Hong Kong

CHAPTER THREE

“Tell me again about Tiger Cole,” Callie Grafton said to her husband. They were eating lunch on the balcony of their hotel room. Jake had related his adventure at the bank square this morning and the fact that Tommy Carmellini had dropped by for breakfast.

“I remember you and Tiger flew a plane from the carrier into Cubi Point during the final months of the Vietnam War,” Callie said, “and I went to the Philippines to meet you. I remember meeting him at the airport when you showed me the plane before you left.”

Jake nodded. He, too, remembered. “A few weeks after that we were shot down,” he said.

“As I recall,” Callie said, “he was tall, silent, intense.”

“That was Tiger. He never had much to say, but when he did, people listened.”

She had been a junior translator at the U.S. consulate in Hong Kong in those days. And now Tiger Cole was the consul general. Who would have guessed?

“Tiger broke his back in the ejection,” Jake continued, recalling days he hadn’t thought about in years. “After we were rescued he spent a long time in the hospital, then they sent him to Pensacola for rehabilitation. He finally said to hell with it and pulled the plug. I think he went back to college in California, got a master’s in something or other, then got involved in the computer industry.”

“I lost his address about ten years ago,” Callie explained. “He sent us Christmas cards, then we moved or he moved or whatever.”

Jake Grafton chuckled. “Sometimes life deals you an ace. Last month Fortune magazine said he was in on the ground floor of three big high-tech start-ups.”

“And now he’s the consul general,” Callie said distractedly. “Why do you want me to translate this tape?”

Jake summarized his morning conversation with Carmellini while Callie finished her salad. “The tape may contain something worth knowing. China Bob was a rainmaker, a wheeler-dealer who played every angle he could find. Something on that tape might shed some light on what is happening in this town.”

“You mean on what the Americans are doing to help make it happen?”

“If they are.”

“This CIA officer, Carmellini? Do you trust him?”

“I met him last year in Cuba,” Jake explained. “He was working with a CIA officer who was subsequently killed. The dead officer told me Carmellini was a safecracker before the CIA recruited him.”

“That doesn’t sound like anything I’d want on my resume,” Callie shot back.

“It may not take all kinds, but we sure as hell got all kinds.”

“Are we going to do this tonight?”

“I don’t know. Whenever Carmellini shows up with a tape player.”

“I certainly don’t want to sit around this hotel room all evening waiting for him.”

“I didn’t say we should.”

“Why don’t you call Tiger Cole, invite him to go to dinner with us?”

“You think he’d go?” Jake asked dubiously.

“For heaven’s sake, of course he’d go! Unless he has another commitment, then he’d probably want to set something up for tomorrow. Call him. Tell him you’re in town and want to have dinner. I always thought you saved his life after you two were shot down.”

“That’s true,” Jake admitted. “But he’s the consul general and pretty busy and—”

“You’re a two-star admiral in Uncle Sam’s navy, Jake Grafton. You can buy a drink anywhere on this planet.”

Rip Buckingham was about ready to send the bank story to the makeup room when he received a telephone call from the governor’s office.

“This is Governor Sun’s assistant, Mr. Buckingham. Your newspaper is running story about tragedy in front of Bank of Orient? This morning?”

“Yes.”

“Governor Sun Siu Ki has issued statement. Statement go in story.”

The aide’s English was almost impossible to follow, so Rip replied in Cantonese. “Read it to me,” he said, trying to keep the dejection out of his voice.

“A crowd of justly outraged citizens gathered this morning at the Bank of the Orient to withdraw their money panicked when bank officials shamefully failed to open their doors,” said the aide, reading slowly. “In the rioting that followed, several people were killed by the gallant soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army while they were restoring order. The officials of the Bank of the Orient will be held responsible for this tragedy …”

There were several paragraphs more, and as the governor’s assistant dictated in Cantonese, Rip wrote it down in English, in his own private shorthand. He read it back to ensure he had it, then quickly typed out the statement on his computer. He put a note above the statement for the front-page editor, directing him to put the governor’s statement in a box in the center of the page. However, he didn’t change a word of his story, which gave the facts, without comment, as they had been gathered by his reporters.

When he had sent the story for the China Post on its electronic way, he called it up again and made some changes. His fingers flew over the keyboard, changing the slant of the story, trying to capture the despair of Saburo Genda and the hopelessness of the crowd waiting for money that rightfully belonged to them and would never be paid. He also tried to capture the callousness of the soldiers who used deadly weapons on defenseless people.

When he had finished this story, he E-mailed it and the governor’s statement to the Buckingham newspapers worldwide. The China Post was owned by Buckingham Newspapers, Ltd., of which Rip’s father, Richard, was chairman and CEO. Richard Buckingham started with one newspaper in Adelaide at the end of World War II, and as he liked to tell it, with hard work, grit, determination, perseverance, and a generous helping of OPM — other people’s money — built a newsprint empire that covered the globe. Richard still held a bit under sixty percent of the stock, which was not publicly traded. A series of romantic misadventures had spread the rest of the shares far and wide; even Rip had a smidgen under five percent.

Thirty minutes after Rip E-mailed the story to Sydney, the telephone rang. It was his father.

“Sounds like Hong Kong is heating up,” Richard growled.

“It is.”

“When are you going to pack it in?”

“We’ve had this conversation before, Dad.”

“We have. And we are going to keep having it. Sometimes in the middle of the night I wake up in a sweat, thinking of you rotting in some Communist prison because you went off your nut and told the truth in print about those sewer rats.”

“All politicians are sewer rats, not just ours.”

“I’m going to quote you on that.”

“Go right ahead.”

“So when?”

“I don’t know that my wife or mother-in-law will ever leave, Dad. This is their place. These are their people.”

“No, Rip. You are their people. You are the husband and son-in-law, and in China that counts for just about everything. You make the decision and they will go along with it. You know that.”

“What about the Post?”

“I’ll send someone else to run it. Maybe put it up for sale.”

“Nobody is going to pay you serious money for a newspaper in Communist China, Dad. Not here, not now.”

“We’ll see. You never had a head for business, Rip. You are a damned good newspaperman, though, a rare talent. You come to Sydney, I’ll give you any editorial job in the company except mine, which you’ll get anyway in a few years.”

“I’ll think it over.”

“The thought of you in one of those prisons, eating rats… Oh, well.” Without waiting for a response, his father hung up.

The massacre in front of the Bank of the Orient was the hot topic of conversation among the American Culture conference attendees during the afternoon break. One of Callie Grafton’s fellow faculty members told her about it as she watched the attendees whispering furiously and gesturing angrily. Three or four of them were trying to whisper into cell phones. Callie didn’t tell her informant that Jake had been in the crowd in front of the bank and had given her an eyewitness account at lunch.

At least twenty people were killed, the faculty member said, a figure that stunned Callie. Jake hadn’t mentioned that people were killed, only that there had been some shooting. Obviously he didn’t want her to worry. “Ridiculous to worry, after the fact,” he would say, and grin that grin he always grinned when the danger was past.

Through the years Jake had wound up in more than his share of dangerous situations. She had thought those days behind her when he was promoted to flag rank. An admiral might go down with his ship, it was true, in a really big war, but who was having really big wars these days? In today’s world admirals sat in offices and pushed paper. And yet… somehow this morning Jake wound up in the middle of a shooting riot!

Perhaps we should go home, Callie mused, and then remembered with a jolt that Jake was here for a reason and couldn’t leave.

She tried to forget riots and bodies and her husband’s nose for trouble and concentrate on the conference.

Unfortunately, one of the attendees was a government official, a political officer sent to take notes of the questions and answers and jot down the names of any Chinese who might be “undermining the implementation of the laws,” in the phrase the official used to explain his presence to the faculty.

This official was a bald, middle-aged party apparatchik, a generation removed from most of the attendees, who were students in their early to mid-twenties. The first day Callie Grafton found herself fixating on the man’s facial expressions when any student stood to ask a question.

Angry at herself for feeling intimidated, she still had to carefully phrase her comments. While she could not be prosecuted for political deviancy, her participation in the conference could be terminated by this official on the spot. That sanction was used the very first day against a political science professor from Cornell. Callie was ready to pick up her notebook and follow him out the door, then decided a precipitous leave-taking would not be fair to the students, who came to hear her comments on American culture.

That first evening Callie remarked to Jake, “Maybe taking part in this conference was a mistake.”

“Maybe,” he agreed, “but neither of us thought so when the State Department came up with the invitation.” State had procured a conference faculty invitation for Callie as a cover for the Graftons’ presence in Hong Kong. “Don’t be intimidated,” Jake continued. “Answer the students’ questions as best you can, and if the organizers give you the boot we’ll see the sights for the rest of our stay. No big deal.”

Today after the break, the questions concerned the American banking system. Hu Chiang had asked questions often during the last three days, and he was ready when the room fell silent.

“Mrs. Grafton,” he asked in Chinese, the only language in use during the conference, “who decides to whom an American bank will lend its money?”

Hu was tall, more muscular than the average Chinese youth, Callie thought, which made him a fairly typical Hong Kong young adult, most of whom had enjoyed better nutrition while growing up than their mainland Chinese peers.

“The bank lending committee,” Callie answered.

“The government gives the committee guidance?”

“No. Government sets the financial standards the banks must adhere to, but with only minor exceptions, the banks loan money to people and enterprises that are most capable of paying back the loan with interest, thereby earning profits for the owners of the bank.”

This colloquy continued for several minutes as the party boss grew more and more uncomfortable. Finally, without even glancing at the listening official, Hu asked, “In your opinion, Mrs. Grafton, can capitalism exist in a society that lacks political freedom?”

The official sprang from his seat, turned to face Hu, and pointed his finger. “I can sit silently no longer. That question is a provocation, an insult to the state. You attempt to destroy that which you do not understand. We have the weapons to smash those who plot evil.” He turned toward Callie. “Ignore the provocations of the criminal elements,” he ordered peremptorily, closing the discussion. Then he sat heavily and used a cloth to wipe his face.

Callie was trembling. Although she could speak the language, she felt the strangeness of the culture acutely. She was also worried that she might somehow say something to jeopardize the conference or the people who had invited her.

“Mr. Hu merely asked my opinion,” Callie said, trying to hold her voice steady. “I will answer the question.”

The official’s face reddened and his jowls quivered. “Go,” he roared at her, half rising from his seat and pointing toward the door. “You insult China with your disrespectful attitude.”

Callie gathered her purse and headed for the door. As she walked she addressed her questioner, Hu Chiang, who was still standing in the audience. “The answer to your question, Mr. Hu, is no. Political freedom and economic freedom are sides of the same coin; they cannot exist independently of each other.”

“I got thrown out,” she told Jake when she unlocked the hotel room door and found him on the balcony reading.

“I thought you would, sooner or later,” he said and grinned broadly. “Still glad we came?”

She slumped on the side of the bed and held her head in her hands.

Jake put his arms around her. “Hey, I called the consulate. Tiger Cole wants us to come to dinner tomorrow night.”

“I told you so,” Callie Grafton said through her tears, then tried to smile.

Removing the tape player that would play the miniature tape he had taken from China Bob’s library from the tech shop in the basement of the consulate presented Tommy Carmellini with several problems, the most intractable of which was that the device could not be in two places at once. Kerry Kent had access to the office. Carmellini thought that if she chose to look for the player while it was missing, she would realize that Carmellini had lied to her, that he didn’t trust her. She might even conclude that she was a possible suspect in China Bob’s murder.

The problem was that the tape player was a unique device that played a nonstandard small tape that held up to eight hours of recording, so Carmellini couldn’t hope to buy one over the counter at a gadget shop.

Tommy Carmellini thought about all of this as he stood in the small shop staring at the one serviceable tape player. Or was there only one? The room was chock-full of electronic components and gizmos, perhaps he just didn’t know what was there. He began searching under the workbench, then worked his way to the large steel filing cabinets that stood against the back wall.

Aha! On the top of the cabinet behind an obsolete commercial Sanyo reel-to-reel tape player was another small player that looked as if it could handle the tape from China Bob’s. He got it down, blew the dust off it, sat it beside the first one. Yes. The same model, controls, etc. He plugged the thing in and found a tape in one of the drawers that looked like it would fit. When he had the tape properly installed on the reels, he pushed the Play button.

Nothing. The thing was broken.

Without a qualm, he put the working machine in his attaché case and left the broken one in its place. There were several headsets lying around, so he selected one and tossed it into the case, too.

He found Kerry writing a report in the office the CIA officers used. The senior man was there, Bubba Lee, schmoozing with two of the other permanent men, George Wang and Carson Eisenberg. All three were Chinese-Americans; Lee and Wang had two Chinese parents, Eisenberg had a Chinese mother. All could speak perfect Cantonese and pass for natives, which they often did. This morning they wanted to shoot the breeze about Harold Barnes, who had been in Hong Kong for only a couple of months before he was killed.

“I went to the police department this morning,” Eisenberg told Tommy, “to see if they have developed any leads on Barnes. They were all atwitter over China Bob’s murder last night. You and Kerry got out of there just in time. They kept everyone else until dawn, including Mr. Cole.”

“Did they ever find the murder weapon?”

“Little automatic, nickel-plated?”

“Could have been.”

“Found it in the secretary’s office just outside the library, in the trash can.”

“That makes sense,” Kerry Kent said. “If I had just shot someone, I would want to get rid of the weapon as soon as possible.”

Tommy Carmellini stared at her in amazement. She was either ditsy or had more brass than any broad he had ever run across.

Lee and the others spent a very pleasant half hour going over the Chan layout with Tommy, speculating about motives, generally rehashing everything, and reaching no conclusions.

Then, finally, the men returned to their offices, closed their doors, unlocked their private safes, and got on with the business of covert and overt espionage, leaving Carmellini to the gentle company of the British transplant, Kerry Kent.

“I wonder who has the tape,” she said. “Barnes was always such a careful workman. One must assume the device worked and someone swiped the tape.”

Carmellini shrugged.

“One has to assume,” she continued, “that the tape is the key to the mystery.”

“If you think I have it, you’re barking at the wrong dog,” he said.

She came over to the desk where he was sitting, squatted so her face was level with his. No more than twelve inches separated them. “You can trust me, you know.”

“So you think I have it.”

“I don’t think you trust me.”

“Whatever would give you that impression? I’ve known you three whole days… no, four now. Four delightful days of humdrum work and one evening of romance lite. You kissed me what? Twice? I trust you as much as you trust me.”

“I never mix business and pleasure.”

“So there’s no hope for us? Wait until my mother hears the news; she had such high hopes. Now get up off the floor and go sit in a chair. A woman kneeling before me will give people the wrong impression and create a tragic precedent.”

Kerry did as he asked.

“What I’d like to know,” he said, “is how many people paraded through that library before and after me, looked over China Bob’s corpse, then went back to the party and didn’t say a word to anyone.”

“This morning a request came in from the chairman of the congressional committee,” she informed him. “Congress invited China Bob to Washington to testify.”

“All expenses paid, no doubt.”

“The poor man is probably better off dead,” Kerry said firmly. “His position between the Chinese and the Americans was going to get scorching hot.”

“Whoever shot him did him a real favor,” Carmellini agreed. He picked up his attaché case and walked out of the office.

“I had just graduated from college when I first came to Hong Kong,” Callie Grafton told her husband as they walked the streets of Kowloon, taking in the sights, sounds, and smells. “I felt like I had finally come to the center of the earth’s civilization, the place where all the currents and tides came together.

“I remember my first ride on the Star Ferry as if it were yesterday. The white-and-green boat was Morning Star, very propitious, you must agree, for a girl making her way in the world for the very first time. All of the thirty-nine-ton double-ended diesel boats are named for stars, and between them made four hundred and twenty crossings a day between Kowloon and Central. Each crossing took about ten minutes, regardless of the weather or sea conditions. The boats began running at six-thirty in the morning and stopped at eleven-thirty at night. There were two classes of passengers — first class, which rode on the upper deck, and second, which rode on the main deck.

“Everyone who lived or worked or visited Hong Kong rode on these ferries. On days off I would ride the ferries a dozen times a day, looking at the people and listening to them talk, laugh, cry, giggle … Chinese laborers and wealthy merchants and sons and daughters and wives and mistresses and teenage toughs, English civil servants and nannies, Australian adventurers, tourists from everywhere on earth, Europeans, Russians, American sailors, Malays, Filipino maids, Japanese businessmen, Hindus, Sikhs — everyone came to Hong Kong, to make money and a new life for themselves or just to see it, to learn the truth of it. All the roads of the earth lead to this place.

“I loved the city. It was British, colonial, civilized, grand and trivial, yet it wasn’t. It was Chinese, but not quite. It was timeless, yet everyone was in a hurry and the city was being transformed before my eyes.

“From this city I could feel the power of China, the thousand million people, the ancient and the new, the way of the seeded earth. I came to think of China as a giant oak, deeply rooted and enduring through the centuries while the lives of men changed like the seasons.

“In this city I can still feel the pulse of the earth. I can stand in the crowded places and listen to the hundreds of voices, all babbling about the things that fill human lives. I can hear the generations talking of the things that never change, the dreams, ambitions, and concerns that make us human.”

Jake Grafton squeezed his wife’s hand, and they walked on.

Rip Buckingham’s brother-in-law, Wu Tai Kwong, was a delivery driver for the Double Happy Fortune Cookie Company. Rip was happily married and living in Hong Kong when he learned that his wife’s younger brother was involved in the anti-Communist movement in Beijing. The whole thing seemed innocent enough… until that same brother-in-law stood in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and had his photo plastered on every front page in the world. That incident made him a criminal. And a dedicated revolutionary.

Now, of course, he was a fugitive… and living in Rip’s basement. Although he was a notorious political criminal and the object of the greatest manhunt in Chinese history, the government had no idea what Wu looked like now, where he was from, who his family was, or what name or names he might be using. Perhaps this was to be expected in a nation where public records were spotty at best, a nation where a significant portion of the population was illiterate and without identity papers of any kind, a nation with more than a hundred million migrants who roamed at will, looking for work.

Still, the Chinese authorities knew with an absolute certainty that sooner or later they would get their man. They had offered a large reward for Wu Tai Kwong. Human nature being what it is, they had merely to wait until someone betrayed him.

Wu Tai Kwong, being who he was, was not hiding. True, he wasn’t broadcasting his whereabouts and he was using a false name and false identity papers, but he had no intention of stopping his political activities. He hated the Communists and intended to destroy them or be destroyed by them, whichever way fate spun out the story.

The tale could go either way, he realized. Someone who knew or suspected who he might be would tell someone, and so on, and the rumors would spread like ripples in a pond. Still, Wu had to talk to his friends, had to plan, to plot, to conspire against those he hated. He did so knowing that any day could be his very last, for he knew that once the Communists caught him they would execute him quickly, then broadcast the news of their triumph.

This afternoon he stopped his delivery van at various corners on Nathan Road and picked up the solitary people standing there waiting. He picked up four men and a woman in this manner, then found a quiet place to park near the old Kai Tak airport. These people knew him, knew his real name, knew the risks he took, and he trusted them with his life. Since they literally held his life in their hands, they also trusted him.

Today this “gang of six” discussed the current situation, the public anger at the failure of the Bank of the Orient, the predictable resentment against the PLA for shooting into an unsuspecting crowd.

“Is this the spark? Is now the hour?”

They debated the question hotly.

To overthrow the Communists, Wu Tai Kwong had argued for years, two things must come to pass. The great mass of people must be aroused against the government, and the army must refuse to fight the people.

“There are things still to be done,” Hu Chiang argued. “We are almost ready, but not quite.”

“The police know far too much,” the woman replied. Alas, keeping the existence of a large subversive organization a total secret was impossible. People whispered, some tried to sell information to the authorities, others wanted to betray their colleagues and the movement for reasons that ran the gamut of human emotions. “There are too many leaks, too many people talking. We must wait no longer. Every day we wait the danger grows, yet we grow only marginally stronger.”

“We are bribing the police,” one man pointed out when his turn to talk came. “Every day the number of people who want money grows. It is inevitable that someone will take a bribe and turn us in… if they haven’t called Beijing already. We must act now!”

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 green-house.

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.