Meanwhile, in the executive suite of the bank, President Saburo Genda was getting bad news from the assistant finance minister in Tokyo.
“We will not loan the bank additional funds. I’m sorry, but the prime minister and the finance minister are agreed.”
President Genda’s forte was commercial loans to large companies. He had spent much of his adult life dealing with wealthy businessmen with a firm grasp of economic reality. He fought now to keep his temper with this obtuse government clerk.
“You don’t understand,” he said, his voice tightly under control. “We are experiencing a run on the bank. There is a crowd of several thousand depositors outside demanding their money. Without additional cash, the bank cannot pay them. Without more money, the bank will collapse.”
“I am sorry, Mr. Genda,” said the bureaucrat. “It is you who do not understand. The government has decided to let the bank fail. It would simply cost too much to save it.”
“But—”
“The Bank of the Orient made far too many real estate loans in Hong Kong at astronomical evaluations. As you know, the market collapsed after the Communists took over. It may be twenty years before the market recovers. Indeed, it may never recover.”
“Mr. Assistant Minister, your ministry has known about the bad loans for years. Your colleagues were working with us. We have the assets to pay our depositors, but the assets are in accounts in Japan and you have frozen them. Those funds belong to this bank! Make them available for us to pledge and we will borrow the cash we need locally.”
“I am sorry, Mr. Genda. The government has decided to offset the bank’s assets against the amounts the bank owes the government.”
“You can’t do this,” Genda protested. “This isn’t the way things are done. You are violating the banking regulations!”
‘The decision has been made.”
“Have you discussed the failure of the bank with the governor of Hong Kong or the Chinese government in Beijing?”
“We have. Since the bank is not Chinese, they did not choose to guarantee its debts.”
Genda continued, almost pleading, trying to make the bureaucrat see reason. “This is a Japanese bank! Many of our senior people are former Finance Ministry officials. We have close ties with the government, extremely close ties.”
“I am sorry, Mr. Genda,” the civil servant said politely. “As I said, the decision has been made. We here in the Ministry expect you to take personal responsibility for the condition of your institution. Good-bye.”
The assistant minister hung up, leaving Saburo Genda standing with the telephone in his hand, too stunned to hang it up, too stunned to speak to his subordinates standing around the room waiting for a report. He felt as if his head had just been separated from his body. In two minutes of conversation, the civil servant at the Finance Ministry had ruined him: He could never work in a bank again; his whole life had just been reduced to rubble.
“Open the bank,” General Tang said in Chinese. “I order you to open the doors of the bank.”
“The bank is ruined,” Saburo Genda told the soldier, his lips barely able to form the words. “Tokyo refuses to guarantee our borrowings of cash to pay the depositors.”
Tang Ming tried to understand. Foreigners! “But this is a bank. You have much money in the vault. Give it to the people who want it, and when you run out, tell them they will have to come back another day.”
“Then the riot will occur in our lobby.”
“You must have money!” Tang gestured to the crowd. “What have you done with all of their money?”
Genda had had it with this fool. “We loaned it out,” he said through clenched teeth. “That is the function of banks, to accept deposits and make loans.”
Tang Ming stretched to his full height. He looked at Genda behind his great, polished desk, a whipped dog, and his two colonels and Genda’s secretary and the crowd beyond the window.
“Come,” he murmured at the colonels and strode out.
The tangible anger of the crowd made Jake Grafton uneasy. He sensed it was high time for him to be on his way, time to be out of this group of angry Asians who were working themselves up for a riot.
Still he lingered. Curiosity kept him rooted.
Although he spoke not a word of Chinese, he didn’t really need the language to read the emotions on people’s faces. A few people were openly crying, weeping silently as they rocked back and forth in sitting positions. Others were on cellular phones, presumably sharing their misfortune with family and friends.
The number of wireless telephones in use by the crowd surprised Jake — China was definitely third or fourth world. There was money in Hong Kong, a lot of which had been invested in state-of-the-art technology. Still, most of the people in this square existed on a small fraction of the money that the average American family earned.
As Jake sat there with two thousand American dollars’ worth of traveler’s checks in his pocket that he could get cashed at any bank in town, the vast gulf between the comfortable, middle-class circumstances in which he had lived his life and the hand-to-mouth existence that so many hundreds of millions — billions — of people around the world accepted as their lot in life spread before him like the Grand Canyon.
He was no bleeding heart, but he cared about people. Always had. He found people interesting, could imagine himself in their circumstances; this was one of the qualities that made him a leader, a good naval officer, and a decent human being.
General Tang Ming climbed into a small van with public address system speakers mounted on the roof. Sitting in the passenger seat of the van holding a microphone, the general explained the facts as he understood them: The bank had loaned all the money it had and had no more to pay to the people in the crowd. It would not open its doors.
Since waiting for an event that would not happen was futile, Tang ordered the crowd to disperse. The language he used was Mandarin Chinese, the dialect of northern China, of Beijing, and of most of the soldiers under his command. Unfortunately, it was not the language of the people in the crowd, most of whom spoke Cantonese or English.
As General Tang harangued the crowd in the street outside the Bank of the Orient over a loud, tinny PA system in a language few understood, the crowd became more boisterous. Some people began shouting, others produced stones and bits of concrete from construction sites that they threw toward the bank windows. Several men nearest the main entrance to the bank pounded on the door with their fists, shouting, “Open up and pay us!”
Others in the crowd, sensing approaching disaster, tried to leave the area by passing through the cordon of soldiers. Almost by reflex, the greatly outnumbered soldiers tried to hold the crowd back. They struck out with billy clubs and rifle butts. Inevitably the conflict panicked onlookers, many of whom gave in to their urge to flee all at the same time. Those in the center of the crowd began pushing those on the fringes toward the soldiers.
A shot was fired. Then several shots.
General Tang was still holding forth on the PA system from the passenger seat of the van when the first fully automatic burst was triggered into the crowd by a frightened soldier.
People screamed. More shots were fired into the crowd, random insanity, then the soldiers were either trampled or ran before the fear-soaked mob trying to escape.
A sergeant in one of the tanks on the edge of the park tried to aid the escape of his fellow soldiers, who ran past the tank in front of a wall of running civilians who were also desperate to escape. The sergeant opened fire at the civilians with a machine gun mounted on top of the main turret. The bullets cut down several dozen people before the gun jammed.
In three minutes the sidewalk and street in front of the bank contained only dead, dying, and wounded people, many of them trampled. More than a hundred people lay on the pavement and grass and in the flowerbeds, some obviously dead, some bleeding and in shock.