Noble House

by James Clavell

  Another flood of guttural Cantonese and an insolent wave toward a small door. The old man hawked and spat and went back to his paper with a yawn.

  “Sodding bastard,” Grey muttered, his temperature soaring. He opened the door. Inside was a tiny, grimy foyer with peeling paint, a sorry row of mailboxes with names on the boxes. With great relief he saw the name he sought.

  At the cab he took out his wallet and carefully looked at the amount on the meter twice before he paid the man.

  The elevator was tiny, claustrophobic, filthy and it squeaked as it rose. At the fourth floor he got off and pressed the button of number 44. The door opened.

  “Mr. Grey, sir, this’s an honor! Molly, his nibs’s arrived!” Sam Finn beamed at him. He was a big beefy Yorkshireman, florid, with pale blue eyes, an ex-coal miner and shop steward with important friends in the Labour Party and Trades Union Council. His face was deeply lined and pitted, the pores ingrained with specks of coal dust. “By gum, ’tis a pleasure!”

  “Thank you, Mr. Finn. I’m glad to meet you too. I’ve heard a lot about you.” Grey took off his raincoat and gratefully accepted a beer.

  “Sit thee down.”

  The apartment was small, spotlessly clean, the furniture inexpensive. It smelt of fried sausages and fried potatoes and fried bread. Molly Finn came out of the kitchen, her hands and arms red from years of scrubbing and washing up. She was short and rotund, from the same mining town as her husband, the same age, sixty-five, and just as strong. “By Harry,” she said warmly, “thee could’ve knocked us’n down with feather when we heard thee’d be a-visiting us’n.”

  “Our mutual friends wanted to hear firsthand how you were doing.”

  “Grand. We’re doing grand,” Finn said. “’Course it’s not like home in Yorkshire and we miss our friends and the Union Hall but we’ve a bed and a bit of board.” There was the sound of a toilet flushing. “We’ve a friend we thought thee’d like to meet,” Finn said and smiled again.

  “Oh?”

  “Aye,” Finn said.

  The toilet door opened. The big bearded man stuck out his hand warmly. “Sam’s told me a lot about you, Mr. Grey. I’m Captain Gregor Suslev of the Soviet Marine. My ship’s the Ivanov—we’re having a small refit in this capitalist haven.”

  Grey shook his hand formally. “Pleased to meet you.”

  “We have some mutual friends, Mr. Grey.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, Zdenek Hanzolova of Prague.”

  “Oh! Oh yes!” Grey smiled. “I met him on a Parliamentary Trade Delegation to Czechoslovakia last year.”

  “How did you like Prague?”

  “Very interesting. Very. I didn’t like the repression though … or the Soviet presence.”

  Suslev laughed. “We’re invited there, by them. We like to look after our friends. But much goes on I don’t approve of either. There, in Europe. Even in Mother Russia.”

  Sam Finn said, “Sit thee down, please sit thee down.”

  They sat around the dining room table in the living room that now had a neat white tablecloth with a potted aspidistra on it.

  “Of course, you know I’m not a Communist, and never have been one,” Grey said. “I don’t approve of a police state. I’m totally convinced our British democratic socialism’s the way of the future—Parliament, elected officials and all that it stands for—though a lot of Marxist-Leninist ideas are very worthwhile.”

  “Politics!” Gregor Suslev said deprecatingly. “We should leave politics to politics.”

  “Mr. Grey’s one of our best spokesmen in Parliament, Gregor.” Molly Finn turned to Grey. “Gregor’s a good lad too, Mr. Grey. He’s not one of them nasties.” She sipped her tea. “Gregor’s a good lad.”

  “That’s right, lass,” Finn said.

  “Not too good, I hope,” Grey said and they all laughed. “What made you take up residence here, Sam?”

  “When we retired, Mrs. Finn and me, we wanted to see a bit of the world. We’d put a bit of brass aside and we cashed in a wee coop insurance policy we had, and got a berth on a freighter …”

  “Oh, my, we did have a good time,” Molly Finn broke in. “We went to so many foreign parts. It were proper lovely. But when we cum here Sam was a bit poorly, so we got off and were to pick up a freighter when she cum back.”

  “That’s right, lass,” Sam said. “Then I met a right proper nice man and he offered me a job.” He beamed and rubbed the black pits in his face. “I was to be consultant to some mines he was superintendent for, in some place called Formosa. We went there once but no need to stay so we cum back here. That’s all there is to it, Mr. Grey. We make a little brass, the beer’s good, so Mrs. Finn and me we thought we’d stay. The kids are all growed up….” He beamed again, showing his obviously false teeth. “We’re Hong Kongers now.”

  They chatted pleasantly. Grey would have been totally convinced by the Finns’ cover story if he had not read his very private dossier before he left London. It was known only to very few that for years Finn had been a card-carrying member of the BCP, the British Communist Party. On his retirement he had been sent out to Hong Kong by one of their secret inner committees, his mission to be a fountain of information about anything to do with the Hong Kong bureaucracy and legislature.

  In a few minutes Molly Finn stifled a yawn. “My my, I’m that tired! If thee will excuse me I think I’ll go to bed.”

  Sam said, “Off thee go, lass.”

  They talked a little more about inconsequential affairs then he too yawned. “If thee’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go too,” adding hastily, “Now don’t thee move, chat to thy heart’s content. We’ll see thee before thee leaves Hong Kong, Mr. Grey … Gregor.”

  He shook hands with them and closed the bedroom door behind him. Suslev went over to the television and turned it on with a laugh. “Have you seen Hong Kong TV? The commercials are very funny.”

  He adjusted the sound high enough so they could talk yet not be overheard. “One can’t be too careful, eh?”

  “I bring you fraternal greetings from London,” Grey said, his voice as soft. Since 1947 he had been an inner-core Communist, even more secretly than Finn, his identity only known to half a dozen people in England.

  “And I send them back.” Suslev jerked his thumb at the closed door. “How much do they know?”

  “Only that I’m left-wing and potential Party material.”

  “Excellent.” Suslev relaxed. Center had been very clever to arrange this private meeting so neatly. Roger Crosse, who knew nothing of his connection with Grey, had already told him there were no SI tails on the MPs. “We’re quite safe here. Sam’s very good. We get copies of his reports too. And he asks no questions. You British are very close-mouthed and very efficient, Mr. Grey. I congratulate you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “How was your meeting in Peking?”

  Grey took out a sheaf of papers. “This’s a copy of our private and public reports to Parliament. Read it before I go—you’ll get the full report through channels. Briefly, I think the Chinese are totally hostile and revisionist. Madman Mao and his henchman Chou En-lai are implacable enemies to international communism. China is weak in everything except the will to fight, and they will fight to protect their land to the last. The longer you wait the harder it will be to contain them, but so long as they don’t get nuclear weapons and long-range delivery systems they’ll never be a threat.”

  “Yes. What about trade? What did they want?”

  “Heavy industries, oil cracking plants, oil rigs, chemical plants, steel mills.”

  “How are they going to pay?”

  “They said they’ve plenty of foreign exchange. Hong Kong supplies much of it.”

  “Did they ask for arms?”

  “No. Not directly. They’re clever and we didn’t always talk or meet as a group. They were well briefed about me and Broadhurst and we weren’t liked—or trusted. Perhaps they talked privately to Pennyworth or one of the other
Tories—though that won’t’ve helped them. You heard he died?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good riddance. He was an enemy.” Grey sipped his beer. “The PRC want arms, of that I’m sure. They’re a secretive lot and rotten.”

  “What’s Julian Broadhurst like?”

  “An intellectual who thinks he’s a Socialist. He’s the dregs but useful at the moment. Patrician, old school tie,” Grey said with a sneer. “Because of that he’ll be a power in the next Labour government.”

  “Labour will get in next time, Mr. Grey?”

  “No, I don’t think so, even though we’re working very hard to help Labour and the Liberals.”

  Suslev frowned. “Why support Liberals? They’re capitalists.”

  Grey laughed sardonically. “You don’t understand our British system, Captain Suslev. We’re very lucky, we’ve a three-party vote with a two-party system. The Liberals split the vote in our favor. We have to encourage them.” Happily he finished his beer and got two more from the refrigerator. “If it wasn’t for the Liberals, Labour would have never got in, not never! And never will again.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “At the best of times the vote for Labour’s only about 45 percent of the population, a little under 45 percent. Tory—Conservatives—are about the same, usually a little more. Most of the other 10-odd percent vote Liberal. If there was no Liberal candidate the majority’d vote with the Conservatives. They’re all fools,” he said smugly. “The British are stupid, comrade, the Liberal Party’s Labour’s permanent passport to power—therefore ours. Soon the BCP’ll control the TUC, and so Labour completely—secretly of course.” He drank deeply. “The great British unwashed are stupid, the middle class stupid, the upper class stupid—it’s almost no challenge anymore. They’re all lemmings. Only a very few believe in democratic socialism. Even so,” he added with great satisfaction, “we pulled down their rotten Empire and pissed all over them with Operation Lion.” Operation Lion was formulated as soon as the Bolsheviks had come to power. Its purpose, the destruction of the British Empire. “In just eighteen years, since 1945, the greatest empire the world has ever seen’s become nonexistent.”

  “Except for Hong Kong.”

  “Soon that will go too.”

  “I cannot tell you how important my superiors consider your work,” Suslev said with pretended open admiration. “You and all our fraternal British brothers.” His orders were to be deferential to this man, to debrief him on his Chinese mission, to pass on instructions as requests. And to flatter him. He had read Grey’s dossier and the Finns’. Robin Grey had a Beria-KGB classification 4/22/a: “An important British traitor paying lip service to Marxist-Leninist ideals. He is to be used but never trusted, and, should the British Communist Party ever reach power, is subject to immediate liquidation.”

  Suslev watched Grey. Neither Grey nor the Finns knew his real position, only that he was a minor member of the Vladivostok Communist Party—which was also on his SI dossier.

  “You have some information for me?” Grey asked.

  “Yes, tovarich, and also, with your permission, a few questions. I was told to ask about your implementation of Directive 72/Prague.” This highly secret directive put top priority on infiltrating covert, hard-core experts into positions as shop stewards, in every car-manufacturing plant throughout the U.S. and the West—the motor industry, because of its countless allied industries, being the core of any capitalist society.

  “We’re full speed ahead,” Grey told him enthusiastically. “Wildcat strikes are the way of the future. With wildcats we can get around union hierarchies without disrupting existing unionism. Our unions’re fragmented. Deliberately. Fifty men can be a separate union and that union can dominate thousands—and so long as there’s never a secret ballot, the few will always rule the many!” He laughed. “We’re ahead of schedule, and now we’ve fraternal brothers in Canada, New Zealand, Rhodesia, Australia—particularly Australia. Within a few years we’ll have trained agitators in every key machine-shop union in the English-speaking world. A Brit will lead the workers wherever there’s a strike—Sydney, Vancouver, Johannesburg, Wellington. It’ll be a Brit!”

  “And you’re one of the leaders, tovarich! How marvelous!” Suslev let him continue, leading him on, disgusted that it was so easy to flatter him. How dreadful traitors are, he told himself. “Soon you’ll have the democratic paradise you seek and there’ll be peace on earth.”

  “It won’t be long,” Grey said fervently. “We’ve cut the armed services and we’ll cut them even more next year. War’s over forever. The bomb’s done that. It’s only the rotten Americans and their arms race who stand in the way but soon we’ll force even them to lay down their arms and we’ll all be equal.”

  “Did you know America’s secretly arming the Japanese?”

  “Eh?” Grey stared at him.

  “Oh, didn’t you know?” Suslev was well aware of Grey’s three and a half years in Japanese POW camps. “Didn’t you know the U.S. has a military mission there right now asking them if they’d accept nuclear weapons?”

  “They’d never dare.”

  “But they have, Mr. Grey,” Suslev said, the lie coming so easily. “Of course it’s all totally secret.”

  “Can you give me details I could use in Parliament?”

  “Well, I’ll certainly ask my superiors to furnish that to you if you think it’d be of value.”

  “Please, as soon as possible. Nuclear bombs … Christ!”

  “Are your people, your trained experts, in British nuclear plants too?”

  “Eh?” Grey concentrated with an effort, heaving his mind off Japan. “Nuclear plants?”

  “Yes. Are you getting your Brits?”

  “Well, no, there’s only one or two plants in the U.K. and they’re unimportant. The Yanks’re really arming the Japs?”

  “Isn’t Japan capitalist? Isn’t Japan a U.S. protégé? Aren’t they building nuclear plants too? If it wasn’t for America …”

  “Those American sods! Thank God you’ve the bombs too or we’d all have to kowtow!”

  “Perhaps you should concentrate some effort on your nuclear plants, eh?” Suslev said smoothly, astounded that Grey could be so gullible.

  “Why?”

  “There’s a new study out, by one of your countrymen. Philby.”

  “Philby?” Grey remembered how shocked and frightened he had been at Philby’s discovery and flight, then how relieved he was that Philby and the others had escaped without giving lists of the inner core of the BCP that they must have had. “How is he?”

  “I understand he’s very well. He’s working in Moscow. Did you know him?”

  “No. He was Foreign Office, stratosphere. None of us knew he was one of us.”

  “He points out in this study that a nuclear plant is self-sustaining, that one plant can generate fuel for itself and for others. Once a nuclear plant is operating, in effect it is almost perpetual, it requires only a few highly skilled, highly educated technicians to operate it, no workers, unlike oil or coal. At the moment all industry in the West’s dependent on coal or oil. He suggests it should be our policy to encourage use of oil, not coal, and completely discourage nuclear power. Eh?”

  “Ah, I see his point!” Grey’s face hardened. “I shall get myself on the parliamentary committee to study atomic energy.”

  “Will that be easy?”

  “Too easy, comrade! Brits are lazy, they want no problems, they just want to work as little as possible for as much money as possible, to go to the pub and football on Saturdays—and no unpaid work, no tedious committees after hours, no arguments. It’s too easy—when we have a plan and they don’t.”

  Suslev sighed, very satisfied, his work almost done. “Another beer? No, let me get it, it’s my honor, Mr. Grey. Do you happen to know a writer who’s here at the moment, a U.S. citizen, Peter Marlowe?”

  Grey’s head snapped up. “Marlowe? I know him very well, didn’t know he w
as a U.S. citizen though. Why?”

  Suslev kept his interest hidden and shrugged. “I was just asked to ask you, since you are English and he originally was English.”

  “He’s a rotten upper-class sod with the morals of a barrow boy. Hadn’t seen him for years, not since ’45, until he turned up here. He was in Changi too. I didn’t know he was a writer until yesterday, or one of those film people. What’s important about him?”

  “He’s a writer,” Suslev said at once. “He makes films. With television, writers can reach millions. Center keeps track of Western writers as a matter of policy. Oh yes, we know about writers in Mother Russia, how important they are. Our writers have always pointed the way for us, Mr. Grey, they’ve formed our thinking and feeling, Tolstoy, Dostoevski, Chekhov, Bunin …” He added with pride, “Writers with us are pathfinders. That’s why nowadays we must guide them in their formation and control their work or bury it.” He looked at Grey. “You should do the same.”

  “We support friendly writers, Captain, and damn the other shower whichever way we can, publicly and privately. When I get home, I’ll put Marlowe on our formal BCP media shit list. It’ll be easy to do him some harm—we’ve lots of friends in our media.”

  Suslev lit a cigarette. “Have you read his book?”

  “The one about Changi? No, no I haven’t. I’d never heard of it until I got here. It probably wasn’t published in England. Besides, I don’t have much time to read fiction and if he did it, it’s got to be upper-class shit and a penny-dreadful and … well Changi’s Changi and best forgotten.” A shudder went through him that he did not notice. “Yes, best forgotten.”

  But I can’t, he wanted to shout. I can’t forget and it’s still a never-ending nightmare, those days of the camp, year after year, the tens of thousands dying, trying to enforce the law, trying to protect the weak against black market filth feeding off the weak, everyone starving and no hope of ever getting out, my body rotting away and only twenty-one with no women and no laughter and no food and no drink, twenty-one when I was caught in Singapore in 1942 and twenty-four, almost twenty-five when the miracle happened and I survived and got back to England—home gone, parents gone, world gone and my only sister sold out to the enemy, now talking like the enemy, eating like them, living like them, married to one, ashamed of our past, wanting the past dead, me dead, nobody caring and oh Christ, the change. Coming back to life after the no-life of Changi, all the nightmares and the no sleeping in the night, terrified of life, unable to talk about it, weeping and not knowing why I was weeping, trying to adjust to what fools called normal. Adjusting at length. But at what cost, oh dear sweet Jesus at what a cost…