situation. She waited for him to speak. Instead he turned his head and looked out at the sea again.
The jetfoil arrived on time at twelve thirty, and by twelve forty-five they had cleared Macau Customs and Immigration and were in a cab headed for the City of Dreams, about ten kilometres away. The driver avoided the old city, taking the Friendship Bridge to the northern edge of Taipa and then looping southeast past rows of small hotels and shops. When he made a right turn onto the Cotai Strip, Ava gasped. Skyscrapers flanked both sides of the street, filling seemingly every inch of land.
“This is like the strip in Las Vegas,” she said.
“On a lot less land,” Michael said.
They drove up the Strip past the Fairmont Raffles, the Hilton Conrad, the Sheraton, and the Shangri-La to their right. Across the street from the Shangri-La was a Four Seasons, and directly next to it was the Venetian Macau, an exact replica of the Venetian in Vegas. Ava had never seen such a concentration of luxury hotels, and that was before they got to the City of Dreams, at the very end of the Strip, its four towers and silver pod the climax.
“My God, I never imagined anything of this magnitude. So many five-star hotels,” she said.
“They just keep building them bigger and better,” Michael said. “The Crown Towers is supposed to be six stars.”
“And someone will build one with seven stars,” Simon said.
“Where is your lot?” she asked.
“Right there,” Michael said, pointing to a long, narrow finger of sand adjacent to the Venetian.
She imagined the foot traffic all those hotels were generating. “What a great location.”
“That’s why we put up the money,” he said.
“What kind of business are the hotel restaurants and shops doing?”
“We hear the casinos are doing great, but as for the rest of it —”
“I hear that the City of Dreams hotels, and a lot of the others around here, are running at about seventy percent capacity, and that’s if you count the complimentary stays,” Simon said. “In that pod there’s every designer store you can name and more than twenty restaurants, including some of the best in Asia, but I’m told they’re hard pressed to do enough business to pay their rent.”
“Then why build something so huge, so luxurious?” Ava said.
“You’d have to ask Lawrence Ho and James Packer,” Michael said.
“They must have done a lot of market research,” she said.
“I don’t know who they hired to do that, but whoever it was didn’t understand the customer base,” Simon said. “This isn’t Vegas, where people stay for a week. Ninety-nine percent of the gamblers here are Chinese who’ve walked across the border or taken a day bus or the jetfoil from Hong Kong. The average stay in Macau is a day and a half. Those people don’t need hotel rooms. Shit, they’ll stay awake for thirty-six hours or sleep on the bus instead of wasting good gambling money on a room or some upscale dining experience.”
“And your shopping centre?”
“It was down and dirty. Give them something cheap to buy, give them lots of basic, affordable food options. At least that was the plan.”
“That’s still the plan until someone tells us otherwise,” she said.
They pulled up in front of the Boulevard shopping complex. Ava looked past it on either side. The entire sky seemed filled with glass and steel. It would take a full day just to walk through these places, she thought.
The Treasure Palace restaurant was on the first level of the Boulevard. As they walked to it, Ava looked around. Simon hadn’t been wrong about the dearth of customers.
The restaurant wasn’t that busy — maybe thirty or forty diners. They stood in the doorway, Michael scanning the room. “There they are, at the back,” he said.
There were two of them. Ava had expected them to stand as they neared, but they stayed seated, staring silently at them. She was about ten metres away when she noticed that one of them was looking directly at her chest. She had large breasts for a Chinese woman and her shirt was a bit snug, but she couldn’t remember the last time she had been so blatantly ogled. As they drew close, the ogler turned and whispered to his companion, who smiled, showing teeth that angled in several directions.
Ava realized she knew him. She’d been with Uncle in a Kowloon restaurant and the man had come to the table to pay his respects. Other than the teeth, which were remarkable,