The Year of the Woman (22 page)

Tears really did flow now. The shop man emerged, still in his grubby T-shirt, floppy pants and plastic
sandals
, a crumpled cigarette drooping from his wrinkled mouth. He sidled up.

“Good-not-good,
a
?”

She said, “The Hell Money. I want to see it.”

He shouted, and his men came at a trot carrying
bundles
of the Hell Money she’d see in the pigeon-holes earlier. She examined each denomination, the gathering crowd withdrawing respectfully, giving her space,
wanting
to see if the girl approved.

No denomination was less than 500,000. Some
bundles
consisted of denominations of one to eight
millions
. The ancestor would know the currency, which required no specification, for what if Hell Money were specified in some international currency – dollars, pounds, yen – that suddenly fell just as the Hell Money burned and flew to Heaven? The shame would haunt a family for ever, and insult spirits.

The important thing was for the denominations to be impossibly high. Most were labelled HELL BANK NOTE, complete with serial numbers. Eight bundles, each of eight blocks. Gold and silver ingots shone on paper trays. The paper-shop man had included paper money-printing blocks simulated in paper, in case Honoured Ancestor wanted to print yet more Hell Money up in the skies.

Everything was paper, from the walls of the house to the concubines, cars, trees, windows, beds, money, ingots. It was as exquisite as anything she’d ever seen. She had been coming to steal from these shops for as long as she could remember, but had seen nothing to equal this feat of artistry.

“Good-not-good,
a
?” the man asked anxiously.

“Replace the silver ingots with gold.”

People murmured, nodding and talking of funeral houses they had known. He shouted, and the ingots were swapped for new gold-paper ingots.

“Good-not-good,
a
?” He was beside himself. The cluster of pedestrians waited for her reply, speculating loudly.

“Good,” she said finally, into a chorus of exclamations from those watching. A tourist lady across the road smilingly took out her camera, only to be foiled by two young men in suits who approached her. They took the camera from her, producing some badge or other.

“You light it for Honoured Ancestor, Little Sister?”

KwayFay pondered a moment. “No,” she said. “Honoured person light it,” and edged her way through the crowd.

At the corner of the road, where it turned between
Canton Road and Battery Street, she paused an instant, sensing the beautiful sacrifice-house’s moment had come.

In the gloaming she saw a stooping, old man emerge from the paper shop and stand before the iron chair. She saw a match flare, gilding his features for a moment. He touched the match to the paper house and stepped back. The whole lovely building with its furnishings, paper clothes, paper gardens, ponds, concubines, Hell Money and all, went up with a whoosh of flame.

Old Man stood silhouetted between two threat-men, one of them swinging the tourist woman’s camera from his wrist. The paper, fragments still burning, swirled up into the night sky. The house was gone in seconds. She walked away, without tears.

“This is beyond description, Witherspoon.”

The Deputy Governor of Hong Kong was more civil servant than political appointee. He saw the two terms as synonymous. The Governor, a lifelong politician, was a cynic who fancied his chances at Cantonese. Consequently he was taken for a ride by every hawker who paused, grinning like an ape, to applaud the silvery haired git as he strolled, sweat-stained and scrawny from dehydration, through the street markets in his crumpled suit. A failed political nerk for Governor of practically the last Crown Colony. Ugh!

He could not say such things to his Head of Protocol, who had headaches enough and wouldn’t thank him for criticisms, implied or overtly stated, until the Handover was done with. Witherspoon had more mistresses than the parson preached about, but most of the people in Government here had the tact, and others the
subservience
, to ignore the obvious. Hong Kong’s way.

“I know, sir. It does seem unlikely.”

The Deputy Governor cut through the crap.

“Have we proof?”

Witherspoon sighed heavily, shaking his head, his mannerism to show acceptance of the impossible. He wasn’t chewing gum today,
Deo gratias.

“More than enough. The fucking idiots in Whitehall have turned something up. You knew the moron in Great Smith Street, I think?”

“Don’t tell me it’s Frobisher.”

“You were with him in that Rhodesia business, with some cret from Immigrants and Demographics. The
passport scam that time?”

“Don’t remind me.”

The Deputy Governor stood at the window of the building next to The Four Seasons restaurant near the bottom terminus of the Peak Tram. It was all terribly secret, supposedly belonging to the next-door American Embassy, whose windows were never opened. Of course it didn’t, as everybody knew and pretended otherwise. It was still Crown property, thank God, and would be until the People’s Republic came shuffling in with their red stars and russet drabs, new shams for old. Empire was all a parade of shams. Wait until Hong Kong was an autonomous region of China; then you’d see fur fly.

“Is he here, the claimant?”

“Downstairs with the Legal Service jokers, sir.”

The Deputy Governor would have sighed, had he been that demonstrative. The weather in Hong Kong seemed somehow to pervade indoor sanctuaries, even working its evil humidity through walls. God knows how they managed in ancient China. That’s a point, he thought.

“How did his documents survive this long? The
relative
humidity, I mean.” He explained when the other looked blank, “Think, Witherspoon. Where the
westbound
trams do that shifty dog-leg. The street market there, right?”

“Left, sir.”

“I know it’s left. Right would run the fucking trams into the harbour before they got anywhere near Western Market. There. The book stalls.”

“Sir?”

“Have you ever seen any old books, calligraphics or
not and however valuable, that wasn’t rotted to hell by the humidity, and covered in mould?”

“Come to think of it…”

“Neither have I.” The Deputy Governor added with feeling, “My fucking amah puts my shoes out into the sun to crack them. Does it deliberately, the cow. Saves them from going mouldy, sure, but she sells them once they’re cracked. I found my best fucking patent leathers in the Snake Market at Shau Kei Wan. Bitch.”

“The documents should have rotted, sir.”

Master of the bleeding obvious, the Deputy Governor thought. The standard of civil servants had gone
downhill
ever since the new lot got in by a landslide, general elections back. Grumpy at the depressing news of the old Cantonese man’s find about Kellett Island, he stared out at Cotton Tree Drive.

“I wish they’d built these Government Offices higher up. What’s wrong with Magazine Gap Road?” It was all irrelevant now, so near the Handover, clock ticking, the end of the China Lease from Nanking
et seq.

“Possibly too high up in the old days, sir.”

“I didn’t mean it literally, Witherspoon, for Christ’s sake.”

“Sorry, sir.”

“Let Gresham handle it. He can talk to the old man.”

“Any instructions, sir?”

“Yes. Tell him to bat out time if he can.”

“Or what, sir?”

“Or we’re in the clag even more than we imagine, Witherspoon.”

Gresham welcomed the old gentleman between two legal eagles from the Supreme Court. That only meant the young lawyers had retainers keeping a locker
somewhere
on the premises so the addresses would sound right to strangers. Hong Kong was not deceived. Gresham, though, was a career diplomat with useful connections Home and Oversea, meaning watch your gossip when he was around.

He was an able man for all that and looked the part. His assistants Jane Kelvedon and William Barr worked with him and had done well so far. Only trivial matters, but law was law and principles remained inflexible
whatever
the worth of the issue. Jane, the brighter of the two, lived with a younger sister who “taught the flute to sailors”, as the
South China Morning Post
once blithely reported, ha-ha, so unless she stopped all that would have to go. Money didn’t matter much; law did. These two knew this. It held the key to defining criteria for what decisions remained.

“Mr Min,” Gresham said, smiling, shaking the
beaming
man’s hand. “And Mr Wong! So good to see you!”

“Kind of you to receive us at such short notice, Sir Robert.”

Trust Hong Kong, Gresham thought with pleasure. Other nations could never get the hang of titles, but even Hong Kong beggars and hawkers got them right every time. He’d been called Sir Gresham, Lord Gresh, anything in the Middle East, bloody Yanks the worst and most uncomprehending of the lot. Good old Hong Kong. He began the joust immediately.

“We have perused the documents, Mr Min. There are a few points that puzzle us.”

Ah Min spread his palms. “And we too!”

His beam was inflexible. Gresham guessed it stood for astonishment and dismay as well as a how-de-do. He would have to work it out, light on his toes with this man. Was he too a lawyer? Gresham glanced at Jane who smiled, getting the query and nodding yes, she’d looked him up. He guessed the man had a degree in law from Peking. He’d have heard if it was Sun Yat Sen University in Canton.

“What points puzzle you, Mr Min?”

The old man who called himself Wong did not smile. Features with the skin of an ochre-coloured prune, he simply listened. Could he speak English well? At all? Gresham had had no warning. He glanced at William who shook his head. No data on this man. Oh dear, Gresham thought, it was one of those, was it; no
information
, so the man could be anyone and up to anything. Was he at least registered in Hong Kong as a citizen, with a Hong Kong identity card under any name at all?

William shook his head. Was that a no, or a dunno? William irritated Gresham. William Barr supported Liberal Democrats back home. Liberal Democrats were wet wallpaper trying to be Rembrandts, and their leader, that sandy git from Fife, was an itch hoping for a scratch. British politics were the pits.

“How could the documents have remained in storage so long without decay, Sir Robert?” Mr Min said,
beaming
still.

“The same thought occurred to us. To me,” Gresham amended immediately. Careless.

Mr Min took up the litany. “One only has to see books and calligraphics on the street markets – where
the trams turn, what, left is it? Before they reach Western Market, I mean – to see how Hong Kong’s vile humidity treats documents stored without air-
conditioning
!”

“Indeed,” Gresham said, feeling slightly sickened. “What else puzzles you, Mr Min?”

“The significance of Kellett Island, Sir Robert.”

“Significance,” Gresham stated, leaning back in his chair and wishing the office were better appointed.

You could be too spartan in colonial circumstances, but that was the effect of this Governor. Ridiculous of the man to clean his family’s own shoes of an evening, stupid bastard. Didn’t he know he was letting the side down? As bad as washing your own car. A dreadful appointment, quite dreadful. What on earth the Prime Minster thought he was up to putting the silly sod into this slot, God alone knew. Okay, losing his seat at the general election in sacrifice to the Conservative Party was one thing, but the common sense and practicalities ruling this last-remaining colony imposed dictates of their own. This Governor would blubber like a tart at the Handover ceremony, he guessed. Government staff were already taking odds of 3-1 that he’d do exactly that. “I too wondered about significance,” he said, ball in their court.

“The size of it, for one thing,” he went on when
neither
spoke. “The fact that the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club has owned it for so long. And the proximity of the Admiralty, the Police Officers’ Club, the Typhoon Shelter at Causeway Bay …”

Mr Min’s beam was inflexible, like a neon lamp
irritatingly
left burning during a fuel shortage. Maddening but
unavoidable.

The old man said nothing sitting there in his
cheong saam
, the material draped across his knees and his leather shoes black and dulled. Gresham wondered what he wore underneath. Quite like a priest’s cassock.

“The Harbour Tunnel from underneath Salisbury Road in Kowloon,” Gresham said, thinking, cut to the fucking chase, man, for Christ’s sake, or we’ll be here all day.

“Ah, yes. That too. It seems the area to be considered is far larger than the present extent of Kellett Island would suggest, Sir Robert.”

“Does it, Mr Min?”

“I am as uncertain as your good self, Sir Robert. The implications are difficult to define.”

“But if they were precisely delineated, Mr Min, I should hope for an effective compromise, or at least the start of negotiations.”

“That too seems possible, Sir Robert. Or would be, in different circumstances.”

Here we go, Gresham thought miserably. We’ve already lost and the swine is still playing
catchee-mousee
. He was heartily sick of this job. His brother was retired in Stourbridge learning watercolour painting Tuesdays and Thursdays, had a fine handsome woman on the sly for afters. Guess who’d live longer.

“Different circumstances, Mr Min?” he put in, more to complete the taped recording than any hope of deflecting this beaming bastard’s next move.

The palms spread again. “The Lease expires soon, when Hong Kong will return to the sovereignty of the People’s Republic of China. So little time left!
Negotiations often proceed at snail’s pace, far too slow for the issue to be resolved in session after session.”

“Do you have a suggestion, Mr Min?”

The old man’s silence was getting on Gresham’s nerves. Very soon he would commit the unforgivable and speak to him outright. The thought made him almost redden with embarrassment, but mercifully he’d eliminated that silly tendency in his first month as a diplomat. Twenty years on, it was a non-starter.

“I was hoping that perhaps you, Sir Robert, might make some proposal leading to a solution, of a kind. Without wanting to prejudice your case, of course.”

The two smiled benignly at each other, the issue
settled
. Gresham tried to match the visitor’s radiant beam but couldn’t come anywhere near. They rose together and shook hands.

The visitors left immediately and without another word.

An hour later, Gresham was ushered in to see the Deputy Governor. He flung his file down on the mahogany desk and dropped into the leather armchair.

“Well?” the Deputy Governor growled.

“The transcording’s in your outer office being put to type, sir. The buggers won’t move. They know the implications. If we don’t deal immediately, they’ll let the cat out of the bag. China’s probably already got wind of it. The consequences…”

“I know the consequences, Bob. Don’t give me
consequences
. What will they settle for?”

“Par value, plus rental from somewhere near 1844, give or take. They’d be mad to take less. They probably
know what Great Smith Street’s found.”

“Hmph.” The Deputy Governor stared at his desk. “Better get down to nuts and bolts, then. Make a show, cut them in on the costs as a rental allocation. You know how to make do. The usual American dollar accounts elsewhere. Is it knighthood time?”

“No, sir. That would be a stigma, seeing who’s going to come marching down Waterloo Road.”

“Right, right.”

They went to tea to discuss the least they could get away with.