Hong Kong

CHAPTER FOUR

Tommy Carmellini was waiting in their hotel room when the Graftons returned after dinner. He was sitting in the darkness well back from the window.

“Did the maid let you in?” Jake asked sharply.

“No, sir. I let myself in. I didn’t want the staff to know I was here.”

“Next time wait in the lobby.”

“Right.”

“Callie, this is Tommy Carmellini.”

“Mrs. Grafton, you can call me Jack Carrigan. That’s the name I travel under.”

“So you have two names, Mr. Carmellini?”

“Sometimes more,” he admitted, grinning.

“Most people are stuck with only one,” Callie said, “the one their parents picked for them. It must be nice to have a name that you pick yourself and can toss when you tire of it.”

“That is one of the advantages,” Carmellini agreed cheerfully.

“I brought the tape player.” He gestured toward the bed, where the device rested. “I don’t speak Chinese. To me it just sounds like a bunch of birds twittering.”

Jake flipped on the rest of the lights as Callie seated herself on the bed across from Carmellini. She eyed the tape player distastefully. “What’s on the tape?” she asked.

Carmellini leaned forward and looked into her eyes. “A CIA officer was murdered just hours after he planted two bugs and a recorder in the library of a man named China Bob Chan. Two nights ago China Bob was shot and killed in that library by a party unknown. I got there before the body cooled and took the tape from the recorder. That tape is probably the best evidence of the identity of the person who killed Chan. In fact, it may be the only evidence we’ll ever get. It also might shed some light on who killed the CIA officer.”

“You told Jake that Tiger Cole, the consul general, might have killed Chan.”

“Mrs. Grafton, anyone in Hong Kong could have gone into that library and shot China Bob.”

Callie glanced at Jake, who said nothing.

“The recorder was voice-activated,” Carmellini explained, “so that valuable space on the tape wouldn’t be wasted recording the street noises that penetrated an empty room. When the sound level dropped below the electronic threshold, the tape would play on for a few seconds, then stop. Places on the tape where the recorder stopped were marked as audible clicks.”

“We’ll play it later,” Jake Grafton said in a tone that settled the issue.

“Sure.” Carmellini rose to go. “Nice to meet you, Mrs. Grafton.”

Callie merely nodded.

Buckingham Lin Su, or as she wrote it in the Western style, Sue Lin Buckingham, found her mother, Lin Pe, in her study consulting her fortune book. Lin Pe lived in her own three-room apartment in the Buckinghams’ house. Just now she was smoking a cigarette which she had fixed in a short black plastic holder. The smoke rising from the cigarette made her squint behind the thick lenses of her glasses.

Sue Lin broke the news. The Bank of the Orient had collapsed, failing to open its doors today. Depositors trying to withdraw their money had been fired upon by soldiers.

Lin Pe took the news pretty well, Sue Lin thought, considering that her company kept all its accounts at the Japanese bank because it paid the highest interest rates in Hong Kong.

Lin Pe listened, nodded, and when Sue Lin left, got the accountant’s latest summary from her desk and studied it.

The Double Happy Fortune Cookie Company, Ltd., was a profitable international concern because of one person — Lin Pe. Thirty years ago when she came to Hong Kong from a village north of Canton, she found a job in a factory that baked fortune cookies for export to America. Before she went to work there she had never even heard of a fortune cookie. The little fortunes printed on rice paper inside the cookies charmed her. She wrote some in Chinese and one day showed her creations to the owner, an alcoholic old Dutchman from Indonesia who also mixed the cookie batter and cleaned up the place at night, if he was sober enough. He translated a few, they went into the cookies, and Lin Pe had found a home.

When the Dutchman died five years later of cirrhosis of the liver, she bought the company from his heirs. It thrived, because Lin Pe was a very astute businesswoman and because the fortunes she put into her cookies were the best in the business.

About three dozen fortunes were in use at the cookie factory at any one time. Writing good fortunes was a difficult business. She was hard put to come up with three or four good new ones per month, which meant some of the old ones had to be used again. Lin Pe kept a book, her “book of fortunes,” in which was recorded every fortune she had ever written and notations on what months it had been used. She changed the fortunes going into the cookies on a monthly basis.

Just now she put down the accountant’s summary and consulted the fortune list she had constructed for use next month.

“Happiness will find you soon.” She had used this fortune before and thought it one of her best. Other cookie people wrote “You will find happiness,” but that was bland, without wit or snap. Lin Pe sent the happiness searching for you.

“Your true love is closer than you think.” Love, Americans seem enamored with it. Many of the letters she received from restaurant owners in America pleaded with her to use more love fortunes in her cookies. Lin Pe had never been in love herself, so to write these fortunes she had to imagine what it might be like. This was becoming more and more difficult as the years passed.

“Beware… use great care in the days ahead.” When she saw this fortune in her book, she inhaled sharply.

It was her fortune.

One cookie in three thousand contained that fortune. Yesterday she plucked a cookie off the conveyor belt as it was about to go into the packing machine, and that was the fortune inside.

She closed the book, unable to continue. She shivered involuntarily, then sat staring out the window.

Rip Buckingham disliked the Communists, and her son Wu hated them. Neither knew them like Lin Pe did, for she had lived through the Great Cultural Revolution. Occasionally she still awoke in the middle of the night with the stench of burning houses and flesh in her nostrils, listening for the shouts, the sobs, the screams. She had fled to Hong Kong to escape that madness; now the storm seemed to be gathering again out there in the darkness. She could feel its presence.

The money. Its loss was a disaster, of course, but perhaps the Japanese could be shamed into paying it back. The neat little men with their perfect haircuts and creased trousers must know the importance of keeping faith with their customers, even if the law didn’t require it.

The cookie company could run a few days without writing checks. Lin Pe began considering whom she might borrow money from to meet the payroll. Rip and Sue Lin had plenty of money and would have loaned her all she wanted without giving it a thought, but Lin Pe was too proud even to consider that course of action. Amazingly, the possibility never crossed her mind. From her desk drawer she removed a private list of her fellow businesspeople and studied that.

Rip Buckingham’s idea of the perfect way to spend an evening was to loaf in a lawn chair on his roof reading newspapers from all over the world as he sipped beer and listened to music. Occasionally he would pause to watch a ship slip through the harbor on its way to or from the open sea.

Hong Kong didn’t have enough dock facilities, so many of the freighters had their cargo on- and off-loaded onto lighters, which were towed back and forth between their anchorages and the ships by tugboats. Flotillas of ferryboats were in constant motion crossing and recrossing the strait, fuel boats cruised for customers, tour and party boats dashed about, here and there someone sculled a sampan through the heaving ridges of waves and wakes.

Rip was not enjoying the view tonight.

He finished with a Beijing newspaper and threw it onto the pile with the Hong Kong dailies. He grabbed a Sydney paper and started flipping though it.

The problem was that he liked being a newspaperman. He liked going to the office, saying hello to everyone, reading the wire service stories, tapping away on his computer as the cursor danced along, then seeing it all in print. He liked holding the paper in his hand, liked the heft of it, liked the way that it felt cool to the touch. He liked the smell of newsprint and ink, liked the idea of trying to catch the world every day on a pound of paper. A newspaper was worth doing, and Rip Buckingham didn’t want to do anything else.

And he wanted to keep doing it here. In Hong Kong.

He was still stewing, and trying to get into last Sunday’s Washington Post, when his wife came through the greenhouse leading two men. Rip recognized them immediately — Sonny Wong and Yuri Daniel.

Wong Ma Chow, “Sonny,” was a gangster, the leader of the last of the tongs. He made a huge fortune in Hong Kong real estate, then lost it in the collapse that followed the British departure. Since then he had returned to the service business. Whatever service you wanted, Sonny could provide… for a price.

Rip had seen Yuri Daniel, Sonny’s associate, around town for four or five years. Rip had never before had any dealings with him, nor had he wanted to. Yuri was a Russian or Ukrainian or something like that, reportedly from one of those hopelessly poor, squalid villages in the middle of the vast Eastern European plain. Rumor had it that he left the mother country in a large hurry with a suitcase full of money taken at gunpoint from a Russian mobster. How much truth was in the rumor was impossible to say, but it was a nice rumor.

Yuri’s expressionless face, with its cold, blank eyes and pallid features, certainly didn’t inspire trust. Inspecting it at close range, Rip idly wondered why Sonny chose to be in the same room with Yuri Daniel.

“Hey, Sonny.”

“Hey, mate. What do you hear on the Bank of the Orient thing?”

“At least fifteen dead.”

“The lid is gonna blow off this place. People aren’t going to take this lying down. Even I had money in that goddamn thing.”

“Tea? Beer?”

“Beer would be great.”

Sue Lin was still there, and now she nodded at Rip and went for the refrigerator.

“First time I’ve been up here,” Sonny said, surveying the view from a chair beside Rip. “Hell of a view you got here, yessir. Hell of a view. You’re right up here with the upper crust, looking down on the world.”

Yuri sat on Sonny’s other side, turned slightly away from the two of them. He hadn’t yet said a word.

Sue Lin brought the beer, then left them. She paused at the door of the greenhouse and looked back, catching Rip’s eye. She raked her windblown hair from her eyes, then went in, closing the door behind her.

“… owned a building just below here some years back,” Sonny was saying. He pointed. “That one right there, with the little garden on the roof. The value of that building went up to four times what I paid for it. I was collecting fabulous rents every month, then it all just… just melted away, like ice cream in the noonday sun.”

“Yeah.”

“One day, the whole thing…” He sighed.

Rip sipped a beer. Sue Lin had brought one for each of them. Yuri was looking at the ships in the harbor to the west.

“I always liked this view,” Sonny said. “Always.”

“Yeah.”

‘These are the last days of Hong Kong, Rip. It’s coming to an end.”

Rip didn’t say anything to that. What was there to say?

“Got your message that you wanted me to drop by. So what can Wong and Associates do for the scion of the Buckingham clan?”

“China Bob Chan.”

“Too bad, huh?”

“Got any ideas on who might have done it?”

“It wasn’t me, Rip.”

“Hey, Sonny. If I thought there was the slightest possibility, I would have respected your privacy. What I’m after is any background or insight you might be able to provide, not for attribution, of course. What was China Bob into?”

“You’ve been following the American thing…?” Sonny began. “The PLA was giving him money to contribute to American political campaigns. Don’t ask me why. The generals think the American politicos are as crooked as Chinese politicians. And they may be right — there was a guy in the American embassy in Beijing who was handing out visas to the United States to anyone who said he would go over there and contribute to the president’s reelection campaign.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Chan was into the usual stuff here. And he was big into smuggling people, which I won’t touch. It’s too dirty for me, Rip, but not for China Bob.”

“Where to?”

“Anywhere. Malaysia, Australia, America, anywhere people wanted to go, China Bob would do the deal. Course he didn’t always deliver — it’s a smelly business.”

“Did he do passports?”

“S.A.R. passports, but no one wanted those,” Wong said. Hong Kong became a Special Administrative Region of China in 1997 when the British turned over the colony. “I heard that for the right price — and the right price was very high — China Bob could produce genuine passports. That’s not generally known around, I believe.”

“Was he doing that a lot, do you think?”

“No country I know about is granting visas to people holding S.A.R. passports, so there isn’t a lot of demand for those. The refugee problem has these other countries scared silly. The old British colonial passports are a dreg on the market — you can’t get into America or Australia or Singapore or Indonesia or anyplace I know with one of those. Even Britain is worried about tens of thousands of Chinese refugees flooding in. No one is granting entry visas.”

Rip sipped some more on his beer and waited.

“Guy like China Bob had a lot of deals going,” Sonny said, thinking aloud. “The guy who sold China Bob blank American passports will deal with me, if you want. Faking an Australian visa on an American passport shouldn’t be a problem.”

“You and China Bob were sorta competitors, weren’t you?”

Sonny bristled slightly at that remark. “Our businesses paralleled each other at times,” he admitted. “There was room for both of us.”

“You’re talking a forged passport?”

“Genuine. The real thing, right out of the lock box at the consulate. The source is very reliable.”

“Uh-huh.”

“He’s not honest, you understand, but he is reliable. That’s a critical distinction in business, one so few people appreciate.”

“I think I see it,” Rip told Sonny, who nodded as if he were pleased.

“I put the passport with Australian entry visa in your hands,” Sonny explained. “You take your Chinese relative to the airport, put her on Qantas to Sydney. She breezes through immigration at both ends. Guaranteed.”

“How much?”

“Twenty grand American. Cash. Half in advance, half on delivery of the documents.”

Rip whistled. “Is that what China Bob was into?”

“He did a little of that. And he brought stuff in. He could get import permits for darn near anything; anything he couldn’t get a permit for he could smuggle in. Money, import, smuggling — those were his main businesses, but he did some people, too. For fifty grand he could put your cousin on a freighter going to the United States. The Philippines were a real bargain, though, only about four thousand. Your cousin would be in a locked container with some other passengers. He’d have to take his own food and water with him, but he wouldn’t get a sunburn. About eight days at sea, five hundred a day. Hell, Rip, it would cost more money than that to send him on a cruise ship.”

“The passengers didn’t always get there, though,” Rip pointed out.

“Rip, I just couldn’t say. Dumping the cargo at sea — something like that the people involved don’t talk about. Oh, you hear whispers, but people like to whisper. Gives them something to do.”

Rip waved away that possibility. He knew those kinds of things were happening, but he really didn’t believe China Bob had gotten his hands that filthy for the paltry dollars involved.

Rip glanced at the Russian. On the other hand, Yuri looked like he would cheerfully cut your throat for cigarette money.

“Was Bob into Chinese politics, do you think?”

“Hey, Rip, I don’t think the guy intentionally set out to die young.”

“Well, he figured wrong somewhere, that’s for sure.”

“Everyone makes mistakes occasionally. Even China Bob.”

“Think someone double-crossed him, one of his associates maybe?”

“I doubt if somebody shot him to get his wife. Wives being what they are, not too many people kill to get one. To get rid of one, yes.” Wong snorted at his own wit. When the noises stopped, he said, “A double cross is likely. Though if I were a betting man, I would put my money on the PLA. Rumor had it Bob might go to America, embarrass a lot of important people.” He shrugged.

“Thanks for coming by tonight, Sonny.”

“Okay. Now tell me the real reason you called.”

“I enjoy seeing your smiling face.”

“I didn’t shoot him, Rip. Bob and I did a lot of business together. His death leaves me scrambling, trying to salvage some things we had going. I’m not saying his death will be a net loss to me — I figure over time everything will balance out. You gotta be philosophical. These things happen.”

“Uh-huh.”

Sonny Wong gave up. “Great view you got here, Rip.”

“Yeah.”

“You ever want a passport for your mother-in-law, call me.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Come on, Yuri. Let’s go find some beds.”

With her husband’s help, Callie Grafton got the small tape reels properly installed on the player and pushed the play button. She was wearing the headset Carmellini had brought. Before her was a legal pad and pen on which she made notes and summarized the conversations as she listened. She made no attempt at a word-by-word translation. Occasionally she had to rewind the tape and listen to portions of conversations several times to make sure she had the meaning right.

Midnight came and went as she listened intently, occasionally jotting notes.

Finally she took a break, stopped the tape, and took off the headset. After she had helped herself to water, she muttered to her husband, who was out on the balcony watching the lights of the city; “What are you going to do with the tape after I finish with it?”

“I don’t know. Depends on what’s on it.”

“I’m about halfway, I think. I don’t understand everything I’ve heard, but Chan was apparently laundering money.”

“For whom?”

“For the PLA. The money was going to America.”

“Okay.”

“The congressional investigators might be able to put voices and facts together to make something of all this.”

“Perhaps.”

She stood silently, stretching. Finally she lowered her arms and massaged his neck muscles. “Do you think Tiger killed him?”

“Hon, I don’t know. I’m waiting for you to tell me what you think.”

“What are you going to do if he did?”

“I don’t know that either.”

She went back inside and put on the headset.

It was three in the morning when Callie Grafton removed the headset and turned off the tape player. Jake was curled up on the bed, asleep.

She went out on the balcony and saw that rain had fallen during the night. Just now the air was almost a sea mist, which made the lights of the city glow wondrously.

She had listened to the ten minutes prior to the gunshot, which the tape captured, three times.

China Bob Chan had been a human, and presumably somewhere there was someone who cared for him, perhaps even loved him. Try as she might, Callie could work up no sympathy for the murdered man. He was gone and that was that.

She turned off the lights and lay down on the bed. She was so exhausted she wondered if she could relax enough to sleep. Then her eyes closed and she was out.

The sound of morning traffic coming through the open sliding-glass door woke Jake. Callie was asleep on the bed beside him.

Being as quiet as possible, he got up and put on running shorts, shirt, and shoes, made sure he had a key to the room, then slipped out and made sure the door locked behind him.

Down on the street the day was in full swing. People filled the sidewalk, all in a hurry, all rushing somewhere. Jake tried to stay out of their way until he got to Kowloon Park, with its semi-empty sidewalks. As he jogged through the park he passed morning exercise classes engaged in slow, stylized calisthenics that reminded him of ballet.

He ran the entire length of the park and out onto the sidewalks of Austin Road, where he headed for the docks on the western side of the peninsula.

He had gone only a few dozen yards along Austin Road when he realized that he was being followed. Someone was jogging behind him, huffing loudly. And there was a car on the street, creeping along.

Jake Grafton glanced back over his shoulder, taking in the car and the man in casual pants who was running behind. He was a couple hundred feet back, and running was obviously not a sport with him. The guy was wearing the wrong shoes and carrying too much weight, for starters.

The thought of Callie asleep in a hotel room with the tape of China Bob’s last hours on the bed beside her flashed through Jake’s mind.

When he reached the street that ran beside the dock area, Canton Road, he turned left, south, to head back toward Tsim Sha Tsui on the southern tip of the peninsula. He kept his pace steady and tried not to look over his shoulder, though he did glance back once to make sure his tail had not collapsed on the sidewalk.

He veered left onto Kowloon Park Drive, just loping along.

Ahead was a ramp up to an overpass that went across the street and into the lobby of a major hotel. Looking neither right nor left, Jake took the ramp, made the turn at the top, and slowed just enough to go through the glass doors, which reflected the early morning glare.

His tail came thudding up the ramp, made the turn, charged for the door with his head down, inhaling deeply as he tried to get enough air to ease the pain in his chest. On the street below the car that had been keeping pace with the runner accelerated away.

Jake Grafton caught the tail by the throat as he came through the door and slammed him into a marble pillar, where the man collapsed, too stunned to move.

Glancing around to be sure no one was paying too much attention, Jake picked the man up by his pants and shirt and shoved him back out the door onto the ramp. There he slammed the man’s head into the ramp railing, and the man passed out.

After he eased the heavy man to the concrete, Jake patted him down. He had a small automatic in a holster in his sock, so Jake relieved him of that and pushed it down inside his own athletic sock. A wallet… he didn’t need that anymore, either. A few keys, matches, an open pack of Marlboros…

Grafton spent no more than ten seconds searching the man, then he straightened and went on into the hotel, leaving one middle-aged Western woman staring open-mouthed at him. No one else seemed interested.

Callie was still asleep when Jake let himself into the hotel room. The tape was still in the player.

Jake examined the pistol, a Chinese-made automatic, loaded. He put it in his luggage.

The wallet he had taken from the tail contained Hong Kong dollars and a variety of cards, all displaying Chinese characters.

He was toweling off after his shower when Callie awoke.

“Hey, beautiful woman, did you sleep okay?”

She sat up in bed, looked around at the bright room and the daylight streaming through the gauzy drapes.

“I don’t know who killed that man, Jake.”

“Couldn’t tell from the tape?”

“Impossible to say. But China Bob was into everything. Everything! He smuggled people, money, dope… he was even bringing in computers and guns.”

“Computers?”

“I couldn’t make much sense of it.”

“Was Cole on the tape?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know his voice.”

“You’ll meet him again tonight.”

“I don’t know that I want to.”

“Hey, kiddo. We’re the first team, okay? What say we have breakfast and see some sights?”