Zhang propped himself on his pillow. “You don’t think you’re reading too much into that one quick glance?”
“Then it happened again,” she said.
Two days later, in the evening, she looked out of her living-room window. Seven floors below, on the narrow promenade that bordered the creek, stood the man she had noticed in the gallery. He was dressed in the same suit and hat, which made him seem either careless or dangerously confident. Hands in his pockets, one ankle crossed over the other, he was leaning against the painted metal railing that separated the promenade from the creek below. His eyes were fixed on the front of her building. She stepped back from the window. The lights weren’t on, and her window was one of many. She doubted he had seen her. Thinking fast, she pulled on a T-shirt, some leggings, and a pair of trainers, tied her hair back, and let herself out of the apartment. Once on the ground floor, she exited through the rear of the building. In less than five minutes, she was jogging along the promenade, back towards the place where the man had been standing.
Zhang laughed in anticipation, though he was silently cursing Johnny Yu for having been so indiscreet.
When she drew level with the entrance she usually used, she said, she slowed to a walk, pretending to be out of breath. Elbows propped on the top of the railing, hands dangling, the man was still staring up at the building. Staring, if she had it right, in the rough direction of some windows on the seventh floor. Her floor.
“Great building, isn’t it,” she said.
He turned and looked at her, and his face seemed to open wide. “I’ve seen you before.”
She had to admire the coolness of his response. It was canny. Sly. But she could tell that he was lying. Of course he had seen her before. He was spying on her. Stalking her.
“In a gallery on Moganshan Road,” she said. “Two days ago.”
“You have a good memory.” His sudden smile revealed stained teeth. “You fancied me, perhaps.”
“I don’t think it was that.”
“Oh.” Adopting a wounded look, he took out a packet of cigarettes and offered her one.
She shook her head. “Are you interested in art?”
“I’m interested in art, in poetry—in culture generally.” He gestured with the cigarette he had just lit. “I’m not a collector, though. I don’t have that kind of money.”
“Do you live round here?”
“Not really.” Turning lazily, he leaned back against the railing. He held his cigarette below his chin, with his thumb against the filter, and watched her through the smoke that coiled upwards, past his face. “What about you?”
This, too, was sly.
“I live there.” She pointed at her own dark windows.
“Sir Victor Sassoon built it,” he said. “In 1934.”
“That’s right.”
“Apparently, it’s constructed in a loose S shape—a subtle reference to his initial.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“You’d need to see it from above, of course. From the air.” He smiled, his stained teeth showing once again. “Anyway,” he said, and he took a deep final drag on his cigarette and flicked the butt into the soupy waters of the creek, “I should be getting along.” He brushed a few flakes of ash from the arm of his jacket, then looked at her sidelong. “Have a nice evening.”
She watched as he set off along the promenade. Just before the bridge, he climbed down a flight of steps and signaled to a taxi that happened to be passing. He didn’t look back, not even once.
“Strange encounter,” Zhang said.
“Twice in a matter of two days, and in two completely different locations.” She pushed the hair out of her eyes. “It seems an unlikely coincidence.”
Zhang agreed that it seemed unlikely.
“It’s not you, is it,” she said, “spying on me?”
He held her gaze, though his heart was beating fast. “Why would I spy on you?”
She didn’t answer.
“If you see the man again,” he said, “tell me. Maybe I can do something.”
“Like what?”
“I know people. I might be able to sort it out.”
She looked at him for a long moment. Finally, she nodded. “All right,” she said.
“It’s late,” he told her. “I should get some rest.”
He woke again to see her standing naked at the bedroom window. Her back to him, she appeared as a silhouette, slender triangles of daylight showing on either side of her, between her elbows and her waist.
“Can’t you sleep?” he said.
She turned from the window. “I have trouble sleeping.”
“Are you worried about that man?”
“It’s not that.” She glanced at her watch. “I should go. I have a busy day.”
“Would you like a lift somewhere? Chun Tao could drive you.”
She leaned over him and kissed him, her hair falling across his face. “That’s sweet of you, but there’s no need.”
He heard the hiss of the shower, but didn’t hear her leave.
When he woke an hour and a half later, at seven thirty, he rolled over in the bed and lay where she had been lying. Her pillow smelled costly, exquisite. The Sacred Tears of Thebes. He smiled. As he washed and dressed, he remembered how he had flown over windswept grass, and he remembered the exhilaration, a heart-bursting feeling that seemed to belong to childhood. I didn’t know I could do this. He could see the landscape even now—the quaint wooden houses, the river, the distant line of trees. They were no less vivid in daylight than they had been in the dream—except that it hadn’t been a dream at all, since he hadn’t been asleep. Why had he imagined such a place? What did it mean?
Once in his office, a Starbucks Frappuccino next to his laptop, he put in a call to Mad Dog.
“What?” Mad Dog sounded tetchy and listless, the legacy of too much whiskey and Tiger beer. In the background, Zhang could hear the chatter of cartoons. Mad Dog lived with Ling Ling, a woman half his age, and Ling Ling had a five-year-old daughter.
“You got home all right, then,” Zhang said.
“No thanks to you.”
“Any damage?”
Mad Dog’s chuckle was dry and humorless. “Unscathed.”
“Do you remember what you said when we were upstairs,” Zhang said, “by the toilets?”
“I was drunk. Forget it.”