Typhoon

34

All the way back to the hotel, in the lift to his room, down to the spa and through twenty laps of the Ritz-Carlton’s outdoor pool, Joe Lennox tried to remember where he had heard the name Ansary Tursun. Switching on CNN at eight o’clock, he watched a news report about a car bomb in Iraq and contemplated sending a message to Vauxhall Cross asking them to comb the files for mention of Tursun’s name. But Joe was a stubborn man and it became a point of operational pride that he should remember where he had heard the name before London woke in the morning. If he could not come up with an answer, he would admit defeat and contact Waterfield. Yet he had retrieved Platoon from his memory, and the violins of Barber’s “Adagio” still soared in his mind. What was the difference? It was just a question of locating the melody of Ansary Tursun.

The phone rang beside his bed. Joe muted the television and picked up.

“Joe? It’s Tom. What are you doing for dinner?”

He had seen Tom Harper three times in the previous week. In other contexts, this might have been considered excessive, but it was quite normal in Shanghai, where groups of Western expats met up sometimes three or four nights a week. The alternative was bleak: to stay at home watching cheap, pirated DVDs of the latest Hollywood blockbusters with a takeaway from Sherpa’s for company. Most of the interesting overseas radio stations were banned by the Chinese internet censor and state television consisted largely of game shows, military parades and historical soap operas. When Joe had lived in Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore, expats had also clung together in gangs, and life was lived to an excess which would have been unthinkable back home. It was one of the things he had found most frustrating about returning to London: his social life had somehow seemed stale and predictable by comparison.

“I hadn’t got any plans,” he replied.

Tom explained that half a dozen of his friends were going to Paradise Gardens, a Thai restaurant on Fumin Lu. Joe was pleased to be invited, and not simply because of the operational advantage to being seen out in Shanghai. He had also begun to feel the restrictions of life in the hotel. He had no desire for women, but neither did he want to spend every waking moment thinking about Miles and Isabella. Although it was in the nature of his profession to exist in what might be described as a perpetual artificial state, Joe was no different from most people in that he required the escape valve of an occasional night out.

They arranged to meet at the restaurant at nine. Joe took the lift down to the first-floor bar, where he sank a vodka and tonic and nodded at the band, a New Orleans jazz trio who had been playing at the hotel for the previous fortnight and knew Joe on sight. He bought the pianist a Coke (“I’m AA,” he had disclosed during their one and only conversation), malt whiskies for the vocalist and drummer, and signed the bill to his room. There was a long queue for cabs downstairs, so he walked a block east along Nanjing Lu and hailed one off the street.

By the time Joe arrived at the restaurant, Tom’s friends-three men, two women-were already sitting down. He knew all of them except for one, a striking woman in her mid-twenties who looked lively and possibly Malaysian. The others-Ricky, a Scouser who managed a factory on the outskirts of Shanghai making ladies’ underwear; Mike, a physics teacher at the American School in Pudong; Jeff, a Canadian ex-lawyer who now hawked teeth-whitening products to the Chinese; and Sandrine, a senior French employee of Estee Lauder-were familiar faces. They were all of a similar age and had lived in Shanghai for several years.

“Watch out, here comes the spy,” Ricky called out as Joe walked in. “You’re looking very handsome tonight, mate.”

“That’s because I’m wearing one of your bras, Ricky,” Joe replied, and everybody laughed. He apologized for being late and sat at the vacant seat between Tom and the Malaysian girl, who introduced herself as Megan. Her voice was confident and international and Joe suspected that she had been educated, at some point, in America. He scoped her ring finger and saw that she was not married.

“So how’s the Ritz-Carlton?” Jeff asked. Jeff always asked about the Ritz-Carlton.

“Expensive. I had my company accounts director on the phone this morning asking why I’d sent her a bill for fifteen thousand dollars.”

“Fifteen thousand dollars? Why so much?”

“Because spies watch lots of porn,” said Ricky.

Joe was shown a menu from which he ordered a beer and a green chicken curry. It didn’t bother him that Ricky made jokes of this sort: on the one hand, they added to the Lennox legend, which was helpful in terms of rumours filtering down to Miles; on the other, Ricky’s sheer effrontery suggested that he did not take the idea that Joe might once have been a spy particularly seriously. Had he done so, he would almost certainly have kept his mouth shut. Popping a napkin and placing it in his lap, Joe felt the momentary apprehension that comes from being seated next to an attractive woman and was glad when Tom engaged him directly in conversation. They spoke about a building which was being torn down in Tom’s neighbourhood to make way for a shopping mall, but Ansary Tursun was still on Joe’s mind and he set about trying to trigger his memory.

“Have you ever eaten in a restaurant called Kala Kuer?”

“Xinjiang food?”

Joe nodded.

“Sure. It’s on Yishan Lu. Probably the best la mian noodles in town. Why? You getting bored of Chinese?”

“Very,” Joe replied. “We should go there sometime.”

Joe’s beer arrived and he decided to keep pressing. Tom was a walking Yellow Pages of Shanghai bars and restaurants and it saved time to pick his brain.

“What about Mexican nightclubs?”

“What about them?” Megan had leaned across to interrupt, bringing with her an invisible mist of scent and shampoo. She looked at Joe and smiled a smile that told him she was a test. I’m single, you’re single. These guys are setting us up.

“One of the musicians at the bar in my hotel told me what a good time he’d had at this Mexican nightclub.” He took his beer from the waiter and said “Thank you” in Mandarin. “Said I should go down there but couldn’t remember the name of the place.”

Megan and Tom shared a look that Joe could not quite interpret. After a beat, she said, “That’s where we were going to go afterwards.”

“Seriously?”

“He must have been talking about Zapata’s,” Tom explained. “That’s the only Mexican bar between here and Tijuana.”

“It’s a bar, not a nightclub?”

“It’s everything,” Megan whispered. “You’ll see.”

A two-storey building on the corner of Hengshan Road and Dong Ping Road, Zapata’s is a wild, chaotic Shanghai nightspot that relies for its atmosphere on a cocktail of cheap alcohol, elastic opening hours and hot Asian weather. Joe arrived direct from the restaurant with Tom, Megan and Ricky, who led him across a crowded outdoor terrace where tanned, freshly showered expats sank Heinekens and talked shop in midnight temperatures of twenty degrees. Conscious of Zhao Jian’s disclosure that Sammy, Miles’s Pakistani contact, was a regular customer, Joe scanned the crowds for his face, but there were too many people to make an effective assessment.

A wooden staircase on the far side of the terrace led to a packed first-floor “cantina,” where margaritas were on special offer and queues at the bar went three deep. Mike, who had come ahead in a separate cab with Jeff and Sandrine, had already bought a round of drinks which he was distributing from a small metal tray. Against a deafening background of Aerosmith and Run DMC, Joe thanked him and took a mouth-numbing slug of crushed ice and cheap tequila.

“What do you think?” Megan asked, looking up at him with wide, dark eyes. After a long campaign over dinner, she was still flirting, still apparently assessing his potential.

“Rammed,” was all Joe managed to say before Ricky hooked a hand through her arm and dragged her away through the crowds.

“You’re dancing,” he told her.

Joe turned. There was a second, interior entrance towards which Ricky was leading the now laughing Megan. Joe followed them and found himself on a three-sided wooden balcony overlooking a thronging bar and dance floor. A Western girl wearing only a bikini top and a pair of skinny jeans had leaped up onto the top of the curved bar, where she was grinding and writhing her body to the chorus of “Walk this Way.” Men and women alike clapped and whooped on the dance floor as a second girl joined in, removed her T-shirt and threw it into the crowd. Tom appeared at Joe’s side and must have misinterpreted the look on his face because he said, “Now that’s what I call a cultural revolution. Chairman Mao must be turning in his grave.”

One of the barmen, a sinewy Chinese with the waxed, sculpted hair of a male model, reached out his hand and was pulled up onto the bar by the prettier of the two girls. Joe saw that he was carrying a bottle of tequila. The customers directly beneath him seemed to know what this signified because they turned around, tipped back their heads and allowed the barman to pour it neat into their opened mouths. More cheers, more whoops as the tequila was coughed and spat and swallowed. The inevitable “Billie Jean” replaced “Walk this Way” and Joe took out a cigarette.

“Interesting place,” he said.

That was when he spotted him. On the left-hand side of the balcony, about twenty feet away, looking down at the chaos below. Sammy. The likeness was unmistakable, although Joe could now see that he was probably Persian or Arabic, not Pakistani, as Jian’s photograph had initially suggested; a trick of the light had given the man’s face a false structure and colouring. He was in his late twenties, good looking, well built and smooth, wearing a gold necklace, a smart, collared shirt, jeans and an expensive watch. He also appeared to be alone.

“Another drink?” Tom shouted.

“Sure. Can I have a beer?”

It was time to go to work. As Tom pushed his way back to the bar of the cantina, Joe kept his eye on Sammy, trying to make a rapid assessment of his circumstances and character. His body language-tight, withdrawn-continued to suggest that he was not with a friend nor part of any group. The bottle of Heineken he was holding was almost full, so it seemed unlikely that someone was fetching him a drink. He did not appear to be communicating with anybody down on the dance floor, but instead kept his gaze fixed on the activity at the bar, occasionally flicking his eyes back up to the balcony, as if scoping for girls. This seemed to be the most likely explanation for his presence in Zapata’s: young Chinese women, mostly in their late teens and early twenties, were standing all around him. Joe knew that some of them would be looking for a rich Western boyfriend, while others would be prepared to go home with a foreigner in return for money. They were not full-time hookers, but students or workers looking to supplement meagre incomes. It was the same story in almost every Western nightspot in China.

Five minutes went by. Nothing appeared to change. Sammy didn’t check his mobile phone or give any other obvious sign that he was waiting for company. Instead, he slowly sipped his beer, smoked a Marlboro Light and arranged his hair several times in a manner that Joe thought of as nervous and self-conscious. There were two Chinese girls to his left, close to the far wall, one of whom appeared to be building up the courage to speak to him. It was dark and crowded on the balcony, but Joe could see that the girls were not particularly attractive, and that Sammy seemed to have little interest in approaching them.

“You all on your own, mister?”

Megan had appeared beside him. She slipped her hand around Joe’s back and he felt her fingers briefly move across his skin. The sudden contact surprised him, but he returned the gesture, placing his hand on the small of her back. It occurred to him that this was his first sustained physical contact with another person since he had embraced his mother on Christmas Day.

“Crazy in here, no?” she said.

“Crazy.”

Sammy was about halfway through his beer and still scanning the room for girls. He seemed completely at ease in the Zapata’s environment and Joe was fairly sure by now that he was a naturalized European or American. As Megan curled her hand further around his back, resting her fingers against the edge of his stomach, an idea came to him which combined a certain ruthlessness with the benefits of long experience in the secret world. He would use her for bait. She was by far the most attractive woman in the upper section of the club, and if he could manoeuvre her closer to Sammy, her looks and natural flirtatiousness might prompt him to make conversation. Joe could then introduce himself at a later point without arousing suspicion.

“Let’s go over there,” he said, nodding to his left, “where it’s a bit less crowded.”

Holding Megan by the hand, he waited until Sammy was looking down at the bar, then led her to within two or three feet of where he was standing. There was a Chinese girl positioned between them, but Joe knew that she had been waiting there, un-approached, for at least ten minutes.

“What happened to Tom?” he asked, releasing Megan’s hand and formalizing his body language so that they would not look like a couple. Megan leaned against the balustrade and started moving her body to the music.

“No idea,” she replied.

“He said he was getting me a drink. Wait here, will you? I’ll see if he needs help.”

Megan did not suspect a thing. As Joe walked off, making his way back towards the bar, she continued to look down at the dance floor, mouthing along to the lyrics of “The House that Jack Built.” For the next five minutes Joe gave her the opportunity to work her magic, purporting to search Zapata’s for Tom, but in reality killing time in the ground-floor bathroom. Walking back upstairs, he found Tom and Ricky at the bar of the cantina, took his bottle of beer and led them back to the interior door. As they emerged onto the balcony, Joe looked across and saw what he had wanted to see: Sammy, God bless him, smoothing back his hair and making awkward conversation with Megan.

“There she is,” he said, pointing towards them. “That’s where I left her.”

After that it was easy.

“Oh there you are,” she said, as if she had given up all hope of ever seeing Joe again. “I was wondering what had happened to you. This is Shahpour. Shahpour, these are my friends, Tom, Ricky and Joe.”

“Good to meet you, guys.”

The accent was American, born and bred, but the name was probably Iranian. Shahpour looked momentarily annoyed to have had Megan swamped by male admirers, but any irritation was soon replaced by a confident, conciliatory smile that Joe recognized as natural charm.

“Are you living here in Shanghai?” Tom asked.

“Yeah. Have been for about a year now.”

“Shahpour used to work in construction,” Megan said, making a joke with her eyes. “Now he’s here in China selling software to small businesses.”

By the tone of her voice, it was obvious to Joe that she had been bored by their conversation. Inadvertently, however, she had supplied him with two important pieces of information. “Construction” might mean Macklinson. “Selling software” could possibly imply that Shahpour was using the same cover as Miles.

“What about you guys?” he asked.

Tom and Ricky explained that they had been living in Shanghai for some time. Joe, deliberately standing behind them, added that he had arrived in the New Year. Shahpour did a good job of appearing to listen, but it was obvious that he was interested solely in their relationship to Megan. Was one of these guys her boyfriend? If not, could he take her off their hands?

“And what do you do, Tom?” he asked.

“I’m a yacht broker.”

“You, Joe?”

“Pharmaceuticals.” There was a danger of the conversation lasting no more than a few minutes. Ricky made a drunken joke about “making knickers for a living,” but as far as Shahpour was concerned, he, Tom and Joe were just three British guys getting in the way of his plans for Megan. If Joe was going to find out what he needed to know, he would have to act fast. “I work for a small British company here,” he said. “Quayler. We’re trying to expand into China.”

“Pharmaceuticals, huh?”

“That’s right.”

“Dancing Queen” sealed it. When Megan and Ricky heard the opening bars of the song, they both screamed in delight and announced that they were heading back to the dance floor.

“Great to meet you, Shahpour,” she called out, disappearing into the distance.

“Yeah, great to meet you too.”

There was a certain ruthlessness in the manner of her departure and Joe felt a pang of sympathy. He looked at Shahpour’s face, where an uneasy mixture of loneliness and irritation crossed behind his eyes. Male pride had been wounded. Just as quickly, however, his frustration was replaced by a look of practised indifference.

“So what’s her story?” he asked.

“Oh she’s just crazy,” Tom replied. “Forget about her.”

An awkward silence lingered. To Joe’s frustration, he could sense that both Tom and Shahpour wanted to end the conversation. They appeared to have little in common, and their reason for meeting had just disappeared downstairs. Joe was left with a dilemma. Try to keep them talking, a strategy which might arouse Shahpour’s suspicion, or abandon the contact altogether. He could always tap Megan for answers later on.

“So you’re from America?” he asked, opting for one last question.

“Nowadays I try to keep that a secret,” Shahpour replied. His eyes were once again scanning the balcony and Joe could see that it was a lost cause. A man like that didn’t want to be wasting his night talking to a guy who sold antibiotics for a living.

“Which part?” he asked.

“Pacific Northwest.”

Another disinterested answer. Time to wrap things up.

“Well look, here’s my card.” As a tactic, this was not as cack-handed as it might sound; in China, exchanging business cards is common practice, regardless of social circumstances. “It was good to meet you.”

Shahpour was well aware of the tradition and duly accepted Joe’s card in a manner imitative of the Chinese, clasping it in both hands, studying the lettering carefully and even bowing his head for comic effect. He then returned the favour, as Joe had hoped he would, handing two cards of his own to Tom and Joe.

“Goodarzi?” Joe said, pronouncing Shahpour’s surname. He had noted, with a leap of astonishment, that the card was embossed with the Microsoft logo.

“Goodarzi, yes. And yours? Lennox?”

Joe nodded. Had Shahpour put a slight stress on the surname, as if he had heard it before? Or was he simply checking its pronunciation? Joe could not be sure. “It’s Scottish,” he said.

Shahpour’s eyes went to the roof of the club, as if he had been reminded of something, taken sideways into a separate life. Was Joe imagining this? It was like watching himself struggling with the memory of Ansary Tursun. Where had he heard the name before? Their eyes met but Joe was disappointed to see that Shah-pour now looked just as bored and as indifferent as before. He was even angling past them as he shook their hands, heading back in the direction of the cantina.

“It was great to meet you guys,” he said. “Dancing Queen” was coming to an end. “Maybe we’ll run into each other sometime.”

“I certainly hope so,” Tom said, without feeling, and before Joe could add a farewell of his own, Shahpour Goodarzi had been swallowed up by a balcony of girls.

An hour later, out on the terrace, Joe saw Shahpour leave the club in the company of a young Chinese girl wearing torn denim jeans and a tight pink top. Turning to Megan, whose T-shirt was soaked through with sweat after a long session on the dance floor, he said: “Well, your Iranian friend got lucky.”

“My Iranian friend?”

“Shahpour. The guy who worked in construction. You remember? The one you were talking to on the balcony.”

“Oh him.” She had forgotten their encounter entirely. “Were you jealous, Joe?”

He liked the way she went directly to the point. Her game was never over. “Inconsolably,” he said, because he was now loose and drunk and strangely tempted by the idea of going to bed with her. “What was he like?”

“Didn’t you and Tom stay and talk to him afterwards?” A line of German students squeezed past them, pushing Megan’s body closer to Joe’s. He caught the sweet toxicity of her breath as she held his arm for balance.

“Only for five minutes. He said he used to work in construction.”

“That’s right. Some big American company,” Megan remembered.

Zapata’s was emptying out. Joe could not afford to ask too many questions, at the risk of seeming unusually inquisitive. He offered Megan a cigarette and looked around the terrace.

“Where are the others?”

“Jeff and Sandrine went home about an hour ago. I guess Ricky and Tom are still dancing.” Megan had not moved from her position, close to Joe. It was strange, he thought, how alcohol and the adrenalin rush of work could combine to push his longing for Isabella temporarily to one side. For weeks he had thought about little else but their first possible encounter, yet this alluring, flattering woman had worked her way under his skin. In Megan he detected something of the same rawness of spirit which had once captivated him about Isabella. Running his hand across her flat, cool stomach, he began to doubt the nature of his own feelings. How much of his need for Isabella was love, and how much a desire to get even? Did Joe want to possess Isabella again, only so that he could walk away? Seven years is a long time to harbour the grudge of heartbreak.

“So you think he was Iranian?” Megan asked, the palm of her hand gently brushing the hairs on Joe’s arm. Here was another chance to discuss Shahpour, but all he could think about was the delicacy of her touch.

“Iranian Californian,” he said. “A lot of them live over there. Families who escaped the Shah.”

Megan nodded. They were communicating as much through silence as they were through words. The early hours of the humid Shanghai morning were a possibility into which they could pour their desire. Joe pulled Megan towards him so that his arms were completely encircling her waist. She leaned back against his chest. He lowered his face into her hair and closed his eyes to the smell of her. It was in this blissful instant that the name Ansary Tursun suddenly returned to him and he was alone again on the streets of Tsim Sha Tsui. The process by which Joe’s brain arrived at the inspiration was as puzzling to him as the momentary loss of his desire for Isabella. He looked up at the night sky and smiled.

“So what are the rooms like at the Ritz-Carlton?” Megan whispered.

“What’s that?”

Joe had heard her, but he needed time. His memory was racing back to the apartment, to Sadha and Lee, to stories of torture and betrayal.

“I said, what are the rooms like at the Ritz-Carlton?”

“A mess,” Joe said, because he knew now that he ought to leave, to contact London, to speak to Waterfield before England went to bed.

“Don’t they tidy up after you?”

“Not when I tell them not to.”

Megan was waiting for an invitation. Of course she was. A woman needed more than code. He thought of the long night that lay ahead of them, the sudden end to his permanent solitude, the challenge and the excitement of taking a beautiful woman to bed, then the rapture of eventual sleep beside her. The twin, competing strands of Joe Lennox’s personality, his immense tenderness and his ceaseless professional zeal, helixed in an instant that dizzied him. He wondered whether it was possible to do both: to love and to work; to lie and to please? He was drunk and he was out of answers. A weakness in him, or perhaps it was a strength, said, “Come home with me tonight.”

Megan squeezed his arm so tightly that he almost laughed. He saw her twist away from him and turn and look up into his eyes in a way that was suddenly beyond lust and game-playing. Did this girl actually understand him? A few hours earlier Joe had been sitting beside her eating green curry, trying to sound clever about China. Yet his desire for her now was overwhelming. He wanted to kiss her, but also to save that kiss until they were alone and there was privacy and control. He did not want anybody to see them. He did not want those kinds of rumours.

“There are cabs outside,” she said.

“Let’s go.”