Fragrant Harbour by John Lanchester Read Free Book Online Page A

HQ of Jardines, a skyscraper with hundreds of porthole-like windows, known as the Palace of a Thousand Arseholes. If you worked for Wo, people would occasionally try to needle you at parties, until they saw clear evidence that you simply didn’t give a shit.
    That Saturday, as per instructions, I went down to Queen’s Pier just before eleven. Two or three boats were bobbing about in the usual scum of filthy water and floating rubbish – cans, bottles, God knows what. One of the boats, which had just cast off from the pier, was flying a Hong Kong Bank flag on the stern mast and carrying the usual flushed quota of overseas officers, wives,chums, children. The harbour smelt the same way it always did. A fit late-forties Brit in an expensive-looking, I-could-sail- round-the -world-in-this-at-a-moment’s-notice windcheater was standing on shore beside a lurching yacht, on board which I could see Berkowitz and a dozen others milling about, getting stuck into the day’s first hard-earned beverage.
    ‘Miss Stone,’ said the man, smiling, affable, warm–cool. ‘What a pleasure. Philip Oss. Bob has told me so much about you. And, like everybody else, I’ve been so enjoying your things in Asia .’
    The calm I had shown when Berkowitz relayed this invitation was phoney. I was highly curious about Oss. He was T. K. Wo’s factotum and fixer and right-hand man, and as such was unusual , because the Cantonese tended to regard the British as thick, and not many Chinese tycoons had such a close British colleague. In the first instance, it was said, Oss had gone to work with Wo to help with things that required a fluent English speaker, and he was now inseparable from all parts of Wo’s business. There was said to be a Mrs Oss, an elegant German woman whom nobody had ever met. I could see that he was super-easy; not just smooth but absolutely frictionless.
    ‘It’s very kind of you to invite me out on your…’ The word that I was going to use next was ‘junk’, which suddenly seemed ridiculous, since anything less like a rackety old wooden junk than this opulent floating pleasure palace, its radar aerial revolving confidently in the muggy air, would have been hard to imagine . Oss helped me out.
    ‘Dinghy,’ he said in his clipped accent. He had clearly used the line before; it had got a laugh before; and it did this time too. He handed me over to one of his boat boys, a middle-aged Cantonese in a navy blue-and-white uniform, and I was gently bundled towards the back of the ship.
    The only person I knew on board was – excluding my new friend Mr Philip Oss – Berkowitz. I went over and stood next to him.
    ‘Bob,’ I said. Calling him Berkowitz, which is what everyone always called him at work, would have seemed too intimate. We stood there and talked about nothing for a while as the boat gradually filled up. A couple of the new arrivals came over and schmoozed. Ricky Tang, a legislative counsellor for the lawyers’Functional Constituency, quondam columnist for the South China Morning Post – another smoothy, with a lush Oxonian voice; a half-bright journalist called Mat something, ‘Pacific Rim correspondent ’ for some Seattle magazine I’d never heard of; Susan Lee, a dressed-up Chinese woman, my age, who worked for Oss in some unspecified capacity; Sammy Wong, a Chinese–American businessman and, highly unusually for a money guy, a rabid anti-Communist , with links to the nuttier, let’s-nuke-China- while-there ’s-still-time fringes of the Republican Party; his wife; and another woman called Lily Zhang, a not-quite-standard-issue Dragon Lady (she showed signs of having once read a book). I had already worked out that, as a general rule, Hong Kong required you to be one and a half notches more dressed up than you would be in England. This applied not just to men having to wear jackets and ties in the permanent sauna of Hong Kong’s summer, but to things like drinks parties and junking. In England, on a day