Ava landed in Port of Spain right on schedule at 7 p.m. It was already dark. Trinidad is in the southernmost reaches of the Caribbean, and fifty-two weeks a year, the sun falls like a stone behind the western mountain range at 6 p.m. From the air and all lit up, the city looked bigger than she had imagined. She guessed it was also a hell of a lot prettier from where she sat than it was on the ground.
She coasted through Immigration, Customs, and baggage claim, stepping out into air that was Thailand humid but filled with unfamiliar odours. Rotting leaves. Dead birds. Dog shit. Gas fumes. She couldn’t put a fix on it, but she nearly gagged. When Ava walked through the Arrivals gate, she saw a large black man standing at the curb in front of a Lincoln Continental. He was holding a sign with her name on it. She signalled to him, he opened the back door, and she climbed in.
“That’s some smell,” she said.
“Mainly dead vegetation,” he said.
She didn’t need more detail. “How far to the hotel?”
“About half an hour.”
For once she hadn’t overslept on the plane. She had caught about eight hours en route to New York and that had been it. She was sleepy, which was good, because she wanted to be fresh the next day.
“Are you here on vacation or business?” he asked.
“Business.”
“Staying long?”
“Just overnight. Tomorrow I head for Guyana. My business is there.”
“Guyana. That is… one… crazy… place,” he said.
“Have you been?”
“Don’t have to go to know. We hear the stories — there are always stories. Nothing works. Can’t trust no one. Can’t go out at night with even a ten-dollar watch on your wrist. We get some of them here, Guyanese. They come with suitcases filled with shrimp and go from hotel to hotel and restaurant to restaurant trying to sell it. As if the chef at the Hilton is going to buy shrimp from some guy selling it out of a suitcase.”
“Someone must be buying it or they wouldn’t keep coming,” she said.
He looked at her in his rear-view mirror to see if she was making fun of him. Ava wasn’t laughing.
“The only good thing about Guyana is that it makes the rest of us in the Caribbean look good. No matter what kind of stunts our politicians pull or how many drug dealers we have or how bad our crime is, it’s always worse in Guyana.”
She knew that Port of Spain sat on the Caribbean Sea, but as they began to work their way along the highway into the city she could see no sign of it. She rolled down her window and listened. Nothing. “Where’s the sea?” she asked.
The driver pointed left to a row of what looked like warehouses and abandoned factories. “It’s there, behind those buildings.”
On her right house lights glimmered weakly above a large brick wall that flanked the highway for at least two kilometres. “That’s the wall of shame,” the driver said, noting her interest.
“It isn’t a sound barrier?”
“More like a sight barrier. That’s Beetham Estate behind the wall, our biggest slum. You’ll find squatters, shacks, people who live on scraps. Not a place to wander into. The government built the wall just before the Summit of the Americas was held here so the foreign dignitaries wouldn’t have to look at Beetham on the way into the city. Building the wall was cheaper and quicker than doing anything about the slum. Hide it, pretend it isn’t there. Mind you, not many taxi drivers are complaining. It used to be that if your car broke down on this part of the road the animals from Beetham would be on you in two minutes. Now with the wall it takes them a bit longer.”
As they drove into the city, office towers, hotels, and small shopping complexes emerged from the night. Most of them were to the right of the highway, away from the sea. What kind of place is this? Ava thought. In Hong Kong, any kind of waterfront view, no matter how slight, drove up the real estate prices. Here it was as if they had decided they needed to distance themselves from the Caribbean.
The driver left the highway, turned right, and cut uphill through a series of narrow streets lined with houses and shops only a sidewalk away. It was a bumpy ride. Many of the streets were cobblestoned, and the driver had to come almost to a complete halt to navigate deep V-shaped trenches cut across the roadway.
At the top of the hill the road opened onto a broad expanse and the driver began to circle what was obviously a park. There was only a half-moon and not all the street lights were working, but as they drove along Ava was taken aback by the scale and variety of architecture they passed. “This is the Savannah, the Queen’s Park Savannah,” he said, meaning the park. “Used to play cricket here every Sunday, but now I just come for Carnival.”
“What about these buildings?” Ava asked.
“That’s All Saints’ Church, and over there is the American embassy.”
“No, I mean those,” Ava said, pointing to a row of mansions that looked as if they belonged in a Victorian-era London neighbourhood.
“The Magnificent Seven, we call them. They were built over a hundred years ago by European businessmen who were all trying to outdo each other. That one there is now the president’s house, and the rest I really don’t know,” the driver said.
They continued around the circle to get to the Hilton, which was adjacent to the Savannah and close to the Royal Botanic Gardens. The hotel’s curious hillside structure was reflected in the interior. The lobby at the front of the hotel was on the ground floor, and Ava’s room at the rear, which still had a view of the lights encircling the Savannah, was two floors below. Aside from the architectural eccentricity, when she opened the door to her room she found herself in a classic Hilton hotel room: clean, middle-class, dependable.
She ordered a Carib beer and a club sandwich from room service and then called Hong Kong. It was just past ten in the morning there, and Uncle, as usual, was at breakfast. “I’m in Trinidad. I leave for Guyana tomorrow.”
“We don’t have anyone there,” he said.
“I didn’t think we would.”
“The closest we have someone is in Venezuela.”
“I’ll handle it myself.”
“Ava, if you think you need help I’ll call Venezuela.”
“I don’t need help,” she said. “I’m staying at the Phoenix Hotel in Georgetown. I don’t know if my cellphone is going to work there, so if you can’t reach me that way, call the hotel. I don’t know how long this is going to take, so don’t get worried if you don’t hear from me for a few days.”
“You are sure he is there?”
“As sure as I can be.”
“My friend saw me last night. We were at massage and I couldn’t avoid him. He said you talked to Tam.”
“He caught me by surprise.”
“Well, nothing we can do but finish this project.”
“How many haven’t I finished?”
“A few… but then they were usually dead by the time we got to them.”
On a previous case the client had assigned more than one group the job of recovering their money. Twice she had been in meetings with targets, easing them towards repayment, when the competitors intruded, blood in their eyes. She convinced one set to leave by promising to share part of the commission with them. The other had to be neutralized more forcefully.
“Do they have anyone else working this job?”
“No, no, no, it is just us. I am very careful about that now.”
“All right, then I’m off to bed. I have an early start tomorrow.”
Ava showered and then shampooed the smell of airplane out of her hair. She pulled on clean panties and a T-shirt and then sat on the bed to watch the local news. The lead story was about how Trinidad had become a major part of the South American drug pipeline to the U.S., which was reported with a mixture of shock and pride. The opposition leader, who was black, came on the screen to charge four cabinet ministers, who were all East Indian, with corruption. Lifelong politicians who had never made more than thirty thousand dollars a year, they had each somehow amassed a personal net worth in excess of ten million dollars. One of the cabinet ministers was interviewed in front of what appeared to be a local school. He looked directly into the camera and claimed to have gotten lucky in the stock market. It’s amazing, Ava thought, just how many politicians get lucky in the stock market.
She turned off the television and crawled into bed, her mind randomly flitting ahead to Guyana. She had no idea what to expect when she got there, in terms of either the country or Seto. She knew well enough from trips to hinterlands in India, China, and the Philippines that her life’s usual amenities might be in short supply, but it would be another thing entirely to experience deprivation of clean water and food she could actually identify. Guyana, from what she’d read, certainly held that potential. She could only hope she was wrong.
Then there was Seto. All he was right now was a passport picture, a fragment of a voice, and an address in a neighbourhood she didn’t know in a city and country in which she had no connections. She could land tomorrow and find him gone. Maybe Antonelli had figured that keeping $2.5 million was worth a little — no, a lot of — humiliation. Or maybe when she got there she wouldn’t be able to find a way to get to Seto. But when has that ever happened? she thought. Not often. Actually, never.
There was always a way; it just depended on what level of risk was warranted by the money at the other end. The risk and the reward weren’t always in balance, and Ava liked to think she was pragmatic enough to recognize when that was the case and to make the appropriate decision. Five million dollars, though… her commission share of $750,000 was an awful lot of money, an awful lot of reward.