The Last Six Million Seconds

by John Burdett

  Although he’d remained a model husband, he knew that she’d fled from the profound disillusionment she saw in his face when he looked at her. If only she’d been able to let it go, all that absurd European pretension, but without those borrowed opinions and the energy of resentment, what would she amount to? The thought of being no different from any struggling Chinese housewife in the streets of Mongkok was unendurable to her. It was implicit in the way she talked and in the letters she wrote afterward: The last thing she’d expected from marriage to a Chinaman was that he would not be able to respect her, as if when all was said and done, disdain were a prerogative of the Raj. Moira, it was true, seemed very different, but there were reasons for caution.

  Perhaps he had fallen into a doze or was merely thinking too hard. He didn’t hear her enter. Her hands over his eyes made him jump.

  “You’re jumpy.”

  There was no light in the room except for the flickering images of the television and the eternal glare of Mongkok leaking through the curtains; she was no more than a voice and a subtle caress. Reaching behind him, he felt his raw silk dressing gown. Under it, those breasts that almost brought him sleep.

  “My Irish genes.”

  “Irish people aren’t especially nervous. Half the NYPD is Irish, including me. My maiden name was Kelly. They’re no more sensitive than a sack of potatoes.”

  “I bet the murder squad is jumpy.”

  She sat down beside him. “Ever thought of changing professions?”

  “Sure. I have great options. Security for a bank, adviser to the triads. I’d make a great hit man except for my stomach trouble.”

  “You have stomach trouble?”

  “No guts.”

  She snuggled up to him. “I don’t believe that. I saw that photograph of you receiving an award for bravery.”

  “I was very young. I just reacted. Probably caught between two fears. Fear of being called a coward was the stronger.”

  “But you saved a life.”

  “Maybe.”

  She caressed his thigh, moved on up until she reached his neck. Her fingers probed his facial muscles, pausing at the ones that twitched.

  “You know, in the West, where I come from, we think it helps to talk about it.”

  He leaned forward, lit a cigarette. “Maybe because in the West you have ‘its’ to talk about. You think of problems like thorns. Just find it, pull it out and live happily ever after.”

  “And in the East?”

  “Chinese call it ‘being alive in the bitter sea.’ It’s not a thorn that hurts; it’s the whole environment.”

  “In Hong Kong, the richest city in the world?”

  “In China. Hong Kong is a Christmas decoration. Christmas will soon be over.”

  Moira grunted. “Nobody loses sleep over politics. That’s what we pay politicians for. Was it a woman?”

  He rested his head on the back of the couch. “Yes, a woman.”

  “Look, I’ll be gone by tomorrow. We don’t even need to meet again. I can be just a voice in the night. You’ve helped me, more than you know. Why not let me help you?”

  He smiled into the darkness. “She was Chinese, through and through-not inscrutable, though. She had a big moon face, eyes that took you straight to the purest soul you could ever meet. Eyes that couldn’t help believe everything you said because she didn’t know how to lie.

  “She was short and dumpy, about five foot two, and no matter how hard things got she always made sure there was steamed rice and pork or duck for her kids to eat. The only adventurous thing she ever did was to come to Hong Kong but that was because her big sister was here. She walked. Lots of them did in those days. They camped by the frontier, tried to keep out of sight of the soldiers; then, when night came, they’d make a break for the border fence. They knew that some of them would be killed. A bullet in the back from the People’s Army, but most got through. The British weren’t too gentle either. They sent them back if they caught them near the border, but they had a rule, one of those funny British rules like a school game. If they made it as far as Hong Kong Island and the Immigration Department, they could stay. And she did. The little dumpy Chinese girl with the moon face made it when tougher ones failed.”

  Chan stopped, moved from the sofa to find his Bensons. When he returned to the sofa, he smoothed the robe over Moira’s breasts. She held his hand. “Go on.”

  He exhaled into the night. “No, it’s not interesting to you. You wanted another story full of sex and torment.”

  She dropped his hand, let her own rest on his thigh. “That’s not true. You’re talking about your mom, right? You’re forgetting, I’m a mother. Was. Mothers don’t get such good press these days. It’s encouraging to know that some men have a passion for the woman who gave them life.”

  Chan heard the catch in her voice. He squeezed her hand. “I’m sorry, I’m being selfish. You’re the one with the grief.”

  “It’s soothing to hear you talk. And it’s not a story I’ve ever heard before.”

  He took a long draw, found the ashtray. “Mai-mai lived with her sister in a squatter hut for a while, until she met Paddy. Actually his name’s not Paddy; I just think of him as a Paddy. I think he did love her, like a bastard can love his opposite. She really believed him when he told her he had to work nights during the week and could only be with her at weekends. It was believable to her because that’s what Chinese men did. Of course, he was out whoring in Wanchai, but he liked the emotional security of the little girl with the moon face who adored him. I was born first, Jenny three years later.

  “Thirteen years later Paddy just disappeared one day as Paddys do. Mai-mai went into depression. No one had ever seen her like that. She even forgot to feed us, and her sister had to do it. Eventually she decided that these big red-faced people with the round eyes really were devils, just like everyone said. She’d left her home village to wander into the land of the devils. So she went back. On foot again. Somehow she managed to avoid the guards at the border. I guess they weren’t keeping an eye out for anyone who actually wanted to return to the PRC.

  “When she reached her home village, it was infested with Red Guards. China’s second civil war this century, called the Cultural Revolution, was in its closing stages. As a ruse to keep power Mao Zedong set his people against each other, the young against the old, brother against brother, pupil against teacher, wife against husband. It was an orgy of hate, Chinese style. But to some of the outside world it was a courageous socialist experiment. Wise men and women from Europe and America were taken to a kind of Walt Disney China where everything was wonderful, the people full of smiles.

  “The real China was villages like Mai-mai’s, where they arrested her for being a capitalist running dog. They put her in a dunce’s cap and paraded her through the streets. Red Guards about her age, or younger. They made her confess, something she was glad to do since she believed everything they told her and supposed she must have been deluded by the wicked West.

  “Ordinarily they would have let her go, but she made a mistake only the very innocent make. She told them she would have to return to Hong Kong to bring her children back. So they decided she hadn’t really reformed at all and threw her from a fourth-floor room in a government building. The fall broke both her legs and her pelvis and made a hole in her skull, but she remained conscious. I have eyewitness accounts of her lying there, deciding to die because all over the earth from west to east there was no place for her. A pure soul with a big moon face who believed what people told her.”

  Chan went to the fridge, found a beer, came back. They sat in silence.

  Moira coughed. “That’s a lot of hate to carry around. Hate is a problem, like a thorn, at least to my Western eyes.”

  Chan shook his head, opened the can, swallowed. “No, hate’s not a problem. If you’re bad and you hate, you kill someone; if you’re good, you forgive; if you’re in between, you hesitate-but it’s not the real problem.”

  “Wha
t is?”

  “The way they’ve turned the world upside down. That’s what drives you crazy.”

  “Upside down?”

  “Sure. During the Cultural Revolution important people like film stars, famous BBC commentators with film crews, French left-wing journalists went to China and were deceived. We said, ‘Okay, that’s because the West is naive; they want to believe in the socialist experiment, and those cunning old men in Beijing, they’re so good at the art of deception.’

  “But even when the truth came out, nothing much happened; you didn’t even hear any of those famous people apologize for being so stupid. We said, ‘Well, what can you expect? They’re embarrassed, and anyway what could they do about it? But next time those old men start murdering people, then surely the West will expose them to the world.’ Which is exactly what happened when they killed all those students in Tiananmen Square in June 1989.

  “The West was mad as hell. People went on television denouncing the violence; politicians talked about trade sanctions; nobody believed those murderous old geriatrics anymore. But in America and Japan and Europe there were people who said, ‘Hold on, there are one point four billion people over there, the biggest single market in the world, and if you impose trade sanctions, some other bastard is going to be selling them the T-shirts and the sneakers and the pocket calculators and the mopeds instead of us.’

  “So the trade sanctions didn’t last long, and the murdering old men in Beijing laughed so hard you could hear them in Hong Kong. And in two months’ time they’ll be here with their tanks and their cynical sneers and their contempt for human life, and the Chinese screens will go up, and no one over there in your country will want to know what’s really going on here. They’ll be happy with the shadow play on the screens, glad not to have reasons for refusing to sell the T-shirts. That’s the problem: how to live a life when you always have to pretend that the world is upside down and has always been that way.”

  Moira had stopped stroking him. He let the television lights flicker over his face. Her voice when she spoke was a Bronx rumble. “Kinda tough, that one, Charlie. Not sure there’s anything I can do to help.”

  “Well, there’s one thing that might help in a tiny way.”

  “Name it.”

  “You could stop lying.”

  A pause.

  “Did you say stop lying?”

  “Yes, that’s what I said. You were a sergeant in the NYPD, but you took early retirement over two years ago. Your daughter, Clare, did go to NYU, but she didn’t graduate in sociology; she graduated in business studies. Strange mistake for a mother to make.”

  The silence lasted so long Chan assumed Moira wasn’t going to answer. It didn’t much matter. He became absorbed in the images from the kung fu show again. Evil wasn’t vanquished as easily as all that. There had been a counterattack by the bad monks from the black monastery over the hill. It was no problem telling them apart from the good monks because they always snarled when they spoke whereas the good monks oozed serenity. If he went into movies, he’d have to be one of the bad guys. Finally Moira made rumbling sounds preparatory to saying something.

  “You checked the same day? With the university as well? Would have taken NYPD a month, minimum. If they’d bothered at all. Guess what made you suspicious was the stuff I pocketed in the shop downstairs, huh? You didn’t believe I did it to test you, did you?”

  Chan tried to look at her. “You mean I was supposed to?”

  Moira grunted. “Guess not.”

  18

  A million U.S. dollars does not buy a house on Hong Kong Island, not even a small one; almost everyone lives in apartment blocks. The few remaining houses, old colonial constructions (built by the taipans of yesteryear high up on the Peak and away from the cholera and malaria that made nineteenth-century Asia a threat to expatriate health), tended to be owned by international corporations and used by their top executives to entertain and impress. To own privately one of the three- or four-story mansions that clung to the side of the mountain was proof of membership in the local aristocracy, a demonstration of wealth staggering even by Hong Kong standards.

  Jonathan Wong had organized the conveyancing when Emily first bought hers six years before. She had been excited, full of plans for improvements and visions of the many parties she was going to give. Since then she had hardly stopped adding wings, demolishing walls, changing decor. Her swimming pool was the largest private one in the territory, almost Olympic size, shaped in an oblong with Roman columns and terra-cotta tiles on the perimeter. The house faced southwest so that the view was not of the harbor but of the dense green drop to the Lamma Channel and the wide-open sea beyond.

  A large awning close to the swimming pool gave some shade. She was sitting in a fawn bathrobe and Gucci sunglasses when her maid showed him in.

  He pecked her on the cheek, sat down opposite her at the marble table.

  “I’ve got the cook to give us Italian for once. Antipasto misto, spaghetti al funghi followed by fruit. I found some reasonable strawberries in Oliver’s that you can have with cream à l’anglais if you like. Or have you given up cream along with every other middle-class male approaching forty?”

  Wong took off his jacket, undid his tie. “I still eat cream. I hold the view that it’s stress, not cholesterol, that kills. Anyway, I don’t have the strength of character to give up cream.”

  She wasn’t smiling today at his jokes. She even seemed irritated that he’d removed his tie. The stock market hadn’t crashed; it must be a particularly heavy period.

  He waited until the maid had brought an ice bucket with a bottle of Perrier. “So, you have more work to burden me with?”

  “If it’s not too much to ask.” She studied him for a moment. “I’m afraid it’s just a tad controversial, but I want you to do it anyway. Let’s be frank: You owe me, and I need you to do this thing.”

  Under his smile Wong quaked. He couldn’t tell how closely she was looking at him through the black lenses. “Shoot, this poor slave is only too eager to be of assistance.” He was surprised at how little sarcasm he was able to invest in the words.

  “You remember the Zedfell purchase of Chancery Towers?”

  Wong shot her a sharp glance. “How could I forget?”

  It had been about three years ago. Emily had introduced an important piece of conveyancing into his firm. As usual, she had channeled it through Wong, although he was not a conveyancer himself. He had assumed that the transaction was proceeding normally when his conveyancing partner had demanded a meeting with Wong and Rathbone, the senior partner. The conveyancing partner had been nervous.

  “Cash! They want to buy a whole office tower in cash! It’s bent, and I’m not prepared to carry on unless I get the full support of all the partners.”

  Wong had had to admit the conveyancing partner had a point. Zedfell Incorporated, the would-be purchaser of a substantial apartment building, was, on examination, owned entirely by an offshore company, which in turn was owned by sixteen Chinese men, all domiciled in the PRC. The problem arose from some recent legislation intended to crack down on money laundering. Nobody doubted that the sixteen gentlemen who owned Zedfell were corrupt Communist cadres who had accumulated a great deal of spare cash and needed to hide it. Nobody doubted either that Emily was helping them because she owed them favors.

  Rathbone had found a way of describing the transaction that seemed to take it outside the antilaundering legislation. But the firm had looked on Emily in a different light from then on. In banking parlance she was no longer Triple A, and by extension neither was Wong.

  Emily took off her sunglasses, looked him in the eye. “Well, Zedfell want to buy another three apartment blocks, two on Kowloon, near Castle Peak, one at North Point. They’ve also successfully negotiated for an office block in Kennedy Town.”

  “I see.”

  “Total price for all four transactions is in the region of five hundred million U.S. Payment will be in cash. Your firm will
receive the money itself and bank it.”

  Wong took a sip of Perrier. Even under the awning it was hot. He was sweating and wished he’d brought his sunglasses.

  He swallowed hard. “No, Emily. I’m sorry.”

  She replaced her sunglasses, stared out over the Lamma Channel. For a full two minutes he had her in profile, the jutting chin, the black glasses, the bathrobe.

  “Emily?”

  She turned back to him, pushed the sunglasses up onto the top of her head. He thought she was smiling until he saw it was a grimace. In all the years she had never shown him this side of herself, the side other people talked about, the killer instinct finely honed.

  “We all have to grow up sometime, Johnny. I’ve helped you put it off for long enough. You were my innocence, but I can’t afford you anymore. And anyway, I’ve made you lazy and dumb. So listen. You’re going to do this thing. Understand? Of course you’ll be paid your usual exorbitant fees, whatever they are.”

  Wong opened some more buttons on his shirt, wiped his palms on the Kent and Curwen jacket that he’d slung across a chair. In one of the pockets he found a cigarette, lit it. She had turned away from him again, presented him with her stubborn profile. He let the silence continue. Open defiance would only make her more determined. If he soothed her somehow, she would see how ridiculous she was being.

  He lit a second cigarette from the first, stood up, walked around the table, knelt by her chair. To his surprise she put a hand down without looking at him, stroked his face.

  “I’ve always loved you, Johnny, like the brother I never had.”

  “I love you too, like a sister.”

  “You’ll do it?”

  “Emily, listen, it’s out of the question. Five hundred million U.S.? We only just got away with the Zedfell thing last time. And that was only about thirty million. I’m not going to ask questions about where this money is coming from, but you know and I know that it’s hot. A sum like that gets onto the front pages of Time and Asiaweek. My firm would be blown away in the scandal. Remember what happened to Freeman’s in the Nabian debacle?”