by Adam Brookes
On day five, he sat in the restaurant in the morning, watching lawyer Teng arrive for work by car. Mangan had not seen the car before, a blue SUV. The car had a driver, who lingered outside. Lawyer Teng entered his office, only to emerge moments later and climb back into the SUV.
Mangan walked quickly to his hire car. By the time he’d turned around and pulled out, the blue SUV was nowhere to be seen. He sped up the street, checking each way at every intersection.
There it was, stuck half a block ahead, trying to nose out onto a busier thoroughfare. Mangan slipped in two cars behind. Any attempt at discretion abandoned, he struggled simply to keep the blue SUV in sight. At a tricky right turn, he narrowly missed a kid on a moped, jammed on the brakes, and the whole street seemed to be shouting and honking at him. The SUV was picking up speed, heading away from the centre of the city, onto quieter roads lined with scrub and new-growth forest. Mangan fell back, his knuckles white on the wheel, and checked his mirrors. He had no idea where he was. The SUV was turning into a dusty car park.
Paramaribo Zoo.
Mangan parked, watching in his mirror. Lawyer Teng got out of his car and put on a white floppy sun hat. He stood for a moment, looked around, as if searching for someone, then went to buy a ticket and walked purposefully into the zoo. Mangan waited a moment, then stepped from the car, feeling the heat like a walk-in oven. He felt feverish, his mouth dry. He leaned for a moment against the car, then made for the ticket booth and through the front gate. He could smell the reek of the animal cages on the air, heard the yowl of peacocks. He followed a sandy path past the ostrich enclosure, a tree draped in howler monkeys. The zoo was mostly empty of people, a few schoolchildren, the odd tourist. He paused to watch a jaguar, its maddened pacing along the bars, back and forth, back and forth. There was no one behind him, but even so he jogged off the path into the forest, then doubled back. Nothing.
Teng was sitting at a concrete picnic table, his white sun hat visible from a distance. He was alone, but Mangan saw vigilance in him, in his looking about, checking his watch. Mangan cut a slow, wide arc around him, keeping him in sight, absorbing himself in a dusty iguana, otters, owls. He was sweating profusely, his heart pounding.
When Mangan looked back, a man in a pale green polo shirt and shorts had come out of nowhere and was approaching Teng. Teng clearly recognised him, half stood to greet him, then sat again, indicating that Polo Shirt should sit too. Polo Shirt was also of East Asian appearance, middle-aged, with a paunch; ungainly, preoccupied. He sat, then signalled to someone just out of Mangan’s vision to say he would be only a couple of minutes. The two men talked. Lawyer Teng seemed to be asking questions, the other man giving short replies.
Mangan moved carefully on, taking himself out of vision for a few moments, behind a reptile enclosure. He leaned against its plywood wall, breathed deeply, then emerged the other side. The two men were still there, and perhaps thirty or forty feet away from them, at another picnic table, sat two women, also Asian. One older, one younger.
Mangan eased himself closer.
The younger one was very pale and wore spectacles, her hair shoulder length, dressed carelessly. She seemed flushed with the heat, bothered, recalcitrant. The older woman sat very still, unmoving, as if she wished to be anywhere but where she was. The two men were still talking. But then they both stood abruptly, Polo Shirt looking around himself intently. Mangan turned away, too quickly, he knew, busied himself with an enclosure that was, he discovered, empty. He wandered off, his back still to them, shaky now.
What had he just seen?
When he turned back, lawyer Teng was gone, and Polo Shirt was leading the two women back towards the car park, chivvying them along. They looked like a family, the three of them, a dispirited family, amid a dull and incomprehensible holiday, waiting around in the heat while Father conducts brief, intense meetings with lawyers who are linked to Chinese intelligence.
As they walked away, the younger one—the daughter?—turned and looked straight at Mangan.
He abandoned any hope of following either Teng or the family. He drove back to the Buena Vista, crashed and slept for four hours, waking less feverish but weak and listless in the freezing air conditioning. He lay on the bed for a while and turned on the television, a news channel, a meat-faced British anchor rumbling earnestly on, the lack of comprehension in his eyes. He drank a litre of water, forced himself to sit up. He seemed ridiculous to himself.
That evening, Mangan sat in the Mazda down the street from Teng’s house as the sun turned the palm trees to black shadows. He saw the woman come out and water the flowers, and wondered if he was reading far too much significance into the meeting at the zoo. He still felt ill, his limbs heavy and aching, a featheriness in his head. He was appalled by his own clumsiness, and was feeling his incompetence like a welt when he remembered the younger woman’s eyes on him. Surely, she had made him? Sitting in the car now, hour after hour, felt like penance for his own ineptitude, his own vanity. Surveillance? How hard can it be?
But at nine, as he was admitting defeat and hunger and was allowing himself to contemplate a cold beer and a burger and bed, a yellow taxi pulled up, leaving its engine running and its lights on. The front door opened, and a figure emerged, moving quickly. Mangan saw the stiffness, the slight stoop. He started the car, let the taxi pull away before turning on his lights, and pulled out after it.
It turned out to be a short journey, terminating in a car park outside Club Ruby, a vile-looking place, decked out like a hacienda and lit up like a steamboat. But lawyer Teng was positively scampering up its steps, clearly anticipating something. Mangan paid protection on his car to a boy in a baseball cap and went in.
It was the usual thing, he saw, with sinking heart: the would-be hard men on the door and behind the bar with their shaved heads and the stupid tattoos, shatteringly loud music, ultraviolet light that made everyone’s teeth float around in the darkness, the smell of dry ice, cigarettes, cleaning fluid, perfume and body odour. And there were the strung-out girls pumped full of silicon draped on the banquettes, sad simulacra of the women in magazines and on porn sites, while their eyes said closure, attenuation. The über brothel of the world—same in Bangkok, Addis, Santiago, same in Cape Town, Moscow, Jakarta, the same sticky tables, the same pointlessness.
Lawyer Teng had taken a booth and one of the bartenders was there with a bottle of Chivas, ice, tumblers, ducking his head deferentially. So, lawyer Teng is a regular, and a tipper. Mangan eased back into shadow and ordered a Coke, considering how long he should stay. Long enough to see a squad of girls forming a perimeter around Teng’s table, one now sashaying over to him, bending over, running a finger down his lapel, asking him something. Teng shook his head, and the girl, rebuffed, walked away, smiling.
There is a moment, recognisable to an experienced operative, when, after weeks of preparation and cultivation, months of effort, years even, an operation flickers into life, when the hard little bead of possibility breaks open to reveal the actual. A journalist knows the moment, too, that second when the shape of the story starts to show itself, its scope, its layers of meaning. The moment may come with the acquisition of a specific piece of information, or the making of a connection, or an event. Or it may be something far smaller, an inconsistency, a gesture, a look on someone’s face that tells of a lie.
Mangan, over his many years as a reporter, knew such moments and could sense their presence.
And as he watched, Teng looked up and greeted a man in a green polo shirt—the same man who he had met at the zoo. The two of them sat and leaned in, talking intently, Teng tapping the table as if describing his dispositions. And as the music clanged and blared, and the girls’ eyes flickered and lingered in the gloom, and as Teng took something from his pocket, clamped it in his fist and then pushed it across the table to Polo Shirt, who palmed it quickly and stuffed it in his trouser pocket, Mangan knew that he was in such a moment.
The two men looked at each other with a s
ense of finality and accomplishment and understanding, picked up their whisky glasses and drained them. Polo Shirt reclined, relaxing now, his eyes moving to the girls, and Teng leaned over and gave him a tap on the chest with the back of his hand and pointed to a languorous, wide-hipped girl in a white clingy dress and bronze eyeshadow. Polo Shirt’s eyed moved up and down her, then skated away to the others, comparing.
And Mangan knew he had to move very carefully and very fast.
25
To Mangan’s right sat a girl in jeans and a leopard-print top which fell from one bronzed shoulder. Her hair was long and loose, and her gold jewellery cheap and thin. Venezuelan, perhaps? She sensed him looking and turned to him with a high-wattage smile, a full, deep smile, the ultraviolet light rendering her skeletal. She walked over, and Mangan gave her an encouraging nod. She slid onto a chair next to him and touched his arm.
“Hey, baby,” she said.
“Hi there,” said Mangan. “Do you speak English?”
“Yes, baby. I speak whatever you want. My name Eva.” She held out a hand. Mangan shook it, feeling cool, dry skin.
“Well, Eva, let me buy you a drink, and then I want to ask you something.”
She ordered vodka, which she drank through a little straw, her big eyes on him.
“Eva, you see that man over there, in the green shirt?”
“Yes, baby.”
“Well, I need to know who he is.”
“You ask him.”
“No. I don’t want to talk to him.”
She was losing interest fast, her eyes skating around the room.
“Well, I don’t know, baby.”
“Eva, I’ll pay you a hundred dollars if you go over to him and talk to him, and find out what his name is, or where he’s staying or anything at all.”
“Hundred dollars? U.S.?”
“Two hundred.”
Her eyes widened. Then she frowned.
“Why you want to know?”
“There’s no problem. I just need to know.”
“You are police?”
“No. No, nothing like that.”
“Oh baby, you are police.”
“Really, I promise. Not police.”
“So why?”
Mangan leaned into her.
“I am a journalist.”
She looked at him, wondering.
“Journalist? Like, newspaper.”
“Yes! That’s right. It’s a big story. And I need you to help me.”
She looked back at Polo Shirt, considering.
“He is bad man?”
“No. He’s okay. Just … some business. We need to be quick, Eva, or he might go with another girl.”
“Maybe he don’t want talk to me.”
“You’re beautiful, he’ll talk to you.”
She rolled her eyes, made a face at him.
“Three hundred, Eva.” He took a one-hundred-dollar bill and gave it to her. She put it in her purse with a sigh.
“After you’ve spoken to him, you come outside. I’ll be waiting in my car. I’ll wait for you.”
“You want to know—”
“Anything. Who he is. Where he’s staying, his name, where he’s from. Try for me, okay?”
She looked back at him, tilting her head slightly to one side, as if to ask him, What are you making me do? Then she stood up—tall, slender—and walked across the dance floor towards lawyer Teng and Polo Shirt.
Mangan sat in the car in the dark, watching. Just after eleven, Teng came out, by himself. He was very drunk and he looked around, bewildered. A taxi driver went to him, took him by the arm and guided him to a cab.
No sign of Polo Shirt or Eva. Mangan smoked while he waited, jabbed his fingernails in his wrist to stay awake.
At eleven thirty-three, there she was. She walked out of the front doors quickly, her face down. The doorman said something to her but she ignored him. When she got to the bottom of the steps she looked up, searching the car park. Mangan was up and out of the car. She saw him. When she got into the car, he smelled cigarette smoke and sweat on her. He started the car and drove in what he thought was the direction of the city centre. She was silent, looked straight ahead. When he saw a quiet side street, he turned down it and pulled over.
“So? Eva?”
She turned to him and her face was set, hard.
“Eva?”
“You have my money?”
“Are you okay?”
A car passed behind them, its headlights sliding over her face and he saw that her mascara was smudged and her face was older, the lines around the eyes showing. We call them girls, he thought, though they’re women. And her lip, he saw, was fattened and split.
“What happened?” he said.
“So I go talk to him, and he want to go to the room, so we go upstairs.” She stopped, looking straight ahead.
Mangan waited.
“And then …” Her voice tailed off.
“What happened?”
She just shook her head.
“You say three hundred.”
“Yes.”
She took a deep breath.
“I ask him, but he don’t say nothing.”
“Nothing at all?”
She just shook her head.
“He don’t want to talk. I say, where you from, baby? You from China? Where? He just tell me shut up.”
“What about—”
“I try. I say, ‘Where you stay? You stay in Paramaribo? You very wealthy guy, baby, I can tell, you stay at Torarica?’ He just say no, shut up.” She had started to cry a little, the tears welling, on the edge of spilling onto her cheeks.
“Eva, I—”
“Don’t give me bullshit. You are bullshit. You say he’s not bad guy.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Fuck you. Bullshit.”
Mangan swallowed.
“What happened?”
“He tell me shut up. Then he hit me. Then he fuck me.”
She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. Mangan looked away.
“You see?” she said. He turned back to her and she was examining the front of her flimsy little leopard-skin top, smoothing it out, picking at it, and Mangan saw that it was stained, and understood that the stains were blood. You see?
“Three hundred, you say you will give me.”
Mangan reached in his pocket, pulled out a wad of bills. He counted them out and added another hundred and she took them without a glance.
“I’m so sorry,” he said.
She was making to open the door, readying to get out, when she stopped, pursed her lips, wiped her eyes again.
“He is from America, USA.”
Mangan sat very still.
“His name, Tao. T-A-O. Mitchell Tao.”
“I thought you said—”
“He went in the bathroom. His pants on the bed. I look in his wallet. Driver’s licence from Maryland, USA.”
“Eva—”
She got out of the car but then turned, leaned back in and tossed something in his lap.
“And this.”
A matchbook. The Regal Hotel, Paramaribo.
“You never talk to me again. Never.”
She slammed the door hard, and walked off into the night.
26
Washington, DC
It was the ghastly Black Rooster again. Patterson got there first, after an hour-long surveillance detection run, cutting over towards Georgetown and along the river for a bit, then cabbing it to Dupont and spiralling her way back down to M Street in the soft evening light, through the college kids and the commuter crowd and a group of bowler-hatted black guys busking on trombones. Not much, but preferable to nothing at all.
Is that what this is? Playing at being operational?
But then she remembered the charred house by the bay, Molly Monroe’s hair stuck to her hand. Washington. Just beneath the surface it was foul with secrets.
She took a seat and ordered a glass of red. And then Polk wa
s standing over her in his awful suit, breathing hard, trying not to show it. She looked up at him. He held his hands out.
“Patterson,” he said.
“It’s Trish,” she said.
“Gesundheit.”
He turned to look for a waiter.
“In England,” she said, “we don’t have waiters in pubs.”
“Really? You amaze me.”
“Detracts from the authentic pub experience, in my view.”
“Jeez, you detract much more from this place, there’ll be nothing left but the smell.”
“You said it.”
“That’s why it suits me.” He ordered a pale ale in a bottle and sat with his hands on the table, as if to show he wasn’t about to reach for his Glock.
“So, Patterson. Why the urgency? Is there a flap? That’s what you guys call it, isn’t it? A flap?”
All right, she thought. Go carefully. Don’t explain, just tell.
“So. I went to see the wife. Molly. In hospital.”
“Excuse me?”
“I went—”
“I heard what you said, Patterson, I’m wondering why the fuck you would do that.”
Oh, shit. Push on.
“Did you know they had a cottage? Like a vacation home?”
He said nothing, but those blue eyes were locked on her.
“I went and took a look,” she said.
He allowed his head to fall forward and his eyebrows to shoot up. Still, she pushed on.
“It’s in a place called Wachapreague. That’s down in Virginia, on the coast.”
“I know where it is, Patterson.”
“Yes. Well. Someone had searched it. And then tried to burn it. The house.”
He started to rub his chin.
“And there was someone there, keeping watch. Gave me a bit of a fright, I don’t mind telling you.”
He was starting to do his writhing thing.
“Okay. I see. A bit of a fright,” he said. He was staring at her now, wide-eyed. “What else d’you find?”
She paused, took a sip of her wine, working the moment.