They walked after dinner in Central, on empty sidewalks past buildings too tall to see the tops shrouded in fog. Grace linked her arm in Nate’s—that mystery perfume washed over him—and he steadied her a little. They flagged a taxi, which careered up Garden Road onto Magazine Gap Road to the front door of Grenville House, fifteen stories of luxury apartments perched on the side of the jungly hill looking over the tops of the high-rises on the next level below, slices of the harbor visible between the forest of buildings. Grace said the Peninsula Hotel paid her astronomical rent; otherwise, she would be living in a moldy flat in Kowloon. Propriety in mind, Nate chastely bussed her good night on the cheek and was going to leave, but she spilled her purse on the lobby floor digging for her keys, and giggled that she shouldn’t have had that third glass of wine. Nate chivalrously rode up in the elevator with her, and got her key in the door. She tilted her head, and said he should come in to see how she lived, because, after all, he seemed interested in her. “You are interested in me, aren’t you, Nathaniel?” she drawled. Okay, take this slow, he thought.
Grace kicked off her shoes and led him into a large living room with picture windows and a herringbone parquet floor, without a stick of furniture or anything on the white walls—Nate cracked wise that he loved what she did with the room. The air was redolent with that same fragrance. Three large wicker baskets were lined up against the wall. At the end of the room an immense gong (from Tibet, Grace said solemnly) hung from a varnished standing frame, with a large white pillow on the floor in front of the dimpled seven-foot bronze disk. On either side of the gong were black lacquer console tables with matching Chinese cloisonné candlesticks, a deep copper bowl, and a squat black-granite carving that Grace called a shivalinga, an idol to the Hindu deity Shiva, the patron god of yoga. This is nothing less than an altar in a yoga church, thought Nate.
Nate picked up the gong hammer, but Grace said, “No, not that way, I’ll show you,” and lightly ran the felt head of the hammer around the edge of the dimpled disk that started a low moan as the palpable vibrations started, then were overlaid with a higher whine as the harmonics mingled. She dropped the hammer, and shook herself, and Nate figured the wine had caught up to her, but she straightened and walked close to him, and he braced for either a kiss or projectile puking, but in a small voice she asked whether he wanted to see Kundalini energy, her style of yoga, the coiled snake at the base of the spine. It was a little creepy. Nate remembered Bunty thinking maybe she was a bunny boiler, but she was tipsily offering to show him the wellspring of her soul after two dates, and he said yes, of course; the snake at the base of the spine, sure. Then things got weird.
Grace took two steps back, unzipped her cocktail dress, and stepped out of it, the straps of the straining black-lace balconette bra loose on her shoulders, and her boy shorts smooth between her legs. She sat on the cushion in front of the gong, folded her legs in the classic yoga Padmasana, and placed her hands on her knees. “First comes Kapal Bhati, skull shining breath,” she whispered. She began slow, controlled breathing, with deep inhalations and explosive exhalations. After a dozen breaths, she nodded to Nate, okay, make the gong sing like she showed him, and the low Tibetan rumble started, and Nate could feel the buzz in his own spine, but he had to concentrate on a smooth circular motion with the hammer as the second sympathetic higher note started, and he looked at Grace who was sitting rocking her torso in a circular movement, chin up and eyes closed, gaining speed, and she began an indecipherable chant at the same musical note as the gong. Four minutes, five, six, shoulders in a circle forward and back, hands braced and eyes closed, and the sweat started pouring off her face and ran in rivulets between her glistening breasts, and down her stomach to soak the waistband of her panties. Nate’s arm was getting tired, but he was afraid that if he stopped with the gong she would breathe fire at him, and levitate off the balcony into the night sky. At about the ten-minute mark of unabated violent torso swinging, Grace leaned back, arched her spine off the wood, the back of her skull planted on the floor. Her sweat-transparent bra strained high, and she clasped her hands together in a Ksepana Mudra above her heart. She bent back even farther, her rib cage expanding like a bellows, her prayerful hands pressed between her breasts, and she started trembling, tsunami spasms rolling up her heaving belly, the long muscles of her legs pulsing, her feet twitching, and her quivering chin pointing at the ceiling. She suddenly tensed, her eyes rolled white, and her mouth opened as she expelled a huge breath and lay still, hands now slack on her chest.
Nate figured the telephone he’d use to call the ambulance was probably in the kitchen, but first he leaned over Grace who was now lying flat on the floor, eyes closed, legs unfolded and outstretched. Her rib cage was still expanding with her breathing. “Are you okay?” he asked, putting his hand on her shoulder. Her eyes slowly opened and focused on him. She smiled, put a hand behind his neck, and pulled his mouth down onto hers for a hint of a kiss, a single caress of her lips. Her sweet fragrance enveloped him, and his head swam. “What is that perfume?” he said. She pulled his mouth down on hers again.
“Ylang-ylang,” she whispered in his ear, pronouncing it ee-lang, ee-lang. “It is very old.”
“Are you all right?” said Nate. “What happened to you?” Grace rolled to her feet, unhurriedly unclasped her sopping bra without covering herself, and walked to one of the wicker baskets, pulled out a linen kimono, and slipped it on.
“What was that?” said Nate. Grace ran her fingers through her hair, then knotted the belt of the kimono, looking him in the eye without blinking, not at all embarrassed.
“Awakening Kundalini,” she said. “It’s when I lose myself.”
“Awakening what?” said Nate.
“Have you heard of the seven chakras in the body? Life-force centers? No? I will explain it another time. It is too late tonight.”
Another whisper of a kiss at the door, and Nate walked home along Bowen Road, mentally drafting tomorrow’s cable for COS Burns’s release on what appeared to be a notable start in the developmental to recruit Grace Gao, aka Zhen Gao. Nate’s case-officer antennas were vibrating a little, assessing factors: This was going faster than normal, maybe artificially faster? This Kundalini energy thing was unexpected; could it be exploited? She had sobered up fast enough. She was an enigma, but irresistible: erotic without being salacious; alluring without being wanton; at once sophisticated and naive. If he could swing it, he had a feeling this could be an exceptional recruitment. The foreign scholarship in the United Kingdom was still an unexplained anomaly, as was her apparent uninterest in his personal history. These were false notes, but he’d resolve them.
The MSS counterintelligence team in the apartment next door listened to the audiotape of the dinner at the China Club, and reviewed the video of Zhènniǎo, the poison-feather bird’s performance in the honey-trap apartment on the other side of the bare wall—with the choreography of the gong and Matsyasana, the provocative bowstring fish pose, and the chaste kiss—and were satisfied with the evening and with future prospects for entrapping the American CIA officer and eliciting the name of his agent. His assassination was a foregone conclusion. The team leader politely congratulated their esteemed guest from Moscow, the beautiful blue-eyed Russian SVR officer who sat in an armchair in front of the monitors, bouncing her foot. Her guidance on how best to concoct Grace Gao’s fictitious personal legend to inveigle the American was sibylline—almost as if she knew how he thought.