V. clears his throat and blows half the snuff back out of his nose into a square of fine linen. He’s disgusting.
‘Arms dealing? Exactly what do you know of arms dealing? Wasn’t it you who accused me of profiting from the war trade? Hmm?’
‘I’ve had my moments of intrigue, ‘ I protest weakly.
He looks skeptical. ‘I tried intrigue myself. I wanted to be a diplomat, a go-between, an intriguant. I actually offered to spy on my friend, Frederick the Great.’
‘You?’ No one as indiscreet, as vain, as out there, as Voltaire could pull off diplomatic spying.
‘It’s true,’ V. insists. ‘On October 20th, 1740, the ruler of the Austro-Hungarian empire died, leaving the throne to the young Maria Theresa. All eyes turned to Prussia where my friend and admirer, the young Frederick not-yet-so Great, was visibly aching to use his army of 100,000. Was my philosophy pupil going to turn out to be a warmonger like all the other kings?’
This grand introduction has not deterred me from clearing the breakfast dishes. Irritated by the indifferent bustle around him, V. stands to attention, ‘I wrote to the French minister, Cardinal Fleury, and offered my services as Secret Agent for France.’
I stop, cups and saucers balanced mid-air, and shake my head. ‘A spy for Versailles? They’d just run you out of town.’
‘Yes, well, I was determined to raise my standing a little around court by winning Prussia’s friendship for France.’
‘Wasn’t Fred already a friend of France?’
‘Eh bien, he was under-impressed, you might say, by King Louis’ military record. As Frederick said to me, an army that runs away for three years in succession and is defeated everywhere it shows its face, is not exactly a troop worthy of Caesar or Alexander.’
Always the perfect gentleman, V. carries a single dirty cup to the sink.
‘Nonetheless, I left Paris with secret instructions from the Foreign Minister Amelot to make clear to King Frederick the danger that threatened him from Austria, which had just attacked us in France. I would induce Frederick to ally with the French.’
‘You just turned up in Prussia for a chat?’
‘Ah, non, you’re right, I needed a pretext. So I contrived a very public quarrel with that ass of a Bishop of Mirepoix, and I wrote to Frederick that I wished to find refuge with him at the Court of Prussia. The Bishop was, of course, informed that I had insulted him.’
‘He didn’t mind his new international reputation as an ass?’
‘Oh, yes, the old bishop complained to King Louis who assured him that his ordained asshood was agreed upon for state reasons.’
Something tells me that insulting Church leaders is a typically misguided Voltairean start to his new espionage career.
‘Of course, I got Frederick to pay all my expenses for my journey.’
‘You were spying for King Louis. Why didn’t he pay?’
‘Oh, I had a separate deal with Louis that my cousin became the French army’s supplier of food and uniforms, with a percentage for me. Then I negotiated a cut from the Brothers Paris for the food supplies I had already procured.’
‘So to recap, you were a spy for peace paid with war profits?’
Ignoring my insinuations, he continues, ‘Meanwhile, I set about my mission. For three months, I waged my secret diplomacy, first from Frederick’s palace in the Hague. Through the aid of the Prussian Ambassador’s mistress, wife of an influential Dutch official, I obtained copies of secret agreements between states hostile to France. I passed to Versailles exact information about military expenses and strengths of the Dutch troops.’
‘That’s not bad,’ I concede.
‘Then I proceeded to Berlin where I used all my flattery and wit to persuade Frederick to ally himself with Louis.’
‘So far so good. Now,’ I slam the dishwasher door shut and start up the machine, ‘exactly where did you go wrong?’
He stiffens with surprise. ‘Why do you ask that?’
‘I start to know you.’
He sheepishly mutters, ‘The French ambassador to Berlin felt upstaged by my scheme. He informed Frederick he was nurturing a spy in his bosom. Frederick started opening my letters—’
‘You were probably opening his—’
‘—whenever I got a chance. But I think what he really didn’t like was paying me back the three thousand thalers he owed me for publishing his critique of Machiavelli in France; that and my travelling costs.’
‘In short, Fred didn’t like paying for the pleasure of being spied on, even by you?’
V. straightens his sleeves and brushes croissant crumbs off his lacy cuff. ‘Well, that hardly justifies starting the First Silesian War over the Austrian succession. Eight years of bloodshed because I wanted my outlays repaid! Really!’
I laugh, agreeing wholeheartedly that this is an instance of expense account bickering gone horribly wrong.
I look at him directly. ‘That wasn’t the real reason.’
‘No,’ V. admits, ‘Frederick allied himself with France on and off when it suited him, but no thanks to my efforts. You see, Madame, intrigue does not always live up to its reputation.’
‘Well, you blew it with your Berliner. Now listen to my story about a German arms smuggler. Your mistake was assuming there was intrigue waiting for you. I assumed there was no intrigue at all, but boy, was I wrong.’
‘Is this a true story or one of your thriller efforts?’
‘It’s true. In fact, I’m so afraid that the villain might turn up at my door for revenge, I’m going to change the names.’
***
The weather that January morning of 1989 is cold and humid. The office windows leak wet gusts and our secretary, Dorothy, empties the plastic bin of the dehumidifier twice before lunch.
Dori Jones Yang had hired me away from the Economist to Business Week only a few months before. It’s early days for me with a new publication. I have to prove myself.
Our two workspaces are divided by a sliding cardboard partition somewhat warped by steamy summers. Our swivel chairs are upholstered in plastic leather so cracked the stuffing pokes through. McGraw Hill’s steel-and-glass tower on the Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan is a far cry from these low-rent accommodations.
Dori thrusts a telex from New York at me and asks offhandedly, ‘Can you look into this? I don’t think it’ll come to much, but we have to answer it anyway.’
I can see Dori’s working flat out to finish a cover story. The pressure is obvious from two telltale signs; she’s forgotten to remove a metal hair clip before leaving home this morning, and she has immediately scattered the top of her desk with M&M candies, her deadline fuel.
A little discouraged, I scan this tag end of a job. New York asks us to follow up a curious news item coming out of Germany. A chemical weapons plant capable of producing both mustard and Sarin gas is close to completion in Rabta, Libya, A Hong Kong company, the innocuous-sounding Wing-wing Trading, appears to have sold equipment made in Germany by Von Stall Chemie to Colonel Gaddafi. Yesterday, Dr. Von Stall appeared at a press conference in Bonn denying all knowledge of the deal.
‘‘Oh, God,’ I sigh. ‘Lemme read this again. Von Stall equipment sold by a Hong Kong company was photographed in Libya . . . ’
Dori laughs a little apologetically. ‘Yeah, it sounds like a wild goose chase.’
‘I’ll make some calls,’ I say. Rousing myself, I stalk stoically a couple of blocks through the clanging streets. All umbrellas seemed perfectly aimed at my eye line, garbage clogs up the gutters, and anything that makes Hong Kong a glamorous tourist destination seems to have taken refuge on the far side of the island,
I ride the soulless elevator up to Hong Kong’s very unpicturesque Office of Business Registrations to set off on a paper trail. I call for Wing-wing Trading’s file number and wait twenty minutes in a crowd of teenage Cantonese office boys. I wish I had remembered to buy a sandwich on the way.
A harried clerk slams a tower of tape-b
ound government flies on the main counter. A rugby scrum breaks out while the flies, grubby cotton tapes flying, are handed out. I flip through the thin Wing-wing file. It seems that Wing-wing Trading is owned by a textile firm, Wing Trading Corp. That means another quarter of an hour’s wait to open another anorexic file revealing that Wing Trading Corp. is run by a certain Martin W.W. Chong and Cecilia P.K. Tso, directors of something called Q&K Secretaries.
So, it’s back to request Q&K Secretaries to surface from the basement archives. The file contains only a couple of sheets of paper and enjoys a cross-holding arrangement with yet another company bearing the curious name, Kwok Medical Center.
The lunch hour is crawling past me, while I wait for Queen Elizabeth’s loyal clerks to wipe the curry chicken noodles off their chins and rummage through their basement of battered folders yet again.
I feel desolate. I let myself be lured from a decent beat analyzing Chinese Communist politics at the Economist for a career at Business Week plugging up little holes in other people’s stories. Pile after pile of bound files slam down on the front desk. My number for Kwok Medical Center is finally shouted out over the running hubbub—
Voltaire looks worriedly at his empty mug. ‘Is this a long story?’ he asks.
‘Longer than your spy episode, but not as long as your murder,’ I say pointedly, annoyed at his impatience.
‘If there are more of these files to wait for, l’d better boil more water,’ he says.
‘No, now it gets more interesting . . .’
Kwok Medical Center’s file is much fatter, and I wend back through quarter after quarter of unimpressive earnings, to come across an inexplicable shift in the company’s fortunes. Kwok was founded by a couple of Germans back in the seventies to trade in Chinese herbal medicines. Hippie healing had fallen on moribund times, but they struggled along on tiny profits. Then in 1984 control of the limping Kwok Medical Center shifted to the mysterious Cantonese cotton-trading duo in Mongkok, the directors of Wing-wing.’
‘So there was a German connection!’ V. lights up.
‘Exactly. I jot down the addresses, noting that Wing-wing’s Chong and Tso live in the same Kowloon apartment, possibly as man and wife. The Wing-wing operation sits in Mongkok, Hong Kong’s most crowded industrial district—’
‘—and as far from the desert wastelands of Libya as one could imagine,’ V. comments perceptively.
‘Indeed.’
When I emerge from the Mongkok metro station, it’s pissing with rain. The neighborhood is a wilderness of rackety trams and double-parked trucks. The sidewalks are impassable, blocked up with hawkers selling hot chestnuts or tacky baby clothes. I get to Wing-wing’s office block—cement corridors stinking of dog shit and ask myself, this is the secret hideout of a global poison-gas fiend?
‘Inside the nondescript offices of Wing-wing Trading Corp. and Kwok Medical Center there are these two secretaries slurping curry noodles and tea. They just gape open-mouthed at this guay-po arriving out of nowhere.
‘What’s a guay-po?’ V. interrupts.
‘Cantonese for foreign devil woman.’
I start to introduce myself, and trip over bales of cotton samples. They start giggling behind their hands. Bundles of fabric are blocking the entry, piled on the shelves, everywhere. I glance inside Chong’s inner office door and—surprise, surprise—the International Sarin Smuggler is out to lunch. All over his office I see these Rotary club plaques and jokey desk toys—I mean, obviously this guy is just one of thousands of little nobodies running textile businesses across the Chinese border. A medical center? There isn’t a pharmaceutical degree in sight!
‘Much less a signed portrait of Gaddafi,’ V. adds. ‘Precisely.’
I stop near the front door, you know, just to think. I’ve lost an hour. And I’m standing there by the fax machine, when I notice the usual list of auto-dialing codes on the wall. I expect to see area codes for China or Britain. But no—the first six area codes are for Germany, Liechtenstein, and Austria.
‘Another German connection!’
‘Well, it’s something unusual.’
I write the numbers down, although I still feel a bit of a jerk. Back in the office, Dori’s spirits are flying high, working with inserts from our colleagues in Tokyo, Seoul and Paris. I tell her all I’ve got are six note pages of shareholdings and addresses of these dummy companies that trade cotton shirts.’
Voltaire interrupts, ‘You didn’t abandon the hunt?’
‘I was tempted. It was typical Hong Kong. You’re a businessman, Monsieur, but you don’t know the Chinese mania for sequestering wealth behind a string of nominee companies.’
‘Well, I bought and sold a lot of properties in my time,’ shrugs V. ‘But I didn’t trust shareholdings after the collapse of Law’s banking scheme bankrupted the French Crown. Do go on.’
Well, just when I’m about to give up, I notice something in my notes. Before it became a meaningless plaque on Mr Chong’s mildewed wall, Kwok’s offices were in the Central district. And there’s a suspicious time gap between the German herbal hippies and the cotton-trading Rotarian. So instead of listening to Dori munch M&Ms, I take a taxi to the address—a spooky, old colonial low-rise in the oldest part of Hong Kong. Next to a heavy mahogany door upstairs, there’s this elegant teak signboard painted with the names of about two hundred companies. I’ve stumbled into an office devoted to managing ‘shelf companies.’
‘Shells? Seafood vendors?’ Voltaire looks startled, trying to follow.
I laugh. ‘No, companies that just sit on shelves and hold other companies.’
‘Fascinating. . .’ My friend Voltaire takes a note, I fear for his own future financial shenanigans.
A beautiful secretary ushers me into the office of Mr Woo, a whip-thin Chinese in pinstripes. We drink jasmine tea while the willowy Iris looks up Kwok. ‘Oh, yes, I remember the Kwok sale, about five years ago,’ says Woo. ‘A European stranger came here in person. I believe he left his card. It should be here in the file.’
Iris deposits the Kwok ring-binder into my lap. An oversize piece of pasteboard, an almost royal calling card, has been punched and ringed, along with the company papers. It reads: Dr. Gerhard Von Stall, Managing Director, Von Stall Companies.
‘Extraordinaire!’
‘Yes! Just like that! Sitting in my lap!’
Photocopies of letters, bank records and shareholdings, showing how the ‘innocent’ son-in-law of the patriarch of the German chemical giant Von Stall Chemie walked Hong Kong’s streets like a spider weaving a web to avoid international sanctions selling chemical weapons to Libya.
He purchased Kwok off the shelf and then opened a new Swiss bank account in Hong Kong for it, giving Kwok a 23% shareholding in the venerable Von Stall Chemie GMBH, which would have been worth millions to the hapless ‘director,’ the Rotarian Chong, had he ever known. His account application has telefax numbers identical to Von Stall’s Liechtenstein branch—the same numbers I copied off Chong’s wall back in Mongkok. Then Kwok opened a Hamburg subsidiary in 1987, allowing the deadly Von Stall equipment to be sold to a German entity with a Hong Kong headquarters, thereby evading export control laws.
Like a good German schoolboy, Yon Stall had recorded Kwok’s business purpose as, ‘trading chemicals outside Hong Kong.’ Not textile or herbal medicines. Poison gas.
I lean back and beam at Voltaire. His third pot of coffee sits untouched. His mouth is hanging open.
‘Did you get him?’
I blush only a little.
‘Not alone of course, but I supplied the missing proof.’
U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency officers photocopied the documents the day after Business Week published its eight-column story. Dr. Gerhard von Stall was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison in Germany. Stern ran a two-page photo spread of him in a nifty pair of handcuffs. It made a handsome wall decoration for our office.
V. is shaking his head in wonder. ‘Quite intriguing.’
/>
‘You might have made just as good a spy if Frederick hadn’t been so quick-witted.’
‘To be sure,’ V. admits. ‘To be sure. Your own German was a monumentally clumsy intriguant, in may say so.’
‘Don’t be jealous. They say every criminal has a telltale modus operandi, a sort of operational calling card that can be read by the well-trained eye. In my case, the culprit left his actual calling card!’
V. sniffs. ‘Never underestimate the arrogance of the Germans, or for that matter, the aristocracy in any century. And you realize, when you set out that ordinary rainy morning, you could not have imagined the day would end in international triumph. You didn’t think you would find anything so fascinating, hmm?’
I don’t like where this is heading.
‘You’re hinting that I shouldn’t dismiss the possibilities of village life in Switzerland?’
‘Perhaps?’
‘All right, I’ll stop saying it’s dull. For example, there’s something weird about the local ceramist—’
He nods, ‘—making teapots with the spouts that look like—’
‘Uncircumcised penises!’ I burst out laughing. ‘Have you seen them in the window next to the tabac?’’
‘Tasteless kitsch! Madame de Pompadour put France’s state budget back on track by setting up her porcelain factory. You could use a Madame de Pompadour here, if only to improve the quality of the handicrafts.’
‘Tell me about Pompadour,’ I urge him. I’m afraid that he’s going to make his excuses to run off and leave me alone making lunch. He’s always busy with something.
‘Once I’ve finished my new entries in the Dictionnaire Philosophique.’
V. strolls away, murmuring, ‘Hmm, shelf company.’
Like I said, things are getting worryingly predictable around here, even the ghosts. However, I was determined to hear more about Pompadour later.
Chapter Fourteen A MORSEL FOR A KING
During my years in England and China, a fellow Californian was following a different path.
A Visit From Voltaire Page 16