Yu sighed. “It’s organic. From Yorkshire.”
“Where else?” Alex was getting a bit fed up with all this. He toyed with his knife, wondering if he had the speed and the determination to stick it into the man’s heart. It might be five or ten minutes before the maid came back. Enough time to find a way out of here . . .
Yu must have seen the idea forming in Alex’s eyes.
“Please don’t think of anything foolish,” he remarked.
“There is a pistol in my right-hand jacket pocket, and, as the Americans would say, I am very quick on the draw. I
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think I could shoot you dead before you had even left your chair—and that would spoil a perfectly pleasant lunch. So come now, Alex. I want to know all about you.
Where were you born?”
Alex shrugged. “West London.”
“Your parents were both English?”
“I don’t want to talk about them.” Alex looked around.
Suddenly the paintings, the furniture, the clothes, even the food made sense. “You seem to like England, Major Yu,” he remarked.
“I admire it greatly. If I may say so, Alex, I have enjoyed having you as my adversary because you are English. It is also one of the reasons I have invited you to eat with me now.”
“But what about Invisible Sword? You tried to kill every child in London.”
“That was business, and I really was very unhappy about it. You might also like to know, by the way, that I voted against sending a sniper to kill you. It seemed so crude. Some more apple juice?”
“No, thank you.”
“So where do you go to school?”
Alex shook his head. He’d had enough of this game. “I don’t want to talk about myself,” he said. “And certainly not to you. I want to see Ash. And I want to go home.”
“Neither of which is possible.” Yu was drinking wine.
Alex noticed that even that was English. He remembered Ian Rider once describing English wine as the sort of liq-270
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uid that might have been extracted from a cat. But Yu sipped it with obvious enthusiasm.
“I love England, as a matter of fact,” he said. “Since you won’t talk about yourself, perhaps you will permit me to tell you a little about me. My life has been a remarkable one. Maybe one day someone will write a book about me . . .”
“I’ve never much cared for horror stories,” Alex said.
Yu smiled again—but his eyes were cold. “I like to think of myself as a genius,” he began. “Of course, you might remark that I have never invented anything or written a novel or painted a great painting, despite what I said just now, it is unlikely that I will become a household name. But different people are talented in different ways, and I think I have achieved a certain greatness in crime, Alex. And it’s not surprising that my life story is a remarkable one. How could someone like me have anything else?”
He coughed, dabbed his lips and began again.
“I was born in Hong Kong. Although you wouldn’t believe it to look at me now, I began with nothing. Even my cot was a cardboard box filled with straw. My mother was Chinese. She lived in a single room in a slum and worked as a chambermaid at the Hilton Hotel. Sometimes she would smuggle home soaps and shampoos for me. It was the only luxury I ever knew.
“My father was a guest there, a businessman from Tunbridge Wells, in Kent. She never told me his name.
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The two of them began an affair, and I have to say that she fell hopelessly in love with him. He used to talk to her about the place where he lived, this country called Great Britain. He promised her that as soon as he had enough money, he would take her with him and he would turn her into a British lady with a thatched cottage with a garden and a bulldog. For my mother, who had nothing, it was like an impossible dream.
“As a young person, I’m sure you have no attachment to your country, but the truth is that it’s a remarkable place. At one time, this tiny island had an empire that stretched all around the world. You have to remember that when I was born, you even owned Hong Kong.
Think how many inventors and explorers, artists and writers, soldiers and statesmen have come out of Britain.
William Shakespeare! Charles Dickens! The computer was a British invention—as was the Internet. It’s sad that much of your country’s greatness has been squandered by politicians in recent years. But I still have faith. One day, Britain will once again lead the world.
“Anyway, my mother’s affair came to an unhappy end.
I suppose it was inevitable. As soon as he found out that she was pregnant, the businessman abandoned her and she never saw him again. Nor did he ever pay a penny toward my upkeep. He simply disappeared.
