The Red Pole of Macau by Ian Hamilton

distributed. I’ll email it to you later,” she said, realizing she should have done that the day before.
    The art forgery case had been concluded less than three days ago. To Ava it felt like light-years.

( 7 )
    Ava wasn’t much of a girl for bars, especially when she was alone, but the day had jangled her nerves and she needed to calm down.
    She went to her room first, collected her notebook and laptop, and rode the elevator two levels up to the twenty-fifth floor. She wasn’t overly superstitious, as were many Chinese people, but she still had more superstitions than any gweilo , and one of them was that she wouldn’t stay on or visit the twenty-fourth floor of the hotel; in fact, she closed her eyes if the elevator stopped there. It was from that floor that Leslie Cheung had jumped to his death. Ava wasn’t a huge fan of Cantonese pop but she’d liked Cheung, maybe partially because he was gay, and it haunted her that his sexual orientation had somehow contributed to his suicide.
    The M Bar looked out on Victoria Harbour, its lotus-bud–shaped counter positioned so that everyone sitting there had a view. It was early and she had a choice of seats. She took one of the high-backed chairs on the right side. The bar served tapas, Hong Kong style, and she was tempted. There were two restaurants on the same floor: Man Wah, which some people considered the best Chinese restaurant in Hong Kong, and Pierre, a Michelin two-star French restaurant. She was hungry. The snow pea tips and a few scallops were all she had eaten that day. She decided to wait to have a real meal, and ordered just a glass of white burgundy.
    She turned on her laptop and made the wireless connection. She sent Uncle the financial summary of the Wuhan case and was about to connect to the Millennium website when her cell rang. It was her father. She knew he was still in Toronto and realized it was six a.m. there. Michael must have called him.
    “Daddy,” she said.
    “How are you?”
    “I’m okay. Has Michael been talking to you?”
    “Yes.”
    “How upset is he?”
    “He doesn’t know what to be upset about first.”
    “It is a mess,” Ava said, seeing no reason to be anything but honest.
    Her father sighed. She could imagine him sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and the morning newspaper, dressed in a pair of the Holt Renfrew silk pyjamas her mother made him wear. He had thick black hair that he still wore long, and in the morning it was always rumpled. She and Marian loved to see him like that, rather than in his normal Hong Kong–slick mode.
    “Michael is worried that you think he’s a fool.”
    That should be the least of his worries , she thought. “Well, they certainly did a foolish thing.”
    “Obviously. And Ava, you are sure about this Lok character, that he is triad?”
    “He is, and he’s pulled this real-estate scam before. If they had done any serious due diligence they would have found that out.”
    “It is Hong Kong,” Marcus Lee said. “We still do business on handshakes, we trust friends and family. Michael trusted Simon, Simon trusted this David Chi, and that overrode common business sense.”
    “I know. A lot of my business comes from people whose friends have screwed them over.”
    “Yes, you would know, and now Michael knows. A bit late, of course.”
    She heard the resignation in his voice. “Daddy, I’m still working on a few ideas. I’m going to meet with Michael and Simon tomorrow, so let’s not quit just yet.”
    “Ava, Michael is clinging by his fingertips to the hope that you can come up with something. I’m a bit more realistic. Don’t try anything silly.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “He told me about the man Wu. He’s upset about having put you at risk.”
    “I know how to handle people like Wu.”
    “Obviously you do. What I don’t know is how often you’ve had to do something like that, and how you came to have those skills.”
    “You paid for martial arts training for