“I’ll look into it.” Joe needed to put in an appearance at the Quayler office before the day was out and brought the conversation to an end.
“I’d better be off.”
“Of course. Just a quick request before you go.” Waterfield’s voice briefly became a stern paternal rebuke. “Can you for God’s sake move out of the Ritz bloody Carlton? Fifteen grand on board and lodging is in the general arena of taking the piss. Bean counters not amused. End of lecture.”
The information Joe had requested arrived by diplomatic bag seventy-two hours later. It was sent to Beijing, where it was passed to me in Fish Nation, a tiny, British-style fish-and-chip shop, by the head of media and public affairs at the British embassy. To my knowledge, she thought she was handing over documents relating to Britain’s recent decision to lift an embargo on the sale of arms to China. The package consisted of a padded A4 envelope in which Waterfield had placed two typewritten sheets of paper and a compact disc. I flew to Shanghai that night, placed the papers inside an edition of the China Daily, hid the disc inside a bootlegged copy of Blood on the Tracks, and presented both items to Joe at dinner. At about midnight, he left me in Park 97 with Tom and Ricky and returned to his hotel.
He soon discovered that London had been unable to trace a Shahpour Goodarzi either to Langley or to the Macklinson Corporation. All known aliases for Iranian-American Cousins under the age of thirty-five had been investigated. A database match of a photograph of “Sammy,” provided by Zhao Jian, had also been attempted, without success. It was the same story with Ansary Tursun. Nothing from Amnesty, nothing from Human Rights Watch. London apologized for “any frustration this might cause.”
The compact disc looked more promising. Booting up his laptop, Joe sat on the bed, inserted a pair of headphones, opened iTunes and was swiftly returned to the innocent spring of 1997.
Professor Wang, this is Mr. John Richards from Government House. The man I tell you about. He has come to see you.
It was the live recording of the interrogation. Joe pressed the headphones against his ears and felt his skin prickle at the sound of Lee’s voice. The take quality was poor; the room sounded faded and lifeless. Joe heard a creak of springs and remembered Wang rising slowly to his feet. He could picture the benign, intelligent face, the face that he had warmed to, the face that had later encouraged young Uighur men to kill.
Mr. Richards. I am very glad to make your acquaintance. Thank you for coming to see me so late at night. I hope I have not been any inconvenience to you or to your organization.
Joe turned up the sound as Shanghai closed in around him. Now he was alone in the safe house, twenty-six years old again, and the pitch of his confident, entitled voice embarrassed him. This younger self was so innocent, so ambitious, so free of the pressures of age.
So I would say that you are a very lucky man, Mr. Wang… You survive a very dangerous swim. You are surprised on the beach not by Hong Kong immigration, who would almost certainly have turned you back to China, but by a British soldier. You claim to have information about a possible defection. The army believes your story, contacts Government House, we send a nice, air-conditioned car to pick you up and less than twenty-four hours after leaving China here you are sitting in a furnished apartment in Tsim Sha Tsui watching Lawrence of Arabia. I’d say that qualifies as luck.
He was so sure of himself! Was that the man Isabella would remember? Had he changed so much that he would no longer be of interest to her? Joe lay back on the bed, his eyes closed, the side of his face resting on a fresh white pillow. Every trace of Megan had been erased by chambermaids and air conditioning.
At some point Ansary was taken into what he believes was the basement of the prison. His left arm and his left leg were handcuffed to a bar in a room of solitary confinement. He was left to hang like this for more than twenty-four hours. He had no food, no water. Remember that his crime was only to read a newspaper.
On it went. As Joe listened to the recording, images flooded back from the discovered cave of his memory; he had arrived at the name Abdul Bary before he even heard it. Wang said that Bary had been imprisoned, that a toenail had been torn from his foot by a laughing guard. It was like listening to an account of an execution.
Other prisoners, we later learned, had been attacked by dogs, burned with electric batons. Another had horse’s hair, that is the hard, brittle hair of an animal, inserted into his penis. And through all this, do you know what they were forced to wear on their heads, Mr. Richards? Metal helmets. Helmets that covered their eyes. And why? To create disorientation? To weigh them down? No. Ansary later learned from another prisoner that there had been an instance when an inmate had been so badly tortured, had been in so much pain, that he had actually beaten his own head against a radiator in an attempt to take his own life.
The phone rang beside the bed. Joe was shaken from his semi-hypnotic state and tore off the headphones, as if somebody had burst into the room.
“Joe?”
It was Megan. He looked at his watch. “Are you OK?”
“Did I wake you?”
He stopped the playback. “No. It’s almost two. What’s happening? Are you all right?”
“I can’t sleep,” she said.
He was still under the spell of the recording, yet the prospect of seeing her again was immediately enticing. He was thirsty and stood up off the bed. “I’m wide awake,” he said. “Do you want to come over?”
“Would that be OK?”
They had spent two of the previous three nights together, always at the hotel, always sleeping late into the morning. Increasingly, Joe was living on London time. That was what Shanghai did to you. “I have to check out tomorrow,” he said. “I have to move into my new apartment. But I’d love to see you.”
I have often wondered if Joe had Megan vetted. He was never prepared to say. When a spy meets a strange girl in a strange restaurant, and that girl turns out to be as forthcoming as Megan, the spy has a right to feel suspicious. Why was she calling him at two o’clock in the morning? Why was it so important to Megan that they spend the night together? Joe was certain that she was legitimate, but as soon as he had hung up the phone, he removed the CD from the laptop and placed it in the small black safe located in the main wardrobe of his room. Afterwards, switching on the hot water in both the bath and shower, he created a room of steam to defeat the hotel fire alarm and burned the pages of Waterfield’s report in the sink.
You could never be too careful. You never knew who you were dealing with.
37
Joe checked out the following morning.
His two-bedroomed apartment was part of a colonial art-deco complex set back from a dusty, tree-lined avenue in the heart of the French Concession. The contrast with the bustle and noise of Nanjing Road was stark: in Joe’s new neighbourhood, traffic was more subdued and there was scarcely a high-rise in sight. The pace of life also slowed to a crawl: two blocks from his front door a carpenter sold lutes and handmade violins. All along the street middle-aged Chinese men played majiang and slumbered through long afternoons in the backs of wooden carts. From the window of his new kitchen Joe could hear birdsong and neighbourhood conversations. He was within walking distance of several small European-style cafes, as well as the Shanghai Library, the Ding Xiang Gardens and-more by accident than design-the main building of the Consulate General of the United States of America. The apartment was already fully furnished, with shelves of paperback books, broadband wireless internet, IKEA pictures on the walls and spices in the cupboards. Joe didn’t need to buy sheets or pillows, lightbulbs or soap: everything was already in place. It must have felt like stepping into another person’s life.
Two days after checking out of the hotel he went shopping for groceries in Xiangyang Market. It was raining heavily and Joe was carrying an umbrella as well as a briefcase full of documents from Quayler. The market, which has since been razed to the ground to make way for a shopping centre, was a crowded sea of stalls protected only by flimsy tarpaulin coverings which dripped water onto the ground. Butchers in white chef’s hats took meat cleavers to joints of pork and chicken and failed to meet Joe’s eye when he paid for them. At a vegetable stall he bought radishes and husks of white corn, beetroot for homemade borscht, as well as mangoes, bananas and apples to eat
