The Tenth Witness (Henri Poincare Mystery) (7 page)

Beyond the kiosks, passengers admitted to the British colony followed a walkway through a set of double doors that opened to a broad receiving area in the main terminal. An enormous banner read: W E L C O M E T O H O N G K O N G. Down the corridor, I saw two uniformed agents and smelled a strong scent of Turkish tobacco that cast me back to the cafés of my student years. A tall man in a linen suit was leaning against the wall along the corridor, smoking what could only have been Gauloises.

How unlikely that a French cigarette would be my first scent of the Orient! But that earthy, acrid smell confirmed what Alec had told me: East collided with West in Hong Kong more violently than anywhere else in the world. “A total mash-up,” he called it. “And frequently not pretty.”

The lanky smoker must have been a Frenchman who’d lost his luggage in transit, for he hadn’t yet stepped beyond the exit into the arrival hall, and he had no suitcase.
Waiting for news,
I figured. Schmidt was waiting, too, so I walked down the hall and introduced myself to a presumed countryman.

“
Comment ça va?
”

He looked up, cigarette dangling from his mouth.

“I couldn’t help but notice your Gauloises.”

He reached for a cellophaned package.

I held up my hands. “No—no, thank you. I tried once but couldn’t stop coughing. At school all the intellectuals were smoking them. They were full of themselves.” I gestured at holding a cigarette between my thumb and index finger, palm up. “Henri Poincaré,” I said, extending a hand. “It feels good to speak French.”

“There’s a mathematician—”

“Yes, I know.”

“Renard Malet. You’re coming from—?”

“Holland, mostly . . . I’ve been working there. I live in Paris.”

He ground out the cigarette on the tile floor and lit another after tapping it against his watch crystal. “I represent a men’s clothier in Paris,” said Malet. “We’re searching for talent in Hong Kong to make custom suits and shirts for our clients. We fax our partners here precise measurements. That’s the key, you see. Eighteen different measurements, not just neck size and sleeve length. Do you need a suit?”

I didn’t.

“Well, if you do. Eighteen data points. We specify fabric. I take samples back home with each trip, and our tailors in Hong Kong send me finished suits and shirts at one-tenth the cost of custom tailoring in France. The workmanship here is as good or better than what you find anywhere in the world.

“Take this suit, for instance. My measurements are on file here. I made a call and five days later I received an airmailed bundle.
Voilà
—and a perfect fit! It’s a new world, Monsieur Poincaré. Every type of business is going global. I’d hate to be a tailor living in Toulouse or Lyon just now. In one year or ten, he’ll lose his job. It’s just a matter of time.”

In fact, I had noticed Malet’s suit: a tightly woven linen, a blend of cotton and some other fabric that kept the material from wrinkling. With good lines, too, a handsome product.

Malet was a large, rangy man with bear-paw hands. In profile, he had the face one finds on old Roman coins, with a straight nose and strong chin. “Quite a racket over there with the old man,” he said. “I saw you waiting for him. Are you two connected? Is he in trouble of some sort?”

“I know him slightly. I’m not exactly with him, Monsieur—”

“Renard, please.”

“We met a few days ago. We were on the same flight. He invited me to share his ride into the city, which I’ll do if I don’t fall asleep standing up talking to you.”

The senior customs agent returned to Schmidt’s kiosk. “So sorry for the confusion,” he said. He spoke a few hushed words to his subordinate.

The younger man nodded. Revealing nothing beyond dead-eyed obedience, he said: “Welcome to Hong Kong, Sir. Enjoy your stay. I apologize for my rudeness.”

“That’s my cue,” I said. “He’s through. I’ll need to—”

“Take my card,” said Malet. “This way if you need a suit, you can contact me. It’s a local number for Paris. I promise you won’t walk very far in this city without someone grabbing you to ask if you need custom-made clothes. I know the better tailors. And remember, eighteen measurements. It makes all the difference. Call if you have the need or if you have a sudden craving to speak French. I’m staying at the Peninsula. We’ll catch a drink.”

“Herr Schmidt is, too. The Peninsula. Perhaps you’d like a ride?”

Malet declined. “I came to meet someone,” he said, “but it seems I missed him. I’ve got my own transportation.” He left quickly through the double doors before it occurred to me to wonder why the guards permitted him to wait inside a restricted area.

Schmidt trundled his suitcase and boxes across the yellow line. “We’re off,” he said. “Damned Chinks.”

twelve

S
chmidt was pleased to announce that he had arranged an adventure for us. An old oil tanker slated for scrapping, the
Eagle Maiden,
swung at anchor a kilometer offshore. Through a translator, he had spoken with the captain via radio, and the
Maiden
would wait for us if we cared to ride her onto the beach at his breaking yard. “I’ve wanted to do this for years,” he said. “It’s an opportunity not to be missed. What do you think?”

Ride an oil tanker onto a beach? I could only agree.

His driver headed north, then east, in search of a water taxi.

Away from the high-rent district of the Peninsula Hotel, the streets narrowed and the sidewalks teemed with people who wore jeans and work shirts and uniforms, anything but suits. These were the workers who serviced Hong Kong’s towers and glittery hotels, very likely the ones who would fill the manufacturing plant I hoped to build for a company in Stuttgart. After an hour or so of crawling through traffic, Schmidt determined we were close enough, and he leapt from the car to find a pier and a boat that would ferry us out to the
Maiden.

Stepping from the limousine was like stepping into a fast-running current. The crowd pushed us past live chicken markets and butchers who hung geese and dog carcasses in window displays. Street vendors called to me, jangling cheap watches. Bead sellers were jammed next to fishmongers who shared stalls with jade merchants, tailors, and import-export companies where men in undershirts yelled into phones. Women sat on boxes shooing flies off carp, the buckets at their feet alive with eels. Everywhere, men and women smoked rank-smelling, filterless cigarettes. Drivers leaned on horns. At the windows in sagging buildings, old men on cheap folding seats picked food from their teeth, watching the show unfold. Scooters zipped around idling cars and trucks. The air was thick enough to make me spit, a soup of diesel and tobacco and pork sizzling on coal-fired braziers. It was an assault on all five senses.

Schmidt found his pier and negotiated a ride out to the tanker, using a map of the harbor with the
Maiden
’s position circled, a wad of cash, and hand gestures. And then I was on a boat again, a snug, freshly painted tender headed for open water.

Soon enough, so soon I didn’t have a chance to get sick, we saw a reddish-brown object that rose in the distance much like the islands off the Kowloon Peninsula. But as we drew near, what had looked like a mountain resolved into a supertanker as long as the Eiffel Tower was high.

“Single-hulled,” Schmidt shouted above the wind. “Twenty-eight years, a good run but not worth refitting. The owner sold it to us for two million US. We’ll break her down and make four million after all is said and done. A tidy business.”

Our boat approached the massive ship. Without its cargo of oil, she rode a full ten stories above the sea, with the bridge four stories above that. We were ants approaching an elephant.

It was no easy climb, up a narrow, rusted-out ladder—a steel hull hard to my right and thin air and a likely fatal fall to my left. Schmidt scrambled right up. Onboard, a gap-toothed Malaysian dressed in a faded blue uniform waved. I greeted him in French; Schmidt tried German. The man pointed to himself and said “Doud” in Malay, something else in Chinese, and finally “David” in halting English. He motioned for us to follow, and I was amazed to see him mount a bicycle—
a bicycle!
—wending his way through a grillwork of broad-gauge pipes, back to the bridge. The stench of crude oil stung my nostrils. We walked for ten minutes to reach the stern. It was like crossing the back of a city block, all the more strange because, as an engineer, I well understood the principle of water displacement. Still, I could scarcely believe how all this steel could float.

We reached the bridge. Doud led us up another stairwell to a rusting steel door with a thick glass window. He pulled hard, the door swung wide, and he addressed a short, sallow-faced man.

Captain Lee bowed to Schmidt, his employer, then spoke Chinese to Doud, who in turn spoke English to me. I translated to German. Mr. Lee, I learned, had just lately come aboard the
Maiden.
Others piloted supertankers across the oceans. Mr. Lee specialized in the controlled grounding of large ships, and he welcomed us for the
Maiden’s
final voyage.

Doud explained the maneuver. “When the wind is up and the seas are heavy, it is delicate work,” he said, because a ship to be scrapped must land bow first, dead perpendicular to the beach. Tankers are not nimble things. The helmsman must execute the maneuver with care as well as with an eye on the tide clock.

“We must land at the highest tide to get as far up the beach as possible,” said Doud. He pointed to his watch. “We are good. Very good. Tonight, 17:30.”

The
Maiden
pulled anchor and we were off.

To be sure, the view was fine. The coast of the Kowloon Peninsula looked as if a creature had risen from the South China Sea and taken bites out of the continent, each bite a bay and each bay an unspoiled repetition of the one preceding, with thick green vegetation that ringed white, sandy arcs of beach. One bay would end, rising to a rocky promontory, then descend to another. The pattern repeated for a good hour until we passed a promontory atop which stood several steel towers.

The
Eagle Maiden
had reached her burial ground. This bay was larger than the others. Aligned like so many container trucks queued at an industrial park, eleven ships—some as large as the
Maiden
—sat high on the beach, bow first. We were too far offshore to see men with torches climbing over the hulls. But I knew they were working because I could see plumes of yellow-orange sparks raining down onto the beach.

The scale of this enterprise stunned me. I was prepared to congratulate Schmidt on his achievement, but as we drew closer, a second impression colored the first. A haze had settled over this beach, and what few trees I saw looked singed and dead. The offshore breeze carried a bitter smell.

“What are those?” I asked Doud, pointing. I’d been studying the shoreline with binoculars. Some seventy meters off the sand, I spotted two bare poles rising from the water.

“Guideposts,” he said. “At low tide this morning, we drove these tree trunks into the sand. If we can steer the
Maiden
between them, she will sit on the beach where we want.”

The captain took his bearings and consulted the tide tables a final time. He took the wheel. He adjusted course and sounded the ship’s horn. Aligned on the trees, he ordered the ship’s engine full ahead.

I could feel the
Maiden’s
speed. The guideposts approached, followed by a sight sure to panic anyone who earned a living from the sea: the rapid onrush of land. No one needed to translate as the captain sounded the horn moments before impact.

We braced ourselves as the
Maiden
hit the beach at twenty knots in a last kamikaze run. At impact, the binoculars flew from the chart table and struck a metal pillar. Windows shattered. On any other bridge in any other body of water a captain would have been mad to push the engine as this man did, grinding his ship harder onto the beach. He backed off, then rammed forward, back and forward, rocking the
Maiden
to death.

And then it was over.

thirteen

T
he Kraus ship-breaking facility was a boneyard, a charnel house. To our right lay a ship, gone but for its huge aft section. To look inside, through the hull, was to see the crosscut of a mechanical drawing in actual fact: raw trusses and holding tanks, crew’s quarters, half a bathroom, each sliced through, meant to be hidden and in their nakedness obscene. To the left lay the remains of another ship, rusted and half gone, its cables and pipes dangling like the guts of a freshly butchered animal.

Workers scrambled across the face of these behemoths like beetles over a carcass. Plumes of sparks rained onto the beach. The men below ignored the cascade. Many went bare-chested, their shoulders and backs scarred from burns and months of bearing heavy loads. They worked in open-toed flip-flops, one flimsy step from slicing their feet on sheared steel. No one wore hard hats or glasses, no one wore protective gloves. The air reeked of oil, acetylene fumes, diesel, and whatever fertilizers and solvents had been pumped onto the open cesspit of beach.

It was an ecosystem as complete and merciless as any in Nature. These men, sinew and bone wrapped in rags against the heat, cut and carried steel until the hulls disappeared and nothing remained but greasy sand and petroleum stink.

I could scarcely believe my eyes as a winch operator gunned an engine and
pulled
one ship higher onto the beach with steel cables threaded through holes cut into the bow. A tremendous belch of smoke rose from the engine. A marine winch turned, cables snapping tight, and the bow of a ship larger than the
Maiden
lifted and moved, millimeter by groaning millimeter, up the inclined beach.

Schmidt turned to me, rocking on the balls of his feet. “Every fourteen or eighteen months, seven hundred oceangoing ships are retired and new ones take their place. Anselm and I buy as many wrecks as we can. We’ve got a sister facility in Bangladesh and are building another in Cambodia.”

He turned a circle, pleased with his creation. “It takes one month to cut a forty-five-meter ship to nothing. I’m amazed myself, frankly. We use every part of the ship. The oil and gas, the pipes and wires, bolts, even the furniture from the crew’s quarters and the lifeboats. It’s where the steel for your dive platform came from,” he said. “We cut it to your specs from an old container ship.”