“Ordinarily they would have let her go, but she made a mistake only the very innocent make. She told them she would have to return to Hong Kong to bring her children back. So they decided she hadn’t really reformed at all and threw her from a fourth-floor room in a government building. The fall broke both her legs and her pelvis and made a hole in her skull, but she remained conscious. I have eyewitness accounts of her lying there, deciding to die because all over the earth from west to east there was no place for her. A pure soul with a big moon face who believed what people told her.”
Chan went to the fridge, found a beer, came back. They sat in silence.
Moira coughed. “That’s a lot of hate to carry around. Hate is a problem, like a thorn, at least to my Western eyes.”
Chan shook his head, opened the can, swallowed. “No, hate’s not a problem. If you’re bad and you hate, you kill someone; if you’re good, you forgive; if you’re in between, you hesitate-but it’s not the real problem.”
“What is?”
“The way they’ve turned the world upside down. That’s what drives you crazy.”
“Upside down?”
“Sure. During the Cultural Revolution important people like film stars, famous BBC commentators with film crews, French left-wing journalists went to China and were deceived. We said, ‘Okay, that’s because the West is naive; they want to believe in the socialist experiment, and those cunning old men in Beijing, they’re so good at the art of deception.’
“But even when the truth came out, nothing much happened; you didn’t even hear any of those famous people apologize for being so stupid. We said, ‘Well, what can you expect? They’re embarrassed, and anyway what could they do about it? But next time those old men start murdering people, then surely the West will expose them to the world.’ Which is exactly what happened when they killed all those students in Tiananmen Square in June 1989.
“The West was mad as hell. People went on television denouncing the violence; politicians talked about trade sanctions; nobody believed those murderous old geriatrics anymore. But in America and Japan and Europe there were people who said, ‘Hold on, there are one point four billion people over there, the biggest single market in the world, and if you impose trade sanctions, some other bastard is going to be selling them the T-shirts and the sneakers and the pocket calculators and the mopeds instead of us.’
“So the trade sanctions didn’t last long, and the murdering old men in Beijing laughed so hard you could hear them in Hong Kong. And in two months’ time they’ll be here with their tanks and their cynical sneers and their contempt for human life, and the Chinese screens will go up, and no one over there in your country will want to know what’s really going on here. They’ll be happy with the shadow play on the screens, glad not to have reasons for refusing to sell the T-shirts. That’s the problem: how to live a life when you always have to pretend that the world is upside down and has always been that way.”
Moira had stopped stroking him. He let the television lights flicker over his face. Her voice when she spoke was a Bronx rumble. “Kinda tough, that one, Charlie. Not sure there’s anything I can do to help.”
“Well, there’s one thing that might help in a tiny way.”
“Name it.”
“You could stop lying.”
A pause.
“Did you say stop lying?”
“Yes, that’s what I said. You were a sergeant in the NYPD, but you took early retirement over two years ago. Your daughter, Clare, did go to NYU, but she didn’t graduate in sociology; she graduated in business studies. Strange mistake for a mother to make.”
The silence lasted so long Chan assumed Moira wasn’t going to answer. It didn’t much matter. He became absorbed in the images from the kung fu show again. Evil wasn’t vanquished as easily as all that. There had been a counterattack by the bad monks from the black monastery over the hill. It was no problem telling them apart from the good monks because they always snarled when they spoke whereas the good monks oozed serenity. If he went into movies, he’d have to be one of the bad guys. Finally Moira made rumbling sounds preparatory to saying something.
“You checked the same day? With the university as well? Would have taken NYPD a month, minimum. If they’d bothered at all. Guess what made you suspicious was the stuff I pocketed in the shop downstairs, huh? You didn’t believe I did it to test you, did you?”
Chan tried to look at her. “You mean I was supposed to?”
Moira grunted. “Guess not.”
18
A million U.S. dollars does not buy a house on Hong Kong Island, not even a small one; almost everyone lives in apartment blocks. The few remaining houses, old colonial constructions (built by the taipans of yesteryear high up on the Peak and away from the cholera and malaria that made nineteenth-century Asia a threat to expatriate health), tended to be owned by international corporations and used by their top executives to entertain and impress. To own privately one of the three- or four-story mansions that clung to the side of the mountain was proof of membership in the local aristocracy, a demonstration of wealth staggering even by Hong Kong standards.
Jonathan Wong had organized the conveyancing when Emily first bought hers six years before. She had been excited, full of plans for improvements and visions of the many parties she was going to give. Since then she had hardly stopped adding wings, demolishing walls, changing decor. Her swimming pool was the largest private one in the territory, almost Olympic size, shaped in an oblong with Roman columns and terra-cotta tiles on the perimeter. The house faced southwest so that the view was not of the harbor but of the dense green drop to the Lamma Channel and the wide-open sea beyond.
A large awning close to the swimming pool gave some shade. She was sitting in a fawn bathrobe and Gucci sunglasses when her maid showed him in.
He pecked her on the cheek, sat down opposite her at the marble table.
“I’ve got the cook to give us Italian for once. Antipasto misto, spaghetti al funghi followed by fruit. I found some reasonable strawberries in Oliver’s that you can have with cream à l’anglais if you like. Or have you given up cream along with every other middle-class male approaching forty?”
Wong took off his jacket, undid his tie. “I still eat cream. I hold the view that it’s stress, not cholesterol, that kills. Anyway, I don’t have the strength of character to give up cream.”
She wasn’t smiling today at his jokes. She even seemed irritated that he’d removed his tie. The stock market hadn’t crashed; it must be a particularly heavy period.
He waited until the maid had brought an ice bucket with a bottle of Perrier. “So, you have more work to burden me with?”
“If it’s not too much to ask.” She studied him for a moment. “I’m afraid it’s just a tad controversial, but I want you to do it anyway. Let’s be frank: You owe me, and I need you to do this thing.”
Under his smile Wong quaked. He couldn’t tell how closely she was looking at him through the black lenses. “Shoot, this poor slave is only too eager to be of assistance.” He was surprised at how little sarcasm he was able to invest in the words.
“You remember the Zedfell purchase of Chancery Towers?”
Wong shot her a sharp glance. “How could I forget?”
It had been about three years ago. Emily had introduced an important piece of conveyancing into his firm. As usual, she had channeled it through Wong, although he was not a conveyancer himself. He had assumed that the transaction was proceeding normally when his conveyancing partner had demanded a meeting with Wong and Rathbone, the senior partner. The conveyancing partner had been nervous.
“Cash! They want to buy a whole office tower in cash! It’s bent, and I’m not prepared to carry on unless I get the full support of all the partners.”