THE KING OF MACAU (The Jack Shepherd International Crime Novels) (2 page)

When I heard the rumble of a big bike revving hard and moving south toward the harbor, I figured that had to be the shooter beating it out of there and I resurrected the idea of taking a glance out from behind the Rolls. I pushed myself to my knees and did a quick head fake over the hood. Since that didn’t draw any fire and I didn’t see a shooter, I lifted my head and took a long look around.

Nobody was down and there wasn’t any sign of damage. All I could see was a lot of people running around like idiots. Macau was getting back to normal already.

SUDDENLY I REALIZED I
wasn’t alone there behind that Rolls Royce.

A middle-aged man dressed in a dark grey suit and a white shirt without a tie was sitting on the ground and leaning back against the car’s rear door. He looked Chinese, with a square face and a head so large he made me think of a bobble-head doll. The man was serenely smoking a cigarette and he looked as if he had merely chosen the driveway behind the Rolls as a convenient place to relax and grab a smoke following a hard night at the tables, rather than as a shelter from flying bullets.

The man saw me looking at him and smiled politely. “It’s a real nuisance, isn’t it?” he said.

A nuisance?

“You needn’t worry,” he continued while I was still thinking about his choice of words. “They probably just wanted to scare somebody.”

“They sure as hell scared me.”

“They almost never hit anyone. I doubt they even mean to.”

“Are you saying this sort of thing happens all the time?”

The man looked me over more closely. “I took you for a local,” he said. “Where do you live?”

“Hong Kong.”

He nodded his head very slowly as if that fully explained my ignorance about life in Macau, but he didn’t say anything else.

“Are you telling me attacks like this are common here?” I asked him again.

“It happens,” the man shrugged, looking uncomfortable now.

“I thought the gang violence ended when the Portuguese left and the Chinese took over.”

“All that ended when the Chinese took over was anyone talking about the violence.”

The man pushed himself up and brushed at his trousers with his open hands.

“You said they probably wanted to scare somebody. Who are you talking about? Who is ‘they’?”

The man dropped his cigarette and ground it out under the toe of one impeccably polished wingtip, but he stayed stubbornly silent.

“You mean the triads, don’t you?” I pressed. “You’re telling me those were triad shooters we were ducking.”

“I velly solly,” the man murmured. “I no speakee English.”

He shoved his hands in his pockets, trotted quickly up the steps, and disappeared into the lobby of the Wynn.

I WAS STILL ON
my knees behind the Rolls Royce, and I felt pretty silly about that, so I got up and looked around. There were some people here and there who might be described as appearing anxious, but appearing anxious was pretty much the usual state of most people in a gambling town like Macau, and no one really looked like they had just survived a barrage of gunfire.

Near the end of the driveway two Chinese men in dark suits were punctuating their conversation with animated gestures. The loud, harsh cadence of their Mandarin made them seem as if they were about to start swinging at each other. I doubted they were. Mandarin is an angry-sounding language at the best of times. I remembered somebody once telling me that Mandarin isn’t a spoken language at all. It’s a screamed language.

Back in the other direction, a black and cream colored taxi was unloading two women and a man who could have been almost any nationality. The man was badly dressed in long black shorts, flip-flops, and a wrinkled t-shirt, but the two women were costumed as if they were going to a ball. One was in a long silver sheath that glittered in the light, and the other was wearing a short purple dress that displayed her legs to maximum advantage. I glanced at the man’s face as they passed. He looked as smug as someone who had hit the daily double. Which, in a manner of speaking, I guess he had.

I looked out toward
Avenida 24 de Junho
where the shooter’s bike roared away not two minutes before, and I watched as a young woman in a short yellow dress and red heels puttered past on a sea-blue motor scooter that looked like a Vespa. I doubted it actually was a Vespa, but rather almost certainly a Chinese copy. The woman was slim and small-boned with tightly cropped hair and a dazzling smile, and I wondered briefly if she was a fake, too, a sort of Chinese knock-off of Audrey Hepburn.

Then I stopped wondering about the people around me and started wondering about something far more important.

I started wondering what I was getting myself into there in Macau.

I DIDN’T SLEEP WELL
that night, probably because being shot at makes you pretty jittery. Or maybe that’s just me…

After tossing and turning for a few hours, I woke around dawn to murky grey light creeping past the heavy wine-red drapes in the bedroom. For a minute or two there I couldn’t even remember where I was, but then I did, and I sat up, found the phone, and called room service for toast and scrambled eggs. And coffee. Lots and lots of coffee.

I showered, shaved, and dressed in khakis and a white shirt while I was waiting for breakfast. I pulled out a lightweight blue blazer, but I didn’t even think about putting on a tie. I stuck with the uniform I had settled on some time ago for first meetings with new clients. The jacket said I was a lawyer, but I figured the open-neck shirt added that I wasn’t anything like the rest of those pompous pricks.

Breakfast arrived and I ate the eggs and toast and drank coffee out in the living room while I watched the New York market wrap on CNBC. When it was over, I shut off the television, poured the rest of the coffee out of the pot, and unfolded the copy of the South China Morning Post that had been left outside my door. I read for a while and was wishing I had some fresh coffee when, at exactly nine o’clock, the suite’s doorbell rang. I folded up the paper and opened the door.

“I’m Gerald Brady, Professor Shepherd. Welcome to Macau.”

“Call me Jack, huh? I haven’t been Professor Shepherd for quite a while.”

We shook hands and Brady nodded slowly. Something close to a smile slid over his face and was gone. I was left with no doubt Brady knew the story of my hasty and slightly undignified exit from the academic life. At least now I wouldn’t have to tell it myself.

“I’m a vice president of MGM Macau, Jack. I’m in charge of security for the company.”

I guess that explained why I had such a nice suite.

When I stepped back and invited Brady in, a room service waiter wheeling a cart followed closely behind him. The cart was covered with a crisp white tablecloth and held a silver urn, a silver tray with a cream and sugar service, and two cups. The cups rattled against their saucers as the waiter pushed the cart across to the two love seats upholstered in dark green velvet that faced each other across a large glass coffee table.

“I hope you don’t mind,” Brady said. “I had some coffee brought up.”

“I never mind coffee.”

Brady and I sat opposite each other on the two love seats while the waiter fussed about, drawing us coffee from the urn. I examined my prospective client while the waiter worked. He was wearing an obviously expensive grey suit with just a bit too much sheen to it, an expensive gold watch that was just a bit too chunky, and an expensive haircut that was just a bit too perfect. Brady’s face also had that curious perma-tanned look everyone associated with Las Vegas and Hollywood. I had always wondered why chemically induced tans inevitably come out as an odd shade of color never seen in nature. How hard can it be for a nation that has sent men to the moon to come up with a cream that turns people’s skin brown instead of orange?

After the waiter finished, he bowed slightly toward Brady and slipped out without hanging around for somebody to produce a tip. It was obviously good to be vice-president.

I took a sip of coffee. It was a lot better than the room service coffee I’d had for breakfast. Maybe the executives at the MGM got classier coffee than the guests.

“Is this a corporate matter?” I asked to get the ball rolling. “Your email left me with the impression that it was personal.”

“I don’t like to be too specific in emails. You never know who’s reading them, do you?”

I thought I knew who was reading my emails and, hysterical claims aside about how NSA is watching us all, I was pretty sure it was the people to whom I sent them. But then I wasn’t running security for a major casino in Macau. Maybe that was a whole different deal.

So I nodded, drank some more coffee, and waited. When in doubt, I have always believed, drink more coffee. And wait.

“YOU COME WELL RECOMMENDED,
Jack.”

“By who?” Or was it whom?

“He asked me not to mention his name.”

Okay,
I thought,
at least that narrows it down a little.
Brady said ‘he’, so both of my ex-wives were out as the source of my testimonial. Not that I was hugely surprised by that.

“Why did he tell you not to mention his name?”

“I don’t know. You’ll have to ask him that.”

“Which is hard to do if I don’t know who to ask, don’t you think?”

Brady gave a tiny nod that appeared to concede the point, but he said nothing else.

I thought about that for a moment. Then I put my coffee cup down, leaned back on the love seat, and laced my fingers together behind my head.

“Okay, Mr. Brady. I’m listening. Why am I here this morning?”

BRADY RAMBLED ON FOR
at least ten minutes while I listened and drank coffee. I didn’t really mind because it was good coffee, but the story Brady told was pretty simple and needn’t have taken nearly that long.

The casino at the MGM Macau had recently experienced an unusual spike in its drop, the gambling industry term for the total amount of money the punters throw on its tables and push into its slots every day. I nearly went to sleep while Brady explained how they recognized the spike was unusual and not merely a matter of business getting better. I was willing to assume Brady, since he was head of security, recognized unusual when he saw it. I didn’t really need for him to persuade me.

The bottom line was that Brady suspected the MGM casino was being used for large-scale money laundering. Only he didn’t know quite how or, naturally, by whom.

“I understand, Jack, you’re pretty good at getting to the bottom of things like this.”

I was, so I didn’t say anything. I think modesty is tedious, and false modesty is downright obnoxious.

“We want you to find out what’s going on. If we’re being used to launder money, we want you to find out who’s using us and what the source of the funds is.”

“That’s all you want?”

“That’s all.”

Brady didn’t seem to realize I was joking, and I didn’t bother to tell him that I was. When you have to explain irony, it’s no longer particularly ironic, is it?

“Do you have any suspicions?” I asked instead.

“Of course. We always have suspicions.”

I said nothing and, after a moment, exactly like I knew he would, Brady told me exactly what those suspicions were.

“The triads aren’t as powerful in Macau as they once were,” he said. “But they’re still very much here.”

“So you think this is triad money?”

“It’s certainly a possibility that has to be considered.”

I gave him a look.

He cleared his throat.

“I guess it’s a fairly strong possibility,” he murmured.

MOST WESTERNERS THINK OF
the Chinese triads, if they think of them at all, as something out of a Bruce Lee movie. Just a bunch of crazy Chinese guys, mostly fictional, and even a little comic. The truth is that there’s nothing fictional about the Chinese triads. And absolutely nothing about them that is even slightly comic.

The triads have been established in Macau for at least four hundred years. The Sun Lee On, the Dai Huen Jai, the 14K, and the United Bamboo are the biggest players, but there are others, too. They’re all involved in drug trafficking, extortion, kidnapping, loansharking, smuggling, gambling, prostitution, and most every other form of criminal activity that anyone has been able to think of.

Officials in Macau routinely deny that the triads are active there, but nobody even pretends to believe them. Macau is the biggest gambling city on earth. It floats on an ocean of cash. Get serious.

In the 1990’s, Macau was a sanctuary for gangsters, gunrunners, pimps, corrupt officials, and spies of almost every nationality. It was a mixture of Chicago in the 20’s, Shanghai in the 30’s, and Casablanca in the 40’s. The Chinese triads controlled the streets, and everybody else kept their heads down. Most locals were smart enough not to go out after dark.

Then, on December 20, 1999, the first day of Chinese sovereignty over Macau, heavily armed convoys of PLA troops rumbled over the border in trucks and armored personnel carriers. They were greeted with cheers by thousands of Macanese. The message was clear: the Portuguese had been hopelessly inept in dealing with the violence and lawlessness in Macau, but the Chinese would impose order because order was good for business.

I thought back to what my bobble-headed friend had said the night before when we were sharing the shelter of that Rolls Royce. He said that the Chinese hadn’t stopped the triads at all. They had just stopped people from talking about them.

“SO YOU WANT ME
to investigate the triads,” I said to Brady.

“I didn’t actually mean—”

“You said you wanted me to get to the bottom of a spike in your drop, you think is money being laundered through your casino, and you think it is triad money.”

“We want you to find out the source of the spike in funds, Jack. Perhaps it’s triad money, perhaps it’s not.”

“You know it’s triad money, Mr. Brady. In Macau, what else could it be?”

Brady looked down at his shoes, which pretty much answered my question.

“There’s no way I’m going to get involved with the triads,” I said. “I was outside the Wynn last night when somebody plinked a few shots in my direction, apparently for grins. I’d hate for them to be serious about it next time.”