'What's so difficult?'
'You want me to save ICAC embarrassment? Daniel, I work for Frank Hamley. I'm not going to put my job on the line like that.'
Your job's already on the line. If he finds them, he's going to suspect you, isn't he?'
'Hang on a minute,' I said, using anger to conceal my confusion. 'Every month since I got here the Weird Sisters have been pumping me for everything I know about Hamley. Now they have a bug in Hamley's office and they want me to pull it out?'
'Tomorrow,' he said. 'Without fail. Adam, this is serious. We can't nail Hamley with an unauthorised listening device - '
'You're nowhere near to nailing Hamley for anything Daniel and you never have been.'
'Oh yes?'
'It's all office-politics bullshit and you know it.'
'Really.'
'What if I get caught?' I said. 'I'm sorry, Daniel. I can't get involved with things like this.'
He let me alone until my anger dissipated. Then he started in again: a different tack, this time. 'All your victories are on paper, right?'
'I suppose so,' I replied, sulkily. Let him insult my manhood, I thought. I'm British. I don't need manhood.
'Well,' White sighed, 'I guess that's where your strengths are.' His discoloured eyes had a saurian quality: he knew it and used it. 'I mean it. Frank Hamley's very impressed with your paperchasing, Adam.'
'Oh?'
'According to the last tape we lifted from that bug in your office.'
'You listened in on it?'
White shrugged. 'No crime in just listening, Adam. Yes I heard him. Hamley, I mean. Talking to Top Luck's MD Jimmy Yau.'
'He called - '
'He was in kind of a state. I've got the tape. Do you want to hear it?'
I don't know how I responded. White saw he was getting through. 'He warned Mr Yau about you,' he said. 'He said you were a very good paperchaser.'
'So?'
He said you're close to breaking Top Luck's operation. He said you would have to be dealt with.'
'Dan - '
'We can't always be holding your hand Adam,' he said. 'You're going to have to learn to look out for yourself.'
The next day, arrived at the office an hour earlier than usual. I was the first one in. Hamley's inner sanctum was locked. I went and borrowed the key off the cleaner, said I had some papers in there I needed. The cleaner waited for me by the door. I told him I'd bring him his keys. He told me he was leaving now, and was happy to wait. I gave him some money and told him to buy me a coffee, and something for himself. He treatest me to a nasty smile and sloped off. I looked at my watch. I had forty-five minutes.
Hamley's phone was the old-fashioned kind where the mouthpiece simply unscrews from the handset. It was stuck.
I tapped it against the edge of the desk.
It wouldn't come free. I hit it again, hard.
'Oh. Adam.' Lucy Wah, the receptionist, bit the tip of her thumb and leaned against the door jamb. 'It's you.'
'Yes.'
'You're in early.'
'Yes.'
'Do you want a coffee or anything?'
'Sorry, Lucy, I've got to make this call.'
''Hm.' She went back to her desk. Now I needed to make a call so the light would light up on her switchboard. I dialled home, got the answerphone, and let it run. I pulled my shirt-tail out and used it to get a grip on the mouthpiece.
There was a knock at the door.
'Your coffee.'
He didn't offer me any change. I didn't ask for it. 'Go away,' I said, when he lingered. 'You're not supposed to be in here.'
'I want to leave. I'm late.'
'Here. Take the keys.'
Hamley would just have to think the cleaners had forgotten to lock the door behind them. I looked at my watch.
Thirty-five minutes.
I reached forward to close the door. Lucy was watching me from her desk by the lifts. We were the only ones there still. How well could she hear from there? Could she tell I wasn't talking down the phone? I smiled at her, got nothing back, closed the door.
The handset came undone.
I tipped the microphone out so it dangled from its wires and looked inside. There was nothing there.
The door swung open. 'Morning, Adam.'
Hamley put his briefcase on the desk, took the phone out of my hand, screwed the mouthpiece cover back on, and dropped it into its cradle. He sat down and put his feet on the desk. 'Lost something?'
I don't remember what I said.
'It's all right, Adam,' he sighed. 'I guessed it was you.'
19.
In all the time I knew him, Jimmy Yau never went nowhere for nobody. They always came to him. Jimmy's home was a hillside retreat near Wong Nai Chung Gap, overlooking the Tai Tam Reservoir. The exclusive, tourist-crammed beaches around Shek O were just a few minutes' drive away, but up here, the worst intrusion he'd ever suffer would come from the expats who regularly hiked over these hills back to Happy Valley. After lunch near the office I took the Eastern Island Corridor along the coast, and even though I dawdled, savouring the elevated view of high-rise beach apartments, aflame with early summer light, I reached Shau Kei Wan by 2:30. Today was the Tam Kung temple's festival day and the streets were full of fish; wire head-dresses, costumes of card and crepe - it took me for ever to get through it all, and then I missed the turn for the reservoir.
It was just as I dropped the car into a mean-tempered first that I saw his turning. There was no sign, but then, there were no other houses. I could just see its grey tile roof, over the trees that lined the fence. They had been planted here in defiance of the landscape, lush and unlikely as the dressings of a film set. There was an intercom beside the heavy, brutal gate. I got out and used it and something clanged. I pushed experimentally at the drab-painted bars. The gates rolled back on tracks mulched over with dead Gingko leaves.
The foliage went on and on, rhododendrons and wax trees and jasmine, wild indigo: the garden seemed arranged to take all the light from the earth. The drive made its final turn. The house was intimidating. Three storeys. A cupola above the front door. Deco mouldings round each window. A portico with pillars. It might once, but for its location, have been an ambassador's residence. The most I'd expected of Jimmy was a minimalist apartment in Good Profit Towers. Indeed, before I saw his address, I assumed he'd conform to the usual pattern of his kind - holed up in a single, subdivided room within spitting distance of a dai pai dong, surrounded by boxes of kiddie-porn videos and counterfeit Dunhill lighters.
Wrong.
The door was opened by an old man wearing an apron over a cheap but well-cut suit. He smelled of beeswax. His lined, defeated face belied his strength; there was something hard and thick about the set of his shoulders. I followed him through a vestibule tiled with pink marble. I imagined him of a morning, wading treacle-ishly through his Tai Chi moves, splitting logs with his bare hands for firewood. Anyway, he couldn't have got those muscles from just rubbing down the Chippendale. Garden urns converted to uplighters lit the neutrally-painted hall. Campaign-style curtains busied-up the narrow windows. It was a strange, chinzed-up house; like a society woman who can't follow the new make-up. More likely, Jimmy Yau's wife had come late to the CondŽ Nast look, and this was her attempt to fit in.
Either the front of the house was a period fake, or the back of the house had been outraged, because the room the old servant finally led me to had a wall all of glass. Outside, a teenage girl in a black strappy swimming costume was turning laps in a kidney-shaped pool. The old man shuffled out without a word. The room was more what I had expected, but perhaps only because it revealed so little. Low-voltage track lighting hung from taut steel wires anchored lengthways across the room. The desk at the far end wanted to be a Kubrick monolith when it grew up. A notebook computer sat ostentatiously askew on its black granite surface. Behind it, the floor-to-ceiling limed ash shelves were empty. I went to the window. The glass was tinted, lending a greenish cast to the girl's skin as she lifted herself from the pool. Water ran off her back and her legs. She was very thin, very young. Her hips were beginning to fill. She got to her feet, water puddling the pink tiles. She crossed her arms, reaching for her shoulder straps, and pulled them down. She bent, pulling the costume away. She was evenly tanned. As she stepped out of the suit she hooked it with a toe and kicked it expertly onto the table beside her sun lounger. Water Catherine-wheeled from the damp lycra. She settled on the lounger, facing the window. Her shallow breasts hardly bobbed as she moved, they were so taut. She couldn't be more than sixteen. She was facing the window now; I turned away.
Jimmy Yau stood in the doorway.
He was wearing chinos; his white shirt was untucked. Jesus sandals bound his powerful, hairy feet. He was eating pears out of a paper bag.
I swallowed, smiled, watched as he walked slowly across the room and around behind his desk. He pulled out his chair. He sat down. 'Adam.' It was his favourite weapon - the pause. 'You got a new job, I hear.'
Before my walk with Daniel White, I would have been impressed. 'News travels fast,' I said. Now, thanks to White, I knew just how fast it travelled.
'You're making quite an impression, for a newcomer.'
'Old job. New title.'
'Up to you.' He took the last pear, bit the stalk off and spat it back into the bag I said, 'You know I know about Top Luck.'
He looked at me, and looked, and looked. 'Are you a cinephile, Adam?'
'What?'
He leant back in his chair. 'An enthusiast of the cinema. A movie fan. Do you follow our films?'
'Frank Hamley,' I said.
Jimmy Yau blinked.
'Sack him,' I said.
Jimmy Yau's laughter was mischievous and childish. It sent a shiver down my back. 'Adam,' he chided me, 'you're supposed to be his friend.'
'If it wasn't for Hamley, ICAC would be dangling you by your ankles over Garden Road by now. Trouble is, ICAC know it. Frank's no use to you, any more. He's a liability. Get rid of him.'
He studied me, probably wondering which of my limbs to tear off first. 'And if I don't?' he said at last, very measured, very calm. I was impressed.
'How long do you think it will be before I crack your operation?'
'Operation?'
'I work for ICAC now. I know you're layering funds through Top Luck. I know how.'
'Get to the point, please.'
'Only I know how.' I let it sink in a second.
'Go on.'
I said, 'You need a player in ICAC. Someone who can cover your back.'
He smiled. 'No I don't,' he said.
'Buy me,' I said. 'I've better things to spend your money on than whores.'
Jimmy Yau bit through the core of his pear, pushed both halves into his mouth and swallowed them down.
'I'm broke, Jimmy.'
Jimmy pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his hands. He screwed the empty bag into a tight ball. I explained about Justin. 'I can't meet the school fees,' I said. They were setting me back seventy thousand pounds a year.
From a desk drawer he pulled out a mobile phone, thumbed it on, and spoke Cantonese. Seconds later the long, defeated face that had greeted me on my arrival reappeared at the open door. He was still wearing his apron.
'Take some fruit for Eva,' said Jimmy Yau. 'It's ripe.'
I must have looked a picture.
He threw me the balled-up bag. 'Willy, take him through the garden. Send her in while you're about it.'
Willy glanced at the girl by the pool, and back to Jimmy, without turning his head. A well-trained retriever.
'Jimmy, I - '
'Okay?'
There was nothing more to say. There never had been. I wondered, with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, whether he'd heard a single word I'd said.
I stood up. I even managed to muster up a little dignity. 'You have my number, Jimmy,' I said.
'Oh yes.' His teeth were long and grey as old bones. 'Take some fruit before you go.'
Jimmy Yau's soldier slid open the glass door. I followed him through onto the patio surrounding the pool. The girl was still naked, stretched out on her sun-lounger. Her breasts were small and round and unfinished. The hair between her legs was sparse: she had already begun shaving it into shape. Willy barked something in Cantonese. The girl blinked at him and stretched and smiled, but his eyes were already off her. He picked a narrow dirt path between jasmine trees and beckoned me to follow. This wasn't the way to my car. This wasn't the way to anywhere. Willy saw my hesitation and sighed.
'Sir, you wanted some fruit?'
The girl brushed my back as she eased between me and the edge of the pool.
'Yeah,' I said. 'Whatever.' I watched her go: her towel was slung low round her back, showing off her powerful shoulders. Jimmy was waiting for her at the open door.
'Jimmy likes them young,' I said, following Willy in between the trees.
'She's his daughter.'
'Oh.'
The orchard was laid out in neat, well-maintained rows. Roses bordered the plot. The air was so thick and scented here, it was like wafting a sweet jar under your nose.
'His youngest,' said Willy. 'Her brothers are stunt fighters. Karate, all that. For Top Luck films. Here.' He picked a pear for me.
'I'm sorry,' I said, taking it. 'I didn't mean any offence.'
The fruit was soft and rotten. A wasp crawled out of it onto my hand. I cried out and dropped the pear. It landed on Willy's shoe and burst over the polished leather. Willy looked at his shoe, looked back up at me, and tried to smile. The lines on his face were so melancholy and deep, a Pierrot could not have looked more pitiable. 'You don't have to apologise,' he said. He flicked his fist into my gut. I fell. Ash clogged my nostrils.
Willy trod on my head. My face sank easily into the forked earth. He twisted his foot over my ear, tearing it. I couldn't breath, it felt like my lungs were ironed flat.
'Message from Mr Yau.' He lifted his foot, and stamped. Blood filled the deafened cavity. He got off me.
'Are you listening?' He kicked me again and again until I lay face up. The sky was full of insects. Little black insects, swooping and flocking bet