About a half-mile down Lockhart Road, I spotted the dirty brick facade of the Old China Hand pub which was something of a local monument. The Hand had been a Hong Kong expat hangout longer than anyone I knew could remember. I could hardly imagine the deals and schemes that had been whispered of within its dingy interior.
On a whim I cut diagonally across the road and ducked inside the dark wooden door stained black from decades of exposure to Hong Kong’s rancid air. The room was as gloomy as I remembered it, and like most expat bars in Hong Kong it was chilled down to the temperature of a meat locker. The room was mostly empty. I slid into a chair at a table and in a few moments a dumpy Filipina girl of indeterminate age shuffled over. She was dressed in jeans and a man’s shirt and she expressionlessly thrust out a menu that looked dirty and dog-eared.
“A pint of San Miguel,” I said, not bothering with the menu. “And fish and chips if you’ve got any left.”
The girl pulled the menu back and walked away without a word. I gathered they still had some fish and chips. Or maybe not. Welcome to Hong Kong, I told myself.
From a loudspeaker somewhere up near the greasy ceiling, Tony Bennett crooned about leaving his heart in San Francisco. I spotted a table near the door with some newspapers and magazines heaped on it so I got up and rummaged through them for something to read while waiting for my beer. To my surprise, I found some books under the pile. They were mostly dog-eared paperbacks, but a slim, red-bound hardback caught my eye and I picked it up to see what it was.
When I saw the title on the front cover, I chuckled. Normally, you wouldn’t expect to find A Register of Hong Kong Banking Institutions among the reading matter in a run-down pub, but this was Hong Kong after all and making money was just about the only thing that anyone thought about. Barry Gale’s banking misadventures with the Asia Bank of Commerce popped into my mind and I flipped the book open to the index. Sure enough, about a third of the way down the first page, I found a listing for the ABC.
When I turned to the page number listed in the index, I found very little there. The ABC had nothing but a restricted banking license in Hong Kong, which meant it had a little capital, but not much, and that it was legally entitled to take only very large deposits and make certain kinds of corporate loans. No vaulted lobby, no cute tellers, no toasters with every new account. At least the book listed an address for the ABC. The Hong Kong office was on Duddell Street, a steep lane that ran from Queen’s Road up to Ice House Street a few blocks west of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank building.
Duddell Street was only about a ten-minute walk from the building where Southeast Asian Investments had its offices and I thought about that for a moment. I would have plenty of time after the board meeting tomorrow. It would probably be a waste of effort, but I might as well check out the address and see what was there. My flight back to Bangkok wasn’t until early evening and I really had no plans for the afternoon other than to pick up some Cuban cigars since they were both cheaper in Hong Kong and better quality than the ones sold in Bangkok.
I jotted down the address. Then I put the book back on the table and picked up a copy of the South China Morning Post that was stained yellow with spilled beer. At least I hoped the stain was spilled beer.
Back at my table, I found a pint of San Miguel waiting and I opened the newspaper and took a long pull. Most of my students seemed to imagine that becoming a director of a company in some major financial center like Hong Kong was a ticket to a glamorous life, an express ride straight to the place where the real players hung out. I glanced around at the grimy pub in which I sat drinking beer and reading an old newspaper and smiled. If they could only see me now, huh?
For a moment I thought about the guy who sat next to me on the flight up and wondered if he was tucked up in bed somewhere nearby dreaming of Offshore. Was that really what I was all about now, getting paid to help people and companies hide their business operations and avoid taxes? Like every young lawyer I had started out imagining myself as an architect of events that mattered; but then almost before I knew it, the work-a-day business of making a living had taken over my life and those inspiring dreams had faded. In spite of all evidence to the contrary, I nourished my conviction that those youthful dreams were not altogether dead. Something was still waiting for me out there, I was sure of it, something that was going to count for a lot. I just had to recognize my chance when I saw it and have the courage to grasp the moment when it came.
The dumpy girl shuffled over, her feet making scrapping sounds against the floor.
“No fish,” she snapped and shuffled away again.
Jai yen yen, I reminded myself. Stay cool, man.
SIXTEEN
I got to Southeast Asian Investments about nine the next morning which gave me time to drink some coffee and eat a few of the pastries heaped on a silver platter in the middle of the board table before anyone else showed up. The board meeting started promptly at nine-thirty.
Directors from outside the ranks of management are generally trivial appendages on any board. Most outside directors are just semiretired old geezers — or college professors, which most people think are more or less the same thing — who have nothing much better to do than show up for meetings a few times a year. We are seldom expected to do anything other than keep our mouths shut, stay awake, and vote the way the company’s management tells us to vote.
After the board sat through a seemingly endless Power Point presentation about a Mekong River hydroelectric project that of course no one understood, we listened to a droning recitation on the future of the shrimp industry in Cambodia that was so dull I think one director may have passed away during it without anyone noticing. We dutifully voted to approve both projects and management rewarded me for my support with a small retainer to review the shrimp farm’s financial structure.
The meeting ended just after twelve and a light lunch was served in the boardroom. I made small talk with some of the other directors and picked at the buffet until a decent interval had passed, then I said my goodbyes and slipped away. Crossing Des Voeux Road, I walked through the Landmark, a ritzy shopping mall that joined the bases of two of Central’s principal office towers, and emerged on Queen’s Road. Across the street, just where Central began to slope sharply up toward the Peak, I spotted Duddell Street.
It was narrow and so steep that the sidewalks were actually flights of stained concrete steps. I watched the street numbers carefully as I climbed and all the way at the end of the street I finally located the address that the book had for the Asian Bank of Commerce. It was an altogether unexceptional office building of no more than a dozen floors faced with black-streaked brick that had probably once been yellow. An elderly Chinese man wearing a dirty undershirt and baggy gray trousers sat slumped on a folding metal chair next to the glass and metal entry door. He snorted and spat as I passed, but I didn’t take it personally.
Inside the building the small lobby was dim and smelled faintly of urine. I examined the directory between the elevators and, sure enough, found a listing for the Asian Bank of Commerce on the ninth floor.
When I got out of the elevator, I saw only three offices on that floor and none of them looked much like a bank. One was a dentist’s office, one seemed to be a sweatshop with an Indian tailor hovering hopefully just inside the open door, and the third was something called Hong Kong Directors Limited. When I spotted the large board at the end of the corridor with columns of small wooden signs hanging from brass hooks, I realized that Hong Kong Directors was the place I was looking for after all.