by Peter Tonkin
‘You had it all sussed out, didn’t you?’ The chief super was a friend if not a fan.
‘Pretty much, towards the end.’ Tom was feeling sick and beginning to wonder whether he should be driving after all.
‘Easter I understand. And I was listening when he said he was looking down on you, but what tied it all together?’
‘The name. They choose a new name and they choose one that gives it all away. They do it every time; you’d think they’d learn.’
‘Thomas? What? Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son?’
‘Most amusing. Usually it’s Thomas for John Thomas — from those who have heard of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, at any rate. But not this one.’
‘Not Thomas the Tank Engine?’
Tom Fowler looked across at the chief superintendent and for a moment there was about him nothing at all of the absent-minded professor. ‘Try Tomas de Torquemada,’ he said. ‘You should know all about him. Founder of the Inquisition.’
He was just reaching for the handle of the Rover, feeling quite pleased with his last remark, when the sergeant called out, ‘Wait, Professor Fowler, there’s a phone call for you. Switchboard says its from someone in Hong Kong …’
*
Edgar Tan looked down at the two bodies on the hotel floor, then up at the slightly sheepish, deeply sickened face of the police inspector at his side. The bodies were less repulsive so he looked back down. Both bodies were naked, and the feminine body at least had a great deal to recommend it — other than the bullet wound, of course.
‘Why don’t you run me through that again,’ said Tan. As soon as he said it, he paused, aware that his phrasing of the simple question was all too obviously influenced by American English. Singapore was a society which had made it all but illegal for citizens to follow his profession, that of private investigator. The authorities knew that Edgar was not his Christian name; so, as one of the rapidly decreasing number of professional detectives in the city-state, he needed to be careful even though he was long established and well respected in his profession, not least by the authorities themselves. He specialised in small stuff. Divorces. Missing persons. Corpses were out of his line.
‘I mean to say,’ he continued gently, ‘I was hired by Mrs Sawa to find out what exactly her husband was up to. She thought maybe a little extra-marital liaison or whatever. She didn’t suspect a bloodbath. I didn’t suspect a bloodbath. Tell me about it, Sung.’
The policeman shrugged. ‘Who would have thought it, Mr Tan? It was one of those things which nobody could predict.’
Tan looked at the portly corpse of his client’s husband and agreed with the policeman wholeheartedly.
There was a sudden stir behind them. It was the hotel manager, enquiring when the police unit envisaged releasing his third floor and the guests who had been sleeping on it when the incident occurred. Inspector Sung looked at him until he went away again, but he never stopped talking to Tan.
‘The gentleman, Mr Sawa, apparently was concerned to maintain absolute secrecy. He must have been aware that his wife was beginning to suspect something.’
Tan nodded. It was possible, he could see that.
‘And — I’m surmising here — the lady in question …’
‘Miss Fa. His secretary.’
‘Miss Fa was the sort of a bed partner who makes repeated, individual, and very loud noises at particular times. So they had the television on quite loudly in order to cover the noise they were making. Unfortunately for them the walls in the hotel are thin and the guests on either side were tired and impatient It was unfortunate, too, that they were using a gangster film to cover up what they were doing.’
Inspector Sung stopped, as though assuming Tan would be able to work it all out from there, and Tan was just about to ask one or two pertinent questions in order to make sure that he had, in fact, got everything clear in his mind, when the policeman started to speak again.
‘After four repeated complaints, the manager phoned the room but there was no reply. The complaints persisted, mentioning screams and sounds of violent fighting, so he called the police. The officer who answered was young, inexperienced; eager. He came to the door and he, too, heard repeated screams, shouted threats and, at the moment he knocked on the door, a gunshot.
At once, the officer drew his pistol and charged the door with his shoulder. The doors in this hotel are, as you can see, as flimsy as the walls and it burst open at once. At this point, he says, he called the caution as required, but I doubt that anyone heard him.
‘Mr Sawa and Miss Fa were on the sofa which, as you will have noticed, has its back to the door. The people and the television were all, therefore, concealed from the officer who ran into the room to the sound of a shot being fired and believing an act of violence was being perpetrated. Mr Sawa then popped up, stark naked, from the sofa. The officer shot him. The bullet went straight through his heart and then through the television, causing it to explode with some violence. At this point Miss Fa, whose screams, one assumes, were rapidly moving from the ecstatic to the terrified, also popped up.’
‘He’s a very good shot, this young officer.’
‘Champion marksman.’
‘What’s the phrase?’ asked Edgar Tan idly, thinking of something philosophical like ‘In the midst of life, we are in death’.
‘Coitus interruptus,’ answered Inspector Sung, whose mind was moving along different lines.
And that seemed to sum it up, really. Except that Edgar Tan still had a phone call to make to a client who had been plotting a divorce and now had to plan a funeral instead.
*
Helen DuFour, senior executive of Heritage Mariner, looked across the table at the committee. There were six of them, all looking like retired rugby coaches — solid, square, slightly battered. Their suits were well-cut though and their eyes, though weary, were intelligent.
Behind them this particular window of the Kremlin gave a spectacular view of Red Square which for some reason was even more busy than usual today. Wearily, for she was as exhausted as any of them after the weeks of negotiation, she wondered whether she should start going through things again. But the chairman prevented her.
‘We had assumed, you see,’ he said in his technically flawless, richly accented English, ‘that the incident in Chechnya would have pulled the republics together. President Yeltsin at that time, you will understand, was concerned about the manner in which gangster elements were moving into the most powerful positions in some of the governments of the republics and it was always his contention that this was the case in Chechnya.’
‘I see,’ temporised Helen. This was old news but a new ploy. She glanced left and right at the rest of her little team. They too were frowning with concentration. Perhaps, after all, their persistent patient probing had at last worn through the bullshit.
‘You can imagine in general terms, I am sure,’ the chairman rumbled on, ‘with what horror the government here viewed the possibilities of such a thing. Whole republics being run by gangsters, drug barons, smugglers, answerable only to their own greed and the orders of their bosses further up the Mafia chain. Imagine if Siberia was run like that!’
Helen tried to imagine the man who ruled Siberia taking orders from an old-age pensioner somewhere in Sicily. But the chairman’s point was well made, and it was relevant if he was telling the truth and President Yeltsin had been driven by such nightmares. And it suddenly broke upon her that, after Chechnya, the brigand ruling Siberia would know all too clearly that he didn’t have to take orders from anyone. Including, in fact, the Kremlin.
‘You have been locked in negotiations with us for nearly five years now over the matter of decommissioned warheads,’ said the vice-chairman when the chairman himself fell silent.
‘With you and your predecessors, yes. We are the only people who can guarantee to move the warheads safely when they are decommissioned and to dispose of them properly.’
‘We recognise that. And, indeed, that if properly c
arried out, the business might be done to our mutual profit. But …’
There was the briefest of silences as the chairman re assumed his authority. ‘But it all turns on one simple thing. The guarantee that the republics will give up the warheads as agreed. And after Chechnya …’ He stopped, and shook his head.
‘It is almost two years since Chechnya,’ observed Helen with all the courtesy she could muster. Which, after all this time, was not a lot ‘Why do you bring this up now?’
‘Because now is the time when we have to admit that we cannot guarantee the obedience of the republics in this matter. We cannot guarantee your supply because we cannot control what is going on out there.’
Helen looked at him, flabbergasted. It had been in the backs of all their minds, of course, for there was obviously a weakening of the political grip from the centre. But if the chairman of this particular committee, with its contacts not only in the civil nuclear programme but also in the relevant sections of the armed forces, was prepared to admit that they were losing control, then things must be at a pretty pass indeed.
‘Of course, one is aware of the amount of material coming out illicitly through Europe, through Germany particularly,’ she said sympathetically.
And the chairman actually laughed.
Helen stopped, surprised, for the Russians were never rude when sober, except on purpose. Her eyes slitted and her mind raced.
‘My dear lady, I am sorry. I meant no rudeness. But you are talking about the little trickles which go west into a high-security situation with thousands on the watch — security forces, police forces as well as news agencies, newspapers, reporters of all kinds trying to get hold of it and publish what they have found. And where is the market there anyway? A few ersatz terrorists? Gaddafi? No. I am afraid the haemorrhage that we fear is flooding out, even as we speak, far beyond our ability to control it, to the east and to the south. China, Korea, India, even Japan — the powers around the Pacific Rim. It is all to play for there, as the English say, and that is where the stuff is going now.’
And just at the moment when the chairman made this admission and effectively brought to an end nearly five years of intense negotiation, there came a knock at the door and a secretary peeped in. ‘There is a call for Madame DuFour on line one,’ he said quietly. ‘I understand it is from Hong Kong.’
Helen looked up, suddenly aware that everyone in the room was looking at her.
*
Charles Lee sipped the green tea with every evidence of enjoyment, watching Xiang Lo-wu through narrow eyes. This was the point when the game turned. This was the moment when all that could be done was done and everything else was down to joss and ancestors. The tea lay bitter on his tongue as he waited for the next word, and grains of dust from the cooling liquid ground between his teeth to warn him that his jaws were working with tension.
A warm wind rattled the ill-fitting windows and more dust puffed in round their edges. The thickness of a spring sandstorm obscured for a moment the thoughtfully smiling face of Mao Zedung as he gazed down from the Gate of Heavenly Peace across the Square of Heavenly Peace, also known as Tiananmen Square.
Most of the negotiations had been held here, although this was by no means the most important of the government offices. Nor was it the easiest to reach from the Beijing Hotel. The rest of the negotiations had been held out in the government suburb of Zhongnanhai, as was only right and proper. It was hard to estimate which section of the negotiations was the more important. He suspected that the words in this room were the vital ones, however. This was the reason they had chosen to speak them overlooking the site of his destruction — well, the destruction of his plans, at any rate.
The Chinese government negotiator was in no rush to speak, however. He seemed to be enjoying the bitter, grainy tea. And there was a paper he wished to consult, invisibly, in his Western style executive briefcase which lay, like Charles’s, on the table between them. Had either been an aficionado of Western cinema, they might have been put in mind of gamblers, or of gunfighters facing up in a saloon.
‘When,’ began Xiang Lo-wu at last, ‘you bribed a whole generation of our most promising students, what did you hope to gain?’
Always expect the unexpected. Who said that? Some unsubtle Western thinker, or writer. But it was a good lesson. He had been so entranced by the unsubtlety of negotiating in this place that he had taken his eye from the reason why they were negotiating in this place. Well, never bluff a bluffer. ‘To gain power and influence.’
‘When you financed the student reform movement which met its end outside this room, were you seeking power for yourself individually? For your family, your company or your country?’
‘For myself first, then for my family. If the Lees are powerful, then our businesses will thrive and Xianggang,’ he calculatedly used the Chinese name for Hong Kong, though he was more used to the Western one, ‘Xianggang will join its near-neighbour the great city of Guangzhou and its other powerful sister, Shanghai, in taking the real financial power in the Pacific Rim and the world away from the Americans and the Japanese.’
‘You believe that this can be done?’
‘I do.’
‘But you do not trust us elder brothers in government to do it for ourselves?’
‘Beijing is a long way from Guangzhou, and it is even further from Xianggang. We do not always even speak the same language.’
‘You insist on speaking with such a … Western accent.’
‘Are we, then, to return to the days of the Quing Empire and look for ever inwards? You know what that led to, elder brother.’
‘You believe that there will be another, what would you call it? Opium War? And that, once again, we would lose it?’
‘There are companies in Japan and in America, and even in Europe now, who see business as war without end. You are familiar with the writings of Sun Tzu?’
‘The Art of War …’
‘They use it as a training manual for business executives. They have done so for many years.’
‘But not Heritage Mariner?’
‘In Heritage Mariner, I am the only senior executive who has read Sun Tzu, as far as I am aware.’
‘You are uncertain?’
‘There is one with whom I shared a course, a professor, twenty years ago at Johns Hopkins …’
‘This one?’ Xiang Lo-wu took a paper from his briefcase and placed it in front of Lee. On the front page was a picture of Richard Mariner and Lee’s eyes leaped avidly down the page to the headlines and stopped. The newspaper was printed in a language he did not understand. He looked up at the Chinese minister, betraying — against all his inclination, breeding and training — surprise.
Xiang Lo-wu took back the paper and looked down at once, seeming not to notice his victory.
And Charles Lee did the only thing he could do under the circumstances: something equally unexpected. So unexpected was it that it even surprised Charles himself. He laughed.
He laughed at the ridiculousness of finding himself here, negotiating with a man who had used tanks to slaughter his unarmed teenage student friends. He laughed at the pointlessness of even expecting to walk away from here alive. And he laughed at the simple, dark joy of having been bested so elegantly at such an unexpected but perfectly chosen moment. It was very Western laughter, utterly un-Chinese.
Xiang Lo-wu looked up, surprised. And down again, impressed.
‘No,’ said Charles Lee after a moment or two. ‘No, not him; his wife.’
‘Really? His wife?’ asked Xiang, apparently surprised again. He paused for an instant. Then, ‘This person, perhaps,’ and he presented another newspaper, this time with Robin’s picture on the front. And this time Charles could read the writing; ‘SHIPPING MAGNATE ACCUSED OF MASS MURDER’.
Then the paper was gone again, into the briefcase. Charles felt a little less like laughing. ‘Yes,’ he said quietly. ‘That person. Robin Mariner may have read Sun Tzu.’
‘And is it your
opinion that this person is the sort of business executive who would leam from what she has read? And practise what she has learned?’
‘Oh yes, definitely.’
‘In that case, Mr Lee, why is she not here in your place? Must we assume that the position for Heritage Mariner which you are trying to negotiate is of secondary importance to the company?’
‘No. The opposite. It was felt that, if I succeeded in approaching the relevant ministers, I would be in a position to negotiate hardest and to leam most. Sun Tzu commends highly the importance of precise intelligence.’ There was more than a touch of wryness audible to his own ears in the admission.
‘Indeed.’ It was not a question.
Perhaps Xiang Lo-wu had also read The Art of War, thought Charles in the silence which succeeded this exchange. But the thought was short-lived, drowned in a welter of speculation about the meaning of the newspaper headline.
‘But the fact is, if something were to occur which kept these other persons occupied, shall we say, then power would pass to you, as elder son?’ purred Xiang Lo-wu.
Charles was by no means certain that he did hold the position of Crown Prince behind the Mariners in Heritage Mariner. The family held all the stock at the moment, and Helen DuFour was nearer family than he was for she was all but married to Sir William. But now was not the time for hesitation.
‘Yes, that is indeed so,’ he said firmly.
‘Then you will wish to keep a close eye on events, I should imagine.’ Xiang Lo-wu slid the paper with Robin’s picture on it across the table with every appearance of solicitous courtesy.
As Charles’s eyes devoured the story below the headline, a quiet chirruping noise insinuated itself above the bluster of the sandstorm outside. Xiang reached into his briefcase and pulled out a personal phone. ‘Wai?’
‘The caller from Hong Kong is trying to reach Mr Lee once again,’ said the politician’s elder son and confidential secretary. ‘Should we allow the call through?’
‘Not at all.’
‘Very well, sir. But how long will it be before he finds out what is going on?’