by John Burdett
“Feminists? What do I care about feminists? To be a feminist, you have to believe that men have all the power. My problem is I’m too formidable. I can kill an erection on an Italian in two seconds flat. Eighteen months ago I persuaded myself that it wasn’t my chain saw personality that ruined my sex life but the size of my bust. So I had implants and discovered that it was my chain saw personality after all. And to make matters worse, they’re giving me trouble, and I’m thinking of joining a class action against that surgeon in Los Angeles who performed the operation. There are about sixty women like me all with pains in their chests and feeling nervous.”
“No one in your life at the moment?”
She raised her shoulders, lifted her hands. “Are you kidding? I’m too busy.”
“What about that blond?”
“A mere Kleenex, darling.” When Jonathan winced, she added, “He’s a new recruit to the government’s prosecutions department. Hardly my style.”
“Ah! Really no one else?”
She smiled. “You know why I love having lunch with you, Johnny? You’re the only man in this town under fifty who isn’t scared of me. All right, there was a guy last week in Shanghai, very sensitive, artistic-reminded me of you. I had to drop him, though. Clinging. Gave him some money to get lost. How’s your partnership going? I might have some work for you-something big. Even bigger than last time.”
Wong put down his drink, used his chopsticks to pick up a tiny piece of pickled ginger. He looked around the room. In total the men and women gathered at the club represented a wealth equal to the gross national products of some European countries. Together they could have bought Manhattan, if they had not done so already. But with all the frantic energy that Hong Kong created it had never made a single significant contribution to any form of science, art or literature, with the doubtful exception of Bruce Lee movies. Each of the hundred or so conversations taking place in English, Cantonese, Mandarin, Fukienese, Shanghainese, German, French and Italian was centered one way or another on the same thing, and it wasn’t love or the improvement of mankind. He often wondered if he would have been happier if he’d been less lucky. Perhaps struggling to make art films somewhere in Europe; a tortured affair with a woman who talked about her feelings; friends who worried about the state of the world.
He looked at his friend, smiled. “I can never thank you enough, you know that.”
She beamed. “Now, more important, how’s Jenny?”
Wong beamed too, leaned forward. In matters of intimacy he and Emily spoke in Cantonese. “We’re pregnant. It’s official.”
Emily let out a cry, stretched both arms over her head. “Bravo.”
Everyone turned, looked at Emily and turned back to their food. She grinned. With a hand half cupped she beckoned a waiter and ordered champagne. He returned immediately with a silver ice bucket on a blackwood pedestal. People turned again when the cork popped.
They clinked glasses.
“And what are you going to call the bambino? Are you going for the traditional Hong Kong hybrid of English stroke Cantonese?”
“Probably. For the sake of the family we’ll have one of the usual Chinese ones.” He reeled off a list of traditional Cantonese names. The girls’ names always included the name of a flower; the boys’ invoked wisdom.
Emily nodded approval. “By the way, thanks for the party the other night. You know that was the first time I met your brother-in-law. I must have missed him at the wedding.”
“It’s easy to miss him. He never stays long at social events.”
Emily swallowed some more champagne. “An intense-looking type. Does he talk to you much about his work?”
“Only if I let him.”
“Interesting?”
Wong grimaced. “Don’t tell me you fancied him?”
“He told me he was investigating those Mincer Murders. Gorree!”
“You want me to introduce you properly? He loves to dole out reality sandwiches to the pampered classes.”
“Oh, I’m not that interested. Weird, though, mincing up three people like that.”
“Triads.”
“I guess.” She picked up a piece of pickled ginger with her chopsticks, glanced around the room. She leaned forward, whispered: “So, you haven’t had a chance to find out what’s behind the Mincer Murders from your manic brother-in-law?”
Wong stopped eating. “Emily, what is this? Are you going through some kind of change? Since when did you care about what the criminal classes got up to?”
She sighed. “Oh, you know, as I get older, I wonder about how the other half lives. Don’t you? We’re pretty cushioned, people like you and me, aren’t we?”
Wong shrugged. “From wayward meat mincers? I hope so. Can we change the subject now? I’m looking forward to my braised abalone.”
Emily laughed. Toward the end of the meal she revealed that on this occasion she was paying. She insisted that they end with Wong’s favorite brandy, Armagnac.
16
Emily left Wong in the lobby of the China Club to refresh herself in the ladies’ room. She checked her Longines gold watch: 2:45. She had five minutes to reach the new Bank of China, which was ten minutes away walking slowly in the heat. It didn’t matter that she would be a little late; punctuality was something Communists rarely worried about.
She checked her face in the mirror, smoothed her blouse over her sore breasts, took the lift down to the ground floor. At the new Bank of China building she showed her ID card to the old man at reception, who telephoned up to the top floor. She was shown to a private lift at the back of the building. Unlike the lifts in the public lift bank, it stopped on only one floor: the top.
Fear made her stomach flutter. The meeting with Wong had not gone as well as she had hoped. His news about the pregnancy of his wife had taken her by surprise and made it difficult to talk about money and murder. The fact was, she had little to report, except that in the end Jonathan Wong would do whatever she told him to do.
She stepped out at the top floor. As a state-owned bank the Bank of China was more than a commercial branch of the PRC; it was a center of intelligence gathering and surveillance as important in its own way as the New China News Agency, which functioned as the PRC’s consulate in Hong Kong. The new bank building had been designed to accommodate visiting cadres. There was a sauna room, Jacuzzis, large bedrooms with videos and televisions, a huge kitchen that was manned twenty-four hours a day and a cocktail area with the best views of Hong Kong that money could buy. Better, the new Bank of China was the tallest building in Central. From the start it was envisaged that the People’s representatives would not suffer during their frequent visits to the despised British colony.
She was shown upstairs to the glass-enclosed cocktail area on the roof of the building, where the old man was waiting. Seventy stories below, toy cars sped along Connaught Road; tiny ships lay at anchor in the harbor; the richest city on earth lay at the feet of the seventy-year-old man lounging in an Italian leather-and-chrome armchair. The owner of possibly the largest personal fortune in the world after the sultan of Brunei’s, he wore an open-neck shirt of the kind that could be bought in Stanley Market, khaki slacks. His worn sneakers rested on a suede footstool hand-stitched out of brown and beige triangles.
He did not rise to greet her. Nor did he offer her one of the cigarettes that he shook out of a flimsy pack: Imperial Palace, unavailable outside the PRC.
“So?”
She took a seat opposite him, sat straight, tried to attract his attention. Some kind of sexual chemistry might have been useful in these interviews, but he had never shown the slightest interest. His age didn’t help either. Mass murderers do not necessarily mellow with the passage of time. His wiry form reminded her of a ginseng root. She recognized in it the will of her people at its crudest. Her striking looks, enlarged breasts, billions in assets, the respect she was able to command throughout Hong Kong and anywhere else in the world where money was revered had no effect at a
ll on this ugly old man. Still without looking at her, he started to pick his nose.
“You had lunch with your little friend the lawyer?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“I told you, he’ll do whatever we want.”
“Yes, that I already know. How did you develop the matter today? That’s what interests me.”
“I’ll phone him in a day or two; he’ll come to see me at my house. If you’re really serious about this.”
The old man grinned. “What could be more serious than five hundred million American dollars?”
“In cash? It’s pure provocation.”
He laughed with a whinny like a horse. “Not provocation. Convenience. I’m tired of these gweilo games. Why should we hide anymore? With only two months to go, we’ve won already. Now we can start enjoying the victory.”
“I know. I guess I don’t understand why you need to move five hundred million again so soon. Less than a month ago you also moved half a billion dollars.”
An expression of intense fury passed over the old man’s face. He caught himself. “I’d forgotten I’d told you. There was no laundering involved on that occasion. We were paying for something. In cash. This next consignment I want to be clean and official. There are still parts of Hong Kong we haven’t yet bought.”
Emily breathed in deeply. “I can’t think what.”
The old man twisted his features into a smirk. “Now, tell me, this interesting piece of luck with that detective-did you explore it at all?”
“The only lucky part is that Chief Inspector Chan is Jonathan Wong’s brother-in-law. The rumor is that Chan himself is a dedicated fanatic, who hates Communists. I don’t know what you expect Jonathan to do.”
“Do? They’re in the same family, aren’t they? Your friend is rich; the detective is poor. How much does he want?”
She watched while he took a long draw on his cigarette.
“I told you, he’s dedicated. I don’t think he takes money.”
The old man kicked the footstool away, turned to look at her for the first time. “Everyone takes money. Anyway, he’s half Chinese, isn’t he?” He laughed again, then made a long retching noise in his throat. About to spit, he remembered that there was no spittoon. He swallowed instead. “Cuthbert will have to deal with it.”
“He won’t. Aiding and abetting isn’t part of the deal; you know that. He’ll turn a blind eye, but that’s all he’ll do.”
The old man had a way of looking with one eye closed, immobile as a lizard on a rock.
“Are you telling me we may be driven to something more decisive?”
Emily felt her cheeks burning. She rose, stood directly in front of the old man, who blinked.
“Can’t you people get it through your skulls that you can’t just kill everyone who gives you trouble? Yes, I’m daring to yell at you; are you going to kill me too?”
He laughed then. “Who said anything about killing? I want the little detective to carry out his investigation. I want to know who died in that mincer. I want him to tell me first-perhaps exclusively.”
He stared at her. She felt the fear again, a sense of doom in the pit of her stomach. Never raise your voice to a psychopath. She sat on the footstool, kept her eyes below his.
“I’m sorry. Everyone thinks you had them killed. Give me another few weeks. I’ll see what I can do. I have a few ideas.”
The old man sneered at her. “What ideas?”
“Wong needs to get to know his brother-in-law better first. They’re not great friends. I’ll try to set it up.”
The old man grunted. “It’s not urgent until the little detective gets close. I want to know what happened to those three before Cuthbert is told.” He stared at her. “D’you still fuck him?” He smirked at her discomfort. “Pity. You could have kept me informed about how much he knows, our little English diplomat. They’re going to make him Sir Milton Cuthbert when he goes back in July. If you’d managed to marry him, you would have been Lady Cuthbert.” He sniggered.
“I don’t understand. Why are you so interested in those killings if you didn’t do it? It was probably just triads; people like that get snuffed out.”
The old man turned his face away from her. “Maybe. See what you can do about the detective anyway-make friends with him, find out what stage he’s at. Fuck him if you have to. And as far as the five hundred million is concerned, I expect results. It’s been hanging around for too long. You don’t want to lose those development rights along the Pearl River, do you? You have a lot of money riding on that. All your money, taking the personal guarantees into account. I don’t think you want to be poor.”
Seeing the expression on her face, he laughed again.
When she had gone, the old man picked up a telephone on a coffee table near his left hand, told his secretary whom he wished to speak to. When the telephone rang, he began speaking immediately in Mandarin, his voice heavy with condescension. At the end of the conversation he said: “By the way, don’t impersonate me again. I want this investigation to continue. I want to know who died and who did the killing.” His reply to the question that followed was to hang up. After a moment’s thought he pressed the intercom button again. “Get me the other Englishman, the one in London. And stay on the line; I’ll need you to translate.”
17
Moira was a generous lover. Generous and adventurous, the beneficiary of a culture that ordained that the over forties must have fun. Chan was surprised she’d had the delicacy to sober up before his return from work and more surprised that she’d been able to arouse him when Angie hadn’t. She was unexpectedly sensitive, and then there was a self-sufficiency to her suffering that attracted him. Half dreaming beside her, he found it possible to believe he lay with a woman whose soul was as big as the world. He liked her breasts. They were large, pendulous, friendly. He formed a spoon around her body to hold them while she slept. She woke up once to say thank you, turned over, fell into a deep sleep.
As usual he remained awake. After a while he slid out of bed, closed the door, sat naked on the couch to smoke. He turned on the television with the sound off. Monks who had perfected the art of kung fu in the Shao Lin Monastery flew through the air, slaughtering their opponents against the usual impossible odds. On another channel an aging landowner in mandarin dress was taking his daughter to market when they were ambushed by a gang of robbers. Fear of rape, pillage and murder was amplified by the makeup. China dramas usually dug into the distant violent past. The recent violent past was too much for most stomachs.
He turned back to the monks of Shao Lin. He’d gone through his karate stage. To perfect the body to the point where you could defy gravity was a legend engraved in the imagination of every Asian boy. He lit another cigarette, coughed, wondered what to do about Moira.
The truth was, she was only the second Western woman with whom he’d been involved. Comparisons were inevitable. He wondered if the learning curve he’d been through with Sandra was applicable to an American. What he remembered most about his English wife was her complaining. She was very different from a Chinese wife; the problem did not seem to lie in lack of material possessions or social status. Sandra’s moans emanated from high moral ground. Hong Kong was shallow and materialistic, greedy, inhuman. Chan deduced that the British Isles were a fortress of psychological depth, moral courage, human kindness. He set himself to understand more, to take advantage of his wife’s wisdom and background. He found that she had an agile wit that ranged over English and American cultures with apparent ease. She used different voices, different accents to accord with certain moods. One funny little voice was used when she wished to convey affection. Chan wondered why she could not express love in her own voice, but he learned to live with it. A phony New York accent was used when she would have liked to be forceful; an upper-class British accent appeared when she thought he was being uncouth.
It was the videos that precipitated the end, though he could never have predicted i
t. He’d subscribed to a rental shop largely to try to alleviate the homesickness she complained of from time to time. She’d reacted with enthusiasm, renting mostly old videos of English comedy shows with a strong satirical, self-mocking bite. As he’d sat with her night after night, he’d begun to realize where her voices came from. Not only her voices. Her opinions, her moral postures-even her disdain for Hong Kong was a rerun of a BBC documentary. The English, it seemed, in their cold, wet climate spent hours in front of televisions being told what to think and who to be. He was married to a collage of Monty Python, Spitting Image, Black Adder, Not the Nine o’Clock News and a range of similar shows.
At the start she had been vehemently antiracist. Indeed Chan had worried that she had married him out of an excess of political correctness. Little by little, though, odd epithets had poked through the facade, like barbed wire through snow. English mockery was highly developed and embraced the world. French were Frogs, Germans were Krauts, Scandinavians were Hurdy-Gurdies, Italians and Greeks were Dagos, Chinese were Chinks or Chokies, Japanese were Nips. Was it possible that behind the television programs there cowered a mean-spirited people smaller than life?
Chan had probed further (he was looking for the woman he had married). Political opinions were reproduced verbatim from the Guardian; feminism was lifted direct from Cosmopolitan. Even her vegetarianism was tainted. She ate tiny dishes of vegetables to keep her figure, but when she discovered how well the Cantonese roasted duck, she stole morsels from Chan’s plate with a self-forgiving smirk. Under questioning (she called it interrogation) she seemed to consist most of an appetite for sex, marijuana and Greek sheep’s yogurt, with a nonspecific resentment that could fixate without warning on anything but most frequently targeted men and capitalism. Sobbing, she accused him of misogyny and chauvinism, two words that peppered her speech. He shook his head; it was worse than that. He’d married a piece of the West, and intimacy had bred contempt.