‘Are you all right?’ Maria asked him. The man waved her away. She looked hot and ruffled but not, I was amazed to see, fundamentally discomposed.
‘Which way do we go now?’ I asked. My feeling was that once we got back to one of the main roads, out from the crowded warren of flats, we would be safe.
‘Keep on?’ Maria replied. I shrugged and agreed. A few of the men who had taken refuge with us had already melted away, but some followed us. I looked around the corner into the alley we’d come out of. It was empty – not sparsely peopled, but completely empty. There was no noise. In the most crowded place on earth, that was frightening. We turned the corner and the others scattered, running off in the opposite direction while we headed towards Nathan Road. We walked as quickly as we could. I was conscious of being observed from the flats above us. After a couple of hundred yards the alley bent to the right, and suddenly there was an explosion of sound. A crowd of people about fifty yards ahead were running back and forth across a small open space where four alleys intersected. At first I could detect no pattern in what they were doing; then I saw that their arms were loaded, and they were carrying all sorts of goods – boxes, crates of bottles – and I thought they must be evacuating a building. Then I realised that they were looting. The individuality of those men’s faces was visible – a pair of buck teeth here, a bald patch there – but at the same time, all particularity was lost in the mad urgency of the crowd.
‘Better go on back,’ Maria said. ‘We must get to Nathan Road.’
So we turned around, again trying not to run. I could feel people looking at our backs. One man, his hands holding a crate of dead, unplucked poultry, his eyes empty, looked for a moment as if he was going to stand in front of us and block our way, but he saw me seeing him decide what to do, and in that second’s pause Maria and I were past him. The alley went around another slight bend, and then another, and opened out a little so that the buildings no longer seemed to close together over our heads, and just as it opened we could hear the same roaring noise from not far away, and then three or four youths, their faces rigid with fear, came sprinting past, falling and shouting and picking themselves up like tumblers. They might have been trying to be funny if it had not been for the terror in their faces.
Just to our right there was a furniture shop, its front fortuitously or presciently boarded up. But the rioters’ attention had already been drawn to it and the door, smashed open at the lock, was swinging open on its hinges.
‘In here,’ I said, and took Maria’s arm. We went in. I pushed the door closed. I had expected devastation, but inside there was only mild disarray and an overpowering smell of camphor wood. Chests of drawers and office furniture had been pushed about, but not smashed. A desk at the end of the room, which was half sales and display area, half workshop, had all its drawers opened. They had gone for the money.
The noise outside grew louder. Through chinks in the boarded-up window we could see a shouting, swearing crowd run past. Without warning somebody kicked hard against the door, much too hard, so that it rebounded in the face of whoever was trying to break in. Then it was finally kicked off its hinges and fell into the shop. Five or six men came into the room. They were panting, furious, maddened. One had a badge with a picture of Chairman Mao, the only such sign I saw that day. They clearly did not know what they wanted to do. But violence was a part of it. There was cacophony outside the room while silence stretched inside it.
Maria, who had been standing about a pace behind me, stepped forward, and gave the men a second to take her in fully. They might not have been able to tell at a glance that she was a nun, but they could probably sense something official about her; just enough of a whiff of magic. She reached out a hand behind her to the ransacked desk and said in an absolutely calm voice:
‘There’s no money left. If you want to take some furniture, though, just help yourselves.’
The man in front, the one with the Mao badge, did not smile, but gave a sort of grunt. Some colour came back into his face. All the men, I suddenly saw, looked relieved. Whatever they had been about to do they hadn’t wanted to do any more than we had wanted them to do it. The man with the Mao badge looked around the chaotic workshop, turned, pushed through the others, stepped over the door, and went out. The others followed him. There was perhaps a faint tinge of sheepishness. I realised I had been holding my breath.
‘Jesus,’ I said.
‘Don’t blaspheme,’ said Maria. We waited there for a half-hour and then headed to Nathan Road without further incident.
This episode was the start of what became known as the Riots. It was by far the closest encounter I had with them. There were comparable incidents, and many bombings, and not a few deaths. Many people panicked. I didn’t, because if the Chinese wanted to take back Hong Kong, all they needed to do was to shut off the water supply; the world wasn’t going to be turned upside-down by a few Red Guards shouting and waving copies of the Little Red Book. Eventually, the Gurkhas were sent to Hong Kong, and things quietened down. For my part, I started renting a cottage on Cheung Chau, the same one where I live today. It occurred to me that Masterson would have described what I was doing as ‘sitting out the Riots’. The public inquiry into the Riots blamed people who had made public allegations of corruption in the colony and accused them of fomenting trouble.
Chapter Fourteen
Cooper, my old chum from the Darjeeling, the war, and Stanley internment camp, was by now an extremely senior big shot at the Bank. He had done stints in the US and the UK, and by the late sixties was back in the colony for his last few years before retirement. He and Mrs Cooper, the former Miss Farrington, would occasionally come out to visit me on Cheung Chau at weekends. He had lost almost all his hair but otherwise seemed trim and fit, as intelligent and as uninterested in his job as ever. She seemed much more in love with him than she had when they were younger. Their two daughters, both now in their teens, were at boarding school in England. It was always touching to see how much happier he was during school holidays.
One Sunday afternoon I was expecting the Coopers, their daughters, and some friends to drop in for tea. I spent the morning doing chores and tidying up, and then set off down to the village to buy some odds and ends – I had promised to serve moon cake. My way down into the village was blocked by Ming Tsin-Ho, my closest neighbour. He was sitting on the porch of his house. This seating area was a small but potent irritant, since he would sometimes listen to loud Cantonese music there, especially at weekends. He greeted me as I went past, by no means a standard occurrence.
‘Mr Stewart,’ he said. ‘Extraordinary news!’
‘Oh?’ The Riots were not long past. I assumed it would be some recrudescence of fighting or bombing, or a mob outside Government House. I didn’t much care what it was.
‘Wo Man-Lee has been arrested! Big scandal!’
I felt my heart begin to beat quickly and threadily.
‘Arrested?’
‘Murder – drug dealing – conspiracy – extortion. Big big scandal!’
His grin was dividing his face into two. I struggled to work out why. Later I found out that the Wos had a controlling interest in the film studio which made most of his brother’s movies. Hence his delight. Anything that was bad news for his sibling was an occasion for festival.
*
The people from the Bank boat arrived in mid-afternoon, puffing a little from the climb. Most of the adults were Bank people and their wives. They were the usual mix of bluff happy ones and clever malcontents. Everyone smelt of suncream and alcohol and salt water. Cooper’s daughters and their friends – it was hard to count them, I mainly had an impression of brown limbs and bathing jackets – went straight to the front of the house.
‘They’re trying to hypnotise each other,’ said Mrs Cooper. ‘They’ve been at it all day.’
Ming was right about the arrest being a big scandal. My guests could speak of nothing else. Their talk had the usual Triad note of horrified excitem
ent.
‘It’s directly linked to the Riots,’ someone said. ‘They had to have a clean-up. There’ll be a big fuss and drama and some high-profile arrests and then it’ll go back to business as usual.’
‘Surely it’s no different from home, from the Kray twins or something,’ said another of the visitors. Cooper shifted round slightly in his seat and said, a little reluctantly:
‘There’s a bit more to the Triads than that. They aren’t just people waving choppers about. It starts off like that, small, but money always wants to turn legit. Has a mind of its own, almost. Chaps like Wo are very old-fashioned now. They’re an embarrassment to the new chaps. Why make risky criminal money in drugs or gambling when you can make safe legal money in property? Of course the drugs and girls and gambling and all that are good cash-flow businesses, but the future lies in looking as respectable as possible. No different from Jardines and all that lot, if you take a long enough view. Wo sent his son to Harvard. That’ll show you.’ Cooper looked at me, inviting me to tell my I-knew-Wo-when story. I silently declined.
‘Well, the trial should be quite something,’ one of the men said. ‘I do wonder what evidence they’ve got. I thought the whole point was that nobody ever spoke about anything.’
I remember thinking that was a good question. Conversation moved on to golf, and gossip about the Governor’s wife.
The case was all over the news the next day, covered in that unique Hong Kong style in which the most significant information is present in the gaps, omissions, and implications. The Wos were described as ‘prominent local businessmen’, a designation which, when juxtaposed with the charges – to do with drugs – positively screamed Triad. Wo Man-Lee had applied for bail and judgement on whether it would be granted had been reserved. Wo Ho-Yan had not been charged with anything. Presumably, as the legitimate front of the business, he would now be running the shop.
‘Interesting,’ said Beryl, who was entertaining business contacts at the Empire that day. ‘They must have lost their protection. Or have they? We’ll see. All sorts of stuff going on behind the scenes, no doubt. I’ve never seen my boys so surprised by anything, ever.’
‘What do they think will happen?’
‘Well –’ Beryl made a face. It was an expression she sometimes adopted to indicate philosophical resignation at the mysteries of the East. ‘They don’t think Wo Man-Lee will end up in jail. Let’s put it like that. Ah, this is me.’ She downed the remains of her first gin and tonic and pulled herself to her feet to greet a small middle-aged man, advancing towards the table with his hand outstretched.
A couple of times that week I found myself walking into a room at the hotel and having the assembled company suddenly go silent. I did not enjoy the sensation. The fact that I had known Ho-Yan was of course no secret, and there were still a few employees at the Empire who remembered him – who may still have known him, for all I knew. I took my traditional refuge in working hard and did not think any more than I had to about what had become of the Wo brothers. I twice called Maria and twice left messages at the mission but she didn’t call back. I thought her way of coping would be to keep her nose down.
Looking back at those days I can see how I was in many ways scaling down my life, retreating from contact with people. Without knowing it, I was generally withdrawing. This was not apparent to me at the time. That weekend I again went out to Cheung Chau, on my own, with no plans to see anyone. I took some books and records and a bag of groceries and drank my usual bottle of beer at the rail of the ferry. I was looking forward to being quietly, pleasantly lonely for a couple of days. I was also planning on fixing the stove, which had kept cutting out at inconvenient moments; I was going to take it apart and put it back together, armed with the manufacturer’s schematic diagram.
On Saturday morning before the first weekenders’ junks and powerboats arrived, I was sitting out on the balcony looking down at the bay, drinking coffee and reading the South China Morning Post. I had already been down into the village and back. It was hot and clear and still, not quite pre-typhoon weather but not far off. There was a ring at the doorbell followed without pause by a loud, rapping, confident knock. I thought that it could conceivably be a telegram – but no postman knocks like that. I went through, put the door on its chain and opened it. The face on the other side of the door was so unexpected that it took me a moment longer than it should have to recognise Chief Inspector Watts. He was wearing shorts and long white socks and a crisp short-sleeved shirt, a sort of semi-mufti which left it unclear whether he was on duty. He was holding a panama hat, half crumpled, in his left hand, which he tapped against his leg as I opened the door. His face was an impressive baked colonial red-brown. There was a rigidity in him which in a different man would have been embarrassment.
‘Hello there, just let me get this,’ I said as I undid the chain. He stood there looming and unapologetic as he said:
‘Well, hello to you as well. I hope you don’t mind, I came out here for a ramble and a swim. Doctor’s orders, to keep the constitution up. I know I don’t have to tell you, being a great walker and all that. Thought I’d invite myself in for a cup of coffee. Know I should have called.’
‘Of course not, it’s a great pleasure, and well timed. I’ve just got the percolator on.’
‘No servants out here? Good for you.’
He came in, his hands now behind his back, openly giving the place a look-over. More than any other trade, policemen never quite manage to stop being policemen. A man who acquires the habits of suspicion and distrust will find that life never gives him an adequate reason to shed them. Watts went over to look at a carriage clock Beryl had given me for Christmas a decade before.
‘Made a bit of a study of these. They’re mostly from Paris, as you know. The Mandarins went mad about them in the eighteenth century. I always think that if I was a bit more clever, I’d be able to tell something original about the Chinese mind from that. This one isn’t bad. I could get it valued for you if you like. There’s a chap in Tsim Sha Tsui I know. Count your fillings after you shake his hand, but he’s straight with me.’
The message went something like this: I may not be clever, but I have other things at my disposal which mean I don’t need to be. Watts straightened up from the clock and continued looking at other bits and pieces while I went for the coffee. When I got back to the sitting room, he wasn’t there. He had gone out onto the balcony and was sitting in one of the rattan chairs, flicking through my South China Morning Post. He was smoking and letting the ash fall onto the veranda floor. I doubled back into the kitchen and retrieved an ashtray.
‘Nice place you’ve got here. I can see why you like it. Bit of fresh air, get the Hong Kong out of your lungs.’
‘Thank you.’
‘We used to have a place in Malaya, up in the hills. It was like Scotland. In fact there were so many Jocks there it almost was Scotland. Lovely air. Cheap. Much less humid, that was the thing. Didn’t get there as much as we’d have liked, and of course it was never all that safe … Good country though. Funny, although the place was going through civil war, in lots of ways it was more straightforward than Hong Kong. You’d know where you were most of the time. Not really like that here, is it?’
This was the most abstract I had ever heard Watts being. He had the manner which close-mouthed men sometimes adopt when they are feeling their way towards making a confidence.
He seemed to be waiting for a reply.
‘No, it’s all about layers here,’ I said.
‘Layers. That’s a good word for it. Layers.’ He got up and went over to the low wall at the far end of the balcony. Below it a patch of garden sloped away fifty feet or so to where the hill dropped more sharply downwards. I had a fah wong come in during the week to do some watering and general upkeep, but aside from that, the garden was mine.
‘You like it here, don’t you?’ he said. ‘You properly like it. Lots of people like the pay or the taxes or the girls or the being away from
home or the East in general, but you actually specifically like it here, in Hong Kong. For itself. Unusual.’
‘You get past a certain point in life and you’ve accumulated a history in a place, and so that’s where you’re from. Most of my memories and all of my friends are here.’
‘Yes, you’ve got a lot of friends here. That party …’ Watts smiled. He had been to the do I had thrown for the opening of Deep Water Bay. ‘A good night. I don’t think I’d ever got pissed on champagne before. Didn’t half feel it the next day …’
He trailed off and kept looking across the garden towards Hong Kong.
‘Friends from different walks of life, like that professor, and Mrs Marler, and your friend the nun. Sister Maria.’
‘Well, the last two are from the same place, really, since I met both of them on the boat out. The Darjeeling. Sister Maria taught me Cantonese on that trip. That’s how we got to know each other. Beryl and I were in camp together afterwards.’
‘I didn’t know that,’ he said. ‘But it’s funny you should mention Sister Maria. There’s been something on my mind about her. On my conscience. I haven’t known what to do. It’s difficult. Not clear where my duty lies, as a friend as well as a policeman.’
He sat back down.
‘This is the thing: Sister Maria has been giving us a bit of help. Not me directly but some of my colleagues. They’ve been having a spot of trouble with some translation. We’ve got some tapes. The tapes are all in some sort of dialect. A type of Fukienese. You know how it is in China, move a couple of hundred yards down the road and they speak a whole different language. The trouble is, no one will help us translate what’s on the tapes. Most people don’t speak the dialect and no one who does is going to help us. That’s because the person we’ve arrested is important. Very, very important. And very, very frightening, especially to anyone with any sort of living family or relatives back in the old country. It’s been a famous case, all over the papers.’
Fragrant Harbour Page 22
