“Why don’t you bring her along?” Miles suggested.
“Tomorrow?”
“Sure.”
Joe agreed, although he had no intention of extending the invitation. The dinner would be complicated enough without throwing Megan into the mix. “Not a bad idea,” he said. “I’ll see if she’s around.”
“Maybe Shahpour can come too,” Miles added. “The more the merrier, right?”
“Right,” Joe said. “The more the merrier.”
Forty seconds after Joe had left the restaurant, Miles took out his mobile phone, walked out onto Huaihai Road and called Shah-pour on a secure number.
“Why the fuck didn’t you tell me you’d run into Joe Lennox?”
“Who’s Joe Lennox?”
“British. Ex-MI6. Works in pharmaceuticals. Ring any bells?”
“Miles, I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”
He did, of course. From the moment Shahpour had shaken Joe’s hand in Zapata’s, seen his card and registered the name, he had been weighing up the implications of their encounter. The look Joe had seen in his eyes was the look of a man who had found his salvation. Shahpour Goodarzi was Miles’s right-hand man on the renewed TYPHOON, but he was also the greatest obstacle to its fruition.
“Hold on,” he said. “Pharmaceuticals?”
“That’s right.” Water was dripping onto Miles’s scalp. He looked up at the offending balcony, wiped the rain off with his hand and began walking east towards the metro station at Shaanxinanlu. “Six foot, dark hair…”
“Yeah. Oh yeah. Sure, I remember.” Shahpour was smoking a joint in his apartment on Fuxing Middle Road and rested it on a table in the kitchen. “He gave me his card. I’ve got it here somewhere. Who did you say he was?”
“Only the guy who first interviewed Wang Kaixuan. Only the guy who supposedly quit MI6 three months ago and now just happens to be living in Shanghai. Only my wife’s fucking ex-boyfriend. I told you about him, for Chrissakes. I told you two weeks ago there were rumours he’d been sent to Shanghai.”
“Calm down,” Shahpour said. “It’s probably just coincidence.”
“Coincidence?” Miles was barking into the phone as he walked. “What is this? A seance? Don’t tell me to calm down, you prick. How did he get to you?”
Shahpour removed the phone from his ear, mouthed the words “Fuck you” soundlessly at the mouthpiece, and picked up the joint. “He didn’t get to me,” he said, dragging on the roach. “I was talking to his girlfriend and his buddies came down on me like a SWAT team.”
“Who’s the girlfriend?”
“How should I know? Mary or Megan or something…”
“Well, she’s coming to dinner tomorrow night. So is Joe. And so are you.”
“Miles, it’s the weekend. I have plans…”
“The only plans you have are to make it to M on the Bund by eight o’clock. Do your job, Shahpour. Fuck this up and you’re on a cargo flight back to Sacramento.”
38
Joe spent the next twenty-four hours trying his best to convince himself that he was ready to see Isabella.
He made dinner for Megan at his apartment, took her for a drink at the Cotton Club, lay awake beside her until almost four o’clock in the morning, then woke at nine to find her standing at the end of his bed bearing a tray of freshly cut mangoes and black coffee.
“I made us breakfast,” she said.
For the first time their lovemaking felt pointless and forced, as if a memory of Isabella had slipped into bed beside them. After watching a bootleg DVD of Troy, Megan left the apartment at midday and Joe paced the rooms, the afternoon passing with a geological slowness. He fixed a leaking tap in the bathroom; he went running in Xujiahui Park; he read the same paragraph of the same article in the Pharmaceutical Journal eight times. How would Isabella react to seeing him? With indifference? With studied cool? He couldn’t bear the prospect of a polite, bourgeois dinner where she asked meaningful questions about “Iraq and the war” while Miles joked about “the good old days in Hong Kong.” He wanted Isabella to himself. He wanted to connect with her again.
Finally, as the sun went down behind the London plane trees of the French Concession, Joe took a shower and changed for dinner. It was six-thirty. Within two hours he would be sitting at a table making conversation with the woman who had colonized his thoughts for the best part of a decade. Pouring himself a drink, he settled in a deep armchair, took out his copy of Gatsby and finished it just before half-past seven.
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
The traffic running east along Yan’an Road was as slow as the midweek rush hour and Joe was twenty minutes late arriving at M on the Bund. A bald Italian steered him through the glittering dining room to a table on the crowded outdoor terrace which appeared to have been set for only four people. Shahpour was already in situ with his back to the Bund, looking crisp and laundered, but with a certain nervous intensity in his eyes. A cool breeze was blowing south along the river. Miles was seated opposite him and clambered to his feet as Joe came towards them.
“Joe. Buddy. Great to see you.” He was wearing a black Polo shirt and his voice boomed around the terrace. “I believe you two have already met.”
Shahpour also stood up to shake his hand. He looked more anxious and somehow far younger than Joe remembered from the club.
“Yeah, we met in Zapata’s,” he said. “Nice to see you again.”
Joe scanned the two vacant places. Where was Isabella? Both napkins were still folded onto white ceramic plates with the chairs neatly pushed in. Making the obvious calculation, he realized that she was not going to be coming to the restaurant. The day had been a prolonged anti-climax. Sensing his confusion, Miles said simply, “Izzy couldn’t make it,” and Joe felt a terrible gnaw of disappointment. “What happened to your date?”
“Ditto. Last-minute crisis.”
He wondered what had gone on behind the scenes. Joe had had no intention of inviting Megan and supposed that Miles had also lied about his plans. Did Isabella even know that he was living in Shanghai? That thought, in itself, was enough to drive him crazy with frustration. Yet the alternative was even worse: that Isabella knew of his presence in the city, but had told Miles she had no desire to see an ex-boyfriend who had lied to her throughout every moment of their relationship. Joe settled into his seat and ordered a vodka and tonic.
“So I guess it’s just the three of us,” he said.
At least it was a glorious evening on the Huangpu. Miles had secured one of the finest views in all Shanghai. From his chair, Joe could look directly across the river at the high-rise lightshow of Pudong while, ahead of him, the grand fluorescent curve of the Bund arced north towards Suzhou Creek. Long ago he had concluded that Asian cities were at their best at night: the chemistry of heat and neon was exhilarating. He lit a cigarette as two young Chinese waiters mournfully cleared away the empty space in which he had longed to find Isabella.
“So tell us about her.”
“About who?”
“Megan,” Miles said.
Joe looked at Shahpour, who had been drinking steadily since he arrived. Candlelight caught a look of disquiet on his face which suggested to Joe that he was either out of his depth or struggling to suppress feelings of anxiety. Hastily, Shahpour described his meeting with Megan and Joe in Zapata’s, a story that Miles appeared to have heard before. There were predictable jokes about “sharking for chicks” and Joe was glad when his vodka arrived, sinking half of it almost immediately to quench his thirst. He had given some thought to the reasons behind Shahpour’s presence at the dinner. It was possible that he was authentic Microsoft, and therefore a useful ally for Miles in trying to prove the legitimacy of his cover. More likely, however, Shahpour was also CIA and Miles had brought him along as a second pair of eyes. Yet he wondered why a trained intelligence officer would appear at a meeting of such importance looking so edgy. In Zapata’s, Shahpour had seemed impressively self-assured, if somewhat vain and intense, and Joe had been struck by both his intelligence and charm. Either this current mood was an act, the purpose of which would eventually be revealed, or Miles had said something which had momentarily undermined his confidence. If that was the case, it certainly wouldn’t have been the first time that Miles had belittled a junior colleague.