Tommy Carmellini thought about all of this as he stood in the small shop staring at the one serviceable tape player. Or was there only one? The room was chock-full of electronic components and gizmos, perhaps he just didn’t know what was there. He began searching under the workbench, then worked his way to the large steel filing cabinets that stood against the back wall.
Aha! On the top of the cabinet behind an obsolete commercial Sanyo reel-to-reel tape player was another small player that looked as if it could handle the tape from China Bob’s. He got it down, blew the dust off it, sat it beside the first one. Yes. The same model, controls, etc. He plugged the thing in and found a tape in one of the drawers that looked like it would fit. When he had the tape properly installed on the reels, he pushed the Play button.
Nothing. The thing was broken.
Without a qualm, he put the working machine in his attaché case and left the broken one in its place. There were several headsets lying around, so he selected one and tossed it into the case, too.
He found Kerry writing a report in the office the CIA officers used. The senior man was there, Bubba Lee, schmoozing with two of the other permanent men, George Wang and Carson Eisenberg. All three were Chinese-Americans; Lee and Wang had two Chinese parents, Eisenberg had a Chinese mother. All could speak perfect Cantonese and pass for natives, which they often did. This morning they wanted to shoot the breeze about Harold Barnes, who had been in Hong Kong for only a couple of months before he was killed.
“I went to the police department this morning,” Eisenberg told Tommy, “to see if they have developed any leads on Barnes. They were all atwitter over China Bob’s murder last night. You and Kerry got out of there just in time. They kept everyone else until dawn, including Mr. Cole.”
“Did they ever find the murder weapon?”
“Little automatic, nickel-plated?”
“Could have been.”
“Found it in the secretary’s office just outside the library, in the trash can.”
“That makes sense,” Kerry Kent said. “If I had just shot someone, I would want to get rid of the weapon as soon as possible.”
Tommy Carmellini stared at her in amazement. She was either ditsy or had more brass than any broad he had ever run across.
Lee and the others spent a very pleasant half hour going over the Chan layout with Tommy, speculating about motives, generally rehashing everything, and reaching no conclusions.
Then, finally, the men returned to their offices, closed their doors, unlocked their private safes, and got on with the business of covert and overt espionage, leaving Carmellini to the gentle company of the British transplant, Kerry Kent.
“I wonder who has the tape,” she said. “Barnes was always such a careful workman. One must assume the device worked and someone swiped the tape.”
Carmellini shrugged.
“One has to assume,” she continued, “that the tape is the key to the mystery.”
“If you think I have it, you’re barking at the wrong dog,” he said.
She came over to the desk where he was sitting, squatted so her face was level with his. No more than twelve inches separated them. “You can trust me, you know.”
“So you think I have it.”
“I don’t think you trust me.”
“Whatever would give you that impression? I’ve known you three whole days… no, four now. Four delightful days of humdrum work and one evening of romance lite. You kissed me what? Twice? I trust you as much as you trust me.”
“I never mix business and pleasure.”
“So there’s no hope for us? Wait until my mother hears the news; she had such high hopes. Now get up off the floor and go sit in a chair. A woman kneeling before me will give people the wrong impression and create a tragic precedent.”
Kerry did as he asked.
“What I’d like to know,” he said, “is how many people paraded through that library before and after me, looked over China Bob’s corpse, then went back to the party and didn’t say a word to anyone.”
“This morning a request came in from the chairman of the congressional committee,” she informed him. “Congress invited China Bob to Washington to testify.”
“All expenses paid, no doubt.”
“The poor man is probably better off dead,” Kerry said firmly. “His position between the Chinese and the Americans was going to get scorching hot.”
“Whoever shot him did him a real favor,” Carmellini agreed. He picked up his attaché case and walked out of the office.
“I had just graduated from college when I first came to Hong Kong,” Callie Grafton told her husband as they walked the streets of Kowloon, taking in the sights, sounds, and smells. “I felt like I had finally come to the center of the earth’s civilization, the place where all the currents and tides came together.
“I remember my first ride on the Star Ferry as if it were yesterday. The white-and-green boat was Morning Star, very propitious, you must agree, for a girl making her way in the world for the very first time. All of the thirty-nine-ton double-ended diesel boats are named for stars, and between them made four hundred and twenty crossings a day between Kowloon and Central. Each crossing took about ten minutes, regardless of the weather or sea conditions. The boats began running at six-thirty in the morning and stopped at eleven-thirty at night. There were two classes of passengers — first class, which rode on the upper deck, and second, which rode on the main deck.
“Everyone who lived or worked or visited Hong Kong rode on these ferries. On days off I would ride the ferries a dozen times a day, looking at the people and listening to them talk, laugh, cry, giggle … Chinese laborers and wealthy merchants and sons and daughters and wives and mistresses and teenage toughs, English civil servants and nannies, Australian adventurers, tourists from everywhere on earth, Europeans, Russians, American sailors, Malays, Filipino maids, Japanese businessmen, Hindus, Sikhs — everyone came to Hong Kong, to make money and a new life for themselves or just to see it, to learn the truth of it. All the roads of the earth lead to this place.
“I loved the city. It was British, colonial, civilized, grand and trivial, yet it wasn’t. It was Chinese, but not quite. It was timeless, yet everyone was in a hurry and the city was being transformed before my eyes.
“From this city I could feel the power of China, the thousand million people, the ancient and the new, the way of the seeded earth. I came to think of China as a giant oak, deeply rooted and enduring through the centuries while the lives of men changed like the seasons.
“In this city I can still feel the pulse of the earth. I can stand in the crowded places and listen to the hundreds of voices, all babbling about the things that fill human lives. I can hear the generations talking of the things that never change, the dreams, ambitions, and concerns that make us human.”
Jake Grafton squeezed his wife’s hand, and they walked on.
Rip Buckingham’s brother-in-law, Wu Tai Kwong, was a delivery driver for the Double Happy Fortune Cookie Company. Rip was happily married and living in Hong Kong when he learned that his wife’s younger brother was involved in the anti-Communist movement in Beijing. The whole thing seemed innocent enough… until that same brother-in-law stood in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and had his photo plastered on every front page in the world. That incident made him a criminal. And a dedicated revolutionary.
Now, of course, he was a fugitive… and living in Rip’s basement. Although he was a notorious political criminal and the object of the greatest manhunt in Chinese history, the government had no idea what Wu looked like now, where he was from, who his family was, or what name or names he might be using. Perhaps this was to be expected in a nation where public records were spotty at best, a nation where a significant portion of the population was illiterate and without identity papers of any kind, a nation with more than a hundred million migrants who roamed at will, looking for work.