The Godfather of Kathmandu (35 page)

Properly understood, it’s a tap-your-desk-and-wait-for-the-brain-to-catch-up moment, but I seem to be doing a lot of that these days. I’m actually sort of freaked out by the sight of the big orangey-pink sapphire in the middle of my screen. I mean, my intuition is screaming that this is a case solver of a break, but I just don’t know why or how. Anyway, it’s lunchtime and Lek feels rejected if I don’t take him across the road at least three times a week.

Now I’m at the braised-pig-knuckle food stall opposite the station with Lek, who still watches me anxiously for signs of psychosis. Normally he doesn’t eat pork except to keep me company, but we both know that if you reach the stall early enough you can have the pick of the choicest pieces of meat braised to an exquisite tenderness so that it melts in your mouth, and even a 90-percent veggie like Lek cannot resist. We order a couple of iced lemon teas to finish, then lean back in our plastic seats.

“Padparadscha,”
I say with an insane smile.

“That’s the fourth time you’ve said that,” Lek complains. “At least tell me what it means.”

“I don’t know,” I reply. “That’s why I have to keep saying it.”

Lek sighs and sucks neurotically on his straw in an expression of distress which empties the glass. When we’re finished I realize the need for some more Internet surfing; I return to my desk, and key in the name
Johnny Ng
.

Well, you can’t expect your luck to hold all day long. In Hong Kong, it seems, there are about a million people with the surname
Ng
, and about half of those own webpages. That’s what happens in societies with too much money and too few brothels: citizens are forced to play with themselves in cyberspace.
Ng:
I still don’t know how to pronounce it. Where’s the vowel?

I pause to open my mind to the cosmos. For some reason this cannot be done in the police station, so I take a stroll. It’s around three in the afternoon, which is to say between meals and therefore snack time. Most of the cooked-food stalls have closed for an afternoon break, but a nifty
new gang of entrepreneurs on wheels have shown up with snacks on a stick. Sausages, fishballs, eggs, shrimp, chicken, whole fish, ice cream, frozen coconut, dim sum, satay, dough balls, watermelon, and dried squid can all be eaten off a bamboo spike: watch. Now I’m tucking into a well-stuffed Isaan sausage and feeling a little better, not so much because I was hungry but because I’m claiming back my city soul. Nobody who wasn’t reared in Krung Thep can saunter down the street with a gun stuck down the small of his back, gnawing at sausage, nodding to acquaintances, grabbing an iced lemon tea from the iced lemon tea lady on the corner, and generally walking the walk with the kind of panache I’m exhibiting at this moment; it might not be much, but it’s making me feel like
the man
. It’s good for inspiration, too.

Now I’m back at my desk frantically surfing the Net again, with an idea so whacky I’m embarrassed to be following it up, and I’m not going to tell you about it,
farang
, unless it yields results.

Well, it has. How about this: I used a search engine to find people named Ng in the Hong Kong gem trade, and guess what? One Johnny Ng is quite well known and successful in that field. I even have his office telephone number and his Internet address. My instinct, though, is not to give him any room to maneuver: I’m thinking of getting on a plane. But before I do that, I need help. Detective Sukum is out of the station on some minor case at the moment, so I decide to hit him with a question designed to jangle his nerves. I call him on his cell phone, and as soon as he has said hello I say, “What is it about gemologists that Doctor Moi is attracted to?”

“Huh?”

“Witherspoon and Johnny Ng—both jewelers and gem traders. I haven’t checked on the two dead husbands—named Thompson and Legrand, I believe—maybe you can save me the trouble? After all, you were the one who sent me that article about padparadscha. You also sent me the Suzuki case.” The pause is so long I think we’ve been cut off—then he lets me have a long sigh. “Get off the phone.”

Sukum will not speak to me at the station. He will not even communicate via Lek. I think I’ve lost his support completely, and maybe I’ll even have to report him to Vikorn for holding out on me with information vital to my investigation, when I get a text message from an unidentifiable source:

Pretending I’ve dropped something, I do as instructed. Printed on a small piece of paper:

The important thing about Taksin pier is that it connects the Skytrain to the riverboats: you can take the train to the terminus, walk down the steps to the river, and buy your ticket for any direction: upstream, downstream, or across. I noticed that Sukum was in the same compartment of the same train as me, but he would not acknowledge me, so I make no attempt to approach him at the line for the boat tickets; on the other hand, I need to be close enough to him to find out where he’s going. In the event, he helpfully points downstream before scurrying off to wait for the boat on a bench as far away from me as he can find. Now the boat’s here, about seventy
feet long and ten feet wide, a pilot at the back whistling his lungs out with Morse-like directions to the captain as he pauses for a moment at the jetty. The intense whistling brings excitement and a dash of fear as everyone hurries to get off and on. Finally Sukum and I are forced together by the crowd as we board.

We are hanging on to stainless-steel uprights at the stern of the ferry, designed to help people keep their balance during turbulence. Sukum is wearing an incredibly loud banana-and-mango tourist shirt, shorts which show his unexpectedly powerful legs (he’s built like a football player), dark glasses, and a straw hat, which he has to press down on his head when the boat speeds up. I intuit he would have preferred a more temperate climate for this meeting so he could have worn a raincoat with the collar turned up to his eye sockets.

“You’re half Thai, so you are the victim of superstition,” Sukum explains. He is embarrassed that his security precaution has forced him to shout into the oncoming wind, right into the ear of a
farang
woman tourist, who glares at him. “But you are also half
farang
, so you don’t have it in the marrow of your bones the way full Asians do.”

“Meaning?”

“You might have guessed. I myself didn’t see the connection until your mother mentioned she had spotted Moi with the victim, Frank Charles—then I got scared.”

“You’ve been watching me buzzing around like a fool all this while?” I yell.

“Correct,” he yells back. “I admit to a certain ego-based pleasure in knowing more about the case than the great Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep. On the other hand, I have tried to discourage you. You can’t complain that I’ve been cynically watching you race toward death.”

“Like Moi’s two dead husbands?”

“Yes. Like them.” He screws up his face for a moment and shakes his head.
“Farang
say Asians are corrupt. Maybe we are, but it’s a disease we’ve developed some immunity to—most of the time we keep it under control, because we know in our hearts that too much corruption leads to destruction.
Farang
have no such instinct. Once they get into grabbing dough, they show no restraint.”

“You better give it to me in chronological order, Detective.”

“Not a chance.”

I frown. “What? You wear fancy dress and drag me here in the middle of the river just to give a half-minute lecture on differentials in global corruption?”

“Right.”

“Are you going to tell me any more?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“If it is obvious your information comes from me, we both die. If I just give you a few clues to follow up, maybe only you die.”

Try as I might, I cannot fault his logic. “Okay. Give me one more clue to take me forward.”

“Look in the gem trade journals.”

“That’s it?”

He scans the crowd around us like a security camera before saying in a superior voice, “Yes, that’s it. Let’s change the subject. That file I sent you—the Japanese suicide your
katoey
got all worked up about, how’s it going?”

I’m so irritated I think if not for the crowd, I would punch him.

Not everyone on the street in downtown Hong Kong is talking about money on a cell phone—only 99 percent. You don’t need to be an investigative journalist to realize this place is all about dough. I’ve been ashamed of my generic Thai black pants, white shirt, and black jacket since the moment I arrived. I don’t know why I didn’t think to bring my consigliere wardrobe; of course, it was because I’m not here on Vikorn business, am I? Never mind, I am armed with my Armani cologne. I’m staying at a three-star hotel on the Kowloon side, but Johnny Ng, I have discovered, is a jeweler-socialite based on the island itself. I know from the local society press that he is a leading member of the gay community here, and the only leverage I have is that he may not want it known that he was once married to a woman. He is in his midforties and, judging from the pics, still pretty. I have also discovered that everything happens around food over here. The local gem traders’ guild is throwing an over-the-top buffet supper at the Grand Hyatt tonight, which I intend to crash. In the meantime, I’m sightseeing in the world’s biggest shopping mall: central Hong Kong.

Most people here are Chinese, of course, but there are plenty of
farang
, too, whom the locals call
gweilo
(meaning “foreign devil”: I don’t know why
we
didn’t think of that—just teasing). I think it’s a mistake, though, to talk about race in this city of the future; clearly the citizens here are genuinely color blind, as long as you’re a millionaire. Everyone else is second-class, or worse. Here the smiles don’t fade on shopkeepers’
faces when they see I’m Eurasian; it’s the generic jacket and black pants that turn them hostile. Just now I went to buy a necktie for tonight and the sales assistant put all my personal details into a computer before he would hand it over, so they can flood my e-mail account with special offers of three-hundred-dollar ties for the rest of my life. The clerk was so much better dressed than me he could not withhold a sneer as he handed over the long gold-embossed packet containing the tie that cost me more than a thousand Hong Kong dollars. It’s a one-off Japanese design which might someday fetch a fortune at Sotheby’s; am I being naïve to think it will compensate for the rest of my inadequate wardrobe? No, not naïve, just bloody-minded: I knew I had to have a tie, so I bought the most expensive one I could find, to confuse the hell out of them; for the rest, I’m having an allergic reaction to capitalism and cannot bring myself to buy better clothes. In fact, I don’t want to buy anything. The prices are so inflated and the sales clerks so precious, I’m feeling nostalgic for lazy Thais who don’t give a rotten durian if you spend your money or just hang around window-shopping for a week.

But guess what—the tie works. I used a fantastically high-tech public toilet that looked like a bathroom out of
Home & Country
to put it on, then tried it out on another sales assistant in another men’s clothing store. The clerk offered me a complete new wardrobe—except for the designer tie. Thank Buddha I’ve brought my Nokia N95 (eight-gig) cell phone, or I really would feel like a third-world refugee. The tie apparently being my sole claim to membership in the human race, I decide to sightsee before attempting to ambush Johnny Ng at the buffet banquet tonight.

Ghosts of the departed British colonial power are everywhere, especially in street-and place-names. Victoria and Stanley are the biggest haunters, with George and Albert as runners-up. Now I’m on a funicular railway climbing a mountain called Victoria at about thirty degrees to the vertical. I get off to do the famous walk on a path called Stanley, which, at a certain point, overlooks a town of the same name. The path is circular, so you end up staring down at a harbor also called Victoria—but it’s a magnificent view. High-prowed green fishing trawlers compete for sea space with giant oil tankers, luxury yachts, sailboats, and high-speed ferries plying between here and Macau, where you can gamble legally. You can gamble illegally in Hong Kong to your heart’s content, but those homemade roulette wheels are notoriously easy to fix and inevitably lead
to fights—better to take the forty-five-minute trip to the former Portuguese enclave where Siberian whores will wipe your brow after every loss, assuming you are not attracted to the local girls.

It’s a near-God experience, up here above the mighty throbbing silicone heart of the tiny city-state which took over China ten years ago. (Haven’t you noticed how Beijing looks more like Hong Kong with every passing minute?) Your sense of divinity decreases as you descend, though. In the backstreets of Wan Chai, a red-light district that has the effect of making me feel more at home, the clacking of mahjong tiles is deafening, like a heavy sea shifting gravel right next to your ear. And I can’t say the local personal habits quite live up to the sartorial elegance. Just now I watched a well-dressed Chinese man in his sixties expertly blow the snot from his left nostril while pressing with an index finger on his right at exactly the point in his stride when he was leaning somewhat to the left, thus ensuring the turbocharged mucus would hit the pavement (or someone else—these streets are jam-packed 24/7) rather than his person, then perform exactly the same maneuver with right nostril, left index, right-inclining stride. I guess in the Asian city that never sleeps people don’t have time to blow their noses on tissue.

I’m told there’s a good Thai restaurant on a street called George, just off a street called Stanley, so I decide to leg it over there so I can speak Thai. Kathmandu never made me this homesick, and I’ve only been here three hours. It takes me a while to find the Sawatdee restaurant. When I get there the food is perfect, but no one speaks Thai; the owners and staff are all Filipinos. I say, “I thought you people were experts at imitating music?”