Chan took her hand, gazed into her eyes. He reminded himself: Directness was a virtue with Westerners. “I’ve got a hard-on,” he said.
23
Chan wanted badly to know if the divers had discovered anything at the second dive site where he had seen the trunk, but he resisted calling Higgins. It was Sunday. Moira’s plane would be leaving early the next morning. He took her to breakfast in a large hotel in Central, then proposed that they check into the Grand Hyatt for a day and a night. Chan’s flat wasn’t designed for full-time habitation by adult humans. Moira agreed on condition she pay half the bill.
The Grand Hyatt was a Chinese impression of Renaissance Rome. Marble pillars soared past two mezzanines to a cupola also of marble. There was a marble font, a marble floor leading to a marble check-in desk. Small and large bronze cupids held up silk lampshades, Cantocamp statuettes slouched on every shelf. Only God was missing. Chan and Moira checked into a room on the executive floor. They spent the day like good lovers, took a swim early evening in the Olympic-size swimming pool with a view over the harbor. Chan said it was like being in an advert for cognac. They had dinner in the Italian restaurant on the second floor but raced back to the bedroom without bothering with dessert.
“It’s fun being sixteen again,” Chan said.
“Especially for me. I think I missed it the first time around.”
She didn’t disguise her obsession with his lean body. For him she offered the endlessly voluptuous experience of total acceptance. Nothing kept an erection better than unremitting appreciation by one’s lover. They hardly slept, but the night was over in a flash. Moira took the wake-up call. Chan steeled himself to say good-bye.
At the airport only his twitch gave him away. They were careful not to promise to see each other again soon. Or at all. Nevertheless, in the taxi back to Mongkok Chan carried her with him: those generous breasts, long legs that gripped him close. Most of all, though, he retained a subtle memory of something entirely new: uncritical affection. And by a Westerner at that. To sleep with a woman who somehow knows all about you and forgives everything was-well, a lot better than being called a misogynist by a vegetarian grouch. He could still feel her strong American hands gripping his buttocks just before she slipped away to the security area.
At Mongkok he checked his watch: 10:00 A.M. on a Monday. He was due into work after lunch, but he would phone Higgins as soon as he reached his flat.
His detective’s instinct told him something was wrong as he walked along the corridor to his flat on the tenth floor. Silence. It was as if the corridor had been evacuated.
There was no damage to any of the three bolts on his door. He tried to recall the best karate maneuvers to disarm an assailant; in Hong Kong the favored burglar’s aid is the small meat cleaver. Then he pushed open the door. He had long enough to take in two people in white spacesuits with matching soft helmets and visors passing black instruments with luminous dials slowly around the kitchen before something hit him on the back of the neck and he slammed into the floor.
They were still checking him with the black boxes when he came to. The two spacemen took off their headgear, revealing the blotchy complexions, round eyes, receding hair of Englishmen in their early forties.
“He’s clean. So is the flat.”
“Clean? Well, well, well, isn’t that a coincidence,” a voice behind him said. He twisted to look.
“We thought you’d done a runner, old chap,” the same voice said. “Mind telling us where the hell you’ve been?”
Chan twisted further, ignoring the pain. He had assumed that it was the owner of the voice who had hit him, but he saw that that was a false assumption. The owner of the voice was surely the slim, impeccably dressed Englishman with black polished shoes and sober tie whom he dimly recognized. The owner of the rabbit punch would be the tall and very muscular South African standing next to him whom Chan knew to be a senior officer in the Independent Commission Against Corruption.
24
The ICAC was created in the early seventies, when the Royal Hong Kong Police Force was known to be the most corrupt in the world. Desk sergeants were millionaires with Swiss and Taiwanese bank accounts; senior officers absconded at Kai Tak Airport with suitcases full of cash; outlying islands suitable for importing morphine were nicknamed Treasure Island by the wealthy constables who patrolled them. Questions were asked in Parliament; the governor, Sir Murray Maclehose, responded by creating an organization with powers of arrest without charge, with authority to obtain confidential documents from banks and to interrogate potential witnesses whether they agreed to it or not. It was an organization answerable to no one except the governor. It investigated allegations of corruption in the police force in particular and was loathed by most policemen for its aggressive tactics and envied for its successes. Hardened criminals who never gave statements to police had a way of talking after seven days in ICAC custody at its offices on Queensway Plaza.
It was said that policemen made pathetic defendants, being subject to a form of guilt to which hardened criminals were immune.
“Scum.” The big South African spat a fleck of his contempt into the wastepaper bin. His name was Jack Forte. The other, the slim Englishman, was Milton Cuthbert, the political adviser. Chan had recognized him from numerous appearances on news flashes about the progress of talks in Beijing concerning the future of the colony. Such an honor, to be intimidated by a celebrity.
Forte stood up, walked around his desk, stood very close to Chan, who was sitting in a chair in the middle of the room. Languidly Cuthbert looked at his watch.
It was always instructive to watch a fellow professional at work. Chan had no idea what he was supposed to have done, but fear of Forte induced an ardent wish to confide in Cuthbert, who was always on the point of leaving him alone with the South African. Forte’s nationality helped. In small bare rooms such as this blacks and coloreds had been beaten to a slow death in Forte’s hometown only a few years ago, a fact it was not easy to erase from one’s mind. In Forte’s system Chan was colored. Ironic considering the rainbow of shades that, close up, could be found in the white man’s face. As the South African bent down to breathe over Chan, the chief inspector discerned purple veins and russet blood vessels bursting in a spray of pink and blue under an alabaster membrane, a blue eye set in porcelain flared with orange and mauve; red, gray, white and black whiskers close enough to be counted twitched around the near-lipless rim of a small mouth with a prodigious capacity for loathing.
“I hate you as I hate all bent coppers.”
The big fist slammed into the big open hand two millimeters from Chan’s left eye. Chan knew fists from his karate days. There were fists that no matter how big never succeeded in inflicting more than superficial bruising, others that were weapons of assault capable of smashing rib cages, splintering sinuses, crushing skulls. Forte was proud of his fists.
Cuthbert stood up, stepped across the floor, bent down so that both men were staring into his face.
“Who’s paying you?”
“Paying me?”
“Why?”
“Which agent are they using here?”
“Agent?”
“Where’s the rest of the guns?”
“Guns?”
“What are the weapons for?”
“Is it heroin?”
“Heroin?”
“What do they want?”
