He stopped and stared at me. “Really, Mr. Cain, you are stubborn! Is there nothing I can say to convince you?”
I said: “Nothing. Nothing at all. Good day, Ming Sin-san.”
I could feel his eyes on me as I walked down the pathway to the big iron gates. One of the armed men threw them open for me, unsmiling, uncaring, unmoved—like a hireling letting out the gardener and locking the gates behind him.
A helicopter was circling overhead, low enough for its roar to blot out the early-morning sounds. There was a big letter “M” painted in scarlet on its bright green flanks. The fishermen on the beach were staring up at it, and as passed them they turned back to their work; I heard one of them muttering, and his eyes flickered briefly towards me and back again.
I walked quickly along the esplanade under the broad leafed trees, listening as the helicopter landed in the grounds behind me. It took off again before I’d gone another hundred yards, rising straight up and then wheeling round fast and heading west towards the Chinese mainland and the island of Siang-chu.
It had been an interesting meeting. I’d never heard so many lies told so expertly, all in a row. I came away with one thing certain, and that thing was all that really mattered.
Ming had Sally Hyde, or knew where she was.
I shuddered when I thought about what might be happening to her.
CHAPTER 11
From the roof of Bonelli’s place, the Navy night-glasses were strong enough to pick out the island clearly, dark in a darker sea against the moonlight that shone on the hills of China.
Three miles from the mainland coast, it was a fortress built by the adherents of the White Lotus Society. That must have been back in 1797, when the anti-Manchu forces were gathering on the coast for the final showdown that turned, at last, into the Tai Ping rebellion. I remembered that a hundred years later, Sir Robert Hart, the great Irish-Chinese statesman, had mapped the coastline around Canton—till then a shoreline almost unknown to the West—in an effort to deny the security of their hideouts to the opium smugglers whose silver drain was having a chaotic effect on the Chinese economy. His success at stabilizing the government’s source of income had been largely due to his memorable attention to the smallest possible detail, and the records he had left—the few that survived—were masterly. Hart’s pro-Manchu energy had earned him the vicious enmity of the pirates, the gangsters, and the smugglers who still operated openly along the coast in the name of some obscure political fanaticism. The Boxers had burned his house down with all its priceless records, all, that is, except the diary he had kept for forty years, and the maps of the coast which he had presented to the Emperor.
I was thinking, suddenly, of the map in Bonelli’s office, knowing now what that chord was, that its delicate penmanship had evoked. Just a worthless fake, Bonelli had said. But at that time we hadn’t known each other very well, and the little lie, which I was sure it was, had perhaps been necessary for the sake of an intelligent security.
Now, the name of the unscrupulous Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi kept knocking at the back of my mind, clamoring for some sort of notice; and when I’d sorted out the bits and pieces, I remembered that her son, the Emperor T’ung Chi, was an amateur cartographer and had, in turn, donated all his maps to one of the Canton museums. His collection was a famous one; did it include, I wondered, any of the rare Robert Hart maps? It was a probability, at least.
On the island, there was no sign of life. The rocky massif was dark, and I fancied that the powerful glasses were bringing it close enough for me to hear any sounds if sounds there were on it; the stillness and the clarity of the night made the fancy irresistible. But the great stones were silent as death. It was hard to recognize them as a fortress; from this distance, they were a jumble of granite blocks set against granite cliffs and washed with the spray of the granite sea.
I went downstairs to find Bonelli in his own little fortress. He was at the great teak desk in a corner of the main fan-tan room, paying large wads of notes to a small and somber Chinese who watched carefully as the notes were counted, a thin and alert old man who waited till the paying was done, not taking his eyes from the money, and then looked up at me and said, in tolerably good Portuguese: “I have to thank you for this, Cain Sin-san.” He turned away and placed the money on one of the tables, and Bonelli got up and said cheerfully, taking my arm and guiding me away:
“A great deal of money is riding on your well-being, Cain. If you stay alive for a few more days, I will be ruined.”
I didn’t believe it. I knew that he was shrewd enough to bet heavily on my continued survival, and I wondered how he’d feel when I told him what I was planning. I said: “Remember the T’ung Chi map collection? I have an idea it was sold to the Portuguese, but I can’t remember when. Or even if that’s a fact.”
He looked at me in surprise. There was a touch of suspicion there too. “How should I know a thing like that?”
I said: “How could you possibly not know? That’s the collection your Robert Hart came from.”
“Oh.”
We were moving into his office, and he stood in the doorway watching me as I went to the fine old map that was over the divan. Its penmanship was splendid.
I said: “I never really did believe that this was a fake.”
He said, seeming surprised: “Did I say it was a fake? What a foolish thing to do! But then, you had only just arrived, and I did not really know very much about you, did I? I said to myself: I will trust this man completely, but only when I know him a little better. So you will forgive me?”
“Of course.”
“And if you’re interested in maps, I have much better ones. In my vault, there’s a half-section of Peutinger’s Tabula, the only one in the world outside the great museums.”
The Hart map was of the area around Amoy, more than three hundred miles too far north to interest me at the moment.
I said: “I’m more interested in the T’ung Chi collection.”
Bonelli frowned, a distant look in his eyes. “The Emperor she placed on the throne before she died, what was his name?”
“Kuang Hsu.”
“Ah yes, Kuang Hsu’s entire estate was broken up when he died, and part of it was presented to the Portuguese here in Macao more than a hundred years ago.” He shrugged. “In those days; you may know, it was essential for the Chinese that the colony retain its status quo as an outlet to the West. Hong Kong, you remember, was just beginning to thrive, and the Cantonese saw the eventual decline of Macao as a result. So they tried to bribe the Portuguese to build bigger harbors here, to strengthen the colony as a counterweight to the British influence in Hong Kong. It was not a very successful overture, but part of the price the Manchus paid was Kuang Hsu’s collection of jade, twelfth-century armor, and maps. Somewhere around 1843, I think.”
“And the Robert Hart maps were part of the collection?”
He podded. “And they’re still here in the museum.”
I said: “Where’s Mai?”
He looked at me in surprise. “You do not wish to hear how I acquired one of them? It was really quite a coup. Just the faintest touch of illegality, and quite a brilliant stroke of double-dealing.”
“Is there a map of Siang-chu island in the collection?”
“There must be. The purpose of Sir Robert’s maps was to further his fight against the Boxers. And Siang-chu, in those days, was a collection point for Boxer weapons smuggled in from Japan. So, provided that he was able to gain access to the island he must have mapped it with his customary efficiency.” He looked hard at me and said: “But there’s nothing on Siang-chu any more, nothing but an old fortress which is slowly crumbling into the decay that comes even to the best of us in time.”
“No military outpost of the Canton defenses?”
“Nothing, nothing at all.”
“How sure are you of that?”
Bonelli raised his oh-so-elegant shoulders. “I am perfectly sure. One of my junks was driven ashore there in the last typhoon we had, and the crew spent the night on the island before we were able to rescue them.”
