Noble House

by James Clavell

  He picked up the phone. “Yes?”

  “Mr. Lop-sing please?” the woman’s voice said.

  “There’s no Mr. Lop-ting here,” he said easily. “Sorry, you have a wrong number.”

  “I want to leave a message.”

  “You have a wrong number. Look in your phone book.”

  “An urgent message for Arthur: Center radioed that the meeting’s postponed until the day after tomorrow. Stand by for urgent instructions at 0600.” The line went dead. Again a dial tone.

  Plumm frowned as he put the phone back on its cradle.

  Four Finger Wu stood at the gunnel of his junk with Good-weather Poon watching Gornt get into the sampan that he had sent for him.

  “He hasn’t changed much in all this time, has he?” Wu said absently, his narrowed eyes glittering.

  “Foreign devils all look alike to me, never mind. How many years is it? Ten?” Poon asked, scratching his piles.

  “No, it’s nearer twelve now. Good times then, heya,” Wu said. “Lots of profit. Very good, slipping upstream toward Canton, evading the foreign devils and their lackeys, Chairman Mao’s people welcoming us. Yes. Our own people in charge and not a foreign devil anywhere—nor a fat official wanting his hand touched with fragrant grease. You could visit all your family and friends then and no trouble, heya? Not like now, heya?”

  “The Reds’re getting tough, very clever and very tough—worse than the Mandarins.”

  Wu turned as his seventh son came on deck. Now the young man wore a neat white shirt and gray trousers and good shoes. “Be careful,” he called out brusquely. “You’re sure you know what to do?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “Good,” Four Fingers said, hiding his pride. “I don’t want any mistakes.”

  He watched him head awkwardly for the haphazard gangway of planks that joined this junk to the next and thence across other junks to a makeshift landing eight boats away.

  “Does Seventh Son know anything yet?” Poon asked softly.

  “No, no not yet,” Wu said sourly. “Those dogmeat fools to be caught with my guns! Without the guns, all our work will be for nothing.”

  “Evening, Mr. Gornt. I’m Paul Choy—my uncle Wu sent me to show you the way,” the young man said in perfect English, repeating the lie that was now almost the real truth to him.

  Gornt stopped, startled, then continued up the rickety stairs, his sea legs better than the young man’s. “Evening,” he said. “You’re American? Or did you just go to school there, Mr. Choy?”

  “Both.” Paul Choy smiled. “You know how it is. Watch your head on the ropes—and it’s slippery as hell.” He turned and began to lead the way back. His real name was Wu Fang Choi and he was his father’s seventh son by his third wife, but, when he was born, his father Four Finger Wu had sought a Hong Kong birth certificate for him, an unusual act for a boat dweller, put his mother’s maiden name on the birth certificate, added Paul and got one of his cousins to pose as the real father.

  “Listen, my son,” Four Finger Wu had said, as soon as Paul could understand, “when speaking Haklo aboard my ship, you can call me Father—but never in front of a foreign devil, even in Haklo. All other times I’m ‘Uncle,’ just one of many uncles. Understand?”

  “Yes. But why, Father? Have I done something wrong? I’m sorry if I’ve offended you.”

  “You haven’t. You’re a good boy and you work hard. It’s just better for the family for you to have another name.”

  “But why, Father?”

  “When it’s time you will be told.” Then, when he was twelve and trained and had proved his value, his father had sent him to the States. “Now you’re to learn the ways of the foreign devil. You must begin to speak like one, sleep like one, become one outwardly but never forget who you are, who your people are, or that all foreign devils are inferior, hardly human beings, and certainly not fornicating civilized.”

  Paul Choy laughed to himself. If Americans only knew—from tai-pan to meathead—and British, Iranians, Germans, Russians, every race and color, if they all really knew what even the lousiest coolie thought of them, they’d hemorrhage, he told himself for the millionth time. It’s not that all the races of China despise foreigners, it’s just that foreigners’re just beneath any consideration. Of course we’re wrong, he told himself. Foreigners are human and some are civilized—in their way—and far ahead of us technically. But we are better …

  “Why the smile?” Gornt asked, ducking under ropes, avoiding rubbish that scattered all the decks.

  “Oh, I was just thinking how crazy life is. This time last month I was surfing at Malibu Colony, California. Boy, Aberdeen’s something else, isn’t it?”

  “You mean the smell?”

  “Sure.”

  “Yes it is.”

  “It’s not much better at high tide. No one but me seems to smell the stench!”

  “When were you last here?”

  “Couple of years back—for ten days—after I graduated, B.A. in business, but I never seem to get used to it.” Choy laughed. “New England it ain’t!”

  “Where did you go to school?”

  “Seattle first. Then undergraduate school, University of Washington at Seattle. Then I got a master’s at Harvard, Harvard Business School.”

  Gornt stopped. “Harvard?”

  “Sure. I got an assist, a scholarship.”

  “That’s very good. When did you graduate?”

  “June last year. It was like getting out of prison! Boy, they really put your ass on the block if you don’t keep up your grades. Two years of hell! After I got out I headed for California with a buddy, doing odd jobs here and there to make enough to keep surfing, having ourselves a time after sweating out so much school. Then …” Choy grinned. “… then a couple of months back Uncle Wu caught up with me and said it’s time you went to work so here I am! After all, he paid for my education. My parents died years ago.”

  “Were you top of your class at Harvard?”

  “Third.”

  “That’s very good.”

  “Thank you. It’s not far now, ours is the end junk.”

  They negotiated a precarious gangway, Gornt watched suspiciously by silent boat dwellers as they crossed from floating home to floating home, the families dozing or cooking or eating or playing mah-jong, some still repairing fishing nets, some children night fishing.

  “This bit’s slippery, Mr. Gornt.” He jumped onto the tacky deck. “We made it! Home sweet home!” He tousled the hair of the sleepy little boy who was the lookout and said in Haklo, which he knew Gornt did not understand, “Keep awake, Little Brother, or the devils will get us.”

  “Yes, yes I will,” the boy piped, his suspicious eyes on Gornt.

  Paul Choy led the way below. The old junk smelled of tar and teak, rotting fish and sea salt and a thousand storms. Belowdecks the midship gangway opened onto the normal single large cabin for’ard that went the breadth of the ship and the length to the bow. An open charcoal fire burned in a careless brick fireplace with a sooty kettle singing over it. Smoke curled upward and found its way to the outside through a rough flue cut in the deck. A few old rattan chairs, tables and tiers of rough bunks lined one side.

  Four Finger Wu was alone and he waved at one of the chairs and beamed. “Heya, good see,” he said in halting, hardly understandable English. “Whiskey?”

  “Thanks,” Gornt said. “Good to see you too.”

  Paul Choy poured the good Scotch into two semiclean glasses.

  “You want water, Mr. Gornt?” he asked.

  “No, straight’s fine. Not too much please.”

  “Sure.”

  Wu accepted his glass and toasted Gornt. “Good see you, heya?”

  “Yes. Health!”

  They watched Gornt sip his whiskey.

  “Good,” Gornt said. “Very good whiskey.”

  Wu beamed again and motioned at Paul. “Him sister son.”

  “Yes.”

  “Good sc
hool—Golden Country.”

  “Yes. Yes, he told me. You should be very proud.”

  “Wat?”

  Paul Choy translated for the old man. “Ah thank, thank you. He talk good, heya?”

  “Yes.” Gornt smiled. “Very good.”

  “Ah, good never mind. Smoke?”

  “Thank you.” They watched Gornt take a cigarette. Then Wu took one and Paul Choy lit both of them. Another silence.

  “Good with old frien’?”

  “Yes. And you?”

  “Good.” Another silence. “Him sister son,” the old seaman said again and saw Gornt nod and say nothing, waiting. It pleased him that Gornt just sat there, waiting patiently for him to come to the point as a civilized person should.

  Some of these pink devils are learning at long last. Yes, but some have learned too fornicating well—the tai-pan for instance, him with those cold, ugly blue fish-eyes that most foreign devils have, that stare at you like a dead shark—the one who can even speak a little Haklo dialect. Yes, the tai-pan’s too cunning and too civilized, but then he’s had generations before him and his ancestors had the Evil Eye before him. Yes, but old Devil Green Eyes, the first of his line, who made a pact with my ancestor the great sea warlord, Wu Fang Choi and his son, Wu Kwok, and kept it, and saw that his sons kept it—and their sons. So this present tai-pan must be considered an old friend even though he’s the most deadly of the line.

  The old man suppressed a shudder and hawked and spat to scare away the evil spit god that lurked in all men’s throats. He studied Gornt. Eeeee, he told himself, it must be vile to have to look at that pink face in every mirror—all that face hair like a monkey and a pallid white toad’s belly skin elsewhere! Ugh!

  He put a smile on his face to cover his embarrassment and tried to read Gornt’s face, what was beneath it, but he could not. Never mind, he told himself gleefully, that’s why all the time and money’s been spent to prepare Number Seven Son—he’ll know.

  “Maybe ask favor?” he said tentatively.

  The beams of the ship creaked pleasantly as she wallowed at her moorings.

  “Yes. What favor, old friend?”

  “Sister son—time go work—give job?” He saw astonishment on Gornt’s face and this annoyed him but he hid it. “’splain,” he said in English then added to Paul Choy in guttural Haklo, “Explain to this Eater of Turtle Shit what I want. Just as I told you.”

  “My uncle apologizes that he can’t speak directly to you so he’s asked me to explain, Mr. Gornt,” Paul Choy said politely. “He wants to ask if you’d give me a job—as a sort of trainee—in your airplane and shipping division.”

  Gornt sipped his whiskey. “Why those, Mr. Choy?”

  “My uncle has substantial shipping interests, as you know, and he wants me to modernize his operation. I can give you chapter and verse on my background, if you’d consider me, sir—my second year at Harvard was directed to those areas—my major interest was transportation of all types. I’d been accepted in the International Division of the Bank of Ohio before my uncle jer—pulled me back.” Paul Choy hesitated. “Anyway that’s what he asks.”

  “What dialects do you speak, other than Haklo?”

  “Mandarin.”

  “How many characters can you write?”

  “About four thousand.”

  “Can you take shorthand?”

  “Speedwriting only, sir. I can type about eighty words a minute but not clean.”

  “Wat?” Wu asked.

  Gornt watched Paul Choy as the young man translated what had been said for his uncle, weighing him—and Four Finger Wu. Then he said, “What sort of trainee do you want to be?”

  “He wants me to learn all there is to know about running shipping and airlines, the broking and freighting business also, the practical operation, and of course to be a profitable cog for you in your machine. Maybe my Yankee expertise, theoretical expertise, could help you somehow. I’m twenty-six. I’ve a master’s. I’m into all the new computer theory. Of course I can program one. At Harvard I backgrounded in conglomerates, cash flows.”

  “And if you don’t perform, or there’s, how would you put it, a personality conflict?”

  The young man said firmly, “There won’t be, Mr. Gornt—leastways I’ll work my can off to prevent that.”

  “Wat? What did he say? Exactly?” Four Fingers asked sharply in Haklo, noticing a change in inflection, his eyes and ears highly tuned.

  His son explained, exactly.

  “Good,” Wu said, his voice a rasp. “Tell him exactly, if you don’t do all your tasks to his satisfaction you’ll be cast out of the family and my wrath will waste your days.”

  Paul Choy hesitated, hiding his shock, all his American training screaming to tell his father to go screw, that he was a Harvard graduate, that he was an American and had an American passport that he’d earned, whatever goddamn sampan or goddamn family he came from. But he kept his eyes averted and his anger off his face.

  Don’t be ungrateful, he ordered himself. You’re not American, truly American. You’re Chinese, and the head of your family has the right to rule. But for him you could be running a floating cathouse here in Aberdeen.

  Paul Choy sighed. He knew that he was more fortunate than his eleven brothers. Four were junk captains here in Aberdeen, one lived in Bangkok and plied the Mekong River, one had a ferryboat in Singapore, another ran an import/export shipwright business in Indonesia, two had been lost at sea, one brother was in England—doing what he didn’t know—and the last, the eldest, ruled the dozen feeder sampans in Aberdeen Harbor that were floating kitchens—and also three pleasure boats and eight ladies of the night.

  After a pause Gornt asked, “What did he say? Exactly?”

  Paul Choy hesitated, then decided to tell him, exactly.

  “Thank you for being honest with me, Mr. Choy. That was wise. You’re a very impressive young man,” Gornt said. “I understand perfectly.” Now for the first time since Wu had asked the original question he turned his eyes to the old seaman and smiled. “Of course. Glad to give nephew job.”

  Wu beamed and Paul Choy tried to keep the relief off his face.

  “I won’t let you down, Mr. Gornt.”

  “Yes, I know you won’t.”

  Wu motioned at the bottle. “Whiskey?”

  “No thank you. This is fine,” Gornt said.

  “When start job?”

  Gornt looked at Paul Choy. “When would you like to start?”

  “Tomorrow? Whenever’s good for you, sir.”

  “Tomorrow. Wednesday.”

  “Gee, thanks. Eight o’clock?”

  “Nine, eight thereafter. A six-day week of course. You’ll have long hours and I’ll push you. It’ll be up to you how much you can learn and how fast I can increase your responsibilities.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Gornt.” Happily Paul Choy translated for his father. Wu sipped his whiskey without hurrying. “What money?” he asked.

  Gornt hesitated. He knew it had to be just the right sum, not too much, not too little, to give Paul Choy face and his uncle face. “1,000 HK a month for the first three months, then I’ll review.”

  The young man kept his gloom off his face. That was hardly 200 U.S. but he translated it into Haklo.

  “Maybe 2,000?” Wu said, hiding his pleasure. A thousand was the perfect figure but he was bargaining merely to give the foreign devil face and his son face.

  “If he’s to be trained, many valuable managers will have to take time away from their other duties,” Gornt said politely. “It’s expensive to train anyone.”

  “Much money Golden Mountain,” Wu said firmly. “Two?”

  “1,000 first month, 1,250 next two months?”

  Wu frowned and added, “Month three, 1,500?”

  “Very well. Months three and four at 1,500. And I’ll review his salary after four months. And Paul Choy guarantees to work for Rothwell-Gornt for at least two years.”

  “Wat?”

 
Paul Choy translated again. Shit, he was thinking, how’m I going to vacation in the States on 50 bucks a week, even 60. Shit! And where the hell’m I gonna live? On a goddamn sampan? Then he heard Gornt say something and his brain twisted.

  “Sir?”

  “I said because you’ve been so honest with me, we’ll give you free accommodation in one of our company houses—The Gables. That’s where we put all our managerial trainees who come out from England. If you’re going to be part of a foreign devil hong then you’d better mix with its future leaders.”

  “Yes sir!” Paul Choy could not stop the beam. “Yes sir, thank you sir.”

  Four Finger Wu asked something in Haklo.

  “He wants to know where’s the house, sir?”

  “It’s on the Peak. It’s really very nice, Mr. Choy. I’m sure you’ll be more than satisfied.”

  “You can bet your … yes sir.”

  “Tomorrow night be prepared to move in.”

  “Yes sir.”

  After Wu had understood what Gornt had said, he nodded his agreement. “All agree. Two year then see. Maybe more, heya?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Thank old frien’.” Then in Haklo, “Now ask him what you wanted to know … about the bank.”

  Gornt was getting up to go but Paul Choy said, “There’s something else my uncle wanted to ask you, sir, if you can spare the time.”

  “Of course.” Gornt settled back in his chair and Paul Choy noticed that the man seemed sharper now, more on guard.

  “My uncle’d like to ask your opinion about the run on the Aberdeen branch of the Ho-Pak Bank today.”

  Gornt stared back at him, his eyes steady. “What about it?”

  “There’re all sorts of rumors,” Paul Choy said. “My uncle’s got a lot of money there, so’ve most of his friends. A run on that bank’d be real bad news.”

  “I think it would be a good idea to get his money out,” Gornt said, delighted with the unexpected opportunity to feed the flames.