Hong Kong (53 page)

"After a couple hundred miles I'll be down to a toothbrush and one extra pair of socks," Cole replied. "I'll give the backpack to some lucky soul who wants to make it into a hat."

Another car drove up. Rip Buckingham and Wu Tai Kwong got out, along with two women, one old and one in her thirties.

The younger woman had been crying. Rip took her in his arms and held her tightly as he swayed ever so slightly back and forth. He didn't seem to care who was watching.

"I wish you would stay," she whispered.

"I'm a newspaperman, Sue Lin. This is the story of a lifetime. I have to go."

"I know," she whispered.

Wu hugged the old woman, bent down and whispered something to her, then picked up his backpack and walked away. He looked back once, paused, then continued on into the crowd, which swallowed him.

Rip lingered. "I want you and Lin Pe to go to Australia," he said to his wife. "I mean it. No ifs, ands, or buts. I don't want to walk all over China worrying about you."

"We'll worry about you."

"That'll be enough worry for the whole family. Lin Pe, will you and Sue Lin do as I ask?"

Both women nodded.

He put them back in the car finally, murmured something to the driver. The car pulled into a gap in the passing traffic and crept away.

Rip came over to where Cole and the Graftons were standing. "Hello, Admiral. I owe you a debt of gratitude for rescuing my brother-in-law.

Jake just nodded and shook the outstretched hand. "Good luck, Mr. Buckingham. Don't be too harsh in your stories on the archcriminal Virgil Cole."

"I'll try to be objective and fair."

"I'll hold
you
to
that,"
Cole
said,
serious
as
always.
Buckingham winked at Grafton, shook Callie's hand, then shouldered his packs and walked away.

"How long will you stay in Hong Kong?" Cole asked Jake.

"A couple of weeks, according to the weenie at State. He's probably lying so I won't squawk too much. You know how it is—I'll leave when they tell me to go back to the states, and not before."

"I love Hong Kong," Cole said, quite unnecessarily. He stood looking around, breathing in the sights and smells and sounds.
"It's
a unique, magical place. Nowhere else quite like it."

Callie Grafton found herself nodding in agreement. She too found Hong Kong fascinating. "When you get back to America," she told Cole, "come see us. If you're broke, call and we'll wire you the price of a bus ticket."

That remark brought a shadow of a grin to Cole's features.
"I'll

remember the invitation," he said, offering his hand. Callie shook it, then Jake.

"There is one thing I still don't know," Jake said as Cole picked up his bags. "Who shot China Bob Chan?"

"Ooh," Cole said, grunting a little as he hefted his pack. "I did, of course. He knew too much."

"Why didn't the CIA tape pick up a conversation?"

"I knew the office was bugged, so I stopped in the secretary's office, and Chan stopped because I did. We discussed our business right there. He decided he wanted to show me a letter he had received, so he opened the door and walked across to his desk, me tagging along behind.

"You see, he knew everything and he wanted money, a lot of it. Even if I paid him off, I thought it probable that he'd tattle to the authorities with specifics they could check. So as I followed him to the desk I drew the pistol from my pocket and shot him in the head when he turned around. Bob didn't even see it coming. Not a bad way to check out, if you gotta go, and he did. Then I ditched the pistol in a trashcan and went downstairs and got on with the mixing and mingling."

"So you knew there was nothing on the tape that would implicate

"I was pretty sure there wasn't, but the truth was that I didn't care. Still don't. I wouldn't pay ten cents for a videotape of me doing the shooting, if one existed. Sonny Wong never understood that simple fact, which tells you how bright he really was. You can tell State I shot Chan if you want to—now that the revolution has begun, it just doesn't matter."

"Doesn't sound like you're planning on returning to the states any time soon."

"I'm not." Cole sucked in a bushel of air and let it out. "Life's an adventure. I've been a high-tech exec long enough, been a diplomat, been rich, been to all the black-tie parties I can stand. Now I'm going in this direction, going wherever the road leads."

"Keep the faith, shipmate."

"Yeah, Jake Grafton.
I'll
do that. For you and me and all of those guys who fought the good fight in their time."

They shook hands, then Tiger Cole walked out of Jake Grafton's
life.

Jake turned to Callie. "I hate to say this, but I'm up to my ears in work at the consulate. Want to have the kitchen make us a pizza and help me tackle the paperwork?"

"Yes," she said and put her arm around his waist as they walked back to the car.

AUTHORS NOTE

Alas, there is no "correct" way to render the Chinese language into English. Prior to the Communist takeover of China, the widely used Wade-Giles system of transliteration gave us Hong Kong, Peking, Mao Tse Tung, Chiang Kai Shek, etc. The Communist bureaucracy spawned a new system, Pinyin, to transliterate Mandarin, which the bureaucrats decreed would be
putonghua,
or "common speech," i.e., the "official" language of China. (Mandarin is the language of northern China; the language of southern China is Cantonese.)

Unlike Wade-Giles, Pinyin often fails to present phonetic clues to English speakers, or, amazingly, the speakers of any language that uses the Roman alphabet. For example,
qi
in Pinyin is pronounced
chee.
We anglicize or transliterate Paris, Rome, and Moscow, and the French, Italians, and Russians seem unruffled. Why must Hong Kong become Xianggang?

For reasons we can only speculate about, in the last two decades American and British newspaper editors have embraced Pinyin with remarkable fervor, which leads to nonsense such as "The President ate Peking duck in Beijing."

In his excellent book,
The Making of Hong Kong Society
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), Dr. W. K. Chan points out that there are at least fifty-four different ways of presenting any Cantonese name in

English. Faced with this plethora of choices, the author has spelled the names in this book in a way that seemed to him easiest for an English speaker to pronounce. Any complaints should be addressed to the Pin-yin troglodyte in Peking, or Beijing, or wherever.