Typhoon (22 page)

Cicadas were clacking in the humid night. She stared directly into Miles’s eyes. If there had been less at stake, if he could have been completely sure of how she would respond, he would have placed his hands around her waist and pulled her body towards his.

“How else do you like being told that you’re beautiful?”

This was too much. Isabella felt the force of Miles’s desire and it flooded her, but knew that she had no choice but to stop him overstepping the mark. Their time would come. “It was lovely to see you, Miles,” she said, and in an instant she was poised and elegant and British. “Thank you so much for all your help.” Every word closed him out. They stumbled, off-balance, into a brief cheek kiss. “I’ve got amazing notes,” she said. “The guys are going to love me.”

The driver of the cab opened the back door of the vehicle using the automatic lever beside his seat. It swung open quickly on its hinge, almost knocking Isabella over.

“Hey, buddy!”

“It’s all right.” Isabella defused the situation by leaning into the taxi and showing the driver that she was unhurt. Then she climbed inside and wound down the window.

“What are you doing for the handover?”

“Parties all over town,” he said.

“Want to get together?” Isabella did not want to leave him with the feeling that she had rejected him, but the invitation was intended to imply that she would be with Joe. What other choice did she have?

“Sure. It’d be great to hook up with you guys.” Miles recognized that wherever Joe and Isabella ended up for
wui gwai
, Billy Chen would have to follow. It was useful to know their plans. “I have to go to a dinner at the American Chamber of Commerce on the 28th. Otherwise I’m pretty much free.”

“Well, there’s a big party in Lan Kwai Fong on the night of the 29th. Let’s go to that.”

“Good.”

The cab was sliding down the hill as Isabella leaned out of the window, smiling as she looked up at the low night sky. “It’ll probably rain,” she said, leaving Miles with a memory of her curled dark hair, those eyes that tricked and lured him. “It’ll probably rain.”

Which, of course,
famously, it did.

And not just any old rain. A monsoon that made the red dye in Lance Corporal Angus Anderson’s Black Watch hackle run pink like a child’s watercolour as he marched in the gala parade. Rain that soaked the crisp white tunic of the lone bugler who played the “Last Post” as the standard was lowered over Government House for the final time. Rain that tried to drown out every solemn, stubborn word of Prince Charles’s speech to the “appalling old Chinese waxworks” at HMS
Tamar
. And rain that stained the shoulders of Governor Christopher Francis Patten’s already crumpled blue suit as he aimed one final shot across China’s bows.

“As British administration ends, we are, I believe, entitled to say that our own nation’s contribution here was to provide the scaffolding that enabled the people of Hong Kong to ascend,” he said. Huddled under complimentary umbrellas beneath a lightless, granite sky, 9,000 Chinese and expatriate spectators looked on. “This is a Chinese city, a
very
Chinese city, with British characteristics. No dependent territory has been left more prosperous, none with such a rich texture and fabric of civil society. Now Hong Kong people are to run Hong Kong. That is the promise. And that is the unshakeable destiny.”

Watching the live broadcast on television from a suite in the American consulate, Miles Coolidge turned to Dave Boyle of the Visa Section and said, “In other words, Beijing can go fuck itself.”

“One country, two systems,” Boyle replied.

“Exactly.”

Miles watched as Patten reluctantly returned to the dais to accept the thunderous applause of his most loyal subjects.

“You know that can’t be easy,” he said.

“What can’t?”

“Clapping. Most of the people out there are holding umbrellas. You gotta really commit if you want to clap while you’re holding an umbrella.”

In common with about three-quarters of the international community in Hong Kong, Boyle had been drunk for the better part of five days. Yet the character of Patten’s conduct in these moments triggered something in his melancholy soul. When the governor returned to his seat and briefly bowed his head, as if holding back tears and searching for renewed strength within himself to cope with the magnitude of the occasion, the man from the Visa Section choked up.

“When a great man leaves, the heavens open,” he said, as the pitiless rain sliced across the parade ground. A boozy sleeplessness formed a knot in his Adam’s apple.

“What’s that?”

“A Chinese proverb,” Boyle replied.

In different circumstances, Miles would have poured scorn on this.
You wanna hear another Chinese proverb? It takes many days of rain to wash away 150 years of shame.
But he thought better of it. Guys in the Visa Section weren’t worth the trouble. Instead he said, “So you’re a fan of Fat Pang, are you?”

“Fat Pang” was the affectionate nickname that Patten had been given by the people of Hong Kong who, over a period of five years, had noted his fondness for Cantonese food, and for custard tarts in particular.

“He did his best,” Boyle replied.

Less than a kilometre away, David Waterfield raised his own silent toast to the waterlogged sunset of the British Empire and squeezed his wife’s hand. They had gathered at the Hong Kong Club on Chater Road to see out the final hours of colonial rule at a black-tie event attended by several hundred of the island’s business and diplomatic elite. When the post-
Tamar
fireworks began to explode over Victoria Harbour at around 8:30 p.m. there was a brief moment of panic when the glass walls of the club became so thick with condensation that a waiter had to be dispatched to the top of a ladder to wipe them clean. Thereafter, as the night sky erupted in umbrellas of light and fire, the assembled guests were afforded a clear view of proceedings.

“Beautiful,” Waterfield muttered. “Beautiful. God we do this sort of thing well.” Then he realized that somebody was missing. “Have you seen Joe Lennox at all this evening?” he asked his wife.

“No, darling” she replied. “Have you?”

The Waterfields had turned down the most sought-after and prestigious invitation of 30 June, the official handover dinner at the newly completed Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre. Kenneth Lenan, on the other hand, had lobbied long and hard for his place at table. Waterfield’s number two believed that it was his right to break bread with the great and the good, to exchange knowing glances with Douglas Hurd and Sir Geoffrey Howe, to get a decent look at the all-new, all-smiling Tony Blair, and to witness Baroness Thatcher in the misery of her perpetual retirement. For some reason the menu for the event had been one of the most closely guarded secrets in the colony, but as Lenan chewed on his flavourless smoked salmon and sawed into a stuffed breast of chicken, he reflected that he could have eaten better at the airport. His suit was wet through from the celebrations at HMS
Tamar
and he was intensely bored by the property developer making conversation to his left. All anybody could talk about was the weather. Wasn’t it
symbolic
? Wasn’t it just a
disaster
? The only disaster, he reckoned, was that he had been forced to stand for over an hour in the shivering, air-conditioned hall while an international array of bored, exhausted VIPs had gradually made their way into dinner. The champagne had been over-chilled and, several times, the recently completed roof had dripped water onto his head.

Sovereignty was officially transferred at midnight in a ceremony at the Convention Centre which felt sterile and anti-climactic. The Union Jack came down, the flag of China went up, and then the international array of bored, exhausted VIPs made their way back to their $10,000-a-night suites at the Mandarin Oriental. Twelve hundred miles away, in Tiananmen Square, a specially invited crowd of the Party faithful consigned 150 years of shame and humiliation at the hands of the British to the dustbin of history, celebrating the safe return of their beloved Hong Kong with a fireworks display that shook the foundations of the Forbidden City. Meanwhile, the Royal Yacht
Britannia
slipped her moorings in Central and embarked on a final journey home, heading eastward through the Lei Yue Mun gap bearing a heavy cargo of grieving royals and weeping Patten daughters. The governor himself gave a triumphant, neo-Nixonian wave on the port-side railing and then was gone, disappearing into the bowels of the ship.

It was a chaotic night to be a journalist, fighting against deadlines and rain. Whenever I had a spare moment I tried—unsuccessfully—to reach Joe on his mobile, but neither he nor Isabella were taking calls. As Tung Chee Hwa was being sworn in as the first elected Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, I went down to the democracy rally in Central Square which had begun at about 10:30 p.m. and which straddled the midnight handover. Most of those taking part relished the irony that by the time the gathering had dispersed, at around 1:30 a.m., their right to public protest had effectively been stripped away by Beijing. They could now be arrested and locked up for promoting, say, an independent Eastern Turkestan, or for criticizing elements of Chinese government policy. Twenty-one armoured personnel carriers and 4,000 PLA troops had rolled over the border into the New Territories at midnight to be welcomed by stage-managed villagers waving flags and throwing flowers, smiles decorating their faces in spite of the wind and incessant rain. Hong Kong’s police officers had already removed their colonial insignias and replaced them with the gold star of China. British coats of arms had been taken down from government buildings and the royal emblem quietly detached from the governor’s Rolls-Royce. As Martin Lee, the founding chairman of the Hong Kong Demo cratic Party, finished a speech in front of the Legislative Council building in which he had called on Chinese President Jiang Zemin to respect the rights of the people of Hong Kong, a dry-witted wag from the
Daily Telegraph
, standing directly behind me, muttered, “That’ll be the last we see of him for a while. See you in the gulag, Marty,” and a bevy of hacks duly laughed in unison. It was depressing stuff. All of us were tired and wet and hot, and it felt as though something decent and hopeful had come to an end.

As a sworn enemy of the Communist Party, Ansary Tursun took little interest in the handover celebrations. At around nine o’clock, on what was a typically warm summer evening in Urumqi, he left his parents’ apartment on Tuan Jie Lu and made his way to the bazaar at Shanxi Hangzi. He walked through the narrow channels of the market, past stalls selling vegetables, sweaters, nuts and dried fruit, occasionally stopping to sift through a table of cassettes or to make brief conversation with Uighur friends from the neighbourhood. The market was crowded and noisy: Uighur songs competed with the new popular music from India and combined with the shouts and arguments of the stallholders to create a discordant yet somehow innocuous din. Large crowds were gathered around television screens showing highlights of the fireworks display over Victoria Harbour.

At the western edge of the market, Ansary became aware of a smell that he loved—pieces of lamb being grilled on a
kavabtan
. As it always did, the odour of cumin and meat and slow-burning charcoal triggered his appetite and he ordered
kavab
and
nan
from a young man who took his responsibilities as a chef so seriously that he barely spoke a word in conversation. As a treat, Ansary also purchased a bottle of
musdek piva
, opening it with his teeth and taking a first, thirst-quenching slug of lager before his lamb had finished cooking.

In order to eat, he was obliged to sit at one of the small wooden tables beside the
kavabtan
, because his left arm had still not recovered sufficiently from the period of solitary confinement at Lucaogu prison. Ansary had been hung from a wall by his left arm and leg for more than twenty-four hours; as a result, he could not stand up while holding both the
kavab
and the bottle of beer. Ansary had adjusted quickly to the constraints of a temporary injury and rarely reflected on the injustice of his physical condition; his scars were purely psychological. As he ate, placing his food on the table in order to drink the ice-cold beer, he made conversation with the mother of the young man who had served him, a middle-aged woman who wore a black skirt, a headscarf, a bright red jacket and a pair of thick, knee-length socks in which she kept the stall’s money. When she was not threading chunks of marinated lamb onto metal skewers with practised efficiency, she was scrabbling around inside the socks trying to find change for a customer.

It was only when Ansary turned to observe an argument between two cloth tradesmen at a neighbouring stall that he realized he was sitting no more than a stone’s throw from Abdul Bary. Abdul had been one of Ansary’s fellow prisoners at Lucaogu. A former student of Professor Wang Kaixuan at the University of Xinjiang, Abdul had spoken passionately in prison of his desire to topple the provincial government in Xinjiang. The two men had been released on the same day and had recovered from their ordeal at Wang’s apartment, under pretence of paying their respects for the death of his son, Wang Bin.

Aware that Abdul might be under surveillance, Ansary made no attempt to communicate with him, but calculated that his appearance was more than coincidence. He tried to watch him as carefully as possible. He was buying fruit at a nearby stall. Was he trying to tell him something with his body language? Did he want Ansary to follow him to a new location, or even to pretend that they had accidentally bumped into one another? It was not clear. Yet it would be extremely dangerous for them to be observed—or, worse, photographed—by Chinese surveillance officers or by informers within the Uighur community. The authorities needed only the slightest provocation, backed up by scant evidence, to prosecute Uighur men for treasonable activities.