The Dragon Head of Hong Kong (9 page)

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ANDY WAS QUIET
during the taxi ride. Ava could sense his doubt about the need to go to Kung’s office. She thought about saying something and then decided to leave things as they were. She’d find more money or she wouldn’t. Either way, she didn’t feel the need to justify taking the time to confirm Kung’s claim.

The three-storey red-brick office building was on a side street between the train station and the hotel. For a building that looked to be only ten years old, it was shabby. The windows were stained and dusty, the brick was chipped, and the blue paint on the front door had faded. The door also had hack marks that could have been made by a machete.

“Charming place,” Ava said.

“Typical of the older part of Shenzhen,” Andy said. “They threw up these places in what seemed like a few weeks. The original tenants were here to make a quick killing and weren’t too interested in anything fancy.”

There wasn’t an elevator, but Kung’s office was on the second floor, up one short flight of stairs. Its door was plain grey steel with one lock. Andy opened it and they stepped inside. The office had a metal desk, two one-drawer filing cabinets, a small table that held a fax machine, and four chairs. Ava went behind the desk and sat down.

“I could be a while,” she said. “You don’t have to stay.”

“I think it’s better that I do. If one of Kung’s goons decides not to listen to him, you might need me.”

Ava shrugged. “That’s your decision, but thank you for being considerate.”

“Can I help?”

Ava started opening the desk drawers. “I’ll tell you in a minute.” The middle drawer was empty. The right-side drawer had files marked
WIRE TRANSFERS
and
LETTERS OF CREDIT
.
She took them out and stacked them on the desk. The left-side drawer was full of business directories and phone books. Ava got up and went to the nearest filing cabinet. She saw files fat with purchase orders, shipping documents, and invoices. Those also went onto the desk. The other cabinet gave up all kinds of files devoted to the banks Kung had named. She pulled them out. “I seem to have everything I need to start,” she said.

“I feel kind of useless,” Andy said.

“Well, you can sit and watch me look at paper or you can go and get us some lunch.”

“Lunch sounds good.”

“I’d love some fried noodles.”

“I’ll lock the door when I leave. Don’t open it unless you hear three knocks.”

“Don’t rush,” Ava said, opening the China Agricultural Bank file.

She restricted her search to the time when Lo and Kung were doing business. If she couldn’t find what she was looking for, she’d go further back, but her feeling was that if Kung had been pulling the same scam for years, she’d find its roots in the Lo deals.

She worked quietly and steadily, matching letters of credit and purchase orders to shipping documents, and then found the wire transfers Kung had sent to Lo at the beginning of their relationship. Then she looked at the invoices that Kung had cut when he sold the goods, and she matched them against the inbound manifest. Every single kilo of chicken feet had been sold. She pulled out Kung’s accounts receivable file. Not only did they appear to have been sold, but every invoice was stamped
PAID
and dated. Now she turned to the bank records. Some statements were missing for the months she was interested in, but in the ones she did find, it appeared that the money from the sales of the chicken feet had found its way to the China Agricultural Bank.

Ava had separated the Royal Meats paperwork from Lo’s, and now she turned her attention to it. She had just confirmed that all that company’s products had been sold when she heard three sharp knocks. She walked to the door and pressed her ear against it. “Is that you, Andy?”

“Yeah. My hands are full.”

She thought his voice sounded slightly strained, and her nerves jumped. “Just a second,” she said. She moved to the right of the door and pressed her back against the wall. If there was someone else with Andy on the other side, they would push the door as hard as they could, trying to ram her, and rush inside. Positioned to the right, she was clear of the door and would have an unobstructed view of anyone coming in. She turned the handle and then saw Andy’s foot kick the door. She slid further along the wall, her right hand poised to strike.

“Hey, don’t hit me,” Andy said, stepping inside with his hands cradling a large brown paper bag.

“Sorry, I thought you had someone with you,” Ava said, relaxing.

He had bought fried noodles with beef in XO sauce, steamed baby bok choy, and salt-and-pepper shrimp. He opened the bag and put the containers on a chair, then placed chairs on either side. “How’s it going?” he asked.

“Not bad. There’s a paper trail for the goods. Now all I have to do is get more fully into the bank records. It looks like he sold all the chicken feet and pork,” Ava said as she plucked a long, thin slice of beef from its nest of noodles. It was so tender she hardly had to chew. “I wonder how they manage to get the beef so soft,” she said.

“Magic water,” Andy said.

“What?”

“That’s what we call it. My wife and I have a noodle shop at the Kowloon
MTR
station. My father-in-law opened it years ago and we bought it from him last year. He had this concoction that he soaked pork, beef, and chicken in to soften it. My wife knows what’s in it but I don’t. She just says it’s magic water and tells me not to worry about it.”

“Oh, I wish I hadn’t asked.”

Andy shrugged. “Don’t worry. She wouldn’t let me eat it if she thought it would harm me,” he said. “Now, you didn’t finish telling me about the money. You said he sold everything, but did he make a profit?”

“It looks like it. Not huge amounts, but there was certainly enough margin that he seems to have covered his costs and pocketed some profit.”

“So if we’re owed a million and a half, there should be that much in those two accounts.”

“You would think so, but there isn’t. I took a quick look at the balances on the last statements from both banks, and they add up to just over four hundred thousand, like he said.”

“So where is the money?”

“I don’t know yet. It could have been spent, or tied up in new inventory, or just moved to another account somewhere. I’m missing a couple of paper bank records, but once I go online I should be able to at least find a starting point.”

Andy reversed his chopsticks, picked up two shrimp from the tray, and put them on Ava’s plate.

“Thanks,” she said.

“Could you answer another question?”

“Sure.”

“You brushed me off when I asked you, but Carlo and I were talking about it last night when you were sleeping, and it’s really bugging us.”

“Is this about me and that thug of Kung’s?”

“Yeah. How in hell did you do that? He’s twice your size but you floored him like he was a midget.”

“There isn’t any mystery to it,” Ava said. “I practise a martial art that’s called bak mei. It’s a very old form and it’s designed to cause damage. In this case I hit a pressure point at the base of his rib cage where there’s a gathering of nerve endings. The person’s size doesn’t matter — a blow there with enough force is incapacitating.”

“I’ve never heard of bak mei, and I thought I knew most of the martial arts.”

“Well, bak mei is only taught one-on-one. It’s passed down from father to son, or in my case, mentor to student. I just never imagined I would ever have to use it.”

“Whatever it is, it works.”

“I know. I guess I have my mother to thank.”

“She taught you?”

“Good God, no, but when I was young, she insisted that my sister and I be fully developed young women. She put us into Chinese, abacus, and ballet classes, but I drew the line when it came to learning the violin, so my mother gave me a choice between gymnastics or kung fu. I took kung fu and that eventually led me to bak mei.”

“I have two daughters, and my wife is pushing them into dance and music as well. Maybe I’ll insist on a martial art.”

“It can’t hurt. How about Carlo? Does he have kids?”

“You gotta be joking. He’s a lover, or so he thinks. Most of the action he gets he pays for, and there aren’t many mama-sans in the Hong Kong clubs or over in Macau who don’t know him.”

“And what about Uncle?”

Andy shook his head. “There’s no wife and no kids that anyone’s ever heard about. He’s a bit of a loner and not a talker. Keeps things close to his chest, but when he tells you something, it’s always good to listen, because he’s not wrong very often and he always tells the truth. Maybe you’ll get to meet him when we’ve finished this job.”

“And why would I want to do that?” Ava said.

Andy blinked as if surprised by her response. “No particular reason, other than I think the two of you might get along.”

“What makes you think that?”

“You’re both smart.”

“That’s not much of an answer.”

Andy shrugged and looked down at his food.

“I told you a lot of things about me when you asked how I took that guy out. Now it’s your turn. Tell me a bit more about Uncle.”

“Like what?”

“What business was he in before? Carlo wouldn’t say anything when I asked him at the apartment.”

“Uncle was a dragon head.”

“A what?”

“That’s what they call the guy who runs the organization. It’s an inside term.”

“What kind of organization calls its leader a dragon head?”

“It’s an old Chinese society, a brotherhood.”

“How big is it?”

“It has hundreds, maybe even thousands of members. I don’t know the numbers.”

“And what does this society do?”

“It looks after the brothers and their families, kind of like a union.”

“How?”

He shook his head. “I couldn’t give you any details. I was just a worker.”

“Uncle isn’t with the organization any longer?”

“No, he retired. He’s got all the money he’ll ever need, and besides, I think there was a lot of stress attached to the job.”

“This money-collecting business seems stressful enough to me. What made him get into it?”

“People came to him.”

“I don’t understand.”

“When he retired, I think his plan was to buy some horses and spend his days at the Happy Valley and Sha Tin racetracks. But people kept coming to him for help getting their money back from the scumbags who’d taken it. Some of them were friends and he couldn’t say no to them. Word got around and, I think before he knew it, he was in the business. And Carlo and me and some other guys had new full-time jobs.”

“Obviously he’s good at it.”

“He’s the best.”

“What makes him the best?”

Andy shrugged again, and Ava could see he was feeling uncomfortable.

“It’s isn’t my place to talk about Uncle,” he said. “I think I’ve probably said too much already.”

Ava placed her chopsticks on her empty plate. “And what I think is that I’d better get into those electronic bank records. Again, you don’t have to hang around if you don’t want to.”

He shrugged. “There’s a coffee shop a few doors down from this building. I’ll go there and then check back with you in about an hour.”

“That’s sounds just fine, and if I’m finished before then I’ll come and find you.”

He left with the paper bag filled with the remains of their lunch. Ava made sure the door was locked behind him and then went back to the desk. She logged on to the China Agricultural Bank website, entered the account number and
TRADER22
, and “Kung Imports” appeared. She had separated and stacked the letters of credit, purchase orders, wire transfers, manifests, and invoices to one side of the computer. Now she matched invoices to deposits and wire transfers to outgoing funds. Within five minutes she was smiling.

Over the past twelve months, the money flowing into the China Agricultural Bank account had come from the sales of Lo’s products and nothing else. His customer base was only a bit broader — five major customers and then a few smaller ones — so it didn’t take long to see that the numbers fitted. She was able to confirm what the partial paper records had already told her: every pound that Lo had shipped had been received, sold, and paid for.

Now she switched over to the Guangzhou Chemical Engineering Bank and found the same pattern. That account was the depository for the money Kung made selling Royal Meats’ products. There were no other suppliers, and again only a handful of customers.

At first Kung had paid both Lo and Royal promptly and in full, but then the delays started and finally non-payment became the norm. The only question was, where had he moved the money he’d received?

She scrolled through the Guangzhou statements. Money that had left the account was always sent by wire transfer. On the statements, every withdrawal was listed as a wire but showed only a date, an amount, and an account number for the recipient. Ava opened the wire transfer file on the desk and found the detailed instructions. From the Guangzhou bank, wires had been sent to two companies: Meridian Trading and Bai Trading. They shared an address, on Bute Street in Kowloon. According to the wires, the money sent was for the purchase of toys from Meridian Trading and shrimp from Bai Trading.