John Burdett - The Last Six Million Seconds

By midafternoon Chan was restless. Moira hadn’t telephoned. That was understandable; what was there for her to say to him? But still he worried. How to explain the suicide of a victim’s mother in the apartment of the investigating detective? His twitch was at maximum mobility by the time he reached his apartment, sweating from the effort.

She was sitting on the couch poring over the file and only grunted when he entered. He stood behind her, tried to see how far she’d read.

“It’s all right. I already read it twice. I appreciate you doing it this way-much better than to have to break down in front of you. I already did that too-break down, I mean.” She looked up. “But you do good work over here. File’s in better shape than I’ve seen in a long while. Real quality control.”

He glanced at the floor. The bottle of scotch was half empty.

“I’m sorry.” His English was perfect but, on occasion, stale. There must be some other phrase gweilos used at moments like this? He said it again: “I’m sorry.”

She grunted, stood up. Her legs were not as steady as her voice. She staggered a little on the way to the window.

“No.” He started forward, but it was too late. She swung the window open until it crashed against the frame.

Essence of Mongkok flooded the flat: diesel, burned monosodium glutamate, fried rice, fried noodles, dry cleaning fluid, burning rubber, burning petrol, fumes from the underground railway ventilator, hamburger, cooking oil, every human odor. In Mongkok nobody opened windows.

Moira leaned out, screamed at the world once at the top of her lungs, coughed violently, closed the window.

“That’s what I was waiting for you for. Didn’t trust myself to do it alone.”

She walked back across the room toward him, steadier now. Her arms embraced him, clutched him tight. Her tears flooded down his neck. She made hardly any noise apart from the soft sucking sound of the sobs. It was minutes before he heard her voice, her face in his ear so close he could feel the fine hairs around her mouth. The voice was soft, caressing, comforting, as if the pain was his.

“I’m going to ask you to do a terrible thing, Charlie. You can say no. But when you come home tonight, will you make love to me? I think if I don’t do one life-affirming thing today, I’ll just dry up forever.”

Although by no means the largest law firm in Hong Kong, Jonathan Wong’s catered exclusively to CIPs. As a litigation partner Chan’s brother-in-law divided the commercially important people who sought his advice into three groups. There were the rich, the very rich and the fabulously wealthy.

Only the rich paid for their own lunches; the higher categories expected to be wined and dined, Emily Ping in particular. She was fabulously wealthy on a number of counts, but most recently her friends in Beijing had appointed her managing director of a PRC-owned development company registered in Hong Kong. The new company would raise funds in Hong Kong to develop large tracts of land along the Pearl River. As proof of her faith in the project she had put a huge slice of her own money into it.

The Wong-Ping relationship was of a kind better understood in Asia than the West. Their families were distantly related, and they were lifetime friends. They had sat together in primary school, they had been close at grammar school, they had taken exams together and they had studied in England together, although at different universities (Emily at Cambridge, Wong at Oxford). They had never been lovers. Emily had acted as “best man” at Wong’s wedding to Charlie Chan’s sister, Jenny. In Asia some aspects of human life could still be innocent, if innocent meant uncontaminated by sexual innuendo.

Money was different. Although Wong was from a wealthy family and would one day inherit more than a million U.S. dollars, she was infinitely richer. He owed his partnership in his firm to Emily, who insisted on channeling all her commercial work through him. In the circumstances Wong didn’t mind buying her lunch, which was on the firm in any case.

Wong waited for her in the China Club, which occupied a complete floor in the old Bank of China building. The waiters dressed in Red Army uniforms; a huge portrait of Chairman Mao stared down on the diners; Democracy Wall posters competed with more abstract paintings from Beijing. Wong was fond of Chen Guanzhong and other PRC artists who painted with Chinese sensitivity in a Western style. The furniture was blackwood with marble. Everyone said it was a clever idea, to invoke nostalgia for Chinese communism before it was officially dead.

Wong ordered a Bloody Mary. At a table nearby he recognized the English wife of one of his partners, to the other side of him a table for six included two lawyers and three businessmen all well known to him and in the far corner he saw his intellectual property partner, a slim Englishman with the embarrassing habit of wearing a monocle. Hong Kong was a small town where the superrich occupied a social archipelago in which they bumped into one another all the time. As Wong sipped his drink, he saw an Englishman whom he knew to be the political adviser to the governor walk in with the mayor of Shanghai. Behind them was Emily.

Her black Chanel suit with wide gold belt matched black stockings and black and white high heels, her substantial bust filled out a white blouse with gold buttons, she walked as straight as a ramrod and what one noticed most of all was what some claimed was her greatest business asset, her jaw. Sunbathing on the deck of a yacht, she still looked ready to climb a mountain.

Wong heard her call out in Mandarin to the mayor of Shanghai. He turned, beaming. Cuthbert, the political adviser, stepped aside while the two old friends greeted each other. She knew Cuthbert too; the three stood exchanging pleasantries for a few moments until Emily pointed to the table where Wong sat and made her excuses.

“Mayor of Shanghai,” Emily said, offering each cheek for Wong to kiss.

“And Cuthbert, the political adviser.” Wong held his hands palms up. “You always know more important people than I do.”

“I have a magic secret. It’s called working your buns off. If you’d eaten your fahn like your mummy told you and hadn’t watched all those movies, you might have got to know the mayor of Shanghai too.”

“Boring. Anyway, how’re the tits?”

Emily put a finger over her lips. “Shh! Not so loud!” She grimaced. “Not that good. It’s humiliating. God knows what persuaded me to have those implants; I wasn’t exactly flat-chested before. It’s not like me at all.”

“I told you not to.” Wong pointed an accusing finger. “The feminists would shoot you.”

“Feminists? What do I care about feminists? To be a feminist, you have to believe that men have all the power. My problem is I’m too formidable. I can kill an erection on an Italian in two seconds flat. Eighteen months ago I persuaded myself that it wasn’t my chain saw personality that ruined my sex life but the size of my bust. So I had implants and discovered that it was my chain saw personality after all. And to make matters worse, they’re giving me trouble, and I’m thinking of joining a class action against that surgeon in Los Angeles who performed the operation. There are about sixty women like me all with pains in their chests and feeling nervous.”

“No one in your life at the moment?”

She raised her shoulders, lifted her hands. “Are you kidding? I’m too busy.”

“What about that blond?”

“A mere Kleenex, darling.” When Jonathan winced, she added, “He’s a new recruit to the government’s prosecutions department. Hardly my style.”

“Ah! Really no one else?”