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age. The fact preoccupied him, and sometimes it baffled him. He seldom thought about Wang anymore, except when remembering how Wang's mother, Jia-Jia, had been his amah and how the man at times had frightened him. And whenever he compared himself to Wang, Bunt concluded that although they were different in every way, nothing would change for either of them, ever. Their lives were fixed for good as master and servant.
    This morning Bunt stood and smacked his lips while his mother wiped a fleck of yolk from his chin, and then, muttering something about the heat, he left the house. He remembered Mr. Chuck as he released the hand brake and left in his Rover, driving past the Peak fire station, down the long hill and into the tunnel traffic to Kowloon, taking all the familiar detours. From home to office he saw nothing. After all these years Hong Kong had become invisible to him, and even when someone pointed out a new hotel or office block, more land reclaimed,
another shop, he might look but he saw nothing. The city was no more real to him than the shop signs he could not read, in the Cantonese language which was just a grating noise that did not remotely resemble human speech. Up the flyover to Princess, to Waterloo, and at last he came to rest at a painted parking space beside the building, which he had begun to think of as his building.
    Mr. Woo, the janitor, said good morning and stuck his arm into the elevator to hold open the door and punched the top-floor button to save Bunt the trouble. Bunt went directly to his office. Miss Liu brought him a cup of tea and a folder of mail—bills, queries, busybody brochures. "Hand-over bumf," Bunt said, and gave those items back to Miss Liu, the schedules and new regulations. "File it." He did not want to think about the event. Whenever he was asked his intentions, he said, "I'm staying. Nothing will change," and most of the time he meant it. To him Hong Kong was just an anthill with a Union Jack flying over it. The flag was changing but Hong Kong would remain an anthill.
    Where was Mr. Cheung? There was no sign of the general manager. They met each morning and went over the orders and the daily objectives. Because of Cheung the factory was well run and productive, and orders were filled on time. Cheung simply asked for approval—like Bunt, Cheung had been trained by Mr. Chuck.
    Bunt usually saved his reading of the
South China Morning Post
for his second cup of tea, after Cheung left, but today—untypically—he opened the paper. He skimmed the world news, skipped the Hand-over news, and settled on crime,
which was always unusual and sometimes gripping. Of a page of violent stories, one caught his eye: a man in jail for assaulting his wife was bringing a case against the poor woman because she had refused to sell the family house. TWo things interested Bunt about the story. The first was the audacity of the man in suing his wife—his victim; the second was the crime itself. He had accused her of adultery and demanded she leave him.
You must leave, but your face belongs to me,
the man had said, and he had bound her with his neckties and poured acid on her face.
I will take your face away.
The burns were so gruesome that she had been unable to get a job, and she needed the house. She had two children. The violent acid-throwing husband wanted the profit from his half of the house.
Seriously disfigured,
the story said. Bunt wondered what she looked like.
    "Excuse me, sir."
    Bunt was so startled that for an instant he saw the villain from the newspaper story at his office door.
    But it was Mr. Cheung, jerking his head and grunting, his way of saying sorry.
    "The train was late."
    "What train?"
    Cheung lived in Kowloon Tong.
    "This morning I went to China," Mr. Cheung said.
    "Fancy that."
    To wake up and travel to the People's Republic of China and return before ten the same morning seemed foolish. Bunt told himself that such a journey was so pointless he would not