Typhoon (2008) Read online

  “What happened?” he said.

  “Dog,” she replied, as if that explained everything. They did not leave one another’s side for the next two hours. At dinner, seated at separate tables, they made naked eyes across the marquee as a farmer complained to Isabella about the iniquities of the Common Agricultural Policy while Joe told a yawning aunt on his left that freight forwarding involved moving “very large consignments of cargo around the world in big container ships” and that Hong Kong was “the second busiest port in Asia after Singapore,” although “both of them might soon be overtaken by Shanghai.” As soon as pudding was over he took a cup of coffee over to Isabella’s table and sat at a vacant chair beside hers. As they talked, and as he met her friends, for the first time he regretted having joined SIS. Not because the life required him to lie to this gorgeous, captivating girl, but because within four days he would be back at his desk on the other side of the world drafting CX reports on the Chinese military. Chances are he would never see Isabella again.

  Towards eleven o’clock, when the speeches were done and middle-aged fathers in red trousers had begun dancing badly to “Come on Eileen,” she simply leaned across to him and whispered in his ear, “Let’s go.” Joe had a room at a hotel three miles away but they drove back along the M40 to Isabella’s flat in Kentish Town, where they stayed in bed for two days. “We fit,” she whispered when she felt his naked body against hers for the first time, and Joe found himself adrift in a world that he had never known: a world in which he was so physically and emotionally fulfilled that he wondered why it had taken him so long to seek it out. There had been girlfriends before, of course—two at Oxford and one just a few days after he had arrived in Hong Kong—but with none of them had he experienced anything other than the brief extinguishing of a lust, or a few weeks of intense conversations about the Cultural Revolution followed by borderline pointless sex in his rooms at Wadham. From their first moments together Isabella intrigued and fascinated him to the point of obsession. He confessed to me that he was already planning their lives together after spending just twenty-four hours in her flat. Joe Lennox had always been a decisive animal, and Joe Lennox had decided that he was in love.

  On the Monday night he drove back to his hotel in Hampshire, settled the bill, returned to London and took Isabella for dinner at Mon Plaisir, a French restaurant he loved in Covent Garden. They ate French onion soup, steak tartare and confit of duck and drank two bottles of Hermitage Cave de Tain. Over balloons of Delamain—he loved it that she treated alcohol like a soft drink—Isabella asked him about Hong Kong.

  “What do you want to know?” he said.

  “Anything. Tell me about the people you work with. Tell me what Joe Lennox does when he gets up in the morning.”

  He was aware that the questions formed part of an ongoing interview. Should I share my life with you? Do you deserve my future? Not once in the two days they had spent together had the subject of the distance that would soon separate them been broached with any seriousness. Yet Joe felt that he had a chance of winning Isabella round, of persuading her to leave London and of joining him in Hong Kong. It was fantasy, of course, not much more than a pipe dream, but something in her eyes persuaded him to pursue it. He did not want what they had shared to be thrown away on account of geography.

  So he would paint a picture of life in Hong Kong that was vivid and enticing. He would lure her to the East. But how to do so without resorting to the truth? It occurred to him that if he told Isabella that he was a spy, the game would probably be over. Chances were she would join him on the next flight out to Kowloon. What girl could resist? But honesty for the NOC was not an option. He had to improvise, he had to work around the lie.

  “What do I do in the morning?” he said. “I drink strong black coffee, say three Hail Marys and listen to the World Service.”

  “I’d noticed,” she said. “Then what?”

  “Then I go to work.”

  “And what does that involve?” Isabella had long, dark hair and it curled across her face as she spoke. “Do you have your own office? Do you work down at the docks? Are there secretaries there who lust after you, the quiet, mysterious Englishman?”

  Joe thought about Judy Heppner and smiled. “No, there’s just me and Ted and Ted’s wife, Judy. We’re based in a small office in Central. If I was to tell you the whole story you’d probably disintegrate with boredom.”

  “Are you bored by it?”

  “No, but I definitely see it as a stepping stone. If I play my cards right there’ll be jobs that I can apply for at Swire’s or Jardine Matheson in a year or six months, something with a bit more responsibility, something with better pay. After university, I just wanted to get the hell out of London. Hong Kong seemed to fit the bill.”

  “So you like it out there?”

  “I love it out there.” Now he had to sell it. “I’ve only been away a few months but already it feels like home. I’ve always been fascinated by the crowds and the noise and the smells of Asia, the chaos just round the corner. It’s so different to what I’ve grown up with, so liberating. I love the fact that when I leave my apartment building I’m walking out into a completely alien environment, a stranger in a strange land. Hong Kong is a British colony, has been for over ninety years, but in a strange way you feel we have no place there, no role to play.” If David Waterfield could hear this, he’d have a heart attack. “Every face, every street sign, every dog and chicken and child scurrying in the back streets is Chinese. What were the British doing there all that time?”

  “More,” Isabella whispered, looking at him over her glass with a gaze that almost drowned him. “Tell me more.”

  He stole one of her cigarettes. “Well, at night, on a whim, you can board the ferry at Shun Tak and be playing blackjack at the Lisboa Casino in Macau within a couple of hours. At weekends you can go clubbing in Lan Kwai Fong or head out to Happy Valley and eat fish and chips in the Members Enclosure and lose your week’s salary on a horse you never heard of. And the food is incredible, absolutely incredible. Dim sum, char siu restaurants, the freshest sushi outside of Japan, amazing curries, outdoor restaurants on Lamma Island where you point at a fish in a tank and ten minutes later it’s lying grilled on a plate in front of you.”

  He knew that he was winning her over. In some ways it was too easy. Isabella worked all week in an art gallery on Albemarle Street, an intelligent, overqualified woman sitting behind a desk eight hours a day reading Tolstoy and Jilly Cooper, waiting to work her charms on the one Lebanese construction billionaire who just happened to walk in off the street to blow fifty grand on an abstract oil. It wasn’t exactly an exciting way of spending her time. What did she have to lose by moving halfway round the world to live with a man she barely knew?

  She took out a cigarette of her own and cupped Joe’s hand as he lit it. “It sounds incredible,” she said, but suddenly her face seemed to contract. Joe saw the shadow of bad news colour her eyes and felt as if it was all about to slip away. “There’s something I should have told you.”

  Of course. This was too much of a good thing for it to end any other way. You meet a beautiful woman at a wedding, you find out she’s terminally ill, married, or moving to Istanbul. The wine and the rich food swelled up inside him and he was surprised by how anxious he felt, how betrayed. What are you going to tell me? What’s your secret?

  “I have a boyfriend.”

  It should have been the hammer blow, the deal-closer, and Isabella was instantly searching Joe’s face for a reaction. Somehow she managed to assemble an expression that was both obstinate and ashamed at the same time. But he found that he was not as surprised as he might have been, discovering a response to her confession which was as smart and effective as anything he might have mustered in his counter-life as a spy.

  “You don’t any more.”

  And that sealed it. A stream of smoke emerged from Isabella’s lips like a last breath and she smiled with the pleasure of his reply. It had convic
tion. It had style. Right now that was all she was looking for.

  “It’s not that simple,” she said. But of course it was. It was simply a question of breaking another man’s heart. “We’ve been together for two years. It’s not something I can just throw away. He needs me. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about him before.”

  “That’s OK,” Joe said. I have lied to you, so it’s only fair that you should have lied to me. “What’s his name?”

  “Anthony.”

  “Is he married?”

  This was just a shot in the dark, but by coincidence he had stumbled on the truth. Isabella looked amazed.

  “How did you know?”

  “Instinct,” he said.

  “Yes, he is married. Or was.” Involuntarily she touched her face, covering her mouth as if ashamed by the role she had played in this. “He’s separated now. With two teenage children …”

  “… who hate you.”

  She laughed. “Who hate me.”

  In the wake of this, a look passed between them which told Joe everything that he needed to know. So much of life happens in the space between words. She will leave London, he thought. She’s going to follow me to the East. He ran his fingers across Isabella’s wrists and she closed her eyes.

  That night, drunk and wrapped in each other’s bodies in the Christmas chill of Kentish Town, she whispered: “I want to be with you, Joe. I want to come with you to Hong Kong,” and it was all he could do to say, “Then be with me, then come with me,” before the gift of her skin silenced him. Then he thought of Anthony and imagined what she would say to him, how things would end between them, and Joe was surprised because he felt pity for a man he had never known. Perhaps he realized, even then, that to lose a woman like Isabella Aubert, to be cast aside by her, would be something from which a man might never recover.

  5

  THE HOUSE OF A THOUSAND ARSEHOLES

  Waterfield wasn’t happy about it.

  Closing the door of his office, eight floors above Joe’s in Jardine House, he turned to Kenneth Lenan and began to shout.

  “Who the fuck is Isabella Aubert and what the fuck is she doing flying eight thousand miles to play house with RUN?”

  “RUN” was the cryptonym the Office used for Joe to safeguard against Chinese eyes and ears. The House of a Thousand Arseholes was swept every fourteen days, but in a crowded little colony of over six million people you never knew who might be listening in.

  “The surname is French,” Lenan replied, “but the passport is British.”

  “Is that right? Well, my mother had a cat once. Siamese, but it looked like Clive James. I want her checked out. I want to make sure one of our best men in Hong Kong isn’t about to chuck in his entire career because some agent of the DGSE flashed her knickers at him.”

  The ever-dependable Lenan had anticipated such a reaction. As a young SIS officer in the sixties, David Waterfield had seen careers crippled by Blake and Philby. His point of vulnerability was the mole at the heart of the Service. Lenan consoled him.

  “I’ve already taken care of it.”

  “What do you mean, you’ve already taken care of it?” He frowned. “Is she not coming? Have they split up?”

  “No, she’s coming, sir. But London have vetted. Not to the level of EPV, but the girl looks fine.”

  Lenan removed a piece of paper from the inside pocket of his jacket, unfolded it and began to improvise from the text: “Isabella Aubert. Born Marseilles, February 1973. Roman Catholic. Father Eduard Aubert, French national, insurance broker in Kensington for most of his working life. Womanizer, inherited wealth, died of cancer ten years ago, aged sixty-eight. Mother English, Antonia Chapman. ‘Good stock,’ I think they call it. Worked as a model before marrying Aubert in 1971. Part-time artist now, never remarried, lives in Dorset, large house, two Labradors, Aga, etcetera. Isabella has a brother, Gavin, both of them privately educated, Gavin at Radley, Isabella at Downe House. The former lives in Seattle, gay, works in computer technology. Isabella spent a year between school and university volunteering at a Romanian orphanage. According to one friend the experience ‘completely changed her.’ We don’t exactly know how or why at this stage. She didn’t adopt one of the children, if that’s the point the friend was getting at. Then she matriculates at Trinity Dublin in the autumn of ‘92, hates it, drops out after six weeks. According to the same friend she now goes ‘off the rails for a bit,’ heads out to Ibiza, works on the door at a nightclub for two summers, then meets Anthony Charles Ellroy, advertising creative, at a dinner party in London. Ellroy is forty-two, mid-life crisis, married with two kids. Leaves his wife for Isabella, who by now is working for a friend of her mother’s at an art gallery in Green Park. Would you like me to keep going?”

  “Ibiza,” Waterfield muttered. “What’s that? Ecstasy? Rave scene? Have you checked if she’s run up a criminal record with the Guardia Civil?”

  “Clean as a whistle. A few parking tickets. Overdraft. That’s it.”

  “Nothing at all suspicious?” Waterfield looked out of the window at the half-finished shell of IFC, the vast skyscraper, almost twice the height of the Bank of China, which would soon dominate the Hong Kong skyline. He held a particular affection for Joe and was concerned that, for all his undoubted qualities, he was still a young man possibly prone to making a young man’s mistakes. “No contact with liaison during this stint in Romania, for instance?” he said. “No particular reason why she chucks in the degree?”

  “I could certainly have those things looked at in greater detail.”

  “Fine. Good.” Waterfield waved a hand in the air. “And I’ll have a word with him when the dust has settled. Arrange to meet her in person. What does she look like?”

  “Pretty,” Lenan said, with his typical gift for understatement. “Dark, French looks, splash of the English countryside. Good skin. Bit of mystery there, bit of poise. Pretty.”

  6

  COUSIN MILES

  It wasn’t a bad description, although it didn’t capture Isabella’s smile, which was often wry and mischievous, as if she had set herself from a young age to enjoy life, for fear that any alternative approach would leave her contemplating the source of the melancholy that ebbed in her soul like a tide. Nor did it suggest the enthusiasm with which she embraced life in those first few weeks in Hong Kong, aware that she could captivate both men and women as much with her personality as with her remarkable physical beauty. For such a young woman, Isabella was very sure of herself, perhaps overly so, and I certainly heard enough catty remarks down the years to suggest that her particular brand of self-confidence wasn’t to everyone’s taste. Lenan, for example, came to feel that she was “vain” and “colossally pleased with herself,” although, like most of the stitched-up Brits in the colony, given half a chance he would have happily whisked her off to Thailand for a dirty weekend in Phuket.

  At the restaurant that night I thought she looked a little tired and Joe and I did most of the talking until Miles arrived at about half-past eight. He was wearing chinos and flip-flops and carrying an umbrella; from a distance it looked as though his white linen shirt was soaked through with sweat. On closer inspection, once he’d shaken our hands and sat himself down next to Joe, it became clear that he had recently taken a shower and I laid a private bet with myself that he’d come direct from Lily’s, his favourite massage parlour on Jaffe Road.

  “So how’s everybody doing this evening?”

  The presence of this tanned, skull-shaved Yank with his deep, imposing voice lifted our easygoing mood into something more dynamic. We were no longer three Brits enjoying a quiet beer before dinner, but acolytes at the court of Miles Coolidge of the CIA, waiting to see where he was going to take us.

  “Everybody is fine, Miles,” Joe said. “Been swimming?”

  “You’re smelling that?” he said, looking down at his shirt as a waft of shower gel made its way across the table. Isabella leaned over and did a comic sniff of his armpits. “Just came fr
om the gym,” he said. “Hot outside tonight.”

  Joe stole a glance at me. He knew as well as I did of Miles’s biweekly predilection for hand jobs, although it was something that we kept from Isabella. None of us, where girls were concerned, wanted to say too much about the venality of male sexual behaviour in the fleshpots of Hong Kong. Even if you were innocent, you were guilty by association of gender.

  Did it matter that Miles regarded Asia as his own personal playground? I have never known a man so rigorous in the satisfaction of his appetites, so comfortable in the brazenness of his behaviour and so contemptuous of the moral censure of others. He was the living, breathing antithesis of the Puritan streak in the American character. Miles Coolidge was thirty-seven, single, answerable to very few, the only child of divorced Irish-American parents, a brilliant student who had worked two jobs while studying at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, graduating summa cum laude in 1982 and applying almost immediately for a position with the Central Intelligence Agency. Most of his close friends in Hong Kong—including myself, Joe and Isabella—knew what he did for a living, though we were, of course, sworn to secrecy. He had worked, very hard and very effectively, in Angola, Berlin and Singapore before being posted to Hong Kong at almost the exact same time as Joe. He spoke fluent Mandarin, workable Cantonese, a dreadful, Americanized Spanish and decent German. He was tall and imposing and possessed that indefinable quality of self-assurance which draws beautiful women like moths to a flame. A steady procession of jaw-dropping girls—AP journalists, human rights lawyers, UN conference attendees—passed through the revolving door of his apartment in the Mid-Levels and I would be lying if I said that his success with women didn’t occasionally fill me with envy. Miles Coolidge was the Yank of your dreams and nightmares: he could be electrifying company; he could be obnoxious and vain. He could be subtle and perceptive; he could be crass and dumb. He was a friend and an enemy, an asset and a problem. He was an American.