I parked the car in a multi-storey park, in the middle of the town, which formed part of a sprawling civic centre, flew a large helmet-flag and was plastered everywhere with garish posters. There was a concert hall and a children’s playground with trampolines. An open-ended arcade ran through the building, with a gilded canopy above the entrance, and an excessively uniformed Chinese commissionare stood at its wrought-iron gates. It looked dauntingly expensive, but Han Tu Chu Mall was not, as I expected, lined with antiquarian shops full of ivories, and scented boutiques. It was occupied entirely by the headquarters of corporations — The Hav East Corp, Peninsula Exchange, Achilles International, the Sunrise Company — all with offices too in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Taipeh or Singapore, and with showily opulent premises here. Corinthian pillars, dual marble staircases, discreet but impressive name-plates, elegant receptionists to be seen sitting at vast semi-circular desks — the whole repertoire of high capitalist display offered me a steely greeting as I walked down the arcade, and made me feel I was not in a small Chinese settlement a thousand miles from Beijing but in some powerful financial outpost of Chinese power. I remembered then that long ago Chevallaz had told me of Chinese money behind the old Casino, and when I reached the commissionaire at the other end of the mall I asked him if the Casino still existed.
‘I have heard about it, dirleddy, of course,’ he said, ‘my father used to talk of it, but I believe it disappeared beneath the works of the port. But they still call this Casino Cove, you know. You might perhaps enquire at the Port Captain’s office — straight down here, past the post office on the waterfront, not to be mistaken.’
I thanked him. He bowed. ‘Ask for Mr Chimoun,’ he added. ‘He would be well informed about the old Hav. It was before my time!’
Mr Chimoun! I hastened down the street, past the ornately decorated Post Office with sculpted storks along the roof, past the Black Tortoise Refreshment Restaurant and the Tiger Tea-House, until I reached the waterfront. This was different from the quays down at Hav City. A squadron of fishing-boats was tied up at one side of the cove, but the big ships lay off-shore in their dozens, swarmed about with lighters and motor-launches. The quays were piled high with containers, in piles as big as houses, with mobile cranes and transporters moving ceaselessly among them.
The Port Captaincy occupied a severely functional Modernist block. The Chinese official behind the reception desk had never heard the name Chimoun. Not very enthusiastically he shuffled through the pages of a directory, and then shouted across the hall to a colleague: ‘Hey, Li, ever hear of a guy called Chimoun?’
‘Old guy?’ asked Li.
‘Old guy?’ asked the man of me.
‘Old by now, I suppose,’ I said, ‘but he used to be Port Captain.’
‘Try Transient Services,’ Li said, ‘they use some old-timers there’; and so I found myself led along bleak corridors, past conference rooms and offices full of computers, until I reached a door marked ‘Transient Enquiries (A)’, and there sure enough they directed me to Mr Chimoun. ‘That’s Mr Chimoun over there. Chimoun! Chimoun! CHIMOUN! Someone to see you!’
For Mr Chimoun the Port Captain of twenty years before, who had born himself like an admiral and felt himself a doge, who had looked out from his stately headquarters on the old Fondaco Quay with so grand an air of possession — Mr Chimoun was now a deaf old clerk bent over a ledger-like volume, like an illustration by Boz. He stumbled over to me pushing his spectacles up his nose, and responded with a blank stare when I told him who I was. I thought he might have had a stroke, or a nervous breakdown, or had lost his memory, but no; after a baffling moment of silence he said perfectly lucidly: ‘We can’t talk here — we’ll go to the canteen.’
As we walked there he said, rather testily I thought, ‘Yes, yes, of course I know who you are. You came to see me just before the Intervention. You met Harry Gunther, didn’t you? He told me about it, Richards too. Yes, yes, of course I know about you.’
In the bare and empty staff canteen bright-painted Chinese thermos flasks, lined up on the counter, were all that showed of catering or hospitality. Chimoun poured us each a cup of lukewarm tea, and we sat in a corner. ‘Now then,’ he said, ‘what do you want to know?’
To be honest I didn’t know what I wanted to know, although I was sure there must be something; but he forestalled me anyway.
‘Because’, he said, ‘whatever it is, I can’t discuss it. You want to know what Gunther and Richards were doing on the quay? You want to know about Biancheri? You’re going to put it all into a book, aren’t you, and make money out of it, and let me down? Well I’ll tell you, Ms Morris, I’ve suffered enough already, since the Intervention, I’ve paid my price; you see me now a poor clerk of the Chinese, when once I had the whole port of Hav at my command, and I’m not going to say more. I am myself engaged, during my spare time, in compiling a documentary history of medieval Hav — purely as a labour of love. That perfectly occupies my mind. It’s by the favour of the Perfects that I have this humble job at all, and I’m not going to risk losing it.’
‘You won’t even talk about the old Casino?’
‘There’s really nothing to say about that. You knew Biancheri, you probably met Antony Ho, what more do you want to know? It’s moved on to bigger things now, anyway, as you’ve doubtless discovered for yourself. You’re staying at the Lazaretto, I suppose? Well then, you must have some inkling of it.’
‘Yes, but—’
‘No, no, Ms Morris, more I will not say. I am grateful for your visit — I see very few foreigners these days, except for crews and transients. I won’t offer you another cup of this horrible tea (they grow it here now, you know, out on the Escarpment), and so must wish you goodbye, with memories of happier times. Mind how you go, Ms Morris. Mind what you write.’
‘Good luck with the medieval documents,’ I said, ‘and go easy on the Crusaders.’ But I don’t think he heard, or he would have asked me what I meant by that, and I wouldn’t have known.
I remembered that from the old Casino Cove there used to be a rough road westward across the peninsula towards the Balad, so I followed my nose back along the motorway until I discovered signs of it running away unmarked across the moors. I took it, hoping to see whatever there was of countryside in the new Hav. It took me across the old grazing land, in the foot-slopes of the escarpment, and I did see some signs of pastoral life. There were farm-huts sometimes along the way, and occasional herds of wizened-looking cattle, guarded by no less bloodless cow-herds. All the huts seemed to be empty. The herdsmen stood motionless beside the track, leaning on sticks or picking their noses, and watched my passing without visible interest. They all seemed to be old, and possibly half-witted, and I decided that the agricultural sector was low on the list of Myrmidonic priorities.
But presently I crossed the line of the old railway, and the now neglected Escarpment road, and skirting the salt-flats I discovered a very different rural scene. The whole of the northwest plateau, stretching away towards the coast hills and the sea, seemed to be a shimmering mass of silver plastic, billowing slightly in the breeze, interspersed with vegetable fields, greenhouses and steel windmills. Brand-new roads criss-crossed the area, and trucks crawled about wherever I looked, and there were gangs of workers among the vegetables, and the windmills whirred. I was reminded of the flower-farms of Jersey, or the windmill plateau of Lassithi in Crete, or Carolina cotton-fields. It all looked purposeful, and profitable.