“Well, let’s just do that, big fella.”
We took turns doing cowboy accents. It turns out Canada has cowboys. “They just have to dress warmer,” Sam explained.
We talked about the mounties – who Sam insisted on calling the “RCMP.” When he was a little boy, Sam wanted to be a mounty, but he never grew tall enough.
We talked about soldiers, and the Canadians who were slaughtered in World War I because the British regarded them as expendable. We talked about the Winnipeg Grenadiers, who were defending Eu Castle at the western end of Repulse Bay when the Japanese arrived. They were all killed, and their bodies were thrown off the cliff into the sea.
“You know those glitzy apartments that are there now?” said Sam. “Chinese won’t live in them – because of the ghosts.”
“The Chinese take ghosts quite seriously,” I told him.
“Canadians take ice hockey seriously,” said Sam, “– that and not being Americans. Personally, I take sex seriously. If you refuse to get laid tonight, I can respect that. But let’s at least get serious about drinking.”
I woke up hung over and naked in my own bed. Most of the women in my life seemed to be in the room. Julia was sitting on the edge of my bed in pyjamas and a dressing gown, drinking green tea. She’d taken it up since coming to Hong Kong as part of her program to experience China. Amanda was pacing in and out of the doorway with her own teacup. Like Henry, she’d always drunk black tea. Song was opening the curtains, paying no attention to either of them. Amanda seemed to be having an argument with me. It had presumably started while I was still asleep, because she was in full flight and I didn’t know what she was talking about.
I had the covers pulled up to my chin, feeling vulnerable.
“Get up, Wendy,” Amanda said. “It’s after nine. You have to go play banker.”
Her commanding tone made me worry that she was making progress at getting Henry declared dead. I vaguely remembered Sam telling me, at some stage in our wanderings the previous evening, that Amanda had instructed solicitors, who in turn had retained a barrister.
“I’m not decent,” I said.
“I don’t see why that matters,” she said. I was her prisoner of war. With torture in the offing, why care about nakedness? “Who do you think put you to bed last night?” she asked.
“Sam?” I said hopefully.
“Small man Sam leave right away,” said Song. “Maybe tired.”
“You have nothing to be concerned about,” said Julia, patting my knee. “I’ve seen boys before.”
“All of you, get out of here,” I said.
I examined my memory cautiously. Sam and I had progressed to a Szechuanese restaurant and consumed very hot food with many beers. We’d done war movies, the absurdity of the French, the charms of French women, the geopolitics of Asia, the charms of Oriental women, the later philosophy of Wittgenstein, the history of Hong Kong, and the politics of God.
“Did you know,” Sam had said, “that as soon as Charles Elliot planted the Union Jack here, the Pope, God bless him, declared Hong Kong to be under the control of Rome – ecclesiastically, that is – with the result that when the Japanese took over they considered the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception – don’t you love that name? – to be, somehow, Italian, and since Italy was an ally, they didn’t bugger it up the way they did to St. John’s?”
“No, Sam, I did not.”
“The Chinese Communist Party resembles the Roman Catholic Church,” he had said, warming to the topic. It was coming back to me. “They have ‘cadres.’ They have a creed. They demand obedience, permit no rivals, are equally capable of bureaucratic dithering, sudden brutality and breath-taking pragmatism…”
“And therefore?” I had said – and put my head down on the table.
If you have a meeting in China and something doesn’t get discussed, that was the subject of the meeting. Our drunken evening was all about Serena. I had spent a wrenching afternoon with her, which Sam would have known, but I didn’t mention it, by which I was asserting that there was a personal element to my relationship with her. In a long and rambling monologue that was mostly about sex, Sam ostentatiously didn’t ask about my trip to London, by which he sought to remind me that what had passed between Serena and me was business.
I had hurt Serena. She had cried on my shoulder. My emotions were thoroughly engaged. The practical consequence was that when she was withdrawn from the operation, my inhibitions evaporated. Simon may even have planned it that way.
16
Walking back from lunch that Friday – my hangover and I had made it to the Bank around eleven – I paused to watch one of Hong Kong’s too-narrow double-decker trams take the curve on Des Voeux Road. It looked like the Flat Iron Building on wheels. The buses are bigger and more deadly. You feel their malice as they whoosh past you. But the precarious trams are Hong Kong writ small: hills too steep, success too easy, disaster a misstep away. That morning’s papers had been full of a little boy, out walking on the Peak after the rain, who climbed up on the edge of a nulla fascinated by the roaring water, oblivious to the risk. Before his father could reach him, he slipped on the moss that covered the lip of the nulla and vanished into the flood. They haven’t found his body yet, but they will. The father will never be forgiven.
Every other week some venerable Chinese person with no understanding of the laws of physics steps in front of a vehicle, expecting deference, and becomes road kill. And sure enough, as I watched, a spindly old man stepped off the sidewalk in front of the tram. Almost immediately, an arm shot out of the crowd and pulled him back.
But was that mercy? I sometimes wonder if these fortnightly accidents that rate no more than a paragraph on an inside page are not the local equivalent of elderly Inuit in the Canadian Arctic going out onto the ice when their time has come. One imagines the spindly old man’s situation: five people in a tiny flat, his middle-aged daughter and her husband running out of patience, grandchildren hostile, incontinence coming on. Grandfather thinks about that blind corner every night as he lies awake in bed. Filial piety is great propaganda, but in the end accommodations must be made.
I got back to the Bank to find “Calvin,” whom Serena and I had met in Bali.
“He says you’ve met socially,” Catherine told me, perfectly deadpan. She had put him in my gentleman-scholar’s office rather than Henry’s, perhaps out of a protective instinct, perhaps because she sensed that it suited his temperament. Phyllis, in any event, was radiant.
Calvin was charming and awkward, wearing his Armani suit and Hermès tie as if they were borrowed. He had no appointment. He’d just come.
“I didn’t want to tell your secretary how we’d met,” he said, “in case you were never officially in Bali.”
“I was in Tokyo then,” I told him, and immediately wondered why.
“Pansy and I aren’t newlyweds,” he said. The thought seemed to be that we were both men of the world. I offered him tea.
“Yes, please,” he said. “English, and with cream and sugar if it isn’t too much trouble.”
I tried to summon Catherine but Phyllis sprang into action. My office was her turf.
Calvin commented on the excitement in Beijing over the Olympics. I asked him whether the Thais cared about sport. Not really, seemed to be the answer – not sports other people cared about, at least.
Phyllis deposited a whole tea tray, with all the traditional implements and a small vase of flowers. My hangover was happy to see it. She shut the door behind her. Calvin took a sip.
“As you might have guessed,” he said, “I am not here for a loan.”
I nodded to indicate that I had.
“You are engaged in a takeover contest,” he said.
“So it would seem.”
He took another sip of his tea, looking at me over the cup. “We want you to win.”
“We?”
“Well, Pansy feels the same way.”
“How is she?”
“Fine, I think. Your English girlfriend was very amusing.”
More tea, more silence.
“Do you think I will win?”
“Princeton does not teach a course in mergers. Nor does the Party. All I know is what I read in the papers, but it looks bad for you.”
“Um, are you here to offer help of some kind?
“No. Just our good wishes. Mr. Henry Wong is not an enthusiastic supporter of Beijing’s objectives, as you must know, being his son-in-law.”
I decided against responding to that.
“Reading the local press, some people might conclude that we wish him ill because of that. We do not. He makes no noise. It is noise, primarily, that bothers Beijing.”
“I see.” Knowing Serena and Simon and Sam, I was beginning to wonder how Calvin could have the job he supposedly did – or have gotten into Princeton, for that matter.
“I think what Pansy would want me to tell you is, essentially, don’t give up.”
“I wasn’t planning to.”
“Good. That is, your wife, we thought, might have other ideas. She and Mr. Mercury Chao were friends, I believe, as children.”
“When she was a teenager, yes.”
“And still.” He paused.
I didn’t respond to that either.
“If you were to lose, how soon would Mr. Chao have control of this bank – that is, when could he fire people, or make decisions, or, um, look at the bank’s files?”
“Almost immediately. I believe it is customary for the board of the winner to meet and appoint new officers as soon as they have more than fifty percent of the shares.”
“Will you clean out your desk, then, before you go to the meeting?”
“I hadn’t thought of it. Perhaps I should. Bad luck to assume I’ll be allowed to come back.” I paused. “You think I should clean my desk out? For luck?”
“For luck. Yes, I do.”
“What did you study at Princeton, Calvin?” I wanted to keep him there longer, if only to observe him. He lived simultaneously in two completely different worlds. He probably had the Princeton Alumni Weekly mailed to him in grimy Beijing.
“Economics,” he said. “One is supposed to study economics.”
“What did you want to study?”
“Music. Harmony. Syncopation. I wanted to be a composer.”
“So instead you became a…diplomat?”
“I am good at languages.”
“Have you learned any Thai?”
“I do not live in Bangkok, Mr. Lee. I assumed you had worked that out. Do not worry about speaking freely, by the way. We do not plant bugs. They get discovered too easily.”
I said nothing.
Calvin collected himself. “As I said, I do not live in Bangkok. I live in Hong Kong. My job is excruciatingly boring. Hong Kong is excruciatingly ugly. It is filled with money-grubbing Cantonese.”
“I thought you came from Shanghai.”
“You are right. We are also commercial. But there is an aesthetic to the way Shanghainese people get rich. They sense trends. They feel the earth moving on its axis, and around the sun. They are prepared to take risks. The people of Hong Kong simply buy flats and wait for the government to make them temporarily scarce so they can sell them at a profit. It has gone on this way so long they have lost any brains they had. I used to think it was a plot on the part of the English, feeding them property opium to make them stupid so they would never revolt. If this island had been full of Shanghainese, the English would have been kicked out in the 1960s.”
“There were some riots then, I believe.”
“We had to organize them. And now, of course, it is not just the Cantonese who are stupid. Even rich immigrants like Chao Mu Bai, whose grandfather gave us support at crucial moments, lack judgment. He and his friends do not seem to realize how silly they look, going to receptions in Beijing. We know they have American green cards or Canadian passports and keep half their money in Switzerland. They should go to one of the poorer provinces, like Guizhou or Gansu, and serve the people.”
“Do you have a green card? Have you worked in Guizhou?”
“No – and of course not. What would be the point of Princeton if I went to Guizhou? But I do not pretend I am a communist the way Mr. Mercury Chao does when he comes to Beijing.”
“What are you then?”
“Chinese.” He said it as if surprised by my question.
“Do you belong to the Party?” I’d finally gotten to ask him.
“Of course.”
“I suppose Princeton would be a waste if you didn’t join the Party.”
“I joined when I was eighteen. Having parents who were officials made it easier.”
“And Pansy?”
“It would be wrong for me to tell you anything about her.”
“She isn’t by any chance actually your wife, is she?”
Calvin didn’t respond.
“How amazing,” I said without meaning to.
“She has more talent than I do…” – he sounded almost sad – “and other training. She would have handled this so much better. You would now be feeling pride and excitement about the next stage of China’s rise. There is a struggle for the soul of the Party. It is corrupt from within. Too many cadres care only about the money they can extract from the people they are meant to serve. Her work…I cannot tell you anything about her, but if the Party had more people like Ping it would be able to cleanse itself. She takes much risk. That is why we have decided not to have children. She says she will be destroyed eventually, by those who are both powerful and corrupt.”
“You could be a composer then,” I said.
As soon as I said it I was embarrassed. Calvin should have been angry, but he only gave me a mournful smile.
“Who does she work for?” I went on. “I know you can’t tell me, but she cannot be a diplomat with her own private agenda.”
“She works for someone powerful who is not corrupt.”
One of those cunning idealists Simon had described, I said to myself.
“And perhaps she and your father-in-law do not work at cross-purposes. But I have told you more than I should.” He extended his hand stiffly, like a character in a play who was headed for his death. We shook.
“I am afraid for Ping,” he said, and made his exit.
It took my addled brain a minute to put the pieces together. Calvin knew Pansy’s job involved surveillance of Henry and now of me. That was why the two of them shadowed Serena and me on the Peak and followed us to Bali. The attention being paid to Henry was not unfriendly, which was slightly puzzling, given my father-in-law’s obvious lack of sympathy with Beijing. It had something to do with corruption within the Party. Pansy reported directly to a very powerful official, but such an individual would have opponents. Those opponents would include the kind of people Mercury went to receptions in Beijing to suck up to. If Chao Yinhang took over Pearl River Bank, those people would want to look through Henry’s files, and Mecury would be eager to accommodate them. Calvin was worried that those files might implicate Pansy or – which came to the same thing – give them ammunition to use against Pansy’s very powerful boss. Calvin wished to remind me of this vulnerability. He’d come himself – and probably without telling Pansy – because he knew she wouldn’t compromise her mission or her very powerful boss by coming to see me herself. This analysis worked even if Calvin was as big a klutz as he pretended to be.
17
“He’s in jail already,” said Serena. She made it sound like it was my fault. We were doing the circuit around Severn and Barker Roads that passes the steps going down to the Castle and winds up at the top of the Peak Tram. We’d already been up Mt. Austin Road and around Governor’s Walk. Serena had on shorts and a polo shirt and looked as good as ever, but she was all business.
“Pansy told me. Or Ping, if that’s her name. I went for a run around Lugard Road before breakfast.”
“She followed you?”
“No, actua
lly, she was just sitting on a swing in the playground next to the stairs you and I went up.”
“You knew she’d be there?”
“I knew she’d be somewhere, once I arrived in Hong Kong and my passport number hit their computers.”
“What did she say?”
“You don’t need to know.”
Getting Serena to come out to Hong Kong at all had been a struggle. She had “other clients.” It would save me money to have Sam assign a Hong Kong-based associate, since Pearl River Bank was absorbing all expenses.
I couldn’t tell her why I needed to see her – not over the phone. In the end I almost had to appeal to Simon, and she made me wait until Tuesday, then wouldn’t see me until late morning, even though she’d gotten in the night before.
Life in the Castle had turned into a soap opera, with Amanda alternately ordering everyone around and weeping in her room. Whatever Mosquito had implied on Monday, and again this morning, seemed to be particularly cruel. Song had explained it to Julia, who tried to explain it to me, but I had difficulty taking in the fine points. I was running out of patience.
Serena let me brief her when we finally met up at the top of the Peak Tram, listened without interrupting as I explained that Pansy and Calvin were both patriots, that Calvin was just a translator, that Pansy wouldn’t tell Calvin everything she did but that Calvin could sense the underlying politics, could hum the tune even if he didn’t know the words, and on and on. It turned out Serena knew all that already.
I felt hurt. She took hold of my hand. “Sweetheart, he’s in jail because he came to see you and your secretary had planted a microphone in the flowers on the tea tray she brought in.”
“The secretary I wasn’t supposed to fire.”
“The secretary you weren’t supposed to trust,” she said.
My caution on the phone got me no credit.
“Ugly Phyllis, as I believe you call her, planted the bug at the behest of her cousin, who has a senior position in Chao Yinhang. ‘Xiao Ng,’ his name is. He gave the recording to Mercury, who handed it to China’s senior representative in Hong Kong. Said official passed it on to Ping. A major part of her official job is listening to the recordings of phone taps and other clandestine recordings. In trying to protect her, Calvin put her in grave peril. Fortunately, she secretly works for someone very very senior, which gave her the opportunity to save herself.”
The Daughters of Henry Wong Page 14
