Zhang asked Chun Tao to wait. He didn’t say how long they would be.
“I thought private members’ clubs were only for men,” she said as they stood by the lift.
He nodded. “Usually.”
Once upstairs, they were shown to a room that was at the end of a long, hushed corridor. There were vases of fresh lilies and cedarwood armchairs upholstered in gold brocade. Traditional lute music tinkled out of hidden speakers. A picture window framed a little spotlit forest of bamboo and a wall of rough brown bricks with water running down it. At the foot of the wall was a rectangular pond filled with carp. He sat down on one of the chairs and watched her move towards the window.
“This is perfect,” she said.
“Not too quiet?”
“No.”
Two glasses of Hennessy X.O arrived. As she stood with her back to him, looking out, he once again sensed the force field that surrounded her, invisible, magnetic.
He asked what her name was.
“Naemi,” she said.
“Where are you from?” He was aware of the need to keep his questions simple. His unpredictability would come from somewhere else.
“I’m Finnish,” she said. “My mother was Sami.”
Zhang wasn’t familiar with the word.
“The Sami are nomads,” she told him. “They can be found in the northernmost parts of Norway, Sweden, and Finland, and also on the Kola Peninsula in northwest Russia. Sami people used to make a living from herding and hunting reindeer. From fishing too. They were believed to be skilled in the art of magic. Laplanders, they’re sometimes called.”
Zhang tasted his cognac. “But you grew up in Finland?”
She nodded.
“I’ve never met anyone from Finland,” he said. “What are Finnish people like?”
“We’re supposed to be undemonstrative. Reserved. There’s a myth about us—the myth of the silent Finn.”
“But it’s not true?”
“I don’t think you can generalize.” She turned from the window. “Are Chinese people really inscrutable?”
Zhang smiled.
“And your family?” he said. “Are they still there, in Finland?”
She shook her head. “My parents are both dead.”
“Do you have any brothers or sisters?”
“No.”
“You’re alone,” Zhang said. “I’m sorry.”
She was suddenly next to his chair, and leaning over him. The heat of her mouth came as a surprise, almost as if she had a temperature. She didn’t seem ill, though, not in the least. His heart speeding up, he put his hands under her jacket and drew her closer.
Later, she moved back to the window and looked out into the garden.
“I like the wall with the water running down it,” she said. “I grew up near the water.”
He joined her at the window.
She used to swim in a river, she told him, about half an hour’s walk from her parents’ house. The river was cold, even in the summer. The shock of it tightened your skin against your bones. But afterwards you felt so alert, so alive. They had lived in the country—the middle of nowhere, really. Her eyes lost their focus, and she seemed to swallow.
“You were a child, then,” he said.
She nodded slowly. “Yes.”
There was a stillness, and he thought he could hear water trickling, like the sound you make when you run your tongue over your teeth without opening your mouth. He couldn’t have, though. The window was closed. And anyway, soft music was being piped into the room. “I should go,” she said. “Already?”
“I have to be up early, for work.”
“You work?”
“Doesn’t everyone?”
He touched her cheek with his fingertips. “I didn’t see you as everyone.”
She was standing so close that he could feel her breath against his face. There was a single faint line at the edge of her left eye. Otherwise, her skin was unblemished, clear. He moved his hand to the back of her neck, beneath her hair. Then they were kissing. Once again, he noticed the heat of her mouth. Once again, the wild racing of his heart.
As they took the lift to the basement, they stood against opposing walls, looking at each other, the space between them charged and tingling, just as it had been earlier, in the car.
Everything they hadn’t done as yet.
Everything they might still do.
When the door opened and the car park lay before them, vast and warm and windowless, he asked if she wanted a lift back to where she lived.
“I’ll take a taxi,” she said. “It’s not so far.”
His car was waiting, engine running, but he turned his back on it and walked her up to the street.
“I’d like to see you again.” He reached into his jacket pocket. “Can I give you my card?”
“No need,” she said.
“How will you find me? You know nothing about me—” He bit his lip. He hadn’t meant to say so much.
“I found you tonight,” she said. “I’ll find you again.”
In a city of more than twenty million, he thought. How was that possible?
A green light appeared.
He waved the taxi down and opened the door for her. She climbed in. One hand on the top of the door, he gazed at her. The night smelled of cordite and sulfur, as if people had been letting off fireworks. As if there had been a wedding.
“Was I right when I said you were twenty-four?” he asked.
“In a way,” she said.
“You like riddles, don’t you.”
“It’s not a matter of liking them. We live with them.” She looked up at him, her lips black in the yellow light of the streetlamps. “We’re all riddles, aren’t we, even to ourselves.”
He closed the door. As he watched the taxi pull away, he felt oddly torn between regret and relief, and had no idea why.
* * *
—
By the time Zhang reached his apartment complex, it was raining hard. The security gate lifted, and Chun Tao drove through the landscaped grounds and down into the car park in the basement of Zhang’s building. It was almost three thirty in the morning. He asked Chun Tao to pick him up at ten. Chun Tao would probably park outside the complex and sleep in the car, though Zhang didn’t encourage it. He didn’t like the smell of slept-in clothes and exhaled breath. He was particular about such things. But it was hard to see what other option Chun Tao had, given that he lived more than an hour’s drive away, near Hongqiao airport.