moldings that amplified sound.
More groans, the sounds of bodies turning.
“Can’t sleep?” It was Jenny’s voice.
“No, I nodded off, but now I’m wide-awake.”
“Something bothering you?”
“No.”
A pause.
“Yes.”
“Want to tell me?”
“Well, you disappeared tonight. Everyone wondered where you went. It was kind of rude, you know.”
“I was with Charlie. He disappeared too, didn’t he?”
“He’s just a cop, and he’s got a personality problem. You’re my wife; things are expected of you.”
“Personality problem? Because he doesn’t suck up to people?”
“I don’t like the way you look at him. It’s weird.”
“You want to start a fight, is that it? What’s wrong with you? You’re jealous of my brother?”
“Why d’you look at him like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like he’s a god or something.”
“We were very close as kids. We went through trauma together. He saved my mind. Some of those people you suck up to, like Xian, they killed our mother.”
A pause.
“Isn’t this just a little too blue-collar?”
“Huh?”
“All this vendetta stuff. I mean, okay, you had a traumatic adolescence, but life goes on. It was over twenty years ago.”
“You don’t understand. You have no depth of feeling.”
“Depth? Is that what he has?”
“Okay, you want it straight, this is it. After they told us Red Guards had killed Mai-mai, I lost my mind. He was all I had. He dedicated his whole time to me, never went to school, never left me alone, not for a single minute. Something happens when you get that close. When I look at him, I remember. What I remember is love winning over hate. Not something a lawyer would understand.”
A long pause, then Wong’s voice, meaner and more dogged than when he was putting on the charm. “I guess I need you to tell me if he raped you or not.”
Jenny’s outraged voice: “What did you say?”
“If it happened and you were under sixteen, that’s rape. Even if you consented. It happens a lot in-well, the poorer Chinese families. It’s the great unreported crime of Southeast Asia. I did a lot of family law when I was starting out, I know about these things.”
“You’re one sick lawyer. I tell you what, Charlie would rather have died than taken advantage of me. But if he’d asked me, I would have done anything. Anything at all. And I probably would have loved it. Happy now?”
“Calm down, relax. It was a natural question.”
“No, it wasn’t. It was a dirty lawyer’s question. You have all these artistic pretensions, but you’re just another money snob, like everyone else in Hong Kong.”
“Don’t raise your voice. Let’s just forget it, okay?”
“I won’t forget it. Rape? Maybe you’re the one with the problem.”
Chan grinned at the wall. She always did have a way of turning things around. She wouldn’t stop until she’d extorted an unconditional surrender.
“Look, I don’t want an atmosphere all day tomorrow. I know how good you are at doing that. I’m very sorry I cast an aspersion on your bighearted, macho, crime-busting brother, okay? Can we drop it now?”
“Don’t worry, I won’t embarrass you with peasant emotions in front of your friends-or are they clients? I can never tell the difference somehow.”
Chan shook his head and got up. The argument next door had stirred his thoughts, and there was no way he was going to sleep now. He pulled on some shorts and wandered up to the top deck, where he sat on the electric windlass and tried to make out the anchor line as it disappeared into the sea. It was a night of perfect calm. The line slid cleanly into the water as if set in marble. Likewise the hands that came from behind slid cleanly under his arms and lifted him up high in the air. The second bodyguard appeared also from behind and held Chan’s legs just as he started to struggle.
“Be calm,” a voice said in English. There was no doubt about the Beijing accent, but the owner had certainly spent time in England.
The hands set him down again after carrying him two yards toward the wheelhouse. From the shadows a gruff peasant voice spoke in Mandarin.
“We apologize,” the first voice said. “We saw you leave your cabin. We’ve been waiting for you. We wanted you to come into the shadow so that we would not be seen talking to you.” Chan assumed that this was a translation of the old man’s words.
Chan shook himself, waited. The old man cleared his throat.
“You like this boat?” This time there was no translation. The old man himself had spoken. The effect of the stunted, near-unintelligible English was of brutish stupidity. It could have been the opening gambit in an argument about pig feed.
“Yes,” Chan said.
“You want it?”
“No.”
“How about an apartment block?”
“No.”
There was a grunt. “When you find out, you tell me, okay?”
“Find out what?”
Another grunt. “What you think?”
Chan stood still. His Mandarin was good enough to understand the old man telling his bodyguards to follow him belowdecks. No more than a craggy shadow, the old man turned at the last minute.
“By the way, I don’t kill your mother. Red Guards, not army. Okay?”
“No,” Chan said, but he spoke into a void.
He shook himself again, only half believing. It took minutes for the mind to catch up:
On the rear deck where they had eaten dinner he saw a single red glow move in an arc toward the deck, flicker, then rise again. Cuthbert didn’t get up from the chair next to the rails or turn his head, even though Chan exaggerated the noise of his bare feet on the deck. He stood by the rail, not far from the diplomat.
“Welcome,” Cuthbert finally said. “Won’t you sit down?”
Chan drew up a white plastic chair. It occurred to him that voices from the swimming deck would carry this far without serious diminution in volume.
“Have you been here long?” Chan said.
“Only just arrived. Couldn’t sleep.”
But when the Englishman lowered his cigarette again to knock it out on an ashtray, Chan saw a small mountain of stubs. He knew that some kind of small talk was in order, but there was no point in pretending to a skill so alien to his personality.
“Why did you say that earlier? About not letting her seduce me?”
Cuthbert drew slowly on his cigarette, then took out the case and offered one to Chan without looking at him. Chan took it, lit up and waited. The extreme languor of the diplomat’s movements was unusual, even for an upper- class Englishman.
