14
Hong Kong is the world’s biggest shopping mall, but the business of Hong Kong is China. Apart from a brief moment when the Chinese Communist Party was communist, it has always been so, from the nineteenth century, when Britain sent gunboats up the Pearl River to force opium down the lungs of twenty million Chinese, to the present day, when the gigantic container port of Kwai Chung sends goods to and receives goods from the mainland that, if spread out horizontally, would occupy a land area as vast as a medium-sized country, or if placed end to end would stretch around the world three times, depending on what statistic you prefer. After Mao’s revolution of 1949, when the great expat party that was Shanghai finally came to a bloody end, the remains of the Raj continued its largely alcoholic contribution to world culture right here in the former narcotics entrepot, where the fortunes of a few were made out of the misery of the millions. From the start in the 1840s, if you wanted to be a real player, what you needed was a place on the peak called Victoria from which you commuted by palanquin carried by a team of four coolies who, for reasons of survival, were inevitable end consumers of your honorable product, with a life expectancy of maybe thirty years if they were lucky. (The more one eats and drinks at the Hong Kong Club, the more of one’s dope Johnny Chinaman has to smoke so he can haul one up the hill afterward, ha, ha. Can’t go wrong, old boy.)
The opium has gone and there is a funicular railway, but the ultimate proof of wealth beyond measure remains a spread on the peak, where you can rely on a refreshing breeze when everyone else is sweating down on the shore, and a Scottish mist weaves romantically over the hills during winter. Naturally, the first thing Lilly and Polly’s grandfather did when he arrived with his factory from Shanghai was to buy a home up here, and it seems the property has remained in the family ever since. It was not difficult to find all this out by making a few inquiries before I left Bangkok, but I’ve not yet decided whether to forewarn them of my arrival, or to simply turn up at the door. Of course, there’s no guarantee they will be at home: they could still be trading organs with les miserables at Lourdes, or playing roulette at Monte Carlo. I’m taking a flier, as usual.
The address I’ve been given involves taking a path called Stanley around the top of the peak. Naturally, those who live up here may use their cars to commute, but the rest of us have to walk. I find the house easily enough. There is an iron gate with a large red button to push and a microphone to speak into-and a speaker that says, “Yes?”
“Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep,” I announce.
Silence, then something clanks at the bottom of the iron gate, which begins to swing open so slowly, I am over the threshold long before it has reached the full compass of its aperture, whereupon it immediately starts to close again. I’m about twenty yards down a hundred-yard drive before I hear it clank shut. I ought to add that it’s a magnificent day up here on billionaire mountain, with almost zero humidity, a cerulean blue sky against which contrasts perfectly the dark foliage of bodi leaves, ferns, and beech. The house from this side looks like a long half- timbered bungalow in the Elizabethan style, but a glance over the hedge reveals that the top floor of the house must be no more than a kind of lobby, for living quarters, tennis courts, a swimming pool, and what looks like a Chinese garden in the Ming style spread out about twenty feet below.
I must confess I was expecting, in the circumstances, to be greeted by a maid; instead an arched door (English green oak) has been left fully open for me to stride through. Inside: an intimidating selection of classic Chinese blackwood furniture stands on gray flagstones: stern chairs with curved backs, a student’s bench at which would-be mandarins once knelt, a blanket trunk with mother-of-pearl inlay, a wardrobe in polished elm more than seven feet tall with great brass locks-and a collection of black-and-white photographs which form a family narrative that circumnavigates the long room. I would like to study the pictures, which from a quick glance seem to feature old Shanghai with the wealthy all dressed in top hats, monkey suits, and flowing dinner gowns and the poor in traditional Chinese peasant dress, but feel like an intruder who needs to identify himself before someone calls the police.
A second door, also oak and arched, also open, leads to a set of broad stone stairs that turn on themselves to land me on the ground floor. Corridors that must have been cut into the rock lead to the left and right, while an oval solarium of generous proportions, populated by a hundred varieties of orchid, invites me onward. The solarium is of the wrought-iron kind that reached a perfection of style a hundred years ago.
The main door is fitted with tinted glass, which throws a jolly collage of color onto the flagstones. I open it to emerge into the fresh air. The tennis court and swimming pool are on my left, the Ming garden with tiny humped stone bridges and trickling brooks on my right; the frozen psychosis of Hong Kong with its motherboard of steel and glass towers hums far below. At a marble table in the garden on the other side of the bridge, the Twins are sitting with a carafe of white wine and two glasses. One of them-I would not dare to guess which-is holding a revolver to her head while the other watches with considerable concentration. The one with the gun slowly squeezes the trigger until there is a click, then replaces it on the table. Jaw jutting, her sister now picks up the gun, holds it to her head, and slowly pulls the trigger until it clicks. She replaces the gun on the table. I am not surprised to note a sudden relaxation in the atmosphere, permitting them both to look up.
“Detective, what a surprise,” one of them-the last to fail to die-says. They smile.
“Tell me it wasn’t loaded,” I say as I approach.
By way of answer she hands me the gun. “This is what we call our shrine.”
When I spin the chamber, I see there is one cartridge in it. I look at the sisters, who raise their eyebrows. “It’s a blank, right?” The eyebrows rise higher. I align the cartridge with the trigger and point-it must be the boy in me-at the crystal carafe. I already know the answer by the way they have both moved their chairs back, but I fire anyway. There goes the crystal carafe, as the shot echoes over the mountain. The last of the Chablis dribbles over the marble.
Suddenly I need to sit down. One of the sisters drags up a chair. “Do you do this often?” I say.
“Only when it’s the maid’s day off,” one says. “That’s why there was no one to greet you at the door. Very sorry, appalling manners and all that-but as you see, we were in the middle of something exciting.”
Not for the first time in the company of these two, I am dragged into another world: surreal, exotic, rich, and mad. The scene is still playing in my mind: yes, the gun was loaded with a live shell; yes, each of them did raise it to her head and pull the trigger. But I still can’t believe it; I’m tempted to ask them to do it again.
“I don’t believe you play it every week. One of you would be dead by now.”
They exchange glances. “That’s true. You must be a good detective.”
Silence. Now one of them says, “So, which do you think I am, Lilly or Polly?”
“I have no idea.”
“Well, neither do we,” they say in unison.
Nothing in my career as a cop, or as a human, has prepared me for this conversation. The beauty of the day here on the mountaintop, the ancient genius of the garden, the buzzards hanging in the air close to the peak, the sailboats and pleasure vessels in the harbor-it all seems to have taken on a darker hue, like a hallucination that has started to go wrong. “What do you mean, ‘Neither do we’?” I say.
One of them-I shall have to call her Lilly or I’ll go mad-makes a sulky face. “Sometimes I’m her and she’s me. It’s easy to get mixed up.”
“You’re a Buddhist,” Polly says. “You must know there’s no such thing as a self. Think of it: when you want to see yourself, you look in a mirror. You have a choice whether to look or not.”
“But with us the other is there all the time in a mirror that follows you around. The same but different,” Lilly says.
“It’s not at all unusual for twins to go homicidal and want to kill each other,” Polly explains.
“Oh,” I say.
“It’s a trick we discovered when we were teens. The Russian roulette. We both knew we would murder each other one day if we didn’t do something-so we used the gun.”
“It has a way of clearing the air.”
“Sure does,” I say. “You mean you were in the middle of an argument?”
“A serious one.”
“What about?”
