“Did he?”
“No. But he said — and he was lying, of course — that we had offered him thirty million dollars in foreign aid to release the three of you, and he said that he had evidence to prove it. Well, he did have that fool letter of apology from the Secretary. That was real enough. The British were still fuming and leaking stuff all over the place, so the press went along. Can’t say I blame them really. More headlines, and God, the editorials. The New York Times called it a ‘tragedy of errors.’ The Washington Post said it was ‘inane chicanery.’ And the New York Daily News wanted somebody ‘horsewhipped.’ So the word came down from the White House. Buy them out no matter how much.”
“How much was it?” I said.
Carmingler gave me his need to know look. “Oh, they still asked for thirty million, but it was less than that. Much, much less.”
“Ten cents on the dollar,” I said. “Three million.”
Carmingler glared at me suspiciously. “Only six persons in the country are supposed to know that.”
“Now you can make it seven.”
“Who told you?”
“A wily Oriental.”
The deep flush started at the top of Carmingler’s faultless collar and rose slowly until it reached his temples. It made him look like a traffic light that would never say go again. He sucked away on his pipe and fooled with his Phi Beta Kappa key at the same time, a sure sign that he was upset.
“I assume,” he said, spitting the words at me from around his pipe, “that the wily Oriental also told you why you were kept in solitary.”
I shrugged. “Standard procedure, I suppose.”
“You suppose wrong. Has it occurred to you that we could debrief you in Hong Kong just as well as we could in San Francisco? After all, Hong Kong’s been your home for the past ten years. You probably have more friends there than you do in the States.”
“It crossed my mind,” I said, “and since it might make you feel better, I’ll ask why — about both the solitary and being hustled back to the States, although I don’t mind that. I left nothing in Hong Kong except some cheap suits in my hotel and some equally cheap books. My car was leased and my bank account wasn’t over two hundred dollars.”
“You were paid enough.”
“I’m a spendthrift.”
The flush in Carmingler’s face had receded. He put his pipe carefully into the ashtray and placed the palms of his hands flat on the table. His elbows jutted out as he leaned toward me. He looked something like a middle-aged turkey who thought he would try to fly just one more time.
“They kept you in solitary and we brought you back here because Li Teh’s people have put a price on your head.” He enjoyed saying that.
“How much?”
“Enough.”
“How much, goddamn it?”
He smiled. “Five thousand dollars. American. At that price you wouldn’t live two hours in Hong Kong.”
“And here?”
“It doesn’t matter here.”
I nodded. “Monsters of all kinds shall be destroyed.”
“Where’s that from?”
“From China,” I said. “From Chairman Mao.”
Chapter 8
Until I was a little more than eight years old I went to school each afternoon for three hours following lunch. My teachers were prostitutes. I would have liked to have gone to school in the morning, but the ladies were never up.
I learned simple arithmetic (they were all good at that), French, Russian, German, and English — speaking the last, I was told, with a pronounced Australian accent. I also learned a highly garbled version of world history, spiced with tales of high romance and shattered dreams during the impossibly good old days in Berlin, Sydney, Canton, Rome, Marseilles, St. Petersburg, and San Diego. My Chinese also improved, but by the time I was eight I still couldn’t read or write my name in any language.
And it wasn’t until my seventh birthday that they stopped dressing me in rich brocades and silk. Until then I wore a series of long Mandarin gowns with high collars. My trousers were made of contrasting raw silk and red felt slippers covered my feet. The girls took turns painting my cheeks and plucking my eyebrows and powdering my face until it was chalk white except for two round spots of rouge on either cheek. I was a hell of a sight.
I’ve never been quite sure why Tante Katerine took me home with her or even kept me around after she did. It may have been some latent maternal instinct, but that’s doubtful. More likely, she made one of her usually accurate snap judgments and decided that having an American towel boy in her whorehouse would provide a novelty well worth the cost of my room and board.
Three years later, when I was nearly seven, she told me that the officials at the U.S. Consulate, as well as the Texaco management, as sumed that both my father and I had been blown to bits in 1937 by the Nanking Road explosions. A few days after she brought me home with her she had coached one of her American girls — the one from San Diego, Doris, I recall — for an hour or so and then had had her telephone both the Consulate and Texaco.
Posing as an old friend of the Dye family, Doris inquired if the doctor’s relatives in the States had been informed of his death and that of his son. She was told that the doctor had no living relatives. She then asked if there were any personal effects and the Texaco man said that there was nothing other than the doctor’s medical bag, his clothes and those of his son, and four five-year diaries that the doctor had faithfully kept since he was fourteen years old. Doris somehow talked the Texaco man into sending her the diaries to some poste restante or other under the unlikely pretext that they would be of immense value to the Montana State Historical Society, of whose board of directors she claimed to be chairman. After the diaries arrived, Doris occasionally read me some of the juicier passages. I’m still not sure how Doris knew about the Montana State Historical Society, but it may have been that she had once whored in Helena for a while.
Tante Katerine must have been close to forty in 1939. Her full name, so she said, was Katerine Obrenovitch, and she claimed to be a distant cousin of ex-King Alexander of Serbia, who took over the throne when his father, King Milan, abdicated in 1889. She also said that she had been born in St. Petersburg (she could never bring herself to say Leningrad) and had fled the revolution to Manchuria along with a sizeable bunch of other White Russians. I heard the tale dozens of times. It always had a lot of snow in it and even some wolves chasing a sleigh. Although still a very small child, I knew that most of it was a lie, but it was one that I never grew tired of hearing.
When the Japanese took control of Shanghai on November 8, 1937 — except for the International Settlement and the French Concession — Katerine employed every guile she had learned during twenty years of varied experience to determine who was what she, in her cosmopolitan patois, called, “Señor Number One Garçon.”
Mr. Number One Boy turned out to be a Japanese major who had been too long in grade, at least in his opinion, and was not at all averse to being bribed with both money and free samples. I remember the major, although I can’t recall his real name. The girls referred to him as Major Dogshit. That was close enough and since he didn’t understand English, he didn’t mind. His preferences in money ran to English pounds and American dollars, which commanded an exorbitant rate of exchange on the black market. He liked his girls in matched sets of twos and threes and when that was over, he liked his opium pipe. If I’d been a little older, he might even have liked me.