“How will I know him?” Neal asked.
Chin had smiled broadly. “You’ll know him.”
It didn’t take long for the efficient and unsmiling immigration officials to handle the incoming crowd. Neal told them that he was there as a tourist, and they asked him how much money he had brought with him. His answer matched the number he had put down on the immigration form, and they let him right in. He didn’t tell them he was going to put the Bank’s gold card away for the duration, though, lest he be tracked down via the paper trail.
He didn’t have any trouble recognizing Ben Chin. He had the same thick chest, the same block-of-granite face, and the same short black hair. He sported a silk lavender shirt, white denims, and black tassled loafers. His wraparound reflective sunglasses were pushed up on his head.
Ben Chin didn’t have any trouble recognizing Neal, either.
“Mark said to hide you out and help you find some babe, right?” he asked as he grabbed Neal by the shoulder.
“Close enough.”
“So maybe I should get you out of a crowded airport,” Chin said. “Where’s your luggage?”
Neal hefted his shoulder bag. “You’re looking at it.”
Chin led him through the terminal and out into the parking lot.
“Kai Tak Airport is a very sad place, you know. According to legend, this is where the Boy Emperor, the last ruler of the Sung Dynasty, jumped off a cliff into the ocean and drowned.”
“Why did he do that?”
“He lost a war with the Mongols or something, I don’t know. Anyway, he didn’t want to be captured.”
“I don’t see a cliff or an ocean.”
“Bulldozers. We’d rather have an airport than a suicide launch pad.”
Chin unlocked the trunk of a ’72 Pinto and threw Neal’s bag in. Then he opened the left-side passenger door for Neal. He gestured for Neal to get in and then walked around to the right side of the car and squeezed himself behind the steering wheel. As they pulled out of the lot, he asked, “Aren’t you going to tell me how good my English is?”
“I hadn’t planned on it.”
“I did a year at UCLA.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, but I flunked out.” He patted his belly. “I clean-jerked a few too many brews, you know what I mean?”
“I’ve had those nights.”
“Did you go Greek?”
“Hmm?”
“Which frat?” Ben asked.
“I lived at home.”
“Oh,” said Ben.
He sounded so disappointed that Neal added, “In an apartment. By myself.”
“Cool.”
Help me, baby Jesus, Neal pleaded. Less than a week ago I was happily burrowed in my little hill, now I’m trapped in a ’72 deathmobile in Hong Kong with a failed frat rat. Life is a strange and wonderful carnival of experiential delights.
“So what do you do now?” Neal asked, trying to avoid a discussion of those good old college days of keggers, mixers, and coeds.
“I’m a security guard at the Banyan Tree Hotel.”
Please, baby Jesus, come down now. I’m off the midway and headed for the sideshow tents.
“It’s the family trade. Besides, it gives me access to a gym. And a place where I can conduct a couple of sidelines, if you know what I mean.”
Yeah, I think I know what you mean.
“The security work?” Ben continued. “I have it dicked. The place was a mess when I took the job. Thieves… beggars… little kids swiping handbags. The tourists were really put off. And vandalism that you wouldn’t believe. I came in and brought some of my boys with me. We cleaned it up, you know what I mean?” He showed Neal his enormous fist. “Now the word is out. We don’t have to work much, and the owners are happy to pay us, feed us, let us use the gym-an empty room now and then when the need comes up, if you know what I mean.”
Yeah, I know what you mean. You organize the thieves, the beggars, and the pickpockets. You commit the vandalism. Then you make it stop. It works the same way in Chinatown in New York, or in Little Italy. People pay you to protect them against yourself. It works the same way on Wall Street, on Capitol Hill. On the street it’s called “protection,” in the halls of power they call it “lunch.”
“I think I know what you mean, Ben.”
“I think you do, too.”
Ben Chin eased his way skillfully into the flow of slow-moving early-morning traffic. He stayed in the mainstream moving down Chatham Road for about twenty minutes, then manuevered into a turn lane and onto Tung Tau Tsuen Street.
Chin pointed out the window to a patch of decrepit, filthy, high-rise tenements about the size of two football fields.
“You don’t ever want to go in there, Neal.”
“No?”
“No. That’s the Walled City. You go in there, you don’t come back out. It’s like a maze.”
Neal said, “I don’t see any walls.”
“Torn down. It was a Sung fort. Even the British didn’t want it when they took over in Kowloon. You’re looking at one of the worst slums in the world. No government, no law. It’s the end of the road.”
Ben sped up again and turned back onto Chatham Road.
“Speaking of the end of the road,” Neal said, “where are we going?”
“To the hotel. We got you a nice room.”
Any time now, baby Jesus.
“Ben, didn’t your cousin explain to you that some people might be looking for me?”
“sure.”
“So, a hotel?” Neal asked. No wonder you flunked out.
“Not a hotel, Neal. My hotel. You don’t sign the register, and you have a room we can keep an eye on. Nobody will get to you.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“My boys at the hotel.”
“The other guards that you supervise.”
Ben Chin chuckled. “Sure. We pride ourselves on keeping our guests safe and secure.”
Chin took a left off Chatham onto Austin Road.
“Hey, Ben?”
“Yeah, Neal?”
“Let’s cut the happy-Buddha, Hop Sing routine, and get down to it. You’re mobbed up, right?”
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘mobbed up.’”
The idea sure didn’t make him mad, though. He was grinning with glee.
“You’re a junior executive with one of the Triads. In the management training program, so to speak.”
“Oooohh, ‘Triad’… the man thinks he knows the lingo.”
Yeah, the man thinks he does. You’d have to be deaf, dumb, and stupid to do my kind of work in any major city in America and not know about the crime syndicates that controlled so much of daily life in every Chinatown. Neal knew that the Triads’ high-ticket item was heroin, but the protection racket provided a big slice of the daily bread, and the Triad bosses used this extortion as a training ground for its thugs and up-and-comers. The Triads had spread their fingers over the Asian communities worldwide, but their home offices were in Hong Kong.
“Quit running a number on me, Ben.”
“So you’re from New York, Neal? You’ve had some Peking Duck on Mott Street and you think you’re an expert on the inscrutable world of the Orient? Let me tell you, something, Neal-you know shit.”
He took a left off Austin onto Nathan Road.
“So tell me what I need to know,” Neal said.
“You need to know that you’re in good hands and leave it at that.”
“Am I in good hands?”
“The best.”
The Banyan Tree Hotel occupies a block on the east side of Nathan Road in the Kowloon District called Tsimshatsui-the Peninsula. It’s the major tourist area in Hong Kong, with its “Golden Mile” shopper’s paradise, restaurants, and bars.
“You’ll blend right in here,” Chin assured Neal as they climbed the back staircase, not bothering to check in. “And you’re prepaid.”
They walked up to the second floor and then grabbed the elevator to the ninth. Neal’s room, 967, was large and anonymous. Its furniture and decor could have been in any hotel room in New Jersey, except that the large picture window looked out over Kowloon Park, across from Nathan Road. The banyan trees that lined the park were survivors from the days when Major Nathan first surveyed the lines for the dirt track that at the time led to nowhere and hence got the name “Nathan’s Folly.” The park appeared to be filled mostly with old people and kids. A deformed beggar, his legs bent underneath him, was crawling along the sidewalk, feebly chasing passersby.