Painkillers (11 page)

'I don't know anything about them.'

'Four legs and a tail: what's the difficulty?' Victor Pang took a final slurped spoonful of bird's nest soup and leaned back in his wing chair, weather-eyeing the monitors strung above the restaurant bar. For now he was laughing at me, but if I didn't place a bet soon he'd think I didn't know how to enjoy myself. I tried to make sense of the odds spooling across the distant screen. I wished Hamley were here.

'How about Fool's Money?'

'An accumulator would be safer.'

'A what?'

Victor Pang hid his frustration behind his brandy glass.

Spoiled by Hamley's toting me around everywhere, I'd expected this evening to be spent, if not in a private humidor fug high above the track's vast public video screen, then at least buoyed up by champagne in the Lusitano Club's private quarter. (I knew Pang was well established there; he had inherited Portuguese connections from his bereaved mother's remarriage in the late Forties, and maintained several business interests in Macau.)

But Pang took his gambling seriously, the way his wife and her American cronies could not. Once the races started and they all started jumping up and down like game show contestants, he'd shot them a look of contempt worthy of the surliest Gerrard Street waiter, and led me by the arm out of the club and into a public restaurant barely one level from the public stands, 'where we can concentrate'. Where he could concentrate, and I could look like a lemon.

Now, it seemed, I'd failed the restaurant test. 'Come on.' He stood up, left an insultingly large tip, and led the way from the terrace restaurant straight down to the members' enclosure. So much for waiter service and highballs under the stars.

I'd expected an hour, maybe less, in Pang's company: the usual glancing social contact. Not an entire evening of painful misconnection. I couldn't see why he was bothering with me in the first place, unless it had to do with work. But he had friends more powerful than I to lean on, hadn't he?

Hadn't he?

I'd never been to a race before, and obviously this was the place to start. At Happy Valley, even the horses have private swimming pools. As I watched the gates spring open on the huge public video screen in the centre of the track, I thought maybe all this gloss and brilliance and high-tech was missing the point of the place, but then Pang elbowed us a path to the rail and I got my first real taste of occasion. The riders appeared, rounding a bend in the track: a terrifying, hectic blur of limbs and leather. The ground shook. I didn't know to expect that. The horses thundered past, and the sound of them rose through my feet, and something fluid and free stirred inside me.

Maybe that's why I asked him.

'God, no,' he laughed, 'it wasn't my idea.' Like he wouldn't be so dumb as to invite me. He glanced around. 'Where is she, anyway?'

I knew straight away who he meant. If it wasn't him had invited me here, there was only one woman in his circle it could be. Adolescent paranoia swept over me: My God, what if she's?

The ground trembleda simple, regular rhythm this time. I turned to look. A single, laggard horse, so far behind the pack it might have been running a different race, scrambled past. Pang squinted. 'Isn't that Fool's Money?'

I crumpled up my card.

'Don't take it too hard, Mr Wyatt.'

'Get back on the bloody horse, is that it?' I meant it to come out ironic. Funny, even. It didn't. I smirked like a prat to cover my embarrassment and went inside to place yet another blind wager. Eva was waiting for me, just inside the glass doors. She was experimenting with Laura Ashley, and it wasn't working. She kissed me on the cheek and came with me to the line for the teller. It was hard for us to say what we had to say.

'He prefers wet ground,' she warned me, as my pen descended uncertainly toward Secret Service.

'It pissed down this morning,' I said.

About four people ahead of us, the teller was explaining complex accumulators to a pair of befuddled Australian tourists.

'The track's synthetic,' she warned me, but I bet anyway.

I lost again, and just to rub the pain in it started to spot with rain. 'Told you,' she sighed, leading the way from the rail into shelter.

'Yes, you did.'

'Don't be down.'

'I'm no gambler,' I said.

'You wouldn't have come here if you weren't.' Typically Eva: so aphoristic, so Noel Coward.

'I was invited,' I said. 'You invited me.'

Her smile was shy and adult and I felt as though I was falling into it. 'I'm talking about Hong Kong,' she said.

The rain came to nothing, so we went back to the rail. It was deserted now. Unlit. We were alone. She said, 'We're always wandering off into the dark.'

'It does seem that way.'

Her hand was tiny and strong. Not a child's hand at all.

'One more race,' she said.

'Not again.'

'Forget your plastic?' The rain glistened in her hair.

'I like it here,' I said.

'In the dark?'

'With you,' I said. 'I thought I wasn't going to see you again.'

She glanced around. Her father was standing behind us, in a pool of light, yards away. Rainwater drizzled from the balconies. It was like a curtain, cutting him off. I made to raise a hand but Eva stopped me with a touch. He hadn't seen us. We turned back towards the track.

She said, 'I wasn't pregnant, incidentally, if that's what you're thinking.'

I shrugged.

'Sorry. That was a rotten thing to say.'

'No it wasn't.'

She leaned against the wet rail, her hands clasped, very earnest. She said, 'I wouldn't have minded.'

'What?'

'You can fuck me as much as you want. I love you. I've been a cow.'

'What was that about'

'I want to be your girl,' she said.

I glanced round, nervous as hell. Pang was still standing there, still looking in the wrong direction. It couldn't last. 'Can't we do this somewhere else?'

She led me into the shadow of the stewards' social club, and down a covered alley, out of the rain. It was very dark. I had to touch her just to figure out where she was. There was a sweet refuse smell coming from somewhere. Above us, cheap cigarette smoke and muffled Cantonese wafted from a kitchen window.

'I'm going to tell them,' she said. 'Everybody. Friends, parents. I want you to come to lots of parties with me. I want to show you off. I don't know why I was so afraid. It wasn't you, it was me'

I shut her up with a kiss. Big lower-middle-class brute that I was.

'Your dad'll think I've buggered off,' I said, when we were done.

'Don't be so nervous of him.'

An unpleasant thought struck me. 'God, you don't want me to ask him for permission or anything, do you?'

She laughed and kissed my nose.

'He thinks I'm a wuss as it is.'

'Let me choose you a winner then.' Out in the middle of the track, the big video monitor was screening odds for the next race. She tried to read them over my shoulder. 'Get your hand out my knickersthere.'

She bobbed up on tiptoe and squinted. 'Who do you fancy?'

'I daren't look.'

'It's only a race.' She led me out of the alley and back into the Jockey Club building. 'Pride of Asia?'

'Sounds like a fruit company.'

'Lucky Jim?'

'Too Kingsley Amis.'

'Hmm?'

I picked blindly.

'Oh Adam,' she cried, despairing of me, 'It's forty to one.'

'Double Happiness or nothing.'

'Adam, why?' Victor Pang cried, drawing level with us in the queue. I practically had a heart attack. Pang, on the other hand, seemed quite unsurprised, finding Eva and I with our arms round each other. She must have told him about us. Or had he seen her unhappy these past weeks, and set this up himself?

I thought about Pang's notoriously snobbish wife, Eva's motherhow he had arranged it so that she was still blithely ensconced with her Vanderbildt/Stepford mob...

'Yes, Adam,' Eva chipped in, 'why?'

The worst chip shop in the world is the Double Happiness in Mile EndI was hardly going to tell her that.

'Okay,' Eva sighed, admitting defeat. She reached into her purse and pulled out her plastic. Dad contained himselfjust. 'I'll match you,' she said.

It was a big wedding; even the Hong Kong Tatler said so. Our winnings barely paid for the reception. ICAC's choice of offices - above a fortress-like multi-storey car park on Garden Road - might indeed have been invented by John le CarrŽ. High in their forbidding concrete eyrie, Hong Kong's Independent Commission Against Corruption answered to no-one. No-one had even bothered to tell them how long they could entertain their suspects without trial - an oversight that caused more than one Hong Kong broker to glance up nervously as he crossed Statue Square of a Friday night.

'Adam?'

I turned from the window.

His suit was reddish brown; a metallic thread ran through it, lending the material a strange, hectic bloom.

'Daniel White,' he said. 'How're you doing?' I came and shook his hand. He was your typical FinCEN yuppy, fresh from some Tony Robbins-style leadership course in Key West. They were all bastards. I hadn't met one yet who didn't own a video of Wall Street. He leaned his head to one side, squinting at me from under thin, gingerish eyebrows. His eyes were the blue of oxidised egg yolk. 'You want to see him now?'

'Sure,' I said.

ICAC needed bodies to beef up its investigation into Top Luck, a local film investment company. Hamley had recommended me, for his own reasons; I impressed at interview, and I was in. It turned out that Daniel White, my immediate superior, was on secondment, too, though he'd been working at ICAC full-time for a couple of years now. I followed him through an open-plan office and past a line of rooms, none of them occupied. I watched my reflection bounce back off every glass panel. White saw. 'Why do office doors these days all have to have windows?' he complained. 'What do they think we'd do in there? Mainline?'

I smiled a beatific smile.

He cracked, eventually: 'You don't say much, do you?'

'I have my moments,' I said. I was only obeying orders. Back then, British officials were required to feel a lot of animosity towards their US counterparts. All through the Cold War the CIA had thought it was running the government, and no sooner was that over then these FinCEN yuppies turned up thinking they were policing our economy.

We entered a conference room, startling its sole occupant: a young man with a cheeky, freckled face.

'John Pollard, this is my colleague Adam Wyatt.'

There were huge bags under his eyes, and when he reached out to shake, his hand trembled. Imagine Richmal Crompton's William once he's discovered masturbation. His palm was so damp, as soon as he wasn't looking I wiped my hand on my trousers.

He unpacked his squash bag onto the big central table: files and notebooks and a handful of computer disks. By the look of him, he hadn't used the bag for its intended purpose since arriving in the colony. When he bent over the bag, his gut folded itself over the table.

Three extremely scary Chinese women from ICAC followed us in. We only ever addressed them by their family names because their first names were all Suzy. Privately, ICAC staff had nicknamed them the Weird Sisters.

Pollard must have been made stupid by the intimidating surroundings because it took him half the interview to realise White and I were mere observers, and it was up to the women whether this belated whistle-blowing of his was enough to keep him from prison.

'And as far as you've been able to ascertain,' the first Sister began - a shark could not have smiled an uglier smile - 'your firm has had no previous dealings with Top Luck?'

'No. Ma'am,' he panted, his eyes flicking back and forth as he tried to keep all three predators in his field of view.

It took us the best part of two hours to assemble an order of events from the records Pollard had copied for us, and they made unedifying reading. No wonder he was blushing as we returned to run it through with him.

'When were you first approached?'

''Five months ago.'

'Where?'

'A wrap party in Chatham Square.'

'"Wrap party"?' The third Sister made it sound like a pyjama party, or worse.

'Yes, a film party,' Pollard explained, and added, unwisely, '"Double-barrelled Vengeance", I think.'

The Sisters sneered collectively.

'Who approached you?'

'One of the directors. Yau Sau-Lan.'

Call him Jimmy, I remembered, and a cold thrill went down my spine. Sau-Lan was his Chinese name. Jimmy was the name he went by. Jimmy. Jimmy Yau.

'And Mr Pollard, did you know that Chatham Square is notorious as the headquarters of Sun Yee On triad?'

Pollard swallowed. He looked to me like I could help him. Like I wanted to. Pollard had agreed to do business for Top Luck Investments after only the most cursory of verifications. A lot of it was his company's fault: their compliance systems were culpably shoddy and this wasn't the first time they'd failed in their legal obligations.

Nevertheless, Pollard only had himself to blame for what followed. Soon he was receiving instructions to redirect funds to random-seeming accounts in Switzerland and the Caymans, sometimes as little as half an hour before those transactions were due to process. No-one Pollard spoke to at Top Luck ever showed the slightest interest in the relatively poor rate of return they were getting from their investments. So at last

- this was his story - the penny dropped. Poor sod. His only available defence was that he was a complete idiot.

It was a straightforward case on the surface, and the amounts involved were positively trifling. If it wasn't for the bizarre personal connection - Jimmy Yau's dad getting my girlfriend's granddad slain on Stanley beach - I wouldn't have been that excited. 'And besides,' I asked White, when we were done, 'what's a straightforward compliance failure got to do with the ICAC?'

White hit the button for the third floor. He looked at me, enquiringly.

'Same,' I said.

The lift slid shut and jerked into life.

'Maybe Pollard's paranoid,' White admitted, as we rode down. 'ICAC's the only body he says he trusts.'