“Just in time for lunch,” Cuthbert said.
“It’s mostly lunch that I’ve come for. You’ve no idea how unbelievably awful London’s become; there’s been a measurable decline in civilized values. Nobody dares be seen enjoying a good business lunch these days for fear of incurring some bloodcurdling epithet from the limited vocabulary of the politically correct: ‘decadent,’ ‘wasteful,’ ‘conspicuous consumer,’ would you believe? I’ve even heard a minister described as sleazy because he finished lunch with a cognac. There’s a new fascism about, Milton, and it gives me the creeps. You don’t know how lucky you have been, this past decade, stationed in this bastion of flamboyant laissez-faire.”
Cuthbert smiled. “Will the club do, or would you prefer haute cuisine at Pierrot’s?”
“My dear, to this long-suffering proletarian the club is haute cuisine. I snatched forty winks on the plane, and do you know, I experienced the most vivid dream of my entire life, the salient feature of which was that silver trolley at your club bearing a huge slightly underdone slab of roast Angus with bone marrow topping, light gravy and Yorkshire pudding crisp on the outside with a wickedly seductive softness at the center. The other memorable feature was a Bordeaux. I couldn’t quite make out the label, but it looked very much like a St. Julien, or possibly a St.-Estèphe.”
“Perhaps a St.-Estèphe 1984, Cos d’Estournel?”
Henderson allowed his large hand to drop onto Cuthbert’s forearm and grip it. “My word, Milton, I do believe you’re developing an Oriental clairvoyance.”
Cuthbert acknowledged Henderson’s humor with a prolonged chuckle. Rank aside, Cuthbert admired the only man he knew who could solve the Times crossword more quickly than he could himself. And of course the fat man’s mental agility manifested in other equally telling ways. Inside the pampered gourmet there lurked a paper warrior of extraordinary subtlety and cunning. Even if Cuthbert hadn’t liked him, he would have been a fool not to cultivate him. The less influential desks of Whitehall were frequently manned by those who had neglected to pay homage to Sir Michael Henerson.
The driver stopped outside the revolving doors of the Hong Kong Club in Jackson Road and got out to open the rear door for Henderson. Cuthbert gestured him through the doors into the lobby of the club. To the right was a full-length portrait of the queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, on the left two bored Chinese cloakroom attendants. Four eminent Englishmen whom he recognized were waiting for guests. In the lift the chief secretary of Hong Kong was waiting to ascend.
“Come along, Michael, if you dare test Japanese technology with your bulk,” the chief secretary said.
Henderson grinned broadly. “Peter, what on earth are you doing here?”
“I work in Hong Kong, Michael. Surely you knew that?”
“I did hear a rumor-some sort of secretary, aren’t you?”
“Something like that,” the chief secretary admitted. “What brings you to this quiet backwater?”
“He dropped in for lunch,” Cuthbert said as the lift doors closed.
“In that case I’m going to order on the double, before he eats the whole of the daily roast.”
The three men laughed on their way to the Jackson Room, where a Chinese maître d’ greeted them with slick charm and showed Henderson and Cuthbert to the diplomat’s usual table in a corner facing the room. Every diner they passed on their way to the table was male; women were not allowed in the Jackson Room at lunch-time.
They sat simultaneously, pulled napkins from rings, glanced up at the maître d’.
“Bloody Mary,” Henderson said.
“Same,” Cuthbert said. He smiled at a Chinese queen’s counsel who was lunching with the attorney general at a nearby table.
“Your chief secretary is looking haggard these days,” Henderson said, “I do hope he’s not gone on a politically correct diet.”
“I think rather it’s the future of Hong Kong that’s causing him concern.”
“Oh, that! Yes, he always was a worrier, even at Eton. That’s why I advised him to come out here, you know. Jolly glad I did; he’s never looked back. He didn’t have quite the sangfroid or the gravitas for the home team. Don’t tell him I said so, though.”
“Is that why you sent me out here, Michael?”
Henderson placed his large hands together on the table as if he were about to say a prayer. “My dear, you’re out here because you are the only one who does have the nerve to preside over the last hours of the Holy British Empire-the runt of it anyway.”
“Really? You said at the time it was because I spoke Cantonese and Mandarin. ‘Like a coolie’ was the phrase you used, as I recall.”
Henderson tutted. “You never believed that was a reason. You know how I am about languages, especially Asian ones. How on earth you can have a decent crossword with ten thousand characters or whatever it is, I just don’t know. Chinese cuisine, though, that does command one’s deepest respect. Anyway, as I remember, you were keen as mustard. I assumed, to your credit, it was the food you were after, the Paris desk having been bagged by old Moffat.”
“The food-and China.”
Henderson allowed his eyes to rest on Cuthbert for a moment. “Yes, China. Well, shall we postpone business until after the main course? You know how strict I am about priorities.”
Discreetly Cuthbert checked his watch. Just after one. From the way Henderson watched the sommelier open the St.-Estèphe, Cuthbert guessed it would be late afternoon before the undersecretary was ready to talk shop.
Jonathan Wong also checked his watch for the fifth time in as many minutes. The trucks were due at one o’clock but had probably been snarled in the traffic on Queen’s Road. He saw that Sowcross, the director whom the bank had appointed to oversee the operation, was also anxious. Twenty of the bank’s usual security guards with pump-action shotguns stood in half attention around the underground entrance to the vaults, but Wong was most curious about five white men whom the bank had hired from a different kind of security company. They had taken up their own strategic positions in and around the vault and were waiting after their own manner. They slouched against walls and pillars, but Wong saw alert eyes constantly moving in lean faces. Black machine pistols with wire stocks hung around their necks. The white men had been flown in especially, according to Sowcross.
He heard a shout at the same time as he heard the security truck approaching the gate. Sowcross pressed a button on the wall behind the entrance to the vault; the steel gate rolled up; the small armored truck trundled up a ramp to the area next to the vault. Sowcross pressed another button; the steel gate rolled down. They were alone with the first consignment. Wong watched while some of the security guards unloaded crude cardboard boxes with Chinese characters on the side. Wong exchanged glances with Sowcross and followed him into the vault, where a team of clerks was waiting. Each clerk sat at a bench set against the wall; next to his or her right hand an automatic bill-counting machine also waited. Wong knew that the aperture of the machine could be adjusted for different-sized notes and the dial was adjusted to the currency.
Although it had underpinned and structured every aspect of his life for the whole of his life, having usurped the role that some cultures still reserved for God, Wong had never seen money in this quantity before. All around the room the machines whizzed through stack after stack of banknotes, many of them the dull green, black and white of the American currency, others the lurid colors of the Australian dollar, some French francs with the head of Delacroix, plenty of British pounds expressing the national obsession with their queen, small German marks, Dutch guilders, Italian lire, Spanish pesetas, Singaporean dollars-it seemed that all over the world crime paid. Wong realized that he was surrounded by money in all its mind-numbing banality. People died, slaved, prostituted themselves for this monotony. He saw that Sowcross was not of the same mind. The Englishman stared at the mountains of cash, impaled by fascination. When the last machine stopped whizzing, he roused himself to check the dials and enter the numbers on his pocket calculator. Having traveled in a circle, he returned to Wong.