Monday February 8th, 1937 Macao in sight! A most comfortable night in a first-class bed had me reflecting there might be something in being Lady Allworthy after all - though I quickly squashed that notion. At Songmark we are very happy for our beds after a few nights on the ground, and a longhouse with Jirry’s company is the right and proper place for me to lay my head next year. It might be only six months time, in fact. Besides, currently Spontoon is paying with its not inexhaustible funds for us to travel first-class right now, and if it was not the long-suffering Allworthy estates would be. I have done nothing for them yet to deserve to draw a salary on them, I know. The mountains above Hong Kong go right up from the water, making it a perfect place for seaplanes and very difficult for land models to operate. Maria joked that the only way anyone could put a major airport in the Territories would be to slice the whole top off a mountain, and nobody will ever do that! The only other option would be to fill in a big piece of the bay, which is almost as impractical. It is both a reassurance and a worry, having Hong Kong right next to Macao across the bay. Having a staunch outpost of the Empire there would be useful if things go wrong on Macao - but I cannot forget I am wanted as an Enemy Agent under my real name, and having to throw myself on the authorities for help might do more harm than good. At any rate it is a lot safer than China, where furs can simply vanish and never be heard of again. We touched down at the Imperial Airways dock and I was pleased to see our passports and travel documents stood up to close scrutiny. Nobody looked much at Molly; even to keen-eyed and hard nosed Customs officials a maid is just a generic maid and attracts no interest as a person. In that uniform the question of where she is going and why, rather answers itself. By the time we had cleared Customs the rain was coming down; it is the rainy season here and everything was rather sticky in the heat. One tends to forget how far North Spontoon really is, until one gets to compare it with the real semi-tropics. Then Helen went out and engaged a local guide to point us towards the Macao ferry piers; the dockside was an absolutely bustling place with thousands of furs and the waters criss-crossed with boats and ships of every size going in every direction; some smart new designs and some a floating collection of old junk. The locals were quite a mix; a lot of mice and rabbits in Native Chinese dress, with the occasional red or black and white panda. Even in China it appears the black and white ones are not common. There were some exotics; small Muntjac deer, snow leopards and one very striking black and yellow Salamander girl who presumably was not bothered by the heat. At least I assumed it was a girl; the traditional robed costumes of both sexes look similar to me and with some reptiles there is not much physically to tell the sexes apart. Definitely, it is a lot easier to spot Euros here than in the extremely mixed Spontoons where one can see a Spontoonie waiter in full evening costume and a tourist trying on a hula skirt, often with amusing results. Over here the wolves, bears and similar are almost entirely in European costumes. I did not notice any jackals, hyenas or mongooses, but they are possibly around in the “non-Euro, non-Native” business section of Hong Kong. Though the Chinese are justly famed as traders, in the British Empire a lot of the international commerce is in paws that originated in Daar es Salami, Bombay or Calcutta. Some folk say it is a deliberate policy that binds the Empire together, not having locals in charge of their own commerce. I doubt there is anything actually written down about such things, but it does make sense. It was tempting to go sightseeing, but Lady Allworthy is here for business and we had a hotel in Macao booked and waiting for us. So Helen followed the guide towards the other end of the dock, while she watched over us. If ever there was a heaven for pick-pockets this is surely it - although there were no lack of keen-eyed Colonial Police officers on the street corners. Helen has tightly sealed pockets and I have almost none as they would spoil the outline of the costume. We have not adopted Beryl’s plan of sewing fishhooks in fake pockets and behind easily-grabbed lapels, as it only irritates one’s dressmaker and laundresses when they come back covered in blood. Anyway, it would be out of character for Lady Allworthy, who is not based on Beryl or Kansas Smith, for that matter. Maria did manage some brief shopping as we waited for the ferry; she returned happily waving one of those shoehorns, the sort with teeth she has been unable to find on Spontoon and has been told do not exist. In Hong Kong you really can find anything. We may return with more time to spend on the return trip, all being well. Ironically, Maria as the humble secretary is the only one with her own money to spend, the rest of us are on expenses and will have to account for everything. If we end up having to use those emergency gold sovereigns sewn into various parts of our costume, Miss Devinski is liable to hand us shovels and frying-pans and book us working passage in steerage on a tramp steamer to Alaska with orders not to return without enough gold to replace them twice over. And she would probably have us manufacture coins from the raw metal that would pass inspection at the bank, too. The boat across the bay was generally rather packed; even so there was a first-class deck that was half empty and we took our place on it. Molly was holding a sun-shade over me this time, and I had to fight down an impulse not to laugh. I doubt I will get much fresh air on my fur this trip, unlike the trip to qualify as a pilot last year in the Gilbert and Sullivan islands. It is a long way from oiled fur, but I could hardly appear in whatever high-level meeting of the Direwolf’s financiers dressed in Spontoonie costume! Customs formalities were rather brief; we showed our passports and Helen handed over a large tip to ensure Customs did not look in our bags but waved us straight through. Evidently there is nothing in Hong Kong that the Macao authorities are worried about being brought in; by all accounts it is traffic in the other direction that gets searched. On the far side of the barrier was a tall grey-furred Weimaraner canine in an unfamiliar uniform holding a placard “Lady Allworthy and party”, and evidently awaiting us. The crew of the Direwolf certainly believe in not waiting for the grass to grow under their paws. The officer clicked his heels and bowed in the old-fashioned manner, and I was introduced to Seeöberleutnant Franz Kramm, a supply officer of the Direwolf’s crew. The ship itself was currently at sea, he told me with another bow, but should be returning shortly. In the meantime, they had left a cadre of officers and local staff ashore to handle the meetings. Herr Kramm ruefully acknowledged he was not one of the original crew that had sailed from Kiel in 1914; he had spent some years as a “Hula Junker” having left Europe never to return after his family estates had been seized by what is now Poland. Having new countries on the map is confusing as well as inconvenient, and one must keep up to date with memorising where they all are. It is not always obvious; as Maria has said, just because the river Rhine goes through the Rhineland does not mean the river Po goes through Poland. Macao looks very much like Hong Kong except there are fewer police to be seen on the streets, and rather more exotics rather than Euros and Chinese species. Then, the Portuguese have been famous for having a rather more relaxed society in their colonies; there was one spectacularly mixed equine I saw who seemed to be thoroughbred on one side of the family and an Angolan or Mozambique Grevy’s zebra on the other. Definitely not a marriage that would appear in The Times! He was rather handsome though. Publications such as “Extra-Spicy Tropic Tales” are full of stories of society girls inheriting estates and ranches a hundred miles from the nearest Euro settlement with hundreds of Native workers there to be of service - and after a few months alone in a tropical climate the mistress of the house forms her own ideas of what services she requires. I had looked at all the maps but not been prepared for just how small Macao really is. It is about the size of Spontoon’s Main Island, though with about twenty times the population. So in about five minutes we were in the up-market hotel district, a fine collection of colonial architecture with tropical flowers winding around the shady porches and verandas. These really were tropical, very different from the Spontoon flora that has to cope with the rather cool winters there. Well! We have checked into some interesting places since starting our Songmark course; I was reminded of the grand hotels of our arrival at Vostok last year. These were just as grand and an awful lot warmer. It still felt strange to have a swarm of servants carry our bags up, hand us tall cool glasses of lemonade and generally treat us like eggshells. (If Molly is like any sort of shell it is an armour-piercing model, and these days the rest of us are scarcely more fragile). One strange thing was the hotel manager bowed and welcomed me back here, saying his predecessor had talked much about me and he hoped all the facilities I had usually requested would be to my satisfaction. He then whispered something to Maria, who was filling in the paperwork. When we got into the lift Maria told me he had wanted to confirm that all damage and breakages would be paid for before our departure. Very odd! We surely do not look the sort of wild party-goers who entertain themselves by seeing how far one can hurl a radio from the third-storey balcony, or insist in seeing if the hotel limousine can float in the swimming pool. And none of us have been here before. Two minutes later my tail drooped as we discovered just what it meant. In the suite the bell-hop announced everything was there for the exclusive use of me and my party - he indicated the bathrooms, the telephone with a private outside line, the Dictaphone with other secretarial equipment - and three shy and downcast-looking local girls dressed in rather abbreviated versions of Molly’s respectable maid’s costume. It suddenly struck me - the Lady Allworthy who had been here before was Lady Susan Allworthy, and having presumably missed hearing the news of her capture and fate last year, the staff assumed I was her! She ran the “lavender house” on The Beach at Krupmark, and from what I have since heard, I hardly like to think of the sort of “damage and breakages” the hotel was blithely accustomed to computing on the bill. This may not be Krupmark, but it is certainly not Casino Island either!  It was awfully embarrassing. The door closed and I looked over the “facilities”, a tiny deer far smaller than me and hardly breast-high next to Molly, a white-furred mouse and a very slender and upright avian girl of that strange mostly East Indies sort they call “runner ducks”. They looked at us with rather downcast eyes and the cervine girl (a Pére David’s deer, I think) announced shyly that they come with the room, like the bath and beds. It looks as if Lady Susan Allworthy had rather specific tastes. This is a very high-class hotel, but it is rather alarming that they supply such “facilities” as a matter of course. It was a jolly uncomfortable situation; apart from them I had Molly, Maria and Helen looking at me, Helen trying to hide a broad grin while Molly’s look was definitely one of horror. The first thought was to dismiss them with a tip to go away and stay away - but that might simply have them moved by the management to serve the suite next door and the (probably not very) tender mercies of whoever happens to want such “facilities” there. While they are with us, they should be quite safe. At the same time, there was a good chance that they were here to find out about us, whatever else they expect to do. So I put them to work under Maria’s charge unpacking our trunks, putting everything away while Molly helped me out of the travelling costume. We have our first meeting tonight with the Direwolf’s representatives, and first impressions certainly count. I had to remind myself to let Molly do the work filling the bath and arranging everything. After nearly three years of being taught self-sufficiency at Songmark, it is quite an effort to relax and have other furs wait on me. Still, we did the same for Maria on our Vostok trip. In this humid climate one’s fur soon gets decidedly damp and bedraggled, and a hot bath followed by a vigorous brushing worked wonders. Once Molly had groomed and helped dress me, she had the slightly used bath to herself - about four times the size that regular servants’ quarters have, she tells me. From the splashing ten seconds after I closed the door behind me, she could hardly wait to get out of that starched black costume. Maria was doing her part well as the efficient secretary; when I came back into the main sitting-room she introduced our new “staff”. The deer is Soo Lin, the mouse Ting Lao and the duck-girl Kahavarti Matraporshah, of East Indies ancestry as I had guessed. All are refugees from the troubles in China, and have been working girls in this hotel for nearly a year. None of them had met Lady Susan Allworthy, but they had heard much about her from the departing manager and did not seem to be relishing the encounter. It was hard to work out what to do; without actually saying I am not the one they were expecting I reassured them that they have nothing to fear from any of us - we are here for business, not pleasure. I left Maria in charge of them; she has no real secretarial work to do in this trip, and if they really are any sort of Agent she has a good chance of finding out. An eventful afternoon indeed; as Lady Allworthy I decreed an hour’s nap to get us refreshed and sharp for the evening’s meeting where no doubt we will need all our wits. Lars set this up from this end, which by his account was easy enough to do as the Direwolf’s commanders really do want to meet me with a view to getting military supplies, and they want to make a good impression as much as I (and my unnamed rivals). I retired to my bed, which has a very nice corner window open to the breezes and looking across the bay back towards Hong Kong. I noticed Soo Lin, Ting Lao and Kahavarti Matraporshah standing by the door expectantly, evidently awaiting orders. I told them to retire to their beds and get some rest - at which point I found out they have none, at least none of their own. I would complain to the hotel management about that, but we are trying to stay inconspicuous on this trip and that would never do. As a compromise, I told them to tidy the other rooms and use my bed - when I am not in it. If I was the sort to ask “Why me?” I would wonder why Providence did not push this situation in the direction of Prudence and co. But they would not take advantage, either. Prudence is consecutively Tailfast and I have seen Ada with a Tailfast locket, too. Room service brought up a tray of hot tea and coffee; really we must use them more often to stay in character. On my own I would rather look around for an interesting street stall to investigate the local cuisine, but Lady Amelia Allworthy has different standards. It would not take a local reincarnation of Sherlock Hound to spot there was something severely out of character if I strolled down the street in hobnailed boots chatting with Natives and patronising street vendors. As it is, I do not even pick up the telephone and order room service myself; Molly does that. Actually, the hotel seems to specialise in handsome staff; I suppose it is a buyer’s market right now and they sent up a footman with a tray. He could have pushed a car with the same ease, being a distinctly athletic Chinese wild ox. Though I have seen one or two of the species on Krupmark acting as bouncers and general “heavies”, this one was impeccably uniformed and I could see a certain secretary on my staff looking him over with interest. There was no time to do more than finish our drinks before we had to meet in the ground floor foyer at five. Herr Kramm was there, impeccably turned out and looking as if the humid heat was nothing to him. He seemed surprised to see Molly with me, but I would certainly not travel to business out here without my guide and secretary, which would leave my maid all alone in a strange city unless I brought her with me. Running repairs to my costume and coiffure are certainly something I have to think of now. There was a large black cab waiting on the kerb; again there is nowhere in Macau we could not walk to in an hour or so, but it is the principle of the thing. Even Casino Island embassies in Spontoon have chauffeurs and such on their diplomatic lists, which is a good cover for less official activities in their copious free time (the Soviet Embassy has four huge bears listed on the books as “mechanics” though I doubt it is motor cars they work over with hammers and soldering irons back home.) At any rate, it was not three minutes till we pulled up on the far side of the harbour at what looked like an Embassy. In fact it was; I noticed the double headed eagle flag of Albania on the wall. This rather baffled me till I recall Maria mentioning they act as a “flag of convenience” for many of the tiny independencies in the Pacific, claiming local interest by way of their colony of the Albanian South Indies. Plus they know that no matter how outrageous their clients behave, nobody around here is liable to come storming over the Balkans to complain to King Zog in person. So - the four of us were following a Hula Junker into a room leased from the Albanian Embassy to some Pacific micro-power, who in turn are a flag of convenience and mutual insurance policy to a privateer mostly financed by Chinese Warlords, and whose only official allegiance is to an Imperial German Crown that no longer exists. It is a good thing the Tutors encourage us to do puzzles and logic exercises, my head was almost spinning as it was. Just to make things really confusing, I had started to wonder how Albania could have ever afforded to build on this scale out here when I noticed the spacious walls still had carvings with the Austro-Hungarian flags. Evidently King Zog picked the building up after 1918 in the political equivalent of a fire sale. Anyway, there was a cool and lofty room which in brighter days had been a ballroom, and a table with a dozen furs awaiting me in a mix of tropical white Naval uniforms and civilian suits. I waved the rest of “my staff” back and went in with Herr Kramm, who made the introductions. The highest ranking fur there was a tall mastiff, Count Ulrich von Thurn aber nicht Taxis, who is chief of the commissariat on the Direwolf. It is an essential job in their situation, where the ship needs supplying all the time with a thousand and one essential items and could end up fatally stranded for want of grease, solder or gland-packing asbestos fibre. The others were more Junior ranks, some of them introduced as specialists in procuring food, fuel, mechanical supplies and weaponry. Many of the younger ones were Chinese or other Easterners presumably from near their old Imperial trading post of Tsingtao, and one rather strange-looking amphibian I could only think came from near Ponape which was once in the German Marianas Isles. Although they have been gone from Kiel since before I was born, the Imperial German Navy certainly have not forgotten their manners or their efficiency. They have a shopping list as long as my tail, some of which is very specific in terms of equipment and some of it is broadly-defined specifications to solve certain problems. It looks like inventors as well as middlemen like Lars will be competing here; mechanisms to fit some of these specifications are surely not available off any shelf and one would only expect to see them built and tested on Cranium Island! The bidding is arranged as follows; for items that actually exist in stock, the suppliers have to provide test samples and demonstrate them working. I expect it will discourage unscrupulous furs from palming off ancient naval shells that are likely to explode in the barrel, if they are going to be standing next to the breech at the time. The “specifications” bids are rather looser, the inventors having to demonstrate a prototype, provide full engineering plans and only receive the final payment when the system is working aboard the Direwolf and the crew fully trained. I have been sending a few telegrams back and forward to Barrow-in-Furryness in the past month, and have a fair idea of what they can build and what we would have to charge for it to make the Allworthy estates any profit. Fortunately I was given a copy of the shopping list to take away, it is rather a lot to memorise and calculate just how feasible it all is. There are around thirty people bidding for engineering contracts I am told, but that covers all areas and some of them will be concerned with standard commercial parts like winches, cranes and pumps that should be no problem to get through Customs. The initial paperwork will probably not say in whose paws the items will end up; in this part of the world Malayan tin-mines need pumps and dynamos just as much as renegade commerce-raiders. They certainly do not waste time! I suppose if the Direwolf is on its way back here, they want to get everything set up in time for its arrival. I am one of the last interested parties to arrive, and just tomorrow night there is a Reception being held here where there is no ban on talking “shop”. Possibly the idea is competitors will beat each other’s bids down. Back to the hotel to talk over our approach. Maria is a keen reader of “Jane’s all The World’s Naval Review” and was fascinated by some of the things the Direwolf’s officers want to get. As a heavy cruiser the ship is meant to be armoured against any gun-armed ship that can catch it, but torpedoes launched from fast craft and shore defences are a perpetual worry. Since in most conditions one can see torpedo tracks incoming, the idea of a torpedo breaker seems a good idea and not impossible, although no Navy actually has one. That will probably have some highly qualified Mad Scientists busy at work on the problem. The big problem facing the Direwolf is it chiefly depends on its main guns which are no longer in production, and neither are the spare parts or shells. For most countries that would not be much of a problem, but the whole German military was decommissioned and scrapped in 1919, along with all the machinery and industrial complex to make it. The price of putting together an assembly line to feed one ship specially would be quite hideous. And for most applications they are quite unnecessary; the Direwolf last fought another armoured naval vessel in 1918 and most of its commissioned jobs in China have been shore bombardments that a battery of standardised artillery would be better for and far easier to keep supplied. Molly has told me much about munitions being like people, getting irritable in their old age. Having been exposed to tropical conditions since 1914, I doubt the crew really want to test any original rounds they have left. Molly’s eyes began to gleam and she started doodling a massed battery of huge calibre recoilless “Davis guns” such as the Rain Island aircraft carry but scaled up by a factor of ten. The back-blast would be prodigious but an armoured ship should survive it, although any crew on the open deck are probably uninsurable. It is certainly an idea. Maria says the trouble is that turrets are not just stuck on the deck but are rooted deep in the ship all the way down to the magazine below the waterline, with shell hoists and channels designed strictly for their original loading. Anything that really can be bolted onto the decks would be so much easier to install. Any original spare parts, Maria says, might have to come from unlikely places. Before 1914 Britain and Germany had a major export rivalry on equipping the smaller navies in areas such as South America; Germany as the new contender sometimes did underhand things to break into the market such as throwing in expensive shiploads of spare parts free with every new cruiser and destroyer. If Mixteca or Bolivia has any naval warehouses full of unused twenty year old main gun barrel liners and the like, the Direwolf is one of the few customers left. Actually finding the spares and getting them here (with or without the original owner’s consent) is the kind of trade Lars is in - and he is only a small player, I am sure Hong Kong has operators that make him look like a wayside fruit vendor next to Harrods. I hardly felt like heading out onto the streets of Macao in quest of a suitable restaurant for Lady Allworthy, so room service got some more custom and indeed they responded valiantly. In half an hour there was a covered trolley brought up that Helen searched carefully before letting into the suite (it is a favourite route in for thieves and secret agents if one believes the films.) Actually there was nothing more sinister than half a dozen steaming bowls of fish and vegetable satay, a decidedly spicy dish with chillies, coconut milk and peanuts that certainly hit the target. I have certainly expanded my diet in various ways since arriving at Songmark. And I have heard of a lot more through my friends that I would like to sample some time. The world is changing fast, and a lot of the old dishes will probably be gone and wholly forgotten in a generation. Maria has described an Italian peasant dish that is like a thin round bread with cheese, tomato and various thinly sliced meats on top, which she has not sampled in years. Peasant dishes are being replaced by more sophisticated menus as the world develops, and this one seems more likely to go than most. It was originally baked on hot paving stones by workers re-laying a mediaeval city square, which explains why it is called “Piazza” or something like that. Our three “resident maids” looked extremely hungry, and I asked them what they usually ate at the hotel. Boiled rice with vegetables twice a day, and sometimes millet or rice porridge, with sometimes fruit rejected from the guest’s fruit bowls as a treat! No wonder they looked half starved. I immediately ordered them to tuck in; we are full of Songmark good meals and are not exercising a tenth as much as usual on this trip. I should have chosen my words more carefully, on reflection. Ting Lao was sampling the fish satay dish with some trepidation, which I thought was only because it was too hot for her and encouraged her to eat more despite her polite protests. As we learned in our first term, really potent chillies and curries do one’s senses of taste and scent no harm; in fact they clear the snout most healthfully. Five minutes later she turned rather pale around the nose and asked if she could be excused - of course I let her, which was just as well as the mouse barely made it to the bathroom on time. The overall effect was like Helen on a rowing boat on a choppy sea; audible two rooms away she could do a fair impression of a fire hydrant as she sounded pretty much as if she would throw her tail up. It seems it is the first time in her life she has ever eaten meat or fish, and her system was really not expecting it, any more than one of her first ancestors who presumably sniffed around for wild grains in forest clearings. I had heard of but never actually seen that reaction before, as all my school chums’ parents could afford to feed them well whatever their species. Memo to myself; most Chinese here are really a lot poorer than I had imagined. Back in Barsetshire even the poorest cottager of any type might have a pen with some chickens scratching around, and the village schools see the children get at least one square protein meal a day. Failing that, poaching game is a grand old tradition. Last week when preparing for this trip Molly had mentioned the furs around here are “so poor they ain’t got a pot to piss in”, which instantly prompted Beryl to contemplate starting a charity supposedly collecting for a million chamber-pots at a guinea apiece. The administration costs would have been unexpectedly large, and reside in her pockets. The rest of the meal passed without incident, and after another bath to combat the humid heat it was time to retire for the night. Yet another problem - I would have happily slept on the floor (it is well carpeted, and we have done far worse) and surrendered my bed to the three maids, but as Lady Allworthy that would never do. Neither did I feel like ordering them to sleep on the floor. Next time we should bring Belle or Carmen along for one of these trips, they would probably enjoy it even without taking advantage. As it happens the bed was quite big enough for all, and I made it plain I wanted an undisturbed night’s rest. If anyone is “investigating” us, at least they can report that the sleeping arrangements are as expected - assuming they are still working off Lady Susan’s dossier and have not noticed I have unaccountably changed species since last time. next |