‘Wo Man-Lee,’ I said. He nodded.
‘So we have all this evidence and no way of using it. Frustrating. But then some bright spark finds out that there has been a missionary involvement in that part of China and asks a few questions and comes to meet a person known to you, who speaks the dialect and, what’s much more to the point, is willing to help us with it. To considerable effect.’
I felt myself go cold.
‘Maria has been helping you.’
‘The target of our investigation, when discussing business matters with trusted subordinates, communicates entirely in village dialect. The structure of the criminal organisation is completely integrated with that of the old village. Everyone is known to everyone else. Highly secretive. No way in. We’ve been extremely lucky to find a person with the relevant linguistic skills and willingness to help. It’s a break no one was counting on. The thing is – well, the thing is, to be frank, it’s whether the person who is helping us is quite as lucky as we are.’
‘I’m not sure I understand.’
‘This is one tough Johnny. It’s no accident he’s not been arrested before. No one will talk about him. That’s not because he’s universally loved, but because everyone around him is scared shitless. If you talk about him you’re odds-on to wake up dead. Your friend is doing more than talk about him, she’s indispensable to the process of putting him in chokey for the rest of his life. That is an extremely high-risk thing to do.’
‘And you want me to … tell her that?’
‘I have a conscience. It’s not always the most useful thing in police work but there we are. We’re using her. She’s risking her life. I don’t know if she knows that. I’m not sure if that’s been made clear.’
‘I see.’
I thought for a moment.
‘On whose behalf are you here?’ I asked.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Who sent you here? What’s the message you’re supposed to convey?’
I felt as if I had been short-sighted all my life and had suddenly put on a pair of spectacles.
‘What are you implying?’ Watts was turning red and getting to his feet.
‘You were sent here to give me a message. To convey a threat, disguised as a concern.’
‘I’m not going to listen to this.’
‘Good. Get out.’
I went to the front door and opened it. He stopped as he went through and turned to me. His expression was strange. It was contorted, but not with anger; it was as if he was wrestling with an emotion that was close to grief. He was at the same time bitter. He said:
‘You’ve been here too long.’
I closed the door in his face.
The first thing I did after Watts left was sit at the table in the drawing room and write down as full and verbatim an account of the conversation as I could remember. I found that I was breathing quickly and shallowly; the action of recollection and writing calmed me and I began to try and work out what I should do. I felt that passing on Watts’s message, on behalf of whoever his masters were, would be a kind of betrayal – I would be doing the bidding of bad men. At the same time I didn’t feel it would be right to leave Maria unaware of the warning. In the way I had been put in the position of being forced to do someone else’s mischief I could feel a malign cleverness at work.
I decided to give myself the weekend to think about it. But every time I stopped doing something physical, working in the garden or fiddling with the stove, the threat came back. In the late afternoon, I went down to the village and out to the beach and swam its width over and over again, until I was as physically tired as I could ever remember being, and my arms and legs were pricking with premonitions of cramp. Then I walked back to the bungalow and fell on the bed. But when I closed my eyes I couldn’t stop replaying the conversation with Watts. I got up and put a Louis Armstrong record on and had a whisky. Then I went into the kitchen and fiddled a little more with the stove. Then I lay down on the bed and tried to read. Then I turned out the light and tried to sleep. That was how the weekend passed.
On Monday I went to see Beryl. Her offices had moved out to North Point, where her company was involved in a complicated, multiply contracted housing development. To show willing, as she put it, she had moved her offices into the first phase of the project to have been finished. When I went into her corner room, she was in conversation with Leung, one of her praetorian guard of young besuited Cantonese men. He had a large set of papers, covered with numbers, spread over the table between them. She liked having men doing tasks about her.
‘Ah Chan, if you could excuse us for a moment,’ said Beryl. Leung smiled and left. I pulled a chair up close to the desk, told her the Watts story, and asked what she thought I should do. Beryl puffed out her cheeks, an old gesture of hers which now looked odd; she had had a small stroke the year before and it had reduced mobility on the left side of her face.
‘Chief Inspector Watts, eh? I don’t think one could have been expected to guess that. Watts. It’s the ones who’ve worked in drugs who you always tend to assume are a bit fishy. The old colonial types, well you know they cut corners and all that, without really wanting to imagine the details, but still … Bert, mind you, always used to say he’d never met a copper who wasn’t to some degree bent.’
Once Beryl had mentioned her husband it always took a moment or two for the conversation to get back on track. I waited.
‘Well, that’s Hong Kong,’ she now said, briskly. ‘I suppose the idea is you can pass on the threat without acting as if you know it’s a threat. It gives you an out. You can just say you had this funny conversation with a policeman, and tell yourself that’s all you’re passing on. As long she gets the message it doesn’t matter what you think. Sort of saves face for you. Clever.’
They had left me room to lie to myself. I could see that. I said:
‘But what if something happens?’
‘Bert,’ said Beryl, and then cleared her throat. ‘Albert would have certainly told Watts to bugger off and refused to do his dirty work for him. I can hear him saying it. Then he would have gnawed himself to pieces worrying about it, without ever saying a word.’
‘Well, yes.’
‘If you choose to pretend that Watts was telling the truth, and the main thing he’s worried about is that Maria doesn’t understand the risk she’s taking, then what he’s said is a load of rubbish. Of course she understands perfectly well. She’s known these people her whole life.’
‘You may say that, but there’s an innocent side to Maria. That sounds stupid – she is a bloody nun – but you know what I mean. She might think it was, you know, all talk.’
Beryl was shaking her head.
‘No, she wouldn’t think that.’
‘In which case she knows she’s risking her life.’
‘In which case there’s no point in telling her. And there’s also perhaps no harm in telling her.’
I sat back. We looked at each other.
‘I know you’ll say no,’ Beryl said, ‘but I could tell her for you.’
My turn to shake my head.
‘Sorry,’ said Beryl, by way of farewell.
*
For the next forty-eight hours I was unable to decide whether Maria was in mortal danger, or whether I had simply over-interpreted, or misinterpreted, a half-friendly warning from a half-honest policeman. I stayed away from Maria and spent as much time as possible rushing at work. I went from Deep Water Bay to the Empire at least twice a day. I had a long, gruelling meeting with Rathbone, in his capacity as the Mastersons’ family trustee. He must have thought I was insane; I needed everything said to me at least three times.
Late on Wednesday morning I was sitting at the bar keeping an eye on things and looking over a deeply corrupt new restaurant guide to Hong Kong. It had a large advertisement for both the hotels, and lavish reviews of both establishments. Jim Connor, a star reporter with the South China Morning Post, an alcoholic Irishman and fellow sufferer a
t Father Ignatius’s first nights, came into the bar, not running so much as shuffling at high speed. He was carrying a hat, a notebook, and a copy of his own newspaper.
‘Large Powers and water please, Arthur,’ he called. Arthur was the English name of Ah Lo the barman. The drink arrived. Connor downed it in one, made a signing motion to Ah Lo to put it on his tab, nodded at me, and got up off his stool to go.
‘That certainly redefines the meaning of a quick one,’ I said. ‘What’s up this clammy subtropical morning?’
It was Connor’s habit to speak in a humorously inflated way. This was, when you were talking to him, catching. He continued to shuffle towards the door while he breathlessly addressed me, the whiskey fresh on his breath.
‘Wo Man-Lee’s just been given bail. Biggest story since the Crucifixion’ – that being a standard phrase of Connor’s. ‘Blind luck I was there – only went to the hearing on the off-chance. How conscientious can a bugger be? Mortimer Troy appeared for Wo, so smooth you couldn’t use him to shovel shit if you wanted to. Fucker’s suit costs more than my flat. All the usual tricks. Upstanding member of the this. Established citizen of the other. Benefactors of the doo-dah and contributors to the diddly-pom. Deep roots in the community. Thinness of Government’s case. Absolute lack of physical evidence. Reputations to uphold, businesses to run. Wo’s son sitting there in the front row like he was posing for a graduation photo. Government lawyer makes a very poor fist of it. Bingo. Fishiest thing you’ve ever heard, eh?’
I could not move or think. It was as if my mind and body had entirely seized up. What might this mean? Good news or bad? It might be that the government wasn’t taking Wo Man-Lee seriously enough and had been legally overmatched. But that was difficult to believe. More likely that Wo had been able to pull strings and call in favours and arrange for visits of the sort that had been paid to me. That could only be very bad news. But I still felt I shouldn’t tell Maria about Watts’s visit. Nothing substantial had changed – beyond the fact that it looked possible that Wo might get off.
Or so it seemed. The next big piece of news came the next evening. Beryl rang me in my office. She disliked the telephone so I knew as soon as I heard her that something consequential had happened.
‘Beryl – what is it?’ There was a very faint slurring to her voice since the stroke, which one could hear over the phone but not in person.
‘Tom. I’ve just heard something my boys have picked up on the bamboo telegraph. Wo Man-Lee has flown the coop.’ For a moment I thought she must be referring to the news about bail. Then I realised that couldn’t be the new news.
‘What – left Hong Kong?’
‘Nobody knows where but it would be a shock if it wasn’t Taiwan. For all the obvious reasons. He’s put out a statement regretting the necessity of the action but expressing a lack of confidence in colonial justice.’
Taiwan. Run by the Kuomintang; no extradition; a comfortable life, guaranteed free of any legal unpleasantness.
‘My God. So what does that imply for … for our friend?’ We both listened to the crackling of the telephone.
‘I think it might be an idea if you and she had a chat,’ said Beryl.
I took her advice. Both the hotel cars were busy so I queue-jumped at the Empire’s taxi rank – a terrible piece of hotel-keeping, Masterson would be spinning in his grave – and went down to the mission in Wanchai. Central had been quiet but here the alleys were packed and busy, and all the shops were open. A jeweller’s had opened at the street corner beside the mission hall and a splendidly ferocious Sikh stood outside with his shotgun and turban and jet-black beard, glowering at anyone who dared to walk past. I couldn’t shake off memories of the other time I had dashed, stomach revolving, to the same place to try and find Maria, in the sick panic at the outbreak of war. I told myself that this couldn’t be as bad as that.
Needless to say, Maria was out. ‘Sister somewhere else,’ explained, very patiently and slowly, the man who worked as a sort of concierge in the downstairs hall. He was wearing pyjama bottoms and a vest, smoking, and sitting in front of an upturned crate with a Chinese chess set on it.
‘What time will she be back?’
‘So sorry.’
‘Damn,’ I said, in English, at which he giggled politely. Maria could, and would, be anywhere: visiting pupils, or one of the drug addicts with whom the mission was increasingly concerning itself; with Father Ignatius; at the mission’s new outpost in Kowloon walled city; in the New Territories; anywhere. I settled down to wait. There was a folding chair on the other side of the hall, so I opened it and sat. The concierge did not try to disguise his curiosity. Before too long the appeal of his game mastered him however, and he went back to playing himself at Chinese chess. From upstairs I could hear family hubbub and the noise of televisions. Occasionally people came in or went out, always giving me a frank stare as they did so. One or two even asked, ‘Who’s he?’, which the concierge pretended not to hear. I think he may have regarded me as a deranged suitor.
I had arrived at the mission at half past seven. I resolved that I would leave by midnight, on the grounds that if Maria wasn’t home by then she must be staying the night somewhere else. The concierge had evidently decided to stay up and wait until she arrived or I left. He was on his umpteenth game of chess when Maria came in at five minutes to midnight, walking so quickly and quietly she had almost gone past me to the stairs. The self-appointed guardian of her virtue and I both stood up.
‘Maria.’
She looked at me, startled, abstracted and distant at the same time.
‘Tom,’ she said, perfectly amiably, but as if it had taken a few seconds to remember my name. She did not ask what I was doing there.
‘We should have a word,’ I said. It sounded, even to me, even at the time, a grotesquely English thing to say.
‘Let’s go up. Goodnight, Ah Tung,’ she said, firmly, to the concierge. He smiled at her and frowned at me.
We went upstairs. I had not been in the living quarters at the mission since the outbreak of World War Two. There were the smells of cooking and disinfectant, and of communal bathrooms. The corridors were quiet by now, though one or two lights were still on. A few rooms down the corridor Maria pushed open a door. The room was startlingly empty. There was a bed with a copy of the De Imitatio Cristi on the pillow. It looked as if someone had returned the volume by dropping it there. The only furniture was a table and chair, a crucifix on the wall, a narrow shelf of language textbooks. The room was lit by a bare bulb overhead.
Maria sat on the bed and pointed at the chair. Something about the heaviness of her movements made me realise she was exhausted.
‘Maria, I need to tell you about something which happened a few days ago,’ I began. I told her about Chief Inspector Watts. She listened without commenting or changing her expression.
‘It must have put you in a difficult position,’ she said politely, formally, when I finished.
‘That’s hardly the point, Maria,’ I said. ‘The thing is, what are you going to do? First he gets bail, which shows just how much power he’s got, or just how unwilling the government is to do anything, or both, then he skips out, which means he’s out of reach, and he can do anything he likes. You’re in an exposed position here. He can’t be seen to lose face, and if it looks as if someone could help the police against him and get away with it that makes him look weak. He won’t allow that. You’ve got to do something which gives him face, which makes it look as if you’re frightened of him. Get the Order to post you somewhere. Go to Rome and learn another language or something. Go to the Philippines and teach orphans. Go on a long retreat. I don’t know, anything – but get out of Hong Kong, you have to. Please.’
‘As you are well aware, the reasons you are giving why I, as you put it, “have to” leave Hong Kong are the precise reasons why I cannot. It’s very simple. I have no choice.’
‘This is sheer pride, Maria. It’s like suicide to stay here. Pure wilfulness. You�
��ve already done the courageous thing. To stay here would be a form of weakness, and, I say again, of pride.’
‘You feel free to accuse me of what we’re taught is the greatest deadly sin, merely because I am not doing what you tell me to do.’
‘Even the way you say that reeks of pride. Get down off your high horse and do the obvious bloody thing for once.’
‘You simply do not understand what is involved in this matter. You are speaking much too freely of matters about which you know nothing.’
‘I know you, and that’s the main thing. And thanks to you, as you are perfectly well aware, I also know Wo Man-Lee, and what he’s capable of doing. Maria, by staying in Hong Kong, you are leaving him with no choice. It’ll be open season on him, and people like him, if they can be betrayed – which is how, in their terms, they see it – and have nothing happen to the betrayer. It just doesn’t work like that.’
We were more or less shouting at each other, but at hissing level, as one does in a bitter private argument. My anger and my desire not to be overheard were soaring and parallel.
‘You forget who I am and whom I represent,’ Maria said. ‘Even if I wanted to I would not run away from Hong Kong as if it were I who was the criminal. I will not walk in the shadows for anybody. My Lord does not permit it.’
I had known in advance that if Maria mentioned God the chances of getting her to agree with me would be non-existent. But I kept going.
‘Don’t blame God for your own bloody-mindedness. This has nothing to do with Him. He created me as well as you, which is something you seem to forget. I think as far as God is concerned He’d much rather you stayed alive doing your work than pointlessly sticking your head through the bars of a lion’s cage and daring him to eat you.’
Fragrant Harbour Page 23
