Thai Horse (27 page)

THE WHITE TSU FH

From the balcony of his home on the side of Victoria Peak, Cohen watched the tram rise up the side of the mountain. He had seen Hatcher arrive in the ricksha
w
and board the funicular. Cohen also scanned the street and park below to see if anyone might be following his friend. He saw nothing suspicious. But with Hatcher, one could never be sure, and now, to suddenly appear after all the years, Cohen wondered what his old friend was up to.

Cohen’s mind drifted back in time, to a dark night upriver when his friendship with Hatcher had first begun to blossom.

Cohen was coming back down from the Ts’e K’am Men Ti with a load of contraband goods when a boatload of maverick river pirates had loomed up behind him and fired several warning shots in the air. Cohen had only half a dozen men with him. After all, nobody, nobody, attacked the Tsu Fi, a fact that unfortunately had eluded the bunch of river scum. They ordered his two boats to heave to.

Then Cohen heard the deep roar of engines and a coal-black gunboat materialized out of the darkness. It had the profile of an American riverboat but had no markings. Standing on the bow was the white man he had seen upriver a few months earlier. He dredged the name from his memory: Hatcher. A dozen armed brigands were lined up along the rail of Hatcher’s boat. Then Cohen noticed that the gunner manning the M-60 in the gun tower was wearing a shirt with Army stripes on the sleeve. A sergeant? Were these American soldiers? he had wondered. Nobody else was wearing a uniform. Hatcher wore camouflaged pants and an olive drab tank top, but so did everybody else these days. There was some conversation, and although Cohen could not hear Hatcher, whatever he said had been effective. The pirates had t
u
rned to and headed back upriver. Hatcher pulled alongside Cohen’s tiny but elegant snake boat.

‘We meet again,’ he said with a grin.

‘So we do, mate, so we do,’ said Cohen. ‘And just where the hell did you come from, not that I’m complaining?’

‘We’ve been a mile or so behind you for the last hour,’ Hatcher answered. ‘Then those bows pulled out of a creek and dropped on your stern, so I figured we better check it out.’

‘I owe you,’ Cohen said with a bow.

‘I’ll remember that,’ Hatcher said. ‘Come aboard, I’ll buy you a drink.’

The gunboat had been customized by Hatcher and his men. It was a sleek, fast-moving craft built for action and little else. It had skimpy quarters for the crew b
u
t a large, amply supplied kitchen, more guns and armor plate than a tank, and was painted coal-black. Hatcher’s crew of a dozen bearded G
I
s was as motley as the gangsters he had just chased away. Hatcher led Cohen to his spartan quarters, a small cabin with a liquor cabinet, a desk covered with homemade river charts, and a hammock strung from the rafters. Cohen knew better than to ask his host any direct questions. Hatcher took a bottle of gin from the cabinet and poured them both a generous slug.

‘Where you headed?’ Cohen asked cautiously.

‘Back into Hong Kong for a little R and R,’ Hatcher answered.

Cohen’s face brightened. ‘Ah, I’m delighted. Now there’s an area in which I am truly an expert,’ he said. ‘You will be my guest while you’re in the colony. I insist.,

Hatcher smiled and hoisted his drink. ‘Who could turn down an offer like that?’ he answered.

For the next two weeks, Cohen had entertained Hatcher like a crown prince. They had raised hell from Macao to Kowloon. A sweet time, a time to develop mutual trust and confidence. They became comrades. For Cohen a first, while for Hatcher, Cohen was his first true friend since Murph Cody. Cohen tutored his friend on the operations of the Hong Kong triads while Hatcher regularly supplied Cohen with information about the whereabouts of the British customs patrols. But what had cemented their friendship was that they genuinely liked each other. The two loners traded personal confidences and their friendship had matured in a way that endured through the years. While Cohen was the Ts
u
Fi and could travel the rivers with immunity from Sam-Sam Sam’s interference, he always had the feeling Hatcher was somewhere nearby just in case he got into trouble.

Then, as suddenly as he had appeared on the river, Hatcher had vanished without a word. Good-byes were not Hatcher’s style.

Now Cohen’s pulse quickened at the prospect of seeing his friend again.

Hatcher, too, was excited at the thought of seeing the white Tsu Fi. After his first meeting with the little man, he had asked about him on his occasional forays into Hong Kong. There were vague rumors about him, but he heard nothing specific until one night when he was having a drink with a group of reporters in the Godown Bar on Connaught Street. It was a favorite hangout because of the live American Dixieland band and the generous drinks. There, a boozy ex-reporter named Charlie Raw
l
son perked up when Hatcher mentioned Cohen.

‘I knew him when,’ he said over a glass of Bombay gin and lemon juice. ‘I was at Harvard with him.’

‘Harvard!’ said Sid Barnaby, a
Time
magazine correspondent.

‘Nieman fellow,’ Rawlson said ‘with a flourish.

‘Back in the late sixties,’ Raw
l
son began. ‘At the time, Cohen was kinda the campus j
o
ke. You’d see the little bugger dashin’ across Harvard Square with his briefcase hugged up against his chest like he was afraid somebody would run off with it, hidin’ behind this fringy little beard of his, with never a word for anyone. Had all the social grace of a friggin’ water buffalo, he did. His old man was a hotshot Westchester lawyer or so
m
ething. And old Cohen did his parents proud. Summa cum at Princeton, a DBA from Harvard. When he got his doctorate, every big company in the country lined up to interview him. Then they found out he was a brain without an ounce of social grace, a genius who could hardly say hello to a stranger. He was written off as a reclusive looney tune. Actually he was just shy, is what he was. Shy ‘.vas invented to describe old Cohen.’

‘So what happened?’ Hatcher as}ed.

‘His parents decided what he
n
eeded was a round-the- world cruise to get him back in the social world. “Time you had a little fun,” his father tells him. “Find yourself a nice lady and see how the other
h
alf lives.” Well, the old boy could not have conceived th
e
limits to which Cohen would carry that bit of advice. That was the last I heard of him until about a year ago I see him waltz out of a bank on Connaught wearing a red silk
c
h
eongsam.
He gets in a Rolls-Royce and tools off. God knows what happened in all those years in between.’

Later, Cohen had filled in the blanks for Hatcher.

On his balcony, Cohen, too, was reminiscing, remembering the first time he had ever seen Hong Kong harbor. He had hidden in his cabin all the way from San Francisco, terrified of facing all the strangers on the enormous ship. The first night in, he sneaked out on deck to take a look around and was awestruck by the towering mountain peak, the blazing lights of the city and the sampans that surrounded the big ship with the children yelling for a handout. That was when Cohen was spotted by a purser named Ringer, a seasoned and perverse hand, who genuinely felt sorry for Cohen.

‘See here, sir, I’m going over to the Central District by myself— care to come along?’

Cohen, nervous but interested: ‘That’s the business district, isn’t it?’

Ringer: ‘Yes, but there are other things to see. I thought you might enjoy going to Fat Lady Lau’s House of Orchids.’

Cohen: ‘Is that a restaurant?’

Ringer, that rogue: ‘Well, uh, I suppose you might call it that.’

Restaurant indeed. Fat Lady Lau’s was perhaps the greatest whorehouse in the world and Ringer led him to
it
, believing he was going over to the island for egg rolls and chop suey. The moment Cohen entered the double doors of Fat Lady Lau’s his life changed. His sexual imagination was ignited and a new door opened for Cohen.

He smiled to himself as he remembered that night. The living room was lit by pink candles, and Chinese minstrels played somewhere out of sight. The buffet! The buffet was a succulent miracle. Every imaginable delicacy was on that table. Caviar from Black Sea sturgeon, garlicky sparrow’s wings the way they do it in Canton, shark’s fin and mushroom soup spiced with Chinese vinegar, slices of Peking duck served on
bao bing
and
chun juan
rolls stuffed with curried pork and squid, vegetables stea
m
ed in champagne.

And the women! Cohen was mesmerized. They were all revealed in that soft, flickering candlelight
—
tantalizing shadows and each one an individual, each dressed in her own manner, under the approving eye of Fat Lady.

One was wearing a naughty French nightgown, another a lacy thing with nothing under it, still another a black garter belt and corset, There was a tall Peruvian beauty wearing a high-necked Victorian blouse and not another stitch, a Nubian princess wearing a teddy as thin as air. There were women from every remote corner of the world. Eurasians and Japanese and Chinese and Thais and Egyptians and Greeks and French. There were Africans and Israelis. There was even an American Indian princess and a pair of Eskimo twins they called the Mucklucks, who always performed together in a mirrored room.

My rite of passage was a truly remarkable experience, thought Cohen with a smile.

Fat Lady Lau, who was anything but
—
as tall and slender as a French model, all high cheekbones and broad shoulders
—
was the one untouchable prize in a place where everything else was given away or
for
sale.

‘Why do they call her Fat Lady?’ Cohen asked.

Ringer replied, ‘Because this,
m
y friend, is what fat city is all about.’

Her trained eyes immediately recognized Cohen as a virgin, and she chose a rare prize for him. She left the room and returned with Tiana. Cohen relished the memory
—
that tiny thing, shorter than Cohen, a mere child of sixteen, wrapped in a sarong, her hair combed in a tight little bun held in place by orchids and azaleas, with black bangs brushed down over h
e
r forehead. She smiled at Cohen, the softest smile he h
a
d ever seen, then she reached out and took his hand
—
and led him to paradise. She led him up to her room and Cohen could remember vividly every candlelit corner, the colors of the down pillows piled in one corner, the large old-fashioned tub with brass legs in the other, re
m
embered her selecting each morsel of the delicacies set on a table and feeding it to him, mixing the tastes with such talent that simply eating was an aphrodisiac.

Then she slowly undressed him, massaging every muscle in his body before she reached up and removed the combs and flowers from her black hair and let it tumble down over her shoulders. Then she sat up, unwound the sarong and dropped it on the floor and stood there letting him admire her body before she led him to the tub, which was filled with mud so hot he could hardly bear it, then tantalizing him and then screwing him until he was close to insanity. Cohen’s blood thundered through his veins as he remembered it.

Cohen never left. Never went back to the boat, or any of the boats after that. His world became Hong Kong and that Victorian mansion in Wanchai, sampling, sampling, sampling, learning to speak of love in every language and making love in every marvelously deviate way imaginable.

And then Cohen discovered so
m
ething else about himself, a side of his personality that had lain dormant for twenty-seven years. He discovered that at heart he was a born scoundrel to whom a scam was far more interesting than the market or dollar fluctuations or commodities. Cohen discovered smuggling, brokering illegal gold, outwitting the customs boats to bring contraband into the colony. He also learned that in the Crown Colony, information was as valuable as goods. He and Tiana became friends as well as lovers. She taught him Chinese, he taught her English. The Oriental life-style was like a magnet to him.

It was from the Chinese that Cohen first heard about the Tsu Fi, the Old Man Who Bites Like a Dragon. The Tsu Fi dallied with the taipans of the Central District through silken puppet strings, they said. No secrets were denied him. He was feared by the m
o
st powerful of the Western robber barons. To cross the Tsu Fi, they said, was to cross the gods. In Cohen’s mind, the Tsu Fi was the gatekeeper to the pantheon. Meeting him and sharing his secrets became Cohen’s obsession. But the Tsu Fi was difficult and did not trust
gwai-k
foreigners.

One night at Fat Lady Lau’s, Tiana opened the door to the pantheon.

A customer who came occasionally had confided that a rich woman had hired him to kill her husband. She knew few details except that the woman’s name was the same as a flower’s. Cohen checked
Toole’s Guide to the Crown,
the definitive business reference bo
o
k for Hong Kong. And there it was:

Hampton-Rhodes Overseas T’ransport, Ltd.
President and Chief Executive Officer: Charles Rhodes. Originally Hampton Shipping and Transport, Ltd. Founded 1934, registry: Aberdeen. Founder, Jonathan
H
ampton, died: 1978. Name changed: 1979. Married:
Iris
(née Hampton), daughter of founder: 1
9
75.

He checked with friends in the banking towers of Connaught Street and that night
h
e asked Tiana to arrange an audience with the Tsu Fi.

‘But, Robert, he will not do business with
gwai-lo.’

‘Tell him this
gwa
i
-lo
can make him richer,’ said Coh
e
n confidently.

The plan was audacious, whic
h
was one of the reasons it had appealed to Cohen. But he knew business, that was one thing he knew very well. W
h
at a coup if this
gwai-lo
could learn the Tsu Fi’s secrets.