Noble House

  “Where’s your money?”

  “Diamonds. All Jews need small things, things you can carry and things you can hide, things you can convert easily.”

  “There’s no need for you to be afraid here, Joseph. How many years has your family been here and prospered? Look at Solomon—surely he and his family are the richest in all Asia.”

  “For Jews fear is a way of life. And being hated.”

  Again the old man sighed. “Ah this world, this lovely world, how lovely it should be.” A phone rang and he picked it up delicately, his hands tiny, his Portuguese sounding sweet and liquid to Stern though he understood none of it. He only caught “Señor Mata” said deferentially several times but the name meant nothing to him. In a moment Sir Luis replaced the receiver very thoughtfully. “The financial secretary called just after lunch, greatly perturbed. There’s a deputation from Parliament here and a bank crash would look extremely bad for all of us,” he said. He smiled a pixyish smile. “I suggested he introduce legislation for the governor’s signature to govern banks like they had in England and the poor fellow almost had a fit. I really mustn’t pull his leg so much.” Stern smiled with him. “As if we need government interference here!” The eyes sharpened. “So Joseph, do you vote to let well alone—or suspend either or both of the stocks, if so when?”

  Stern glanced at the clock. If he went to the board now he would have plenty of time to write up both sell offerings and still be able to challenge Forsythe. It was a good feeling to know that he held the fate of both houses in his hands, if only temporarily. “Perhaps it would be very good, perhaps bad. What’s the voting so far?”

  “I said, almost equal.” There was another burst of excitement and both men looked up. Some more Struan shares were changing hands. The new market price dropped to 24.70. Now Phillip Chen was leaning over Holdbrook’s desk.

  “Poor Phillip, he doesn’t look well at all,” Sir Luis said compassionately.

  “No. Pity about John. I liked him. What about the Werewolves? Do you think the papers are overplaying it?”

  “No. No, I don’t.” The old eyes twinkled. “No more than you, Joseph.”

  “What?”

  “You’ve decided to pass. You want to let today’s time run out, don’t you? That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  “What better solution could there be?”

  “If I wasn’t so old I’d agree with you. But being so old and not knowing about tomorrow, or if I shall live to see tomorrow, I prefer my drama today. Very well. I’ll discount your vote this time and now the committee’s deadlocked so I will decide, as I’m allowed to do. You can borrow 200,000 Noble House shares until Friday, Friday at two. Then I may ask for them back—I have to think of my own House, eh?” The sharp but kindly eyes in the lined face urged Stern to his feet. “What are you going to do now, my friend?”

  Joseph Stern smiled sadly. “I’m a stockbroker.”

  He went to the board and wrote in the Ho-Pak sell column with a firm hand. Then in the new silence he went to the Struan column and wrote the figure clearly, conscious that he was on center stage now. He could feel the hate and the envy. More than 500,000 Noble House shares were now on offer, more than at any one time in the history of the exchange. He waited, wanting the clock to run out. There was a flurry of interest as Soorjani, the Parsee, bought some blocks of shares but it was well known he was nominee for many of the Struan and Dunross family and supporters. And though he bought 150,000, it made little difference to the enormity of Gornt’s offering. The quiet was hurting. One minute to go now.

  “We buy!” The tai-pan’s voice shattered the silence.

  “All my shares?” Stern asked hoarsely, his heart racing.

  “Yes. Yours and all the rest. At market!”

  Gornt was on his feet. “With what?” he asked sardonically. “That’s almost 9 million cash.”

  Dunross was on his feet too, a taunting half-smile on his face. “The Noble House is good for that—and millions more. Has anyone ever doubted it?”

  “I doubt it—and I sell short tomorrow!”

  At that moment the finish bell sounded shrilly, the tension broke and there was a roar of approval.

  “Christ what a day …”

  “Good old tai-pan….”

  “Couldn’t stand much more of that…”

  “Is Gornt going to beat him this time …?”

  “Maybe those rumors are all nonsense …”

  “Christ I made a bloody fortune in commissions …”

  “I think Ian’s running scared….”

  “Don’t forget he’s got five days to pay for the shares …”

  “He can’t buy like that tomorrow …”

  “Christ, tomorrow! What’s going to happen tomorrow …”

  Casey shifted in her seat, her heart thumping. She pried her eyes off Gornt and Dunross and looked back at Bartlett, who sat staring at the board, whistling tonelessly. She was awed—awed and a little frightened.

  Just before coming here to meet Dunross, Linc Bartlett had told her his plan, about his call to Gornt and all about the meeting with him. “Now you know it all, Casey,” he had said softly, grinning at her. “Now they’re both set up and we control the battlefield, all for 2 million. Both’re at each other’s throats, both going for the jugular, each ready to cannibalize the other. Now we wait. Monday’s D Day. If Gornt wins, we win. If Dunross wins, we win. Either way we become the Noble House.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  3:03 P.M.:

  Alexi Travkin who trained the racehorses of the Noble House went up the busy alley off Nathan Road in Kowloon and into the Green Dragon Restaurant. He wore a small .38 under his left arm and his walk was light for a man of his age.

  The restaurant was small, ordinary and drab, with no tablecloths on the dozen or so tables. At one of them, four Chinese were noisily eating soup and noodles, and, as he came in, a bored waiter by the cash register looked up from his racing form and began to get up with a menu. Travkin shook his head and walked through the archway that led to the back.

  The little room contained four tables. It was empty but for one man.

  “Zdrastvuytye,” Suslev said lazily, his light clothes well cut.

  “Zdrastvuytye,” Travkin replied, his Slavic eyes narrowing even more. Then he continued in Russian, “Who’re you?”

  “A friend, Highness.”

  “Please don’t call me that, I’m not a highness. Who’re you?”

  “Still a friend. Once you were a prince. Will you join me?” Suslev politely motioned to a chair. There was an opened bottle of vodka on his table and two glasses. “Your father Nicoli Petrovitch was a prince too, like his father and back for generations, Prince of Kurgan and even Tobol.”

  “You talk in ciphers, friend,” Travkin said, outwardly calm, and sat opposite him. The feel of the .38 took away some of his apprehension. “From your accent you’re Muscovite—and Georgian.”

  Suslev laughed. “Your ear is very good, Prince Kurgan. Yes I’m Muscovite but I was born in Georgia. My name’s unimportant but I’m a friend wh—”

  “Of me, Russia or the Soviets?”

  “Of all three. Vodka?” Suslev asked, lifting the bottle.

  “Why not?” Travkin watched the other man pour the two glasses, then without hesitation he picked up the wrong glass, the one farthest from him, and lifted it. “Health!”

  Without hesitation Suslev picked up the other, touched glasses, drained it and poured again. “Health!”

  “You’re the man who wrote to me?”

  “I have news of your wife.”

  “I have no wife. What do you want from me, friend?” The way Travkin used the word it was an insult. He saw the flash of anger as Suslev looked up from his glass and he readied.

  “I excuse your rudeness this once, Alexi Ivanovitch,” Suslev said with dignity. “You’ve no cause to be rude to me. None. Have I insulted you?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Your wife’s
name is Nestorova Mikail and her father was Prince Anotoli Zergeyev whose lands straddle Karaganda, which is not so far away from your own family lands east of the Urals. He was a Kazaki, wasn’t he, a great prince of the Kazaki, whom some people call Cossacks?”

  Travkin kept his gnarled hands still and his face impassive, but he could not keep the blood from draining from his face. He reached out and poured two more glasses, the bottle still half full. He sipped the spirit. “This’s good vodka, not like the piss in Hong Kong. Where did you get it?”

  “Vladivostok.”

  “Ah. Once I was there. It’s a flat dirty town but the vodka’s good. Now, what’s your real name and what do you want?”

  “You know Ian Dunross well?”

  Travkin was startled. “I train his horses … I’ve … this is my third year, why?”

  “Would you like to see the Princess Nestor—”

  “Good sweet Christ Jesus whoever you are, I told you I have no wife. Now, for the last time, what do you want from me?”

  Suslev filled his glass and his voice was even more kindly. “Alexi Ivanovitch Travkin, your wife the princess today is sixty-three. She lives in Yakutsk on th—”

  “On the Lena? In Siberia?” Travkin felt his heart about to explode. “What gulag is that, you turd?”

  Through the archway in the other room, which was empty now, the waiter looked up momentarily, then yawned and went on reading.

  “It’s not a gulag, why should it be a gulag?” Suslev said, his voice hardening. “The princess went there of her own accord. She’s lived there since she left Kurgan. Her…” Suslev’s hand went into his pocket and he brought out his wallet. “This is her dacha in Yakutsk,” he said, putting down a photograph. “It belonged to her family, I believe.” The cottage was snowbound, within a nice glade of trees, the fences well kept, and it was pretty with good smoke coming out of the chimney. A tiny bundled-up figure waved gaily at the camera—too far away for the face to be seen clearly.

  “And that’s my wife?” Travkin said, his voice raw.

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t believe you!”

  Suslev put down a new snapshot. A portrait. The lady was white-haired and in her fifties or sixties and though the cares of a whole world marked her, her face was still elegant, still patrician. The warmth of her smile reached out and broke him.

  “You … you KGB turd,” he said hoarsely, sure that he recognized her. “You filthy rotten mother-eating …”

  “To have found her?” Suslev said angrily. “To have seen that she was looked after and left in peace and not troubled and not sent to … to the correction places she and your whole class deserved?” Irritably he poured himself another drink. “I’m Russian and proud of it—you’re émigré and you left. My father and his were owned by one of your class. My father died at the barricades in 1916, and my mother—and before they died they were starving. They …” With an effort he stopped. Then he said in a different voice, “I agree there’s much to forgive and much to forget on both sides, and that’s all past now but I tell you we Soviets, we’re not all animals—not all of us. We’re not all like Bloody Beria and the murdering arch-fiend Stalin.… Not everyone.” He found his pack of cigarettes. “Do you smoke?”

  “No. Are you KGB or GRU?” KGB stood for the Committee for State Security; GRU for the Chief Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff. This was not the first time Travkin had been approached by one of them. Before, he had always been able to slough them off with his drab, unimportant cover story. But now he was trapped. This one knew too much about him, too much truth. Who are you, bastard? And what do you really want? he thought as he watched Suslev light a cigarette.

  “Your wife knows you’re alive.”

  “Impossible. She’s dead. She was murdered by mobs when our pal—when our house in Kurgan was sacked, put to the torch, torn apart—the prettiest, most unarmed mansion within a hundred miles.”

  “The masses had the right t—”

  “Those weren’t my people and they were led by imported Trotskyites who afterwards murdered my peasants by the thousands—until they themselves were all purged by more of their own vermin.”

  “Perhaps, perhaps not,” Suslev said coldly. “Even so, Prince of Kurgan and Tobol, she escaped with one old servant and fled east thinking she could find you, could escape after you through Siberia to Manchuria. The servant came originally from Austria. Pavchen was her name.”

  The breath seemed to have vanished from Travkin’s lungs. “More lies,” he heard himself say, no longer believing it, his spirit ripped apart by her lovely smile. “My wife’s dead. She’d never go so far north.”

  “Ah but she did. Her escape train was diverted northwards. It was autumn. Already the first snows had come so she decided to wait the winter out in Yakutsk. She had to….” Suslev put down another snapshot. “… she was with child. This is your son and his family. It was taken last year.” The man was good-looking, in his forties, wearing a Soviet major’s air force uniform, self-consciously smiling at the camera, his arm around a fine woman in her thirties with three happy children, a babe, a beaming girl of six or seven missing front teeth, a boy of about ten trying to be serious. “Your wife called him Pietor Ivanovitch after your grandfather.”

  Travkin did not touch the photo. He just stared at it, his face chalky. Then he pried his eyes away and poured a drink for himself, and as an afterthought, one for Suslev. “It’s … it’s all a brilliant reconstruction,” he said, trying to sound convincing. “Brilliant.”

  “The child’s name is Victoria, the girl is Nichola after your grandmother. The boy is Alexi. Major Ivanovitch is a bomber pilot.”

  Travkin said nothing. His eyes went back to the portrait of the beautiful old lady and he was near tears but his voice was still controlled. “She knows I’m alive, eh?”

  “Yes.”

  “For how long?”

  “Three months. About three months ago. One of our people told her.”

  “Who’re they?”

  “Do you want to see her?”

  “Why only three months—why not a year—three years?”

  “It was only six months ago we discovered who you were.”

  “How did you do that?”

  “Did you expect to remain anonymous forever?”

  “If she knows I’m alive and one of your people told her then she’d’ve written.… Yes. They would have asked her to do that if…” Travkin’s voice was strange. He felt out of himself, in a nightmare, as he tried to think clearly. “She would have written a letter.”

  “She has. I will give it to you within the next few days. Do you want to see her?”

  Travkin forced his agony down. He motioned at the family portrait. “And … and he knows I’m alive too?”

  “No. None of them do. That was not at our suggestion, Alexi Ivanovitch. It was your wife’s idea. For safety—to protect him, she thought. As if we would wreak vengeance for the sins of the fathers on the sons! She waited out two winters in Yakutsk. By that time peace had come to Russia so she stayed. By that time she presumed you dead, though she hoped you were alive. The boy was brought up believing you dead, and knew nothing of you. He still doesn’t. As you can see, he’s a credit to you both. He was head of his local school, then went to university as all gifted children do nowadays.… Do you know, Alexi Ivanovitch, in my day I was the first of my whole province ever to get to a university, the very first, ever from a peasant family. We’re fair in Russia today.”

  “How many corpses have you made to become what you are now?”

  “A few,” Suslev said darkly, “all of them criminals or enemies of Russia.”

  “Tell me about them.”

  “I will. One day.”

  “Did you fight the last war—or were you a commissar?”

  “Sixteenth Tank Corp, Forty-fifth Army. I was at Sebastopol … and at Berlin. Tank commander. Do you want to see your wife?”

  “More than my whole life is worth,
if this really is my wife and if she’s alive.”

  “She is. I can arrange it.”

  “Where?”

  “Vladivostok.”

  “No, here in Hong Kong.”

  “Sorry, that’s impossible.”

  “Of course.” Travkin laughed without mirth. “Of course, friend. Drink?” He poured the last of the vodka, splitting it equally. “Health!”

  Suslev stared at him. Then he looked down at the portrait and the snapshot of the air force major and his family and picked them up, lost in thought. The silence grew. He scratched his beard. Then he said decisively, “All right. Here in Hong Kong,” and Travkin’s heart leapt.

  “In return for what?”

  Suslev stubbed his cigarette out. “Information. And cooperation.”

  “What?”

  “I want to know everything you know about the tai-pan of the Noble House, everything you did in China, who you know, who you met.”

  “And the cooperation?”

  “I will tell you later.”

  “And in return you’ll bring my wife to Hong Kong?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “By Christmas.”

  “How can I trust you?”

  “You can’t. But if you cooperate she will be here at Christmas.” Travkin was watching the two photos Suslev toyed with in his fingers, then he saw the look in his eyes and his stomach twisted. “Either way, you must be honest with me. With or without your wife, Prince Kurgan, we always have your son and your grandchildren hostage.”

  Travkin sipped his drink, making it last. “Now I believe you are what you are. Where do you want to start?”

  “The tai-pan. But first I want to piss.” Suslev got up and asked the waiter where the toilet was and went out through the kitchen.

  Now that Travkin was alone despair gripped him. He picked up the snapshot of the cottage that was still on the table and peered at it. Tears filled his eyes. He brushed them away and felt the gun that nestled beneath his shoulder but that did not help him now. With all his inner strength he resolved to be wise and not believe, but in his heart he knew he had seen her picture and that he would do anything, risk anything to see her.