Chow sighed again. “We can probably deal. Give me two days.”
“Certainly,” Jonathan said, and replaced the receiver.
58
They came for Chan at lunchtime. Two tall Chinese with thick Shanghainese accents walked into Mongkok Police Station and up the stairs to his office. Neither would give his name or state his business at reception; no one had the courage to stop them, however. Chan did not resist and was not surprised to see Cuthbert in the back of the black Mercedes waiting in the car park behind the police station. He and Cuthbert found nothing to say to each other. Chan remembered a small room, an old man and black-and-white photographs hanging from a string that depicted people being taken to their executions.
At the top of the Bank of China a feast was in progress. Chan sat next to Cuthbert at a huge circular table. Xian sat directly opposite Chan. The detective had never seen any of the other sixteen men who sat around picking and sucking loudly at the crabs that ended every now and then with a soft
After the crab a very old man served
The old man came around again with balloon-shaped brandy glasses, which he filled from a bottle labeled “VSO Cognac.”
Xian raised his glass, said something loudly in Mandarin to which all the other old men assented.
“I give you human suffering,” Cuthbert translated.
Everyone drank except Chan and Cuthbert. Xian put down his glass, stared at Chan. Whenever he spoke, Cuthbert translated.
“I see our chief inspector from Hong Kong doesn’t like my toast.”
There were murmurs from around the table. Xian held up one hand. The murmurs ceased. “It’s all right, I understand. It’s not a jolly sort of toast of the kind the British and Americans like. But that’s because they are hypocrites. Open your eyes. It’s never been clearer that the happiness of the few depends on the misery of the billions. This is the capitalist system that has been forced upon us. You who have one foot in the West should be pleased with our new enlightenment.”
He paused for a moment in thought. His eyes rested on Chan. “In my youth, when I was only a little younger than you, I believed passionately in Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong Thought. So did General Wen, General Chen Yu, General Wu, General Guo, General Pu Xinyu, General Zuo, General Lao, General Tang, General Zhang, General Wang, General Li, General Yao, General Pan, General Ge, General Yu Wei.” As Xian went around the table, each of the old men nodded. “We all did. In 1952 I had the honor of attending a report given by the great Zhou Enlai in the Cherishing Humanity Hall in Zhongnanhai in Beijing. I listened attentively while he spoke for seven hours. Of course I understood nothing, but how could a man who spoke for seven hours be wrong? How could Mao be wrong? How could Lenin and Marx be wrong? So for forty years we watched China grow poorer from being right, while the West grew richer from being wrong. When the Soviet Union finally disappeared, we all wondered what we had done with our lives. Worst of all, we wondered what we had done to China. How did it come about that the West was right after all? Political power came out of a gun, Mao said. Well, in China we had plenty of guns but not much power. So we started selling our guns, the other generals and I. Overnight things started to change. People we’d never met before from countries we’d never heard of came to see us, asking to buy our guns. America sells arms too. More than we do. More than anyone. The British and the French too. We had started to do things right. But it wasn’t enough. Our guns are too old-fashioned, too inefficient to compare with American and British weapons.
“We sat down to lunch one day, the other generals and I, to work out what it was that was still missing. Being Chinese, we looked to history. Where had the British money come from to enable them to build the biggest empire in the world, to build their factories, their warships, their airplanes? Where had American money come from? Westerners work no harder than Chinese, but they make a thousand times more money, because of the start they have on us. What did it consist of, this start? It took us a whole lunchtime to work it out. Slaves and narcotics. After the slaves and narcotics phase of capitalism, who knows, we might even have democracy in China. But we’re a long way behind, and we have to start in the way approved by history. Aren’t you pleased we’ve taken the path to freedom?”
“No,” Chan said.
He expected a blow or a bullet. Anything except the slowly accumulating rumble of laughter from the old men around the table. Xian was whinnying so hard his neighbor had to thump him on the back. He waved a hand.
“You can go, Chief Inspector. There’s no harm you can do. Tell the world about us; start a revolution. We’ll just march in a few weeks earlier. You’re a good Chinaman-stubborn and old-fashioned. I used to be like you before the West educated me. You solved your case. While you were solving it”-Xian paused for another burst of whinnying-“we bought an atom bomb.” There was an explosion of laughter around the table. “I tell you, I’m starting to like the American way. It’s so easy. You don’t need to study dialectical materialism; money talks. Go. The system you served so loyally is finished. All that Boy Scout stuff is over. Nobody’s buying truth anymore-least of all the British and the Americans. You’re in China now.”
Chan and Cuthbert parted in the lobby on the ground floor of the Bank of China. Cuthbert turned right toward the government offices while Chan strolled slowly back to Central. A digital display in a watch shop in Queen’s Road showed less than two and a half million seconds left to run: Twenty-eight days, and Xian would be emperor of Hong Kong.
It was the end of lunchtime. The sidewalks overflowed with crowds moving like debris in a river after a storm. Chan moved even more slowly because he examined every Chinese face that came into focus. Xian had called him “a good Chinaman,” and so he was, despite his Caucasian features.
These were his people, he loved them; he had wanted to warn them, and this protective impulse had caused him to underestimate them. He saw now that Chinese faces had changed during the two decades that he had burned with anger. Fury had blinded him; he had acted as if he, Jenny and Mai-mai were the only victims of the Chinese holocaust. These people, fighting to return to work, with grimmer expressions than formerly-they knew what to expect. Everyone was waiting for the Beast. Some would leave, but most would stay.
Chan would stay. It was better to live an Eastern reality than a Western fantasy. The ancient master Lao-tsu had said it best: “Irrelevant that the tiger has leapt, is even now at midpoint in an arc that will certainly end in your destruction. So it is for all the ten thousand created things. Of relevance only is the curious fact that at this present instant you are alive.”
At least he thought it was Lao-tsu. He checked his watch. Two-thirty. In another hour a Western woman whose breasts he much admired would land at Kai Tak Airport on a flight from New York. She was a thief and a liar, and he hoped she would enjoy living in a small flat in Mongkok, tigers and other beasts permitting.
AFTERWORD
MILTON CUTHBERT’S TRANSLATIONS were much inspired by Ezra Pound, whose rendering of the second century B.C. poet Mei Sheng has everything in common with the poem that Chan found in the diplomat’s library. The quotation from “The River Song” is from Pound’s translation of Li Po.
On the other hand, Chan himself possessed an original talent; that is to say, the quotation from Lao-tsu on the last page is not to be found in any of the Master’s known works.
