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

deposits to guarantee loans made to him through California banks, but I was paying as little attention as possible and that was all I got. The guy was reading a book to prepare for his meeting and he held it up for me to see. I glanced over politely and had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing out loud. The book was called
Offshore Money Havens: How to Live Tax Free for the Rest of Your Life.
    When the guy asked me what kind of work I did, I thought fast. We were going to be sitting together for the next three hours and telling the truth seemed to be an absolute guarantee that every one of them would be hell on earth. I briefly considered telling him I was an Internal Revenue Service agent on overseas assignment, but that would have been just plain cruel. Instead, I said I was a life insurance executive from Minneapolis, which was the dullest thing I could come up with at short notice. It must have been a good choice because the man didn’t say another word to me for the rest of the trip.
    Why was it that so many Americans look at offshore banking as some sort of occult wizardry? I had a sudden vision of huge airplanes stuffed with microchip importers from San Francisco whizzing endlessly around the globe in search of a fabled and mystical land called Offshore, a place forever beyond the reach of greedy governments, combative creditors, and vengeful ex-wives. I myself have always pictured Offshore as a land ruled by Peter Sellers, but now that he was dead, I imagine that Rowan Atkinson must have taken over the throne. I wondered what people spend their days doing in Offshore. What do they eat? What do they wear? Do they have sex? Well, I could guess the answer to that one. Not with all that money around. Money is so much more interesting than sex for almost everyone.
    My flight landed in Hong Kong exactly on time. Southeast Asian Investments had sent a driver to the airport and the fellow made the trip to the venerable Mandarin Oriental Hotel on Connaught Road in what must have been record time. Still, it was after nine when we got to the hotel. That was too late to do anything in particular, but too early just to sit in my room. Watching Hong Kong television was too awful a thought even to consider.
    I stuck my head in the Captain’s Bar off the Mandarin’s lobby, but the place was filled with middle-aged Englishmen entertaining their Chinese daughters. It was a depressing scene and I didn’t go in. I had skipped the meal on the plane so I briefly considered the possibility of a late evening snack in one of the hotel’s restaurants, but eventually I gave up trying to make a decision and just set out walking to see where I would end up.
    I liked walking in Hong Kong. In winter the climate was balmy and the humidity was low and in every season the intensity of the place was overwhelming. Bangkok was a tropical city. No matter how busy it might be, there was always a languor in the air you could never quite shake. Hong Kong, on the other hand, was all energy all the time. It was like being inside a pinball machine.
    Leaving the Mandarin, I turned right and walked east toward the Wanchai district or, as it had been dubbed by the American troops who took their R&R there during the Vietnam War, the Wanch. The Wanch had a history, but like a lot of history most of it was made up. From the day William Holden first came to Hong Kong, moved into a hotel filled with good-hearted whores, and fell in love with Suzie Wong, it was the Wanch which became the real Hong Kong in the eyes of the world.
    Nightlife in the Wanch never attained the status of Bangkok’s, of course, not even at the height of the Vietnam War when thousands of fresh-faced kids from places like Nebraska and Ohio flooded its streets, all of them looking for a Suzie Wong of their own. Most of the bargirls in the Wanch were more like bar grandmothers who put on their make-up with a garden trowel, but maybe that wasn’t so important when you were nineteen years