Jimmy Yau was always getting in the way of Zoe and me. Death itself had not stopped him.
'Dad liked you a lot,' she said. She looked at the fire. She drank her drink. 'Do you miss him?'
I didn't know what to say.
She put her glass down with a thunk on the coffee table. 'Nobody else does,' she said.
'I'm sure that's not true.'
'Mother's angry with him.'
'That's not so unusual - '
'Granddad's lost his mind. Brian and Eddie, well, they wouldn't show feeling if you chopped them into little pieces in front of each other.'
I dared a small smile.
Zoe watched me. As usual, she was hungry for something.
'I miss him,' I said. 'In some ways I'm not sorry about what happened. I took a lot of damage, knowing him.'
'Adam?'
I turned in my seat. Drops of split rum chilled my thigh.
'I hope you set your video.' Money Yau had aged a lot in the two years since we'd last met. The whiteness of her hair I had expected; but not the way her face had sunken in. 'I'm so glad we've done this at last,' she said.
'Money.' I stood up. 'It's good to see you.'
Her eyes, which had always seemed so mild and reticent, alone still held the spark of life. And her voice that too remained poised and youthful. The overall effect was of a vital and indomitable woman looking and speaking through a grotesque paper mask. 'Come through to the dining room,' she said. 'Everything's set.'
Eddie and Brian were carrying dishes in from the kitchen. Eddie grinned his not-quite-friendly grin and asked me how I was doing. Brian, distracted by my arrival, lost the plot and began orbiting the table, anxiously sniffing the food on each plate. Obviously this meal was something he found profoundly unconvincing - a charade he might yet penetrate, given brains enough and time. Either Eddie had been having a little joke with me, or Money had changed her mind about serving eels. Crispy duck was followed by red mullet in a hot ginger sauce, a dish of bitter melon, and a salad of cucumber and beansprouts and about half a ton of salt. I'd forgotten how much of a taste I'd acquired for the Hong Kong style: I ate so fast I hardly spoke. Plus, I was trying to soak up Zoe's too-generous glass of rum. My insides were okay but my head still felt like it was bobbing about near the ceiling rose. When I swallowed it lashed about at the end of my rubber umbilical neck.
'It's quite an early one,' Money said/ 'Isn't it, Eddie?'
'Yeah,' said Eddie, poking experimentally at his mobile phone.
'My husband did the choreography.'
It had always puzzled me, the simple pride Money took in talking up hher sons' films. As though she didn't know full well where they came from, or what they had involved. I wondered what the commissioning editor at Channel 4 would think - some silk-tie innocent, scoffing posh school dinners in the Union - were he suddenly to be confronted by Eddie's smile, Brian's drowned eyes, their arms, their burned and shredded backs.
I tried to get her to talk about Jimmy, I suppose to show Zoe I cared.
'Privacy came naturally to Jimmy,' Money said. 'It's very hard, now that he's gone, to know what to do for the best.'
'Zoe tells me his father doesn't understand what happened.'
'Zhenshu's senile,' she said, flatly, refusing my easy sympathy. There were other things on her mind.
'Most of these are businesses I've never heard of. I'm beginning to think some of these so-called managers are taking me for a ride.'
I nodded and grunted, my mouth full of rice scented with lotus flowers. I felt awkward, listening to Money's business problems when her children were in the room. Not that Brian or Eddie were paying any attention. Some communication was taking place between them, some wordless, piquant traffic. They seemed to stir and turn their heads and move their hands in unison, as though this unlooked-for and unprecedented screening had triggered old routines in them.
'The tax office sent me another reminder.'
I dragged my attention back to Money. She was still on about her financial worries.
'I know they're going to fine me but it's the interest they charge that frightens me.'
A whole case of rum couldn't have made that evening any more surreal than it already was. Each year organised crime launders about twenty billion US dollars through Hong Kong; not a little of it passed through Jimmy Yau's hands at one time or another. And here was his widow, worrying over her annual tax return.
The first, stylophoned bars of FŸr Elise burst from Eddie's jean-jacket. He took out his mobile and thumbed it. 'Hello?'
'Edward, turn that thing off.'
'Seb? Right - '
'Ed - '
'Cool.'
'Edward, we're eating.'
Smoothly, Eddie got up from the table and walked to the window, phone still pressed to his ear. 'Eleven thirty, mate. Yeah. Kickin'. Rice grains fell from the lap of his linen trousers. Everything was 'cool' with him. 'Big', or, even 'wicked'. Things were 'happening' with him. His laughter was clipped, anxious, and coke-fuelled. Brian, meanwhile, sat watching his younger, smarter brother the grub who had usurped him - with eyes flat and impenetrable as steel plate.
'It takes me the whole of every morning, just replying to official enquiries about the estate,' Money complained.
I couldn't work out what she wanted from me. She wasn't so naive: her anxiety over such routine matters had to be part of some strategy. But what was she angling for? I gave her the calm-down speech I'd used on tax evasion suspects: your tax man is your friend and your confessor, with good will all can be redeemed, and so on.
Brian meanwhile had turned his attention back on his food. He prised a chopstick into the poached eye of his fish and used it to snap the bony plate over the gill.
'Brian. Stop it.'
Brian stared his mother down.
'So, Adam,' she said, fingers fluttering at her throat. Brian unnerved her - there was too much of his father in that dead stare of his. 'How long can an appeal like that drag on?'
Eddie laughed. 'Yes, mate. Yes. Hell, mate, yes. Hell, yes. YES! Yes mate.'
The skull came to pieces under Brian's chopstick. He mushed the cream inside fish's tiny brain pan.
'Thirty, forty minutes, mate,' said Eddie. 'Yes. Yes.' He thumbed off his mobile. 'Fucker,' he said. He came back to the table and clapped Brian on the shoulder. Brian stood up and followed his brother out of the room.
Money said nothing, just let them go. Was she intimidated, or just fed up? Her face was too loose and sunken to read.
The front door banged shut.
'Well,' she sighed, 'let's all have a drink.' She said it as though she'd just put two toddlers to bed. Not intimidated, then - and I had the sense that her flighty-and-no-good-with-numbers routine hadn't been meant for me at all, but for them.
7.
She led us back into the living room. 'What'll you have, Adam?'
I'd eaten well, so I risked a whisky and soda. Zoe went to the sideboard and made three.
'I was hoping you could come visit me sometimes,' said Money, 'and help me with all this.'
'It would be worth investing in some professional advice,' I said. Zoe handed me a glass. I sipped. It was practically neat. 'I can't see that I'd be much use.'
Zoe sat on the sofa beside her mother and set down their glasses. The liquid inside them was pale, the soda water fizzing furiously. I sipped again from mine. There was barely a hint of gas. Was Zoe trying to get me drunk?
'Of course,' said Money, 'Zoe does what she can to help.'
Zoe shrugged.
'You know she deferred a year at college? To help me.' Money smiled at her daughter. 'But I was never a good listener, was I?'
Zoe returned her mother's secret smile. Had they had a row? Were they making up?
'Like I said, professional help will be cheaper in the long run.'
'But complicated.'
'How so?'
'Adam,' said Money. 'I want you to do me a favour. I want you to deal with Jimmy's affairs.'
I stared at her.
'Zoe stayed home to help, but I'd sooner she used the year to relax. It's been a difficult time for us all, and she deserves the time for herself.'
'I don't think - '
'I want her to travel, to enjoy herself.'
'Another drink?' Zoe said. I looked at my glass. It was empty.
'Jimmy's affairs weren't always very clear,' Money admitted. 'I don't want her getting into trouble.'
She'd rather I did. Well, I could hardly blame her for that. I wouldn't want my child associated with Jimmy Yau's 'unclear' affairs, either.
'What about Eddie?' I said, angling for an easy out.
Money snorted. 'I need help, not stunts.' Her contempt for her son was appalling. She had a crudeness that had been bred out of Eva's friends, though they all came from the same stock.
'I'm sure he could do a good job,' I said, 'given the chance.'
Zoe set down my glass. There wasn't the faintest hint of soda in it. She knew my weakness. She wanted her mother to know it, too, for some reason.
Still, it was my out, so I took it; I drained the glass in one. The aliens in my chest spasmed and thrashed.
'I can't help you,' I said. 'For one thing, I've already got a job.'
Money laughed. 'You surely don't mean the cafe.'
'Eva's relying on me,' I said.
For another thing, I was breathing fire into her face. Sweat had broken on my forehead, that had nothing to do with the gas fire. Even I could smell it. Whisky, Wray & Nephew, last night's wine and God knows what else. She really should have taken the hint.
'Would you like another?' said Zoe, reinforcing the obvious point.
'Leave him alone,' Money said.
None of us said very much for a while. We had moved into new territory. Black water. The deep dead sea where deals rise like foam off the tip of an oar - and last about as long. There is nothing so evanescent as organised crime.
'I want you to tidy up Jimmy's affairs,' Money said. 'Turn as much as you can into legitimate interests. Liquidate the rest.'
The enormity of it misfooted me. I struggled not to laugh.
'Is that so unreasonable a request?'
I turned to Zoe. The kid who thought she could show me up with a couple of shots of Glenlivet. 'Is this what you've been up to, Zoe?' It was too absurd. 'Taking apart a triad?'
She sighed. 'We control fifty money-changers in the Hong Kong-Kowloon region. Four money transmitters, a securities broker, two remittance corporations. Dad shut down Miami operations in '95, once FinCEN got wind of our Mexican giro house investments, and converted them to roubles. Thirty billion, all ready to plough into St Petersburg, only the Florence DIA arrested dad's co-investor. He managed to divert about half our moneys into arranging exports of Kazakhstani mercury. The money we get now from the mining companies in Brazil we trade for cocaine in Columbia and change that for Italian gold in Slovakia.'
I stared at her.
'We are not a fucking triad.' She refilled my glass.
I looked at Money. She was serious. I looked at Zoe - her hungry eyes. They were monsters.
'You want to demolish all that?'
'Top Luck's just the weakest, the first to go,' Money sighed. 'But without Jimmy, everything else will come apart in time.'
Zoe explained. 'When we launder money from Shenzhen, we take eighty percent. The market rate is only sixty, so why do our clients keep coming back to us? Last year we exported a consignment of caesium to Korea, and they insisted on paying us for red mercury. That's triple our expected profit and we - '
'I don't want to know this,' I said.
They tried again.
I stood up. 'I don't want to know.'
We're sitting on a time bomb, Adam - '
'It had nothing to do with me.'
'No,' Money agreed, coldly. 'But Top Luck has.'
Slowly, clumsily, I sat down. My hand was shaking so much, Zoe had to take the glass off me before she could fill it.
Money cocked her head on one side, examining me. 'How did you think you were keeping the enquiry at bay? Personal charm?'
'Jimmy said - '
'Jimmy protected Frank Hamley, too.'
I tried picking up my drink. The rug was old but fuck it, I thought, whisky won't stain it. I wiped my chin.
'I'm the one protecting you now,' Money said. I'm all that's standing between you and the inquiry. For the moment, you're safe. But it's only a matter of time before my bluff is called. Look at Hamley.'
I looked at Zoe instead. She was studying the ice in the bottom of her glass. It had been Money's idea to get me drunk. That's why Zoe was still here. Money was using her daughter to soften me up. I thought about what would happen if I said yes to them. The work they would have me do. The lies I would have to tell Eva. The double life I would lead. Zoe's thin arms, her blind, hungry doll eyes. The androgynous scent of her skin, like a perfume.
I thought about what would happen if I said no. About Hong Kong, about testifying at the inquiry, about what I would say. I thought about Jimmy's colleagues, clinging to the wreckage of their fractured empire, watching me from the gallery, watching me on TV, reading about me in the papers and on the internet, waiting for the moment when the gweilo starts to squeal.
Or rather, not waiting. What load does it take to crack open a skull? Does the speed of the car make a difference? The pressure in the tyre?
'Which is it to be?' Money said.
I told her no.
Never, but never, make a grand exit. Be quiet, dignified, melt into the background, fade gently away then if something goes wrong you won't make a prat of yourself. They rang me a taxi but I didn't want to linger there a moment more than I had to. I said I'd wait outside and get some air before the ride; I said a few other things as well, and I don't think they were sorry to see me go.
They swung the door on me and I headed down the gravel drive between rhododendrons and untidy ornamental firs. It was a clear night, and cold, and the air hit the back of my throat like menthol. The moon, a fat crescent, lit my way to the gate. A partial eclipse had taken a bite out of its bottom corner; it hung there, precise and asymmetrical, like a carefully turned engine part. I cast my mind back, trying to recall when I had last seen the stars. A summer night beside the Cam, in my first summer vacation. Sleeping under a net on a small game reserve in Zimbabwe. The night the electricity failed in the resort town of Buzios, during my six-month affair with KPMG Rio... I'd got as far as the open gates when the security light from Hell came on again to light my way. Even reflected off the gateposts, the glare was unbearable. I winced, shielding my dark-adapted eyes, and tripped on something hard and unyielding.