‘It’s a sanction. You’re a soldier doing what soldiers do. Soldiers don’t ask.’ Sloan had said that the first time he ever asked why. And now, for the first time since he met Sloan, Hatcher thought, A soldier without uniform, without identification, without credentials or identity. What the hell kind of soldier was that? And now here he was, back again, and the doubts about Sloan gnawed at him.
Out on the island, black-eared kites, who had rushed to the sanctuary of the trees to escape the rain, spread their two-foot wings and soared over the island. For centuries they had shared the lofty aerie with rich taipans, the business rulers whose homes dotted the precipitous face of the mountain like small forts. Below them spread the Central District, the business heart of Hong Kong, where Chinese gangsters cavorted with British bankers and taipans, where dynasties were created and empires won and lost, gold was king, and where the binding ethic was money.
An island founded by smugglers and pirates, thought Hatcher. The only thing that changes here is time.
And thinking of pirates, Hatchers mind slipped again, this time to Cohen, and another memory crowded his brain. This time it was a happy one.
Thinking of Cohen made Hatcher feel good, for Rob Cohen was one of those characters who made the Orient the Orient, a man of mystery, an American expatriate who had become a Hong Kong legend. Hatcher was one of the few people who knew the whole scenario. They were close and trusting friends, though they had neither seen nor talked to each other for several years.
Ten years before, when they first met, Cohen was known as king of the Macao Runs, arid an unlikely king he was, buying contraband merchandise with the skill of a Rothschild and smuggling boatloads past the Hong Kong customs several times a week with the adroitness of a Chinese warlord.
By then Cohen was known as the white Tsu Fi of the river, although it was a while before Hatcher understood what that meant. All Hatcher knew was if you wanted to know the back-room secrets of Hong Kong, this short, wiry Jew with the Boston accent and the scraggly beard, who wore Chinese clothes, spoke three different dialects, had a lock on the river trade, and had become one of Hong Kong’s most mysterious and feared characters, was your man.
Before they met, Hatcher had heard many stories about Cohen — rumors, tall tales, lies — all slanderous, and all, to one extent or another true. But the real truth was far stranger than any fiction Cohen’s detractors and enemies could have invented. Through the years as Cohen and Hatcher progressed from being cautious adversaries to becoming close friends, Hatcher grew to trust the legendary schemer. And in time he had gradually pieced the story together.
Back in 1975, Cohen’s office was a dismal, dusty, two-room closet over an acupuncture parlor on crowded Cat Street, which was just a small anteroom with two uncomfortable chairs. And it was lot. There was no air conditioning and the ceiling fan looked as if it had been out of order since the second dynasty.
‘Mr. Hatcher? Come on in,’ Chen said in an accent that was part Boston, part British and part singsong Chinese.
To see him, Hatcher had to squint through dancing motes of dust spotlighted by the sun that streamed through the windows. Cohen was sitting in a straight- backed chair framed by the sunlight. Then, suddenly, Hatcher remembered him.
‘We’ve met before,’ he said, extending his hand.
‘Right,’ Cohen said, returning a hearty handshake, ‘two years ago, up the Beijiang in Chin Chin land.’
‘Sam-Sam Sam and his crew,’ Hatcher said with a nod.
And Cohen laughed and nodded. ‘Right, a true shit if there ever was one. He’ll steal your eyeballs and screw your French poodle while you’re holding the leash. You’ve got a good memory there, gwai-lo.’
‘Yours ain’t too bad either.’
‘Jesus,’ Cohen said with a grin,, ‘ain’t it great to talk American. It’s the only thing I miss. These guys out here? They don’t know shit about the vernacular.’
Their meeting two years earlier had been a brief one. At the time, Hatcher had written off the brazen man as just another quick-buck river rat not long for this world, an easy mistake to make because on that night Cohen was making his first trip into what he called Chin Chin land — China.
For three years Hatcher had worked the back rivers from Thailand east through the deltas and terraced plains of Cambodia and north through Laos, Vietnam and China to the Macao Runs of Hong Kong. He knew the Irrawaddy, the Mekong, and the Yalu Jiang rivers and their backwaters, knew the towns and was accepted — or ignored — by the villagers, who considered him a soldier of fortune without flag or loyalty. He dodged the Red patrols in Vietnam by hiding in the daytime and traveling at night, and by speaking Russian when he was stopped. He got by on audacity and because his role was mostly benign. He was there to get information, not to cause trouble, and he gathered his information by observing rather than asking questions.
It was to learn their secret ways, their routes, their sources, their pick-up points and, mostly, their tie-in to the Saigon black market that had brought Hatcher to their meeting place in 1973. They called themselves the Ts’e K’am Men Ti, the Secret Gatekeepers. There he occasionally did business with them to bolster his credibility. On the pretense of selling guns, he continued to build his file of informants and river operators and their connection to the Hong Kong underworld. He was known as gli Occhi di Sassi, the Man With Stone Eyes, a nickname given him by one of the most trusted men on his team, a onetime Mafioso enforcer named Tony Bagglio.
Standing in the dusty office, Hatcher remembered quite clearly his first sight of Cohen materializing out of the fog, a strange-looking creature in a silk cheongsam and with a long, straggly beard standing in the bow of a snakeboat — with only one other man, a hard-looking Chinese at the tiller — gliding quietly up one of the jungle-cramped offshoots of the Beijiang River, forty or so miles north of Macao.
I’ll be damned, Hatcher had thought to himself, what the hell’s this Chinese rabbi doing up here?
He soon found out.
COHEN: 1973
Cohen, too, remembered that night.
And he, too, had thought to himself as he cruised through the heavy fog in the long, slender snakeboat: What the hell is a nice Jewish boy from Westchester with a DBA from Harvard Business School doing here?
The barge had appeared so suddenly it startled Cohen. It was a floating department store, stacked high with crates of cameras, television sets, china dishes and forbidden icons, bolts of Thai silk and Indian. madras. Heavy tarps were strapped over the stacks to keep them dry.
Han, Cohen’s bodyguard and helmsman, throttled back and eased the snakeboat toward the barge. Cohen could feel his heart thundering in his throat and wrists. His mouth was dry.
Standing on the foredeck of the barge was the ugliest, meanest-looking human being he had ever seen. He was shorter than Cohen, perhaps five six, an Oriental built like a crate, his bulging arms covered with tattoos. He had no hair on the right side of his head. In its place was a mottled burn scar, which extended from a disfigured lump of ear halfway to the crown of his head. He combed the rest of his long black hair away from the scar so it swept over the top of his head and showered down the left side almost to his shoulder. He wore a gun belt and an ornate hand-made holster, designed to hold an Uzi machine gun, which was tied to his thigh Western style. His three front teeth were gold. One of them, according to rumor, had belonged to an unfortunate English businessman who thought he could bypass the unwritten and unsaid laws of the river and deal directly with the Ts’e K’am Men Ti.