“Where are you now?” I asked.
“In a coffee shop in Central, ogling a table of Chinese girls. I think they like me.”
“They must not know about your sheep proclivities,” I said.
He laughed. “Shoot, partner, not unless you told them.”
“Stay put for a while. I’ll call you back.”
“Where are you going?”
“I’ll call you back,” I said again, and hung up.
If this had been Tokyo, I could have told him immediately where we should meet and how. I had studied the city for the twenty-five years I’d lived there, and knew dozens of venues that would have worked. But Hong Kong was less familiar to me. I needed to map things out.
I walked to the causeway, then headed west, toward Sheung Wan, looking for the right locale. It was Sunday, and the area was animated with the chatter of thousands of the island’s Filipina maids, who were out enjoying a weekly day of relief from their labors. They sat on flattened cardboard in the shade of the long causeway ceiling and picnicked on pancit palabok and sotanghon and kilawing tanguige and other comfort food and felt, for a few brief moments, that they were home again. I liked how physical they were: the way they braided each other’s hair, and held hands, and sat so close together, like children finding solace, a talisman against something fearful, in simple human contact. Despite their transplanted lives and the loss of what they left behind, there was something childlike about them, and I thought that it was probably this seeming innocence, joined incongruously to an adult sexuality, that drove so many western men mad for Southeast Asian women. Such charms are not lost on me, either, but at that moment, desire wasn’t really what I felt for them. What I felt, dull and somehow surprising, was more akin to envy.
I continued down the causeway, then moved south into the Western District, named entirely for its position relative to Central and without reference to culture or atmosphere. In fact, characterized as it is by the craggy faces of ancient herbalists concocting snake musk and powdered lizards and other such antique pharmacopoeia; the aroma of incense from its temples and of cooking from snake restaurants and dim-sum bakeries; the cries of its fishmongers and street cleaners and merchants, Western feels significantly more “eastern” than the rest of Hong Kong.
I stopped in one of the innumerable bric-a-brac shops on Cat Street and bought several secondhand items, all of which were intended to distract the shopkeeper and would soon be discarded, save one: a gutting knife with a four-inch blade and a horn handle. The knife was nestled in a leather sheath and the blade was satisfactorily sharp.
In my wallet was an old credit card, around which I keep wrapped several feet of duct tape. Thousand and one uses, they say, one of which, it seemed, was securing a gutting knife to the underside of a causeway banister. If I saw anyone following us or detected any other signs of duplicity, I would lead Dox past the banister, retrieve the knife, and finish him with it.
I would have preferred to keep the blade on my person, but Dox wasn’t stupid, despite the appearance he cultivated, and I knew he’d be looking for signs of a weapon. Adequate concealment on my body was possible, of course, but would make for an unacceptably time-consuming deployment. Better to have the element of surprise. Likewise, it would have been sensible to wear some extra clothing, with a running suit or something similar between the outer and inner layers, which I could quickly peel off afterward if things got messy. But I knew this was also something Dox would spot. There was a compromise, though. I purchased a dark nylon jacket and a carton of baby wipes, which I stashed under a trashcan in a public restroom not far from where I had placed the knife. If I had to deal with Dox and got bloody in the process, I could duck into the restroom and quickly make myself presentable again.
I continued east on the causeway, then into the International Financial Center, which houses a large shopping mall. I wandered around until I had found a suitable setup: a third-floor vantage point overlooking a second-floor bookseller called Dymock’s. From the third floor I could monitor not only the entrance to the bookstore, but the nearby second-floor entrance to the mall and the approaches to my position, as well. If I saw something I didn’t like, I could disappear in any one of a number of directions.
I called Dox from a pay phone.
“Moshi moshi,” he said, in his thick drawl.
I wondered briefly whether I was giving Dox too much credit in thinking that his hayseed thing was only an act.
“Still ogling those girls?” I asked.
“Them and some new ones,” he said, his voice booming with good cheer. “There’s enough of me for all of ’em.”
“Meet me in the Dymock’s bookstore in the IFC shopping mall.”
“The what? I don’t…”
“Save the hillbilly stuff for someone who cares,” I interrupted. “The International Financial Center shopping mall. Second floor. At Hong Kong station on the MTR. It should take you less than fifteen minutes to get there. Longer than that and I’m gone.”
“All right, all right, no need to get unpleasant about it, I’m on my way.”
“I’ll be watching along the way, Dox. If you’re not alone, I’m going to take it personally.”
“I know, I know.”
He did know, too. We’d worked together. He’d seen what I could do.
I hung up, went back to my position, and waited.
I didn’t know the details, of course, but then I didn’t really need to. Dox knew I was in Hong Kong because that’s where I’d placed the call to Kanezaki. Somehow he’d created that photograph of me. He’d known me before and had seen me recently; maybe he had worked with a technician the way a witness works with a police sketch artist. Or maybe they had a military-era photo and had digitized it to account for the effects of plastic surgery and the intervening decades. Regardless, Dox would have taken the photo around to hotels on Hong Kong and Kowloon. He knew me, so he would start with the best and work his way down. That’s why he knew I was at a hotel, but didn’t know which one.
I realized he’d probably been to the Peninsula, too, but I had left there in too much of a hurry to bother with a formal checkout. Maybe he would have flashed some sort of government ID, U.S. Customs requesting a favor, something like that. Or maybe he even had local liaison. Sure, the Ritz manager had said something about this being a “police matter.” Maybe the Agency had asked the local gendarmerie for assistance. Great.
I shook my head a little sadly. Staying at high-end hotels when I’m moving around is one of the few luxuries I have. Now I saw that the habit had become a liability. I would have to jettison it.
I tried not to take it personally. Dox, Kanezaki, they had their reasons. They were just doing their jobs.
Well, if it got to be too much, I would just do mine. No hard feelings, guys. You know how it is.
Ten minutes later I watched him enter the shopping mall through the second-floor entrance to my right. For the moment, he seemed to be alone. If he was with anyone, they were hanging back beyond the entrance.
As he went to turn into the bookstore I called to him. “Dox. Up here.”
He looked up and smiled. “Hey there.”
“Use the escalator to your right,” I told him. “Hurry.”
He did. While he moved, I waited to see whether anyone came in the entrance behind him, trying to keep up. No one did.
When he reached the top of the escalator, I started moving. “Turn left,” I said. “Just head through the mall. I’ll be right behind you. I’ll tell you what to do next.”
“Don’t you get tired of this stuff?” he asked, giving me a hangdog look.
I watched the escalator behind him. “Go,” I said. “Now.”
He did. I watched the escalator and the entrance for a moment longer. All clear. Then I caught up to him and fell in just behind and to the right of him. Harry’s detector stayed quiet.