The Woman Who Pretended to Love Men Read online

  For five and a half years, I stood behind curtained windows, crowds of people, pillars and walls and observed the daily activity of a woman my boss called C31. He never explained what the ‘C’ stood for and I never asked for there was another clause in my employment contract that stated I was never to be inquiring about my assignments, but in my own head, I concluded ‘C’ likely stood for ‘Caution’ or ‘Cult’. ‘Caution’, because C31 was, my boss said, really a terrorist in hiding; ‘Cult’, because she was, I was told, a high-ranking member of the Japanese cult that carried out that deadly chemical gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995. Eight people died in that attack and more than two hundred were wounded; as a result, a client of Everquest (my boss was not allowed to disclose who) was not taking any chances with her. Intel was that she had been in constant contact with the cult right around the time they started doing assassination experiments on sheep and people. The client wanted somebody to watch her round the clock just so they could be sure she wasn’t planning a similar attack on the train system in Hong Kong. For five and a half years, that somebody was me.

  I rented a tatty one-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment opposite the dilapidated ‘50s building in which C31 and her family lived and turned it into my home and office. On week days, when C31 sat in the teeny, dusty palm-reading shop she and her husband, Mr Lam, ran on the first floor of the towering apartment block, I would attach a long lens to the video camera I had permanently on tripod in my living room and point it down towards the ground. When she went back up to her cramped, old-fashioned apartment on the sixth floor, I would put a shorter lens on the video camera and tilt it upwards to record the inside of her apartment instead.

  On weekends, if C31 left her apartment, say for meals with her husband and fifteen-year-old son, or to meet friends and family, I would tail her and record who she met, where she went and what she did in one of the many pocket-sized spiral notebooks I bought with my office’s approval. If I knew the entire family of three would be out of the house for more than an hour, say to go to a gathering or for a day out at the beach, I would sneak into her apartment to collect and replace the eight tiny cameras my boss made me install and keep hidden in her apartment at all times. My boss told me to buy an entire box of such cameras the day I finished my six months of training; they were state-of-the-art spy cameras with motion detection capabilities, only just the size of an eraser, and they could record video on removable MultiMediaCards for at least a week before running out of battery or card space. By attaching them to a wad of plasticine and climbing onto whichever chair or table I could get my hands on, I could hide the tiny cameras in high places C31 and her family would never touch—inside ceiling lamps, on the tops of cupboards, above the hood of their stove and on their prayer shelf, on a plastic fan that was mounted on a wall. It helped that C31’s apartment was filled with mismatched furniture and cluttered—clothes and bags of plastic hanging from cupboards and doors; shoes, boxes and storage bags stuffed under beds and chairs or wherever possible; for five whole years, the family of three lived with cameras all around their two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment and not one of them noticed.

  I came to know C31 more intimately than I did my own mother. I knew exactly how long she took to shower and eat, how often she let her husband make love to her, how often she spent helping her only son with his homework. I knew her palm-reading business was doing well, that they had a loyal following who believed she was practically psychic, who came for readings at least once a year or whenever they needed someone to help them make big life decisions. I knew C31 and family had way more savings than the decrepit, shambolic home they lived in implied; that the whole family had even gotten American citizenships by investment approved and were planning to move away from Hong Kong at the end of 1999.

  That was the other reason I decided to ask for a promotion. For five and a half years, all I had ever done was watch, record and write weekly reports on C31; I had no idea what my job would be like if she left the country. My boss had been aware of her move to America for months yet he never once mentioned a transfer to America or a new assignment for me. It didn’t feel like there was anything in the cards just yet and that worried me. I liked my job; I didn’t want to lose it because of sheer bad luck. And hell, if I couldn’t get wed or a boyfriend like other women my age, the least I could do was get my career sorted, right? I had been ‘Fleur de Roller, Junior Security Agent’ for way too long.

  I got lucky. My boss replied my email that very day.

  ‘Let’s discuss. Meet me at the office on Monday, 3pm.’

  I was beyond excited.

  Chapter 3

  21 Jun 1999, Monday

  Everquest Incorporated had its headquarters in a tower of many small and medium businesses within the Central Business District. The tower wasn’t the most modern or stylish of the towers in the area but it wasn’t the shabbiest either.

  Whenever I went over to the office, usually only once every six months for my compulsory appraisals, I would wear a black business suit over a crisp white blouse and pull my long black hair back into a tight, neat bun to blend in with the office crowd on the streets below and within the building.

  After going through the glass door with the Everquest Incorporated logo on it, I would go right to the corridor of doors on the left of the reception counter, to the first bright blue door on the left, behind which I knew my boss and the smell of stale, bitter coffee would be waiting for me.

  On the rare occasion I ran into another office-attired person when making that short journey, I would simply smile and walk on without saying a word like my boss had told me to do very early on. He never explained why but since nobody I ran into at the Everquest office, not even the receptionist, ever made conversation with me, I presumed it was because we all had projects we weren’t allowed to talk about.

  “Hello, de Roller,” my boss said the moment I stepped into his room that Monday, right on the dot at 3pm. His name was Mr Yamamoto. He was Japanese, in his early fifties, with a greying moustache, perpetually neat side-combed hair and a preference for short-sleeved shirts in pale blue, which he usually wore with a black tie. “Nice to see you again. You look prettier than ever.”

  “Thank you,” I said, even though I could see his beady black eyes running over my chest from behind his thick glasses and feel my cheeks go hot. (My blouse was buttoned all the way up to my neck and the jacket above it covered three-quarters of my chest, mind you.) I made myself smile anyhow because I knew that was expected of me. Mr Yamamoto was not the owner of Everquest, just a salaried employee who made it up the ranks over the years, but he had been my boss from day one; he was the one who appraised my work once every six months and also the only person from Everquest with whom I interacted on a regular basis. So even though I had nothing nice to say about his appearance in return—I honestly thought he looked much older and more worn since the last time I saw him, with eye bags that were double the size they had been and creases on his forehead and eyes that were now more visible than ever—I saw no sense in making him dislike me. I kept my thoughts to myself because I knew I needed him more than he needed me.

  “Please, sit.” His tanned hand sprung up from behind the mountains of files, envelopes and paper that buried his desk and he gestured at the cushioned office chair that sat between his desk and me. “Make yourself comfortable.”

  I sat but found it hard to be comfortable in the presence of a man who could determine the future of my career with mere words and numbers; who also seemed to prefer keeping his eyes fixed below my neck most of the time.

  “I called you in today, de Roller, because I want to know why it is you think you deserve a promotion right now,” he said.

  “I’ve been accomplishing my assignment on time and without any problems for six whole years, sir. I would like to progress in my career at some point and, I think, now that I have shown myself capable, I would like to do more.”

  “Fair enough. Unfortunately, d
e Roller, at Everquest, due to the difficult nature of our business, we don’t give out promotions that easily.” He looked up and into my eyes at last. “We require our employees to pass a test, so to speak, to prove themselves capable of handling the next level of duties before we promote them.”

  I held my head high, held his gaze with confidence and nodded. “I would be happy to give the test a go, sir. If you think I’m ready.”

  “The test won’t be easy, I’m afraid. It will require a lot more of your wits and skills than your previous assignment ever did. So, de Roller, what I want to know is... how badly do you want a promotion? Will you be willing to take on an assignment that will take up the whole of your existence for an indefinite amount of time and challenge you in ways you cannot yet imagine or would you prefer to remain on C31, doing what I personally think you’ve been doing a fantastic job on?”

  I noticed he didn’t once mention C31’s move to the U.S. and it made me apprehensive all over again. A sign he was getting ready to remove me from the organisation? “I’d like to take the test, sir,” I said.

  “Are you sure?” He narrowed his already relatively narrow eyes and leaned forward, his brown crinkled cheek almost touching the formerly white, now yellowish, boxy computer monitor that stuck out from behind his stacks of papers. “Because there’s no backing out once you choose to accept the new assignment and any screw up you make will have repercussions. It’s written in your contract. You might want to read it again before coming to a decision.”

  I saw myself in the reflection of his glasses and saw myself looking tense so I took a deep breath and tried my best to present myself as a competent and intrepid individual. “I am aware, sir, and I know I’m ready to take it on. If you’re ready for me to take it on, that is.”

  Mr Yamamoto smiled and dropped backwards into his chair—a chair that looked exactly like the one I was sitting on—and dropped his eyes below my neck yet again. “Good. In that case, de Roller, clean up C31’s apartment and be done with that. Don’t ever monitor her, talk to her or go anywhere near her ever again. The consequences of doing so will be severe. Check your contract if you don’t remember the details.”

  I nodded.

  “Great. Now that that’s done, I’m going to give you your new assignment.” He spun around in his chair, pulled open a drawer on the metallic shelf that was next to him, dug around and pulled out a brown and sealed A3-sized envelope that was puffed out, oddly shaped and full of bulky items. He tossed it over to me and when the envelope landed on my lap, I saw it had the photograph of a young man stapled on its front.

  “Your test will be C39, Danny Diaz from New York. He arrived in Hong Kong two weeks ago under a tourist VISA and our client received intel he’s planning a big terror event in the region. Oddly enough, he’s now, apparently, in a coma at King George Hospital. Your job is to monitor all of his activity, if any, and find out who he’s been in contact with. Send weekly reports and footage back to me, the same way you did with C31. Don’t leave anything out.”

  The young man in the photograph was an extraordinarily good-looking pretty boy who looked younger than twenty-five. His face was like a model’s—perfectly contoured, with dark brown hair shaved close to his scalp, thick eyebrows, dark brown eyes, no stubble and a healthy-looking golden tan. He looked happier than most and possessed the sort of smiley, boyish charm I knew Carla and her friends, and maybe even my mother, would swoon over. He had none of the brooding disgruntlement you’d expect to see on a terrorist’s face, but then, I remembered C31—she looked nothing like a terrorist either; she looked exactly like the average Hong Kong woman would when just a few years short of fifty, with the same innocuous demeanour, the same tight curls in her short hair, the same barely visible makeup, and the same floral blouses worn over loosely-fitted mono-coloured pants. I decided appearances were most certainly deceiving.

  “Do you see the importance of your role here? If you succeed, that promotion you seek is yours, of course, but you will also have contributed to something so much bigger.”

  “I see it, sir, and I’d be more than happy to take on the challenge.” I looked up at him and smiled in a way that would suggest I was both friendly and helpful.

  He smiled back, to my relief. “Good. In that envelope are tools you will use to get the job done. You will assume a new identity and wear the glasses within at all times. You will keep those glasses in the case they now sit in for at least five hours every night when you sleep, without fail, and put on the other devices within when instructed. You will carry the phone within everywhere and pick up every call you get on it as soon as you can. Are we clear?”

  “Yes, sir. We are very clear.”

  “Good. In that case, take that envelope, internalise your new identity and wait for the call that will instruct you on how you’re going to get started.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I look forward to seeing you succeed, de Roller. Just between us, I must say I think you’ve been one of the most capable junior hires we’ve had in a while. I have a feeling you’ll find a way to pass this test, just as you’ve always passed all of mine.” His eyes fell back down onto my chest and this time remained right there.

  I swallowed my discomfort, kept my smile on and stood up from the chair to bring my chest away from his eyes. “I will. I won’t disappoint you, sir.”

  He looked a tad disappointed anyway. “Good,” he said to my crotch. “Now get out of here, I’ve got another meeting in five.”

  I did exactly as he ordered.

  My mother, my teachers, career coaches, self-help books, they always said it was to my benefit to obey everything the boss said.

  Chapter 4

  22 Jun 1999, Tuesday

  The call my boss spoke of came one day later on the cheery yellow Nokia 5110 that had been in the envelope he handed me. By the time the iconic Nokia ringtone cut into the stillness of my otherwise silent apartment, I had already read the stapled stack of papers describing the identity, history and occupation of the woman I was now supposed to be five times over, memorised every detail and burnt the papers as was protocol. I had ‘cleaned up’—meaning remove all cameras from—C31’s apartment too but I remained in the apartment that was opposite hers because that was the only home I had, for the time being, at least.

  The Nokia’s lit five-line screen informed me that an ‘Unknown Number’ was calling, which meant the person on the other line paid extra dollars for privacy. Had I gotten the call on my personal cell phone, my StarTAC, I wouldn’t have picked up—I hated not knowing who was calling. The Nokia, however, wasn’t my personal cell phone; I didn’t have much of a choice.

  “Sandra,” an unnatural, raspy voice said the moment I put the handy Nokia to my ear and pressed the button with the green phone symbol.

  The voice sounded like some comic book monster’s—Blank’s voice in the Dick Tracy movie, to be precise; it had an American-ish twang and was deep like a large man’s—so I was, frankly, quite startled, even though I knew it was part of my job to act unruffled at all times. “Yes. All dressed and ready for duty,” I replied. My words came out calm, to my relief.

  “Plug the earphones from the envelope into the Discman, turn the Discman on then go stand in front of a mirror. When you’re there, put the earphones into your ear and say hello.”

  I did exactly as the voice ordered, stood my bespectacled, reporter-getup-wearing self in front of the full-length mirror I had in my bedroom and said hello once the black wired earphones were in my ear. The silver metal glasses that had been in the envelope had large round rims and a thick metallic bridge decorated with four little black dots. It made me look bookish and intelligent, which I discovered I rather enjoyed.

  “I hear you,” the raspy voice said in my ears shortly after, to my surprise. “My name is Alpha. You are to follow my orders. You can communicate with me via speed dial ‘1’ on your Nokia or by putting on these earphones. If anyone questions you when the
earphones are in, you are to say you’re only listening to the Backstreet Boys’ I Want It That Way on repeat.”

  That made sense. The Discman that had been in the envelope had the Backstreet Boys’ ‘I Want It That Way’ single on CD in it. The night before, I spent a good half hour trying to get it to play but it never did. Now, after seeing what the Discman really was for, I finally understood why. “Got it,” I said to my own reflection.

  In that moment, I noticed the call on the Nokia had been disconnected.

  “Do you remember what your mission is?” the raspy, mannish voice continued in my ear.

  “Yes. Monitor C39 and find out who he’s been in contact with.”

  “Good. You start now. Take the train to King George Hospital and go to the ICUs on the ninth floor. Say you’re a friend visiting or a reporter writing a story after an anonymous tip off if anyone calls you out on it. I’ll speak to you again when you get there.”

  “On it.”

  King George Hospital, a public hospital in Kowloon, felt, to me, more like an overcrowded, ugly maze than it did a hospital.

  The ninth floor was, like its lobby, just one long, endless, enclosed corridor lit by unforgiving florescent lights, full of drab colours and unsightly fixtures. There was not a window in sight. Bulky unused medical machinery, with their electrical sockets curled round their bodies, lay haphazardly scattered throughout the corridor, in between uncomfortable-looking plastic chairs lined up in neat rows against the walls. There were all the sorts of people you would expect to see in a hospital—whole families spanning two or three generations, nurses, doctors, cleaners—but not one of them was able to walk in a straight line or without having to stop. Everyone rubbed elbows with everyone else, literally, and endured the noise that sounded typical of a shopping centre stoically.