eager. ‘The renegade Lama is dead.’
She became thoughtful, then grew unsettled, almost concerned. He had expected her to respond to the news, but not in this manner.
‘I thought you would wish to celebrate,’ he added, suddenly uncertain.
‘Then your presence is even less appropriate than I thought, Private Secretary.’ She always used his formal title when slapping him down. The deep frown was back, creasing her forehead.
‘I don’t understand, Ambassador.’
‘The first perceptive thing you’ve said all day.’
She was unusually brittle this morning. More bowel trouble, perhaps. Best to pacify. He bowed. ‘It would be an honour if you would explain.’
How he hated this vast office at the heart of the Embassy. They might just as well have been back in old Beijing rather than at the centre of a thriving Western capital. When the new Ambassador had arrived it had been an opportunity to bring the place to life with some of the new colour and fashions that were coming out of Shanghai and Hong Kong, but the old woman had turned it into something fit only for the scrapbook of a dowager empress – heavy rosewood chairs complete with antimacassars, dark lacquer screens, heavy rugs, oppressive potted plants. No imagination. All imported from home, even the musty smell, which seemed to have been borrowed from some dank winter’s day in central Beijing.
Madame Lin walked across the room to stand silhouetted against the window, where she lit a cigarette and took the smoke down to the bottom of her lungs.
‘So the Lama is dead,’ she repeated.
‘Gone. Wiped away,’ Mo enthused.
‘No, that’s where you are wrong. Simply because he was an enemy you underestimate him.’
‘But there is nothing left to underestimate.’ He struggled to hide his exasperation, and was not altogether successful.
‘In life he was significant. Yet in death he is a still greater uncertainty. And we have enough uncertainty in China today to satisfy even the keenest sceptic. Which is why young men like you are in such a hurry, Mo.’
Her tone was chiding and he wasn’t entirely sure what she was getting at. Time to get back to the matter in hand. ‘You are suggesting he is more of a threat to us dead?’
‘While he lived we knew where he was, what he was up to. Our eyes were always upon him. But how can we follow him now?’
‘You can’t believe in the absurdity of rebirth?’ Mo was aghast. His training at the Foreign Affairs Institute in Beijing had been most specific on the point.
‘It doesn’t matter what I think. What matters is what millions of Tibetans think, and they believe he will come back to lead them. A new Lama. Like a Messiah. While they are waiting they will make trouble. And when he returns, whoever he may be, they’ll make even more trouble. The wind blows cold from those mountains.’
‘Then we must remain alert, Ambassador.’
She turned on him. ‘The question, Mo, is whether you will remain at all.’
‘Ambassador?’
‘You take me for a fool. That I cannot tolerate.’
He began to protest. She cut him short.
‘You steal antiques and artefacts from the Embassy, Mo. My Embassy.’
Thick cigarette smoke hung in the air, creating an atmosphere that was suddenly clinging and intensely claustrophobic. ‘Ambassador, I can assure you …’
‘You can assure me of nothing. I know, Mo. About how you’ve been moving antiques around the Embassy. To hide them. Sending them off to your cousin in Amsterdam and having them copied. Then selling the original, and returning the fake to the Embassy.’
She was by the fireplace now, with Mo still protesting.
‘Not true. Not true …’
As though to prove her point she picked up an earthenware cocoon vase from the mantelpiece, covered in devils’ eyes and subtle whorls and the encrustations of age. She held it shoulder-high for his inspection. ‘How old would you say, Mo? One thousand? Two thousand? Han dynasty, I think. Yes, two thousand years old.’
Then with remarkable dexterity for a woman of her age she lobbed it across the room in his direction. In alarm Mo reached out and snatched it from the air, juggling desperately with it for a few tangled moments. But he couldn’t hold it. It fell. And smashed to fragments.
‘Not even two thousand days, Mo. But a very effective copy, nonetheless. Your cousin is to be congratulated.’
Across the vast space which seemed to separate them their eyes met and locked, and a change came over Mo. The cringing of previous moments was replaced by something altogether more substantial. If the game was up, he decided, there was little point in continuing to be horsewhipped by a woman. ‘Ambassador, I believe that is the first compliment you have ever paid me or my family.’
She ignored his impudence. ‘Why, Mo? Why all this dishonesty?’
He shrugged. ‘Only three pieces have gone. The first went to pay your predecessor’s gambling debts.’ His tone had an edge of disdain.
‘You never told me he gambled,’ she accused.
‘As you would not expect me to gossip to your successor about you.’
‘And the second piece? What became of that?’
‘It went to pay the outstanding bills on the refurbishment of your Residence.’
‘But why? The budget has been exceeded?’
‘No, simply not paid by the Foreign Ministry. Our budgets are months behind. I thought it wise to pay the bills and fix your leaking roof. And equally prudent not to tell you about it.’
She nodded. The Chinese economy was in chaos and Embassy expenses were beginning to fall ever farther down the list of Foreign Ministry priorities. The Residence was tired, unkempt, in need of refurbishment. What Mo said made sense. Her tone grew more emollient.
‘And the third, Mo? The third piece went for what purpose, please?’
He knew she would come to that. He had carefully dragged his Ambassadors into his little game, paying some of their debts and soiling them by association. But he knew it wouldn’t hide his own activities. Mo was one of the brightest and best-qualified young diplomats of his generation. Fudan University before the Foreign Affairs Institute. Every step of his career accompanied by commendations and acclaim. That’s why many years earlier than he might have expected he’d ended up in London, one of the most prized of foreign postings. But he and the other staff might just as well have been posted to a warehouse in Ulan Bator. Of London itself they knew and saw practically nothing. They weren’t allowed to touch. They lived almost entirely within the Embassy walls. They ate in the Embassy’s canteen, worked beneath the Embassy’s harsh lights and slept in the Embassy’s unwelcoming and lonely beds. The cockroaches here were almost as big as in their old university dorms. And their greatest excitement – oh revolutionary joy! – proved to be a communal bus trip to Brighton. Windy, rain-splattered Brighton. Next year they had been promised Bognor.
Even as the secretaries fluttered at the prospect of Bognor, Mo felt sick with frustration. And his sickness grew. One day he had been permitted (after first reporting to Security) to walk to the Chinese pharmacy in Shaftesbury Avenue so that he might pick up some herbs for the Ambassador. Just down from the pharmacy he had found a young man and his dog, wrapped in a blanket in a doorway. A beggar in the midst of plenty. Proof before his eyes of the Western disease. Except that in his bowl the young man and his dog had made more money in a morning than Mo could spare in a week. A Chinese diplomat, yet he couldn’t even look an English beggar in the eye.
It could have been worse, of course. Mo was already on the ladder of privilege which, as he climbed, would eventually bring