Typhoon

15

They lasted another ten minutes before Miles announced that he wanted to go “someplace else.” Joe should have been wise to the implication-it was one o’clock in the morning, after all-but he allowed Miles to lead him through the stifling, humid streets to a basement nightclub on Luard Road where there was a bouncer on the door, a dimly lit staircase and no entry fee. In Wan Chai, that usually meant only one thing: the club would be full of hookers.

“Been here before?” Joe asked as he pushed through a warped double door at the foot of the stairs to be hit by a wall of cigarette smoke and house music. Miles said, “Coupla’ times,” and followed close behind him. To their left was a darkened, open-plan seating area where groups of expat men, varying in age from perhaps eighteen up to sixty-five, sat at tables talking to girls from the Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand. The bar was directly ahead of them, a high-countered rectangle surrounded on all sides by customers and girls on stools. A sweat-oozing dance floor heaved to their right. Miles walked past Joe, found a table in the far corner of the club and brought over two vodka and tonics.

“Why not Neptune’s? Why not Big Apple?” Joe asked, tilting the question towards sarcasm. Big Apple and Neptune’s were Miles’s favoured knocking shops on the island, ports of call for a certain type of gweilo looking for easy sex after a night out in Hong Kong. Both were awash with women from South-east Asia who would accompany you home for less than the price of a three-course dinner at Rico’s. Joe had been to Neptune’s on several occasions and had hated everything about the experience, not least the barely disguised contempt the trafficked girls held for their cash-rich clientele. But sex for sale was part of everyday life in Hong Kong and Joe wasn’t the type to sit in judgment. If Miles wanted to pay an eighteen-year-old girl from Haiphong who spoke no English to spend the night with him at his apartment in the Mid-Levels, that was his problem.

“I’m not here to get laid, man,” Miles said, as if reading his mind. “I just like the atmosphere. It’s smaller than those other places, right? More intimate. You rather be someplace else?”

Joe knew that Miles had probably brought him to the club as a means of testing the boundaries of his fidelity to Isabella, but he was not about to give a drunk, randy, belligerent American the pleasure of his moral indignation.

“I really don’t care,” he said. “I just want to find out what happened to Wang.”

Miles rolled his eyes and curled a grin at a passing girl wearing a short pink skirt. “Jesus. Can’t you let that go? You fucked up, Joe. You thought Wang was going to make your career and you fell for it. It’s nobody’s fault but your own. Deal with it.”

It took a lot to trigger Joe Lennox’s temper, and this was as close as anyone had come in a long time. He looked across at the dance floor, at the unchosen girls dancing in solemn pairs, at a pot-bellied businessman draping his heavy, sweat-stained arms over the shoulders of a micro-skirted hooker, at a Thai girl laughing as she ground her arse into the crotch of a man whose face was a rictus of consternation, and wondered why the hell he spent so much time in the company of this craven spy whose behaviour was a constant affront to his sensibilities. Was it just a sense of professional responsibility which kept them together? Isabella seemed to like Miles; perhaps that had something to do with it. Or was it simply that Joe had always preferred the company of mavericks and nonconformists, if only because they offered an antidote to the mostly strait-laced sons and daughters of middle England around whom he had grown up?

“I don’t think I fucked up,” he replied, controlling his anger. “I just think you’re lying to me.”

Miles shook his head. “Jesus.” A girl in tottering heels approached their table and he waved her away as if she were little more than a fly in his face. Joe felt a thump of despair. “Let’s put this argument out of its misery, OK?” Miles took one of Joe’s cigarettes and moved his vodka to one side of the table, as if clearing space in which he could make his point. “I’ve listened to last night’s tapes. I’ve listened to what Wang told you. And none of it is news to us. None of it is in the slightest bit of any fucking interest whatsoever.”

Joe caught a wave of garlic breath and pitched away, his eyes going back to the dance floor. He thought of Isabella asleep in bed and wanted to be beside her, entwined in her, away from this. It occurred to him that he had no idea how she had spent her day and this depressed him. “None of it?” he said.

“None of it. The Agency has known about Yining since day one. Christ, we had informants who took part in the riots. Everybody knows what’s going on up there. I’m surprised Wang had the nerve to show up with such an old story.”

Joe had spent the afternoon in the House of a Thousand Arseholes shuttling around the SIS computer system looking for recent reports on Xinjiang. Suffice to say, the Brits had nothing on record about a February uprising in Yining. It was the extent of Joe’s distrust that he suspected Lenan of having wiped the files that morning.

“What about the torture?” he said. “What about the human rights abuses?”

“What about them? Last time I checked I didn’t work for Amnesty International.” Miles was scoping girls, barely seeming to listen to him. At a nearby table, two of them, possibly sisters, slid in next to an American with a thick beard and a deep Texan accent. The low boom of his voice carried to where Joe was sitting and he could hear the man asking if they wanted drinks. “Look, do you know about Baren?”

Joe shook his head.

“Baren is a township in Aktu, near Kashgar.” Miles turned back to the table and now adopted a more serious expression. He had a near-encyclopaedic memory and enjoyed reeling off chunks of history. “Back in April 1990, the Chinese police broke up a public prayer meeting outside some government offices in Baren. Accused the worshippers of inciting jihad, of getting funding from the Afghan muj. Caused a riot involving about two thousand local Muslims. The cops and the Public Security Bureau, probably the Bin Tuan as well, brought in helicopters, riot troops, shot about fifty of them, including the ones who were running away. Surely you know about this?” Joe ignored the effortless condescension. “Baren was just about the biggest ethnic separatist uprising in Xinjiang in the last seven years. Out of a Muslim community of ten thousand, every man between the age of thirteen and sixty was arrested in connection with what happened. That’s how serious the Chinese take the situation up there. Then you got bombs going off right across Xinjiang. One on a bus in Urumqi killed about thirty people in early ‘92. This shit is happening all the time.”

“What about Yining?” Joe asked.

“What about it?”

“Is what Wang told me true?”

Miles drained his vodka and frowned. “Forget about Wang,” he said. “Wang Kaixuan is a myth, a spook story. Nothing that old fuck told you has any meaning.”

Joe was not an aficionado of American movies and did not realize that Miles was lazily quoting dialogue from The Usual Suspects. Myth. Spook story. For ten seconds in a Hong Kong nightclub, Wang Kaixuan was Keyser Soze. “So there was no uprising in Yining?” he asked. “No riots? No mass imprisonments? No torture?”

“Of course there was.” Miles was shrugging his shoulders but seemed equally interested in the fact that his drink was now finished and that it was Joe’s turn to buy a round. He looked down at his glass, rattling the ice. “Nobody’s denying that Yining was a shitstorm. Nobody’s saying that. But you gotta ask yourself a bunch of serious questions about the kind of guy you thought you were dealing with last night. Professor of economics? A Han Chinese who somehow speaks perfect English? Nobody north of Guangdong speaks English like that unless they’re MSS. For Christ’s sake, Joe, Wang spent a year at Oxford University in the seventies pretending to study law.” Miles saw Joe’s look of astonishment and added, “What? He didn’t tell you that?”

“Not in so many words…”

“Then he suddenly develops a conscience about Uighurs getting butt-fucked in Liu Daowan? Give me a break. What do you have here? An entirely new concept? The self-hating Han?” Miles laughed at his own joke and then narrowed his eyes. “How come he just happens to be in Yining when the riot takes place? He was a fucking government agent. You think a Chinese academic from northern Xinjiang is going to risk his life to save a few hundred Muslims? Don’t you have any understanding of the national character? All the Chinese care about is themselves. It’s me, myself and I-then me again if you’ve still got some time left over afterwards. I can’t believe how naive you are.” Miles lifted his glass, waved it at the barman and indicated that he wanted two further vodka and tonics. “You’re paying for these, by the way.”

Joe was at a dead end. Experience had taught him to doubt the word of those who argued their case with a mixture of hostility and impatience; it usually meant that they were concealing something. He believed very little of what Miles was telling him, but had to tread carefully. Miles clearly enjoyed a much closer working relationship with Lenan than Joe had previously realized. As a result, everything that he said about the Wang situation would certainly be reported back to his SIS masters, with potential consequences for his career. So it was better to act dumb, to appear to accept Miles’s version of events and then to check the veracity of his story at a later date. Joe had a hunch that Lenan had handed Wang to the Americans. If that was the case, there was very little he could do about it. There was certainly no future in making waves. He just resented the fact that he was being treated like an idiot.

“Fine,” he said. “I’ll go and pay for the drinks.”

At the bar he handed a five-hundred-dollar note to a middle-aged Chinese cashier who looked as though she had been living underground for the best part of ten years. Her eyes were black pools of fatigue, her light-starved complexion a sickly yellow glow beneath the cruel lights of the neon bar. He put the drinks down on the table, told Miles he was “off to buy cigarettes” and walked to the entrance of the club, splashing water on his face in a toilet that stank of sex and piss. Go home, he told himself, though he was wired and hot and still angry that Wang had slipped from his grasp. Joe thought of Ansary Tursun and Abdul Bary, two Uighur men whose faces he had not yet seen, the one handcuffed to a basement wall in wretched solitary confinement, the other held down by laughing guards as his toenails were extracted by pliers. What was the true character of this country to the north, this ancient land to which Joe had committed so much of his young life? What would become of Hong Kong when the PLA goose-stepped over the border at midnight on 30 June? Joe felt drunk and melancholy. The thud of music in the club reverberated through the toilet walls and he walked outside onto the street to buy cigarettes from a 7- Eleven.

Returning to the club ten minutes later he was struck by a sight so extraordinary that it took him several seconds to realize what was going on. As Joe passed the dance floor, pushing through a crush of men and bored hookers, he saw Isabella straddling Miles at the table, her legs squeezing his hips as she rocked and writhed in his lap. Of course it was not her, yet the shape of the woman, her long dark hair, her sinuous body encased in a dark blue qipao dress, was an uncanny double. Joe felt a surge of desire and jealousy. He sat down and stared at her back in a brief drunken trance.

“Joe, man! You’re back!” The girl turned. She was Chinese, exquisitely pretty, but with flat, wide features that seemed almost Turkic. Joe felt that he was hallucinating. Was this a Xinjiang prostitute in the act of selling herself to the CIA? He was by now so drunk and exhausted that little was making sense. “You gotta meet Kitty. Fuckin’ gorgeous. Kitty, meet Joe.”

The girl stretched out a long, slender arm which looked tanned in the low light of the club. Her touch was cold and Joe saw that there was no life behind her painted eyes, only the sad routine of seducing strangers and laughing at gweilo jokes. He wondered how Miles, or any of the other men in the club, could fail to see through the artifice as the girl smiled and tipped her head provocatively. Then he realized that they probably didn’t care.

“Hello, handsome,” Kitty said.

“Hello.”

She reached for a narrow champagne flute on the table and took a sip while holding Joe’s gaze. “Fuck wine,” they called it, a mixture of cold tea and flat Coca-Cola which sold for twice the price of a vodka and tonic. At the end of the evening the girl and the bar would split fifty per cent of the cost of the drink, with the rest going to the Triads. Kitty’s aim would be to draw another girl to the table, to see to it that Joe also bought her a drink, and then to replenish their glasses as often as possible before leaving the club towards dawn.

Sure enough, more or less as soon as Joe had sat down, a second, less attractive girl, with the paler skin and slightly finer features particular to northern China, dropped herself into Joe’s lap and began stroking his neck.

“My name Mandy,” she said.

“Hello, Mandy. Let me find you somewhere to sit.”

Miles grinned as Joe gently tipped the girl onto her feet, walked past the Texan and found a chair at a vacant table. He had a good deal of difficulty returning it through the crowds and was obliged to lift the chair over the heads of several people at the bar. Joe heard Miles stage whisper “Jesus” but did not mind being the central player in a brief comedy of British incompetence. If anything, he wanted to show by his actions that he was unsuited to this environment, that his presence in the club was by accident, rather than design. He sat down beside her, looked at his watch and tried to make conversation.

“Where are you from?”

He never used Mandarin unless it was necessary. There was always an advantage to being regarded as an outsider, even in a place like this.

“Mongolia. You know it?”

“I know it.”

Mandy was perhaps twenty or twenty-one and dressed so casually that she might have been at home, watching television in a Shatin apartment, doing some ironing or washing-up. Most of the girls in the club wore skirts or dresses, but Mandy was wearing faded denim jeans and a plain white T-shirt. Oddly, this made her more difficult to talk to. She was real. She broke the careful spell of the club. Joe could see in her expression that she did not regard him as a potential customer, nor that she particularly resented him for this. Perhaps she had given up on herself. Perhaps she was just grateful for the company.

“How long have you been here?”

“One month,” she said.

“Have you had a chance to see much of Hong Kong?”

“Not really.” Melancholy crept into Mandy’s exhausted eyes and he wondered how she had ended up working in such a place. Had she been tricked, or travelled willingly? Most of the women came because they had no choice. “No time for sightseeing,” she said. “All day sleep.”

He thought of her, crammed into a tiny, ten-bed Triad dormitory, probably just a few blocks away in Wan Chai, sleeping fitfully on a damp fleabitten mattress alongside other girls just like her who had left their families, their happiness, their self-esteem, thousands of miles away.

“How long will you stay here?” he asked. They were talking over a dance track in which a man was cackling like a jackal. Mandy could not seem to come up with an answer. Part of Joe’s work on snakehead gangs involved preventing the trafficking of Chinese girls to brothels in the UK, but he knew that somebody like Mandy would simply be rotated from club to club in the local area, west to Macau, north to Shenzhen, until age or illness finished her. Kitty, with her looks, might be a bit different. The lucky ones sometimes found husbands. It was the way of things.

“You guys OK?”

Miles had emerged from another cloying embrace with Kitty, whose qipao rode up briefly above her knees.

“Fine,” Joe told him.

“Didn’t you buy your chick a drink?”

Joe had deliberately not done so because he had resented handing over HK$200 to the cashier for their vodka and tonics. SIS was meant to be fighting these arseholes, not supporting them. But a glass of fuck wine for Mandy would at least earn her fifty or sixty bucks. Thirty pieces of silver to salve his conscience. Joe made a gesture of sincere apology and was on the point of going to the bar when Miles waved at one of the barmen and indicated that he would pay for another round.

“You gotta forgive my friend,” he said to Mandy, shouting over the music. “Englishmen. They got no manners.”

Joe ducked the insult and lit a cigarette. He was suddenly tired again and regretted allowing Miles to order him another drink. No good could come from staying in the club any longer. He was going home.

“This is my last one. Then I’m off.”

“Oh relax.”

“Seriously. It’s time for me to go.”

“Seriously,” Miles repeated, imitating him as the music shifted from house to a slow, corny ballad that Joe recognized from his days at Oxford. “I Believe I Can Fly.” Miles began mouthing the words while his right hand slid around the taut silk waist of Kitty’s qipao, her mouth once again nuzzling into his neck. They both started giggling. As if she was feeling left out, Mandy now reached across and put her hand tentatively on Joe’s leg.

“I’m OK,” he said, though she failed to understand. He felt that it would be rude physically to lift her hand from his leg so instead shifted backwards in his chair, dropping it like a rag doll.

“You like R Kelly?” she asked, oblivious to this. It was some time before Joe realized that she was talking about the song.

“Not really,” he replied. Miles emerged from his embrace and shouted “Relax” across the table, as if he had been watching and listening all the time.

“I am relaxed,” he said. “I’m just tired. It’s two o’clock in the morning.”

“So what? You’re twenty-six years old. Enjoy yourself, man. You got someplace else you’d rather be?”

The question coincided with the arrival of their drinks. Miles reached into his back pocket and retrieved a silver money clip from which he peeled off a series of hundred-dollar notes, a process that Kitty and Mandy watched in a state of near-hypnosis.

“Tell me,” he said, as the cashier walked away. “Do you even know what it’s like to fuck a Chinese girl?”

Joe could only laugh, bewildered at his tactlessness. He looked across at the girls, wondering if they had understood the question, although neither of them seemed to be paying much attention. “On second thoughts,” he said, “I’m taking off now.”

“Why?”

“Because I-”

But Miles did not let him finish. For a second time he said, “Tell me, have you ever fucked a Chinese girl?” and Joe tried to kill the exchange with a look. “Have you?”

“You’re drunk,” he said.

“What is it? You don’t like Asian pussy?”

“Let it go, Miles.”

The American took a first sip of his drink and rested his hand in the small of Kitty’s back. I believe I can fly. A prince in his domain. “You want me to tell you about it? Is that it? You can really move them, you know?”

“Miles…”

“And they love it, don’t ever lose sight of that. Chinese chicks love Western guys. When I take Kitty home tonight, she’s gonna have herself a great time. I’m paying her, I’m supporting her family, where’s the harm? People like you need to take your Christian moral heads out of your ass and start to see what’s really going on.”

“If you say so, Miles.”

“Why if I say so? Do you feel sorry for them?”

“I don’t feel happy for them.”

“Do you feel sorry for me?”

This last question carried a sting. The tone of the conversation had abruptly shifted. It appeared as though Miles expected a serious answer.

“You’re gone,” Joe said, but it was not enough.

“Answer me.”

“I’m going home.”

“No, you’re not.” Lifting his hand from Kitty’s back, Miles leaned forward and pinned Joe’s forearm to the table, preventing him from standing up. His grip was strong and purposeful. “You do, don’t you?”

“Do what?”

“You do feel sorry for me.” Joe instructed him to let go but Miles wasn’t hearing. The music returned to thumping house and the American had to shout above it to be heard. Joe could see in his eyes that he was obliterated by alcohol. He had witnessed this in Miles only once before. “You think you’re better than me and better than these girls.” He was swaying slightly in his seat. “You’ve been brought up in that typical fucking British way to believe that sex is wrong, that desire is guilt, that the best thing you can do in a situation like this is just patronize everybody and slip out the back. You’re a fucking coward.”

“No Miles, I’m just not you.”

Joe again tried to release his grip but Miles only squeezed harder. Finally Joe lost his temper. “Let it go,” he said.

“Why? What are you going to do?”

What he did was very simple. In a single abrupt movement, Joe pulled his entire body away from the table, taking Miles and Kitty and four glasses of fuck wine and vodka and tonic with him. Kitty screeched in Chinese like a scalded cat as Miles, realizing that they would both fall, quickly released his grip. The commotion silenced a small section of the club as Joe turned from the toppled table and walked directly through a parted sea of bewildered customers, stunned that he had so quickly lost his temper. Behind him he could hear Miles saying, “Let him go, just let him go,” in Mandarin and he felt a sickness in his gut. It was as if twenty-four hours of frustration and resentment had exploded inside him like an ulcer.

He expected to be stopped by bouncers on his way out but nobody stepped into his path. He climbed the steep stairs and emerged onto the street. On the corner of Jaffe Road he stopped and spun slowly through an almost complete circle searching for a cab, the fresh Hong Kong air, the diesel and the dust and the salt of the South China Sea sobering him up until he felt almost calm. He looked at his arm and saw the sunburn imprints of Miles’s hands beneath the hairs on his wrist. A taxi stopped at the lights and he stepped into it, travelling home without a word to the driver. When his mobile phone rang after five minutes, he ignored it, assuming that Miles was calling to make peace. Talk to him tomorrow, he told himself. Sort it all out in the morning.