Love and the Art of War

by Dinah Lee Küng

  Chapter Thirty-one, Mei Ren Ji

  (The Beautiful Woman Trap)

  ‘Perk up, Chu the Younger! We’ve reached the final six strategies.’

  ‘Why should I perk up? Your handout calls them the Desperation Strategies. I feel desperate, right?’

  Baldwin rubbed his hands together, ‘Are you all feeling desperate tonight? Not quite? Well, they can be also be tagged as the “self-protection,” even “escape” tactics.’

  He looked at Jane. ‘You’re looking very lovely tonight, Ms Gilchrist.’

  ‘Thank you, professor, but if it’s not Jane, I’d prefer Ms King from now on. My maiden name. I suppose everybody knows by now that my partner and I separated some time ago.’

  They did indeed know. ‘He left you for that cookery slag who threw up in Knightsbridge last weekend, right?’ Keith asked. ‘Euw, did you see her photo in the Mail? Somebody caught it on his mobile before they cleaned her up.’

  ‘Fine Jane, Ms King it is, and just as lovely by any other name. And how appropriate, because tonight we study Mei Ren Ji, Number Thirty-one, the use of a beautiful woman to ensnare a man.’

  ‘Hang on,’ Winston interjected. ‘Why doesn’t Thirty-one have a four-character saying like the others? You know, something like, Touch Lotus, Eat Death.’

  Keith agreed, ‘Pretty Girl Trick just sounds naff. How’bout Lose the Race to Lovely Face?’

  ‘Or, Taste Sweet Flower, Downfall Sour?’ Kevin guffawed.

  Winston cheered up: ‘Share Her Bed, Wake Up Dead! C’mon, Nigel, you try one. Forsake Stamp Duty, Merge with Beauty?’

  ‘Clearly, you’ve all got the idea,’ Baldwin brought them to order. ‘Now, I’ll ask Nigel before he asks me: which strategy could Thirty-one compare or link up with? A true strategist combines tactics to maximum effect. But I get ahead of myself—linking them up is, in fact, a strategy all on its own, Number Thirty-Five. Well, Nigel?’

  Nigel pondered in silence.

  Jane raised her hand only a few inches. Dan didn’t bother. Winston raised his hand high. Nigel wobbled: ‘The cicada dressed in gold? No, that wouldn’t be . . . Sorry.’

  Winston couldn’t wait. ‘It’s similar to Eighteen—the attack strategy, where you capture the bandit chief and weaken the core?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose Winston’s right, actually.’ Nigel conceded.

  ‘Good, Winston! The difference is that Eighteen is a head-on, go-at-’em tactic when used on its own, while Thirty-one smacks of corruption. It doesn’t mean just seducing your enemy with a bit of skirt. You might bribe an ally or tempt an underling into executing your will.’

  Dan nodded, ‘How many virgins in paradise to get a dumb kid to blow up a train station?’

  Baldwin pointed his finger back at Dan, ‘A horrifying but pertinent example of combining Thirty-one with Number Three, Borrowing the Knife. Good! Now, let’s put sex to one side: Thirty-one can refer to any kind of bait even, Keith, a fat sales commission. Here are three levels of use.’ Baldwin had written on the board:

  1. Enamoured enemy neglects his duties and allows his vigilance to wane.

  2. Competition for the beauty inflames minor differences in the enemy’s camp, hindering co-operation and destroying morale.

  3. Enemy females at court, motivated by jealousy and envy, plot intrigues to make situation worse.

  ‘These are rather obvious. Bimbos tossed in your lap!’ Nigel tapped his pen with impatience. ‘What are the preventive tactics?’

  Baldwin turned severe. ‘Obvious, is it, Nigel? Haven’t you seen for yourself a bank deal finalised in Tokyo or Seoul by a team of skilled ladies entertaining so-called sophisticated men?’

  Nigel huffed, ‘As I said, rather obvious.’

  ‘I knew a young man once, a civil servant posted to Hong Kong when it was still a British colony. He was an Oxford man, high-flyer, lots of promise at the Foreign Office, ripe for promotion, and happily married to a very suitable woman. Then one day, a new secretary was seconded to his outer office.’

  Baldwin threw back his head and laughed with a bitter note that caught Jane’s attention: ‘Willowy, slender, a classical beauty. She’d studied her way into the civil service out of the back alleys of North Point where her Shanghainese refugee family ran a daipaidong, a noodle stand.’

  Baldwin stared out the window and said, ‘She was a girl who had stepped out of a Tang Dynasty poem by Li Po.’ He recited to the dark pane:

  Her robe is a cloud, her face a flower,

  Her balcony, glimmering with the bright spring dew,

  Is either the tip of earth’s Jade Mountain,

  Or a moon-edged roof of paradise.’

  Keith squirmed. Nigel stared at his cufflinks. Dan’s jaw tightened as he observed Baldwin’s faraway look.

  ‘I suppose that’s pretty fruity stuff in Chinese,’ Kevin said.

  ‘Fruity enough. Before he knew it, the poor man found himself without his suitable wife, without his promotion, and without any future on the Governor’s team.’

  ‘Just for shagging a local?’ Keith asked.

  ‘The girl was a plant, Keith! A spy groomed and then tossed into his lap, as Nigel would say, by the Chinese Communist Party’s intelligence agents. Obvious, except to a man who loved Chinese poetry.’

  Winston blurted out, ‘What happened then?’ when Jane kicked his ankle.

  During the break, she scolded him, ‘You twit! Baldwin was talking about himself! “What happened then?” Instead of being ambassador to Beijing, Baldwin ended up teaching idiots like us in a broom closet, that’s what happened then.’

  ‘Poor guy,’ Dan sighed. ‘Blown out of the water by a honey trap. It must feel like missing a basket in the final shoot-off. You replay it in your dreams until—why, that’s what he’s doing with our class! Replaying the strategic game he lost, over and over. It’s kinda sad.’

  ‘He said he was childless,’ Winston said. ‘So, I guess he’s really on his own, just his class and Tang poetry books. Nigel’s right—’

  ‘Winston, did I hear you say Nigel’s right? Forty lashes with a wet noodle!’ Jane punched the boy’s shoulder.

  Winston protested, ‘I mean Nigel’s right when he says that Thirty-one is so obvious. I can just see Baldwin in a saggy tropical-weight three-piece suit in a back office—I know Hong Kong, remember? He’s got just a sliver of a view through the pollution over Admiralty Station, with pile drivers in the harbour going bam bam bam all day, and a lunchbox of curried noodles at his desk. Then, one day, some babe comes on to him? The poor, deluded old scarecrow, trying to be a Tang lover.’

  Jane watched Baldwin across the canteen. While he fished out some spare change for his tea, the teacher of ‘Sane Separation’ nobbled him for her table. A beaver-like woman full of teeth under a helmet of dark hair, she introduced the stooped Sinologist to her wan-looking ladies garbed in long skirts and hand-knitted sweaters.

  “Maybe he wasn’t always a scarecrow,’ she said to Winston and Dan. She stared at the Mending Marriage group. That could have been me. Should have been me, nesting among those desperate women. No tempting beauties there. I should talk. I’m pretty well separated from Joe, with no marriage to mend. Not even the satisfaction of a proper divorce—decent or otherwise. At least Baldwin’s class kept me going.

  Dan said, ‘He’s a tragic figure, brought low by love.’

  Good-natured Dan, never tortured like Joe by frustrated ambitions but strangely accepting of too much. Perhaps he wasn’t for Jane in the long run, but there was no denying that if she had found the right classroom last September, she would never have felt so buoyant, not to mention even beautiful, with Dan this evening.

  On Winston’s suggestion, they ate a late dinner at the Moonbeam, their conversation fighting the clamour of the kitchen staff at the back. Cecilia bantered with Dan in Mandarin.

  Winston shrugged, ‘I should’ve kept up my classical Chinese. But it was all I could do to get my A-levels without Saturday mornings wasted on flash cards
and stroke order.’

  Dan chugged down his cold beer with zest. ‘So how’s the Romance of the Two Kingdoms going, Winston?’

  Winston looked at his friends from under a clouded brow. ‘Not quite at the double-wedding stage, but I wouldn’t rule it out. Although Selina and Nelson did have a row. She asked him to go to Prague to check out cheap components but Nelson’s waiting for delivery of some film-editing software. They argued for hours—components or I-Movie Ten? Whatev. Anyway, threatening Dad with a Sultana take-over was a complete non-starter.’

  ‘Don’t give up.’ Jane said. ‘If Selina starts to call the shots, your Dad could get cold feet.’

  ‘Cold feet! Hardly. The transformation of my father into Belsize Park’s Don Juan is terrifying! Not only does he not blanch at the suggestion of submerging Chu Printers into Sultana Software, he’s outfitting his private office with a new sofa.’

  Dan worried. ‘Not a sofa bed?’

  ‘Oh, don’t go there. My poor late mother. Could I please have another Sprite, Cecilia?’

  It was a sad reflection on Baldwin’s class that Winston had learned so little about Chinese defensive or offensive strategy. He might even flunk.

  ‘Oh, man, look who’s here,’ Winston cowered. ‘See for yourself, Dan.’

  The doorbells jangled to the entry of Nelson and a well-rounded young woman wearing a fake fur, jeans, and black patent platform boots. They took the first empty table without waiting for Cecilia to seat them.

  ‘Well, well, well. So that is the enemy prince?’

  ‘Please, Dan. Just ignore them,’ Winston hissed.

  Dan ignored Winston instead. He rose from his chair to introduce himself, shake Nelson’s hand, greet Selina, and return with the cooing couple to Winston’s side. Selina was charming, if a tad cagey. Nelson’s blinding smile made it obvious that, as far as he was concerned, the Chu and Leong Empires were not at each other’s throats, unless it was to leave those purple love bites on each other’s gullets visible even now under the restaurant’s garish lights.

  Cecilia poured more green tea and disappeared through the swinging kitchen door. Slaving for her parents had left her hollow-eyed. Dan asked Nelson what he should order for the main dishes.

  Nelson shrugged. ‘Ask Winston.’

  ‘You don’t come here often?’

  ‘Hey, no, this is Winston’s hang out. I’ve never been here before.’

  Selina bit down on a salted peanut. ‘It’s my mother’s favourite mah-jong place,’ she told Jane.

  Cecilia served rice to a party at a table nearby. ‘Have I seen that babe before?’ Nelson winked at Dan, as if they were already bosom friends from back in the days when Xy-write was hot.

  ‘You tell me,’ the affable Dan replied. ‘Here, try some crispie thingies.’

  ‘Cute figure. She’s familiar somehow.’ Nelson’s high, smooth cheekbones caught the glint of the cheap lanterns.

  ‘She’s just the waitress, Nelson,’ Selina said.

  A controlling type, Jane thought. Winston’s tactics might yet work. Behind Selina’s flawless complexion, flicked-ended eyeliner and sticky lip gloss lurked Madame Leong II. She only lacked the cigarette holder from Penang and a turban in Day-Glo orange jersey to nail down Nelson’s future fate as consort to the Leong matriarchy.

  ‘ . . . then you upload the finished video from your camera to your Google account and link it to your channel. YouTube tracks the hits . . .’ Poor Cecilia hovered over Nelson, balancing platters in both arms. Finally Nelson made room for her to arrange the overflowing dishes around the table. She topped up everyone’s glasses and refilled the teapot. Only Winston shrugged a sort of lopsided apology to her for his companions. Jane also noticed her, so young and tired, listening to the fun but left out and unnoticed.

  Nelson kept up with his sales pitch. ‘Dan, I bet you have a whole closetful of shoeboxes stuffed with old family movies. This way, you transfer them to digital, upload them for private viewing . . . ’

  Cecilia held the steaming kettle of tea to one side and interrupted Nelson softly, ‘Excuse me, but you can’t upload more than ten minutes unless you upgrade your account.’ Nelson didn’t appreciate Cecilia’s pathetic attempt to cross the line from waitress to conversationalist. Seeing him scowl, the girl added, ‘I’ll get more rice, on the house.’

  She scraped a plastic ladle around the sides of the rice pot for the last, crispy morsels as Nelson ploughed on: ‘What’s really cool, Dan, is that Google profiles your viewer hits by region, by country and URL address.’

  ‘Nelson, I’m divorced. If I have a box of videos, I don’t want to look at them again, much less post them on the Internet. I’m still in the Ice Age, fellah! My old video camera is so big, it wouldn’t fit into this bag!’

  ‘Oh, that’s too bad,’ Nelson commiserated. ‘The new babies on your I-phone fit into your palm.’

  ‘So I’d jump straight to mobile technology if all you want is a few minutes on the run,’ said Cecilia, smiling at Dan. ‘And go for high definition. Don’t get something out-dated fobbed off on you by a slick salesman.’

  Nelson watched Cecilia clear another table. ‘Slick salesman. She’s got a nerve. God, who wears braids like that? Give me a beautiful woman in a fur bikini, not a greasy cheongsam, right, Dan?’ He grabbed the rice bowl to his mouth and shovelled away.

  Winston leaned over to Jane. ‘See. I told you. He’s got the fur bikini on the brain. Selina caught Nelson watching that HeiBai chick a few nights ago. She practically strangled him with his earphone cords.’

  Jane considered Selina, sitting opposite. ‘She doesn’t seem ready to break up with Nelson over a YouTube fantasy. I see the deposit of your whole inheritance into the Leong bank account before my very eyes, Winston. Pity you can’t download HeiBai Girl into three dimensions to use The Beautiful Woman Trap and lure Nelson off into cyberspace.’

  ‘To use Thirty-one on Nelson, I’d have to knock him out, envelope him in bubble-wrap, and express him to Shanghai, which you can see is where his table manners got stuck.’

  Selina was nuzzling Nelson’s ear. Winston covered his eyes. ‘Oh, they’re disgusting. My future as deputy manager goes right down the drain.’

  At that moment, Selina’s mother, Madame Leong, sailed into the Moonbeam with Winston’s father hanging like an adoring, if emaciated handbag off her formidable elbow. Winston lifted a resigned hand in greeting and with futile filial piety, fetched two more seats.

  ‘Correction. If I play my cards very carefully, Jane,’ he said in a bitter tone. ‘I’ll work my way up to assistant deputy sales manager and all this.’

  Chapter Thirty-two, Kong Zheng Ji

  (The Empty City Scheme)

  Three weeks of Baldwin’s class remained, to be followed by a long break while they prepared for exams. No more Friday nights with Keith, Kev, or Nigel for Jane. Even Winston would recede into the misty Territory of Chu to cram for his final. How did Dan expect their romance to evolve? Was his secondment from the NYPD to London fixed or open-ended? Was he growing sick of staking out amateur wannabe’s while his colleagues back home cracked the conspiracies of hardened terrorists?

  Dan’s attentions to Jane had plateaued comfortably at the level you’d expect for a man on temporary overseas duty. He hadn’t said anything one way or the other. He skirted Jane’s fishing questions, as if he’d absorbed Stratagem Thirty-two, The Empty City Scheme, that recommended anyone under siege drop all pretence of military preparedness and act casually.

  ‘When facing an advancing opponent, the commander opened the gates of the city. Sitting on the city wall in plain view of the enemy, he played music on his zither,’ Baldwin taught them. ‘Suspecting an ambush, his enemy withdrew.’

  Despite her misleading hints to Bella and Rachel, Jane didn’t need Dan’s commitment. She enjoyed the ambiguity of their romance and the secrecy of his work. She needed room to rebuild her life at her own pace. It certainly was a change from the kind of tension she was accustomed to�
�being sucked into Joe’s ambitions, enthusiasms and disappointments. A lot of energy had gone into sharing Joe’s moods, fighting for distance, and in the end, buffering herself from Joe’s roller coaster needs.

  Jane tried to imagine daily life with Dan. His work style and personality meant there might be city gates that would never open.

  She stared out at the square and watched the arrival of one neighbour and the departure of another. So many were strangers these days. They knew nothing of the old days when, in the cause of scraped knees and borrowed birthday-cake tins, Jane had bounced in and out of homes on all sides of the square. Now the Gilchrists were an anomaly, possibly the only middle-class family left. The square seemed immune to property bubbles and busts. Apart from the incongruous bookstore and Joop’s Painted Angel, it qualified as a celebrity biosphere all by itself.

  Nevertheless, it was still their home, or at least, nominally Lorraine’s home for as long as she wanted, and that meant Jane and Sammie’s, too. Yet, there was the possibility that like all of Lorraine’s tours, life at the square must eventually see the curtain fall.

  There was a respectful knock at the door that bordered on the facetious. Lorraine’s recognition that Jane had changed the keys to the front door now produced a theatrical rapping right out of farce. Opening her door, Jane faced Princess Alexandra, The Honourable Lady Ogilvy LG GCVO, the youngest granddaughter of King George V and Queen Mary, in full Battle Dress.

  Or not.

  ‘Omigod, I don’t believe it!’ Jane was quick to curtsey.

  ‘Not bad, eh? Ready for Curtain, Overture, and Beginners, please!’

  Lorraine glided into the room on borrowed high heels. She extended her right hand in front of her as if parting a Red Sea of peasants.

  ‘This is just a dry run. I just went up to the butcher’s and he greeted me in front of all his customers as Your Royal Highness! There were three or four people standing around his shop and boy, did their dentures drop! I swear, they bought my act, kid!’