Shan Pao: The End Of The Hong Kong Colony Saga

By Bill Berg

The Hong Kong Saga ends with “Shan Pao”... a story of Lanxi Hahn’s extended family’s exodus from Hong Kong, that was aided in a strange way by events as far away as Chad, Nigeria and Uzbekistan.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483501864

Book preview

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER 1

Lagos Harbor, Nigeria

Monday, 2 June 1997

It was an hour and a half before midnight. The tramp freighter, Tindalo, lay portside to a dock in Nigeria’s narrow Lagos Harbor, her bow facing into the outgoing tide. A single naked light bulb, suspended from a pole rooted to the base of a movable shore gangway, cast a glare on a couple of local policemen. One leaned against the pole, the other perched on the bottom step of the gangway. The rest of the dock lay in darkness. Both policemen were chain-smoking American cigarettes from a pack that a member of the crew had tossed down to them.

The warm night air, moist and still, carried the heady scent of local flora and deposited a light film of dew on every motionless object. From somewhere on the dock, a jazz tune rattled out of a tinny speaker.

Outside the fenced dock area, dimly-lit bars and food stalls lined the harbor rim road so that from the bridge of the ship, the line of the road could be seen running due west and gradually turning north, away from the harbor, to vanish behind a rise in the land. Just beyond the point where the road disappeared, the bright lights of the new Lagos Convention Center lent a yellowish glow to the low-hanging bank of mist coming off the sea.

The Tindalo’s captain, Musa Buzakuk, had come on board early in the evening, shortly after the ship had docked. He had arrived in Lagos a day earlier, on a flight from Paris. No one else had used the gangway except a man from the port authority who had come aboard to check the Tindalo’s papers and receive a small consideration for his courtesy.

Several of the ship’s crew leaned against the shore-side rail in small groups, enjoying the stillness of the night and watching several local line handlers loiter in the darkness by the mooring bollards. The red tips of cigarettes glowing in the dark revealed their movements.

An empty steel cargo container, trucked from Chad, had been loaded into the ship’s number one hold shortly after the ship docked. No cargo had been offloaded.

The Tindalo was ready to sail. The current from the ebbing tide provided the thrust she needed to turn her bow from the dock and move out of the narrow harbor without the help of a tugboat. Her huge diesel engine idled at a low-pitched hum.

On the port wing of the bridge deck, First Officer Mohammed Saleem flipped a switch and three powerful floodlights in the vessel’s superstructure brought the dock area to life. He spoke through a bullhorn directed at the shore. Look alive on the dock! his voice boomed. Remove the gangway and prepare to cast off shore lines.

A dock tractor belching a black cloud of exhaust drew the gangway away from the ship.

The first officer made sure that each of the three bollards securing the Tindalo was properly manned. Because of the current against her bow, the stern line was slack. He called out to the crew at the stern bollard. Cast off aft!

As soon as the heavy hawser splashed into the water, the crew began hauling it aboard and the first officer spoke into a microphone he held in his left hand.

All ahead slow, Mister Ahmed.

Water under the stern boiled as the ship’s propeller bit in and in a few seconds, the Tindalo eased forward almost imperceptibly. The spring and bow lines began to slacken and the bullhorn blared at the crew standing by the other bollards.

Cast off forward!

Cast off mid-ship!

As the Tindalo inched forward, overcoming the resisting current, the first officer placed the bullhorn on the deck at his feet and leaned on the forward rail, watching the ship’s bow.

Give me a little right rudder, Ahmed. Fifteen degrees.

The Tindalo’s bow swung slowly away from the dock and the pressure of the current on her bow helped turn her in a wide graceful arc toward the center of the channel.

Right standard rudder, Ahmed. All ahead one-third.

The stronger current in mid-channel tightened her turn.

Well done, Ahmed. Now, ease the rudder and put her on the line.

Moments later, the Tindalo was heading straight down the channel toward the harbor gate.

Just as the aft line had hit the water, three men swam up to a rope ladder on the starboard side of the vessel submerged in darkness. They handed their swim fins, their shoes and a plastic bag containing a few tools to someone waiting at the hatch from which the ladder hung. Then, one by one, they silently rolled into the ship, pulling the ladder in after them. The hatch was secured and in the dimly-lit cabin, they quickly changed out of their soaked business suits into dry crew clothing, before going up on deck to join those who had moved to the starboard side to watch the receding city lights in the distance.

On the bridge, Captain Buzakuk glanced at the ship’s clock, then at the shore to check his position.

All ahead full, Ahmed, he said to the young seaman at the helm. Then he joined the first officer on the starboard wing. Both men focused their binoculars inland, training them on the area where the Convention Center stood.

Within a minute, a bright flash lit the area they were watching. By the time their smiles were fully formed, the sound of the explosion reached them.

Eight hours out of Lagos Harbor, bound due south on the Tindalo’s course to pass the Cape of Good Hope and head east to Macao on the South China Sea, the ship’s communications officer made an announcement over the PA system.

Attention, please. Attention, please. The following news item was just recorded from the morning broadcast of the BBC world news.

The pause of a few seconds was followed by the voice of a British newscaster. In Lagos, Nigeria, a car bomb exploded after the inaugural session last night of the Mid-African Conference of Military and Political Alliances, killing Moshe Hersh, an Israeli dignitary attending the conference. Before joining his country’s diplomatic service, Hersh had been a highly decorated colonel in the Israeli army. He had led a lightning attack on Beirut during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon under the command of General Ariel Sharon. Although the invasion supposedly involved a limited strike against Palestine Liberation Organization forces in South Lebanon, subsequent reports revealed that Sharon’s intent from the very outset had been to move beyond these positions and deliver a punishing blow to Beirut. Hersh had commanded one of the first battalions to enter Beirut. The conference….

The voice of the newscaster was cut off, as the communications officer came back on the PA speakers.

The rest of the broadcast is of little interest.

CHAPTER 2

Uzbekistan (East of Samarkand)

Wednesday, 4 June 1997

The beam from the headlamp of the Luboff motorcycle cut through the dark night, lighting up the ancient macadam far enough ahead to ensure that Malik Volosikov ran no risk by traveling at a steady eighty kilometers an hour, a speed he’d held for the past two hours. Low over the hills that commanded the right of the road, a slender slice of moon clipped the top of an occasional scraggly tree clinging to the arid, rocky soil. But the light it cast did little to relieve the darkness. A million stars pierced the black sky. And as the night grew older and the road climbed higher into the foothills, the air turned cooler. In another hour, he’d enter the upper pass and be deep into the mountains. There, by the grace of transient clouds that shared their moisture with the soil, he would see the tall, proud pines that only those few Uzbekistanis who had traveled through the high mountain passes had seen.

The cool wind rushing under his unzipped black nylon jacket had swept away the weeklong depression brought on by the oppressive heat wave plaguing the valley. One ought to pay for such relief, he thought. Last night, and every night since the heat wave began, he had sweltered in the center of Samarkand, dozing fitfully beside his wife, Nina, on a thin mattress thrown down on the iron fire escape outside the bedroom window of their small tenement flat. She would be there now, he knew, and he wished she could be with him, instead, to share the refreshing mountain coolness. Here, he could make love to her sweet, silken body without her sweating from anything other than passion. The tangy salt of her skin would be of his making, and it would be as it was on that first night, just forty-three days ago, when they had married in her father’s mountain dacha, not far from where he was headed. He had become husband to Nina. Since there were other Maliks in his wife’s family, his in-laws usually referred to him in that fashion…Malik, husband to Nina. And Malik was in love.

Though positioned at the very center of the raucous whine that issued from the Luboff’s engine, he was unmindful of it, mesmerized by the mountain silence that lay beyond the machine’s noise bubble. The peaceful stillness was palpable and he was a part of it. All he lacked was his Nina’s presence to make it perfect. Someday, he vowed, he would bring her here and build their own small dacha. Maybe, he could grow a few vegetables and rear some sheep, zooming down to Samarkand on his motorcycle only when it suited his pleasure or, occasionally, to get something special for Nina…Nina, his love. He and Nina would start a family. A small one. Maybe, a girl and a boy. That would be enough. On a cool summer night like this, he and Nina would make love under one of those big pines. Or, perhaps, by a stream? If a stream could be found. He smiled broadly, raised a fist in the air and shouted to the sky, It will happen, Nina!

He broke into song and twisted the throttle, raising the pitch of the Luboff’s engine.

There was nothing in Malik’s simple assignment tonight that caused him concern. Nothing important enough to interrupt his reverie. Until he reached his destination, he could dream and let his imagination run where it wished.

He’d stop pretty soon and stretch his legs. Maybe, eat a little of the flatbread and Lappi cheese from his backpack and drink some of the vodka. But he wasn’t tired. With the cool night air and the clarity of the star-studded sky to keep him company, he’d never tire.

He figured he had at least an hour’s head start on the Volanoff van and doubted that any ten or twelve-year-old Russian van could average the speed he was making on the uphill journey.

When he left Samarkand, the Volanoff had been parked close in front of a restaurant. He had seen the two men ordering an evening meal by a window from which they could keep an eye on the van. It was about seven-thirty then and he had reached the edge of the city in another ten minutes, where he turned onto the highway going east and made for the mountains.

The road out of Samarkand, built on part of the trail that was once a stretch of the ancient silk route from China, was now one of the loneliest of the poorly maintained roads in southeastern Uzbekistan. The occasional cluster of habitation he did pass manifested its presence in a few flickering lights filtered through curtained windows or escaping through chinks in shuttered ones.

Thirty-one kilometers beyond Samarkand, he had entered a corner of Tajikistan. Another few kilometers the road turned north, taking him back into the eastern province of Uzbekistan. The borders of the mountainous southern states fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. In the eastern province, one could not go far in any direction without crossing a border. The border gates were rarely tended now that the great Soviet was undone, and although he had proper ID papers and could give any destination he wished, if asked to, it would not help his mission if a guard casually mentioned to the men in the Volanoff van that a motorcycle had preceded them along this little-traveled road.

It was no great secret that the spot he was headed for happened to be one where Chinese army helicopters often landed to pick up consignments of opium. Malik had made the trip a couple of times before, his saddlebags and backpack loaded with the stuff and accompanied by another motorcycle that didn’t carry as much opium up the mountain, but carried all the money back down.

Malik had worked for a year as a courier and an errand runner for the British Consulate. He liked the job because it paid well and he was occasionally trusted with special jobs…what he called spy work…like tailing a certain person all day and reporting where he went and who he contacted.

This evening, the consulate people had him follow their car on his motorcycle. They led him to a place where he could see a Volanoff van parked in front of a restaurant. They had told him that they thought the Volanoff was going to deliver something to a Chinese helicopter at the place they knew he was familiar with. He was to witness the delivery and report it on a cell phone they had provided. It would not be possible to follow the van on the lonely stretch of highway without being spotted. So, they had to make an informed guess about its destination and send Malik on ahead of the van.

Around midnight, Malik pulled off the road and parked his motorcycle behind a large boulder, so that it could not be seen from the road. As he leaned against the rock and ate his snack, he spotted a pair of headlights rounding a bend less than a kilometer down the road. He changed his position slightly to be doubly certain of not being detected when the vehicle passed. When it did, Malik noticed that it was a white or, at least, a light-colored sedan in a tearing hurry to get to its destination. Within seconds, it had passed out of sight around the next bend. Malik waited for half an hour before continuing his journey to allow plenty of distance between the sedan and his motorcycle. Then he owned the highway again. He and his motorcycle. And there was magic in that.

About half a kilometer short of his destination, which lay around the next tight curve in the road, he turned off his headlamp and slowed down to quieten the roar of his Luboff. A little farther on, he shut the engine off and walked his motorcycle into a wooded area, laying it on its side under some bushes to hide it. He took a swallow of his vodka and walked carefully to a position from where he could observe, unseen, the clearing where the helicopter would land.

At dawn, Malik lay on his belly under a bush at the edge of a small meadow. He had been there for three hours. The high-altitude chill made him grateful for the warm sweater he carried to put on under the light nylon jacket, and even the black balaclava he had brought along for the purpose of camouflage provided a welcome warmth, though it made his scalp itch as if it harbored a nest of fleas. He had slept a little, but became wide awake when, an hour or so before dawn, the Volanoff van pulled noisily into the far side of the clearing.

Through the night-vision binoculars he had been provided, Malik watched the two men unload a plain wooden box, about a meter-and-a-half long, from the van. The box had the tapered shape of a coffin for a baby or a very young child. The van had then been backed into the cover of a small thicket of trees and the two men sat on the coffin at the edge of the meadow, smoking and waiting. Malik had nothing against these men. Watching them was just a job. But watching them smoke their cigarettes while dealing with his own craving for a cigarette and coffee, made him think less-than-pleasant thoughts of them.

Now, as the dawn began to lend shape to his surroundings, Malik raised himself slowly on his elbows and focused his binoculars on the two men and their coffin. One of the men got up and walked out to the middle of the clearing where he placed a small object on the ground. It was difficult to make out what it was, but Malik knew from experience that it was a homing device.

Shortly, there was a sudden whomp-whomp-whomp sound and a helicopter loomed low over the trees. It hovered over the grassy clearing and quickly touched down. The rotor blades slowed, but maintained a steady beat. The man who had positioned the homing device, had stopped on his way back to the coffin to take a piss. The other yelled at him to hurry and he ran, clumsily pushing himself back into his pants. They picked up the coffin and ran toward the helicopter, hunched over to avoid the moving rotor blades, and hoisted it in through an open side door before running back to the edge of the clearing. By the time they were clear of the rotor blades, the engine had begun to whine and, leaning forward like a giant cicada, the helicopter, marked by a big red star on its side, began its smooth ascent. It executed a graceful rising turn and disappeared low over the trees in the direction from which it had come.

One of the men ran to recover the homing device, while the other went for their vehicle. In a few minutes, the coffin was gone, the helicopter was gone and the two men in the Volanoff van were gone.

Malik stood up, stretched the stiffness out of his body and removed the itchy balaclava. He tousled his hair, scratched his skull, shivered in the morning chill and lit the cigarette he had been forced to deny himself, savoring it as he walked through the trees to the spot where he had hidden his motorcycle.

He opened the backpack he had left hooked over the handlebar of the motorcycle and pulled out his bottle of vodka. The first swallow burned its way down his throat. The second sent a flush of warmth through his body.

He returned the bottle to the backpack and drew out the cell phone. He wished he could use it to call his lovely Nina, but they had no phone in the flat. And the cell phone had not been provided for his pleasure. It was simply one of the tools they had given him for the trip. When he opened it, a green light came on in the upper right-hand corner. He pushed the button marked send. Another green dot lit up and he put the phone to his ear. There was a hissing sound, followed for a few seconds by a series of high-pitched beeps. Then silence. He had been instructed to expect these sounds and to speak when they stopped.

It is gone on a Chinese helicopter, he said. It is boxed in a child’s coffin, not much over a meter long….

His words left a message on the cell phone encrypted and scrambled in a manner he didn’t understand, but appreciated.

Malik Volosikov, husband to Nina, didn’t see the muzzle flash, because the shot came from behind. And he couldn’t have heard the thwack the hollow-point bullet made as it entered the back of his skull and blew half his brains out through his forehead. But the sound, encrypted with his words, was transmitted simultaneously by satellite to Langley, London and Paris.

CHAPTER 3

Saturday, 21 June 1997

Up the Pearl River in the People’s Republic of China, forty-four miles northwest of Aberdeen Harbor, Hong Kong, the hundred-and-twenty-foot diesel junk, Shan Pao, slowly eased up to an abandoned rice warehouse dock near the small village of Tangjia. Two pajama-clad crewmen jumped onto the dock and threw lines around a couple of rotting piles. The lines groaned as they took the load of the junk, bringing her gently to a stop. The helmsman pushed a pair of kill buttons on the control console and the deep-throated diesel engines went silent. It was just past noon.

The village of Tangjia is tucked inside the lush, bamboo-fringed mouth of one of the countless tranquil waterways that wander through the fertile delta area south of Guangzhou to join the great Pearl River estuary above its thirty-mile-wide mouth between the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong and the Portuguese Colony of Macao. From the rice warehouse, the village stretches upstream for several hundred yards along the north bank of the small stream…also called Tangjia.

A thick grove of tall bamboo separates the rice dock and the village’s thirty-six flimsy houses perched on the edge of the stream. The bamboo roots are exposed by the ebbing tide. Beyond the fifty-yard-wide stream’s opposite tree-lined bank, a checkerboard of green rice paddies stretches for a mile or so to the next narrow waterway running into the Pearl.

The musty odor of rotting timber that dominates the rice dock area is remarkable only in that it lacks the characteristic food-fish-sewage tang of Shan Pao’s home port, Aberdeen, located on the south side of Hong Kong Island. But the weather is little different. It is as hot and humid as Hong Kong.

Far to the south, driven by light monsoon winds, cumulus clouds, heavy with rain, moved slowly up the estuary from their spawning ground in the South China Sea. In an hour or two, they would bring the cooling afternoon rains that made the summer monsoon season bearable and, possibly, a few intense squalls that the hills of Hong Kong and Macao failed to scrape out of the underbelly of their thunderheads.

As usual, traffic out on the wide Pearl River was heavy with cargo junks, sampans and near miniature tugs valiantly pulling long strings of tethered barges. Some, heading north toward Guangzhou, hugged the near shore to avoid the strong current farther out. Others, bound downstream for the new industrial free zone just above Macao, or for Hong Kong, favored the middle channel, using the strong current and the ebbing tide to their advantage. Only the occasional sampan or small junk moved along the narrow waterway past Shan Pao’s mooring. Most of these carried light cargo and a few passengers to and from villages located farther upstream from Tangjia. Some were fishermen returning with their early morning catch.

To most of the watermen who piloted the boats passing the junk’s high stern, the sight of the imposing Shan Pao at the rice dock was a familiar one. They knew she hailed from Hong Kong…even those who couldn’t read her ornately carved name and home port, in both Chinese and English characters on her high stern. They also knew she carried contraband cargo. And they were aware that she regularly brought at least some form of employment to the peasants of Tangjia.

Under the scorching noonday sun, several crewmen set to sloshing down the deck of the Shan Pao with buckets of water pulled from the river. Others set up a light awning to shade the afterdeck. The water and shade were meant to help keep the deck seams from opening under the searing sun, and marginally lower the soaring temperature of the main cabin below the raised afterdeck.

Moments after the docking, Chan Lee, Shan Pao’s first mate, sorted through several papers at a desk in a forward corner of the large after-cabin, his slender, sun-bronzed hands moving swiftly, as his gaze homed in on the papers he needed. He sat erect, his lean body taut like a cocked weapon, which was the way Chan Lee always appeared. Born aboard a sampan on the Yangtze River near Shanghai and orphaned by a Japanese bomb, he had forestalled starvation by scavenging along the river until the grandfather of Shan Pao’s owner had taken him aboard his junk, shortly before Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government retreated to Taiwan. And he had never spent a full twenty-four hours ashore since. He considered the Shan Pao and her crew his only family. Except for the occasional dalliance ashore with no whore in particular, Chan Lee spent all his time aboard the Shan Pao.

The great after-cabin spanned the junk’s forty-foot beam and measured twenty-five feet fore and aft. A few feet off-center in the forward bulkhead was a door to the captain’s quarters. Captain Lanxi Hahn, owner of the Shan Pao, came through the door naked, except for a towel wrapped around his trim waist. Beads and rivulets of water covered his well-muscled body from the shower he had just left. He walked over to the refrigerator next to Chan Lee’s desk, removed two cans of Tsingtao beer, popped them open and handed one to his first mate.

You’d better throw in a couple of extra blank manifests this time, Chan Lee. He spoke a Hoklo dialect, common among the water people of Hong Kong. I think it is best to keep a step or two ahead of these bureaucratic thieves.

Chan Lee accepted the beer and acknowledged the order with a nod. He opened a drawer on his right, took out three blank manifest forms and added them to the papers he had already gathered and sorted through. They were all in order, filled out in detail and lacking only the stamp of the local harbor and customs office of the People’s Republic.

The captain went back to his cabin long enough to towel-dry, put on a pair of black pajama pants and a white tee shirt with Hong Kong Bowlers printed in bright red block letters across his expansive chest. When he returned, he walked across the room with the stride of an athletic forty-year old and sat with his beer at the end of a long polished teak table in the center of the cabin, silently cursing the hot summer monsoon that had come early and with a vengeance this year, bringing nothing but bad weather…heat, humidity, thunderstorms and squalls…and cursing the lack of the single small spare part that would have resuscitated Shan Pao’s ailing air-conditioner.

Despite his displeasure with the weather, Lanxi Hahn couldn’t think of another part of the world where he would rather be. And he had sampled a great deal of it on business trips aboard giant jets to most of the European capitals and to the major cities of Canada, the United States and several Pacific-rim countries in Central and South America. To him, no other area in the world offered enticements for business or pleasure that surpassed those available around the shores of the South China Sea.

On the dock, inside the cavernous rice warehouse, three trucks waited while the junk’s crew and hired locals loaded them with large cases of American Marlboro cigarettes that had been offloaded from Shan Pao’s cargo hold. When the trucks had been loaded and a tarp secured over their cargo, they drove off. Shortly, three more trucks took their place and the transfer of the contraband cargo continued. The complete transfer of six truckloads of China’s most popular foreign-brand cigarettes took no more than half an hour.

As soon as the last truck had pulled away from the warehouse, a score of local laborers…at least half of them women…boarded the junk and began scrubbing down the decks and empty fiberglass cargo holds with fresh water brought aboard from a well behind the warehouse. These were among the last of Tangjia’s able-bodied labor force.

With the opening of China’s new economic zones…south, near Macao, and at Shenzhen, north of the New Territories of Hong Kong…there had been an exodus from the rich-soiled farms of the Pearl’s west delta region. The villagers of Tangjia, following the practice of other villages, had pooled their meager resources to pay the mandatory bribes against which temporary residence and work permits could be issued for most of their able-bodied men and women. Those who remained were either too few or too frail to get the most out of the paddies. So, the local rice production no longer had surpluses for shipment out of the area. Now, the families of Tangjia, for the first time in anyone’s memory, purchased rice from the markets in Guangzhou with money sent home from the economic zones.

The half dozen laborers assigned to scour the engine room had soon polished everything in sight. The three huge diesel engines capable of pushing the Shan Pao…a very unique junk…to speeds in excess of fifty knots, shone as brightly as on the day they were installed, six years ago.

The regular crewmen moved about, haranguing the laborers to make sure nothing remained for them to clean after Chan Lee had inspected the work.

Shortly after the contraband cigarettes left the dock, a small, outboard-powered sampan drew up to a dock ladder forward of Shan Pao. An emaciated, pajama-clad old man, seated in the shade of his huge straw hat, cut the whining engine and threw a line to a waiting crew member from the junk. Two uniformed officers stepped gingerly from the sampan and climbed up the ladder to the dock. They boarded the Shan Pao and went directly to the main cabin.

Captain Hahn remained seated at the table and exchanged nods with the two officers as they entered, motioning them to seats at the table. The officers smiled nervously and sat down opposite Shan Pao’s master. The contrast between Lanxi Hahn’s appearance and that of the two officers was striking. There was a certain sameness about the officers, despite a probable twenty-year difference in their ages, and except for the older officer’s white hair and the younger one’s extra few inches in height, they were both of the same mold…lower-echelon bureaucrats of the People’s Republic. Both had passive, dreamless eyes under expressionless brows that were never raised in a flight of imagination and were separated by a permanent furrow of anxiety. Parched skin stretched taut over the hollow between high cheekbone and jaw so that one might imagine that the muscles used to form expressions had completely atrophied. The corners of their mouths pointed permanently downward. They were spiritless servants of the People’s Republic who would have no personality at all if it weren’t for their corruptibility. And even that was too commonly shared a trait among their peers to set them apart.

Although Lanxi Hahn’s roots lay in the same Cantonese peasant stock, there must have been a special dominant gene that his grandfather had carried with him to Hong Kong. Lanxi was everything these men were not…handsome by any standard, Eastern or Western, with an erect, well-muscled and supple body. His face had a healthy glow. Lines came and went with changing expressions, candidly reflecting his emotions…except when he chose to hide them. But he could no longer conceal the laughter lines at the corners of his eyes which had become permanent. His ease with life registered in his smile. His eyes were live windows of wonderment, curiosity and anticipation, revealing experience and sincerity…but not secrets. Lanxi Hahn kept his own counsel.

Shan Pao’s captain slapped his hand on the table and called, Two beers for their honors, Chan Lee. He now spoke Cantonese, more familiar to the officers than the Hoklo dialect.

Chan Lee fetched two cans of beer from the refrigerator. He placed a beer and a pack of Marlboro cigarettes in front of each of the officers and a small metal box with a hinged lid before the captain. Both officers opened the cigarettes packs and eagerly accepted a light from Chan Lee’s butane lighter, smiling and nodding their heads in appreciation for such a treat. The younger officer studied the red and white cigarette pack, rolling it over and over in his hand, as though marveling at the simple fact that it was his. In the past, he may have bought the occasional single American cigarette on the black market, but it was doubtful that he had ever owned a whole pack.

Lanxi didn’t smoke. Nor did he have the patience to drag out this affair as if it were a social occasion. As often as this scene had occurred, he had never let it become anything more than a brief business encounter. As was usual on his visits to Tangjia, his social activity for the day waited for him elsewhere.

Cigarettes do not appeal to me. Nor do they make a profitable cargo, he said in formal Cantonese. They are too bulky for the price. But you loyal servants of the People’s Republic are not concerned with that. It is only my comings and goings that are of concern to you. Is this not so?

True, Captain Hahn, said the white-haired officer with the three stripes on his sleeve. Our interest is not in your cargo. It is only in your arrival, when you provide us with cool refreshment and, perhaps, something to help us through difficult times. He removed his hat and placed it in his lap. The younger officer did the same, but remained silent. His anxious grin displayed his greed and an incomplete set of uneven, discolored teeth. A single crease deepened at the outer corners of his eyes where the multiple wrinkles of an honest smile should be. He puffed nervously on his cigarette, his eyes shifting repeatedly between his beer can and the metal box in front of Lanxi. He opened the can of beer. The older officer did the same and wiped the cold can across his forehead before sipping its contents. The younger man swilled his beer as if it were to be his last.

Lanxi beckoned Chan Lee back to the table.

This time, Chan Lee brought four cartons of Marlboros and placed them in the center of the table. Lanxi pushed the cigarettes toward the senior officer with the words, One for each and two for your captain. Okay?

He uttered the last word in English.

Okay, the officers mimicked in unison, grinning broadly as they bobbed their heads repeatedly.

Lanxi placed a hand on the metal box that had been the focus of much of the officers’ attention since Chan Lee had placed it on the table. He hesitated a moment, looking in turn at each of the officers, wondering how much of their bribes they were allowed to keep…all the beer they drank, of course, and maybe, two or three packs of the cigarettes, but, probably, none of the rest. He opened the box and withdrew four small, identical packets, each wrapped in thin red tissue bearing a gold dragon design. Each contained a tael…about an ounce and a third…of pure gold. He handed a packet to each man and declared, This is what makes great ancestors.

The grins broadened and the bowing of the heads increased. Then he handed the other two packets to the senior officer. These are for your captain, he said. And now you can chop my papers.

Another wave of his hand, and Chan Lee brought several documents to the table, including Shan Pao’s sailing permit and several blank cargo manifests. The senior officer took a pen, a stamp, and an ink-pad from his jacket pocket and proceeded to legalize each paper with appropriate characters and the official chop of his superior.

That done, Captain Hahn stood up, signaling the end of the proceedings. The two officers pocketed their gold and stuffed the cigarette