The Water Rat of Wanchai (23 page)

“Bring Seto back here,” she shouted to Patrick.

Seto scuffled into the kitchen. The house was air-conditioned but there were beads of sweat on his forehead. “Take off his jacket,” she said.

Patrick undid the handcuffs, removed the jacket, and then put the cuffs back on, adding a hard tug on Seto’s arms for good measure.

Ava set Seto on a chair, lifted his hands over the chair back, and pulled them down behind. She then knelt down and grabbed his ankles. She spread them until they were aligned with the chair legs and taped his ankles to them.

“Pass me the jacket,” she said to Patrick. She quickly went through the pockets, extracting a wallet.

“Now, where is his computer?”

“Upstairs,” the woman said.

“Let’s go,” Ava said. “Patrick, stay with Seto.”

There were four rooms on the second floor. Two were being used as bedrooms, one was empty, and the fourth was a makeshift office. Ava took Anna into the master bedroom, which was furnished with a king-size four-poster bed made of heavy mahogany and matching massive wooden dressers; one wall was entirely mirrored.

The bed was littered with decorative pillows. Ava pushed them onto the floor and then told Anna to climb onto the bed. Then Ava taped her ankles together and taped her mouth. “Now stay here. Don’t move,” she said.

Ava walked into the office and sat at Seto’s desk. It had two drawers on each side and a laptop computer on top. Ava turned on the computer, and while it was booting up she went through the drawers. They were mostly empty, except for one, in which there was a copy of a plane ticket and two cancelled boarding passes. Seto had come to Georgetown from Port of Spain via Miami. There were also two passports. One was American, in the name of Jackson Seto, and the other Chinese, in the name of Seto Sun Kai.

She opened his wallet. There were four credit cards, all in the name of Jackson Seto, and a Washington state driver’s licence in the same name with the address she had visited in Seattle. He also had a Hong Kong ID card under the name Seto Sun Kai.

The computer flickered to life and asked her for a password. That could wait; she turned her attention to the rest of the room. The only things that interested her were six cardboard filing boxes pushed up against a wall.

When she opened the first box, she could see that Seto was neat and organized Everything was filed alphabetically, and when she looked in the Barrett’s Bank folder, the paperwork was ordered by date. She took the folder over to the desk and quickly scanned the documents from the oldest — a copy of the signature card from when he had opened his account — to the newest, which included a recent online bank statement. She had her notebook in her kitbag, and the account number on the statement matched the one she had written down.

The account was in the name of S&A Investments. There was only one authorized signature: Seto’s. She checked the dates. The account had been open for more than ten years but had been almost inactive until three years ago, when deposit activity picked up. The wire transfers of Tam’s money were the largest deposits by far, but Seto had been squirreling other funds away all along, mainly in the range of ten to twenty thousand dollars. Some much larger deposits had been made over the past year; she assumed that was the money Seafood Partners had been scamming from the Indian and Indonesian fish guys.

The two Tam wire transfers brought the account total to more than seven million American dollars. It was the kind of surprise Ava enjoyed.

She went downstairs to join the boys. Patrick sat quietly on the kitchen counter, jiggling his legs to some music in his head. “Did you find what you were looking for?” he asked.

She put Seto’s passports, his Hong Kong ID card, and the Barrett’s file on the kitchen table. “I didn’t do badly.” She moved closer to Patrick. “I’m going to speak to him in Cantonese,” she said.

Seto was slumped in the chair, his chin almost on his chest. She reached for the tape on his mouth and ripped it off. He yelled in pain.

“Seto Sun Kai, what made you think we would not come after you? And what made you think we would not find you?”

He shook his head as if he was confused, then licked his lower lip. She wondered if it had sunk in that she had used his Chinese name.

“Why would you or anyone else come after me? I haven’t done anything.” His voice was hoarse, his mouth dry from stress.

Ava took a glass from the cupboard and filled it from the tap. The water was a lighter colour than the hotel’s.
Must be the neighbourhood
, she thought.

“Here, drink,” she said, holding the glass to his lips.

He hesitated.

“It’s your own fucking tap water,” she snapped.

He took a careful sip. “Where is Ng?” he asked.

“Gone and not coming back.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Believe this: You don’t have friends here anymore. No one is going to come to your aid. This is strictly between us now, and how it goes and how it ends is your choice.”

“Who sent you?”

“I work for people who are friends of Andrew Tam. You remember Andrew Tam?”

“Where are you from?”

“Hong Kong.”

He became still. She knew he was now fully aware of his situation. She knew he would be thinking about how to extract himself from it. She knew that when he finished examining his options, he would be left with the one she wanted him to choose. But she also knew it wouldn’t stop him from trying other ways out.

“We did business, just business, Andrew and me. There were some problems with customers and I had to step in and salvage what I could, for all our sakes.”

“So you’re telling me you were looking after Andrew’s best interests.”

“We had inventory that was shit. I had it reworked and repacked, that’s all. It couldn’t have been sold any other way.”

“And you discussed this with Andrew?”

“There wasn’t time. And besides, he was just the money man. What did he know about the actual business?”

“Not enough, I guess,” she said. “This product, did you sell it all?”

“I did.”

“Did you get paid?”

He paused. She could almost see his mind whirring away, calculating just how big a lie he could safely tell. “For most of it,” he said.

“How much did you get paid?”

His head rolled back as if she were holding a knife to his throat. “About three million,” he said, squeezing the words out.

“When did you plan to send it back to Andrew Tam?”

“When things settled. I haven’t had time; we just got paid.”

“But you do plan to send it back to Andrew?”

“Of course, of course.”

“Seto Sun Kai,” Ava said gently, “you are a thief and a liar.”

She reached into her kitbag and removed the stiletto, flicked it open, and pressed its point into his thigh. It pierced his pants and then his skin. It was a prick, not much more. Still, he jumped, startled. His leg twitched. “Don’t,” he said.

She moved the knife up his leg and stuck the point into his genitals. He flinched and strained to move back.

The knife tracked up his chest and onto his face. Ava rested the tip in the soft flesh just above his eye. Sweat from his brow trickled down his nose and both sides of his face. She was about to say something about the knife but realized it wasn’t necessary. Seto understood well enough without the theatrics.

“Seto Sun Kai,” she said calmly, “let me tell you what I know and then let me tell you what I need to know. I know why you had a problem with the shrimp. I know the games you and George Antonelli played with it. I know how the shrimp were moved, who repackaged them, and where they were sold. I know how much you got for them. I know about the little bank in Texas where the money was sent. I know that the little bank wired the money to an account in the British Virgin Islands. I have copies of the transfers, so I know to which bank they were sent and I know the account in which they were deposited. I know you are the sole signing authority on that account. Now, there are two things I don’t know. Do you want to guess?”

He shook his head, sweat dripping onto her hand and the knife.

“I don’t know the password to your computer upstairs, and I don’t know the password for your BVI bank account.”

Seto grimaced and said nothing.

She waited. A minute passed, maybe more.

“Seto Sun Kai, I’m waiting.”

“It isn’t that easy,” he said.

She felt her first flush of irritation. “I really don’t want to hurt you, or the woman upstairs,” she said, increasing the pressure on the knife tip.

“The password for the computer is ‘waterrat,’” he said in a rush.

“Your zodiac sign?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“And for the bank account?”

“Eighty-eight, sixty-six, eighty-eight, sixty-six.”

“Thank you.”

“It won’t do you any good,” he said.

She noticed that he was beginning to sweat again and his voice had tightened. This wasn’t where she had thought they were going. “And why not?”

“There’s a limit to the amount of money I can take out of the account electronically.”

“You can access the account through the Internet, yes?”

“Yes.”

“You can transfer money out of the account, yes?”

“Yes, but like I said, it’s restricted.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can only withdraw up to $25,000 per day.”

She saw his left foot begin to shake. He was scared, and she began to think he might be telling her the truth. “I don’t believe you.”

“That’s how we set it up. We never had that much in the account until last year, so it was never a problem.”

Ava picked up the Barrett’s file from the kitchen table. She leafed through it, taking out the monthly statements and the attachments, and read them more closely than she had upstairs. Patrick watched her, confused about what had just transpired.

After ten minutes she said, “There was a withdrawal eighteen months ago of $335,000, and then another ten months ago of $200,000, and then a third just three months ago of another $400,000.”

“How many are there for $25,000 or less?” he said.

“Admittedly, a hell of a lot more.”

“Anything under $25,000 I did electronically. I was sending money to George’s accounts in Atlanta and Bangkok and to my account in Seattle. Those other three withdrawals I did in person.”

“What do you mean?”

“I went to the BVI. I went to the bank. I presented a written request for a certified cheque along with my American passport and one other form of photo ID, usually my driver’s licence. They drew up a release form and I signed it. They photocopied my passport and driver’s licence and dated the copies, and I signed those too. Then they gave me the cheque.”

“Who does that anymore?” she said.

“The account was opened before Internet banking took off,” he said. “And Barrett’s is a conservative bank. They’re paranoid about money laundering and gave me a hard enough time just opening an account.”

“What if you dropped dead?”

“George has the power of attorney, and that is recorded at the bank. He would need to show up and go through the same shit I did.”

“Can’t you request a change in the amounts?”

“Only by doing it in person.”

Seto was telling her the truth. She knew he was — there was no reason for him to lie. But that didn’t help quell her anger: anger about making too many assumptions, about thinking the deal was closed, about having dared google Tommy Ordonez. She had jinxed herself. She had broken one of her own rules and now she was paying for it. The only mistake she hadn’t made was to tell Andrew Tam his money was on the way.

“Patrick, look after him for me,” she said abruptly. “I have to go upstairs for a minute.”

He looked at her questioningly but she was already halfway out of the kitchen.

She went upstairs and checked in on Anna on her way to Seto’s office. She was curled on the bed, crying softly to herself. Ava closed the bedroom door so she wouldn’t have to listen.

The computer was still on. Ava typed WATERRAT and the screen opened up. Then she tried to access the Internet and was told it wasn’t currently available. She waited. On the fourth attempt she finally got online.

She went to the Barrett’s Bank’s home page and clicked on ACCOUNTS. She input the account number and then the password. The S&A bank account came to life. She checked the balance: $7,237,188.22. There was a list of options for her to pursue, and one of them was WIRE
TRANSFER. She clicked on RECIPIENT
DETAILS. She was going to type in Andrew Tam’s bank information until she realized she had left her notebook downstairs, so she typed in her own bank data. Under amount to be sent she requested $50,000. Then she hit the send button. The request was immediately flagged.

Ava appeared calm and focused when she walked back into the kitchen.

“What the hell happened to you?” Patrick asked.

“I have a problem,” she said.

“I guessed.”

“I need to think about it for a while.”

“I have good ears if you want to talk it through.”

She was about to dismiss the idea when she realized that she was going to need help no matter what she decided to do, so she might as well bring him on side sooner rather than later. “Let’s go into the living room,” she said.

They sat side by side on the leather couch, which smelled of cigarette smoke, and she told Patrick about her problem. The only thing she didn’t — and wouldn’t — tell him was the total amount of money involved.

“It sounds to me like you’re going to have to take him to the BVI if you want to get that money back,” he said. “Or spend the next few months transferring $25,000 a day, though I can’t even begin to imagine the things that could go wrong with that idea.”

“It has to be done quickly or chances are it won’t get done. Is there any other choice?”

“What do you think?”

“I think I’m screwed,” she said.

“How’s that?”

“As I said, the quicker you move, the better your chances are to succeed. In my business you strike when guys like Seto are vulnerable, scared, and within your control. The longer the process takes, the more they begin to think they can find a way out. But how do I get him to the BVI without getting their Customs or police involved? All he has to do is open his mouth and scream bloody murder. And believe me, it will occur to him — if I can get him there. He’ll talk himself into thinking he can get away with this. He’ll figure if he can lose me, he has enough money to hide somewhere we can’t find him. We always do find them in the end, but the problem is that the money is often gone by then.”