the cleverest brain of the three, which was perhaps not saying much.
“I think we’d better admit she’s got us. If this lot took their business elsewhere, we’d be bankrupt. Literally, we couldn’t pay the rent.”
“Absolutely,” Ng muttered.
Rathbone groaned, stood up, flexed his pectorals facing first left, then right, squatted with arms folded, stood, sat down again.
“We’d better move fast,” Savile continued. “This must go no further than these four walls. What we do is agree to take the work but, when it comes in, act surprised that payment will be in cash. Let them bring the money at the last minute. Naturally we couldn’t hold up the transaction, but we say we were assuming payment by check or banker’s draft. We’ll take our fees up front. And then… we’ll see.”
Savile didn’t need to spell out the precautions that he and the others would be making that very afternoon: new numbered bank accounts in the Caymans or British Virgin Islands; vacations moved forward; personal effects, especially houses, put into the names of trust companies based in the Channel Islands. The storm, when it came, would take some weathering.
Rathbone looked around the table. “We’re agreed then?”
“I think we are,” Savile said.
Immediately after the meeting Wong called Emily with the news.
“I thought they might see it our way, Johnny. You did well.”
On putting the phone down on Jonathan, Emily pressed an autodial button. A rough old man’s voice answered in Mandarin.
“He’ll do it.”
“Of course he will.”
“But they want the money exactly one hour before each contract is signed. Not sooner or later.”
The old man answered with a grunt. “And the little detective?”
“Jonathan will set up a social meeting somehow. I might even find a way of bringing you since you’re so interested in Charlie Chan.”
20
Feeling mild excitement, Chan ordered a car to take him out to the fishing village of Sai Kung on the east coast of the New Territories; an English senior inspector had called with news of a possible sighting of a meat mincer on the seabed.
Once he was out of the vast conurbation that stretched from the tip of Kowloon in the south to Choi Hung, the land was green and relatively free of development. The road expanded into a turnpike that lifted up to the hills on the east coast.
At nine-thirty in the morning sunlight hurt. Behind them Kowloon radiated its usual glaucous haze, but up ahead the sky was the deep blue of glazed Ming. Under the solar onslaught the world wobbled. Silver pools shimmered in hollows in the road. Green tiled roofs undulated. Chan and the driver put on sunglasses, turned up the air conditioning.
Chan flicked the radio on to a Cantopop station and winced. “Please release me, let me go” lost everything in translation. He turned to an English-language information program. “Visibility good, fire risk extreme,” a voice said in a London accent. Chan switched off.
The driver pointed to two large military helicopters racing from a funnel of smoke twisting up behind a hill to the left. Huge buckets hung from chains attached to their underbellies and swayed against the direction of the choppers dashing for the sea.
“Bad one. Started yesterday.”
“By campers?”
“Probably. It’s in the bush, not near any villages. No one’s been evacuated yet, but the bush is very dry.”
At the top of the hill the sea came into view: the Pacific coast of China. There was not much between here and Japan, Chan remembered, and if you missed Japan, America was probably the next stop. Not that the ancient Chinese had seen any reason to go even a fraction of that distance. The Middle Kingdom had been the center of the earth, where everyone wanted to be. Only Europe could have produced a Columbus, a man so dissatisfied his own continent wasn’t big enough. Or a Marco Polo.
They turned right along a coast road called Hiram’s Highway by the British, “the road to Pak Sha Wan” by the Chinese. Nobody knew who Hiram had been, not even the British, but Pak Sha Wan was a tiny fishing village with a large boat club. Each year the boats and the club grew larger and more expensive. Million-dollar sailing yachts hung in the heat next to cigar-shaped speed machines that the Cantonese called snakeheads. As a general rule Europeans owned the sailing yachts and Chinese owned the snakeheads. On a windless day like this the boats faced in all directions, their mooring ropes drooping. Sampans chugged between the floating parking lots, taking swimmers to beaches across the bay.
“You know this area?” Chan said.
“No, you?”
“Yeah. I was brought up near here. In a squatter hut overlooking the sea.”
“That so? You were lucky. You got fresh fish and fresh air. I was brought up in Hak Nam, the Walled City. Nothing fresh there. Especially not the whores.”
Chan laughed. Five years ago the government had knocked down the Walled City, a square mile of unplanned triad-built apartments with open sewers, fat rats, prostitution and drug addicts. But some people had loved it, as he had loved his wooden hut.
“You’re right. I was lucky. I lived there with my kid sister. I told her stories about sea-monsters and taught her to swim. We never wanted to go to school. Didn’t seem any reason to.”
The driver nodded.
Chan was on his second Benson when they reached Sai Kung. It had expanded from a village into a town since he had lived nearby, but the covered market and the fishing fleet still flourished. The driver swerved to a halt at the end of the car park near the main pier. Chan got out. Chinese kids in black full-face helmets lying over the fuel tanks of Kawasakis and Yamahas practiced side skids in the center of the new concrete square. To one side skateboarders in silken black leggings with Day-Glo knee pads had set up a ramp from which they launched themselves into space. Opposite, the Watson’s supermarket had risen from the ashes of a wooden Chinese village house where the headman had lived. On either side tinted glass and chrome video and music shops offered relief from the heat and a direct line to the twentieth century. For twenty years he had never been more than ten miles away, but he felt like a man who’d returned after spending a lifetime overseas. He remembered paddy fields that came up to the village square, a banyan tree under which the elders spent their days talking and playing Chinese chess, children so shy that even in early teens they were afraid to leave the house. The West had wrought a cultural revolution more drastic than Mao’s. It took only a couple of decades, apparently, to replace a five- thousand-year-old civilization with the shocking new.
He searched down the length of the dockside where the past waited. Most of the fishing fleet was out; only a half dozen of the trawlers were anchored near to the market; the old ladies in the sampans who brought vegetables, duck and pork to the boat wives were plying between the high green walls of the trawlers that had remained behind, each twisting a long single paddle at the back of the curved sterns, where they stood bow-legged and imperturbable. From the distance he saw they still had permanent hairdos and smiles full of gold.
He walked the length of the pier to where a small police launch was waiting.
He nodded to the captain, stepped on board, immediately fell into discussion with the English senior inspector, who was stationed at an outpost in Mirs Bay. They had always made a point of putting an Englishman into this post, the closest to the Chinese coast.
Higgins showed Chan a marine department map.
