by Adam Brookes
She walked slowly behind a freestanding shelf of cookery books, hooked her thumb under one of the two straps of the tote bag, slipped it off her shoulder, opening the bag a little.
Peter Poon had climbed the four steps in front of a shuttered bank, giving himself a better view. The street was still bright, thronged with tourists, but the stallholders were starting to pack up their T-shirts, silks, jewelry. A fruit vendor was pushing his cart through the crowd. Peter lit a cigarette, looked at his phone. Then looked up.
There is a moment, for the watcher, when the world lurches, the polarity flips, when what was thought safe is revealed to be saturated with threat. It was as if Peter Poon could feel them coming. It was a flicker of speed and movement in the crowd. It was a car with darkened windows pulling in abruptly at the end of the street. It was two men standing up at the same time, too fast, from their bowls of khao soi, and looking about them, as if for confirmation. Five, six of them now moving through the oblivious tourists, their clothes too dark, their movement too focused, toward the bookshop.
53
From the corner of her eye she saw the Englishman picking his way through the tourists sprawled on the floor, one hand still in his pocket. She stood still, looking straight ahead, holding open the tote bag. She breathed deeply, smelling the books, the paper.
Her phone vibrated.
She looked down. One word on the silver screen. A code word, searing itself on her eye.
He was four steps away, three, raising his hand with something in it, a small bundle. She stayed still, held the bag open. She looked beyond him to the door, which had opened, shoppers pushing past each other. She looked left to GODDESS 3. He had replaced the magazine on the shelf and was running his hands through his hair and turning away from the door.
Follow me, he was saying.
The Englishman had followed her gaze, had stopped.
God in heaven. Move.
He stayed still, looking around himself, unsure.
A calculation, now. She can break off the encounter, peel away, vanish in the crowd. She knows she can. She knows no one can do this better. She will change her hat, her gait, her silhouette and within a moment she will be gone, just as she has been gone before, in Hong Kong under the noses of MSS, in Jakarta with BAKIN on her, in Manila, in Seoul.
And in Beijing, in the cold. After watching this self-same, flushed, crumpled Englishman with his level look, a year before.
She knows she can vanish. She knows she can leave the Englishman alone, to be swarmed by whatever GODDESS 4 has seen on the street. And he will be carrying.
Or, she forces the encounter. And she is left carrying, to be swarmed by, well, whoever is out there, while the Englishman stumbles away clean.
To hell with it.
Eileen Poon took three steps toward him, kept them calm, measured. She came level with him.
GODDESS 3 was moving fast toward them.
The doors had been pushed open hard and four men stood there. They wore polo shirts, dark jackets, jeans. Two of them wore shades. One chewed gum. They were scanning the store, searching, she guessed, for foreign faces. Plenty of them here.
The Englishman was looking at her, as if seeking reassurance. She met him directly in the eye and, almost imperceptibly, nodded. She saw his relief.
Now GODDESS 3 was with them, Frederick, implacable, smiling, but moving in a way that she knew: urgent, controlled, ready.
The Englishman was raising his hand, pushing the bundle into the tote bag, pushing it down. The four men were moving into the store, so visible, so aggressive. They are not even trying to conceal themselves, she thought. Why so arrogant?
And in a move she knew would infuriate all her teachers, her sons, all her students in tradecraft, every professional she had encountered in her decades on the streets, she leaned into the Englishman, rested her liver-spotted hand on his sleeve, gestured with her eyes to GODDESS 3, and said, “Go with him, now. Fast.”
Whoever they were, they would get the footage from the in-store cameras. It wouldn’t be long before they saw.
So be it. Now we see this stupid old woman’s footwork.
And the best street artist in Asia, carrying now, turned away from the Englishman and from her mute and incredulous son, and made for the ladies’ bathroom.
Mangan felt the old woman’s hand on his arm, heard her whisper, smelled the reek of tobacco on her. He turned to where a younger Chinese man, wiry, a wispy goatee on him, was affecting interest in a glossy book on furniture design. The man put the book down and began walking slowly across the shop floor, away from the door. Mangan turned from the elderly woman, walked after him, trying to look preoccupied, allowing his eyes to pass over the bookshelves. They went round a corner into a short corridor, out of sight of the shop floor, at its far end a staircase. The man had quickened his pace, was climbing the stairs, looking over his shoulder, making a tight move gesture with his chin.
Up the stairs? thought Mangan. You never go up. Going up traps you.
He followed the man up the stairs.
They came out in a dim stockroom, boxes piled almost to the ceiling, the smell of cardboard and dust. The man closed a door behind them, turned off the lights, leaving only a dull glow from the window. He stopped, listened. Mangan could hear running feet, urgent movement. Where? Beneath them? On the stairs? The man gestured again and they crossed the stockroom, entered an empty office. Again, the man closed the door behind them. He seemed calm, moved with purpose, competence. Mangan was breathing hard. The woman. What had happened to her? Did they have her? Had they found the sample? He looked back, licked his lips, calculated.
“We should go back,” he whispered.
The man had wedged a chair beneath the doorknob. There was no other exit from the office, Mangan realized.
“No, we should not,” he said. Mangan heard the Cantonese clip in his voice.
“But what about—”
“She will get out. She always gets out.”
“Well, we can’t stay here,” said Mangan.
The man just looked at him, said nothing. Then pointed to the window.
“You can’t be serious,” said Mangan.
But the man was already standing to one side of the window, looking. Then he reached for the latch. The window opened outward on a hinge. In a single agile movement, the man had one leg through it, was straddling the sill, looking around. Then his other leg was through, and with a quick look to Mangan, he jumped.
Mangan stood alone in the dark office. The night heat was rolling in through the open window, along with the sound of the traffic, the popping of a tuk-tuk.
He looked out of the window.
His escort had jumped some twelve feet to land on a flat concrete rooftop below. Now he was crouched, still, listening. He looked like a cat. But the man’s jump had also, Mangan realized with a sickening lurch, traversed a three-foot gap between the two buildings. The gap fell away another two storeys to an alleyway far below and looked to Mangan like a dark chasm.
Three feet across and twelve feet down.
British secret agent plummets to his death fleeing bookshop. Poor egress protocol blamed.
Dear God, he thought, there must be some other way out of this, surely.
He went back across the room to the door, placed his ear to it and listened.
At first, nothing.
Then, a creak. A footstep?
From the other side, the door handle was being worked, quietly. The chair back prevented the handle from being fully depressed. The door stayed closed.
Then again. A slight rattling of the door this time.
Mangan backed away, looked at the door, then at the window.
He went over, slipped one leg through, straddled the sill, looked down. The man was still crouched on the rooftop below, but staring up at him, an imploring look on his face. Mangan wanted to retch, felt the weakness in his hands, his legs. He pulled himself through the window, squatted on the ledge. He could hear the
door rattling in the room behind him.
Then he thrust out and away.
54
Granny Poon’s pink sun hat went in the cistern. Hidden in the toilet cubicle, she took from the tote bag hair clips and a green visor of the sort golfers wear. She pinned her hair back into a bun, put on the visor. She added heavy, black shades. The white shirt she had been wearing she replaced with a blue T-shirt, bearing the legend, “With a Body Like This Who Needs a Pickup Line?”
She worked surely and with certainty. She felt very calm.
Many times. Many, many times.
The samples and mobile phone went into a pouch she clipped around her waist, the tote bag in the bin. Then she stopped for a moment, breathed deeply, allowed her body to collapse into a stoop. She muttered to herself and felt herself sink into an old woman’s hesitancy. Her hands quivered, her steps shortened. She unlocked the door of the ladies’ room and shuffled out onto the shop floor.
Two of the men remained by the main entrance, watching the crowd. Where the others had gone, she couldn’t tell. She took a cookery book from the shelf, opened it. It was in English. She studied the photographs, perfect salads of banana flowers, glistening shrimp, she ran her wrinkled hand over the glossy pages. She closed the book and walked toward the till.
The girl behind the counter took the book from her with a patronizing smile.
“Such a heavy book!” she said, in English.
“What?” said Granny Poon, tilting her head toward the girl.
“I said, a very heavy book,” said the girl.
“Yes, yes, very heavy,” said Granny Poon.
The two by the door had been joined by a third, who was speaking to them quietly. Some of the tourists were looking in their direction, craning their necks, picking up the men’s urgency. A manager was hovering, trying to pluck up the courage to ask them what they wanted. Who were they? What were they?
“Do you enjoy cooking Thai food?” said the girl, as she put the book into a carrier bag.
“No,” she said. “Hate it.”
The girl looked nonplussed. Eileen took the bag from her and walked, stiff, stooped, toward the door, the carrier bag swinging at her side, toward the three men.
Eileen Poon glared at the men blocking the door of the bookshop. The men looked at her, this crabbed old woman in shades and sun visor, the hard little mouth, the thin lips edged with wrinkles, like tributaries of some ancient river.
She made an I-want-to-get-past gesture, a crabbed flick of the wrist, bony index finger extended, pointing to the door. She allowed herself to list to one side, the carrier bag with the very heavy book weighing her down. One of the men was still talking quietly, urgently, to the others. She could not hear exactly what he was saying, but he was speaking Mandarin, for sure. She edged closer. Northern Mandarin, the soft retroflex sh sound, the rhotic r.
So. China is here. A State Security team? Something else? Who?
She muttered to herself in Cantonese and one of the men gave her a hard look, and then shifted to one side, opening a way for her. She shuffled forward, reached for the door.
But the man wasn’t finished.
Something about her. He sensed it, she knew.
He reached down, grabbed the carrier bag. She let out a squawk. The manager flinched, put his hand over his mouth. The man opened the bag, took out the cookery book, flicked through its pages, but watched her. She let herself shrink, hid behind her absurd shades, let her mouth fall open. She could see the manager girding himself to intervene. The man thrust the book back at her, then the carrier bag. She allowed herself to be flustered, to fumble the book back into the bag, her old, fragile hands quivering with effort. The man was eyeing the pouch strapped around her waist. He was not having that. And if he tried, she’d poke his eyes out. She looked away from him, pushed the door open, shuffled onto the street, faded into the milling tourists.
He was behind her, watching her.
She shuffled forward, saw Peter Poon across the street, standing on the steps, his eyes locked on her, clocking the man behind her immediately and moving fast now, cutting between the stalls, the tourists parting for him, shrinking away from him. Ha! How had she bred such menacing sons?
Then he was beside her, his arm taking hers, protective, murmuring to her in Cantonese. Ma, where have you been? I’ve been waiting. And she snapped at him, Oh, stop your fussing. And they walked down the street through the tinny, blaring music and the litter and the smell of drains and overripe fruit, the whiff of early durian, and the man was still behind them but there was Winston with the moped and she slipped onto the back, snorting with laughter, wrapped her arms around his waist, and Winston was saying Shhh, Ma and he revved the engine and as they roared off she raised her shades and looked back and saw the man standing there looking about in frustration, and she fastened his face in her eye, allowed it to sink into the vast archive of her mind, to be remembered.
55
As he fell, tilting forward, his feet flying behind, not beneath him, the rooftop rushing at him, Mangan’s world shrunk to the night air on his face, the orange wash of street lamps against the night, the black chasm beneath.
Somehow he forced himself not to extend his arms to break the fall.
He slammed into the rooftop, one shin against a gutter, most of the impact in his knees, then in his elbows and torso. His chin snapped downward onto the concrete. Sickened, he felt his world turn cloudy, and he must have passed out for a second or two. Then Frederick Poon was shaking him and looking into his eyes, and he was conscious of thick billowing pain at his very core, and he couldn’t breathe. Frederick was sitting him up, bending him forward, and he managed to inhale a little and retch. He could discern Frederick’s words in his ear.
“You must get up. You must get up. We have to go.”
His body wracked itself for air, and he could hear himself uttering a weird shriek each time he tried to breathe in. He made out blood on his shirt, and for an instant he sank deep inside himself, reflecting on how effort was now required and how he hated making effort at the behest of others, and the whole point of his life until now had been to get out from others’ authority, and yet he’d gone and allowed himself to get drawn into something, and now he was being ordered to stand up and run because the people from hell were rattling at the door.
Frederick wrenched at his shoulder, pulling him to his feet. Mangan still couldn’t breathe properly and his mouth had blood in it. His feet and arms were floppy. He half-staggered across the rooftop with Frederick—wiry, quick, strong—propping him up.
They were at the edge of the roof. Another drop. Frederick sat him down and made him dangle his legs over the edge.
Where were the people from hell? He swayed, went away again, his frame juddering with each breath.
Someone was standing beneath, in the darkness, arms outstretched. A bulky figure waiting to catch him. Someone familiar.
Frederick pushed, and over he went.
Two of them supported him now, his arms around their necks, and they were running. He felt his feet juddering along the road and tried to make them keep up.
A car, again. They tipped him into the backseat. He heard the two of them speaking Mandarin, Frederick’s etched with the sibilance of Hong Kong, the familiar figure’s northern, Beijing. They were disagreeing vehemently. The car lurched forward. His head lolled on the headrest, his breath coming easier now. The familiar figure was driving, his thick hands on the wheel, pushing the car away from the old city, out onto broader throughways. Mangan looked at the big, sloping shoulders, the fleshiness of him, the bristled hair, and thought of a cold, crisp Beijing autumn, of dancers lifting and turning in a park. Of a man with a knife in his chest in the dark, asking for his little boy as he died.
The car made a sudden turn and clattered into an underground car park, the tires squealing on the hot concrete as they came to a halt in a corner.
The familiar figure jabbed a finger at Frederick Poon.
; “You get out. Go,” he said.
“What? No!”
“Go.” He gestured to Mangan. “I’ve got him.”
Frederick looked at Mangan.
“I can’t leave him.”
The man was looking at his handheld, Mangan saw him sneer in its glow.
“Why not? We’re old friends, me and Mang An. I will look after him.”
He turned and looked at Mangan. “Aren’t we?”
Mangan felt a wave of disorientation. He had last seen the face more than a year before, the face of an agent, his agent, the face that had come to him in China, tapped him on the shoulder and forced secrets on him. A face that ruptured his life, ripped open a fissure that would never knot back together. Mangan blinked, struggled to understand.
“Peanut…?” he stammered.
The man spoke again, to Frederick.
“They are all over you like flies on shit. You need to get far away. Now.”
“You know who they are?” Frederick was saying.
Mangan struggled to lean forward, to hear.
“We think they’re private,” said the man he’d known as Peanut. “Chinese. Corporate. So you’re in luck.”
Mangan, mouth thick and dry, spoke in Mandarin.
“Why… in luck?”
“Because my lot don’t like your lot running around here without asking but they like Chinese corporate even less. So you get a pass.”
The man grinned, raised his hands in a mock welcome gesture to the two of them.
“Now be good and fuck off.”
Frederick looked at Mangan, who managed a nod. And Frederick was out of the door and off across the floor of the parking garage at a jog, and gone.
The man reached in his pocket and pulled out a packet of cigarettes, Tiananmen brand, lit two with a hissing gas lighter and passed one to Mangan. He saw his own hand shaking as he took it.
The familiar voice. Its undercurrents of humor, anger, threat, coursing beneath the Mandarin.
“Well, Mang An. That was the worst jump I have ever seen. Quite useless, actually. Perhaps you are too old for this.”