first. He had some people working for him who were, frankly, a bit rough around the edges — the kind you’d expect to encounter in a business like that. They agreed to work with me, although I think, looking back, they were probably humouring me, or maybe they thought it was a way to get me into bed. Anyway, Uncle had a great network of contacts and we tracked down the guy in no time. But when it came to collecting, Uncle’s people had no finesse whatsoever. The guy would have talked his way out of returning about two-thirds of the money he owed if I hadn’t gotten involved and done a little forensic accounting work.
“Word got back to Uncle about what I had done, and he asked me to come and work with him. I said I wasn’t thrilled about his other employees. He told me he’d phase them out, that he thought my style and his were compatible. That was ten years ago, and the business has been just Uncle and me for most of that time.”
“And you’ve obviously been successful.”
“We’ve done well enough.”
The bill came to the table and Alice put twenty dollars on the tray. “Ava, did my brother sound desperate to you?”
Ava slipped on her jacket. “Not any more than most of our clients do.”
“Well, let me tell you, he is desperate. That five million dollars represents nearly all the capital our family has accumulated over the past two generations.” She reached across the table, grabbing Ava’s hand and squeezing. “Please do everything you can to help.”
(3)
It was almost four o’clock when Ava pulled up in front of her condo, tossed her car keys to the concierge, and went upstairs, the manila envelope, still unopened, tucked under her arm.
She opened a bag of sour candy, made herself a coffee, and sat at the kitchen table. Her mind wandered. It had been a long time since she had thought about, let alone discussed, how she and Uncle had gotten together and built their business. She had told Alice Tam the truth, but it was the barebones truth. When she thought about how naive she had been when she started and what she was now able to handle, it was as if she were looking at two different people.
In the beginning she’d been adept enough at the financial side of things, her curiosity, imagination, and training helping her track and find money in places where the thieves had thought it untraceable. And at first that was her main focus. Only gradually did she take on the collection role. She began by working on targets as the soft opener — she had a knack for getting people to talk, especially men, who saw her as a soft-spoken, polite, exotic young thing who needn’t be taken too seriously. By the time they realized the opposite was true, it was usually too late.
Ava didn’t start closing accounts until she saw the muscle Uncle was using botch projects by going too far. There’s a fine line between instilling enough fear to get someone to do what you want and applying so much pressure that the target figures he’s toast no matter what he does, so he might as well try to hang on to the money. Ava had a talent for finding the tipping point. Uncle would say, “People always do the right thing for the wrong reason.” Ava made that her mantra, striving to pinpoint the core self-interest in her targets, the one thing that was more important to them than hanging on to stolen money.
Uncle also said, “Once they have the money they forget where it came from, how they acquired it. In their minds, it is theirs. You need to remind them that it has a rightful owner and that the only thing open for discussion is how they are going to return it.”
Not that they didn’t try to hang on to it anyway. Being yelled at, cursed, and threatened was just part of the job. Knives, guns, and fists weren’t uncommon either, and that’s why Uncle said he used muscle. If there was going to be intimidation and violence, he wanted to have the most firepower. The problem, in Ava’s mind, was that the muscle invited a negative reaction. One look at Uncle’s original crew and the targets would gear up for the inevitable conflict. The violence clouded the process, made the money almost a secondary objective.
Ava urged Uncle to let the enforcers go, using them only on a must-need basis. His only concern was the potential for physical danger the targets posed. “I can look after myself,” Ava said. And the truth was, she could.
She had started taking martial arts when she was twelve and had almost immediately shown ability. She was quick, agile, and fearless. In a matter of months she was so far ahead of everyone else in her class that the teacher moved her up to train with the teens; a year later he moved her again, to work out with the adults. By the time she was fifteen, Ava’s skill paralleled his. That was when he took her aside and asked if she was interested in learning bak mei. It was an ancient form, he explained, reserved for the most gifted. It was taught only one-on-one, traditionally passed down from father to son but now also from mentor to student. There was one teacher in Toronto, Grandmaster Tang. Ava met with him several times before he agreed to accept her as a student. She was his second pupil; another teenager, Derek Liang, was the first, and though he and Ava never learned or practised together, over the years they had become friends.
From time to time Ava had called upon Derek to help her with collection. It was something they never discussed with their other friends, none of whom knew about her job. They had simply come to accept that once in a while Ava would leave the city on business for a few days or even weeks. She doubted they even noticed she was gone.
Ava thought that bak mei was the perfect martial art for a woman. The hand movements were quick, light, and short; they snapped with tension to their fullest extent, where the energy was released. It didn’t take a lot of physical strength to be effective. Bak mei attacks were meant to cause damage, directed as they were at the most sensitive parts of the body, such as the ears, eyes, throat, underarms, sides, stomach, and, of course, groin. Kicks were hardly ever aimed above the waist. Bak mei hadn’t come naturally to Ava. She had to learn to overcome her lack of power — at least, compared to Derek and Master Tang — and to exploit her strengths: her lightning-quick reflexes and her uncanny accuracy.
And learn she did. “I can look after myself,” she had told Uncle. And in all the years they’d been working together, she’d never given him any reason to doubt her.
They had been profitable years, with Ava earning enough money for the condo and the car and an impressive investment portfolio. But the best thing about the jobs she and Uncle did was that when they were successful, the income was only part of the satisfaction. First there was the ride getting to the money — it was never the same twice, and though it taxed her emotionally, it also forced her to expand her senses and her thought processes. Then there were the clients. Although she complained about them sometimes, especially those who in utter desperation were far too clinging and demanding, she also accepted Uncle’s conviction that they were simply lost souls looking for redemption. “When we get them their money back, what we are really doing is saving their lives,” he would say. Ava believed that too.
Ava reached for a black Moleskine notebook resting on the corner of the table, opened it to the first page, and wrote Andrew Tam across the top of the lined page. Every job she had ever done had its own notebook, a meticulous day-by-day record of everything she deemed relevant. The completed notebooks sat in a safety deposit box at the Toronto-Dominion Bank two blocks from her condo.
The manila envelope was stuffed with paper, and she quietly groaned at the prospect of wading through it all. However, a quick scan soon brought a smile to her face. The paperwork was beautifully organized, a complete chronological record of Andrew Tam’s dealings with a company called Seafood Partners, starting with a letter from him summarizing the events from start to finish. The letter even referred to appendices that were attached and neatly numbered. Ava admired his thoroughness. Then she wondered what moment of madness had caused him to go into business with a seafood company.
Of all the characters she had dealt with in the past, the seafood guys were the worst. It was as if they were programmed to steal, and once they had your money, getting it back was harder than pulling teeth with your fingers. One of her clients in Vancouver had bought two forty-foot containers of Chinese scallops; when the product arrived in Canada, he found that the boxes — clearly marked scallops — were filled with freezer-burned mackerel. It had taken her close to two weeks’ trekking around seafood plants in dusty, dirty Dalian in northeast China, on the Yellow Sea near the Korean border, before she caught up with the packer. It took another week before she got the money back. Even then the job wouldn’t have wrapped up so quickly if Uncle hadn’t put her in touch with a high-
