*
O’Connelly wished his young friend goodbye and good luck, who, forcing a grim smile, dumped his carry-on into the boot of a taxi, destination Gare du Nord.
As he watched the taxi disappear along the boulevard Saint-Germain, O’Connelly had the feeling the world was heading for another crisis. His euros would soon be worth nothing at the rate things were going, not that it really mattered to him personally, his royalties were paid in dollars, pounds and euros. It was swings and roundabouts, whatever he lost on one he gained on the other.
It was not cold for January and with a good lunch under his belt he slowly strolled home pondering the fate of Liam Clancy. Everything looked the same as he crossed the boulevard Saint-Germain, as it always seemed to. He supposed some were hit harder than others by the depressed economy, which the French government seemed incapable of resolving, the fact that there were more homeless on the streets spoke more than numbers, though the very poor were always more visible in winter.
He hoped his new book, which would come out in the spring, would have better luck than Houellebecq’s which was launched a few days earlier, two days before the attack on Charlie Hebdo to be precise. Submission should have been a very successful, if controversial, launch with television interviews and press articles. Instead it was swept aside, forgotten, seen as an exercise in bad taste. Worse still, one of Houellebecq’s friend’s died in the massacre, which did not prevent apologists for Islam transforming the writer’s novel into an attack on that community.
The politically correct was transforming France into an Orwellian society, where a pusillanimous media, financed in part by the state, did everything in its power to please its masters. The media was instrumental in deciding what the public should know and not know. The French press brainwashed its readers, the television its viewers, gently rocking them into a state of passive acceptance, as an alien vision of France’s tolerant society slowly spread its roots. It was the media that determined politically correctness, preached unattainable visions of equality, pacifying its audience with football, soaps and reality television, promoting popular idols as role models, whilst the establishment with its political marionettes and their business cohorts were given the liberty of exploiting the ordinary man in their race to accumulate power, wealth and domination.
O’Connelly paused on quai des Grands-Augustins overlooking the Seine, lost in his meanderings, his hands posed on the cold white stone wall, he watched the stream of dark waters flow past, the same stream that had flowed under the same bridges during the Revolution, which was said to have freed the French people from tyranny. He recalled Alexis de Tocqueville’s words:
Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.
The angry sound of a car horn snapped him out of his dream. He smiled at how he was so easily carried away by his thoughts, grinning when he remembered how he himself had become a wealthy man by his pen.
CITY & COLONIAL
It was late evening in Hong Kong when Pat arrived home, exhausted by the events of the day. The City Colonial’s attempt to seize control of Europa Hong Kong Ltd manu militari had been repulsed. But it did not mean they would not come back. As precaution security guards, together with the bank’s own officers, were posted on around the clock shifts before the bank’s offices with strict orders to prevent, by force if necessary, the entry of unauthorized persons. To reinforce security all personnel were issued with new ID cards for the turnstiles in the main lobby of the tower.
Pat had spent a good part of the day with the bank’s lawyers, who had assured him that whilst City & Colonial had taken over Europa Bank Holding plc, and controlled a significant, though minority, holding in the Hong Kong bank, with a seat on its board, their decision making power was next to zero. They were hobbled without the cooperation of the Chinese shareholders who saw nothing good in the sudden arrival of the mega bank.
The Wu family, at the instigation of Pat Kennedy, had been the real force behind the transformation of the INI’s representative office into a fully licensed Hong Kong bank. Old man Liu saw Pat as the kind of dashing entrepreneur, who could carry the bank forward in twenty first century, riding the Chinese dragon as it sought to develop its growing overseas ambitions. He was cast in the same mould as the men who had built Hong Kong, the stuff of Two Gun Cohen, Liu told his son, who though he did not question his father’s wisdom, had never heard of the Anglo-Canadian adventurer who became aide-de-camp to Sun Yat-sen.
The Wu saw Pat expanding and diversifying the family business empire through his links with London, Europe and Russia. He perceived him as dynamic, audacious, and above all fortuitous, a quality appreciated by the Chinese, unlike the kind of European bankers and company men they had met before, surrounded by a coterie of lackeys and interpreters, nor was he one of those naive, penniless, fortune hunters, the kind that arrived in droves in China’s great cities in the hope of gleaning a living.
Pat was domiciled in Hong Kong, as were most of Lili’s family, a status the offered considerable advantages for both Mainland Chinese and foreigners alike. In the four years that had passed since Pat had first met Lili he had applied himself to learning Cantonese and Mandarin, becoming reasonably conversant in both dialects, that is for a foreigner. Often, to the amusement of the Wu’s who switched with ease in from one dialect to another, Pat confused the two mutually incomprehensible languages, for that’s they were. It was quite an achievement, though northern Mandarin speakers were often perplexed when Kennedy unwittingly injected Cantonese words into the conversation.
Once his Cantonese interlocutors got over their surprise, Pat found himself in a different world, a world the average non-Chinese speaking visitors did not even suspect existed.
Pat had discovered a latent talent for languages soon after he realized his chosen profession, or that chosen by his mother, accountancy, was a dull affair. After his initial period of work experience in Boston, Massachusetts, where he learnt the ropes of his trade, he had set up an accounting firm in Limerick City. There he soon found himself working with foreign companies in the Shannon Business Park. In the course of his work Pat established business relations with a Hamburg coffee franchiser he had helped set up a coffee distribution company in Ireland.
His account with the franchiser frequently brought him to Hamburg, more than perhaps would have been normally deemed necessary for business needs. Soon he was discovering Continental Europe, that is to say Germany, Holland and Belgium, and decided it would not be a bad thing to learn a little German. His thick skinned nature prevented him from feeling any embarrassment practising his pidgin German with business partners or striking up conversation with just about any friendly stranger he met on his travels.
As Pat’s German progressed and he discovered his talent he progressed to French and Spanish. Then later to Russian when the bank’s business took him to Moscow and Saint Petersburg. His natural intuition and indifference to grammatical complexities overcame all obstacles, transforming him into an accomplished though unorthodox polyglot.
The Cantonese were proud of their own specificity. They were Chinese, but different from Northerners, they had their own language, or dialect as it was mistakenly called, as different from Mandarin as Portuguese from French. The Cantonese not only spoke their own dialects, the roots of which they went far back to the original language spoken by Chinese in classical times, but were also conversant in Mandarin. This gave them a considerable advantage in business as most Northerners found Cantonese incomprehensible.
The Wu’s believed their investment in INI Hong Kong Ltd, would create new opportunities giving them access to London’s financial markets, opening new doors to Europe, Russia and its Far East. That lin
k was consecrated when Kennedy married Lili and became part of the family.
City & Colonial on the other hand represented all that the Wu’s detested, starting with its overpoweringly arrogant presence, a hangover from the colonial past, monolithic and faceless, casting its shadow everywhere like the Chinese Communist Party. City & Colonial was essentially a British bank, with its headquarters in London, one of the world’s largest with several thousand branches and offices around the world, a behemoth, against which Pat and his friends could not and would not fight, though they would need all their skill and intelligence to avoid becoming a mere titbit in the giant’s maw.
Unlike its confrère HSBC, City & Colonial had never really been been a Hong Kong bank. It had been incorporated in the nineteenth century to finance British trading companies in East Asia, but had always maintained its headquarters in London. When the British government retroceded the Colony to Beijing the question of transferring to London, like HSBC, was never raised as City & Colonial was effectively a foreign bank and its shareholders had no reason to fear their asset would fall into Chinese hands.