Noble House

Armstrong hesitated. Then he smiled. “That’s Hong Kong’s very own, Mr. Bartlett. It’s money.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  11:48 P.M.:

  “All gods bear witness to the foul luck I’m having tonight,” Four Finger Wu said and spat on the deck. He was aft, on the high poop of his oceangoing junk that was moored to one of the great clusters of boats that sprawled over Aberdeen harbor on the south coast of Hong Kong Island. The night was hot and humid and he was playing mah-jong with three of his friends. They were old and weatherbeaten like himself, all captains of junks that they owned. Even so, they sailed in his fleet and took orders from him. His formal name was Wu Sang Fang. He was a short, illiterate fisherman, with few teeth and no thumb on his left hand. His junk was old, battered and filthy. He was head of the seaborne Wu, captain of the fleets, and his flag, the Silver Lotus, flew on all the four seas.

  When it was his turn again, he picked up another of the ivory tiles. He glanced at it and as it did not improve his hand, discarded it noisily and spat again. The spittle glistened on the deck. He wore a ragged old undershirt and black coolie pants, like his friends, and he had ten thousand dollars riding on this single game.

  “Ayeeyah,” Pockmark Tang said, pretending disgust though the tile he had just picked up made him only one short of a winning combination—the game somewhat like gin rummy. “Fornicate all mothers except ours if I don’t win!” He discarded a tile with a flourish.

  “Fornicate yours if you win and I don’t!” another said and they all laughed.

  “And fornicate those foreign devils from the Golden Mountain if they don’t arrive tonight,” Goodweather Poon said.

  “They’ll arrive,” Four Finger Wu told him confidently. “Foreign devils are glued to schedules. Even so, I sent Seventh Son to the airport to make sure.” He began to pick up a tile but stopped and looked over his shoulder and watched critically as a fishing junk eased past, chugging quietly, heading up the twisting, narrow access channel between the banks of boats toward the neck of the harbor. She had only riding lights, port and starboard. Ostensibly she was just going fishing but this junk was one of his and she was out to intercept a Thai trawler with a cargo of opium. When she was safely passed, he concentrated on the game once more. It was low tide now, but there was deep water around most of the boat islands. From the shore and flats came the stench of rotting seaweed, shellfish and human waste.

  Most of the sampans and junks were dark now, their multitudes sleeping. There were a few oil lamps here and there. Boats of all sizes were moored precariously to each other, seemingly without order, with tiny sea alleys between the floating villages. These were the homes of the Tanka and Haklo people—the boat dwellers—who lived their lives afloat, were born afloat and died afloat. Many of these boats never moved from these moorings but stayed locked together until they sank or fell apart, or went down in a typhoon or were burnt in one of the spectacular conflagrations that frequently swept the clusters when a careless foot or hand knocked over a lamp or dropped something inflammable into the inevitable open fires.

  “Grandfather!” the youthful lookout called.

  “What is it?” Wu asked.

  “On the jetty, look! Seventh Son!” The boy, barely twelve, was pointing to the shore.

  Wu and the others got up and peered shorewards. The young Chinese was paying off a taxi. He wore jeans and a neat T-shirt and sneakers. The taxi had stopped near the gangway of one of the huge floating restaurants that were moored to the modern jetties, a hundred yards away. There were four of these gaudy floating palaces—three, four or five stories tall—ablaze with lights, splendiferous in scarlet and green and gold with fluted Chinese roofs and gods, gargoyles and dragons.

  “You’ve good eyes, Number Three Grandson. Good. Go and meet Seventh Son.” Instantly the child scurried off, sure-footed across the rickety planks that joined this junk to others. Four Fingers watched his seventh son head for one of the jetties where ferry sampans that serviced the harbor were clustered. When he saw that the boatman he had sent had intercepted him, he turned his back on the shore and sat down again. “Come on, let’s finish the game,” he said grimly. “This’s my last fornicating hand. I’ve got to go ashore tonight.”

  They played for a moment, picking up tiles and discarding them.

  “Ayeeyah!” Pockmark Tang said with a shout as he saw the face of the tile that he had just picked up. He slammed it onto the table face upwards with a flourish and laid down his other thirteen hidden tiles that made up his winning hand. “Look, by all the gods!”

  Wu and the others gawked at the hand. “Piss!” he said and hawked loudly. “Piss on all your generations, Pockmark Tang! What luck!”

  “One more game? Twenty thousand, Four Finger Wu?” Tang said gleefully, convinced that tonight old devil, Chi Kung, the god of gamblers, was sitting on his shoulder.

  Wu began to shake his head, but at that moment a seabird flew overhead and called plaintively. “Forty,” he said immediately, changing his mind, interpreting the call as a sign from heaven that his luck had changed. “Forty thousand or nothing! But it’ll have to be dice because I’ve no time now.”

  “I haven’t got forty cash by all gods, but with the twenty you owe me, I’ll borrow against my junk tomorrow when the bank opens and give you all my fornicating profit on our next gold or opium shipment until you’re paid, heya?”

  Goodweather Poon said sourly, “That’s too much on one game. You two fornicators’ve lost your minds!”

  “Highest score, one throw?” Wu asked.

  “Ayeeyah, you’ve gone mad, both of you,” Poon said. Nonetheless, he was as excited as the others. “Where are the dice?”

  Wu produced them. There were three. “Throw for your fornicating future, Pockmark Tang!”

  Pockmark Tang spat on his hands, said a silent prayer, then threw them with a shout.

  “Oh oh oh,” he cried out in anguish. A four, a three and another four. “Eleven!” The other men were hardly breathing.

  Wu spat on the dice, cursed them, blessed them and threw. A six, a two and a three. “Eleven! Oh all gods great and small! Again—throw again!”

  Excitement gathered on the deck. Pockmark Tang threw. “Fourteen!”

  Wu concentrated, the tension intoxicating, then threw the dice. “Ayeeyah!” he exploded, and they all exploded. A six, a four and a two.

  “Eeeee,” was all Pockmark Tang could say, holding his belly, laughing with glee as the others congratulated him and commiserated with the loser.

  Wu shrugged, his heart still pounding in his chest. “Curse all seabirds that fly over my head at a time like that!”

  “Ah, is that why you changed your mind, Four Finger Wu?”

  “Yes—it was like a sign. How many seabirds call as they fly overhead at night?”

  “That’s right. I would have done the same.”

  “Joss!” Then Wu beamed. “Eeeee, but the gambling feeling’s better than the Clouds and the Rain, heya?”

  “Not at my age!”

  “How old are you, Pockmark Tang?”

  “Sixty—perhaps seventy. Almost as old as you are.” Haklos did not have permanent records of births like all village land dwellers. “I don’t feel more than thirty.”

  “Have you heard the Lucky Medicine Shop at Aberdeen Market’s got a new shipment of Korean ginseng, some of it a hundred years old! That’ll stick fire in your stalk!”

  “His stalk’s all right, Goodweather Poon! His third wife’s with child again!” Wu grinned toothlessly and pulled out a big roll of 500-dollar notes. He began counting, his fingers nimble even though his left thumb was missing. Years ago it had been hacked off during a fight with river pirates during a smuggling expedition. He stopped momentarily as his number seven son came on deck. The young man was tall for a Chinese, twenty-six. He walked across the deck awkwardly. An incoming jet began to whine past overhead.

  “Did they arrive, Seventh Son?”

  “Yes, Father, yes they did.”


  Four Fingers pounded the upturned keg with glee. “Very good. Now we can begin!”

  “Hey, Four Fingers,” Pockmark Tang said thoughtfully, motioning at the dice. “A six, a four and a two—that’s twelve, which’s also three, the magic three.”

  “Yes, yes I saw.”

  Pockmark Tang beamed and pointed northwards and a little east to where Kai Tak airport would be—behind the Aberdeen mountains, across the harbor in Kowloon, six miles away. “Perhaps your luck has changed, heya?”

  Monday

  CHAPTER THREE

  5:16 A.M.:

  At half-dawn a jeep with two overalled mechanics aboard came around Gate 16 at the eastern end of the terminal and stopped close beside the main landing gear of Yankee 2. The gangway was still in place and the main door slightly ajar. The mechanics, both Chinese, got out and one began to inspect the eight-wheeled main gear while the other, equally carefully, scrutinized the nose gear. Methodically, they checked the tires and wheels and then the hydraulic couplings of the brakes, then peered into the landing bays. Both used flashlights. The mechanic at the main landing gear took out a spanner and stood on one of the wheels for a closer inspection, his head and shoulder now well into the belly of the airplane. After a moment he called out softly in Cantonese, “Ayeeyah! Hey, Lim, take a look at this.”

  The other man strolled back and peered up, sweat staining his white overalls. “Are they there or not, I can’t see from down here.”

  “Brother, put your male stalk into your mouth and flush yourself down a sewer. Of course they’re here. We’re rich. We’ll eat rice forever! But be quiet or you’ll wake the dung-stained foreign devils above! Here …” The man handed down a long, canvas-wrapped package which Lim took and stowed quietly and quickly in the jeep. Then another and another small one, both men sweating and very nervous, working fast but quietly.

  Another package. And another …

  And then Lim saw the police jeep whirl around the corner and simultaneously other uniformed men come pouring out of Gate 16, among them Europeans. “We’re betrayed,” he gasped as he fled in a hopeless dash for freedom. The jeep intercepted him easily and he stopped, shivering with pent-up terror. Then he spat and cursed the gods and withdrew into himself.

  The other man had jumped down at once and leaped into the driving seat. Before he could turn on the ignition he was swamped and handcuffed.

  “So, little oily mouth,” Sergeant Lee hissed, “where do you think you’re going?”

  “Nowhere, Officer, it was him, him there, that bastard son of a whore, Officer, he swore he’d cut my throat if I didn’t help him. I don’t know anything on my mother’s grave!”

  “You lying bastard, you never had a mother. You’re going to go to jail for fifty years if you don’t talk!”

  “I swear, Officer, by all the gods th—”

  “Piss on your lies, dungface. Who’s paying you to do this job?”

  Armstrong was walking slowly across the tarmac, the sick sweet taste of the kill in his mouth. “So,” he said in English, “what have we here, Sergeant?” It had been a long night’s vigil and he was tired and unshaven and in no mood for the mechanic’s whining protestations of innocence, so he said softly in perfect gutter Cantonese, “One more tiny, insignificant word out of you, purveyor of leper dung, and I’ll have my men jump on your Secret Sack.”

  The man froze.

  “Good. What’s your name?”

  “Tan Shu Ta, lord.”

  “Liar! What’s your friend’s name?”

  “Lim Ta-cheung, but he’s not my friend, lord. I never met him before this morning.”

  “Liar! Who paid you to do this?”

  “I don’t know who paid him, lord. You see he swore he’d cut—”

  “Liar! Your mouth’s so full of dung you must be the god of dung himself. What’s in those packages?”

  “I don’t know. I swear on my ancestor’s gr—”

  “Liar!” Armstrong said it automatically, knowing that the lies were inevitable.

  “John Chinaman’s not the same as us,” his first police teacher, an old China hand, had told him. “Oh I don’t mean cut on the cross or anything like that—he’s just different. He lies through his teeth all the time to a copper and when you nab a villain fair and square he’ll still lie and be as slippery as a greased pole in a pile of shit. He’s different. Take their names. All Chinese have four different names, one when he’s born, one at puberty, one when he’s an adult and one he chooses for himself, and they forget one or add another at the drop of a titfer. And their names—God stone the crows! Chinese call themselves lao-tsi-sing—the Ancient One Hundred Names. They’ve only got a basic hundred surnames in all China and of those there’re twenty Yus, eight Yens, ten Wus and God knows how many Pings, Lis, Lees, Chens, Chins, Chings, Wongs and Fus and each one of them you pronounce five different ways so God knows who’s who!”

  “Then it’s going to be difficult to identify a suspect, sir?”

  “Full marks, young Armstrong! Full marks, lad. You can have fifty Lis, fifty Changs and four hundred Wongs and not one related to the other. God stone the crows! That’s the problem here in Hong Kong.”

  Armstrong sighed. After eighteen years Chinese names were still as confusing as ever. And on top of that everyone seemed to have a nickname by which they were generally known.

  “What’s your name?” he asked again and didn’t bother to listen to the answer. “Liar! Sergeant! Unwrap one of those! Let’s see what we’ve got.”

  Sergeant Lee eased aside the last covering. Inside was an M14, an automatic rifle, U.S. Army. New and well greased.

  “For this, you evil son of a whore’s left tit,” Armstrong grated, “you’ll howl for fifty years!”

  The man was staring at the gun stupidly, aghast. Then a low moan came from him. “Fornicate all gods I never knew they were guns.”

  “Ah, but you did know!” Armstrong said. “Sergeant, put this piece of dung in the wagon and book him for smuggling guns.”

  The man was dragged away roughly. One of the young Chinese policemen was unwrapping another package. It was small and square. “Hold it!” Armstrong ordered in English. The policeman and everyone in hearing distance froze. “One of them may be booby-trapped. Everyone get away from the jeep!” Sweating, the man did as he was ordered. “Sergeant, get our bomb disposal wallahs. There’s no hurry now.”

  “Yes sir.” Sergeant Lee hurried to the intercom in the police wagon.

  Armstrong went under the airplane and peered into the main gear bay. He could see nothing untoward. Then he stood on one of the wheels. “Christ!” he gasped. Five snug racks were neatly bolted to each side of the inner bulkhead. One was almost empty, the others still full. From the size and shape of the packages he judged them to be more M14’s and boxes of ammo—or grenades.

  “Anything up there, sir?” Inspector Thomas asked. He was a young Englishman, three years in the force.

  “Take a look! But don’t touch anything.”

  “Christ! There’s enough for a couple of riot squads!”

  “Yes. But who?”

  “Commies?”

  “Or Nationalists—or villains. These’d—”

  “What the hell’s going on down there?”

  Armstrong recognized Linc Bartlett’s voice. His face closed and he jumped down, Thomas following him. He went to the foot of the gangway. “I’d like to know that too, Mr. Bartlett,” he called up curtly.

  Bartlett was standing at the main door of the airplane, Svensen beside him. Both men wore pajamas and robes and were sleep tousled.

  “I’d like you to take a look at this.” Armstrong pointed to the rifle that was now half hidden in the jeep.

  At once Bartlett came down the gangway, Svensen following. “What?”

  “Perhaps you’d be kind enough to wait in the airplane, Mr. Svensen.”

  Svensen started to reply, stopped. Then he glanced at Bartlett who nodded. “Fix some coffee, Sven, huh?”


  “Sure, Linc.”

  “Now what’s this all about, Superintendent?”

  “That!” Armstrong pointed.

  “That’s an M14.” Bartlett’s eyes narrowed. “So?”

  “So it seems your aircraft is bringing in guns.”

  “That’s not possible.”

  “We’ve just caught two men unloading. There’s one of the buggers”—Armstrong stabbed a finger at the handcuffed mechanic waiting sullenly beside the jeep—“and the other’s in the wagon. Perhaps you’d be kind enough to look up in the main gear bay, sir.”

  “Sure. Where?”

  “You’ll have to stand on a wheel.”

  Bartlett did as he was told. Armstrong and Inspector Thomas watched exactly where he put his hands for fingerprint identification. Bartlett stared blankly at the racks. “I’ll be goddamned! If these’re more of the same, it’s a goddamn arsenal!”

  “Yes. Please don’t touch them.”

  Bartlett studied the racks, then climbed down, wide awake now. “This isn’t a simple smuggling job. Those racks are custom made.”

  “Yes. You’ve no objection if the aircraft’s searched?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “Go ahead, Inspector,” Armstrong said at once. “And do it very carefully indeed. Now, Mr. Bartlett, perhaps you’d be kind enough to explain.”

  “I don’t run guns, Superintendent. I don’t believe my captain would—or Bill O’Rourke. Or Svensen.”

  “What about Miss Tcholok?”

  “Oh for chrissake!”

  Armstrong said icily, “This is a very serious matter, Mr. Bartlett. Your aircraft is impounded and without police approval until further notice neither you nor any of your crew may leave the Colony pending our inquiries. Now, what about Miss Tcholok?”

  “It’s impossible, it’s totally impossible that Casey is involved in any way with guns, gun smuggling or any kind of smuggling. Impossible.” Bartlett was apologetic but quite unafraid. “Nor would any of the rest of us.” His voice sharpened. “You were tipped off, weren’t you?”

  “How long did you stop at Honolulu?”