“It’s a lot older. Last time I was on it we were still using a sextant.”
Emily laughed, turned to Charlie. “Aren’t the British cute? And smart. You can hide anything behind self-mockery.”
She stood beside him at the rail so that he was caught between them. Through the deck Chan felt an increase in engine revolutions. The view was changing swiftly as they approached the harbor walls.
Cuthbert offered Emily a cigarette, which she refused. He replaced the silver case in his pocket.
“Come now, no one has mastered false modesty better than the Chinese. The first time I went to Beijing there were still restaurants calling themselves the Worst Restaurant on Earth. That was before the party purged Confucius, of course.”
“But that’s the point,” Emily said. “It was too obvious; it didn’t work. But you, you ran the largest empire in history on bluff, paternalism … and phony self-effacement.”
“And the Maxim gun. We started giving the colonies back when everyone else got one.”
The harbor walls curved around in two scythes with a gap between them toward which every boat was racing. On either side green hills plunged down to a sea choppy from conflicting bow waves. Once past the harbor walls the boat picked up speed. Chan could hear the beginnings of a turbo whine behind the roar of the diesels.
“Just out of interest, how far could you travel on a boat like this?” Chan asked. He saw Cuthbert frown.
“You’d have to ask the captain for an accurate estimate,” Emily said. “Most places on the South China seaboard anyway.”
“D’you take it to China much?” Chan felt in his shorts for a pack.
Emily was staring at a large two-masted yacht that was in the process of raising a mainsail. As the crew winched in the sail, the boat heeled and shot forward, a gull racing over the waves.
She looked up at Chan. “Uh-huh. Now and then. By the way, you left your cigarettes on the bridge. I brought them for you.”
She took the pack from her pocket, smiled. “You don’t have to worry, we’re not headed for China today. We’re going the other way, about fifty miles due south in the direction of the Philippines. There’s a reef. It’s not Palawan or Phuket, but the diving’s pretty good. Milton dives, so it’ll be the three of us. Jenny won’t be allowed in her condition.”
34
C
han stood at the bows when the crew dropped anchor. It was almost night in the middle of nowhere. The galvanized scoop-shaped anchor plunged into the blackening sea, drawing a trail like a falling jet until it disappeared. The captain reversed the engines to ensure that the anchor caught on the seabed, then stilled them. Silence.
Emily’s voice came over a loudspeaker. “Sorry to do this, but everyone’s all over the place. Rumor has it that we’re all hungry, including me. So I thought we’d eat early. Like in twenty minutes on the upper rear deck?”
She repeated the sentence in Mandarin.
The crew folded the awning away from the upper rear deck, unwrapping the first stars. Chan watched Emily light candles along the center of the table. She used a gas cigarette lighter, which illuminated her features from a different angle at each candle. Chan saw the determined jaw, tired eyes, the beginnings of age, flashes of incandescent energy, the pursed lips of regret, raw lust. Before each small explosion of light she paused to make sure he was watching.
The others drifted up from the berths below to take their places under Emily’s direction. Xian sat at one end next to the stern; Emily sat at the other. Chan found himself sitting opposite Jenny, who avoided his eyes. The Sri Lankan cook arrived with the hors d’oeuvres, climbing silently up the stairs, her face so black it was invisible against the night except for her wide white eyes.
Xian cleared his throat, said something in Mandarin.
“Mr. Xian is going to say a few words,” Emily translated.
“Thanks to the gods China is rising. It is my opinion that with China, the world also will rise. China is the world’s new destiny. I am glad that all of you from different countries are here with me tonight to celebrate this new destiny.”
“Here, here,” Cuthbert said, before Emily had finished translating.
“Here, here,” Jonathan repeated loudly, apparently to please Xian and Emily. Jenny also repeated the phrase, without conviction.
“I’ll drink to that.” Emily let a beat pass to see if Chan was going to speak, then: “To China.”
Chan nodded. “To China.” From the corner of his eye he saw the old man look at him and smile. He leaned over toward Emily. “Did he really say, ‘Thanks to the gods’?”
Emily hesitated. “Yes, that’s what he said.” She held up a hand. “I know, that phrase was banned during the Cultural Revolution. Let’s not push the point. He didn’t say, ‘Thanks to the Revolution.’ Can we leave it at that?”
Xian spoke again. Emily translated into Mandarin.
“He understood what you said. He says, when he said, ‘Thanks to the gods,’ that’s what he meant.”
Chan looked at Cuthbert, who sat quietly, smiling.
Jonathan cleared his throat. “Just think, how international everyone is these days. Any one of us could be in a different country this time tomorrow. Take me, five days ago I was in Beijing.”
Emily translated into Mandarin, listened to Xian’s reply, then laughed.
“Mr. Xian says that there may not be national boundaries in the future, but there will always be China. China was there at the beginning and will be at the end. Didn’t you feel so very Chinese when you visited Beijing?”
“Definitely, it was like a spiritual homecoming.” Catching the sneer on his wife’s face, Jonathan looked down.
Chan cleared his throat. “The only time I went to Beijing I felt very Chinese.”
“Oh, yes?” Emily sounded surprised.
“Yes. It was late autumn. The peasants had brought all the cabbages in from the countryside. Everywhere you looked, all around Tiananmen Square: cabbages. All along Wangfujing you saw barricades and even mountains of what they were calling
aiguo cai
—‘national vegetable.’ It was that dark ugly green cabbage that they use for bitter soup. All over the city stalls were selling bitter soup. Even the rich were drinking it, as a kind of fashion. The party said it should remind people of the bitter years before communism. But it was nearly fifty years after the Communist Revolution, and almost everyone still had to drink this bitter soup for the vitamin C. Of course I had to have some. It was really the most bitter thing I’ve ever tasted. I’ve never felt so Chinese.”
He saw that Emily had stopped translating and everyone except Cuthbert was avoiding his eyes. He leaned forward again, this time turning toward Xian and looking him directly in the eye. At each question and answer, Emily translated.
“You must have been in the Communist party for a long time?”
“Correct.”
“And I’m sure you impressed senior cadres with your grasp of Marxist-Leninism and Mao Zedong’s thought?”
“Certainly, one had to know a lot about such things.”
“But now China is in the hands of the gods again?”
“When you were a young cadet in the Royal Hong Kong Police Force, did you take your oath to the queen of England?”
Chan twitched and ignored the question. “Does it worry you that China is becoming increasingly corrupt?”
Xian leaned back in his chair. “We’re learning capitalism. Corruption is stage one—personalized profit motive. Does it worry you that England and the United States used to be extremely corrupt and probably still are? Hong Kong owes its origin to the enforced sale of opium to our people. More than one half of the income of the United Kingdom in the nineteenth century came from the sale of opium. Capitalism has won; now the West must pay the price for forcing this system upon us.” Xian leaned forward, smiled. “But don’t quote me.”
Only Cuthbert laughed.
• • •
Chan sat on the swimming deck under a sky of black velvet. Water lapped inches below. Between gaps in the planks it reflected the stars and occasionally offered its own green luminescence.
He knew that Jenny would join him. He heard a soft padding on the deck above, a hesitancy around the steel ladder.
“Charlie?”
How well he remembered those whispers in the night.
“Here.”
“Gosh, it’s black down here.”
“Need any help?”
“No, I’m okay.”
They almost always spoke in English, not out of deference to their father but in obedience to their mother. In Mai-mai’s day even simple peasants knew you had to learn English to get on. Now everyone was scrambling to learn Mandarin.
She sat next to him, took his hand, waited before she spoke.
He badly needed to smoke. He wriggled to free the pack from the pocket under his buttock.
“I need one too.”
He lit two, passed her one.
She sucked deeply, then blew the smoke out in a thick stream. “This is definitely the only one I’m going to have for the next eight months. Being on a boat with you, though, under the stars—” She dropped her voice, as if she expected him to silence her. “Remember when we took up smoking?”
“Of course. The night after Aunt told us they’d killed her. I haven’t missed a day since.”
“Charlie, no man is ever going to replace you in my heart, even though I’m going to have Jonathan’s baby—”
“Don’t start that again. I’m your brother, a dumb, hard-bitten cop. He’s a fine man, rich, successful, fantastic with people—all that.”
She giggled. “You’re so unconvincing when you lie. Lawyers are such creeps, aren’t they? The way he sucks up to Xian and Emily really gets on my nerves.”
In the dark he smiled. Nothing would cure her of loose talk apparently. He tried to make his voice stern. “We shouldn’t be talking like this. It’s disloyal of you.”
“You’re the one I’m loyal to. Don’t shush me; it’s an accident of history. When I was a skinless bundle of hurt, you held me tight and saved me with love. When I remember that summer, it’s like you were holding me tight all the time. I didn’t have your strength. I was borderline psychotic. I know that now; I’ve been reading about trauma, victims of violence—”
“Stop! Please.”
She was silent for a moment, started on another tack. “Jonathan put a lot of pressure on me to persuade you to come on this trip.”
“That I guessed.”
“I don’t know exactly why, but it has to do with Xian. Jonathan says it’s in your interests to get to know him. He’s going to be running Hong Kong after June, they say. If you make him happy, you could be commissioner of police.” She held up a hand to stop Chan from interrupting. “I said you didn’t give a damn about that sort of thing, but Jonathan said there was something else. The old man wants your help. He’ll give you anything you want, but if you won’t take gifts, at least have the sense not to make an enemy of him. He’s going to approach you in his own way. I don’t know what he wants, something to do with that mincer case, isn’t it?”
“Is it?”
“That’s all I know. Jonathan said that it was important for you to meet Xian in cordial surroundings. He made it sound like things could get pretty unpleasant if you didn’t play ball.” He felt her squeeze his hand. “You’ll be careful, won’t you?”
He squeezed back. “Don’t worry.”
She was silent for a long moment. “Charlie, after I have the baby, I’m going to be well and truly swept up in Jonathan’s world, his people, his money, his servants, you know? I just want you to tell me I’m not crazy, that something very special welded us together that summer all those years ago. I need to know that because well, the rich are so insincere. You may be the only person in my whole life I ever really trust.”
How could he deny it? The intensity of that summer lay embedded in the soul like a burning ember around which the rest of his life congealed.
He lit two more cigarettes, passed her one. She accepted it despite her resolve of a few minutes before.
He inhaled, then exhaled slowly. “After Aunt told us, I dreamed of Mum every night. Except they weren’t dreams, they were crossings into another world. She belonged there; she was happy. Even in broad daylight I was dreaming. It was like Mum was with us.”
“Ah! So it
was
the same for you!”
He felt her body relax. They sat together smoking. Orion, which had been at the rim of the horizon when he’d sat down, had climbed under the inside of the black dome and was hanging there, a sketch of brilliant dots waiting to be joined. She was sitting close enough for the whole of one side of their bodies to be connected. Kids sat like that. She touched his biceps in the area of the faded tattoos.
“If that old man tried to harm you, I’d kill him.”
Chan laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
“I really think you would. It would be kind of ironic, not the end he’s expecting, I’m sure.”
Her hand kneaded the tattoos. “Only you and I know what they used to say.”
Chan inhaled. “Your name in Chinese characters.” He tapped the cigarette to drop the ash between the planks. “And the tattooist. He must know too.”
She punched him on the arm as she stood, whispered, “Thank you,” blew him a kiss and was gone.
35
C
han finally rose from the swimming platform. He’d been there so long his buttocks were numb and there was no feeling in his feet. He had to hold on to a stanchion to wait for the circulation to return. Orion was directly overhead now. It was after midnight. The intensity of the stars had steadily increased until they cast dim shadows. Thinking of Moira, he pulled down his shorts, dived naked into the black sea.
When he climbed out, he was wide-awake. He showered using the hose on the swimming deck, returned wet to his cabin, where he dried himself with a fresh towel, dug out the only book he’d brought with him. He lay on his bunk. Idly he read the blurb.
“His travels began in 1271 when he accompanied his father and uncle on their second visit to China. There he worked as a diplomat, undertaking numerous missions in the service of Kublai Khan. Despite piracy, shipwreck, brigandage and wild beasts, Polo moved in a world of highly organized commerce. He loved describing precious gems, spices and silks.…”