‘Ko,’ he whispered. ‘Admiral Nelson. Ko?’
The echo of her cackle bounded away across the water.
‘Po Toi!’ she screamed. ‘Tin Hau! Po Toi!’
‘Today?’
‘Today!’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘Tomollow!’
He tossed her a couple of dollars and her laughter followed him as he crept away.
I’m right, Lizzie’s right, we’re right, he thought. He’s going to the festival. He hoped to God Lizzie was staying put. If she woke up, he wouldn’t put it past her to wander.
He walked, trying to stamp away the aching in his groin and back. Take it stage by stage, he thought. Nothing big. Just play it as it comes. The fog was like a corridor leading to different rooms. Once he met an invalid car crawling along the kerb, as its owner exercised his Alsation dog. Once, two old men in undervests performing their morning exercises. In a public garden small children stared at him from a rhododendron bush which they seemed to have made their home, for their clothes were draped over the branches and they were naked as the refugee kids in Phnom Penh.
She was sitting up waiting for him when he returned and she looked terrible.
‘Don’t do that again,’ she warned, and shoved her arm through his as they set out to find some breakfast and a boat. ‘Don’t ever bloody walk out on me without warning.’
Hong Kong at first possessed no boats at all that day. Jerry would not contemplate the big out-island ferries which took the trippers. He knew the Rocker would have them sewn up. He refused to go down to the bays and make conspicuous enquiries. When he telephoned the listed water-taxi firms whatever they had was either rented or too small for the voyage. Then he remembered Luigi Tan the fixer, who was a myth at the Foreign Correspondents’ club: Luigi could get you anything from a Korean dance troupe to a cut-price air-ticket faster than any fixer in town. They took a taxi to the other side of Wanchai, where Luigi had his lair, then walked. It was eight in the morning but the hot fog had not lifted. The unlit signs sprawled over the narrow lanes like spent lovers: Happy Boy, Lucky Place, Americana. The crowded food stalls added their warm smells to the reek of petrol fumes and smuts. Through splits in the wall they sometimes glimpsed a canal. ‘Anyone tell you where to find me,, Luigi Tan liked to say. ‘Ask for the big guy with one leg.’
They found him behind the counter of his shop, just tall enough to look over it, a tiny; darting half-Portuguese who had once earned a living Chinese boxing in the grimy booths of Macao. The front of the shop was six foot wide. His wares were new motorbikes and relics of the old China Service, which he called antiques; daguerreotypes of hatted ladies in tortoiseshell frames, a battered travelling box, an opium clipper’s log. Luigi knew Jerry already but he liked Lizzie much better, and insisted that she go ahead so that he could study her hind quarters while he ushered them under a washing line, to an outhouse marked private, with three chairs and a telephone on the floor. Crouching till he was rolled into a neat ball, Luigi talked Chinese to the telephone and English to Lizzie. He was a grandfather, he said, but virile, and had four sons, all good. Even number four son was off his hands. All good drivers, good workers and good husbands. Also, he said to Lizzie, he had a Mercedes complete with stereo.
‘Maybe I take you ride in it one day,’ he said.
Jerry wondered whether she realised that he was proposing marriage, or perhaps something slightly less.
And yes, Luigi thought he had a boat as well.
After two phone calls he knew he had a boat, which he only ever lent to friends, at a nominal cost. He gave Lizzie his credit card case to count the number of cards; then his wallet to admire the family snaps, one of which showed a lobster caught by number four son on the day of his recent wedding, though the son was not visible.
‘Po Toi bad place,’ said Luigi Tan to Lizzie, still on the telephone. ‘Very dirty place. Rough sea, lousy festival, bad food. Why you want to go there?’
For Tin Hau of course, Jerry said patiently, answering for her. For the famous temple and the festival.
Luigi Tan preferred to speak to Lizzie.
‘You go Lantau,’ he advised. ‘Lantau good island. Nice food, good fish, nice people. I tell them you go Lantau, eat at Charlie’s, Charlie my friend.’
‘Po Toi,’ said Jerry firmly
‘Po Toi hell of a lot of cash.’
‘We’ve got a hell of a lot of cash,’ said Lizzie with a lovely smile, and Luigi looked at her again, contemplatively, the long up and down look.
‘Maybe I come with you,’ he said to her.
‘No,’ said Jerry.
Luigi drove them to Causeway Bay and rode with them on the sampan. The boat was a fourteen-foot power boat, common as driftwood, but Jerry reckoned she was sound and Luigi said she had a deep keel. A boy lounged on the stem, trailing one foot in the water.
‘My nephew,’ said Luigi, ruffling the boy’s hair proudly. ‘He got mother in Lantau. He take you. Lantau, eat Charlie’s place, give you good time. You pay me later.’
‘Old boy,’ said Jerry patiently. ‘Sport. We don’t want Lantau. We want Po Toi. Only Po Toi. Po Toi or nothing. Drop us there and go.
‘Po Toi bad weather, bad festival. Bad place. Too near China water. Lot of Commies.’
‘Po Toi or nothing,’ Jerry said.
‘Boat too small,’ said Luigi, with a frightful loss of face, and it took all of Lizzie’s charm to build him up again.
For another hour the boys primed the boat and all Jerry and Lizzie could do was sit in the half cabin keeping out of sight and sip judicious shots of Remy Martin. Periodically one or other of them sank into a private reverie. When Lizzie did this, she hugged herself and rocked slowly on her haunches, head down. Whereas Jerry yanked at his forelock, and once he yanked so hard she touched his arm to stop him, and he laughed.
Almost carelessly they pulled away from the harbour.
‘Stay out of sight,’ Jerry ordered, and for safety’s sake put his arm round her to keep her in the meagre shelter of the open cabin.
The American aircraft carrier had stripped off her ornamental garb and lay grey and menacing, like an unsheathed knife above the water. At first, they had nothing but the same sticky calm. On the shore, shelves of mist pressed on to the grey highrises, and brown smoke columns slid into a white expressionless sky. On the flat water their boat felt high as a balloon. But as they slipped the shelter and headed east, the waves slapped her sides hard enough to wind her, the bow pitched and cracked, and they had to brace themselves to keep upright. With the little bow lifting and tugging like a bad horse, they tumbled past cranes and godowns and factories and the stumps of quarried hillsides. They were running straight into the wind and spray was flying on all sides. The coxswain at the wheel was laughing and crowing to his mate, and Jerry supposed it was the mad roundeyes they were laughing at, who chose to do their courting in a pitching tub. A giant tanker passed them, not seeming to move, brown junks running in her wake. From the dockyards, where a freighter was laid-to; the white flashes of the welders’ lamps signalled to them across the water. The boys’ laughter eased and they began to talk sensibly because they were at sea. Looking back between the swaying walls of transport ships Jerry saw the Island drawing slowly away from him, cut like a table mountain by the cloud. Once more, Hong Kong was ceasing to exist.
They passed another headland. As the sea roughened, the pitching steadied and the cloud above them dropped until its base was only a few feet above their mast, and for a while they stayed in this lower, unreal world, advancing under cover of its protective blanket. The fog ended suddenly and left them in dancing sunlight. Southward, on hills of violent lushness, an orange navigation lamp winked at them through the clear air.
‘What do we do now?’ she asked softly, looking through the porthole.
‘Smile and pray,’ said Jerry.
‘I’ll smile, you pray,’ she said.
A pilot’s launch was pulling alongside and for a moment he definitely expected to see the hideous face of the Rocker glowering down on him, but the crew ignored them entirely.
‘Who are they?’ she whispered. ‘What do they think?’
‘It’s routine,’ said Jerry. ‘It’s meaningless.’
The launch veered away. That’s it, thought Jerry, with no particular feeling, they’ve spotted us.
‘You sure it was just routine?’ she asked.
‘Hundreds of boats go to the festival,’ he said.
The boat bucked violently; and kept bucking. Great seaworthiness, he thought, hanging on to Lizzie. Great keel. If this goes on, we won’t have anything to decide. The sea will do it for us. It was one of those trips where if you made it nobody noticed, and if you didn’t they’d say you threw your life away. The east wind could swirl right round on itself at any moment, he thought. In the season between west monsoons, nothing was ever sure. He listened anxiously to the erratic galloping of the engine. If it gives up we’ll finish on the rocks.
Suddenly his nightmares multiplied unreasonably. The butane, he thought. Christ, the butane! While the boys were preparing the boat, he had glimpsed two cylinders stowed in the front hold beside the water-tanks, presumably for cooking Luigi’s lobsters. Fool that he was, he had made nothing of them till now. He worked it out. Butane is heavier than air. All cylinders leak. It’s just a question of degree. With this sea pounding the bows they leak faster, and the escaped gas will now be lying in the bilge about two feet from the spark of the engine, with a nice blend of oxygen to assist combustion. Lizzie had slipped from his grasp and stood astern. The sea was suddenly crowded. Out of nowhere, a fleet of fishing junks had gathered, and she was gazing at them earnestly. Grabbing her arm he hauled her back to the cover of the cabin.
‘Where do you think you are?’ he shouted. ‘Bloody Cowes?
She studied him a moment, then gently kissed him, then kissed him again.
‘You calm down,’ she warned. She kissed him a third time, muttered ‘Yes,’ as if her expectations had been fulfilled, then sat quiet for a while, looking at the deck but keeping hold of his hand.
Jerry reckoned they were making five knots into the wind. A small plane zoomed overhead. Holding her out of sight he looked up sharply, but was too late to read the markings.
‘And good morning to you,’ he thought.
They were rounding the last point, tossing and groaning in the spray. Once, the propellers lifted clean out of the water with a roar. As they hit the sea again, the engine faltered, choked, but decided to stay alive. Touching Lizzie’s shoulder Jerry pointed ahead of them to where the bare, steep island of Po Toi loomed like a cutout against the cloud-torn sky: two peaks, sheer from the water, the larger to the south, and a saddle between. The sea had turned iron blue and the wind ripped over it, slapping the breath from their mouths and hurling spray at them like hail. On the port bow lay Beaufort Island: a lighthouse, a jetty, no inhabitants. The wind dropped as though it had never been. Not a breeze greeted them as they entered the unruffled water of the island’s lee. The sun’s heat was direct and harsh. Ahead of them, perhaps a mile, lay the mouth of Po Toi’s main bay, and behind it, the low brown ghosts of China’s islands. Soon they could make out a whole untidy fleet of junks and cruise boats jamming the bay, as the first jingle of drums and cymbals and uncoordinated chanting floated to them across the water. On the hill behind lay the shanty village, its tin roofs twinkling, and on its own small headland stood one solid building, the temple of Tin Hau, with a bamboo scaffold lashed round it in a rudimentary grandstand, and a large crowd with a pall of smoke hanging over it and dabs of gold between.
‘Which side was it?’ he asked her.
‘I don’t know. We climbed to a house and walked from there.’
Each time he spoke to her he looked at her, but now she avoided his gaze. Tapping the coxswain on the shoulder he pointed the course he wanted him to take. The boy at once began protesting. Squaring to him, Jerry showed him a bunch of money, pretty well all he had left. With an ill grace, the boy swung across the mouth of the harbour; weaving between the boats toward a small granite headland where a tumbledown jetty offered a risky landing. The din of the festival was much louder. They could smell charcoal and suckling pig, and hear concerted bursts of laughter, but for the time being the crowd was out of sight to them, as they were to the crowd.
‘Here!’ he yelled. ‘Put in here. Now! Now!’
The jetty leaned drunkenly as they clambered on to it. They had not even reached land before their boat had turned for home. Nobody said goodbye. They climbed up the rock, hand in hand, and walked straight into a money game that was being watched by a large and laughing crowd. At the centre stood a clownish old man with a bag of coins and he was throwing them down the rock one by one while barefooted boys hurled themselves after them, pushing each other almost to the cliff-edge in their zeal.
‘They took a boat,’ Guillam said. ‘Rockhurst has interviewed the proprietor. The proprietor is a friend of Westerby, and yes it was Westerby and a beautiful girl, and they wanted to go to Po Toi for Tin Hau.’
‘And how did Rockhurst play that?’ Smiley asked.
‘Said in that case it wasn’t the couple he was looking for. Bowed out. Disappointed. The harbour police have also belatedly reported sighting it on a course for the festival.’
‘Want us to put up a spotter plane, George?’ Martello asked nervously. ‘Navy int. have all sorts standing by.’
Murphy had a bright suggestion. ‘Why don’t we just go right in with choppers and scoop Nelson off that end junk?’ he demanded.
‘Murphy, shut up,’ Martello said.
‘They’re making for the island,’ Smiley said firmly. ‘We know they are. I don’t think we need aircover to prove it.’
Martello was not satisfied. ‘Then maybe we should send a couple of people out to that island, George. Maybe we ought to do a little interfering finally.’
Fawn was standing stock still. Even his fists had stopped working.
‘No,’ said Smiley.
At Martello’s side Sam Collins’s grin grew a little thinner.
‘Any reason?’ Martello asked.