The Trail to Buddha's Mirror - Don Winslow [40]
Xao went back to the statistics. Even taken at face value, they were dismal. Allow for exaggeration, and they approached disastrous. He reached into the bottom left-hand drawer of his desk and pulled out a blue folder labeled, PRELIMINARY STATISTICS ON PRODUCTION FROM PRIVATE HOLDINGS. It was the only copy. Best not to let the bastards in Beijing see this stuff quite yet.
He delved into it yet again. It was tantalizing: the only production statistics in his province that were actually on the rise. And these farmers had every reason to lie on the downside, since they owed a percentage of all their production to the commune. And still … and still … Oh, old friend, I wish I could stoke the flames of hell with these papers for you. Make you burn a little more.
He was involved with his statistics when his driver came back with a covered dish of bean curd and vegetables and a large tureen of fish soup. The driver set it on his desk in front of him.
“Thank you,” Xao said. “Did you eat?”
“Yes, Comrade Secretary.”
Xao offered the pack of cigarettes. His driver, a tall, well-built young soldier he had brought with him from Henan, shyly took one cigarette. Xao struck a match, lit a fresh cigarette for himself, and used it to light the soldier’s.
“And?” Xao asked.
“There was a message.”
“Good.”
’ ‘The doll is in the hallway,’” the driver recited.
Xao inhaled the smoke, which tasted better than it had all day. He was suddenly ravenously hungry.
“Tell her to wait.”
“Yes, Comrade Secretary.”
The driver saluted and left the room.
Xao took a pair of chopsticks from the top desk drawer and wiped them on the hem of his shin.
“‘The doll is in the hallway,’” he repeated to himself. “Good.” The food was delicious.
PART TWO
The Unpredictable Ghost
6
Kipling had it wrong with that bit about East and West never meeting. East and West meet in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong usually gets called an island, which is true as far as it goes. The island of Hong Kong meets the basic requirement, being surrounded by water, but the colony of Hong Kong includes more than 230 islands. However, the largest chunk of the colony sits on the mainland, which is to say it isn’t surrounded by water at all. It’s surrounded by China.
The colony of Hong Kong is more correctly called the Crown Colony of Hong Kong, which is a way of letting you know it’s one of those pieces of real estate the British stole when they were still capable of doing that kind of thing. They grabbed Hong Kong Island itself back in 1841 as compensation for a few warehouses of their opium that the Chinese burned. Seems that the Chinese government had some objections to the British trying to turn Chinese citizens into junkies, and interfered with the sacred principles of free trade by confiscating the dope. So Queen Victoria lent the Royal Navy to her drug dealers and showed the cheeky mandarins that British merchants would peddle dope to anyone they damn well pleased, thank you very much. The navy shelled a few forts, killed a few chinks, and took an empty little island called Hong Kong as reimbursement for the out-of-pocket expenses. The Queen was pissed, though, because she thought she should have gotten a lot more for her money than one stinking rock with no potential customers on it, and fired the guy who inked the contract. That’s the thing about pushers—they’re never satisfied.
Sure enough, the British spent the rest of the century asserting the sacred right-to-deal, teaching the yellow heathen a lesson, and collecting more land as a tutorial fee, and that’s how the Crown Colony of Hong Kong came to occupy some 366 square miles, and the Chinese came to wish that Kipling had been right.
The West had the nifty high-tech weaponry, but the East had something better: population. Lots of it. You can plant any flag you want, but if it waves over a place that has a few thousand Brits and five million Chinese, you don’t need a rocket scientist to figure out that the place is more Chinese than British. And it took the Chinese about