Noble House

Wu and the others gawked at the hand. "Piss!" he said and hawked loudly. "Piss on all your generations, Pockmark Tang! What luck!"
"One more game? Twenty thousand, Four Finger Wu?" Tang said gleefully, convinced that tonight old devil, Chi Kung, the god of gamblers, was sitting on his shoulder.
Wu began to shake his head, but at that moment a seabird flew overhead and called plaintively. "Forty," he said immediately, changing his mind, interpreting the call as a sign from heaven that his luck had changed. "Forty thousand or nothing! But it'll have to be dice because I've no time now."
"I haven't got forty cash by all gods, but with the twenty you owe me, I'll borrow against my junk tomorrow when the bank opens and give you all my fornicating profit on our next gold or opium shipment until you're paid, heya?"
Goodweather Poon said sourly, "That's too much on one game. You two fornicators've lost your minds!"
"Highest score, one throw?" Wu asked.
"Ayeeyah, you've gone mad, both of you," Poon said. Nonetheless, he was as excited as the others. "Where are the dice?"
Wu produced them. There were three. "Throw for your fornicating future, Pockmark Tang!"
Pockmark Tang spat on his hands, said a silent prayer, then threw them with a shout.
"Oh oh oh," he cried out in anguish. A four, a three and another four. "Eleven!" The other men were hardly breathing.
Wu spat on the dice, cursed them, blessed them and threw. A six, a two and a three. "Eleven! Oh all gods great and small! Again— throw again!"
Excitement gathered on the deck. Pockmark Tang threw. "Fourteen!"
Wu concentrated, the tension intoxicating, then threw the dice.
"Ayeeyah!" he exploded, and they all exploded. A six, a four and a two.
"Eeeee," was all Pockmark Tang could say, holding his belly, laughing with glee as the others congratulated him and commiserated with the loser.
Wu shrugged, his heart still pounding in his chest. "Curse all seabirds that fly over my head at a time like that!"
"Ah, is that why you changed your mind, Four Finger Wu?"
"Yes—it was like a sign. How many seabirds call as they fly overhead at night?"
"That's right. I would have done the same."
"Joss!" Then Wu beamed. "Eeeee, but the gambling feeling's better than the Clouds and the Rain, heya?"
"Not at my age!"
"How old are you, Pockmark Tang?"
"Sixty—perhaps seventy.-Almost as old as you are." Haklos did not have permanent records of births like all village land dwellers. "I don't feel more than thirty."
"Have you heard the Lucky Medicine Shop at Aberdeen Market's got a new shipment of Korean ginseng, some of it a hundred years old! That'll stick fire in your stalk!"
"His stalk's all right, Goodweather Poon! His third wife's with child again!" Wu grinned toothlessly and pulled out a big roll of 500-dollar notes. He began counting, his fingers nimble even though his left thumb was missing. Years ago it had been hacked off during a fight with river pirates during a smuggling expedition. He stopped momentarily as his number seven son came on deck. The young man was tall for a Chinese, twenty-six. He walked across the deck awkwardly. An incoming jet began to whine past overhead.
"Did they arrive, Seventh Son?"
"Yes, Father, yes they did."
Four Fingers pounded the upturned keg with glee. "Very good. Now we can begin!"
"Hey, Four Fingers," Pockmark Tang said thoughtfully, motioning at the dice. "A six, a four and a two—that's twelve, which's also three, the magic three."
"Yes, yes I saw."
Pockmark Tang beamed and pointed northwards and a little east to where Kai Tak airport would be—behind the Aberdeen mountains, across the harbor in Kowloon, six miles away. "Perhaps your luck has changed, heya?"
MONDAY
3
5:16 A.M. :
At half-dawn a jeep with two overalled mechanics aboard came around Gate 16 at the eastern end of the terminal and stopped close beside the main landing gear of Yankee 2. The gangway was still in place and the main door slightly ajar. The mechanics, both Chinese, got out and one began to inspect the eight-wheeled main gear while the other, equally carefully, scrutinized the nose gear. Methodically, they checked the tires and wheels and then the hydraulic couplings of the brakes, then peered into the landing bays. Both used flashlights. The mechanic at the main landing gear took out a spanner and stood on one of the wheels for a closer inspection, his head and shoulder now well into the belly of the airplane. After a moment he called out softly in Cantonese, "Ayeeyahl Hey, Lim, take a look at this."
The other man strolled back and peered up, sweat staining his white overalls. "Are they there or not, I can't see from down here."
"Brother, put your male stalk into your mouth and flush yourself down a sewer. Of course they're here. We're rich. We'll eat rice forever! But be quiet or you'll wake the dung-stained foreign devils above! Here …" The man handed down a long, canvas-wrapped package which Lim took and stowed quietly and quickly in the jeep. Then another and another small one, both men sweating and very nervous, working fast but quietly.
Another package. And another . . .
And then Lim saw the police jeep whirl around the corner and simultaneously other uniformed men come pouring out of Gate 16, among them Europeans. "We're betrayed," he gasped as he fled in a hopeless dash for freedom. The jeep intercepted him easily and he stopped, shivering with pent-up terror. Then he spat and cursed the gods and withdrew into himself.
The other man had jumped down at once and leaped into the driving seat. Before he could turn on the ignition he was swamped and handcuffed.
"So, little oily mouth," Sergeant Lee hissed, "where do you think you're going?"
"Nowhere, Officer, it was him, him there, that bastard son of a whore, Officer, he swore he'd cut my throat if I didn't help him. I don't know anything on my mother's grave!"
"You lying bastard, you never had a mother. You're going to go to jail for fifty years if you don't talk!"
"I swear, Officer, by all the gods th—"
"Piss on your lies, dungface. Who's paying you to do this job?"
Armstrong was walking slowly across the tarmac, the sick sweet taste of the kill in his mouth. "So," he said in English, "what have we here, Sergeant?" It had been a long night's vigil and he was tired and unshaven and in no mood for the mechanic's whining protestations of innocence, so he said softly in perfect gutter Cantonese, "One more tiny, insignificant word out of you, purveyor of leper dung, and I'll have my men jump on your Secret Sack."
The man froze.
"Good. What's your name?"
"Tan Shu Ta, lord."
"Liar! What's your friend's name?"
"Lim Ta-cheung, but he's not my friend, lord, I never met him before this morning."
"Liar! Who paid you to do this?"
"I don't know who paid him, lord. You see he swore he'd cut—"
"Liar! Your mouth's so full of dung you must be the god of dung himself. What's in those packages?"
"I don't know. I swear on my ancestor's gr—"
"Liar!" Armstrong said it automatically, knowing that the lies were inevitable.
"John Chinaman's not the same as us," his first police teacher, an old China hand, had told him. "Oh I don't mean cut on the cross or anything like that—he's just different. He lies through his teeth all the time to a copper and when you nab a villain fair and square he'll still lie and be as slippery as a greased pole in a pile of shit. He's different. Take their names. All Chinese have four different names, one when he's born, one at puberty, one when he's an adult and one he chooses for himself, and they forget one or add another at the drop of a titfer. And their names—God stone the crows! Chinese call themselves lao-tsi-sing—the Ancient One Hundred Names. They've only got a basic hundred surnames in all China and of those there're twenty Yus, eight Yens, ten Wus and God knows how many Pings, Lis, Lees, Chens, Chins, Chings, Wongs and Fus and each one of them you pronounce five different ways so God knows who's who!"