The coffee showed up; the toast did not. I was a little concerned about talking in the room, but Kang said not to worry.
“Not to step where I’m not wanted,” I said, “but how did you get in the country? I would have thought some sort of lookout had been issued for you.”
“They don’t even know for sure if I am still alive, Inspector. They have a collection of faded photographs and out-of-date descriptions. I could be anybody’s grandfather. I’ll bet my documerits are better than yours. It was time to come back. I’ll be out of your hair and set up in another part of town by the end of the day. Then we shall see what we shall see.”
After a little more Delphic volleyball like this, by 11:30 we were both hungry. “Let’s try the restaurant. I hear the soup is good.”
3
“Maybe he’s not dead; maybe we’re still speculating,” I said, though I only said it to make Kang feel better. It didn’t make me feel any better. The armrest on my chair was loose. Fancy restaurant, gold-trimmed mirrors, gold-trimmed tables, and the damned gold-trimmed chairs were falling apart. The table wobbled, too; it was the sort of wobble that would only get worse if they didn’t tighten the screws. I reached underneath to see if I could turn the ones on my side with the end of my spoon.
“No, I’m not speculating. I know Macau, Inspector. I used to do my banking there. It was hard not to bump into someone who would dispose of a body for the right fee. When the economy was bad, you could even get a rate for more than one body. He’s gone; I’m sure of it. But I need to know what happened. That’s the only way I can figure out where the solid ground is, and where the swamp. If we know who did it, and how, it may put us in a better position for the next move. Greta thinks you have a theory.”
“Greta. You know, if you mix up the Roman letters for her name you get ‘great.’ How is Greta, by the way?”
“Busy.” Another couple of words would have been polite, but he wasn’t handing them out. “Now, tell me your theory. Don’t worry with the political gloss. We’ll treat this like a police matter.”
“Nice try,” I said. “But you know as well as I do that these strands wrap around each other. I can’t separate the political from the criminal even in normal times-on this one, it is completely impossible.”
“What a relief, Inspector. For once, I thought, you might actually do exactly as I asked, and that would mean we had both become boring old men. All right, we’ll throw everything into the pot and see what we get.”
“He arrived in Macau on Sunday night, the ninth of October, at five o’clock, but you already knew that. There is a gap between that time and when he showed up at the Grand Lisboa Hotel. That you may not have known. He wasn’t preregistered, didn’t even have a reservation. That suggests a last-minute move, or an effort to keep his travel as far as possible under the radar. I don’t know where he was between the moment he put his feet on the soil of Macau and when he walked into the lobby. It might matter a lot, or it might not matter at all. If you ask me, it was the first time he had been out of the country in a while. Maybe he wanted to stretch his legs and gather his thoughts before the operation got underway.”
I kept myself from staring into Kang’s eyes. I knew they would tell me nothing. They would go from expressionless to dead, barren orbs in a frozen sky. It wouldn’t even help to watch his hands. I’d learned the lesson sitting across from him fifteen years ago, and I never forgot. Kang was in complete control of his every gesture; if he needed a nervous tic, he could time it to the millisecond. If I wanted a reaction, the only thing to do was wait. I’d laid down the challenge to him-that I was pretty sure what had happened in Macau wasn’t the result of an accident, that it was far worse than that, that it was a political assassination. I’d already told Greta that I suspected she had been in Macau to pass a message. Kang knew I was picking up the shards of a broken operation, but now I was challenging him directly to tell me the details, or at least a few of them.
“Maybe someone spotted him while he was walking around.” Kang’s voice was completely noncommittal. Then his cheek twitched. Astounding, I thought, right on schedule. “Maybe it was someone who wasn’t supposed to know he was there.”
“Could be.”
“That wouldn’t help if, as you say, he was involved in an operation.”
“Listen, either we play this on level ground or we finish our lunch and go our separate ways. You know exactly what the operation was. I have my suspicions. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, but please don’t play dumb. It’s annoying. After all these years, it’s very annoying.”
Kang nodded. “Let’s put it to the side for now. Good enough?”
It wasn’t nearly good enough, but it was clear that I wasn’t going to get anything more on this from him, not yet, so there was no sense pouting. “I’ll throw some more in the pot. You tell me when to stop. He arrived at the hotel at half past six. He wanted a very specific room. He gave the front desk a list of requirements, but that was chaff. There was only one thing he really cared about: It had to have a good view of the Portuguese fort on the hill. I think I know why. I think you do, too.”
Kang made a sweeping gesture with his hand. “More for the side pile.”
“He had one suitcase with him, a Louis Vuitton Pegase 60. That’s a two-wheeler, good enough for a few days’ travel if you don’t care about wrinkling your suit. Not as good as the 70.”
“Get on with it, O.”
“He goes up to his room and locks himself in for three days. I think he was nervous. He wanted to be alone to think. Maybe he wasn’t sure he was ready for what was coming. And he was waiting for a message. That’s when he made the first mistake. He put on the DO NOT DISTURB light. He may not even have known he turned it on. The light switches in those rooms are a nightmare. They’re like the control panel in an agent submarine. But the housekeeping staff had no way of knowing whether he did it by mistake or not. All they knew was that the light was on and that meant they were supposed to stay away.”
“And they did?”
“Religiously. He waited for the message. By the second day he began to worry when it didn’t come. His stomach was in knots and he couldn’t eat. He wanted to talk to someone, anyone, but he knew he couldn’t do that because he wasn’t supposed to tell anyone at all where he was. It was too dangerous. He was alone, without friends, without protection, for the first time in his life. His only hope was the message. That would be his lifeline. But the message didn’t come.”
“Why not? It was delivered.” Kang bit off the last word. He knew he had gone too far. Or he wanted me to think he had.
“Yes, it was delivered. It showed up the first night, exactly according to plan. But the concierge held it. The DO NOT DISTURB light was on. The next morning, word came in that the message was to be ‘misplaced’ for another day or so. The concierge didn’t ask why. He just put it in the bottom drawer. Once that happened, the trap was set.”