Jake Needham - Laundry Man

Before I even had a chance to give him the number he hung up. It was only a few seconds before it rang.

“Hello.”

“Good on ya, mate. She’ll be right now.“

“I won’t even bother to ask you how you got this number, Archie.”

“Shit, mate. I wouldn’t fucking tell you anyway.”

“So…” I hesitated a moment. “What’s new?”

Archie started laughing so hard I thought he might hurt himself.

“What’s new? Jack Shepherd, you are without a doubt the only bloke I’ve ever known who would have the nerve to ring me up and ask, ‘What’s new?’ You Yank ratbags are too much. You really are.”

“Just being friendly.”

“Well, mate, I’m as busy as a one-legged bloke in an arse-kicking contest, so let’s have it. What’s on your mind?”

“It’s all probably just a lot of nothing, Archie, but I need to collect on one of those favors you owe me. Something a little strange has come up and I thought you might be able to give me some background.”

“Reckon I probably can if I want to. What’s the subject?”

“The Asian Bank of Commerce. You ever heard of it?”

There was a short silence.

“Bloody oath,” Archie sighed after a few moments. “What are you doing mixed up with those bodgie mongrels?”

“Well, it’s a little hard to explain, but-”

“Never mind. Can you meet me right now?”

“Yeah, I guess so. Sure. Where are you?”

“Don’t worry about that. Just pay attention, Jacko. Do exactly what I tell you to do.”

I paid attention, then following Archie’s instructions I took the lift downstairs and left the Mandarin by the front entrance. Climbing a short flight of stairs just on the other side of the hotel’s service drive, I joined the rivers of pedestrians flowing through the networks of overhead walkways that knitted Hong Kong together and walked to the Star Ferry terminal.

The Star Ferry had been running back and forth across Victoria Harbour for over a century. The little green-and-white double-decked vessels crossed the harbor from the wharf on Hong Kong Island, docked at Tsim Sha Tsui at the tip of the Kowloon peninsula and then traveled back again, moving almost continuously over the same ten-minute route all day and through a good part of the night.

When each ferry bumped with practiced ease into its berth, a Chinese sailor in a blue uniform swung open an iron gate to allow boarding passengers to stream on even as disembarking passengers were still being funneled off in the opposite direction. After the ferry was filled-and it happened very quickly, like everything else in Hong Kong-a loud bell rang, a large traffic signal hanging over the gate snapped first to yellow and then to red, and a sailor-suited man pushed the iron gate firmly shut, stemming if only for a moment the relentlessly advancing crowds. Of course, there were always a last few stubborn stragglers determined to slip around the gate’s closing edge and leap across to the deck of the ferry as the gangway was being hauled away, all that in spite of the fact that another green-and-white ferry would be slipping into the wharf almost as soon as the first one was clear and the whole process would begin again after only the slightest interruption. This was Hong Kong after all. Wasted time was wasted money.

At a few minutes after five I was standing in front of the Star Ferry terminal waiting for Archie. I glanced at my watch and contemplated my immediate future. The traffic to the airport would be horrible. If I was going to make my flight to Bangkok, I probably had a half-hour at the very most to talk to Archie, get back to the hotel, grab my bag, and check out.

That looked pretty unlikely right then, and I knew that this unscheduled excursion would almost certainly cause me to be stuck in Hong Kong for another night. Anita was going to be less than thrilled about that. Actually, I was less than thrilled about that, too. Things had been a little strained with Anita ever since my Sunday night rendezvous with Barry Gale so I was eager to get home. And yet, here I was standing in front of the Star Ferry waiting for Archie Ward. I began to polish the story I would be telling Anita a little later on the telephone.

The walkways of the ferry building were jammed with commuters on their way to Kowloon and the crowds shouldered past me as I shifted my weight from foot to foot. Finally I saw Archie coming from the direction of the Post Office building. He was easing through the throng in such a practiced way that there was hardly a ripple around him and for a moment I envied the evident deftness he had developed for living in a city as combative as Hong Kong.

Archie grinned as he eased up next to me and gave my shoulder a warm squeeze.

“G’day, mate. How you keeping?”

“I’m good, Archie.”

“Still teaching in Bangkok?”

“Yeah, still teaching. You still with…” I wasn’t sure exactly how to put it, so I said the first thing that popped into my head, “the bank?”

Archie chuckled. “Nah. I’ve changed jobs.”

He produced a pack of Marlboros from his shirt pocket and held them out to me. When I shook my head, he extracted one with his lips, lit it using a red Bic, and exhaled in a long, steady stream.

“Got no perks anymore, Jacko. No more promotions, no insurance, no pension. Just me, my shoeshine, and my smile.”

“When did that happen?”

“A few months ago.”

“Your idea?”

“Too bloody right. I’d been watching all those little ratbags who used to be Mossad or Shin Bet quit and then use their contacts to make heaps in the arms or drug business. Big fucking bickies they were scoring, mate. And there was me without a brass razoo to me name.”

The idea that my friend Archie had coolly set himself up in the business of dealing guns or smuggling drugs startled me, and my face must have shown it.

“No, Jacko, that shit’s not for me. But now a lot of your other blokes, they don’t give a flying fuck. That mob’s cunning as dunny rats and they make a few quid, I’ll tell you. Only problem is that most of them aren’t around long enough to spend any of it.”

“So what are you doing, Archie?”

He pulled at his cigarette, acting like he was thinking, maybe wondering if he ought to be saying what he was saying, but I knew better. Archie Ward liked to play the cheery little Aussie larrikin who didn’t really care about anything other than sinking a few tinnies with his mates down at the pub, but I seriously doubted he had ever uttered a word in his life that hadn’t been carefully weighed in advance. Whatever he was about to tell me, Archie thought there might be something in it somewhere for him.

“I’m completely independent now, Jacko. Everybody knows that I’ve got the good oil on just about everybody. Now I sell what I know to whoever offers me the best price. Sometimes it gets a little shonky, I got to admit but, bloody hell, the rest of the time it pays off like a busted pokie machine.”

Archie paused and shifted his eyes around, sizing up the crowd. Finally, he looked back at me and pointed to the ferry entrance.

“Let’s go,” he said. “Hanging around out here we stick out like a dog’s balls.”

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.