World of Trouble (9786167611136) (17 page)

———

———

Yesterday upon the stair
I met a man who was not there.
He was not there again today.
Oh, how I wish he’d go away.

—William Hughes Mearnes,
“Antigonish”

IT WAS JUST after dawn when Jello drove Shepherd back
to the Grand Hotel. In less than an hour, Shepherd had showered,
packed, and gotten himself a cab to the airport. A few more hours
and he was dozing in a business class seat on a Cathay Pacific 777
halfway back to Hong Kong. He felt good to be headed home again,
whatever home actually meant for him these days.

Back when he and Anita had been married they
lived in one of Bangkok’s tonier apartment buildings. They had a
large and airy unit, the walls of which were covered with the
colorful paintings that had made Anita modestly famous as a painter
in European art circles. The apartment was halfway around the world
from where either of them had been born, but it still felt like
home to Shepherd. When he went to the refrigerator and made himself
a ham on rye, he felt like he was making himself a ham on rye at
home. And that was a good enough test for him anytime.

Now he lived by himself in a Hong Kong
apartment loaned to him by a guy he knew from law school. A few
months ago, Freddy had abruptly resigned from his firm, bought a
thirty-eight foot ketch, and pointed its bow south toward Bali. He
told Shepherd he wasn’t coming back until he had all the adventures
he had been putting off since he was twelve years old. Shepherd
wasn’t entirely sure what those adventures actually were but,
whatever it was Freddy was looking for out there on the ocean, he
hoped Freddy found it. As for him, what he needed was a place to
live and a way to earn a living, and that was why he was staying in
Freddy’s apartment while Freddy sailed his sea of dreams. The
problem was that still didn’t make it home. When he went to the
refrigerator in Freddy’s place and made himself a ham on rye, it
felt like he was doing it in Freddy’s kitchen, which of course he
was.

All of Shepherd’s recent dislocations had
left him feeling pretty fuzzy concerning the whole concept of home
thing. He wasn’t absolutely sure he knew what it meant anymore.
From time to time, a line from Robert Frost drifted through his
mind. “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they
have to take you in.” If that really
was
the definition of
home, then Shepherd figured he was pretty much screwed. He was a
homeless man. Simple as that. Maybe he should just buy a shopping
cart and be done with it.

Still, Shepherd liked living in Hong Kong
well enough, and Freddy’s apartment was pretty nice. It was in a
district called the Mid-levels, not a particularly romantic name
for a neighborhood perhaps, but the designation was at least nicely
descriptive since the Mid-levels was the area midway up the
hillside between Hong Kong’s famous harbor and the top of Victoria
Peak. Back in the 1990s, in a highly imaginative but ultimately
unsuccessful effort to ease Hong Kong’s chronic traffic congestion,
they built a half-mile long outdoor escalator running down from the
Mid-levels, cutting through the center of SoHo and ending at the
financial district in Central near the harbor. It wasn’t actually a
single long escalator, but rather a ladder of about twenty
escalators tied together by short, glass-roofed walkways and moving
belts. In the mornings, the whole Rube Goldberg contraption ran
downhill and then, late in the morning, it reversed and everything
ran uphill for the rest of the day.

What Shepherd liked most about Freddy’s
apartment was that the Mid-levels escalator was just outside its
door. He loved to ride on it down the hill into the heart of the
city. Instead of jostling through the crowds packed into Hong
Kong’s steaming streets, he could stand quietly and contemplated
his surroundings while he was towed at a comfortable pace straight
through the heart of the bedlam. The Mid-levels escalator turned
the mayhem of Hong Kong into a Disneyland ride. It was all he could
do not to hum
It’s a Small, Small, Small, Small World
every
time he used it.

Shepherd liked the Mid-levels escalator so
much that he rented a small office about halfway down the hill from
Freddy’s apartment right in the middle of SoHo, which was an
acronym for south of Hollywood Road. Hong Kong’s SoHo, like its New
York namesake, tried hard to be the hippest and most pretentious
neighborhood going. In the blocks around Staunton and Elgin
Streets, a cool new restaurant or bar either opened or, more
likely, closed almost every week.

In spite of the stylishness of the
neighborhood, Shepherd’s office was pretty utilitarian. It was a
single, averaged-sized room on the second floor of an old shophouse
just above a noodle shop. It had very little to recommend it,
except for one thing really. The Mid-levels escalator ran right to
its front door. That was the real attraction of the place for
Shepherd. He could commute to work every day by escalator. How cool
was that?

***

WHEN SHEPHERD GOT to Freddy’s apartment, he dropped
his bag in the entry hall and walked around pulling back drapes and
pushing open windows. Then he unlocked the balcony door and walked
outside. The view was one he never tired of. Straight downhill over
the towers of Central, out to the harbor, and all the way to the
mountains of China, wispy and ambiguous in the distance. He could
smell Hong Kong down there, too: that peculiar mix of carbon
monoxide, raw sewage, duck mess, and burning incense that was like
nowhere else in the world. Shepherd didn’t care what anybody said
about the smell of Hong Kong. He liked it just fine. He even had to
admit the whole disgusting stench was beginning to feel a little
like home to him.

The rest of the day Shepherd did very little
but catch up on his sleep, watch sports on TV, and hang around
Freddy’s apartment. During the preceding week, he had been shot at
by hired assassins, beaten to the ground by an old lady wielding a
folding chair, and dragged out of bed in the middle of the night to
identify a headless corpse. Even for Shepherd, that amounted to a
pretty full week. He figured he deserved a little down time.

By the next morning, of course, he was
already bored. He made coffee and toast and ate it standing at the
sink, then he packed his briefcase and headed downhill to the
office. He wasn’t much of a decorator, but he had fixed the office
up enough to be comfortable and he liked being there. He also liked
the fact that no one else ever came there. He doubted Charlie even
knew where it was. His office was
his
place, the only one he
really had anymore.

The shophouse was old, as old as anything in
Hong Kong was, and the interior walls were brick with some kind of
white glaze over them. They had been troweled smooth on some long
ago day and even now still glistened like porcelain. On the north
side of the room, three tall windows looked down into Gage Street,
a narrow roadway just below Hollywood Road that was so overhung
with Chinese-language signs suspended from long metal brackets
poking out from the shop fronts that Shepherd could barely see the
street through the tangle. It seemed like half the buildings on the
street were covered in bamboo construction scaffolding, but then
buildings were always being torn down and rebuilt in Hong Kong. It
was a city in which a building was hardly finished before it was
torn down and something bigger built in its place. Shepherd wasn’t
sure how his little shophouse had survived the onslaught, but he
was glad it had.

Perpendicular to the windows he had placed a
long library table he had found in a used furniture shop up in the
New Territories, and behind it he had put a new Aeron chair he had
paid far too much for. He kept the desk largely bare. There was
nothing on it at all except for a large leather desk pad, two
computers, and a telephone he used so seldom he generally had to
look up the number when somebody wanted to call him on it.

The wall behind Shepherd’s worktable was
lined with three horizontal filing cabinets, each five drawers
high. Locking bars had been welded to the fronts of all three of
the cabinets and formidable looking padlocks dangled from the
handles of each of the bars. On the wall to his left was a line of
tall bookcases. They were half-filled with mostly out-of-date law
books and legal journals while the rest of the shelves held the
kind of accumulation of items that men seemed to amass when they
were left to their own devices. A green gym bag, a broken coffee
maker, a coffee maker that worked sometimes, a half dozen ceramic
coffee mugs, a large bag of potato chips, some magazines, a
burlwood cigar humidor, a couple of ashtrays decorated with beer
logos, and stacks of old copies of
The New York Times
,
The Wall Street Journal
, and the
Financial Times
.

The wall in front of Shepherd, the one on
which his eyes rested whenever he lifted them from what he was
doing at his big table, was bare except for a single large oil
painting hung in the exact center that was at least five feet on
each side. The painting didn’t actually depict any recognizable
form, at least no form that was recognizable to Shepherd. Instead,
it was a riot of primary colors that swirled and swooped and
splashed over the canvas in a way that seem at a glance to be
random, but on closer inspection began to look as intricately
interwoven as the fabric of an English tweed jacket. It was the
only one of Anita’s paintings he still had. She had taken all the
others, but she had given him this one for his birthday and so it
was his and he had kept it when she left. He had brought it with
him from Bangkok and hung it in his new office. Almost immediately
he decided that had been a very bad idea. But he had never gotten
around to moving it and it was still there.

***

SHEPHERD SPENT HIS first day in the office catching
up with the mail and returning a few calls that had been left on
his voice mail while he was away. It was all routine stuff, but
after recent events he found a certain comfort in routine
stuff.

On the second day, reasonably well rested and
pretty much caught up, he brewed a large pot of coffee and turned
his attention to the new work he had created for himself in
Bangkok. First, he sorted through all the wire confirmations that
had come in to make certain Charlie’s funds had been moved out of
Thailand as they were supposed to have been. When he was sure all
the wires had gone where they should have, he distributed the
proceeds in the receiving accounts to the offshore investment
trusts through which he managed Charlie’s money.

He bought some short-dated T-bills in London,
established new currency positions in Frankfurt, acquired a pile of
Australian government bonds, and even placed an order with one of
the brokers he used in New York to take a large position in an
exchange-traded fund focused on gold futures. Shepherd wasn’t very
enthusiastic about gold as a long-term investment, but Charlie was
Asian so naturally he loved it.

All in all, Shepherd managed Charlie’s
investment portfolios with a bias to the stodgy side. He would be
the first to admit that there was nothing particularly imaginative
about his asset allocation strategy, but all of the portfolio
holdings were extremely liquid and that suited Charlie just fine.
Charlie wasn’t the kind of guy who liked to have his money tied up
in shopping malls in New Jersey. What he liked were the kind of
investments he could turn into cash at a moment’s notice:
refugee money,
Charlie called it. So that’s just what
Shepherd gave him.

Shepherd worked later than usual trying to
sort out the accounts for some of the offshore trusts, but he just
couldn’t get them to balance. Finally, around 7:00
P.M.
, he decided he’d had enough and the problem would
keep until the next day. He locked up the office and headed to
Jimmy’s Kitchen for dinner. An old-time Hong Kong expat hangout
down at the bottom of Wyndham Street, Jimmy’s was one of Shepherd’s
favorite places to pull up a stool and have dinner alone at the
bar.

He was about half a block from Jimmy’s when
his cell phone rang.

“We found the head,” Jello announced without
preamble. “You need to look at it.”

“You going to FedEx it up here?”

“I was thinking more along the lines of
emailing you a picture.”

Shepherd was reasonably sure no one had ever
called him before on his way to dinner to tell him he was about to
receive a photograph of a severed head. Maybe, he thought to
himself, it would be better just have a martini.

“We’ve cleaned it up,” Jello said, “but it
was in the water a long time. It isn’t in very good shape. The
crabs got to it.”

Maybe even two martinis.

JIMMY’S KITCHEN IS all dark wood paneling, wall
sconces with red cloth shades, elderly waiters in black with
starched white aprons, and booths that are either tufted red
leather or pretty good vinyl imitations. It’s the kind of a place
where you can easily imagine Frank Sinatra sauntering through the
door, throwing a two-fingered salute to the bartender, and breaking
into a couple of choruses of ‘My Way.’ And it is unquestionably the
last restaurant on earth with both Beef Wellington and Baked Alaska
on the menu. Shepherd liked Jimmy’s for three reasons. The food was
pretty good; the prices were generally reasonable; and he was
almost always the youngest person in the place.

He took a stool at the bar and ordered a
Hendricks martini, then he pulled out his phone and checked his
email. Nothing but an offer from a Canadian drug store to sell him
cheap Viagra. Another couple of weeks like the one he’d just had
and maybe he would check that out.