At a few minutes after five I was standing in front of the Star Ferry terminal waiting for Archie. I glanced at my watch and contemplated my immediate future. The traffic to the airport would be horrible. If I was going to make my flight to Bangkok, I probably had a half-hour at the very most to talk to Archie, get back to the hotel, grab my bag, and check out.
That looked pretty unlikely right then, and I knew that this unscheduled excursion would almost certainly cause me to be stuck in Hong Kong for another night. Anita was going to be less than thrilled about that. Actually, I was less than thrilled about that, too. Things had been a little strained with Anita ever since my Sunday night rendezvous with Barry Gale so I was eager to get home. And yet, here I was standing in front of the Star Ferry waiting for Archie Ward. I began to polish the story I would be telling Anita a little later on the telephone.
The walkways of the ferry building were jammed with commuters on their way to Kowloon and the crowds shouldered past me as I shifted my weight from foot to foot. Finally I saw Archie coming from the direction of the Post Office building. He was easing through the throng in such a practiced way that there was hardly a ripple around him and for a moment I envied the evident deftness he had developed for living in a city as combative as Hong Kong.
Archie grinned as he eased up next to me and gave my shoulder a warm squeeze.
“G’day, mate. How you keeping?”
“I’m good, Archie.”
“Still teaching in Bangkok?”
“Yeah, still teaching. You still with…” I wasn’t sure exactly how to put it, so I said the first thing that popped into my head, “the bank?”
Archie chuckled. “Nah. I’ve changed jobs.”
He produced a pack of Marlboros from his shirt pocket and held them out to me. When I shook my head, he extracted one with his lips, lit it using a red Bic, and exhaled in a long, steady stream.
“Got no perks anymore, Jacko. No more promotions, no insurance, no pension. Just me, my shoeshine, and my smile.”
“When did that happen?”
“A few months ago.”
“Your idea?”
“Too bloody right. I’d been watching all those little ratbags who used to be Mossad or Shin Bet quit and then use their contacts to make heaps in the arms or drug business. Big fucking bickies they were scoring, mate. And there was me without a brass razoo to me name.”
The idea that my friend Archie had coolly set himself up in the business of dealing guns or smuggling drugs startled me, and my face must have shown it.
“No, Jacko, that shit’s not for me. But now a lot of your other blokes, they don’t give a flying fuck. That mob’s cunning as dunny rats and they make a few quid, I’ll tell you. Only problem is that most of them aren’t around long enough to spend any of it.”
“So what are you doing, Archie?”
He pulled at his cigarette, acting like he was thinking, maybe wondering if he ought to be saying what he was saying, but I knew better. Archie Ward liked to play the cheery little Aussie larrikin who didn’t really care about anything other than sinking a few tinnies with his mates down at the pub, but I seriously doubted he had ever uttered a word in his life that hadn’t been carefully weighed in advance. Whatever he was about to tell me, Archie thought there might be something in it somewhere for him.
“I’m completely independent now, Jacko. Everybody knows that I’ve got the good oil on just about everybody. Now I sell what I know to whoever offers me the best price. Sometimes it gets a little shonky, I got to admit but, bloody hell, the rest of the time it pays off like a busted pokie machine.”
Archie paused and shifted his eyes around, sizing up the crowd. Finally, he looked back at me and pointed to the ferry entrance.
“Let’s go,” he said. “Hanging around out here we stick out like a dog’s balls.”
EIGHTEEN
I followed Archie as he dropped some coins in a turnstile and we joined the river of humanity moving up the stairs and then down a ramp toward the ferry. Archie was in the lead, but when a loud bell started clattering and the green light flashed to yellow, the black iron gate at the bottom of the ramp began to close. The crowd surged forward and I lost sight of him.
When the light snapped to red, a few people started to run as well as they could in the tight quarters. Bouncing on my toes to see over the crowd, I could tell that the gate was closing so I edged past an old woman carrying a stack of white food boxes from which drifted some pungent although unidentifiable smell, bounced off a very large and red-faced German tourist and, in the clear for a split second, took two fast side steps, twisted to my left and lunged through the last crack of open space as the gate clanged shut behind me. I trotted down the ramp and crossed the gangway just as the sailor began to haul on the rope that hoisted it away from the dock.
Archie was leaning on the rail, waiting for me, a half-smile on his face.
“Still pretty good moves, leastwise for an old guy,” he said as I pushed in next to him.
“Is this all really necessary?” I asked.
“What?”
“The ferry ride. Where are we going?”
“Nowhere. We’re just mucking around.”
“Couldn’t I have just come to an office somewhere?”
“Nope.”
I wasn’t really as annoyed as I sounded. Riding the Star Ferry had always been one of my favorite things to do in Hong Kong anyway. The ferry’s engines throbbed and white water churned as we pushed away from the wharf with a slight shudder and began moving out into the harbor.
“Friend of yours?” Archie asked.
“Who?”
“Over there, at the gate.”
Archie gestured vaguely past me in the general direction of the wharf. The crowd had drifted back to wait for the next ferry, but there was a tall man who was still standing right up against the gate as if he was watching the ferry leave with considerable regret. He was wearing a dark raincoat and looked to be Chinese.
I shook my head. “No. Don’t know him.”
“Didn’t think you would.”
Archie and I watched the man until the next ferry sliding into the berth blocked our view.
“Are you saying this guy is following me, Archie?”
“Maybe. He was watching us before we got on. Maybe that was just a coincidence; maybe not.”
Before I could ask him what that was supposed to mean, Archie walked up to the glass-enclosed cabin that walled off the fifty or so seats at the front of the ferry. Instead of sitting, Archie stood right in the bow, turned his back to the stunning panorama of Victoria Harbour and looking over the crowd on the ferry. I wasn’t sure what else to do, so I stood next to him and watched the next ferry maneuvering into position at the wharf even while we were still pulling away. My eyes sought out and eventually found the man in the dark raincoat again. He was still standing at the gate, both hands hooked through the bars, and he was still looking unhappy. Surely Archie’s imagination was on overtime, I told myself.
“Look, Archie-”
He waved me into silence. “Let’s give it a minute, huh, mate?”
I leaned back and folded my arms, waiting for Archie to decide he was ready to talk.
“Okay,” he said after we were clear of the wharf and no one had taken any of the seats near us, “I’m listening, Jacko.”
Archie tilted his head toward me while he continued scanning the crowd. I told him most of what I knew about the Asian Bank of Commerce, but I adjusted the story on the fly so that I could talk around the resurrection of Barry Gale rather than bring that up right away. Archie remained expressionless throughout my tale, but the moment I stopped talking, he grinned at me.
“What is it you’re not telling me?”
I sighed. “I thought I was better than that.”
“You’re pretty good. But it’s still London to a brick you wouldn’t tell me the whole thing the first time.”