Hong Kong (8 page)

Wu waved them into silence. "There is another factor. The Americans suspect that the American consul, Cole, has moved money into Hong Kong. They are trying to trace the money, find out where it went. China Bob Chan is dead, but the trail is not cold. If we wait too long, the Americans may decide to tell Beijing what they know ... or suspect."

"So that is the decision?" Hu Chiang demanded.

"I will not make the decision," Wu told them. "We will vote. Now."

Only Hu Chiang voted to wait.

"Then it is decided," Wu told them. Even Hu looked relieved that the waiting was over, he thought.

"The longest journey begins with the first step. Let us begin."

As he started the van to drive away, Wu remarked, "We must win or die."

"Win or die," they murmured.

The house where the Buckinghams lived perched precariously on the side of the mountainous spine of Hong Kong Island, just below the Victoria Peak tram station. From it one had a magnificent view of the central business district, Kowloon, and the harbor.

The roof of the building was flat. Paved with tile and equipped with lawn chairs and sun umbrellas, it made a wonderful patio on almost any day clouds did not obscure the sun. At the head of the staircase was a small room with large windows that Lin Pe, Rip's mother-in-law, used as a greenhouse.

When he got home, Rip found his wife, Sue Lin Buckingham, on the roof sitting under an umbrella, reading. He removed a cold beer from the refrigerator in the greenhouse and sagged into a lawn chair beside her. As he summed up the events of the day, his wife put down her book and listened in silence.

Sue Lin was a rarity, a highly educated Chinese woman. She had never known her father, who died before she was born. Her mother made a small fortune in fortune cookies and insisted that her daughter get an education. Sue Lin spent her teenage years at a private school

in California, then got bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of California at Berkeley.

Rip Buckingham, Australian bum and Chinese aficionado, fell for her the very first time he saw her. She had not been similarly smitten, but he persisted. Eventually he won her heart, a triumph that he still regarded as the great accomplishment of his life. She was, he thought, the most gracious lady he had ever met.

This evening she listened in silence to Rip's narrative of the Bank of the Orient debacle and his summary of Governor Sun's statement.

"The statement was really an order telling you how to write the story, wasn't it?"

"Yes, I suppose." Rip took a big swallow of beer, then stared glumly at his toes.

"The government may shut down the newspaper. You've been expecting it."

"I know. I just kept hoping it wouldn't happen." He swept his hand at the city before them. "This is our city, our place. We have done nothing wrong. The paper merely prints the news in a fair, unbiased manner. What's wrong with that?"

Sue Lin didn't reply. "Perhaps they won't shut you down."

Rip sipped some more beer. "It's time we thought about leaving."

"We can go anytime," his wife responded without enthusiasm. They both held Australian passports. "But I don't want to go without Mother. You know that. And Mother won't leave Hong Kong."

"She always said she wouldn't leave, sure, but this place is going to explode," Rip argued. It was hell trying to use logic on women who didn't want to hear it. "This isn't the city that it used to be. She
must
see that! And she had money in the Bank of the Orient. In the middle of listening to the reporters and writing the story, that thought ran through my head."

"Money or no money, she won't leave without my brother. Absolutely not."

"I guarantee you he won't leave alive. Not a chance in hell."

"He's all she has from her early life."

"Bull! She has both of you! I know there were three other children, but that was thirty-some years ago. They are adults with children of their own or they're dead." "Rip, you don't understand."

"I
do
understand. And I think it's time your mother listened to reason. When this place explodes, your brother is going to be leading the revolution. The government is going to figure out who he is—who his mother is, who his sister is, who his brother-in-law is. While Wu is busy answering destiny's call, the Communists are going to put you, me, and your mother against the wall and shoot us dead.
We're running out of time!
If we don't leave we'll die here. We've
got
to get the hell out of China!"

"Don't be ugly."

"Why don't you listen to reason?"

Sue Lin held out her hand. He took it.

"Our world is coming apart," Rip told her. "Everything is cracking, breaking, shattering into thousands of pieces. I feel helpless, doomed. At any second the great quake will come and this little world where you and I have been so happy is going to cease to exist."

Tears ran down her cheeks. She turned her back on him and wiped them away.

They were sitting side by side, holding hands and looking at the city, when the cook called from the greenhouse and told them dinner was ready.

CHAPTER FOUR

Tommy Carmellini was waiting in their hotel room when the Graftons returned after dinner. He was sitting in the darkness well back from the window.

"Did the maid let you in?" Jake asked sharply.

"No, sir. I let myself in. I didn't want the staff to know I was here."

"Next time wait in the lobby."

"Right."

"Callie, this is Tommy Carmellini."

"Mrs. Grafton, you can call me Jack Carrigan. That's the name I travel under."

"So you have two names, Mr. Carmellini?"

"Sometimes more," he admitted, grinning.

"Most people are stuck with only one," Callie said, "the one their parents picked for them. It must be nice to have a name that you pick yourself and can toss when you tire of it."

"That
is
one of the advantages," Carmellini agreed cheerfully.

"I brought the tape player." He gestured toward the bed, where the device rested. "I don't speak Chinese. To me it just sounds like a bunch of birds twittering."

Jake flipped on the rest of the lights as Callie seated herself on the

bed across from Carmellini. She eyed the tape player distastefully. "What's on the tape?" she asked.

Carmellini leaned forward and looked into her eyes. "A CIA officer was murdered just hours after he planted two bugs and a recorder in the library of a man named China Bob Chan. Two nights ago China Bob was shot and killed in that library by a party unknown. I got there before the body cooled and took the tape from the recorder. That tape is probably the best evidence of the identity of the person who killed Chan. In fact, it may be the only evidence we'll ever get. It also might shed some light on who killed the CIA officer."

"You told Jake that Tiger Cole, the consul general, might have killed Chan."

"Mrs. Grafton, anyone in Hong Kong could have gone into that library and shot China Bob."

Callie glanced at Jake, who said nothing.

"The recorder was voice-activated," Carmellini explained, "so that valuable space on the tape wouldn't be wasted recording the street noises that penetrated an empty room. When the sound level dropped below the electronic threshold, the tape would play on for a few seconds, then stop. Places on the tape where the recorder stopped were marked as audible clicks."

"We'll play it later," Jake Grafton said in a tone that settled the issue.

"Sure." Carmellini rose to go. "Nice to meet you, Mrs. Grafton."

Callie merely nodded.

Buckingham Lin Su, or as she wrote it in the Western style, Sue Lin Buckingham, found her mother, Lin Pe, in her study consulting her fortune book. Lin Pe lived in her own three-room apartment in the Buckinghams' house. Just now she was smoking a cigarette which she had fixed in a short black plastic holder. The smoke rising from the cigarette made her squint behind the thick lenses of her glasses.

Sue Lin broke the news. The Bank of the Orient had collapsed, failing to open its doors today. Depositors trying to withdraw their money had been fired upon by soldiers.

Lin Pe took the news pretty well, Sue Lin thought, considering that her company kept all its accounts at the Japanese bank because it paid the highest interest rates in Hong Kong.

Lin Pe listened, nodded, and when Sue Lin left, got the accountant's latest summary from her desk and studied it.

The Double Happy Fortune Cookie Company, Ltd., was a profitable international concern because of one person—Lin Pe. Thirty years ago when she came to Hong Kong from a village north of Canton, she found a job in a factory that baked fortune cookies for export to America. Before she went to work there she had never even heard of a fortune cookie. The little fortunes printed on rice paper inside the cookies charmed her. She wrote some in Chinese and one day showed her creations to the owner, an alcoholic old Dutchman from Indonesia who also mixed the cookie batter and cleaned up the place at night, if he was sober enough. He translated a few, they went into the cookies, and Lin Pe had found a home.

When the Dutchman died five years later of cirrhosis of the liver, she bought the company from his heirs. It thrived, because Lin Pe was a very astute businesswoman and because the fortunes she put into her cookies were the best in the business.

About three dozen fortunes were in use at the cookie factory at any one time. Writing good fortunes was a difficult business. She was hard put to come up with three or four good new ones per month, which meant some of the old ones had to be used again. Lin Pe kept a book, her "book of fortunes," in which was recorded every fortune she had ever written and notations on what months it had been used. She changed the fortunes going into the cookies on a monthly basis.

Just now she put down the accountant's summary and consulted the fortune list she had constructed for use next month.

"Happiness will find you soon." She had used this fortune before and thought it one of her best. Other cookie people wrote "You will find happiness," but that was bland, without wit or snap. Lin Pe sent the happiness searching for you.

"Your true love is closer than you think." Love, Americans seem enamored with it. Many of the letters she received from restaurant owners in America pleaded with her to use more love fortunes in her cookies. Lin Pe had never been in love herself, so to write these fortunes she had to imagine what it might be like. This was becoming more and more difficult as the years passed.

'Beware ... use great care in the days ahead." When she saw this fortune in her book, she inhaled sharply.

It was her fortune.

One cookie in three thousand contained that fortune. Yesterday she plucked a cookie off the conveyor belt as it was about to go into the packing machine, and that was the fortune inside.

She closed the book, unable to continue. She shivered involuntarily, then sat staring out the window.

Rip Buckingham disliked the Communists, and her son Wu hated them. Neither knew them like Lin Pe did, for she had lived through the Great Cultural Revolution. Occasionally she still awoke in the middle of the night with the stench of burning houses and flesh in her nostrils, listening for the shouts, the sobs, the screams. She had fled to Hong Kong to escape that madness; now the storm seemed to be gathering again out there in the darkness. She could feel its presence.

The money. Its loss was a disaster, of course, but perhaps the Japanese could be shamed into paying it back. The neat little men with their perfect haircuts and creased trousers must know the importance of keeping faith with their customers, even if the law didn't require it.

The cookie company could run a few days without writing checks. Lin Pe began considering whom she might borrow money from to meet the payroll. Rip and Sue Lin had plenty of money and would have loaned her all she wanted without giving it a thought, but Lin Pe was too proud even to consider that course of action. Amazingly, the possibility never crossed her mind. From her desk drawer she removed a private list of her fellow businesspeople and studied that.

Rip Buckingham's idea of the perfect way to spend an evening was to loaf in a lawn chair on his roof reading newspapers from all over the world as he sipped beer and listened to music. Occasionally he would pause to watch a ship slip through the harbor on its way to or from the open sea.

Hong Kong didn't have enough dock facilities, so many of the freighters had their cargo on- and off-loaded onto lighters, which were towed back and forth between their anchorages and the ships by tugboats. Flotillas of ferryboats were in constant motion crossing and re-crossing the strait, fuel boats cruised for customers, tour and party boats dashed about, here and there someone sculled a sampan through the heaving ridges of waves and wakes.

Rip was not enjoying the view tonight.

He finished with a Beijing newspaper and threw it onto the pile with the Hong Kong dailies. He grabbed a Sydney paper and started flipping though it.

The problem was that he liked being a newspaperman. He liked going to the office, saying hello to everyone, reading the wire service stories, tapping away on his computer as the cursor danced along, then seeing it all in print. He liked holding the paper in his hand, liked the heft of it, liked the way that it felt cool to the touch. He liked the smell of newsprint and ink, liked the idea of trying to catch the world every day on a pound of paper. A newspaper was worth doing, and Rip Buckingham didn't want to do anything else.