The phone rang beside the bed. Joe was shaken from his semi-hypnotic state and tore off the headphones, as if somebody had burst into the room.
“Joe?”
It was Megan. He looked at his watch. “Are you OK?”
“Did I wake you?”
He stopped the playback. “No. It’s almost two. What’s happening? Are you all right?”
“I can’t sleep,” she said.
He was still under the spell of the recording, yet the prospect of seeing her again was immediately enticing. He was thirsty and stood up off the bed. “I’m wide awake,” he said. “Do you want to come over?”
“Would that be OK?”
They had spent two of the previous three nights together, always at the hotel, always sleeping late into the morning. Increasingly, Joe was living on London time. That was what Shanghai did to you. “I have to check out tomorrow,” he said. “I have to move into my new apartment. But I’d love to see you.”
I have often wondered if Joe had Megan vetted. He was never prepared to say. When a spy meets a strange girl in a strange restaurant, and that girl turns out to be as forthcoming as Megan, the spy has a right to feel suspicious. Why was she calling him at two o’clock in the morning? Why was it so important to Megan that they spend the night together? Joe was certain that she was legitimate, but as soon as he had hung up the phone, he removed the CD from the laptop and placed it in the small black safe located in the main wardrobe of his room. Afterwards, switching on the hot water in both the bath and shower, he created a room of steam to defeat the hotel fire alarm and burned the pages of Waterfield’s report in the sink.
You could never be too careful. You never knew who you were dealing with.
37
Joe checked out the following morning.
His two-bedroomed apartment was part of a colonial art-deco complex set back from a dusty, tree-lined avenue in the heart of the French Concession. The contrast with the bustle and noise of Nanjing Road was stark: in Joe’s new neighbourhood, traffic was more subdued and there was scarcely a high-rise in sight. The pace of life also slowed to a crawclass="underline" two blocks from his front door a carpenter sold lutes and handmade violins. All along the street middle-aged Chinese men played majiang and slumbered through long afternoons in the backs of wooden carts. From the window of his new kitchen Joe could hear birdsong and neighbourhood conversations. He was within walking distance of several small European-style cafes, as well as the Shanghai Library, the Ding Xiang Gardens and-more by accident than design-the main building of the Consulate General of the United States of America. The apartment was already fully furnished, with shelves of paperback books, broadband wireless internet, IKEA pictures on the walls and spices in the cupboards. Joe didn’t need to buy sheets or pillows, lightbulbs or soap: everything was already in place. It must have felt like stepping into another person’s life.
Two days after checking out of the hotel he went shopping for groceries in Xiangyang Market. It was raining heavily and Joe was carrying an umbrella as well as a briefcase full of documents from Quayler. The market, which has since been razed to the ground to make way for a shopping centre, was a crowded sea of stalls protected only by flimsy tarpaulin coverings which dripped water onto the ground. Butchers in white chef’s hats took meat cleavers to joints of pork and chicken and failed to meet Joe’s eye when he paid for them. At a vegetable stall he bought radishes and husks of white corn, beetroot for homemade borscht, as well as mangoes, bananas and apples to eat for breakfast. One of the pleasures of renting the flat was the opportunity he now had to prepare and cook his own food; from vast hessian sacks at the perimeter of the market Joe scooped dried mushrooms and black beans, nuts and rice, planning to host a flat-warming dinner party to which he would invite Tom and Megan and their friends. Weighed down with plastic bags, he eventually walked out onto Huaihai Road at about six o’clock, in the hopeless aspiration of hailing a cab. Every other shopper had the same idea. It was as if all of Shanghai was sheltering from the tropical rain beneath the eaves and awnings on the street. As the thick wet traffic fizzed past, Joe swore under his breath and knew that it would be hours before he saw a vacant taxi.
Sixty metres away, Miles Coolidge emerged from a branch of the Lawson’s con ve nience store carrying a rucksack in which he had placed a box of Camel cigarettes, a bar of Hershey’s chocolate, some aspirin and a packet of Style condoms. He had heard rumours of Joe Lennox’s presence in Shanghai from two sources: a friend at the United States embassy in London who had attended his leaving party at Vauxhall Cross, and a young Chinese corporate lawyer who happened to mention that she had bumped into “a really interesting guy called Joe” at a bi-weekly meeting of the British Chamber of Commerce. The lawyer, who worked part-time for Microsoft-and full-time trying to fend off the advances of Miles Coolidge-was unable to recall anything about Joe’s profession except that he “was a chemist or something.” Miles had eventually discovered that Joe was staying at the Ritz-Carlton, only to be informed twenty-four hours earlier that Mr. Lennox had checked out, leaving no forwarding address. It was a measure of how busy Miles was that he had given little further thought to Joe’s whereabouts until he glimpsed the tall, slim figure, weighed down by plastic bags, sheltering under an umbrella on the opposite side of Huaihai Road.
Sixty seconds later, the bottom of his trousers soaked with rain and grime, Joe was preparing to trudge home when he felt a presence behind him, a hand on his back, then a head popping up under his umbrella like a jack-in-the-box.
“You just never know who you’re gonna run into in this town.”
Miles was just as Zhao Jian had described, just as he had looked in the photos: thickset and shaven headed, only now with a heavy black beard that aged in white streaks around the neck and ears. This was it; the moment London had been waiting for. Joe had rehearsed dialogue for their first chance encounter, but he was so taken aback that it was three or four seconds before he was able to remember his lines.
“Jesus Christ. Miles. I didn’t recognize you with the beard. What the fuck are you doing here?”
The umbrella had fallen to one side and the warm rain was drenching his face. It ran through the tangle of Miles’s beard; it glistened the teeth of his grin.
“I was gonna ask you the same question.”
“I live here.”
“Well I do too.”
They stepped off the street for shelter and found themselves in a dumpling restaurant that smelled of rain and spilled vinegar. A huddle of pedestrians were gathered in the entrance but Miles barged through them like a commuter running late for a train. Joe could see that he had no choice but to join him and followed the American to a table at the back of the restaurant.
“You got time to talk, right?”
“Of course.”
The table was constructed out of moulded orange plastic. A waitress in a navy blue apron came over and Miles said, “Just tea,” without looking at her. Joe put his bags on the floor and tried to work out what was happening. Had Miles been following him? Was this just coincidence? It was impossible to tell.
“I’m trying to remember how I feel about you,” he said, which was the first of the lines he had rehearsed. Miles, taking off his jacket, said, “Cute,” and threw it on the chair beside him. Joe stared at his stomach, fat as an empathy belly, full of booze and lunches, and felt an immediate, visceral hatred of the man who had betrayed him. As he had long suspected, these first instincts were purely personal; they had nothing to do with the operation. He tried to arrange his face so that it would not reflect his anger and picked at a scratch on the table. He was forced to concede that Miles’s beard gave his face a certain rugged grandeur, but the eyes had gone. Age had beaten the truth out of them: they were now just sockets of greed and lies.