Fragrant Harbour by John Lanchester Read Free Book Online

the territory made London seem like a Mardi Gras of free expression. One or two local heroes simply issued a lawyer’s letter every single time their name was mentioned in print. So one of my first pieces was ostensibly an account of the Nick Leeson case, and of how well the chubby Essex boy was faring in his Singapore jail – but the real meat of it was about what an extraordinarily horrible place Singapore was. The cabs had alarms to limit the top speed, the streets were 100 per cent rubbish-free, the family was central, and the city was stone dead. It was a thriving necropolis. Although the local gwailos were a chillingly thick, amoral bunch, even by Hong Kong standards, you too would want to celebrate your free time by smashing car windscreens or drinking fifty pints of lager and mooning bystanders – at least you would if you lived in Singapore. That piece led into another, about the big earthquake due in Japan. (It was the Kobe earthquake that caused the Japanese stock market to take a dip just as Leeson had bet his bank on its going up.) I spent a weird two weeks in Japan, mainly Tokyo but with a bit of Kobe, Osaka, Kyoto thrown in, living in tiny clean hotel rooms and being fobbed off, patronised and misled by a series of Nipponese men in dark blue suits. The gist of their story was that the Japanese earthquake preparations were the best in the world. This was not very subtle code for ‘We’re Number One’. The gist of my piece, on the other hand, was, if that was true, then how come a six point four earthquake – which a drawling and wonderfully quotable San Francisco architect told me was ‘barely enough to shake a martini’ – had killed several thousand people? That went down well. Pieces about Japanese hubris usually did, in south-east Asia and in the English-speaking world both.
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    The invitation to go out on Tai Pan , Philip Oss’s boat, came via a phone call from Berkowitz, who was at pains to stress what a big deal it was.
    ‘I’ve only ever met him three or four times myself, for fuck’s sake. He’s my boss’s boss. The only gwailo close to Wo himself. If it was a mafia movie, he’d be the consiglieri . Something vaguely military about his background. Doesn’t talk about it. Well, you know what not to ask.’
    ‘Yeah yeah, big event, best behaviour, don’t mention the war. I’ll be good.’
    Berkowitz’s general view about the wealthy in Hong Kong was that ‘the first million or two’s always a bit dodgy. Some of these guys just pop up overnight, the money’s obviously from the Triads or the Communists. Then they get into property, which is where the real money is in Hong Kong, and they start to get properly rich.’ The ultimate owner of our company, T. K. Wo, controlled a multilayered and super-ingeniously structured firm which in turn controlled all sorts of businesses all over the world, among them the media concern which owned Asia . Wo was famous for his guanxi – his connections, juice, and general mojo – with Beijing. He was the son of a man who had fled to Taiwan to avoid drug charges in the sixties. There were rumours about how the Wo money had been made. The subject had only ever come up once in a work context, oddly enough when I went to visit Matthew Ho, the guy who’d sat beside me on the plane out, as part of a series about young entrepreneurs. He had mentioned in passing that his grandfather refused to have any publication owned by the Wos anywhere in his house. Needless to say I left that out of the piece.
    My view of the Wo rumours could be summed up as follows: so what? Compared to other local bigwigs, one of whom was the frontman for the opium-dealing Shan warlord Khun Sa, another of whom recycled Macao gambling money back through half the new building developments in Europe, the allegations were no big deal. In any case none of these guys was in the same league as the drug-dealing companies who had founded Hong Kong, like Jardines. Not for nothing was the