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.
(16)
Ava’s wakeup call came at six. She brushed her hair and teeth and put on her Adidas training pants, a clean bra, and a T-shirt. She pulled a copy of the Trinidad Tribune from underneath her door and left it on a table near the window. There was a kettle in the room; she turned it on and then sat down to read the paper while the water boiled.
There was a rehash of the television story from the night before, with pictures of all of the accused cabinet ministers. They looked like half a cricket team gone to fat. Ava skipped that story and read about the government’s concern over the rising crime rate and their search for a new police chief. A Canadian from Calgary was one of the candidates. Ava thought that had to be a bad idea. How could a Canadian understand the social dynamics and financial imperatives of a place such as Trinidad?
She poured hot water into a mug and made herself some instant. She had drunk one coffee and was halfway through the second when the room phone rang to tell her the car had arrived. She took the elevator to the lobby and was greeted by a different driver, who looked East Indian. As he drove away from the hotel and onto the road that circled the Savannah, she asked him what he thought about the corruption charges against the cabinet ministers.
“The blacks,” he said, as if that explained everything.
She asked about the drug trade.
“As long as the drugs don’t stay here, who cares? It could be good for the economy.”
Ava turned her attention to the passing city. The Magnificent Seven looked almost decrepit in the daylight, the bright morning sun exposing faded paint, chipped bricks, and raised roof shingles. The Savannah had lost some of its allure as well. She noticed that there was less actual grass than patches of bare ground pocked with clumps of crabgrass and weeds. Ava thought about something Uncle had said about older women in the morning light without makeup, then pushed it aside.
They rode quietly along the main highway. The factories and warehouses looked less oppressive now, and Beetham Estate seemed even more shabby. When they got to the intersection that took them to the airport, the car stopped for a red light. As it sat idling, a scrawny woman, her naked body streaked with mud and dirt, her hair matted, her breasts lying flat against her torso, jumped out and began pounding her fists on the hood. Her face pressed against the glass of Ava’s window as she screamed obscenities. Ava recoiled.
“No worries,” the driver said. “She’s here every day. Just a mad woman.”
“She needs help,” she said, still alarmed.
“No money, no help,” he said. “This is Trinidad. Go downtown at night, there are a lot more people like her. Maybe not so crazy, but crazy enough.”
“Shit,” she said.
“So where are you going?” he asked as the car pulled away from the intersection, leaving the screaming woman behind.
“Guyana.”
“Why?”
“Business.”
“The only business in Guyana is monkey business.”
“That’s not my business.”
“Just don’t drink the Kool-Aid,” he said, and laughed.
“What?”
“Kool-Aid — don’t drink it. You don’t remember Jim Jones?”
“Vaguely.”
