Beijing Smog

by Ian Williams

  “Chuck, you said a Tellytubby. You didn’t say which one.”

  At that moment, there was a huge roar from the crowd. The final whistle. England had beaten Wales. Music began blasting around the ground: “Sweet Caroline, good times never seemed so good…”

  And the crowd chanted, “So good, so good.”

  In the packed south stand, one drunken mass of humanity seemed to move and sway in unison. Which is when Drayton and Morgan both saw them, near the top of the stand, towards the left and briefly captured on a giant television screen: a group of more than a dozen Tellytubbies, jigging their bloated bodies to the music.

  Without a further word, Drayton shut down his phone, barged past two men dressed as priests, spilling a jug of beer they were sharing, and nearly collided with a woman dressed as a banana as he headed towards the south stand.

  Beneath the stand, the floor was sticky with spilled beer as crowds milled around bars, ordering beer by the jug. Kim Jong-un staggered past, beer in hand, escorted by a detachment of North Korean soldiers. Two judges told Kim he was as guilty as hell. A ballerina, or boozy ballerina according to a big and quite accurate label on her outfit, was slumped against a wall. Captain America was throwing up in a wastebasket.

  And it was only one thirty. Jesus, Drayton thought, ploughing through a group dressed as whistle-blowing Australian lifesavers and spilling another beer, this one out of the hand of a nun.

  “May the wrath of God be upon you,” she slurred.

  Drayton ignored her and headed up a set of stairs and towards the area of the stand where he’d seen the Tellytubbies. He was caught in the crossfire of beer cups between a group dressed as surgeons and Kim Jong-un’s guards, who were back in their seats.

  Halfway up the stand, a group dressed as bowling pins blocked the path. He pushed one, who fell into another, and then another, like bowling pins do. And soon they were splayed over several seats, covered in their own beer.

  He had the Tellytubbies in his sights now, but as he drew closer the Tubbies all stood on their seats and pulled down their costumes, exposing a dozen Tellytubby arses to the crowd, which roared with approval and threw more beer.

  Drayton grabbed at the nearest La-La, but its suit had no pocket.

  “Hey man,” said La-La. “What’s up?”

  But before Drayton could reply he was pushed from behind by several vengeful bowling pins, then pulled by the Tubbies, who set about ripping the Dipsy suit from his back, wanting to bring another Tellytubby arse to the party.

  Then the south stand’s security guards barged into Tellytubby land, deciding that the Tubbies had crossed a line with the arse stuff.

  By this time Morgan had another drink in his hand and was waiting for the next game. The rowdy scenes in the south stand seemed little more than the usual for the first Saturday of the Sevens. But then he sat up in his seat.

  Was that Drayton? Surely not. But it sure looked like him.

  Several security guards were surrounding and escorting out of the ground a man dressed only in a skimpy and shredded pair of briefs. As they walked along the touchline, the crowd rose to its feet, cheering the guy and showering him and his escort in beer.

  Though Morgan couldn’t hear it, the man was angrily protesting.

  “I’m a diplomat. I’m a fucking diplomat.”

  The security men ignored him. They’d heard and seen it all before. Priests, Supermen, nuns, clowns, airline pilots. Diplomats. Sure.

  The next game was getting underway now, China against Korea. China scored the first try. Few people seemed to be paying attention, though if Drayton or Morgan had cared to look high into the east stand they would have noticed another La-La. This one jumped to its feet and cheered when China scored.

  Then it left. Out at the front of the stadium, a group of tourists asked for a photograph. La-La told them to fuck off before climbing into a van with dark windows, which headed back towards the harbour and a People’s Liberation Army facility in a part of the island that still went by its former colonial name of Admiralty.

  – 24 –

  The Video

  Geraldine MacMaster didn’t take an active management role these days, but she tried not to miss the company’s annual strategy meeting in Hong Kong, where her great-great grandfather had founded the company.

  Her family still held a controlling stake in MacMaster and Brown. Which is why, looking from her hotel window at the hazy harbour view, she was more than a little troubled.

  It was shortly after dawn, two days after the rugby weekend, and she had hardly slept. The journey from her home in New York was tough at the best of times, and the sixteen-hour flight and a thirteen-hour time difference seemed to get harder each time she did it. It took her days to get over the jet lag.

  So she left the hotel, thinking a walk might clear her head, and anyway, she had time to kill before the meeting, scheduled around a working lunch, to be followed by a harbour cruise on the company boat.

  Andrew, her chauffeur, who was already on standby with the company limo, intercepted her. She told him she wouldn’t need him until later.

  The meeting was going to be difficult enough as it was. There were tough questions about China, which still accounted for half the firm’s business, but now she’d have to sit through Morgan’s presentation while trying to keep a straight face, not knowing quite whether to laugh or cry. What was the man thinking?

  She walked north on an elevated walkway, then boarded a tram, climbing its narrow stairs to the upper deck, and took a hard plastic seat beside an open window. It was already busy, and the tram screeched and rattled through the central business district before ending its journey in the crowded streets of Sheung Wan in the western part of Hong Kong Island.

  It was more instinct than planning that had guided her to an area she associated so much with her youth, growing up in the city, exploring these narrow alleyways and streets lined with shops overflowing with sacks of dried seafood, from squid and scallops to snakeskin and seaweed. She found the smell overpowering, but reassuring. The timeless Hong Kong.

  She looked for, but couldn’t find, an old teashop she remembered that specialised in dried chrysanthemum, so settled for a coffee in a market area that wasn’t so timeless and had been transformed into a mall of boutique shops, cafés and stalls.

  Outside, another tram rumbled past. It was the MacMaster and Brown tram. They’d turned two of them into mobile billboards, advertising their private banking. “Making your dream a reality,” it said. “Nobody serves you better.” There were images of smiling faces, young and old, an impossibly sincere-looking banker looking over the Hong Kong skyline, a private jet. It made her feel embarrassed, not proud. She thought it was horrible.

  But she was no longer involved in that sort of day-to-day decision. She saw herself more as the company’s conscience. A guiding hand from afar. And on that morning all she could think about was the stupidity of ego-driven men and wondered how she could best protect them from themselves.

  She told herself not to jump to conclusions. Morgan was an idiot. What other way was there to look at it? That thing. And she wondered who else had seen it. She’d always thought of Morgan as such a gentleman. Now this. Was it blackmail, extortion, some sort of revenge? She’d have to confront him with it.

  The video had arrived as an email attachment. The subject line said simply, “Anthony Morgan – Urgent”. The sender used a Gmail account, which was a jumble of letters and numbers. No name.

  There was no message either. Just the video, which she had opened without thinking, to find herself looking at a grainy image of a poorly lit room with whitewashed walls and a single narrow bed on which a man was lying naked on his back.

  The picture kept losing focus, but then stabilised. A slim young woman was standing by the bed. She looked a little bored, but it wasn’t her face th
at drew MacMaster’s attention, but what she was doing with her hands, one of which was moving rather erratically around the man’s private parts, while the other held a phone, which appeared to be taking most of her attention.

  It was only when the man looked up and angrily threw a towel at the woman that she realised that, good God, that’s Morgan. There was no sound on the video, so it was like watching an old silent movie, which somehow made it all the more compelling. And sordid. Morgan appeared to be shouting. He was certainly shaking, waving his arms all over the place, before storming out of shot. The young woman continued on her phone, and seemed oblivious to all the fuss.

  MacMaster finished her coffee, then took a cab to the Wanchai skyscraper where the company had its China headquarters, and where the meeting was being held.

  The lift from the ornate main lobby to a second lobby on the forty-sixth floor took precisely thirty seconds. She’d timed it, and hated every second; it always made her feel nauseous.

  Another lift took her to the sixty-eighth floor, and the company’s offices. She was the first into a conference room with panoramic views of the harbour, over which the morning haze was beginning to lift. Other than the view, the room was barren and soulless. Writing pads, pencils and bottled water had been arranged at a dozen places at a long rectangular-shaped table.

  A projector and screen linked to a laptop computer were at the ready.

  The receptionist brought her tea, and she sat, looking at the harbour, thinking, making notes. No, this was not going to be easy.

  She’d considered talking to Morgan before the meeting, get it over with, but there were already several others in the room before he arrived. She’d have to talk to him afterwards.

  There were teas, coffees and a few pleasantries, everybody saying how really good it was to see everybody else, sounding like they meant it, before the meeting began at midday, on schedule. MacMaster sat at the head of the table, the Director of Finance on her left, Chief Executive Officer on her right, and the heads of the company’s regional offices spread around the table. All of them, apart from MacMaster, were men.

  The CEO and finance guy gave brief presentations. The figures were mostly good, though projections cautious. China was perhaps the biggest uncertainty. Tony?

  He waited as sandwiches were delivered to the table with bottled water, juice and more tea and coffee.

  “It’s true there is a lot negativity on China,” he said. “And there are certainly challenges. There’s a lot of debt in the system. It’s hard to calculate how much, but we think it’s manageable. And there’s a lot of over-capacity. A lot of money’s fleeing the country too. There are concerns over growth, the exchange rate. The property bubble’s bursting. And the ongoing anti-corruption campaign has injected further uncertainty.”

  “That’s an awful lot of negativity,” MacMaster said. “How do we know the debt is manageable when we haven’t a clue what it is? What do we really know about what’s going on with China’s economy?”

  Morgan avoided a direct answer, saying it was at times like this that clients turn to us, that they value our insights. He said that China’s financial system was still fundamentally sound, and that Beijing had the tools and the skills to reform the economy.

  “And that’s what we’re telling our clients?” MacMaster said.

  Morgan took a sip of coffee and nodded. He said not to forget that economic growth rates, though falling, are still the envy of the world.

  “But do we believe the figures?” MacMaster said. “Can we believe any official statistics? From what I can make out, they’re about as real as the DVDs and handbags in their markets. If they don’t like the figures they seem to suppress, abolish or massage them.”

  “Massage them Tony,” she repeated, holding Morgan’s gaze for what seemed to her like an eternity before looking away.

  “It seems to me that China’s leaders live in a sort of alternative reality, a parallel universe in which black is white, white is black and the truth is whatever they say it is,” she said.

  MacMaster then asked the finance head on her left what contingency plans he had if it did turn out that the Chinese economy was like Greece and Lehman Brothers on steroids and the China Miracle ended in one big train crash.

  “We’re selling up,” the finance guy said. “Discreetly, of course. Getting out of a lot of our mainland investments and shorting the Hong Kong and Taiwan markets, especially Chinese companies or any with heavy exposure to the mainland economy.”

  “So if I understand this correctly, we are betting against the Chinese economy, while telling our clients to keep ploughing their money in because all will be well?”

  The finance guy said there wasn’t really a contradiction here, that they were just being prudent and responsible, hedging their position.

  Morgan said that client trust was the most important thing. That it was MacMaster and Brown’s job to offer them assurances during this choppy period, to look for opportunities in the new consumer and innovation economy that China now wanted to build.

  “Isn’t there a bigger issue here?” MacMaster said. “I’ve always felt there’s a bit of an unwritten deal between the Party and the people. The Party delivers growth and the people let them get on and govern without any irritating demands for democracy. But what happens when they stop delivering? What happens when the music stops?”

  Morgan ducked that one too, just saying there was a lot of music still to play, putting on a smile that MacMaster was starting to find really annoying. Morgan said they shouldn’t get too carried away by property and stock market wobbles. “Markets in China can be a bit of a casino,” he said.

  “I don’t think so, Tony. Casinos have rules,” said MacMaster, looking at Morgan, a benign smile on her face, and thinking that maybe he was a bigger idiot than she’d thought. But it was time to move on to the reports from the other regional heads, who rattled off summaries of their positions with few questions asked. Then MacMaster proposed they move to the limos to take them to Stanley, on the far side of Hong Kong Island, where the company boat was moored, and where they would be joined by other staff for the harbour cruise.

  As they got up to leave, MacMaster asked Morgan to wait.

  “Can we have a quick word?”

  Morgan said sure and sat back down.

  MacMaster waited for the rest of them to leave the room.

  “I have received a video,” she said, stumbling over the words.

  “A video? A blockbuster, no doubt.”

  “Well, of sorts. It’s about you. Or rather of you.”

  “Of me?”

  “Yes.”

  She looked out of window, no longer able to hold his gaze. “And a masseuse.”

  Morgan could feel the blood draining from his face. He felt dizzy. He stretched for some water, but stopped after he realised his hand was shaking.

  “A masseuse? Doing what?”

  “Well, she was on the phone. At least, in part.”

  MacMaster handed him her smartphone, the video ready to go. He watched the grainy images.

  “Well, this is a little embarrassing,” Morgan said.

  MacMaster said it was not up to her to judge his private life, what he chose to do in his own time, but she had to consider the interests of the company. She had to protect MacMaster and Brown. She said the video had arrived by email. Just the video. And she asked if he’d received any threats or messages at all that might explain the motive for this.

  “What do they want?” she said.

  He said he had no idea, that he’d received nothing, and was anybody else aware of this?

  “Nobody, Tony. Not yet. Perhaps we should report it. Though it’s hard to say to whom.”

  Morgan asked for a copy, and she immediately emailed it to him. He said he suspected it was something personal
. A silly thing, and could she please keep it between themselves for now and leave him to look into it?

  She said she’d do that. At least for now, and they left to join the others.

  Morgan said he needed the bathroom, and once inside and confident he was on his own he called a number, his fingers still shaking.

  The call went straight to voicemail.

  “Chuck,” he said. “Morgan here. We need to talk. It’s urgent.”

  – 25 –

  Lamma Island

  Drayton had messaged Morgan to meet at a quarter before noon the following day, outside pier number four on the harbour front, right in front of the IFC Tower in Central Hong Kong.

  Morgan arrived five minutes early and found the American already there, sitting on a concrete bench between students shovelling noodles from plastic lunch boxes. He was reading a newspaper and drinking coffee.

  The first thing Drayton said was that the coffee tasted like it had just been scooped from the harbour, and what was it with all those judges he’d seen walking through Central in wigs and robes like pallbearers at a funeral, except without the coffin.

  “They’re lawyers mostly, protesting against the death of justice,” said Morgan. “Against interference from Beijing. It’s an important principle for Hong Kong.”

  “Oh yeah?” said Drayton. “You really think Beijing meant all that stuff about leaving Hong Kong to do its own thing for fifty years? It’s not in their DNA. They want to control everything.”

  Morgan changed the subject. He said the video had come as a real shock, sent to his boss for Christ’s sake. And when she told him, at a company meeting of all places, it had been the most embarrassing thing he’d ever had to sit through.”

  “Well, I can see that, Tony. But let’s not talk here.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “We’re going for a hike.”

  They boarded a ferry to Lamma Island, just off Hong Kong, climbing to an upper deck so fiercely air-conditioned it made Morgan shudder, and then out the back to an open area of metal seating but with a nice breeze. Drayton thought it would be more private out there, but by the time the ferry left at noon it was packed.