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.”