Read Online Fragrant Harbour by John Lanchester - Free Book Online Page B

South-east Asia is where most of the world’s billionaires live, so there was plenty of material, the only difficulty being presented by the fact that of all the various types of people there are, billionaires are about the least keen on publicity. It wasn’t at all clear what kind of access I would get, and I very much didn’t fancy the idea of spending weeks being fended off and playing phone tag with PRs and PAs.
    ‘That’s part of the interest,’ said Berkowitz. ‘Inaccessibility. Shiftiness. Keeping secrets. The whole point of these guys, especially in Hong Kong, is no one knows where the money comes from. Not the real mega-money but the money they started with. Focus on the early years.’
    ‘I thought you said that the combination of British libel laws, Chinese ideas about face and a few hundred million dollars in the bank made for a cast-iron guarantee that no one ever said a truthful word about any of this,’ I said.
    ‘Not in public they don’t. But,’ said Berkowitz, waving his hands in front of his face like a man trying to enact the Dance of the Seven Veils without moving his body, ‘you can hint .’
    So now, in a rage, I went ahead and wrote about billionaires – except I didn’t take Berkowitz’s advice about hinting. Instead I went ahead and spent a month gathering, collating and writing up the unexpurgated story of the Hong Kong über -rich, focusing on the issue of where their money came from. In the case of several of the biggest local fortunes, the answers involved the Communists, the Triads, Khun Sa and his opium empire, and the rights to gambling in Macao. I put in all the stories which oneheard told over and after drinks: about the money that had been filtered back from Macao to the socialist parties of Portugal and France, as recompense for mysterious favours; about the money which had poured into the British Conservative Party in the run-up to the 1992 General Election, a subject on which Hong Kong was pullulating with rumours; about how the appointment of Governor Patten – who as Conservative Party chairman had been in charge of spending the party’s war chest in that same election – had in some local circles been seen as a discreet gesture of acknowledgement; about many other things besides. I put in, in short, as much of the secret history of Hong Kong as I had ever heard.
    There was one omission from the piece: the Wos. Everybody knew about the Triad rumours in the family’s past. Since there wasn’t a hope in hell of printing anything about them in a magazine they owned, I deliberately left it all out, in the hope that that would be in its own way a signal about how things worked in Hong Kong. In the end, up against the deadline, I wrote all day and all night and filed the story at dawn the next morning. It was, though I say so myself, fucking great – the best piece I’d ever written. At ten, Berkowitz called me with a herogram. I ran a bubble bath and read a Mills and Boon, booked a massage for four that afternoon, and went back to bed.
    At about six I was floating around the flat in a post-massage stupor, feeling a bit knackered, a bit drifty, and very pleased with myself, when the phone rang again. I picked it up expecting more compliments.
    ‘Miss Stone?’
    ‘Yup, speaking.’
    ‘Winston Tang here. Mr Oss’s personal assistant. Mr Oss asked me to present his compliments and would it be possible for you to meet him at Queen’s Pier in an hour.’
    ‘Um, yeah, sure, may I ask … no, that’s fine.’
    Another herogram, I felt sure. News clearly travelled fast within the Wo organisation.
     *
    I arrived at the pier about ten minutes early, dressed for business in a pink fake-Chanel power suit, Gucci slingbacks, with a Prada handbag, and, for a touch of offhand cool, Calvin Kleinsunglasses. Not bad, though I say so myself. Men always overestimate the extent to which women dress for display, and underestimate how much we use clothes as armour.
    I wasn’t sure who