by Mitch Silver
The most refined of the Hong Kong brothels were the “purple mansions.” In the late 1940s I was fortunate enough to have been a guest in the only purple mansion that had survived the Japanese occupation, the one that featured foreign women. A male slave in a blue cotton robe greeted me, smiled deeply, and ushered me into a large square room with green and white draperies covering the walls. There was no place to sit down. The elderly Chinese madame who ran the establishment inquired as to my racial preference in women. “You choose,” I said.
There were cabinets fashioned of expensive mahogany, with shelves displaying valuable china ornaments. It had earlier been made clear to me that the gentleman was expected to compliment his hostess on her collection of knickknacks as he waited for his “companion” to join him. I did so, cooing absurdly over each piece in pidgin Chinese until my escort joined us. Brenda (imagine!) turned out to be an Indo-Chinese beauty. We spoke in French as we made our way upstairs past elegantly furnished cubicles. Each had a name, such as “Field of Glittering Flowers” or “Club of the Ducks of the Mandarin.” Ours was “Bamboo Meadow.”
In Wallis’s day there were also the flower boats called hoa thing, sixty- to eighty-foot-
long barges floating in the harbour. The interior floors were lavishly carpeted and crystal lamps hung from the ceilings. It was customary for the client to hire the entire boat for the evening. His party would begin with a multicourse dinner at 9 p.m. Afterwards, each guest would lead his dinner companion across a small wooden platform to one of the boats tethered by ropes to the mother vessel.
Wallis’s “China dossier,” as MI6’s file became known, was ordered destroyed after the war. I should know. I destroyed it. But I made a few more mental notes: that Wallis Spencer spent ten weeks in these houses is beyond dispute. That she did so with the knowledge, and under the orders, of American Naval Intelligence will, of course, be hotly disputed by the Americans. But in any case, by the time she reached Peking, Wallis was a cum laude graduate in the seductive arts, specifically in the very particular skills of fang chung.
Practised for centuries, fang chung works by relaxing the man through prolonged and carefully orchestrated massage of the nipples, stomach, thighs, and, after an exquisitely protracted delay, the genitals. The practitioner is taught to target the nerve centres of the body, so that the lightest movement of the fingers has the effect of arousing even the most moribund of men. Fang chung is especially helpful in building the confidence of men of, let us say, diminutive stature, as well as those given to premature ejaculation. By the application of a firm, specific touch between the urethra and the anus, climax may be delayed, removing the fear of failure in intercourse that underlies male dysfunction. While I’ve never required such a service, it sounds like an awful lot of fun.
By November, Wallis was ready for her assignment. But first, Win Spencer had a surprise for her. On the eve of her trip to Shanghai and Peking, he confessed he had fallen in love during their long separation. In the future, any correspondence between them should be sent in care of Robert Leslie, a young painter of some note (and famously little body hair), who lived in Kowloon and was the talk of the Colony. In shock, Wallis bade him good-bye in the morning, never to see him again before his death from alcohol poisoning in 1950.
Chapter 14
PROVENANCE
Jack Barnard, the American military attaché, briefed Wallis on her initial intelligence target in Peking, a prominent member of the diplomatic community. (I mentioned earlier that we had a dossier on Wallis. Actually, British Intelligence were compiling dossiers on every prominent foreigner in China, Barnard among them. I’m rather disgusted to say that our people went through the legation’s garbage.)
At any rate, we discovered that Wallis used the entrée she had acquired in Washington to make the rounds of Peking’s foreign colony—the teas in the afternoon, the dinners at night, the Sundays at the dog track—as opposing forces fought in the sprawling native quarters not three miles away. She finally met her subject, not at a private function but at a public ceremony. Every afternoon at four, the foreigners shared a communal moment with the ordinary citizens of Peking when a thousand pigeons were released from wicker baskets into the ice-blue late autumn sky. Tiny bamboo flutes tucked under the birds’ wings created an eerie, plaintive sound and provided the conversational opening for Wallis to engage her prey: the blond, suavely handsome naval attaché to the Italian Embassy, Alberto de Zara.
Descended from a long line of cavalry officers, de Zara as a youth had been sent abroad every summer, where he developed numerous international contacts. In 1907, he achieved a boyhood dream when he was accepted into America’s Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, where he became the classmate and good friend of—wait for it—Earl Winfield Spencer.
In his memoirs, de Zara later wrote, “The role of naval and aviation attaché in a country such as China, without a navy or aviation, did not appeal to me.” His passion, somewhat misplaced in a naval officer, was for horses. So Wallis did what she had always done. Feigning her own passion for horses, she got him to take her to the Peking Horse Show, where she oohed and aahed over the animals, their riders (especially the Italians), and de Zara himself.
What could the thirty-five-year-old Italian do for the Americans? He was the one man with the position and the persuasive powers to marshal support among the anti-Bolshevik military advisers in China—which was all of them except the Russians—for the defence of Standard Oil’s vulnerable supply line. Which he eventually did.
During her assault on de Zara, Wallis was “billeted” in the home at 4 Shih Chia Huting of Mr. and Mrs. Herman Rogers. A tall, handsome, athletic intelligence officer at the embassy, Rogers could have been the model for the Cary Grant character in Notorious. In everything but looks, Wallis Spencer might have been the woman played by Ingrid Bergman.
Rogers had grown up in the privileged world of Crumwold Hall, two estates down from FDR’s in Hyde Park, New York. He and his wife, Katherine, had the means and, through friendship, the desire to help Wallis in every way possible, as they would continue to do a dozen years later at the Villa Lou Viei. On weekends they drove her up to their rented Buddhist temple in the hills that doubled as a lookout post on General Feng’s army. Wallis joined them for horseback riding, poker, and the inevitable Mah-Jongg. (I’m told that she had already developed her petulant habit of breaking things when fortune did not go her way: our service found a receipt describing three jade replacement pieces for the Rogers’ delicately carved Mah-Jongg set.)
On the twenty-ninth of December, Wallis left the make-believe world of the Imperial Yellow City and the Forbidden Violet City, with their sea palaces built on icy lakes, spanned by marble bridges and dotted with frosted lotus leaves. She carried with her a letter from de Zara introducing her to another handsome, and much younger, Fascist. The dark, moody Count Galeazzo Ciano would later marry Mussolini’s favorite daughter, Edda, and become Italy’s Foreign Minister. For the present he was the Americans’ second target in China because of who his father was: the Admiral of the entire Italian fleet and a member of Italy’s ruling clique.
The elder Ciano had also marched on Rome in 1922 and was one of the plotters in the murder of Giacomo Matteotti, the Socialist leader of the opposition to Mussolini. Together, father and son would be able to do much to impede or impel America’s march toward world naval supremacy.
Wallis made short work of the twenty-one-
year-old Ciano. She went up the coast to Qinhuangdao, the summer resort where the Great Wall of China meets the sea. The young Count Ciano came down from Peking to spend much time with her there. A woman whose husband was one of Win’s fellow officers on the Pampanga was none too kind. “It was the gossip among us Navy wives back in Hong Kong. It was an open scandal.”
For Wallis, almost thirty, seducing the callow Ciano must have seemed like child’s play. But for him, Wallis Spencer was his first great passion, the passion one never gets over. Like Espil, de Zara, and
countless others before him and after, Ciano would be left in her wake as she climbed the ladder of social position.
Amy did her two-fingered eye rub and looked to her left, out of the plane. Clouds and ocean. The same clouds and ocean a transatlantic traveler would have seen a century ago. Only the traveler then would have been sandwiched between white and blue, not flying high above them at thirty-something thousand feet.
As she sketched a few misshapen clouds to keep her hands busy, she tried to understand Fleming’s lingering interest in Wallis Simpson. His letter had promised to reveal something about “pure, unalloyed evil.” The Duchess of boring old Windsor? It didn’t add up. Of course, the woman’s love life was anything but boring. Dashing Count This, suave Ambassador That throwing themselves at her feet. Amy thought she could handle it if handsome foreigners threw themselves at her and…Hold it. Hadn’t Scott-the-adorable-Englishman just done precisely that? With a ring?
She looked straight in front of her at the flight monitor two rows away on the bulkhead. Atmospheric temperature: –2° F. Distance to go: 2,940 miles.
She’d never read a James Bond book. She’d seen the movies, of course. They played all the time on TV. She wondered what Fleming’s fiction was like, how it played out on the page without Connery and Roger Moore and—who was the current one?—doing the heavy lifting, conning the con men and killing the killers.
Con men. Her thoughts shifted to Shields, the bookseller, and his “find.” The man had seemed genuine. But con artists always seem genuine, don’t they? And there were a lot of them in this game, because it was so easy to pull off. All you had to do was identify a museum or library with an illuminated manuscript that was missing its explicit. Concoct some “old ink” by scraping it off worthless documents and reconstituting it with linseed oil. A couple of pages of calligraphy on aged calfskin calculated to match that of the chosen manuscript, and bingo! Big bucks.
Amy knew Yale had been burned a couple of times before, in the sixties and seventies. But what if this one was real? Imagine. The actual explicit signed and dated by the men who had created the Book of Kells! If Amy could authenticate it and Yale could buy it…She could envision her next book: The Men Behind the Book of Kells. A tenure-grabber, if ever there was one. Then she and Scott would be on an equal footing.
Whoa! Was that what this was about—pulling even with Scott? Competing with Scott? She wondered, was Scott competing with her? She tried to imagine herself in his place and guessed he didn’t give her career a moment’s thought. Was that good? Or bad? Susan would know. Her husband was a lawyer at a big New York firm. She’d have to ask Su about competing with your man when she got back. Just then Amy realized that she’d been holding her breath, and she let it out. Men didn’t trouble themselves with all this stuff, did they?
Irritated with herself, Amy turned back to the manuscript on the tray table in front of her, reangling the little gooseneck lamp built into the headrest for maximum light. She had to admit it was awfully nice up here instead of in the back of the plane. Some of the people sitting around her had lowered their window shades, anticipating the in-flight movie. Others were reading newspapers from the cart that had come through: the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, the Financial Times. When they said seat 2A was in the business section, they meant it.
2B, next to her in the aisle seat, was a beefy man with a bull neck and an old-fashioned crew cut. Football player? Ex-football player? Scott’s only sporting interest was something he called rugger, and Amy had better things to do on Sunday than watch the NFL, so he could be the most famous football player in the world and she’d never know—except for OJ. She’d recognize OJ.
“Looks interesting. Work?” The bull neck had a voice. And a smile.
Amy was not one for plane chat. “Kind of.”
The man indicated the Wall Street Journal he was holding in his huge hands. “Me too.”
A person with any social skills was now supposed to say, “What kind of work do you do?” But all Amy could manage was, “I see,” and turned back to her reading.
Chapter 15
PROVENANCE
It was the middle of January 1931, and by seven o’clock it was already night at the Furness country house in Melton Mowbray, in the heart of Leicestershire’s foxhunting country. By now, the Prince had thrown over Freda Dudley Ward and installed dark, gorgeous Thelma Furness in her place as “the Princess of Wales.” When Thelma strolled through the salon door with her houseguests, the Prince of Wales and his brother, the Duke of Kent, it was the first time another weekend guest, Wallis Simpson, had seen the Prince in the flesh. Here he was, not as the golden personage of the newsreels and magazines but as the somewhat sad-faced thirty-seven-
year-old man of real life who was actually saying “Good evening” to her and shaking her hand. She curtsied, looking hard at him with a burning curiosity.
Much later, Wallis would tell me all about it. She had liked the Prince at once. The man who had seemed so unapproachable in photographs, all yellow hair and dazzling smile, had, up close, world-weary blue eyes and an old man’s pouches under them. His face was lined from too much sun and too little sleep. Wallis thought she detected a secret pain behind the mask.
Three years earlier, Wallis had got her divorce from Win and had taken up with Ernest Simpson. A friend of mine, Harold Nicholson, had called him a “good-looking barber’s block.” Married in New York in 1928, they were happy at first. When the Crash came, Ernest was called to London to take the reins of his father’s faltering shipbuilding company. Hard times were coming on, but that didn’t stop the lovebirds from leasing a flat in Bryanston Court in George Street, on the Savile Row side of Regent Street. The lease came with a cook, maid, butler, chauffeur, and Maud Kerr-Smiley, Ernest’s sister, who immediately installed herself as the couple’s chaperone and tour guide to London society. And who should turn out to be Maud Kerr-Smiley’s best friend in all the world? Thelma Furness.
But right now, this evening, the contrast between her tongue-tied husband and the sparkling conversation of the golden Prince led Wallis to consider trading in her current man for a newer, flashier model. Dinner was served at nine, and Wallis and Ernest were seated a long way down the dining table from their hostess, Thelma, and the royals. Too far for her to engage the Prince in any of that witty conversation.
Late the next morning, Wallis walked downstairs to find the Prince of Wales chatting with his aide, Brigadier-General Gerald F. Trotter, known as “G.” G. Trotter had lost his right arm in the Boer War and had his uniform sleeve pinned to the front of his tunic. The luncheon table had been set without place cards, and Wallis, boldly, sat herself next to the Prince.
For something to say, he observed, “You must miss central heating, Mrs. Simpson.” To which she replied, “To the contrary, sir, I like the cold houses of Great Britain,” which she most certainly did not. Then she added, “I am sorry, sir, but you have disappointed me.” The Prince was startled by this effrontery. “In what way, Mrs. Simpson?” The other guests must have been stunned when she replied, “Every American woman who comes to England is asked that same question. I had hoped for something more original from the Prince of Wales.”
From the moment she had looked into his weak, sensitive eyes, Wallis had known he wanted to be dominated. Her cool, expert calculation paid off. She had caught his interest, and she knew it.
Chapter 16
PROVENANCE
Let’s jump ahead to 1934. Ramsay MacDonald’s government have been unable to pull Britain out of the Depression. In marked contrast, the first anniversary of the Nazi regime finds Germany well on the way to economic recovery. In Russia, the Reds are purging the usual suspects.
Meanwhile, the old King is starting to go downhill. For this reason, red dispatch boxes of state papers begin arriving at the Prince’s digs in Fort Belvedere. It is the MacDonald Government’s belief that, if the end should come, it would be better for the future King to be as informed as possible about th
e day-to-day affairs of state. But the Prince seems congenitally uninterested in the workings of state, and even less in state security. He regularly leaves drafts of treaties lying around for the charwoman to find. One dinner guest used the powder room and discovered a secret memorandum from the Permanent Under-Secretary of the Foreign Office, Sir Robert Vansittart, expressing alarm over recent remarks by Herr Hitler, Germany’s new Vice-Chancellor.
Thelma Furness has returned from an extended winter holiday in America. Before going, she had put the fox in with the chickens by asking Wallis, her new best friend, to look in on the Prince while she was away, and “see he doesn’t get into any mischief.”
Remember, Thelma was movie-star beautiful. Besides the usual number of gorgeous breasts and limbs, she had inherited the lustrous black hair of her father’s Chilean forebears. It was impossible for her to conceive of any way in which the Prince would prefer Mrs. Ernest Simpson to herself. Now add to your mental picture the irony that Thelma has returned from her ocean voyage looking ten years younger than when she left.
Has the rest and relaxation in warm American climes done the trick? Or the skill of some New York plastic surgeon? Neither. Thelma has just come from a month in the arms of Aly Khan, the lithe, muscular, twenty-three-year-old heir to an immense fortune. Addicted to polo, fast cars, and smouldering Latin beauties, Aly had been sent at eighteen to the brothels of Cairo by his father, the Aga Khan. (The things I missed not having a father. Sigh.) There he had become skilled in the art of imsak, the Egyptian equivalent of fang chung.