Dead and Kicking (18 page)

I nodded. ‘And there’s also a new fish-farming company in the works, I believe.’

‘Fischer Aquaculture Industries,’ he said.

‘When I hear the word aquaculture I reach for my grill pan.’

Fischer stared at me.

‘Very good, very amusing,’ Playford Peng said. Now Fischer was staring at him.

‘Mr …?’ Peng said, smiling at me.

‘Murdoch,’ I said. ‘My friends call me Alby.’

‘Mr Murdoch is playfully paraphrasing the Nazi Heinrich Himmler who said, “When I hear the word culture I reach for my gun”,’ Peng explained to the table.

‘Or it might have been Hermann Göring,’ I said. ‘It’s a bit murky. Actually, I’m paraphrasing a misquote from a National Socialist play by Hanns Johst. The original line is “Whenever I hear of culture … I release the safety-catch of my Browning!”’

Peng gave me that original icy look. ‘So you like fish, eh, Mr Murdoch? My good friend Detlef is in the fish business.’

‘I’ve heard,’ I said.

‘Detlef and I were at school together, in Melbourne,’ he added, ‘at Fairbrothers.’

A bloke in a dinner suit appeared at Peng’s elbow. He looked a bit out of breath and I got the idea he’d been sent for and told to report on the double. The two men had a hurried private conversation that I had a feeling involved me, and possibly not in a good way. Playford didn’t stop smiling, but that didn’t make me feel any better.

‘Mr Murdoch, let me introduce my accountant, Mr Leroy Fong. Mr Fong looks after my …’ he paused, ‘interests.’

Leroy Fong was about my age and height. If Leroy was Playford Peng’s accountant, I was a Dutchman. I figured his real job was accounting for anyone who got in Playford’s way. Fong bowed slightly and handed me a business card with both hands, which I took the same way. I know how to play the game.

Waiters placed cut-crystal tumblers in front of Peng and myself.

‘A toast to new friendships, eh, Mr Murdoch?’

The waiters half-filled our glasses from matching elegant crystal decanters shaped like smoothly polished river stones. Then the waiters stood ready with Coca-Cola bottles poised on the lip of each glass.

‘Brandy and Coke fine with you, Murdoch?’

I lifted my glass and took a sniff. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘brandy Cokes it is.’

‘Jesus Christ, Alby!’ Jezebel shouted, knocking the waiter’s arm away and spilling bubbling Coke onto the tablecloth. ‘That’s fucking Hennessy Ellipse! It costs ten grand a bottle!’

I put my glass down and smiled at Peng, who didn’t smile back.

‘You don’t always want to believe what’s on the label, Jez.’ I picked up my teacup and raised it. ‘To new friendships, Mr Peng.’

He smiled, but didn’t drink.

‘What kind of food do you like, Mr Murdoch. We have separate kitchens specialising in Italian, French and Japanese cuisine, all with five-star chefs, and our Chinese New Year banquet is beginning soon. You like Chinese food, eh? How about some sweet and sour pork or maybe some special fried rice? You look like a special fried rice kind of guy to me.’

First the brandy and now this. Playford Peng was set on making me look like a dopey
gwailo
to his associates. It was a subtle game of establishing superiority that I’d played before and I wasn’t all that interested in allowing it to continue – ten grand-plus in welcome gifts or not.

I shrugged. ‘Perhaps the kitchen can rustle up some Hakka food?
Ngiong tew foo
or maybe some
kiu nyuk
might be nice.’

Playford smiled coldly and dipped his head slightly. Round one to Alby.

‘You might enjoy our Hakka salt-baked chicken or pork with fermented tofu as well?’

I nodded. ‘Sounds great.’ I wasn’t a big fan of fermented tofu but I’d force it down just to piss Playford off.

He clapped his pudgy hands and a waiter appeared. Peng rattled off an order and the waiter scurried away.

‘You and Miss Quick are old friends?’ Playford asked. When he mentioned Jezebel he smiled across at her, and for the first time I saw something approaching warmth and genuine affection in his eyes. The effect was even more disturbing than that cold calculating look I was getting used to seeing.

‘Alby and I go way back,’ Jezebel said. ‘In fact, we flew into Hong Kong together from Vietnam. Alby’s been working over there.’

‘Mr Fong has also been in Vietnam recently,’ Peng said, ‘acquiring items for my next big project. The Manchu Palace is staging a free outdoor production of
Miss Saigon
this summer.’

‘Sounds impressive.’

‘Impressive isn’t the word, Alby,’ Jezebel said. ‘For the final scene they’re going to use a real American military helicopter, a vintage Huey. It’s going to lift off an exact replica of the US Embassy rooftop in Saigon built on stage, and then actually fly away. Friggin’ awesome. Leroy has been spending a lot of time in Vietnam learning all there is to know about choppers.’

‘Is that right, Mr Fong?’

‘Yes, Mr Murdoch. Unfortunately, some of those old helicopters are getting to be quite dangerous.’

Fong took a gold cigarette case from his pocket and offered me one. There was a bandage on his left hand that wasn’t quite covering a nasty graze. When I shook my head, Fong took a cigarette and lit it with a gold lighter. The lighter looked familiar.

‘I heard a Huey fell out of the sky a few days ago,’ I said, ‘near Dien Bien Phu.’

Fong looked directly into my eyes. ‘Really? Was it pilot error or a mechanical problem?’

‘Neither.’ I held his stare.

Jezebel shuddered. ‘You wouldn’t get me up in one of those things. I make it a rule not to fly in anything without wings and a first-class cabin, isn’t that right, loverchops?’ she said, turning her attention back to Detlef.

‘Do you spend much time in Hong Kong, Mr Fong?’

‘Please call me Leroy,’ he said. ‘I am in Hong Kong quite frequently. Why do you ask?’

‘I saw someone who looked a lot like you last night on Wyndham Street in Central.’

‘I’m quite sure it wasn’t me, Mr Murdoch. Besides, don’t we Chinese all look alike?’

‘My mistake,’ I said. ‘But believe me, I’ll know you next time.’

Fong picked up a glass from the table and raised it in a toast. ‘Here’s to the next time.’

I raised my teacup. ‘I look forward to it,’ I said.

Behind us Playford Peng snapped an instruction in Cantonese and we turned towards him. He didn’t look happy. Fong bowed slightly with a fixed smile on his face and left the table.

‘Miss Quick tells me you are a famous picture-taker, Mr Murdoch. I’m sorry to say I’ve never heard of you. Do you do weddings?’

I smiled. He’d have to do better than that. I’ve been insulted by experts in my time.

‘Why? Do you see a wedding in Jezebel and Detlef’s future?’

‘Miss Quick is not the marrying kind. And Detlef’s future is very much involved with his new venture.’

‘His top-secret wonderfish? How soon do you think we’ll be able to sink our teeth into them?’

‘Very soon, I believe.’

‘That’s fantastic,’ I said. ‘I can’t wait.’ I smiled. ‘Just as long as they don’t bite back, eh?’

Peng’s expression didn’t change, but I saw a hard glint in his eye. ‘Please excuse me, Mr Murdoch. I need to check with my chefs on how our banquet is progressing.’

I had a feeling that Playford was actually going to the kitchen to get his chefs to whip up some extra fermented-tofu dishes, and that they’d all be coming my way.

Mr Rayes let me back into the hotel through the locked security door just after eleven. I was a bloke in a well-fitting dinner suit just back from a night at a casino looking for some hot loving with a dangerous woman between crisp, thousand-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets. Sipping vintage port with a couple of gay guys wasn’t the conclusion to the evening I had in mind.

‘How was dinner?’ Jack said, putting a third glass down on the table on the rooftop terrace.

‘Spectacular,’ I said as I pulled up a chair. ‘The food at the Eight Banners is as good as you said.’

VT filled the glass from an open bottle. I picked up the bottle and studied the label. ‘Trying to get rid of the out-of-date stock, Jack?’ I asked.

The port was Warre’s, the 1997 vintage – the really, really goodvintage. I took a sip. Then I took another. A bloke looking for something to take his mind off the events in the casino, getting dumped by a good-looking woman yet again and having no idea what was going on didn’t need to look much further than this. If I was a wine critic, I might have used the words voluptuous or lissom or elegant, but that would only have made me think of Nhu. Dangerous would’ve worked, too, especially if we finished off the bottle, which seemed to be on the cards.

‘Figure out who did the inviting?’

I shook my head. ‘But I ran into some people I knew and I scored a couple of gifts. One was ten grand in poker chips.’

‘Sweet,’ Jack said.

I nodded. ‘I dumped them into a charity donation box on the way out and almost caused a bloody riot. Plus I got these.’

I took the gold fountain pen from my jacket pocket, along with a small red envelope.

‘Mont Blanc make a nice pen,’ Jack said. ‘And
lai see
. You been out mugging little kids for their lucky money?’

I’d been given the little paper envelope as I was leaving the casino after dinner. The red envelopes called
lai see
or
hong bao
usually contain small gifts of money and are handed out at Chinese New Year to bring good fortune and prosperity for the coming year. The gift can also be seen as a way of symbolically clearing debts or starting off the New Year with a clean slate.

When I’d left the restaurant there had been a huge crowd gathered at the bottom of the long escalator, the reason being that the Manchu Palace had a lion in the lobby. Not a real lion, though that was something I wouldn’t put past Playford Peng, but lion dancers, the traditional and always welcome visitors at Chinese New Year, or on any special or auspicious occasion.

Long strings of red firecrackers were blasting off outside the casino to scare away evil spirits and there was much banging of drums and clashing of cymbals as the two men inside the lion costume pranced through the spectators. This was a southern Chinese lion, and a pretty boisterous one. It had a long, flowing piece of red, black and gold silk for its body and the dancer in front was throwing the fringed, tasselled and elaborately painted wood and papier-mâché head from side to side while winking its eyes and noisily snapping its massive jaws open and shut.

In amongst the crowd I could see an old man in a wheelchair. An attractive young woman in an extremely tight-fitting white nurse’s uniform was pushing the wheelchair. From time to time, the nurse would bend down and wipe the man’s lips with a tissue. The old man was in a dinner suit and was slumped to one side of the chair, his right arm lying limp in his lap, his head resting on his right shoulder. It looked like Playford Peng still let his father out on special occasions.

Mothers in the crowd were pointing their children towards Old Peng and shoving them forward. Those brave enough to approach were rewarded with a crooked smile and one of the small red envelopes that the nurse took from a bag slung over the back of the wheelchair and placed in the old man’s left hand.

The wheelchair was being pushed in my direction, and I was wondering if Old Peng still had enough of his faculties intact to instruct his nurse to wear a uniform a couple of sizes too small when I saw his right index finger flick up. The wheelchair stopped right in front of me and Old Peng slowly and painfully worked the words ‘
Kung Hei Fat Choy
’ out of his twisted and drooping mouth.

‘Happy New Year,’ I said back, smiling.

The nurse reached into her spectacular cleavage and handed me a red envelope. As lucky envelopes went, that was one very lucky envelope. And suddenly the wheelchair was gone, swallowed up in the frantic New Year melee.

I sipped my port and carefully opened the red envelope. There wasn’t any money, just a small, shiny paper sleeve holding a colour negative. Those shiny paper sleeves for storing negatives and postage stamps were called glassine and I hadn’t seen one for years.

There were some Chinese characters written on the outside and the single photographic negative inside the sleeve was slightly faded but still in good condition. It was a small square format I also hadn’t seen for years, from a Kodak Instamatic, a very popular amateur point-and-shoot camera in the sixties and seventies. There weren’t too many GIs in ’Nam who hadn’t had a compact little PX-bought Instamatic stuffed in a pocket of their fatigues.

I took the negative out of the sleeve, holding it carefully by the corner. When you’ve looked at enough negatives you can read them easily. And this one was very interesting.

‘Bit of nasty porn, Alby?’ Jack asked.

‘Something like that, Jack. Any chance Mr Rayes can get me on a flight back home to Sydney first thing in the morning?’

‘No worries, mate. But if that means this is a farewell party, maybe we should knock this over and open a bottle of the good stuff.’

‘And why the hell not, Jack?’ I said.

I didn’t see much reason to be rushing upstairs to an empty bed. Especially as I didn’t even have that photograph of the lovely Nhu standing naked at the window to console myself with. When I’d picked up my Leica earlier in the day, I’d found the memory card was gone. Miss Nhu Hoang obviously wasn’t a trusting soul.

The next few hours were a bit fuzzy but when I finally unscrambled my brain I was in an economy-class seat on a plane with its nose pointed south, and with a number of my fellow passengers staring at me.

We’d finished off the port, I remembered, and then Jack had put together a late-night snack of steak sandwiches with tomato relish and shoestring French fries, and he’d opened a ’92 Petrus. That was when things got really fuzzy.

I had only the vaguest recollection of getting to the airport and checking in for my flight to Sydney, and now all these people staring in my direction were starting to freak me out. Looking for a distraction, I rummaged through the seat pocket in front of me.