John Burdett - The Last Six Million Seconds

Smiling, Chan looked her in the eye; she knew the Chinese answer to that question. Since her early twenties her looks had raised her above her class. She was a natural member of the aristocracy of beauty. Not only her looks; her grace, elegance, a kind of poise that cut through social strata. It would have been stupid not to capitalize while she could. How many attractive women from their background ended by working in bars and nightclubs? That would have broken his heart. It wasn’t the job of older brother to be romantic on younger sister’s behalf; his duty was to save her from poverty and shame, a duty he’d discharged in a rare act of social shrewdness by persuading her to enter a beauty competition. Quite amazing, the respectability that a title could bestow: Miss Hong Kong. The wealthy suitors alone would have filled a house. Not all eligible from Jenny’s point of view, though; Wong had been among the prettiest.

She was safe now; even if the marriage didn’t work, she’d be protected by a share of Wong’s money. Chan was still proud of himself. Would marriage to a pauper have been less stormy?

“Okay, he was a good catch, and you were being the Chinese patriarch. Well, I have real news. I’m probably pregnant.”

“Whoopee.”

“Right word but not much feeling. Are you pleased or not?”

“Of course I’m pleased.”

“You’re going to be the godfather.”

“Honored.”

“And in addition to your usual duties, you will make sure that he or she grows into a real person. If I catch them prancing around like those creeps out there, you’ll be in trouble.”

“Agreed. I’ll be a blue-collar street-cop uncle. Weekends we’ll spend at the morgue.”

She smiled and kissed him, held his arms while she gazed into his face. He made to move away, but she held him still. She wore no pearls, no jewelry at all. A neckline like that could not be improved.

“No one compares to you.” She said it in a hurried whisper, before he could stop her.

He admonished her with a finger, tutted, returned to the door to release the bolt, let Jenny out first. She led him back down the hall to the huge reception room, which had filled since he’d left it. “You didn’t even introduce your new girlfriend,” Jenny said.

Chan looked for Angie over the heads of the other guests. Finally he saw her talking to the young blond man, who was now fully dressed. “She’s not. This is the first night-I mean, she’s a colleague.”

Jenny smiled. “I’m so glad. I hope she stops you smoking.”

Chan pushed his hair back. “It’s not that serious.”

He saw Angie say something to the young man while keeping her eyes on Chan. The blond boy-he was hardly more than that-took his leave of her before Chan arrived. A pity, Chan thought, they seemed to go well together. The boy looked Australian too.

“We can go,” Chan told Angie, feeling suddenly nervous; it was so long since he’d had to entertain a Western woman on his own.

Three hours later outside the Bull and Bear Chan stood with Angie in the taxi queue. Nearly midnight and still as hot as a sauna. In the pub she’d felt instantly at home and talked for hours. He’d forgotten almost everything she’d said. Something about family and Australia, with an unlimited collection of sports anecdotes that had grown cruder as the alcohol took effect. Apparently she was homesick.

He’d never seen a woman drink so much beer. There was something almost professional about the way she poured it down; she held it well too, except for a moment on the steps of the pub when she’d swayed and almost fallen. Now she stood very close, a hint having condensed to an assumption without any help from him. He didn’t want to offend her. How did you explain that you were just too Chinese to take a woman to bed on the first night? Or that your complicated sensitivity found drunkenness a turnoff even in the last years of the twentieth century? Or that your flat was designed for Chinese-size lovers?

The hand that had been stroking his arm suddenly gave up.

“You’re not going to take me home, are you?” Chan appreciated the effort she was making to keep the slur out of her speech.

“No.”

She turned, put her arms around his neck. “Why not?” He felt the weight of her heavy breasts on his chest, as if she’d decided to make them his problem.

“I can’t.”

“Why? Still destroyed about Sandra?”

“Maybe.”

She dropped her arms. “You don’t like me.”

“I do. A lot. Can we talk about this another night?”

She overlaid a pout with a smile. “Sure.”

“I thought, I mean, you’re very popular with the men. Surely there’s someone?”

She shook her head. “Ain’t that easy, mate. The white men chase Asian women like there’s no tomorrow, and the best Chinese stick to their own.”

“Leaving me?”

She squeezed his arm, buried her lips in his neck. “You’re so intense, Charlie. It turns me on.”

A small hand slipped between his thighs to find the outline of his penis expertly. He caught the hand, wrapped it, for want of a better place, around his waist. “Didn’t that blond guy get your phone number?”

She sighed deeply with undertones of irritation, looked up at the black sky. “You never go off duty, do you?”

In his mind’s eye he saw them, two Australians far from home comforting each other with rugby jokes and drunken sex. The fact was that Hong Kong only pretended to be superficial, crass and transient. Underneath there was a depth of cynicism that began to frighten after a while. And then to appall. When the beautiful blond boy and Angie swapped stories about the predatory Emily Ping and the intense Chief Inspector Chan, it would be with an Anglo-Saxon relief at having escaped from some complex Oriental trap. They would look into each other’s blue, round eyes and see-well, to the bottom anyway. It would have been better if she had been rude enough to go off with him directly from the party.

“He’ll ring you tomorrow,” he said with a smile as he put her in a taxi. He was about to take the next one when he decided to walk to the underground instead. Free from the pressure of seduction, his mind leaped back to the case. There was an adage by Confucius-or was it Raymond Chandler?-Never dwell on a mystery that has been solved.

In other words, forget the front teeth. Forget the muffled screams of agony. Why had Polly, an attractive Westerner, allowed her fillings to fall out? Self-neglect placed her in a specific category in her culture. Like where? What caused a young woman to fall into the drifting class, to become indifferent to her own well-being? Not thwarted love-not these days. Self-indulgence, an aversion to work, an adolescent need for adventure untamed even in adulthood?

It all came back to drugs in the end. Drugs sold provided the funds; drugs abused provided the adventure; drugs shared provided the company; drugs prescribed provided the cure. The First World was a drug addict. Illegal drugs were only the tip of the iceberg. Take into account the barbiturates and the amphetamines, then add in the spectrum of antidepressants; in other words, make a list of all the popular tranquilizers and stimulants of prescription, and you had not so much an epidemic, not even a pandemic, as a colonization of the human species by traders in chemicals, from the multinational pharmaceutical companies at the top to the street corner dealers at the bottom. And it had all happened in the last years of the twentieth century.

It was a five-cigarette meditation that took up most of the ride home. Emerging at Mongkok station, Chan realized he was short of cigarettes. Only one pack left and only two left in that pack. He’d forgotten to add the tobacco companies to the list. And the brewers and distillers too. Was there a single person left on earth who took reality straight? Some thoughts led to mountains too high to climb. Especially without a nicotine stash.