Noble House

"Old Friend" to a Chinese was a particular person or company who had done you an extreme favor in the past, or someone in business who had proved trustworthy and profitable over the years. Sometimes the years went over generations.
Yes, Wu thought, this tai-pan's an old friend. It was he who had suggested the birth certificate and the new name for his Seventh Son, who suggested sending him to the Golden Country and had smoothed the waters there and the waters into the great university, and had watched over him there without his knowledge—the subterfuge solving his dilemma of how to have one of his sons trained in America without the taint of the opium connection.
What fools barbarians are! Yes, but even so, this tai-pan is not. He's truly an old friend—and so is the Noble House.
Wu remembered all the profits he and his family had made secretly over the generations, with or without the help of the Noble House, in peace and war, trading where barbarian ships could not: contraband, gold, gasoline, opium, rubber, machinery, medical drugs, anything and everything in short supply. Even people, helping them escape from the Mainland or to the Mainland, their passage money considerable. With and without but mostly with the assistance of the Noble House, with this tai-pan and before him Old Hawk Nose, his old cousin, and before him, Mad Dog, his father, and before him the cousin's father, the Wu clan had prospered.
Now Four Finger Wu had 6 percent of the Noble House, purchased over the years and hidden with their help in a maze of nominees but still in his sole control, the largest share of their gold transmittal business, along with heavy investments here, in Macao, Singapore and Indonesia and in property, shipping, banking.
Banking, he thought grimly. I'll cut my nephew's throat after I've fed him his Secret Sack if I lose one copper cash!
He was below now and he went into the seamy, littered main cabin where he and his wife slept. She was in the big straw-filled bunk and she turned over in half-sleep. "Are you finished now? Are you coming to bed?"
"No. Go to sleep," he said kindly. "I've work to do."
Obediently she did as she was told. She was his tai-tai, his chief wife, and they had been married for forty-seven years.
He took off his clothes and changed. He put on a clean white shirt and clean socks and shoes, and the creases of his gray trousers were sharp. He closed the cabin door quietly behind him and came nimbly on deck feeling very uncomfortable and tied in by the clothes. "I'll be back before dawn, Fourth Grandson," he said.
"Yes, Grandfather."
"You stay awake now!"
"Yes, Grandfather."
He cuffed the boy gently then went across the gangways and stopped at the third junk.
"Goodweather Poon?" he called out.
"Yes . . . yes?" the sleepy voice said. The old man was curled up on old sacking, dozing.
"Assemble all the captains. I'll be back within two hours."
Poon was immediately alert. "We sail?" he asked.
"No. I'll be back in two hours. Assemble the captains!"
Wu continued on his way and was bowed into his personal ferry sampan. He peered at the shore. His son was standing beside his big black Rolls with the good luck number plate—the single number 8— that he had purchased for 150,000 HK in the government auction, his uniformed chauffeur and his bodyguard, Two Hatchet Tok, waiting deferentially beside him. As always he felt pleasure seeing his great machine and this overrode his growing concern. Of course, he was not the only dweller in the sea villages who owned a Rolls. But, by custom, his was always the largest and the newest. 8, boat, was the luckiest number because it rhymed wiihfaat which meant "expanding prosperity."
He felt the wind shift a point and his anxiety increased. Eeeee, this has been a bad day but tomorrow will be worse.
Has that lump of dogmeat John Chen escaped to the Golden Country or is he truly kidnapped? Without that piece of dung I'm still the tai-pan's running dog. I'm tired of being a running dog. The 100,000 reward for John Chen is money well invested. I'd pay twelve times that for John Chen and his fornicating coin. Thank all gods I put spies in Noble House Chen's household.
He stabbed his hand shoreward. "Be quick, old man," he ordered the boatman, his face grim. "I've a lot to do before dawn!"
19
2:23 P.M. :
The day was hot and very humid, the sky sultry, clouds beginning a buildup. Since the opening this morning there had been no letup in the milling, noisy, sweating crowds inside and outside the small Aberdeen branch of the Ho-Pak Bank.
"I've no more money to pay out, Honorable Sung," the frightened teller whispered, sweat marking her neat chong-sam.
"How much do you need?"
"$7,457 for customer Tok-sing but there must be fifty more people waiting."
"Go back to your window," the equally nervous manager replied. "Delay. Pretend to check the account further—Head Office swore another consignment left their office an hour ago . . . perhaps the traffic . . . Go back to your window, Miss Pang." Hastily he shut the door of his office after her and, sweating, once more got on the phone. "The Honorable Richard Kwang please. Hurry. . . ."
Since the bank had opened promptly at ten o'clock, four or five hundred people had squirmed their way up to one of the three windows and demanded their money in full and their savings in full and then, blessing their joss, had shoved and pushed their way out into the world again.
Those with safety deposit boxes had demanded access. One by one, accompanied by an official, they had gone below to the vault, ecstatic or faint with relief. There the official had used his key and the client his key and then the official had left. Alone in the musty air the sweating client had blessed the gods that his joss had allowed him to be one of the lucky ones. Then his shaking hands had scooped the securities or cash or bullion or jewels and all the other secret things into a briefcase or suitcase or paper bag—or stuffed them into bulging pockets, already full with bank notes. Then, suddenly frightened to have so much wealth, so open and vulnerable, all the wealth of their individual world, their happiness had evaporated and they had slunk away to let another take their place, equally nervous, and, initially, equally ecstatic.
The line had started to form long before dawn. Four Finger Wu's people took the first thirty places. This news had rushed around the harbor, so others had joined instantly, then others, then everyone with any account whatsoever as the news spread, swelling the throng. By ten, the nervous, anxious gathering was of riot proportions. Now a few uniformed police were strolling among them, silent and watchful, their presence calming. More came as the day grew, their numbers quietly and carefully orchestrated by East Aberdeen police station. By noon a couple of Black Maria police vans were in one of the nearby alleys with a specially trained riot platoon in support. And European officers.
Most of the crowd were simple fisherfolk and locals, Haklos and Cantonese. Perhaps one in ten was born in Hong Kong. The rest were recent migrants from the People's Republic of China, the Middle Kingdom, as they called their land. They had poured into the Hong Kong sanctuary fleeing the Communists or fleeing the Nationalists, or famine, or just simple poverty as their forebears had done for more than a century. Ninety-eight of every hundred of Hong Kong's population were Chinese and this proportion had been the same ever since the Colony began.
Each person who came out of the bank told anyone who asked that they had been paid in full. Even so, the others who waited were sick with apprehension. All were remembering the crash of last year, and a lifetime in their home villages of other crashes and failures, frauds, rapacious money lenders, embezzlements and corruptions and how easy it was for a life's savings to evaporate through no fault of your own, whatever the government, Communist, Nationalist or warlord. For four thousand years it had always been the same.