A woman entered the bar, and nodded to the barman who snapped to attention. She stopped briefly at a table to greet a Western couple, obviously tourists. She then walked over to their table and shook Bunty’s hand, smiling faintly. She turned to Nate and nodded while Bunty introduced her as Grace Gao, assistant general manager of the Peninsula Hotel. With studied indifference, she categorized Nate in the manner of all hoteliers, assessing in three seconds his financial, social, and professional status. She didn’t blink.
Nate’s case-officer instincts quivered like a spider on a hot rock. Grace Gao was one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen. She had a high forehead and straight brows over almond-shaped brown eyes. Her black hair was done in a braided bun at the back of her head, tendrils falling loose on both sides. Morning-after cheekbones framed the oval face and a chiseled mannish chin. An incongruous straight nose, a Roman nose with a slight bump, accentuated her most remarkable facial feature: a china-cup mouth with pink lips. She was Chinese, to be sure, but with the long-ago blood of a Portuguese sailor or a Dutch trader in her veins, that Eurasian hint of cardamom and cloves.
Behind the beauty, but not because of it, her face radiated diffidence, impatience, disdain. She chatted easily with Bunty, ignoring Nate. She was short and thin, dressed in a black skirt and soft black jacket with wide lapels, over a stretchy black camisole that did more than hint at a prodigious figure more commonly encountered in Manhattan or Malibu. She wore expensive black pointy-toed pumps. Nate noticed that blue ropey veins showed through the skin on top of her hands and slim feet, suggesting frequent physical activity and cracking good health. She shook Bunty’s hand, ignored Nate again, turned, and walked out of the bar displaying tennis-ball calves that pulsed as she walked. Another woman has legs like that, ballerina’s calves, Nate thought, feeling a stab of guilty longing. Bunty sat down, tilted his head back to finish his drink, and looked at Nate.
“Welcome to the club, mate,” said Bunty.
“What club?” said Nate.
“The Grace Gao fan club,” said Bunty. “Half the expats in Honkers want to snorkel in Lake Gao, and several billionaires from Singapore and Shanghai have offered her the moon. As far as I know, no one’s gotten into the garden, much less through the front door. She works sixteen-hour days at the hotel, then goes home to a little unit in Grenville House on Magazine Gap Road—incidentally not far from where you are.”
“How do you know where she lives?” said Nate. Bunty’s face was deadpan.
“Out of curiosity I did a little checking on her.”
“Curiosity?”
“Her only hobby is yoga; you can see how fit she is. She studies with some ancient crust of bread in Kowloon, and occasionally gives private lessons for guests at the hotel. She apparently is quite good; a level-three yogini, whatever that means.”
“And no men in her life, at all?” asked Nate.
“Mate, every man in the room cracks a fat when she walks in the door, but she’s unapproachable,” said Bunty.
“If I guessed that ‘crack a fat’ means ‘get an erection’ would I be far off?” Bunty checked his watch.
“For a Yank, you learn fast. Just don’t tell Marigold.”
They walked through the Peninsula shopping arcade, past windows filled with cashmere, leather, and gold, to the private elevator to Felix Restaurant. The interior walls of the elevator were covered in dark wood panels carved in fantastic undulating ridges. As the elevator rose to the twenty-eighth floor, the normal lights dimmed as spots of blue, purple, and red slowly came on, as if they had ascended into an inky mesosphere. The doors opened onto a narrow corridor also dimly lighted with colored lights and they walked into the restaurant, a soaring room with massive anthracite columns, luminous Lucite stairways to upstairs bar levels, and floor-to-ceiling windows with a magnificent view of Victoria Harbour, the ziggurats and obelisks of Hong Kong Island ablaze, the reflection of a million lights shimmering on the dark waters of the harbor.
Marigold Dougherty was sitting at a table near the window and waved to attract their attention. She was about thirty years old, short and slight with a mass of shoulder-length blond hair in ringlets, bushy blond eyebrows, and square-framed hipster eyeglasses. Also a former surfer, she was irreverent and sassy, with an infectious laugh that showed straight white teeth. She shook Nate’s hand firmly and pointed to the chairs at their table.
“Whose face do you want to lean on?” said Marigold. The tubular steel chairs in the restaurant all were covered in white fabric, and on every chair back was the silk-screened likeness of a smiling Peninsula employee, including the face of the acclaimed chef of Felix. Nate laughed.
“Is there a chair with Grace Gao’s face on it?” said Bunty. “That’s the one Nate wants.”
Marigold turned toward him. “Oh no, Nate,” she said. “Don’t tell me you, too.”
Nate shrugged. “We just met her in the bar, but Bunty’s confusing lust with operational interest,” said Nate. “An assistant general manager in this hotel could be a useful asset. Hasn’t anyone ever tried to sign her up?” The Australians looked at each other as they sat down. A waiter opened a bottle of wine.
“A Pommy from the MI6 station three or four years back had a go,” said Bunty. “What was his name?”
“Nigel. Nigel something,” said Marigold.
“But no progress was made,” said Bunty. “Our girl Grace reportedly went to university in the Land of the Dry Towel. She loathes England,” said Bunty. Nate looked over to Marigold for an explanation.
“Dry towel because Pommies bathe once a week,” she laughed.
“Well, she must come from money to have gone to school in the UK,” said Nate.
“No one knows. The Brits took a close look at her, and so did we, but we didn’t find much,” said Marigold, the analyst. “She might be from Foshan, close to Macao, which may account for her Eurasian looks.”
“Which may in turn explain why she’s so standoffish,” said Bunty, the case officer. “The Chinese are funny about mixed-race women, call them ham shui mui, ‘salt-water girls,’ because they were supposedly conceived on ships in the harbor.”
“What’s her Chinese name?” asked Nate. It was customary for Chinese who deal with Westerners to choose a more easily pronounced Western name.
Marigold shook her head. “It’s something strange, but I can’t recall. I can look it up tomorrow,” she said.
“Enough about the Pearl River Delta,” said Bunty. “You’d be wasting your time on her. We have to give you a bit of the drum on this Macao lark. All unofficial, mate, if you please.”
Nate nodded. “We’re partners on this op,” he said. “Shoot.”
“The Blunt End has just had the Winter Web,” said Bunty. “And our greedy PLA general topped the agenda.” Marigold anticipated the question.
“The Web is a quarterly budget and planning session in ASIS headquarters. As in ‘the tangled webs we weave,’ ” she said. “And we lovingly refer to our headquarters in Canberra as ‘the Blunt End.’ ”
“We call Langley the Puzzle Palace,” said Nate. “Blunt End is better.”
“Annual budgets for the service rise and fall according to operational successes,” said Bunty.
“Not to mention the careers of the tall poppies who take credit for what happens in the field,” said Marigold. “We’ve had a long line of tossers over the years—The Cumquat, Spud Ben Gurion, Captain Dirty.”