Tom Bradby - The Master Of Rain

He stepped farther into the shadow of the trees and lit a cigarette. He glanced up at the bedroom window but saw no movement. Every so often he wiped the sweat from his forehead.

Lu returned at five minutes past two. All four bodyguards were on the running boards now. They jumped off before the car had come to a halt, taking up the same positions as they had done earlier. After about thirty seconds Field saw Grigoriev tap the driver’s window and another of the men stepped forward to open Lu’s door. He went slowly up the steps to the house. The bodyguards followed him and the car drove off. There was still no sign of Natasha.

Field lit another cigarette.

He was about to leave when a rickshaw pulled up outside the house.

Before Field had even had time to retreat farther into the shadows, Lu’s door had opened and Field caught a glimpse of the man who had arrived. It was Caprisi. He stepped inside.

For a moment Field stared at the door and the empty street. Then he leaned back against the tree. His shoulders sagged; hope drained from him. Natasha had been right. Everyone and everything was corrupt; nothing here was left untainted.

He could feel his father mocking him, and he realized that to have believed in any kind of purity, to have sought any kind of victory, moral or practical, had been doomed from the beginning.

It made him fortune’s fool.

Caprisi stepped out of Lu’s doorway. He lit a cigarette and glanced deliberately up and down the street, as if assuming he was being watched. He looked deflated; the meeting had not gone well. By Field’s watch he had been in there exactly half an hour.

The American beckoned to his rickshaw driver, walked down the steps, and climbed in.

Field watched for a few moments before following on foot, occasionally having to break into a run to ensure he did not lose the rickshaw as it turned off toward the Chinese city.

The streets were narrower now, swift progress no longer possible against the oncoming wall of humanity.

They did a series of turns, and Field was soon lost, a stranger still in the dusty, teeming sprawl beyond the European boulevards.

The rickshaw pulled up at an intersection and he ducked back into a doorway as Caprisi got out and put a note into his driver’s hand. Field was bent low, beneath a lamp, a baby crying in the open courtyard of the tiny house behind him. He listened to its mother trying to soothe it.

The American began walking, and for fifty yards they were the only two people in sight, then Caprisi turned right into a busier street. Field bumped into a woman herding a group of pigs, and when he looked up, the American was gone.

Field stopped, then turned off to the left.

This alley was dark and much narrower. The dust rose around him as he walked, the only sound that of distant voices. There was no sunlight to penetrate the gloom. He heard the tinkle of a bicycle bell.

A figure came at him from a doorway and knocked him down. The man was onto him as he regained his feet, pushing him back hard against the wall, a revolver pressing against Field’s nose.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Caprisi growled.

Field waited until he’d regained his breath. “Following you.”

“Why?”

“I saw you go into Lu’s house.”

Caprisi held him still, then relaxed his grip and took a step back, without lowering his gun. “You’re lucky I didn’t kill you.”

“So you’re on the take, like everyone else?”

The American raised the revolver again so that it was pointing at Field’s face. “You holier-than-thou Brits are getting on my nerves.”

Suddenly, Caprisi’s expression changed. He lowered his gun and put it back in its holster. “All right,” he said. “You want to know? I’ll show you.”

He walked away fast, so that Field had to struggle to keep up. They were in another warren of narrow alleys, where still almost no light penetrated and the smell of sewage and human excrement was overwhelming. A group of children played in an open drain to their right as they turned into a narrow path and ducked through a doorway.

Inside, it took a few seconds for Field’s eyes to adjust to the darkness. He heard a hacking cough and followed Caprisi over to the corner, where he was greeting a young woman and holding both her hands. He had crouched down and was taking something out of his satchel-bread and a metal flask of clean water.

“This is a”-he hesitated, looking at Field-“a friend.”

Field knelt down and smiled at the girl. She was pretty. In another world, without the dirt on her face and the rags on her back and without the stench in this place, she might even have been beautiful.

There were three children behind her. They stared at him, their eyes hollow with suffering. One, a girl, must have been six or seven; another, four or five; the youngest was a boy of, he guessed, two or three. Behind them a man lay flat on a thin straw mat, shirtless, his head on a small pile of clothes. When he coughed, it shook his entire body, shook the glistening sweat from its place.

Caprisi spoke quickly in Chinese, with his back to Field.

Field looked around the room. The five of them had only a small corner to themselves, and he estimated that there must be six or seven different families living in here, each with no more than a few square feet of floor space. They were all watching Caprisi and the woman, though most were trying to pretend they were busy with something else.

Field looked back to see the American take something else from his satchel-a bottle that looked like medicine and what could have been a roll of money. He placed the items in the woman’s hand and closed his own over it.

Caprisi stood. He touched each of the children on the head, as if blessing them, and then marched out. Field saw, as he passed, that he was upset and angry.

The American did not slow down until they were back at the rickshaw. “Do you see now?” he asked.

Field didn’t know how to answer.

“You see the great city we’re building? We’re always fucking congratulating ourselves on how marvelous it is…”

“Would it be any better if we weren’t here?”

“Don’t hide behind false moral choices, Field. At least it would be their city.” Caprisi sighed. “She was begging outside my apartment with all her children, looking even worse than tonight. Her husband is an addict and he stole some opium from one of Lu’s men, so if he’s found he’ll be executed. His family probably will, too, as a warning to others.”

“So you went to see Lu.”

“They’re small-fry, nothing to him. I said I would pay for what he had stolen.”

“But he said no?”

Caprisi nodded.

Field looked at his colleague, relief and regret threatening to swamp him. “I’m sorry.”

“After all that we’ve said, you doubted me.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Why?”

Field crossed his arms defensively. “I was watching Granger on the telephone a couple days ago, after our first visit to the factory, and it suddenly occurred to me that if someone had called Lu to warn him that we were going to the factory-I mean if Granger had-then the operator would have made a record of it.”

“And?”

“The call came from your telephone.”

“And you think I made it?”

“Not anymore.”

“But you have thought that?”

Field said nothing for a moment, then nodded slowly. “You’ve been a friend to me-the only one who has-and I’m just so sorry.”

There was another uneasy silence. Then Caprisi took hold of Field’s hand, shaking it hard. “Okay,” he said. “Okay, Field. That’s it now, all right?”

Field felt his heart flooding with relief and warmth. “That’s it.” They clasped each other in a bear hug, then stepped apart, awkward in their newly rediscovered affection.