FORTUNE COOKIE

by Bryce Courtenay

  I grinned, giving her the word: ‘Seduction’.

  ‘No, for murder,’ she corrected me. She had told the story quickly without missing a beat and now continued in the same manner. ‘We don’t know exactly what happened. There are various versions, probably all wrong. Only Lotus Blossom would know for sure. But it would seem that Captain Takahashi was pretty drunk and upset by recent events in Japan and wasn’t interested in any of the usual preliminaries. While this is pure conjecture, we have it from a servant that the food and drink weren’t touched. It seems that, shortly after entering the suite, Kazuhiro Takahashi simply had his way with Lotus Blossom, virtually or actually raping her.

  ‘Whether it was Johnny Wing or Beatrice or Lotus Blossom herself we may never know, but Captain Kazuhiro Takahashi’s shirtless body, his face smashed beyond recognition, was discovered, along with those of the two guards, in a ditch at the opposite end of the city the following day. The shirts of all three men had been removed, so that their unit couldn’t be identified by means of the embroidered insignia on the pocket, but there must have been some identifying features on the bodies.’

  Dansford now interjected for the first time, explaining. ‘In those last days, facial disfigurement and the removal of the shirt and anything that might identify the body were common enough as the communist guerrillas went about settling scores.’

  Detective Chicken Wing, a bit impatient and anxious not to lose her momentum, glanced at Dansford meaningfully as if to say ‘butt out’, then continued. ‘According to an amah I interviewed nearly three years ago, who at the time worked for Beatrice, by the 12th of September, when the official surrender ceremony took place at the City Hall, presided over by Lord Louis Mountbatten, Lotus Blossom had missed her monthly. It was soon apparent she was pregnant and in May 1946 a female child was born.’

  ‘Jesus. Mercy B. Lord!’

  Dansford grinned. ‘You got it, Simon.’

  Detective Chicken Wing sighed impatiently. Her explanation of what happened was textbook police verbal reportage. She’d accomplished a remarkable piece of research and she clearly wanted to finish recounting it without a hitch. ‘With the war finally over, the indefatigable Beatrice Fong started all over again by re-opening the three brothels. It was a very different Singapore and she was acutely aware of the intense stigma associated with the circumstances surrounding her daughter’s infant – not only a bastard child but also that of a Japanese soldier and the despised enemy. She decided to put the child in the recently re-opened Catholic orphanage. She swaddled the tiny infant in Captain Takahashi’s shirt – with the sleeve removed – as a means of identification. She obviously hoped the nuns would keep the shirt as the infant’s only possession on arrival, a crude baby blanket. She then took her daughter to Burma, where she renewed her contacts with the hill tribes, who trusted her, knowing they would protect the girl.’

  ‘You mean she willingly abandoned her granddaughter and then banished her daughter?’

  ‘Simon, those were not easy times and Beatrice Fong was beginning all over again from scratch. She was a tough, resilient woman, and while she had worked out a role for her daughter, she may have been ambivalent about what she regarded as a bastard and possibly mongrel girl child. Lotus Blossom was still a young woman capable of having many more children. Besides, Beatrice Fong could keep an eye on the child in the orphanage, which we know she did.’

  ‘Do you think Mercy B. Lord knew any of this?’

  ‘We think it very unlikely,’ Detective Chicken Wing replied. ‘Beatrice Fong was a woman who was fanatically secretive. It’s taken three years to work all this out and we still don’t know everything. But it’s highly unlikely she would have confided in Mercy B. Lord while she was alive. After all, it would appear the inheritance came as a complete surprise to her.’ She paused. ‘But there again, she may now know some or all of it. The old woman may have left a written record among her personal papers in the bank deposit box. We just don’t know.’

  ‘So what are you saying? That, until yesterday, Mercy B. Lord didn’t know the whereabouts of her mother or that Beatrice Fong was her grandmother? Do you know what happened to Lotus Blossom?’

  ‘Oh yes, we know, and so does Mercy B. Lord.’

  ‘What? I don’t understand. Did you say she knows her mother?’

  ‘She definitely knows who her mother is. In fact she visits her every Thursday in northern Thailand. What she doesn’t know, or probably didn’t know until yesterday when she inherited her grandmother’s fortune, is that Beatrice Fong is her mother’s mother and her own grandmother.’

  ‘Christ, this gets more and more bizarre by the minute. But hang on, how?’

  ‘How what?’

  ‘How does she know, without knowing Beatrice Fong is her grandmother, that this woman she meets in Thailand is in fact her mother?’

  Detective Chicken Wing laughed. ‘You’d make a good detective, Simon. Of course, we asked ourselves the same question. But the answer, we concluded, was staring us in the face. It could only be the sleeve.’

  ‘Ah, exactly,’ I exclaimed, ‘the missing sleeve on the Japanese captain’s shirt. I’ve seen the shirt and she guards it like a precious relic.’

  ‘Yes, well, either Lotus Blossom sent it to Beatrice from Burma or, as seems more likely, the old lady kept it herself all these years and told Mercy B. Lord it had been sent by the woman making enquiries about her whereabouts. It would have been simple enough for Beatrice to invent a story about a woman contacting the orphanage and asking the nuns about the girl who had been abandoned as a baby, wrapped in a khaki shirt. Then, by means of matching the sleeve and shirt, she would have been able to prove she was Mercy B. Lord’s natural mother. In any event, there is no doubt Mercy B. Lord accepts that Lotus Blossom is her mother.’

  ‘Incidentally, while this would have happened before we mounted the operation, it couldn’t have worked out any better for us,’ Dansford interrupted.

  ‘Absolutely!’ Detective Chicken Wing continued. ‘Naturally, we put a tail on Mercy B. Lord in the hope that she would lead us to others involved in the crime cartel. Her routine was fairly simple – she’d arrive at Don Muang airport in Bangkok, which, by the way, is a major logistical base for the US air force in Thailand. Here she was met by corrupt officials, her passport stamped, and without ever going through customs or immigration she was driven across the airport to an American compound, where an unmarked Piper Aztec twin-engine light plane was waiting to take her north. Two hours later she’d land at a small airport near the town of Wiang Phrao near the Thai–Burma border. She’d be met by a car that would transfer her to the same small Chinese hotel in town, where she’d meet a good-looking Chinese woman who appeared to be in her forties.

  ‘They’d have lunch together, and exchange identical briefcases, full for empty, then they’d spend the rest of the day and the night together at the hotel, where a set of rooms had been built, we were to learn, to accommodate members of the cartel when in town. We know this because we’ve had the premises bugged for two years and have two undercover agents working as hotel staff. The hotel was, of course, owned by Beatrice Fong. The restaurant makes it seem respectable, not that security was much of a concern. This is a drug town, almost solely reliant on the heroin and opium trade from across the border, and is protected by corrupt senior members of the Thai army and police force and others in local and national government. Finally, it has the blessing of the CIA.

  ‘We imagine it was the reason why she never questioned the task she’d been given. It gave her weekly access to her mother, something she could never have afforded on her salary.’

  It explained a lot. Quite obviously Mercy B. Lord had been controlled by the threat of not being allowed to see her mother again if she revealed the nature of her weekly task to anyone. To someone reared as an orphan, it must have seemed miraculous to find her mother and, more importantly, to learn that she was accepted and no doubt loved. She would have quickly grown to love the woman
in Burma, which must have been incentive enough to keep her mouth shut, even with me. It certainly explained why she absolutely refused to give up her Thursday assignations, even if it meant leaving me because of it.

  I turned to Dansford. ‘My next question is an obvious one: how and why are the CIA involved?’

  He laughed. ‘Been waiting for you to ask, Simon. It is, of course, the sole reason I’m in Singapore and at the heart of everything. I’ll attempt to make it short and sweet. When Mao’s communists defeated the American-backed forces of Chiang Kai-shek, some of the remnants of the defeated armies escaped into northern Burma.

  ‘Around 10 000 of them, under a General Li Mi, set up there and ran what’s called the Shan States as their own territory. This part of Burma is hill and jungle country where the local tribes have always resisted the control of the Burmese government in Rangoon. They now found they had a potentially powerful ally. Many of the Shan tribesman joined General Li Mi and together they set up a quasi state that posed a problem for the new communist government in southern China, just across the border.

  ‘Naturally, the Americans saw the advantage of continuing to lend support to Li Mi’s forces by supplying them with arms, military hardware and medical supplies, which we did by air drops and, in the early days, flying into the heavily fortified air base at Mong Pa-liao in northern Burma. We even supported an invasion of Yunnan Province in southern China.’

  ‘C’mon, that’s absurd! What? They expected to bring down the Chinese government?’

  ‘Ah, Simon, there’s no accounting for some of the curious logic of a nation with a rabid paranoia about communism. It has warped our foreign policy. At the time, the CIA convinced Washington that the Chinese people would rise up against their communist oppressors and join the free world. When they didn’t, we settled for becoming the covert allies of General Li Mi’s troops, who had escaped into Burma, equipping them so they could make occasional incursions into southern China to satisfy our secret commitment.’

  ‘And your government is still supporting them?’

  ‘Simon, we’re locked in a permanent war with communism. For a long time our experts believed, truly believed, the Chinese would sweep down through Burma and invade northern Thailand and Vietnam. It was felt the best thing we could do was use these anti-communists in Burma as our border guards. We’ve even recruited some of them to fight as mercenaries against the communists in Laos.’

  ‘But hang on, mate. These blokes controlled the opium trade. Surely the US government – any government in the free world, for that matter – couldn’t support that? I mean, how can that make any sense?’

  ‘Simon, as far as Washington and the Pentagon are concerned, there’s no room for idealism in this war against communism. The prevailing mantra is “Whatever it takes”. Nobody admits America is involved with the ex-Chiang Kai-shek forces in Burma. You won’t find US soldiers or US planes anywhere near there. It’s all done through front companies like Air America. The CIA also supports a whole network inside the Thai police and army. For many years the CIA’s main ally in Thailand was a General Phao, the commander of the Thai police, and he was the main connection in Thailand for the drug producers. It’s people like him who run things in Bangkok. So you see, we can throw up our hands and deny direct US involvement.’

  ‘Even though blind Freddy knows it’s happening?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know this blind Freddy of yours, Simon, but I get what you mean. It’s an open secret. So open, in fact, that the New York Times has run articles alleging US involvement in protecting the drug trade. It’s all vigorously denied, of course. And the justification is always that Chiang Kia-shek’s exiled troops in Burma are useful allies in the fight against communism. So we simply pretend we don’t know what else they’re involved in.’

  ‘But didn’t Burma boot out Chiang Kai-shek’s troops?’

  ‘Things didn’t all go strictly to plan. The Chinese government finally got together with the Burmese and drove most of our little friends out of Burma. But then several thousand settled in northern Thailand around Chiang Mai. That’s where the opium was going anyhow. People such as Beatrice and the Wings stayed and re-organised the Shan tribesmen, the hill people, who continued to grow opium. The CIA and the Thai generals supplied the arms, the logistics and the political protection for these tribal warlords and their troops. The money that came from the opium trade kept everyone happy and paid the salaries of the troops, who, in turn, provided security for the growers and the mule convoys that carried the opium out of Burma into northern Thailand. The Chinese force kicked out of Burma simply set up their heroin labs in northern Thailand, protected by the Thai police and army, who then provided transport of the refined heroin to Bangkok for shipment to Hong Kong, Singapore and the rest of the world. Additionally, American-owned planes and pilots were flying heroin into Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. In Vietnam, in particular, the demand began to grow steeply.’

  ‘Christ, what a mess. It can’t make you terribly proud …’ I mumbled.

  ‘No, but we’re not the only ones, or the first. What the CIA is doing is exactly what the French were doing in their old territories, including South Vietnam. They used the profits of the opium trade to pay mercenary tribal groups to fight the communists. Simon, war and politics always shit on morality. There’s another factor to consider too. While corrupt Thai officials are benefitting hugely from the drug trade, this is incidental to the fact that the Thai government will never close down the Burma operations because the ex-Chiang Kai-shek troops are the main security force protecting them along the Burmese border.’

  ‘Well, if all this is true, as it obviously is, why are your mob, the DEA, going in against the CIA?’

  ‘Ah, because we’ve totally miscalculated the effect of the drug trade on the Vietnam War. We’ve now got hundreds of thousands of addicts in America, many of them ex-GIs who got turned on to cheap heroin in South Vietnam and are still using. When they get repatriated they take their problem home with them. Heroin use is exploding in our cities. We’ve finally realised we’ve created a nightmare for ourselves. So long as the product was going to European or Asian addicts, it was less important than stopping the communists. Now it’s a primary factor in stopping us.’

  ‘In other words, you’ve shot yourselves in the foot.’

  ‘If Hilda will excuse the French, you could say we’ve succeeded in fucking ourselves up the ass.’ Dansford leaned back in his chair. ‘That’s all the background you need to know, which brings us right back to Beatrice Fong in 1945, who had resumed her operation trading in young girls and drugs. This is when the Wing reconnection grew into a business proposition.’

  ‘I was beginning to wonder where the connection was. Johnny Wing’s involvement earlier sounded like pretty hairy stuff. Obviously the teenage romance with the banished Lotus Blossom didn’t continue, but the old bird, Beatrice, must have stayed close to him or she wouldn’t have made him executor of her will, would she? Then there’s Sidney and possibly even Ronnie. How do they fit into the picture?’

  Dansford laughed. ‘How indeed, Simon! It is, of course, the reason I’m here. As to how Johnny and Sidney got involved, it was simply a matter of money. Beatrice Fong and Johnny were fellow conspirators in the murder of the Japanese Captain Kazuhiro Takahashi and the two guards. Not that they could be indicted for murder, but taken together with Johnny’s teenage love affair with Lotus Blossom, they became natural allies. When Beatrice started all over again, she needed money and help. Johnny was given the job of restarting the sex-slave trade, and Sidney, just back from sitting out the war at university in America, was persuaded by Johnny to meet Beatrice.

  ‘Now, Sidney, who was already in America when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, had taken the Japanese seriously and persuaded his father to move all his money to America, where he invested in US bonds and other secure assets. Napoleon Wing, the father, died of a heart attack during the Japanese occupation, and as the eldest son, Sidney inherited a
now even larger fortune while based in America. Sidney, after talking to Beatrice, knew a good thing when he saw one and the Fong–Wing syndicate was born in July 1946.’ Dansford grinned. ‘Drugs and sex have always been a good combination, and rock ’n’ roll had just arrived on the music scene.

  ‘With Wing money, Beatrice returned to Burma with Lotus Blossom, who no doubt had been forced by her mother to “deposit” her tiny infant in the orphanage. The Shan tribesmen welcomed Beatrice back, and Lotus Blossom, now nineteen, was left in residence to re-establish opium growing in the areas where they had worked before.

  ‘Three years later, when General Li Mi crossed the border with his troops, the Fong–Wing drug cartel was well underway, having bought a lot more land and encouraged the peasant farmers to grow opium poppies. While this wasn’t as huge as it would eventually become, Beatrice had re-opened all her distribution channels. She supplied girls to brothels and bars worldwide and re-established the heroin-processing lab. She welcomed General Li Mi’s incursion into northern Burma. She had the knowhow, the distribution and the trust of the hill people, and together they would in years to come control ninety per cent of the opium trade out of Burma. Since then they’ve grown the business from around forty tons of raw opium a year to over 400 tons.