PART II
Shaking the Tree
13
LIESE
Star Heights was the newest and tallest apartment block in the Midlevels, built on the round, and by night jammed like a huge lighted pencil into the soft darkness of the Peak. A winding causeway led to it, but the only pavement was a line of curbstone six inches wide between the causeway and the cliff. At Star Heights, pedestrians were in bad taste. It was early evening and the social rush hour was nearing its height.
As Jerry edged his way along the curb, the Mercedes and Rolls-Royces brushed against him in their haste to deliver and collect. He carried a bunch of orchids wrapped in tissue: larger than the bunch Craw had presented to Phoebe Wayfarer, smaller than the one Drake Ko had given the dead boy Nelson. These orchids were for nobody. “When you’re my size, sport, you have to have a hell of a good reason for whatever you do.”
He felt tense but also relieved that the long, long wait was over.
A straight foot-in-the-door operation, Your Grace, Craw had advised him at yesterday’s protracted briefing. Shove your way in there and start pitching and don’t stop till you’re out the other side.
A striped awning led to the entrance hall and a perfume of women hung in the air, like a foretaste of his errand. And just remember Ko owns the building, Craw had added sourly, as a parting gift. The interior decoration was not quite finished. Plates of marble were missing round the mail-boxes. A fibreglass fish should have been spewing water into a terrazzo fountain, but the pipes had not yet been connected and bags of cement were heaped in the basin.
He headed for the lifts. A glass booth was marked “Reception” and the Chinese porter was watching him from inside it. Jerry only saw the blur of him. He had been reading when Jerry arrived, but now he was staring at Jerry, undecided whether to challenge him, but half reassured by the orchids. A couple of American matrons in full war-paint arrived and took up a position near him.
“Great flowers,” they said, poking in the tissue.
“Super, aren’t they? Here, have them. Present! Come on! Beautiful woman. Naked without them!”
Laughter. The English are a race apart. The porter returned to his reading and Jerry was authenticated. A lift arrived. A herd of diplomats, businessmen, and their squaws shuffled into the lobby, sullen and bejewelled. Jerry ushered the American matrons ahead of him. Cigar smoke mingled with the scent. Slovenly canned music hummed forgotten melodies. The matrons pressed the button for twelve.
“You visiting with the Hammersteins too?” they asked, still looking at the orchids.
At the fifteenth, Jerry made for the fire stairs. They stank of cat, and rubbish from the chute. Descending, he met an amah carrying a nappy bucket. She scowled at him till he greeted her, then laughed uproariously. He kept going till he reached the eighth floor where he stepped back into the plush of the residents’ landing. He was at the end of a corridor. A small rotunda gave on to two gold lift doors. There were four flats, each a quadrant of the circular building, and each with its own corridor. He took up a position in the B corridor with only the flowers to protect him. He was watching the rotunda, his attention on the mouth of the corridor marked C. The tissue round the orchids was damp where he’d been clutching it too tight.
“It’s a firm weekly date,” Craw had assured him. “Every Monday, flower arrangement at the American Club. Regular as clockwork. She meets a girl-friend there, Nellie Tan, works for Airsea. They take in the flower arrangement and stay for dinner afterwards.”
“So where’s Ko meanwhile?”
“In Bangkok. Trading.”
“Well, let’s bloody well hope he stays there.”
“Amen, sir. Amen.”
With a shriek of new hinges unoiled, the door at his ear was yanked open and a slim young American in a dinner-jacket stepped into the corridor, stopped dead, and stared at Jerry and the orchids. He had blue, steady eyes and he carried a brief-case.
“You looking for me with those things?” he enquired, with a Boston society drawl. He looked rich and assured. Jerry guessed diplomacy or Ivy League banking.
“Well, I don’t think so, actually,” Jerry confessed, playing the English bloody fool. “Cavendish,” he said. Over the American’s shoulder Jerry saw the door quietly close on a packed book shelf. “Friend of mine asked me to give these to a Miss Cavendish at 9D. Waltzed off to Manila, left me holding the orchids, sort of thing.”
“Wrong floor,” said the American, strolling toward the lift. “You want one up. Wrong corridor, too. D’s over on the other side. Thattaway.”
Jerry stood beside him, pretending to wait for an up lift. The down lift came first, the young American stepped easily into it, and Jerry resumed his post. The door marked C opened; he saw her come out, and turn to double-lock it. Her clothes were everyday. Her hair was long and ash blond but she had tied it in a pony-tail at the nape. She wore a plain halter-neck dress and sandals, and though he couldn’t see her face he knew already she was beautiful. She walked to the lift, still not seeing him, and Jerry had the illusion of looking in on her through a window from the street.
There were women in Jerry’s world who carried their bodies as if they were citadels to be stormed only by the bravest, and Jerry had married several; or perhaps they grew that way under his influence. There were women who seemed determined to hate themselves, hunching their backs and locking up their hips. And there were women who had only to walk toward him to bring him a gift. They were the rare ones, and for Jerry at that moment she led the pack.
She had stopped at the gold doors and was watching the lighted numbers. He reached her side as the lift arrived and she still hadn’t noticed him. It was packed, as he had hoped it would be. He entered crabwise, intent on the orchids, apologising, grinning, and making a show of holding them high. She had her back to him, and he was standing at her shoulder. It was a strong shoulder, and bare either side of the halter, and Jerry could see small freckles and a down of tiny gold hairs disappearing down her spine. Her face was in profile below him. He peered down at it.
“Lizzie?” he said uncertainly. “Hey, Lizzie. It’s me, Jerry.”
She turned sharply and stared up at him. He wished he could have backed away from her, because he knew her first response would be physical fear of his size, and he was right. He saw it momentarily in her grey eyes, which flickered before holding him in their stare.
“Lizzie Worthington!” he declared more confidently. “How’s the whisky, remember me? One of your proud investors. Jerry. Chum of Tiny Ricardo’s. One fifty-gallon keg with my name on the label. All paid and above-board.”
He had kept it quiet on the assumption that he might be raking up a past she was keen to disown. He had kept it so quiet that their fellow passengers heard either “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” over the Muzak or the grumbling of an elderly Greek who thought he was boxed in.
“Why, of course,” she said, and gave a bright, air-hostess smile. “Jerry!” Her voice faded as she pretended to have it on the tip of her tongue: “Jerry—er—” She frowned and looked upward like a repertory actress doing forgetfulness. The lift stopped at the sixth floor.
“Westerby,” he said promptly, getting her off the hook. “Newshound. You put the bite on me in the Constellation bar. I wanted a spot of loving comfort and all I got was a keg of whisky.”
Somebody next to him laughed.
“Of course! Jerry darling! How could I possibly . . . So, I mean, what are you doing in Hong Kong? My God!”
“Usual beat. Fire and pestilence, famine. How about you? Retired, I should think, with your sales methods. Never had my arm twisted so thoroughly in my life.”
She laughed delightedly. The doors had opened at the third floor. An old woman shuffled in on two walking-sticks.
Lizzie Worthington sold in all a cool fifty-five kegs of the blushful Hippocrene, Your Grace, old Craw had said. Every one of them to a male buyer and a fair number of them, according to my advisers, with service
thrown in. Gives a new meaning to the term “good measure,” I venture to suggest.
They had reached the ground floor. She got out first and he walked beside her. Through the main doors he saw her red sports car, with its roof up, waiting in the bay, jammed among the glistening limousines. She must have phoned down and ordered them to have it ready, he thought; if Ko owns the building, he’ll make damn sure she gets the treatment. She was heading for the porter’s window. As they crossed the hall, she went on chattering, pivoting to talk to him, one arm held wide of her body, palm upward, like a fashion model. He must have asked her how she liked Hong Kong, though he couldn’t remember doing so.
“I adore it, Jerry, I simply adore it. Vientiane seems—oh, centuries away. You know Ric died?” She threw this in heroically, as if she and death weren’t strangers to each other. “After Ric, I thought I’d never care for anywhere again. I was completely wrong, Jerry. Hong Kong has to be the most fun city in the world. Lawrence, darling, I’m sailing my red submarine. It’s hen night at the club.”
Lawrence was the porter, and the key to her car dangled from a large silver horseshoe which reminded Jerry of Happy Valley races.
“Thank you, Lawrence,” she said sweetly, and gave him a smile that would last him all night. “The people here are so marvellous, Jerry,” she confided to him in a stage whisper as they moved toward the main entrance. “To think what we used to say about the Chinese in Laos! Yet here they’re just the most marvellous and outgoing and inventive people ever.” She had slipped into a stateless foreign accent, he noticed. Must have picked it up from Ricardo and stuck to it for chic. “People think to themselves : Hong Kong—fabulous shopping—tax-free cameras—restaurants. But honestly, Jerry, when you get under the surface, and meet the true Hong Kong, and the people—it’s got everything you could possibly want from life. Don’t you adore my new car?”
“So that’s how you spend the whisky profits.”
He held out his open palm, and she dropped the keys into it so that he could unlock the door for her. Still in dumb show, he gave her the orchids to hold. Behind the black Peak a full moon, not yet risen, glowed like a forest fire. She climbed in, he handed her the keys, and this time he felt the contact of her hand and remembered Happy Valley again, and Ko’s kiss as they drove away.
“Mind if I ride on the back?” he asked.
She laughed and pushed open the passenger door for him. “Where are you going with those gorgeous orchids, anyway?”
She started the engine, but Jerry gently switched it off again, so that she stared at him in surprise.
“Sport,” he said quietly. “I cannot tell a lie. I’m a viper in your nest, and before you drive me anywhere, you’d better fasten your seat-belt and hear the grisly truth.”
He had chosen this moment carefully, because he didn’t want her to feel threatened. She was in the driving seat of her own car, under the lighted awning of her own apartment block, within sixty feet of Lawrence, the porter, and he was playing the humble sinner in order to increase her sense of security.
“Our chance reunion was not entire chance. That’s point one. Point two, not to put too fine an edge on it, my paper told me to run you to earth and besiege you with many searching questions regarding your late chum Ricardo.”
She was still watching him, still waiting. On the point of her chin she had two small parallel scars like claw marks, quite deep. He wondered who had made them, and what with.
“But Ricardo’s dead,” she said, much too early.
“Sure,” said Jerry consolingly. “No question. However, the comic is in possession of what they’re pleased to call a hot tip that he’s alive after all, and it’s my job to humour them.”
“But that’s absolutely absurd!”
“Agreed. Totally. They’re out of their minds. The consolation prize is two dozen well-thumbed orchids and the best dinner in town.”
Turning away from him, she gazed through the windscreen, her face in the full glare of the overhead lamp, and Jerry wondered what it must be like to inhabit such a beautiful body, living up to it twenty-four hours a day. Her grey eyes opened a little wider, and he had a shrewd suspicion that he was supposed to notice the tears brimming and the way her hands grasped the steering-wheel for support.
“Forgive me,” she murmured. “It’s just—when you love a man—give everything up for him—and he dies—then one evening, out of the blue—”
“Sure,” said Jerry. “I’m sorry.”
She started the engine. “Why should you be sorry? If he’s alive, that’s bonus. If he’s dead, nothing’s changed. We’re on a pound to nothing.” She laughed. “Ric always said he was indestructible.”
It’s like stealing from a blind beggar, he thought. She shouldn’t be let loose.
She drove well but stiffly, and he guessed—because she inspired guesswork—that she had only recently passed her test and that the car was her prize for doing so. It was the calmest night in the world. As they sank into the city, the harbour lay like a perfect mirror at the centre of the jewel box. They talked places. Jerry suggested the Peninsula, but she shook her head.
“Okay. Let’s go get a drink first,” he said. “Come on, let’s blow the walls out!”
To his surprise, she reached across and gave his hand a squeeze. Then he remembered Craw: she did that to everyone, he’d said.
She was off the leash for a night: he had that overwhelming sensation. He remembered taking his daughter out from school when she was young, and how they had to do lots of different things in order to make the afternoon longer.
At a dark disco on Kowloon-side, they drank Rémy Martin with ice and soda. He guessed it was Ko’s drink and she had picked up the habit to keep him company. It was early and there were maybe a dozen people, no more. The music was loud and they had to yell to hear each other, but she didn’t mention Ricardo. She preferred the music, and listening with her head back. Sometimes she held his hand, and once put her head on his shoulder, and once she blew him a distracted kiss and drifted onto the floor to perform a slow, solitary dance, eyes closed, slightly smiling. The men ignored their own girls and undressed her with their eyes, and the Chinese waiters brought fresh ashtrays every three minutes so that they could look down her dress.
After two drinks and half an hour, she announced a passion for the Duke and the big-band sound, so they raced back to the Island to a place Jerry knew where a live Filipino band gave a fair rendering of Ellington. Cat Anderson was the best thing since sliced bread, she said. Had he heard Armstrong and Ellington together? Weren’t they just the greatest? More Rémy Martin while she sang “Mood Indigo” to him.
“Did Ricardo dance?” Jerry asked.
“Did he dance?” she replied softly as she tapped her foot and lightly clicked her fingers to the rhythm.
“Thought Ricardo had a limp,” Jerry objected.
“That never stopped him,” she said, still absorbed by the music. “I’ll never go back to him, you understand. Never. That chapter’s closed. And how.”
“How’d he pick it up?”
“Dancing?”
“The limp.”
With her finger curled round an imaginary trigger, she fired a shot into the air.
“It was either the war or an angry husband,” she said. He made her repeat it, her lips close to his ear.
She knew a new Japanese restaurant where they served fabulous Kobe beef.
“Tell me how you got those scars,” he asked as they were driving there. He touched his own chin. “The left and the right. What did it?”
“Oh, hunting poor innocent foxes,” she said with a light smile. “My dear papa was horse mad. He still is, I’m afraid.”
“Where does he live?”
“Daddy? Oh, the usual tumbledown schloss in Shropshire. Miles too big but they won’t move. No staff, no money, ice cold three-quarters of the year. Mummy can’t even boil an egg.”
He was still reeling when she remembered a bar where they gave h
eavenly curry canapés, so they drove around until they found it and she kissed the barman. There was no music, but for some reason he heard himself telling her all about the orphan, till he came to the reasons for their breakup, which he deliberately fogged over.
“Ah, but Jerry, darling,” she said sagely. “With twenty-five years between you and her, what else can you expect?”
And with nineteen years and a Chinese wife between you and Drake Ko, what can you expect? he thought.
They left—more kisses for the barman—and Jerry was not so intoxicated by her company, or by the brandy-sodas, to miss the point that she made a phone call, allegedly to cancel her date, that the call took a long time, and that when she returned from it she looked rather solemn. In the car again, he caught her eye and thought he read a shadow of mistrust.
“Jerry?”
“Yes?”
She shook her head, laughed, ran her palm along his face, then kissed him. “It’s fun,” she said.
He guessed she was wondering whether, if she had really sold him that keg of unbranded whisky, she would so thoroughly have forgotten him. He guessed she was also wondering whether, in order to sell him the keg, she had thrown in any fringe benefits of the sort Craw had so coarsely referred to. But that was her problem, he reckoned. Had been from the start.
John Le Carré: Three Complete Novels Page 70