The commissioner leaned back in his chair, gazed at the chief inspector.
“You’d better tell me what you know—just so that we’re sure we’re talking about the same thing.”
“Everyone knows. The British love information. In Hong Kong there’s hardly a pig roasted without the British knowing about it.”
“And you think that will help your inquiry, knowing the rate of pig mortality?”
Chan thanked his Chinese genes for a condition of implacable stubbornness that turned him into rock from time to time. “Every facility. That’s what the fax said.”
Still half astonished at his own temerity, half ashamed at his earlier timidity, Chan lit a cigarette without asking permission.
Tsui scratched his head. “I wasn’t supposed to show it to you, though. The fax, I mean.” He thought for a moment, then picked up a telephone. “Get me the political adviser, please.” When he had arranged a meeting with Cuthbert, Tsui looked at Chan and smiled.
At the long table in the anteroom to Cuthbert’s office, Chan waited patiently for the political adviser to deny everything he had just said
and was even prepared to relish the elegance of the diplomat’s lie. On instructions from Tsui, Chan had not mentioned the top secret fax the commissioner had shown him.
Cuthbert tapped the table, turned to Tsui, the only other person in the room.
“What d’you say, Ronny?”
“Nothing,” Tsui said.
Cuthbert pursed his lips. “Yes, I thought you’d say that.” He gave the appearance of thinking hard for a moment. He turned to Chan. “Well, I know when I’m beat. I may as well face it, you’ve just about cornered me.” He tapped his nose and winked. “Of course you realize that everything you’ve just told us, this fantastic notion of some sort of systematic invasion of privacy by Big Brother, is just so much nonsense?”
“Of course,” Chan said, surprised. He liked the British principle of magnanimity in victory.
“It’s close to lunchtime,” Cuthbert said. “If you’d allow me?” He raised eyebrows at Tsui. “Ronny—”
“I’m afraid I have a lunch appointment,” Tsui said, taking Cuthbert’s hint. “I’ll leave you two to talk.” At the door the commissioner grimaced, like one who has reluctantly delivered a lamb to a tiger.
Chan was not surprised that Cuthbert led him to the car park of the government building, where he expected the political adviser to summon one of the chauffeur-driven white Toyotas that were a privilege of the most senior ranks in government. The Englishman, though, led him to a vintage Jaguar XJ6 in English racing green with properly scuffed leather upholstery and a sun roof. After opening the front passenger door for Chan, Cuthbert slipped into the driving seat with a soft aspiration of pleasure.
They were screeching around a bend on the way to the Peak when Cuthbert turned on the CD player. Male voices unaccompanied by instruments chanted through the speakers in Latin. Chan guessed it would be to a speeding green XJ6 filled with Gregorian
chants that upper-class English bachelors would graduate when they died. Cuthbert, as usual, was one jump ahead.
Near the top of the mountain, above the level where Chan and Moira had once sat, exclusive settlements of low-rise, low-density, high-value apartments with spectacular views accommodated the great and the rich. About half were owned by government. Cuthbert stopped in the outdoor car park to Beauchamp Villas, led Chan to a lift that waited with open doors. On a brass plate with the list of floors the word
PENTHOUSE
appeared next to the number 5. Cuthbert pressed 5.
The diplomat’s penthouse flat was to light, air and space what Chan’s was to darkness, asphyxiation and cramp. A huge sitting room with bay windows gave views over every part of Hong Kong Island. Orchids pressed against the inside glass; bougainvillaea cascaded over wrought-iron balcony railings; hibiscus tongues licked more orchids in window boxes; frangipani danced in the sunlight. On a tripod by a window a nautical brass telescope cocked a single eye at the sky.
While Cuthbert disappeared to find someone called Hill, Chan collected other evidence of an eccentric and discerning colonial mind. Turkish kilims, Afghan and Persian rugs were scattered haphazardly over the parquet; five shelves of a polished rosewood case with glass doors held the best collection of opium pipes Chan had seen outside an antiques dealer’s showroom. On one wall, a set of classic Chinese rugs and tapestries, framed and behind glass as if they were pictures. On the opposite wall in what may have been the place of honor, a nineteenth-century long-barreled rifle with its worn and torn canvas case and another, slimmer brass telescope. Cuthbert returned in an open-neck shirt and slacks, pointed to one of the rugs.
“Kansu saddle rug with fret and floral medallion, cloud band border. I imagine it on the back of a bandit’s horse somewhere along the silk route between Samarkand and Beijing.”
He led Chan into an annex off the sitting room where a small Italian marble table was laid for lunch. Surrounding the table were huge terra-cotta pots from which small rubber, coffee, caocao, teak
and mahogany trees grew. As he sat down at the table, Chan supposed the humidity in the room was deliberate. It was like picnicking with the viceroy of India, somewhere between Maharbellapuram and Kashmir.
Hill appeared. Unlike Emily, the Englishman did not require his servants to wear uniforms. The Filipino wore jeans, an open-neck short-sleeved shirt.
“Been with me years,” Cuthbert said when Hill was out of earshot. “Damned fine chap. Half Chinese, from Luzon, up in the north somewhere. Lives with his wife just down the road where she’s a maid with a Chinese family. Perfect arrangement. I get Hill all day; I’m alone at night.” He smiled.
This was a different Cuthbert. From the moment they had entered the apartment the diplomat’s manner had subtly changed. A new kindness, an attentiveness to his guest, a commitment to some lost tradition of hospitality soothed even Chan’s nerves. He agreed to a gin and tonic, along with Cuthbert.
“Emily. Smart girl,” Cuthbert said suddenly, as if in answer to a question. He proceeded to butter a roll. “Of course, trying to talk to her about anything other than money is like trying to get an orangutang to play the sitar. Firmly believes she’s Chinese. I keep telling her, ‘You’re not Chinese, dear; you’re Hong Kong.’ And she is. She simply couldn’t have been produced anywhere else in the world. D’you know she’d made four million American dollars profit by the time she was twenty-six? On a single transaction at that.”
Cuthbert sipped his gin and tonic, stared at the stem of his rubber tree. “Damn, fungus. I just don’t know how we manage it, Hill. It never bothered the planters in Malaysia, I know because I once asked one. We must be doing something wrong.”
Chan watched Hill cross the room with the same smile on his face. With a tolerant “yes, sir,” like a batman to an officer, he placed a small earthenware hot plate filled with glowing charcoals on the table and left the room.
Chan replaced his glass on the table. “What kind of transaction?”
Cuthbert stood up, bent over another of the trees for a moment,
then sat down again. “We’ll have to back up a little. Emily’s family, the Pings, they’ve been helping us for decades. Her father fled Shanghai in ’49 but kept his connections there. During the sixties Beijing wasn’t officially talking to us at all. To do business, we had to use go-betweens. Nothing unusual about that, the Chinese invented the go-between system—like everything else. Emily’s an only child. Old Man Ping coached her to take over from him. When I was posted here twelve years ago, I gave her her first job: Xian. I knew I had to get in with him on the ground floor or the whole process of handover would be in jeopardy, and Emily seemed like a good choice. She knew Shanghainese, Xian’s mother tongue, was well connected in southern China and already respected in Hong Kong.” Cuthbert sipped his gin and tonic reflectively. “Women. Doesn’t matter if it’s business or bed, there’s always a complication. Where’s Hill?”
The Englishman’s mind, Chan realized, raced at the same dangerous speed as his Jag. The diplomat left the room while he tried to catch up. Chan acknowledged that Cuthbert
was
answering a question: Chan’s. Back in Cuthbert’s office Chan had asked generally about the availability of top secret information for his inquiry; Cuthbert had commenced providing that information, using his own “need to know” criterion. Emily, it seemed, was a part of the answer.
Chan stood up to look for a bathroom. In the hall he glimpsed Cuthbert’s library. Not for him a few dozen paperbacks rotting in a cupboard. Not even the cultivated man’s set of bookshelves. It was a real library with shelves from floor to ceiling, a small oak stepladder, an oak lectern in front of a window for a man who liked to read standing up. Next to the lectern an ashtray on a pedestal. At another window a cigar-colored leather chesterfield awaited a reader’s pleasure.
Cuthbert was back when Chan returned to the table. He resumed before Chan had sat down. Hill appeared at the same time with a wok of stewed lamb with dry bean curd, which he placed on the hot plate.
“The complication was her greed. She saw an opportunity. She’d
bought the lease to a two-story Chinese house in Central out of her own money, but she didn’t have the funds to redevelop. Banks weren’t going to lend a twenty-six-year-old girl twenty million to build a high-rise, and her old man, being Chinese, wasn’t either unless he owned a majority of the shares in the company. Spirited girl, can’t deny it. Xian was only too pleased to help. He loaned her the money; she built her office block, made her four million profit—and discovered with a jolt that Xian owned her. The old devil had found the ideal way of laundering his ill-gotten gains; Hong Kong real estate. And Emily was the perfect front. Xian’s not the kind of chap you say no to, not if you want to live in this part of the world. The next time he needed to find a home for a few hundred million, he used Emily. Gave her all the status, all the face, all the profit she wanted. But she wasn’t free. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to talk her out of a suicidal depression. Lamb?”
“Emily depressed?”
Cuthbert used a large wooden spoon to serve the lamb. “Mmm. Wouldn’t believe it, would you? But you see, Xian is a life sentence. Even when he dies, she’ll never be free; there’s a whole army standing in line behind him. It’s not that easy to live with, if you’re the independent type. Of course, I couldn’t use her again for anything delicate. It’s part of my job to keep the lines open with Xian, though. It didn’t much matter. Xian and I reached a kind of modus vivendi. We talk almost every day. There’s a lot to do when you’re delivering six million people to someone else for safekeeping.” The Englishman studied Chan for a moment. “I believe you know quite a lot about
laogai
?”
“I have a friend who does.”
“I know, that tiresome old man in Wanchai.”
“Who spent most of his life as a slave in the
laogaidui.
”
“Quite. Then you’ll understand Emily’s self-disgust. She launders money for an organization that derives much of its profit from the use of slaves. Slaves to grow the opium, hump the guns, cook the morphine. Chinese slaves, just like in the Middle Ages. Poor girl, there is absolutely no way out for her. She really is a divided soul.
Tough as nails on the outside, riddled with self-loathing on the inside. Difficult to live with.”
Sometimes Chan couldn’t believe how stupid he was. He should have seen it on the boat, should have caught the subtle clues in tones and eye contact, should have guessed, at least, when Cuthbert had warned him not to sleep with Emily. It was his job, after all, to detect.
He’d been misled, largely, by the Englishman’s personality. One pictured him so much more easily with a cricket bat or a rifle or a leather-bound tome than a woman. The phrase “talk her out of a suicidal depression” echoed in his mind. An ex-lover’s phrase; the sort of duty a gentleman acknowledges toward a woman he’s dropped. Chan saw Emily, ten years younger, less promiscuous, more of a prudish Chinese girl perhaps, wandering through this bachelor’s flat, trying to follow Cuthbert’s encyclopedic conversation. Their arguments would have been worth listening to.
Cuthbert’s revelations about Emily were fascinating but, on reflection, failed to carry the investigation any further.
“Mr. Cuthbert, I don’t understand.”
“Oh?”
Under the diplomat’s raised eyebrows, Chan flustered. He sensed that he was being manipulated with a finesse that produced a twinge of nostalgia for the rough killers of Mongkok. He felt his chin jutting, along with other symptoms of a vulgar belligerence.
“Perhaps you’re trying to help me by supplying this information about Emily Ping. But I don’t see how it fits.”
Cuthbert leaned back in his chair, smiled. “But surely that’s
your
job, old chap?”
Chan felt his tongue start to trip on a stutter. “I—I—I thought, in fact I’m sure, there’s information somewhere, secret, in a computer.… You know? All these people, Xian, Emily Ping, Clare Coletti—they must be known to M16. I thought you would persuade the committee to give me access. I thought that’s why I was invited here to lunch, to discuss it further.”
Too late, Chan realized he’d used a fatal word.
“Committee? You mean some sort of hypersecret little group of
gray men who know everything? Come on, Charlie, I thought back in my office we’d agreed that such a notion was fantastic, absurd?”
“I thought you were being ironic when you denied it.”
Cuthbert wrinkled his brow, rubbed the side of his cheek. “You know, it’s a hard thing for a man like me to admit, but I do believe you’re just a tad too subtle for me.”
Chan felt hairs prickle at the back of his neck. Cuthbert’s mastery of diplomatic humility or sarcasm—with the English there was hardly a distinction—was effortless. Chan couldn’t decide if it would have been worse if the political adviser were Chinese. As a Eurasian one did not always know which race one preferred to be screwed by.
“I’ve been told that I’m to be given every facility.” Stubbornness was the last resort of the outclassed.