EU boys began to relax. The tear gas had blown south, away from us, so the police removed their masks. I found my friend, Sergeant Jack Rudman, among them. There was a large sweat stain on the back of his tunic and sweat poured off his face. Rudman’s dark eyebrows sank in a fierce V toward a beak-like nose, parallel with a widow’s peak, which made him look stern and all-seeing. Few people could see so much of others as Jack could, and yet he saw so little of himself. He was still breathing hard and scanning the windows of buildings above us for trouble.
“I’m glad you’re all right,” I said.
He gave me an examining look but did not respond. He flicked his head to get the sweat off his brow. Drops fell on my hand. “Yeah, I’m fine,” he said then looked about at the civilians at the side of Canton Road. “But what about you, mate? You almost got a sting there, pursued by those dollies and their toy guns. Why the hell did you stand there ...” He paused to think of a literate-sounding metaphor, then said: “... like a garden gnome.” He looked back to me for a moment and added, “Trust you.”
I tried to make a joke, knowing that I’d been foolish. Inwardly, I was very unhappy that Jack couldn’t have been a little more sympathetic. He could have murmured a kind word or something, at least expressed the most oblique thanksgiving that I hadn’t been injured. Otherwise, what was the point of standing in harm’s way? He looked about to satisfy himself that none of his fellow coppers had been injured in the fight. They got his tender concern. I envied them for having his loyalty.
Fire engines came down Canton Road to put out the gasoline fire, bumping over rioters’ stones and EU projectiles, so we went and stood over by the harbour side of the street.
“Got your message about your girlfriend,” Rudman said. “Been too busy.”
I told him I understood.
“I feel like a steak,” Rudman said.
“I’ll buy,” I said too quickly. “Tonight.”
Rudman surveyed the wrecked street again then glanced back at me. This time he had a look of warmth. He touched his sweaty hand to my jacket. “Yeah, all right.” He even smiled.
When I returned to the newsroom in Central shortly before noon there was a message from Chen Lo-wen at Great World. Chen was Becky’s favourite director and the creator of Long Ago and Far Away. He had come down with Feng from Shanghai after the Communists took power and had laboured for Great World for little money ever since. The studio directors were grotesquely underpaid relative to their commercial value. Actors frequently planted rumours in the mosquito press about imminent retirement from films; actresses hinted they were getting married to rich businessmen and were leaving the screen. It was the only way to guarantee a meeting with Feng Hsiao-foon to discuss their lousy pay. He kept everyone waiting in strict silence out in Miss Chin’s anteroom, where she gave them hard, disciplinary looks until they were cowed into thinking they were badly spoiled children exploiting the studio’s father. Confucian deference to Feng, as well as highly restrictive contracts, meant that performers rarely had the sort of tantrums and upsets that Hollywood performers indulged in. They almost never complained on the set, issued few protests, and if they did, Feng would punish them with fines and a lecture. A couple of months before Becky vanished, Tina Ti from Cathay Studios disappeared for a few days without explanation. She washed up safe and sound at the studio a couple of days later, citing a curfew surrounding the Maoist riots in Kowloon. She may have just wanted a few days off from her hectic shooting schedule. Most top actresses had a reputation with audiences for inaccessible glamour, but the reputation they had with impecunious and dominating studio lords like Feng Hsiao-foon was something else: they were dispensable goddesses with short shelf lives who wouldn’t have known how to put on lipstick if it hadn’t been for his instruction. Becky hadn’t, before she went into the movies. Many performers had miserable lives — some were actually refused permission to marry. Others were never allowed to travel abroad for fear they wouldn’t come home. They all fought bitterly with Feng and sometimes walked out, paying contract penalties or launching lawsuits to free themselves.
Feng didn’t mind the atmosphere of anxiety at all. He made sure that no one ever really knew what he was thinking - he would only sit behind his desk and nod his head while employees vented their spleens, wept furiously or shouted feeble threats. Then he would simply say: “Go back to work now and stop making a fool of yourself ”Humiliated and no wiser or richer, they just went back to work. The only time I had ever seen him unnerved was when a young actress hung herself in her dormitory room at the Great World studio. They brought Feng to see her body, gently swaying and swollen. He had the room exorcised.
As a director, Chen Lo-wen had even less latitude than the performers. He was so beholden to Feng, who had kept him all these years, that his complaints were few and he worked very hard, often at great personal sacrifice. Chen gave himself a serious groin pull loading one of Great World’s heavy old Mitchell cameras into a truck for a location shoot on The Herdsman and the Weaver. Feng told him to keep working or lose pay for every day he was off. Chen was in such pain that he miscalculated in lining up a close-up shot of Becky’s climactic scene because the Mitchell used a range-finder rather than the through-the-lens reflex system. When the film came back from Rank, her face was away off to one side of the frame, one eye obscured. I thought the shot had an appealing quality because it made it look as if the weaver were trying to hide her sorrow over her husband’s long absences. But Feng was furious. He ordered the whole scene reshot and expenses charged against Chen’s pay. Why Chen stayed with Feng was a testimony to not only his loyalty to the studio father but also to the desperate oversupply of Shanghai movie directors.
I called Chen back. You could hear the upset in his voice and I assumed it was because of Becky’s disappearance. “Have you learned anything?” I asked him in English.
He made a lengthy and suspicious protest: “I do not want any harm to come to Miss Chan. No one has told me anything about her going away. I had nothing to do with it. I know nothing. No one has informed me of anything.”
His answer was peculiar so I poked about with a few questions. When had he last seen her? How did she seem at the time? I had no strategy in my questions to cause any direction to emerge so I gave up. I just put my head in my hand and rubbed my eyes. “I don’t want her hurt,” I said.
“Neither do I!” Chen said. “You must run a story in the China Telegraph saying that I do not know anything about her disappearance! Please telephone Mr. Feng at once and tell him the same. I have told this very same thing to Cloudburst! You must not tell Feng that I spoke to Cloudburst. They get everything wrong in that paper and I want to make sure they understand that I had nothing to do with her disappearance. I am no one. I am just a quiet man who does his job.”
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