“If you say so. I think he fancies you.”
“Simon, please. You’re not helping. I feel very uncomfortable in this dress. And these shoes. I can hardly walk.”
“You look adorable. When are you meeting him?”
“He’s picking me up downstairs in ten minutes. What are your plans?”
“I thought I might take a stroll down the Bund.” He shrugs. “Perhaps look in somewhere for a cocktail.”
“Well, be good. I’m going to wait downstairs.”
“Have fun.”
She throws him a sardonic glance, and teetering a little in her new Lilian Zhang cocktail dress and Mary Ching stilettos—the prospect of submitting the expenses claim makes her blood run cold—runs a last check in the mirror. She looks, she’s forced to admit, pretty good. The hotel hairdresser’s even magicked her mousy hair into something resembling a French roll.
“You don’t think the make-up’s too much?”
“No! Now go.”
The invitation came as a surprise, to say the least. The meeting in the Peninsula suite had more or less stalled after Eve’s questioning of Jin Qiang. Spies, even among themselves, are highly disinclined to admit that they actively engage in spying. Following a further hour of discussion of the murder of Zhang Lei, in the course of which Eve handed over a prepared dossier about the investigation of the Kedrin murder, Jin brought the meeting to a halt and ushered her and Simon down to the lobby.
There, amid the art deco grandeur, the same cast of business types appeared to be engaged in the same muted conversations. As they shook hands beneath the pillared portico, Jin hesitated. “Mrs. Polastri, I’d very much like to show you something of Shanghai. Are you by any chance free this evening?”
“I am,” she said, surprised.
“Excellent. I’ll call for you at your hotel at eight o’clock.”
She opened her mouth to thank him, but he was already gliding soundlessly away.
He arrives at 8 p.m. precisely. He’s on a scooter, wearing a sharp black suit and open-necked white shirt, and looks a very different man from the cautious intelligence officer Eve met just hours earlier.
“Mrs. Polastri, you look… spectacular.” With a courtly smile he hands her a tiny bouquet of fresh violets, tied with a silk ribbon.
Eve is enchanted, and thinking of Niko teaching GCSE maths to a class of bored teenagers half a world away, she feels a stab of guilt. Thanking Jin, she wraps the dewy violets in a tissue and places them in her bag.
“Ready?” he asks, passing her a helmet.
“Ready.” She arranges herself side-saddle, as she’s seen Shanghainese women do.
They swing out into the traffic, and onto East Nanjing Road. The thoroughfare, one of Shanghai’s busiest, is gridlocked and exhaust-choked. Jin weaves the scooter deftly between the crawling vehicles and comes to a halt at a red light.
As Eve sits there, the scooter burbling beneath her, she catches sight of a striking figure walking up the pavement towards her. A young woman, poised and slender, in jeans and a black, pearl-buttoned cardigan. Dark blonde hair slicked back from fine, sharp-cut features. A subtle, sensual twist to the mouth.
Eve watches her for a moment. Has she seen that face before, or is it just déjà vu? As if sensing her stare, the woman glances back. She’s beautiful, in the way that a bird of prey is beautiful, but never has Eve encountered a gaze of such inhuman blankness. When the lights change, and the scooter lurches forward, the temperature seems to have dropped a degree or two.
Five minutes later they draw up at an intersection, outside a grand art deco building topped by a cascading neon spire. Coloured lights course up and down its antique facade. Above the portico, the word Paramount blazes into the twilight.
“You like dancing?”
“I… yes,” Eve replies. “I do, actually.”
“The Paramount is a famous landmark from the nineteen-thirties. This is where everyone came to dance. Gangsters, high society, beautiful women…”
She smiles. “You sound as if you’d like those days to return.”
He locks the scooter. “They were interesting times. But then so are these. Come.”
She accompanies him into a foyer hung with sepia photographs, and from there into a small lift that conveys them unhurriedly to the fourth floor. The dance hall is like a music box in gilt and red plush. On the stage, a middle-aged singer in a floor-length evening dress is delivering a smoky-voiced version of “Bye Bye Blackbird,” as a dozen or so couples gravely quickstep around the cantilevered dance floor.
Jin leads Eve to a side table in a booth, and orders Coca-Cola for both of them.
“Business first?” he asks.
“Business first,” she agrees, sipping the sugary drink. A couple glides wordlessly past them.
“What I tell you, you never repeat, OK?”
She shakes her head. “This conversation never took place. We talked about dancing. About nightlife in Old Shanghai.”
He moves closer to her on the banquette, and inclines his head towards hers. “Our late friend, as you know, was killed in an establishment in the Old City. He was a surgery fetishist. A masochist. We knew about this. He visited the place every six weeks or so, and paid a professional sex worker to simulate… various medical procedures. He was discreet about these visits; his colleagues knew nothing about them.”
“But not discreet enough to escape your department’s notice, evidently.”
“Evidently.”
Eve notes that Jin is, in effect, admitting that Zhang Lei was working for the state.
“So we are either looking at an organisation able to mount an extensive and long-term surveillance operation…” She hesitates. “Or one with access to information acquired by your department.”
Jin frowns. “Certainly the former. Just conceivably the latter.”
Eve nods slowly. “Either way, a sophisticated organisation with a long reach.”
“Yes. And I don’t believe it was the British, or the Americans. The economic consequences of discovery would be…”
“Catastrophic?” Eve suggests.
“Yes. That’s right.”
“So do you have any other ideas for who might be responsible?”
“Right now, not really, although one can never discount a Russian connection, especially if, as you suggest, the same organisation is responsible for the death of Viktor Kedrin. So we’re trying very hard to find out more about the woman they sent. We know that she entered by the back stairway, overpowered the sex worker who calls herself Nurse Wu, who remembers nothing beyond the fact that her attacker was a woman, and then eliminated our friend by means of carbon monoxide poisoning.”
“You’re sure that was the cause of death? It couldn’t have been an accident on the part of this nurse person? After all, she wasn’t qualified to administer surgical gas or anything of the sort, surely.”
“The only gas she ever gave her ‘patients’ was pure oxygen. We tested all the tanks there. And as it happens, as well as being a part-time sex worker she was also a trained nurse, who worked in a private medical facility in Pudong. So she knew what she was doing. And the symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning are unmistakable.”
“Cherry-red lips and skin?”
“Exactly. The pathologist was in no doubt.”
“But no sign of a CO tank, or canister?”
“No, the killer took it away with her.”
“And what makes this Wu person so sure that her attacker was a woman?”
“She remembers the feel of a woman’s breasts against her back when she was grabbed. And the hand that went over her mouth was strong, she said, but not a man’s hand.”
“She’s sure about this?”
“Very sure. And there’s a man who has a food stall on Dangfeng Road opposite the backstairs exit. He knows what the building is, and that only men come out of that door. So when he saw a woman, he remembered her.”