38
T
HE PLAN,
H
AVERFORD THOUGHT
as he stood at the Star Ferry landing in Kowloon, is coming together.
Hel had received the message sent through the Muslim restaurant. He knew where to go and how to get there. The members of the extraction team, composed of Hui, were making their way to the Temple of the Green Truth.
“We’ll need some talent,” Haverford warned. “Things could get tough.”
Benton answered, “The whole team is trained in a Muslim Chinese martial art —
bajiquan.
Very good for close-range work in confined spaces. Same art used by Mao’s personal bodyguard. The team leader is a master.”
“He’ll need to be,” Haverford said.
“Don’t worry,” Benton answered. “He’s quick and clean.”
Quick, maybe, Haverford thought, but nothing about what we do is ever clean.
It would be good to get out of Hong Kong. Haverford never really liked the city, and the British were ridiculously sensitive about the “cousins” poaching on their turf. Just this morning, his British counterpart, Wooten, had accosted him at the breakfast table at the Peninsula before Haverford could even get down a cup of the less than mediocre coffee.
“Good morning, Adrian,” Haverford said. “A little early for you, isn’t it?”
“A Bloody Mary’s on the way over,” Wooten answered. A large, bluff man with, if Haverford recalled correctly, a rugby background, Wooten looked out of place in China. Looks were deceptive — Wooten was a noted Sinologist, a first at Cambridge and a lifetime in Asia attesting to the fact. “What brings you onto my patch, Ellis?”
“It isn’t the coffee, I’ll tell you that.”
“Then what is it?”
“Awfully direct, Adrian.”
“It’s early and I’m hungover.” The waiter arrived with the Bloody Mary. Wooten took a grateful sip.
“Just passing through,” Haverford said, “on my way back from Macau, checking in with some of the tea-leaf readers there.”
“Anything my king should know about?”
“Not unless he’s awfully bored,” Haverford said. “It’s the usual unusual — the Chairman is winnowing his enemies, what opposition he has are keeping their heads low, anti-this and anti-that campaigns are going on.”
“My boys reported a Benton sighting yesterday.”
“Everybody gotta be someplace,” Haverford answered, echoing the old Myron Cohen joke. He’d have to catch him the next time he was back in New York. But damn Benton and his leadfootedness.
Wooten nodded. “But a Benton sighting
and
a Haverford sighting. Raises the hackles, you must admit.”
Haverford shrugged.
Wooten’s red face turned unusually serious as he said, “I don’t want you mucking around on my pitch, Ellis. You, or Benton, or the both of you. Do I make myself clear?”
“I’m just back to Tokyo, Adrian.”
“Didn’t mean to be inhospitable,” Wooten said. “How are you getting to the airport?”
“Taxi.”
“No need,” Wooten said. “I’ll get one of my boys to drive you. Otherwise they just sit around all day quaffing beer.”
So I’m being escorted out of the colony, Haverford thought.
All right by me, the planning here is about done anyway.
39
W
U
Z
HONG SMASHED
his elbow into the wooden post.
A bolt of pain shot up from his forearm, through his wrist, and into his hand, still open in the distinctive “rake” posture that gave
bajiquan
its name, but Wu exhaled it away and looked back at the splintered wood. His elbow had put a hole three inches deep into the post.
That was
bajiquan
— it relied on quick, single, devastating strikes. Its great master Li Wu Shen once said, “I do not know what it feels like to hit a man twice.” Had this post been a man, the explosive force of the blow would have shattered his throat or his forehead, or simply stopped his heart. Wu would have continued practicing, but heard the call for prayer from the minaret just a block away.
He slipped into a white kaftan, put on his cap, and stepped out of the dojo onto Nelson Street. The mosque was the largest in Hong Kong, servicing the island’s small but devout Muslim community. The ulama had grown in recent years, as refugees fled from the mainland and found a more congenial home in cosmopolitan Hong Kong than in Chiang Kai-shek’s Taiwan.
As he walked toward the mosque, Wu was glad to be going to prayer. Tonight he would be infiltrated through the New Territories across the border into his homeland. The assignment itself should be nothing, the danger lay in getting in and getting out. A
wushu
instructor with the KMT Army for years before he retired to civilian life, he would find rough handling if he fell into Communist hands.
Now thirty-five years old, Wu had a wife and three young children who needed him. Still, he could not refuse an assignment like this. It paid well; moreover, it allowed him to strike a blow against the hated Communists, godless Kaffirs who oppressed his people. Not only would he bring home a year’s worth of income, but the American agent promised to provide a shipment of rifles to the nascent rebel movement in Xinjiang.
A tall man with impressively broad shoulders, he had to turn sideways to get through the old doorway of the mosque. He shucked off his slippers, found the prayer mat in its accustomed place, walked into the sanctuary, and knelt. Several other men, all friends from the neighborhood, were already there and had begun prostrating themselves.
Stretching his forehead to the floor, Wu could not get the assignment out of his mind. Killing was as nothing. He had used his mastery of
bajiquan
to kill many times before — Communists in Shanghai, Japanese in Hunan, and then the Reds again until Chiang gave up the fight and left so many of them to flee for their lives.
Now he was in a new war — a jihad to save his people. If killing helped to achieve that, then so be it. He would do it and if it was God’s will that he survive and come home to his family, then
inshallah.
If not, at least he knew that the ulama would not let his family starve. A brother would marry his widow and take care of his children.
Comforted by that thought, Wu gave himself over to prayer, and the ritual, as always, felt good to him. Old, solid, and reliable. There was joy in pure worship, peace in the repetition of the ancient words as he chanted, “There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is His prophet.”
40
A
BLEARY-EYED LEOTOV
stood in front of Voroshenin’s desk.
He had worked all night and now Voroshenin didn’t as much as offer him a glass of tea, although he sipped his own, the white sugar sitting at the bottom of the glass like sand under a lake at one of the vacation dachas that Voroshenin could use but Leotov couldn’t.
“So?” Voroshenin asked.
Leotov started with Guibert.
It all seemed to check out. The Guiberts were indeed a Languedoc family of arms merchants with loose ties to the French Communist Party. Papa Guibert opened a Hong Kong office to take advantage of the business opportunities presented by the incessant warfare between Chinese warlords following the 1911 Revolution. He appeared to have ceased operations during the Japanese occupation, owing his survival to that discretion and to the Vichy French status as noncombatants. There were rumors, however, that he continued to work, with American collusion, with Vietnamese rebels fighting against the Japanese, especially but not exclusively Ho Chi Minh and that lot.
His leftist ideology appeared to be somewhat flexible, as, after the war, he dealt with both Nationalists and Communists in China, as well as with independence movements in French Indochina.
“Connections with L’ Union Corse?” Voroshenin asked, citing the Corsican mafia that controlled the drugs and arms between France and its Southeast Asian colonies.
“Naturally,” Leotov answered, “although Guibert isn’t Corsican, so the relationship is strictly business. Certainly he dealt with La Corse during the war.”
“What about the son?” Voroshenin asked.
“Michel?”
Voroshenin sighed. “Yes.”
Again, all appeared to be as it seemed. Leotov laid some grainy photographs on the desk. The son was born in Montpellier but raised in Hong Kong, hence his fluent Cantonese. He had the reputation of a gambler, womanizer, and ne’er-do-well, out of his father’s favor until after the war and the auto accident.
“The what?”
“There was a car crash in” — Leotov checked his notes — “the summer of ‘50, in Monaco. Michel had apparently dropped a bundle at the casino, drowned his sorrows, and crashed the car halfway through a wicked S-curve.”
Apparently it was touch and go for a while, and Guibert fils needed extensive surgery to repair his face. The surgeries seemed to have accomplished a character transplant of a sort — the son emerged a changed, more serious man, eager to take his place in the family business.
“That’s interesting,” Voroshenin said.
Leotov shrugged. He really didn’t see what was so interesting about it.
Voroshenin did. He hadn’t survived the Stalinist purges by being tone deaf, and this auto accident struck a discordant note. Reconstructive facial surgery followed by a moral metamorphosis?
“Where is the father now?” he asked. “Do we know?”
“I suppose in Hong Kong.”
“You suppose? Find out.”
“Yes, Comrade.”
“All right, what about Ivanovna?”
“I have a full report.” Leotov started to recite his findings.
“Leave it.”
“But there are —”
“I said to leave it.”
Leotov set the file on the desk and left.
Voroshenin opened the desk drawer. He had a feeling he would need a stiff drink to read this file.
41
T
HE
G
REAT
W
ALL
certainly is, Nicholai thought.
A monumental, as it were, achievement of architecture and organization. But, like a static Go defense, it never fulfilled its function of keeping out an invader. There is no point building a wall when the gatekeepers can be purchased.
Still, the wall was a marvel to see, as it stretched along the rises and falls of the ridges and hills, flexible as a giant snake, its stones resembling the scales of a reptile. Or a dragon, perhaps, Nicholai thought, in the Chinese zoological cosmology.
No, he decided, the Go analogy is more apt. The wall was like a thin long line of stones, vulnerable by its very length, unsupported by defensive depth.
A lesson to be had there, certainly.
Chen fell asleep on the drive back to Beijing, sparing Nicholai the necessity to make small talk. Instead he began to prepare his mind for the task at hand, and as he thought about it, he realized that he was soon to become a professional assassin.
He had killed three men in his young life — nothing by the standards of his generation, which had endured the slaughters of the war.
His first had been Kishikawa, his father figure, and he had done it to spare his mentor shame. So it was a matter of filial duty, almost as if he had assisted the general in committing seppuku.
The next two had tried to kill him first, so they were acts of self-defense.
But this would be an intentional act of murder for profit. He could rationalize it by thinking that he was reclaiming his own life, and Solange’s, but the fact remained that he was about to take another’s life to benefit his own, and moral evasions were as useful as the towers of the Great Wall.
Yet the monetary compensation from the Americans was almost irrelevant.
This was a matter of honor.
Voroshenin was not just another man, another human life.
Shortly before she died, Nicholai’s mother had told him the story of what happened between her and Yuri Voroshenin.
Petrograd was frozen and fast running out of fuel.
The winter of 1922 was unusually harsh, the small supply of coal had already dwindled, and the Communists were tearing down private homes for firewood. The famed lindens of Taurichesky Gardens had been stripped of the branches for firewood, and the trees looked like execution stakes.
It was a miracle — no, not a miracle but a testament to her iron will — that the Countess Alexandra Ivanovna’s family house, occupying half a block on Kirochnaya Street, still stood, although the Soviet Petrograd had forced her to turn most of it into a
kpmmunalka,
housing several dozen workers’ families.
Well, workers in theory, anyway — the lack of fuel and materials and the hyperinflation brought on by Western financial assaults on the ruble had closed many of Petrograd’s factories. The workers were freezing and starving.
It was on a February afternoon that Yuri Voroshenin, then the head of the Petrograd Cheka, climbed the steps to the huge wooden doors and kicked the snow off his shoes. He entered without knocking.
The enormous foyer was full of people, shuddering in coats and blankets, and yet she had prevented them from chopping up the expensive wooden furniture that filled the house. Voroshenin walked past them onto the sweeping curved staircase and went up to the rooms where she retained her “apartment.”
She was thin, her cheeks a little sunken, her skin pale with hunger. Even the upper classes were hard-pressed to find or pay for food. Nevertheless she regarded him with the haughty look of the ruling class, as if to ask what he was doing disturbing her at such an early hour of the afternoon.
Clearly he was not used to insolence. He wanted her to be afraid, as well she might have been, for this creature was responsible for countless executions and hideous tortures and she was at his mercy. But she showed no fear.
“Good day, Comrade Ivanovna.”
“I am not, nor never will be, your ‘comrade.’ ”
“You know that such an attitude could get you shot.”
She closed the book. “Now? Shall we go? Should I bring a wrap or are you going to shoot me here?”
“I am not amused.”
“Nor amusing.”
She reached to her bed table for a square of colored paper and unwrapped it to reveal a piece of chocolate and then noticed the Bolshevik’s hungry stare. Despite the fact that she had saved this little bit for weeks, she said, “How rude of me. Would you care for a bite?” Snapping the chocolate in half, she held it out to him.
He accepted it. “I haven’t seen chocolate since …”
“I believe ‘since before the Revolution’ is the phrase you’re searching for,” Alexandra said pleasantly. “Yes, St. Petersburg was a city of large and small pleasures then.”
“It’s Petrograd now.”
“As you wish,” she said.
She watched him savor the chocolate, and then he said, “You will be required to move out.”
What was she to do? she asked Nicholai as she told him the story. Her family had all been killed in the war or executed by the Reds. More than death, she was terrified by the thought of being out in the street, without her attachments, her belongings, her things. There were few places to live in Petrograd, fewer still where a notorious “White” would find a welcome. She had seen her peers on the streets carting human waste, selling apples, renting their bodies.
“And where will I go?” she asked.
“That is not my concern.”
Alone and helpless, the only power she retained was the only power a woman had in those days. She looked at him for several moments and then said, “It could be. Your concern, that is.”
“Whatever would make you think that?”
“The way you look at me,” she answered. “But am I wrong? Perhaps I am mistaken.”
“No, you are not wrong.”
Releasing her hand from his grip, she walked over to the huge bed.
She kept her apartments.
He joined her there many afternoons and most nights, his position in the Cheka protecting him, at least for the time being, against the “social contamination” of an affair with a member of the “possessing classes.”
One night he told her that he loved her. She laughed. “Certainly a good Bolshevik such as yourself doesn’t believe in romantic love.”
“Perhaps I do.”
“Perhaps you shouldn’t,” she said. “Romance is dead in this world, my dear. You should know, you helped to kill it. We have an arrangement, Voroshenin, nothing more.”
An arrangement indeed, he thought. She gave him herself, he protected her from himself. The symmetry was mind-boggling.
The next afternoon he walked into her apartment, his face white with concern. “Alexandra, you have to go. Now.”
She looked startled. “I thought that —”
“The Cheka knows about Rizhsky Prospect.”
Since the Revolution she had carefully, secretly, bit by bit hidden the Ivanov family fortune — millions of rubles — away in the safekeeping of an old accounting firm on Rizhsky Prospect. For a fee, the men there were slowly smuggling it out of the country, little by little, into banks in France and Switzerland. It was an act of incredible daring — Whites had been tortured to death for hoarding a watch, a ring, some loaves of bread, and she conspired to hide millions. And the discipline — feigning poverty, going hungry, starving herself, allowing herself only the odd little square of chocolate.
“It’s only a matter of time before they come for you,” he said. “Me too. You have to go. Get out. Leave the country.”
“But my things, my furniture —”
“A train east out of Finland Station tomorrow morning at seven,” Voroshenin said. “I’ve arranged space for you and all your things. A heavy bribe, but apparently you have money, no? I’ve drawn up travel papers that will take you safely to Vladivostok. After that …”
Thousands of Whites had taken this route — to Vladivostok, then across the porous border into China, where most had sought the relatively cosmopolitan refuge of Shanghai. It was not a pleasant choice, but the only choice she had.
“Where is your money?” he asked. “I’ll need some of it for bribes. The rest, carry with you in cash.”
“I’ll go get it.”
He shook his head. “Too dangerous. You would be arrested and then … I could no longer protect you. And you would tell them everything, Alexandra. Trust me on this, you would tell them everything they want to know and more.”
She told him where the money was. “But most of it is still there?” he asked.
She nodded.
They made plans.
Cheka agents would storm her house that night, “confiscate” and cart off all her furniture and belongings, and take them to a waiting rail agent at the station, where they would be loaded onto a special Cheka car.
“No one will have the nerve to inspect it,” Voroshenin assured her.
She would be “arrested” before dawn and taken to the station for removal to some hellhole in Siberia. Instead, she would ride in relative comfort to Vladivostok with the papers asserting her new identity.
“And my money?” she asked.
“I will deliver it to the train myself,” he said.
“And what about you?” she asked. “Aren’t you in danger?”
“I will be on the next train,” he said, “with my new papers. In Vladivostok, we can decide what to do next about our arrangement. But we have to act quickly,” he urged. “There is much to do and little time to do it, and the Cheka is on the hunt.”
Ivanovna gave him the address of the accountants in Rizhsky and then started to gather her personal belongings — jewelry, china, crystal, treasured family heirlooms, all the things she had protected against the mob for the past five long years.
Voroshenin went to Rizhsky Prospect.
His Chekan subordinates, suitably bribed and cowed, arrested her in the morning and took her to the train.
Voroshenin, of course, never turned up.
She knew that she had been outsmarted and was lucky he had let her take her belongings into exile.
This was the story that the Countess Alexandra Ivanovna told her son.
How Yuri Voroshenin had taken her honor and his inheritance.