1
Eagle knew his faults. When he was unsure of himself he exuded too much optimism. He already regretted his swaggering entrance to the office of the Party Secretary of the Sports Institute. But the coach had encouraged him. The same man who had sacked him from the team greeted him like a prodigal son and praised his physical condition, repeating over and over how he hoped Eagle would return to fill a vacancy in the squad. No problem, no problem, insisted the coach, rubbing Eagle’s bad ankle. The carton of duty-free cigarettes that Eagle had got from the foreigner was zipped inside the coach’s carry bag. But it was not the coach’s decision. Eagle would need to speak to the Party Secretary. She was a slim middle-aged woman who wore red chiffon scarves with her Japanese running shoes. Eagle adopted a clownish certainty of success and made the fatal mistake of trying to charm her. He had no cigarettes left.
The Party Secretary gave a cold and precise recitation of Eagle’s relations with the Sports Institute. He had asked for holidays at inconvenient times. He played the fool with his teammates, putting fun above disciplined team spirit. He blamed luck when the team was defeated, rather than criticising his own performance, and he lost heart when the opposition was impossibly superior. His injury had been caused by his own carelessness, at great cost to the Institute. He was not a Party member.
‘Your attitude has not been good,’ said the Party Secretary.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Is there any change?’
‘My attitude has changed. I have learned from my mistakes.’
‘Fine,’ said the woman. ‘Okay. You can rejoin the team.’
It was her tactic to leaven kindness with a bitter moral. ‘As long as you have your unit’s approval, you can start training tomorrow.’
‘Oh,’ said Eagle as his rising heart sank again, ‘don’t you look after that?’
‘The responsibility for releasing you lies with your work unit. We have nothing to do with that. Haven’t you spoken with them?’
Feeling the hopelessness of his situation, Eagle smiled his broadest fake smile like a goody-goody child. ‘Thank you, Party Secretary.’
As if from the Emperor’s throne, he backed from the room. The coach was scurrying out of sight, but Eagle chased him. If the unit would not release him, maybe the coach could help.
The coach knew a friend who knew a friend; it was not impossible. His words trailed off as Eagle sloped down the corridor in the strange good mood that came over him when his heart hit bottom. As his mother said, he was too happy. He couldn’t take life seriously.
In the street, despite himself, his step quickened—quite in contrast to the compliant position he had been forced to adopt in the Party Secretary’s office. The question of whether he could rejoin the team was out of his mind, proof itself of bad attitude. He squeezed aboard a bus and sprang off at one of the most crowded places of the city, where he could rub shoulders, move like a fish, look and be seen. He streamed into a department store, peered at ugly shoes, streamed out again into the sunshine. He bumped into a girl on a bicycle who abused him. ‘You stupid idiot, strolling along in a dream …’ He abused her back, both of them laughing. ‘You can’t even ride straight!’ The old-fashioned grey brick shopfronts had bright vertical panels of characters announcing that they sold medicine or hardware or fish. Some old shops had tacked aluminium frames, sheet glass and neon to the front, and sold computers and photocopiers. Eagle deviated from the main street, passed a theatre and racks of potted daffodils and hyacinths outside a florist, and followed deeper into sun-slashed alleys. Everywhere people were basking, busying and budding like flowers at the onset of spring. The emerald sprouts on the pruned trees along the way were turning to catkins and the sky was joyfully blue. He knew as he knew himself the grey uneasy heart of the city that contracted to frozen wounding rock, then thawed in uncomfortable negotiations, sluggish, adaptive, and at last awakened with an irrepressible smile. He pranced into the little dumpling shop as he turned a last corner. The queue of empty stomachs growled and wisecracked and behind the counter his classmate Lotus sat taking the money. She saw him and looked down, showing no expression. He stood in the queue, impatiently shifting his weight in a kind of jig, as if he were one of those kids listening to foreign music on a Walkman. Lotus waited till he reached the head of the queue before she looked up and rolled her Rs at him as only a Beijing girl can.
‘Eat half a jin of dumplings,’ was his taciturn reply.
His ticket passed through the window to the back of the shop where they kneaded and rolled the dough, stirred the filling, stuffed the dumplings and placed them in huge steamers over boiling water: hot, hard, never-ending work. There were no empty stools round the tables in the little shop. No matter how quickly one ate and left, another was always waiting for the place. The city was insatiable. Eagle poured some vinegar into his bowl and leaned against the wall. They made good dumplings.
He liked Lotus too, who gave a slight smile from under her white hygiene cap as juice dribbled down his chin. They came from the same neighbourhood. Although not directly affected by the Cultural Revolution, most ordinary kids had grown up in an atmosphere of violent mistrustfulness, ignorant and unskilled. Eagle and Lotus had played kids’ games through it all. He would sneak out to meet her on the ruined bit of city wall behind the station where they could scramble and hide as long as daylight lasted. By the time they were teenagers, in the terrible months before Premier Zhou Enlai died, they could no longer be innocent of the world around them. The streets were full of vagrants, delinquents and untended children. Eagle and Lotus stuck together. Their relationship, though uncondoned, was protective and loving at the base of that crumbling bit of wall. They saved themselves from the destructive despair that overwhelmed many others, and had a great time.
But Mother Lin thought the girl was scarcely better than a peasant. She could not know the moments of beauty that Eagle and Lotus discovered amidst social chaos in the stormy years of their adolescence. Then as things settled, they drifted apart. Lotus was married to a factory worker and moved to the western suburbs. Her husband worked hard and made little. She produced a son and went to work in the dumpling shop. Some days she chopped, some days she rolled, some days she served, some days she took the money. Though she got fat and lost her prettiness, she had no complaints.
The door of the shop was wide open to the air, and across the way carnations and geraniums bloomed. After hibernation the beginning of spring brought restlessness and the desire to test new powers of body and spirit. No more than two or three times a year Eagle came to see Lotus, when he needed comfort or pleasure. When the feeling came, his feet, like a homing device, took him to her. At first it brought shame to both, but eventually it became an understanding. For her he was an opening of the window, a night out, a treat. She came from behind the counter to walk him to the corner. In that snatched private moment he said, ‘Tonight at the canal.’
No more words, no contact. The dough-rollers in the shop were all eyes and ears, and the old lady selling iceblocks from her trolley was an informant. Eagle vanished, and Lotus returned to her workaday self.
He figured that at night it was warm enough if they wore their coats, and there were enough leaves on the trees for them not to be seen if they leant against a tree in the scrubby area at the far end of the wasteland beside the canal. After going to his unit, he would call at his friend’s to pick up some condoms. Lotus would leave a message at her husband’s factory to say that she was staying at her mother’s overnight. To go home and change would take too long, but she could go to the bathhouse and perhaps buy a scarf on the way. Anyhow she must ask Eagle to get a pair of shoes for her husband through his friend at the leather factory.
As he walked away, Eagle’s thoughts switched to the basketball team. As a child he had studied martial arts. He enjoyed rolling on the old mattresses in the yard, shaping and toning his young body with the other boys, until martial arts were discouraged as a stinking vestige of feudal superstition and he switched to other sports. After his ankle injury, he had taken it up again, determined the office job would not make him soft. The friend with whom he trained was a martial arts champion, and by the time he came to reapply for the basketball team, Eagle was in good shape. But could he get a release from his job? If he didn’t, it was goodbye to his chances of winning the ex-model Pearl and a new flat. His step leadened as he reached his work unit.
It was Chief Hou who had got Eagle the job in the state office as a favour to Old Lin that turned out to be an exercise in not showing undue favouritism. Knowing that the young man had come into the office through the back door, everyone was satisfied to see him bored, humiliated and wasted. And once inside, the door shut behind you.
Chief Hou explained that a government office could not be seen to release an employee on the employee’s own request, especially on a youthful whim to play sport. That was a bad precedent that might lead to chaos. Eagle protested that basketball was part of the Four Modernisations, raising China’s sport to a high level of international prestige.
Chief Hou prickled at the boy’s rationalisations. A great rationaliser himself, he was not swayed. It was a question of ‘work need’. Eagle was essential to the office, said Hou, preparing to embroider the palpable lie. In China, service personnel, especially the military and their dependents, relied on the promise of early retirement and a cushy unthinking afterlife, which it was the duty of Chief Hou’s office to take care of. From the age of twenty-five the needs of service personnel, retired out due to injury, were catered for from the Ministry’s ‘iron rice bowl’. Eagle’s task, once a week, was to take the senior citizens to the park where they could quaver pieces of Peking opera to each other. Someone young and fit was needed to herd the elderly to and from the park. Eagle was indispensable.
There was no arguing. The only recourse to a leader’s God-like decision was prostration, a series of return visits until God’s mood changed or His price was found. Eagle bowed his head, not angrily, and left.
On the way to the bus stop he executed a whirling martial arts movement, a foolproof device for bringing your opponent to the ground in agonising submission. Then he shrugged and shook his shoulders like a bird ruffling its feathers, and scrambled aboard the bus. Lotus was waiting by the canal.
2
It was not clear who was treating whom. Mother Lin wanted to introduce the Doctor to Peking opera, the Doctor wanted to give Mother Lin a night out. Eagle scoffed, but came along for the ride. There was much fretting about tickets. Wally insisted that he could get them. Mother Lin put on her best jacket and slacks, and mother and son caught the bus to the theatre where the Doctor was waiting as planned. Eagle considered it a major sacrifice to sit through an evening of Peking opera. It was an unpopular art. He was glad when interval came and he could join the scrum for icecream. Mother Lin was content with faint praise for the performance, not as good as it used to be. Wally’s head was ringing. He had understood nothing but cacophonous, kinaesthetic sensation. Eagle had mistranslated the opera’s title as ‘The King of Bah Says Goodbye to His Cucumber’, and Wally improvised accordingly. At interval he was still trying to sort out the pieces.
Then suddenly Jin Juan came bumping through the crowded foyer, exclaiming with surprise to see him there. The man at her side, standing confidently in a smart beige trenchcoat, gave Wally’s hand a firm Western shake.
‘What’s your opinion?’ asked Jin Juan.
Wally said he was there with his friends and looked round for Eagle and Mother Lin, who had vanished. He was on a mission to achieve a little understanding of even the most impossible things Chinese, such as shrieking Peking opera. Jin Juan relished its stylised energy. Her cousin was one of the performers, so she often came. Tonight, she explained, after interval, her cousin would perform an extract from the ancient tragedy Snow in Summer in which a young woman is falsely accused of trying to murder her mother-in-law. As Jin Juan talked with animation, her companion, Zhang, took no part, grinning at the woman’s foreign-language fluency with incomprehension and a degree of hostility.
As they were drifting back to their seats, Eagle returned. He didn’t notice Zhang at first, and was delighted to see the Doctor escorting the elegant woman down the aisle. But Zhang came from behind and placed his hand possessively in the small of Jin Juan’s back, provoking her, it seemed, to suggest that they should all sit together so she could explain the plot to Wally. Zhang acquiesced, self-importantly proper, and further disconcerted to find an old woman, Mother Lin, included in the party. He scarcely humoured Jin Juan’s taste for Peking opera. He had been happier as a firebrand adolescent chanting ‘Down with the Stinking Olds’, of which opera was one of the rankest. Now he was into Democracy with Chinese Characteristics at the prestigious Centre for Research into Economic Structures.
How could she have any feeling for him left, thought Jin Juan. He had been late, as usual. They had planned to eat together, but he had changed the arrangement, as usual. She had waited outside the theatre in Goldfish Alley, and Zhang had been sublimely unflustered when eventually he arrived. She had stiffened to his touch before releasing inevitably into its warmth. He could be romantic, turning his serious eyes to her. He was self-preoccupied, but zealous and bright; not indolent like some of his ilk, nor knotted and strained with political resentment and ill will. He existed happily on the egotistical enthusiasm of an unsoured princeling.
On stage a prison scene takes place, the deep-voiced gaol matron as impervious to the bride’s pleas for help as a tree stump in winter; the tyrannous mother-in-law demanding judgement, not for herself but in recognition of the law; the innocent bride, removing her jewels and brocade, sorrowing as she flutters nearer to her death, like a moth to the flame.
As Jin Juan explained the characters, the story of Snow in Summer emerged in archetypal outline for Wally, the distortions of voice and rising anxiety of percussive sound became expressive and the nuances of the three performances shaped a bride’s tragedy that was as moving as it was tautly artificial. His eyes were on the girl, the cousin, who had Jin Juan’s long Sui-dynasty face and swanlike neck. She wore a sky-blue dress and silver lollipops quivered in her hair. Her face was a puce and white mask of purity and her voice shrilled like a reed. Her body seemed to shudder with outraged virtue as if it were a set of vibrating fibres, and with self-sacrifice that grew more erotic as more defiant. When she was led off to wrongful execution at the last, it was as if stretched elastic had snapped—and the opera was over.
The clapping was perfunctory. The performers stood in full light on the bare stage before rows of rapidly emptying chairs. Jin Juan tugged Wally up on stage to meet the three principals. Their eyes were like glimmering pools of oil in hard masks and they stayed in character as they greeted and nodded. Jin Juan’s cousin whispered only a few words in her ear as they left the stage. Wally was intrigued by the power of their characters, offstage in their bulky costumes as well as onstage, and especially he was taken by the slim sorrowing bride into whose eyes he was permitted to stare deeply as she made her exit.
Zhang smoothed down his trenchcoat as Wally and Jin Juan said their goodbyes on the street corner. They were speaking in English, but Wally dropped his voice nevertheless when he asked her how they could make contact in future.
‘I have no way of reaching you,’ he said, ‘so I’m relying on you to get in touch with me. You know you can find me through your friends at the Medical College.’
‘That’s right,’ responded Jin Juan with a discreet little nod.
Whether or not Zhang understood the communication, Eagle noticed and took his farewell in high spirits. Zhang wore his rank imposingly, and Jin Juan was a dish, and Wally laughed when Eagle told him frankly, as they walked with Mother Lin to the bus stop, that he approved of the woman.
3
Ralph the Rhino was waiting for Wally in the New Age Bar. Sitting alone, he’d been pestered. Foreign Trader had joined him for a drink and offered Han bronzes, Song porcelain, girls, boys; dope, heroin and excellent exchange rates. But Ralph kept his hands clean—unlike Party Greenhorn, who was developing a paunch and sat in the dark with a white hand appearing from behind to rub his trouser front. He must have been sitting on the girl.
‘Extracting the honey,’ snickered Bi the bartender as he fixed Ralph’s favourite drink. ‘Is it all right?’ asked Young Bi respectfully.
‘Better and better, mate.’
Wally rescued Ralph not a moment too soon. The Doctor was tingling with electric sensations from the evening at the opera and Ralph greeted his enthusiasm like a satisfied parent. Then, laughing all the way, Ralph quickly got down to business. ‘You got the stuff?’ His big balding pate shone.
Wally pulled from inside his jacket a swatch of blurred grey photocopies.
‘The usual high-quality reproduction,’ commented Ralph, bringing the sheets closer to his eyes. ‘You don’t want an instant translation, I hope. This is technical stuff. I’ll need reference books for medical terms—musk, mugwort, toad’s venom—you know the sort of thing. Can you give me some time? This one looks good. Cervical Cancer Removed by Witchdoctor: a Scientific Investigation.’
Wally pricked up his ears. ‘What are the other titles?’
‘Let’s see. Remission of Tumours through Herbal Medicine and Acupuncture. Interesting. Malignancy-bearing Genomes and the Impact of Certain Tree Fungi of Southern China. Radiation, the New Moxybustion? A whole host of goodies. All the work of your Director Kang? Impressive. And you say Kang’s the bogus Yankee? This looks like traditional Chinese medicine to me. I’m surprised to see it emanating from the Peking Union Medical College. It’s usually a case of never the twain shall meet. What’s the rest of Kang’s stuff like, the stuff in English?’
‘Impressive in places. The data is exceptional. Sometimes there’s an inspired hypothesis, other times he makes ludicrous, totally implausible links between the Chinese data and modern Western practice. It’s full of contradictions. At places he doesn’t have a clue what he’s dealing with.’
‘The stuff’s published abroad?’
‘A fraction, and that’s the more modest part, though plausible for that reason. The pieces published in the English-language journals in China do a lot of trumpet-blowing, with great insistence on the need for the latest Western technology, scanners, chemotherapy, radiology, all that.’
‘A bid for funding?’
‘Presumably.’
Ralph shuffled the pages together and slipped them inside his coat. The translations would be hard work, but he had no greater love than to ferret his way through the esoterica of Chinese wisdom or fantasy.
‘By the way,’ he said, ‘Hsu Chien Lung was the name of your old boy, right? I asked one of my trusty colleagues at the Trad. Med. Academy, dear sweet Emeritus Professor Wu, a real honey of an eighty-year-old. She wouldn’t come up to the height of the bar here, bent double by the weight of her knowledge, looks like a Maori tiki, a totem face cut with a chisel. Anyway, she’s a love, even if she does go in for ellipsis. She said of your Hsu Chien Lung, and I quote, “He could not be surpassed.” High praise. She said they had carbon copies of his original papers in the archives. Never-published things. If I’m very nice to her, she might just arrange for me to see them.’
‘Does she know what happened to him?’
‘I asked. She just shook her head with that special Chinese mixture of horror, wonder and resolute fatalism.’
‘Hmm. Well, drink up. Another Black Chinaman?’
4
Wally was drinking too much in China. Tea and booze. Booze and tea. Booze brought him closer to the people, as if his wild drunken fire of impulses, wishes, hallucinations and flights reflected the rainbow-coloured dream-world flaring in everyone’s head; as if, despite drab exteriors, everyone were secretly the Monkey King in a drama that could be entered upon through drink. His work failed to exhaust his energies, and his determination to research China had expanded in an unruly fashion to include what Ralph called The Deep Structure. His behaviour was becoming more and more peculiar. What was the committee man, the concerned doctor, the administrator of yore doing ambling along an empty midnight street waving at any car that passed? He had no objections, suddenly, to wasting his life. But he had misjudged Director Kang, letting surface impressions get the better of reasoned assessment, and he must make the appropriate amends. He thought of the tiki totem’s comment on Professor Hsu Chien Lung. ‘He could not be surpassed.’ Playing with words produced another reading. ‘He was in the way.’ He had surprised Jin Juan tonight with her callow chap. As he thought of Jin Juan, her face metamorphosed into the exquisite sorrowing mask of the opera princess, Emperor’s Cucumber in a salad of snow.
5
‘Who’s he?’ snapped Zhang as he and Jin Juan walked away from the lighted foodstall where a long-whiskered man in a night cap was turning kebabs over a brazier. ‘How did you meet him?’
‘Song introduced us.’
‘What’s her aim?’
‘He’s helping with her work.’
‘You should keep away from foreigners.’
‘You’re a typical suspicious Chinese. Aren’t we supposed to be learning from them?’
Once in the darkness he put his arm tightly around her waist. The shadowy east gate of the Imperial Palace loomed, where they turned to follow the moat. In the air was the sharp fragrance of mimosa beginning to bud.
‘Have you thought about us?’ she asked.
‘I always think about you. I love you.’ Perhaps five hundred times before in the ten years of their never-ending courtship he had said those words to her. When was it he had promised to marry her?
Zhang’s father was a high cadre in the Ministry of Aeronautics and Astronautics, one of the ultra-leftists of fifteen years ago who had turned himself inside out and kept on top. His mother was a Vice-Mayor of Tianjin. The family went back to the Manchu rulers, which accounted for Zhang’s cruel cheekbones. He had been protected from everything, Jin Juan judged, and was a glossy, moody, self-concerned young ram. She had not forgiven him for being late and unapologetic, and contrasted his behaviour with the foreigner’s straightforward friendliness.
They turned the corner of the moat and climbed the crumbling steps by the boathouse to reach an alcove that was exposed only to tranquil water, their trysting place. He pushed her against the wall.
‘Easy!’ she protested.
‘I love you. Really. Truly. I love you. Say you love me. Say it.’
She could never resist their passion, although she hated it now. Ten years ago when she came back young and confused from the countryside, she had admired his brash undentable student’s optimism. At the time she was starving for some friendship, some opening out, after the cut-off years in the work camp. They had joked together on those days when they met by the lake and ice glittered. She had pretended to be a student at the Foreign Languages Institute and he was amazed by her English, which he wanted to study. They became committed intellectual partners and prudent, demanding lovers. With Zhang’s help she got into the Foreign Languages Institute after all; he was the more impressed by her lie.
Her fingers behind his back counted ten years of sweet, necessary, efficient lovemaking as he held her against the boathouse wall. Afterwards, walking back along the moat, she raised once more the question of the flat, which was the question of their marriage.
‘It’s fallen through,’ he said. ‘Mum doesn’t agree.’
‘I’ll talk to her then.’
‘She’s in Tianjin.’
‘I’ll go to Tianjin.’
‘No.’
It was the custom that Jin Juan did not contact Zhang’s family, whose high position put them strictly out of bounds.
‘You mean you haven’t spoken to her.’
‘They oppose.’ Zhang had staved her off for years, by sharing the hope that in time all obstacles to their marriage would be overcome. He used her as his mistress, sympathising with her problems, sharing with her the difficulties he faced with his family. But Zhang was growing older. He wanted to marry and have a son. The relationship had grown stagnant despite the sexual satisfaction. He could find another, a younger girl who suited his prospects; he could start again. He knew that he had no will to fight his parents, and each year Jin Juan sensed the hardening impasse.
On this ordinary evening, as they walked back along the moat as on a hundred other evenings, for no apparent reason, except that there had been nothing else between them but sex, and Zhang had been bored by the opera, and irked by the foreigner and Jin Juan’s animated English, and that she had been a little more removed, for whatever reason, Zhang said words that could not be retracted.
‘We’ll never be able to get married. Let’s forget it.’
She did not reply at once. The reply was not worth the effort. At last she said feebly, ‘I’ll talk to your mother.’
‘Forget it. No use. Let’s call it quits.’
‘No!’ Stopping, she addressed to his face loud savage words. ‘No, that’s not possible. You promised. You’ll carry it through.’
As she threatened him, he felt piteous and hostile. ‘I won’t be ruled by you or anyone.’
‘Does your mother rule you?’ she spat.
‘It’s the end.’
‘It’s certainly not the end. You’re a seducer.’
‘Don’t say that.’
‘I say it. It’s the truth, that’s why!’
She stamped the ground with her sharp heels as she walked quickly away from him. He did not follow. So it was as easy as that. He stopped again, lingering at the kebab stall. Jin Juan sat head erect and dry-eyed all the way home on the bus. In Chinese law to sleep with a woman on the promise of marriage and to break the promise was rape. The thought that for ten years she had been raped by young Zhang gave her a certain despicable satisfaction. Her fingers felt around her eyes for wrinkles. She was no longer young. Because of the years in the countryside she had aged fast. There would be no other man for her if Zhang got away. Whether he liked it or not she was his for life. On her beautiful face the strain showed not a flicker. Her tumultuous emotions were calmed by some lines from the earliest Chinese book of songs. Three thousand years ago, women had lamented:
I had hoped to grow old with you,
Now the thought of old age grieves my heart.
The Qi has its shores,
The Shi its banks;
How happy we were, our hair in tufts,
How fondly we talked and laughed,
How solemnly swore to be true!
I must think no more of the past;
The past is done with—
Better let it end like this!
6
Flattery did not come easily to Wally. He considered that to remark on another’s virtue implied astonishment that such virtue could exist. Director Kang had no such scruples, however, and launched into fulsome praise of Wally’s work in the College. Wally countered that he had not been giving his full attention to supervision in the lab because he had been working through the pile of the Director’s papers given him by Mrs Gu.
‘Fascinating, remarkable stuff,’ Wally declared. ‘You’ve been hiding your light under a bushel, Director.’
‘Oh no, that is not my recent work. Those were my salad days. A few speculations on the conjunction of Chinese and Western medicine. You see, Professor Doctor, I do not believe we can command Chinese medicine unless it is thoroughly integrated into the discipline of Western critical science. Our aim here—I speak broadly—is to root out superstition, to destroy false science, and to establish watertight findings compatible with the latest Western technology.’
‘All very laudable,’ smiled Wally with a sense of the ground sinking under him.
Kang spoke in high-falutin’ terms, with an eccentric version of a laid-back East-coast scholarly manner, all the time beaming, twinkling and flopping open his fleshy mouth. He was perhaps sixty and the Italian shoes he had newly procured in Chicago sparkled.
‘When you have time, perhaps,’ broached Wally, ‘there are a couple of steps in the clinical data itself—a couple of stages in the application process of Chinese drugs where I don’t follow the leaps—no doubt dependent on knowing the traditional method of treatment, which I don’t. I am concerned with how precisely the hormone or embryo treatment works that you indicate in your papers …If you could spare the time …’
This was the closest Wally came to a technical question. Kang rubbed his hands gleefully. ‘Nothing I like better than an exchange of ideas—Oh, if only there were sufficient time! I am honoured, Professor Doctor, most honoured. The details of course are a little fuzzy—it was all some time ago now.’
Wally stared into Kang’s jolly eyes that gave nothing away.
‘I’m interested in learning something of your testing procedures.’
‘Of course, of course. Time is so precious, you know, Professor Doctor. I can gladly invite one of my assistants to work with you on the matter.’
Wally paused. It was a snow job. He rose to his feet and shook Kang’s hand with an excess of joviality.