“So far as I am concerned, it is done,” I said.
“Wait until you hear what it is.”
“Do you know?”
Her eyes were mischievous. “I do but I’m not supposed to tell.”
“Give me a hint, Ngat T’oy.”
“To do that would rob my father of the pleasure of asking for himself,” she said, and her face was suddenly the inscrutable, demure countenance of a dutiful Chinese daughter.
Ngat T’oy was like that. Educated in California, she was pure Chinese beneath the flippant veneer of Western civilization and casual slang. Her mind was just like that, a mysterious well of oriental mysticism beneath a layer of the Occident. There could be no mixture of the two. At times, she was merely a casual American girl with breezy informality and a mischievous give-and-take of repartee. Then, when the going got tough, she became as Chinese as Cathay itself.
“Come,” she said, “and bring your ears and your wisdom to the house of my father.”
Chapter Two
Soo Hoo Duck had the air of benevolent wisdom which comes with age. The eyes that peered out at the world from behind horn-rimmed spectacles were kindly, shrewd and penetrating.
Dressed in a loose Chinese costume with baggy sleeves and wearing those awkward Chinese shoes which shuffled along the floor as he walked, the man, nevertheless, had that about him which made his carriage solemnly dignified.
The older Chinese prefer to shake hands with themselves rather than with you. And it is etiquette to clasp your own hands over the heart, agitate them gently, and bow.
I returned Soo Hoo Duck’s courteous salutations.
“It is as though warm sun gladdened my heart on a winter morning,” Soo Hoo Duck said in Cantonese. “I was stumbling in the dark, but now with your presence, warmth and light illuminate my path. My feet are to follow.”
“I am but a mirror,” I said. “The light which you see comes not from me, but is the reflection of your own wisdom illuminating the pathway the Gods have selected for your feet.”
“You have the modesty of wisdom,” Soo Hoo Duck said. “It has been written that only the very wise are very humble. It is the stupid man who has the loud voice. Will you join me in a cup of tea?”
Soo Hoo Duck, bowing again, escorted me across deep Oriental rugs that seemed to the feet like a springy mat of pine needles in a virgin forest. Overhead, chandeliers of cut and polished crystal glittered in myriad coruscations. The furniture was of teakwood and Chinese mahogany inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Suspended from the walls were wide banners of silk on which had been embroidered the words of various prominent scholars, black ideographs against a red silk background.
We seated ourselves on those straightbacked chairs which only the disciplined spines of the Chinese can find truly comfortable. A servant brought tea, melon seeds, thick, sweet almond cakes, placed them on the carved, inlaid table and departed noiselessly. Ngat T’oy placed cigarettes and matches at my elbow.
Soo Hoo Duck glanced at his daughter. “You will interpret for our distinguished visitor,” he said.
My knowledge of Cantonese is such that I can follow ordinary conversation and reply in kind, and I happen to know that Soo Hoo Duck has an excellent knowledge of English. Yet when he wishes to be doubly certain that he says what he intends to say and to scan closely the replies of his visitor, he presses Ngat T’oy into the job of interpreter, which gives him the advantage of listening to his own statements after he has uttered them, as well as hearing the replies of his visitor twice.
Recently, however, Ngat T’oy was becoming inclined to take liberties with the utterances of her father, masking her short cuts by the use of slang which, being completely foreign to Soo Hoo Duck’s vocabulary, left him very much out on a limb.
“Tell him,” Soo Hoo Duck said, “the preliminaries.”
Ngat T’oy said, “You know, Ed, these days, you never can tell what you’re up against. You’ll get what looks like a live lead and it will turn out to be a dud. Then something will come along that looks like an absolute washout and it will be the real goods. That’s what’s bothering the paterfamilias. He’s in touch with a jane by the name of Betty Crofath who has something he can’t afford to overlook, if she has it.”
I glanced at Soo Hoo Duck.
The old men’s eyes were puckered in puzzled bewilderment as he listened to what his daughter was saying. She paused and he said to her sharply in Cantonese, “What is this language you are using?”
She met his gaze guilelessly. “The language of the white barbarians.”
“Truly it is barbarous,” the old man sighed. “Go ahead.”
“Okay,” Ngat T’oy said to me. “This jane tries to make a build-up without first putting an ante in the jack pot or letting us know how many cards she wants to draw. She writes Dad a letter that she’ll be in San Francisco day after tomorrow at the Pelton Hotel. She has certain information which is definitely authentic and which she wants to turn over gratis.
“That’s the payoff, Ed. That Annie Oakley business. You know, we get all sorts of propositions from people who want to turn over information for a payoff. We have certain definite ways of playing them, but this jane is different. It’s a purely voluntary contribution to the cause as far as she is concerned. There’s only one condition. She has to deliver the information to my father personally.”
“What,” I asked, “is the general nature of the information?”
Ngat T’oy said to her father in rapid Chinese, “How much am I at liberty to tell him about this information?”
Soo Hoo Duck’s face was utterly without expression. “To this man,” he said, “I bare my soul.”
Ngat T’oy said, “Secret data on the entire construction program of the Japanese Navy, and the exact location of the different yards where carriers, cruisers, destroyers and other ships are being constructed.”
I gave a low whistle.
“And,” she went on, “that isn’t all. It seems that just as everyone misjudged the Japanese before Pearl Harbor, they are now making the mistake of misjudging them afterward. There has been a lot of talk that, according to the true oriental concept of things, the Japanese will never make a peace at which they will lose face; that they will go on butting their heads against a stone wall — that if they can’t win, they will commit military hara-kari by fighting to the last soldier.”
I nodded.
“It is,” she said, “sound psychology except for one thing.”
“What,” I asked, “is that?”
“There is a very strong amount of evidence dead against it.”
“Evidence that can be believed?”
She nodded. “The Japanese have absorbed much from their contact with occidental civilization. The Japanese would be extremely reluctant to admit defeat and taste the bitter dregs of the cup of humiliation.”
“I can well understand.”
“But,” she said, “Japan is cunning. Japan remembers what happened to Germany in nineteen-eighteen. In place of carrying on until the Allies trampled her so completely in the dust she could never rise again, Germany accepted the best terms she could get, pretended an external docility, and within twenty years, was in a position to try again. And that time, she came within an ace of doing it.
“There is some talk in Japan that it would be better to accept even humiliation and an apparent loss of face for another quarter of a century and then conquer the world, using the hard-earned knowledge gained in the present war, than to carry on until the last gun is fired. Because the smart ones in Japan realize now that when the last gun is fired, it will be pointed at Japan’s heart and secret bombs will be used that will leave nothing in Japan for the Allies to shoot at.”