Dictator

50

London is arguably the most racially diverse city in the world. Heathrow handles more international passengers than any other airport, anywhere. It follows that there is nowhere on earth with as rich and concentrated a tapestry of ethnicities as the airport’s overcrowded passenger terminals: they are their very own rainbow nation. It would take a very unusual human being indeed to warrant a second glance. So neither Samuel Carver nor Zalika Stratten paid any attention whatsoever to the tall, shaven-headed African standing by a suitcase a few steps away with a telephone pressed to his face as they checked in their baggage for the Thursday-morning Cathay Pacific flight to Hong Kong.

Carver’s mind was torn between the beautiful woman standing in line next to him and the job he was preparing to undertake. He had never visited Hong Kong before and spent much of the flight engrossed in maps and guidebooks: partly a professional familiarizing himself with the surroundings of his next mission, partly a tourist intrigued by one of the world’s most fascinating cities, a tiny oasis of something approaching capitalist democracy within the great totalitarian monolith of communist China.

Although it was surrounded by a mass of small outlying islands, the heart of Hong Kong consisted of three sections. The first was Hong Kong Island, the site of the first British occupation in 1841 and still the political and financial heart of the city. Across Victoria Harbour, on the Chinese mainland, stood Kowloon, one of the most crowded places on the planet, where up to a hundred thousand people squeezed into every square mile. North of Kowloon, past a band of hills now preserved as a string of country parks and lakes, came the New Territories, land acquired by the British from the Chinese in 1898. Here, in the outlying district of Tai Po, was where the Gushungos had their bolthole. Carver took a good long look at the maps, memorizing every route in and out of Tai Po, by road, rail, air and sea.

The flight arrived at breakfast time on Friday morning. They checked in to a hotel on the Kowloon side of the water – the location chosen for ease of access to Tai Po. Once unpacked, showered and changed, they headed out into the city’s incomparable atmosphere of energy, enterprise and tightly packed humanity, all jostling, arguing, bantering and sweating in the sweltering heat and humidity. Everywhere Carver looked, familiarity and strangeness collided with each other in a mesmerizing cultural confusion. Most of the signs were in Chinese characters that were totally incomprehensible to him. Yet among them English words would suddenly pop out: ‘Tom Lee Music’, ‘Stockwell Securities’, ‘Classic Beauty’, and even, on a shopfront that could have been pulled straight from an English high street, ‘Body Shop’. More than a decade after the end of British rule, Pitt Street, Knutsford Terrace and Jordan Path still jostled for space with Tak Shing Street and Yan Cheung Road, traffic drove on the left, and the buses were double-deckers.

On one corner, there’d been some kind of incident in a grocery store. A handful of police were on the scene. They were all Chinese, but they wore olive-green short-sleeved tropical uniforms, with fatigue trousers tucked into gleaming black boots that could have come straight from a British Army quartermaster’s stores, right down to their berets and cap badges. Carver passed one policeman speaking into his radio. A blizzard of Mandarin dialect was followed by ‘Yes, sir. Over.’

Zalika insisted on stopping for a bite to eat at a white-tiled, neon-lit restaurant where the menu was in Chinese and they ordered by pointing at pictures of dishes and the numbers next to them. But the label on Carver’s beer read ‘Carlsberg’.

By then he’d already found a tailor to make the alterations to his suit trousers. Two hours later he had a car. He needed something that looked dowdy and unexceptional, but was still quick enough to get him out of trouble if any should arise. After twenty minutes online, a cab through the Cross Harbour Tunnel from Kowloon on to Hong Kong Island took him to the showroom of Vin’s Motors in Tin Hau Temple Road, North Point, not far from the Happy Valley racecourse.

When Carver walked in, neatly dressed with a beautiful young woman on his arm, the salesman’s eyes gleamed. Here, surely, was a man with the need and the means to impress. A fat commission would soon be on the way. His enthusiasm waned, to be replaced by disappointment, bafflement and then unfettered curiosity, as Carver spent a mere twenty-two thousand Hong Kong dollars – roughly seventeen hundred pounds – on one of the oldest, cheapest cars on the premises: a faded maroon-coloured 1998 Honda Civic EF9. It was a model beloved by petrolheads for the astounding horsepower the engineers at Honda had squeezed from its modest 1.6-litre engine – the most power per cc of any engine ever, some maintained.

That satisfied Carver’s requirement for speed, but the downside was that Honda’s stylists had tried to signal the car’s capabilities by fitting it with red Recaro sports seats, a titanium knob on the gear-stick and fancy aluminium pedals. Carver politely requested that all these should be replaced by much drabber parts and bought a second, even shabbier Civic to provide them. He also asked for the bodywork to be scuffed and dented. The engine, meanwhile, had to be tuned to the highest possible spec, irrespective of the cost or number of components that needed replacing. He handed the salesman an incentive payment of twenty thousand Hong Kong dollars, cash, to make sure that the job was done within twenty-four hours. Then he answered all the questions he could see the man was dying to ask by winking and saying that a friend of his had just bought a new Porsche 911. He intended to turn up in his tatty old car, offer to race him, put a lot of money on the outcome, then watch his face as the Honda won. This, it was agreed, was a brilliant joke, and Carver was made to promise that he would come back on Monday and tell all the lads in the service department about the victory they had won for him.

‘You’re an excellent liar,’ said Zalika as they left the showroom.

‘That makes two of us,’ said Carver. ‘No wonder Klerk thought we were suited.’