Jin’s features remain impassive. “Perhaps we might order some tea,” he suggests.
“Have you seen my black cardigan?” Villanelle asks. “The Annabel Lee one, with the pearl buttons?”
In answer, Alice Mao groans. She’s lying on her bed opposite a young man with chiselled features and a gym-toned body which gleams like oiled teak. Both of them are naked. Beneath the silk sheet, the man’s hand is moving rhythmically between Alice’s legs. It’s half past two in the afternoon.
“I’m sure I left it here somewhere,” Villanelle murmurs.
Exasperated, Alice rolls onto her stomach. “Please. Just come to bed?”
“I have to go shopping.”
“Now?”
Villanelle shrugs.
“Ken’s very much in demand, you know,” Alice says. “He’s doing us a huge favour, fitting us in like this.”
Villanelle knows Ken’s story, because Alice has told it to her. How he was a student at Hong Kong University, completing an MA dissertation on the late poetry of Sylvia Plath, when he was talent-spotted in a hotel steam room. How he became Ken Hung, the most famous porn star in China.
As if on cue, Ken throws back the sheets. “Ladies, we have wood!”
Alice gasps. “Oh my goodness, it’s just like in the films. Bigger, even. Sweetie, at least have a little stroke.”
“Sorry, but I really don’t want that thing anywhere near me. I just want my black cardigan.” Villanelle frowns. “You don’t happen to know somewhere I can buy nice kitchen stuff, do you?”
“You could try Putua Parlour on Changhua Lu,” says Ken, complacently regarding the most famous penis in China. “I get all my bakeware there. I’m a big Nigella fan.”
An hour later, Villanelle is strolling down one of the many aisles of Putua Parlour, noting the positioning of the CCTV cameras. It’s a warehouse store for the restaurant trade, offering every imaginable appliance and vessel. Shelf after shelf is piled high with pans, skillets, steamers, hotpots, baking dishes and gleaming tinware. There are elaborate cake stands, fantastical jelly-moulds, and an entire aisle of woks. Tiny woks for flash-frying individual prawns, jacuzzi-sized woks capacious enough for a whole ox.
The place has only a handful of customers. There’s a young couple quietly arguing about kebab-skewers, a harassed-looking man loading a trolley with bamboo dim-sum steamers, and an elderly woman muttering to herself as she picks through the melon-ballers.
In the last aisle, Villanelle finds what she’s looking for. Cleavers. Fine-bladed cleavers for slicing and dicing, heavy bone-choppers for hacking and dismembering. Her eye alights on a chukabocho, a locally made cleaver with a 25oz carbon-steel blade and a tiger-maple handle. It feels good in her hand. Two minutes later she checks out, paying for a dozen cocktail glasses and several sets of paper umbrellas. Somehow, unseen by the CCTV cameras, the chukabocho has made its way to the bottom of her shoulder bag.
“OK, I admit it,” says Eve. “I’m nervous.”
“You’ve been on dates before, haven’t you?”
“This is not a date. This is an appointment with the head of the Chinese Secret Service.”
“If you say so. I think he fancies you.”
“Simon, please. You’re not helping. I feel very uncomfortable in this dress. And these shoes. I can hardly walk.”
“You look adorable. When are you meeting him?”
“He’s picking me up downstairs in ten minutes. What are your plans?”
“I thought I might take a stroll down the Bund.” He shrugs. “Perhaps look in somewhere for a cocktail.”
“Well, be good. I’m going to wait downstairs.”
“Have fun.”
She throws him a sardonic glance, and teetering a little in her new Lilian Zhang cocktail dress and Mary Ching stilettos—the prospect of submitting the expenses claim makes her blood run cold—runs a last check in the mirror. She looks, she’s forced to admit, pretty good. The hotel hairdresser’s even magicked her mousy hair into something resembling a French roll.
“You don’t think the make-up’s too much?”
“No! Now go.”
The invitation came as a surprise, to say the least. The meeting in the Peninsula suite had more or less stalled after Eve’s questioning of Jin Qiang. Spies, even among themselves, are highly disinclined to admit that they actively engage in spying. Following a further hour of discussion of the murder of Zhang Lei, in the course of which Eve handed over a prepared dossier about the investigation of the Kedrin murder, Jin brought the meeting to a halt and ushered her and Simon down to the lobby.
There, amid the art deco grandeur, the same cast of business types appeared to be engaged in the same muted conversations. As they shook hands beneath the pillared portico, Jin hesitated. “Mrs. Polastri, I’d very much like to show you something of Shanghai. Are you by any chance free this evening?”
“I am,” she said, surprised.
“Excellent. I’ll call for you at your hotel at eight o’clock.”
She opened her mouth to thank him, but he was already gliding soundlessly away.
He arrives at 8 p.m. precisely. He’s on a scooter, wearing a sharp black suit and open-necked white shirt, and looks a very different man from the cautious intelligence officer Eve met just hours earlier.
“Mrs. Polastri, you look… spectacular.” With a courtly smile he hands her a tiny bouquet of fresh violets, tied with a silk ribbon.
Eve is enchanted, and thinking of Niko teaching GCSE maths to a class of bored teenagers half a world away, she feels a stab of guilt. Thanking Jin, she wraps the dewy violets in a tissue and places them in her bag.
“Ready?” he asks, passing her a helmet.
“Ready.” She arranges herself side-saddle, as she’s seen Shanghainese women do.
They swing out into the traffic, and onto East Nanjing Road. The thoroughfare, one of Shanghai’s busiest, is gridlocked and exhaust-choked. Jin weaves the scooter deftly between the crawling vehicles and comes to a halt at a red light.
As Eve sits there, the scooter burbling beneath her, she catches sight of a striking figure walking up the pavement towards her. A young woman, poised and slender, in jeans and a black, pearl-buttoned cardigan. Dark blonde hair slicked back from fine, sharp-cut features. A subtle, sensual twist to the mouth.
Eve watches her for a moment.
