As they walked out of the Star Ferry terminal, Tommy Carmellini nodded at the admiral and set off for the consulate on Garden Road.
The president of the Bank of the Orient was Saburo Genda. When General Tang and his officers were escorted into his office, he was on the telephone with Governor Sun, trying to explain the situation.
“We do not have money on hand to pay all the depositors waiting outside,” Genda explained as patiently as he could.
He listened to a burst of Chinese, which he spoke reasonably well, then answered, “Of course the bank is solvent. Yes, we have reserves. Unfortunately, we just do not have sufficient cash in the vaults to pay all the people waiting outside … Yes, we will open in a few hours. You have my assurances, sir.”
He hung up the telephone and wiped his forehead.
Tang wanted to know why the bank wasn’t open.
Genda ran through it all again.
“Get some money,” General Tang said.
“We are trying, General, but since we don’t have printing presses in the basement, we must obtain currency from other banks. We are in the process of doing that now.”
Tang disliked being patronized, which he thought a slight on his dignity and his position, and he told Genda that in no uncertain terms.
He was just winding up when the telephone rang. Genda answered.
“Sir, the Finance Ministry in Tokyo is on the line.”
Genda switched to Japanese and began talking into the telephone, leaving the general to stew. Tang felt out of place in this huge, opulent office decorated with tropical hard-woods and designer furniture, four stories high in a grand temple dedicated to the gods of money.
Tang Ming was a peasant’s son, born during World War II, whose earliest memories were of his family fleeing before advancing Japanese troops.
He had spent his adult life in the army. From skin to backbone he was a soldier. A firm believer in the social goals of communism, he was, like a majority of his fellow countrymen, a cultural and racial xenophobe. Before his assignment to Hong Kong he had actually seen foreigners on only two occasions in his life, both official visits to Beijing. He had seen the foreigners at a distance, not talked with them.
Sitting in this huge office and watching an impeccably attired senior Japanese executive babble in a foreign tongue about matters he didn’t understand made General Tang Ming restless and irritable.
Someone with a cellular telephone called the editor of the China Post, Hong Kong’s leading English-language newspaper, and informed him about the restless crowd in front of the Bank of the Orient. The editor, Rip Buckingham, had heard rumors for the past two days about the possible collapse of the bank, so as he listened to the caller describe the crowd and the troops, his gut told him, This is it.
Rip called the newsroom and ordered four reporters and two photographers dispatched to the scene immediately. Then he extracted an eyewitness account from the caller while he jotted notes.
When he finally let the caller go, Rip automatically glanced out the window of his corner office at the giant Coca-Cola sign on top of the Bank of the Orient building, an imposing seventy-story skyscraper in Hong Kong’s Central District. In a typical Hong Kong deal, the developer of the building played off competing consumer giants, one against the other, for the honor of having their logo prominently displayed on the masthead of the new bank building, the biggest one in the colony. Reportedly the local Coke bottler had paid a fee in excess of ten million dollars U.S. to the developer just for the privilege of putting a sign up there. That was in 1995, two years before the British turned over the colony to the Chinese Communists.
No one is building buildings like that in Hong Kong now, Rip thought bitterly.
Rip was an Australian who had enjoyed a wonderful, vagrant youth. He repaired slot machines in Las Vegas, worked as a motorman on San Francisco trolleys, sailed the Pacific and Indian oceans in the forecastles of rusty Liberian tramps, and bicycled across most of China, including the entire route of the ancient Silk Road, from Tyre on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean to Sian in central China. Finally, in his late twenties, Rip Buckingham came to rest in Hong Kong, where he got a haircut and traded his sandals for leather shoes. He even married a local girl.
Rip turned to the computer sitting on a stand beside his desk and began writing. He wanted to get the eyewitness account down while it was fresh and immediate. He was still working on it when his reporters began calling in on their cellular telephones. He folded the facts they had gleaned into the story he was writing and asked questions.
Unlike a reporter operating in a Western nation, Rip did not telephone the governor’s officer or the police or the PLA to elicit comments or give those officials a chance to dispute the accounts his reporters were getting. He had done that years ago when he first took over the managing editor’s position, and before long was told by some government functionary, “You can’t print that.” The police then came to the newspaper office to ensure that he didn’t.
So far he had managed to avoid the wrath of the Communist officials who ruled Hong Kong. It hadn’t been easy. He was, he often thought wryly, becoming a master at damning with faint praise. I’m the king of innuendo, he once grumped to his wife. Actually, as he well knew, he had escaped censorship only because his paper was published in English, a language that few government officials spoke with any fluency. All the Chinese-language newspapers had a squad of resident apparatchiks from the New China News Agency who had to approve everything.
As Rip worked on the story, a sense of impending doom came over him. There were several hundred banks in Hong Kong, most of them privately owned, yet China had no Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Chinese banks outside of Hong Kong were owned by the state and theoretically could not fail. Of course, if those state-owned banks were examined using Western accounting standards, all were insolvent.
The problem was the desperate financial straits of the Chinese government, which saw the privately owned banks in Hong Kong as a source of low-interest loans for noncompetitive state-owned industries that would collapse without cash infusions, industries that employed tens of millions of mainland workers.
The Japanese who owned the Bank of the Orient had refused to make those loans to the Chinese government. Now the bank was failing, and thousands of people were going to be flat-ass broke after a lifetime of work and saving.
What was the Chinese government doing to prevent that outcome, if anything?
As luck would have it, after he left the Star Ferry terminal Jake Grafton wandered along with the crowd, lost in thought. When he at last began paying attention to his surroundings he found himself in the square outside the Bank of the Orient, shoulder-to-shoulder with several thousand other people. The doors of the bank were apparently locked. From time to time people came out of the crowd to try the doors, which refused to open.
Armed soldiers in uniform were visible here and there, but they were well back, away from the crowd, and seemed to be making no attempt to disperse it or prevent people from approaching the door of the bank to rattle it, pound on it, or press their foreheads against the glass and look in.
Here and there knots of people argued loudly among themselves, waved passbooks, and stared openly and defiantly at the soldiers.
For a moment, Jake thought of wandering on, finding another bank to cash his traveler’s checks. Surely they all weren’t closed today.
Yet something made him linger. He found a few empty inches on a flower bed retainer wall and parked his bottom.