Jason did it in Sri Lanka and got away with it, brought home the product. Tomlin did it in Costa Rica, got in and got out and left a chief of police hanging from his feet in a brothel. Cartwright did it in Tokyo, took on their mafiosi and got a British national home and followed on with a smashed hip and his nerves like a bombed piano — but they were the success stories, the ones we pass around in the Caff between missions to remind ourselves how good we are at this game, how successful, how intrepid, as an antidote to the fear of going out again. There are also the others, the other stories, which are not passed around in the Caff — Brockley tried the get-in-their-way thing in Athens and the colonels had him shot at dawn; Fairchild tried it in Calcutta and went out wearing a garotte; Myers tried it in Damascus and lasted three days and died mad, I was there in the signals room when the DIF reported through a drug runner's radio: executive seized, believed under torture, am pulling out.
So that is the way it is, it sometimes works and then you're in spooks' heaven and hallowed by the name around the tea-slopped tables in the Caff, but it very often doesn't work and you can end up in the scuppers of some stinking hulk with your throat cut or spread-eagled on a trash heap with their heavy bone-white beaks picking at the still-warm flesh, I don't mean, I do not mean to sound discouraging, my good friend, but that, as I say, is the way it is, we must keep our fingers crossed and from the depths of the timorous soul pluck up a prayer that this time it will work for us. She had taken a step, had turned again and was coming between the tables, coughing in the smoke, and I angled my head to make sure she'd recognize me and she slowed at once, almost tripping, then went on past my table without looking at me again, her voice just loud enough for me to catch.
'You are in great danger.'
Swallowed some more tea, didn't actually need telling of course but she'd meant well, could have saved me as she'd done before in the other place, went out, she went out through the wide-open doorway into the street.
He stayed ten minutes, the young Oriental in black leather, then put some money down and left the table, moving along the bar on the far side without coming anywhere near me, though the path Su-May had taken was the more direct. So I had made contact, and must follow up.
Put five yen on the table, the generosity of a man with nothing to lose, got up and went to the door and found the smoke drifting into the sunlit street and some policemen pulling up in a jeep, it looked in fact as if the whole place was on fire, turned my face away and followed the man in black.
He wouldn't carry a gun; the police were fussy here, pick you up on the spot and search you and he'd known that. But he was a senior belt, by his walk, and that was far more dangerous. And he wouldn't be alone: he was walking alone toward the marketplace, but there would be others not far away; this was already a mobile trap they'd got me in — it hadn't, you see, failed; it never does.
They wouldn't like it in London.
Executive in immediate contact with opposition and fully compromised.
It's the way they say things on the signal boards, and I suppose it works, as a kind of shorthand. They wouldn't know, of course, for a while; they'd have to wait until I'd surfaced and reported my new position to Pepperidge, or had not of course reported at all, because of the bone-white-beaks thing they so charmingly call sky-burial.
How does it feel to have the left eye plucked from the socket and carried aloft, and then the right, carried aloft by those great black wings and digested in the airy pathways of their going, the eyes and the tongue and the genitals and then the whole thing buried in the sky with only the skeleton left down there, grinning at its fate, how does it feel? But we must not be morbid, we must keep on walking, keep up a steady pace and not bump into any monks, they're everywhere, there must surely be redemption for this doomed spook in a place so holy, turning to the right, into an alleyway, the man in black leather, and I followed him.
The sun beat down from a brazen sky and the smells from an apothecary's stall were rich and strange as I passed through them; they grind the bones of tigers here, and bottle the ashes of snakes and sea horses, a different smell, you will acknowledge, than your good old milk of magnesia.
I walked into the alleyway and in a moment they followed, the others, but simply kept station, not crowding me, and I felt pleased, as well as frightened, horribly frightened, pleased that even though I might never get out of this alive at least I had decided to make a final effort and get in their way, not for his sake, Xingyu's, not for the future of the Chinese people or the stock market in Hong Kong but of course from pride, the stinking pride of the professional, that and vanity, the constant itch to take on dangerous things to prove not that I can do them but won't die in the doing, that personal and very special game of hide-and-seek you play in the shadows, so that when the grim reaper comes you can take him by surprise and with his own dread scythe cut him asunder.
There were stray dogs here in the alley, mangy and hollow-flanked, their eyes milky, and one of them, dirty white with brown patches, backed off from me as I went down on my knees and stayed like that for a moment and then fell prostrate like the monks I'd seen, the dog coming close now and sniffing at me as I wondered if I was facing the east as I should be, prone on the ground like this.
Chapter 22: Mad
Naked, she was more slender than I'd imagined.
It had been the clothes she'd worn, thick and padded against the cold, that had made her look almost dumpy, in spite of her small face. Sitting like this in the soft light of the lamp she had the stillness of an ivory figurine, one arm resting across her raised knee, her dark eyes watching me and her mouth pensive, her throat shadowed, flawless, a tuft of silken black hair curling from her armpit, her small breasts high on her chest, their nipples erect in the centre of their large ochre-coloured aureoles. She hadn't spoken since we'd come in here.
For a time I just let my eyes take in the beauty of her face, her body, and then I began feeling restless because it wasn't enough, and I put my hand on her sharp, delicate shoulder blade and she came against me at once, but I couldn't see her so clearly now because they'd taken one of my eyes, the shadows of their great wings falling across her body, and then I was sightless, and my tongue flared and they began tearing at my genitals and I think I called out, though there wasn't any pain, just a feeling of surprise that I knew what it was like now, to be buried in the sky.
'Ta kuai xingle.'
Indefinable scents in the air, and coloured lights drifting against the walls, casting rainbows across the huge gold man.
'Yao wo qu jao ta ma?'
No, coloured lights not drifting anywhere, it was when I'd turned my head; the lights weren't moving.
'Shi.'
The huge gold man sat very still. I'd seen one as big as this before, in the monastery. They were all over the place, all sizes.
'Water.'
I heard sandals scuffing across the floor, opened my eyes again — the lids had closed without my knowing it — saw the head and shoulders of a man going through a doorway, I must be lying on my back.
'Here.'
A face near me, creased into fine lines, a dark mole on the temple just above the eye, reflections throwing light across it, reflections from the glass of water.
A stray thought, quick as a spark — he'd known I would be thirsty: the water had been here. He wasn't the man who'd gone through the arched doorway.
'Thank you.'
'Drink.'
Yes, thirsty.
'Where's the dog?'
He frowned, shaking his head, tugging his robes tighter around his thin body. Perhaps he didn't know about the dog, the dirty white one with the brown patch.