Typhoon. Charles Cumming

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       13

       The Double

      When Joe returned home he found Isabella asleep, a white cotton sheet pushed down below her feet, her face turned towards the bedroom wall so that in the darkness he could make out the lovely cello curvature of her back and legs. He drank a small glass of single malt in their cluttered kitchen, showered in a stuttering stream of vaguely sulphurous Hong Kong water and slipped into bed beside her. He wanted to wake her with kisses that laddered down her spine, to encourage her body to turn towards his, to place his hand in the blissful envelope created by her closed thighs, but he could not do so for fear that she would wake up, look at the clock and ask where he had been, ask why it had taken him so long to resolve a simple problem at Heppner’s, and why it was now almost four o’clock in the morning when he had left the restaurant before ten? Best just to set his alarm for six and to slip out before the questions started. Best just to leave her a note.

      Despite his exhaustion, Joe found it difficult to sleep. Unable to shut down his mind he lay motionless on his back as the clock on the bedside table thrummed towards five, turning over the details of the long conversation with Wang and plotting the possible trajectory of their imminent second meeting. Shortly before dawn he fell into a deep sleep from which he was woken by dreams of prisons and pliers and Urumqi. At six he gave up on sleep, rolled out of bed, kissed Isabella gently on the shoulder and went into the kitchen. From the fridge he removed a mango, some bananas and a pineapple and prepared a fruit salad for when she woke up. He then laid out a breakfast tray, wrote her a short note, placed a sheet around her body to keep her warm in the cool air of the morning, dressed and slipped outside in search of a cab.

      Twenty minutes later he boarded a half-empty Star ferry which chugged across Victoria Harbour like a faithful dog. Junks and cargo ships assumed silhouettes in the gradually improving light. Joe stood at the stern railings like a departing dignitary, looking back at the coat-hanger lights of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, at the fading neon outlines of Central and Causeway Bay, at the great massed lump of the Peak behind them. As the sun grew brighter he picked out workmen buzzing in the bamboo scaffolding of the Convention and Exhibition Centre, working day and night to finish the building before the handover. Inside the ferry, businessmen and cleaning ladies and ageing shopkeepers, most of whom had known the same view every morning of their working lives, snoozed on cramped plastic chairs, undisturbed by the day’s first aeroplanes which roared in low overhead.

      On the Kowloon side Joe shuffled out of the terminal through a crush of rush-hour workers and walked east along Salisbury Road. There was still an hour to go before he was expected at the safe house and he gave in to a sudden, imperial urge to eat breakfast at the Peninsula Hotel. A waiter in late middle age guided him through the marble splendour of the ancient lobby and found him a quiet table with a view onto the bustling streets outside. Joe ordered eggs Benedict and orange juice and read the International Herald Tribune from cover to cover while thinking of Isabella eating breakfast alone in their apartment. Towards eight o’clock he paid the bill, which came to almost HK$300, and took a cab to within a block of Yuk Choi Road.

      Only when he was at the door, waiting for Lee to respond to his four short bursts on the buzzer, did Joe remember that he had switched off his phone the night before. As he waited on the steps of the building, the machine burst into life. The read-out said: ‘FORGET ABOUT TOMORROW. CHANGE OF PLAN. GO TO WORK AS NORMAL. KL’ and Joe felt all the tiredness of a night without sleep catching up with him. It was too early in the morning for an anti-climax.

      Lee’s surprised, groggy voice crackled on the intercom.

      ‘Who is this please?’

      ‘It’s John.’

      It took some time before Lee finally buzzed Joe inside. He looked unusually anxious when he opened the door to greet him. His forehead was creased with worry lines and he was breathing quickly, as if he, and not Mr Richards, had just climbed four flights of humid stairs.

      ‘You forget something?’ he asked. Nor was this Lee’s typical greeting. He was usually more deferential, keen to smile and make a good first impression. There were windows open throughout the flat and Joe sensed immediately that Wang, Sadha and Lenan had all left. He briefly entertained the wild notion that he had caught Lee with a girl in the back bedroom. He certainly looked not to have slept.

      ‘No, I didn’t forget anything,’ he said. ‘Is everything all right, Lee?’

      ‘Everything fine.’

      Joe moved past him into the kitchen and saw that the bedroom was empty. ‘I just got the message,’ he said. ‘I’ve made a wasted journey. Mr Lodge told me not to come. Where the hell is everybody?’

      ‘They went home,’ Lee replied uneasily.

      ‘What do you mean, they went home?’

      ‘Leave at five. Mr Wang go with them.’

      ‘Mr Wang doesn’t have a home.’

      This remark seemed to confuse Lee, who looked like an actor struggling to remember his lines. For want of something to say, he muttered, ‘I really don’t know,’ an evasion which irritated Joe. He was beginning to suspect that he was being lied to.

      ‘You don’t know what?’

      ‘What, Mr Richards? I think they take Mr Wang somewhere else. I think they leave at five o’clock.’

      ‘You think?’

      Lee looked ever more sheepish. He clearly didn’t know whether to tell Joe what had happened or to obey orders and keep his mouth shut.

      ‘What about Sadha?’ he asked. ‘What happened to Sadha?’

      ‘Sadha go with them.’

      ‘With who?’

      ‘With Mr Lodge and Mr Coleman. They take the professor north.’

      Joe had been passing through the red plastic strip curtains on his way into the sitting room but the shock of this information spun him round. Malcolm Coleman was one of Miles’s cover names.

      ‘The СКАЧАТЬ