Typhoon. Charles Cumming

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СКАЧАТЬ has been through all of this before,’ I said. ‘“The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell.’’ ’

      Isabella smiled. ‘He also said, ‘‘Life is very simple. It’s men who insist on making it complicated.’’ ’

      ‘Yeah,’ said Miles. ‘Probably while getting jerked off by a nine-year-old boy.’

      Isabella screwed up her face. ‘If you ask my opinion – which I notice none of you are doing – both sides are as bad as each other.’ Joe turned to face her. ‘The British often act as though they were doing the world a favour for the last three hundred years, as if it was a privilege to be colonized. What everybody always seems to forget is that the empire was a money-making enterprise. Nobody came to Hong Kong to save the natives from the Chinese. Nobody colonized India because they thought they needed railways. It was all about making money.’ Miles had a gleeful look on his face. Seeing this, Isabella turned to him. ‘You Yanks are no better. The only difference, probably, is that you’re more honest about it. You’re not trying to pretend that you care about human rights. You just get on with doing whatever the hell you want.’

      All of us tried to jump in, but Miles got there first. ‘Look. I remember Tiananmen. I’ve seen the reports on torture in mainland China. I realize what these guys are capable of and the compromises we’re making in the West in order to –’

      Joe was pulled out of the conversation by the pulse of his mobile phone. He removed it from his jacket pocket, muttered a frustrated: ‘Sorry, hang on a minute,’ and consulted the screen. The read-out said: ‘Percy Craddock is on the radio’, which was agreed code for contacting Waterfield and Lenan.

      Isabella said, ‘Who is it, sweetheart?’

      I noticed that Joe avoided looking at her when he replied. ‘Some kind of problem at Heppner’s. I have to call Ted. Give me two minutes, will you?’

      Rather than speak on a cellphone, which could be hoovered by one of the Chinese listening stations in Shenzhen, Joe made his way to the back of the restaurant where there was a payphone bolted to the wall. He knew the number of the secure line by heart and was speaking to Lenan within a couple of minutes.

      ‘That was quick.’ Waterfield’s éminence grise sounded uncharacteristically chirpy.

      ‘Kenneth. Hello. What’s up?’

      ‘Are you having dinner?’

      ‘It’s OK.’

      ‘Alone?’

      ‘No. Isabella is here with Will Lasker. Miles, too.’

      ‘And how is our American friend this evening?’

      ‘Sweaty. Belligerent. What can I do for you?’

      ‘Unusual request, actually. Might be nothing in it. We need you to have a word with an eye-eye who came over this morning. Not blind flow. Claims he’s a professor of economics.’ ‘Blind flow’ was a term for an illegal immigrant coming south from China in the hope of finding work. ‘Everybody else is stuck at a black-tie do down at Stonecutters so the baton has passed to you. I won’t say any more on the phone, but there might be some decent product in it. Can you get to the flat in TST by ten-thirty?’

      Lenan was referring to a safe house near the Hong Kong Science Museum in Tsim Sha Tsui East, on the Kowloon side. Joe had been there once before. It was small, poorly ventilated and the buzzer on the door had been burned by a cigarette. Depending on traffic, a taxi would have him there in about three-quarters of an hour. He said, ‘Sure.’

      ‘Good. Lee’s looking after him for now, but he’s refusing to speak to anyone not directly connected to Patten. Get Lee to fill you in when you get there. Apparently there’s already a file of some sort.’

      Back in the dining area, Joe didn’t bother sitting down. He stood behind Isabella – almost certainly deliberately, so that he didn’t have to look at her – and put his hands on her shoulders as he explained that the bill of lading from a freight consignment heading to Central America had been lost in transit. It would have to be retyped and couriered to Panama before 2 a.m. Neither Miles nor myself, of course, believed this story for a minute, but we made a decent fist of saying, ‘Poor you, mate, what a nightmare,’ and ‘You’ll be hungry’ as Isabella kissed him and promised to be awake when he came home.

      Once Joe had gone, Miles felt it necessary to polish off the lie and began a sustained diatribe against the phantom clients of Heppner Logistics.

      ‘I mean, what’s the matter with these people in freight? Bunch of fuckin’ amateurs. Some asshole on a ship can’t keep hold of a piece of paper? How tough is that?’

      ‘They work him so hard,’ Isabella muttered. ‘That’s the third time this month he’s been called back to the office.’

      I was trying to think of ways of changing the subject when Miles chimed in again.

      ‘You’re right. You gotta guy there working hard, trying to climb the ladder from the bottom rung up, they’re always the ones who get treated badly.’ He was enjoying having Isabella more or less to himself. ‘But it can’t last. Joe is way too smart not to move onto bigger and better things. You have to stay positive, Izzy. Mah jiu paau, mouh jiu tiuh.’

      ‘What the hell does that mean?’

      It was Cantonese. Miles was showing off.

      ‘Deng Xiaoping, honey. ‘‘The horses will go on running, the dancing will continue.’’ Anybody join me in another bottle of wine?’

       7

       Wang

      Joe hailed a cab on the corner of Man Yee Lane and was grateful for the cooling chill of air conditioning as he climbed into the back. A humid three-minute walk from the restaurant had left his body encased in the damp, fever sweat which was the curse of living in Hong Kong: one minute you were in a shopping mall or restaurant as cool as iced tea, the next on humid streets that punched you with the packed heat of Asia. Joe’s shirt glued itself to the plastic upholstery of the cab as he leaned back and said, ‘Granville Road, please,’ with sweat condensing on his forehead and sliding in drops down the back of his neck. Five feet from the cab, a group of Chinese men were seated on stools around a tiny television set drinking cans of Jinwei and watching a movie. Joe made out the squat, spike-haired features of Jean-Claude van Damme as the taxi pulled away.

      Traffic on Des Voeux Road, coming both ways: buses, bicycles, trucks, cabs, all of the multi-dimensional crush of Hong Kong. The journey took forty minutes, under the cross-hatch of neon signs in Central, past the mamasans loitering in the doorways of Wan Chai, then dropping into the congested mid-harbour tunnel at North Point and surfacing, ten minutes later, into downtown Kowloon. Joe directed the driver to within two blocks of the safe house and covered the last 200 metres on foot. He stopped at a street café for a bowl of noodles and ate them at a low plastic table in the heat of the night, sweat now coagulating against his clothes. His shirt and the trousers of his suit seemed to absorb all of the dust and the grease and the slick fried stench of the neighbourhood. СКАЧАТЬ