“My apologies. You are still hungry. Incidentally, Lovejoy, this next dish has a ham base. Do you in East Anglia believe that your Suffolk hams with honey and mustard glaze are superior to the processed variety?”
“Er…” I gaped at her blankly. How the hell would I know that? Meat’s meat. I thought of quipping that I’d given up meat for Lent, but instead stayed mute, glad we were back to normal, with more dim sum arriving and waiters calling our score to assembled multitudes and Ling Ling a picture. But I knew she didn’t want to remember Hong Kong’s one snow scene. Just like me to put my bloody great foot in it, when I was maneuvering my way through murders.
“You have a scheme, Lovejoy,” she prompted.
I’d given up worrying how this lot communicated. I daresay even now our conversation was being beamed out. “Brokers Gelman should be owned, Ling Ling.”
“You suggest we buy them out, Lovejoy?”
“They wouldn’t agree and word would get around. International dealers would become suspicious. You’d need to avoid that.” The next load was shrimps in a kind of pale translucent envelope, hot as hell. I fell on them politely.
“Buy them, yet not buy them, Lovejoy?”
“There’s a way, love. It’s called shame. I’ll provide the scam. The Triad provides the materials.”
“Shame.” Her eyes sparkled with such inner excitement I almost had to look away. I sensed another sickening poetic quotation on the way and braced myself, but she outguessed me. “You mean blackmail?”
“Shame’s shame, love. Blackmail’s cruder, a mere technique.”
“What a marvelous philosophy, Lovejoy! Shame as a single determinant!” Her face clouded. “But do American businessmen respond to shame?”
“It’s everybody’s weakness, love. Even Queen Victoria was ashamed— once when she forgot herself and a camera caught her smiling.”
“Yet wasn’t the Queen Empress a superb if secret camera woman? Didn’t she buy all her children a Kodak camera from George Eastman’s shop along Clerkenwell Road?”
She laughed, doing the concertina bit with her fan. “What a treat, wandering incognito round Brighton taking snaps as she did when a princess!”
“Her photos are valuable now. A few come up occasionally…”
And we were off into antiques. She had a good, scholar’s knowledgeable attitude interlaced with a breathtaking head for finance. Paintings, porcelains, carpets, furniture, belle epoque dresses, Regency silver, clocks, stuffed animals, even the recent difficult switches in numismatics, medallions, the rarefied antiquarian area of prints—she had it all at her fingertips. That is to say, she had learned a hell of a lot. But after half an hour I was satisfied. Ling Ling was brilliant, a genius at everything. But she was no divvy.
That’s what this meeting was all about, one last go to see if the divvy gift could be grafted on. Her skill, the endless training was complete, but that was it. I mean, she told me things I’d never heard of. The real blammer was an incidental: “Amusing that Napoleon’s father wanted his young son to join your Royal Navy. Can you imagine Nelson, Wellington, and Napoleon all on the same side, Lovejoy?” I didn’t see the point of her remark. She added, “He didn’t. Therefore he was a disobedient son, Lovejoy.
Therefore the world hunted him down. And him Napoleon!”
“Disobedience isn’t linked to failure, love.”
“Who is to say? We Chinese have a different belief.”
Lesson umpteen. I wasn’t to be exempt from being hunted down if I reneged. I’d used up all my chances. I nodded acknowledgment, and she touched my hand. The deal was sealed. Opposed to a slick mind like hers I felt a dullard, futile as when you can’t find something in the kitchen though you know it’s grinning at you on the shelf. “So, Lovejoy. You will do it for us. Somehow obtain a majority-share capital of Brookers Gelman. We provide expenses. You devise the plan, seeing that our sorry efforts are unable to provide divvying skills.” Her smile was still endearing, even though it was probably the first time she had been found deficient in anything. I thought, that’s perfection. She read my mind, but for women that’s naught new.
“This skill you possess which I lack, Lovejoy. Does it give strength?”
“Like learning, you mean? No, love.”
“You often speak the truth.” A flat statement while she appraised me. I hadn’t thought of that—if divvying was teachable, I was a dead duck, like Johny Chen. To my relief she smiled. Safe. “Lovejoy. You are an innocent. We Cantonese are not too familiar with this attribute. To divvy: to divine, no? Among the Sisala people of north Ghana, their word for ‘divination’ is etymologically close to ‘discussion’… but I see I disinterest you, Lovejoy.” A wicked naughty girl grin here. “Perhaps I need to learn from you.”
To her mute inquiry, I nodded I was full. “Ta, Ling Ling. Good grub, eh? What were those flat sliced things?”
As she led the way in a regal exit we chatted amiably about food, about which she was of course omniscient. Marilyn and the woman attendants followed glamorously on, the eight goons giving ominous glances all around. The sampan lady was over the moon at being selected by a jade woman and deliberately took her time, bragging to admiring friends among the junks.
A funny thing happened, though, which I should have understood but didn’t, being thick. Most of the sampan ladies have, as well as black pajama suits and gold teeth, babies strapped piggyback and often one or two free- range. Our sampan had two tiny roamers, one of each. The little lad had a bell clonking over his head, somehow fixed round his waist on kind of a spring, and was tied to the improvised hooped sunshade.
The baby girl lacked these queer accessories, so crawled unhindered. Halfway across the narrow straits we wobbled in the wake of a decorated junk, its colored banners flying, gongs going and firecrackers exploding. The infants were captivated and rose to express delight. I grabbed the tiny girl just as she started falling over the side.
“Watch it, chuckie,” I told her. “I’m not dressed for swimming.” Her brother’s rope held him, so he wasn’t at risk. I stood and held her up to see the celebration. The junk looked new, perhaps putting to sea for the first time. Everybody was happy, the junk people, Ling Ling’s entourage in our three following sampans, our sampan lady, her
