LAUNDRY MAN (A Jack Shepherd crime thriller) by Jake Needham Page B

old, it was three in the morning, and the ninth bottle of San Miguel had just gone down so smoothly and, best of all, stayed down.
    I circled around the golden glass-clad bulk of the Admiralty Centre, its bronze-mirrored surface twisting and shimmering with the city’s garish nighttime light show. Heading up Queensway, I fought my way through the crowds still jamming the sidewalks even at this hour. Almost entirely Chinese, the throng pulsed and surged as if driven by some otherworldly energy source.
    About a half-mile down Lockhart Road, I spotted the dirty brick façade of the Old China Hand pub which was something of a local monument. The Hand had been a Hong Kong expat hangout longer than anyone I knew could remember. I could hardly imagine the deals and schemes that had been whispered of within its dingy interior.
    On a whim I cut diagonally across the road and ducked inside the dark wooden door stained black from decades of exposure to Hong Kong’s rancid air. The room was as gloomy as I remembered it, and like most expat bars in Hong Kong it was chilled down to the temperature of a meat locker. The room was mostly empty. I slid into a chair at a table and in a few moments a dumpy Filipina girl of indeterminate age shuffled over. She was dressed in jeans and a man’s shirt and she expressionlessly thrust out a menu that looked dirty and dog-eared.
    “A pint of San Miguel,” I said, not bothering with the menu. “And fish and chips if you’ve got any left.”
    The girl pulled the menu back and walked away without a word. I gathered they still had some fish and chips. Or maybe not. Welcome to Hong Kong, I told myself.
    From a loudspeaker somewhere up near the greasy ceiling, Tony Bennett crooned about leaving his heart in San Francisco. I spotted a table near the door with some newspapers and magazines heaped on it so I got up and rummaged through them for something to read while waiting for my beer. To my surprise, I found some books under the pile. They were mostly dog-eared paperbacks, but a slim, red-bound hardback caught my eye and I picked it up to see what it was.
    When I saw the title on the front cover, I chuckled. Normally, you wouldn’t expect to find
A Register of Hong Kong Banking Institutions
among the reading matter in a run-down pub, but this was Hong Kong after all and making money was just about the only thing that anyone thought about. Barry Gale’s banking misadventures with the Asia Bank of Commerce popped into my mind and I flipped the book open to the index. Sure enough, about a third of the way down the first page, I found a listing for the ABC.
    When I turned to the page number listed in the index, I found very little there. The ABC had nothing but a restricted banking license in Hong Kong, which meant it had a little capital, but not much, and that it was legally entitled to take only very large deposits and make certain kinds of corporate loans. No vaulted lobby, no cute tellers, no toasters with every new account. At least the book listed an address for the ABC. The Hong Kong office was on Duddell Street, a steep lane that ran from Queen’s Road up to Ice House Street a few blocks west of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank building.
    Duddell Street was only about a ten-minute walk from the building where Southeast Asian Investments had its offices and I thought about that for a moment. I would have plenty of time after the board meeting tomorrow. It would probably be a waste of effort, but I might as well check out the address and see what was there. My flight back to Bangkok wasn’t until early evening and I really had no plans for the afternoon other than to pick up some Cuban cigars since they were both cheaper in Hong Kong and better quality than the ones sold in Bangkok.
    I jotted down the address. Then I put the book back on the table and picked up a copy of the
South China Morning Post
that was stained yellow with spilled beer. At least I hoped the stain was spilled beer.
    Back at