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.”
“Well, it seems better to me if I-”
“Just lay out what you know, Jacko. Give me everything and I’ll let you have a mate’s rate on some good advice.”
I trusted Archie and I really didn’t have anything to lose, so I started again. I told Archie the story one more time and this time I included the part about the second coming of Barry Gale. By the time I had finished, the ferry was bumping against the pier in Kowloon and the passengers were beginning to move toward the gangway. I started to join them, but Archie just shook his head and offered a little downward flutter of his right hand in a gesture that obviously meant we were going to continue our voyage.
“Are we just going ride back and forth on this damned thing all day?” I asked.
Archie gave no sign that he had heard me and stood silently as the ferry filled once again with passengers and shoved off to begin its trip back across the harbor. I looked at the ferry that was approaching the spot on the wharf we had just vacated and wondered if the man in the dark raincoat was vainly trailing in our wake or if he was still somewhere back on the Central side waiting for us.
It wasn’t until we had wallowed out into the harbor again that Archie finally spoke.
“Are you certain this man you met was really Gale?”
“No doubt at all.”
“Well Christ, mate.”
The ferry slid into a trough left by a passing ship and floundered up the other side, forcing us to shift our balance and lean into the roll of the deck.
“And he said he’d taken over the Asian Bank of Commerce using Russian mob money?”
“He did.”
“Do you believe him?”
“I can’t imagine why anyone would lie about a thing like that.”
“Yeah, but did you believe him?”
I tried to look as credible as possible, although I wasn’t entirely certain what constituted a look of credibility while riding a ferry back and forth across Victoria Harbour.
“He was scared to death, Archie.”
“Maybe it wasn’t Russian mobsters he was scared of.”
“Then who?”
“The way I hear it, it wasn’t the Russian mob behind the Asian Bank of Commerce. It was somebody… bigger.”
“Bigger?”
Archie hesitated. He was either going to tell me what he knew or he wasn’t and there wasn’t anything more I could say to convince him one way or the other.
“Russian mobsters make for sexy stories,” he went on after a while, “but the truth is that most of them are just jackasses. When it comes to these huge international conspiracies they always get blamed for, well… they’d be well and truly buggered, Jacko. Reckon they’d have Buckley’s chance of making any of them work.”
I kept my mouth shut and just listened.
Archie looked at me for a long time, then he cleared his throat. “It was Chinese money, Jacko. That’s what funded the takeover.”
“You mean the triads?” I asked.
“No, nothing like that.”
“Then what?”
Archie’s head bobbed around on his shoulders as if it had become momentarily detached.
“Military?” I asked. “Government?”
“Not officially.”
“You mean it was Chinese intelligence.”
Archie nodded.
“The ABC was where they stashed the bribe money?” I asked.
“Yeah, something like that.”
I thought back to my midnight walk and talk in Bangkok with Barry Gale.
“If that’s true, Archie, Barry Gale doesn’t know it.”
“So what?”
“But Barry Gale was running the ABC. If he didn’t know it, how could it be true?”
Archie rolled his eyes and looked away.
“I think you’ve been in Asia too long for your own good, partner,” I said. “Everything that happens out here looks like some huge conspiracy to you.”
“Everything that happens out here is some huge conspiracy, Jacko.”
The wharf in Central was coming up fast. I looked over what I could see of the walkways around it, but there was no sign of our friend in the dark coat. Archie’s imagination had apparently gotten out of hand there. Maybe his tale of Chinese money being behind the ABC fell into the same category.
“Who was this bribe money supposed to belong to?”
“The usual suspects. A bunch of generals, a couple of ministers. It even went as high as the Politburo, I hear.”
“Who was paying? And what for?”
Archie didn’t seem to notice I had asked him anything. He pulled out his pack of Marlboros, then changed his mind and pushed them back into his shirt pocket.
The ferry’s engines churned into reverse as the pilot edged toward to the wharf. A sailor stood by the gangway with the rope to lower it wrapped around both hands and a few people in the crowd rose and began to shuffle toward the exit.
“This is the end of the trip, Jacko.” Archie’s voice was flat. “That’s all I’m saying. We’re square now.”
“Just one more thing, Archie.”
He shifted his eyes to mine.
“Did these Chinese generals and politicians get their money before the ABC collapsed?”
The ferry bumped the pilings and we stumbled slightly. Almost immediately I heard the sound of winches squealing followed by the crash of the metal gangway as it hit the concrete pier. The crowd surged forward and Archie turned away and began moving along everyone else, but I stuck to him as if we were handcuffed together. When he finally spoke his voice was so low I could barely pick out the words through the rumble of shuffling feet and the bursts of Cantonese crashing around us like mortar shells.
“That’s the funny part,” he said without looking at me. “I hear it all disappeared without a trace.”
“Do you know where the money went?”
Archie turned his head slightly and shifted his eyes onto mine. “You know how difficult it is to see anything when you look straight at it in the dark, Jacko? The harder you look, the harder it is to see. They tell me that to see something clearly when the light’s bad you ought look at it out of the corner of your eye, like soldiers do when they’re fighting at night.”
“What in the hell are you talking about, Archie?”
Archie watched me as we shuffled forward with the crowd toward the gangway. He looked as if he was waiting for me to say something else, but I couldn’t imagine what it was, and when I didn’t, he slipped back into the rhythms of his Australian vernacular.
“Those Chinese blokes are mean as cat’s piss when it comes to money, Jacko. I reckon that whoever did them is rooted. That’s what I reckon.”
“Rooted?”
“Fucked, Jacko. When they find whoever the poor wanker is who’s got their money, his dick will be in the dirt before he knows what hit him.”
Archie grinned at me then for a second and, entirely unexpectedly, he winked.
“I just hope it wasn’t you, matey.”
Then he took three quick strides over the gangway and disappeared into the crowd as completely as if he had never been there at all.