The Wardens of Punyu (The Handover Mysteries, Volume I) Read online

  ‘Vic, it’s Claire! Open up!’ she shouted.

  No one came. The bass resumed its assault on the decrepit landing.

  She had Vic’s spare key from Cecilia. She opened the door, and stepped inside. To her left, stood his tiny kitchen with two Chinese-style hot plates on the waist-high shelf. She glanced over the porcelain tiling. It looked like he’d been cooking; a British baking scale stood next to the sink piled high with dirty dishes. There were traces of flour casually swiped across the counter.

  ‘Vic!’ she yelled, taking the few short steps into the living room, which gave on to three small bedrooms. She stood confused for a second in the center of the main room which was littered with newspapers, flip-flops, dress shoes, burnt-out mosquito coils and an open briefcase.

  The door to the largest bedroom stood open.

  With all that pounding bass, no one could have heard her approach. She stared through the doorway into the glazed expression of Vic’s on-off girlfriend, Nancy Chew, sitting stark naked astride a man. Stomach heaving, she looked with disbelief at Claire. Her heavy eye makeup was smeared and her wiry hair stuck up sideways from her head. The Chinese girl blushed, her blotchy complexion more irregular than ever. When she realized Claire wasn’t a ghost, her face contorted with surprise, embarrassment, and anger.

  ‘Diow nay,’ she yelled, fuck, ‘Diow nay lo mo,’ adding someone’s mother. Her childlike breasts gave her an innocent appearance that contrasted with her elaborate eye make-up. Beneath her, the man’s head twisted up to look back. Flustered at first, Claire stood her ground to confront Vic.

  But the man wasn’t Vic. It had been many months since Claire had had even phone contact with him, but she recognized the patrician chin and nose, and the cool, pale eyes. Craig Hager was their magazine’s Bangkok stringer. He was the wrong man in the wrong city with the wrong girl.

  Claire realized she had two delinquent subordinates on her hands, not one.

  She waited for Hager in the living room. No wonder no one had answered the phone. Hager was supposed to be in Thailand. She heard hushed conversation behind the bedroom door and then he emerged, all six feet three inches of decadent flesh that had probably been solid brawn before Bangkok took its inevitable toll. He’d thrown a towel around his hips. He stretched his deeply tanned torso languidly and adjusted the towel slightly lower on his rump. Claire found herself staring at a knife tattooed below his collarbone.

  He turned the pounding music off, languidly, provocatively, as if there was one more guitar riff he wanted to catch. He gestured to Claire to sit on the rattan sofa.

  Nancy remained in the bedroom—Claire heard clothes and bedding rustling and a closet door slam.

  ‘Want some coffee? I got some espresso blend at Oliver’s downtown. Vic’s instant tastes like piss.’

  Craig didn’t wait for an answer as he clearly wanted coffee himself. He disappeared into the kitchen and Claire heard some energetic preparation. He emerged few minutes later with a bamboo tray set with Vic’s cheap blue-and-white crockery from China Products.

  ‘Looking for Vic?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He said I could stay here for the week he was up in Guangzhou reporting out some electronic story.’ Craig poured ink-black brew into a cup for her.

  ‘Where in Guangzhou?’ she asked, keeping a straight face.

  Vic was in China? That was a neat one, to cross the border into China without saying anything to her, but making arrangements with another stringer. Well, she understood his absence now. Of course Vic wasn’t back on time. It was his first year in Hong Kong. The idiot wouldn’t have realized that during the Chinese New Year, nearly a million Hong Kong people crossed the border northward into Guangdong province. Getting back during the inevitable crush at the train stations and airports required a combination of good planning, willpower, and some familiarity with this annual ritual of good-natured migratory mayhem.

  Vic lacked all three.

  ‘Some town up the Pearl River. That’s all I remember. He’s coming back tomorrow. Don’t worry.’

  Claire resented Hager’s confidence and his patronizing tone—boys covering for boys with ‘Mom.’ Why had her predecessor hired Hager? She’d heard it was because they had made a habit of bar hopping together in Bangkok.

  ‘Why should I worry? Anyway, you’re obviously making the most of his absence. It’d be nice if you were back in Bangkok doing your job. Cecilia is faxing you a page of questions for your local Chase manager as we speak.’

  He scratched one well-toned, bronze pectoral. ‘You don’t give me enough work or retainer to expect me to keep banker’s hours. You can hardly expect me to devote myself to waiting for a monthly call from Business World. You’re not my main string.’ He smiled again, less pleasantly.

  ‘I need to check Vic’s desk. I don’t know anything about an assignment in Guangzhou,’ Claire cut him off.

  ‘You’re the boss, boss.’ He shrugged. His tone implied Claire’s being the boss actually had little to do with his interests—or Vic’s, for that matter.

  Claire brushed off his insolence. Any woman running an Asian bureau network could expect certain traits in her stringers: the Singapore stringer would be meticulous but politically timid, the Delhi stringer overeducated and underpaid, the Sydney stringer out of touch with New York’s priorities, the Jakarta stringer vague with deadlines, the Taiwan stringer melancholic about not being the Beijing stringer, and the Beijing stringer keen to eliminate Claire’s interference so he could work directly to New York.

  Living in the corrupt, oblique and murky hub of Southeast Asia, any Bangkok stringer who had the contacts his bureau chief needed—plus the wiles to use them—always came with personal baggage that tipped the scales. More often than not he (and the Bangkok stringer was always a he) sported ex-wives, bargirl troubles, drug jones, drink handovers or war wounds. One had a false leg that gave him migraines. Another couldn’t get out of bed before four in the afternoon. Bangkok stringers were, by definition, trouble.

  You needed one per bureau, but thank God, only one.

  Hager left for the kitchen again with the tray. She heard more clearing up.

  Vic’s desk was an uncensored version of his mess at work. There was a Chinese edition of Penthouse—a lot of teen-age bottoms and white cotton anklets on the cover—a mess of dog-eared spiral notebooks, used matchbooks and a carpet of strewn cigarette ashes. She glanced around the rest of his ‘study.’ What was she looking for? Hager wasn’t going to tell her more. She could feel Hager, sitting and sipping in the living room only yards away, listening to the silence of her confusion and smiling to himself. Her indignation mounted by the second. Craig was either laid-back or getting laid, but being laid off would hardly faze him. Reporters with fluent Thai and all the right connections were hard to find. He’d land on his feet within a week, probably with a rival weekly.

  She wouldn’t give him that satisfaction. ‘When are you going home?’

  ‘I’ve got a flight out tomorrow night.’

  Claire glanced at the bedroom door.

  Hager read her thoughts. ‘That doesn’t mean anything. Bangkok isn’t any good anymore– everyone’s HIV there. She doesn’t like Vic all that much, that’s for sure. I’m not certain why she’s been hanging around with him, but last night she said something about being with Vic for the sake of her brother.’

  Claire scowled, ‘Uh, uh.’

  ‘Whatever.’ Craig loitered now in the doorway, watching her riffle through Vic’s notes. ‘Um, have you spoken to anybody about Vic’s being gone? Better not panic and call in authorities. It’ll just make trouble for everybody. He’ll show up sooner or later.’

  It was presumptuous and premature advice but for the sake of her authority, she didn’t seize the bait. She’d do whatever she thought right and when she decided, not Hager.

  She gave up on making any sense of Vic’s scribbles like this. She’d take whatever had to do with Brainchild, or electronics in general.


  ‘I’ve got to get back to the office. Message me when you’re back at your desk. If Vic contacts you, tell him he’s making life very difficult for the magazine for no good reason. I don’t care how many good ol’ boys on Domestic Edition are rooting for him—he works for International now.’

  ‘Don’t be too tough on him. And don’t be in such a hurry. I can imagine it’s hard for you, lady bureau chief, corralling all the stallions into the yard every week. Kinda lonely at the top? Feel like a threesome?’

  Craig smirked and without warning, even though Claire stood only three feet from him, he slowly unwrapped the towel on his hips completely, stood stark naked for just a beat, and then rewrapped it more securely. It was a vulgar gesture of braggadocio and aggression, but it didn’t quite come off—he was used to intimidating smaller, Asian women. Claire glanced down with disdain and met his gaze with equal loathing.

  ‘I don’t waste time on stale news,’ she said, ‘That’s why I’m bureau chief and you’re not even on staff.’ She was desperate to return to the fresh air of the hilltop.

  The whole encounter ate up valuable time. It was too cold now to stay on deck. Halfway across the West Lamma Channel, a piercing rain broke down, streaking the cabin windows at an angle of forty-five degrees. Claire saw two acquaintances, a Chinese stylist and her photographer husband, and waved. At other times, she might have joined them for some gossip. Even though Hong Kong was a city of more than six million, to residents it could be a cozy village of intertwining worlds—trade, politics, local entrepreneurs mixing with intrepid artists. But this afternoon she stayed near the noodle vendor at the far end of the second floor, leaning deep in thought in a window seat at the end of one of the long tables.

  Hager didn’t seem to know much about Vic’s absence but at the same time acted pretty confident that although something might have gone wrong, nothing was wrong enough to report to the police.

  Odd, that comment. What was Hager hiding? Why would she get help or alert anyone about a wayward reporter? Even stranger was the total indifference Nancy and Hager displayed to the fate of someone who was supposed to be their friend—no matter how needy and unprepossessing Vic could be.

  She’d waited long enough. She pulled out her notebook and drafted an e-mail to put online to New York once she got home.

  ‘ZCZC

  MMCD

  BNIR

  .CCRD

  Att: Business World International Desk

  For McDermott

  Ex Raymond, HK

  d’amato awol from hong kong, possibly stuck guangdong province—suspect heavy chinese new year traffic—no message received here. Any assignment traffic from your end uncopied to Hong Kong bureau? Also please inform us asap if message received exd’amato overnite. warm regards raymond

  NNNN’

  She didn’t like missing reporters who hadn’t left messages by phone, telex or fax. Maybe Vic had roped one of his domestic reporter buddies at the New York office into okay’ing this foray into Guangdong. It was certainly possible, if not kosher. In fact, at this point, she almost hoped that was the explanation. She shivered, not from the rain outside or the ferry’s air-conditioning, but from a new wariness.

  The ferry lurched eastward toward Aberdeen and the shoreline lights of Hong Kong appeared through the window. They would dock in Central in twenty minutes after crawling along the western edge of Victoria Island. Claire gazed at the busy skyline with affection for its high-rises dangling glinting lights, some of them leftover green and red Christmas decorations economically recycled into Chinese New Year symbols.

  No matter her relief, getting back to the deadline rush of the afternoon would do nothing to resolve new questions raised by the day’s detour to Cheung Chau.

  Certainly, the sight of Nancy, her slight form pumping up and down on top of Hager, had been startling, and the fact that it was Hager and not Vic, worrying for Vic. She’d never liked Nancy Chew much, not since the first time Vic had paraded her into the office before a lunch together, but perhaps this was unfair to the girl. She’d come to associate Nancy with her brother. Chew Lo-man had pestered their office ever since, trying to sell them various useless gadgets and business scams. Finally even the docile Cecilia had been forced to toss him out on his butt with a dismissive Cantonese tirade.

  No, it was something else that troubled Claire. In fact, she’d fled the apartment determined to keep her composure after seeing something very unexpected—and very wrong—leaving her as truly shaken as Craig’s sex antics and arrogance hadn’t.

  Avoiding his aggressive scrutiny, her eyes had grazed across the apartment’s rough sea grass matting until they fell on an open suitcase lying on the floor in the middle of the unused third bedroom.

  There, amid an impressive pile of new shirts and shoes still in their shopping bags and even an unopened tie bag from Armani, Claire had glimpsed in full the crude metal body of a pistol.

  Chapter Three

  —Saturday dawn—

  It wasn’t the first time her phone had rung while she was making love. Over the years of round-the-clock calls from far-flung editors and reporters, she’d developed tremendous powers of sexual concentration. She encouraged her lovers to do the same. Still, a part of her brain instantly calculated her remaining margin for pleasure. It was five-thirty a.m. in Hong Kong and only six hours since Xavier had returned from a mission to North Korea via Beijing for his agency. That made it 5:30 p.m. in New York.

  Deadline time.

  While the Swiss ran his hands through her tangled red curls, they both heard the muted ringing of the phone trigger the answering machine’s click. When he held Claire’s hips firmly beneath his, they heard McDermott almost shouting, ‘Claire. This is Roger. I got your message about Vic in China. We don’t know anything here at the international desk about a China assignment. We thought you were keeping him on a choke chain. Call me when you wake up.’

  Over years of various affairs punctuated by such interruptions, she’d almost come to think that hearing MacDermott yell at her from New York during lovemaking in her Hong Kong eerie was becoming a reliable aphrodisiac in her orgasmic history.

  She was still sighing when the insistent dial tone stopped blaring over the speaker and the tape of Claire’s voice rewound.

  ‘I’m glad they can’t hear us the same way,’ she laughed limply into his ear.

  ‘They would certainly have a different image of you if they could,’ he called over his shoulder as he headed for the bathroom.

  Her rose-colored damask silk dressing gown had fallen off the bed. She rescued one of her bamboo bangles from under the sheets before one of them sat on it.

  ‘You’re not a beauty, but you’ve got something,’ her girlfriends would say of Claire. They made no secret that they were bewildered by her gangly charms. As a lover, she could never aspire to the femme fragile aura she envied in her petite friends, but she secretly liked to imagine herself in a previous life as a Tang Dynasty lady so often depicted in small statues treasured for their slender grace. In her active sexual imagination, weekly deadlines were forgotten and her home office dissolved away to be replaced by a chamber filled with music and the aromatic traces of vanilla and jasmine wafting through the humid breeze. She could enjoy all this even though her hair wasn’t black or straight, and the only Asian lover she had bedded had been a Hong Kong political cartoonist wearing Levis, not silks. That had been over a decade ago. She still bumped into him from time to time, and there were no regrets on either side.

  Claire sat up and finger-combed her mane. In his own way, Xavier was worthy of a classical portrait. His brushy graying hair was curled stiff by the moist climate and his torso muscular, with legs gnarled from decades of skiing, mountain climbing and rigorous field work for his development agency. Claire and Xavier had met by accident about a year after Jim had disappeared from Hong Kong.

  One evening she’d rushed pell-mell into the wrong cocktail party at a downtown hotel. She’d found herself at a rec
eption given by Xavier’s agency for a gaggle of Asian diplomats instead of a press conference for Shanghai’s new securities regulators. It was typical of Hong Kong’s nonstop entertaining circuit that it took her a few minutes to realize she was in the wrong function room. By the time Claire had noticed the preponderance of consular types and a distinct shortage of Shanghainese, it was too late. Xavier had seen her, mentally crossed the room and as he later confessed over the pillows, bedded her.

  ‘What did you think of me when we first met?’ She took a sip of water from a half-filled glass next to the bed.

  ‘Long-legged redhead in a hurry. Terribly brave and maybe even a little lonely?’

  Claire shot him a less than grateful glance but thought it was the second time in one day she’d been described as visibly lonely.

  ‘I got used to being alone once I left the States. Most Chinese men don’t lie awake at night dreaming of tall redheads. When I met you, I thought, ‘Ugh, Swiss, Bircher muesli and bratwurst, and Orson Welles as Harry Lime saying that Switzerland’s greatest contribution after seven hundred years of democracy was the cuckoo clock.’

  ‘Which is wrong—cuckoo clocks come from Bavaria in Germany. You’ll have to see Switzerland sometime and you’ll see more than bratwurst.’

  ‘Well, that’s a good idea. I’d like that very much.’ She glimpsed him through the doorway unwinding a Balinese sarong around his solid hips. It was an innocent gesture, a thousand miles from Hager’s slovenly pass.

  The shower muffled his response, if there was one. Any discussion about a deepening of their courtly on-off dating always came to a quick halt. He seemed available, but held himself aloof. He came and went for the agency—to North Korea, China, Mongolia and Vietnam—using his architect’s training to turn undifferentiated international largesse into something with roofs, doors, windows and plumbing in villages across north Asia. He used Hong Kong as a stopping point from which to write up his reports on far-flung clinics, schools and community centers.