High Road to China. Jon Cleary
took the watch: it ticked like a tiny gold bomb in her hand. ‘It’s my father’s. I gave it to him last Christmas.’
‘Your father was captured the day he arrived in Hunan province, two days after you left Shanghai on your ship. I travelled overland to Hong Kong and the intention was to speak to you there. Your ship was supposed to spend four days in that port.’
‘We were there only two days. The schedule was altered for some reason or other. None of us minded,’ she said irrelevantly; then added very relevantly, ‘At the time.’
‘I caught another ship and followed you, but at each port I just missed you.’
‘You could have sent a wireless message to the ship.’ Eve, assaulted by reason, now believed everything she was hearing: no swindler could be so cool about his facts.
‘How to word it, Miss Tozer?’ Sun smiled again, as if admitting even the cleverness of the Chinese would have found such a code beyond them; he marvelled sometimes at the stupidity of white foreigners, whose minds never seemed to work as quickly as their tongues. ‘My master wants secrecy. If I had sent a wireless message, even if you had believed it and not thought it a hoax, you would have contacted the authorities in Shanghai, am I not correct?’
Eve nodded, and Henty said, ‘You said something about – how long? eighteen days? – in which to return the statue. Return it to where – Hunan? That’s absolutely impossible, you know that.’
‘I regret the limited time allowed, but I am afraid there is no way of changing my master’s mind. If I do not have the statue back with him on the day appointed, I too shall be killed.’ Sun was abruptly grave, as if the thought of his own possible death was suddenly a surprise to him. Then he shrugged away the possibility: he was that acrobatic philosopher, an optimistic fatalist.
‘Why is there such an absolute deadline?’ Henty asked. ‘Can’t you ask your master for an extension?’
Sun shook his head. ‘The only wireless in Hunan is controlled by Chang Ching-yao. I should have told my master before this that I had missed you, had it been possible. I have been in a veritable state of frustration ever since I took ship at Hong Kong. What to do? I kept asking myself.’
‘How did you manage to arrive here today then, if you were always so far behind Miss Tozer?’
‘My ship went to Constantinople – I caught the Orient Express from there. A very funny name for a train, one that stops over 4000 miles from the real Orient. But very comfortable and full of very strange people. It saved me several days getting here.’
‘It hasn’t saved us enough to get us to Hunan in eighteen days.’
Eve looked at the watch in her hand. Somehow she knew, with a sickening feeling of certainty, that it was all the evidence she needed to know that her father had indeed been kidnapped. But with despairing hope she said, ‘What if I don’t believe your story, Mr Sun? You could have stolen this watch – ’
Sun Nan produced a piece of folded notepaper from the inside of his jacket and handed it to her. As soon as she unfolded it she recognized the handwriting, bold, assertive even while it asked for her help: Eve darling, These fellows, I’m afraid, mean business. Give them what they want. And don’t worry. Dad.
‘I don’t understand why the Shanghai office hasn’t cabled us your father is missing,’ said Henty.
‘Mr Henty, China hasn’t changed since you left. Up-country, two days out of Shanghai, and you could be on the other side of the moon as far as keeping in contact.’ She turned back to Sun Nan. ‘Will your master, whoever he is, really kill my father if he doesn’t get back that statue?’
‘I’m afraid so, Miss Tozer. He does not value lives highly, especially those of foreigners. He often jokes he would have made a very good imperialist.’ He smiled, but Eve and Henty did not share the joke.
‘What about you? Do you value foreigners’ lives?’
Sun spread his hands. ‘I value my own. I am a humble messenger. Does the telegraph boy carry the burden of every telegram he delivers?’
‘Good Christ, now he’s spouting bloody aphorisms!’ Then Henty hastily looked at Eve, wobbled on his stick. ‘I’m frightfully sorry. I usually don’t swear in front of ladies – ’
‘It’s all right, Mr Henty. Everything is bloody at the moment.’
Eve felt choked: with helplessness, fear, premature grief for her father who was about to die. She had felt grief before but that had been bearable; her mother, gone suddenly with cancer, had been spared what the doctors had said would otherwise have been a long lingering death. But Bradley Tozer, for all his adventurousness, had always seemed to her invulnerable. Though they had often been separated in the years during and since the war, she living in America with her grandmother and he coming home from China on his annual visits, she had never thought of life without him. The bond between them had never been severed or even frayed by distance. Distance …
‘How far is it from London to Hunan by air?’
‘By air?’ Henty’s eyebrows went up this time as if he had had a sudden spasm; then they came down again in a puzzled frown. ‘By aeroplane, you mean? But there’s no aeroplane service that far. The furthest it goes is to Paris.’
‘I can fly. Father and I have our own machine back home. We usually fly from Boston down to our winter place in Florida. We were planning to do so next month.’ She heard herself already speaking in the past tense; and tried to sound more resolute. ‘We can buy a machine here and fly to China. How far is it?’
‘I don’t know. Seven, perhaps eight thousand miles as the crow flies. But you wouldn’t be flying as the crow flies. It’s out of the question, Miss Tozer – ’
‘Nothing is out of the question, Mr Henty, if it will save my father’s life. Unless you can think of an alternative?’
Henty thumped his stick on the carpet in frustration. ‘No, I can’t. But such a flight – ’ He trailed off helplessly.
‘Some men – what was their name? Smith? – flew out to Australia only last year.’
‘Ross and Keith Smith. But there were four of them, they had an engineer and a mechanic and they flew a Vickers Vimy bomber. Even so they took longer than eighteen days. A month at least, I think. And another half a dozen chaps have tried to follow them and got less than half-way.’
‘China is not as far as Australia and the Smiths were not as hard pressed for time as I am.’
‘I wish there were some other way – ’
‘There isn’t,’ said Eve. ‘Where can I buy an aeroplane?’
2
Extract from the William Bede O’Malley manuscript:
George Weyman always said he could read my sky-writing better than he could the handwritten notes I used to leave for him in our office. Perhaps that was because he suffered from what we now call dyslexia; or perhaps it was because the only sky-writing contract we ever had was for Oxo, the meat extract. Or more correctly, nearly had. Because at the time I am writing of, we were no more than on trial. The first sky-writing had been attempted by an American way back in 1913, but nobody had yet come up with a formula for keeping the smoke coming consistently out of the exhaust pipes of our machines. Letters kept breaking off in mid-stroke; if the world at large had been able to read Mr Pitman’s shorthand we might have been successful. There were plenty of advertisers waiting to use our services once we proved, as it were, that we were not illiterate. That summer we had been approached by a sweets manufacturer who wanted his name, plus a gumdrop in green, sketched above half a dozen seaside resorts. The producers of the motion picture Why Change Tour Wife? had also been in touch with us; they wanted the name of their film in purple smoke and that of the delectable actress, Miss Gloria Swanson, in red, hung, as one of their publicity