The tail lost Hatcher in the Cat Street crowd. Then he thought he saw Hatcher dodge into a shop. He rushed ahead, elbowing pedestrians out of the way.
The tiny store was crammed with racks of jeans and sport clothes. Shirts and blouses were stacked from floor to ceiling and shoppers stood elbow to elbow looking for bargains. Hatcher had gone straight through the store out the back door, had turned back in the narrow alley to Connaught Street and jumped in the first rickshaw he saw. He leaned back in the seat, out of view.
‘To the tram, and hurry,’ he told the rickshaw boy in Chinese. He didn’t look back.
Back up Cat Street, the man following him stepped out the back door of the clothing shop and looked both ways. There was no sign of Hatcher. He pulled out his walkie-talkie and pressed the button.
‘He ditched me,’ he said with disgust.
The rickshaw boy trotted rhythmically down Connaught Street to Garden and turned up to the entrance to the Victoria Peak Tram. Hatcher paid him and got out, looking back down the street. Just the usual traffic.
So far, so good, he thought and entered the tram.
THE WHITE TSU FH
From the balcony of his home on the side of Victoria Peak, Cohen watched the tram rise up the side of the mountain. He had seen Hatcher arrive in the rickshaw and board the funicular. Cohen also scanned the street and park below to see if anyone might be following his friend. He saw nothing suspicious. But with Hatcher, one could never be sure, and now, to suddenly appear after all the years, Cohen wondered what his old friend was up to.
Cohen’s mind drifted back in time, to a dark night upriver when his friendship with Hatcher had first begun to blossom.
Cohen was coming back down from the Ts’e K’am Men Ti with a load of contraband goods when a boatload of maverick river pirates had loomed up behind him and fired several warning shots in the air. Cohen had only half a dozen men with him. After all, nobody, nobody, attacked the Tsu Fi, a fact that unfortunately had eluded the bunch of river scum. They ordered his two boats to heave to.
Then Cohen heard the deep roar of engines and a coal-black gunboat materialized out of the darkness. It had the profile of an American riverboat but had no markings. Standing on the bow was the white man he had seen upriver a few months earlier. He dredged the name from his memory: Hatcher. A dozen armed brigands were lined up along the rail of Hatcher’s boat. Then Cohen noticed that the gunner manning the M-60 in the gun tower was wearing a shirt with Army stripes on the sleeve. A sergeant? Were these American soldiers? he had wondered. Nobody else was wearing a uniform. Hatcher wore camouflaged pants and an olive drab tank top, but so did everybody else these days. There was some conversation, and although Cohen could not hear Hatcher, whatever he said had been effective. The pirates had turned to and headed back upriver. Hatcher pulled alongside Cohen’s tiny but elegant snake boat.
‘We meet again,’ he said with a grin.
‘So we do, mate, so we do,’ said Cohen. ‘And just where the hell did you come from, not that I’m complaining?’
‘We’ve been a mile or so behind you for the last hour,’ Hatcher answered. ‘Then those bows pulled out of a creek and dropped on your stern, so I figured we better check it out.’
‘I owe you,’ Cohen said with a bow.
‘I’ll remember that,’ Hatcher said. ‘Come aboard, I’ll buy you a drink.’
The gunboat had been customized by Hatcher and his men. It was a sleek, fast-moving craft built for action and little else. It had skimpy quarters for the crew but a large, amply supplied kitchen, more guns and armor plate than a tank, and was painted coal-black. Hatcher’s crew of a dozen bearded GIs was as motley as the gangsters he had just chased away. Hatcher led Cohen to his spartan quarters, a small cabin with a liquor cabinet, a desk covered with homemade river charts, and a hammock strung from the rafters. Cohen knew better than to ask his host any direct questions. Hatcher took a bottle of gin from the cabinet and poured them both a generous slug.
‘Where you headed?’ Cohen asked cautiously.
‘Back into Hong Kong for a little R and R,’ Hatcher answered.
Cohen’s face brightened. ‘Ah, I’m delighted. Now there’s an area in which I am truly an expert,’ he said. ‘You will be my guest while you’re in the colony. I insist.,
Hatcher smiled and hoisted his drink. ‘Who could turn down an offer like that?’ he answered.
For the next two weeks, Cohen had entertained Hatcher like a crown prince. They had raised hell from Macao to Kowloon. A sweet time, a time to develop mutual trust and confidence. They became comrades. For Cohen a first, while for Hatcher, Cohen was his first true friend since Murph Cody. Cohen tutored his friend on the operations of the Hong Kong triads while Hatcher regularly supplied Cohen with information about the whereabouts of the British customs patrols. But what had cemented their friendship was that they genuinely liked each other. The two loners traded personal confidences and their friendship had matured in a way that endured through the years. While Cohen was the Tsu Fi and could travel the rivers with immunity from Sam-Sam Sam’s interference, he always had the feeling Hatcher was somewhere nearby just in case he got into trouble.
Then, as suddenly as he had appeared on the river, Hatcher had vanished without a word. Good-byes were not Hatcher’s style.
Now Cohen’s pulse quickened at the prospect of seeing his friend again.
Hatcher, too, was excited at the thought of seeing the white Tsu Fi. After his first meeting with the little man, he had asked about him on his occasional forays into Hong Kong. There were vague rumors about him, but he heard nothing specific until one night when he was having a drink with a group of reporters in the Godown Bar on Connaught Street. It was a favorite hangout because of the live American Dixieland band and the generous drinks. There, a boozy ex-reporter named Charlie Rawlson perked up when Hatcher mentioned Cohen.
‘I knew him when,’ he said over a glass of Bombay gin and lemon juice. ‘I was at Harvard with him.’
‘Harvard!’ said Sid Barnaby, a Time magazine correspondent.
‘Nieman fellow,’ Rawlson said ‘with a flourish.
‘Back in the late sixties,’ Rawlson began. ‘At the time, Cohen was kinda the campus joke. You’d see the little bugger dashin’ across Harvard Square with his briefcase hugged up against his chest like he was afraid somebody would run off with it, hidin’ behind this fringy little beard of his, with never a word for anyone. Had all the social grace of a friggin’ water buffalo, he did. His old man was a hotshot Westchester lawyer or something. And old Cohen did his parents proud. Summa cum at Princeton, a DBA from Harvard. When he got his doctorate, every big company in the country lined up to interview him. Then they found out he was a brain without an ounce of social grace, a genius who could hardly say hello to a stranger. He was written off as a reclusive looney tune. Actually he was just shy, is what he was. Shy ‘.vas invented to describe old Cohen.’
‘So what happened?’ Hatcher as}ed.
‘His parents decided what he needed was a round-the- world cruise to get him back in the social world. “Time you had a little fun,” his father tells him. “Find yourself a nice lady and see how the other half lives.” Well, the old boy could not have conceived the limits to which Cohen would carry that bit of advice. That was the last I heard of him until about a year ago I see him waltz out of a bank on Connaught wearing a red silk cheongsam. He gets in a Rolls-Royce and tools off. God knows what happened in all those years in between.’