Fragrant Harbour (24 page)

‘It must have put you in a difficult position,’ she said politely, formally, when I finished.

‘That’s hardly the point, Maria,’ I said. ‘The thing is, what are you going to do? First he gets bail, which shows just how much power he’s got, or just how unwilling the government is to do anything, or both, then he skips out, which means he’s out of reach, and he can do anything he likes. You’re in an exposed
position
here. He can’t be seen to lose face, and if it looks as if
someone 
could help the police against him and get away with it that makes him look weak. He won’t allow that. You’ve got to do something which gives him face, which makes it look as if you’re frightened of him. Get the Order to post you somewhere. Go to Rome and learn another language or something. Go to the Philippines and teach orphans. Go on a long retreat. I don’t know, anything – but get out of Hong Kong, you have to. Please.’

‘As you are well aware, the reasons you are giving why I, as you put it, “have to” leave Hong Kong are the precise reasons why I cannot. It’s very simple. I have no choice.’

‘This is sheer pride, Maria. It’s like suicide to stay here. Pure wilfulness. You’ve already done the courageous thing. To stay here would be a form of weakness, and, I say again, of pride.’

‘You feel free to accuse me of what we’re taught is the greatest deadly sin, merely because I am not doing what you tell me to do.’

‘Even the way you say that reeks of pride. Get down off your high horse and do the obvious bloody thing for once.’

‘You simply do not understand what is involved in this matter. You are speaking much too freely of matters about which you know nothing.’

‘I know you, and that’s the main thing. And thanks to you, as you are perfectly well aware, I also know Wo Man-Lee, and what he’s capable of doing. Maria, by staying in Hong Kong, you are leaving him with no choice. It’ll be open season on him, and
people
like him, if they can be betrayed – which is how, in their terms, they see it – and have nothing happen to the betrayer. It just doesn’t work like that.’

We were more or less shouting at each other, but at hissing level, as one does in a bitter private argument. My anger and my desire not to be overheard were soaring and parallel.

‘You forget who I am and whom I represent,’ Maria said. ‘Even if I wanted to I would not run away from Hong Kong as if it were I who was the criminal. I will not walk in the shadows for
anybody
. My Lord does not permit it.’

I had known in advance that if Maria mentioned God the chances of getting her to agree with me would be non-existent. But I kept going.

‘Don’t blame God for your own bloody-mindedness. This has nothing to do with Him. He created me as well as you, which is
something you seem to forget. I think as far as God is concerned He’d much rather you stayed alive doing your work than
pointlessly
sticking your head through the bars of a lion’s cage and daring him to eat you.’

Maria sighed and shook her head but said nothing. I could feel my anger curdling, or settling, and turning into sadness, and
perhaps
she did also.

‘What about your parishioners, the community?’ I asked, more calmly. Without a second’s pause, but without any heat, she said:

‘And I serve their interests better by absenting myself, by
running
away?’

‘If something … happens to you, nobody’s interests are served apart from Wo Man-Lee’s. Surely you can see that. If you stay put you give him an opportunity to make his point. You’re behaving like the hero of a Western, and there’s no good reason for it.’

‘And when you stayed on in Hong Kong and went to Stanley, there was a good reason for that?’ Her voice had completely changed. It was as if these words had been forced out of her by some great pressure. She sounded bitter – something I could never have imagined from her; as if this was something which had happened the previous day, and not more than a quarter of a century before. I was at a loss.

‘That was different,’ I eventually managed to say. ‘Everything about the time, the circumstances, was different. For Christ’s sake, Maria, it was a world war. I had made a promise. You know all these things. And besides, if I had come with you I might very well have ended up dead. Plenty of people lost their lives in occupied China. I can’t believe you’re bringing this up like that.’

‘Perhaps you would believe it more easily if you had a real
conception
of what those times had been like for me. If you had known that, I do not think you could have left.’

This was such an utterly outrageous thing to say that I couldn’t think of a reply. There was no point in taking this any further. We sat in silence for a while.

‘There’s going to be a judicial inquiry,’ Maria said, still
sounding
bitter, or at least sarcastic, but mercifully not directing the feeling at me. ‘It has already been announced.’

‘That’s something.’

‘Is it? I suspect not. There will be the usual cloud of words and determination to conceal unpleasant realities with a fog of British noble intentions and hypocrisy.’

‘But all sorts of things will surely come out.’ She shook her head. I made a last try:

‘You must see reason about this, Maria. It doesn’t make sense to stay. Look at it this way: Wo has left the territory and will never be able to come back, not with this hanging over him and having jumped bail. You leave the territory too. You’re quits, except he’s lost more than you, and you’re still alive.’

‘Or I could take my own life,’ she said, the bitterness back in her voice. ‘That also would be doing what they wanted.’

There might have been something more to say, but if there was, I couldn’t think of it.

‘Do you remember Fanling?’ Maria asked, much more softly.

‘Of course I do. I think of it all the time.’

She smiled. ‘Me too. I’m glad. And now you must go.’

This time I did leave.

Maria disappeared two days later. She left the mission in the morning, on her way to the Sisters’ drug-rehabilitation clinic in the Walled City. One of the other nuns, Sister Euphemia, was supposed to go with her but had an upset stomach and begged off at the last minute. A few people saw Maria on the Star Ferry, travelling second class, but she didn’t arrive at the clinic, and the police could not find anyone who saw her on Kowloon’s side. It was as though she had simply vanished.

I learned she was missing that night. Father Ignatius called and told me. I could hear in his voice that he knew not just the
immediate
news but the story which lay behind it. He told me that the police were doing everything they could and that there was
nothing
for me to do.

Maria’s disappearance was a big story for a few days, a story for a few weeks, and a memory of something scandalous for a while after that. Rumours almost immediately started to circulate about her and the Triads; not about Wo, but about her having crossed local bosses who sold drugs at street level, through her work with addicts. For about a month after she went missing I felt as if I encountered her picture on posters everywhere I looked.
It was the closest imaginable thing to being haunted. Then her face began to be posted over by more recent disappearances, until one no longer saw it anywhere.

When did I accept that she had gone missing for ever? Part of me knew as soon as I first heard that she would never be seen again. The part of me which expected the news was also able to accept it. Another part of me never accepted or understood or even believed what had happened, and still doesn’t. I still very clearly see her going around a corner in Central Market, or on the upper deck of a moving tram, or in a photograph as the page is turned in somebody else’s newspaper. But the face I see is always Maria as she was a long time ago, years even before she
vanished
.

As for the specifics of what happened, for a long time I tried not to think about them. I had nightmares, I woke up in tears, I would have times when the work of trying not to think about Maria seemed to be the only thing I was doing. So I decided to face the question and try to work out what had happened, as well as I could. This is the conclusion I reached. Because Maria would
certainly
have struggled and screamed, they had to silence her quickly and immediately, so I think they drugged her, with
chloroform
or an injection, and bundled her into a car. All this
probably
took place near the Kowloon Star Ferry terminal, perhaps while a diversion was staged somewhere nearby. Then they drove somewhere, probably in the New Territories, killed her and disposed of the body. It would all have been done with a minimum of fuss.

The inquest was held three months after she disappeared. I tried to submit the notes of my conversation with Chief Inspector Watts, but the coroner decided they were not relevant. The inquest returned an open verdict. The general opinion was that Maria had fallen foul of one of the drug addicts with whom her work brought her into such frequent contact.

Grief is the hardest emotion to describe because so much of it is numbness; it is also passive, something one undergoes rather than something one undertakes. It becomes difficult to locate oneself. When Maria went missing a part of me did too. My capacity for love, which had always seemed elusive and
equivocal
even to me, was bound up in my relationship with Maria. I discovered that after her death. I had not known it before. It is a familiar story. There is nothing original about pain.

Hatred is of course a comfort. Wo was said to dislike Taiwan greatly, and to yearn for a return to his adopted homeland. The newspapers controlled by the Wos began to run little pieces about the thinness of the case which would have been brought against Wo, and hinted about anonymous, corrupt enemies in the police force. There were occasional implications that he might return to face trial. I knew that that would never happen; the scandal of his flight had been barely containable, but that around his return would destroy the colonial administration. I liked to think of him festering in his villa outside Taipei. I hoped that he would die soon.

Beryl took a firm line with me. She was utterly furious about what had happened, saw it clearly, and talked about it with nobody but the most trusted and senior of her boys and me. At the same time she insisted on seeing what had happened as a
victory
.

‘She destroyed Wo. Wherever she is now she’s looking down on us and laughing at him. If she’d just pottered quietly off to Singapore and run an opium clinic or a leper colony or something he’d have sweated in Taiwan for a few years and then been able to come back when his brother had done enough whingeing and greased enough palms. As it is, he’s going to rot there until the day he dies.’

‘The inquest didn’t see it that way. There wasn’t a word to incriminate the Wos.’

‘Don’t talk rot, Tom, you know that’s not the way Hong Kong works. Everyone knows what happened. She forced them to go too far. She knew what she was doing.’ Then Beryl’s manner became less gung-ho. She thought for a moment. ‘I suppose, in a way, that makes it harder to bear.’

‘She was so stubborn, so bloody stubborn.’

From about a week after Maria’s disappearance I had been forcing myself to use the past tense about her.

‘She wouldn’t have wanted to go quietly,’ said Beryl.

When the mission had a service of thanksgiving for Maria, six months after she had gone missing and a few months after she had been declared legally dead, Beryl came with me. Father Ignatius had taken the lead in arranging both the legalities and the memorial. He was good at the practical, administrative side of things.

I picked Beryl up in one of the hotel cars. She was still living in the same flat she had in mid-levels, an area now being
compressed
by buildings spreading up the hill from Central. Her amah let me in, and I found Beryl in the sitting room adjusting her hat in front of the mirror with a gin and tonic on the
mantelpiece
.

‘I’m rather dreading this,’ I said by way of a greeting. Beryl shook her head to indicate that this was not how I should think. She offered her arm and we went out to the car.

The church was packed. It was the first service I had been to since the day with Austen and Cobb, and the first time I had ever been to a Catholic mass. I remember almost nothing about it except a constant wondering at who all these people were – which made me feel that the section of Maria’s life I had seen was only a tiny fragment of her whole being.

The other thing I remember is Father Ignatius’s eulogy, which was, to my amazement, at least at the start, very funny. ‘There is an English saying,’ he said in his quick Cork voice. ‘I often, in dealing with Sister Maria, and especially when an issue of
principle
was involved, or perceived to be involved’ – he smiled after the ‘perceived’, which got a chuckle – ‘I often thought it guided her conduct. The saying is: “Why be difficult, when with a little extra effort, you can be impossible?”’

He then spoke about the various aspects of her work. Much of it was news to me.

After the service there was a mêlée outside, curiously happy in its emotional texture. It was all much more of a celebration than I had braced myself for. I had offered the use of the Empire to Father Ignatius for a reception, but he had politely declined, so there were tiny sandwiches and dim sum at the main mission hall instead. As I was leaving, a tiny old European nun, bent over at thirty degrees from the vertical, came towards me on the arm of a younger Chinese sister. The younger nun was beaming. I realised that the older woman was blind.

‘Mr Stewart,’ she said.

‘Yes, Sister.’

‘You do not recognise me.’ Her accent was French.

‘Good God – Sister Benedicta, of course I recognise you.’

‘It is a sad day.’

‘Yes.’

‘She was stubborn.’

‘Yes.’

‘You had that in common.’

‘There are lots of ways in which I was Maria’s inferior, and that was one of them.’

She smiled. ‘Are you sure?’ Then she shook her head. ‘I feel too old. No one should have to outlive their children.’

Longevity can be a form of spite. It was from around now that I began looking forward to news of Wo Man-Lee’s death. The slim intent youth I had known was now an incessant smoker known to have heart trouble. He did not want to die in Taiwan.

His brother Ho-Yan did not last long. The strain of running the family business was too much for him. He died of a stroke, and Wo Man-Lee’s son, Tung-Ko, took over. He was a serious, unsmiling, charmless young man who spoke impeccable
American-accented
English thanks to his time at Harvard. It quickly became clear that he was a brilliant businessman. He ingested a chain of competing Chinese newspapers, and was said to have bought, through a subsidiary, controlling shares in one of the local
television
stations. He now owned outlets across all media and all political views. At the same time the family’s property assets
rocketed in value. He floated some of the business on the stock market, after setting up a system of nested public and private ownership through holding companies which left all control in his hands. The umbrella company was called Po Lam Holdings. From being very wealthy, the Wos now became billionaires. There was talk of Tung-Ko’s standing for Legco, the
undemocratic
advisory council which had a role in government. I hated him.

Work had helped me through difficult times in the past. As I got older I found that to be less true. My mind wandered off more, and the ability of things such as inventories, staff problems, restaurant margins, furnishing replacements, supplier price rises, and bed occupancy rates to occupy all my attention, in the way that the area under a spotlight absorbs all the light, had lessened. I missed it; as one gets older, one begins to miss one’s former appetites. Chef Ng asked if he could move from the Empire to Deep Water Bay, saying he wanted a slower pace of life and a smaller kitchen to run (though, it should go without saying, no less money). Once that would have seemed a fully fledged drama, requiring extensive deployment of tact and negotiating skills to explain to the other shareholders in the Empire that I was not effectively poaching my own staff. Now it seemed like a not especially big practical problem, solved by a couple of emollient letters. Part of me missed the drama.

One should always be careful what one wishes for. That at least does not change with age. Rathbone, the plump trustee lawyer with whom I had always had excellent working relations, asked me to come to his office one morning, for what I thought would be a routine meeting about the hotel’s accounts. In retrospect, a note of more than usual formality in the letter, and the unusual venue, his territory rather than mine, should have tipped me off, as it perhaps – to give the clever, affable man his credit – was meant to do. Rathbone’s secretary let me into his office, on a high floor of a block in Des Voeux Road with a lovely view of the
harbour
. The air conditioning was turned up high enough for him to be wearing a charcoal-coloured three-piece pinstripe suit with a watch chain.

The hotel business trains one to smell money. This is not always to do with people who have enormous amounts of it, so much as with people who move in money, theirs or others’; who
have money as their natural element. It was a smell one
encountered
more and more often in Hong Kong, and the lawyer gave off a particularly sharp whiff of it. He padded softly across the office towards me, his hand extended.

‘Tom,’ he said. ‘So good of you to come.’

We sat down on chairs in front of his desk and went briskly through the figures. All was, as I had known it would be, well. The Masterson family’s share of the profits was accruing nicely in a Hong Kong-based holding company, safe from the insatiable maw of the UK tax system.

‘Good,’ said Rathbone, closing the folder on the papers. ‘And now, I have something to convey which may prove less welcome. There is no euphemistic way of imparting this news, so I will not attempt to minimise its surprise. The Mastersons have been made a direct offer for the ownership of the hotel, based not on its
profitability
as a going concern, which I may say is, thanks to your efforts, formidable, but on its value as a property, specifically, on its potential value for demolition and redevelopment. It is a very considerable offer and, not to beat about the bush, the Mastersons have told me to use their controlling interest to accept it.’

I’m not sure if I had anything quite as discreet and identifiable as a first thought. Several notions seized me at the same time. One of them was that the prospective buyer must have found out who the family were, established that they had a controlling interest, and approached them directly without letting me know, and that couldn’t have been done by accident. Company papers did not name the Masterson family as owners – their share of the Empire Hotel belonged to the trustees. With that thought, instantly, came the realisation that Rathbone had to have been involved. I’m not sure how I was so certain; but I was. It might even have been him who set the deal up. But that was fair enough, in a way; he was supposed to look after the family’s interests, and this was without doubt an offer worth considering, even if he had generated it himself in the first place. He would be taking a cut from the
buyers
as well as his trustees’ fee. That would make sense too. It was cynical, clever, lucrative, and as long as I was happy to sell out, it left everyone ahead on the deal.

A part of my brain was running over these thoughts. Another felt at the same time a complete lack of surprise. One would have
had to be unusually stupid not to realise that the land the Empire stood on was worth a very great deal of money. Hong Kong was shooting up, buildings were being torn down and replaced with skyscrapers all the time. Because space was strictly finite,
property
values were only going to continue to rise, which meant that investment was rocketing. Beryl’s company, by her own account, had made more money in the last five years than in the previous thirty. Cooper had once asked me, ‘How long do you think you’ll hold out?’ I shrugged and said, ‘As long as the family wants me to.’ And now they didn’t want me to any more … There was a twinge of rejection in the thought. And then, mixed in with all this, an idea which was like nausea came over me. I could not keep it out of my mind. What if the buyers were the Wo family? The son was known to have a business-school interest in ‘
diversifying
’ the family empire. Property was a one-way bet in Hong Kong, as well as a notoriously good business in which to launder money. A bid for the Empire by the Wos would make perfect sense. It would also make me want to kill somebody. I would be the punchline of somebody else’s joke.

I realised that I must have been silent for about five minutes. In the context of a meeting in Rathbone’s office it was an extremely long time. I made an effort to control my voice.

‘Might I ask the identity of the buyers?’

‘They would prefer that to remain confidential, for the time being,’ Rathbone murmured. But as Chief Inspector Watts
pointed
out, I had lived in Hong Kong for too long.

‘It would be misleading of me if I gave the impression that this idea had never been mooted before,’ I said. ‘One has had
numerous
expressions of interest in the Empire on precisely this basis. Mere feelers, obviously. I usually deflect inquiries with the words “if the hotel is ever up for sale, I’ll let you know.” Of course, a
situation
in which competitive bidding was involved would be of considerable interest to your clients.’ Rathbone blinked. ‘The Mastersons, I mean, of course. I’m sure they’d regard an open auction for the property as an exciting development.’

He knew I knew. He knew I knew he knew I knew.

‘I have reasons for wanting to know who the buyers are not,’ I said, man to man, ‘much more than I need to know who they are.’

I’m not sure how much of it he got, but he got enough. His face
cleared. He moved his fountain pen on the leather desktop, which held an unmarked sheet of blotting paper.

‘The financial entities involved are European interests with an extremely optimistic medium-term view of the Hong Kong
economy
in particular and the south-east Asia sphere in general. They are using the expertise of one of the local Hongs but the
overwhelming
bulk of the capital is western European. To put it another way,’ he went on, delicately, ‘it’s no one you know.’

I could feel myself unclench. He saw that. ‘It should go without saying that the special nature of your contribution to the Empire will not go unacknowledged,’ he said. Rathbone was now
enjoying
this; he loved to please; a good deal was one from which everyone walked away richer, happier, and freshly stroked. ‘My clients know that the debt they owe you is greater than is
reflected
in your share of the enterprise as it currently stands, and intend to make a settlement when the hotel is sold which I think you will find reflects that esteem.’