The Case of the Chinese Boxes Read online

  ‘Yes, I know.’ Lucy had sucked me in yet again. I felt better in the wide open space of Tumbalong Park than in the confines of the Gardens. So scattered that one can ride a horse there, so dense that even a needle can hardly be seen. I thought again about the man with no tie. Maybe the Chens were monitoring my activities. I didn’t like the idea. I like working alone. If they were sewing a shadow onto me I might very well trip over it.

  ‘So tell me about the Chens.’

  ‘Which ones?’

  ‘You can start with Victoria.’

  ‘She’s inscrutable.’

  I looked at Lucy’s deadpan face. Then she burst out giggling and put her hand over her mouth to cover it. The discipline and mindfulness of a warrior and a laugh that sounded like a little bell. Even Bruce Ruxton couldn’t fail to be charmed. She pulled her face together again.

  ‘What does she do?’

  ‘Lots of things. Runs the Red Dragon restaurant in Dixon Street, for a start.’

  ‘Yeah, and what else? Gambling clubs?’

  Lucy screwed up her face. ‘Possibly. She runs just about everything else. She’s on all the social committees, does good work. The family owns property in Chinatown, she’s fairly influential, the power behind the throne sort of thing. Since her husband died she’s been trying to train her son to front for her, but despite looking delicious he’s a bit of a wimp.’

  ‘When did her husband die?’

  ‘John Chen met with an unfortunate accident some months ago.’

  ‘This hasn’t been Mrs Chen’s year, has it?’

  ‘The year of the Dragon is always a time of change.’

  Of course, this would have to be the year of the Dragon.

  ‘It’s more than just that,’ Lucy continued. ‘There is some . . . instability in Chinatown. Something’s going on down there. There are fights, murder even. We haven’t had that since the good old days. I don’t know, maybe it’s these newcomers from Hong Kong, those that don’t want to be around for the change of management in 1997. Power bases are shifting. Certain influential “businessmen” are moving out to established Chinatown communities throughout the world, and of course Australia has such a lovely climate. Things grow so well in the heat.’

  I knew by Lucy’s tone of voice what sort of ‘businessmen’ she meant. The same sort of ‘businessmen’ we had here already. As long as you had $500,000 ready cash to invest not many other questions were asked.

  ‘What sort of unfortunate accident did John Chen meet with?’

  ‘He fell on a knife.’

  ‘How come it didn’t make it into the newspapers?’

  ‘Hush money maybe. Chinese like to keep themselves to themselves. They shipped the body back to China. Very traditional. The emigrants always wanted to go back to China once they’d made their money in New Gold Mountain. Most times it was like Mr Chen. Back in a box.’

  ‘And a nice long way away from possible autopsies.’

  ‘The death was so inconvenient, John was just about to buy into the antique market.’

  ‘You know an awful lot about them for someone who never sets foot in Chinatown.’

  ‘Only what I hear around the dinner table when I attend a family dinner—which is as seldom as possible. Lots of tourists round this time of year—and aren’t they handsome!’

  I turned to where she was looking. On a park bench sat a man with a camera. It had a zoom lens. As he casually raised a magazine to his face a gold watch glinted. I had a flash of déjà vu. And it wasn’t just the fact that I also casually raised magazines to my face when doing surveillance work.

  When Lucy and I were about five metres away from the bench he put the magazine down and started walking away. Not hurrying away, just strolling.

  Something about him reminded me of James Bond. It wasn’t the fact he was handsome and wore a well-tailored dark suit. It wasn’t the bright yellow handkerchief in the jacket pocket or the black kung fu shoes. It certainly wasn’t the fact that he was Chinese.

  I picked up the magazine he’d left behind. it was Rolling Stone and had Tom Cruise on the cover. But that wasn’t what I found most intriguing. It was the headline: TRIADS: THE FULL STORY.

  I flicked it open to the appropriate page to find CHASING THE DRAGON.

  The Chinese call it chasing the dragon; you pour a thin line of heroin along a sheet of alfoil, light a match underneath and inhale through a paper cone down the line as the heroin burns and the sickly-sweet smoke hits the back of your throat.

  Chasing the dragon. Was that the message? Stay away from drugs? It hardly seemed relevant. But there might be something else in the article that was.

  We walked at some distance behind the man till he disappeared into the arcades of Darling Harbour.

  ‘Cute bum,’ said Lucy, ‘though I prefer blonds.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ I said absent-mindedly.

  How could he wear a suit in this weather and still look that cool? He wasn’t even sweating and the trousers still held their crease.

  That’s what reminded me of James Bond.

  Cabramatta was as close as I’ve been to Asia without actually leaving the country. But I felt foreign long before I got to Cabramatta; I felt foreign at Five Dock. From there on it was red bricks and fibro. I had entered the western suburbs. The city I knew like the back of my hand dropped away and I needed the Gregory’s.

  We drove through Bankstown. I thought of Carol. Bankstown was where Carol’s childhood had withered away and died. The way she presented it. Bankstown was the end of the earth. Cabramatta was even further out.

  We drove for miles and everything looked the same.

  Finally the highway passed over Cabramatta railway station. ‘How do we get in there?’ I asked Lucy.

  ‘Do a loop.’

  After the railway bridge we turned right and descended into the heart of Cabramatta.

  It was the reversal of westernisation. Here easternisation had taken place. The buildings were that make-it-square-and-put-a-fence-around-it architecture characteristic of fifties-style Australian suburbia. But the signs were straight from the Orient. Kim Do Electronics, Tan Hung Meats, the Bing Lee Centre offering the Biggest Bargains This Side of Hong Kong. There was Dr Van Huoc Vo, surgery, beside Tai Huyuk, acupuncturist. From a doorway that said Snuker Bilija Pul you could hear the sounds of snooker balls clinking. The CES was subtitled Trung Tam Tim Viec and the State Bank, Nga Hang.

  It wasn’t only the signs, it was the contents of the shops and the way things were arranged in them. Every second shop seemed to sell fabric, with rolls of it stuck into bins making a colourful disordered display. Disordered to my eye not yet attuned to the underlying rationale. Everything shouted simultaneously, like a chorus of five-year-olds all singing a different song.

  Lunch was well underway when we entered the restaurant. There was a sudden arrest in the atmosphere and all eyes were on us, as if a duck had wandered into a chook-yard. A waiter was cleaning off a table that had been recently vacated, one near the kitchen—probably low on the pecking order, but the only one free. I felt conspicuous enough just standing there, let alone trying to walk out again. We sat down on green vinyl chairs.

  ‘We have only noodles,’ said the waiter.

  Lucy said something to him and he nodded his head and went off.

  ‘You learnt Vietnamese up there in Surry Hills?’

  ‘Cantonese. Works wonders. I’ve got us some duck to go with the noodles.’

  The restaurant had red and gold bordello style wallpaper and red tasselled lanterns hanging from the ceiling. There was a calendar, a day out of date, from the Chinese Buddhist Society, and a clock made in Canada in the shape of a maple leaf. Between us and the kitchen was a small cupboard with the door taken off. It was a shrine. It was the thought that counted and I’m sure it impressed Buddha as much as a twenty-foot gold statue of himself. There was a drawer above it where the waiter casually flung the dish-rag he’d been cleaning our table with. The inside of the cupboard glowed re
d; in the back left corner a red electric light bulb was sitting on top of a candlestick. Behind were some Chinese ideographs and in front, incense sticks and an offering of two plump mangoes. In the kitchen sat an old lady looking out at the world, or what was left of hers. She had her feet on a little footstool. She sat so still she could have been a statue.

  The waiter came back with the noodles, duckling, and two forks. He hovered about while I picked up the chopsticks already in place and started lacing the noodles around them. ‘There are forks,’ he said. ‘Thank you,’ said Lucy, and took them. She started in with the fork. ‘I like a bit of iron in my diet,’ she said, ‘better than plastic.’ I persevered with the chopsticks. I felt like I was onstage in front of a thousand people with my pants down.

  After a while the other lunchers got bored with watching and went back to talking. It was relaxing to be sitting in total linguistic isolation. To hear sound without meaning. They were probably only talking about operations, marital problems and what was wrong with the car but it was nice not to have to take it in.

  We finished with jasmine tea.

  Lucy walked off to the Community Health Centre and I started wandering the streets. I went into a supermarket that sold everything. There were packets of fragrant rice and monosodium glutamate, bras spilling out of a bin alongside men’s shirts. There were warty cucumbers, long sticks of lemon grass, banana leaf packets of sticky rice, green pawpaw, coriander and other fresh herbs. Deeper into its bowels I discovered some unidentifiable dried matter in leathery brown half shells. I think it was dried bird embryo. I quickly turned away and looked for something more pleasant. Tins of lychees. Instead of Letona the brands were Dragon Bowl, Twin Elephants, Heaven Temple.

  I bought some fresh herbs and left. It was late afternoon when I got back out on the street and the day shift of shoppers was being replaced with the night shift of young dudes cruising. The boys were no more than sixteen, wearing jackets with the sleeves rolled up, and hair that had a lot of time spent on it. There were some girls, mostly accompanied, with nowhere near the peacock strut of the boys.

  Then I saw him. The man with no tie. And I wasn’t even looking for him. He was coming out of the snooker hall. I saw now why he had been making funny hand signals in the Chinese Gardens—he had two fingers missing. He was with another man who looked like he spent a lot of time in snooker halls. They got into a car and drove off. I took note of the number-plate.

  I climbed the stairs of the snooker hall.

  The sound of the balls clinking stopped immediately I entered. The room was full of young guys in jeans, holding cues. Some of them had dragons tattooed on their forearms.

  But one didn’t. Nor was he young or holding a cue.

  He was sitting at a table with two other men who looked like minders. They weren’t especially big, they just had that air about them. Propped up against the table was a walking-stick.

  The man wore an old-fashioned pin-striped suit and a black hat that obscured most of his face. On his hand was a gold signet ring. I noticed the hand because it was resting on a large pile of money. Maybe they were having a quiet game of poker. But I couldn’t see any cards. He made no attempt to hide the money, nor did he even look up. He had no reaction to my appearance there whatsoever.

  One of the minders came over to me.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘Just looking,’ I said.

  ‘Private club. Members only. Sorry,’ he said, as if there was nothing he could possibly do about it.

  Sure.

  The balls on the snooker tables made no sound and neither did the men standing beside them. The cues would make ideal fighting sticks but I didn’t have one.

  I nodded. My curiosity did not extend to being killed over it. I didn’t really feel like a game anyway.

  As I walked down the stairs I couldn’t help thinking about that man in the black hat. As far as everyone else was concerned I stuck out like a sore thumb. But for him I might just as well have been invisible.

  I walked to a central food hall and ordered some shaved ice. There was a choice of green, red, yellow or white to go with it. I settled for yellow and white. They turned out to be chewy mango and lychee.

  I was just about to take out the Rolling Stone when a tall red-haired security guard came over to my table. I put the magazine away again. The memory of the taxi driver commenting on my reading material was still fairly fresh and I didn’t want to be caught out again. The guard was eating fish and chips. He was the only other European in sight. He didn’t look as though he was enjoying his job.

  ‘You like that stuff?’ he asked.

  ‘Very pleasant.’

  ‘You’re not from round here, are you? What brings you to this part of town?’

  ‘Just visiting. What goes on around here that they need a security guard?’

  ‘Anything you’d like to imagine and more. But that’s none of my business and I don’t want it to be. As long as things are quiet in here I’m happy.’

  He sat down. I hadn’t asked him to join me, and the smell of the fish and chips interfered with the taste of mango and lychee. But if he wanted conversation he was going to get it and it wouldn’t be just him asking the questions.

  ‘What goes on in the snooker hall?’

  ‘Snooker. What do you think?’

  ‘Not a front for anything?’

  ‘Everything here is a front for something. But I don’t get to hear about it. And I’m not curious. It’s a good way to be.’

  ‘Do you like this beat?’

  ‘Not particularly. But it’s better than going into the city every day. That’s where you’re from, isn’t it?’

  ‘How can you tell?’

  ‘Not hard. The way you’re dressed and that.’

  ‘Do you think anyone else has noticed?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘Anyone that I should be worried about?’

  ‘Got someone in mind?’

  There was just enough wariness in his voice to stop me asking about the man in the black hat.

  ‘No, just curious.’

  ‘Curious is not a good way to be.’

  ‘So you said.’

  ‘It was advice, not a passing comment.’

  ‘Am I boring you?’

  ‘Not yet. But it’s probably a good idea not to hang around. You’re not one of them and you don’t exactly look like a tourist.’

  ‘Next time I’ll bring a camera.’

  ‘Is there going to be a next time?’

  ‘Not in the immediate future but you never know.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘you just never know.’ He threw his fish and chip paper into a nearby bin. ‘I’ve been working this beat for three years and you know what? I don’t know any of these people. Sure, I say hello and goodbye and how’s business but beyond that . . . you know what I mean?’

  ‘Maybe the uniform scares them off.’

  ‘Well that’s what it’s designed to do. Scare off the shoplifters and stuff like that. That’s good, saves me the heavy-duty stuff.’ He stood up. ‘Been nice talking to you.’

  Before he came round again I was on my way back to the car to wait for Lucy.

  I sat in the car with the windows up and the doors locked. I didn’t feel all that comfortable in Cabramatta and I didn’t want to be interrupted while I read the Triad article.

  The dragon has another meaning in Chinese slang; the Dragonhead is the leader of a Triad, the Chinese version of the Mafia.

  The article gave a brief history of Triads, named names and dated dates, gave an outline of the Triad hierarchy—the Red Pole in charge of fighting; the Straw Sandal, the administrator; and the White Paper Fan in charge of ritual and promotion. It mentioned a man called Lo Chi Wing (alias Pedro Jong), the Australian Dragonhead who was deported in 1985.

  Since Lo’s departure the Triad has continued its operations unabated, with its new Dragonhead a prominent and respected businessman in Sydney’s Chinatown.

  I wa
s startled by the sound of someone tapping at the window.

  It was Lucy, making signals for me to open the door. I leaned over to the passenger’s side and let her in.

  ‘God, it’s so hot in here,’ she said, waving her hand in front of her face. ‘What have you been doing, reading dirty magazines?’

  ‘Something like that,’ I said, starting the engine.

  ‘Well, how did you like it?’ Lucy asked, when we were back on the highway.

  ‘Saw the man with no tie,’ I said.

  ‘Sure. There’s lot of them in Cabramatta.’

  We didn’t speak again till we were back in the city.

  Jack was eating a toasted ham and cheese sandwich that he decorously referred to as his dinner. George, of the black teeth which had so fascinated my children, and a few other regulars sat at the bar halfway through schooners, reading the newspaper or staring into space. It would be a good ten minutes before any re-orders. Slow drinkers but steady. Only not so steady at closing time when they climbed down off their perches and walked stiffly out into the night air.

  ‘When was the last time you had any greens, Jack?’

  ‘November, 1963. The day Kennedy got assassinated.’ He took another bite of the sandwich and signalled me to wait. He had something for me.

  ‘Had a bloke in here looking for you. Said he’d be back. He left this.’ Jack felt his pockets, mumbling to himself, ‘Where did I put the damn thing? Oh yeah, with the postcards.’ He went to the area beside the till where he kept a board of postcards from regulars who had actually managed to leave not only the pub, but the country.

  ‘Not a bad likeness,’ he said, handing me a photo.

  It was a photo of two people I knew. In a place that I knew. Lucy and me at Darling Harbour. Taken only this morning. I was still wearing the same clothes.

  The furry animal stretched out again and clawed at my stomach.

  ‘What did he look like, this guy?’

  ‘Young, Asian, well-bred.’

  ‘Was he wearing kung fu shoes?’

  ‘Can’t see the feet from this side of the bar. You want to see him if he comes back?’