Thrilling Cities

by Ian Fleming

  Like the Mafia, Dick explained, the Triad member never squeals and thus, for the running of smuggling channels, the Triads provide an almost limitless army of reliable couriers for the dispersal, through Hong Kong to the rest of the Orient, of the gold bullion quite legally purchased from Dr Lobo. Only a couple of years ago, one of Jardine Matheson’s most respectable cargo and passenger ships had been arrested in Calcutta where the police found £ 200,000 worth of solid gold neatly inset and over-painted by a passenger in the woodwork of a cabin. The gold was on its way into India. Although arrests were made, the highly indignant firm of Jardines (or rather their insurance company) was fined £100,000 by the Indian Government for inadequate protective devices and for acting as a carrier, at however many removes, of smuggled gold. As a result, Jardines have had to organize their own security service to supplement the incredibly active and ingenious Hong Kong Customs and Police Department.

  I asked Dick how Dr Lobo, in the face of the Triads, managed to bring his gold bullion into Macao without its being hi-jacked in transit, and Dick explained about Len Cosgrove and his ancient Catalina amphibian. I was later to meet Len Cosgrove (in Jack Conder’s bar, of course) and I was greatly taken with him. He is a Scot, another Hemingway character, generally known as ‘Cos’, a small, tough, cheerful individual who can stand your hair on end with his stories of authentic derring-do. He was in the R.A.F. during the war and drifted into civil aviation and then into this perilous job of ferrying fortunes in gold bullion from Singapore to Dr Lobo’s vaults in Macao, expecting to be cracked on the head by a crew member or shot down by communist planes on each trip. And with these lone jobs, as he explained to me, things could go wrong. An Australian friend of his, also flying a Catalina, had been paid by a Chinese syndicate to fly a huge cargo of opium from Singapore to Macao for onward smuggling into Communist China. At the point of no return from Singapore he had flown into the edge of a monsoon and had had to keep going. With his fuel almost exhausted, he came over the islands to find Macao harbour completely obscured by low cloud. He came down through it and found himself almost on top of one of the neighbouring communist islands with a bad swell running. At this moment one of his engines failed and he decided to ditch, got the angle wrong and buried his nose in the sea. The plane slowly broke up and, as the communist gunboat appeared, he was horrified to see the canisters of raw opium bobbing about in the waves. He and his navigator spent two years in a communist jail, came out, and died of their experiences. Cos was very matter-of-fact about the hazards of his profession, but also understandably tight-lipped – not necessarily because of the secrets he knows, but because, when the last five years of his contract have run out, he wants to write his memoirs. I shall look forward to them.

  The next few days in Hong Kong were more respectable than the Macao interlude – golf at the Royal Hong Kong Club a few miles from the communist frontier, where the rattle of Bren-guns at the ranges and the occasional passage of a tank are apt to disturb one’s swing, and where the huge cartwheel hats of the Haka women, plucking weeds out of the greens with their finger-nails, form a useful back wall for the topped approach; a morning in Cat Street, the Portobello Road of Hong Kong, where I found no difficulty in rejecting the assorted chinoiserie of ten centuries; dinner one night in an enchanting Sea Palace amidst the myriad sampans that pave the fishing port of Aberdeen; and a final fling on the Hong Kong racecourse from the luxurious fastness of the Jardine box. This must be one of the most splendidly equipped racecourses in the world, with overall closed-circuit television coverage giving instantaneous photographs of the entire race, the latest totalizator (at least £30,000 is bet on each race) and modern moving staircases to each floor. There, with the help of Jardine’s know-how and a place accumulator, I recovered my and the Sunday Times’s losses in the gambling hells of Macao.

  And then it was time to go, on an evening of brilliant stars, to make the next leap, in Comet G/APDO, over Formosa and Okinawa, to Tokyo.

  I have seldom left a town with more regret.

  INCIDENTAL INTELLIGENCE

  The Bella Vista is the best hotel to stop at. Ask for a double room with veranda overlooking the wide sea-approaches to the Pearl River, which are alive day and night with fishing-junks hastening to and from Canton. (Tariff: HK$45 a day.)

  Best place for eating: the Macao Inn on the Avenue of the Republic, not far from the British Consulate and the residence of Mr Foo Tak Yam, the gambling king of the colony. Ask for the special baked or grilled Macao pigeon, or select from a wide range of peppery Portuguese dishes, including African chicken (baked in coconut). Excellent cheap, light, dry Portuguese wines.

  The gambling tables are open day and night at the Central Hotel. The cricket-fighting season is held in the autumn. There is a Grand Prix motor-race early in November.

  (Travel agencies at the leading Hong Kong hotels will buy your return ferry ticket to Macao and will also secure your passport visa for you. There is no need to change your Hong Kong dollars for Macao patacas; Hong Kong money has the same exchange rate and is as interchangeable as English money in Dublin.)

  3

  TOKYO

  I WAS FULL of reservations about Japan. Before and during the war they had been bad enemies and many of my friends had suffered at their hands. But many other friends whose opinions I value love the country and its people, and my comprador, Richard Hughes, who came with me in the Comet and who, being an Australian, should have been predisposed against Japan, was totally enamoured of it. There was nothing to do but clear my mind of the splendours of Hong Kong and prepare myself for a great deal of hissing and bowing.

  We had a happy landing. Japanese friends of Dick Hughes were at the airport to meet him and I was at once taken with ‘Tiger’ Saito, editor-in-chief of This is Japan, the massive and beautifully produced annual which the privileged receive through the Japanese Embassy around Christmas time. He was a chunky, reserved man with considerable stores of quiet humour and intelligence, and with a subdued but rather tense personality. He looked like a fighter – one of those war-lords of the Japanese films. He had, in fact, been a judo black-belt, one rank below the red-belt elite, and there was a formidable quality about him which I enjoyed. We crowded ourselves into some kind of a car and hurtled off into the night. It was an hour’s run through endless and very depressing suburbs (Tokyo, with a population of nine million, is the largest, and incidentally the most expensive, city in the world). It had been a four-and-a-half hour flight from Hong Kong. It was one o’clock in the morning and everyone was chattering about people I didn’t know. I began to long for bed and solitude.

  Dick had tried to get us into a Western hotel, but on top of hordes of American tourists attending the fashionable autumn or Chrysanthemum Season, six hundred delegates for a G.A.T.T. conference had descended on the town and Dick had finally had to accept rooms in a Japanese inn. ‘They’re wonderful,’ he enthused. ‘Much better than those ghastly Western hotels. You’ll really be seeing the Japanese way of life.’

  We bumped and clattered through darkened side-streets, stopping every now and then to verify our whereabouts and consult about the next turning. My depression grew. In due course, down a rutted lane, there was a glimmer of light coming from a pagoda-form entrance. We piled out. Immediately there were two wide-awake, bowing women in full traditional dress on the doorstep. A polite rattle of Japanese ensued. Behind the porte cochère were the dwarf shrubs and firs of a tiny Japanese garden and the outlines of some kind of a villa. My companions seemed excessively cheerful. I fixed a Japanese grin on my face and followed them to the front door and, for the first of many times, took off my shoes at the threshold and tried to stuff my feet into Japanese-size slippers.

  Inside, it was very light and gleaming with polish and cleanliness. I slip-slopped up a short shiny staircase and was shown, with many smiles and bows, through a sliding partition into one of those rooms you see in Japanese prints. There I was left alone, staring at my suitcase, while Dick’s voice boome
d happily down the corridor and the rustling sound of awakened sleepers reached me through the walls.

  I hate small, finicky, breakable things, and I am slightly over six feet tall.

  My room appeared to be made of plywood and rice-paper. The floor was carpeted with black-edged oblongs of rush matting that reminded me of uninscribed mourning cards. In the centre of the floor, or rather on it, was the spotless bedding, a thin feather mattress, sparkling sheets and a silken eiderdown. Behind the small, hard pillow was a child’s teapot, a glass with a wooden cover, a small lacquer box containing toothpicks and a bed light. Next to this, against one wall, was a very broad red lacquer table about one foot off the floor. Above this hung a scroll depicting a wispy landscape and opposite, in the corner, was what appeared to be a large earthenware wastepaper basket filled to the top with fine grey ash in which were stuck two iron styluses and a kind of iron comb. In the corner opposite on the floor stood a tall rough pottery vase containing a spindly branch encrusted with small red berries and a much shorter branch of dwarf chrysanthemums. Having read a B.O.A.C. leaflet about Japanese flower arrangement, I assumed that these twigs held some gracious message which was hidden from me. The only other furniture was a narrow shelf against one wall which held a lacquered box containing a stylus and a bottle of sepia ink and, on the floor, a telephone balanced precariously on a black lacquered mushroom.

  I moved gingerly round the walls looking for cupboards amongst the anonymous maze of what turned out to be plastic rice-paper and thin battens of three-ply. One of these revealed a wardrobe containing one coat hanger and an extra roll of bedding. Another partition concealed a blessed basin with running water. I looked again at my bulky round-the-world suitcase standing obscenely in the midst of this delicate chamber and, aching with the gorilla stance that was necessary because of the low ceiling, I slumped down on the exquisite red lacquer table and cursed gently but fluently.

  Dick appeared, happy and boisterous. ‘Where the hell do I put my clothes?’ I said. ‘What the hell’s that wastepaper-basket full of ash for? And, anyway, where’s the lavatory?’ Dick looked grieved at this Western outburst. He meekly showed me across the corridor to an odd-looking hole-in-the-floor contraption. ‘But there’s a Western one downstairs,’ he said. ‘Next to the Japanese bath.’

  ‘What the hell’s a Japanese bath?’

  ‘Oh, haven’t I told you? You’ve got to wash outside and then get into the bath. There may be other people in it but you don’t have to bother about them.’

  ‘Thanks very much.’

  ‘Perhaps you’d better put your clothes on the table. The barrel with the ash in it is for a charcoal fire.’

  I said, ‘Thanks very much,’ again, furiously, and we parted for the night.

  I will pass over the further tribulations I suffered in my dainty, willow-pattern bird-cage. I took a sleeping-pill, composed my aching limbs amongst the bedding on the floor and went to sleep trying to remember the full details of Saki’s ‘Barbary Apes Wrecking a Boudoir’.

  Dick had told me to clap my hands if I wanted anything. The next morning, awakened by a mild earthquake that rattled the hotel like a dice-box, I did this until I got bored with it and then padded downstairs and, in sign language and pidgin English, extracted a promise of breakfast from the bowing and giggling maid. She was so amused and happy about everything that I was at once filled with a good humour which remained with me for the rest of my stay in Japan. I even got to like my idiotic, damnably pretty little room, and somehow learned to contort my limbs into a painful approximation to the lotus position on the many occasions when I had to eat meals off foot-high tables. All in all, I can warmly recommend the Fukudaya Inn (it means, for what that is worth, ‘Rich Ricefield’), not far from the British Embassy. May its dwarf pine trees never grow smaller!

  With only three days in Japan, I decided to be totally ruthless. I told Dick that there would be no politicians, museums, temples, Imperial palaces or Noh plays, let alone tea ceremonies. I wanted, I said, to see Mr Somerset Maugham, who had just arrived and was receiving a triumphal welcome; visit the supreme Judo Academy; see a Sumo wrestling match; explore the Ginza; have the most luxurious Japanese bath; spend an evening with geishas; consult the top Japanese soothsayer; and take a day trip into the country. I also said that I wanted to eat large quantities of raw fish, for which I have a weakness, and ascertain whether sake was truly alcoholic or not. Thanks to Dick and Tiger Saito, I achieved all these ambitions to the full, with the exception of the Sumo wrestling bout which I was only able to see on television.

  We started off with Mr Maugham. We happen to be friends.

  Our friendship is largely based on the fact that he also wishes to be married to my wife, and he is always pleased to see me if only to hear news of her. We met at the Imperial Hotel and had a cheerful and excellent luncheon, through which Mr Maugham alternately crackled with malice about our friends in London and purred with pleasure at his first visit to the East for thirty years. After luncheon we repaired to the Kodo Kan gymnasium and judo academy for a most memorable experience.

  Briefly, judo is a philosophy, or way of life, and ju-jitsu is an art of self-defence based on judo. I have always been vaguely interested in the subject since, at Eton, two vast sergeant majors used to give exhibitions of throwing each other about with flicks of the wrist. Tiger Saito, who is an excellent photographer, accompanied us, and the head of the establishment showed us round – Mr Maugham, Mr Alan Searle, his secretary, Dick Hughes and myself. The Academy is a very large and imposing building. The ground floor is devoted to miscellaneous classes. There was a room where fifty young men were practising break-falls, another where foreigners, four Americans, a Frenchman and a Turk, were trying various holds while awaiting their teacher, and another room for the girls, who obligingly staged a mock fight, which was not as exciting as it sounds.

  Then up to the next floor and to an astonishing scene. Here, in one vast hall, upwards of two hundred individual bouts and classes were in progress. Black-belts were two a penny, but what fascinated us all was the class for children between eight and ten being conducted by a famous red-belt aged about sixty. As it might have been at some sporting event in an English school, half a dozen doting mothers sat on a bench and watched their sons with a mixture of pride and anxiety as they wrestled together or had lessons from their teachers.

  But what held our whole attention was the wise old red-belt teaching leg and kick routines to a tough, lively little boy of ten. Between these two all the traditions were strictly adhered to – the courteous bow before the lesson and after each surrender, and the smiling concentration. For perhaps ten minutes the red-belt tried to teach the little boy one particular backward hack which sweeps the legs of the opponent from under him and can only be defeated by various counter-moves. Again and again the red-belt swept the little boy’s legs from underneath him and, while holding the lapels of his wrestling robe, collapsed him gently, but not too gently, on the floor. And again and again the little boy was up and trying again, hacking bravely at the back of the red-belt’s bulging calves with the inside of his own small leg. At last he got it right and, in acknowledgment, and by no means with false theatricality, the red-belt measured his length, got to his knees, bowed to his vanquisher and they started again.

  What was so splendid about this scene was its entire seriousness. The old champion, without mockery, fell to the ground because the little boy had got the gambit absolutely right. He wanted to demonstrate to the little boy that, in jujitsu, no matter how inferior your size, Jack can bring down the Giant-killer. It was an exquisite scene, and Tiger Saito took a photograph which caught Mr Maugham exclaiming at its beauty.

  The fag end of the afternoon I spent with Japan Air Lines, whom I had chosen to carry me on to Hawaii because I was already reluctant to embrace the West again and wished to leave myself in Oriental hands for as long as possible. It was only as my ticket was being made out that I realized I would be flying the ‘Willow Pat
tern’ route on Friday the 13th. But what matter! In a book of mine, From Russia With Love, when my hero, James Bond, arranged to fly to Istanbul, there is the following passage:

  The day before, when he had left M. and had gone back to his office to arrange details of his flight, his secretary had protested violently at the idea of his travelling on Friday the 13th.