He didn’t turn to look at me.
‘You’ve been here almost a year, and Conchita comes three times a week. She spends three hours in the flat each time. You’ve known her that long and yet you never once asked her a single question about her life? You’re swanking around sucking up to rich shits and going out on boats, boat parties, and finding this madly cheap little place where they sell frigging Prada espadrilles and whatever it is, and no more Bollinger for me please, it’s only Wednesday, and don’t you like my new mobile phone it plays the “Marseillaise” as a ring tone, and who’s the richest person you’ve ever met, all this fucking shite, this shite, yet you’ve never asked Conchita, who picks up your fucking knickers off the bedroom floor and washes them and puts them back in the drawer where they belong, and you’ve never asked her a single question about her life, you know fuck all about her, you hardly even see she’s there?’
‘Hang on a minute, Michael, I …’
‘The truth is I don’t know who you are any more. That’s the kind of thing you laugh at when people say it on TV or in films, isn’t it? It’s the kind of line that really cracks you up. But I’m saying it and it’s fucking well true. You’ve turned into this … this person I just don’t recognise. You used to laugh at people obsessed with success and money and with having stuff. It was a real thing about you. Now you’ve got a Filipino maid and you won’t give her the fucking time of day.’
‘Well, Saint Michael rides in on his fucking chariot, kisses the leper’s sores, takes a couple of arty black-and-white photographs, and goes home thinking well of himself.’
‘What did you want when you came out here? What did you think you wanted?’
‘To get away from you, mainly, you stuck-up useless shit,’ I said. We had stopped at a traffic light by Happy Valley Road and I got out of the car, slamming the door and catching a brief glimpse of a very worried-looking driver in the front seat as I did so. I hoped his English wasn’t any better than it seemed to be. I headed for the path at the top of Bowen Road, with no plan other than to walk for an hour or so, and hope that Michael died horribly in a car accident. Then I went to see Casino at a Wanchai cinema. It was so-so. By the time I got home, Michael had moved his return ticket from next Sunday to the preceding Wednesday, packed, and checked into a hotel.
Chapter Six
If I hadn’t been so pissed off about Michael I probably wouldn’t have done what I did next. Berkowitz had been nagging me, on and off, to write a series of profiles of local billionaires – the term defined as someone with a capital value of US$1,000,000,000. (We would have a little box inset in the first piece to help our readers calculate in which currency they were billionaires. Good gag. In those days, I didn’t qualify even in Italian lira.) South-east Asia is where most of the world’s billionaires live, so there was plenty of material, the only difficulty being presented by the fact that of all the various types of people there are, billionaires are about the least keen on publicity. It wasn’t at all clear what kind of access I would get, and I very much didn’t fancy the idea of spending weeks being fended off and playing phone tag with PRs and PAs.
‘That’s part of the interest,’ said Berkowitz. ‘Inaccessibility. Shiftiness. Keeping secrets. The whole point of these guys, especially in Hong Kong, is no one knows where the money comes from. Not the real mega-money but the money they started with. Focus on the early years.’
‘I thought you said that the combination of British libel laws, Chinese ideas about face and a few hundred million dollars in the bank made for a cast-iron guarantee that no one ever said a truthful word about any of this,’ I said.
‘Not in public they don’t. But,’ said Berkowitz, waving his hands in front of his face like a man trying to enact the Dance of the Seven Veils without moving his body, ‘you can hint.’
So now, in a rage, I went ahead and wrote about billionaires – except I didn’t take Berkowitz’s advice about hinting. Instead I went ahead and spent a month gathering, collating and writing up the unexpurgated story of the Hong Kong über-rich, focusing on the issue of where their money came from. In the case of several of the biggest local fortunes, the answers involved the Communists, the Triads, Khun Sa and his opium empire, and the rights to gambling in Macao. I put in all the stories which one heard told over and after drinks: about the money that had been filtered back from Macao to the socialist parties of Portugal and France, as recompense for mysterious favours; about the money which had poured into the British Conservative Party in the run-up to the 1992 General Election, a subject on which Hong Kong was pullulating with rumours; about how the appointment of Governor Patten – who as Conservative Party chairman had been in charge of spending the party’s war chest in that same election – had in some local circles been seen as a discreet gesture of acknowledgement; about many other things besides. I put in, in short, as much of the secret history of Hong Kong as I had ever heard.
There was one omission from the piece: the Wos. Everybody knew about the Triad rumours in the family’s past. Since there wasn’t a hope in hell of printing anything about them in a magazine they owned, I deliberately left it all out, in the hope that that would be in its own way a signal about how things worked in Hong Kong. In the end, up against the deadline, I wrote all day and all night and filed the story at dawn the next morning. It was, though I say so myself, fucking great – the best piece I’d ever written. At ten, Berkowitz called me with a herogram. I ran a bubble bath and read a Mills and Boon, booked a massage for four that afternoon, and went back to bed.
At about six I was floating around the flat in a post-massage stupor, feeling a bit knackered, a bit drifty, and very pleased with myself, when the phone rang again. I picked it up expecting more compliments.
‘Miss Stone?’
‘Yup, speaking.’
‘Winston Tang here. Mr Oss’s personal assistant. Mr Oss asked me to present his compliments and would it be possible for you to meet him at Queen’s Pier in an hour.’
‘Um, yeah, sure, may I ask … no, that’s fine.’
Another herogram, I felt sure. News clearly travelled fast within the Wo organisation.
*
I arrived at the pier about ten minutes early, dressed for business in a pink fake-Chanel power suit, Gucci slingbacks, with a Prada handbag, and, for a touch of offhand cool, Calvin Klein sunglasses. Not bad, though I say so myself. Men always overestimate the extent to which women dress for display, and underestimate how much we use clothes as armour.
I wasn’t sure who would be waiting for me. It was Oss himself, standing beside a pillar reading a copy of the Wall Street Journal through half-moon spectacles. He was wearing a very well cut uncrumpled linen suit and looked up as I approached. At his feet a Chinese man was crouched in a posture which, in the split second when I first saw it, looked somehow sexual – a prelude or aftermath of some self-immolating act of public fellation. Another half second’s bug-eyed looking and I realised Oss was having his shoes shined. You often see Chinese men having this done; Europeans almost never. As I approached, Oss smiled.
‘I was just getting some stock-market advice from my good friend Ah Loo here,’ he said. ‘He gives the best shoeshine and best stock tips in the whole territory.’
‘Po Lam stock go up, last week I make five hundred dollar,’ said Ah Loo in apparent confirmation.
‘Does that mean I get my shoeshine for free?’ Oss asked. To judge from the shoeshiner’s reaction, this was a running gag. He paid Ah Loo, who did a big thank-you routine – it was evidently not a trivial tip. Ah Loo picked up his kit and ambled off towards the Star Ferry terminal in a rolling walk.
‘We’ll be popping out for a splash in Tai Pan; I hope that’s all right?’ said Oss. It’s always nice, with this kind of meaningless rhetorical question, when you’re never in a million years going to say no, if people exert themselves to sound as if they meant it.
‘Delighted,’ said the young Katharine Hepburn.
‘Captain Mok should be here any m … –
and here he is,’ said Oss, who had folded his newspaper and tucked it under his arm like a baton. Many of his gestures had a faintly exaggerated or theatrical quality. He seemed younger than I had remembered, a well preserved forty-five passing for ten years less.
The boat was docking. Two Cantonese in matelots’ uniforms were standing on the other side of a folded-out gangplank with what looked like velour rails. For some reason, getting off boats, which should be harder because you’re never stone-cold sober when you do it, is easier than getting on. With the slapping and bucking of the water on the pier, Tai Pan was none too steady. Oss put one firm dry hand on mine and passed me over the gangplank into the waiting outstretched arms of the Cantonese cast of The Pirates of Penzance. He himself then skipped nimbly and unfussily across, and I remembered that mention of something military in his background. He said something in Chinese to the older of the two sailors, which made the man smile.
‘I told him we haven’t lost one yet,’ Oss said to me. ‘We can go aft, which is more interesting and has the view, or below decks, which has the armchairs and is more comfortable.’ I voted for below. I had decided that if Oss was too cool to tell me what this was about, I was too cool to ask.
‘Good idea.’ We went down into the first cabin, which was fitted out as a sitting room, and then into the one beyond, which was an office. A door into the room beyond was ajar, swinging slightly as the boat moved, and I could see it was a bedroom. The only decoration in the office was a series of framed woodcuts of Mount Fuji and, on the mantelpiece, a number of photographs of T. K. Wo standing with various luminaries. There was one of him with the Prime Minister of China and another with the Prime Minister of the UK. It made you think. Presumably it was meant to. Oss sat in an armchair in front of his desk, and I sat beside him. Soon we were nursing matching glasses of Cristal.
‘He’s a millionaire, you know,’ he said. ‘Ah Loo, the shoeshine man. Works twelve hours a day, plays the market, supports an extended family, and has a big new house built on old clan lands in the New Territories.’
‘Only in Hong Kong,’ I said. This was meant to be a joke, but Oss went all serious on me.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Only in Hong Kong. Does it ever strike you that England is a childish place compared to here? That we’re all infantilised back home? There’s no real poverty in England. If there were, people would go and do what they do here – they’d shine shoes. It only costs a couple of quid to buy polish and brushes and set yourself up. But they’d rather sit on their arses and whinge about benefits. Here people go and work. And if they make money, what do they do? In England they piss it away. Spend it as if it were water. The proles spray Bollinger all over each other, and the toffs buy big houses and give themselves delusions about being lord of the manor. Here a rich man keeps going to work every single day and concentrates on looking after his family. Since the market became a big thing here, you have cab drivers, hotel doormen, lift operators who are worth millions. They all keep on doing what they do because they haven’t been turned into children. But they know damn well that money is the only subject in the whole world that is completely serious.’
‘Is that why you asked me out on your boat?’ Oss had been leaning closer and closer towards me as he spoke; he smelt, not unpleasantly, of cologne.
‘I liked your piece about local billionaires very much,’ he said. ‘Terribly amusing. Wonderful detail about Bob Lee’s first business partner ending up in the foundations of the Cross-Harbour Tunnel.’
‘Thank you.’
There was a pause; this wasn’t quite the kind of congratulations I’d had in mind. Still, if your boss’s boss’s boss likes something you’ve done, you don’t fuss about the form of the praise. Then Oss said:
‘But I’m afraid we can’t publish it.’
I didn’t know what to say. I have once or twice seen people’s jaws drop; it does actually happen; I suspect on this occasion it happened to me.
‘What?’
‘Perhaps I should have said, there’s bad news and there’s good news. The bad news is, as I say, we can’t publish the piece. This is an extremely sensitive time for Hong Kong. The territory is about to enter a difficult period. The eyes of the world will be on us. The glare of publicity. It is a transitional phase. In thirty years’ time, when China is the richest country in the world, people will be careful what they say. They will not lightly attract her wrath. At the moment there are some people who feel they can say anything, make any criticism, however intemperate. Hong Kong, or rather the future prosperity of Hong Kong, has many enemies. This story, in this form, will be a tremendous boon for them. I am sorry.’
I stood and ran upstairs. I was gasping for air, and I felt sick. We were round the corner of the island, and the water was less rough, so it wasn’t that. It was a feeling from childhood. Something had been taken away from me. I started crying.
Oss left me alone for about ten minutes, and then came out to the rail beside me with a handkerchief and more champagne.
‘I’m taking you to Po Lam. It’s an island where Mr Wo has a house,’ he said.
‘Great, fabulous, whatever,’ I said. He nodded. We did not speak again until we got to the island. When we did, Oss said, ‘This is the good news part.’
*
I’d never seen anything like the house. But why would I have? It’s not as if I knew lots of billionaires. If pressed, I think I would have imagined that Wo lived somewhere big and traditional. Where he did live was somewhere huge and modern, devised by a famous Chinese–American architect. It seemed to rise out of a bamboo terrace and weave around the hillside with views out over the smaller outlying islands. I was left on my own in the sitting room beside a gleaming Bang and Olufsen stereo which was playing some plinky-plink minimalist modern music. Oss had gone off ‘to attend to a couple of things’. So far the only people I had seen were four silent Chinese servants dressed in white smocks and black trousers. I was feeling highly pissed off and also highly curious. The whole place had, more than anywhere else I had ever known, the aura of wealth, intense and concentrated down to an essence – and the essence was not to do with luxury or being able to have anything material that you wanted, but to do with insulation. Here, you were insulated from all consequences. Nothing that happened anywhere in the outside world could affect you. It wasn’t that you were safe – because the idea of being safe admitted that you could be unsafe, implied the potential existence of its opposite. It was that the whole world could not reach you here. You could do anything you wanted to it and it could do nothing back.
A door that I hadn’t noticed opened, and Oss said,
‘Dawn, would you care to step in with us?’
I crossed the room, hearing my heels click, and went into what must have been Wo’s office, or one of them. It was a huge bright clean room with a large fancy antique desk at which was sitting, in a shirt and tie but no jacket, behind thick glasses, Wo himself. Without smiling he stood up and extended his hand.
‘Miss Stone,’ he said.
‘Mr Wo, it’s a great honour.’
He gestured at a chair – a Mies van der Rohe, I think. Oss kept standing.
‘We would like to offer you a job,’ said Wo without preamble.
‘What?’ I said.
‘A job,’ he said again.
‘I spoke about some of the special circumstances facing Hong Kong on the boat here,’ Oss said. ‘Special circumstances create special opportunities. Mr Wo’s concerns will invariably attract attention. Hong Kong is going to be crawling with press. The prediction is that there will be more journalists here for the handover than were in Atlanta for the Olympics. We want our relations with the press to be handled sensibly and intelligently by someone who understands the way the western media work. The job is as a media liaison for all of Mr Wo’s companies. You would be working for Mr Wo but, in the first instance, would report to me.’
‘It sounds like you’re buying me off.’
‘This is a serious
offer.’
‘It sounds like glorified PR work.’
‘There is obviously a PR component. But you will have much more power than that. In the future, if there were the need for a little conversation such as the one you and I had earlier, it would be you who took the decision.’
‘I’m flattered but this sounds like a rather limited brief. What happens when they pack their bags and go home? Collect my P45 and get on the plane back to Heathrow?’
Oss looked at Wo, who nodded. For a moment I thought he was agreeing with what I’d just said and that, yes, I would be on the jumbo with my severance pay crammed into the top pocket of my Armani jacket.
‘Mr Wo’s business interests are diversified and not all of them are in Hong Kong,’ Oss said. ‘There are opportunities all over the world and a wise man does not neglect any of them. The wise man also seeks to diversify his interests during difficult times – times of transition. There will be many opportunities for a hardworking executive in the areas in which you show knowledge. Mr Wo’s investments in the area of media already amount to many tens of millions of pounds. A not inconsiderable amount of those interests are in the English-speaking world. He’s a man who has influence. The job we have to offer a successful executive in this field would be, it is safe to say, an opportunity of unparalleled range and interest and, dare I say so, power.’
Then he mentioned the salary. That was how the strangest day of my life brought me to work for Philip Oss and for T. K. Wo, and for money. And that was my fourth and biggest break.
*
On the boat home, Oss left me to myself for the first quarter of an hour, and then, just as I was thinking, disappointedly, that I’d be on my own for the whole return trip, he appeared on the afterdeck carrying another bottle of champagne and two glasses.
‘So what do you think?’ he asked.
‘Of what? The place? Mr Wo? The offer?’
He shrugged in a way that meant all the above.
Fragrant Harbour Page 6
