“So you’re only part orphan,” she said. “You could talk to your mother if you wanted to. You have grandparents. You have Henry.”
“You do too, if he’s alive.”
We sat in her living room on a long deep sofa, six floors above Park Avenue, its muted traffic noise a sort of background music, not exactly next to each other but close enough that she could refill my glass from the decanter on the coffee table, her cat appraising me from the chair opposite. At one point I said something that made her laugh – perhaps my description of Mercury – and she leaned over and very briefly put her head on my shoulder. Or so I remember it.
“When do you want me in Hong Kong?” she said finally.
“Soon as you can,” I said.
“May I bring presents for my nephews?”
“They have no conception of presents. Just bring yourself. I expect they will like you.”
I realized the next day that we had never really spoken about Amanda. Wrong of me, polite of her. Julia had beautiful manners the whole way through.
11
I recount this next episode with some embarrassment, but it cannot be left out. After a week with the correspondence and the associated files Serena had told me to ask Catherine for – work I managed to fit in while attending to Julia – I called my “spymistress” and said I wanted to see her. I offered no explanation, and she didn’t ask for one.
“Give me a minute,” she said. There was the sound of pages being ruffled. “Bali,” she said. “I hear it’s sexy. Reserve something at the Four Seasons. I’ll be on the BA flight that gets to Denpasar on Saturday afternoon.”
On reflection, I decided “something” could be interpreted as a suite. I flew to Bali on Thursday – I was pretending to go to Japan – but also to be sure the place I was taking Serena was luxurious enough. When I got there it turned out that “suite” meant a free-standing grass house containing a king-size bed and some other furniture, a covered eating area with a table and chairs, and in between, open to the sky, a stone terrace, a plunge pool and five kinds of flowering trees and bushes.
“I’ve never been here before,” I told Serena, feeling slightly embarrassed.
“Very satisfactory,” she said.
When we opened the door of our little compound to go to dinner, the couple in the opposite suite, with whom we shared a wall a person my height could almost see over, opened theirs too. They were both western-educated People’s Republic of China Chinese. As is inevitable in that sort of resort, we said hello, and talked a bit on the path up to the dining room, and somehow decided to have dinner together. “Unless you want privacy,” they said.
“No, no, fine,” we said.
They were honeymooners, presumably starved for new conversation. Calvin was from Shanghai, Pansy from Beijing. They’d met at Princeton, lived in Bangkok but were moving to Hong Kong, they said. He worked for an American consulting firm, she for a Chinese company with a long, forgettable name. Bangkok was nice because it was inexpensive. Her father was a professor of geology at Peking University and her mother was an engineer. His parents were close to retirement. When they had a child, his parents would take care of it.
“They have more room,” said Pansy.
I considered asking whether they planned to join the Party. Belonging wasn’t supposed to be a secret anymore, and I thought it might lead to an interesting conversation. But Serena wasn’t talking much, so I didn’t. They left us with our coffee.
Serena told me later that “more room” was Pansy’s way of indicating Calvin’s father’s rank. Or conceivably his mother’s. Her guess was vice minister. “Rank is critical,” she said. “They have to let you know – want to let you know – and you have to reciprocate, but it all has to be in code, like at a London dinner party. The jump from vice minister to minister is a big one. If one of their parents was a minister, she’d have signaled it somehow.”
When we got back, Serena insisted we have a dunk in the plunge pool. We took turns going into the bedroom house and changing. I got in first and sat on the underwater seat, and tried not to look when she came out in a neon blue bikini. She leaned against the wall opposite from me, the flower-petal-strewn water lapping around her shoulders. Neither of us spoke. After a minute she undid her top and flopped it on the flagstones beside the pool. The desire this awoke in me made me stupid. I failed to remind myself that being here was part of her job. I thought we were falling in love.
I found it impossible not to touch her breasts. She let me, making loudly appreciative noises. Then she suddenly put her finger to her lips. In the ensuing silence, a chair scraped against the stone floor on the other side of the wall. “Do some more,” she whispered in my ear, and moaned when I complied. “Oh, darling,” she said finally and aloud, “you’d better take me to bed.”
I got into bed first, but when Serena came out of the bathroom she curled up under a blanket on the couch. I felt like I’d been kicked in the stomach, and rolled over on my side, that being the only strategy I had ever found for coping with pain. There was a moment, just before I went to sleep, when I thought she might slip in beside me after all. We didn’t have to make love. It felt like she was maybe thinking about it herself. But she didn’t stir.
When I woke in the morning, she’d disappeared. I lay in bed staring at the ceiling and wondered what would happen next. When she returned I pretended to have been asleep, pretended she’d spent the night somewhere else. She was in running shorts and a tee shirt, dripping wet but strangely subdued. We shared some tropical fruits I had never seen before, and a pot of coffee. I read a day-old International Herald Tribune while she showered, put on her bikini, and wrapped a big cotton scarf around her waist. Then we went for a long walk on the beach and she explained that the “quote” newlyweds were the intelligence officers who had followed us on the Peak – “or at least she is.” The fact they were there gave me a brief shudder. As at the Hong Kong Club that first morning, I was being watched.
“So why the plunge pool?” I couldn’t help asking.
“Fringe benefit,” said Serena.
“For you or for me?”
She gave me a smile. “I want them to think we’re here for a tryst,” she said. “It’s what we would have done. I want them to think Hong Kong was part of my job as a high flier in the City, and, overachiever that I am, I couldn’t resist the challenge of getting the famous Jonathan Lee into bed. They may or may not know about…the rest of what I do, but I don’t want them to think you and your bank have anything to do with it.”
“Should we have gone for a run together?” I asked, thinking about other ways we could have perfected our cover.
She paused. “I had to make contact,” she said. “I have to do that every day. There’s a lot I have to do, and other stuff I can’t do. I hope you understand.”
“What if you’d overslept?”
“Don’t know, really. I suppose a ‘friend’ might have delivered some complimentary coffee, or something, if they’d thought it was an emergency.”
“Nice to have someone watching your back.”
She hesitated again. “It would be, but it isn’t always possible. One of the boys in my intake got killed a week ago. I just heard this morning.”
“Details classified?”
“Yes, but I might as well tell you. He seems to have recruited a psychopath. You aren’t a psychopath, are you, sweetheart?” And then in further explanation, “Spies don’t steal secrets. They recruit people in a position to steal secrets.”
“Traitors,” I said, sounding like Charleston grandfather.
She didn’t respond to that.
Anger finds a way to get out, I reminded myself. I told her what I had discovered. Pearl River Bank lent money to shell companies in Hong Kong, which in turn bought real estate in Spain or Sardinia or wherever. The ownership of the companies was vague. For a year or two the companies paid interest and principal as agreed. If you checked the figures, you discovered that the loan often exce
eded the purchase price of the property. There was sometimes an explanatory reference to “improvements,” but I was guessing the purpose was to make the mortgage payments for a while. Eventually the loans went bad. Then there was typically correspondence saying there was a technical problem with the mortgage, and a memorandum concluding that it would be cheaper to write the loan off than to pursue legal action overseas. The bank seemed to make half a dozen loans like this every year.
“So that’s how he does it,” said Serena. “But wouldn’t the pattern be obvious to anyone reviewing the portfolio?”
“The files Catherine brought me were copies he keeps in cabinets in his outer office. The real loan files are scattered among tens of thousands. And the losses don’t make a ripple in the bank’s financials.”
“Anything worth knowing about the directors of the shell companies? Mostly meaningless names, I suppose.”
“Yes, for the most part. But Zhang Hai Ming shows up twice in the past five years, meaning that he was party to defaulting on loans from the bank. I wondered if he was blackmailing Henry. These loans don’t all have to be going to support the system.” Then something else occurred to me. “Who’s the last person to get out this way? Do you know?”
“A noncompliant director general of what we would call the censorship bureau, who was letting too much get into the newspapers. Not exactly a dissident, but doing as much as he realistically could for as long as he could manage.”
“When?”
“A few weeks ago. We talked to him in Toronto.”
“Did he have paint on his hands, or in his hair?”
“Um, yes.”
“You personally interviewed him?”
“I shouldn’t say, but yes, we asked about the paint.”
“Were you going to tell me about him? I knew him. Or I mean, I saw him. He was working in the Castle, as a painter. It makes it all real.”
“China specializes in real,” said Serena, answering none of my questions. “But if you want real, there is something else you should probably know. That servant who helped Song at the dinner party at your house.”
“Yes. I think of him as the ‘intelligent waiter,’ because of his eyes.”
“He didn’t make it. Pulled off the train to the airport at the Tsing Yi stop – less than two hours from the flight to Vancouver and freedom. We had a friend on the train, who of course couldn’t help him.”
“Pulled off the train by the police?”
“Of course not. They can’t involve the Hong Kong police.” She suddenly seemed annoyed by my naïveté – or perhaps at herself for telling me things she shouldn’t. She was new at her job, I realized later. We walked a while without speaking. After a bit she took hold of my hand and gave it a squeeze.
Looking back, my entire experience with Serena could be described as an adolescent fantasy streaked with grim truth: dinner at the Castle, our walk on the Peak, and there in Bali on a pretend dirty weekend.
Half my thoughts, as we ambled down the beach, were of Serena in the plunge pool, half of Catherine in her severe black dress, setting files in front of me on Henry’s desk, putting her finger to her lips, and then opening to specific pages and pointing to crucial sentences.
Henry’s office was nearly as monastic as his bedroom, except that it was furnished as a modern chairman’s office should be: massive desk, credenza behind it, framed photographs of Amanda and the little boys, quite a nice one of me, a sofa and two chairs across from the desk, reproductions of traditional Chinese landscape paintings on the walls. There was nothing whatsoever to tell you what kind of person Henry was. His library at the Castle was where he “lived.” His office was where he engaged outsiders. As I thought about it, I realized that I had almost never had a meeting with Henry in his own office.
We were coming into an area of beach with other tourists on it. Some of the women were bare-breasted.
“Henry’s phone is tapped, isn’t it?” I said.
“Almost certainly. You were perfect when you called me, by the way.”
“His office?” I asked.
“Much harder for them to do, and riskier. Tapping a phone just requires the telephone company to look the other way. Planting a bug is an intrusion. If someone finds it, there can be a lot of fuss. Beijing tries to use a light touch in Hong Kong.”
“Henry’s secretary cautioned me not to say anything. How about my office?”
“Phone yes, just on principle. Office no. I hate to say it, sweetheart, but they probably regard you as unimportant. I hope we can keep it that way.”
Sweetheart?
“Let’s sit down here,” Serena said. She took off her top and handed it to me. “Put it in your pocket.” She turned around and had me put sunscreen on her back. The minute I was finished she stood up, stepped past me and extended her hand to the “honeymooners,” who had evidently been following us.
“Come on, Pansy,” she said. “What’s the point of being in Bali if you don’t follow the local customs?”
I got up and turned around to see Pansy looking fierce as a 1960s propaganda poster and her “husband” grinning uncontrollably.
“Not my thing,” said the Chinese girl. There was an awkward silence before they walked on.
“You want your top back?” I said to Serena.
“Not yet,” she said, splendid girl that she was. We watched our Chinese shadows continue down the beach and merge into the crowd.
“She does seem to be in charge,” I said.
“Absolutely,” said Serena. “Now, back to your friend Zhang. I’ve done some more reading about him. Very friendly with the triads, though not part of them. Terrible reputation. No arrests.”
“Friends in the police?”
“Possible, but…no. He has the look of an informer, but he’d be dead by now if that was his game. The triads also have friends in the police, of course.”
“How does he make his money?”
“Doesn’t seem to need to, though I suppose he could smuggle things in and out of the mainland if he wanted to. He would know the right people. He used to have a trucking company, though he appears to have sold it.”
More half-naked vacationers had planted themselves near us on the beach. Fully dressed local women were offering massages. I was finding the whole situation intoxicating.
“Should I be afraid of Zhang?” I heard myself asking. I was thinking about the pistol Henry kept beside his bed.
“You must never be afraid, sweetheart,” said Serena, “but do be careful” – all in a voice that let me believe we might eventually become lovers. Then she was on her feet and brisk again. “Early lunch before your plane?”
Her return flight to London turned out to be on Monday. Was I supposed to stay till then? Probably not, I decided. But when she teased me by hinting at possibilities was she playing with my head or with her own? Spies have to take physical risks – and presumably enjoyed the surge of adrenalin it gave them. Perhaps they liked emotional risks too. But what pleasure could there be in that? Either you fell in love with your “asset,” which is what I was, and had your heart broken, or you didn’t fall in love and felt dirty. I didn’t like thinking about any of that, so I didn’t.
12
Hong Kong has humidity the way human beings have a subconscious. Even on crisp winter days, you know it is there. You go up on the Peak, and there are clouds despite it being sunny in Central. If you live on the Peak, clouds practically come in your window some mornings. Wong Castle is well down the slope, but we get plenty of fog, and give home to many lizards.
I walked up the glistening path through the mist on Sunday evening to learn that Julia had helped the little boys catch one. They were squealing and jumping up and down in their room, and when I appeared at the door they grabbed me by the hands and made me peek into the shoebox they were keeping it in. The creature took its chance to escape, and Tommy went running for Julia while Philip and I looked behind the curtains.
“Close the door,” said
Julia. “We just have to be systematic.” We spotted him on the wall above Philip’s bed. Quick as a flash, my son had it, and Julia helped him return it to its box.
“The problem is,” she said, sitting on one of the beds, “they want to look at it, but when they do that it gets free. We need a terrarium. Welcome home, by the way, and how was Tokyo?”
“I’m cautiously optimistic.”
“Well, I’m not. Your Mr. Mercury Chao was here for tea within hours of your departure. Amanda introduced us. He wants to talk to you.” She was holding the shoebox in her lap, with a boy on each side of her.
“What about?”
“Well, I suppose about merging rather than having a long, drawn-out battle. That’s what Amanda said.”
“We’re not going to do that,” I said, then yelled, “Stop it, Tommy!” The boy had gotten hold of a mirror, the kind with a round face and a mother-of-pearl handle such as my mother had on her vanity table. He was using it to shine light from the lamp between the beds into my eyes. Tommy dropped the mirror. I’d overreacted.
“New toy,” said Julia. “They found it in my room.”
Amanda came into the room. “Ah, you’re home,” she said.
Song was right behind her, coming to get the little boys ready for bed.
“Have you seen their gecko?” I said.
“What?” said Amanda.
Philip looked up from the mirror. “Newmommie looks like us,” he said.
Julia blushed, stood up and handed Amanda the shoebox. “It’s in here. We caught it on the porch.” Amanda handed it quickly to Song.
“Bedtime,” said Song in her BBC voice. “The adults must leave now.”
The little boys insisted on kissing Julia good night. She nodded in the direction of Amanda, who was standing at the door, and they administered similar dismissals to her, and then to me. Song had taught them to do that, I think.
“You appear to be a hit,” said Amanda, when we got to the living room. “That may be the first time they have spoken.”
The Daughters of Henry Wong Page 10