He looked at his friend, smiled. “I can never thank you enough, you know that.”
She beamed. “Now, more important, how’s Jenny?”
Wong beamed too, leaned forward. In matters of intimacy he and Emily spoke in Cantonese. “We’re pregnant. It’s official.”
Emily let out a cry, stretched both arms over her head. “Bravo.”
Everyone turned, looked at Emily and turned back to their food. She grinned. With a hand half cupped she beckoned a waiter and ordered champagne. He returned immediately with a silver ice bucket on a blackwood pedestal. People turned again when the cork popped.
They clinked glasses.
“And what are you going to call the bambino? Are you going for the traditional Hong Kong hybrid of English stroke Cantonese?”
“Probably. For the sake of the family we’ll have one of the usual Chinese ones.” He reeled off a list of traditional Cantonese names. The girls’ names always included the name of a flower; the boys’ invoked wisdom.
Emily nodded approval. “By the way, thanks for the party the other night. You know that was the first time I met your brother-in-law. I must have missed him at the wedding.”
“It’s easy to miss him. He never stays long at social events.”
Emily swallowed some more champagne. “An intense-looking type. Does he talk to you much about his work?”
“Only if I let him.”
“Interesting?”
Wong grimaced. “Don’t tell me you fancied him?”
“He told me he was investigating those Mincer Murders. Gorree!”
“You want me to introduce you properly? He loves to dole out reality sandwiches to the pampered classes.”
“Oh, I’m not that interested. Weird, though, mincing up three people like that.”
“Triads.”
“I guess.” She picked up a piece of pickled ginger with her chopsticks, glanced around the room. She leaned forward, whispered: “So, you haven’t had a chance to find out what’s behind the Mincer Murders from your manic brother-in-law?”
Wong stopped eating. “Emily, what is this? Are you going through some kind of change? Since when did you care about what the criminal classes got up to?”
She sighed. “Oh, you know, as I get older, I wonder about how the other half lives. Don’t you? We’re pretty cushioned, people like you and me, aren’t we?”
Wong shrugged. “From wayward meat mincers? I hope so. Can we change the subject now? I’m looking forward to my braised abalone.”
Emily laughed. Toward the end of the meal she revealed that on this occasion she was paying. She insisted that they end with Wong’s favorite brandy, Armagnac.
16
Emily left Wong in the lobby of the China Club to refresh herself in the ladies’ room. She checked her Longines gold watch: 2:45. She had five minutes to reach the new Bank of China, which was ten minutes away walking slowly in the heat. It didn’t matter that she would be a little late; punctuality was something Communists rarely worried about.
She checked her face in the mirror, smoothed her blouse over her sore breasts, took the lift down to the ground floor. At the new Bank of China building she showed her ID card to the old man at reception, who telephoned up to the top floor. She was shown to a private lift at the back of the building. Unlike the lifts in the public lift bank, it stopped on only one floor: the top.
Fear made her stomach flutter. The meeting with Wong had not gone as well as she had hoped. His news about the pregnancy of his wife had taken her by surprise and made it difficult to talk about money and murder. The fact was, she had little to report, except that in the end Jonathan Wong would do whatever she told him to do.
She stepped out at the top floor. As a state-owned bank the Bank of China was more than a commercial branch of the PRC; it was a center of intelligence gathering and surveillance as important in its own way as the New China News Agency, which functioned as the PRC’s consulate in Hong Kong. The new bank building had been designed to accommodate visiting cadres. There was a sauna room, Jacuzzis, large bedrooms with videos and televisions, a huge kitchen that was manned twenty-four hours a day and a cocktail area with the best views of Hong Kong that money could buy. Better, the new Bank of China was the tallest building in Central. From the start it was envisaged that the People’s representatives would not suffer during their frequent visits to the despised British colony.
She was shown upstairs to the glass-enclosed cocktail area on the roof of the building, where the old man was waiting. Seventy stories below, toy cars sped along Connaught Road; tiny ships lay at anchor in the harbor; the richest city on earth lay at the feet of the seventy-year-old man lounging in an Italian leather-and-chrome armchair. The owner of possibly the largest personal fortune in the world after the sultan of Brunei’s, he wore an open-neck shirt of the kind that could be bought in Stanley Market, khaki slacks. His worn sneakers rested on a suede footstool hand-stitched out of brown and beige triangles.
He did not rise to greet her. Nor did he offer her one of the cigarettes that he shook out of a flimsy pack: Imperial Palace, unavailable outside the PRC.
“So?”
She took a seat opposite him, sat straight, tried to attract his attention. Some kind of sexual chemistry might have been useful in these interviews, but he had never shown the slightest interest. His age didn’t help either. Mass murderers do not necessarily mellow with the passage of time. His wiry form reminded her of a ginseng root. She recognized in it the will of her people at its crudest. Her striking looks, enlarged breasts, billions in assets, the respect she was able to command throughout Hong Kong and anywhere else in the world where money was revered had no effect at all on this ugly old man. Still without looking at her, he started to pick his nose.
“You had lunch with your little friend the lawyer?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“I told you, he’ll do whatever we want.”
“Yes, that I already know. How did you develop the matter today? That’s what interests me.”
“I’ll phone him in a day or two; he’ll come to see me at my house. If you’re really serious about this.”
The old man grinned. “What could be more serious than five hundred million American dollars?”
“In cash? It’s pure provocation.”
He laughed with a whinny like a horse. “Not provocation. Convenience. I’m tired of these gweilo games. Why should we hide anymore? With only two months to go, we’ve won already. Now we can start enjoying the victory.”
“I know. I guess I don’t understand why you need to move five hundred million again so soon. Less than a month ago you also moved half a billion dollars.”
An expression of intense fury passed over the old man’s face. He caught himself. “I’d forgotten I’d told you. There was no laundering involved on that occasion. We were paying for something. In cash. This next consignment I want to be clean and official. There are still parts of Hong Kong we haven’t yet bought.”
Emily breathed in deeply. “I can’t think what.”
The old man twisted his features into a smirk. “Now, tell me, this interesting piece of luck with that detective-did you explore it at all?”