“They said it was the bad real estate loans.”
“But I thought they have known about those loans for years.”
“They have.”
“Then…”
“Someone in Japan made a decision, Mr. Buckingham. I don’t know who or why. The decision was to make the bank fail.”
“Make it fail? You mean allow it to fail.”
“No, sir. When the Finance Ministry seized our Japanese assets, the Ministry forced the bank to close its doors. There was no way it could stay open. They took a course of action that made the failure of the bank inevitable.”
Rip made a careful note of Genda’s exact words.
“Mr. Genda, I have heard that the Bank of the Orient refused the Chinese government’s demands for low-interest loans. If the bank had made those loans, would it have failed today?”
Genda tried mightily to keep a straight face. He started to answer the question, then thought better of it. He lowered his head. He seemed to be focused inward, no longer aware of Rip’s presence.
Rip tried one more question, then rose and left the office. He pulled the door shut behind him.
CHAPTER THREE
“Tell me again about Tiger Cole,” Callie Grafton said to her husband. They were eating lunch on the balcony of their hotel room. Jake had related his adventure at the bank square this morning and the fact that Tommy Carmellini had dropped by for breakfast.
“I remember you and Tiger flew a plane from the carrier into Cubi Point during the final months of the Vietnam War,” Callie said, “and I went to the Philippines to meet you. I remember meeting him at the airport when you showed me the plane before you left.”
Jake nodded. He, too, remembered. “A few weeks after that we were shot down,” he said.
“As I recall,” Callie said, “he was tall, silent, intense.”
“That was Tiger. He never had much to say, but when he did, people listened.”
She had been a junior translator at the U.S. consulate in Hong Kong in those days. And now Tiger Cole was the consul general. Who would have guessed?
“Tiger broke his back in the ejection,” Jake continued, recalling days he hadn’t thought about in years. “After we were rescued he spent a long time in the hospital, then they sent him to Pensacola for rehabilitation. He finally said to hell with it and pulled the plug. I think he went back to college in California, got a master’s in something or other, then got involved in the computer industry.”
“I lost his address about ten years ago,” Callie explained. “He sent us Christmas cards, then we moved or he moved or whatever.”
Jake Grafton chuckled. “Sometimes life deals you an ace. Last month Fortune magazine said he was in on the ground floor of three big high-tech start-ups.”
“And now he’s the consul general,” Callie said distractedly. “Why do you want me to translate this tape?”
Jake summarized his morning conversation with Carmellini while Callie finished her salad. “The tape may contain something worth knowing. China Bob was a rainmaker, a wheeler-dealer who played every angle he could find. Something on that tape might shed some light on what is happening in this town.”
“You mean on what the Americans are doing to help make it happen?”
“If they are.”
“This CIA officer, Carmellini? Do you trust him?”
“I met him last year in Cuba,” Jake explained. “He was working with a CIA officer who was subsequently killed. The dead officer told me Carmellini was a safecracker before the CIA recruited him.”
“That doesn’t sound like anything I’d want on my resume,” Callie shot back.
“It may not take all kinds, but we sure as hell got all kinds.”
“Are we going to do this tonight?”
“I don’t know. Whenever Carmellini shows up with a tape player.”
“I certainly don’t want to sit around this hotel room all evening waiting for him.”
“I didn’t say we should.”
“Why don’t you call Tiger Cole, invite him to go to dinner with us?”
“You think he’d go?” Jake asked dubiously.
“For heaven’s sake, of course he’d go! Unless he has another commitment, then he’d probably want to set something up for tomorrow. Call him. Tell him you’re in town and want to have dinner. I always thought you saved his life after you two were shot down.”
“That’s true,” Jake admitted. “But he’s the consul general and pretty busy and—”
“You’re a two-star admiral in Uncle Sam’s navy, Jake Grafton. You can buy a drink anywhere on this planet.”
Rip Buckingham was about ready to send the bank story to the makeup room when he received a telephone call from the governor’s office.
“This is Governor Sun’s assistant, Mr. Buckingham. Your newspaper is running story about tragedy in front of Bank of Orient? This morning?”
“Yes.”
“Governor Sun Siu Ki has issued statement. Statement go in story.”
The aide’s English was almost impossible to follow, so Rip replied in Cantonese. “Read it to me,” he said, trying to keep the dejection out of his voice.
“A crowd of justly outraged citizens gathered this morning at the Bank of the Orient to withdraw their money panicked when bank officials shamefully failed to open their doors,” said the aide, reading slowly. “In the rioting that followed, several people were killed by the gallant soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army while they were restoring order. The officials of the Bank of the Orient will be held responsible for this tragedy …”
There were several paragraphs more, and as the governor’s assistant dictated in Cantonese, Rip wrote it down in English, in his own private shorthand. He read it back to ensure he had it, then quickly typed out the statement on his computer. He put a note above the statement for the front-page editor, directing him to put the governor’s statement in a box in the center of the page. However, he didn’t change a word of his story, which gave the facts, without comment, as they had been gathered by his reporters.
When he had sent the story for the China Post on its electronic way, he called it up again and made some changes. His fingers flew over the keyboard, changing the slant of the story, trying to capture the despair of Saburo Genda and the hopelessness of the crowd waiting for money that rightfully belonged to them and would never be paid. He also tried to capture the callousness of the soldiers who used deadly weapons on defenseless people.
When he had finished this story, he E-mailed it and the governor’s statement to the Buckingham newspapers worldwide. The China Post was owned by Buckingham Newspapers, Ltd., of which Rip’s father, Richard, was chairman and CEO. Richard Buckingham started with one newspaper in Adelaide at the end of World War II, and as he liked to tell it, with hard work, grit, determination, perseverance, and a generous helping of OPM — other people’s money — built a newsprint empire that covered the globe. Richard still held a bit under sixty percent of the stock, which was not publicly traded. A series of romantic misadventures had spread the rest of the shares far and wide; even Rip had a smidgen under five percent.
Thirty minutes after Rip E-mailed the story to Sydney, the telephone rang. It was his father.
“Sounds like Hong Kong is heating up,” Richard growled.
“It is.”
“When are you going to pack it in?”
“We’ve had this conversation before, Dad.”
“We have. And we are going to keep having it. Sometimes in the middle of the night I wake up in a sweat, thinking of you rotting in some Communist prison because you went off your nut and told the truth in print about those sewer rats.”
“All politicians are sewer rats, not just ours.”
“I’m going to quote you on that.”