She put his phone numbers to one side and stood up. She looked around her. After what she was about to do, all of this could change – to be frank, it could be no more. She didn’t know what she thought of that. She loved her work and she’d been adequately rewarded for her considerable expertise. Now she could be throwing it all away. She looked again at the coded e-mail from Dalong Fada and memorized the instructions and the single contact number there. She knew that once she dialled that number she might never be able to return to her life here. Before she met Wu Fan-zi in Shanghai she would never have considered giving all this up. But now, after Wu Fan-zi, she would. She picked up the phone and dialled the Dalong Fada number.
The phone was answered with a stiff “Dui.” The use of Mandarin in Hong Kong was unusual, but it was what she expected. Quickly, in Mandarin, she gave the code words from the e-mail, “When does the Club Sierra open?”
“Just before moonrise,” came the coded answer.
“Is the movie star dancing tonight?”
“Dui.”
The phone went dead. If someone tried to trace the call they would be out of luck. The person who answered Joan’s call only used cell phones once then threw them into the sea.
Joan took a breath. The silly old British phrase the game’s afoot popped into her head – a remnant from her British education that had featured second-, third-, and fourth-rate British writers above all others. She sat and dialled the young tech’s number. She felt a little bad about using him – but only a little bad. “It’s Joan Shui,” she said. The pause that followed was probably the result of him dropping his cell phone. “Hey, how’re you doin’, hey?” he said in his best impression of a man in complete control.
It was not a terribly impressive impression.
“I’ve managed to clear the next few days. Are you busy?”
Splutter, pause, clunk, then, “Great. Good. No, great.”
“How about three nights at the Calden Inn?”
The silence that followed was the longest yet. The poor lad was balancing his good fortune with the incredible expense of three nights at the Calden Inn. The Calden Inn was an exclusive private retreat just across from Macaw. Before Joan Shui had gone to Shanghai to investigate an arson in an abortion clinic and fallen hopelessly in love with Shanghai’s head fireman Wu Fan-zi, she had thought that a weekend at the Calden Inn was the height of chic. Wealthy men sometimes suggested the Calden Inn as a great place for a little R and R and she sometimes took them up on it. Before Wu Fan-zi, she thought of sex much the same way as she thought of calisthenics – sometimes the exertion was very pleasing and sometimes it was less pleasing. The only consistent reality of her many visits to the Calden Inn was the pleasure she had given the men she was with and the luxury that they had provided for her.
“I’ve already made reservations in your name. I gave them your Visa number; we have it on file here for times that you have to go out of pocket for us. I got us a suite. I have to complete something here but I’ll meet you out there first thing tomorrow morning. Okay?”
She didn’t have to wait for an answer. She knew what it was going to be.
“Great. See you out there. Don’t be late.” She hung up then dialled the Calden Inn. She asked for the manager, who she’d befriended a few years back when she helped him solve a little arson-related unpleasantness in his kitchen.
“Ms. Shui, how nice to hear from you,” the manager said with evident feeling.
“I have a favour to ask.”
“Ask, please.”
“My new boss . . .” – since the handover, Hong Kongers used the term to refer to totally incompetent but politically connected mainland overseers appointed by Beijing – “. . . has a son who just won’t take no for an answer. He’s booked a suite at your resort for three nights. When he arrives, I need you to claim that I came and found that he wasn’t there on time so you assigned me my own private room in the other end of the building and that I have sworn you to secrecy so that under no circumstance will you tell him which room I am in.”
“It is a large resort,” he chuckled.
“And so very private.”
“Indeed.” He cleared his throat. “And were you particularly angry at the young man’s tardiness?”
“Furious.”
“As well you should be. I myself am almost beyond speaking I am so profoundly upset by the actions of this young hellion.”
“Thanks.”
“My pleasure, Ms. Shui.”
She hung up and made one more call. This to one of her snitches. Firebugs liked to brag – snitches were invaluable to arson inspectors.
“Now what?” came the snivelling voice over the cell phone. “You going to bust my balls over exactly what this time?”
Joan took a breath and asked sweetly, “Your balls grew back then?”
“Ha, ha! Lady cops! Ye sheng!!! Spare me from lady cops.”
“You know where the main forensics lab is?”
“Near Qian Shui Wan?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, I know where it is,” he said slowly.
“Good. Follow a young tech named Clarence Chi and very early Saturday morning, say between 1 and 2 a.m., put a sizeable quantity of sand into the gas tank of his car.”
“And I get what out of this, exactly?”
“I conveniently lose the file on a certain restaurant robbery that took place last Tuesday.”
“I thought you were arson.”
“I am but I’ve got friends all over the place.”
More muttering about lady cops, the general unfairness of the world and references to a particularly painful self-inflicted sex act, then in a small voice he said, “It wasn’t really a robbery. It was more that I was hungry.”
“Therefore a restaurant?”
“Right. I was hungry,” he quickly agreed.
“You should keep your gloves on when you eat.”
“Fingerprints?”
“Everywhere – on the fridge, on the ovens, on the cash register – odd place to keep food, don’t you think? Robbery came to me because they ID’d your fingerprints in about ten minutes. Two guys claimed they’d seen your prints so often they recognized them by sight.”
“Po gai! Po kai!!!”
“I couldn’t have said it better. But today’s your lucky day. A little sand in a gas tank and all is forgiven.”
“That simple, huh?”
“That simple.”
And that simply she had her cover to get out of Hong Kong, or so she hoped.
At the entrance to the Nevada Texan strip club Joan tipped the doorman. The man pocketed the money, leered at her and said, “Dancin’ tonight, honey?”
She smiled at him. He pulled aside the restraining rope and she entered the darkened club. The place had become even more popular since the arrival of the Beijing authority. The club and others like it represented an attachment to pleasure that was anathema to the puritanical Communists but was so much a part of the life of capitalist Hong Kongers. People now came to this club who wouldn’t have been caught dead in a place like this just six years before.
Joan was directed to a small round table close to a corner, and before she smoothed out her skirt a martini was delivered. A demand for an outrageous amount of money quickly followed. Joan paid the tariff then asked, “Is Marie dancing tonight?” as she had been instructed to do in the Dalong Fada e-mail.
The waitress, a slender girl with better legs than brains, smiled and winked.
Joan assumed that meant yes.
Five minutes later a silicon wonder approached her table carrying a milk crate. “You been waiting all your life for me, sweetie?” the girl asked.
“Are you Marie?”
“No. Don’t know any Maries.”
Joan froze her out. “Get lost. And I’d be very careful with the breast augmentation. Latest studies have not been encouraging for the health of the recipient.”