The Water Rat of Wanchai (12 page)

She walked into a lobby that was nearly deserted and chose a chair in the middle of the lounge. Across from it was a couch, with a broad coffee table in between. She ordered an espresso and waited. A few minutes later the elevator doors opened and Antonelli charged into the lobby. He was wearing a Georgia Tech tank top, baggy shorts, and a pair of blue Crocs. His legs were pale and surprisingly smooth. He hadn’t brushed his hair, and the few strands he had left were sticking up in the air. He looked around the lobby; she could see a mixture of anger, urgency, and desperation on his face.

Ava waved at Antonelli and smiled. He headed towards her, the envelope clasped tightly in his hand.

“You, you bitch! You Chinese bitch! You fucking Chinese bitch!” he yelled when he was still ten metres away.

“Have a seat,” she said, pointing to the sofa.

He ploughed towards her, his face contorted, and for a second she thought he was going to try something physical with her. She shifted her feet, bracing herself for a countermove. He stopped when he was still a short distance away from her. “You fucking bitch,” he spat.

Even from that distance she could smell breath that was foul from beer and God knows what else. His bared teeth were stained and coated with a yellow film. She guessed he hadn’t taken the time to brush.

He brandished the envelope in front of him. “You fucking Chinese bitch.”

“You’re getting repetitive, and not accomplishing anything. I suggest you sit,” she said.

“You were the one who was here yesterday. I remember you, you bitch. I thought there was something funny about you.”

“Obviously there was.”

He waved the envelope again. “What is this about? What the fuck is this about? I don’t know you. There is no fucking reason for this.”

The server hovered nearby with Ava’s coffee, afraid to come any closer. “You can bring it over now,” Ava said to her, and then turned to Antonelli. “Do you want something?” she asked. “I’m buying.”

“Fuck off.”

“Later. Right now we need to talk.”

“What do you think you’re going to do with this?”

“You are George Antonelli, correct? And you have a partner named Jackson Seto, and the two of you have been stealing money from a client of mine. That’s why I’m here.”

“I have no fucking idea what you’re talking about.”

“Yes, you do, but really it doesn’t matter one way or another. I have very little interest in you or your hobbies. What I need to do is find Jackson Seto. I want you to help me.”

“I still have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about.”

She pulled the file Arthon had given her from her purse and placed it on the table. “I know all about you. I know how long you’ve been here, who you’ve worked with, how many scams you and Seto have pulled. I also know about the wife and kids back in Atlanta. Their address and phone numbers are in the file.”

Antonelli sat down and reached for the folder. He opened it and started to read. She waited, watching his face for reaction. His jaw tightened, and he licked spittle from the side of his mouth.

“What the fuck are you trying to do?” he said finally.

“It’s very simple — I need to locate Seto. You know where he is, or at the very least you know how I can contact him. You have two options. You tell me what I want to know, or I’m going to make a hundred copies of that photo — and the five others that I have — and send them to your wife, your kids, your Atlanta neighbours, your parents, any siblings you have, your in-laws, and anyone you’re doing or have ever done business with. My experi-ence is that Americans, particularly Americans in the South, and Baptists at that, are slightly less liberal about matters like this than Thais are.”

He closed his eyes.
A good sign
, she thought. He was imagining the worst. He was calculating the odds. “How do I know —”

“You don’t,” she interrupted. “But I am in the habit of keeping my word. Just help me find Seto and the photos will be burned.”

“Fuck.”

“I’m sorry it had to be like this, I really am. If I could have found him any other way this wouldn’t have been necessary,” she said.

“What will you do if you locate him?”

“Get the money back.”

“What if I direct you to him and you can’t get the money back? What will happen to the photos?”

“Just get me to him. Do that and you’re completely off the hook, I promise.”

He chewed a fingernail while he thought. “You got a pen?”

She took out her notebook and Mont Blanc. “Go ahead.”

“I’ll give you his email address. He rarely checks it and normally doesn’t answer directly. I email him and tell him I need to talk, and he phones me. But you can try. You never know.”

“All right.”

“Right now he doesn’t have a North American or Asian phone number that works. You’ll have to call 592-223-7878.”

“What area code is that?”

“Guyana.”

“He’s in Guyana?”

“Obviously.”

“Why Guyana?”

“We used to buy bangamary and sea trout there. We’d ship it to Atlanta, tray-pack, and sell it to the black and Hispanic markets. It was a good business for a while. Jackson has a house there, and a kind of wife, and he knows enough of the right people that he feels safe there. Whenever things get tight, he always fucks off to Guyana.”

“You’re sure I’ll find him there?”

“He was there yesterday.”

“Why does he feel safe there?”

Antonelli smiled. “Guyana is a shithole, filled with people who either helped make it a shithole or people who thrive in shitholes. Even for me — and I’ve seen a lot of shitholes — it’s more shithole than I can stand. And Jackson has surrounded himself with the nastiest bunch of shitholes he could find. As long as he pays them, they’ll do what he wants.”

“What about the police?”

“Most of the people he’s paying
are
the fucking police.”

“Do you have an address for him?”

“Malvern Gardens. I don’t know the number but there are only about ten houses in the subdivision. It’s fucking grand by Georgetown standards, and he’s the only Chinese there.”

“Georgetown is the main city?”

“Yep. A shithole.”

“I get the picture,” she said.

“You think you do,” he said. “Wait till you get there. However bad you think it is, it will be that much worse.”

“If I get there and it turns out that Seto knows I’m coming —”

“I won’t tell him.”

“I mean it. If he has any clue —”

“Look, I don’t want those photos in the wrong hands. You know that. You are a hundred percent fucking sure about that, aren’t you? So I’m trusting that you will honour your word. That’s all. Do I think you’re going to be able to ambush Seto and get him to fork over the money? No, I don’t. I don’t think you’ve got a fucking chance in hell. So with that thought in my mind, why would I risk screwing you over? I’ll not say a word to him. Nothing. You go and do whatever the hell you want. You just can’t blame me if it doesn’t work out.”

“Give me your phone.”

“Why?”

“Just do it, please.”

He tossed his cellphone to her. She caught it and flipped it open. “I’m going to call the Guyana number you gave me,” she said. “I’m also going to put the phone in speaker mode.” She checked her watch. “It isn’t too late there. Hopefully he’ll answer. If he doesn’t, then what? Voicemail?”

“Yeah.”

“Either way, just tell him you’re going away for a long weekend and that you’ll be out of touch until the middle of next week. Is that plausible? Would you do that under normal circumstances?”

“I have.”

She hit the numbers, put the phone in speaker mode, and placed it on the table between them. It rang four times before a muffled voice answered, “What the hell do you want, George?”

“Jack, just wanted you to know I’m heading down to Phuket for some R and R. I’m not taking my laptop, so you won’t hear from me till next week.”

“Whatever. Have fun.” The phone went dead.

She was surprised to hear that Seto still had a trace of Chinese accent. His brother spoke flawless English and she had expected the same of him.

“Okay, you happy?” Antonelli said.

“One last thing,” she said slowly. “Money. Do you have access to the money?”

“No,” he said. “That’s all Jackson.”

“Has he sent you money?”

“He sends me money every month, but just enough to cover my overheads, my expenses.”

“You don’t profit-share?”

“We have a seventy-thirty split, and you don’t have to guess who gets the seventy. Normally we wait till year-end, around Christmas, before we dip into it. By then we know how much we actually have. You know, there are a lot of fucking ups and downs in our business.”

“So it seems.”

“And you could be one big fucking down.”

“Let’s hope,” she said, standing. She put the notebook and the envelope back in her purse. “Thanks for your help.”

“What I hope is that I never hear your fucking voice again,” he said.

“The feeling is mutual.”

( 14 )

ANTONELLI’S DESCRIPTION OF GUYANA BEGAN TO FADE
the moment Ava went online to find a flight to Georgetown. The most obvious carrier, she thought, would be a national airline. Every country has one. Except Guyana — theirs had gone bankrupt in 2001. And then there had been another, quasi-national one that went broke as well.

The predominant carrier that flew to Guyana was Caribbean Airlines, and all its inbound flights originated in Port of Spain, Trinidad. The best way to get to Port of Spain was through New York or Miami. She knew that Thai Air had a direct flight from Bangkok to New York. It left at midnight and got into New York in the late afternoon. There was a flight to Port of Spain at 7 p.m. She would have to overnight in Port of Spain and catch a morning flight to Guyana.

She checked the seating availability in business class; all the flights were wide open. She emailed her travel agent to arrange the flights and book her into the best hotels she could find.

Checkout time at the Hyatt was noon. She called downstairs and negotiated a late checkout for half the normal daily rack rate.

Ava had missed two phone calls while working online, one from Arthon and the other from Uncle. She phoned Arthon. He was pleased, if a bit surprised, that things had gone so well. She told him to keep a set of the photos in case they were needed. He said he had been going to anyway, and she wondered what that implied for Antonelli.

When she called Uncle, he asked her how it had gone with Antonelli. That was his way of letting her know he was always in the loop, and that indeed it was his loop.

She described her meeting in detail.

“Where is this Guyana?” he asked.

“What, you don’t have friends there?”

“I won’t know that until I know where the place is.”

“It’s in South America. On the northeast coast, surrounded by Suriname, Brazil, and Venezuela, and a stone’s throw from Trinidad. And I know that only because I looked it up.”

“This is encouraging,” he said, meaning that she had located Seto. Geography was lost on him.

“Do you want to say anything to Tam’s uncle?”

“No, not until you have the money,” Uncle said. “Ava, where you are at the Hyatt, the Erawan Shrine is right next to you.”

“It is.”

“Go there, will you? Light some incense, leave some flowers, make a donation, and pray for us all.”

“I didn’t know you were a Buddhist.”

“I’m not, but neither is the shrine. It is actually Hindu, and it is devoted to the Thai version of Brahma — I can never remember his Thai name — and his elephant, whose name I do remember, but only because of the hotel. It’s Erawan.”

“I’ll go.”

“Good. It’s a lucky shrine. I’ve been there twice, and both times the results were more than I could have hoped for.”

The shrine was on the corner of Ratchadamri Road, one of the busiest corners in one of the busiest cities in the world. The area was large, about twenty metres square, and was fenced, so Ava had to squeeze in through a gate. Even at one in the afternoon, with the sun at its peak, the shrine was filled almost to overflowing with concentric circles of worshippers standing around the statues of the six-armed Brahma and his elephant.

Ava bought a garland of flowers, an orange, and three incense sticks. She placed the flowers and the orange at Brahma’s feet, where hundreds of gifts already lay. She lit the incense, held it in between her palms in the
wai
position, and began to pray, rocking gently back and forth, her lips moving, her words gentle.

It was mainly Thais who were praying. The tourists stood on the outskirts, taking photos of the worshippers and the troupe of Thai dancers who performed there every day, dancing to please Brahma so that he in turn would be kind to the supplicants.

Ava prayed for more than five minutes, naming all the members of her family and her closest friends. She asked for health and happiness, repeating the words like a mantra. When she had finished, she felt at peace. She put a hundred-baht note in the dancers’ collection urn and returned to the hotel.

Since it was a Saturday the hotel had a couple of weddings booked. She couldn’t move through the lobby without bumping into someone wearing a uniform or a gown. She figured that only people affiliated with the police or the military could afford to get married at the Hyatt. Their base pay was meagre, but the perks and kickbacks made up for it. Uncle said he had never met a retired police officer who wasn’t a millionaire. She assumed that the same applied to the military.

If she had been feeling more sociable she could have quizzed Arthon about how it all worked. He had been pretty blasé about picking up contributions from casinos that weren’t supposed to exist. She had heard that the street beggars worked like franchises, being assigned a specific spot to work their pathos and kicking back half their proceeds to the police. There wasn’t a bar in the city that didn’t contribute to the police pension fund. Every stolen car ended up being either sold or cannibalized by a special cop squad. The money moved upstream in an established and fully controlled pattern.

Still, she loved Thailand. Organized corruption was always superior to corruption with no rules. Uncle avoided doing business in places such as the Philippines and India and parts of China for that very reason.