Lust, Caution by Eileen Chang

Author:Eileen Chang [Chang, Eileen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-48778-0
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-03-11T16:00:00+00:00

Three black capes were now sitting around the mahjong table. The nose of the new arrival—Liao Tai-tai— was speckled with white pockmarks.

“Mr. Yee’s back,” Ma Tai-tai smirked.

“What a wicked liar that Wang Chia-chih is!” Yee Tai-tai complained. “Promising to take us all out to dinner then running away. I’ll collapse with hunger if she makes us wait much longer!”

“Mr. Yee.” Liao Tai-tai smiled. “Your wife’s bankrupted us all today. She’ll be the one buying dinner tomorrow.”

“Mr. Yee,” Ma Tai-tai said, “where’s the dinner you promised us last time you won? It’s impossible to get a meal out of you.”

“Mr. Yee ought to buy us dinner tonight, since we can never get him to accept our invitations,” the other black cape said.

He merely smiled. After the maid brought him tea, he knocked his cigarette ash onto the saucer, glancing across at the thick wool curtains covering the wall opposite and wondering how many assassins they could conceal. He was still shaken by the afternoon’s events.

Tomorrow he must remember to have them taken down, though his wife was bound to object to something so expensive being sidelined into a storeroom.

It was all her fault, the result of her careless choice of friends. But even he was impressed by how elaborately, how far in advance—two years— the entire trap had been premeditated. The preparations had, indeed, been so perfectly thorough that only a last-minute change of heart on the part of his femme fatale had saved him. So she really had loved him—his first true love. What a stroke of luck.

He could have kept her on. He had heard or read somewhere that all spies are brothers; that spies can feel a loyalty to one another stronger than the causes that divide them. In any case, she was only a student. Of that group of theirs, only one had been in the pay of Chungking, the one who had gotten away—the single glitch in the entire operation. Most likely he’d stepped out of the P’ing-an halfway through a showing, then gone back into the theater once the assassination attempt was aborted. After the area was sealed off, he would have shown the police his ticket stub and then been allowed to slip away. The young man who’d waited with him to do the job had seen him check that the stub was safely stashed along with his cigarettes. It had been agreed in advance that he wouldn’t take up room in the getaway car; that afterward he would stroll inconspicuously back into the cinema. After they’d been roughed up a bit, the little idiots came out with the whole story.

Mr. Yee stood behind his wife, watching the game. After he had stubbed out his cigarette, he took a sip of his tea; still too hot. Though an early night was surely what he needed, he was overtired, unable to wind down. He was exhausted from sitting by the phone all afternoon waiting for news; he hadn’t even had a proper dinner. As soon as he’d reached safety, he’d immediately telephoned to get the whole area sealed off.

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