The Clown Prince of Kowloon

by James Dudley

  Increasingly flummoxed, Tommy dug through the briefcase until he found the one he wanted. “How about one of the biggest hits of 1955? Thirty-Love is a quirky romantic comedy about a golf pro and a tennis pro who have to share a new country club, starring Doris Day and yours truly.”

  Chao shook his head. “I’ve seen it. It’s not your best work.”

  Tommy looked back down into the briefcase, feeling increasingly defeated as Chao began to laugh at him. It was a deep laugh, coming from the depths of his belly.

  “You English are all the same. You think that because you’re our colonial masters you can push whatever inferior product you want on us. First it was opium, now it’s these films.”

  “I’m not even English,” said Tommy. “I’m American and my family came from Ireland.”

  Chao’s expression grew more serious, and his hand cut the air in front of him like a knife. “Well listen here my mick-yankee friend. If you want to do business with me you’re going to have to do better than this. Did you see those two gentlemen who were in here before you? They offered me brand new weapons, recently stolen from the British military. Can you offer me anything better than that?”

  Tommy hesitated, unable to find the right words.

  “I didn’t think so. But here, let me give you a parting gift. If you want to get into the film smuggling business, then you should see what I am currently selling.”

  He dropped a film reel labeled “Hong Kong Harry” in Tommy’s brief case. Tommy held it up, not believing his eyes. “How is this possible? Where did you get this? We haven’t even finished filming it yet!”

  “One cannot do what I do without believing in the impossible,” Chao said. “Now good day to you, Mr. Malloy.”

  Feeling deflated, Tommy gathered his things and walked back outside, having just one more step to complete. He retraced his steps back out on the roads and returned to the green space of Kowloon Park. Once there, he followed a walking path to a topiary garden, where he took a seat on a park bench beside a lamppost. In accordance with his instructions, he retrieved a notepad from his briefcase and jotted down a succinct report.

  “Subject was uncooperative, goods were a no-go. Also very condescending and arrogant. The food was really good though. I had the cha siu bao and it was delicious. Overall 3/10, would not employ.”

  He ripped the page from the notepad, folding it up into a small square, which he placed inside a small magnetic container. He looked around to make sure nobody was watching, and then stuck the container underneath the bench. Despite the night’s disappointing results, he still felt an intoxicating rush of adrenaline as he walked back towards the ferry. Three years after Paris, he was once again a player in the world’s most dangerous game.

  Chapter 6

  It was a long and trying day of filming back on the set. By the time the adrenaline rush from Tommy’s covert operation finally wore off, it was almost time for him to wake up and get back to work. Copious amounts of coffee sustained him for the first few hours of the shoot until the crash finally starting to catch up to him. Perhaps fortunately for him, Tony and Lars had both shown up with strong enough hangovers that Tommy was not the worst prepared of the cast. Fortunately for all of them, Louis Poutine was very familiar with all of their antics, and had the patience of a saint while dealing with it.

  For this portion of the film, they had been granted permission to shoot in a historic temple that was posing as the headquarters of the pirate queen Ching Shih. Donna Chang had slipped seamlessly into character, commanding a regal presence as she prepared to dispense her own brand of justice.

  At this point in the story, Harry and Benjamin have assumed command of Joao Da Silva’s pirate ship, pretending to know what they are doing as they lead their new crew in their missions. After slowly getting the hang of becoming pirates, they doubled down and expanded their holdings, picking off whatever loot they could from smaller ships. This brought them to Ching’s attention, and her far superior fleet captured our heroes and brought them in for questioning. In the current scene, they were brought in for an audience, and she had to decide whether to deal out a punishment or welcome them into her pirate fleet. Digging within themselves to their deepest reserves, they attempted to save their lives through the power of a choreographed song and dance number.

  Musical numbers, especially ones with this level of coordination, were the most difficult parts of any movie to film, and by the end of the day, the cast and crew were exhausted. After a hard day’s work, Louis gathered the principal cast members around him to give a short talk recapping where they were and what they had let to do. “And one more thing,” he added at the end, “I have been invited to a reception at Government House tonight, and they have requested that I bring at least one cast member with me. Do you any of you want to volunteer?”

  “I need to work on some things for tomorrow’s shoot, so I’d better not,” said Donna.

  “I’m feeling sick,” said Lars.

  “So am I,” Tony said as he forced himself to cough. “Very sick.”

  Tommy glared daggers at Tony as he realized that he was the odd man out.

  “Well that settles it,” said Louis. “Tommy, you’re going to be the belle of the ball.”

  *****

  When the time came to leave for the reception, Tommy walked down to the lobby of the hotel, where Louis was sitting and waiting for him. Louis was wearing a classic black tuxedo, while Tommy had opted for one with a white jacket. The car hired by the hotel was already waiting for them outside, and they were quickly on their way.

  “Thanks for coming, I’ll remember this next time something like this comes up,” Louis said as they sat in the back of the car.

  Tommy shrugged. “I’ll never turn down a free meal.”

  Throughout Hong Kong’s years as a British colony, Government House was the building from which it was all ran. It served as the Governor’s official residence, as well as the site of the most prestigious receptions and charity fundraisers. For those who cared about such things, of which Tommy most assuredly was not, an invite to Government House was a sign that you had truly made it in Hong Kong society and successfully climbed the social ladder of an expat community that was large at first glance, but small enough that everybody who mattered more or less knew each other.

  When they arrived outside Government House, the car pulled up along the roundabout and stopped to let Tommy and Louis out in front of the white stone façade. They stepped inside to the foyer, and were immediately greeted by a youngish looking Foreign Office type who introduced himself as Phillip.

  “Mr. Poutine and Mr. Malloy, I am honored that you could be with us tonight,” Phillip said as he checked their names off a list. “Now, would you please follow me to the main event?”

  Phillip’s head was on a constant swivel, and a nervous sweat covered his face. Tommy could only imagine the amount of precise moving parts that were falling on Phillip’s shoulders, and the number of people he had to please. He certainly did not envy the man. Following Phillip’s lead, they stepped into the grand ballroom, a room that truly lived up to its name. Neo-classical style columns lined all four walls, and six glass chandeliers hung from the ceiling. The fanciest Oriental rug covered the floor, matching the fine silk curtains draped over the windows, and a string quartet was playing in the corner. It was a breathtaking sight for Tommy, and certainly not the type of place that a working class kid from Philadelphia would typically be invited to.

  As they began to filter through the tightly-packed, mingling crowd, Phillip paused to introduce Tommy to a middle-aged man wearing a well-kept military dress uniform with an impressive array of medals displayed on his chest. “This gentleman here is General Tso, one of our allies from across the strait in Taiwan.”

  Tommy reached out and shook his hand. “It’s nice to meet you, General Tso. I’m Colonel Sanders.”

  The General studied Tommy carefully while Phillip hid his face in embarrassment. “You are a Colonel in t
he U.S. military? You look very young for a Colonel. That is most impressive.”

  Tommy bit his lip, instantly regretting his attempt at humor and feeling just as embarrassed as Phillip. “Well, you see, I’m not actually a Colonel. Well I was a paratrooper in the army, but I was only a Private. But I was really just trying to make a joke there, I mean there’s this company in America called KFC, it stands for Kentucky Fried Chicken…”

  Tommy looked around only to see that Phillip, General Tso, and Louis had all been pulled into a neighboring conversation circle. His uncomfortable predicament seemingly over, he shrugged and walked over to the food table. He couldn’t recognize or pronounce any of the hors devours on display, but he was anxious to taste them all nonetheless.

  “I got the joke. I for one thought it was pretty funny,” a female voice announced from behind him when he reached the table.

  Tommy turned around to see a very elegant woman who, like him, seemed to be around her early to mid-thirties. She was wearing a pink dress with a frilly skirt, lace sleeves, and a silk bow tied around the waist, and her long auburn hair was pulled back in a bun. Her posture was near-perfect, and she had a warm smile that saved her from appearing pretentious. If Hong Kong Harry needed to cast an actress to play the archetypal role of a British colonial administrator’s daughter in a faraway land, she would have fit the casting call perfectly.

  “Well I’m glad somebody here has a sense of humor, Miss…”

  She reached out her hand. “Covington, Millie Covington.”

  “Nice to meet you, Millie. I’m Tommy Malloy,” he said as shook her hand.

  She smiled demurely. “Yes, I know who you are, Mr. Malloy. Most people do.”

  Tommy looked down in embarrassment once more. “Oh yes, right, of course.” He was never completely comfortable with being a celebrity, and he probably never would be. He perked up again when he recognized the background music. “Ah, that’s Stravinsky’s Three Pieces for String Quartet. One of my favorites.”

  Millie raised an eyebrow. “Oh, so you’re a classical music aficionado in addition to your other talents? You truly are a renaissance man, Mr. Malloy.”

  “Well, it’s not so much me, but Natalie, my fiancée. She’s a classical pianist, plays with the Los Angeles Pops sometimes. She’s really good,” Tommy said, hoping to kill two birds at once by appearing humble and nipping any possible romantic tensions in the bud.

  “Yes, I know who she is, too.”

  Now Tommy was excited. “Oh, really? You’ve heard her play?”

  Millie looked around to make sure nobody else was within earshot, and then spoke in a hushed tone, “I actually know her from her previous career. Not socially, of course, but professionally. We were colleagues of sort, or shall I say competitors.”

  Tommy took a deep breath as he processed the implications of that statement. There were few people that knew that Natalie Peterson was once Natalia Sergeevna Petrova, an officer of the KGB. If Millie was one of them, then she had to be MI6, and fairly high up at that.

  “Come, we need to have a talk,” she said as she took his arm and led him through the corridor to a more secluded study. “How have you enjoyed Hong Kong so far?”

  “No complaints, other than the humidity,” Tommy said. “Good food, good people, good scenery, and the film shoot is going really well.”

  “But I gather your other mission isn’t though?”

  Tommy tried to avoid eye contact. “I…I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  She giggled. “Oh, you yanks are adorable; so earnest, yet so naïve. Your elder cousins have been at this game a lot longer than you have. I know full well that the CIA tasked you to evaluate a list of smugglers with an enticement of bootleg films.”

  Tommy knew there was no point in denying it, but he still had one more card to play. “Oh really, but did you know that a German arms dealer is currently shopping stolen British weapons to those same smugglers?”

  Millie’s eyes opened up in surprise. “Touché, Malloy. I guess were all evened up then.”

  “But really though, how did you know about my mission?”

  “You were a little too obvious with your dead drop. One of our agents observed you placing the container, so we grabbed it before somebody else did. Don’t worry; the higher-ups on both sides of the pond have already discussed the issue, and we believe that Her Majesty’s government would also benefit from your operation. We would like you to continue with it and are happy to provide any support you may require. And that part you discovered about the weapons helps us a great deal in ways you wouldn’t realize. Also, Sir Alastair sends regards.”

  The last sentence brought a smile back to Tommy’s face after the initial disappointing bit about his seemingly deficient tradecraft. During his ordeal of being chased across Paris, Tommy finally felt safe when he came under the protection of the legendary British spymaster, Sir Alastair Thorncliffe. If Sir Alastair trusted Millie, then that was more than enough for Tommy.

  Tommy and Millie proceeded to talk shop for the next hour or so until the conversation eventually turned back to the personal.

  “So…you and Natalia, I’m sorry, Natalie; I’d really like to hear how that happened. She always struck me as very cold and not very open,” Millie said.

  “I can see why you would think that, and that was my first impression of her as well. Well the second impression if you will, the first was that she was ridiculously good looking. But anyway, I guess she did resemble a real-life Hitchcock blonde in many ways. But the thing with Russian girls is you just have to find a way to melt the ice.”

  “Ah, and I can see how your sense of humor would be the ideal icebreaker.”

  “I guess so,” said Tommy. “But enough about me; what about your personal life? Do you have anybody?”

  Millie shook her head. “If the service wanted me to have a husband, they would have issued me one.”

  Wheels began to turn in Tommy’s head as he made some connections he was surprised he hadn’t thought of earlier. “That sounds just like something that a good friend of mine I met in Paris would say. He’s single, he’s a British spy just like you, and he looks like Cary Grant. I’m not trying to play matchmaker or anything, but maybe you two should meet.”

  Millie burst out in a fit of laughter. “You’re talking about Richard Boothwyn, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I should have figured you would already know him,” Tommy said as they started walking back towards the ballroom.

  “Do you know what we like to call him behind his back?”

  “I think I’ve heard this. The Welsh Wanker?”

  Millie smiled as she poured two drinks from the punchbowl, handed one to Tommy and raised a toast. “Mr. Malloy, I believe we just became best friends.”

  Chapter 7

  The first thing Richard Boothwyn did after being pulled from his undercover assignment was take a very long shower to rid himself of the stench of Singapore harbor. After a shave and a proper haircut, he was beginning to feel like himself again. And when he stepped into the lobby of the Raffles Hotel wearing a tailored grey suit, a crisp white shirt with silver cufflinks, and the blue and red striped regimental tie of the Welsh Guards, he looked a lot closer to Cary Grant than the jungle warrior turned shipyard worker he had spent the past few months posing as. He walked up the stairs to the Long Bar, as the hotel bar was known, and took a seat on a stool.

  “May I help you?” the bartender asked.

  “I’ll have a Singapore Sling. You know what they say, when in Singapore…”

  The bartender pretended to laugh as he prepared the mixed drink that the hotel had become nationally and even internationally famous for. The sling was a careful mixture of gin, cherry liqueur, Cointreau, Benedictine, grenadine, pineapple juice, lime juice, and a dash of Angostura bitters. When the mixing was complete, the drink had a distinctive pink hue to go with its cool, refreshing flavor.

  “You know what would be funny?” Richard asked the bartender
when his drink was finished. “If somebody just ordered a shot of this. Then you could call it a sling-shot!”

  The bartender smiled politely and successfully restrained himself from rolling his eyes as he moved on to attend to other customers. In the short but memorable time that Richard once spent adventuring through France with Tommy Malloy, he had acquired Tommy’s habit of trying to make a joke out of nearly everything. But alas, he had long since resigned that he would never have anything approaching Tommy’s talent for it, which is why it was for the best that they both stuck to their principal professions.

  Richard sipped his drink at a leisurely pace, enjoying the simple pleasures he had gone without for so long, such as classy drinks and air conditioning. When he was finished, he paid off his tab, and then took an elevator up to the top floor. Around a few corners and down a few hallways, he pried open a door and stepped into one of the hotel’s luxurious suites. In the small parlor between the two bedrooms, Sir Alastair Thorncliffe sat behind a wooden desk, wearing his reading glasses as he pored over the spread out stacks of papers.

  It was quite a long trip for the London-based spymaster, but the old man liked to seize any opportunity he could to get out of the office, longing to relive his youthful days in the field before his age forced him behind a desk. He was a legend in the intelligence community, a legend that began in 1916, when the young Lieutenant Thorncliffe, fresh out of Oxford, used his daring initiative and superior linguistic skills to infiltrate German lines and blend in well enough to sit in on a staff meeting where sensitive battle plans were discussed. The plans in hand, he then crawled all the way through the mud and barbed wire of no-man’s land and back to the British trenches. The mission earned him a promotion and a transfer to the Eastern front, where he had all sorts of adventures throughout the Middle East and later Russia, including crossing the Arabian desserts with T.E. Lawrence himself. He was now entering the fifth decade of his storied career, having achieved the venerable status of an old man in a world where men die young. He paused and looked up when Richard entered the room.