Free Fragrant Harbour by John Lanchester

would be waiting for me. It was Oss himself, standing beside a pillar reading a copy of the Wall Street Journal through half-moon spectacles. He was wearing a very well cut uncrumpled linen suit and looked up as I approached. At his feet a Chinese man was crouched in a posture which, in the split second when I first saw it, looked somehow sexual – a prelude or aftermath of some self-immolating act of public fellation. Another half second’s bug-eyed looking and I realised Oss was having his shoes shined. You often see Chinese men having this done; Europeans almost never. As I approached, Oss smiled.
    ‘I was just getting some stock-market advice from my good friend Ah Loo here,’ he said. ‘He gives the best shoeshine and best stock tips in the whole territory.’
    ‘Po Lam stock go up, last week I make five hundred dollar,’ said Ah Loo in apparent confirmation.
    ‘Does that mean I get my shoeshine for free?’ Oss asked. To judge from the shoeshiner’s reaction, this was a running gag. He paid Ah Loo, who did a big thank-you routine – it was evidently not a trivial tip. Ah Loo picked up his kit and ambled off towards the Star Ferry terminal in a rolling walk.
    ‘We’ll be popping out for a splash in Tai Pan ; I hope that’s all right?’ said Oss. It’s always nice, with this kind of meaningless rhetorical question, when you’re never in a million years going to say no, if people exert themselves to sound as if they meant it.
    ‘Delighted,’ said the young Katharine Hepburn.
    ‘Captain Mok should be here any m … – and here he is,’ said Oss, who had folded his newspaper and tucked it under his arm like a baton. Many of his gestures had a faintly exaggerated or theatrical quality. He seemed younger than I had remembered, a well preserved forty-five passing for ten years less.
    The boat was docking. Two Cantonese in matelots’ uniforms were standing on the other side of a folded-out gangplank with what looked like velour rails. For some reason, getting off boats, which should be harder because you’re never stone-cold sober when you do it, is easier than getting on. With the slapping and bucking of the water on the pier, Tai Pan was none too steady. Ossput one firm dry hand on mine and passed me over the gangplank into the waiting outstretched arms of the Cantonese cast of The Pirates of Penzance . He himself then skipped nimbly and unfussily across, and I remembered that mention of something military in his background. He said something in Chinese to the older of the two sailors, which made the man smile.
    ‘I told him we haven’t lost one yet,’ Oss said to me. ‘We can go aft, which is more interesting and has the view, or below decks, which has the armchairs and is more comfortable.’ I voted for below. I had decided that if Oss was too cool to tell me what this was about, I was too cool to ask.
    ‘Good idea.’ We went down into the first cabin, which was fitted out as a sitting room, and then into the one beyond, which was an office. A door into the room beyond was ajar, swinging slightly as the boat moved, and I could see it was a bedroom. The only decoration in the office was a series of framed woodcuts of Mount Fuji and, on the mantelpiece, a number of photographs of T. K. Wo standing with various luminaries. There was one of him with the Prime Minister of China and another with the Prime Minister of the UK. It made you think. Presumably it was meant to. Oss sat in an armchair in front of his desk, and I sat beside him. Soon we were nursing matching glasses of Cristal.
    ‘He’s a millionaire, you know,’ he said. ‘Ah Loo, the shoeshine man. Works twelve hours a day, plays the market, supports an extended family, and has a big new house built on old clan lands in the New Territories.’
    ‘Only in Hong Kong,’ I said. This was meant to be a joke, but Oss went all serious on me.
    ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Only in Hong Kong. Does it ever strike you that England is a childish place