Typhoon (21 page)

He sat beside her on the sofa, the weight of him, and they spoke in general terms about the film. What did she need to know? What was the purpose of the documentary? Isabella’s eyes wandered to
Ladder of Years
and
The Accidental Tourist
and she knew that Miles had placed them there to impress her. She mentioned that she had studied
Brighton Rock
at school. When Miles began to talk about the book, however, she found it difficult to concentrate on what he was saying. Her mind was suddenly scrambled by a nervous apprehension, the source of which she could not trace. Was it that she had long suspected Miles of harbouring feelings for her, feelings which he had been forced to suppress because of his responsibilities towards her boyfriend? Or was it possible that Miles felt nothing for her, that his soul had been so corrupted by a life of lies and easy sex that he was no longer capable of loving a woman? This last possibility made Isabella intensely sad, but it also intrigued her. She had had a glass of wine while getting dressed at home and wondered if she was already slightly drunk.

“So the triangle of that relationship is very interesting.”

“What?”

She had not been listening.

“Pinkie, Rose and Ida. The triangle. I thought that was incredibly powerful. It’s what really stuck with me about the book. The heat between them.”

Isabella took a sip of her vodka. It was already half finished. That was the danger of living in a humid climate; you drank alcohol like water. She looked at the window again because she needed somewhere to settle her eyes. An aeroplane was flying low over Victoria Harbour, piercing a vertical searchlight that shot up from the top of the Bank of China building like a column of fire.

“I should read it again,” she said, desperate to move away from talk of Catholic guilt and love triangles. She hoped, somehow, that Miles’s observations on
Brighton Rock
might move them seamlessly from a discussion of organized crime on the south coast of England to the Triads of Hong Kong. Instead, operating from a pre-rehearsed list of topics, he asked her endless questions about her life in Hong Kong, her past relationships, her jobs, a discussion that took them through a second vodka and tonic, into dinner, then three-quarters of the way down the bottle of Pinot Noir until they were eating pudding.

“So tell me about life at English boarding schools,” he said.

“What do you want to know?”

“Do the girls all sleep in the same dormitory?”

It was a typically flirtatious question. Miles had been grinning as he asked it and Isabella, by now drunk and relaxed, enjoyed playing the role of gatekeeper to his fantasies.

“Oh sure,” she told him. “And when it was hot we all slept naked and had pillow fights at the weekends.”

“Gardeners?” Miles asked immediately.

“Gardeners?” She was starting to laugh. “What do you mean?”

“Isn’t that what upper-class English girls do? Hump the gardener? Please don’t tell me that’s a lie, Izzy. I always had this image of you—what do you call it?—‘rogering in the undergrowth.’ ”

Other stretches of the conversation were more sedate; Miles was careful to maintain a balance. How, for example, did Isabella find working for a French company? Were they respectful towards her? Did they seem to know what they were doing? Had television, he asked, pouring her another glass of wine, always been something that she had wanted to become involved in, or was it just an accident of her life in Hong Kong? For every joke or anecdote there was a subtle, intuitive observation about Isabella’s life. It must have been difficult, he said, to be separated from her mother in Dorset who, if he remembered correctly, had never remarried. Didn’t she also have a brother who lived in the States? Isabella was flattered that Miles should have remembered so much about her background. The only subject which remained uncovered was Joe himself; instead, he hovered over the evening like an invisible chaperon, determined to ruin their fun. Isabella concluded that Miles had not mentioned his name out of a deliberate sense of mischief, yet as the evening wore on and the wine began to take effect, she longed to speak about the frustrations of their relationship and even to open herself up to the possibility of desire. For all Miles’s bravado and roguery, he was a thoughtful, perceptive man and she thrilled to the energy of their flirtation. It was harmless, she told herself, but it had been bound to happen. In some strange way, they had been dancing around one another for years, even during the period when Isabella had been blissfully happy with Joe.

“Listen, we should talk about my documentary,” she said, suddenly aware that she was risking everything on their increasing closeness.

“Sure. Just tell me what you want to know.”

Miles was pouring boiling water into a cafetière that he had used only once before.

“Anything,” Isabella said, taking out her notebook and pen. “There are only six people in Hong Kong who know less about Triads than I do and four of them are still in kindergarten. If you tell me that the average Triad is five foot six, listens to Barbra Streisand records and spends his weekends in Wolverhampton, I’ll believe you. The gaps in my knowledge are shaming.”

Miles was too busy moving to a mental lecture he had prepared to laugh at her joke. “Well, the term ‘Triad’ was coined by the British authorities here in Hong Kong to refer to a disparate group of secret societies that originally sprang up during the Qing dynasty to overthrow the emperor.” Isabella put her glass down and started writing. “Just about the only thing you can credit Chairman Mao with achieving in China is the eradication of opium abuse after 1949. Thirty million peasants may have died from starvation under communist rule, but at least they weren’t high.” Miles plunged the coffee. “That opium trade had been controlled by the Triads, who were forced to move their operations to Hong Kong. I guess you could say we’re living in the spiritual home of the Chinese mafia.”

Miles poured the coffee into two bottle-green espresso cups, sat opposite Isabella at the table and lit a cigarette. They smiled at one another in an attempt to lighten the suddenly didactic mood but, for the next twenty minutes, he swamped her in information about the various societies that controlled Hong Kong life in the post-war years, “Each of them,” he said, “responsible for a par ticu lar geographical area or sector of the economy.” It was exactly what Isabella needed in terms of her research, but she remained nostalgic for the earlier part of the evening and tried frequently to catch Miles’s eye, to make him revert to his earlier mood of playfulness. At the same time she enjoyed the process of watching Miles’s mind open up, his expertise, the confidence he clearly felt in his own intellectual abilities.

“This is great stuff,” she told him, scribbling onto a third sheet of paper, like a journalist on the scent of a good story. “So they operate in the same way as the Sicilian mafia? It’s about protection money, drug-running, prostitution?”

“They operate like the Sicilians, sure. And the Turks, and the Russians, and the Albanians. All wiseguys are basically the same. But Chinese criminal activity has its own particular characteristics.”

“What kind of characteristics?”

“Different societies use different hand signals to communicate secretly with other members. But your average French cameraman is gonna find it pretty difficult to capture those gestures on tape. He’d need to be like those David Attenborough guys making a nature documentary, sitting around in a hut on Lantau Island for eight months waiting for Mr. Chan to give the thumbs up.” Isabella laughed and curled a thick handful of hair behind her neck. “These guys are masters of concealment. The way they might offer a cigarette, sign a credit card transaction, even pick up a set of chopsticks, all those gestures are sending signals to other Triads. I know a guy in the 14K who has this way of accepting a bowl of tea with his thumb and two of his fingers extended so it forms a kind of tripod.”

Miles picked up his coffee cup in the manner he had described to illustrate the gesture more clearly. Isabella wanted to take a photograph to show her boss, but thought better of asking.

“One of the prejudices you should maybe think about parking is the idea that all Triad activity is inherently violent and antisocial.” Miles finished the coffee and set it down on the table. “Making that clear to the audience would probably make your programme a lot more interesting. Sure, there’s drug-running, people smuggling, violence. But Triad societies also pay for schooling in their local communities, find jobs for the unemployed, help out families who might have fallen on hard times. It’s not all protection money. It’s not all turf wars and assassinations.”

“They run the construction industry here.”

“That’s right.” Miles didn’t patronize Isabella by seeming surprised that she should know this. “Part of the reason why Patten has had so much trouble with the airport out at Chek Lap Kok isn’t because of threats from the Chinese government, but because the building contractors have had to pay millions of dollars in kickbacks to the Triads. You want land reclaimed from the sea? Call the Teochiu. You want your runway built in record time? Have words with the Sun Yee On. If you don’t pay these guys, your scaffolding doesn’t go up, your illegal coolies don’t make it across the border, your concrete gets mixed with salt. It’s the same story on the mainland, in Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand. Triad groups control most things in South-east Asia.”

Miles took the opportunity to stand up and walk across to the sofa. He sat down and put his bare feet on the low coffee table, leaning back with a sigh. He was convinced that he had won her round. There was a haughtiness that went out of Western girls when they had finally succumbed to him. Their pride was replaced by a sort of desperate, manic energy and he knew that it would only be a matter of time before he could possess her. Across the room he could see the lower part of Isabella’s legs as she sat drinking coffee and scribbling notes. As if sensing this, Isabella looked at him, her eyebrows giving a little knowing bounce over the rim of her espresso cup, and she stood up from the table. He watched as she picked up their glasses, filled them from a bottle of wine that he had found to replace the empty Pinot Noir, and walked over to join him.

“What about kidnappings?” she said.

“What about them?”

Isabella discarded her shoes and sat at the opposite end of the sofa to Miles, her body twisted towards him so that the lower part of her dress lifted up over her knees. But Miles had drunk heavily all evening and some of the finesse now started to go out of his performance. Carelessly, he stole glances at her calves and thighs and allowed his eyes to drift along the length of her body. He was annoyed when Isabella responded to this by covering her legs completely, tucking her feet beneath her thighs.

“Well, are things like that common?” she asked. A little of the haughtiness had returned to her voice. It angered him. “Do you come across them at the consulate?”

“Oh sure.” A nonchalant response. He stood up to convey a sense that he was indifferent to her physical proximity and crossed to the hi-fi, shuffling through randomly scattered CDs until he found a bootleg copy of Cannonball Adderley’s
Nippon Soul
.

“Go on,” she said, because he was stalling. Rudeness was always a failsafe option and Miles built a level of deliberate condescension into his response.

“Well, if you want stories for your film, as opposed to just a bunch of facts about Triad history, you could tell your guys what happened to Leung Tin-wai.”

“Leung Tin-wai?”

“I think it was June of last year.” Miles now sat at the table where they had eaten, as if oblivious to the tensions racing between them. He was just a teacher with a bothersome student, a man of the world making time for a girl. “The story was all over the TV. Leung owns a tabloid magazine which ran a piece about the Triads. Next thing he knows, two guys are in his office slicing his arm off with a meat cleaver. Took seventeen hours of surgery to reattach it.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah.” Miles feigned a profound concern for his fellow man. “A bunch of Hong Kong journalists put up about a four-million-dollar reward for information leading to the arrest of the guys who did it.”

“And nobody’s come forward.”

“I guess not.”

Isabella looked at her watch. Seeing that it was almost twelve o’clock, she closed her notebook.

“I should be going.”

Miles had expected this. To stay any later than midnight would look suspicious to Joe, and the last thing Isabella would want would be to create the wrong impression. He watched her spring decisively to her feet. “Can I order a cab?”

“Sure.” It was important to look nonchalant. “They usually take about twenty minutes.”

Which left them with what turned out to be another half an hour, time filled only with further talk about the Triads. It was as if the documentary had broken the spell between them. Isabella continued to take notes, Miles continued to impress her with the depth of his knowledge. But their shared intimacies, the excitement they had both felt at dinner as they began to unravel one another’s lives, had passed. The long day, the food and booze, had rendered Isabella exhausted. Miles, who would usually at this stage have made a bid for sex, realized that his best hope now lay in waiting for the intrusion of Billy Chen.

Nevertheless, as they made their way downstairs towards the waiting cab, he tried to revive some of the attraction they had felt for one another with a carefully constructed compliment.

“Make sure Joe sees you in that dress. You look amazing.”

It wasn’t too late. Isabella felt the buzz of flattery again. All her life she had been subjected to the advances—both charming and insidious—of older men. Under normal circumstances, her response was to ignore what had been said. Yet she knew there was an underlying meaning in Miles’s choice of words, a code which needed to be cracked. She turned towards him at the entrance of the apartment building and took a chance.

“What a funny way of telling me that you think I look nice.”