Thai Horse (22 page)

HONG KONG

Hatcher loved the Orient. He had spent years there before Sloan sent him to Central America, years on the back rivers, rubbing elbows with the Ts’e K’am Men Ti, the river pirates who operated south fro
m
Shanghai and east from Thailand into the Macao Runs of Hong Kong. He knew them all. Joe Cockroach, half Chinese, half Malaysian, who had a flawless British accent and wore tailored raw-silk suits when he did business in the backwaters of the Jungsian River. Harry Tsin who had a degree from UCLA and a peg leg from a Japanese prison camp. Sam-Sam Sam, a psychopath who controlled the river, demanded tribute from all wh
o
did business on it, and skinned anyone who double-crossed him and hung the skin on the side of his boat as an example.

And Cohen, the white Tsu Fi.

As the 747 swept over the bay and banked into Kai Tak airport he felt a surge of excitement. Not that Hong Kong was a particular favorite
—
it was too crowded, too noisy, too full of itself. But this was where everything in the Orient began, where the money changers squatted on the doorstep of China, and riches flowed back and forth like the tides. The first red glow of dawn streaked the horizon as they swept in low from the south. Shaukiwan, the floating city of junks, sampans and snakeboats, slid silently below them, then Hong
K
ong island and the bay, and finally Kowloon peninsula, facing a harbor fat with cargo ships from all over the world. Junks and sampans surrounded them like pups nuzzling a bitch hound.

Hatcher had old friends here
—
and old enemies, too, but he never thought about them. D
o
n’t ever look back, Sloan had told him in the beginning. Bad for the old clicks. Clicks, that’s what Sloan called instinct.

It was
5
A.M., only two hours before his nonstop left for Bangkok, hardly time to get into trouble. He would eat at a small restaurant he liked a few miles from the airport and be off again.

As he left the plane his plans were suddenly changed. The first thing he heard when he entered the terminal was the page.

‘Attention, arriving passenger Hatcher, please contact Pan American information as
soon
as possible.
. .

He went to the Pan Am counter near the gate.

‘I’m Hatcher,’ he told a handsome, very erect Asian woman. ‘You paged me.’

‘Take the phone right there,’ s
h
e said pleasantly, pointing to a house phone on the e
n
d of the counter. The operator was just as pleasant. ‘You have a message to call this number collect in Washington, D.C., and ask for Sergeant Flitcraft,’ she said, and dictated the number. Hatcher repeated the number, then found a pay phone and made the call.

‘OSI, Sergeant Flitcraft,’ a crisp voice on the other end answered. He quickly accepted the call. ‘Mr. Hatcher?’

‘Yes,’ Hatcher whispered.

‘Would you mind giving me your old Navy serial number, sir?’

‘Not at all,’ Hatcher’s voice rasped. ‘N3146021.’

‘Very good, sir. You also cleared the voice print. Colonel Sloan says to wait in Hong Kong for him. He’s a few hours behind you. You have adjoining rooms at the Peninsula Hotel, he’ll meet you there at about ten hundred hours, give or take.’

‘That’s it?’

‘That’s it, sir.’

‘Thanks, Sergeant,’ Hatcher said arid hung up. Damn, he thought, Sloan was really riding tight herd on this one. What the hell could all this be about?

To Hatcher, the Peninsula Hotel defined Hong Kong. It stood like a beacon on the tip of Kowloon, facing the Star Ferry that carried passengers to the Central District on Hong Kong island. Rolls-Royce limos for the guests lined up at the door in front of ricksha
w
s. The desk manager was a short, sleek Oriental in a dark double- breasted suit; the ancient concierge wore a traditional silk brocaded
cheongsam.
In a corner of the lobby a blond woman who looked Swedish played Chinese melodies on a Swiss harp for those who came in late or rose early. It was truly where East and West came together and was one of the finest hotels in the world. Guests were treated like royalty.

It was raining when he got to his room. The bellhop hung up his suit bag, turned on the ceiling fan and the television, vanished for a minute or two and returned with a bucket of ice.

‘Mm goi,’
Hatcher said, thanking him and tucking a Hong Kong five in his hand.

When the bellman was gone, Hatcher flicked off the TV, opened the sliding door and went out on the balcony. He had slept little for the past three days, and he let the rain-cooled breeze refresh him as he watched the rising sun chase the storm across the bay. It had already passed over the island, leaving
behind
a glittering jewel of skyscrapers and glass towers below the towering peak of Victoria Mountain.

He ordered breakfast and had the waiter set up the table on his balcony. While he ate he watched the riverboats moving in and out of the harbor, the Star Ferry streaking toward the island, the Peak Train gliding up the side of the mountain.

He began to doze. Jet lag was catching up to him, and for reasons he did not immediately understand, Hatcher’s mind slipped back to a dark night ten years before. To the tram rising up in darkness, through the banyan trees, past the rich houses. The dark figure of Harline waiting at the top, a cigarette glowing between his smiling lips. Hatcher leading him around to the cliffs of the overlook and Harline holding out his hand eagerly, almost salivating, his effete British accent in the darkness
—
‘Good to do business with people you can trust, chum’
—
and Hatcher dropping the envelope, leaning down to pick it up, grabbing the Britisher around the knees as if he were tackling him, vaulting the slender man backward, down into four hundred feet of emptiness, his terrified scream fading into the darkness.

Hatcher jerked awake and s
a
t staring out at Victoria Peak. Ten years. Where in hell did that come from? Yesterday was history, you never looked back, never thought back, never went back unless the job required it, and when it did, you dealt with it with the old clicks, your subconscious providing whatever background was necessary to stay alive. Now, suddenly, here it was, hunched on the rim of the alpha zone, dogging him. Suddenly he found himself wondering for what purpose he had killed Harline. Sloan had never told him and he had not asked.

‘It’s a sanction. You’re a soldier doing what soldiers do. Soldiers don’t ask.’ Sloan had said that the first time he ever asked why. And now, for the
f
irst time since he met Sloan, Hatcher thought, A soldier without uniform, without identification, without credentials or identity. What the hell kind of soldier was that? And now here he was, back again, and the doubts about Sloan gnawed at him.

Out on the island, black-eared kites, who had rushed to the sanctuary of the trees to escape the rain, spread their two-foot wings and soared over the island. For centuries they had shared the lofty aerie with rich taipans, the business rulers whose homes dotted the precipitous face of the mountain like small forts. Below them spread the Central District, the business heart of Hong Kong, where Chinese gangsters cavorted with British bankers and taipans, where dynasties were created and empires won and lost, gold was king, and where the binding ethic was money.

An island founded by smugglers and pirates, thought Hatcher. The only thing that changes here is time.

And thinking of pirates, Hatchers mind slipped again, this time to Cohen, and another
m
emory crowded his brain. This time it was a happy one.

Thinking of Cohen made Hatcher feel good, for Rob Cohen was one of those characters who made the Orient the Orient, a man of mystery, an A
m
erican expatriate who had become a Hong Kong legend.
H
atcher was one of the few people who knew the whole scenario. They were close and trusting friends, though they
h
ad neither seen nor talked to each other for several years.

Ten years before, when they first met, Cohen was known as king of the Macao Runs, arid an unlikely king he was, buying contraband merchandise with the skill of a Rothschild and smuggling boatloads past the Hong Kong customs several times a week with the adroitness of a Chinese warlord.

By then Cohen was known as the white Tsu Fi of the river, although it was a while before Hatcher understood what that meant. All Hatcher knew was if you wanted to know the back-room secrets of Hong Kong, this short, wiry Jew with the Boston accent and the scraggly beard, who wore Chinese clothes, spoke three different dialects, had a lock on the river trade, and h
a
d become one of Hong Kong’s most mysterious and feared characters, was your man.

Before they met, Hatcher had he
a
rd many stories about Cohen
—
rumors, tall tales, lies
—
all slanderous, and all, to one extent or another true. But the real truth was far stranger than any fiction Cohen’s detractors and enemies could have invented. Through th
e
years as Cohen and Hatcher progressed from being c
a
utious adversaries to becoming close friends, Hatcher grew to trust the legendary schemer. And in time he had gradually pieced the story together.

Back in 1975, Cohen’s office was a dismal, dusty, two-room closet over an acupuncture parlor on crowded Cat Street, which was just a small anteroom with two uncomfortable chairs. And it was lot. There was no air conditioning and the ceiling fan looked as if it had been out of order since the second dynasty.

‘Mr. Hatcher? Come on in,’ Chen said in an accent that was part Boston, part British and part singsong Chinese.

To see him, Hatcher had to s
q
uint through dancing motes of dust spotlighted by the sun that streamed through the windows. Cohen was sitting in a straight- backed chair framed by the sunli
g
ht. Then, suddenly, Hatcher remembered him.

‘We’ve met before,’ he said, exte
n
ding his hand.

‘Right,’ Cohen said, returning a hearty handshake, ‘two years ago, up the Beijiang in Chin Chin land.’

‘Sam-Sam Sam and his crew,’ Hatcher said with a nod.

And Cohen laughed and nodded. ‘Right, a true shit if there ever was one. He’ll steal your eyeballs and screw your French poodle while you’re holding the leash. You’ve got a good memory
there,
gwai-lo.’

‘Yours ain’t too bad either.’

‘Jesus,’ Cohen said with a grin,, ‘ain’t it great to talk American. It’s the only thing I miss. These guys out here? They don’t know shit about the vernacular.’

Their meeting two years earlier had been a brief one. At the time, Hatcher had written off the brazen man as just another quick-buck river rat not long for this world, an easy mistake to make because on that night Cohen was making his first trip into what he called Chin Chin land
—
China.

For three years Hatcher had worked the back rivers from Thailand east through the deltas and terraced plains of Cambodia and north through Laos, Vietnam and China to the Macao Runs of Hong Kong. He knew the Irrawaddy, the Mekong, and the Yalu Jiang rivers and their backwaters, knew the towns and was accepted
—
or ignored
—
by the villagers, who considered him a soldier of fortune without flag or loyalty. He dodged the Red patrols in Vietnam by hiding in the daytime and traveling at night, and by speaking Russian when he was stopped. He got by on audacity and because his role was mostly benign. He was there to get information, not to cause trouble, and he gathered his information by observing rather than asking questions.

It was to learn their secret ways, their routes, their sources, their pick-up points and,
mo
stly, their tie-in to the Saigon black market that had brought Hatcher to their meeting place in 1973. They called themselves the Ts’e K’am Men Ti, the Secret Gatekeepers. There he occasionally did business with them to bolster his credibility. On the pretense of selling guns, he continued to build his file of informants and river operators and their connection to the Hong Kong underworld. He was known as
gli Occhi di Sassi,
the Man With Stone Eyes, a nickname given him by one of the most trusted men on his team, a onetime
Mafioso
enforcer named Tony Bagglio.

Standing in the dusty office, Hatcher remembered quite clearly his first sight of Cohen materializing out of the fog, a strange-looking creature in a silk
cheongsam
and with a long, straggly beard standing in the bow of a snakeboat
—
with only one other man, a hard-looking Chinese at the tiller
—
gliding quietly up one of the jungle-cramped offshoots of the Beijiang River, forty or so miles north of Macao.

I’ll be damned, Hatcher had thought to himself, what the hell’s this Chinese rabbi doing up here?

He soon found out.