The First Novels: Pay Off, the Fireman (46 page)

‘The shows aren’t up to much,’ said Fender. ‘Not compared with what you get in Bangkok or Manila.’

‘But you’ve got to take it where you can,’ said Howard and Fender nodded, and motioned the waiter to bring over another round of drinks.

Fender leant forward, putting his elbows on the table and cupping his bearded chin in his large, labourer’s hands.

‘So what happened then?’ I asked Fender.

‘Huh?’ he said, raising his refilled glass to his lips, leaving a thin film of foam on his thick black moustache.

‘After they’d taught you Vietnamese.’ This time there was something floating among the ice cubes but it wasn’t lemon, it was a slice of lime. Things were looking up.

‘They sent me to Vietnam,’ he said, as if he was patiently explaining to a child that two times three is six.

‘But he got more than he bargained for,’ chipped in Howard. ‘Instead of the easy life he was out on patrol, hunting for tunnels.’

‘Tunnels?’

‘The underground tunnels the North Vietnamese lived in. They had whole towns ten feet under the jungle floor, complete with hospitals, ammo dumps, lecture halls. Rabbit warrens where they could disappear when the going got tough.’

‘Almost impossible to find,’ agreed Fender.

‘But every now and again they’d find a way in, and that’s where Barry came into his own. Twelve months of intensive language training paid off. They’d hold him by the ankles and lower him head first into the tunnels. It was his job to shout “come out with your hands up” in fluent Vietnamese. If the little bastards were there they’d start shooting, they’d yank him back up and throw in a handful of grenades and return fire.’

The two of them started laughing together, drawing a few hostile looks from the neighbouring tables.

It was a story they’d obviously told many times before, telling and retelling until all the rough edges had been smoothed off. It was as polished as a seaside pebble. There might have been a grain of truth left in it, but I doubted that. Then realization dawned and I put my glass down on the beer-stained cloth.

‘You were helping Sally on the refugee story?’ I said.

‘Well, she sure as hell couldn’t speak to them,’ said Fender. ‘She was a smart kid and could just about handle Cantonese, but Vietnamese is a whole different ball game. As soon as Healy gave her the story she was on the phone to me, offering to split the fee. She’d write the words, I’d do the translation and take the pictures.’

‘Howard said you were a journalist.’

‘Photojournalist. I do a bit of photography on the side. More of a hobby than anything, but I’m good with a camera.’

‘Modest too,’ said Howard.

‘Come on, Howard, admit it. I’m one of the best.’

‘You’re not so bad. I’ve seen a lot worse,’ agreed Howard reluctantly.

I wanted to ask him why he wasn’t doing it full time if he was so good but there was no point in antagonizing him so instead I asked: ‘How did it go?’

‘Waste of time,’ he said, stroking his beard. ‘We spent the best part of an afternoon there but they wouldn’t say a bloody thing. I got some great pics but we couldn’t get it to stand up. Have you been round one of the refugee camps?’

I shook my head.

‘There’s a big one on Lantau Island, a ferry ride away. There are a few thousand refugees there, all Vietnamese. Some of the poor buggers have been there for six or seven years now. Hong Kong used to be a short stopover before they were taken in by Britain, Canada or the States, but they’ve virtually said that enough is enough. So they just sit there and wait.’

‘Come on, laddie, it’s not as if they’re political refugees anymore, fleeing from Communism,’ said Howard. ‘The ones that are leaving now are economic refugees, they’re just looking for a better standard of living.’

‘You can’t blame them for that.’

‘Agreed, but you can’t expect Britain to welcome them with open arms.’

‘They could do more for them.’ Fender looked at me. ‘You know what choice they’re given now? The Hong Kong government either patches up their boats and puts them back to sea with a week’s provisions, or they can sit in one of the camps, with no guarantee of a place abroad. Some choice, eh? Oh, what the hell, be still my bleeding heart,’ and he emptied his glass.

‘And the story you were on was to see if North Vietnamese agents were infiltrating the camps?’

‘It would make sense from the Communists’ point of view. South Vietnam is full of their agents, and all they’d have to do is pay for their passage on one of the boats and make their way to Hong Kong or the Philippines and from there to the West, assuming they don’t end up rotting in one of the camps. Sally and I arranged to go on a tour of the Camp in Lantau, we told GIS we were doing a colour piece for one of the Sunday supplements.’

‘GIS?’ I said.

‘Government Information Services – hear no evil, see no evil and tell them nothing. They’re fine for shoving out press releases on trade figures but bugger all use for anything that even smells of a story.’

‘And what happened?’

‘Nothing, absolutely nothing. I got some great pictures, children behind the wires, men lounging in their dormitories, a woman with all her belongings packed into a small rucksack, all of it good stuff. But no story. I must have spoken to a score of refugees, and they all said it just didn’t happen, or if it did they weren’t aware of it. Sally gave it her best shot, though.’ He guffawed, a deep-throated belly-laugh that had the table vibrating like an approaching earthquake.

‘What do you mean?’

‘She was practically pulling out their finger nails with pliers to get them to talk. She had spunk did Sally. She was a real trier. She’d ask the most goddamned impolite questions and I’d have to tone them down. Until we got to a face-to-face with one of the camp administrators, a middle-ranking gweilo civil servant called Barker. God, she went straight for the jugular, how many Special Branch officers were in the camps, how many North Korean agents had they found, how long were they going to keep the refugees behind barbed wire. The poor bastard didn’t know what had hit him.’

That sounded like the Sally I knew, push, push, push until she got what she wanted, never mind whose toes you step on or whose feelings get hurt. Sometimes it works, you go in hard, question, question, question, until they lose their temper and give you the quote you need. Usually it’s better to be more devious, to go around the houses, win their confidence and gradually pull out the information, but it’s horses for courses.

It takes quite a while to learn the techniques. Your average cub reporter sweats up on an interview in advance, reads through all the cuttings and probably draws up a list of questions to ask. You soon learn that’s not the way to do it, best to go in with an open mind, looking for the angle.

Sometimes, though, it pays to go in hard, to pretend you already know everything and antagonize them until they snap and you get lots of reaction. You can do it, but you have to know what you’re doing and Sally didn’t have the experience for that. It was just Sally being her usual impetuous self, head held high, leading with the chin. I remember her when she was six years old, riding her bicycle without holding onto the handlebars. ‘Look Dad, no hands,’ she’d yelled, until she lost control and grazed her knee and elbow on the ground, but she hadn’t cried as our father picked her up and hugged her, her pride had steadfastly held back the tears.

She was a girl forever acting on impulse, but usually her instincts were right. What had gone wrong this time?

Fender had gone quiet and I suppose we’d both been thinking about the Sallys we knew, and I wondered how similar they were, if the girl who’d sat with her head on my knee in London had been the same cock-sure journalist he’d taken around the refugee camp. Had she changed since she’d come out to Hong Kong, or had I only seen one facet of her. No, I shrugged that thought off, I knew Sally, she was my sister.

‘She was a good kid,’ he said, softly, and Howard nodded in agreement. ‘We could do with more like her in Hong Kong.’ Fender’s huge eyebrows knitted together as he frowned. ‘If there is anything I can do . . .’ he said, but he didn’t finish the sentence, instead he banged his glass on the table, hard.

‘Fuck it,’ he shouted, ‘she was so fucking young.’

Howard put his hand across Fender’s arm.

‘Relax, Barry,’ he said. Fender shuddered all over and for a brief moment a flash of jealousy sparked through my mind but I ignored it, Sally and he were friends at best, nothing more.

Fender seemed to want to talk about her, so I coaxed him a little.

‘What sort of journalist was she?’ I asked him.

He thought for a while, and I knew I’d get an honest answer from him. ‘She was a quick learner,’ he said. ‘When she first arrived she hadn’t a clue, but she’d spend all night in the FCC picking our brains and she’d keep bringing in stories she’d written and asking for our opinions. She was a real trier, and she didn’t mind being told. She just agreed with you and asked how she could improve.’

That was Sally, all right. She used people, but used them in such a way that they were grateful for being used. People got a warm feeling helping her, in the same way that you’re grateful to the cat who sits on your lap and allows its ears to be tickled.

‘Then she started getting some good stuff in the papers, mainly business stories,’ Fender continued. ‘She’d obviously got herself some good contacts and they began feeding her with top rate information, real Deep Throat stuff.’ He nudged Howard. ‘Remember that Securities Commission report on that toy manufacturer? Christ, that was a good story.’

Howard nodded. ‘Yeah, we never found out where she got that from.’

‘That’s right,’ said Fender. ‘That was something else about her, she was so bloody secretive. She’d quite happily spend hours asking me questions, but she’d never ever let on who her contacts were or what she was working on, unless it was general knowledge or unless she needed help.’

‘Like the Vietnamese story?’ I said.

‘Case in point,’ agreed Fender. ‘I’m sure she only told me about that because Healy had given her the story and she needed me to translate for her.’ He fell silent again.

‘But the story didn’t stand up?’

‘Despite all Sally’s pushing, no. The Government clammed up and the Vietnamese we spoke to said they knew nothing about it, just gave us the same old crap about how they wanted a new life in the United States.’

‘Maybe they were lying.’

‘No, they’d sell their own grandmothers for a way out of the camps. If they knew anything they’d talk in the hope that it would get them a passport.

‘We’d heard stories that Special Branch had put their own men into the camps, but we couldn’t get that confirmed either. But that didn’t surprise us, they wouldn’t tell you the time of day. So what did we have? Sweet F.A. A fair enough collection of pics, but not the news story we’d hoped for. We decided to cut our losses and do what we’d told GIS we were doing – a general feature piece. Sally was going to write a couple of thousand words but then she lost interest and then she went to China for a few days. Shortly after she got back she died.’

‘China?’ I looked at Howard. ‘You didn’t tell me anything about China.’

‘I didn’t know. This is the first I’ve heard of it.’

‘Why did she go?’ I asked Fender.

‘Something to do with a story she was writing about diamonds. She went to Zhejiang province, there’s some sort of mining operation there.’

‘Did she go on her own?’

‘No, she went with Tod Seligman, he’s fluent in Mandarin and he’s always going in and out of China.’

‘When did they get back?’

‘About a week ago, maybe less. You should go and talk to Tod, I saw him in the FCC a couple of nights ago.’

‘Tell me a bit about him.’

‘Mid-thirties, good looking all-American boy. Looks like your typical CIA agent, light grey suits, steel framed glasses, short blond hair, blue eyes.’

‘CIA?’

‘Not officially, no, but you’d be hard pushed to find an American who isn’t out here, especially working in the media. He’s a copy editor on a financial paper but he keeps disappearing for a few days at a time and when he gets back it turns out he’s been to Korea, Taiwan or the Middle East. He never writes a word and he’s always vague about what he’s been doing.’

‘Have you got a number for him?’ I asked Howard, and he pulled out a battered black address book from his jacket and copied two numbers onto the back of one of his business cards.

‘Top one’s his home number,’ he said.

‘Cheers, Howard.’

‘Where are you off to, laddie?’

‘Sally’s flat, there’s something I want to check. I’ll call you tomorrow.’

I stood up and as I did the spotlight came on and the organ dried up in mid-chord. As I walked out a Filipina dancer in a red dress and a long white feather boa started to undress and Howard and Fender settled back to watch. I was glad that Howard hadn’t offered to come because I wanted to be alone, to try to sort out the jumbled mass of data swirling through my brain and to assemble it into some coherent pattern. I reckoned that I’d be able to think more clearly in Sally’s flat, and besides, I wanted to go through her files and check ‘D’ for diamonds.

Outside I caught a taxi, beating two Chinese couples to the doorhandle. I had to say the address four or five times before the driver nodded and pulled away with a lurch.

The lounge was the same as when I’d last been there, my empty glass was still on the coffee table. Howard had left the fan on and it was still ruffling the papers on the glass topped table and the plants on top of the television set were swaying gently.

Something was missing and I couldn’t pin it down. It was like one of those kiddies’ puzzles where you have two cartoons, side by side, and you have to work out what has changed, compare and contrast, spot the differences in the two pictures. Pictures. The photograph of Dennis Lai had gone. Howard had left it on top of the magazines on the coffee table and it wasn’t there anymore and it hadn’t been blown on to the floor by the fan. In its place were the Porsche keys.