Typhoon (2008)

by Charles Cumming

  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.”

  He sat beside her on the sofa, the weight of him, and they spoke in general terms about the film. What did she need to know? What was the purpose of the documentary? Isabella’s eyes wandered to Ladder of Years and The Accidental Tourist and she knew that Miles had placed them there to impress her. She mentioned that she had studied Brighton Rock at school. When Miles began to talk about the book, however, she found it difficult to concentrate on what he was saying. Her mind was suddenly scrambled by a nervous apprehension, the source of which she could not trace. Was it that she had long suspected Miles of harbouring feelings for her, feelings which he had been forced to suppress because of his responsibilities towards her boyfriend? Or was it possible that Miles felt nothing for her, that his soul had been so corrupted by a life of lies and easy sex that he was no longe
r capable of loving a woman? This last possibility made Isabella intensely sad, but it also intrigued her. She had had a glass of wine while getting dressed at home and wondered if she was already slightly drunk.

  “So the triangle of that relationship is very interesting.”

  “What?”

  She had not been listening.

  “Pinkie, Rose and Ida. The triangle. I thought that was incredibly powerful. It’s what really stuck with me about the book. The heat between them.”

  Isabella took a sip of her vodka. It was already half finished. That was the danger of living in a humid climate; you drank alcohol like water. She looked at the window again because she needed somewhere to settle her eyes. An aeroplane was flying low over Victoria Harbour, piercing a vertical searchlight that shot up from the top of the Bank of China building like a column of fire.

  “I should read it again,” she said, desperate to move away from talk of Catholic guilt and love triangles. She hoped, somehow, that Miles’s observations on Brighton Rock might move them seamlessly from a discussion of organized crime on the south coast of England to the Triads of Hong Kong. Instead, operating from a pre-rehearsed list of topics, he asked her endless questions about her life in Hong Kong, her past relationships, her jobs, a discussion that took them through a second vodka and tonic, into dinner, then three-quarters of the way down the bottle of Pinot Noir until they were eating pudding.

  “So tell me about life at English boarding schools,” he said.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Do the girls all sleep in the same dormitory?”

  It was a typically flirtatious question. Miles had been grinning as he asked it and Isabella, by now drunk and relaxed, enjoyed playing the role of gatekeeper to his fantasies.

  “Oh sure,” she told him. “And when it was hot we all slept naked and had pillow fights at the weekends.”

  “Gardeners?” Miles asked immediately.

  “Gardeners?” She was starting to laugh. “What do you mean?”

  “Isn’t that what upper-class English girls do? Hump the gardener? Please don’t tell me that’s a lie, Izzy. I always had this image of you—what do you call it?—’rogering in the undergrowth.’ “

  Other stretches of the conversation were more sedate; Miles was careful to maintain a balance. How, for example, did Isabella find working for a French company? Were they respectful towards her? Did they seem to know what they were doing? Had television, he asked, pouring her another glass of wine, always been something that she had wanted to become involved in, or was it just an accident of her life in Hong Kong? For every joke or anecdote there was a subtle, intuitive observation about Isabella’s life. It must have been difficult, he said, to be separated from her mother in Dorset who, if he remembered correctly, had never remarried. Didn’t she also have a brother who lived in the States? Isabella was flattered that Miles should have remembered so much about her background. The only subject which remained uncovered was Joe himself; instead, he hovered over the evening like an invisible chaperon, determined to ruin their fun. Isabella concluded that Miles had not mentioned his name out of a deliberate sense of mischief, yet as the evening wore on and the wine began to take effect, she longed to speak about the frustrations of their relationship and even to open herself up to the possibility of desire. For all Miles’s bravado and roguery, he was a thoughtful, perceptive man and she thrilled to the energy of their flirtation. It was harmless, she told herself, but it had been bound to happen. In some strange way, they had been dancing around one another for years, even during the period when Isabella had been blissfully happy with Joe.

  “Listen, we should talk about my documentary,” she said, suddenly aware that she was risking everything on their increasing closeness.

  “Sure. Just tell me what you want to know.”

  Miles was pouring boiling water into a cafetiere that he had used only once before.

  “Anything,” Isabella said, taking out her notebook and pen. “There are only six people in Hong Kong who know less about Triads than I do and four of them are still in kindergarten. If you tell me that the average Triad is five foot six, listens to Barbra Streisand records and spends his weekends in Wolverhampton, I’ll believe you. The gaps in my knowledge are shaming.”

  Miles was too busy moving to a mental lecture he had prepared to laugh at her joke. “Well, the term ‘Triad’ was coined by the British authorities here in Hong Kong to refer to a disparate group of secret societies that originally sprang up during the Qing dynasty to overthrow the emperor.” Isabella put her glass down and started writing. “Just about the only thing you can credit Chairman Mao with achieving in China is the eradication of opium abuse after 1949. Thirty million peasants may have died from starvation under communist rule, but at least they weren’t high.” Miles plunged the coffee. “That opium trade had been controlled by the Triads, who were forced to move their operations to Hong Kong. I guess you could say we’re living in the spiritual home of the Chinese mafia.”

  Miles poured the coffee into two bottle-green espresso cups, sat opposite Isabella at the table and lit a cigarette. They smiled at one another in an attempt to lighten the suddenly didactic mood but, for the next twenty minutes, he swamped her in information about the various societies that controlled Hong Kong life in the post-war years, “Each of them,” he said, “responsible for a par ticu lar geographical area or sector of the economy.” It was exactly what Isabella needed in terms of her research, but she remained nostalgic for the earlier part of the evening and tried frequently to catch Miles’s eye, to make him revert to his earlier mood of playfulness. At the same time she enjoyed the process of watching Miles’s mind open up, his expertise, the confidence he clearly felt in his own intellectual abilities.

  “This is great stuff,” she told him, scribbling onto a third sheet of paper, like a journalist on the scent of a good story. “So they operate in the same way as the Sicilian mafia? It’s about protection money, drug-running, prostitution?”

  “They operate like the Sicilians, sure. And the Turks, and the Russians, and the Albanians. All wiseguys are basically the same. But Chinese criminal activity has its own particular characteristics.”

  “What kind of characteristics?”

  “Different societies use different hand signals to communicate secretly with other members. But your average French cameraman is gonna find it pretty difficult to capture those gestures on tape. He’d need to be like those David Attenborough guys making a nature documentary, sitting around in a hut on Lantau Island for eight months waiting for Mr. Chan to give the thumbs up.” Isabella laughed and curled a thick handful of hair behind her neck. “These guys are masters of concealment. The way they might offer a cigarette, sign a credit card transaction, even pick up a set of chopsticks, all those gestures are sending signals to other Triads. I know a guy in the 14K who has this way of accepting a bowl of tea with his thumb and two of his fingers extended so it forms a kind of tripod.”

  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.