It was one of their more asinine orders, a shade dumber than most, so I tore everything up and flushed it down the toilet. I then called in Joyce Jungroth, my Minnesota-born secretary who after three years still clung to her romantic notions about Hong Kong, had a bad complexion, and always smelled faintly of Noxzema. I handed her the Bartlett’s.
“Get rid of it,” I said.
She sighed and accepted the book. “Don’t you ever use dirty novels, something that I could read?”
“You’re not supposed to read them; you’re supposed to get rid of them.”
I suspected that she took the books home to her apartment. Not that it mattered, because the method — inexcusably old-fashioned, outdated, even juvenile — was used but once or twice a year and always by someone like Carmingler whose inbred distrust of technological innovations caused him to choose kitchen matches over a butane lighter, a bicycle (whenever possible) over a car, and even a knife over a revolver. You couldn’t pay Carmingler enough to travel by subway.
By then I had spent ten years in Hong Kong as managing director of an American-owned life insurance company called Minneapolis Mutual. During that time I had personally sold three policies, all straight life. I was running six agents, supposedly insurance salesmen, who worked the Southeast Asian territory. They were fortunate that they didn’t have to live on their commissions because their combined efforts over the decade had brought the total number of Minneapolis Mutual policies sold up to an even dozen.
Two of my own three sales, each with a face value of $100,000, had been bought six years previously by a Ford dealer and his wife from Mobile who were on a world tour and suffering from twin cases of diarrhea which proved uncomfortable enough to convince them that they would never see the heart of Dixie again. Arriving in Hong Kong by ship, and determined to complete their tour, they had looked up insurance companies and gratefully spotted Minneapolis Mutual which was, after all, American, even if its headquarters in the States were located a little far up north. Nobody had anticipated drop-in business when they had plunked me into the managing directorship and I still knew next to nothing about insurance. So when the American couple descended on me, checkbook in hand, I had to call in my secretary (not Joyce Jungroth; I had a different one then) who at least knew something about the drill, where the forms were anyway, and she wrote up the policies and dispatched the couple to a doctor, as much for their diarrhea as for the mandatory physicals.
It was the only drop-in business that Minneapolis Mutual’s tenth-floor island office on Pedder Street ever got, but it bothered me enough to take out $10,000 worth of straight life on myself that afternoon. I even wrote it up under the amused tutelage of my secretary. But since no one ever came around again, other than the odd office-supply salesman, I let the policy expire after a couple of years.
About the only thing I ever did learn about selling life insurance was that Southeast Asia is a rotten territory.
After Joyce Jungroth left, the copy of Bartlett’s clutched to her under-inflated bosom, I leaned back in my chair, the one with the moulded back that was supposed to correct posture, and pondered the instructions from Las Vegas.
For six months I had been trying to convince a plump, fiftyish Chinese agent that he should double. It had been an odd courtship and for my efforts I had been treated to long recitals of random quotations from Chairman Mao. Nevertheless, Li Teh kept all of the appointments. When he finally ran down, I would murmur something inane such as, “How true,” and drop two hundred-dollar bills on the floor or deck or even desk, adding: “Think about it, won’t you?” Li always took the money.
I learned eventually that Li Teh had been barely thirty years old when he had entered Hong Kong in late September of 1949, virtually indistinguishable from the swarmy horde of Chinese who sought sanctuary in the colony after Chiang Kai-shek boarded the C-47 called Meiling, in honor of his redoubtable wife, and skipped to Formosa, remembering to pack along the $200 million (U.S.) gold reserves of the Central Bank of China.
The thing that did distinguish Li Teh from his fellow pai hua, or refugees, was capital, a goodly amount in American dollars that Mao’s forces had stripped from a money belt found on the dead body of one of the more corrupt members of the Generalissimo’s personal staff. It was enough to allow Li to open a camera shop in Kowloon on Nathan Road with a franchise from an East German manufacturer who before World War II had been famous for the quality of the firm’s lenses. The shop prospered and Li opened another one on Kimberly Road a few years later, this time specializing in Canons and Nikons from Japan.
From there it was only a short step to Swiss watches (I’d bought one from him), transistor tape recorders, miniature television sets, and transistor radios — anything that hard currency tourists could tote along with them. Had it been his own capital, Li would have been a rich man by the time he was fifty, but his profits were either plowed back into his burgeoning businesses or funneled to Peking where his backers found ready use for the dollars and pounds and francs and marks.
I always thought that Li was a better businessman than he was a spy, although he was that too, dealing in information of all kinds, stealing it when he could, buying it when he couldn’t. Once a month he journeyed by train to Peking, a long, hard, uncomfortable trip, bearing a suitcase jammed with as much cash as the profits from his various enterprises would permit. It would have been simpler and more efficient, of course, to have deposited the funds in the Bank of China, but Li also carried along whatever information he had been able to pick up or scrounge and although it was, I understand, welcomed in Peking, it was not met with the same degree of warmth that greeted the hard currency.
Li was a communist and, I suppose, a good one. He once told me that it had all begun in 1938 when as a student he had managed to escape from a Nationalist Army press gang that had roped him to eleven other students. He made his way to Yenan in North China where Mao had located his provisional command post or field headquarters. Although still a teenager, Li was obviously bright and, for China, well educated. He had been allowed to live in one of the clean whitewashed caves that was the home of a senior officer who assumed responsibility for Li’s military training, party indoctrination, morality, and introduction to espionage techniques and practices. The officer was of middling rank in the communists’ intelligence apparatus and as the officer rose, so did Li Teh, until 1949 when they dispatched him to Hong Kong, his even then widening girth encircled by a money belt stuffed with American dollars.
As one of Hong Kong’s fairly prominent businessmen, Li had half-convinced his Peking superiors that he should live up to his reputation. They had given him what must have been grudging, reluctant permission, and he drove a Porsche, which he loved, dwelt as a widower in an elegant apartment building not too far from the Bank of China and the Cricket Club, and entertained frequently with a certain amount of grace and even style. He was a member of the Hong Kong Chamber of Commerce, three civic organizations, and one private Chinese club that offered a quite excellent bill of fare. Li did all this with the approval if not the good grace of his superiors, whose tolerance of the high life ran out on the last day of each month when they scrutinized his books to make sure that he wasn’t left with a dime that he could call his own.
So Li Teh lived a little too well and as a consequence he was broke. Worse, he was in debt, and moneylenders in Hong Kong are even less forgiving than their loan-sharking colleagues in the States. So I corrupted Li Teh with money. It was what I was paid to do and it was what I knew best. In some circles they even said I was very good at it.