“In your youth you had already decided to come East. You envisaged the life of a scholar-diplomat, with large old-fashioned Chinesestyle house, servants, Chinese mistress, occasional opium smoking with gentlemen with long white beards-that sort of thing?”
“Perhaps.”
“And perhaps Emily was part of this dream? True, you were over forty by then, and in Hong Kong, not China, but you had position, privilege and money. You could build your dream. It’s what people do when they get money.” Chan walked up to the diplomat. “She loved you like a Chinese.” He hissed. “Fierce and true.”
Cuthbert winced. “At first, yes.”
“Until you sucked her into your game. You knew what Xian would do with her-”
“Damn and fuck Xian!” Chan stepped back when Cuthbert stood up and strode to the window. He turned to Chan. “He destroyed her. As he will destroy everything.” Chan saw the upper lip tremble, before he brought it under control. Cuthbert placed both hands on the lectern and looked down at the poem. He spoke slowly, enunciating every syllable.
“There must have been a dozen times over the past ten years during her insane tantrums when I wished to God she would do herself in. Then when she did”-he paused and swallowed-“I realized that I had loved her. Last night I was drunk as usual, and I saw her soul, so different to her personality. It was like the woman in that poem… unspeakably lonely, very female, very Chinese.”
The Englishman breathed deeply. “God knows why I left it lying around for you to find. Some sort of awful melodramatic reflex on my part, I suppose. I must have wanted your interrogation.” He took out the silver cigarette case, lit another cigarette, inhaled deeply. “She telephoned me just before, as she had on her previous suicide attempts. Unfortunately I wasn’t in. She left a message on my answering machine. She was dead by the time I arrived. Women handle guilt badly. To their credit, I suppose.” He shuffled among his papers on the lectern. “Or am I doing her an injustice? Here, you were supposed to find this as well.”
His hand shook slightly as he handed Chan a piece of red paper. Two lines were written in green felt tip:
Chan looked at Cuthbert.
“It’s from one of my translations of Li Po, ‘The River Song.’ It was on that marble table near her swimming pool. She knew I would be the one to find it. I think she meant that her brilliant day was over; she was bowing out. She’d had enough of all of us.”
Chan waited for the diplomat to recover. “And that tape recording?”
“Of that memorable night when you smoked opium with her? She’d hidden it in her bedroom. I removed it before calling the police. It was classified information after all.”
Chan kept quiet. There was never anything to say in reply to a true confession. He moved nervously around the book-filled shelves, spoke in an unnaturally light tone. “D’you know, I’ve always wanted a library like this? To have so many books, all in order on beautiful oak shelves. To be able to come in and handle them. To have the space to enjoy them. And the learning, of course. You read wenyen-classical Chinese. I don’t. That’s ironic.”
Cuthbert loosened a shirt button, then, seeming to make a decision, removed his jacket and threw it on the sofa. He had finished his second glass of brandy and showed no sign of drunkenness. Chan finished his.
Cuthbert poured two more. “You envy me, I envy you.”
“You’re mocking me.”
“Not at all. I envy you all the things you don’t have to think about. It must be marvelous, hunting down some half-witted murderer, preparing the evidence for court, potting him. You have a ninety percent success rate. Most people conclude you’re brilliant. I would conclude you’re underusing your gifts.”
Chan looked at the Englishman standing by the window. “You know what’s the weirdest thing of all about your culture? A morbid addiction to guilt. My ex-wife is English. She experienced no guilt herself, of course, but she could inflict it from a distance. You people can impose guilt on anything. If I listened to you, I could end up feeling guilty about solving so many crimes.”
Cuthbert smiled thinly. “I was merely explaining why you should not envy me. In your profession you are given soluble problems, like a crossword. Take the Mincer Murders. To you it was simply a case of identifying the victims and the perpetrators.”
“And to you?”
The diplomat seemed on the point of saying something, then stopped. He started again. “You conclude the investigation, and what was the case really all about? Answer: The general and his cronies who will be running this colony in a few weeks’ time are criminals who have made stupendous fortunes out of the export of heroin and arms and are now in the process of collecting uranium for weapons of mass destruction.”
“Truth can hurt. But it’s still the truth.”
“So you go to the media, tell the world. Six million people in Hong Kong who have been hoping for the best now know that they can expect the worst. The half who have other countries to go to flood the streets to the airport. The other three million riot. It becomes clear that Great Britain cannot contain the situation. So the People’s Liberation Army comes in early to keep the peace. Don’t you see? Xian cannot lose now. He’s holding all the cards. There never was a case to solve. It’s a power game we cannot win.”
Chan felt that Cuthbert was invoking a deeper level of responsibilty and wisdom than he was accustomed to work on. He found himself preoccupied by a different problem.
“You think he’ll kill me?”
Cuthbert shrugged. “It depends. Two days ago you demonstrated to his satisfaction that the 14K and Sun Yee On triad societies made a fool of him and chopped up two of his most senior cadres. I went to the length of recommending the assassination of Clare Coletti and her friends in the hope of keeping the thing secret. Of course I was aware of the futility, but one has to try. I heard today that the news has been leaked to Xian. I would guess that he won’t get around to thinking about you until he’s attended to what he will consider the more pressing aspects of the matter.”
“You hate Xian?”
Cuthbert poured the brandy and shook his head. “I would like to, but it’s difficult to hate a primal force. To hate Xian would be like hating typhoons or volcanic activity. He’s simply a fact of life. A fact of life, moreover, that the Western democracies prefer not to think about. Their awakening from deep liberal sleep is going to be interesting.”
“I don’t understand.”
Cuthbert handed him a glass. Chan lit a Benson. “Oh, I think you do. You must have noticed how the West is complacently convinced that human evolution will eventually produce worldwide democracy, a mirror of itself, in other words. They have no idea. Modern China is hardly twenty years old, if you count the Cultural Revolution as the moment when the old China was destroyed forever. That was also the moment when they destroyed old Peking-
“I would like to understand you.” Cuthbert looked at Chan in surprise. Spoken in Cantonese, the sentence indicated respect and genuine interest.
“You would? It’s not difficult. Just assume the West is one hundred and eighty degrees wrong in its assumptions. Suppose China is not the past but the future. Suppose that over the border they murder their female babies for a reason, oh, not a thought-out reason but a collective psychological reaction to a situation humanity was never designed to endure. See?”
“Too many people?”
“One point six billion at the last count. Have you any idea of the sheer administrative will required to feed such numbers? You’ve been to Beijing; you know that you need a measure of ruthlessness just to get on or off a bus. And by the year 2000 eighty percent of them will be male. Young and male.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that freedom, democracy, liberalism, these are quaint nineteenth-century concepts that have passed their sell-by date. In the very near future all such luxuries will be swept away by monsters who have been spawned by monsters to govern monsters. What will be required will be an extreme of callousness that will make the West faint. And there’s not a force on earth that will be able to contain the problem in China. I’m saying, my friend, that Xian is not a mere thug or warlord. He’s a visionary. He
