Chapter Two

—Friday midday—

Claire pondered Dr Liu’s story while eating a box of tepid chicken curry noodles on the ferry ride to Vic’s flat. The boat to Cheung Chau, a dumb-bell shaped island southeast of Victoria Island, offered a pleasant respite from Hong Kong’s business district—at least during weekdays.

Vic didn’t have to live on Cheung Chau. His housing allowance would have paid for a modern one-bedroom apartment in Midlevels, Wanchai or Happy Valley, only a few minutes’ taxi ride from their office. He wanted local color, he insisted, and so chose the dirty, crowded island instead. Claire respected his decision; although she hadn’t said what she was thinking—that ‘missed’ ferries were a classic way to shorten the work day when catching the early morning boats was too painful.

The heaving, three-story wooden ferries departed every hour from a ramshackle low-rise station with clanging old-fashioned turnstiles and peeling white paint. They were an incongruous reminder of gentler, slower days in Hong Kong. To the east of the station stood Hong Kong’s high-tech post office and towering new Stock Exchange building, to the west, Hong Kong’s more picturesque old market streets that were gentrifying into tourist attractions. Happily, the ferry remained just as Claire remembered from summer jaunts for long curry lunches with other young ‘journos’ over a decade ago.

The ferry’s cabin was crowded with retirees, housewives and boisterous pre-schoolers. One table of scrawny, paunchy men played poker and drank jasmine tea from glass mugs, while a second table of housekeepers heading home devoted themselves to high stakes at a game of mahjong. The noise of the mahjong tiles, the Cantonese conversation, and the pounding engine below was deafening.

Wrapping her long green woolen coat more tightly around her, Claire craved breezes and solitude, so she retreated up to the deck where the summer’s plastic chairs stood stacked in the corner. The blessing of the dry season from September to December had disappeared all too soon this year and Hong Kong had turned both cold and wet. In the colony’s late winter, even with the afternoon sun breaking through heavy cloud, the winds whipping the harbor felt like wet sheets slapping her face. The temperature had dropped to 14 degrees Celsius. Vic often arrived for work wearing two sweaters under his jacket. Only a few weeks ago he’d taken to donning a cheap down jacket picked up in the outlet lanes.

It had been years since she’d ridden out here. Had she been in Hong Kong too long, she thought? Thirty-six wasn’t old, but it felt old in Asia. She felt not only wise, but also worn. Liu’s story had saddened her, but the initial horror slowly passed. She’d heard pretty much all the stories there were to hear. Stories of war and mutilation, tuberculosis and leprosy, kidnapping, gambling, success and abject failure, glamor and impoverished determination, absurd excess and feudal superstition, beady eyed ambition and comic colonial folly.

She felt ancient these days, far removed from the passions of the world around her, at times almost asexual. For that matter, Chinese men had never looked at her much—red hair spelled ‘demon’ in Chinese mythology. Her five feet ten inches discouraged most males across the entire Asian hemisphere, and being in her late thirties merely rounded out the picture of a sexual ‘neutral’.

Her thoughts turned idly to Jim McIntyre. Two years’ worth of love letters nestled in the top left drawer of her desk at home. He’d been an amusement, she told herself, someone to play at love with. He hadn’t been toying with her, but to a boy from the Bronx, their affair was mostly about the color, the setting, and the glamour of a literate media woman. She’d brightened the tiring anonymity of his work. So she told herself, but in the darkening moments of watching the sun finally release the bustling colony to its neon strings of lights, she now asked herself, yet again, where had Jim gone? Where had he disappeared after that last casual kiss outside the Choi’s flower shop? Supposedly gone for one week on assignment, there’d been nothing but silence now for a very long time.

The ferry passed the Hotel Victoria where Xavier Vonalp rented a service flat as his regional base for operations as a United Nations agency delegate.

Xavier was in so many ways different from Jim, but just as elusive. It was hard to say after only a few months of dating this deep-voiced, forceful European exactly where their discreet affair was heading. It had been many years since she’d thought her life might veer from its predictable course. Was Xavier’s careful warmth and steady distance rather too convenient for her? For the moment, she had no difficult choices to make but perhaps that wasn’t such a good thing.

She enjoyed her fifty minutes of solitude, returning to the disturbing questions Liu’s tale prompted. Who was the Hong Kong property magnate with the sick daughter? Who could Claire talk to for a broader picture of what was going on with organ transplants and prisons? Was Liu possibly a plant or a fraud? Was he unstable? Or hoping she’d pay for more information?

She disembarked, cheeks reddened and spirits cleansed. The boat poured its passengers unceremoniously down a gangplank a few feet wide into the arms of fishmongers, pineapple juice vendors and garment hawkers.

She marched five minutes up the steep Peak Road to a tiny junction consisting of a signpost pointing left to a small temple and a little grocery store selling San Miguel beer, dried noodles, soda pop, and mosquito coils. Just beyond stood Vic’s apartment building, really just a mildewed three-story house, its backside supported on ugly cement stilts pounded into the slope falling away down to the village.

From the sidewalk where Claire stood, a small gate barred pedestrians from a short concrete bridge overhung with trees leading to the front door. Vic rented the top floor with rights to the terraced roof. His idea had been to fix up the roof for parties, but an air of overgrown moss, mosquitos and defeat hung over the place.

From Vic’s open window above she heard the thumping of an electric bass guitar. No wonder he couldn’t hear his phone ringing.

The communal front door stood open and Claire loped up the two flights to Vic’s. The music was so loud that there was no way anyone inside could have heard her knocking. Claire waited, irritated, until the last note of a song sounded. She hammered her fist loudly.

‘Vic, it’s Claire! Open up!’ she shouted.

No one came. The bass resumed its assault on the decrepit landing.

She had Vic’s spare key from Cecilia. She opened the door, and stepped inside. To her left, stood his tiny kitchen with two Chinese-style hot plates on the waist-high shelf. She glanced over the porcelain tiling. It looked like he’d been cooking; a British baking scale stood next to the sink piled high with dirty dishes. There were traces of flour casually swiped across the counter.

‘Vic!’ she yelled, taking the few short steps into the living room, which gave on to three small bedrooms. She stood confused for a second in the center of the main room which was littered with newspapers, flip-flops, dress shoes, burnt-out mosquito coils and an open briefcase.

The door to the largest bedroom stood open.

With all that pounding bass, no one could have heard her approach. She stared through the doorway into the glazed expression of Vic’s on-off girlfriend, Nancy Chew, sitting stark naked astride a man. Stomach heaving, she looked with disbelief at Claire. Her heavy eye makeup was smeared and her wiry hair stuck up sideways from her head. The Chinese girl blushed, her blotchy complexion more irregular than ever. When she realized Claire wasn’t a ghost, her face contorted with surprise, embarrassment, and anger.

‘Diow nay,’ she yelled, fuck, ‘Diow nay lo mo,’ adding someone’s mother. Her childlike breasts gave her an innocent appearance that contrasted with her elaborate eye make-up. Beneath her, the man’s head twisted up to look back. Flustered at first, Claire stood her ground to confront Vic.

But the man wasn’t Vic. It had been many months since Claire had had even phone contact with him, but she recognized the patrician chin and nose, and the cool, pale eyes. Craig Hager was their magazine’s Bangkok stringer. He was the wrong man in the wrong city with the wrong girl.

Claire realized she had two delinquent subordinates on her hands, not one.

She waited for Hager in the living room. No wonder no one had answered the phone. Hager was supposed to be in Thailand. She heard hushed conversation behind the bedroom door and then he emerged, all six feet three inches of decadent flesh that had probably been solid brawn before Bangkok took its inevitable toll. He’d thrown a towel around his hips. He stretched his deeply tanned torso languidly and adjusted the towel slightly lower on his rump. Claire found herself staring at a knife tattooed below his collarbone.

He turned the pounding music off, languidly, provocatively, as if there was one more guitar riff he wanted to catch. He gestured to Claire to sit on the rattan sofa.

Nancy remained in the bedroom—Claire heard clothes and bedding rustling and a closet door slam.

‘Want some coffee? I got some espresso blend at Oliver’s downtown. Vic’s instant tastes like piss.’

Craig didn’t wait for an answer as he clearly wanted coffee himself. He disappeared into the kitchen and Claire heard some energetic preparation. He emerged few minutes later with a bamboo tray set with Vic’s cheap blue-and-white crockery from China Products.

‘Looking for Vic?’

‘Yes.’

‘He said I could stay here for the week he was up in Guangzhou reporting out some electronic story.’ Craig poured ink-black brew into a cup for her.

‘Where in Guangzhou?’ she asked, keeping a straight face.

Vic was in China? That was a neat one, to cross the border into China without saying anything to her, but making arrangements with another stringer. Well, she understood his absence now. Of course Vic wasn’t back on time. It was his first year in Hong Kong. The idiot wouldn’t have realized that during the Chinese New Year, nearly a million Hong Kong people crossed the border northward into Guangdong province. Getting back during the inevitable crush at the train stations and airports required a combination of good planning, willpower, and some familiarity with this annual ritual of good-natured migratory mayhem.

Vic lacked all three.

‘Some town up the Pearl River. That’s all I remember. He’s coming back tomorrow. Don’t worry.’

Claire resented Hager’s confidence and his patronizing tone—boys covering for boys with ‘Mom.’ Why had her predecessor hired Hager? She’d heard it was because they had made a habit of bar hopping together in Bangkok.

‘Why should I worry? Anyway, you’re obviously making the most of his absence. It’d be nice if you were back in Bangkok doing your job. Cecilia is faxing you a page of questions for your local Chase manager as we speak.’

He scratched one well-toned, bronze pectoral. ‘You don’t give me enough work or retainer to expect me to keep banker’s hours. You can hardly expect me to devote myself to waiting for a monthly call from Business World. You’re not my main string.’ He smiled again, less pleasantly.

‘I need to check Vic’s desk. I don’t know anything about an assignment in Guangzhou,’ Claire cut him off.

‘You’re the boss, boss.’ He shrugged. His tone implied Claire’s being the boss actually had little to do with his interests—or Vic’s, for that matter.

Claire brushed off his insolence. Any woman running an Asian bureau network could expect certain traits in her stringers: the Singapore stringer would be meticulous but politically timid, the Delhi stringer overeducated and underpaid, the Sydney stringer out of touch with New York’s priorities, the Jakarta stringer vague with deadlines, the Taiwan stringer melancholic about not being the Beijing stringer, and the Beijing stringer keen to eliminate Claire’s interference so he could work directly to New York.

Living in the corrupt, oblique and murky hub of Southeast Asia, any Bangkok stringer who had the contacts his bureau chief needed—plus the wiles to use them—always came with personal baggage that tipped the scales. More often than not he (and the Bangkok stringer was always a he) sported ex-wives, bargirl troubles, drug jones, drink handovers or war wounds. One had a false leg that gave him migraines. Another couldn’t get out of bed before four in the afternoon. Bangkok stringers were, by definition, trouble.

You needed one per bureau, but thank God, only one.

Hager left for the kitchen again with the tray. She heard more clearing up.

Vic’s desk was an uncensored version of his mess at work. There was a Chinese edition of Penthouse—a lot of teen-age bottoms and white cotton anklets on the cover—a mess of dog-eared spiral notebooks, used matchbooks and a carpet of strewn cigarette ashes. She glanced around the rest of his ‘study.’ What was she looking for? Hager wasn’t going to tell her more. She could feel Hager, sitting and sipping in the living room only yards away, listening to the silence of her confusion and smiling to himself. Her indignation mounted by the second. Craig was either laid-back or getting laid, but being laid off would hardly faze him. Reporters with fluent Thai and all the right connections were hard to find. He’d land on his feet within a week, probably with a rival weekly.

She wouldn’t give him that satisfaction. ‘When are you going home?’

‘I’ve got a flight out tomorrow night.’

Claire glanced at the bedroom door.

Hager read her thoughts. ‘That doesn’t mean anything. Bangkok isn’t any good anymore– everyone’s HIV there. She doesn’t like Vic all that much, that’s for sure. I’m not certain why she’s been hanging around with him, but last night she said something about being with Vic for the sake of her brother.’

Claire scowled, ‘Uh, uh.’

‘Whatever.’ Craig loitered now in the doorway, watching her riffle through Vic’s notes. ‘Um, have you spoken to anybody about Vic’s being gone? Better not panic and call in authorities. It’ll just make trouble for everybody. He’ll show up sooner or later.’

It was presumptuous and premature advice but for the sake of her authority, she didn’t seize the bait. She’d do whatever she thought right and when she decided, not Hager.

She gave up on making any sense of Vic’s scribbles like this. She’d take whatever had to do with Brainchild, or electronics in general.

‘I’ve got to get back to the office. Message me when you’re back at your desk. If Vic contacts you, tell him he’s making life very difficult for the magazine for no good reason. I don’t care how many good ol’ boys on Domestic Edition are rooting for him—he works for International now.’

‘Don’t be too tough on him. And don’t be in such a hurry. I can imagine it’s hard for you, lady bureau chief, corralling all the stallions into the yard every week. Kinda lonely at the top? Feel like a threesome?’

Craig smirked and without warning, even though Claire stood only three feet from him, he slowly unwrapped the towel on his hips completely, stood stark naked for just a beat, and then rewrapped it more securely. It was a vulgar gesture of braggadocio and aggression, but it didn’t quite come off—he was used to intimidating smaller, Asian women. Claire glanced down with disdain and met his gaze with equal loathing.

‘I don’t waste time on stale news,’ she said, ‘That’s why I’m bureau chief and you’re not even on staff.’ She was desperate to return to the fresh air of the hilltop.

The whole encounter ate up valuable time. It was too cold now to stay on deck. Halfway across the West Lamma Channel, a piercing rain broke down, streaking the cabin windows at an angle of forty-five degrees. Claire saw two acquaintances, a Chinese stylist and her photographer husband, and waved. At other times, she might have joined them for some gossip. Even though Hong Kong was a city of more than six million, to residents it could be a cozy village of intertwining worlds—trade, politics, local entrepreneurs mixing with intrepid artists. But this afternoon she stayed near the noodle vendor at the far end of the second floor, leaning deep in thought in a window seat at the end of one of the long tables.

Hager didn’t seem to know much about Vic’s absence but at the same time acted pretty confident that although something might have gone wrong, nothing was wrong enough to report to the police.

Odd, that comment. What was Hager hiding? Why would she get help or alert anyone about a wayward reporter? Even stranger was the total indifference Nancy and Hager displayed to the fate of someone who was supposed to be their friend—no matter how needy and unprepossessing Vic could be.

She’d waited long enough. She pulled out her notebook and drafted an e-mail to put online to New York once she got home.

‘ZCZC

MMCD

BNIR

.CCRD

Att: Business World International Desk

For McDermott

Ex Raymond, HK

d’amato awol from hong kong, possibly stuck guangdong province—suspect heavy chinese new year traffic—no message received here. Any assignment traffic from your end uncopied to Hong Kong bureau? Also please inform us asap if message received exd’amato overnite. warm regards raymond

NNNN’

 

She didn’t like missing reporters who hadn’t left messages by phone, telex or fax. Maybe Vic had roped one of his domestic reporter buddies at the New York office into okay’ing this foray into Guangdong. It was certainly possible, if not kosher. In fact, at this point, she almost hoped that was the explanation. She shivered, not from the rain outside or the ferry’s air-conditioning, but from a new wariness.

The ferry lurched eastward toward Aberdeen and the shoreline lights of Hong Kong appeared through the window. They would dock in Central in twenty minutes after crawling along the western edge of Victoria Island. Claire gazed at the busy skyline with affection for its high-rises dangling glinting lights, some of them leftover green and red Christmas decorations economically recycled into Chinese New Year symbols.

No matter her relief, getting back to the deadline rush of the afternoon would do nothing to resolve new questions raised by the day’s detour to Cheung Chau.

Certainly, the sight of Nancy, her slight form pumping up and down on top of Hager, had been startling, and the fact that it was Hager and not Vic, worrying for Vic. She’d never liked Nancy Chew much, not since the first time Vic had paraded her into the office before a lunch together, but perhaps this was unfair to the girl. She’d come to associate Nancy with her brother. Chew Lo-man had pestered their office ever since, trying to sell them various useless gadgets and business scams. Finally even the docile Cecilia had been forced to toss him out on his butt with a dismissive Cantonese tirade.

No, it was something else that troubled Claire. In fact, she’d fled the apartment determined to keep her composure after seeing something very unexpected—and very wrong—leaving her as truly shaken as Craig’s sex antics and arrogance hadn’t.

Avoiding his aggressive scrutiny, her eyes had grazed across the apartment’s rough sea grass matting until they fell on an open suitcase lying on the floor in the middle of the unused third bedroom.

There, amid an impressive pile of new shirts and shoes still in their shopping bags and even an unopened tie bag from Armani, Claire had glimpsed in full the crude metal body of a pistol.