Charles Cumming - Typhoon

“More,” Isabella whispered, looking at him over her glass with a gaze that almost drowned him. “Tell me more.”

He stole one of her cigarettes. “Well, at night, on a whim, you can board the ferry at Shun Tak and be playing blackjack at the Lisboa Casino in Macau within a couple of hours. At weekends you can go clubbing in Lan Kwai Fong or head out to Happy Valley and eat fish and chips in the Members Enclosure and lose your week’s salary on a horse you never heard of. And the food is incredible, absolutely incredible. Dim sum, char siu restaurants, the freshest sushi outside of Japan, amazing curries, outdoor restaurants on Lamma Island where you point at a fish in a tank and ten minutes later it’s lying grilled on a plate in front of you.”

He knew that he was winning her over. In some ways it was too easy. Isabella worked all week in an art gallery on Albemarle Street, an intelligent, overqualified woman sitting behind a desk eight hours a day reading Tolstoy and Jilly Cooper, waiting to work her charms on the one Lebanese construction billionaire who just happened to walk in off the street to blow fifty grand on an abstract oil. It wasn’t exactly an exciting way of spending her time. What did she have to lose by moving halfway round the world to live with a man she barely knew?

She took out a cigarette of her own and cupped Joe’s hand as he lit it. “It sounds incredible,” she said, but suddenly her face seemed to contract. Joe saw the shadow of bad news colour her eyes and felt as if it was all about to slip away. “There’s something I should have told you.”

Of course. This was too much of a good thing for it to end any other way. You meet a beautiful woman at a wedding, you find out she’s terminally ill, married, or moving to Istanbul. The wine and the rich food swelled up inside him and he was surprised by how anxious he felt, how betrayed. What are you going to tell me? What’s your secret?

“I have a boyfriend.”

It should have been the hammer blow, the deal-closer, and Isabella was instantly searching Joe’s face for a reaction. Somehow she managed to assemble an expression that was both obstinate and ashamed at the same time. But he found that he was not as surprised as he might have been, discovering a response to her confession which was as smart and effective as anything he might have mustered in his counter-life as a spy.

“You don’t any more.”

And that sealed it. A stream of smoke emerged from Isabella’s lips like a last breath and she smiled with the pleasure of his reply. It had conviction. It had style. Right now that was all she was looking for.

“It’s not that simple,” she said. But of course it was. It was simply a question of breaking another man’s heart. “We’ve been together for two years. It’s not something I can just throw away. He needs me. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about him before.”

“That’s OK,” Joe said. I have lied to you, so it’s only fair that you should have lied to me. “What’s his name?”

“Anthony.”

“Is he married?”

This was just a shot in the dark, but by coincidence he had stumbled on the truth. Isabella looked amazed.

“How did you know?”

“Instinct,” he said.

“Yes, he is married. Or was.” Involuntarily she touched her face, covering her mouth as if ashamed by the role she had played in this. “He’s separated now. With two teenage children…”

“… who hate you.”

She laughed. “Who hate me.”

In the wake of this, a look passed between them which told Joe everything that he needed to know. So much of life happens in the space between words. She will leave London, he thought. She’s going to follow me to the East. He ran his fingers across Isabella’s wrists and she closed her eyes.

That night, drunk and wrapped in each other’s bodies in the Christmas chill of Kentish Town, she whispered: “I want to be with you, Joe. I want to come with you to Hong Kong,” and it was all he could do to say, “Then be with me, then come with me,” before the gift of her skin silenced him. Then he thought of Anthony and imagined what she would say to him, how things would end between them, and Joe was surprised because he felt pity for a man he had never known. Perhaps he realized, even then, that to lose a woman like Isabella Aubert, to be cast aside by her, would be something from which a man might never recover.

Waterfield wasn’t happy about it.

Closing the door of his office, eight floors above Joe’s in Jardine House, he turned to Kenneth Lenan and began to shout.

“Who the fuck is Isabella Aubert and what the fuck is she doing flying eight thousand miles to play house with RUN?”

“RUN” was the cryptonym the Office used for Joe to safeguard against Chinese eyes and ears. The House of a Thousand Arseholes was swept every fourteen days, but in a crowded little colony of over six million people you never knew who might be listening in.

“The surname is French,” Lenan replied, “but the passport is British.”

“Is that right? Well, my mother had a cat once. Siamese, but it looked like Clive James. I want her checked out. I want to make sure one of our best men in Hong Kong isn’t about to chuck in his entire career because some agent of the DGSE flashed her knickers at him.”

The ever-dependable Lenan had anticipated such a reaction. As a young SIS officer in the sixties, David Waterfield had seen careers crippled by Blake and Philby. His point of vulnerability was the mole at the heart of the Service. Lenan consoled him.

“I’ve already taken care of it.”

“What do you mean, you’ve already taken care of it?” He frowned. “Is she not coming? Have they split up?”

“No, she’s coming, sir. But London have vetted. Not to the level of EPV, but the girl looks fine.”

Lenan removed a piece of paper from the inside pocket of his jacket, unfolded it and began to improvise from the text: “Isabella Aubert. Born Marseilles, February 1973. Roman Catholic. Father Eduard Aubert, French national, insurance broker in Kensington for most of his working life. Womanizer, inherited wealth, died of cancer ten years ago, aged sixty-eight. Mother English, Antonia Chapman. ‘Good stock,’ I think they call it. Worked as a model before marrying Aubert in 1971. Part-time artist now, never remarried, lives in Dorset, large house, two Labradors, Aga, etcetera. Isabella has a brother, Gavin, both of them privately educated, Gavin at Radley, Isabella at Downe House. The former lives in Seattle, gay, works in computer technology. Isabella spent a year between school and university volunteering at a Romanian orphanage. According to one friend the experience ‘completely changed her.’ We don’t exactly know how or why at this stage. She didn’t adopt one of the children, if that’s the point the friend was getting at. Then she matriculates at Trinity Dublin in the autumn of ‘92, hates it, drops out after six weeks. According to the same friend she now goes ‘off the rails for a bit,’ heads out to Ibiza, works on the door at a nightclub for two summers, then meets Anthony Charles Ellroy, advertising creative, at a dinner party in London. Ellroy is forty-two, mid-life crisis, married with two kids. Leaves his wife for Isabella, who by now is working for a friend of her mother’s at an art gallery in Green Park. Would you like me to keep going?”

“Ibiza,” Waterfield muttered. “What’s that? Ecstasy? Rave scene? Have you checked if she’s run up a criminal record with the Guardia Civil?”

“Clean as a whistle. A few parking tickets. Overdraft. That’s it.”

“Nothing at all suspicious?” Waterfield looked out of the window at the half-finished shell of IFC, the vast skyscraper, almost twice the height of the Bank of China, which would soon dominate the Hong Kong skyline. He held a particular affection for Joe and was concerned that, for all his undoubted qualities, he was still a young man possibly prone to making a young man’s mistakes. “No contact with liaison during this stint in Romania, for instance?” he said. “No particular reason why she chucks in the degree?”