John Burdett - The Last Six Million Seconds

“No.”

“I can tell you everything you want to know. Not just about the case. I know so much. I’m weary with all this knowledge. I want to share it with a true hero who will know what to do with it.”

She touched his hair delicately with the tips of her fingers. It was eerie how her personality had begun to alter. He sensed a burden not of knowledge but of loneliness. She seemed almost shy. Her voice was softer and slower with a girlish lilt of longing. “Your friend, for example, that old man in Wanchai-I know about him.”

“You do?”

“I knew about him long before I knew about you. So many times I’ve been on the point of going to see him. I have information he could use, a whole head full. When you protected him, I admired you. I wanted to be like you. I wanted even more to be like that old man. Can you imagine, the purity of his soul? To live at peace with oneself like that…”

Her arm was around his shoulders. In her other hand she held the pipe. “It’s not like sex, my friend. I promise you, you’ll feel no connection, no obligation afterwards. Just a wonderful peace.”

He watched her prepare the pipe again. “Imagine, eight whole hours free from the demon that drives you. It will be the only holiday of your life.” She caressed his head. “Be kind to yourself for once; it’s only addictive if you do it a lot.”

When she had finished preparing the pipe, he hesitated, then bent forward to inhale. In the bowl of the pipe the black ball burned away.

He was disappointed to find that the drug had no apparent effect, except for a mild improvement in his patience. He slipped a hand into his pocket to flick a switch on the microphone that would activate the tape recorder and waited until she had smoked another pipe of her own. The receiver was locked with the tape recorder in the black briefcase.

“Milton told you he used me. But I’m sure he didn’t tell you what for?”

“No, he didn’t.”

“I was a go-between. Xian wasn’t happy about the Joint Declaration between London and Beijing; nobody had consulted him about it. He insisted on a secret protocol. Milton had to agree to his demands. There’s no border control on anything Xian wants to move out of China into Hong Kong. That was the deal. Of course it’s not the sort of thing anyone wanted written down, and neither Xian nor Milton was openly talking at that stage. That’s why they used me.”

Chan sat still, trying to absorb a simple phrase: no border control. He should have guessed; the most appalling answers are often correct. So much fell into place when the message of those three words was properly absorbed. He saw the outline of a fine historical irony: England as reluctant comprador; a drug that was steadily corroding Western societies.

“They let him bring anything in?”

“Anything at all. And he can ship from here too. Of course, once it leaves Hong Kong, it’s his risk.”

“And he runs the army in southern China?”

“He and sixteen other generals. Little by little they’ve bought up more than half the major public companies in Hong Kong, using proxies, of course. They’ve bought Hong Kong. It’s simple, but it’s brilliant. Shanghai collapsed in ’49 because the West took all its money away. They won’t do that this time because half the local companies are supported by Chinese shareholders with unlimited funds. As the British found last century, nothing is more reliable than narcotics.”

“You’re their agent. You launder the money, procure the proxies, set up the companies. That’s what you do?”

She nodded. “When it started, I didn’t know anything about laogai . I’d like you to believe that.”

It was possible. Laogai even now was hardly more than a rumor. The press rarely mentioned the slaves in the gulag over the border. In Mongkok it was no more than a Chinese whisper. Chan thought of an old man with wispy beard, John Lennon T-shirt and tunnels for eyes.

After the second pipe Chan felt a deep relaxation penetrate to the core of his being. Nerves that had been clenched for a lifetime stretched like cats and purred.

Emily carefully replaced the pipe on the table. “Before Milton I was a normally romantic twenty-six-year-old. I’d had only one other lover. Since him I’ve had hundreds, but no one even comes close. It was a bizarre triangle. I found him fascinating. Xian needed me. Milton was transfixed by Xian. At first I didn’t understand. Milton’s the most cultivated man I’ve ever met. His Mandarin is better than mine; his Cantonese is perfect; his Latin and Greek are not half bad. His main hobby is translating classical Chinese poets. Xian is a rough peasant with no education, twenty words of English and the heart of a butcher. But Xian’s instinct for power is infallible. Only Mao came close, and he’s dead. Milton told me once that he’d trade a lifetime’s erudition for one minute with a finger on a true lever of power. He’s a bystander, and Xian’s a major player; that’s the difference. Another pipe.”

“No.”

“It’s the price you must pay, Chief Inspector. Nothing is free in Hong Kong, and you have nothing to offer except your virginity.”

He watched while she prepared the pipe and found himself dutifully inhaling the sweet smoke once again.

“Sex and opium are the best anesthetics. With sex you forget everything for a moment; with opium you remember even your worst transgressions with pleasure.”

“Clare Coletti,” Chan said. The words emerged slowly as if from another mouth in a graveyard tone. “She’s still alive, isn’t she?”

He had saved the question until now, expecting a dramatic reaction, but Emily appraised him as if checking his level of intoxication. She looked away, ignoring the question. “Milton taught me to smoke, of course; Dad warned me not to. But I guess Milton knew I would need it. He said if it was good enough for Thomas De Quincey and Sherlock Holmes, it was good enough for him. He’s very disciplined about it, of course.”

“Sherlock Holmes used cocaine,” Chan said, and almost giggled. He remembered the diplomat’s extreme languor on the boat that night. He felt Emily’s eyes studying him.

“It had to be you; there’s really no one else I can talk to. And it had to be opium because by morning this will be no more than an opium dream. You won’t even be sure if you’re remem bering correctly. You’ll have no proof.” She gave a short, humorless laugh. “For your purposes it really would have been preferable to screw me.”

“Clare…” He found he had difficulty remembering the last name. How odd, it was a surname he’d been living with for weeks.

“Coletti.” Emily placed both hands palms down on the marble table, stared at them for a moment. She heaved a great sigh. “Is she still alive? Perhaps she is. Does it matter that much? Let me start at the beginning. For years Xian had been thinking about linking up with an overseas organization on a permanent footing. He started negotiations with people in New York. He never mentioned anything to me about weapons-grade uranium. Then all of a sudden the most ridiculous woman in the world shows up, and-”

He had been exerting all his will to concentrate on what she was saying. He tried to convince himself that it was important, but somewhere in the middle distance other events of far greater significance were taking place. It was rude to ignore Emily, and there was his professional reputation at stake; he bent his mind back to the case. In his bending it, a tension grew that he was unable to control.

It happened suddenly, like a door springing open that had been locked for an age. In a blink he was not with Emily anymore. It was a summer’s day, and he was with Jenny on their old sampan. He noticed the colors-golds, blues and greens-how perfect they were, like the finest porcelain. Jenny was pointing to something in the water. He followed the direction of her arm. Mai-mai floated under the surface of an emerald sea. He thought at first that she was dead, but she turned her head to the sky. When she saw him, she smiled and beckoned eagerly. In slow motion he stood at the end of the sampan, gathered his energy and sprang in a perfect dive into the sea. He followed where she led, down, down, slowly down into the depths of a friendly ocean.