“And the Wheatleys and their pals, the Mitsubishi?” Jonnie was amused by the motion-picture-disseminated fad for American slang. “Do we blow the whistle on them?”
“We’ll see just what,” Sir Jonathan directed. “But we won’t, ah, do nothing.”
Mary recognized the glint in the Old Gentleman’s eyes. Clear the decks for action, she thought. She knew the Old Gentleman’s plans to smash his former employers. They had not only discussed strategy, but had sent detailed instructions to their agents, associates, and friends throughout Asia.
The Japanese were ubiquitous. Everywhere in Asia, except unoccupied China, Japanese businessmen, technicians, and craftsmen diligently plied their peaceful trades. In the city of Angeles on the island of Luzon in the Philippines near Clark Field, the chief American airbase in the Far East, streets of Japanese shops offered cheap services and goods ranging from hairdressing through electrical appliances to farm implements. In the hamlet of San Mateo, eighteen miles away, the general store was run by the amiable Suzuki Tadao, who had married a Filipina fifteen years earlier and embraced her Catholicism. In Manila, the zaibatsu—the five big conglomerates of Japanese commerce and industry—maintained offices four times as large as those of American firms and staffs ten times larger.
“All our correspondence with the home office must be in Japanese,” the managing director of Mitsui explained blandly. “We need larger staffs, Japanese staffs. Japanese is a very difficult language.”
The same pattern was apparent in independent Thailand; in British Burma, Malaya, and Singapore; in the Dutch East Indies; and in French Indo-China. Harbor dredgers skilfully practiced their craft, as did plantation managers, masseurs, mining engineers, and curio dealers. Half held commissions in the Japanese Army or Navy, while an additional 40 percent were civilian agents of the Japanese Intelligence Service. Some 10 percent were legitimate businessmen who served Nippon’s economy first and its imperial ambitions second.
Almost as ubiquitous were the offices of Derwent, Hayes and Company, called in Chinese Teh Wan, which meant “Virtue Universal.” The bitter Chinese jested that Teh Wan really meant “Grab Everything.” The cynical pun, based on a slight shift in intonation, was inspired by Iain Wheatley’s flexible business ethics. Derwent’s did not, however, lower itself to retail trade—unless the quick profits were irresistible. But its shipping lines, tea plantations, departmental stores, jute factories, rubber plantations, construction companies, tin mines, and general trading firms were a dynamic network centered on Hong Kong.
Natural affinity attracted Derwent’s and Mitsubishi. Though itself immense, the Japanese firm did not disdain the petty retail dealing Derwent’s spurned. But Iain Wheatley and his hand-raised company of gentlemen merchants were accepted in Government Houses and Chancelleries closed to the Japanese. Sir Jonathan had initially watched the development of cooperation between the two giant enterprises with only slight misgivings, for it was a natural commercial alliance. But his informants had been relaying disturbing news ever since the Japanese incursion into Manchuria in 1931 signaled Tokyo’s ambition to conquer all Asia. Derwent’s services to Mitsubishi verged, originally, upon the unethical; subsequently, upon the illegal; and, most recently, upon espionage. Only Iain Wheatley knew the full extent of the social introductions, the political influence, and the commercial intelligence with which Derwent’s provided Mitsubishi “for a reasonable commission.” Mary, Charles, and Jonnie constantly heard of specific deals that shocked even their sensibilities, long calloused by intimate acquaintance with the infinitely flexible business ethics of the China Coast.
Sir Jonathan was the master of all the ramifications. The Sekloongs’ own network was smaller and less obtrusive than either Mitsubishi’s or Derwent’s, but it was more cohesive and homogeneous. Their gold winged-dragon emblem was displayed on twenty-odd freighters and sixteen branch offices throughout Asia. Nine million overseas Chinese, who controlled the retail trade of Southeast Asia, were bound to the Sekloongs by both racial sympathy and the House’s intelligently magnanimous business practices. The patriarch, Sir Jonathan, was not only a generous philanthropist, but a spectacular Chinese success in a business milieu dominated by foreigners. Besides, Mitsubishi or Derwent’s allowed a Chinese shopkeeper in Semarang on Java no more than 8 percent profit on textiles, while J. Sekloong and Sons permitted him 12 percent. Self-interest, coupled with patriotic sentiments, therefore provided Sir Jonathan with a network of associates, informants, and collaborators that dwarfed the resources of both the Japanese zaibatsu and the Hong Kong British hongs.
The widely dispersed overseas Chinese had already demonstrated that they could bring the commercial life of Southeast Asia to a standstill if they acted in concert. A hartal—a total shutdown of overseas Chinese businesses accompanied by a general strike of Chinese workers—was, however, a dangerous weapon. It could paralyze normal life, but it could also provoke vicious pogroms against the Chinese themselves as it had in the past.
On August 25, 1939, Sir Jonathan sent out messages to all the chief Chinese merchants of Southeast Asia. In coded telegrams, chatty letters, and by word of mouth, the Sekloongs informed their countrymen that Derwent, Hayes and Company was collaborating with the Japanese invaders of the Motherland not only by providing commercial assistance, but also by furnishing military and political intelligence to the enemy.
An epidemic of minor difficulties beset the Universally Virtuous hong. Salesmen in Malaya were met with bland protestations that reorders were impossible because business was so bad. Normal bill collections were snarled in the East Indies, while bank drafts were mysteriously delayed or defaced. Chinese money-lenders in the Philippines abruptly called their loans to customers of the Virtuous hong. Shipments went astray in Burma, and freighters plying the Indian Ocean suffered inexplicable breakdowns in engine rooms manned by Chinese stokers. Rumors cascaded throughout Asia, multifarious in their multiplicity and ingenuity: “Derwent’s is approaching bankruptcy.… Iain Wheatley has promised to raise $200 million for the Japanese for armaments.… Derwent’s ships are transporting Japanese troops disguised as coolies.”
Within five days, Derwent’s directors, assembled for a routine board-meeting, were presented with sheafs of alarming reports. However, no clear pattern was discernible. Unfortunate coincidence appeared to have contrived that difficulties, each itself minor, all came at once. The hong’s Managing Director Iain Wheatley shrugged his heavy shoulders and reassured his directors. The Universally Virtuous hong, he said, had survived many grave threats in its long history, and the present difficulties were no more than a bad patch. Besides, the firm was solid. Its financial reserves were great, and the impending war in Europe would offer new opportunities for profit.
On August 31, 1939, Sir Jonathan Sekloong leisurely drew on a panatella pierced by the attentive Opal. The Old Gentleman sat back in his red-leather chair, smiled benignly—and waited.
The battlefields of China were quiet, though minor harassment, like that James Sekloong’s guerrillas mounted, irritated the Japanese. The vast expanse and the primitive communications of China, rather than Chinese fighting men, sapped Japanese strength. A virtual truce prevailed in the undeclared war, leaving Nationalists and Communists free to direct their most punishing assaults against each other under the tattered cloak of their United Anti-Japanese Front. China had become a sideshow of the international circus.
Politicians and journalists turned from the confusing Far Eastern imbroglio to concentrate upon the border between the National Socialist Greater German Reich of Chancellor Adolf Hitler and the demi-fascist Republic of Poland. Having forestalled any Soviet reaction by the Russo-German nonaggression pact that secretly promised Joseph Stalin his share of the spoils, Adolf Hitler sent German infantrymen rolling in Mercedes trucks across the table-flat Polish plain on the night of September 1, 1939. German bombers swept low over Warsaw, and, most ominously, columns of German Panzerwagen—dark-green battletanks marked with black crosses—th
rust deep into the heartland of Poland. Blitzkrieg, “lightning war,” was dismembering the Polish Republic, as it would later dismember Western Europe.
Germany did not declare war. Responsibility for formally proclaiming the greatest conflict in human history devolved upon the wan British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who had a year earlier confidently promised “peace in our time.” On September 3, 1939, Chamberlain told the British people that they were at war with Germany. Britain had kept her promise to come to Poland’s assistance.
The wiry young man standing on the cobblestones of the Place Pigalle outside the Moulin Rouge was oblivious to the speculative glances of the heavily perfumed women in tawdry finery hurrying to their evening’s work in the bars and nightclubs of Montmartre. A black overcoat, its heavy collar buttoned around his throat, protected him from the chill winds of December 2, 1939. But his head was bare, his black homburg swinging negligently in his gray-gloved hand. He was deaf to the bellowed enticements of the doorman of the Moulin Rouge, who attempted to compensate by volume for the wartime blackout’s extinguishing the nightclub’s revolving red-neon windmill. His short-cropped glossy brown hair was shot with reddish undertones, and his hazel eyes were fixed on the dusk-blurred silhouette of the Church of the Sacre Coeur.
Charles Philips Sekloong marveled that the grotesque confusion of spires, domes, and cupolas, familiar from dozens of bad paintings, could move him so profoundly. Aesthetically, the Church of the Sacre Coeur was so monstrous that the baroque Castle in Sekloong Manor appeared harmonious in comparison. But the soaring edifice was dedicated Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam, “to the greater glory of God,” and its fantastic tracery against the graying sky was a proud reaffirmation of man’s faith in his Creator. The prostitutes, pimps, strongarm men, and musicians of the quartier, those practitioners of the varied, sordid skills that catered to the base appetites of naive tourists, needed the consolation of Holy Church at least as much as did the stolid bourgeoisie who inhabited most of Paris.
Charles glanced at his wristwatch. It was still a few minutes before the 5:30 rendezvous his brother Thomas had appointed in that incongruous location. He clapped his hat foursquare on his head, uncomfortable at the unfamiliar constriction, and pulled his coat-collar higher around his throat. Since the Place Pigalle who no fit place for a priest to loiter, he preferred not to advertise his calling by displaying his Roman collar. Besides, he was still self-conscious about the narrow strip of red silk that identified him as a monsignor. It was, he had protested to his superior, ridiculous to elevate him at the age of twenty-eight, only four years after ordination. The old Archbishop had reprimanded him for “false humility” when he argued that he was better suited to a pastoral mission, a humble post as a curate, rather than the diplomatic assignment to which he was ordered.
“My son, you have taken vows of obedience,” the aged prelate had admonished Charles. “You will go where you can best serve Mother Church—as decided by your superiors. These are troubled times. Troubled times for the souls of men, as well as their bodies, and troubled times for the Church. You must, above all, obey.”
“I shall, of course, obey,” Charles replied. “But is it absolutely essential to make me a monsignor? There are so many others more worthy who would rejoice in the honor. I entered the priesthood to atone in part for the excessive material blessings the Lord bestowed upon the Sekloongs, not to seek advancement.”
“It is no more fitting for you to question the Lord’s allotment of worldly goods than to question the decisions of His Church,” the Archbishop reproved Charles. “You will be attaché to the Papal Nunciature in Paris, as a monsignor, and you will obey. Without discipline, the Church would be no more than a mass of moldering buildings.”
“But, Father.” Charles still objected, and the Archbishop frowned. “Why am I chosen?”
“We require a representative who is neutral, yet can move with ease in the diplomatic milieu. You are, in the eyes of most men you will meet, a neutral Oriental. Yet you possess the requisite languages and close ties with England through Stonyhurst.”
“I shall obey, Father,” Charles affirmed reluctantly, though his heart remained heavy with doubts.
Afterward, he had prayed that he might accept with grace the assignment that would have delighted so many of his colleagues. To Charles it was a burden, for he had hoped to return to the interior of China to serve the suffering Chinese people. He longed to hear the lowing of water buffaloes and hearty jests in rough Cantonese, rather than the irritable honking of Citroën motorcars and the nervous flow of liquid French. He had been home only twice in the fifteen years since he entered Stonyhurst, once after leaving the school, the second time for his ordination by the Bishop of Hong Kong. Monsignor Charles Philips Sekloong, the newest member of Paris’s Corps Diplomatique, was as homesick as a schoolboy. Even if his cloth had not debarred him from many of the pleasures of Paris, he would have found no joy in the City of Light.
Charles was virtually unique in his sense of deprivation. Although the fabled lights of Paris were dimmed as a precaution against German air raids, the city’s fabled gaiety was even more frenetic than it had been in peacetime. Adolf Hitler had been quiescent since completing his conquest of Poland at the end of September. The only serious fighting in Europe was taking place in frozen Finland, where Stalin was attempting to compel the Finns to subservience. But Helsinki was far from Paris, almost as far, it seemed, as Chungking. Secure behind the deep concrete bunkers of the Maginot Line, which was manned by the finest army in the world, the Parisians called their bloodless confrontation with the Germans la guerre drôle, “the phony war.” Men dying elsewhere were not their concern.
The remote danger symbolized by men in uniform and the imperfect blackout merely spiced the pleasures of the Parisians. The wealthy, the celebrated, and the bearers of ancient names flocked to dinner parties, receptions, and glittering balls. Their sexual behavior was as unrestrained as their public revels. Nero, Charles reflected sourly, must have dined and danced and postured like the pampered French plutocrats before Rome burned.
“Ah-dazi! Ho giu mei gien. Nei cheung-dai-la. Ho mng ho?” A light touch on his shoulder broke Monsignor Charles’s abstraction, and a familiar voice spoke in Cantonese. “Little brother! It’s been a long time. You’ve grown, I see. How’ve you been?”
“Lo-yee, ho giu. Tai giu-ah!” he replied in the language of their childhood. “Second older brother, very long. Too long indeed!”
Thomas Sekloong, eight years older and four inches shorter than his youngest brother whom they had called the Little Mandarin, was debonair in a double-breasted dinner jacket with wide, corded lapels and a pinched waist. His velvet-collared overcoat hung open to reveal the perfect butterfly of his black bow-tie and the gleaming front of his starched shirt. Command had stamped his dark features with authority, but he smiled at his brother’s frank scrutiny.
“You didn’t expect me in uniform, did you?” he asked. “I’m conspicuous enough already. This phony war—it’s hard to tell who’s on whose side.”
“Tell me everything.” The questions cascaded from the younger brother’s lips. “How are Mother and Father? Still grace in dissension? And the Old Gentleman? Still the iron hand in the steel glove?”
“The iron hand and the restless penis, you mean!” Thomas replied coarsely.
“And Charlotte? I haven’t seen her yet. Are Gwinnie and George Parker coming to Paris? They wrote they might, and …”
“Hold on, youngster,” the general told the priest. “We can’t stand around swapping family confidence in the middle of Pigalle. The Jap dwarves are having me followed. But I know a place.”
The Lapin Agile, the “Nimble Rabbit,” on the narrow alley halfway up the hill had not changed since Maurice Utrillo painted it in 1897. The black door beneath the lath-crossed plaster façade opened at Thomas’s knock, and they entered a virtual rabbit warren of low-beamed, dark rooms. Six in the evening was still very early, but wartime Paris took
its pleasures when it could—whenever it could. The medieval rooms were already half filled: with soldiers and their girls; with students self-consciously defiant in worn civilian clothing; and with petit bourgeois, the women elegant in inexpensive dresses, the men stiffly uncomfortable in their best blue suits. Wearing a loose red shirt that vaguely recalled a medieval jerkin, the waiter did not solicit their order, but placed on the rough wood table two globular glasses of brandy garnished with maraschino cherries. The chorus of a song Monsignor Charles did not recognize resounded from the next room. As far as he could make out, it related the remarkable feats of a marchioness with eighty hunters.
“I assure you, Little Brother, it’s a perfectly respectable place,” Thomas said. “You may even see another Roman collar or two. And the songs, mostly old folk songs, they’re not that bawdy.”
“I’ve heard worse,” the priest said dryly. “But, if you’re satisfied that you’re concealed in this throng, start talking. Don’t keep me waiting any longer.”
“Well, I doubt that any of these types speaks Cantonese,” the general conceded in that remarkable language, alternately as formal as a court ritual and as earthily crude as a Billingsgate fishmonger. “Our respected parents are well. They live in great outward harmony. Father’s slowed up a little, not like the Old Gentleman. And Mother’s will is as strong as ever, when she cares to press. Jonnie and Sarah? Well, it looks like true love—and he’s practically running the business, day to day, that is. But the old man’s still full of piss and vinegar. The gallant knight’s got a new concubine, a Polynesian girl he calls Opal, and …”
“So I’ve heard,” Charles interrupted. “What about James?”
“James? Him?” Nationalist Major General Thomas Sekloong frowned when he spoke of his brother, the Communist colonel. “James is crawling around in the mud and night-soil somewhere. I haven’t seen him in years. But I hear—that’s all, just hear, you understand—he’s working in the Japanese-occupied areas. Against the Japanese, he’d say, but undermining the legal government for the Communist bandits, I’d say.”
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