The Water Rat of Wanchai (7 page)

When the plane landed, Ava found HKIA its usual ruthlessly efficient self. She was off the plane and through Immigration, Baggage Claim, and Customs within twenty minutes of landing. She spotted Uncle at the back of the Kit Kat, a plain, square box with round glass tables, metal chairs, and posters of coffee beans on the walls. He had a Chinese newspaper open in front of him and an unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth. Even in Hong Kong there were places where you couldn’t smoke now.

He was tiny, not much taller than Ava, and thin. He was always dressed the same way: black lace-up shoes, black slacks, a white long-sleeved shirt buttoned to the neck. The monochromatic image was part convenience, part camouflage. It made him easy to overlook — just another boring old man not worth a second glance, except to those who knew.

Ava thought Uncle was somewhere between seventy and eighty, but that was as close as she could come to determining his age. Many people meeting him for the first time guessed that he was younger, and not from politeness. His face was fine-boned, with a small, straight nose and a sharply defined chin with a hint of a point; his skin had not begun to sag, and he had only the faintest of wrinkles around his eyes and on his forehead. His hair was cropped close to the scalp; Ava could see streaks of gray, but it was still predominantly black.

“Uncle,” she said.

He looked up from his paper, a smile cracking his face as his eyes fell upon her. She loved his eyes: pitch black pupils and dark chocolate brown irises set in a sea of white that seemed immune to lack of sleep or too much alcohol. They were eyes whose age was indeterminable: lively, curious, probing. Ava had learned rapidly that Uncle’s world was defined through those eyes, not through his words. They could embrace you, mistrust you, detest you, adore you, question you, or not give a damn whether you lived or died. And she knew how to read them in all their subtlety. Ava had seen their many moods, although their darkest intent had never been directed at her. She was part of his unofficial family, after all, the only kind of family he had ever had.

She leaned down to kiss him on the forehead. “You didn’t have to come,” she said.

“I was eager to see you,” he said. “You’re as beautiful as ever.”

“And you look as young as always.”

He looked around. “I don’t like this place. We’ll go to Central for noodles. Let me call Sonny. I’ll have him bring the car down from the garage.”

They walked through the cavernous Arrivals hall, Uncle’s hand resting lightly on her elbow. Two Hong Kong policemen watched them as they neared the exit. The older of the two nudged the younger and they nodded their heads in Uncle’s direction. Ava saw the movement, looked sideways, and caught Uncle nodding in return.

Sonny was leaning against the front fender of the car. It was new, a Mercedes S-Class.

“What happened to the Bentley?” Ava asked.

“I sold it. Sonny said it was time to move into this decade.”

Ava had never known Uncle to be without Sonny, and she’d never met anyone who had. He was technically Uncle’s driver, a monochromatic match to his boss in his black suit, white shirt, and plain black tie. He was tall for Chinese, a couple of inches over six feet, and heavyset. For someone that large he was quick — deadly quick — and he could be vicious when the circumstances required. He was one of the few people in the world whom Ava feared physically. And he wasn’t talkative. If you asked him a question, you got a simple answer with no embellishments. Beyond that he didn’t seem to have any opinions he needed to share.

When they approached the car, Sonny gave Ava a small smile and reached for her bags. She and Uncle climbed into the back seat as he put them in the trunk.

It was a quick ride to the city centre. Their route took them over the Tsing Ma Bridge, six lanes of traffic on the upper deck, rail lines beneath. The bridge always took Ava’s breath away. It was close to a kilometre and half long and soared two hundred metres above the water. The Ma Wan Channel, part of the South China Sea, glittered below in the early morning sun as sampans and fishing boats skirted the armada of huge ocean freighters waiting to be escorted into Hong Kong’s massive container port.

They slowed when they reached the city proper, caught in the last of the morning rush hour. Hong Kong isn’t a city filled with private cars. Finding a place to park isn’t easy or cheap in a place where office and retail space is rented by the square inch, but there are red taxis everywhere, scurrying like beetles. Sonny drove carefully — too carefully for Ava, but he was a cautious man, maybe even deliberately cautious. It was as if he were restraining his true nature. She had seen this trait in him when he attended meetings with Uncle. He didn’t do that often, but when he did, he remained standing off to one side, his eyes flickering back and forth as he followed the flow of conversation. Ava realized that his body language changed along with the tone of the meeting. If Uncle was having his way, Sonny was placid. Any opposition to Uncle’s position caused him to tense, his eyes growing dark.

The financial and commercial heart of the Hong Kong Territory is divided into two main areas: Hong Kong Island and Kowloon, two dense urban settings connected by the Cross-Harbour Tunnel and the Star Ferry. Ava’s hotel was on the Hong Kong side, in the Central district, set just back from Victoria Harbour and a short walk to the financial sector.

They reached the Mandarin within forty minutes of leaving the airport. Uncle walked into the hotel with her and sat patiently in the lobby while she checked in. She sent her bags to the room.

“There is a noodle shop a block from here,” Uncle said when Ava joined him. “We’ll walk.”

It always took her a day or two to adjust to Central foot traffic — the jostling, the pushing, everyone eager to get to the next corner, where they could wait in a throng before shuffling along to the next intersection, their pace dictated entirely by the mob around them. Ava and Uncle were hemmed in on all sides by a crush of people. Central streets weren’t a place for the claustrophobic.

The noodle shop was a hole in the wall, ten tables with pink plastic stools. The place was full, but a man in an apron came from behind the counter to tell two young men sitting by themselves to move to another table that was occupied but had vacant seats. He then waved Uncle and Ava to the empty table and bowed as Uncle walked past.

She ordered har gow — shrimp dumplings — and soup with soft noodles. Uncle ordered beef lo mein and a plate of gai lin, steamed Chinese broccoli slathered in oyster sauce, to share.

“How is your mother?” he asked while they waited for their food.

“As lively as ever.”

“A crazy woman.”

Ava’s mother was highly sociable and made friends as easily as other people changed clothes. Marian and Ava’s friends weren’t immune from her attention. It bothered Marian but never Ava; she saw it as just a natural extension of her mother’s all-consuming interest in their lives. So it had come as no surprise when her mother, in Hong Kong to visit her own friends, called Uncle and said she’d like to meet him, to find out what kind of man her daughter was working for. If Ava had been working in Toronto for a North American firm, she would have been mortified, not because of what her mother had done but more because they wouldn’t understand why she was doing it. But Uncle understood Chinese mothers; they met and got along well enough that from time to time Jennie Lee felt free to pick up the phone and call Kowloon. Just keeping in touch, she called it.

“She sends her love,” Ava said.

Uncle shrugged off the lie. “Will you call your father while you are here?”

“I don’t think so.”

The two men had never met but they knew of each other, as the wealthy and powerful of Hong Kong tend to do. “Maybe just as well. I hear that the wife in Australia is causing him problems.”

Ava hadn’t heard that news and the surprise registered on her face.

“It is smart of him, keeping them all separated. I don’t know, though, where he finds the energy or the time to keep them satisfied.”

Their food came. She poured tea for both of them. The restaurant was full, a steady flow of people coming and going.

Uncle ate quickly, hardly bothering to chew his food. For a man who was otherwise outwardly serene and calm almost to an extreme, it was an unusual characteristic. She wondered sometimes if this might be truer to his nature than the bland, confident face he liked the world to see.

“There isn’t any point in going to the Wanchai address you were given for Jackson Seto,” he said, pushing his empty plate aside. “I sent someone there today. He hasn’t lived there for at least six months.”

“Do you have another address for him?”

“No.”

“Hong Kong phone number?”

“No, but you might get better information from Henry Cheng. He is the one who connected Seto to Andrew Tam. You have an appointment with him tomorrow in his office at 11 a.m. He doesn’t know why you want to talk to him, but he should be cooperative enough. One of my friends called him and made the arrangement.”

“Where is the office?”

He passed her a slip of paper. “Kowloon side, Nathan Road.”

“I was thinking of going to see Andrew.”

“Why don’t you wait until you see Henry Cheng?” Uncle said. “And even then it may not be a great idea. What can you tell him? That you’ve found out where his money is? What good does that do him? You might create false expectations.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“You know, Andrew’s uncle, my friend, used to call me every three weeks. Now he calls me twice a day. He is nervous for the nephew. The family does not have the kind of money where they can afford to lose thirty million Hong Kong. The repercussions would be massive. When he calls, I tell him I know absolutely nothing. And I’ll keep telling him that until you tell me it is over, one way or another.”

“I need to find Seto.”

“Maybe Cheng can help.”

“And I need to find George Antonelli, the Bangkok partner.”

“Our friends in Bangkok have already been working on that. By the time you get there they should have all the information you need.”

“I don’t think Antonelli has access to the money. From what I can gather, Seto has those controls.”

“But Antonelli can give you access to Seto.”

“Exactly.”

They walked slowly back to the hotel together, his arm looped through hers. The Mercedes was parked near the hotel entrance. Sonny stood near the car’s front door, watching them as they approached. He opened the back door for Uncle and helped him into the car. Ava said goodbye and turned to walk into the Mandarin.

“Call me after you meet with Cheng,” Uncle said to her back.

( 6 )

AVA LOVED THE MANDARIN ORIENTAL HOTEL. THE
very first in the chain had been built on the Chao Phraya River in Bangkok in 1887. She had first discovered it when she was dating a banker and had travelled there with her for a four-day conference. They had splurged on their accommodations, booking the Somerset Maugham Suite in the Author’s Wing. After the banker left for her meetings in the mornings, Ava took the hotel’s private ferry across the river to its spa and indulged.

Her afternoons had been split between the wing’s lounge, where she introduced herself to the works of Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene, and the restaurant terrace on the Chao Phraya. She was hardly a literary historian, but the fact that Conrad, Greene, Maugham, Noel Coward, and James Michener had all stayed and supposedly written there fascinated her. And the river was alluring in its own way. It was broad, brown, and sluggish, and as busy as a North American highway with ships, tugs, and barges working their way north from the Gulf of Thailand into the interior, while water taxis and ferries worked their way from east to west, dodging the bigger vessels as they went.

Most evenings her friend had an official function to attend, so Ava ate at the hotel by herself. There was a Chinese restaurant — the China House — on the hotel property next to the main building. It served perhaps the best Chinese food she had ever eaten up till then: abalone that had been gently braised for twelve hours, stir-fried black chicken, soy-braised pomfret.

The thing that had struck her most about the hotel was its level of service. It wasn’t just that it offered good service — that was routine for every five-star hotel in Asia — it was more that the staff seemed to anticipate everything she did or wanted to do. In the four days she had never pressed an elevator button. On her first day there she ordered ice at exactly four o’clock. The ice was there again the next day, the day after, and the day after that, always at exactly four o’clock. And every staff member in the hotel seemed to know her name.

The only negative was the hotel’s location, which was outside the city core. If you wanted to go anywhere else in Bangkok, you had to contend with traffic that was perpetually paralyzed. The hotel wasn’t a place for someone who needed to get about quickly.

The Mandarin in Hong Kong did not have a location problem. After a quick shower and a change into her business attire, Ava walked out the front door and got to the Star Ferry in ten minutes. After a five-minute wait she was crossing Victoria Harbour to her meeting with Henry Cheng in Kowloon.

It was a pleasant day for Hong Kong, about room temperature, slightly overcast, with a light breeze. She sat at the back of the ferry, taking in the sun and looking at the skyline. There was nothing like it in the world — a solid wall of skyscrapers lining the harbour like some medieval fortress. The Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. Central Plaza. Two international finance centres. The Hopewell Centre. The Bank of China building, designed by I. M. Pei. More than forty buildings over sixty-five storeys high. New York couldn’t even come close.

The ferry docked in Timshashui on the Kowloon side. She thought about taking a taxi but had time to spare, so she walked instead. When she got to Henry Cheng’s office on Nathan Road it was five minutes to eleven.

Kowloon isn’t as aggressively modern as Hong Kong Island. The building on Nathan Road was only five storeys high, its brick exterior faded and chipped. She rode its single elevator to the top floor and found that Cheng’s company occupied half of it — about three thousand square metres — a large office by Hong Kong standards. A hundred or so employees were working in an open-concept area. A handful of closed offices was at the far end, and a boardroom with its door open that Ava could see was empty. The receptionist noted her name and said in Cantonese that Mr. Cheng was expecting her; would she please follow her to the boardroom.