got bombs going off right across Xinjiang. One on a bus in Urumqi killed about thirty people in early ‘92. This shit is happening all the time.”
“What about Yining?” Joe asked.
“What about it?”
“Is what Wang told me true?”
Miles drained his vodka and frowned. “Forget about Wang,” he said. “Wang Kaixuan is a myth, a spook story. Nothing that old fuck told you has any meaning.”
Joe was not an aficionado of American movies and did not realize that Miles was lazily quoting dialogue from The Usual Suspects. Myth. Spook story. For ten seconds in a Hong Kong nightclub, Wang Kaixuan was Keyser Soze. “So there was no uprising in Yining?” he asked. “No riots? No mass imprisonments? No torture?”
“Of course there was.” Miles was shrugging his shoulders but seemed equally interested in the fact that his drink was now finished and that it was Joe’s turn to buy a round. He looked down at his glass, rattling the ice. “Nobody’s denying that Yining was a shitstorm. Nobody’s saying that. But you gotta ask yourself a bunch of serious questions about the kind of guy you thought you were dealing with last night. Professor of economics? A Han Chinese who somehow speaks perfect English? Nobody north of Guangdong speaks English like that unless they’re MSS. For Christ’s sake, Joe, Wang spent a year at Oxford University in the seventies pretending to study law.” Miles saw Joe’s look of astonishment and added, “What? He didn’t tell you that?”
“Not in so many words…”
“Then he suddenly develops a conscience about Uighurs getting butt-fucked in Liu Daowan? Give me a break. What do you have here? An entirely new concept? The self-hating Han?” Miles laughed at his own joke and then narrowed his eyes. “How come he just happens to be in Yining when the riot takes place? He was a fucking government agent. You think a Chinese academic from northern Xinjiang is going to risk his life to save a few hundred Muslims? Don’t you have any understanding of the national character? All the Chinese care about is themselves. It’s me, myself and I-then me again if you’ve still got some time left over afterwards. I can’t believe how naive you are.” Miles lifted his glass, waved it at the barman and indicated that he wanted two further vodka and tonics. “You’re paying for these, by the way.”
Joe was at a dead end. Experience had taught him to doubt the word of those who argued their case with a mixture of hostility and impatience; it usually meant that they were concealing something. He believed very little of what Miles was telling him, but had to tread carefully. Miles clearly enjoyed a much closer working relationship with Lenan than Joe had previously realized. As a result, everything that he said about the Wang situation would certainly be reported back to his SIS masters, with potential consequences for his career. So it was better to act dumb, to appear to accept Miles’s version of events and then to check the veracity of his story at a later date. Joe had a hunch that Lenan had handed Wang to the Americans. If that was the case, there was very little he could do about it. There was certainly no future in making waves. He just resented the fact that he was being treated like an idiot.
“Fine,” he said. “I’ll go and pay for the drinks.”
At the bar he handed a five-hundred-dollar note to a middle-aged Chinese cashier who looked as though she had been living underground for the best part of ten years. Her eyes were black pools of fatigue, her light-starved complexion a sickly yellow glow beneath the cruel lights of the neon bar. He put the drinks down on the table, told Miles he was “off to buy cigarettes” and walked to the entrance of the club, splashing water on his face in a toilet that stank of sex and piss. Go home, he told himself, though he was wired and hot and still angry that Wang had slipped from his grasp. Joe thought of Ansary Tursun and Abdul Bary, two Uighur men whose faces he had not yet seen, the one handcuffed to a basement wall in wretched solitary confinement, the other held down by laughing guards as his toenails were extracted by pliers. What was the true character of this country to the north, this ancient land to which Joe had committed so much of his young life? What would become of Hong Kong when the PLA goose-stepped over the border at midnight on 30 June? Joe felt drunk and melancholy. The thud of music in the club reverberated through the toilet walls and he walked outside onto the street to buy cigarettes from a 7- Eleven.
Returning to the club ten minutes later he was struck by a sight so extraordinary that it took him several seconds to realize what was going on. As Joe passed the dance floor, pushing through a crush of men and bored hookers, he saw Isabella straddling Miles at the table, her legs squeezing his hips as she rocked and writhed in his lap. Of course it was not her, yet the shape of the woman, her long dark hair, her sinuous body encased in a dark blue qipao dress, was an uncanny double. Joe felt a surge of desire and jealousy. He sat down and stared at her back in a brief drunken trance.
“Joe, man! You’re back!” The girl turned. She was Chinese, exquisitely pretty, but with flat, wide features that seemed almost Turkic. Joe felt that he was hallucinating. Was this a Xinjiang prostitute in the act of selling herself to the CIA? He was by now so drunk and exhausted that little was making sense. “You gotta meet Kitty. Fuckin’ gorgeous. Kitty, meet Joe.”
The girl stretched out a long, slender arm which looked tanned in the low light of the club. Her touch was cold and Joe saw that there was no life behind her painted eyes, only the sad routine of seducing strangers and laughing at gweilo jokes. He wondered how Miles, or any of the other men in the club, could fail to see through the artifice as the girl smiled and tipped her head provocatively. Then he realized that they probably didn’t care.
“Hello, handsome,” Kitty said.
“Hello.”
She reached for a narrow champagne flute on the table and took a sip while holding Joe’s gaze. “Fuck wine,” they called it, a mixture of cold tea and flat Coca-Cola which sold for twice the price of a vodka and tonic. At the end of the evening the girl and the bar would split fifty per cent of the cost of the drink, with the rest going to the Triads. Kitty’s aim would be to draw another girl to the table, to see to it that Joe also bought her a drink, and then to replenish their glasses as often as possible before leaving the club towards dawn.
Sure enough, more or less as soon as Joe had sat down, a second, less attractive girl, with the paler skin and slightly finer features particular to northern China, dropped herself into Joe’s lap and began stroking his neck.
“My name Mandy,” she said.
“Hello, Mandy. Let me find you somewhere to sit.”
Miles grinned as Joe gently tipped the girl onto her feet, walked past the Texan and found a chair at a vacant table. He had a good deal of difficulty returning it through the crowds and was obliged to lift the chair over the heads of several people at the bar. Joe heard Miles stage whisper “Jesus” but did not mind being the central player in a brief comedy of British incompetence. If anything, he wanted to show by his actions that he was unsuited to this environment, that his presence in the club was by accident, rather than design. He sat down beside her, looked at his watch and tried to make conversation.
“Where are you from?”
He never used Mandarin unless it was necessary. There was always an advantage to being regarded as an outsider, even in a place like this.
“Mongolia. You know it?”
“I know it.”
Mandy was perhaps twenty or twenty-one and dressed so casually that she might have been at home, watching television in a Shatin apartment, doing some ironing or washing-up. Most of the girls in the club wore skirts or dresses, but Mandy was wearing faded denim jeans and a plain white T-shirt. Oddly, this made her more difficult to talk to. She was real. She broke the careful spell of the club. Joe could see in her expression that she did not regard him as a potential customer, nor that she particularly resented him for this. Perhaps she had given up on herself. Perhaps she was just grateful for the company.
“How long have you been here?”
“One month,” she said.
“Have you had a chance to see much of Hong Kong?”
“Not really.” Melancholy crept into Mandy’s exhausted eyes and he wondered how she had ended up working in such a place. Had she been tricked, or travelled willingly? Most of the women came because they had no choice. “No time for sightseeing,” she said. “All day sleep.”
He thought of her, crammed into a tiny, ten-bed Triad dormitory, probably just a few blocks away in Wan Chai, sleeping fitfully on a damp fleabitten mattress alongside other girls just like her who had left their families, their happiness, their self-esteem, thousands of miles away.
