Thai Horse

‘It is time for you to go up the Macao Runs,’ the Tsu Fi said. Cohen was shaken by the news. It never occurred to him the Tsu Fi would send him upriver into Chin Chin land.

‘Why?’ he asked.

‘If it is necessary to ask, perhaps I am sending the wrong person,’ the Tsu Fi said. ‘You are my new negotiator. You must win these China pirates with bravado, show no fear. This is business. The price of goods. You have a taste for money, American. You are getting rich, but it will require some discomfort.’

The Tsu Fi gave him a Queen Victoria twenty-dollar gold piece.

‘This says you speak for me,’ he said. ‘In the past my men have not done well in their negotiations. They do not trust their own thoughts and they agree too quickly. You are the nobleman of negotiators, gwai-lo, you must make new deals that are better.’

‘Then we need to sweeten the pot,’ Cohen suggested.

Sweeten the pot? What pot?’

‘Offer them something better than the others who are doing business on the river.’

‘And what would that be?’ asked the Tsu Fi.

‘I’m thinking,’ Cohen said.

‘Think quickly,’ said the Tsu Fi. ‘You go tonight.’

And that was the night Cohen first met Hatcher.

Cohen became the white Tsu Fi. He had his own men on the river. He was respected by the Ts’e K’am Men Ti and feared by the Hong Kong taipans. His contacts upriver in Red China were impeccable. But mostly he traded in information. Cohen was a clearinghouse for every personal and business rumor in the colony.

If there was a major problem, the taipans turned to him.

They called him China Cohen.

He loved every minute of it,

When Hatcher got to the top of the mountain, he strolled around the side of the peak to Albany Road, near the Botanical Gardens. Cohen’s house stood near the edge of the peak.

He was deep in thought, but not too deep to miss the car parked far above him at the entrance to the Botanical Gardens, or the driver watching him through binoculars.

OLD TIMES, NEW TIMES

Hatcher stood in front of the large iron gates that led to Cohen’s mountaintop estate. The wall that surrounded it was eight feet high. The iron grille gates had once guarded the entrance to the castle of a Chinese warlord in Shanghai. Electric eyes and an electrified wire added a modern touch to the wall, although they were not visible from the ground.

He pressed the button in the wall beside the gate, and a moment later a guard appeared, staring at him through the grille.

‘Hai?’ the guard said.

‘Ngo hai gli Occhi di Sassi,’ Hatcher answered, using the nickname, ‘the Man With Stone Eyes,’ by which he was known on the river.

‘Deui mju,’ the guard said. He vanished for a few moments, then returned. ‘Ho,’ he said, bowing as the gates swung soundlessly open. ‘Cheng nei.’

The gates closed behind Hatcher, and he followed the guard down the winding road toward the house, which was hidden behind banyan and pine trees.

China Cohen had fashioned his sanctuary with taste and passion, a strange amalgam of Oriental cultures and religions, some from China, others from Thailand, Malaysia and Japan. The single-story white house sprawled at the edge of a precipice with a truly spectacular view of the harbor. The curved yellow Chinese tiles that covered the roof glittered like gold; two ferocious-looking marble temple dogs guarded the white facade of the house. On one side of the front walk was a Japanese stone garden, which had been raked with infinite care. On the other side was a garden ablaze with azaleas, roses and orchids. A six-foot long naga, the Thai serpent of good luck, jutted its green and yellow head from among the blossoms, flashing an evil grin that revealed rows of ivory teeth. Delicate, slender-leaved palm trees shaded the garden.

Wind chimes sang gently on either side of the gold and black lacquered doors, and delicately carved teak horns, called ham yon, the ‘sacred testicles,’ were placed over the doorway to the main room of the house because the virility of the master was believed to be stored there.

A large bronze lion’s head knocker announced his arrival. The door was opened by a small, wizened woman who looked a hundred years old and more Thai than Chinese. She was dressed simply, and she peered intently into Hatcher’s eyes for a moment and then smiled and bowed. ‘Welcome, Occhi di Sassi,’ she said.

She stepped back and ushered him into the main room of the house, a room decorated with plush Western furniture, Oriental antiques and Turkish carpets, its French doors opening onto a sprawling balcony. Beyond it and far below was the bay, and across it, Kowloon. The room smelled of fresh flowers. Nothing about it seemed to have changed since he had last been in the house.

A moment later Tiana entered the room, dressed in floor-length silk, her hair decorated with orchids. She didn’t look a day older than the last time Hatcher saw her.