'Lizzie!' he called, as if he had just sighted an old friend, and ran quickly to her side before she could reach the powder room door. 'Lizzie! My God! It's been years! A lifetime! Super!'
A couple of security guards looked on meekly as he flung his arms round her for the kiss of long friendship. He had slipped his left hand under her cape and as he bent his laughing face to hers, he laid the small revolver against the bare flesh of her back, the barrel just below her nape, and in that way, linked to her with bonds of old affection, led her straight into the street, chatting gaily all the way, and hailed a cab. He hadn't wanted to produce the gun, but he couldn't risk having to manhandle her. That's the way it goes, he thought. You come back to tell her you love her, and end up by marching her off at gun point. She was shivering and furious but he didn't think she was afraid, and he didn't even think she was sorry to be leaving that awful gathering.
'That's all I need,' she said, as they wound up the hill again, through the fog. 'Perfect. Bloody perfect.'
She wore a scent that was strange to him, but he thought it smelt a deal better than juice of the vine.
Guillam was not bored exactly, but neither was his capacity for concentration infinite, as George's appeared to be. When he wasn't wondering what the devil Jerry Westerby was up to, he found himself basking in the erotic deprival of Molly Meakin or else remembering the Chinese boy with his arms inside out, whining like a half shot hare after the disappearing car. Murphy's theme was, now the island of Po Toi and he was dilating on it remorselessly.
Volcanic, sir, he said.
Hardest rock substance of the whole Hong Kong group, sir, he said.
And the most southerly of the islands, he said, and right there on the edge of China waters.
Seven hundred and ninety feet high, sir, fishermen use it as a navigation point from far out to sea, sir, he said.
Technically not one island but a group of six islands, the other five being barren and treeless and uninhabited.
Fine temple, sir. Great antiquity. Fine wood carvings but little natural water.
'Jesus Christ, Murphy, we're not buying the damn place, are we?' Martello expostulated. With action close, and London far away, Martello had lost a lot of his gloss, Guillam noticed, and all his Englishness. His tropical suits were honest-tocornball American, and he needed to talk to people, preferably his own. Guillam suspected that even London was an adventure for him, and Hong Kong was already enemy territory. Whereas under stress Smiley went quite the other way: he became private, and rigidly polite.
'Po Toi itself has a shrinking population of one hundred and eight farmers and fishermen, most Communist, three living villages and three dead ones, sir,' said Murphy. He droned on. Smiley continued to listen intently but Martello impatiently doodled on his pad.
'And tomorrow, sir,' said Murphy, 'tomorrow is the night of Po Toi's annual festival intended to pay homage to Tin Hau, the goddess of the sea, sir.'
Martello stopped doodling. 'These people really believe that crap?'
'Everybody has a right to his religion, sir.'
'They teach you that at training college too, Murphy?' Martello returned to his doodling.
There was an uncomfortable silence before Murphy valiantly took up his pointer and laid the tip on the southern edge of the island's coastline.
'This festival of Tin Hau, sir, is concentrated in the one main harbour, sir, right here on the southwest point where the ancient temple is situated. Mr Smiley's informed prediction, sir, has the Ko landing operation taking place here, away from the main bay, in a small cove on the east side of the island. By landing on that side of the island which has no habitation, no natural access to the sea, at a point in time when the diversion of the island festival in the main bay -'
Guillam never heard the ring. He just heard the voice of Martello's other quiet man answering the calclass="underline" 'Yes, Mac,' then the squeak of his airline chair as he sat bolt upright, staring at Smiley. 'Right, Mac. Sure, Mac. Right now. Yes. Hold it. Right beside me. Hold everything.'
Smiley was already standing over him, his, hand held out for the phone. Martello was watching Smiley. On the podium, Murphy had his back turned while he pointed out further intriguing features of Po Toi, not quite registering the interruption.
'This island is also known to seamen as Ghost Rock, sir,' he explained in the same dreary voice. 'But nobody seems to know why.'
Smiley listened briefly then put down the telephone.
'Thank you, Murphy,' he said courteously. 'That was very interesting.'
He stood dead still a moment, his fingers to his upper lip, in a Pickwickian posture of deliberation. 'Yes,' he repeated. 'Yes, very.'
He walked as far as the door, then paused again.
'Marty, forgive me, I shall have to leave you for a while. Not above an hour or two, I trust. I shall telephone you in any event.'
He reached for the door handle, then turned to Guillam.
'Peter, I think you had better come along too, would you mind? We may need a car and you seem admirably unmoved by the Hong Kong traffic. Did I see Fawn somewhere? Ah, there are you are.'
On Headland Road the flowers had a hairy brilliance, like ferns sprayed for Christmas. The pavement was narrow and seldom used, except by amahs to exercise the children, which they did without talking to them, as if they were walking dogs. The Cousins' surveillance van was a deliberately forgettable brown Mercedes lorry, battered looking, with clay dust on the wings and the letters H. K. DEVp and BLDg SURVEY Ltd sprayed on one side. An old aerial with Chinese streamers trailing from it drooped over the cab, and as the lorry nosed its lugubrious way past the Ko residence — for the second, or was it the fourth time that morning? — nobody gave it a thought. In Headland Road, as everywhere in Hong Kong, somebody is always building.
Stretched inside the lorry, on rexine-covered bunks fitted for the purpose, the two men watched intently from among a forest of lenses, cameras and radio telephone appliances. For them also, their progress past Seven Gates was becoming something of a routine.
'No change?' said the first.
'No change,' the second confirmed.
'No change,' the first repeated, into the radio telephone, and heard the assuring voice of Murphy the other end, acknowledging the message.
'Maybe they're waxworks,' said the first, still watching. 'Maybe we should go give them a prod and see if they holler.'
'Maybe we should at that,' said the second.
In all their professional lives, they were agreed, they had never followed anything that kept so still. Ko stood where he always stood, at the end of the rose-arbour, his back to them as he stared out to sea. His little wife sat apart from him, dressed as usual in black, on a white garden chair, and she seemed to be staring at her husband. Only Tiu made any movement. He also was sitting, but to Ko's other side, and he was munching what looked like a doughnut.
Reaching the main road, the lorry lumbered toward Stanley, pursuing for cover reasons its fictional reconnaissance of the region.
Chapter 20 — Liese's Lover
Her flat was big and unreconciled: a mix of airport lounge, executive suite and tart's boudoir. The drawing-room ceiling was raked to a lopsided point, like the nave of a subsiding church. The floor changed levels restlessly, the carpet was as thick as grass and left shiny footprints where they walked. The enormous windows gave limitless but lonely views, and when she closed the blinds and drew the curtains, the two of them were suddenly in a suburban bungalow with no garden. The amah had gone to her room behind the kitchen and when she appeared Lizzie sent her back there. She crept out scowling and hissing. Wait till I tell the master, she was saying.