Typhoon (20 page)

“They’re
what
? Engaged? Since when? Who told you that?”

“It’s common knowledge.” It wasn’t, of course, but it was the sort of thing Lenan said when he was needling people.

Miles looked down at the table and tried to assemble some dignity. “Jesus. So how did he pop the question?”

“Oh it’s not popped.” Lenan seemed to enjoy the playful language.

“I don’t understand.”

“Rumour has it he’s going to do it at the handover.”

“On June 30th?”

“That is the day that has been outlined for the transfer of Hong Kong’s sovereignty back to the People’s Republic of China, yes.”

Miles said “Jesus” one more time.

“You seem shocked, Miles.”

“I’m pretty surprised, sure.” He was thinking, calculating, his mind turning over, like the low hum of the air-conditioning unit above their heads. “Does David know?”

“David is the one who found out.”

“What? Joe asked his permission?”

“Apparently.”

A sniff of laughter from both men. Colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic liked to console themselves with the theory that Joe was still young and inexperienced in the ways of the world. It made them feel better about their own shortcomings.

“So he wants her to know all about RUN? He’s prepared to break cover?”

Lenan nodded.

Which gave Miles an idea.

Twenty minutes later
—no time for coffee, for
digestifs
—Miles was making a phone call on the corner of Haiphong Road and Kowloon Park Drive having put Lenan into a cab.

“Billy? I got a problem. What are you doing for
wui gwai
?”

Billy Chen was an American asset in the Triads whom Joe distrusted as a faithless opportunist, a drug-running hoodlum whose lust for the trappings of wealth and power was matched only by his colossal vanity and self-importance. Chen must have been about twenty or twenty-one in 1997, and had been taking Miles’s dollar for three years in return for information about criminal activity in Guangdong province, Macau and Hong Kong. Joe had had the chance to recruit him as an agent of SIS shortly after he arrived in 1995, but had turned it down flat on the basis that Chen was clearly unreliable. The Yanks, he quickly discovered, were less discerning; they tended to throw money at anybody who was willing to tell them what they wanted to hear.

“
Wui gwai
?” Chen replied, pronouncing the Cantonese phrase for “handover” with a native finesse denied to Miles. “Maybe I’m in Hong Kong, maybe I’m not. How come you don’t call me so long?”

“Listen, Billy. I need you to do me a favor.”

“What kind of favour?”

Chen was sitting in the front seat of his favourite BMW with one hand on his mobile phone and the other sliding up the leg of a teenage girl plucked from a KTV bar in Shenzhen.

“Nothing serious, nothing special,” Miles told him. “Just involves a couple of friends of mine in the run-up to June 30th.”

“The run-up?” It was as if Chen didn’t understand the expression.

“That’s right, the run-up.” Miles couldn’t be bothered to explain it. He was in a panic over Isabella and had made a lightning quick decision to undermine Joe’s proposal with a simple if somewhat clumsy strategy of his own. For the time being, all thoughts of going to Lily’s had been postponed.

“Everybody take five days off,” Chen said, referring to the common assumption that Hong Kong would grind to a halt in the week of
wui gwai
, as offices closed and the colony’s residents waved their final farewells to British rule.

“Yeah, everybody’s taking five days off. But on one of those days you’ll be helping me, Billy. You’ll be at the end of the phone and you’ll be doing me a favor. Like I said, it’s nothing special. Just make sure you’re in Hong Kong.”

It felt good to be bullying someone after two hours of Kenneth Lenan. Miles had the leverage to make demands of Billy Chen because, for all his suits and his cars and his blank-eyed girls, the gangster was just another creature of American power, a small fish in a great sea whose elevated position within the Teochiu could be ended with a single phone call.

“OK, Miles. OK. So tell me what you want to do. Tell me why you need me around.”

“You remember my friend Joe?”

“Who?”

“The English guy. Tall. You met him a couple of years back at the Lisboa.”

A memory of meeting Joe in a hotel room at Macau’s largest casino assembled itself in Chen’s mind. Hesitatingly, he said, “Sure.”

“Well that’s who you’ll be dealing with,” he said. “That’s the guy I’m after.”

In the final
weeks of British rule—that strange, chaotic period of excitement and regret and uncertainty over the colony’s future—many people commented on the change that came over Miles Coolidge. Several of his consulate colleagues at Garden Road, for example, noticed that he was less brash and self-assured around the office, while Joe was struck by a sudden courteousness in Miles’s behaviour, bordering on humility. Unaware of what was going on behind the scenes, we all assumed that he was simply putting his house in order before making the big move to Chengdu, and didn’t want his final months in Hong Kong to be obscured by a fog of conflicts and hedonism. There were parties almost every night in June, yet Miles kept his head down and worked hard, laying further foundations for TYPHOON and popping up socially only for the occasional beer at Club 1911, or a bowl of pasta at Grappa’s.

The primary motivation for this uncharacteristic behaviour was undoubtedly Isabella’s imminent engagement. Miles wanted to present himself as a viable alternative to Joe and must have believed, in his strange, corrupted pathology, that he had a chance of breaking them up if he appeared to be the sort of man who could put his life back on track at the flick of a switch. As a strategy, it was ambitious to the point of lunacy, yet it had the effect of creating a sense of confusion within Miles’s circle of friends. What had come over him? Why was the celebrated Lothario suddenly cleaning up his act? And, of course, this confusion fed its way down to Isabella.

At the same time, she had begun to tell her close friends that her relationship with Joe was in a dip. They were seeing less of one another. They were constantly working. Habits of his that had once been charming and idiosyncratic now seemed commonplace, even annoying.

“He’s never around when I need him to be,” she told me. “There’s always an excuse or an apology. We can’t ever plan anything because he’s always at the beck and call of his job. Yet he has this fixed way of seeing the world which somehow prevents us being spontaneous.”

Their sex life, which had been dizzying in its initial intensity, had now moved into a second, more predictable phase. It had been the same story with Anthony, her married lover who had left his wife for her after the summers in Ibiza; two years of bliss, then the power cut of over-familiarity. Yet a part of Isabella was determined to make this latest relationship last, to go through the wall of her momentary indifference and to build something constructive and lasting with Joe. She knew that he adored her. She knew that if she left him it would break his heart. If he proposed, she would find it very difficult to turn him down, yet she knew that she was not quite ready, at twenty-six, to take the plunge into marriage.

Every snake needs his bit of luck and, against this background, Miles experienced a further slice of good fortune. The French television company for whom Isabella had been working decided to remain in Hong Kong after the handover and to shoot two supplementary films: a documentary about the first few months of Chinese rule, and a factual programme about the history of the Triads. I was in Hong Kong when Isabella was first approached to act as a researcher on the second film, so it was perhaps telling that she turned to Miles as her primary source of information. There was an additional irony, of course. Isabella had a man sharing her bed who knew just as much about Chinese organized crime as anyone in the Hong Kong CIA. But Joe was just a freight forwarder at Heppner Logistics. Joe didn’t know anything.

Miles played the whole thing very cleverly. He was keyed in to Joe’s itinerary because of the crossover between both services and suggested to Isabella that she come to his apartment to discuss the documentary on a night when he knew that Joe would be tied up until the small hours discussing handover security issues with David Waterfield. It was necessary to meet at his flat, he explained, because he was expecting delivery of a painting at some point after six o’clock.

Miles left the consulate at five in order to be home in good time to prepare supper, have a shower and put on a clean set of clothes. An enormous amount of time and thought had gone into every element of the evening. Should he shave or leave a stubble? Should he cook a three-course dinner, or would that look ostentatious? Was it better to have the apartment looking lived-in and scruffy, or reasonably clean and organized? Miles had been to the best supermarket in town—Oliver’s in the Prince’s building—to pick up the ingredients for a decent meal: a rack of lamb, some expensive French cheese, a homemade apple pie and a tub of Ben and Jerry’s vanilla. He then blew HK$150 on a bottle of Sancerre at Berry Bros & Rudd and a further HK$230 on a Robert Mondavi Pinot Noir. At about seven o’clock he began scattering CD cases on the floor near his hi-fi and placed a stack of old
New Yorkers
and well-thumbed paperbacks on the coffee table in the sitting room. If Isabella sat on the sofa at any point in the evening, she would see that Miles was reading Graham Greene’s
Brighton Rock
, Jacques Gernet’s
Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion
, Mikhail Lermontov’s
A Hero of Our Time
, and a brace of novels—
Ladder of Years
and
The Accidental Tourist
—by Anne Tyler. No harm, after all, in being seen to read fiction by women. (The book that Miles was actually reading—and was quite gripped by—was
The Firm
, momentarily stashed in a cupboard in the spare bedroom next to Michael Crichton’s
Disclosure
and a hygienically unreliable copy of
Playboy
.)

Isabella arrived at eight o’clock. She was wearing a dark blue Agnes B dress and a pair of wedge-heeled espadrilles. It was a hot night, muggy in the Mid-Levels, and she had wanted to dress in a way that was striking without seeming provocative. Miles buzzed her in and came to the door of his apartment wearing a pair of blue jeans and a white linen shirt. He had taken a shower an hour earlier and the fresh warm smell of his skin tugged in Isabella’s stomach in a way that surprised her. She thought back to her dream and felt oddly embarrassed. Music was playing in the sitting room ahead of them—The Fugees’
The Score
—and a smell of garlic and rosemary wafted through from the kitchen.

“Wow. Something smells good.”

“You eat meat, right?”

Miles knew very well that Isabella ate meat. He had just wanted to appear casual.

“Of course.”

“Great, because I bought us some lamb. Is that gonna be OK?” He was not wearing socks or shoes, and the sight of his tanned feet padding down the corridor ahead of her added to the entirely artificial sense of homeliness and relaxation that Miles had hoped to create.

“Lamb’s wonderful. You’re very sweet to have cooked anything. I should have taken you out.” She paused at the edge of the sitting room. “Great flat, Miles.”

“You never been here before?” Another question to which he already knew the answer. “The American taxpayer can be pretty generous. You should check out the view.”

They now walked in different directions: Miles towards the open-plan kitchen, where he popped the cork on the Sancerre; Isabella towards the vast rectangular window at the northern end of the apartment. Spread out beneath her was the city at night, a brilliant wide shot of Hong Kong light and colour, every building from Sheung Wan to Causeway Bay illuminating the sky with a phosphorescent glow that framed the distant neon blur of Kowloon. She thought about all the girls that Miles must have lured to this place, the one-liners and seductions, and watched her own grin reflected in the glass.

“Pretty, huh?”

“It’s amazing. Did your painting arrive, by the way?”

“Sure,” he lied. “I’ve already got it hanging upstairs.”

The Sancerre was corked, which broke the ice. Miles swore and made a joke at the expense of the French which Isabella found funny, in spite of herself. It flattered her that he seemed slightly nervous and hesitant in these early moments, a side of his usually supremely confident personality that she had not experienced before. Was this just loyalty to Joe, or the uncertainty of a serial philanderer who did not know how to behave in the presence of a younger woman not visiting his flat solely for sex? Miles poured the wine down the sink—he didn’t want to appear cheap by corking it for a refund—and Isabella asked instead for a vodka and tonic. She was intrigued to watch him operate in his home environment, a domesticated male fetching ice from the freezer, switching CDs on the hi-fi, filling pans with water to boil vegetables on the stove. It somehow made him more human, more intriguing.

“I brought a notebook,” she said, because there was a danger that the atmosphere between them might quickly become flirtatious.

“Do you need me to ask you questions or can I just listen to you talk?” she asked.

“You want to listen to me talk, Izzy?” Miles seized on the opportunity to make another joke. “Works for me. Nothing I like more than the sound of my own voice.”