Painkillers (10 page)

The voice came from behind and above us. I turned round. Pang winced as though someone had drawn their fingernails down a blackboard.

The stranger was Chinese, but not of any caste that I had seen. He was taller than me. His teeth were jagged, grey and shiny like steel. Unusually, he was bald: what hair was left to him was shaved close to his skull. His ears were too small: delicate pink shells. He picked at one with a thick, dark workman's finger.

'Adam Wyatt.' I held my hand out to shake.

His calluses scraped my palm.

Pang, making no effort to keep the sigh out of his voice, introduced us. 'James Yau Sau-Lan,' he announced, deadly formal.

'Call me Jimmy,' said Jimmy Yau, cutting Pang out. 'Have you been in Hong Kong long?'

'Just a couple of weeks.'

'One of Rob's boys, eh? Fresh from SIMEX?'

'SCG,' Pang told him, stiffly. 'He's a police spy.'

Jimmy Yau didn't bat an eye - maybe Pang was right. 'London, then,' he said, brightly. There was such strength and certainty in his face, I didn't like to contradict him. I looked to Pang for help, but he was glowering into the middle distance. I said, 'Do you know Frank Hamley?'

'Frank? Sure.'

Pang barked, humourlessly. 'Oh Jimmy's great friends with Frank,' he spat. He was still facing deliberately away from us. 'Aren't you, Jimmy?'

Jimmy Yau shot Pang an amused, supercilious glance, like a small dog had just yapped at him. 'Been to Shenzhen?' he asked me.

'This winter,' I said, too eagerly.

'Carry a gun,' he said.

Pang wandered off. Jimmy Yau watched him go, and smiled.

'So how come you know Frank?' I said.

'Just business.'

'So - '

'I'm in import,' he said.

'For?'

'Have you been out to Lantau?'

'Not yet,' I said.

'We specialise in land reclamation. Pumping equipment and pipework.'

'Uh-huh.' I wondered what possible business he had with the Serious Crime Group. Jimmy Yau yawned. 'Want a drink?'

Pebbles crunched dully beneath the matting as we walked. He was a big nasty man, in a big nasty suit, and I felt dwarfed and child-like beside him. Fireflies and moths as big as my palm dive-bombed the linen curtain. Jimmy Yau pulled it back for me and we went inside. A bar ran the full length of the tent. Chandeliers hung from the roof, filling the space with creamy light. Below the buzz of conversation came the purr of a petrol-driven generator. A string quartet was assembling itself out of a pile of cases and music stands in the far corner.

'Brandy?'

'Whisky.'

'When in Rome - '

'I'm afraid brandy makes me sick.'

Jimmy Yau shrugged and got me a Glenlivet.

He was so tall, he must have come from the North - from Shanxi or Manchuria, where the mildest clerk cracks his knuckles sometimes, and dreams of rape and wild horsecraft, the sun setting on a Mongol camp. 'So you know Shenzhen well?' I said.

Things could only get more asinine after that, but it was hard to get away. Pang was deep in conference with Lavender Patten and he was hardly going to come over and rescue me; I hadn't seen Hamley since we'd arrived.

Saved in the end by my bladder, I made my excuses and left the tent. The toilets were little pavilions, arranged in a horseshoe facing the sea. They might have been changing rooms in an upmarket Edwardian resort. When I was done and pulled the braided curtain aside, it was like I was stepping out onto a flame-lit stage. Everything was theatrical here: a fancy-dress party where everybody had come as more vivid versions of themselves.

The barbecued chicks had done for my appetite and I was too nervous to drink any more. Overpowered, I headed towards the sea. The matting stopped just out of the circle cast by the last brazier. My feet sank unsteadily into the shingle. I moved slowly, finding my feet, while my eyes adjusted to the dark.

I wasn't alone. People were walking back and forth along the tide-line, where the shingle gave way to sand. Most were in couples: men in Sam's dinner jackets, women glimmering in dresses from Sogo and Matsuzakaya, shoes hanging from their hands like necklaces. Against the stars, against a sea bright with reflections, they moved, poised and slow as ghosts.

But inland, it was clouding over: the sky had turned orange beyond the hill-line, reflecting the streetlights of Shenzhen. I imagined that dead glow, sweeping over us. It was only a matter of time before the developers got here, too, sank marinas into the sand and blurred the sky with sodium. Back out to sea, a ghost woman passed, all soft cream curves, barefoot, carrying a flame in her hand. She brought it to her lips and drew in, lighting a cigarette.

'Have you got a spare?' I said.

She turned to me, taken aback. A real princess. 'Of course,' she said. She opened her purse. Her shoes were slung round her wrist by their straps. They sparkled like glass when she lit her lighter for me.

I looked into her face. Her mouth was red like a wound. She crinkled up her eyes against the light of the flame. She looked so vulnerable.

I took a deep drag from the cigarette and my head reeled.

'Are you all right?'

'A bit strong,' I said.

'It's only Silk Cut.' She smiled. The flame was gone, I couldn't see her properlyonly the dark, provoking crescent of her mouth. God had slapped and beaten her into shape, puffing up her lips in bee-stings, bruising her eyes into bedroomy slits.

'I'm Adam,' I said, bumbling and bearish.

'Eva.' Her hand was cold and smooth.

'I'm new here,' I said.

'I'll show you around.'

'Please don't.'

'The governor's here.'

'I met him.'

We didn't have anything to say.

'Adam, is it?'

I threw the stub into the waves.

'What do you do?'

Land reclamation. Import-export. Futures. I work for a Saab dealership. You're not a merchant banker, are you?'

'I'm a police spy.'

'Oh,' she said.

'Apparently.'

'Is it exciting?'

'Yes,' I said. 'No. I don't know.' I looked out to sea. 'I only started this week,' I said. I was surprised when she didn't laugh. 'I'm sure it must be,' she said.

'What do you do, Eva?'

'Me?' She laughed. 'Oh, I don't do anything. I lunch.'

'Oh.'

She studied me in the light coming off the sea. She wrinkled her nose. 'That's sweet.'

'What?'

'You're intimidated,' she said. 'Most gweilos just take the piss.' Her hand found mine in the dark. 'Take me for a walk,' she said.

It was about three when I got back to the car. Hamley had picked up a couple of accountants from somewhere. The girl, a blonde in an pencil skirt that did little to hide her generous backside, had her face pressed to the boy's chest and her hand down the front of his pants. The boy had beefy, blown, ruggerish looksthe sort that deteriorate as soon as schooldays end. He fixed me with a wild, blind blue eye. I didn't engage. When Hamley saw me he unlocked the rear door and poured them into the back. They entered the vehicle like a single defective animal, arms and legs flailing. I went round to the passengers' side and strapped myself in.

Hamley put the car into Drive. 'Enjoy yourself?'

'Some.'

Behind me, a zipper whined open.

I caught Hamley's eye and gestured with my thumb to the couple in the back. He just shrugged. He gunned the car and we wallowed out onto the track, trailing distant tail-lights over the hill and deep into the darkness of Lau Fau Shan.

'Saw you with Jimmy Yau,' said Hamley.

'"Call me Jimmy".'

'Fucker.'

'How so?'

Hamley shook his head.

'Is he a friend of yours?'

'Jimmy Yau doesn't have friends.'

A knee dug into the back of my seat.

Hamley adjusted the rear-view so he could watch.

'Pang left me with him,' I said.

'As lizards leave their tails behind.'

'There's no love lost between them, I noticed.'

'Jimmy's dad got Victor's dad executed by the Japs.'

'You're kidding.'

'It's the way Victor tells it. You seemed to make an impression.'

'On whom?'

'Victor.'

'I hardly spoke to him,' I said.

'You were all over his daughter.'

'Eva?'

A belt-buckle rattled. The girl in the back started making 'Mmm' noises. Hamley let go the wheel. 'Hold this a sec.' He loosened his tie.

I seized the wheel in a panic and held it steady against the rightwards pull of the camber. I was just thinking that maybe we'd get away with it, when the road slid suddenly to the left. A single concrete post marked the turn. Behind it, the hillside fell away.

I yanked the wheel. I practically fell in Hamley's lap to make the full turn. Hamley hit the brake and the safety-belt snatched my throat like a hand. 'Jesus Christ.'

Hamley shot out his thumb and gave the wheel a life-saving nudge. He went back to his tie, pulling it off and away in a single gesture. He took back the wheel and checked his mirrors. 'Ugh.' He reached up and knocked the rear-view askew. I glimpsed skin; maybe it was upholstery.

'In the glove compartment.'

'What?'

Hamley undid his collar button. 'In there. In there.'

I opened it.

'Oh shit.'

Was that the boy or the girl?

'Oh shit...'

'Go on!'

The bottle was still cold; there was sweat on the glass. I tore off the foil and unwound the wire. The cork ricocheted off the edge of the sunroof and into the night. Foam ran down my hand.

'Go on, then.'

I didn't want it, but I took a swig anyway. Bubbles shot up my nose.

'Not you,' said Hamley, exasperated. 'Them.'

I looked back.

'Cool those little fuckers off.'

13.

Any ideas I had about becoming a latter-day Harry Palmer were quickly scotched, those first few weeks in the office. It was modern enough for its time I suppose, its workspaces arranged in little islands, its coffee point a comfortable if smoke-laden lounge where all the real work went on. But if at first this all seemed very Silicon Valley, very Bill Gates, I soon learned there was a good reason for it: for we were as severely desk-bound as any code-monkey rattling the bars at Microsoft, and our work was as far away from 'police work', as it's popularly imagined, as it is possible to get. There are three stages or levels of laundering. First, there's the messy business of actually finding somewhere secure to hide your ill-gotten loot. Second there's what's euphemistically called 'layering', which is a middle-class way of saying 'burying'. The more layers of mind-numbingly complex transactions you make with your dirty money, the cleaner it seems, if only because anyone who tries to follow the paper trail quickly ends up on Prozac. Then there's integration: now your dirty money is indistinguishable from clean, you can feed it back into the economy: legitimate money making more legitimate money, the way Adam Smith and Margaret Thatcher intended.

At the dirty end of the business there's a vibrant and well-lubricated social scene. A criminal mastermind (at least by his own estimation) meets a sharp broker (ditto) at some cocktail party or other - usually in Happy Valley - and gets him good and plastered. The next day the broker, all pie-eyed, is buying hair-of-the-dog for all his office pals on account of he just pulled this really great new client at last night's shindig. And it's only weeks or even months later, when his instructions get all muddled up - full of last minute changes, investments in unrelated third parties, purchased outside a regular custodial system, cancelled early, refunded to third-party accounts, or what you will - that your credulous broker starts getting a nasty taste in his mouth.

At the other end of the business - the end we had most to do with - is the slew of strategies, practices, legal obligations and compliances that are supposed to prevent this kind of scenario from ever happening. If companies don't put safety procedures in place, or more usually if they fail to comply with their own safety procedures, then they're breaking the law. And the only way you find out about that is by chasing paper. Lots of paper. Mountains of bloody paper.

Maybe my old boss in Rio had a point about my buccaneering instinct, because soon my disappointment and frustration began to show in my work.

'You can't go pulling people around in bars. You haven't the authority.'

'For God's sake, Frank,' I said - and sank uninvited into the chair opposite him - 'he knew when they approached him that the deal wasn't straight. What kind of investments were they suggesting anyway?

Two-per cent. Who the hell invests clean funds at such a shitty rate of return? If we can only - '

'You're not a policeman and you're not empowered to question witnesses.'

'Frank, the paper trail's cold, like I said. Haven't you read my report?'

There was a moment's impasse and then, quite unexpectedly, Frank Hamley grinned. 'You're a little monkey, Adam.'

'Oh?'

'Don't take it as a compliment. Right now you're my office's biggest liability.'

'Because I meet someone in a bar?'

'Because you scared the life out of him.'

'Well - '

'Tipping off a suspect carries a jail term, Adam.' He left that hanging over me for a good long while. It soaked in well enough. At last he relented: 'I can't use you in here,' he said. I stared at him. I'd never been sacked in my life.

'Oh don't look so gobsmacked,' Hamley complained, waving away my astonishment. 'It's not like we're going to stick your head on a pike.'

My dad was delighted when I told him I was moving desks. I tried playing it down, but it didn't do any good. 'It's not a promotion, dad. It's a secondment.'

'Do you get more money?'

'No, dad.'

Hamley had been very friendly, very avuncular. He promised to smooth things over at work about what he dubbed my 'over-zealous approach'. And, since I was not 'a natural team player', perhaps it would be best, he said, if he gave me 'more of a roving brief.'

This wasn't unusual. With few resources of its own, Hamley's Serious Crime Group team regularly provided expert assistance to other Hong Kong agencies. 'ICAC would really benefit from your perspective,' he said.