The Wardens of Punyu (The Handover Mysteries, Volume I) Page 12

  Standing next to her painfully neat little desk near the front door and smoothing her bangs away from her face with a small plastic clip, Cecilia looked brave and to anyone someone who knew her office dress style, slightly ridiculous. She wore a pair of jeans, a cotton blouse and an acrylic sweater that read in embroidery across the front, ‘Dancing Fun Fun.’

  She carried a red plastic knapsack over her shoulders. She looked like any local girl with just a little extra money to spend, one of the many who worked in the factories across the border, or maybe a Hong Kong girl visiting relatives. Claire knew this trip was a demonstration of Cecilia’s loyalty to the company. There was no way she could repay Cecilia now or later, whatever happened.

  It was seven-thirty in the morning. The two women had already pored over a small map of Punyu faxed overnight to the bureau by Harris, as well as the local phone directory showing the addresses and phone numbers of the Punyu ministry outlets and the surrounding areas on the provincial map. Cha Ling was nowhere to be found.

  ‘If you can just locate Cha Ling, that will be enough. It must be really dinky. Don’t take any risks. None. Turn around as soon as you learn anything at all about the location. We’ll turn it over to Harris as soon as we know something specific enough for him to work on.’

  They said good-bye in the corridor. The cheap mirroring on all sides of the elevator reflected a series of small, upright Cecilia’s like a row of doomed infantrymen.

  ‘I can’t tell you how much this means,’ said Claire, feeling already that it was inadequate.

  Cecilia smiled, ‘It’s my pleasure,’ but her voice wavered.

  Claire returned to her desk. The office was so quiet.

  Across the upper half of her desk lay Cecilia’s work for Claire: clips, correspondence, and invitations. Staring at this arrangement only added to her worries about letting her assistant cross the border alone. An image of Cecilia floating up on the shore of Sai Kung Bay appeared in her mind. She shook it off and took out the Walkman in her desk. She fought the silence with music, a new cassette of Kei Koito playing Bach, a gift from Xavier. Was this his way of replacing words of love with love itself?

  The image of Cecilia’s face disappearing behind the elevator doors returned. Claire really knew too little about Cecilia’s breakdown. Millions had marched through the streets of Hong Kong protesting the slaughter. Cecilia had been one of those thousands of young Hong Kong worker bees suddenly confronted with the reality of Chinese Communism at its most bestial. Since then, the girl’s fragile stability in a city that was increasingly threatened came from the mental refinements she exacted from the most mundane tasks. It was perhaps all the order she could impose on a world she had first greeted from the chaos of an aisle between the deafening whirr of hundreds of sewing machines.

  There was little time to clear away the work on her desk since all effort went to meeting that week’s deadline. Without Cecilia, there was no chance at all. She hadn’t spoken to MacDermott since last Saturday when she reported Hager’s murder. McDermott’s response had been terse, devoid of comfort, and ominous in its correctness. Checking to make sure she was still on the story schedule was an excuse to place a call to him at home in New York. She wanted to catch him up with everything that had happened since Monday’s meeting in the consulate.

  If she needed deeper reassurance from him, she wasn’t getting any. McDermott had some news of his own:

  ‘We’ve talked to Vic’s mother. I wasn’t about to suggest he’d been drinking or disappeared with some bimbo or something,’ he said. ‘Are you sure he’s not just on a bender?’

  ‘Wishful thinking. Not when Craig turns up missing eyes, legs, not to mention his et cetera,’ said Claire.

  ‘Well, Hager wasn’t on staff. He’s an item for the police out there. For that matter, you’ve got to push your murder-for-kidneys story to the backburner and concentrate on our ‘New Asian Order’ package. We’re expecting you to provide some background notes by the end of next week in time for our story conference on the fortieth floor. They’re worried that the advertising isn’t in yet. They’ll drop the package if we can’t put some kind of sexy spin on it. You can leave the spin to us but in the end, you’re going to have to write eighteen columns, so you might as well tell us what you want to saw.’

  ‘And search for Vic at the same time? Just like that? All because Alan wants some ideas for a package that’s only running in the International Edition and isn’t making money two months before publication?’ Claire knew her voice was rising too high, too fast. It wasn’t the way to win arguments long-distance, even with a friendly editor.

  McDermott seemed ready for a little temperament. ‘I know, I know that sounds pretty brutal, but it’s a fact of life. I agree your priority should be to get Vic out of China. But you haven’t got a corpse. China’s still a police state. You’re telling me that a white guy can just disappear somewhere around Shanghai—?’

  ‘Roger, he never got to Shanghai. There was something strange about that telex message—’

  ‘OK, somewhere in Guangdong, and the peasants just step over his body in the paddy fields, going “Hey look, Wong, here’s some white devil lying face down on my rice!” Naw, he’s just being an asshole. And it’s your job to be the cat that drags him in, and then we’ll deal with him. It’s all part of your job, Claire, when the time comes, but in the meantime, the New Asian Order package. Do it. OK? ‘

  It was late at night in New York. The divorced MacDermott sounded very much alone and post-nightcap. She glanced out the window into the morning steam covering the harbor. Somewhere in that direction lay container ships, ferries, a gunship docked at Tamar, and the British military port a few blocks away. Cecilia’s taxi would reach the train terminal soon. And further beyond, somewhere, somewhere was Vic.

  By noon, she’d sent the New Asian Order story ideas coded for McDermott and the others asleep in New York. She was free again until it was time to catch Cecilia’s call. They’d arranged that the girl would contact her by phone or telex every single night, so Claire could track her as she moved out of Punyu on the search for Cha Ling.

  There was no way she was putting her prison organ story on the backburner. She spent an hour calling Hong Kong’s major construction companies. Claire had contacts in the upper management of all the major firms—Cheung Kong, Swire, Hong Kong Land, Henderson Land, Hopewell Holdings, Sun Hung Kai—and she left messages for all of them, systematically calling in her chips, one by one. The rise and fall of property values was one of the biggest running stories in Hong Kong for a reporter. Property and construction companies accounted for more than sixty per-cent of the city’s Hang Seng Index on the local stock market.

  So this was today’s question: who was building a gynecology wing for Guangzhou’s First Affiliated Hospital? Then she dropped the same question on the desks of the property analysts at the half dozen major brokerage houses. It took her most of the lunch hour.

  Claire Raymond’s reportorial teeth had sunk into Dr Law’s ankle. By the end of the day, Claire should have a name.

  Now she had to prepare for tomorrow’s breakfast meeting with MacGinnes. He’d had dozens of contacts in the manufacturing enclave. He was a dynamic, self-made man, but even a one-man show like Brainchild had support staff, directors, bankers, and Chinese partners up and down the coast and along the land border with the colony.

  He could hardly refuse to help her trace Vic.

  She intended to research Brainchild for anything Vic might have rumbled, any sensitive thread she could pull to avoid being blindsided by MacGinnes.

  Fueled with a sandwich from the corner deli, she headed off to do a paper chase on Brainchild at the Companies Registry office. There had to be a clue, a hint, something of a trail to Vic’s secret.

  It was a short walk to the Supreme Court Building, but Hong Kong, with the crowds, street litter, pollution, and weather, was no city for pedestrians who took last place to trams, buses, cars and thousands of trucks belchin
g their way between China and all points in the colony. As she grabbed her jacket, Claire heard a familiar crack in the clouds above the building as the heavy gray-green sky collapsed on itself yet again, pouring torrents of cold rain roaring through the garbage-strewn gutters.

  By the time she’d managed the long wait for the elevator and the tedious trip down to the lobby, with office girls piling in at every other floor, the street was heaving with waves of water. The traffic moved slowly, with tires half submerged, past her building. Andy and Ivy Choi were dashing in and out of the building’s foyer, dragging huge pots of ferns and funeral wreaths to safety inside. From his long counter in the corner of the lobby, Mr Shuk wasn’t exactly helping. He had more important work to do smoking his usual ‘555’, but he was yelling loudly at any service people—moving men or delivery boys—who obstructed the shuttling Choi’s.

  People trapped without umbrellas or raincoats packed three deep, blocking the entrance. However, indifferent to the commotion and cheerful mayhem of young office workers triggered by the downpour, one tall Chinese man leaned against the lobby wall and puffed on his cigarette. Claire excused herself in Cantonese and hunkered under her jacket for the two-block dash to the Supreme Court. What a place to loiter, she thought. Why doesn’t he just stand in the middle of Queen’s Road Central and get himself run over? She ignored a small frisson of warning that ran down her neck and then with a sickening feeling, admitted to herself that she recognized the stranger’s face from the ferry terminal and the cruising sedan.

  The companies’ registry took up three floors of the Supreme Court Building. From first thing in the morning until four each afternoon, its reading rooms were clogged with hired ‘searchers,’ mere teenagers who pulled the registry’s records for solicitors, real estate agents, and anyone else who wanted to know what little the Hong Kong bureaucracy required companies to divulge.

  The main hall reeked of wet sweaters, cigarette smoke, and discarded curry cartons. The doorway was strewn with umbrellas, too many for the red plastic pail meant to catch their drips.

  Claire was the only guay po in the room, but no one took any notice. Western law clerks often turned up. There was a general hum in the room, not only from the conversation at the tables and the lengthy queue at the file window, but also from a dozen variations of the Walkman piping rock into the searchers’ ears. All of this was punctuated by shouts from clerks bustling behind the long counter lining the wall, as runners arrived with the required files, dumping their loads of cardboard with a thud on the counter.

  Searching the registry for information was always a drag. Even for a veteran who knew to check the limited companies, the unlimited companies, the new listings and the expired registrations in both the computer and paper versions, the harvest could be meager. Hong Kong had earned its international reputation as a harbor for thousands of ‘nominee’ and offshore companies that hid their secrets behind family directorships and ‘shelf companies.’ Such shelf companies were often maintained in paper herds by small management houses that listed hundreds of firms on a single, elegant wooden plaque outside their discreet doors.

  That sort of accommodation made Hong Kong what it was—a hub of dubious business opportunities and sidelong nods.

  In years past, Claire had put in futile hours trying to locate ownership of a company, calling up one file after another, like unpeeling the layers of an endless onion to no avail.

  At other times she got lucky and immediately struck a vein of gold that threaded its way through the byways of the registry stacks to a management company somewhere in a seedy office in Central. Sometimes people who were curious or worried enough for their reputation managed these companies and they’d open up the company’s innards to her discreet scrutiny.

  Anyway, thought Claire, let’s go through the motions. Perhaps Vic recently did a search himself. Maybe the seeds of his absence were germinating in this fetid crowd pouring over unglamorous archives.

  What was there to expose? Smuggling components protected by COCOM regulations to China? Fraudulent claims for the Lychee? Drug smuggling inside computer monitors? Claire had tried to think of everything and anything, but nothing matched up with Craig’s mangled body floating in Sai Kung or Vic’s disappearance.

  She bought a fistful of search tickets at the shroff’s window. Then she waited again for the elevator to take her upstairs to the computer room where half a dozen monitors were encased at eye level in the wall. She signed in with her name and passport number and settled herself in front of a computer. The machine asked what language she wanted, English or Chinese.

  ‘English’ she keyed in, and at the request of the machine entered ‘Brainchild.’ The machine responded ‘No such listing, please try again,’ so she tried ‘Brainchild Ltd.’ Again no listing. She tried, ‘Brainchild Electronics Ltd.’ No listing. ‘Brainchild Computers Ltd.’ No listing.

  Next to her a man in flapping shirtsleeves and baggy Armani-type slacks was tapping away with abandon. Claire paused, then gave another try with ‘Brainchild International.’ No listing. This time she tried ‘Brainchild International Ltd.’

  If that name didn’t work, she might have to resort to running her finger down all the ‘B’ companies in the well-thumbed paper books scattered on a long table outside the computer room.

  File 6346, answered the machine. She wrote it down. She tried ‘Brainchild International, China, Ltd.’

  Yes, indeedy, a second home run. The screen coughed up File 16241. She added that to her notes.

  Then she switched the computer back to the main menu and asked to search in Chinese. On the card found on Vic’s desk she had seen the Chinese name of the company, Jin Nai, or ‘Golden Brain.’ She entered this name, choosing the Chinese characters from the selection of ‘jin’s carefully, but got nothing. She wandered around the computer’s imaginary alleyways and dead ends, trying variations on ‘Jin Nai Holdings,’ ‘Jin Nai International,’ ‘Jin Nai Company’ with ‘Ltd.’s’ and without.

  She found nothing in Chinese to match the card. Was there yet another name for the company across the border?

  She headed back downstairs again in a mood of plodding, but satisfied determination. Speed and cash measured most Hong Kong life today—but not yet in these rooms, thank goodness. This little world had belonged to old-fashioned Chinese clerks. And those clerks had been trained by British civil servants with all the time in the world on their hands, colonials who valued patience and care—virtues on their way out the door. Money couldn’t buy you shortcut answers here and when the searchers found what they were looking for, nothing remained but yet more search requests.

  Why take shortcuts or hurry?

  Claire was in a Cantonese village of modern Sisyphuses, rolling their boulders up endless mountains of company names that hid little more than yet more company names. This kind of hunting was done in New York for a fee by dialing a service and waiting for the photocopies to be delivered to your door. But even in Manhattan you had to know what you were looking for. Claire derived a deeper pleasure from searching herself, by hand and eye, making sure that every avenue was travelled.

  Next she hit the open stacks, each shelf numbered by the file directories it contained. These weren’t the company records themselves, simply the records that itemized the number of the folder attached to the microfiche for every year of the company’s life. She found shelf 16000–16500. A kid of about eighteen was jotting down a number from that file, so she backtracked to the 6000 shelf.

  There it waited for her, a single sheet of paper for company number 6346, hand-titled at the top, ‘Brainchild International Ltd.’ The year of registration in Hong Kong was 1980, probably the first year MacGinnes had set up shop in the colony. She filled in a request ticket for that file and for the current year as well.

  By now the 16000 shelf was free. She grabbed the loose-leaf binder that would contain 16241. This might be more interesting, and she wrote down the year that Brainchild International China, Ltd was bo
rn, 1985, as well as the current year. That made four files to wait for—enough to fill the rest of the afternoon. The line to submit requests snaked the entire length of the main reading room and Claire took her place at the end.

  Twenty minutes of waiting passed slowly as the rain pounded the windows outside. A girl with short wet hair tried to cut in front of her by chatting to a friend ahead of Claire and inserting herself slowly behind her companion. The average Cantonese held a pretty low opinion of the Western invention of lining up. Life in the East was determined by favors, debts, connections, and one’s own talents for elbowing and ignoring the less assertive lagging behind you. Why should the registry be any different?

  Claire took the girl firmly by the shoulders and, smiling, shifted her cleanly out of the line, but still within chatting range of her friend. Flustered, the girl giggled and waved herself off to continue her yakking with another member of their regular group standing at a reading table nearby.

  Then Claire spotted him again.

  The tall Chinese man from her office building leaned against a high wooden table along the opposite bank of windows. Claire turned cold with recognition. But was it the same man as the stranger she had seen from her elevator lobby? Was she getting paranoid? His face was turned away from her.

  She settled on a wooden bench near the back of the room. She concentrated on the business at hand and resisted the urge to check him out but a surge of doubt engulfed her. What was she looking for, anyway? For that matter, what did she expect from her meeting with MacGinnes except his condolences and more of the same bland boosterism about China trade and investment she could read in Vic’s notes?

  This was crazy.

  She glanced back but now the sinister tracker was gone. Perhaps he’d never been there. She saw only streams of rain streaking across the broad, darkening window.

  Her numbers were called—producing four little squares of blue microfilm tossed at her across the counter. There wasn’t much time left before the registry closed. This was the only chance she had to get something on the company, something she could use during her precious half hour with MacGinnes over coffee.