I spotted what must have been Mr Tony’s office: a rectangular glass booth on the far right of the dining area. A large man with broad shoulders and white hair sat behind a desk, a fan spinning above him blowing his hair while he spoke on the phone, a conversation that was clearly making him agitated. He hung up. I waited a minute, then approached the booth and knocked on the door.
‘Enter!’ he called.
He was sitting on a swivel chair in front of a computer. He smiled and raised his eyebrows. I went to close the door behind me.
‘Leave the door open. We need some air in here.’
‘Mr Tony?’
‘Tony is fine.’
‘I’m Petra.’ I held out my hand.
‘Ah, yes, of course.’ He wiped his hand on his trousers and shook mine; his grip was warm and sweaty. ‘Take a seat.’ He pointed at a plastic chair in the corner of the booth.
The entire place was awash in laughter and music and spices, and it all swirled around the little booth as it seeped in through the open door.
‘What you have here is amazing,’ I said. ‘You run this organisation yourself ?’
He nodded, smiled and said, ‘Don’t get me wrong – these Asians are ungrateful people.’ But then his smile faded, and he glanced down at the ground.
‘Really? So why do you help them?’
‘I was married to one. Do you mind if I smoke?’
‘Not at all.’
Taking a cigarette out of a box, he lit it with a large match, shaking out the flame and chucking it into a crystal ashtray that sat on a notebook.
‘And plus, I found a lot of injustice around.’
At that moment the phone rang; he looked down at the flashing screen on his desk and sighed. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, and picked it up. ‘Good afternoon, Mrs Kaligori, can I call you back in about—’
‘No.’ The voice on the other end interrupted. ‘She’s no good for me, Tony. She doesn’t even speak any English.’ The woman said a lot more but I turned my attention to outside the booth, where a beautiful young woman in a green and gold sari was passing by holding a bowl of steaming noodles. Beyond her, I saw the women in the kitchen still sweating and chopping, emptying the contents of their woks into large blue dishes.
‘No problem, we’ll sort this out,’ Tony said loudly. ‘I have someone here. Let me call you back in around thirty minutes.’
The woman seemed to acquiesce, although her voice was much quieter now and it was hard to hear.
‘I don’t work like the agents,’ he said to me, when he had hung up. ‘The employers come to me directly. They can try out the women, and if they don’t like them they send them back. Like Mrs Kaligori. You’re not getting some person from Nepal that you are tied to blindfolded. These people’ – he waved his hand around him – ‘need someone to help them. To the agents they are merchandise, not people.’
‘So, the women aren’t indebted to you?’
‘No! That is the whole point. The agents are furious.’
I nodded and watched him as he sucked deeply on his cigarette, narrowing his eyes at a streak of light from the sliding doors at the front. I noticed on his desk, propped up on some paperwork, a tiny grainy photo of a woman in a bronze frame. He followed my gaze.
‘Your wife?’
‘Ex-wife. Vietnamese.’
It seemed to me that he was about to say more about this as he opened his mouth, but then he pursed his lips and took a long, hard drag of the cigarette, blowing the smoke in a straight line towards the fan.
‘So, you’re looking for a girl?’ he said.
‘Not exactly,’ I said.
‘On the phone you said you wanted to see me about an urgent matter. In my experience most urgent matters come from women who are looking for a new maid because they are dissatisfied with the one they have.’
‘I see.’
‘So how may I be of assistance?’ he asked, grinning even more broadly now. He was like a gambling saint – there was a disparity, a weird dissonance about this man.
‘Well,’ I hesitated, and he nodded, urging me on patiently and impatiently. ‘I had a maid, and she has disappeared. She just vanished one day. I was told that you might be able to help.’ I could hear my voice crack. Saying it out loud to a stranger, and a strange stranger at that, made it so much worse.
‘Vanished?’
I nodded.
‘When?’
‘Two Sundays ago.’
‘And you’ve been to the police.’