‘I suppose you think,’ said M last night, ‘that there are no pirates left in Yuan Wen Kuo? You’re wrong. I’ll introduce you to one right now.’ In the twilight we walked up the hill to one of the grand houses at the eastern end of the ridge, immediately below the semaphore, and there we were immediately invited in for coffee by X, as I had better call him, who is one of the Chinese directors of the Casino. This was a very urbane experience, Old Money in the truest sense, since it was originally made out of the silk trade with the Venetians. X is Harvard-educated, his wife was at the Sorbonne, and their house is full of books, pictures Western and Chinese, advanced hi-fi and little Hav terriers. Marvellous vases and ceramic beasts stand about the rooms, and it would not surprise me to learn that some paintings of the Hav-Venetian school are hidden away upstairs. We had our coffee alfresco, looking down over the sea, and it was true X talked in an authentically piratical way about financial coups and deeds of daring — about his success in exploiting the insecurities of Hong Kong, his lucky investments in Singapore during the Japanese occupation, his personal loans to the Castro administration and his profitable stakes in Tanzania. I did not like to ask him if Hitler really had come to Casino Cove, or how well he had known Howard Hughes, but presently M said, ‘Go on, tell Jan about Tiananmen.’ X, who was otherwise anything but taciturn, at first seemed reluctant, but ‘Go on,’ said Madame X too, ‘tell her, where’s the harm now? It might be useful, anyway.’ And this is what I learnt from Bluebeard’s lips.
For years, said X, a group of rich men in Yuan Wen Kuo, calling themselves the Crimson Hand, had supported an active partisan movement against the Communist government in Beijing. They had nothing to do with the Kuomingtang in Taiwan. They were fanatical monarchists, dedicated to the restoration of the Manchu dynasty to the imperial throne of China. Many of the mysterious events reported out of China could be attributed, X said, to them: for example, the supposedly accidental plane crash which in 1971 killed Marshal Lin Biao, Mao’s appointed successor. It was rumoured that they had links with the Gang of Four, and that if all had gone well for them the Cultural Revolution would have been climaxed by the deposition of Mao and the restoration of the imperial dynasty to its throne in the Forbidden City.
In 1960 their directors in Hav had conceived a spectacular coup: they decided to abduct the old man who had been, briefly in his childhood, the last Emperor of China, then working as a humble clerk in Beijing. They would bring him to Hav as the rallying-point of a great monarchist movement which would, they hoped, sweep all through the world of the overseas Chinese. It would not be a difficult operation, they thought. The Chinese authorities were proud of pointing out Pu Yi, so docile, so well-adjusted to events, as he took the morning bus from his home in the suburbs to his work at a ministry office. Foreigners often saw him, sitting there in his blue work suit, and sometimes spoke to him. His responses were always ideologically correct.
The Crimson Hand’s plan was to have a pair of partisans board that morning bus and ride with it until Pu Yi got out at his usual stop at the northern end of Tiananmen Square. He would then be seized in the confusion of the crowd, bundled through the mêlée of the morning commuters into a waiting taxi, and spirited away to Hong Kong and eventually to Hav. Everything was arranged, the get-away taxi, the route to Kwangchow and thence to Hong Kong, where the Crimson Hand had many friends. A dozen dummy runs were tried. Diversions were arranged in Tiananmen Square — a couple of bicyclists were to collide, some subversive leaflets were to be found upon the pavement.
But the very moment they laid hands on Pu Yi as he stepped through the opening door of the bus, they themselves were grabbed by the four harmless-looking passengers stepping out before him, and by two equally innocuous commuters behind their backs. The last of the emperors might be politically cooperative but never for a moment, forty years after his deposition, did the authorities let him out of sight, and the secret policemen of his final bodyguard had not failed him in their duty. The conspirators were quietly executed; Pu Yi continued to take the bus to work until his retirement and peaceful end.
‘I hear the Crimson Hand is lying low these days,’ said M.
‘So I understand,’ X replied, ‘and yet I have it on very, very good authority that they are grooming their own successor to the throne of the Manchus right here in Hav — rather like’ (he said to me) ‘your friend the Caliph!’
‘Can you imagine?’ laughed Madame X, pouring us more coffee.
‘Can you imagine?’ mimicked M, as we walked down the hill again. ‘In that house you can imagine anything, can’t you? You can imagine X himself as Emperor of China!’
But down in the town the Crimson Hand seemed an improbable fancy. It was almost midnight, yet all was as usual among the Hav Chinese: the tireless crowds and the smell of cooking, the piles of roots and powders, the dead ducks and the live ones, the bright bare lights in hotel lobbies, the rickshaws and the limousines, the clic-clac and the threshing fish, and so ad infinitum…
19
A very strange and horrible thing has happened in Hav. Somebody broke into the old Palace chapel and slashed two of the priceless portraits of the Hav-Venetian school which hang inside. The city buzzes with it. The vandals left no explanatory message, but simply daubed a large red tick beside each ruined painting, as though to say that their mission had been accomplished.
Who could have done it? Why? I suggested diffidently to Mahmoud that the motive might have been religious. He dismissed the idea. ‘Hav’, he said, ‘is not a religious place.’
St Paul would have agreed. There are three references to Hav in his epistles, and none of them are complimentary. Besides complaining about its inhabitants’ feckless ineptitude — ‘for be not like the people of Hav, who cannot cut wood nor build houses’ — he calls them Godless, lustful and not to be trusted. It used to be said that a Pauline epistle to the Havians themselves existed somewhere, in an Anatolian monastery perhaps, or hidden away at Athos: if so, it would make uncomfortable reading for this citizenry.
The Crusaders also found the indigenes of the promontory, by then a mixture of Arabs, Africans, Syrians, Greeks, Turks and Kretevs, spiritually uninspiring. Beycan, in a letter to Raymond of Toulouse, described them as ‘worthless and incorrigible’, and a contemporary illuminated picture of the castle at Hav shows the inhabitants outside its walls looking horridly gnomish and dog-like. Even the Muslims, it seems to me, have never quite converted this city, though they have been calling it to prayer for nearly a thousand years: the mosques are full enough on Fridays, the Imam of the Grand Mosque is powerful, the presence of the Caliph is never forgotten, but one never feels here the mighty supremacy of the faith, the grand saturation of everyday life, that gives Islam elsewhere in the East its sense of absolute ubiquity. One can hardly imagine a Hav taxi-driver pausing to say his prayers at midday, just as he is unlikely to have dangling at his windscreen an icon of the Virgin Mary or his patron saint — only a plastic model of the Iron Dog, or a little pair of running shoes.