The Red Pole of Macau (3 page)

“How far along is the project? I know you’re behind schedule, but by how much?”

He grimaced. “The land hasn’t been touched, not a spade in the ground. It’s been more than twelve months. I’m beginning to think they have some zoning or government permit issues, although everyone denies it.”

“I didn’t realize it was quite that bad,” Ava said slowly.

“Well, it is, and now they want more money.”

“Why?”

“They claim one of the other investors pulled out and now we have to make up the difference. They say construction won’t start until all the money is in place.”

“Do they have a legal right to ask for the money?”

“No, no.”

“And you’ve told them that?”

“They don’t care. They keep asking for the money anyway, and not nicely,” he said. “They say Simon verbally agreed to put in extra money if they needed it, right after the deal was signed.”

“Did he?”

“He says no.”

“What does your lawyer say?”

“He says we don’t have to.”

“What does he think about your right to get your original investment returned?”

“There’s an addendum to the contract that says we’re entitled to make that request if the project hasn’t started within twelve months of the original signing date.”

“I didn’t see that in the papers you sent.”

“Sorry, I was in a hurry.”

“The twelve months is up now.”

“Yes, it’s been fourteen months.”

“And you’ve made the request?”

“Repeatedly.”

“And what do they say?”

“They say no, and when we persist, they tell us to sue.”

“And we’ve talked about how difficult that would be.”

“Even our lawyer agrees with that.”

Ava looked down at her brother, who seemed lost in his own thoughts. “It seems to me, Michael, that the Macanese probably want you to abandon your investment. Asking for the extra money is just them leveraging you.”

“We can’t walk away from that money, or even just let it sit,” he said absently. “The bank is already all over us for missing deadlines. We are in breach of some covenants and I’m afraid they’re going to call in the loan.”

“I understand.”

Michael finally seemed to see her. “I’m sorry,” he said, standing up. “I’m sorry to be so rude. Thank you for coming, Ava.”

He was about a foot taller than her, lean and fit. He looked down at her, an awkward smile on his face. He started to extend his hand, then pulled it back and leaned over to kiss her on both cheeks. “Thank you for coming,” he said again.

They sat side by side in the boardroom, the contract and its addendum between them. They went over it line by line, parsing it until they were cross-eyed.

She saw Michael sneaking sideways glances at her; she was doing exactly the same. It was as if they were each trying to accept the reality of the other’s presence.

Ava finally said, “They’re fucking you over. The contract is very clear about the nature of your investment, and the addendum is equally clear that you can request the return of your money after twelve months if the project hasn’t started.”

“I know. Like I said, they don’t care.”

“How did you meet these guys?”

Michael looked uncomfortable. “Through Simon. Or actually, through a friend of Simon’s.”

“His name?”

“David Chi.”

“What do you know about him?”

“Not much. I’d met him socially a few times with Simon.”

“So Chi brought the deal to Simon and Simon brought it to you. Is that how it worked?”

“Yes.”

“Did Chi get paid for this?”

“Not by us.”

“By the other side?”

“I’m beginning to think so.”

“How about this Ma Shing — how much due diligence did you do?”

She saw a bead of sweat on his forehead; his lips looked dry. “Not nearly enough,” he said.

“What does that mean?”

“I left it mainly to Simon, although our lawyers did confirm that the land was owned by and registered to Ma Shing.”

“So what kind of due diligence did Simon do?”

His discomfort increased. “Ava, I’m beginning to think that he didn’t do any, that he just believed everything David Chi told him.”

“Geez.”

He said in a rush, “We’ve been friends for more than twenty years and I trust him like a brother. Besides, he has as much to lose as I do, and I just assumed he was looking after our interests . . . That’s the way we run the business, you see. We each have our own turf and we don’t meddle in each other’s areas. Business development falls under Simon’s watch.”

“You don’t have to defend him to me.”

“I feel as if I do, because I want you to understand our relationship.”

“The same kind of relationship Simon obviously had with David Chi.”

“I imagine.”

“So you trust Simon, Simon trusts Chi, and Chi trusts — or is paid to trust — Ma Shing. And you end up getting screwed.”

“Not yet.”

She looked at the contract in front of them. She suspected it wasn’t going to have any bearing on how this deal played out. “I’d like to talk to Chi.”

“Simon is trying to contact him.”

“Trying?”

“Chi has been difficult to reach. Simon says he thinks he’s gone to Malaysia.”

“Hong Kong cellphones work in Malaysia.”

“I know, Ava, I know,” Michael said, a look of despair on his face.

“I also want to talk to Simon,” she said.

“I just spoke to him to say you were in Hong Kong. The plan is to have dinner tonight in Sai Kung. His father owns a restaurant there.”

Ava didn’t like the idea of wasting an afternoon. “Where is he now?”

“In Shenzhen, visiting a franchisee.”

She pulled her notebook from her Chanel purse. She asked, “What do you know about Ma Shing?”

“It’s owned by a guy called Kao Lok.”

“What’s he like?”

Michael shrugged. “I don’t really know — I met him only twice. The first time was when we toured the proposed construction site and then spent a couple of hours with the architects and engineers, going over plans. The second time was when we signed the contract at his lawyer’s office in Macau. He didn’t say much at either of those meetings. He has a business manager by the name of Wu. Wu did most of the talking, he and Simon and Chi.”

“What was Wu like?”

“Loud and crude, and I assume he doesn’t have much of an education, because his Cantonese is really working-class. Actually, the few times that Kao Lok opened his mouth I noticed the same thing. Neither of them were that much different from other builders we’ve dealt with.”

“Did you do a background check on them?”

“David Chi said they’d been in construction in Macau for more than ten years.”

“Did you visit any of their finished jobs?”

“No.”

“Did you talk to anyone they had ever done business with?”

“No, I left that to Chi and Simon.”

“Geez.”

“I know.”

“And your bank let you get away with this?”

“All the bank cared about was that the land was actually owned by them.”

“Is the bank holding your portion of the land as collateral?”

Michael tilted his head back and then rubbed his eyes with the tips of his fingers. “What a fucking mess,” he said.

“Tell me about the bank,” she said, wondering why he seemed even more pained.

“We don’t own any of the land. For our investment we got thirty percent of the finished building but Ma Shing retained all ownership rights to the land.”

“No land?” Ava said, hardly believing they’d sink twenty million into a property deal that did not involve land.

“No.”

“So on what basis did the bank make the loan?”

“They liked our business plan, and obviously we pledged our shares in Millennium . . . and signed personal guarantees.”

And the bank knows that Marcus Lee won’t walk away from his oldest son
, Ava thought. She made some notes as she gathered herself. “So here’s what we have,” she said slowly. “You have a deal on paper that looks okay, except for the fact that you don’t know who you’re doing business with. Now the deal is in limbo, maybe dead, and not only can you not get your money back but Lok and Wu are pressing you to put in more or the money you’ve already invested will disappear. Now it’s possible that these guys are legitimate and they aren’t blowing smoke about losing an investor. If that’s the case, then we need to look at what that means for you. Maybe we need to go and find someone else to come in on the deal. Maybe we can find more money and renegotiate our position, take a bigger share of the building, get a piece of the land.”

“Is that doable — the last bit, I mean?”

“If they’re for real, why not? But Michael, we need to get in front of these people. I want to talk to them. It’s too late to do due diligence on the money that’s in there, but we won’t find anyone else willing to sign on unless this is clean.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Call them, set up a meeting.”

“Okay.”

“And I want Simon there as well. If they’re saying he made a verbal commitment then he needs to be there in person to refute it.”

“I understand.”

“Can we get Chi to attend?”

“We have to find him first.”

“Do the best you can.”

Ava checked her watch. It was almost lunchtime and she was hungry. “Can you do dim sum?” she asked.

He shook his head. “I have a meeting at the bank in an hour. It’s supposedly to review the cash-flow projections for the noodle chain for the coming year, but I know they really want to grill me on Macau.”

“Do you want me to go with you?”

“Not this time — it might make them anxious. I’m trying to project a business-as-usual attitude.”

“That’s sensible,” she said.

Michael stood and looked down at her.

“I’m sorry if I was a bit aggressive,” she said.

“No, don’t be. We should have known better. Hopefully it’s salvageable.”

“The concept is sound,” she said with a shrug.

“Where are you staying?”

“The Mandarin Oriental in Central.”

“How about I pick you up at six for dinner?”

“Perfect.”

He walked her to the elevator, his face pinched and distracted again. “Are you thinking about the bank meeting?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Then think positive. They don’t want to lose money. They want you to succeed almost as much as you do yourself. They won’t pull the plug until every last possible option has been exercised.”

The elevator door opened. “That’s what I keep telling myself,” he said.

Then start acting like it
, she thought.

She stepped out of the building into a gorgeous day with hardly a cloud in the sky, a light breeze blowing in from the sea, and the temperature balmy. Hong Kong had, Ava believed, one of the worst climates in the world. The summers were long, hot, and unbearably sticky, and all of the hotels, shops, restaurants, and public places responded by jacking up their air conditioning to the max. Moving between indoors and outdoors, between those two extremes, had given Ava some of the worst colds of her life. The winters were long, dull, wet, and cold enough to put a permanent chill in your bones. The weeks that bridged those two seasons were the best time to be in Hong Kong, and Ava had lucked out on this trip.

She walked down the hill to her hotel, occasionally turning to face the sun. The previous two weeks had been spent in northern Europe, in a persistent damp drizzle. She was a fool for the sun.

She wanted to go for a run in Victoria Park, but she knew that at lunchtime she wouldn’t be able to manoeuvre along the packed jogging path, so she decided to eat first and run later. Dim sum on her own didn’t appeal to her. On the way to the hotel she stopped at a noodle shop and had a plate of lo mein with beef and XO sauce. She ate only half of it, just enough to take the edge off her appetite.

It was two o’clock when she stepped out of the
mtr
station at Causeway Bay and crossed the street into the park. The crowd had ebbed and she was able to run unimpeded. Normally she ran the inner jogging path, which was about seven hundred metres in circumference, but there were so few people in the park that the outer route was manageable. It measured just over a kilometre and she was able to work up a real sweat after eight laps.

As she ran, her mind turned over Michael’s problem. She knew that nothing would be accomplished until she had met with Ma Shing. On the surface it seemed straightforward. The contract and the addendum were clear, so unless there was something she hadn’t seen, it was going to come down to what kind of people Lok and Wu were. If they were serious businesspeople then a deal could get cut. If they weren’t, she’d have to figure out a way to get the money back that didn’t involve lawyers.

She had two worries. First, it was possible that Simon To had made a verbal commitment. Chinese businessmen took a handshake as seriously as, if not more seriously, than a contract. If To had been stupid enough to verbally commit to putting up more money, she would have to talk her way around that from a severely weakened position. Second, she didn’t know if Ma Shing actually had the funds to repay Michael and Simon. If they had put the money into the land purchase and they weren’t liquid, that could be a problem.

She rode the
mtr
back to her hotel in Central, sweating like mad in the subterranean climate of the Hong Kong underground. She jumped into the shower as soon as she got into the room, and then put on a clean T-shirt and her training pants. She guessed they’d be eating outside at Sai Kung, so there was no reason for her to dress up.

She turned on her computer and checked her inbox. Her father had written:
Sorry to have missed you before you left. Thank you for going to Hong Kong so promptly. Keep me posted if you can. Love, Daddy.
Ava sighed. She made it a policy not to communicate with clients when she was on a job. They had a habit of taking every morsel of progress and exaggerating its impact. She preferred them to have minimal expectations, and one way to maintain that was to keep them in the dark. Her father might not be a client exactly, but she decided she would have to treat him like one.
I have arrived safely. I’ll let you know when I have something definite,
she wrote back.

Maria had emailed as well, and reading her message brought a smile to Ava’s face.
I miss you already, but I haven’t showered since you left and I can still smell you on my skin. Hurry home.
Ava wrote:
I’m in Hong Kong and things are fine. It looks like I’ll be here for a few days. Please wash. Love you.

She logged out of her email and did another search for Ma Shing, and then one for Kao Lok in both English and Chinese, and came up with absolutely nothing. She sighed and told herself she’d find out more when they met. She hoped Michael would be able to engineer a meeting in Hong Kong, but she suspected it was going to be in Macau.

It had been a while since she’d had any dealings in Portugal’s former colony, but judging from Michael’s situation, it was evidently still a rough-and-ready place. Ava had been there once with Uncle, in 1999, just a few years after Portugal had returned the territory to the Chinese. They had a potential client, a furniture manufacturer, who had shipped two container loads of goods to Dalian and then been stiffed on payment.

It was winter, and he’d arranged to meet them in the old town, in the area where the wild-animal restaurants were located. Those restaurants did a booming business in the winter. In addition to the usual reason to visit them — to strengthen the male libido — many older Chinese people believed that eating snake or raccoon or bat or bear or any number of other wild animals thickened the blood and staved off cold-weather illnesses. In deference to Uncle, the furniture manufacturer took them to a very expensive snake restaurant. There was a glass cage in the front window where hundreds of snakes were displayed until they became someone’s meal. Four snakes were extracted and fed to them in various forms, starting with soup and ending with grilled meat.

When the dinner was over, they agreed to take on the case. Then they found themselves with several hours to kill before catching the hydrofoil back to Hong Kong. So she and Uncle walked over to the Hotel Lisboa, where he said an old friend of his worked.

The Lisboa was also a casino, and at the time probably the premier casino in Macau. It was owned by Stanley Ho’s Sociedade de Turismo e Diversões de Macau, as were the other four or five casinos in Macau at the time. Ho had been granted a monopoly in 1962 and still held it when they were there. Later the People’s Republic of China opened the doors for competition, but at the time every property belonged to Ho.

Ava detested casinos in general, and the moment she walked into the Lisboa she put Macau’s casinos at the top of her hate list. The place reeked of cigarette smoke and the carpets were stained and damp from people spilling drinks and spitting on them. There were lineups at the tables as people jostled to bet, fighting for a chance to give their money away. “Wait here while I look for my friend,” Uncle said, leaving her at a blackjack table.

A
gweilo
with an American accent was seated at the table. Two old Chinese women crushed against his back, staring over his shoulders. Ava knew blackjack, but she hadn’t seen a table like this one before. Behind the regular spot where a player placed his bet were two circles. As she watched, the
gweilo
placed his bet in front and then the two women reached around him to put money on the circles, betting on his cards.

He was dealt a ten and a five. The dealer had a jack. Ava listened to the women chatter in Cantonese; they wanted the man to stand on his fifteen. From what she knew, he should hit, which is what he did. When he motioned for another card, both of the women hissed at him. He obviously didn’t understand the Cantonese word for “asshole.” He bust with a nine, and one of the women flicked the back of his head with her middle finger. He turned and looked at them.

“They didn’t want you to hit,” Ava said. “When Chinese gamble, they like straightforward one-time win-or-lose bets. They don’t want to have to think about what to do.”

“Then they shouldn’t play blackjack,” he said.

“I’ll tell them,” she said, but she didn’t.

The
gweilo
lost steadily over the next five minutes, the women getting more and more agitated. Finally his cards turned and he won five or six hands in a row, including two in which he took a third card. The hissing stopped. After the first win, Ava saw the dealer short-pay the
gweilo
. Before she could speak up, the dealer beat her to it, shrugging and saying, “Tell him I don’t speak English.”

Ava relayed the message.

“What the hell is she doing?” he asked.

“Why are you paying less than he won?” she asked the dealer.

“I’m taking my tip.”

Ava told him what the dealer had said and then watched as the man’s face turned red. “I decide when and how much to tip. Tell her to stop doing that.”

Ava told the dealer what the man had said. The dealer, looking bored, said to Ava, “Those are Macau rules.”

“I don’t believe this place,” he said. “It stinks, it’s dirty, the dealers are so fucking rude. In Las Vegas this place would be scheduled for demolition.”

Uncle rescued her. His friend was in his office on the other side of the casino. They walked across the floor, his hand looped through her arm as they passed a long line of baccarat tables. They were all nearly full, with lines of bettors behind the players. What was odd was the people who weren’t playing but who sat with briefcases on their laps. They were tightly focused on the play in front of them, hardly ever looking up. Two who did glance their way saw Uncle and bowed their heads.

“Who are those men?” she asked.

“Moneylenders.”

“In the briefcases?”

“Cash.”

“What, they just open the briefcases and hand money to players?”

“The ones who are sitting next to a player have done that already. They are watching their money, ready to give more if it’s needed.”

“Is it legal?”

“This is Macau. Everything is more or less legal.”

On the return trip to Hong Kong Uncle said, “I have never liked Macau. It was always a good place for business, but all the Portuguese left behind were Ho’s casinos, one wall of a cathedral, and some lousy cuisine. For four hundred years of occupation, that’s not much of a legacy.”

“How about the language, the culture?” she asked.

“Less than one percent of the people can speak any Portuguese, and as for the culture, after African chicken there isn’t much.”

After several more trips she had begun to share Uncle’s view. Compared to the other European territory attached to China — Hong Kong — Macau was an exercise in mediocrity. What the Chinese would do with it was anyone’s guess; all she knew was that it couldn’t get any worse.

Ava typed “Macau” into several search engines and tracked its changes since the handover, since it had become a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic. The population hadn’t grown that much: it was now about 500,000 people, 95 percent Chinese. And despite reclaiming some land, Macau was still the most densely populated place on earth, with close to twenty thousand people squeezed into every square kilometre of a territory that had almost no arable land, pastures, or woods. Despite the tight quarters, the Macanese had the highest life expectancy in the world — over eighty-four years on average.

Its economy was driven by tourism to its casinos, and the number of visitors had increased from just under nine million a year in the late nineties to close to thirty million today. Ava did some rough math. Las Vegas covered 219 square kilometres and had forty million tourists a year. Macau squeezed thirty million into 28 square kilometres. Almost eight times the density, and at least twice the intensity, given the Chinese mania for gambling.

Macau consisted of four regions: the Macau Peninsula, the most northern part of the province, which was connected directly to the Chinese mainland; Taipa, an island to the south accessible via three bridges, and a major residential area; Coloane, an island still farther south that was less developed; and Cotai, the strip of reclaimed land between Coloane and Taipa. That was where the Venetian had been built and where Michael’s shopping centre was supposed to be going up.

In terms of location for gamblers Macau couldn’t be much better. It was only 60 kilometres across the South China Sea from Hong Kong. Guangzhou was 145 kilometres away. The Zhuhai Special Economic Zone was right next door, feeding carloads — and, more often, busloads — of gamblers through the Portas do Cerco and over the Lotus Bridge. That was about a hundred million people right on Macau’s doorstep.

Stanley Ho, Uncle maintained, was the least far-sighted businessman he had ever met. To have a monopoly on the only casino action in or near China and Hong Kong was like a dream, and for forty years it was Ho’s reality. In Uncle’s opinion, Ho should have used those forty years to make himself completely irreplaceable. But he hadn’t. The problem, according to Uncle, was not the money he took out; it was what he didn’t put back. His casinos were small and shoddy. The hotels were second-rate. The service was deplorable. Did he think that Macanese and Chinese government officials never went to Las Vegas? That they wouldn’t make comparisons? That they wouldn’t realize what Macau could become if they opened it up? So open it they did, in 2004, and in rushed the big boys from Vegas — Wynn, Sands, MGM, the Venetian — and in flowed some serious Australian and Chinese money to build hotels and casinos that matched their American rivals. Ho kept his little casinos and finally invested some money in them. All too little, too late, Uncle said. Even Ho’s daughter, Pansy, had joined forces with outside investors to compete against her father.

Ava hadn’t been to Macau since the big build-up started in 2004. Hopefully they would have their meeting with Lok in Hong Kong, and she’d be able to avoid it one more time.

At five to six she went down to the lobby wearing her training pants and a matching nylon jacket. Michael was already at the hotel entrance, his silver Mercedes coupe idling, a woman sitting next to him in the front. He got out of the car when he saw Ava, his eyes taking in her clothes. “Do I need to dress for Sai Kung?” she asked.

“No, no, of course not,” he said.

Ava saw the woman in the car staring at her. She turned and smiled as Ava climbed in the back seat. “I’m Amanda Yee, Michael’s girlfriend,” she said.

Everything about her looked expensive and, Ava had to admit, quite classy. She was young, in her mid-twenties, slim and fine-featured, her hair, long and loose, falling over the shoulders of a light blue jacket. When she tucked her hair behind her ears, Ava saw diamond earrings that had to be more than a carat each, and a diamond pendant around her neck that was around three carats. Her eyes were lively, friendly, and whatever misgivings Ava had felt when she first saw her began to dissipate.