Typhoon

21

Twenty minutes later — no time for coffee, for digestifs — Miles was making a phone call on the corner of Haiphong Road and Kowloon Park Drive having put Lenan into a cab.

“Billy? I got a problem. What are you doing for wui gwai?”

Billy Chen was an American asset in the Triads whom Joe distrusted as a faithless opportunist, a drug-running hoodlum whose lust for the trappings of wealth and power was matched only by his colossal vanity and self-importance. Chen must have been about twenty or twenty-one in 1997, and had been taking Miles’s dollar for three years in return for information about criminal activity in Guangdong province, Macau and Hong Kong. Joe had had the chance to recruit him as an agent of SIS shortly after he arrived in 1995, but had turned it down flat on the basis that Chen was clearly unreliable. The Yanks, he quickly discovered, were less discerning; they tended to throw money at anybody who was willing to tell them what they wanted to hear.

“ Wui gwai?” Chen replied, pronouncing the Cantonese phrase for “handover” with a native finesse denied to Miles. “Maybe I’m in Hong Kong, maybe I’m not. How come you don’t call me so long?”

“Listen, Billy. I need you to do me a favor.”

“What kind of favour?”

Chen was sitting in the front seat of his favourite BMW with one hand on his mobile phone and the other sliding up the leg of a teenage girl plucked from a KTV bar in Shenzhen.

“Nothing serious, nothing special,” Miles told him. “Just involves a couple of friends of mine in the run-up to June 30th.”

“The run-up?” It was as if Chen didn’t understand the expression.

“That’s right, the run-up.” Miles couldn’t be bothered to explain it. He was in a panic over Isabella and had made a lightning quick decision to undermine Joe’s proposal with a simple if somewhat clumsy strategy of his own. For the time being, all thoughts of going to Lily’s had been postponed.

“Everybody take five days off,” Chen said, referring to the common assumption that Hong Kong would grind to a halt in the week of wui gwai, as offices closed and the colony’s residents waved their final farewells to British rule.

“Yeah, everybody’s taking five days off. But on one of those days you’ll be helping me, Billy. You’ll be at the end of the phone and you’ll be doing me a favor. Like I said, it’s nothing special. Just make sure you’re in Hong Kong.”

It felt good to be bullying someone after two hours of Kenneth Lenan. Miles had the leverage to make demands of Billy Chen because, for all his suits and his cars and his blank-eyed girls, the gangster was just another creature of American power, a small fish in a great sea whose elevated position within the Teochiu could be ended with a single phone call.

“OK, Miles. OK. So tell me what you want to do. Tell me why you need me around.”

“You remember my friend Joe?”

“Who?”

“The English guy. Tall. You met him a couple of years back at the Lisboa.”

A memory of meeting Joe in a hotel room at Macau’s largest casino assembled itself in Chen’s mind. Hesitatingly, he said, “Sure.”

“Well that’s who you’ll be dealing with,” he said. “That’s the guy I’m after.”