A Death in China - Carl Hiaasen [100]
McCarthy ordered up another gin-and-tonic. Cursing the idiots—that’s what R-and-R is for. Get it out of your system, Jimbo.
The club was bustling and noisy with journalists hell-bent on a night of sloppy decadence—British, Australians, New Zealanders, a Frenchman, even two American network guys. Behind the huge padded bar, stone-faced Cantonese bartenders poured quickly and expertly. As the night wore on, McCarthy knew, the ratio of water to booze would escalate in proportion to the patron’s inability to tell the difference. McCarthy, who could hold his liquor and appear to when he couldn’t, kept a close eye on the Tanqueray bottle behind the counter. The instant the bartender made a secret move for an off brand, McCarthy would lunge for his throat.
At the big table in the center of the club, one of the American network guys was screaming at the French magazine free-lancer. Vietnam again, McCarthy thought. Every time he was in the place there was a fight about Nam. Almost everybody in the club had covered the war, some of them with a fanaticism otherwise reserved for the World Series or slot machines. Everybody had a story, everybody had a theory, everybody had a pain. The walls of the club had become a Nam shrine: headlines, photographs, tributes to fallen colleagues like Larry Burroughs and Sean Flynn. When Nam had been hot, Hong Kong had been the jump-off point for journalists. The club had been electric then, swirling with stories of war; the war had been the story, and even besotted Fleet Street could focus on it. Now the story was China, McCarthy reflected, huge, ungainly, enigmatic, unsexy China. There was only so much you could write, so many telescopic shots of the Great Wall, before the guys on the desk started hollering for more Rubik’s cubes.
McCarthy guided himself to the men’s room. Standing at a urinal, he observed that in the eight months since his last visit, there had been only one addition to the wall graffiti: a strikingly accurate likeness of Lady Diana, reclining languorously. The Aussies, McCarthy decided, it had to be. As he was admiring the steady hand of the artist, the door swung open and McCarthy was joined by another man.
“Remember me?”
McCarthy studied the face in the mirror. “Stratton, baby! Gimme a second here and I’ll be right with you.”
“Take your time,” Stratton said.
“Hey,” McCarthy said, zipping up, “you don’t suppose the princess is really double-jointed?”
“Not like that, Jim.”
To make room for Stratton at the bar, McCarthy gently shooed a buxom prostitute who had costumed herself like Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot. Stratton immediately claimed the barstool and ordered a Budweiser.
“Heresy!” McCarthy exclaimed. “Every time I see you you’re ordering the wrong beer. What brings you to this seedy place?”
“You do,” Stratton said. “I need your help.”
After leaving the consulate, he had walked for hours through Hong Kong, dazzled and disoriented, distracted from the city’s raucous vitality by his own despair. Stratton mourned for David, and for Kangmei. Once, in an alley market where old crones cooled their feet in vats of live shrimp, he had spotted her, swaying through the crush of people, an ebony trail of silken hair. He had run, hurdling racks and side-stepping vendors, until he had caught her, taken her by the elbows, turned her and seen a stranger’s face. The young woman had smiled shyly and backed away, but Stratton had been too sad to apologize.
He had taken a tram to the Peak, and from a windy platform imagined China unfolding beyond Kowloon. Somewhere, David’s body. Somewhere, Kangmei. As the sun set, the grand harbor had shimmered and then in darkness evaporated to a vast black hole. The famous floating restaurants