The Water Rat of Wanchai (3 page)

“Are you involved in the business?” Ava asked.

“No, I have nothing to do with it, but my brother and I are very close.”

“What kind of business is it?”

“It’s a company that specializes in financing purchase orders and letters of credit. You know how it is these days. Companies get big orders and may not have the money to finance production. Even if they have letters of credit, the banks can be very sticky. And even if the banks do help, it’s never for the whole amount. So my brother’s company fills in the gaps. It advances the company money for production — at very high interest rates, of course, but the companies know that upfront and build it into their margins.”

“How high?”

“Minimum two percent a month, normally three.”

“Nice.”

“They’re filling a gap.”

“I wasn’t being critical.”

“Anyway, once in a while they have a problem. Normally, because of the amount of due diligence they do — and because they don’t finance anything that seems risky and the purchase orders and letters of credit are typically from blue-chip companies — those problems have been small and infrequent.”

“Until now.”

“Yes.”

“What was the blue-chip company, or is this an exception?”

“Major Supermarkets.”

Ava was caught off guard. “That’s the largest food retailer in North America.”

“Yes.”

“So what went wrong?”

Alice started to reply and then caught herself. “I think it’s better if you read the contents of the envelope. If you need more information or any clarification, you should call my brother directly. His cellphone number and private home number are in the envelope. He doesn’t want you to email him or call him at the office. He also said you could call him anytime, night or day. He hasn’t been sleeping much.”

“All right, I’ll read the documents.”

“This is very difficult for him,” she said slowly. “He prides himself on being cautious and always acting with integrity. He’s having trouble accepting that this is actually happening to him.”

“Stuff happens,” Ava said.

Alice fingered the crucifix around her neck, her eyes taking in the simpler one that Ava wore. “You’re Catholic?” Ava asked.

“Yes.”

“Me too.”

“You live here in Toronto?”

“Yes, I’m the only one. The rest of the family is in Hong Kong.”

“What do you do?”

“We’re in the clothing business, my husband and I. He is Chinese too — mainland — and we have factories there and in Malaysia and Indonesia.”

“Tough business. My father was in it for a while,” Ava said.

“We’ve been lucky. My husband decided years ago that the only way to survive was to move into private-label lines. So that’s all we do now.”

“Are you involved in the day-to-day activities?”

The woman looked across the table, her eyes suddenly curious. Ava wondered if her question had hit a sore spot. “I don’t mean to pry,” she said quickly.

“
Momentai
,” Alice said. “I have two sons now, so I spend most of my time raising them and looking after our home. My husband keeps me up to date on most things, and I still have to suck up to the wives of the buyers, but no, I’m not that involved.”

Ava reached for the dim sum list but Alice beat her to it. “I’ll pay,” she said.

“Thanks.”

Ava’s Adidas jacket was draped over the back of her chair. As she turned to get it, she saw Alice’s eyes lock onto her again. “Have I said or done something wrong?” she asked.

“No, not at all. It’s just that you look familiar to me. Where did you go to school?”

“York University here, and then Babson College, near Boston.”

“No, before that. I mean high school.”

“I went to Havergal College.”

“I did too,” Alice said.

“I don’t remember you.”

“Do you have an older sister named Marian?”

“Yes.”

“I was in the same class as her. We were part of the first big wave of Chinese students and we hung around together. You would have been, what, two or three years behind us?”

“Two.”

“I remember seeing you with Marian.”

Ava searched her memory and came up dry, but then Marian had hung out with a gaggle of Chinese girls that reached double figures. “She’s married now and has two daughters and a husband who is a rising star in the Canadian public service.”

“Is he Chinese?”

“No, Canadian.”

“That’s Havergal girls for you: they know how to marry well,” Alice said, and then glanced at Ava’s ring hand. “You aren’t married?”

“No,” Ava said.

“A working girl.”

Alice held up the dim sum list for a server to collect and take to the cashier. When it was gone, she folded her hands neatly in front of her, Havergal-style, and again looked intently at Ava. “How did you get into this kind of work? I mean, it is a bit unusual. My brother told me what it is your company does, and when I was told I was meeting a woman, my imagination certainly didn’t envision you. In fact, I assumed the woman would be more of a go-between than an active participant in the business. You are active, aren’t you?”

“I am.”

“I thought so . . . I wasn’t being condescending. My husband has had to employ companies like yours in the past, so I know something about how they operate and the kind of people who work in them. That’s why I didn’t expect to meet someone quite so young.”

“And on top of that, I’m a woman,” Ava said with a little smile.

“Yes, that too.”

“So how did you get into this?”

The question caught Ava off guard. She was more used to asking questions than being asked, and she hesitated. “It’s boring,” she said.

“Please,” Alice insisted.

Ava poured tea for them both, Alice tapping her finger on the table in thanks. “It really is boring.”

“I’m not sure I believe you.”

Ava shrugged. “When I got out of school, I went to work for one of the big accounting firms in Toronto, and I quickly found out it wasn’t for me. I was a crummy employee, really. I found it difficult being part of a big bureaucracy, doing what you’re told without being able to question the effectiveness or efficiency of it. Looking back, I was probably quite arrogant, a bit of a know-it-all, always ready to argue with my bosses. I lasted six months before packing it in. I think they were as glad to see me go as I was to leave.

“I decided to open my own little firm, so I took an office up here — two buildings over, actually — and began doing basic accounting for friends of my mother and some small businesses and the like. One of them, a clothing importer, believe it or not, ran into a problem with a supplier in Shenzhen. When he couldn’t collect his money, I asked him to let me try, for a percentage of whatever I could recover.”

“What made you think you could do that?”

“I’ve always been persuasive.”

“And you actually went to Shenzhen to do this?”

“Yes, but when I got there, I found that the supplier had been screwing over more than one customer, and there was a line-up waiting to go after him. Except, of course, he was nowhere to be found. He’d taken off with whatever money he had left. In the course of nosing about, I discovered there was another company trying to do what I was doing. I figured it would be counterproductive to compete against them, so I suggested we join forces. That’s when I met Uncle.”

“Yes,” Alice said, her eyes averted. “Andrew mentioned Mr. Chow. He has his reputation, of course, and who knows really what’s true or not . . . So he’s not a blood relative, then?”

The same question her brother had asked. “No, he’s a Chinese uncle in the best sense of the word,” Ava said.

“I see.”

She wants to ask me about him
, Ava thought, and then quickly moved on. “I didn’t deal with him directly at first. He had some people working for him who were, frankly, a bit rough around the edges — the kind you’d expect to encounter in a business like that. They agreed to work with me, although I think, looking back, they were probably humouring me, or maybe they thought it was a way to get me into bed. Anyway, Uncle had a great network of contacts and we tracked down the guy in no time. But when it came to collecting, Uncle’s people had no finesse whatsoever. The guy would have talked his way out of returning about two-thirds of the money he owed if I hadn’t gotten involved and done a little forensic accounting work.

“Word got back to Uncle about what I had done, and he asked me to come and work with him. I said I wasn’t thrilled about his other employees. He told me he’d phase them out, that he thought my style and his were compatible. That was ten years ago, and the business has been just Uncle and me for most of that time.”

“And you’ve obviously been successful.”

“We’ve done well enough.”

The bill came to the table and Alice put twenty dollars on the tray. “Ava, did my brother sound desperate to you?”

Ava slipped on her jacket. “Not any more than most of our clients do.”

“Well, let me tell you, he is desperate. That five million dollars represents nearly all the capital our family has accumulated over the past two generations.” She reached across the table, grabbing Ava’s hand and squeezing. “Please do everything you can to help.”

( 3 )

IT WAS ALMOST FOUR O’CLOCK WHEN AVA PULLED UP
in front of her condo, tossed her car keys to the concierge, and went upstairs, the manila envelope, still unopened, tucked under her arm.

She opened a bag of sour candy, made herself a coffee, and sat at the kitchen table. Her mind wandered. It had been a long time since she had thought about, let alone discussed, how she and Uncle had gotten together and built their business. She had told Alice Tam the truth, but it was the barebones truth. When she thought about how naive she had been when she started and what she was now able to handle, it was as if she were looking at two different people.

In the beginning she’d been adept enough at the financial side of things, her curiosity, imagination, and training helping her track and find money in places where the thieves had thought it untraceable. And at first that was her main focus. Only gradually did she take on the collection role. She began by working on targets as the soft opener — she had a knack for getting people to talk, especially men, who saw her as a soft-spoken, polite, exotic young thing who needn’t be taken too seriously. By the time they realized the opposite was true, it was usually too late.

Ava didn’t start closing accounts until she saw the muscle Uncle was using botch projects by going too far. There’s a fine line between instilling enough fear to get someone to do what you want and applying so much pressure that the target figures he’s toast no matter what he does, so he might as well try to hang on to the money. Ava had a talent for finding the tipping point. Uncle would say, “People always do the right thing for the wrong reason.” Ava made that her mantra, striving to pinpoint the core self-interest in her targets, the one thing that was more important to them than hanging on to stolen money.

Uncle also said, “Once they have the money they forget where it came from, how they acquired it. In their minds, it is theirs. You need to remind them that it has a rightful owner and that the only thing open for discussion is how they are going to return it.”

Not that they didn’t try to hang on to it anyway. Being yelled at, cursed, and threatened was just part of the job. Knives, guns, and fists weren’t uncommon either, and that’s why Uncle said he used muscle. If there was going to be intimidation and violence, he wanted to have the most firepower. The problem, in Ava’s mind, was that the muscle invited a negative reaction. One look at Uncle’s original crew and the targets would gear up for the inevitable conflict. The violence clouded the process, made the money almost a secondary objective.

Ava urged Uncle to let the enforcers go, using them only on a must-need basis. His only concern was the potential for physical danger the targets posed. “I can look after myself,” Ava said. And the truth was, she could.

She had started taking martial arts when she was twelve and had almost immediately shown ability. She was quick, agile, and fearless. In a matter of months she was so far ahead of everyone else in her class that the teacher moved her up to train with the teens; a year later he moved her again, to work out with the adults. By the time she was fifteen, Ava’s skill paralleled his. That was when he took her aside and asked if she was interested in learning bak mei. It was an ancient form, he explained, reserved for the most gifted. It was taught only one-on-one, traditionally passed down from father to son but now also from mentor to student. There was one teacher in Toronto, Grandmaster Tang. Ava met with him several times before he agreed to accept her as a student. She was his second pupil; another teenager, Derek Liang, was the first, and though he and Ava never learned or practised together, over the years they had become friends.

From time to time Ava had called upon Derek to help her with collection. It was something they never discussed with their other friends, none of whom knew about her job. They had simply come to accept that once in a while Ava would leave the city on business for a few days or even weeks. She doubted they even noticed she was gone.

Ava thought that bak mei was the perfect martial art for a woman. The hand movements were quick, light, and short; they snapped with tension to their fullest extent, where the energy was released. It didn’t take a lot of physical strength to be effective. Bak mei attacks were meant to cause damage, directed as they were at the most sensitive parts of the body, such as the ears, eyes, throat, underarms, sides, stomach, and, of course, groin. Kicks were hardly ever aimed above the waist. Bak mei hadn’t come naturally to Ava. She had to learn to overcome her lack of power — at least, compared to Derek and Master Tang — and to exploit her strengths: her lightning-quick reflexes and her uncanny accuracy.

And learn she did. “I can look after myself,” she had told Uncle. And in all the years they’d been working together, she’d never given him any reason to doubt her.

They had been profitable years, with Ava earning enough money for the condo and the car and an impressive investment portfolio. But the best thing about the jobs she and Uncle did was that when they were successful, the income was only part of the satisfaction. First there was the ride getting to the money — it was never the same twice, and though it taxed her emotionally, it also forced her to expand her senses and her thought processes. Then there were the clients. Although she complained about them sometimes, especially those who in utter desperation were far too clinging and demanding, she also accepted Uncle’s conviction that they were simply lost souls looking for redemption. “When we get them their money back, what we are really doing is saving their lives,” he would say. Ava believed that too.