In the thick mist that had engulfed the city after yesterday’s storm, they gathered around the pyre and solemnly watched Cheung Wan-See burn. Because the air was wet, it smoked prodigiously at first. Tanaka poured on two more bottles of gin—there was lots available because the British had left a lot (it had been the substance that allowed them to turn unseeing eyes to whatever they didn’t want to acknowledge), and the Japanese didn’t much care for it. Still, it burned wet. Horace contributed a single bottle of Screech Owl rum, all the more precious because of the peculiar taste for syllabub that all the Test match players and guests had developed. Miraculously, this made the fire burn with a clean blue flame, even when a strong wind brought them steady rain to remind them of the power of the storm the day before. It burned so cleanly that the wickets, bats, sofa, chairs, tables, and one old Chinese lady were all burnt down to a cup of fine salt, transparent as pure quartz crystal. When it was cool enough, they swept it into a soup tureen of fine English bone china, the closest thing they had to an urn.

And at the end of the day, they were rewarded by a clearing of the skies and the unexpected sight of the sun as it set behind Victoria Peak and sank into the South China Sea. They all felt very small but strangely grateful for their lives in this little trading entrepôt at the edge of the once and future British Empire.

CHAPTER 41ENDGAME

September 20, 1942

Japan was down, 332 to 364 in the fourth and final innings. She still had a chance, a pretty good one. The last three batsmen in play were Morgan Horace, star member of the West Indies Cricket Team and veteran of twenty-two Test matches, albeit in his youth; Tanaka Shigeru, the second-best batsman through forms five and six on the Whitsunday Boys’ School cricket team across the water in Kowloon; and Colonel’s Noma’s chief interrogator, Ishiyama Hinata, who’d been a decent baseball player all the way through military college in his day. Though the rules of cricket were different, he was very good at hitting a ball across a field.