The Butterfly Effect by Eve Zaremba

Author:Eve Zaremba
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000, FIC022000
Publisher: Second Story Press
Published: 1994-05-16T00:00:00+00:00

PART II

40

Ladrone Partners

“Angus, you should know this. That CHNOPS business seems to be stirring again.”

“Who? Chops? Oh, yes, that runny CHNOPS business.” Angus McGee liked to pretend that CHNOPS sometimes slipped his memory. He didn’t like to think about it too much; besides, slips like that covered up for the times when he really did forget other matters. For, in fact, CHNOPS was not something either he or Ray Choy were likely ever to forget. “Well, good. Maybe it will be lucrative for us again. Haven’t heard anything for a while, have we? Something to do with that Burke fellow, right?”

“Yes. Remember that Nagoya hit? Some mobster got killed. And Burke’s girl Julie Piper was involved and then disappeared, remember? We got that Canadian investigator Helen Keremos to check it out. Then Piper turned up hiding out in a hospital. Now she’s disappeared again. So just to be on the safe side, CHNOPS went to ground. Temporarily, of course.”

“Humph! Why would CHNOPS have done that? How does a yakuza being murdered and a girl disappearing connect with CHNOPS?”

“Nagoya police found one of the CHNOPS paintings. I don’t know which one or the circumstances but it’s probably not hard to identify. So I guess the fear was that depending how far they go with it, they could unravel much of CHNOPS. Possibly including our past role.”

“But you’re saying CHNOPS is active again?”

“It seems so.”

Ray Choy didn’t bother looking at his partner directly as he explained the screw up in Nagoya and the fact that CHNOPS might be active again. He knew exactly what Angus McGee would look like and say in any situation. Including this one.

Angus nodded in an abstracted way as if the subject of CHNOPS had already fled his mind.

“How is your father keeping these days, Ray? I haven’t seen him for a while.”

This wasn’t as much of a non sequitur as it seemed on the surface.

“He’s old, Angus, what can I say? Holding up well enough, though. For his age. I’ll tell him you asked.”

Neither man needed to be reminded that it was at the insistence of Ray’s father that Angus became a Ladrone partner. Or that they had become involved in CHNOPS without his knowledge and consent. Ray was bound by filial duty to honour his father’s wishes about Angus but he didn’t have to like it. He wasn’t about to let his father’s old-fashioned ideas interfere with the way he ran the business.

His father was traditional. He had arrived in Hong Kong from a village in China in the early years of this century. Charles McGee — Angus’s father — had given him his first job. As the McGee Mercantile Company grew from one small warehouse into a major player in the busy Hong Kong market, Choy’s position grew with it. At the beginning of World War II, he was McGee’s right-hand man, as wealthy and honoured as any Chinese could be in the British colony at the time. Then came the cataclysm of the Japanese conquest.

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