Noble House

by James Clavell

  “Has an approach been made to the Gang of Three?”

  “I understand White Powder Lee made the approach, Younger Brother. It seems the three are going to join together.”

  Lee gasped. “With blood oaths?”

  “It seems so.”

  “They’re going to work together? Those devils?”

  “So they said. I’ll bet old Four Finger Wu will be the Highest Tiger.”

  “Ayeeyah, that one? They say he’s murdered fifty men himself,” Lee said darkly. He shivered at the danger. “They must have three hundred fighters in their pay. It’d be better for all of us if those three were dead—or behind bars.”

  “Yes. But meanwhile White Powder Lee says they’re ready to expand, and for a little cooperation from us they can guarantee a giant return.” Tang-po mopped his brow and coughed and lit another cigarette. “Listen, Little Brother,” he said softly. “He swears they’ve been offered a very large source of American money, cash money and bank money, and a very large retail outlet for their goods there, based in this place called Manhattan.”

  Lee felt the sweat on his forehead. “A retail outlet there … ayeeyah, that means millions. They will guarantee?”

  “Yes. With very little for us to do. Except close our eyes and make sure Marine and Narcotics Branch seize only the correct shipments and close their eyes when they’re supposed to. Isn’t it written in the Ancient Books: If you don’t squeeze, lightning will strike you?”

  Again a silence. “When does the decision … when’s it going to be decided?”

  “Next week. If it’s decided yes, well, the flow of trade will take months to organize, perhaps a year.” Tang-po glanced at the clock and got up. “Time for our shower. Nighttime Song has arranged dinner for us afterwards.”

  “Eeeee, very good.” Uneasily Lee turned out the single overhead light. “And if the decision is no?”

  Tang-po stubbed out his cigarette and coughed. “If no…” He shrugged. “We only have one life, gods notwithstanding, so it is our duty to think of our families. One of my relations is a captain with Four Finger Wu….”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  8:30 P.M.:

  “Hello, Brian,” Dunross said. “Welcome.”

  “Evening, tai-pan—congratulations—great night for a party,” Brian Kwok said. A liveried waiter appeared out of nowhere and he accepted a glass of champagne in fine crystal. “Thanks for inviting me.”

  “You’re very welcome.” Dunross was standing beside the door of the ballroom in the Great House, tall and debonair, Penelope a few paces away greeting other guests. The half-full ballroom was open to crowded floodlit terraces and gardens where the majority of brightly dressed ladies and dinner-jacketed men stood in groups or sat at round tables. A cool breeze had come with nightfall.

  “Penelope darling,” Dunross called out, “you remember Superin tendent Brian Kwok.”

  “Oh of course,” she said, threading her way over to them with her happy smile, not remembering at all. “How’re you?”

  “Fine thanks—congratulations!”

  “Thank you—make yourself at home. Dinner’s at nine fifteen, Claudia has the seating lists if you’ve lost your card. Oh excuse me a moment….” She turned away to intercept some other guests, her eyes trying to watch everywhere to see that everything was going well and that no one stood alone—knowing in her secret heart that if there was a disaster there was nothing for her to do, that others would make everything well again.

  “You’re very lucky, Ian,” Brian Kwok said. “She gets younger every year.”

  “Yes.”

  “So. Here’s to twenty more years! Health!” They touched glasses. They had been friends since the early fifties when they had met at the first racing hill climb and had been friendly rivals ever since—and founding members of the Hong Kong Sports Car and Rally Club.

  “But you, Brian, no special girlfriend? You arrive alone?”

  “I’m playing the field.” Brian Kwok dropped his voice. “Actually I’m staying single permanently.”

  “Dreamer! This’s your year—you’re the catch of Hong Kong. Even Claudia’s got her eyes on you. You’re a dead duck, old chap.”

  “Oh Christ!” Brian dropped the banter for a moment. “Say, tai-pan, could I have a couple of private minutes this evening?”

  “John Chen?” Dunross asked at once.

  “No. We’ve got every man looking, but nothing yet. It’s something else.”

  “Business?”

  “Yes.”

  “How private?”

  “Private.”

  “All right,” Dunross said, “I’ll find you after dinner. What ab—”

  A burst of laughter caused them to look around. Casey was standing in the center of an admiring group of men—Linbar Struan and Andrew Gavallan and Jacques deVille among them—just outside one of the tall French doors that led to the terrace.

  “Eeeee,” Brian Kwok muttered.

  “Quite,” Dunross said and grinned.

  She was dressed in a floor-length sheath of emerald silk, molded just enough and sheer just enough.

  “Christ, is she or isn’t she?”

  “What?”

  “Wearing anything underneath?”

  “Seek and ye shall find.”

  “I’d like to. She’s stunning.”

  “I thought so too,” Dunross said agreeably, “though I’d say 100 percent of the other ladies don’t.”

  “Her breasts are perfect, you can see that.”

  “Actually you can’t. Just. It’s all in your mind.”

  “I’ll bet there isn’t a pair in Hong Kong to touch them.”

  “Fifty dollars to a copper cash says you’re wrong—provided we include Eurasians.”

  “How can we prove who wins?”

  “We can’t. Actually I’m an ankle man myself.”

  “What?”

  “Old Uncle Chen-Chen used to say, ‘First look at the ankles, my son, then you tell her breeding, how she’ll behave, how she’ll ride, how she’ll … like any filly. But remember, all crows under heaven are black!’”

  Brian Kwok grinned with him then waved at someone in friendly style. Across the room a tall man with a lived-in face was waving back. Beside him was an extraordinarily beautiful woman, tall, fair, with gray eyes. She waved happily too.

  “Now there’s an English beauty at her best!”

  “Who? Oh, Fleur Marlowe? Yes, yes she is. I didn’t know you knew the Marlowes, tai-pan.”

  “Likewise! I met him this afternoon, Brian. You’ve known him long?”

  “Oh a couple of months-odd. He’s persona grata with us.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. We’re showing him the ropes.”

  “Oh? Why?”

  “Some months ago he wrote to the commissioner, said he was coming to Hong Kong to research a novel and asked for our cooperation. Seems the Old Man happened to have read his first novel and had seen some of his films. Of course we checked him out and he appears all right.” Brian Kwok’s eyes went back to Casey. “The Old Man thought we could do with an improved image so he sent word down that, within limits, Peter was approved and to show him around.” He glanced back at Dunross and smiled thinly. “Ours not to reason why!”

  “What was his book?”

  “Called Changi, about his POW days. The Old Man’s brother died there, so I suppose it hit home.”

  “Have you read it?”

  “Not me—I’ve too many mountains to climb! I did skim a few pages. Peter says it’s fiction but I don’t believe him.” Brian Kwok laughed. “He can drink beer though. Robert had him on a couple of his Hundred Pinters and he held his end up.” A Hundred Pinter was a police stag party to which the officers contributed a barrel of a hundred pints of beer. When the beer was gone, the party ended.

  Brian Kwok’s eyes were feasting on Casey, and Dunross wondered for the millionth time why Asians favored Anglo-Saxons and Anglo-Saxons favored Asians.

  “Why
the smile, tai-pan?”

  “No reason. But Casey’s not bad at all, is she?”

  “Fifty dollars says she’s bat jam gai, heya?”

  Dunross thought a moment, weighing the bet carefully. Bat jam gai meant, literally, white chicken meat. This was the way Cantonese referred to ladies who shaved off their pubic hair. “Taken! You’re wrong, Brian, she’s see yau gai,” which meant soya chicken, “or in her case red, tender and nicely spicy. I have it on the highest authority!”

  Brian laughed. “Introduce me.”

  “Introduce yourself. You’re over twenty-one.”

  “I’ll let you win the hill climb on Sunday!”

  “Dreamer! Off you go and a thousand says you won’t.”

  “What odds’ll you give me?”

  “You must be joking!”

  “No harm in asking. Christ, I’d like to carry the book on that one. Where’s the lucky Mr. Bartlett?”

  “I think he’s in the garden—I told Adryon to chaperone him. Excuse me a moment….” Dunross turned away to greet someone Brian Kwok did not recognize.

  Upward of 150 guests had already arrived and been greeted personally. Dinner was for 217, each carefully seated according to face and custom at round tables that were already set and candlelit on the lawns. Candles and candelabra in the halls, liveried waiters offering champagne in cut glass crystal, or smoked salmon and caviar from silver trays and tureens.

  A small band was playing on the dais and Brian Kwok saw a few uniforms among the dinner jackets, American and British, army, navy and air force. It was no surprise that Europeans were dominant. This party was strictly for the British inner circle that ruled Central District and were the power block of the Colony, their Caucasian friends, and a few very special Eurasians, Chinese and Indians. Brian Kwok recognized most of the guests: Paul Havergill of the Victoria Bank of Hong Kong, old Sir Samuel Samuels, multimillionaire, tai-pan of twenty real estate, banking, ferry and stockbroking companies; Christian Toxe, editor of the China Guardian, talking to Richard Kwang, chairman of the Ho-Pak Bank; multimillionaire shipowner V. K. Lam talking to Phillip and Dianne Chen, their son Kevin with them; the American Zeb Cooper, inheritor of the oldest American trading company, Cooper-Tillman, having his ear bent by Sir Dunstan Barre, tai-pan of Hong Kong and Lan Tao Farms. He noticed Ed Langan, the FBI man, among the guests and this surprised him. He had not known that Langan or the man he was talking to, Stanley Rosemont, a deputy director of the China-watching CIA contingent, were friends of Dunross. He let his eyes drift over the chattering group of men, and the mostly separate groups of their wives.

  They’re all here, he thought, all the tai-pans except Gornt and Plumm, all the pirates, all here in incestuous hatred to pay homage to the tai-pan.

  Which one is the spy, the traitor, controller of Sevrin, Arthur?

  He’s got to be European.

  I’ll bet he’s here. And I’ll catch him. Yes. I’ll catch him, soon, now that I know about him. We’ll catch him and catch them all, he thought grimly. And we’ll catch these crooks with their hands in their tills, we’ll stamp out their piracies for the common good.

  “Champagne, Honored Sir?” the waiter asked in Cantonese with a toothy smile.

  Brian accepted a full glass. “Thank you.”

  The waiter bowed to hide his lips. “The tai-pan had a blue-covered file among his papers when he came in tonight,” he whispered quickly.

  “Is there a safe, a secret hiding place here?” Brian asked equally cautiously in the same dialect.

  “The servants say in his office on the next floor,” the man said. His name was Wine Waiter Feng, and he was one of SI’s undercover network of intelligence agents. His cover as a waiter for the company that catered all Hong Kong’s best and most exclusive parties gave him great value. “Perhaps it’s behind the painting, I heard….” He stopped suddenly and switched to pidgin English. “Champigy-nee Missee?” he asked toothily, offering the tray to the tiny old Eurasian lady who was coming up to them. “Wery wery first class.”

  “Don’t you Missee me, you impertinent young puppy,” she rapped haughtily in Cantonese.

  “Yes, Honored Great-Aunt, sorry, Honored Great-Aunt.” He beamed and fled.

  “So, young Brian Kwok,” the old lady said, peering up at him. She was eighty-eight, Sarah Chen, Phillip Chen’s aunt, a tiny birdlike person with pale white skin and Asian eyes that darted this way and that. And though she appeared frail her back was upright and her spirit very strong. “I’m glad to see you. Where’s John Chen? Where’s my poor grand-nephew?”

  “I don’t know, Great Lady,” he said politely.

  “When are you going to get my Number One Grand-nephew back?”

  “Soon. We’re doing everything we can.”

  “Good. And don’t you interfere with young Phillip if he wants to pay John’s ransom privately. You see to it.”

  “Yes. I’ll do what I can. Is John’s wife here?”

  “Eh? Who? Speak up, boy!”

  “Is Barbara Chen here?”

  “No. She came earlier but as soon as that woman arrived she ‘got a headache’ and left. Huh, I don’t blame her at all!” Her old rheumy eyes were watching Dianne Chen across the room. “Huh, that woman! Did you see her entrance?”

  “No, Great Lady.”

  “Huh, like Dame Nellie Melba herself. She swept in, handkerchief to her eyes, her eldest son Kevin in tow—I don’t like that boy—and my poor nephew Phillip like a second-class cook boy in the rear. Huh! The only time Dianne Chen ever wept was in the crash of ’56 when her stocks went down and she lost a fortune and wet her drawers. Ha! Look at her now, preening herself! Pretending to be upset when everyone knows she’s acting as though she’s already Dowager Empress! I could pinch her cheeks! Disgusting!” She looked back at Brian Kwok. “You find my grand-nephew John—I don’t want that woman or her brat loh-pan of our house.”

  “But he can be tai-pan?”

  They laughed together. Very few Europeans knew that though tai-pan meant great leader, in the old days in China a tai-pan was the colloquial title of a man in charge of a whorehouse or public toilet. So no Chinese would ever call himself tai-pan, only loh-pan—which also meant great leader or head leader. Chinese and Eurasians were greatly amused that Europeans enjoyed calling themselves tai-pan, stupidly passing over the correct title.

  “Yes. If he’s the right pan,” the old woman said and they chuckled. “You find my John Chen, young Brian Kwok!”

  “Yes. Yes we’ll find him.”

  “Good. Now, what do you think of Golden Lady’s chances on Saturday?”

  “Good, if the going’s dry. At three to one she’s worth a bundle. Watch Noble Star—she’s got a chance too.”

  “Good. After dinner come and find me. I want to talk to you.”

  “Yes, Great Lady.” He smiled and watched her go off and knew that all she wanted was to try to act the marriage broker for some great-niece. Ayeeyah, I’ll have to do something about that soon, he thought.

  His eyes strayed back to Casey. He was delighted by the disapproving looks from all the women—and the cautious covert admiration from all their escorts. Then Casey glanced up and saw him watching her across the room and she stared back at him briefly with equal frank appraisal.

  Dew neh loh moh, he thought uneasily, feeling somehow undressed. I’d like to possess that one. Then he noticed Roger Crosse with Armstrong beside him. He put his mind together and headed for them.

  “Evening, sir.”

  “Evening, Brian. You’re looking very distinguished.”

  “Thank you, sir.” He knew better than to volunteer anything pleasant in return. “I’m seeing the tai-pan after dinner.”

  “Good. As soon as you’ve seen him, find me.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “So you think the American girl stunning?”

  “Yes sir.” Brian sighed inwardly. He had forgotten that Crosse could lip-read English, French and some Arabic—he spoke no Chinese dial
ects—and that his eyesight was exceptional.

  “Actually she’s rather obvious,” Crosse said.

  “Yes sir.” He saw Crosse concentrating on her lips and knew that he was overhearing her conversation from across the room and he was furious with himself that he had not developed the talent.

  “She seems to have a passion for computers.” Crosse turned his eyes back on them. “Curious, what?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “What did Wine Waiter Feng say?”

  Brian told him.

  “Good. I’ll see Feng gets a bonus. I didn’t expect to see Langan and Rosemont here.”

  “It could be a coincidence, sir,” Brian Kwok volunteered. “They’re both keen punters. They’ve both been to the tai-pan’s box.”

  “I don’t trust coincidences,” Crosse said. “As far as Langan’s concerned, of course you know nothing, either of you.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Good. Perhaps you’d both better be about our business.”

  “Yes sir.” Thankfully the two men turned to leave but stopped as there was a sudden hush. All eyes went to the doorway. Quillan Gornt stood there, black-browed, black-bearded, conscious that he had been noticed. The other guests hastily picked up their conversations and kept their eyes averted but their ears concentrated.

  Crosse whistled softly. “Now why is he here?”

  “Fifty to one says he’s up to no good,” Brian Kwok said, equally astounded.

  They watched Gornt come into the ballroom and put out his hand to Dunross and Penelope beside him. Claudia Chen who was nearby was in shock, wondering how she could reorganize Dunross’s table at such short notice because of course Gornt would have to be seated there.

  “I hope you don’t mind my changing my mind at the last moment,” Gornt was saying, his mouth smiling.

  “Not at all,” Dunross replied, his mouth smiling.

  “Good evening, Penelope. I felt I had to give you my congratulations personally.”

  “Oh, thank you,” she said. Her smile was intact but her heart was beating very fast now. “I, I was sorry to hear about your wife.”

  “Thank you.” Emelda Gornt had been arthritic and confined to a wheelchair for some years. Early in the year she had caught pneumonia and had died. “She was very unlucky,” Gornt said. He looked at Dunross. “Bad joss about John Chen too.”