cuts and before you know it you’re relying on the stringers too much and you make less profit on your expenses because you’re spending more on drink and then they pull you back to London and give you a desk job or make you industrial correspondent or number two on the crime desk to some snotty-nosed kid with halitosis. Then they send out someone young and keen that they’ve been grooming to be the new fireman and the cycle starts again only this time it’s someone else’s by-line on the front page.