Noble House Read online

  “That’s right,” Gavallan said with a short laugh. “My father and grandmother knew her. They had their own trading company here and in Shanghai, Casey, but got more or less wiped out in the Great War and joined up with Struan’s in ’19. My old man told me that when he was a boy he and his friends used to follow the Hag around the streets and when she got particularly angry she’d take out her false teeth and chomp them at them.” They all laughed with him as he parodied her. “My old man swore the teeth were two feet tall and on some form of spring and they’d go, crunch crunch crunch!”

  “Hey Andrew, I’d forgotten that,” Linbar broke in with a grin. “My gan sun, old Ah Fu, knew Hag Struan well and every time you’d mention her, Ah Fu’s eyes’d turn up and she’d petition the gods to protect her from the evil eye and magic teeth. My brother Kyle and I…” He stopped, then began again in a different voice. “We used to tease Ah Fu about her.”

  Dunross said to Casey, “There’s a portrait of her up at the Great House—two in fact. If you’re interested, I’ll show them to you one day.”

  “Oh thanks—I’d like that. Is there one of Dirk Struan?”

  “Several. And one of Robb, his half-brother.”

  “I’d love to see them.”

  “Me too,” Bartlett said. “Hell, I’ve never even seen a photo of my grandparents, let alone a portrait of my great-great-grandfather. I’ve always wanted to know about my forebears, what they were like, where they came from. I know nothing about them except my grandpa was supposed to have run a freight company in the Old West in a place called Jerrico. Must be great to know where you’re from. You’re lucky.” He had been sitting back listening to the undercurrents, fascinated by them, seeking clues against the time he’d have to decide: Dunross or Gornt. If it’s Dunross, Andrew Gavallan’s an enemy and will have to go, he told himself. Young Struan hates Dunross, the Frenchman’s an enigma and Dunross himself is nitroglycerine and just as dangerous. “Your Hag Struan sounds fantastic,” he said. “And Dirk Struan too must have been quite a character.”

  “Now that’s a masterpiece of understatement!” Jacques deVille said, his dark eyes sparkling. “He was the greatest pirate in Asia! You wait—you look at Dirk’s portrait and you’ll see the family resemblance! Our tai-pan’s the spitting image, and ma foi, he’s inherited all the worst parts.”

  “Drop dead, Jacques,” Dunross said good-naturedly. Then to Casey, “It’s not true. Jacques is always ribbing me. I’m nothing like him at all.”

  “But you’re descended from him.”

  “Yes. My great-grandmother was Winifred, Dirk’s only legitimate daughter. She married Lechie Struan Dunross, a clansman. They had one son who was my grandfather. My family—the Dunrosses—are Dirk Struan’s only direct descendents, as far as we know.”

  “You, you said legitimate?”

  Dunross smiled. “Dirk had other sons and daughters. One son, Gordon Chen, was from a lady called Shen actually, that you know of. That’s the Chen line today. There’s also the T’Chung line—from Duncan T’Chung and Kate T’Chung, his son and daughter by the famous May-may T’Chung. Anyway that’s the legend, they’re accepted legends here though no one can prove or disprove them.” Dunross hesitated and his eyes crinkled with the depth of his smile. “In Hong Kong and Shanghai our predecessors were, well, friendly, and the Chinese ladies beautiful, then as now. But they married their ladies rarely and the pill’s only a very recent invention—so you don’t always know who you might be related to. We, ah, we don’t discuss this sort of thing publicly—in true British fashion we pretend it doesn’t exist though we all know it does, then no one loses face. Eurasian families of Hong Kong usually took the name of their mothers, in Shanghai their fathers. We all seem to have accommodated the problem.”

  “It’s all very friendly,” Gavallan said.

  “Sometimes,” Dunross said.

  “Then John Chen’s related to you?” Casey asked.

  “If you go back to the garden of Eden everyone’s related to everyone I suppose.” Dunross was looking at the empty place. Not like John to run off, he thought uneasily, and he’s not the sort to get involved in gun smuggling, for any reason. Or be so stupid as to get caught. Tsuyan? Well he’s Shanghainese and he could easily be panicked—if he’s mixed up in this. John’s too easily recognized not to have been seen getting on a plane this morning so it’s not that way. It has to be by boat—if he has run off. A boat where? Macao—no, that’s a dead end. Ship? Too easy, he thought, if it was planned or even not planned and arranged at an hour’s notice. Any day of the year there’d be thirty or forty scheduled sailings to all parts of the world, big ships and little ships, let alone a thousand junks nonscheduled, and even if on the run, a few dollars here and there and too easy to smuggle out—out or in. Men, women, children. Drugs. Anything. But no reason to smuggle inward except humans and drugs and guns and liquor and cigarettes and petrol—everything else is duty free and unrestricted.

  Except gold.

  Dunross smiled to himself. You import gold legally under license at thirty-five dollars an ounce for transit to Macao and what happens then is nobody’s business but immensely profitable. Yes, he thought, and our Nelson Trading board meeting’s this afternoon. Good. That’s one business venture that never fails.

  As he took some of the fish from the proffered silver tray he noticed Casey staring at him. “Yes, Casey?”

  “Oh I was just wondering how you knew my names.” She turned to Bartlett. “The tai-pan surprised me, Linc. Before we were even introduced he called me Kamalian Ciranoush as though it were Mary Jane.”

  “That’s Persian?” Gavallan asked at once.

  “Armenian originally.”

  “Kamahly-arn Cirrrannoooossssh,” Jacques said, liking the sibilance of the names. “Très jolie, mademoiselle. Ils ne sont pas difficiles sauf pour les cretins.”

  “Ou les English,” Dunross said and they all laughed.

  “How did you know, tai-pan?” Casey asked him, feeling more at home with tai-pan than with Ian. Ian doesn’t belong, yet, she thought, swept by his past and Hag Struan and the shadows that seemed to be surrounding him.

  “I asked your attorney.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “John Chen called me last night around midnight. You hadn’t told him what K.C. stood for and I wanted to know. It was too early to talk to your office in Los Angeles—just 8 A.M., L.A. time—so I called your attorney in New York. My father used to say, when in doubt ask.”

  “You got Seymour Steigler III on a Saturday?” Bartlett asked, amazed.

  “Yes. At his home in White Plains.”

  “But his home number’s not in the book.”

  “I know. I called a Chinese friend of mine in the UN. He tracked him down for me. I told Mr. Steigler I wanted to know because of invitations—which is, of course, the truth. One should be accurate, shouldn’t one?”

  “Yes,” Casey said, admiring him greatly. “Yes one should.”

  “You knew Casey was … Casey was a woman, last night?” Gavallan asked.

  “Yes. Actually I knew several months ago, though not what K.C. stood for. Why?”

  “Nothing, tai-pan. Casey, you were saying about Armenia. Your family emigrated to the States after the war?”

  “After the First World War in 1918,” Casey said, beginning the oft-told story. “Originally our surname was Tcholokian. When my grandparents arrived in New York they dropped the ian for simplicity, to help Americans. I still got Kamalian Ciranoush though. As you know, Armenia is the southern part of Caucasus—just north of Iran and Turkey and south of Russian Georgia. It used to be a free sovereign nation but now it’s all absorbed by Soviet Russia or Turkey. My grandmother was Georgian—there was lots of intermarriage in the old days. My people were spread all over the Ottoman Empire, about two million, but the massacres, particularly in 1915 and ’16 …” Casey shivered. “It was genocide really. There’re barely 500,000 of us left and now we’re scattered throughout
the world. Armenians were traders, artists, painters and jewelry makers, writers, warriors too. There were nearly 50,000 Armenians in the Turkish Army before they were disarmed, outcast and shot by the Turks during World War One—generals, officers and soldiers. They were an elite minority and had been for centuries.”

  “Is that why the Turks hated them?” deVille asked.

  “They were hardworking and clannish and very good traders and businessmen for sure—they controlled lots of business and trade. My granddad said trading’s in our blood. But perhaps the main reason is that Armenians are Christian—they were the first Christian state in history under the Romans—and of course the Turks are Mohammedan. The Turks conquered Armenia in the sixteenth century and there was always a border war going on between Christian Tsarist Russia and the ‘Infidel’ Turks. Up to 1917 Tsarist Russia was our real protector.… The Ottoman Turks were always a strange people, very cruel, very strange.”

  “Your family got out before the trouble?”

  “No. My grandparents were quite rich, and like a lot of people thought nothing could happen to them. They escaped just ahead of the soldiers, took two sons and a daughter out the back door with just what they could grab in their dash for freedom. The rest of the family never made it. My grandfather bribed his way out of Istanbul onto a fishing boat that smuggled him and my grandmother to Cyprus where, somehow, they got visas to the States. They had a little money and some jewelry—and lots of talent. Granny’s still alive … she can still haggle with the best of them.”

  “Your grandfather was a trader?” Dunross asked. “Is that how you first got interested in business?”

  “We certainly had it drummed into us as soon as we could think about being self-sufficient,” Casey said. “My granddad started an optical company in Providence, making lenses and microscopes and an import-export company dealing mostly in carpets and perfumes, with a little gold and precious stones trading on the side. My dad designed and made jewelry. He’s dead now but he had a small store of his own in Providence, and his brother, my uncle Bghos, worked with Granddad. Now, since Granddad died, my uncle runs the import-export company. It’s small but stable. We grew up, my sister and I, around haggling, negotiating and the problem of profit. It was a great game and we were all equals.”

  “Where … oh, more trifle, Casey?”

  “No thanks, I’m fine.”

  “Where did you take your business degree?”

  “I suppose all over,” she said. “After I got out of high school, I put myself through a two-year business course at Katharine Gibbs in Providence: shorthand, typing, simple accounting, filing, plus a few business fundamentals. But ever since I could count I worked nights and holidays and weekends with Granddad in his businesses. I was taught to think and plan and put the plan into effect, so most of my training’s been in the field. Of course since I’ve gotten out of school I’ve kept up with specialized courses that I wanted to take—at night school mostly.” Casey laughed. “Last year I even took one at the Harvard Business School which went down like an H-bomb with some members of the faculty, though it’s getting a little easier now for a woman.”

  “How did you manage to become hatchetman—hatchetlady to Par-Con Industries?” Dunross said.

  “Perspicacity,” she said and they laughed with her.

  Bartlett said, “Casey’s a devil for work, Ian. Her speed reading’s fantastic so she can cover more ground than two normal execs. She’s got a great nose for danger, she’s not afraid of a decision, she’s more of a deal maker than a deal breaker, and she doesn’t blush easily.”

  “That’s my best point,” Casey said. “Thanks, Linc.”

  “But isn’t it very hard on you, Casey?” Gavallan asked. “Don’t you have to concede a hell of a lot as a woman to keep up? It can’t be easy for you to do a man’s job.”

  “I don’t consider my job a man’s job, Andrew,” she replied at once. “Women have just as good brains and work capacity as men.”

  There was an immediate hoot of friendly derision from Linbar and Gavallan and Dunross overrode them and said, “I think we’ll table that one for later. But again, Casey, how did you get where you are at Par-Con?”

  Shall I tell you the real story, Ian lookalike to Dirk Struan, the greatest pirate in Asia, or shall I tell you the one that’s become legend, she asked herself.

  Then she heard Bartlett begin and she knew she could safely drift for she had heard his version a hundred times before and it was part true, part false and part what he wanted to believe had happened. How many of your legends are true—Hag Struan and Dirk Struan and what’s your real story and how did you become tai-pan? She sipped her port, enjoying the smooth sweetness, letting her mind wander.

  There’s something wrong here, she was thinking now. I can feel it strongly. Something’s wrong with Dunross.

  What?

  “I first met Casey in Los Angeles, California—about seven years ago,” Bartlett had begun. “I’d gotten a letter from a Casey Tcholok, president of Hed-Opticals of Providence, who wanted to discuss a merger. At that time I was in construction all over the L.A. area—residential, supermarkets, a couple of good-sized office buildings, industrial, shopping centers—you name it, I’d build it. We had a turnover of 3.2 million and I’d just gone public—but I was still a million miles away from the Big Board. I’d—”

  “You mean the New York Stock Exchange?”

  “Yes. Anyway, Casey comes in bright as a new penny and says she wants me to merge with Hed-Opticals which she says grossed $277,600 last year, and then together, we’d go after Randolf Opticals, the granddaddy of them all—53 million in sales, quoted on the Big Board, a huge slice of the lens market and lots of cash in the bank—and I said you’re crazy but why Randolf? She said because first she was a stockholder in Bartlett Constructions—she’d bought ten one-dollar shares—I’d capitalized at a million shares and sold 500,000 at par—and she figured it’d be dandy for Bartlett Construction to own Randolf, and second, ‘because this son of a bitch George Toffer who runs Randolf Opticals is a liar, a cheat, a thief, and he’s trying to put me out of business.’”

  Bartlett grinned and paused for breath and Dunross broke in with a laugh. “This’s true, Casey?”

  Casey came back quickly. “Oh yes, I said that George Toffer was a liar, a cheat, thief and son of a bitch. He still is.” Casey smiled without humor. “And he was certainly trying to put me out of business.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I had told him to go—to drop dead.”

  “Why’d you do that?”

  “I’d just taken over Hed-Opticals. My granddad had died the previous year and we’d flipped a coin, my uncle Bghos and I, who’d get which business.… I’d won Hed-Opticals. We’d had an offer from Randolf to buy us out a year or so back but we’d turned it down—we had a nice, small operation, a good work force, good technicians—a number of them Armenians—a little slice of the market. But no capital and no room to maneuver but we got by and the quality of Hed-Opticals was optimum. Just after I took over, George Toffer ‘happened to drop by.’ He fancied himself, my God how he fancied himself. He claimed he was a U.S. Army war hero but I found out he wasn’t—he was that sort of guy. Anyway, he made me another ridiculous offer to take Hed-Opticals off my hands … the poor little girl who should be in the kitchen bit, along with the ‘let’s have dinner tonight in my suite and why don’t we have a little fun because I’m here alone for a few days….’ I said no thanks and he was very put out. Very. But he said okay and went back to business and suggested that instead of a buy-out we subcontract some of his contracts. He made me a good offer and after haggling a bit we agreed on terms. If I performed on this one he said he’d double the deal. Over the next month we did the work better and cheaper than he could ever have done it—I delivered according to contract and he made a fantastic profit. But then he reneged on a verbal clause and deducted—stole—$20,378, and the next day five of my best customers left us for Randolf, and
the next week another seven—they’d all been offered deals at less than cost. He let me sweat for a week or two then he phoned. ‘Hi, baby,’ he said, happy as a toad in a pail of mud, ‘I’m spending the weekend alone at Martha’s Vineyard.’ That’s a little island off the East Coast. Then he added, ‘Why don’t you come over and we’ll have some fun and discuss the future and doubling our orders.’ I asked for my money, and he laughed at me and told me to grow up and suggested I better reconsider his offer because at the rate I was going soon there’d be no Hed-Opticals.

  “I cursed him,” Casey said. “I can curse pretty good when I get mad and I told him what to do with himself in three languages. Within four more weeks I’d no customers left. Another month and the work force had to get other jobs. About that time I thought I’d try California. I didn’t want to stay in the East.” She smiled wryly. “It was a matter of face—if I’d known about face then. I thought I’d take a couple of weeks off to figure out what to do. Then one day I was wandering aimlessly around a state fair in Sacramento and Linc was there. He was selling shares in Bartlett Construction in a booth and I bought—”

  “He what?” Dunross asked.

  “Sure,” Bartlett said. “I sold upwards of 20,000 shares that way. I covered state fairs, mail orders, supermarkets, stockbrokers, shopping centers—along with investment banks. Sure. Go on, Casey!”

  “So I read his prospectus and watched him awhile and thought he had a lot of get up and go. His figures and balance sheet and expansion rate were exceptional and I thought anyone who’d pitch his own stock has got to have a future. So I bought ten shares, wrote him and went to see him. End of story.”

  “The hell it is, Casey,” Gavallan said.

  “You tell it, Linc,” she said.

  “Okay. Well, then—”

  “Some port, Mr.—sorry, Linc?”