The Dragon Head of Hong Kong (7 page)

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THE THREE MEN
climbed into the back seat of the taxi, with Kung in the middle. Ava sat in the front. The driver swung away from the curb as soon as the last door closed.

“You should know I’m being kidnapped,” Kung yelled at the driver. “If you go to the nearest police station, I’ll make it worth your while.”

“Fuck off,” the driver said without turning around.

The car went quiet. Then Andy said, “Ava, how did you do that stuff?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“No, tell me. How did you drop that guy?”

She stared straight ahead.

Winter Street was quiet and the Jupiter Boutique was closed. They bundled out of the taxi and stood awkwardly on the sidewalk while Carlo unlocked the apartment door. Andy stood between Ava and Kung, but she could feel Kung’s hatred towards her burn right through him.

Carlo led them upstairs. Andy was behind the importer, his gun in his back. Ava was the last to enter and closed and locked the door. The apartment was directly above the boutique and about twelve hundred square feet, large by Hong Kong standards. It was clean and neat and had the slightest smell of disinfectant. The living room was furnished with an orange velour couch and easy chair, a wooden coffee table, and a television. The kitchen was off to the left; it was large enough to contain a round glass-topped table and three wooden chairs. A fourth wooden chair was against the wall near the bathroom. Andy pushed Kung towards it and told him to sit. When he did, Carlo moved in behind, pulled back Kung’s arms, and taped his wrists together.

“You don’t need to do that,” Kung said.

“It’s procedure,” Andy said, and then turned to Ava and smiled.

She didn’t understand the need for the tape and was about to speak, when she was overtaken by an enormous yawn. Suddenly she felt completely exhausted, depleted of all energy, and her head felt as if it were filled with mush. It was seven a.m. in Toronto, and the adrenalin rush that had kept her going was spent. Total fatigue washed over her.

There were two doors leading off the living room. Both were closed.

“Are those bedrooms?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“Do you mind if I use one? I think I need a nap.”

“Use either of them.”

“How long will this take?” she asked.

“Depends on how stubborn Kung is,” Andy said, glancing at him.

“I don’t have any money left,” Kung said.

“Ah, the negotiations start already,” Andy said. “Somewhere between him saying, ‘I don’t have any money left,’ and me saying, ‘We want every dollar you’ve ever made,’ we’ll reach a deal. Sometimes it goes on for days, but not this time. Kung’s pissed us off by making us wait around the hotel, and then by setting that thug of his on us. We’ll make it happen fast. Don’t worry, though, if anything happens we’ll wake you.”

Ava went into the farthest bedroom. It had a double bed and a plain wooden dresser with a sports bag sitting on it. She took off the chenille cover and pulled back the sheets. She thought about taking off her shirt and skirt and then discarded the idea. She went to the window and looked outside: dusk was setting in. She closed the curtains and the room was plunged into darkness. She fell onto the bed, her face burrowed deep in a pillow. She couldn’t remember the last time she had been so tired. She heard raised voices; for a moment they held her attention, but then they faded and vanished as she lost consciousness.

As always, she dreamt. And, as always, her father dominated the dream. She couldn’t remember when this nightly game of hide-and-seek-and-never-find had started, but it had been a recurrent dream for as long as she could remember. Sometimes they were in a hotel, other times in an office building or a huge mall. It was always just the two of them and they were always preparing to leave for some unknown destination. Her father would give her a chore, a simple thing like getting their suitcases from their hotel room. Off she’d go, eager to please him, only to run into an escalating series of misadventures. Ultimately she would go back to where he had been and find him gone. She would wake then, permeated by a feeling of loss.

This time they were in an airport. They had six suitcases and were trying to check them in and get to the gate for their flight. They had only twenty minutes before they had to board, and they were at the end of a long check-in line. Her father said he’d go ahead and hold the plane at the gate until she arrived. She didn’t believe it was possible but said nothing. The line crawled forward, her anxiety increasing with every passing minute. When she finally reached the counter, she had five minutes left but still thought it was possible to make the flight. Then the counter clerk told her that she could check only four suitcases. As Ava debated between leaving two behind or repacking six cases into four, her time ran out. Then she heard her name being called and someone knocking on a door. Where was the door?

“Ava, it’s Andy.”

She opened her eyes to semi-darkness and struggled to remember where she was.

“It’s Andy,” he said, knocking more briskly.

“Yes,” she said.

“You’ve been asleep for about twelve hours.”

She took several deep breaths to gather herself. “Give me a minute. I’ll be right out.”

“We have good news,” he said.

She slid from the bed and went over to the window. When she drew the curtains back, she saw that Winter Street was alive with early morning traffic. She returned to the bed and kneeled beside it, her hands clasped in front of her face. She said a whispered prayer to Saint Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, thanking him for having delivered her safely to Hong Kong and Shenzhen, and for protecting her the night before when the man had charged at her. Ava had been raised a Roman Catholic, but the Church’s stance on homosexuality made her feel unwelcome. She had rid herself of any attachment but she still felt the tug of religion; only now she expressed it in her own way.

Ava stood, straightened her skirt, and tucked in her shirt. She opened her purse, took out a brush and ran it through her hair, fixing it back with a clasp. Feeling more presentable, she opened the door and walked into the living room.

Andy and Carlo sat at the kitchen table with mugs in front of them. Kung was still taped to the chair. His upper body was wet.

“I need to use the bathroom for a moment,” Ava said.

“We’re not going anywhere,” Carlo said with a smile.

Five minutes later, washed and refreshed, she came back into the living room. “That smells like coffee,” she said, pointing to their mugs.

“The jar is on the counter,” Andy said.

It was Nescafé instant, the same brand she drank at home. She put a teaspoon and a half in a mug and filled it with hot water from a Thermos. She took a sip. “That’s wonderful,” she said.

“Come and join us,” Andy said, sliding his chair sideways to make room for her at the table.

She looked at Kung as she passed him. He seemed to be sleeping, but his face was pinched and distorted. “He doesn’t look so jolly.”

“It was a long night for all of us,” Carlo said.

“And if I heard Andy correctly, a night that ended well.”

“Four hundred thousand,” Andy said, and grinned.

Ava took another sip of coffee. “Is that American or Hong Kong dollars?”

“American.”

She stared at the table and then glanced at Kung again.

“What’s the matter? You don’t seem especially happy,” Andy said.

“I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but —”

“But what?” Carlo interrupted.

“My client is owed a million dollars and yours half a million. Did Kung understand what the total debt was?”

“Yeah, we told him.”

“Four hundred thousand is a long way from those numbers.”

“Look, we know what we’re doing,” Carlo said. “We’ve been at this business for three years and we’ve developed a good sense of who is bullshitting and who’s not. It took us all night to get him to agree to four hundred thousand. We put his head in the toilet more times than I can count.”

“So that would be two hundred thousand each?” Ava asked, realizing that she had provoked Carlo.

“Yeah.”

“And how is that arranged?”

“What do you mean?”

“How do we get the money?”

“Kung will call his money guy and they’ll arrange to get it in cash for us. When we get the cash, we turn Kung loose.”

“How long will that take?”

“A day or two.”

“And in the meantime, Kung’s thugs are looking for us.”

“Don’t worry about that. He’ll phone them and tell them to back off. Now that we have a deal, he’ll see it through. He’s too smart not to.”

“Does it always work like this?” Ava asked.

“Work like how?”

“You negotiate with guys like Kung, knowing going in that you’re prepared to settle for so many cents on the dollar,” Ava said.

“This is a cash business. We take what we can get right now. We don’t have the time to wait for people to dispose of assets.”

“But you don’t how much cash he actually has, do you?”

“After what we put him through, I think we have a pretty good idea.”

“Maybe he just outlasted you.”

“He offered the four hundred thousand hours ago. We kept at him. He didn’t budge. I think it’s all he’s got.”

“You can’t be sure.”

“Like I said, we’ve been doing this a long time. We have experience that you don’t.”

“True enough, but why don’t we at least make the effort to find out if he has more?”

“And how would we do that?”

Ava shrugged. “He has that office he’s using here in Shenzhen. He must have some financial records there. I’d like to look at them. I’d also like to get into his computer and see what I can find.”

“What makes you think you’d find anything?”

“I’m an accountant. I’m trained to poke around in people’s accounts.”

“We made a deal with him,” Andy said.

“I didn’t sign off on any deal,” Ava said.

“And we called our boss and told him it was done.”

“Then phone him again and tell him I don’t want to go along with it until I have more information about Kung’s real financial situation.”

“That won’t go over very well. He will already have called the client and told him how much money he’s getting back.”

“What if I can get more? Will the client object?”

Carlo shook his head. “You don’t understand how this business works. We made the deal with Kung and it’s been passed down the line. You should leave well enough alone.”

Ava drained her coffee and walked around the table to make another. As she stood at the counter, she heard Carlo mumbling something to Andy. “Please don’t talk behind my back,” she said.

“I was just saying I thought you should be happy about getting two hundred thousand back. Without us, you had no chance of getting anything.”

“You don’t know that.”

Carlo smiled. “Believe what you want.”

“What did you say your boss’s name was?” she asked when she sat down again.

“Chow Tung,” Andy said.

“Then please call him for me. I’d like to speak to him.”

Carlo and Andy exchanged nervous looks, and Ava felt a twinge of doubt. Had they actually spoken to their boss from the hotel lobby? Had he really signed off on a fifty-fifty split? Had they used her to get to Kung and were now getting ready to dump her and keep the four hundred thousand for themselves?

“What do you want to talk to him about?” Andy said.

“Getting more money out of Kung,” she said. And then another reason for the men’s being nervous popped into her head. “I’ll tell him I think you two did a great job. I’m not going to be critical.”

“What’s the harm in that?” Andy asked Carlo.

“I still don’t like it. We made a deal.”

“We actually made two deals, and the first one was with Ava. She’s right when she says she didn’t sign off. Maybe we should give her a chance to get more out of Kung.”

“I don’t want to be the one to call Uncle,” Carlo said.

“I’ll do it,” said Andy.

Carlo sighed. “Okay, but do it from the bedroom.”

“Uncle and Chow Tung are the same man?” Ava asked as Andy left.

“Yeah, but nearly everyone calls him Uncle.”

“And you’ve been with him for three years?”

“Longer than that for both of us, but three years in this business.”

“What business were you in before?”

“A bit of this and a bit of that.”

“That sounds mysterious.”

“Better to leave it that way.”

Kung groaned and they both looked at him. Ava had almost forgotten he was there.

“I’ll untie him in a while so he can call his guys,” Carlo said. “Then I’ll probably leave him untied. He’s no threat to us, and as long as Andy or I am here, he’s not going anywhere.”

“Do what you want with him, but don’t let him make any phone calls until I’ve had a chance to get the information I want.”