There had to be a catch. The first-floor bar at the Hong Kong Cricket Club had become a hangout for third nationals with nowhere else to go—Portuguese, Eurasians, Irish, White Russians, and anyone else unlucky enough to find themselves still in Hong Kong for whatever reason, whether because they habitually conducted business here, lived here permanently, were escaping China, or were heading into it. Until now, they had been oddly safe in the first-floor bar, right next door to the Kempeitai’s major interrogation site for British nationals and their Chinese collaborators.

Within Noma’s simple request, Cheung detected a demand to rat out the sympathies of the nominally neutral. So he was silent for a long moment, contemplating his options. Then he said, “I’d rather not, sir. If it’s all the same to you.”

“He voices an opinion!” shouted Noma, mock triumphant. “Did you hear that, Horace?”

Horace took a sip of his rum and Coke and nodded, but didn’t say anything. He had come to Hong Kong looking for his cousin Isadore Davis Wong, and his boyhood pen pal, Noma Kennosuke, from whom he hadn’t heard for over a decade. They had corresponded for a few years when they were teenagers, since around the time of the Conference of Asian Peoples in Nagasaki in 1926, which the precocious fifteen-year-old Horace had read about in Kingston, Jamaica’s Daily Gleaner, leading him to seek out a pen pal in Japan.