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
“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?”
She smiled. “You know why I love having lunch with you, Johnny? You’re the only man in this town under fifty who isn’t scared of me. All right, there was a guy last week in Shanghai, very sensitive, artistic-reminded me of you. I had to drop him, though. Clinging. Gave him some money to get lost. How’s your partnership going? I might have some work for you-something big. Even bigger than last time.”
Wong put down his drink, used his chopsticks to pick up a tiny piece of pickled ginger. He looked around the room. In total the men and women gathered at the club represented a wealth equal to the gross national products of some European countries. Together they could have bought Manhattan, if they had not done so already. But with all the frantic energy that Hong Kong created it had never made a single significant contribution to any form of science, art or literature, with the doubtful exception of Bruce Lee movies. Each of the hundred or so conversations taking place in English, Cantonese, Mandarin, Fukienese, Shanghainese, German, French and Italian was centered one way or another on the same thing, and it wasn’t love or the improvement of mankind. He often wondered if he would have been happier if he’d been less lucky. Perhaps struggling to make art films somewhere in Europe; a tortured affair with a woman who talked about her feelings; friends who worried about the state of the world.
He looked at his friend, smiled. “I can never thank you enough, you know that.”
She beamed. “Now, more important, how’s Jenny?”
Wong beamed too, leaned forward. In matters of intimacy he and Emily spoke in Cantonese. “We’re pregnant. It’s official.”
Emily let out a cry, stretched both arms over her head. “Bravo.”
Everyone turned, looked at Emily and turned back to their food. She grinned. With a hand half cupped she beckoned a waiter and ordered champagne. He returned immediately with a silver ice bucket on a blackwood pedestal. People turned again when the cork popped.
They clinked glasses.
“And what are you going to call the bambino? Are you going for the traditional Hong Kong hybrid of English stroke Cantonese?”
“Probably. For the sake of the family we’ll have one of the usual Chinese ones.” He reeled off a list of traditional Cantonese names. The girls’ names always included the name of a flower; the boys’ invoked wisdom.
Emily nodded approval. “By the way, thanks for the party the other night. You know that was the first time I met your brother-in-law. I must have missed him at the wedding.”
“It’s easy to miss him. He never stays long at social events.”
Emily swallowed some more champagne. “An intense-looking type. Does he talk to you much about his work?”
“Only if I let him.”
“Interesting?”
Wong grimaced. “Don’t tell me you fancied him?”
“He told me he was investigating those Mincer Murders.
“You want me to introduce you properly? He loves to dole out reality sandwiches to the pampered classes.”
“Oh, I’m not that interested. Weird, though, mincing up three people like that.”
“Triads.”
“I guess.” She picked up a piece of pickled ginger with her chopsticks, glanced around the room. She leaned forward, whispered: “So, you haven’t had a chance to find out what’s behind the Mincer Murders from your manic brother-in-law?”
Wong stopped eating. “Emily, what is this? Are you going through some kind of change? Since when did you care about what the criminal classes got up to?”
She sighed. “Oh, you know, as I get older, I wonder about how the other half lives. Don’t you? We’re pretty cushioned, people like you and me, aren’t we?”
Wong shrugged. “From wayward meat mincers? I hope so. Can we change the subject now? I’m looking forward to my braised abalone.”
Emily laughed. Toward the end of the meal she revealed that on this occasion she was paying. She insisted that they end with Wong’s favorite brandy, Armagnac.
16
Emily left Wong in the lobby of the China Club to refresh herself in the ladies’ room. She checked her Longines gold watch: 2:45. She had five minutes to reach the new Bank of China, which was ten minutes away walking slowly in the heat. It didn’t matter that she would be a little late; punctuality was something Communists rarely worried about.
She checked her face in the mirror, smoothed her blouse over her sore breasts, took the lift down to the ground floor. At the new Bank of China building she showed her ID card to the old man at reception, who telephoned up to the top floor. She was shown to a private lift at the back of the building. Unlike the lifts in the public lift bank, it stopped on only one floor: the top.
Fear made her stomach flutter. The meeting with Wong had not gone as well as she had hoped. His news about the pregnancy of his wife had taken her by surprise and made it difficult to talk about money and murder. The fact was, she had little to report, except that in the end Jonathan Wong would do whatever she told him to do.
She stepped out at the top floor. As a state-owned bank the Bank of China was more than a commercial branch of the PRC; it was a center of intelligence gathering and surveillance as important in its own way as the New China News Agency, which functioned as the PRC’s consulate in Hong Kong. The new bank building had been designed to accommodate visiting cadres. There was a sauna room, Jacuzzis, large bedrooms with videos and televisions, a huge kitchen that was manned twenty-four hours a day and a cocktail area with the best views of Hong Kong that
