THE KING OF MACAU (The Jack Shepherd International Crime Novels) (19 page)

“Anyway,” Pine said, “at least now you’re back at your hotel so that’ll be the end of your embarrassment.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Well…” Pine looked confused, “because now you can shower and change and nobody will know you fell down someplace.”

“I meant how do you know I’m staying here at the MGM?”

“You told me when we were having coffee together at Starbucks.”

There were two problems with that.

First, Pine and I were not having coffee together at Starbucks. I was grabbing a quick sandwich for lunch when Pine barged in, introduced himself, and sat down at my table.

And second…

“I didn’t tell you I was staying at the MGM.”

“You must have, Jack. Otherwise, how would I know?”

How would Pine know, indeed? And more to the point, why would he care?

IT DIDN’T TAKE ME
very long after that to get rid of Pine. I mumbled something insincere about how good it was to see him again, walked on to the elevators, and went straight upstairs. The guy gave me a creepy feeling, but what could he possibly be up to?

When I let myself into the suite, I immediately saw the red light blinking on the telephone. There was a message from Pansy. She was back in her office and wanted me to come down as soon as I could. After taking a quick shower, I thought about shaving but decided that would be overdoing it, so I settled for combing my hair and putting on fresh jeans and a clean shirt. A quick glance in the mirror told me I looked pretty good so I went downstairs and to Pansy’s office. She looked a lot better.

PANSY WAS WEARING A
blue blazer over a pink shirt and she had a blue man’s necktie threaded through the collar and loosely knotted around her neck. On some women that outfit would have looked a little butch. On Pansy it looked terrific.

“There’s been nothing in the South China Morning Post about any investigation of money laundering anywhere, let alone here,” she said.

No small talk. No messing around. Straight to the point. I liked that.

“Do you know why they didn’t run the story?” she asked before I could say anything.

I hesitated. I didn’t really want to lie to Pansy, but I didn’t much want to bring Archie into the discussion either. At least not without telling him I was going to. He wasn’t the sort of guy who liked to be mentioned in dispatches.

Pansy must have caught my hesitation, but she completely misinterpreted it.

“It was your doing, wasn’t it, Jack? You got them to kill that story.”

“I can’t take the credit for that.”

“Of course you can. The paper would never have dropped that story without somebody leaning on them. It was too good. And who else knew? Who else could have shut them down?”

“Well, it wasn’t—”

“Don’t be so modest, Jack. Thank you. I’m more grateful than I can ever tell you.”

I didn’t know exactly what to say to Pansy. She was right about one thing: the SCMP would have run the story if somebody hadn’t put the screws to them not to. That was obvious. And since I didn’t want to tell her about Archie, that didn’t leave anyone else but me to have done it. I was uncomfortable taking credit for something I hadn’t done, but I was still trying to figure out how to get out of it when Pansy changed the subject.

“I’ve looked at the security photos that you asked Gerald to collect,” she said. “I don’t really know what to make of them.”

She picked up a fat manila envelope from one side of her desk and handed it to me. “That’s everyone over a five day period who presented a substantial amount of either $50 bills or €100 notes to any of our cashiers.”

“You said on the telephone that there was something odd about these pictures. What is it?”

“First tell me what you see.”

I pulled the flap of the envelope open and slid out a thick stack of photographs. I flipped through them quickly, but nothing in particular caught my eye. There were a lot of photos that appeared to be of the same people dressed differently, but that would be the way, wouldn’t it? There would be a finite number of smurfs involved and they would each make multiple runs. Nothing odd about that. What was I missing that Pansy had seen?

I went back and examined the pictures individually for a few moments. None of them were very good photographs since they had all been printed from surveillance video. Each picture was slightly distorted at the edges from the effects of the camera’s wide-angle lens, and the color was washed-out and unnatural.

The first picture was of a woman. She appeared to be in her thirties and was plainly dressed and unremarkable. She had an Asian face, but I couldn’t guess what nationality she was from the photo. She could have been from almost anywhere.

The rest of the photos were similar. About two-thirds of the people in the photographs were women and one-third were men. Each person looked to be in their twenties or thirties and appeared generically Asian. The mode of dress changed often from one photograph to another, but only the most rudimentary kind of disguises had been employed. The women changed their hair from up to down, and either wore glasses or removed them. The men sometimes wore hats and sometimes didn’t. It was enough variety not to attract the notice of any of the cashiers even if they were reasonably attentive, but in the photos the subterfuge looked pretty amateurish.

I got up from the chair and starting dealing the photos out onto Pansy’s carpet, arranging them in rows with the photos placed tightly side by side. When I finished, I stood with my back to the wall and tried to take in the entire collection with a single glance. Pansy had not said a word the entire time I was laying out the photographs, but now she walked around from behind her desk and stood next to me.

“I don’t know what I’m looking at,” I finally said after a few minutes of examining the photographs in silence.

“I know what you’re not looking at, Jack.”

I shifted my eyes to Pansy and waited.

“You’re not looking at the kind of people you see on the floor of my casino,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll bet you a million dollars that none of those people are Chinese.”

I didn’t have the million with which to call Pansy’s bet, but if I had, I wouldn’t have done it.

It was partly a matter of facial features, partly build and size, partly clothing, and partly body language, but I didn’t think people in those pictures were either mainland or local Chinese. And mainland and local Chinese made up almost all of the gamblers in Macau.

“This isn’t a triad operation then,” I said.

“Not unless the triads are hiring outside help these days,” Pansy said, “and I don’t think they are.”

We both went back to studying the pictures in silence. Finally, I spoke up and broke it.

“So who are they, Pansy?”

“No idea.”

“They look a little Chinese, don’t they? Some of them at least? Could they be Singaporeans?”

“Sure,” Pansy nodded. “They could be from Singapore. They could also be from New Jersey. I’m only telling you these people aren’t locals, and they aren’t mainlanders either.”

She was right about that. I had no doubt now at all.

But if the smurfs weren’t Chinese, then who the hell were they?

I LEFT PANSY’S OFFICE
and took all the security photographs up to my suite to play with them for a while. I hoped that spending some time shuffling them around into various combinations might cause something brilliant to come to me. So I did, but it didn’t.

I was looking at two big problems that were completely unrelated. But try as I might, I could only think of one possible solution, and it was the same for both.

These were my problems: how to find out who those people smurfing money through the MGM casino were, and where to find Freddy or Kim Jong-Nam or whatever the hell I was supposed to call him now.

And this was my solution to both: call Archie Ward.

ARCHIE DIDN’T ANSWER HIS
phone, of course, which wasn’t a big surprise to me, but nobody else answered either. Not even a robot voice asking me to leave a message. The number Archie gave me rang and rang and nothing at all happened, which was a little bit disconcerting in this day when every known form of media provided you with multiple ways to leave messages for everyone. All I could do now was assume Archie’s phone had registered my call and that he would call me back.

So I hung up and waited. It seemed to me I was always doing that: waiting for somebody to call me back. I didn’t really believe in heaven and hell, but if I had I would have imagined hell as sitting in a chair and waiting all eternity for somebody to call me back. I had no idea what heaven might be, but I resolved to give that matter some serious thought first chance I got.

I spent the next hour stacking and unstacking the security photos and sorting them into different combinations. Finally I went slowly through each of the piles of photos, keeping my mind as empty as I could and trying to let the photos tell me whatever they wanted to. After a half hour of that mumbo jumbo I gave up and admitted the truth to myself. They didn’t want to tell me shit.

The whole process was so fruitless and tedious that I was more than ready to abandon it when Archie finally called back.

“I THOUGHT WE HAD
a deal, Archie. You were supposed to give me the number of the phone you actually answer.”

“Did anyone else answer when you called the number I gave you?”

“No.”

“So there you go. This is the phone number I answer.”

“But you didn’t answer.”

“Well…now you’re getting into technicalities, mate. Fucking lawyers. It’s always a bunch of technicalities with you guys, isn’t it?”

I didn’t say anything right away so Archie started talking again.

“You asked me for the number of the phone that I answer, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“That’s what I gave you. If anyone answers the number I gave you, it’s me.”

“This isn’t getting us anywhere.”

“I was hoping you’d see that.”

Sometimes I thought Archie did this sort of thing for fun, and sometimes I thought he did it to polish up his reputation for being a deeply irritating prick. But he also had a reputation for being uniquely well informed and incredibly well connected all over Asia, so I put up with nonsense like this. Sometimes I wondered how many people did.

“I’ve got some pictures I need to show you,” I said.

“Of what?”

“They’re the security camera pictures of the people who brought large numbers of $50 and €100 bills to the MGM cashiers during the last week.”

“Okay,” Archie said. “You want to do it right now?”

“Yeah, right now. Where are you?”

Archie gave me an address. I didn’t recognize it, but I wrote it down.

“Is this where you’re staying?” I asked.

I didn’t get any answer. Archie had already hung up.

WHEN THE CAB STOPPED
and I got out, my first thought was that the driver had misunderstood my no doubt fractured pronunciation of the Portuguese street name and taken me to the wrong place. We were somewhere in the far north of Macau close to the Chinese border in a narrow alleyway paved in worn cobblestones. It was a little after sunset and the filigreed iron lampposts spaced every fifty feet or so lit the whole area with a dim, slightly amber glow. Two story, Mediterranean looking buildings lined both sides of the alleyway. Their pitted and cracked concrete facades were colored in faded pastels and most of the windows that I could see were covered with heavy, mostly black or dark green shutters. There wasn’t a living soul in sight.

Gesturing for the driver to wait, I tucked the envelope with the photos under my arm, pulled out my phone, and dialed Archie’s number. I heard Archie’s phone ringing behind a door no more than ten feet further up the street so I walked up to the door and opened it without knocking.

Archie sat in an old-fashioned black and white barber chair covered in a sheet. His face had a thick layer of lather on it and an elderly man wearing a tan smock was shaving him with a straight razor. Archie’s telephone lay on a narrow shelf under a large mirror and it continued to ring without anyone appearing to give a damn.

“Hang up that fucking phone, mate. The noise is driving me around the twist.”

“You could answer it.”

“Why?” Archie sounded genuinely puzzled. “You’re standing right here.”

He had a point.

I PAID OFF MY
cab, went back inside, and sat in another barber chair toward the back of the room with the envelope on my lap.

“You want a shave?” Archie lifted his thumb toward the old man with a wrinkled and wizened face who was methodically swiping a straight razor through the thick layer of white foam on his face. It sounded like somebody was sandpapering a table.

“No, I don’t want a shave.”

“Suit yourself.” I thought I could see Archie shrug underneath the sheet tied around his neck.

“I have something important to talk to you about, and this doesn’t really seem to me to be the place or time to do it.”

“Don’t worry about Carlos. He doesn’t speak a word of English. You can say whatever you want.”

I thought about that for a moment and finally tossed out my own shrug. Pulling the thick stack of photographs out of the envelope, I held them out. Archie snaked one arm from under the sheet and took them. Carlos paid no attention at all and kept on methodically shaving Archie’s face.

I said nothing as Archie slowly worked his way through the stack of photographs. He looked at each one for a beat, shuffled it to the bottom of the stack, and looked at the next one. When he had seen them all, he held the stack out to me and I took it back.

“Okay, what’s your question?” Archie asked.

“Are this people mainland Chinese?”

“No.”

“Local Chinese?”

“No.”

“You think the triads are bringing in outside help these days?”

“No.”

“It’s not the triads smurfing the MGM, is it?”

“Doesn’t look like it.”

“So here’s my question: who the hell is it?”

In the silence that followed, I listened to the straight razor scratching against Archie’s whiskers under the lather.