The Buddha of Brewer Street

by Michael Dobbs

  ‘How?’

  ‘Give him a hard time. Why not raid his gambling den?’

  His breakfast had become a pool of grease, the yolk staring out like the fading eye of a corpse. Hardin pushed it away in disgust. ‘Easier said than done. Proving that these places are used as gambling dens is damnably difficult. They play games no one but the Chinese can understand, games we’ve never even heard of and whose rules we don’t understand.’

  ‘Why is that a problem?’

  ‘Because it makes it almost impossible to prove in court that they’re doing anything illegal. Or doing anything at all. No witnesses will come forward. No one will co-operate. All we ever find is a large number of Chinese gathered together with money in their pockets and a lot of rice-paper tokens shoved down the john. Get a good lawyer onto that and we end up paying them for wrongful arrest.’

  ‘But you don’t need to prove anything, Chief Superintendent. Simply show that you tried. You raid that gambling den, get Jiang to squeal with annoyance and no one will be able to accuse you of impropriety.’

  A shower of female laughter swept in from a nearby table. Four WPCs were setting about a youthful and inexperienced special constable. The topic under discussion was the length of his service and they were firing questions at him with such vivid innuendo that his defences had been overrun and he had turned bright crimson. Hardin seemed unable to share the humour. His eyes were fixed, struggling with the alternatives. ‘Jiang’s a prominent figure. It would play merry hell with community relations.’

  ‘It’s precisely because he’s a prominent figure that the allegations of favouritism are so easy to believe.’

  ‘Easy to believe?’

  ‘Even easier if it became known that these suspicions had been reported to you by a Member of Parliament and you’d done nothing.’

  His tea was cold but he took a deep gulp. ‘That wouldn’t get out.’ Another gulp. ‘Would it?’

  ‘Not from me. But these confidences have a terrible habit of escaping, Chief Superintendent. A terrible habit. We live in such cynical times.’

  Hardin examined the photograph once more, looking for a means of escape, hoping it would grow sepia edges and fade to nothing. It didn’t. The hand on his shoulder seemed to be stretching for his throat. His mouth had gone dry, he found it difficult to swallow. ‘I want to thank you, Mr Goodfellowe, for coming straight to me with this information. You may just have saved my life.’

  ‘No problem,’ Goodfellowe muttered in reply. ‘I’ll add you to my list.’

  * * *

  The delivery men were the first to suffer. They made such easy targets. Any of them who were thought to have a connection with Jiang began to find their paths strewn with unexpected obstacles and cancelled orders.

  One driver travelled all the way to Milton Keynes only to be told that the storekeeper had obtained his videos from another supplier. When the driver began to remonstrate, the shop door was locked against him. When he continued his noisy protest outside on the pavement he was diverted by a cry from a first-floor window. He looked up, just in time to catch the full force of last night’s noodles.

  The protests became a true family affair. In Brighton, while heated discussions were being held inside the store, children were at work in the delivery van itself. By the time the driver departed hurriedly, his argument cut short by the appearance of a kitchen cleaver, the van was trailing yards of disembowelled videotape.

  The women proved to be most formidable, chasing off delivery men with a mixture of harsh words and assorted kitchen slops, often accompanied by the banging of woks, which sounded like a drum roll before a battle. Yet even the husbands were angry. They were not only businessmen but fathers, too, and everywhere they kept hearing that Jiang had tried to cheat them.

  Many of Jiang’s supplies were carried under informal contract by food wholesalers who began to find their own businesses affected by the boycott. No videos, no veg. Soon they were joining in the boycott themselves, suggesting that Jiang find himself other donkeys to carry his burdens.

  Grit had been thrown into the smooth-running machine of Jiang’s empire. It started to cough and splutter. Even bookings at The Peking Palace began to sag, which from one point of view was convenient since his chef had suddenly walked out. Having spent a fractious morning in his back room trying to sort out his mounting problems, Jiang emerged to discover that misery arrived in many different packages. His new Audi coupé had been penned in by cars that had parked so close they were touching his chrome work. There was nowhere to go. What was worse, he’d left the soft top down, and the bags of refuse from his own restaurant that had been piled at the side of the street had somehow spread wings and begun nesting all over the back seat.

  His wife wouldn’t speak to him. His girlfriend didn’t answer the phone. He found he didn’t have enough cash in hand to pay the wages. Then his day really began to turn sour.

  The raid on Jiang’s gambling club was not a model of its kind, but it didn’t have to be. All that mattered was that it took place. Twenty years earlier the basement had been a Cypriot poker club, and not much had changed since. It hadn’t even had a fresh coat of paint. Strictly economy class. The steps leading down to the basement beneath the travel agent were narrow and worn, so there was no attempt at a concerted rush by the raiders. An orderly queue of members from Clubs & Vice waited their turn to duck beneath the low doorway, which in the event may have assisted with the element of surprise. The gamblers were still at it as they strolled in. Thirteen Chinese women, none younger than fifty, were in the middle of a game of pei-gau. And they didn’t welcome the interruption. Their bets had been laid, the money slapped down on the table with characteristic relish, and the young male croupier was counting off a pile of buttons, using a bamboo wand to divide them into groups of four. The object of the game was to bet on whether the very last group would contain one, two, three or four buttons and the croupier was almost there, the tension of the game at its peak, when he looked up in mid-count and froze. The women, however, were constructed of sterner stuff. Their voices rose as one in protest, screaming at the manager for his incompetence in allowing this interruption, before turning their attentions to the police. The room was not large, the mass of elderly women presented an effective barrier of bodies to the officers, and by the time they had surmounted the human blockade and reached the gaming table, all signs of the money had disappeared. They were left looking at nothing but a pile of old shirt buttons.

  Undeterred, the forces of the law then inspected the rest of the premises. The tiny back room. The kitchen. The single toilet. The store cupboard. There was nothing more. It was a potential death trap, if not from fire then at least from E-coli. It had no licences of any sort, but then this place didn’t officially exist, a sort of blackhole for bureaucracy into which official circulars disappeared and never returned. The police stayed for more than two hours, trying to interview everyone present, but the women decided that not a single one of them spoke any English and would communicate only by screaming in Cantonese. And the manager was outraged at the suggestion that Jiang had any form of connection with this place. Jiang who? If there were to be any charges, they would be borne by the manager and the manager alone. But there wouldn’t be. You can’t build a case on a busload of Chinese matrons and a bowlful of buttons.

  Yet the point had been made. The word would get round that Jiang’s place had a problem. So Jiang himself would have a problem. His cash flow was getting shot to hell from all sides, his sex life had ceased and it was his turn to have the splitting headache. All because of the child. As rewarding as the project had at first seemed, Jiang was rapidly losing his enthusiasm.

  Their relationship had changed, and from both sides. Like Mickey, and in spite of his instinctive abhorrence of commitment, Baader too seemed to have developed something more than solely a desire for physical gratification. She was not simply a great body, there was a mind and exceptionally sharp wit in there too. Not, of course, that
the relationship could develop, but he began to feel that at least it might be sustained. The future, as they said, was inevitable, but for the moment it could look after itself. A certain tenderness had developed between them, a familiarity based on contentment, and what had been a strictly private passion had begun to leak into a more public arena. He borrowed houses and flats, let slip the occasional indiscretion. Baader was bending his own rules, because they were his rules and he was masculine and arrogant enough to believe they were also his to ignore. Or was it simply that the risks of exposure which so turned over his testosterone needed to be taken to new and more dangerous levels?

  In any event, while his wife was away visiting her sister in the New World, he arranged a drinks party at his own home to which he invited the good and the great. He also bent his rules to breaking point and invited Mickey. Asking for trouble, but he did it all the same. The Baader house was a gracious Georgian affair in South Kensington but was not vast and any large number of guests inevitably spread through different rooms on two floors before spilling out onto the plant-filled terrace. His parties were popular because he not only gathered together the standard collection of envoys, politicians and press but sprinkled them liberally with entertainers, sports stars, television personalities and the few famous members of the professions who weren’t overweaningly pompous. In such a constellation, Mickey’s star didn’t seem unduly obvious; there was safety in such a crowded universe.

  Yet with the change in their relationship Baader had discovered something that was unusual to him and came as a surprise. He had grown jealous. As he circulated through his guests he couldn’t help but notice the attention Mickey was paid by men he knew to be of single-minded and lecherous intent, and found himself circulating rather faster than was usual in order to keep her in view. It annoyed him that he should be distracted in this manner. It was out of character. And it meant that for the first time in this relationship he no longer had it entirely under his control.

  So when, during one of his orbits through the stars, he discovered he had lost track of her, he found himself uncharacteristically agitated. Where was she? Who was she with?

  As it happened, Mickey was not with anyone. Superficially the evening had been a delight, with several invitations to dinner and an outright proposition from an Arab envoy to fly her the following morning to the south of France in his private jet. Even on the best of evenings it was not an offer she would have considered, but this was never going to be the best of evenings. She had not wanted to come, she shouldn’t have come, not to the home Baader shared with his wife, but she was driven by circumstance. She had no choice. It might be the only opportunity she found. Baader’s presence was tormenting, all around her, even taking the opportunity of the crush to brush up against her in a suggestive fashion. Every moment, every gesture, every piece of domestic furniture reminded her of what she knew she wanted but could never have. This was going to be a tough one to get over, and was likely to become tougher yet.

  Under cover of the crush Mickey took the opportunity to escape upstairs and look around the home. The bedrooms with their lived-in and slept-under duvets gave her particular discomfort. She had never slept with him, except for a brief doze of exhaustion one afternoon on his Ministerial sofa, and for all her liberated lifestyle she knew that one day she wanted nothing more than arguments over toothpaste and car keys. And a duvet under which to snuggle, although the mincing Laura Ashley colour scheme would have to go; she would need something much bolder.

  She stopped, screamed at herself. This colour scheme and this duvet would never go. It was his. And hers. It could never be Mickey’s.

  The study was on the first floor. It was a dark room, made still darker by the failing evening light, half-panelled with rich fabric wallpaper and full-length velvet curtains. Beside the fireplace stood a winged armchair upholstered in deep, cracked leather. It was a very masculine room, his room, not dusted as much as the rest of the house, and she wanted to be in it. The desk stood near the windows and lying in clear view on top of the desk was his Ministerial red box. She knew it would be locked, but she checked all the same, not being quite sure why. It wouldn’t be the place for his personal secrets; it would contain nothing that his private office hadn’t coded and classified and circulated to a dozen other officials. In Whitehall the distribution lists were often longer than the notes themselves.

  If he had secrets they would be in the desk. She walked slowly around it, inspecting it from all angles, stroking its time-polished wood, feeling him there, running her finger along the embossed writing surface. Then she tried the drawers. Those contained in the pedestals on either side were open, stuffed with the usual paraphernalia of folders and papers and assorted pens, but the three drawers across the top of the desk were locked. Not resolutely so, for it was a traditional desk and the drawers were loose and rattled when she tugged. It seemed probable that with only a little encouragement the locks might give. She picked up a letter-opener, a stout object with a bone handle. It seemed ideal. She was about to put it to the test when the door opened.

  Baader stood silhouetted in the doorway. ‘I’ve been looking for you. What are you doing here in the dark?’

  She almost dropped the letter-opener in alarm, but there had been no hint of accusation in his voice.

  ‘I was waiting for you.’

  ‘Waiting for what?’

  ‘What do you think? All evening I’ve been surrounded by men struggling to get into my underwear when the only man I wanted to try was paying me no attention.’

  ‘I’m hosting a party, or hadn’t you noticed?’

  The noise from downstairs was clearly audible through the open door.

  ‘Seems to be managing very well without you.’

  He advanced into the darkened room. ‘It couldn’t manage for too long.’ The door swung shut behind him.

  ‘Long enough, I think.’

  He chuckled softly. ‘You really are incredible.’

  ‘You ain’t seen nothing yet.’ And she began to move everything from the top of the desk, the red box, lamp, telephone. All the papers she simply swept to one side. By the time he reached her side the desk was bare and he had already removed his tie.

  ‘No,’ she whispered, ‘let me.’ And slowly she began to remove every piece of his clothing.

  A battle ensued. War was waged, matching his male appetites, every fragment of which wanted to rip his clothes off and devour her, against her feminine wiles. She teased him, aroused his impatience and ardour, turning every button into a detonator that exploded inside him one by one. Carefully she folded every item of clothing, leaving him standing by the desk like a naughty schoolboy, until he stood completely naked. Then it was her turn, his senses stretched to extremes as he tried to make out every inch of her body, but it was dark and the only light came from the street lamps outside.

  Then she was lying on the desk top, adjusting her body to its unforgiving outline, and he was upon her. Even for a man with his unusual drive, his enthusiasm was remarkable. All the time he kept demanding to know which of the men in the room downstairs had propositioned her. And she continued to tantalize him, giving him first one name, then another, and on each he vowed vengeance with growing passion until he was no longer able to speak. For him it was nerve-jangling. Explosive. He drove ever deeper inside her, possessing her in a way he vowed no other man ever would. He never wanted to forget this moment. He felt he had total power over her. It was as near perfection as he was ever likely to reach.

  When he was finished it took him several minutes to regain his composure. At last he raised himself. ‘Come on, they’ll be missing us.’

  ‘No,’ she whispered, not stirring. ‘I need a little more time to recover. You go on. I’ll see you downstairs. In a little while.’

  He dressed in silence. Then he kissed her, more tenderly than he had ever done, and departed.

  She did not stir for some moments. Silent tears trickled down her cheek. She hated herself. At
this moment she particularly hated Goodfellowe. Still she could not bring herself to hate the man who had just left her.

  She hated herself all the more when she picked up the keys she had taken from his trouser pocket and began rifling through his private papers.

  TWELVE

  It wasn’t enough that Jiang should have received an unannounced visit that morning from the Environmental Health Officer demanding to inspect the premises. ‘Reports of kitchen refuse being left around in unsanitary conditions outside the premises, sir. And a suggestion that perhaps your kitchen equipment may not be up to regulations.’ Three hours of scratching around behind cookers, under hotplates, in the back of refrigerators. Endless notes being scribbled. Then all he would say was ‘We’ll be in touch.’ Like some medieval torturer heating the irons.

  Jiang had just sat down with a cigarette to calm his nerves before getting back to wrestling with his cash flow when the telephone rang. Customs & Excise. And not just its stationery department but its Investigation Division. The swindle squad. Not a routine VAT enquiry but an implication of irregularity and urgency. Demanding to come round to inspect the books and paperwork.

  His fists beat down upon the table in terrible temper. This wasn’t just fate or coincidence, not just a casual and uncomfortable fall of the fortune sticks. Someone was trying to screw him, which made life bad enough. And they were succeeding. But what made it far, far worse was that Jiang hadn’t the slightest idea who it was.

  Goodfellowe had a favoured place within the Palace where, late at night, he would go to be alone with his thoughts. That’s where Mickey found him.

  The Great Hall at Westminster was the oldest fragment of the Palace, built six hundred years before with an ancient oak roof that had drawn admiration and imitation from all corners of theworld. He regarded this as the place of great survival, the niche of the palace that had defied fire and republic and world war and had stood as witness to so much of Man’s tribulation, and even a few of his triumphs. Goodfellowe would stand high on the stone steps that led to the Grand Committee Room, staring down upon the scene and trying to be part of it.