Bad Day for a Fat Boy (2003)

Dirk Robertson's thriller opens on the grain ship The Happy Dancer, broken by a typhoon in the Fujian Straits with three hundred smuggled people in its hold. Its London strand follows Kennedy, once a principal soloist trained at the Royal College of Music and now, after his wife Debbie's death and the loss of the use of his arm, a specialist courier; its Chinese strand follows Pai-Lan of the Five Circle Boys triad, who charge Fujian peasants thirty to fifty thousand dollars for passage to New York, the Golden Mountain. The copyright page is dated 2003; the Internet Archive record says 2002 and Open Library, under a misspelt author name, 2004. (Open Library)

Watches

Gucci (unidentified model): Business is good for Pai-Lan of the Five Circle Boys, the triad whose role in life is to control, lead and make money, as he and his associates work a town in Fujian province where peasants will find ten thousand dollars down on the thirty to fifty thousand it costs to be smuggled to New York. His Gucci watch and Hugo Boss suit stand out from the monotone clothes of the poor, who acknowledge him as he walks, head straight and back erect, and whom he despises for their smell and their childish dreams. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: Business was good for Pai-Lan. His Gucci watch and Hugo Boss suit stood out from all the monotoned outfits of the poor. (Dirk Robertson, Bad Day for a Fat Boy, scan cataloged as X Press, 2002, p. 23; the copyright page is dated 2003; Internet Archive scan OCR)