Lust, Caution (3 page)

That was the code. The second time, someone answered.

“Hello?”

Thank goodness—it was K’uang Yu-min. Even now, she was terrified she might have to speak to Liang Jun-sheng, though he was usually very careful to let others get to the phone first.

“It’s me,” she replied in Cantonese. “Everyone well?”

“All fine. How about yourself?”

“I’ll be going shopping this afternoon, but I’m not sure when.”

“No problem. We’ll wait for you. Where are you now?”

“Hsia-fei Road.”

“Fine.”

A pause.

“Nothing else then?” Her hands felt cold, but she was somehow warmed by the sound of a familiar voice.

“No, nothing.”

“I might go there right now.”

“We’ll be there, don’t worry. See you later.”

She hung up and exited to hail a pedicab.

If they didn’t finish it off today, she couldn’t stay on at the Yees’—not with all those great bejeweled cats watching her every move. Maybe she should have found an excuse to move out as soon as she had hooked him. He could have found her a place somewhere: the last couple of times they’d met in apartments, different ones each time, left vacant by British or Americans departed to war camps. But that probably would have made everything even more complicated—how
would she have known what time he was coming? He might have suddenly descended upon her at any moment. Or if they had fixed a time in advance, urgent business might have forced him to cancel at the last minute. Calling him would also have been difficult, as his wife kept a close eye on him; she probably had spies stationed in all his various offices. A hint of suspicion and the whole thing would be undone: Shanghai crawled with potential informers, all of them eager to ingratiate themselves with the mighty Yee Tai-tai. And if Chia-chih had not pursued him so energetically, he might have cast her aside. Apartments were a popular parting gift to discarded mistresses of Wang Ching-wei’s ministers. He had too many temptations jostling before him; far too many for any one moment. And if one of them weren’t kept constantly in view, it would slip to the back of his mind and out of sight. No: he had to be nailed—even if she had to keep his nose buried between her breasts to do it.

“They weren’t this big two years ago,” he had murmured to her, in between kisses.

His head against her chest, he hadn’t seen her blush.

Even now, it stung her to recall those knowing smirks—from all of them, K’uang Yu-min included. Only Liang Jun-sheng had pretended not to notice how much bigger her breasts now looked. Some episodes from her past she needed to keep banished from her mind.

It was some distance to the foreign concessions. When the pedicab reached the corner of Ching-an Temple and Seymour roads, she told him to stop by a small café. She looked around her, on the off chance that his car had already arrived. She could see only a vehicle with a bulky, charcoal-burning tank parked a little way up the street.

Most of the café’s business must have been in takeout; there were hardly any places to sit down inside. Toward the back of its dingy interior was a refrigerated cabinet filled with various Western-style cakes. A glaringly bright lamp in the passageway behind exposed the rough, uneven surface of the brown paint covering the lower half of the walls. A white military-style uniform hung to one side of a small fridge; above, nearer the ceiling, hung a row of long, lined gowns—like a rail in a secondhand clothing store—worn by the establishment’s Chinese servants and waiters.

He had told her that the place had been opened by a Chinese who had started out working in Tientsin’s oldest, most famous Western eatery, the Kiessling. He must have chosen this place, she thought, because he would be unlikely to run into any high-society acquaintances here. It was also situated on a main road, so if he did bump into someone, it would not look as suspicious as if he were seen somewhere off the beaten track; it was central enough that one could plausibly be on one’s way to somewhere entirely above-board.

She waited, the cup of coffee in front of her steadily losing heat. The last time, in the apartment, he had kept her waiting almost a whole hour. If the Chinese are the most unpunctual of people, she meditated, their politicians are surely virtuosos in the art of the late arrival. If she had to wait much longer, the store would be closed before they got there.

It had been his idea in the first place, after their first assignation. “Let’s buy you a ring to celebrate today—you choose it. I’d go with you myself, if I had the time.” Their second meeting was an even more rushed affair, and he had not mentioned it
again. If he failed to remember today, she would have to think of artful ways of reminding him. With any other man, she would have made herself look undignified, grasping. But a cynical old fox like him would not delude himself that a pretty young woman would attach herself to a squat fifty-year-old merely for the beauty of his soul; a failure to express her material interest in the affair would seem suspicious. Ladies, in any case, are always partial to jewelry. She had, supposedly, traveled to Shanghai to trade in feminine luxuries. That she should try to generate a little extra profit along the way was entirely to be expected. As he was in the espionage business himself, he probably suspected conspiracies even where they didn’t exist, where no cause for doubt had been given. Her priority was to win his trust, to appear credible. So far they had met in locations of his choosing; today she had to persuade him to follow her lead.

Last time he had sent the car on time to fetch her. The long wait she had had to endure today must mean he was coming himself. That was a relief: if they were due to tryst in an apartment, it would be hard to coax him out again once they were ensconced. Unless he had planned for them
to stay out late together, to go out somewhere for dinner first—but he hadn’t taken her to dinner on either of the previous two occasions. He would be wanting to take his time with her, while she would be getting jittery that the shop would close; but she wouldn’t be able to hurry him along, like a prostitute with a customer.

She took out her powder compact and dabbed at her face. There was no guarantee he’d be coming to meet her himself. Now that the novelty had worn off, he was probably starting to lose interest. If she didn’t pull it off today, she might not get another chance.

She glanced at her watch again. She felt a kind of chilling premonition of failure, like a long snag in a silk stocking, silently creeping up her body. On a seat a little over the way from hers, a man dressed in a Chinese robe—also on his own, reading a newspaper—was studying her. He’d been there when she had arrived, so he couldn’t have been following her. Perhaps he was trying to guess what line of business she was in; whether her jewelry was real or fake. She didn’t have the look of a dancing girl, but if she was an actress, he couldn’t put a name to the face.

She had, in a past life, been an actress; and here she was, still playing a part, but in a drama too secret to make her famous.

While at college in Canton she’d starred in a string of rousingly patriotic history plays. Before the city fell to the Japanese, her university had relocated to Hong Kong, where the drama troupe had given one last public performance. Overexcited, unable to wind down after the curtain had fallen, she had gone out for a bite to eat with the rest of the cast. But even after almost everyone else had dispersed, she still hadn’t wanted to go home. Instead, she and two female classmates had ridden through the city on the deserted upper deck of a tram as it swayed and trundled down the middle of the Hong Kong streets, the neon advertisements glowing in the darkness outside the windows.

Hong Kong University had lent a few of its classrooms to the Cantonese students, but lectures were always jam-packed, uncomfortably reminding them of their refugee status. The disappointing apathy of average Hong Kong people toward China’s state of national emergency filled the classmates with a strong, indignant sense of exile, even though they had traveled little more than a hundred
miles over the border to reach Hong Kong. Soon enough, a few like-minded elements among them formed a small radical group. When Wang Ching-wei, soon to begin negotiating with the Japanese over forming a collaborationist government back on the Mainland, arrived on the island with his retinue of supporters—many of them also from near Canton—the students discovered that one of his aides came from the same town as K’uang Yu-min. Exploiting this coincidence, K’uang sought him out and easily struck up a friendship, in the process extracting from him various items of useful information about members of Wang’s group. After he had reported his findings to his coconspirators, they resolved after much discussion to set a honey trap for one Mr. Yee: to seduce him, with the help of one of their female classmates, toward an assassin’s bullet. First she would befriend the wife, then move in on the husband. But if she presented herself as a student—always the most militant members of the population—Yee Tai-tai would be instantly on her guard. Instead, the group decided to make her the young wife of a local businessman; that sounded unthreatening enough, particularly in Hong Kong,
where men of commerce were almost always apolitical. Enter the female star of the college drama troupe.

Of the various members of the group, Huang Lei was the wealthiest—from family money—and he briskly raised the funds to build a front for the conspiracy: renting a house, hiring a car, borrowing costumes. And since he was the only one of them able to drive, he took the part of chauffeur. Ou-yang Ling-wen was cast as the businessman husband, Mr. Mai; K’uang Yu-min as a cousin of the family, chaperoning the lovely Mai Tai-tai on her first meeting with Yee Tai-tai. After taking K’uang and the obligingly talkative aide back home, the car then drove the two ladies on to the Central District, to go about their shopping alone.

She had seen Mr. Yee a few times, but only in passing. When they finally sat down in the same room together—the first time the Yees invited her to play mahjong with them—she could tell right away he was interested, despite his obvious attempts to be circumspect. Since the age of twelve or thirteen, she had been no stranger to the admiring male gaze. She knew the game. He was terrified of indiscretion, but at the same time finding his
tediously quiet life in Hong Kong stifling. He didn’t even dare drink, for fear the Wangs might summon him for duty at any moment. He and another member of the Wang clique had rented an old house together, inside which they remained cloistered, diverting themselves only with the occasional game of mahjong.

During the game, the conversation turned to the fabric Yee Tai-tai had bought to make suits for her husband. Chia-chih recommended a tailor who had done work for her in the past. “He’ll be madly busy right now, with all the tourist trade, so it could take him a few months. But if Yee Tai-tai telephones me when Mr. Yee has a free moment, I’ll take him. He’ll get them done faster if he knows it’s for a friend of mine.” As she was going, she left her phone number on the table. While his wife was at the door, seeing Chia-chih out, Mr. Yee would surely have time to copy it down for himself. Then, over the next couple of days, he could find an opportunity to call her—during office hours, when Mr. Mai would be out at work. And they could take it from there.

That evening a light drizzle had been falling. Huang Lei drove her back home and they went
back into the house together, where everybody was nervously waiting for news of the evening’s triumph. Resplendent in the high-society costume in which she had performed so supremely, she wanted everyone to stay on to celebrate with her, to carouse with her until morning. None of the male students were dancers, but a bowl of soup at one of those small, all-night restaurants and a long walk through the damp night would do just as well. Anything to avoid bed.

Instead, a quiet gradually fell over the assembled company. There was whispering in a couple of corners, and secretive, tittering laughter; laughter she had heard before. They had been talking it over behind her back for some time, she realized.

“Apparently, Liang Jun-sheng is the only one who has any experience,” Lai Hsiu-chin, the only other girl in the group, told her.

Liang Jun-sheng.

Of course. He was the only one who had been inside a brothel.

But given that she had already determined to make a sacrifice of herself, she couldn’t very well resent him for being the only candidate for the job.

And that evening, while she basked in the heady afterglow of her success, even Liang Jun-sheng didn’t seem quite as repellent as usual. One by one, the others saw the way the thing would go; one by one they slipped away, until the two of them were left alone. And so the show went on.

Days passed. Mr. Yee did not call. In the end, she decided to telephone Yee Tai-tai, who sounded listless, offhand: she’d been too busy to go shopping in the last few days, but she’d give her another ring in a day or two.

Did Yee Tai-tai suspect something? Had she discovered her husband in possession of Chia-chih’s phone number? Or had they had bad news from the Japanese? After two weeks tormented by worry, she finally received a jubilant phone call from Yee Tai-tai: to say goodbye. She was sorry they were in such a hurry that there’d be no time to meet before they left, but they would love to have her and her husband visit in Shanghai. They must come for a good long time, so they could all go on a trip to Nanking together. Wang Ching-wei’s plan to go back to Nanking to form a government must have temporarily run aground,

Chia-chih speculated, and forced them to lie low for a while.

Huang Lei was by now in serious trouble, up to his eyes in debt. And when his family cut off his allowance on hearing that he was cohabiting with a dancing girl in Hong Kong, the scheme’s finances collapsed.

The thing with Liang Jun-sheng had been awkward from the start; and now that she was so obviously regretting the whole business, the rest of the group began to avoid her. No one would look her in the eye.

“I was an idiot,” she said to herself, “such an idiot.”

Had she been set up, she wondered, from the very beginning of this dead-end drama?