Manville waited. Closer to him was a long dark wood dining table, big enough to seat twelve. Five elaborate place settings took up the left half of the table. Apparently Morgan and his friends would eat somewhere else; in the kitchen, maybe, or out back with the dogs.
The four people approached, Curtis smiling like a host. Saying, “Well, George, you look rested. Good. A hell of a long drive, isn’t it?”
“Not too bad, in that car,” Manville said. He was surprised at the calmness of his response, but could see nothing else to do. It’s a natural instinct, apparently, to be polite to somebody who’s being polite to you, return friendliness with friendliness, good manners with good manners.
Curtis went so far as to make introductions: “George Manville, may I introduce Albert and Helen Farrelly, they run Kennison for me, and Cindy Peters, an old friend visiting for the weekend. George,” he told the others, “is a brilliant engineer, absolutely brilliant. We’ve been working together for a year and a half now, haven’t we, George?”
“About that,” Manville agreed. Not so long ago, he wanted to say, while everybody exchanged friendly greetings, you were sending people to kill me, then to kidnap me, imprison me. Has one of us lost his mind? But dinner party politeness was just too strong a force; he couldn’t say a word.
Curtis even rubbed it in, saying, “It’s too bad your friend Kim couldn’t be with you, George, we’d make an even number. Well, we’ll do what we can. I’ll be father at the head of the table here, George, you take that place there on the right, Helen, you between George and me, Cindy, you on my left, and Albert, if you’d sit across from George?”
Everybody did, and Manville saw Curtis extend his foot toward what must be a call button in the floor, because almost immediately two servers in the tan pantsuits came out with plates of crisp green salad.
Manville said to Helen, on his left, “Kennison?”
Surprised, she said, “The station. This place, you’d call it a ranch. And the house. This is Kennison. You didn’t know that?”
“I came here unexpectedly,” Manville said.
Wine was being poured. Around the server’s arm, Curtis said to Manville, “Kennison’s a great place, George, I wish I could be here more often myself. I’ll show you around, I think you’ll be surprised and pleased.”
“I’m already surprised,” Manville told him, and Curtis laughed.
When the five glasses had been filled with an Australian white wine, a chardonnay, Curtis proposed a toast. “To the good life, in a good place, to getting it and keeping it.”
They all drank to Curtis’s toast, Manville last and only a sip. It was a good clean wine, nicely cold. He would have to be alert not to drink too much of it.
As they started their salads, Manville looked more carefully at these three new people. He might be needing allies soon; would any of them fit the bill?
Albert and Helen Farrelly were a middle-aged, comfortable-looking couple, both overweight, both with the leathery cheeks of people who spend a lot of time outdoors, as they would do if they were the overseers of a large ranch. They were Australian, by their accents, and they seemed on very easy terms with their employer.
Would the Farrellys help? They came across as decent people, not criminals, but Captain Zhang was a decent man, too, and look at what he had been prepared to do. How vital was this job, this life, to the Farrellys? Helen Farrelly spoke of Kennison as though it were heaven on earth, and her husband smiled and nodded in agreement; how willing would they be to risk it, or lose it, for a stranger?
Cindy Peters was about thirty, a poised girl, pleasant, well-spoken, also Australian. An old friend of Curtis, visiting for the weekend.
There’s no comfort here, Manville told himself, as the salad plates were removed, replaced by plates of a butterflied boneless chicken breast with lightly sauteed vegetables. And more wine. I have to count on nobody but myself.
Manville turned to Curtis. “How long have you had this place? Kennison.”
“Seven years. It was my second wife’s idea. She’s Australian, she wanted a footprint in her homeland, so we bought this. She’d have liked to keep it after the divorce, but by then I was in love with it. And not with her, you know?”
“I didn’t know you were ever married,” Manville said. He wanted to encourage this new friendliness in Curtis, this companionship, until he could find a way to escape.
“I was married twice,” Curtis told him. And sounding more grim than before: “The second one was the mistake.” Then he lightened again, and turned to rest his hand on Cindy Peters’s, saying, “You don’t mind if I talk about my wives, do you?”
“Just so you don’t bring them around,” she said.
“No fear,” he told her, and turned back to Manville to say, “My first wife died at thirty-nine of leukemia.”
Cindy Peters looked shocked and embarrassed, as Curtis had no doubt intended, and Manville said, “I’m very sorry.”
“So was I, George, so was I. Isabel was my life to me. She got me started in business, what a team we were going to be.” His jaw set and his eyes looked angry, and he said, “Isabel would have known how to deal with the goddam mainlanders. She was Hong Kong born and bred, she’d have tied them in knots, not run around wasting time and money like me.”
Manville said, “She was Chinese?”
“No, a Brit,” Curtis said. “Her background was. Her grandfather came out, started a construction company on the island, over a hundred years ago. Called it Hoklo Construction, which was a joke, because the Hoklo were 17th-century pirates from China that settled in Hong Kong and then assimilated and disappeared, so anybody could be Hoklo. Anybody could be a pirate, you see?”
Manville said, “It’s an interesting point.”
“One Isabel’s grandfather always kept in mind,” Curtis said, “as should have his successors. Anyway, the grandfather built the business, and went back to England to marry, and had children, and his first two sons took over the business, and Isabel was a daughter of the second son. I was just a roustabout from Oklahoma, my father was in construction but in a small way, little tract houses in developments in the dirt around Tulsa, not like Hoklo. They were big, always, from the beginning, building the big godowns the Chinese used for waterfront warehouses, putting up office buildings, apartment houses. I was always interested in travel, seeing something other than the tan dirt of Tulsa, and when I got to Hong Kong I took a job for a while with Hoklo, and met Isabel, and that’s where it all started.”
Manville said, “You went into the firm.”
“I became the firm,” Curtis said, and his voice was harsh again, but then it softened as he said, “The difference between the first generation and the third, you see, the first generation has to work for it, and the second generation at least gets to see their parents work for it, but the third generation gets it handed to them on a plate, with no idea there’s any work involved. Isabel’s brother and two of her cousins were supposed to take over the company, and it would have been like having the company taken over by the Pillsbury Doughboy.”
“You took it away from them.”
Curtis smiled. If tigers smiled, it would look like that. “I showed them what it was like to be in a fight,” he said.
“And lose,” Manville suggested.
“I was always the one to bet on,” Curtis said. “And then, no sooner was it mine, mine and Isabel’s, than it hit her.”
Cindy Peters put a sympathetic hand on his forearm. “That must have been horrible.”
He nodded at her, “It killed me, Cindy. I was dead before she was, and she was dead in five months.”
“Oh, Dick. I don’t know what to say.”