Lust, Caution (4 page)

From this point on, she kept her distance not only from Liang Jun-sheng, but also from their entire little group. All the time she was with them, she felt they were eyeing her curiously—as if she were some kind of freak, or grotesque. After Pearl Harbor, the sea lanes reopened and all her classmates transferred to Shanghai. Although it, too, had been occupied by the Japanese, its colleges were still open; there was still an education (of
sorts) to be had. She did not go with them, and did not try to find them when she got there herself.

For a long time, she agonized over whether she had caught something from Liang Jun-sheng.

Not long after reaching Shanghai, however, the students made contact with an underground worker called Wu—doubtless an alias—who, as soon as he heard about the high-ranking connection they had made, naturally encouraged them to pursue their scheme. And when they approached her, she resolved to do her duty and see the thing through.

In truth, every time she was with Yee she felt cleansed, as if by a scalding hot bath; for now everything she did was for the cause.

They must have posted someone to watch the entrance to the café, and alert everyone the instant his car drew up. When she’d arrived, she hadn’t spotted anyone loitering about. The P’ing-an Theater directly opposite would have been an obvious choice, its corridor of pillars offering the perfect cover for a lookout. People were, in any case, always hanging around theater entrances; one could easily wait there without arousing suspicion. But it was a little too far away to identify clearly
the occupant of a car parked on the other side of the road.

A delivery bike, apparently broken down, was parked by the entrance to a leather goods shop next door. Its owner—a man of around thirty, with a crew cut—was bent over the mechanism, trying to repair it. Though she couldn’t see his face clearly, she was fairly sure he wasn’t someone she had seen before. She somehow doubted the bike was the getaway vehicle. There were some things they didn’t tell her, and some she didn’t ask. But she had heard that members of her old group had been chosen for the job. Even with Wu’s help and connections, though, they might not have been able to get hold of a car for afterward. If that car with a charcoal tank stayed where it was, parked just up from the café, it might turn out to be theirs. In which case it would be Huang Lei at the wheel. As she’d approached the café from behind the vehicle, she hadn’t seen the driver.

She suspected that Wu didn’t have much faith in them: he was probably afraid they were too inexperienced, that they’d get caught and fall to pieces in an interrogation, implicating other people in the process. Chia-chih was sure he was more
than a one-man operation here in Shanghai, but he’d been K’uang Yu-min’s only point of contact throughout.

He’d promised to let them join his network. Maybe this was their test.

“Before they fire, they get so close the gun’s almost up against the body,” K’uang Yu-min had once told her, smiling. “They don’t shoot from a distance, like in the movies.”

This had probably been an attempt to reassure her that they wouldn’t cut everyone around him down in an indiscriminate hail of fire. Even if she survived a bullet wound, it would cripple her for life. She’d rather die.

The moment had almost arrived, bringing with it a sharp taste of anticipation.

Her stage fright always evaporated once the curtain was up.

But this waiting was a torment. Men, at least, could smoke through their tension. Opening her handbag, she took out a small bottle of perfume and touched the stopper behind her ears. Its cool, glassy edge felt like her only point of contact with tangible reality. An instant later she caught the scent of Cape Jasmine.

She took off her coat and dabbed some more perfume in the crooks of her elbows. Before she’d had time to put it back on, she saw, through the tiers of a white display-model wedding cake in the window, a car parked outside the café. It was his.

She gathered up her coat and handbag, and walked out with them over her arm. By the time she approached, the driver had opened the door for her. Mr. Yee was sitting in the middle of the backseat.

“I’m late, I know,” he muttered, stooping slightly in apology.

She sent him a long, accusing look, then got in. After the driver had returned to his seat, Mr. Yee told him to drive to Ferguson Road—presumably to the apartment where their last assignation had taken place.

“I need to get to a jeweler’s first,” she told him in a low voice. “I want to replace a diamond stud that’s fallen out of one of my earrings. There’s a place just here. I would have gone before you got here, but I was afraid I might miss you. So I ended up waiting for ages on my own, like an idiot.”

He laughed. “I’m sorry—just as I was leaving, a couple of people I needed to see showed up.” He leaned forward to speak to the chauffeur: “Go back to where we just came from.” They had already driven some distance away.

“Everything’s always so difficult,” she pouted. “We’re never private at home, there’s never a chance to say a word to each other. I want to go back to Hong Kong. Can you get me a boat ticket?”

“Missing the husband?”

“Don’t talk to me about him!”

She had told Mr. Yee she was taking revenge for her husband’s indiscretion with a dancing girl.

As they sat next to each other in the back of the car, he folded his arms so that his elbow nudged against the fullest part of her breast. This was a familiar trick of his: to sit primly upright while covertly enjoying the pleasurable softness of her.

She twisted around to look out the window, to tell the chauffeur exactly where to stop. The car made a U-turn at the next crossroads, and then another a little farther on to get them back to the P’ing-an, the only respectable second-run
cinema in the city. The building’s dull red facade curved inward, like a sickle blade set upon the street corner. Opposite was Commander K’ai’s Café again, with the Siberian Leather Goods Store and the Green House Ladies’ Clothing Emporium next, each fronted by two large display windows filled with glamorously dressed mannequins bent into all manner of poses beneath neon signs. The next-door establishment was smaller and far more nondescript. Although the sign over the door said JEWELER’S, its single display window was practically empty.

He told the chauffeur to stop the car, then got out and followed her inside. Though, in her high-heeled shoes, she was half a head taller than him, he clearly did not mind the disparity in their heights. Tall men, she had found in her experience, liked girls who were small, while short men seemed to prefer their women to tower over them—perhaps out of a desire for balance. She knew he was watching her, and so slightly exaggerated the swivel of her hips as she sashayed through the glass doors like a sea dragon.

An Indian dressed in a Western-style suit greeted them. Though the shop was small, its interior was light, high-ceilinged, and almost entirely
bare. It was fitted out with just one waist-high glass showcase, toward the back, in which were displayed some birthstones, one for each month of the year—semiprecious yellow quartz, or red or blue gems made of sapphire or ruby dust, supposed to bring good luck.

She took out of her bag a pear-shaped ruby earring, at the top of which a diamond-studded leaf was missing one stone.

“We can get one to match it,” the Indian said, after taking a look.

When she asked how much it would cost and when it would be ready, Mr. Yee added: “Ask him if he has any decent rings.” As he had chosen to study in Japan, rather than Britain or the United States, he felt uncomfortable speaking English and always got other people to interpret for him.

She hesitated. “Why?”

He smiled. “I said I wanted to buy you a ring, didn’t I? A diamond ring—a decent one.”

After another pause, she gave an almost stoic, resigned smile, then softly asked: “Do you have any diamond rings?”

The Indian shouted a startling, incomprehensible stream of what sounded like Hindi upstairs, then escorted them up.

To one side of the cream-colored back wall of the showroom was a door leading to a pitch-dark staircase. The office was on a little mezzanine set between the two floors of the building, with a shallow balcony overlooking the shop floor— presumably for surveillance purposes. The wall immediately to their left as they entered was hung with two mirrors of different sizes, each painted with multicolored birds and flowers and inscribed with gilded Chinese calligraphy:
THIS ROC WILL SURELY SOAR TEN THOUSAND MILES. CONGRATULATIONS, MR. BADA, ON YOUR GRAND OPENING. RESPECTFULLY, CH’EN MAO-K’UN
. Too tall for the room’s sloping ceiling, a third large mirror, decorated with a phoenix and peonies, had been propped up against another wall.

To the front of the room, a desk had been placed along the ebony railing, with a telephone and a reading lamp resting on top. Next to it was a tea table on which sat a typewriter, covered with an old piece of glazed cloth. A second, squat Indian, with a broad ashen-brown face and a nose squashed like a lion’s muzzle, stood up from his round-backed armchair to move chairs over for them.

“So it is diamond rings you are interested in. Sit down, please, sit down.” He waddled slowly off to a corner of the room, his stomach visibly preceding him, then bent over a low green, ancient-looking safe.

This, clearly, was not a high-class establishment. Though Mr. Yee appeared unfazed by his dingy surroundings, Chia-chih felt a twinge of embarrassment that she had brought him here. These days, she’d heard, some shops were just a front for black marketers or speculators.

Wu had selected this store for its proximity to Commander K’ai’s Café. As she’d walked up the stairs, it had occurred to her that on his way back down they would catch him as easily as a turtle in a jar. As he would probably insist on walking in front of her, he would step first into the showroom. There, a couple of male customers browsing the display cabinet would suddenly move out to block his way. But two men couldn’t spend too long pretending to choose cheap cuff links, tie pins, and trinkets for absent lady-friends; they couldn’t dawdle indecisively like girls. Their entrance needed to be perfectly timed: neither too late nor too early. And once they were in, they
had to stay in. Patrolling up and down outside was not an option; his chauffeur would quickly get suspicious. Their best delaying tactic was probably gazing at the window display of the leather shop next door, several yards behind the car.

Sitting to one side of the desk, she couldn’t help turning to look down over the balcony. Only the shop window fell within her line of vision. As the window was clear and its glass shelves empty, she could see straight out to the pavement, and to the edge of the car parked next to it.

Then again, perhaps two men shopping alone would look far too conspicuous. They might draw the attention not only of the chauffeur, but also of Mr. Yee himself, from the balcony upstairs, who might then grow suspicious and delay his return downstairs. A stalemate would be catastrophic. Perhaps they would catch him instead at the entrance to the shop. In which case their timing would need to be even more perfect. They would need to approach at a walk, as the sound of running footsteps would instantly alert the chauffeur. Mr. Yee had brought only his driver with him, so perhaps the latter was doubling as a bodyguard.

Or maybe the two of them would split up, one of them lingering in front of the Green House Ladies’ Clothing Emporium arm in arm with Lai Hsiu-chin, her eyes glued to the window display. A girl could stand for minutes on end staring at clothes she couldn’t afford, while her boyfriend waited impatiently, his back to the shop window, looking around him.

All these scenarios danced vaguely through her mind, even as she realized that none of this was her concern. She could not lose the feeling that, upstairs in this little shop, she was sitting on top of a powder keg that was about to blow her sky-high. A slight tremble was beginning to take hold of her legs.

The shop assistant had gone back downstairs. The boss was much darker skinned than his assistant; they did not look to be father and son. The younger man had saggy, stubbled, pouchlike cheeks and heavy-lidded, sleepy-looking eyes. Though not tall, he was built sturdily enough to serve, if necessity arose, as security guard. The position of the jewelry cabinet so near the back of the shop and the bare window display suggested that they were afraid of being robbed, even in daylight; a
padlock hung by the door, for use at night. So there must be something of value on the premises: probably gold bars, U.S. dollars, and silver.

She watched as the Indian brought out a black velvet tray, around a foot long, inlaid with rows of diamond rings. She and Mr. Yee leaned in.

Seeing their lack of interest—neither picked one up to have a closer look—the proprietor put the tray back in the safe. “I’ve this one, too,” he added, opening a small blue velvet box. Set deep within was a pink diamond, the size of a pea.

No one was selling pink diamonds at the moment, she remembered Yee Tai-tai saying. After her initial astonishment had passed, she felt a rush of relief—that the shop had, in the end, come through for her. Until the pink diamond, she had looked like an incompetent bounty hunter, a Cantonese nobody dragging her powerful Shanghai sugar daddy to a tatty gemstone boutique. Of course, the moment the gun sounded, every-thing—including all peripheral thoughts of plausibility, of pride—would shatter. Although she understood this well enough, she could not allow herself to think about it, for fear that he would see the terror on her face.

She picked up the ring. He laughed softly as he looked at the stone in her hand: “Now that’s more like it.” She felt a numb chill creeping up the back of her head; the display windows downstairs and the glass door between them seemed to be broadening out, growing taller, as if behind her were an enormous, two-story-high expanse of brilliant, fragile glass, ready to disintegrate at any moment. But even as she felt almost dizzy with the precariousness of her situation, the shop seemed to be blanketing her in torpor. Inside she could hear only the muffled buzz of the city outside— because of the war, there were far fewer cars on the road than usual; the sounding of a horn was a rarity. The warm, sweet air inside the office pressed soporifically down on her like a quilt. Though she was vaguely aware that something was about to happen, her heavy head was telling her that it must all be a dream.