Brian Freemantle - The Inscrutable Charlie Muffin

‘You’ll recommend your company to drop their resistance and settle?’ said Lu expectantly.

Charlie stopped, turning.

‘No,’ he said shortly.

‘You can’t win, you know.’

‘So people keep telling me.’

‘Perhaps you should listen to their advice.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Don’t become an irritant, will you?’ Lu cautioned him.

Maybe he hadn’t created as much protection as he had hoped, thought Charlie.

‘Unfortunately,’ he said from the door, ‘it seems to be a’ facility I have.’

‘Yes,’ said Lu, determined to master every exchange. ‘It could be unfortunate.’

After Charlie had left the room the millionaire remained seated in the chair in which he had confronted him, and that was how John Lu found him when he entered from the adjoining office.

‘Well?’ asked the father.

‘Kill him,’ said the son immediately.

Fool,’ snapped Lu. ‘You spend so much time with scum that you even think like them now.’

‘But he’s got it. He’s got it all.’

The millionaire shook his head.

‘He’s got nothing. Not a shred of proof. And there’s nowhere he can get it.’

‘What about the woman?’

‘You chose badly there, didn’t you?’ demanded Lu, avoiding a direct answer.

The younger man, who had remained standing, shuffled awkwardly.

‘She’d talk,’ he admitted.

‘About what?’ said the millionaire dismissively.

‘But she knows!’

‘And everything we’ve got is concealed by companies layered upon companies and by nominees operating through other nominees,’ reminded Lu. ‘There is nothing directly linking us to anything. Who’s going to start investigating us, on the word of a whore?’

‘She could still be a nuisance,’ said John, in rare defiance.

‘Oh, I think she should be punished,’ agreed Lu, as if correcting a misapprehension.

The son smiled.

‘But properly this time,’ warned Lu.

‘Of course.’

Jenny Lin Lee would want to know of the arrangements for the funeral, Charlie decided. There was no reply throughout the afternoon to his repeated telephone calls, so after the inquest at which he gave evidence of identification and which returned the verdict which Superintendent Johnson had anticipated, he went to Robert Nelson’s apartment.

The doorbell echoed back hollowly to him.

The caretaker was happy to open the door for fifty dollars and Charlie’s assurance that he represented the dead man’s company.

Already the rooms had a stale, unlived-in smell. Expertly he went from room to room: nowhere was there a trace of the girl. Known in all the bars, she’d said. Which ones? he wondered.

As he turned to leave the apartment, his foot touched something, scuffing it along the carpet. Bending, he picked up a letter with a London postmark and the Willoughby company address embossed on the back, for return in case of non-delivery.

Aware of its contents, he opened it anyway, reading it in seconds. Sighing, he put into his pocket the underwriter’s letter assuring Robert Nelson that his position would not be in any way affected by the Pride of America fire.

‘Not much,’ muttered Charlie savagely, closing the door.

Since the encounter with the American, Charlie had become over-conscious of the feeling of being watched, making sudden and too obvious checks, so that had he been under surveillance any observer could have easily avoided detection. Desperation. Like trying to bluff Lu. And this new idea. Further desperation, he recognised, forced upon him by the difference of the past from the present.

Before, the only consideration had been Charlie’s rules. Now it was Judge’s Rules, the need not just to learn the truth and then act to his own satisfaction, but to that of barristers and law lords. It imposed a restriction to which he was unaccustomed: like trying to run with a shoelace undone. There seemed a very real possibility of falling flat on his face.

People spilled from the pavement into Des Voeux Road, slowing the cars to a noisy, protesting crawl. Charlie used the movement of avoiding people to check around him, then abandoning the futile attempt, knowing that in such a throng any identification would be impossible.

He had expected the legation of the People’s Republic of China to be an imposing building, perhaps even with a police guard. But so ordinary was it, slotted in among the shops and the cinema, that he was almost past before he realised he had found it.

He pushed slowly forward through the milling Chinese, smiling at his first impression: it was just like a betting shop. Even to the counters round the sides, at which people were filling in not their horse selections but their applications to return to mainland China.

He ignored the side benches, going straight to the reception desk. It was staffed by three men, dressed in identical black-grey tunics.

‘I wish to see Mr Kuo,’ said Charlie. When the clerk did not react, Charlie added, ‘Mr Kuo Yuan-ching.’

‘He knows you?’

‘I telephoned. He said I was to call.’

The man hesitated, then turned through a small door at the rear. Charlie moved to one side, to make room for the continual thrust of people. A hell of a lot of the five thousand seemed to regard it as a wasted swim.

He was kept waiting for nearly fifteen minutes before the clerk returned and nodded his head towards the rear office. With difficulty Charlie squeezed past the counter and went into the room.

It was as spartan and functional as that through which he had just come. A desk, three filing cabinets, one upright chair for any visitors, the walls bare and unbroken by any official photographs, even of Mao Tse-tung.

‘May I?’ asked Charlie, hand on the chair-back.

The head of the Chinese Legation stared at him without any expression of greeting, then nodded. Like confronting a headmaster for the first time, thought Charlie. Christ, his feet hurt.

‘You will take tea?’ said the official.

It was a statement rather than a hospitable question.

‘Thank you,’ said Charlie, accepting the ritual.

Kuo rang a handbell and from a side door almost immediately appeared another tunicked man carrying a tray dominated by a large Thermos. Around it were grouped teapot and cups.

‘Proper Chinese tea,’ announced Kuo, pouring.

Charlie took the cup, sipping it.

‘Excellent,’ he said politely. He had rushed almost everything else and made a balls of it, he thought. And this was his last chance, hopeless though the attempt might be, under the newly recognised rules. So the meeting could proceed at whatever pace the other man dictated.

Kuo topped up the pot from the Thermos, then sat back, regarding Charlie again with a headmasterly look.

Charlie gazed back, vaguely disconcerted. Kuo was a square-bodied, heavily built man, dressed in the regulation tunic but with no obvious signs of his rank. Under its cap of thick black hair, the man’s face was smooth and unlined.

Kuo nodded towards the telephone.

‘You spoke of wanting help?’

‘Yes,’ said Charlie.

‘What kind of help?’

‘I represent one of the syndicate members who insured the Pride of America… ’

‘Who now stand to lose a large sum of money.’

‘Who now stand to lose a large sum of money,’ agreed Charlie.

‘And you don’t want to pay?’

Can’t pay, thought Charlie, sighing. There was something almost artificial in the communist criticism of capitalism, he decided. As ritualistic as the tea-drinking.

‘We’re trying to avoid paying out wrongly,’ he explained. ‘And at the moment, we might be forced to.’

‘How is that?’ demanded Kuo.