by Nick Macfie
At the top of the stairs, I was in for a surprise. The intruder had emptied a box of soap powder all along the hall. I noticed there weren’t any footprints. Pretty significant should the police have to be called.
I turned to the left and looked into the main room, ten foot square, with the view out over the flower farm. Everything seemed to be in place – the television, the iPod speakers, a camera slung over the corner of a rattan bookcase – except for one glaring thing. So glaring, in fact, that I missed it at first.
Someone had stolen the window.
Well, not someone. The window of opportunity. He was just showing off. To a soapy, soppy Brit. I called up the Shrubs person who dealt with security matters and he told me to write an email explaining exactly what had been stolen (I don’t think he believed me) and why I thought it had been stolen. Easy. Well, easy-ish. Just say the fucker with the braces was mad and the fucker with the ear rings was fucking mad.
I checked each room for damage, things missing. I checked the sheets on the bed. All appeared to be in order. Next I called up my cleaner to come round to get someone to clear up the mess and fix the window and change the lock on the front door and the balcony door. Fixing the window in England would probably take a few days, if not a few weeks. In Hong Kong, in the most far-flung rural outpost of the former British colony, it would be fixed within a couple of hours.
Next priority was to have a shower and drive into town and get pissed. I had in mind Rick’s Cafe in Tsim Sha Tsui, where I had first met Marina. I couldn’t stop myself.
My phone went.
“Hadley?”
“Yes?”
“It’s Marina.”
“Marina?”
“I have to see you.”
“You have to see me? I think your husband has done my flat over.”
“Has he? What an antagonistic brute. I must see you. This evening.”
“He stole my window.”
“Hadley, I am sorry if my husband has caused you yet more sorrow, but I must insist on seeing you.”
“Where?”
And here was the strange thing. She wanted to meet at an address in Tai Po, less than a mile from my house. It was the top floor of a thin block of flats above a Chinese bank I had never heard of. She said she was waiting for me.
I parked outside a restaurant where black and yellow snakes lay coiled in round, wire baskets stacked on top of each other on the pavement. I waved to the minibus driver – my neighbour! – who sat waiting for a full load of passengers before heading across the stinking Lam Tsuen River and into the green and lush Lam Tsuen Valley and past my village. He ignored me. I passed the watch shop and the gold shop and found the Chinese bank. I pressed 36A which had a yellow Post-it note stuck above it with Sellotape saying “Last Dance Saloon”. Curious. The door buzzed and I opened the metal grille. An old man wearing a vest and shorts sat behind a desk, listening to a large transistor radio with an earphone. He did not register my existence. Terrific security, I thought. What on earth was Marina doing in a place like this?
The lift was one square metre. How did people move furniture in and out of upper flats, something as ordinary as a reasonably sized chest of drawers or a piano? What happened when someone died? Did they prop them up in the corner? A chain rattled at every floor as the lift rose slowly to the top.
I knocked at the door of 36A, where “Last Dance Saloon” was hand-written in bigger letters on a piece of A4 paper. A dapper young Chinese man opened the door, grinning broadly and stepping back to let me in. He was wearing an expensive grey silk suit over a tee-shirt.
“You must be Hadley,” he said. A right toff.
“Yes, I had a message…”
“From my sister, yes. She is expecting you.”
“Your sister?”
“Indeed yes. She’s just popped out to get some fags.” A right toff who liked to slum it every now and then with his vocabulary.
“I see.”
“Please come in and take a seat.”
I walked into a large sitting room, two rooms knocked into one, with the standard parquet flooring, a mirror and rail along one wall, a piano at one end and a reasonably sized chest of drawers at the other. Above the chest was a window looking east out over the tat of the new town on to the Tai Po waterfront park and the blue waters of Plover Cove, the lighter blue hills of Sai Kung in the distance. The only other furniture was three wooden school chairs.
“This is a dance studio,” I said stupidly, sitting down.
“Yes, that is correct,” the man said, pulling a chair round to sit opposite me and putting out his hand. “Sorry, I am Sebastian.”
“Sebastian?”
“Yes. I am Marina’s half brother. This is my business. Dancing. I understand you are a journalist?”
“Yes. I got to know your sister in Pakistan.”
“I know all about it. She won’t be a tick. Can I get you a cup of tea?”
“No thank you.”
“Something stronger? A Black Label, for instance?”
“That would be wonderful. Please.”
“Marina said you were a lush.” Sebastian slapped his knees, rose from the chair and headed into the kitchen.
“Oh, right.”
“Give him a Scotch and he’ll be a happy man, she said,” he called back. “You must have so many questions.”
“I had no idea Marina had a brother.”
“A-ha. I have no qualms in telling you of my provenance, Hadley. Marina has assured me of your integrity.” He stood in the kitchen doorway. “My father, Marina’s father, had a relationship with a smoking hot Chinese dancer when he was posted here with the consulate decades ago. Hence me. Hence the dance.”
Sebastian disappeared again and I heard the wonderful clinking of ice and glasses. I clapped my hands silently. He returned with a tray.
“Is it public knowledge, about you and your sister?”
He put the tray on the third chair and poured me a triple.
“No, not exactly,” he said. “I have used my family connections to get this place off the ground, but no one knows about those connections.” He was looking around him as though this were the Royal Ballet School, not a three-hundred-square-foot apartment in what many in the West would consider a crawling, high-rise slum.
“Those were the days,” he said. “Did you know I once met Anthony Newley?”
“Wow.”
“We were like brothers.”
I was trying to do the arithmetic in my head. I imagined an age gap, if Tony Newley were still alive, of about seventy years. He could have been like Mian Langhari’s brother, but surely not Sebastian’s.
“Where did you meet him?”
“Here.”
“He came to see you in this flat?”
“He was a friend of my father. He wanted the publicity surrounding his visit to help my business, being the finest British dancer and all-round entertainer.”
“And did it help?”
“We closed the next day.”
“What rotten luck.”
I heard the latch on the door.
“There she is. But then I reopened. Tap dance mainly, but the neighbours complained about the noise. So my students wear socks.”
Marina came in carrying two Park ’n’ Shop carrier bags, a big smile on her un-made-up face, her hair done up in a bun held together by a pencil.
“Hello again, Hadley.”
We shook hands. “The last time I saw you…” I began.
“…was in front of all those people,” she said. “Before I had my turn.”
“Your turn, yes.”
“Before you had your fall. I trust you are fully recovered?”
“Yes, I am fine thank you. Your husband put paid to one of my teeth, but that’s a different story.”
“I shall look forward to hearing all details. Bring your drink on to the roof. Sebastian has a lesson coming up.”
We walked through the narrow kitchen and out a side door on to
the roof. Each tiny top-floor flat – penthouse was too posh a word – had its own area, and Sebastian’s was fenced off from its neighbours with a gap showing the view of Plover Cove and Sai Kung. There was expensive outdoor furniture and a barbecue. We sat at a circular table, under a giant white umbrella.
“Thanks for coming, Hadley. I am happy to renew our acquaintance.”
I briefly wondered about her security people and whether they were looking at us now. Or whether Todd and the colonel were listening in, smoking and sharing an earphone between them in the back of a Suzuki Mehran. I briefly wondered how anyone could lead a life like this. So duplicitous and phony, surrounded by so many dangerous people.
“Your brother gives tap lessons to students who wear socks,” I said. “Because of the noise.”
“Correct,” Marina said. “Occasionally, when the weather is clement, they will go to the waterside. That is a more satisfactory arrangement.”
“I see. Very strange. Your husband broke my tooth and hurt me in a dentist’s chair. He ordered a man to kill me in a drain on the Margalla Hills and I believe he stole my living room window.”
“I am afraid that would not be the first such occurrence.”
“They were all first such occurrences for me. He dropped me in a hole and tried to urinate on my head.” I found myself tapping the table top. “None of this seems to take you by surprise.”
She pulled out a cigarette and lit it without offering one to me. I took a long slug of the Scotch. All irritation vanished. She went back inside, brought out the tray of drinks and poured herself a gin and tonic.
“I can’t keep apologising for my husband,” she said. “He can be brutal. The reason I asked you to come over is to discuss an idea I and my advisers have been considering.”
She stubbed out her cigarette, reached into her handbag and brought out an almost-normal-sized spliff.
“If I am to become a successful politician…” She lit the joint and did one of her sudden Hoover-like inhalations and spoke as though without vocal chords. “…I must put away childish things. Fuck me, this is good stuff.”
“Sorry, I don’t quite understand.”
“It is a reference to Shakespeare.”
“As in, ‘fuck me, sweet prince, this is good stuff’?”
“No…”
“You mean you must choose between being a good king or hanging out with whores and riff-raff. You are choosing to be the good king.”
She leant forward and touched my hand. “Exactly.”
“What childish things did you have in mind?”
“That is the key. You want to try some of this?”
I took the joint between thumb and forefinger. “If you want to become prime minister….” I took a deep hit with a loud, inward “ooof” noise and finished the sentence as though I had been stabbed in the neck: “…you should convert to Islam.”
“You’ve read my mind,” she said, taking back the joint. She did a quick inhalation with a sort of a double-take catching of her breath, licking her lips. “There are many newspapers in Pakistan that would write stories about how I had grown up and was giving up Christianity but no one would believe them, for they are all partisan. You know this. But if Shrubs were to write the same story, if you were to write the same story, to show your gratitude, the world would sit up and take notice. The Pakistani people would take notice.”
“You mean, write that you are giving up alcohol, drugs, partying and Christianity?”
“If you wrote that story for me… To give it some gravitas. Not just my announcement, but the suggestion that it is true. It would take the heat off you as far as my husband and his cronies are concerned. That I can guarantee. There would be another bonus.”
“What’s that?”
“Simply that, without anyone having to know, I would let you kiss me.”
The sun was dropping quickly, reflecting brightly in my eyes off a window in the next building.
“I see,” I said. “You mentioned gratitude.”
“Correct,” she said.
“I apologise in advance if I am being rude, but gratitude for what exactly?”
A piano struck up indoors. It was “The Candy Man Can”, by Tony Newley, a mawkish, fanciful, festering song popular with paedophiles the world over. Marina took another hit.
“You think that monster of a man in the Margalla Hills was run over by accident?”
“You mean…”
“… Someone was attentively watching your back, yes. Now will you do this small thing for me?”
“You mean…”
“I am not going to breathe another word about it. About the hit and run. And neither are you. This is how you can thank me.”
“I don’t know what to say,” I said. “Words aren’t enough.”
“Not spoken words, no. Written ones would be appropriate.”
Was it possible? That huge, unwieldy truck with no lights? How could they have seen anything? In the land of 1945 Hoovers, Bakelite electrical fittings and mid-sixties Goblin Teasmaids, they had thermal imaging binoculars?
“Tell me, Marina, what happened to you that night in Lahore? At the campaign rally.”
“What do you think happened? I was affected and emotional, obviously. But I was also proving a point. It matters not what I say at campaign rallies.” She nailed the end of the joint into the ashtray and downed her G&T in one. “The lesson has begun. You must go.”
Inside, about twenty children were lined up ready to dance. They looked dolefully at us in the mirror, as if to say what’s the fucking point of doing this in socks? Sebastian waved and kept playing. Marina saw me out to the lift.
“I shall be in touch,” she said.
“Thank you. Indeed. From the bottom…”
“Please give some thought to my request. A nice story, written by a nice man.”
Oh right. Nice one.
CHAPTER NINE
“HADLEY, I WILL LET YOU explain what’s happened with Marina Makhdoom,” Baxter said. “Where we stand with the story at this point in time and what we can go with. First off, and I apologise if I have missed something, but in all this drama, you don’t seem to have written anything. Not one word.”
“I can explain that,” I said. I was in the office the next morning with Baxter, Fagin and the chief security guy who was appalled that I hadn’t reported the dentist/manhole/penis waving/death threat incidents earlier. “I wanted to contextualise the information first.”
“What did you just say?” Baxter asked. “You wanted to contextualise the information? What the fuck does that mean?”
“I wanted to pull together all the strands.”
“What are you talking about? This is a news agency, not a trouser repair shop. We write news and put it out immediately. We brush in relevance and background, but we don’t contextualise anything. You’re fucking mad.”
“Hadley did try to give me one story,” Fagin said. “When he first found Makhdoom. It was the middle of the night. I told him to hold off.”
“To contextualise it. Exactly. Then the consulate came out with her being in Hong Kong, which kind of killed it,” I said. “They scooped me.”
“Sorry, Hadley,” Fagin said.
“It’s nothing.”
“And since then?” Baxter asked. “The dentist, the manhole, the cricket roller, the killing…?”
“I had been threatened, Rodney. She and I were in danger. Are in danger. The fucking colonel told me not to breathe a word. What was I supposed to do?”
“Tell me. That is what you should have done. Immediately, for fuck’s sake. And now you have this secret meeting in Tai Po. What was all that about?”
“She told me she had some interesting news.”
“Again, I don’t see any story. What is the news, Hadley? Why are you being so coy? What did she say?”
“Well it’s difficult. She told me this amazing stuff. It is just so sensitive.”
“Tell us.”
“She said
she had erred.”
“Sorry?”
“She said she had erred in her ways and needed to repent.” There was silence around the room. “She said she had done bad things, the drink, the drugs, the affairs, and if she wanted a fair crack at becoming a successful politician, she had to change.”
“So far, PR bollocks,” Fagin said. “What else?”
“Indeed. She said she had to convert to Islam.”
“What?”
“She used Shakespeare. She quoted Prince Hal saying she had to give up childish things to become king.”
“For fuck’s sake. What are you talking about?”
“She wants to convert to Islam so she can become prime minister. That’s how I read it.”
They all looked at one another across the table. “That’s better,” Baxter said. “She will let you write that?”
“Yes.”
“But how do we know she isn’t just playing us?”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, it is the PR bollocks that Fagin just mentioned. She has Pakistan papers that love her. Why doesn’t she turn to them?”
“She said something about integrity. The integrity of Shrubs.”
“But Hadley, we mustn’t set ourselves up for a fall. It is all very well saying she has vowed to do these things. But that is all it is so far. Words.”
“I think she really means it. I mean, I know she really means it.”
“That is all very well and good, but we would have to introduce the voice of scepticism. You would agree with that, right? A balancing comment. She is, after all, borderline crazy, right?”
They were correct. But just as I couldn’t buy completely into Marina’s version of events, nor could I buy into theirs. Had she really saved my life? Baxter and Fagin looked at each other.
“Hadley, laddie,” Fagin began. “Has this wee nutter turned your head?”
“How do you mean?”
“Well to us sitting here, Marina Makhdoom appears to be a political lightweight, whose apparent crush on Rick Astley has made her spoiled goods.”
“She was under a lot of pressure. She had been smoking.”