Miles picked up his coffee cup in the manner he had described to illustrate the gesture more clearly. Isabella wanted to take a photograph to show her boss, but thought better of asking.
“One of the prejudices you should maybe think about parking is the idea that all Triad activity is inherently violent and antisocial.” Miles finished the coffee and set it down on the table. “Making that clear to the audience would probably make your programme a lot more interesting. Sure, there’s drug-running, people smuggling, violence. But Triad societies also pay for schooling in their local communities, find jobs for the unemployed, help out families who might have fallen on hard times. It’s not all protection money. It’s not all turf wars and assassinations.”
“They run the construction industry here.”
“That’s right.” Miles didn’t patronize Isabella by seeming surprised that she should know this. “Part of the reason why Patten has had so much trouble with the airport out at Chek Lap Kok isn’t because of threats from the Chinese government, but because the building contractors have had to pay millions of dollars in kickbacks to the Triads. You want land reclaimed from the sea? Call the Teochiu. You want your runway built in record time? Have words with the Sun Yee On. If you don’t pay these guys, your scaffolding doesn’t go up, your illegal coolies don’t make it across the border, your concrete gets mixed with salt. It’s the same story on the mainland, in Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand. Triad groups control most things in South-east Asia.”
Miles took the opportunity to stand up and walk across to the sofa. He sat down and put his bare feet on the low coffee table, leaning back with a sigh. He was convinced that he had won her round. There was a haughtiness that went out of Western girls when they had finally succumbed to him. Their pride was replaced by a sort of desperate, manic energy and he knew that it would only be a matter of time before he could possess her. Across the room he could see the lower part of Isabella’s legs as she sat drinking coffee and scribbling notes. As if sensing this, Isabella looked at him, her eyebrows giving a little knowing bounce over the rim of her espresso cup, and she stood up from the table. He watched as she picked up their glasses, filled them from a bottle of wine that he had found to replace the empty Pinot Noir, and walked over to join him.
“What about kidnappings?” she said.
“What about them?”
Isabella discarded her shoes and sat at the opposite end of the sofa to Miles, her body twisted towards him so that the lower part of her dress lifted up over her knees. But Miles had drunk heavily all evening and some of the finesse now started to go out of his performance. Carelessly, he stole glances at her calves and thighs and allowed his eyes to drift along the length of her body. He was annoyed when Isabella responded to this by covering her legs completely, tucking her feet beneath her thighs.
“Well, are things like that common?” she asked. A little of the haughtiness had returned to her voice. It angered him. “Do you come across them at the consulate?”
“Oh sure.” A nonchalant response. He stood up to convey a sense that he was indifferent to her physical proximity and crossed to the hi-fi, shuffling through randomly scattered CDs until he found a bootleg copy of Cannonball Adderley’s Nippon Soul.
“Go on,” she said, because he was stalling. Rudeness was always a failsafe option and Miles built a level of deliberate condescension into his response.
“Well, if you want stories for your film, as opposed to just a bunch of facts about Triad history, you could tell your guys what happened to Leung Tin-wai.”
“Leung Tin-wai?”
“I think it was June of last year.” Miles now sat at the table where they had eaten, as if oblivious to the tensions racing between them. He was just a teacher with a bothersome student, a man of the world making time for a girl. “The story was all over the TV. Leung owns a tabloid magazine which ran a piece about the Triads. Next thing he knows, two guys are in his office slicing his arm off with a meat cleaver. Took seventeen hours of surgery to reattach it.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah.” Miles feigned a profound concern for his fellow man. “A bunch of Hong Kong journalists put up about a four-million-dollar reward for information leading to the arrest of the guys who did it.”
“And nobody’s come forward.”
“I guess not.”
Isabella looked at her watch. Seeing that it was almost twelve o’clock, she closed her notebook.
“I should be going.”
Miles had expected this. To stay any later than midnight would look suspicious to Joe, and the last thing Isabella would want would be to create the wrong impression. He watched her spring decisively to her feet. “Can I order a cab?”
“Sure.” It was important to look nonchalant. “They usually take about twenty minutes.”
Which left them with what turned out to be another half an hour, time filled only with further talk about the Triads. It was as if the documentary had broken the spell between them. Isabella continued to take notes, Miles continued to impress her with the depth of his knowledge. But their shared intimacies, the excitement they had both felt at dinner as they began to unravel one another’s lives, had passed. The long day, the food and booze, had rendered Isabella exhausted. Miles, who would usually at this stage have made a bid for sex, realized that his best hope now lay in waiting for the intrusion of Billy Chen.
Nevertheless, as they made their way downstairs towards the waiting cab, he tried to revive some of the attraction they had felt for one another with a carefully constructed compliment.
“Make sure Joe sees you in that dress. You look amazing.”
It wasn’t too late. Isabella felt the buzz of flattery again. All her life she had been subjected to the advances-both charming and insidious-of older men. Under normal circumstances, her response was to ignore what had been said. Yet she knew there was an underlying meaning in Miles’s choice of words, a code which needed to be cracked. She turned towards him at the entrance of the apartment building and took a chance.
“What a funny way of telling me that you think I look nice.”
Cicadas were clacking in the humid night. She stared directly into Miles’s eyes. If there had been less at stake, if he could have been completely sure of how she would respond, he would have placed his hands around her waist and pulled her body towards his.
“How else do you like being told that you’re beautiful?”
This was too much. Isabella felt the force of Miles’s desire and it flooded her, but knew that she had no choice but to stop him overstepping the mark. Their time would come. “It was lovely to see you, Miles,” she said, and in an instant she was poised and elegant and British. “Thank you so much for all your help.” Every word closed him out. They stumbled, off-balance, into a brief cheek kiss. “I’ve got amazing notes,” she said. “The guys are going to love me.”
The driver of the cab opened the back door of the vehicle using the automatic lever beside his seat. It swung open quickly on its hinge, almost knocking Isabella over.
“Hey, buddy!”
“It’s all right.” Isabella defused the situation by leaning into the taxi and showing the driver that she was unhurt. Then she climbed inside and wound down the window.