Typhoon (2008)

by Charles Cumming

Miles ran a hand over his beard, acting as if Joe was being slow on the uptake. “Like I told you, man. I’m legitimate. I work ninety-hour weeks on software piracy. I travelled 100,000 miles last year trying to make sure Windows Vista doesn’t develop a single-fold eyelid when we finally release in Asia.”

  Joe couldn’t help but laugh. The lies. The casual racism. He poured the tea and rested his cigarette in a burn-scarred ashtray.

  “Do you miss it?”

  Miles lurched forward. “Like pussy, man,” he whispered. “Like pussy.”

  Joe disguised another wave of consternation in a gentle, smiling shake of the head. A part of him had always admired Miles’s sheer effrontery—brazenly lying about his work, about Linda, his mistress, about his marriage—yet the reply had been an implied insult to which he wanted to respond in kind.

  “Speaking of which, how is Isabella?”

  Miles sniffed again, pinned like an insect on his indiscretions. It had been a long time since anybody had challenged his natural authority.

  “Oh she’s great,” he replied. “Why? You wanna meet up with her?”

  Joe remembered the last time that he had seen the pair of them together, sitting on a sofa at a party in Causeway Bay. He had walked into the room and Isabella had immediately turned away, pretending to hold a conversation with the woman to her left. They had been separated for two months at that point and Joe had watched Isabella’s hand link into Miles’s arm, playing with the strap of his watch. Afterwards, out on a balcony, he had deliberately started an argument which had ended with both Miles and Isabella leaving the party. Those were the worst times and the humiliation of that period still ran through him like acid in the stomach.

  “Sure. It would be great to see her.”

  “Dinner?” Miles suggested immediately.

  Joe suspected that this was pre-ordained. Miles would want to maintain as much control over Joe as possible, to shunt him around town until he knew exactly what he was dealing with. Joe had planned to decline any initial invitation from Miles under the pretence of leaving Shanghai on Quayler business, but he was aware that he had several bags of fresh food resting at his feet and that such a tactic would now be impossible.

  “Dinner sounds great.”

  “What about tomorrow? I know Izzy’s free. I can get us a table at M on the Bund. She’d get a kick out of seeing you.”

  A kick? He had forgotten Miles’s seemingly effortless slights and condescensions. He was acting as though Joe had been a mere footnote in the long narrative of Isabella’s life. The rain was starting to ease off on Huaihai and he listened to the sound of the crawling traffic, to horns, the squeal of brakes.

  “Fine,” he said. “I’d like that.” M on the Bund was a rooftop restaurant with views over the Huangpu and prices to match. Though he had imagined the circumstances of their reunion for seven long years, in that moment Joe had no conception of how he would react to seeing Isabella after such a span of time. What would he say? How would she behave? Why was he agreeing to meet both of them at the same time?

  “You gotta cellphone?”

  “Of course.”

  Miles was sipping his tea. He knew, as well as anyone, how much the separation had cost Joe in terms of his happiness and self-esteem and appeared to be enjoying his discomfort. Joe, realizing that he had been handed an opportunity, lifted his briefcase onto the table, flipped the catches and swivelled it towards Miles so that it was possible for him to view the contents. He looked quickly at his face and noted the eagerness with which the American scanned the leather interior.

  “What you got in there?” Miles asked. “Vaccines? Viagra?”

  “Just work,” Joe said, “just work,” closing the lid and passing Miles the card. “You got one of these?”

  “Sure.”

  This was the second part of his plan. Miles took a card from his jacket and handed it to Joe, who carried off the act to perfection.

  “Microsoft?”

  Miles nodded. “Yup.”

  “I think I met a colleague of yours the other day. I’ve got his card in here somewhere.”

  Reopening the case, he scrabbled around for several seconds before emerging with what he needed. “Shahpour Goodarzi?” he said, as if struggling to pronounce the name. “Does that ring a bell?”

  The deception had been simple and effortless and Miles fell for it like a hooked fish. “Shahpour?” he said, snatching the card out of Joe’s hand. “Where the hell did you meet him?”

  Joe strained, reaching for the memory. Eventually he said: “Zapata’s? Maybe three nights ago. Matter of fact, I think he was trying to chat up my girlfriend.”

  “You’ve got a girlfriend already?”

  The information had slipped out in the heat of the moment. It was his only mistake. There was no operational advantage in Miles knowing about Megan and Joe stubbed out his cigarette, annoyed with himself.

  “Early stages,” he said, “early stages,” knowing that Isabella would now be told. How would she react when she heard the news? The only thing he feared was her indifference.

  “Why don’t you bring her along?” Miles suggested.

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Sure.”

  Joe agreed, although he had no intention of extending the invitation. The dinner would be complicated enough without throwing Megan into the mix. “Not a bad idea,” he said. “I’ll see if she’s around.”

  “Maybe Shahpour can come too,” Miles added. “The more the merrier, right?”

  “Right,” Joe said. “The more the merrier.”

  Forty seconds after Joe had left the restaurant, Miles took out his mobile phone, walked out onto Huaihai Road and called Shah-pour on a secure number.

  “Why the fuck didn’t you tell me you’d run into Joe Lennox?”

  “Who’s Joe Lennox?”

  “British. Ex-MI6. Works in pharmaceuticals. Ring any bells?”

  “Miles, I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”

  He did, of course. From the moment Shahpour had shaken Joe’s hand in Zapata’s, seen his card and registered the name, he had been weighing up the implications of their encounter. The look Joe had seen in his eyes was the look of a man who had found his salvation. Shahpour Goodarzi was Miles’s right-hand man on the renewed TYPHOON, but he was also the greatest obstacle to its fruition.

  “Hold on,” he said. “Pharmaceuticals?”

  “That’s right.” Water was dripping onto Miles’s scalp. He looked up at the offending balcony, wiped the rain off with his hand and began walking east towards the metro station at Shaanxinanlu. “Six foot, dark hair …”

  “Yeah. Oh yeah. Sure, I remember.” Shahpour was smoking a joint in his apartment on Fuxing Middle Road and rested it on a table in the kitchen. “He gave me his card. I’ve got it here somewhere. Who did you say he was?”

  “Only the guy who first interviewed Wang Kaixuan. Only the guy who supposedly quit MI6 three months ago and now just happens to be living in Shanghai. Only my wife’s fucking ex-boyfriend. I told you about him, for Chrissakes. I told you two weeks ago there were rumours he’d been sent to Shanghai.”

  “Calm down,” Shahpour said. “It’s probably just coincidence.”

  “Coincidence?” Miles was barking into the phone as he walked. “What is this? A seance? Don’t tell me to calm down, you prick. How did he get to you?”

  Shahpour removed the phone from his ear, mouthed the words “Fuck you” soundlessly at the mouthpiece, and picked up the joint. “He didn’t get to me,” he said, dragging on the roach. “I was talking to his girlfriend and his buddies came down on me like a SWAT team.”

  “Who’s the girlfriend?”

  “How should I know? Mary or Megan or something …”

  “Well, she’s coming to dinner tomorrow night. So is Joe. And so are you.”

  “Miles, it’s the weekend. I have plans …”

  “The only plans you have are to make it to M on the Bund by eight o’clock.
Do your job, Shahpour. Fuck this up and you’re on a cargo flight back to Sacramento.”

  38

  MON THE BUND

  Joe spent the next twenty-four hours trying his best to convince himself that he was ready to see Isabella.

  He made dinner for Megan at his apartment, took her for a drink at the Cotton Club, lay awake beside her until almost four o’clock in the morning, then woke at nine to find her standing at the end of his bed bearing a tray of freshly cut mangoes and black coffee.

  “I made us breakfast,” she said.

  For the first time their lovemaking felt pointless and forced, as if a memory of Isabella had slipped into bed beside them. After watching a bootleg DVD of Troy, Megan left the apartment at midday and Joe paced the rooms, the afternoon passing with a geological slowness. He fixed a leaking tap in the bathroom; he went running in Xujiahui Park; he read the same paragraph of the same article in the Pharmaceutical Journal eight times. How would Isabella react to seeing him? With indifference? With studied cool? He couldn’t bear the prospect of a polite, bourgeois dinner where she asked meaningful questions about “Iraq and the war” while Miles joked about “the good old days in Hong Kong.” He wanted Isabella to himself. He wanted to connect with her again.

  Finally, as the sun went down behind the London plane trees of the French Concession, Joe took a shower and changed for dinner. It was six-thirty. Within two hours he would be sitting at a table making conversation with the woman who had colonized his thoughts for the best part of a decade. Pouring himself a drink, he settled in a deep armchair, took out his copy of Gatsby and finished it just before half-past seven.

  So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

  The traffic running east along Yan’an Road was as slow as the midweek rush hour and Joe was twenty minutes late arriving at M on the Bund. A bald Italian steered him through the glittering dining room to a table on the crowded outdoor terrace which appeared to have been set for only four people. Shahpour was already in situ with his back to the Bund, looking crisp and laundered, but with a certain nervous intensity in his eyes. A cool breeze was blowing south along the river. Miles was seated opposite him and clambered to his feet as Joe came towards them.

  “Joe. Buddy. Great to see you.” He was wearing a black Polo shirt and his voice boomed around the terrace. “I believe you two have already met.”

  Shahpour also stood up to shake his hand. He looked more anxious and somehow far younger than Joe remembered from the club.

  “Yeah, we met in Zapata’s,” he said. “Nice to see you again.”

  Joe scanned the two vacant places. Where was Isabella? Both napkins were still folded onto white ceramic plates with the chairs neatly pushed in. Making the obvious calculation, he realized that she was not going to be coming to the restaurant. The day had been a prolonged anti-climax. Sensing his confusion, Miles said simply, “Izzy couldn’t make it,” and Joe felt a terrible gnaw of disappointment. “What happened to your date?”

  “Ditto. Last-minute crisis.”

  He wondered what had gone on behind the scenes. Joe had had no intention of inviting Megan and supposed that Miles had also lied about his plans. Did Isabella even know that he was living in Shanghai? That thought, in itself, was enough to drive him crazy with frustration. Yet the alternative was even worse: that Isabella knew of his presence in the city, but had told Miles she had no desire to see an ex-boyfriend who had lied to her throughout every moment of their relationship. Joe settled into his seat and ordered a vodka and tonic.

  “So I guess it’s just the three of us,” he said.

  At least it was a glorious evening on the Huangpu. Miles had secured one of the finest views in all Shanghai. From his chair, Joe could look directly across the river at the high-rise lightshow of Pudong while, ahead of him, the grand fluorescent curve of the Bund arced north towards Suzhou Creek. Long ago he had concluded that Asian cities were at their best at night: the chemistry of heat and neon was exhilarating. He lit a cigarette as two young Chinese waiters mournfully cleared away the empty space in which he had longed to find Isabella.

  “So tell us about her.”

  “About who?”

  “Megan,” Miles said.

  Joe looked at Shahpour, who had been drinking steadily since he arrived. Candlelight caught a look of disquiet on his face which suggested to Joe that he was either out of his depth or struggling to suppress feelings of anxiety. Hastily, Shahpour described his meeting with Megan and Joe in Zapata’s, a story that Miles appeared to have heard before. There were predictable jokes about “sharking for chicks” and Joe was glad when his vodka arrived, sinking half of it almost immediately to quench his thirst. He had given some thought to the reasons behind Shahpour’s presence at the dinner. It was possible that he was authentic Microsoft, and therefore a useful ally for Miles in trying to prove the legitimacy of his cover. More likely, however, Shahpour was also CIA and Miles had brought him along as a second pair of eyes. Yet he wondered why a trained intelligence officer would appear at a meeting of such importance looking so edgy. In Zapata’s, Shahpour had seemed impressively self-assured, if somewhat vain and intense, and Joe had been struck by both his intelligence and charm. Either this current mood was an act, the purpose of which would eventually be revealed, or Miles had said something which had momentarily undermined his confidence. If that was the case, it certainly wouldn’t have been the first time that Miles had belittled a junior colleague.

  “So what do you make of Shanghai?” Miles asked. He might have been talking to a tourist just off a long-haul from Heathrow. A few feet behind him, the red flag of China was fluttering in an infrequent breeze and Joe reflected on the irony of the restaurant’s predominantly Western clientele quaffing Martinis and New World Chardonnays beneath an icon of communist repression.

  “It’s like a frontier town, isn’t it?” he said, lighting a cigarette. “I’ve been impressed with almost everybody I’ve met. People are ambitious here, sometimes reckless, but the intelligence and energy of the average person you come across is amazing.”

  “Han or laowai?”

  “Both,” Joe replied. “This is Shanghai’s moment, isn’t it? The feeling of tens of thousands of people—Chinese and foreigners—converging on a single city in search of fame and fortune.”

  “Try millions,” Miles replied, as if he were only interested in correcting Joe’s mistakes. Shahpour fixed his gaze at a point beyond Joe’s head and broke his silence.

  “I think it’s a city of contradictions,” he said, touching the gold necklace at his throat. “You got rich and poor, locals and laowai, the cultured and the hedonistic. All of it existing side by side. It’s amazing like that.”

  Was he stoned? Joe looked at his eyes, dark and swimming, then down at the tense, sculpted jaw. There was evident awkwardness in Shahpour’s relationship with Miles, yet the imbalance between them was so pronounced that Joe began to suspect an element of theatre. “So Miles is your boss?” he asked, trying to draw out more background.

  “That’s right. Got me my job, actually. I was working in construction out here and he hired me. Tell me about Quayler.”

  The immediate change of subject was telling: Shahpour was uncomfortable under questioning, as if he knew that Joe could quickly unravel his cover. Joe duly broke into his rote speech on pharmaceuticals, a performance with which his dining companions seemed predictably bored.

  “Gaining sixteen per cent every year, huh?” Joe had finished talking about sector growth.

  “That’s right. Sixteen per cent.”

  Shahpour saved them. “So how do you guys know each other?”

  “We met long ago in Hong Kong.” Here at last was a subject about which Miles could talk for hours.

  “We were good friends.”

  “Still are,” he barked, resting a hand on Joe’s back. “Miles was always very enthusiastic about doing business with China.” The grip and sweat of his hand was like a dead
weight on Joe’s shoulders. “I’m not surprised he’s lasted as long as he has out here.”

  Miles frowned at what was an accurate if harmless observation, and promptly withdrew his arm. An Australian waitress brought three menus to their table and began discussing the specials. Joe ordered seared tuna as a starter followed by fillet steak and went to the bathroom to wash his hands. He wondered if Miles had watchers keeping an eye on him in the restaurant. Setting his cellphone to vibrate, he checked his reflection in the mirror, his thoughts returning time and again to Isabella. He had believed that they were only moments from seeing one another; her absence from the dinner was like a broken promise. His work in Shanghai, he realized, was dangerously entwined in the possibility of their reunion; there were times when Joe felt that he could not rest, nor make progress, without knowing, one way or the other, if they had a future together. Was he mad even to think such things? How was it that a person so calm and objective in every other area of his life was held captive by this unrequited desire? He wanted answers. He wanted hope, or to be free of her and to move on.

  Back on the terrace, Joe found three glasses of Chablis on the table and Miles waxing lyrical about the moral bankruptcy of Chinese businessmen. Shahpour seemed slightly more alert.

  “You’re just in time,” Miles said with mock weariness.

  “In time for what?”

  “In time to hear me tell young Shahpour here that China will never succeed on the international stage until the guys doing business learn some manners.”

  “Manners?” Joe said, placing his napkin on his lap.

  “That’s right. The people here have no respect for us, no interest in our history, no understanding of our culture.”

  “Which culture would that be?”

  “Mine.” Miles swallowed an inch of wine and wiped his beard. “Let me tell you something about the Chinese, Shahpour. Joe, back me up here. For every man, woman and child in this country, it’s about making money. Nothing else matters.”

  “You’ve changed your tune.”