China Seas

by John Harris

  Paying the driver quickly, Willie hurried to the house. No one answered the door but it was unlocked and he pushed inside. A radio was playing somewhere and, as he entered the hall, it stopped abruptly and he heard a step on the stairs. Looking up, he saw Nadya at the top, staring down at him.

  ‘William! What are you doing here?’

  She was pale and looked ill and he could see she had been weeping. He moved up the stairs to her and she put out her hand at once, almost as though she had been waiting for him.

  ‘Nadya! There’s something wrong!’

  She look her head, but the movement was too vehement. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No. It’s all right.’

  ‘Are you in trouble? Is it money?’ Willie studied her narrowly. ‘Why have you been crying, Nadya?’

  ‘I haven’t been crying.’

  ‘Yes, you have. I’ve seen you before when you’ve been crying. Was it because of Zychov?’

  ‘How did you know about that?’

  ‘His cab passed mine. I recognised him at once. I’d recognise that twister anywhere. I’ve had his face stamped on my heart ever since he deserted me at Shantu. If he lived to be a hundred I’d still recognise him. What’s he want?’

  She sighed. ‘Money,’ she said.

  They moved downstairs and she led the way across the veranda to sit in the shade of one of the flame trees and stare over the harbour where they could see shipping moving like beetles across the water.

  ‘Have you given him money before?’ Willie asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Much?’

  ‘Not much. Enough.’

  ‘That was a mistake. That’s why he came back. Did you give him some today?’

  ‘I was just going to the bank to arrange for it.’

  ‘Don’t. When is he coming to collect?’

  ‘This afternoon.’

  ‘Leave this to me. Just telephone for a cab.’

  Returning to the Lady Roberts, Willie went to the big cabin and dug from his luggage the old revolver he always carried. It seemed to look bigger than ever. Stuffing it in his belt, he returned to the cab and directed the driver up the hill. Nadya was waiting quietly, sitting still, her hands on her lap. She managed a faint smile.

  ‘You were always very decisive, William,’ she said.

  ‘Let’s have a drink.’

  ‘Better still, let me provide you with a meal.’

  ‘I’d rather have a drink. I might get drunk enough to shoot our little friend when he turns up.’

  Two hours after the sun had passed its height, they heard a cab toiling up the hill. It stopped by the house and Willie saw Zychov climb out. The old panache was still there, he noticed, as he saw him pay the driver.

  Stepping out of sight behind the stairs as the doorbell rang, he gestured. ‘Let him in,’ he said.

  Zychov entered cheerfully, taking Nadya’s hand and kissing it with a flourish. Willie watched him through the curtains, his stomach twisting with hatred. Zychov was still handsome but he’d grown fatter as if he drank too much.

  ‘You have the money?’ Zychov asked.

  ‘No.’

  Zychov smiled, a wide curling smile, full of teeth but equally full of menace. ‘That’s very foolish,’ he said. ‘I could arrange for you to have quite a lot of trouble.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’ Nadya answered quietly, but her voice trembled as she spoke.

  Zychov’s smile came again. ‘There are people in Shanghai who I know would be more than willing to come down to Hong Kong. Your premises – both this house and your shop – are very vulnerable. Especially as you don’t have a man about the house.’

  ‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ Willie said. ‘She has.’

  Zychov whirled as Willie stepped out. Lifting the big revolver, he pointed it so that Zychov was looking directly down the muzzle.

  ‘Remember this?’ he asked. ‘Know where I got it? Just outside Shantu. From the body of your sergeant. He was murdered by the Boxers after you bolted.’ He gestured with the weapon. ‘So get out. Before I blow your bloody head off.’

  Zychov’s jaw had dropped, but he recovered rapidly. ‘You wouldn’t dare,’ he said. ‘I have friends in Shanghai.’

  ‘Not many, I think. And there are people in Shanghai I know – Communists – who would like to meet you. They’d like to know where you are. I have friends, too. Probably more than you these days. And they’re powerful. More powerful I suspect than yours ever were.’ Willie was bluffing because he had never toyed with the Shanghai underworld. He knew others had – and sometimes burned their fingers, too – but he had always avoided dealing with the secret societies or the gangs, or even dealing with the things they handled.

  Zychov’s smile had died. He was obviously uncertain about the threat and was assuming that, because he had contacts with the underworld himself, Willie had, too. The fact that he would be unable to find them – and Willie knew he’d try – would make him all the more uneasy. He was watching Willie closely, and the smile returned, uncertain at first but eventually with confidence.

  ‘Why have you returned?’ he asked. ‘I thought it was all finished between you and my wife.’

  ‘She isn’t your wife and it never finished. Now get out and don’t come back! If I hear of any more interference or demands for money I’ll deal with you so well you’ll wet yourself without fail every year on the anniversary.’

  Zychov shrugged and swung away. The movement put Willie off his guard. As Zychov passed him, Nadya screamed a warning and, turning, Willie found himself moving into Zychov’s swinging arm. Knocked off balance, as he staggered Zychov reached down, and picking up a bronze statuette from a low table alongside him, swung it at his head. The blow missed and struck his shoulder.

  Furious, as much at his own carelessness as at Zychov’s blow, Willie stepped back and, as Zychov blundered forward, aimed with his left hand at Zychov’s head. The blow caught him on the cheek bone and sent him staggering sideways into a standard lamp which went down with a crash. As he recovered, Willie lashed downwards with all his strength with the heavy revolver. It caught Zychov across the forearm.

  The heavy statuette spun out of his hand to crash against the wall and, as Zychov screamed in pain, Willie swung again. The barrel of the weapon opened a slit in Zychov’s cheek and, as he stumbled sideways, the gun crunched against his nose and he went backwards like a felled tree through the door and down the steps. Staggering to his feet, his nose crushed, the slit on his cheek pouring blood over his tropical suit, his right arm hanging as if it were broken, he turned away to the waiting taxi.

  Hardly able to speak with rage, Willie felt his arm grasped.

  ‘No,’ Nadya begged. ‘No!’

  As the taxi drew away, Willie stared after it, his chest heaving. ‘You shouldn’t have stopped me,’ he grated. ‘If he ever turns up again, I’ll kill him.’ He put his arm round her. ‘I’m going to arrange for someone to watch this house and if he ever comes near it again, I’ll have him beaten within an inch of his life.’

  ‘Can you do that, Willie?’ Nadya asked.

  Willie’s fury was subsiding and the trembling rage had died away. He took the whisky she offered and downed it in a couple of gulps.

  ‘No,’ he admitted. ‘I don’t have any connections with the secret societies. But I do know a policeman or two and I can get them to keep an eye on you. He won’t bother you again. You’ll be safe.’ He paused. ‘There’s another way of doing it, of course. You could marry me.’

  She stared at him, her eyes huge. ‘No, William,’ she whispered.

  ‘Why not? Don’t tell me he’s saying you’re still married to him.’

  ‘No. That’s all finished. I saw to that. I have the papers now.’

  Willie took her hands. ‘Nadya, why did you give him money?’

  ‘Because he was once my husband.’

  ‘That’s a reason?’

  ‘He was part of my life.’

  ‘So was I,’ he reminded he
r.

  ‘You still are, William.’

  Hope leapt in his heart. ‘Then why not marry me?’

  ‘Give me time.’

  ‘How much time do you need? We’re growing older every day. For God’s sake, Nadya, how long do you want?’

  She sighed. ‘I saw the look on the faces of your children when I appeared in Shanghai. I know what they thought of me.’

  ‘They didn’t think that, Nadya.’

  ‘Your daughter did. I couldn’t face it.’

  Willie watched her gloomily as she moved away. She was quite different in looks from Abigail, but there was the same decency, the same honesty about her. He’d met other men who had married more than once, one of them four times and every one of his wives had looked exactly like the one before her.

  ‘Like a set of barmaids,’ Da Braga had commented. ‘I don’t know why he bothers to change them.’

  But it seemed normal enough. If a man liked one type of woman it was not unreasonable that he should go on choosing that type. And there was a lot of Abigail about Nadya. They had slipped once – something which, he supposed, was his fault – but the inherent decency in her had led her to end it all when she had met Abigail, and had seen the disaster she could bring on her.

  He pressed his case. ‘My daughter’s based in Singapore now,’ he pointed out. ‘My elder son’s in England. There’s only one member of the family apart from me still in Shanghai. Married to me, you’d be safe.’

  She touched his cheek with her fingertips, gently, affectionately, but there was no budging her.

  ‘Perhaps if I were married to you,’ she said, ‘you would be in danger. You’d have an unforgiving man for an enemy.’

  Willie snorted his contempt. ‘I’ve never been short of enemies,’ he said. ‘And you know what they say: Why bother with enemies when you have friends? I’ve hundreds of them in Shanghai who’d happily see me dead if they thought they could get their hands on my business.’

  Seven

  As he had promised, Willie called on the Hong Kong police and persuaded them to keep an eye on Nadya’s home and business premises. Back in Shanghai, he also made a point of checking what had happened to Zychov.

  His guess that the Communists were looking for him had been right. He had returned to Shanghai and was at Chiang’s headquarters enjoying the protection of the man who was now the acknowledged leader of the Kuomintang and grateful for what Zychov had done in Shanghai, because he was still, as everyone knew, set on his extirpation of the Communists.

  Zychov remained a threat, inevitably, but even while he was a threat, he was a threat which was well under control. And in any case Emmeline, using Mason and Marchant’s as if they were a bludgeon, remained an equal threat as she undercut with her prices all that Da Braga-Kee’s could offer. Though Da Braga and Kee ran the firm, inevitably Willie was touched by the warfare.

  It didn’t seem possible that anyone could harbour an enmity as long as Emmeline had, unaffected, undiminished even, by the fact that Willie and his family, and in particular, Abigail, had rushed to her assistance in Yangpo. The bitterness he felt that she had been the cause of Abigail’s death had never left Willie, but while Emmeline, like Zychov, remained a threat, also like Zychov at that moment she was not a dangerous threat. Da Braga-Kee’s were sound and Mason and Marchant’s weren’t strong enough to do them much damage. Minor vendettas such as Emmeline was conducting had been around for a long time, as they always were in business, but for the most part businessmen didn’t waste money on such things, and he had a feeling that eventually she’d grow tired of it and back away.

  The Sarth Line’s business picked up again as Willie concentrated on the China Seas and the Western Pacific. There were twelve ships now, the Lady Roberts still among them, ancient, ugly, but somehow still plodding her way resourcefully across the ocean. Willie’s cargoes went regularly to Mindanao, Batavia, Japan, the Aleutians, and as far south as Port Moresby, Sydney and Auckland. Whenever he could manage it, he was with them, enjoying the poinsettia, palms and flame trees of Haiphong, the hot shimmering islands outside Keppel Harbour in Singapore, even San Francisco, dominated by the dark crown of Nob Hill with its little strings of beaded lights; once as far south and west as Cape Town and Table Mountain with its snow-white cloth. But with Da Braga-Kee’s his foothold in China, and offices in Hong Kong and Singapore to look after his interests in the China Seas, he was never far away.

  His ships had never attracted a lot of attention because they were none of them new, and sometimes he suspected that only string and the prayers of the ships’ engineers kept them going. But there was a limit even to the ingenuity of Scottish-born chief engineers, and not long after his trip to Hong Kong he learned that the Dunnose Grange, almost as old as the Lady Roberts, had come to a stop because a shaft bearing for the ancient engine had finally given up the ghost and she had arrived in Hong Kong at dead slow speed with a hose pipe playing on the faulty part.

  Either because he employed good engineers or because he had had a great deal of luck, his ships had been remarkably resilient, but now it seemed as if they had seen the last of the Dunnose Grange. Though they tried Singapore and Shanghai for a spare, there didn’t appear to be one that would fit the ship’s old engine in the whole of the Far East and she was now immobilised and, instead of earning money, was costing it in wages and harbour dues.

  ‘We’ll sell her,’ Willie suggested.

  Da Braga laughed. ‘Who to? Who’s going to buy her?’

  The comment set Willie thinking. The Dunnose Grange had value as scrap, but she had more as a working ship that could earn a profit. Checking her papers, he found she had been built at South Shields in 1902, one of a small flotilla, all with similar names. Rufford Grange, Wimley Grange, Ladywell Grange and Ortton Grange.

  ‘The man who built ’em must have had an itch to be part of the landed gentry,’ he observed.

  Having discovered the Dunnose Grange’s sister ships, he set out to find if any of them were still on the move and it was George Kee who learned that the Ladywell Grange was in Sydney harbour, having long since sailed her last voyage. She had carried copra and Aussie tin and rice from Rangoon, but her engine had finally given up the ghost and she was now used simply as a depository for the city’s rubbish. When she was full she was to get towed out to sea and scuttled.

  ‘There might be a spare part on her,’ Willie said. ‘Normally they have the spare shaft bearing bolted to the bulkhead in the engine room. If there is one, all we need is a block and tackle to hoist it out.’

  A telegram to Sydney enabled them to find the present owners of the Ladywell Grange. They turned out to be the city council and a second telegram requesting to know if there was a spare shaft bearing aboard her brought the answer ‘Yes. The last in the world of its type.’

  ‘I’m going down there,’ Willie announced.

  As usual, he was caught by the blunt straightforwardness of the Australians. They were a people devoid of sham, even sometimes of politeness, but they knew where they were going. For a small sum, he was given permission to remove the shaft bearing for use on the Dunnose Grange.

  Hiring a launch and a marine engineer called MacFee, he headed away from the shipyard to where the Ladywell Grange was anchored near the ferry to Kirribilli and Cremorne. The stern of the launch was full of wire strops, ropes, a Weston purchase and, for MacFee and his assistant, a crate of beer.

  The old ship towered above them as they went alongside, her stern dark and high, her smoke stack like a great cigarette, a single rusty propeller half out of the water.

  ‘Ladywell Grange,’ MacFee said. ‘Registered in South Shields. She’s been here ever since Pontius was a river pilot.’

  There were two men on board keeping up enough steam to work the winches which hauled the city’s rubbish aboard and dumped it into the holds, and they helped make the launch fast so that Willie and MacFee and his assistants could climb aboard. A rope went down for the crate of beer and the blocks,
tackles and wire strops. MacFee had brought two or three car batteries and in no time he had strung up a cluster of lights to work by, then they got the engine room hatch off and rigged up the purchase. It didn’t take as long as they expected and after a while the chain of the purchase was hanging taut and vertical and they began to hoist the bearing to the deck. MacFee’s face was damp with sweat and streaked with dirt and eventually, with the sort of swearing that would have turned milk sour, the result of fooling about with two and a half hundredweight of dead metal, they had the bearing in the launch. Putting the hatch back, they climbed down to the launch with all their equipment to finish off the beer, pleased to be out of the Ladywell Grange because she was full of feverish-eyed rats. They had seemed to be in every corner, living on the rubbish and the scraps of copra and breeding like mad.

  They dumped the spare part in the back of a lorry and deposited it in a shed in MacFee’s yard, then retired to the nearest bar to celebrate. In his hotel room that night, Willie was reading the paper when he came across an item which made him sit bolt upright.

  Two Americans were about to fly to Shanghai with medical equipment needed by the Kuomintang army. The thought of the Dunnose Grange lying at Hong Kong collecting weeds and debts brought him to his feet and heading for the telephone. Ten minutes later, he was heading in a taxi for the airfield.

  The Americans, brash youngsters in plus fours, bow ties and boaters, were the sort of men who had been opening up the airways of the world for some time now. Their names were Biggit and Simpson and they had an old Ford Tri-Motor which they had bought originally without engines or instruments, all of which they had fitted themselves.

  ‘Sure,’ Biggit said. ‘We’ll carry your spare part. We fly from here to Brisbane; Brisbane to Darwin; Darwin to Soerabaya; Soerabaya to Singapore; Singapore to Hong Kong; Hong Kong to Shanghai. Those are refuelling stops. Easy stages all the way. No trouble at all. We know this ship like we know our own hands. We built everything except the shell and before we got her she was part of an expedition to Alaska that folded. You want to come as well? We could take two passengers. Helps to pay for the trip–’