Silencer (17 page)

I showered this time, worked my way through all the frou-frous and big fat towels and finally stretched out on the duvet in my bathrobe and towelling slippers. I tapped out a text to Anna.
Going to bed now. Will call tomorrow. Hope you’re feeling better. xx

I dialled the number on the Post-it. It rang for what seemed like for ever. Maybe Kitty Porn had seen the number, not recognized it, and just fucked it off. Understandable – I did that myself. If it was important, they’d ring back – or try me some other way.

I expected an answering machine to kick in, but it didn’t. After another fifteen seconds or so a female voice snarled at me in Cantonese. This one was extra pissed off because it was so late.

‘Kitty? Kitty Porn? I was given your number.’

‘What you want?’ she snapped back, but at least it was in English. Sort of.

‘Are you Kitty?’

‘What you want?’

I kept it in slow-mo. ‘I was told you could help me find a donor.’

‘Donor? We not charity! Donor for what?’

It was pointless fucking about. ‘I’m looking for a kidney for someone.’

‘What your name?’ She’d calmed down a bit.

‘My name is Nick.’

‘Where you?’

‘I’m staying at the Upper House, on the island at—’

‘I know Upper House. Tomorrow you be outside on terrace. Ten in morning. You know terrace?’

‘I’ll find it.’

‘OK. You be there. I find. You black man? White man?’

‘White. I’ll be wearing a white shirt and jeans.’

A click, then silence.

I lay there, suddenly too tired to bother getting under the duvet. I couldn’t even be arsed to move the iPhone off my chest or press the remote to close the blinds.

I shut my eyes.

My hair was still wet on the pillow when the iPhone vibrated. Anna’s reply flashed at me.

All good here. xx

Pity the ‘xx’ didn’t mean anything. I was getting to like them.

31 August 2011

10.17 hrs

In fact it wasn’t called the Terrace, it was called the Lawn. Why wouldn’t it be? It was on the sixth floor, up a ridiculously wide flight of steps lined with aromatic candles – all part of what they called ‘The Guest Experience’. The hotel had been created from the top thirteen storeys of a fifty-floor 1980s tower, which put the Lawn right up there among the high-rises. I’d wondered why my room – on the thirteenth floor – gave me vertigo.

Even though the sky was as grey as the waiters’ shirts, I could feel the sun on my neck and shoulders. But we were some way short of many of the buildings around us. The tops of their glass and steel towers were lost in the clouds. The ones I could look down on also had their own little gardens. With the city’s noise and chaos safely below us, it was Tranquillity Central up there – and in case you hadn’t got the message, the designer had gone all-out on the Zen. Pristine white stone and gravel separated stretches of lush grass; bean-bags the size of UFOs sprawled around umbrellas and tables. Where the humidity had encouraged last night’s rain to cling to the seats and stone pathways, it was simply vacuumed away.

The cream of the international business community had gathered there. Immaculately dressed and with freshly showered hair, they munched croissants and sipped rainbow-coloured juices or exotic blends of coffee as they scrolled their iPad Minis and tapped on their smartphones. I was the only punter on my own, and the only one looking like a tourist. I nursed my second cappuccino under an ivory-lacquered umbrella, wishing I’d bought some sun-gigs. But since the Upper House coffee cost nearly ten US dollars a throw, I thought I’d probably give the hotel shop a miss.

It was ten eighteen. In the last twenty minutes a couple of solo women had appeared at the top of the steps, but neither had given me a second glance before going to join her associates.

If Kitty or one of her sidekicks didn’t turn up, I’d hit a couple of medical centres, then head out to the airport to see if I could spot the riot of beige – or anyone else waving signs for East European arrivals.

Ten nineteen. I’d give it until half past, then make a move. You can always be twenty minutes late; anything more than thirty is no accident.

I hadn’t sent Anna a text or an email that morning; I didn’t want to wake her. If there had been a major drama, she would have got hold of me.

Ten twenty-five, and I signalled to the waitress that I wanted to sign my bill. A woman’s head emerged from the stairs. She flicked her shoulder-length black hair away from the mirrored aviators that covered half her face, and scanned the terrace. As the rest of her appeared I could see she wasn’t about to go the corporate route. Her blouse and blue jeans were skin tight and she had a bright red leather bag slung over her shoulder that was big enough to sleep in.

She spotted me immediately and tottered towards my umbrella in heels that were nearly the same height as she was.

‘You Nick?’ She sat down without waiting for me to answer or to finish getting up to shake her hand.

‘Can I get you a drink? Coffee? Iced tea?’

My new mate didn’t answer me, but gave the young waitress
who materialized at her shoulder both barrels in Cantonese, then sent her on her way before I could ask for anything myself.

‘OK. What do you want?’

The small-talk was clearly over. She leaned forward, elbows draped over her denim-coated thighs, shoulders drooping, as if she’d already had a hard day. The handles of her bag were now locked in the crook of her arm.

The few wrinkles I could see behind her glasses matched the ones around her mouth. Her nails were perfectly manicured and polished dark red, but her hands said she’d seen worse days than this, for sure. A gold bracelet on her right wrist was meant to cover a crudely inked tattoo that might have been a fish or turtle. On the underside of her left a couple of laceration marks had aged and lightened against her darker skin. Her clothes and handbag might have been Prada, but that girl had come from somewhere else entirely.

‘Are you Kitty?’

‘Yes, Kitty. Yes, yes. What you want?’ She hadn’t bothered with Charm School; she was on a mission.

‘I need a kidney – for my partner. She could travel here, anywhere.’

She shrugged. ‘How much money you got?’

I wasn’t playing hard to get, but I needed her to know that I wasn’t going to settle for something off the shelf. ‘It depends whether you can find what I need.’

I sat back as the waitress returned with a tomato juice. At least, it looked like tomato juice.

Kitty delved into her bag and took out a sleek gold case and matching lighter. She flipped back the lid, sparked up a slim cigarillo and treated me to a lungful or two of noxious smoke.

I leaned forward, and so did my distorted reflection in each of her lenses. There were more fingerprints on them than at most crime scenes. ‘My partner is Hispanic. She has chronic kidney disease, probably triggered by diabetes. I’m after a Hispanic kidney, from a living donor.’

‘Big shopping list.’ She took another drag, and when the smoke had cleared I could see that she had leaned forward too. ‘How much money you got?’

I gave her my best Buddha smile. ‘As much as it takes – so long as I get what I want.’

She smiled too, letting me know that her dental work didn’t match her designer labels. A scrape and a polish to strip back the nicotine would have been a good place to start.

Kitty removed a small strand of tobacco from her tongue with her thumb and forefinger and flicked it aside. Then she aimed her cigarillo at me, at almost point-blank range. ‘You want bespoke, you pay four hundred thousand dollar. You got that kind of money?’

I kept my gaze level. ‘What’s the point of money if my partner is dead?’

My reflection stayed dead centre in her gigs. I couldn’t read her expression, but I knew I had her full attention.

It was at least thirty seconds before she spoke. ‘How did you get my number?’

‘I asked around. I have many numbers.’

She took another drag, sizing me up. I sat back, waiting to see if I’d passed the test. To help things along, I got busy with my iPhone. Fuck it, I had places to go, other people to see. She’d better get a move on if she wanted my four hundred thou.

The waitress swung by and I beckoned again for the bill. Kitty fired off another volley of Cantonese before the girl had a chance to oblige. Then she turned back to me. ‘You come now.’

‘Come where?’

‘You get taxi. I show you.’

I shrugged apologetically at the waitress as Kitty started firing away on her mobile, hand cradling the mouthpiece, Japanese-style. I signed the bill and we made our way to the lifts.

A cab was standing at the rank, door held open by another grinning Australian. Kitty gobbed off to the driver and he set off downhill towards the causeway. I didn’t have a clue where we were going, but it didn’t matter. It felt like progress.

Kitty stared out of her window, with her head at enough of an angle for me to see one of her eyes for the first time. There was no light in it. She wasn’t remotely interested in our surroundings. She was numb – either bored with me or bored with life.

‘Where are we going?’

The eye finally moved as we passed a shoe shop. ‘Not far. Aberdeen. I know the person to help you. Kitty know everyone, and this one right for you.’

So Kitty was the middleman for the middleman. If I was about to be dicked around, it wouldn’t be her doing. And if she was lying, I’d know soon enough.

We hit the main drag and climbed an elevated section, a futuristic freeway that curved between the buildings around us, about ten storeys above ground level. I knew Aberdeen. I knew there was an exit south towards Happy Valley and on through a tunnel to the coast. Once upon a time it had probably been a happy jungle home for monkeys and lizards; now it was just a jungle – the monkeys were bouncers and the lizards owned casinos.

A giant arena loomed in front of us. I’d never been inside it, but I used to pass the floodlit track on my way back into camp, heaving with people wanting to give away their cash. The Chinese loved gambling so much they even had to invent money to do it with. They’d bet on where a fly was going to land and when it was going to take off.

There was another track up in the New Territories, but it had also ranked alongside museums and ancient temples for me as a place I didn’t want to take my wallet. Cash was for beer, paying off bar-fight fines, and saving up for a second-hand Ford Escort XR3i. What else was there?

We emerged from the two-kilometre-long tunnel under the mountains in the centre of the island into a burst of sunshine. The clouds were starting to part. The driver paid cash at the tollbooth. From here, I knew it was left towards Stanley, and straight on to Aberdeen.

Aberdeen was where you went for a night out when you couldn’t afford a taxi north, or couldn’t be arsed to spend for ever on a bus that took the long way round. The whole place was packed with rows and rows of very high and very dull apartment blocks – and some very Gucci ones on lush green garden plots built at weird angles overlooking the sea.

I’d never heard of
feng shui
before I’d got there, but soon discovered it dominated local architecture. Banks embraced it most enthusiastically of all. Even their most traditional concrete, glass and steel blocks would feature a strange door facing in a strange direction. It had nothing to do with fashion, and everything to do with making sure the
chi
, whatever that was, could flow into the building and bring good luck with it. It seemed to be working for Hong Kong.

We entered the sprawl of Aberdeen. Kitty got back on the phone; this time I could make out a man’s voice at the other end. The taxi turned off the main drag and dropped down towards the coast. If there had ever been any beaches, they were now buried under thousands of tons of
feng shui
-oriented business enterprises and industrial-scale oil tanks.

We turned into a private drive opposite a bus terminal that deposited us beneath the Aberdeen Marina Club. It had just been built when I was last here. This was the place 007 would definitely have brought his white tuxedo for a shaken-not-stirred – but it had been out of bounds to people like me. The last thing they wanted was a bunch of squaddie dickheads baring their arses at the bar.

The Marina Club was the expats’ playground within a playground, a waterside oasis for the
über
-rich in the middle of a concrete and glass desert. Swimming-pools, tennis courts, apparently even an ice rink, made it as much a social club as somewhere to park a yacht or two.

On the way into Aberdeen, jammed into a bus or a taxi, we often used to see the limos lining up to drop their well-dressed cargo for a night of boaty fun. Me and a couple of mates did try to bluff our way in one night, detouring our ride from Stanley to see if we could join the party. There was a wedding on – braziers outside and ribbons everywhere – and after a night on the town we thought it would be a piece of piss to slip past security in our Hawaiian shirts and Samurai Sam short-backs-and-sides. We hadn’t even got as far as the gate before two heavies stepped out of the shadows, shaking their heads:
Don’t take another step, lads, it’s not worth it
…

Kitty didn’t open her door or move to get out. ‘Everything OK. Don’t worry. This really nice place. Go, go – go inside!’

I got out but she stayed put and gobbed off at the driver. The heat and humidity slammed into me again as the sun found another gap in the cloud. Kitty powered down her window. ‘Go inside – someone will meet you.’ She shooed me away with the back of her hand.

The taxi swung round and drove off as I walked up the steps. I went through the glass doors and found myself in a vast, empty foyer, not a soul in sight. Then somebody got up from behind a huge settee and came towards me. I recognized her at once.

She was in a blue flowery dress that showed off her tanned arms and shoulders, sun-gigs perched on top of her head doubling as a hairband. Her white-leather bag matched her smile. She threw out her free hand to greet me and slid straight into textbook PR mode, eyes fixed on mine, voice low to draw me in. ‘Hi, Nick. I’m Sophie. Sophie Derry. I’m so glad you were able to make it at such short notice. Thank you for that.’