‘I know a place,’ he said as they emerged into Chung Hua Road. ‘A beer and a bite, OK? Watch for the cars. Jesus these Chinese! How they can stand that opera stuff, Christ knows! Mongolian suit you? You eaten Mongolian before? Pete, isn’t it? That’s what they told me.’
‘Pete will do.’
‘Harry — pleased to meet you, Pete — Harry Korn. There’s a gap in the traffic, c’mon!’ He took Kirov’s arm in a powerful grip and together they dodged through the cars. Once on the other side Korn halted breathless. ‘Those bastards are going to be the end of me, I swear it Where are we? Sure, this way.’ He took a side road past a pachinko parlour and a hotel that let rooms by the hour, and bumped his way through the crowds of Chinese bunching around the open shops and the small food stalls. ‘You notice,’ he said as they walked along, ‘that I don’t keep an eye out for tails. There’s no point. In this place a Round-Eye sticks out like a sore thumb. If someone wants to find you, he’ll find you. The normal rules don’t apply and you’ve just got to get used to it, so relax.’
‘Ko’tory ’chas?’
Korn laughed. ‘Sorry, mate, I don’t speak the lingo too good.’
‘You’re Russian?’
‘As they come, but I left the old country when I was twelve and there isn’t much call for the mother tongue in Sydney. It’s something else you’ve got to get used to, I’ll tell you about it some time. Looks like we’re here.’ They were outside a restaurant with a picture of a Mongolian horseman on the window and a sign in Chinese. Harry Korn led the way inside, dealt with the manager, found a table and ordered a couple of beers. ‘We serve ourselves,’ he explained. He took a plate from a stack and began helping himself to thin slivers of meat and chopped vegetables. He took them to the cook who fast-fried them on a hotplate and passed them back. When he returned to the table he found Kirov still there. ‘Not eating, huh? Too much tucker on the plane? You can try the other stuff if you like.’ He pointed out another table where the diners were picking morsels of food from a copper steamer. ‘No? I guess travel has screwed your guts up. Me, I’m a growing boy.’ He took a pair of wooden chopsticks, snapped them apart and prodded at his dish. A few seconds of this and he put the chopsticks down and put on a miserable face. ‘You’re fair putting me off, Pete, that’s the truth. Something getting at you? Spit it out.’
‘What were you told?’ Kirov asked.
‘You don’t trust me, eh? I can understand that. But I’m loyal, believe me. I may have spent most of my life in Oz, but my dad was a good union and Party man and I took in Marx and Lenin with my mother’s milk.’
‘That wasn’t my question.’
‘No? Suit yourself. What was I told? The answer is — not a lot. I got a request to give you whatever help you needed but strictly off the record, something to do with a fight among the grown-ups back at Moscow Centre. OK, so I don’t care, I’m a soldier and I do what I’m told.’
‘What help can you give me?’
‘That depends on what you want. But not much.’ Korn shrugged and looked serious. He was a big man and the other customers were small people. Kirov was conscious of their visibility. Harry wanted to confide. ‘I’ve been trying to tell you something, Pete. This place isn’t like other countries — different rules apply. The fact that I’m from Australia should have told you that.’ He leaned forward. ‘Do you have any idea how difficult it is to place a Russian here, in a country that’s paranoid about Communism and has no business with the Soviet Union? You were thinking maybe that there’s an organisation here — that somewhere there’s the usual gang of KGB-issue hoods and pimps backing me up? If that’s your idea, you can forget it.’ Harry Korn is it! And even getting me installed, up and running was like landing a man on Mars.’ Korn fell back in his chair, his belly resting on his lap. At the next table the diners were leaving. Korn checked his watch, mopped his brow and called for another beer.
‘What sort of support do you have? Do you have a local network?’
‘Oh, sure!’ Korn answered ironically. ‘I have a local network, and so does the CIA. The trouble is that they’re the same network!’ He laughed and sank his face in his tankard of beer. When he had finished he gave Kirov a goggle-eyed stare. ‘Let me tell you something about your Chinee,’ he said slowly in the way that people do when they’re about to tell you they’ve been in the business for forty years man and boy. ‘Your Chinee doesn’t give a fuck for ideology!’ This was wisdom, so he paused to let it sink in. ‘He cares about the members of his family — all five hundred of them — his clan and his secret society. You’ve heard of the Kuomintang that’s supposed to be the government? Well, you can forget about that too. It’s just window-dressing. Political parties are strictly for Round-Eyes. The real power in this country is a secret society — the Bamboo Society. Anyone who’s anyone is a paid-up member.’
‘What does that have to do with your network?’
‘The Bamboo Society supplies it — where else am I going to get one from? They supply me, they supply the CIA, and they supply every other Round-Eye intelligence agency that tries to get a foothold here. They do things for me if they feel like it, and they tell me what they want to tell me. Same goes for everyone else.’
Kirov looked about the restaurant again. Another table had cleared. No new customers had come in. Harry Korn was checking his watch again. Seeing Kirov watching him, he grinned and tapped the watch glass. ‘Rolex,’ he said. ‘Do you want me to get one for you?’
‘Like the one you gave Scherbatsky?’
‘Who told you that? I never gave Scherbatsky a watch,’ he said crossly. ‘Let me tell you about that bastard. He came here and he gave me a load of shit about being a big-shot back in Moscow so that I was running around and spending a fortune on him. And then he tried to sell me this piece of junk that he’d bought in Singapore one time, not even a genuine Taiwan Rolex.’
‘What about your genuine Taiwan network? Is it any more genuine than your watch?’
Korn looked shocked, then thought about it and nodded. ‘Perhaps you’ve got a point.’
‘Then who are you really working for?’
‘It beats me. The Chinese? I used to worry about it but now I don’t. Like you, Pete, I’m just a policeman. Once upon a time I thought that policemen were loyal to something, you know, something outside of themselves. But then I realised that the blokes who were giving the orders told me lies, and I could never understand what the point of it all was. So then I became loyal to the idea of just being a policeman — and, you know, it was all right!’
In the silence the waiters haunted the doors of the almost empty room. A fan whirred and stirred the muddy air.
‘Let’s get pissed,’ said Harry Korn.
‘Do people normally go home this early?’
A waiter was re-laying a table. The others were just standing around. Harry Korn said, ‘I don’t know what the Chinese normally do. Maybe it’s a saint’s day or something.’ He tried a fat smile. ‘Relax, Pete.’
Kirov looked down at his glass where the beer was losing its sparkle. He thought that the big man might be right: travel had screwed up his guts and everything else. He was tired. The walls of the restaurant were closing in. A Chinese box — was he inside or outside? When he cast his eyes in Harry’s direction again, the Australian was still holding his dopey smile and his goggle eyes were as loose as beads.