“Something like that.”
“What changed your mind?”
She touched his cheek. “Oh, you’re such a pretty boy I couldn’t stand to see you get into trouble.” She said it without a smile, almost mournfully. “I told him it wouldn’t work. You’re the martyr type: better death than compromise.”
Chan scowled. “Just out of interest, why opium?”
Emily looked away over the Lamma Channel. “It’s a family tradition. My father smoked; so did my grandfather. I never knew that Dad indulged every Friday night until Milton Cuthbert told me. When I confronted my father, he explained that working for the British, you need something to remind you from time to time that you’re Chinese. For him, smoking was a way of making contact with the ancestors. For me, it brings relief from stress.”
“I should arrest you.”
“Why don’t you?”
“You’d tell your friend Xian. He’d threaten to explode an atom bomb in Central.”
Emily winced. “I know nothing about that. I heard the rumor about weapons-grade uranium from someone in government only yesterday. That’s what I wanted to tell you.”
“You asked me up here just to tell me that?”
She opened the package, lifted it up to her face, inhaled, set it down again.
“You must have spoken to Milton by now. I’ve heard that your investigation has expanded.”
“It’s becoming a very Chinese investigation. It grows without progressing.”
She smiled thinly without looking at him. “You think I’m the world’s biggest bitch?”
It was like hitting a fairground target and causing loud bells to ring, except that the bells were violent tears. Chan thought of a child in deep pain, searching for comfort while its body contorted with sobs. A dedicated interrogator would drive home the advantage. Chan looked away, waited.
“Excuse me.” She held the tears long enough to rise from the table and walk quickly into the house. Chan heard a door bang and more sobs muffled by the building. It took her fifteen minutes to recover herself and return. She had switched kimonos. This one was an austere black drawn tightly up to her neck.
She sat down again more or less composed. “Perfect timing. I must congratulate you.”
“You wanted to know what I knew. Now you know. You want me to go?”
Her eyes hovered over the opium. “Such a reluctant detective. And everyone said you were a fanatic.”
Chan lit a cigarette. “I don’t like wasting time. You can help my investigation because you know something about Clare Coletti. This even a dunce like me can deduce. You are Xian’s main front in Hong Kong, so you know why he’s so damn interested in this case. Either you want to talk or you don’t. I can’t make you do things. You belong to Xian. He bought you ten years ago.”
Until he had spoken, Chan had not realized how angry he was. He was begging a possible accomplice to provide information because she was rich and powerful enough to despise the law. This was all wrong. No, it wasn’t wrong; it was Chinese. Refusing to look at her, he stared into the billion-dollar night. Below, moving lights-red, green and white-traced the movements of tankers. He felt her hand move over the table, slip over his own.
“Sleep with me.”
“No.”
“How about underwater? We can use the pool.”
He faced her in surprise.
She smiled. “Joke.” She touched her hair. “Is disliking me more difficult than you thought?”
“Yes,” Chan admitted. “But I won’t sleep with you.”
She withdrew her hand. “Then if you want your answers, you’ll have to share a different pleasure with me. You’re right, there’s nothing in the world you can do to make me talk. Only the guilt can do that. Without opium I don’t think I’ll have the guts; we can’t all be righteous heroes. Why should I smoke alone? If you want to solve your case and save the world, a little smoke is no price at all to pay.”
“No.”
She held his chin between finger and thumb and pulled his head around. “That no wasn’t half as convincing as the first. I think you like the edge. I think you made love to me eighty feet under water because you’re as curious about death as I am. Opium can take you into death. It’s a privilege the poppy offers people like us. With the body anesthetized, you walk through a door, and there it is: eternity in all its glory. Who knows what a man like you might find there?”
He watched her skilled fingers roll a tiny piece of the opium into a ball. She heated it on a pinhead over the spirit lamp. Her movements were too quick to follow. In less than a second she was holding the pipe up, tilted sideways over the spirit lamp. She sucked while jabbing the bubbling black ball with the pin to allow air to pass. She consumed the first dose in a second.
“Don’t try it so you’ll never know how good it is, isn’t that what they say? To someone like you, though, that’s an inducement. Take the pipe.”
“No.”
“I can tell you everything you want to know. Not just about the case. I know so much. I’m weary with all this knowledge. I want to share it with a true hero who will know what to do with it.”
She touched his hair delicately with the tips of her fingers. It was eerie how her personality had begun to alter. He sensed a burden not of knowledge but of loneliness. She seemed almost shy. Her voice was softer and slower with a girlish lilt of longing. “Your friend, for example, that old man in Wanchai-I know about him.”
“You do?”
“I knew about him long before I knew about you. So many times I’ve been on the point of going to see him. I have information he could use, a whole head full. When you protected him, I admired you. I wanted to be like you. I wanted even more to be like that old man. Can you imagine, the purity of his soul? To live at peace with oneself like that…”
Her arm was around his shoulders. In her other hand she held the pipe. “It’s not like sex, my friend. I promise you, you’ll feel no connection, no obligation afterwards. Just a wonderful peace.”
He watched her prepare the pipe again. “Imagine, eight whole hours free from the demon that drives you. It will be the only holiday of your life.” She caressed his head. “Be kind to yourself for once; it’s only addictive if you do it a lot.”
When she had finished preparing the pipe, he hesitated, then bent forward to inhale. In the bowl of the pipe the black ball burned away.
He was disappointed to find that the drug had no apparent effect, except for a mild improvement in his patience. He slipped a hand into his pocket to flick a switch on the microphone that would activate the tape recorder and waited until she had smoked another pipe of her own. The receiver was locked with the tape recorder in the black briefcase.
“Milton told you he used me. But I’m sure he didn’t tell you what for?”
“No, he didn’t.”
“I was a go-between. Xian wasn’t happy about the Joint Declaration between London and Beijing; nobody had consulted him about it. He insisted on a secret protocol. Milton had to agree to his demands. There’s no border control on anything Xian wants to move out of China into Hong Kong. That was the deal. Of course it’s not the sort of thing anyone wanted written down, and neither Xian nor Milton was openly talking at that stage. That’s why they used me.”
Chan sat still, trying to absorb a simple phrase:
“They let him bring anything in?”
“Anything at all. And he can ship from here too. Of course, once it leaves Hong Kong, it’s his risk.”
“And he runs the army in southern China?”
“He and sixteen other generals. Little by little they’ve bought up more than half the major public companies in Hong Kong, using proxies, of course. They’ve bought Hong Kong. It’s simple, but it’s brilliant. Shanghai collapsed in ’49 because the West took all its money away. They won’t do that this time because half the local companies are
