Joe had spent the afternoon in the House of a Thousand Arseholes shuttling around the SIS computer system looking for recent reports on Xinjiang. Suffice to say, the Brits had nothing on record about a February uprising in Yining. It was the extent of Joe’s distrust that he suspected Lenan of having wiped the files that morning.
“What about the torture?” he said. “What about the human rights abuses?”
“What about them? Last time I checked I didn’t work for Amnesty International.” Miles was scoping girls, barely seeming to listen to him. At a nearby table, two of them, possibly sisters, slid in next to an American with a thick beard and a deep Texan accent. The low boom of his voice carried to where Joe was sitting and he could hear the man asking if they wanted drinks. “Look, do you know about Baren?”
Joe shook his head.
“Baren is a township in Aktu, near Kashgar.” Miles turned back to the table and now adopted a more serious expression. He had a near-encyclopaedic memory and enjoyed reeling off chunks of history. “Back in April 1990, the Chinese police broke up a public prayer meeting outside some government offices in Baren. Accused the worshippers of inciting jihad, of getting funding from the Afghan muj. Caused a riot involving about two thousand local Muslims. The cops and the Public Security Bureau, probably the Bin Tuan as well, brought in helicopters, riot troops, shot about fifty of them, including the ones who were running away. Surely you know about this?” Joe ignored the effortless condescension. “Baren was just about the biggest ethnic separatist uprising in Xinjiang in the last seven years. Out of a Muslim community of ten thousand, every man between the age of thirteen and sixty was arrested in connection with what happened. That’s how serious the Chinese take the situation up there. Then you got bombs going off right across Xinjiang. One on a bus in Urumqi killed about thirty people in early ‘92. This shit is happening all the time.”
“What about Yining?” Joe asked.
“What about it?”
“Is what Wang told me true?”
Miles drained his vodka and frowned. “Forget about Wang,” he said. “Wang Kaixuan is a myth, a spook story. Nothing that old fuck told you has any meaning.”
Joe was not an aficionado of American movies and did not realize that Miles was lazily quoting dialogue from The Usual Suspects. Myth. Spook story. For ten seconds in a Hong Kong nightclub, Wang Kaixuan was Keyser Soze. “So there was no uprising in Yining?” he asked. “No riots? No mass imprisonments? No torture?”
“Of course there was.” Miles was shrugging his shoulders but seemed equally interested in the fact that his drink was now finished and that it was Joe’s turn to buy a round. He looked down at his glass, rattling the ice. “Nobody’s denying that Yining was a shitstorm. Nobody’s saying that. But you gotta ask yourself a bunch of serious questions about the kind of guy you thought you were dealing with last night. Professor of economics? A Han Chinese who somehow speaks perfect English? Nobody north of Guangdong speaks English like that unless they’re MSS. For Christ’s sake, Joe, Wang spent a year at Oxford University in the seventies pretending to study law.” Miles saw Joe’s look of astonishment and added, “What? He didn’t tell you that?”
“Not in so many words…”
“Then he suddenly develops a conscience about Uighurs getting butt-fucked in Liu Daowan? Give me a break. What do you have here? An entirely new concept? The self-hating Han?” Miles laughed at his own joke and then narrowed his eyes. “How come he just happens to be in Yining when the riot takes place? He was a fucking government agent. You think a Chinese academic from northern Xinjiang is going to risk his life to save a few hundred Muslims? Don’t you have any understanding of the national character? All the Chinese care about is themselves. It’s me, myself and I-then me again if you’ve still got some time left over afterwards. I can’t believe how naive you are.” Miles lifted his glass, waved it at the barman and indicated that he wanted two further vodka and tonics. “You’re paying for these, by the way.”
Joe was at a dead end. Experience had taught him to doubt the word of those who argued their case with a mixture of hostility and impatience; it usually meant that they were concealing something. He believed very little of what Miles was telling him, but had to tread carefully. Miles clearly enjoyed a much closer working relationship with Lenan than Joe had previously realized. As a result, everything that he said about the Wang situation would certainly be reported back to his SIS masters, with potential consequences for his career. So it was better to act dumb, to appear to accept Miles’s version of events and then to check the veracity of his story at a later date. Joe had a hunch that Lenan had handed Wang to the Americans. If that was the case, there was very little he could do about it. There was certainly no future in making waves. He just resented the fact that he was being treated like an idiot.
“Fine,” he said. “I’ll go and pay for the drinks.”
At the bar he handed a five-hundred-dollar note to a middle-aged Chinese cashier who looked as though she had been living underground for the best part of ten years. Her eyes were black pools of fatigue, her light-starved complexion a sickly yellow glow beneath the cruel lights of the neon bar. He put the drinks down on the table, told Miles he was “off to buy cigarettes” and walked to the entrance of the club, splashing water on his face in a toilet that stank of sex and piss. Go home, he told himself, though he was wired and hot and still angry that Wang had slipped from his grasp. Joe thought of Ansary Tursun and Abdul Bary, two Uighur men whose faces he had not yet seen, the one handcuffed to a basement wall in wretched solitary confinement, the other held down by laughing guards as his toenails were extracted by pliers. What was the true character of this country to the north, this ancient land to which Joe had committed so much of his young life? What would become of Hong Kong when the PLA goose-stepped over the border at midnight on 30 June? Joe felt drunk and melancholy. The thud of music in the club reverberated through the toilet walls and he walked outside onto the street to buy cigarettes from a 7- Eleven.
Returning to the club ten minutes later he was struck by a sight so extraordinary that it took him several seconds to realize what was going on. As Joe passed the dance floor, pushing through a crush of men and bored hookers, he saw Isabella straddling Miles at the table, her legs squeezing his hips as she rocked and writhed in his lap. Of course it was not her, yet the shape of the woman, her long dark hair, her sinuous body encased in a dark blue qipao dress, was an uncanny double. Joe felt a surge of desire and jealousy. He sat down and stared at her back in a brief drunken trance.
“Joe, man! You’re back!” The girl turned. She was Chinese, exquisitely pretty, but with flat, wide features that seemed almost Turkic. Joe felt that he was hallucinating. Was this a Xinjiang prostitute in the act of selling herself to the CIA? He was by now so drunk and exhausted that little was making sense. “You gotta meet Kitty. Fuckin’ gorgeous. Kitty, meet Joe.”
The girl stretched out a long, slender arm which looked tanned in the low light of the club. Her touch was cold and Joe saw that there was no life behind her painted eyes, only the sad routine of seducing strangers and laughing at gweilo jokes. He wondered how Miles, or any of the other men in the club, could fail to see through the artifice as the girl smiled and tipped her head provocatively. Then he realized that they probably didn’t care.
“Hello, handsome,” Kitty said.
“Hello.”
She reached for a narrow champagne flute on the table and took a sip while holding Joe’s gaze. “Fuck wine,” they called it, a mixture of cold tea and flat Coca-Cola which sold for twice the price of a vodka and tonic. At the end of the evening the girl and the bar would split fifty per cent of the cost of the drink, with the rest going to the Triads. Kitty’s aim would be to draw another girl to the table, to see to it that Joe also bought her a drink, and then to replenish their glasses as often as possible before leaving the club towards dawn.