Fragrant Harbor - Rilegato

1

If I had to explain in a sentence why I came to Hong Kong and why I now do what I do, that sentence would be this: Money doesn't lie.

Money doesn't lie. It can't. People lie about money, but that's different.

I HAVE NO FALSE MODESTY about my abilities-in case it ever seems as if I do, let me now state for the record that I think I'm shit-hot-but I nonetheless freely admit I wouldn't have done the things I have without four big breaks. The first of them was my job on the middle-market middle-England tabloid The Toxic. (Not its real name.) Prior to that my life went like this: home, school, Durham University, journalism course at Cardiff, job on local paper in Blackpool. I should explain that I am just old enough to have grown up in the days when you were expected to train in journalism on regional papers before moving to London and the nationals. This was back in the Paleolithic, before Eddy Shah took on the unions and Murdoch broke them. Mastodons roamed the banks of the Thames. Some tribes had not yet learned the secret of fire. Men were men, women were women, small furry animals lived in well-justified fear, and the only people allowed to operate the A3 photocopier in the corner of the office were members of the National Graphics Association. Say what you like about Mrs. Thatcher.

Nowadays someone as bright and ambitious and sassy as I thought I was would start hawking pieces to magazines and papers while still at college, and the plan would be to bypass all that grubby cloth-cap crap about reporting and head as quickly as possible for the clean, well-lit uplands of commentary, opinion, and a column with your second most flattering photo at the top. (Second most flattering, because if you chose the best one, [a] your colleagues would take the piss for being vain, and [b] people who met you would think, Oh, she looks nice in the photo but in real life she could pass for a boxer's dog.) This, however, was the old days. So I spent eighteen months in Blackpool at The Argus, doing all the usual stuff from local fairs to sport to news (Granny drives Reliant Robin over cliff, survives) to gradually more interesting court cases to features and eventually-yes-a column. Since the choice of snaps was provided by Eric the staff photographer, the idea of a flattering picture was relative. It was more a question of finding one that didn't make me look like Mussolini.

The other thing that happened was, I changed my name. I was christened Doris. Doris! These days I could probably sue my parents for damages. The trouble is that anyone stupid enough to call a child Doris won't have any assets worth suing for. "Dawn Stone" made an infinitely better byline.

THERE WERE LOTS of local papers. Blackpool wasn't a random choice. It was, is, regularly the site of party conferences, and I reckoned that if I couldn't make useful contacts with the nationals during party conferences I might as well give up and train as a solicitor (which was Plan B). I hope I sound as obsessed as I actually was with this issue of breaking out into the nationals. I daresay if I'd gone to Oxbridge I would have had a least half a dozen chums who fell out of bed and into useful, networkable positions on the kind of paper I wanted to work for. But I didn't, and I didn't, and I knew that I would have to make any contacts I would use. It was a comfort to tell myself that I wouldn't have had it any other way.

I had my first brushes with the nationals about two months before my first party-conference season, during a missing-child case that turned into a search for a body and then, about six months later, into a murder case. (It was the stepfather. Imagine everybody's surprise.) The story would normally have been out of my league at the paper, as a new arrival, but I had written the initial "Where's Little Jimmy?" item and so I stayed with it, on and off, until I left. The London hacks were all over it from the start, richer and pushier and yobbier than I had expected, though the man I met and became friends with, Bob Berkowitz, was none of those things. He turned up at the office one day looking for Ken, an old mate from the Brighton Courier, now The Argus's chief reporter. I looked up from my manual typewriter-there's a Flintstones-era detail-and saw a short, shy man with dark curly hair and glasses, carrying a coat and looking tactically bewildered; bewildered in that way people look when they want you to notice and offer help.

"Can I help you?" I asked, almost certainly in a not very helpful way, a twenty-four-year-old girl scowling over a desk.

"Is Ken around?"

"Out on a story."

He looked at his watch, frowning. "But the pubs are shut," he said. I gave him one of those laughs you do to show you appreciate the effort someone's made in making a joke, and we got talking.

Berkowitz was a cut above the usual reptile-that was part of the signal he sent. He wrote longish reportage for The Toxic and was out-of-the-closet-except-to-his-mother-who-probably-knew-but-it-was-never-spoken-about gay. One evening at his flat near Tower Bridge he told me he was "an intellectual," thus becoming the only working journalist I ever heard use the word about himself. We hit it off right from the start.

"It's not so much a piece about the kid's disappearance per se," Berkowitz explained to me later, across the road, in the pub we called The Dead Brian. (Real name, The Red Lion.) "I'm interested in the effect of these crimes on people and on communities. The aftershocks. What happens in the time when the story isn't on the front pages anymore? How do people get on with their lives?"

I was able to help him out with some contacts and background stuff, and he was nicer about asking for it than people from the nationals usually were; they tended to come over all smarmy and "We're all in this together" when they needed a favor, and the rest of the time act like they had it on good authority that their own shit didn't smell. This was something I got a good look at during that conference, Kinnock's second as party leader, the one after the one when he fell on his bum in the water while trying to walk along the beach looking dignified and visionary. That conference has happy memories for me, because it was the occasion of my first break. I went out for a few drinks on the last-but-one evening with Berkowitz and a couple of his London friends. One of them was a broadsheet hack, another was a Tory apparatchik, a back-room boy for one of the big shots, in town for a bit of spying and to write a think-piece for one of the right-wing papers. Berkowitz left early to file some copy, and the rest of us ended up at my flat, where we got exceptionally drunk. I don't remember how the evening finished, other than being sick and going to bed at some point around five, having somehow called a cab for the apparatchik before passing out. The hack was on the sofa, having conked out a while before.

Gosh, how I don't miss so many things about my twenties. I had to work the next day. The morning was heavy going. I kept sneaking off to the loo and dry-retching. At lunchtime there was a buzz from Reception saying someone had come to see me. It was the Tory back-room boy. He was wearing dark glasses and looked as hungover as any human being I had ever seen. At close range I noticed he was trembling slightly. He had changed his suit but still smelled of drink.

"Can we go somewhere?"

For a split second I wondered if we had had sex at some point in the depths of the night before. No-I might be blurry on the details, but I was confident I'd remember that.

There was a crappy hotel with a crappy bar not far away. We went there and he ordered two Bloody Marys. By this time I found I could remember his name: Trevor.

"Feeling a bit rough," he said, playing with the swizzle stick. When he took the shades off, his eyes were bloodshot. We took his-and-her swigs of our drinks.

"Bit out of line last night," he said. "Thing is, I told you a couple of things I shouldn't have. You know. Real D-notice stuff. I'll have to ask you to keep it, er, them, under your, er, hat. I could lose my job."

He was having trouble with his tone. That last remark wasn't sure whether it wanted to be a plea or a threat. I put my hand on his wrist for a second.

"I won't breathe a word."

"Really?"

"Really."

"I can't tell you how grateful I am."

"Think nothing of it."

"I won't forget this."

He finished his drink. He looked at his watch.

"Well-"

"Don't let me keep you. Thanks for the drink."

"No, thank you."

He scuttled off.

I had then, and have still, no idea what secret he was talking about, but six weeks later I had a call from the diary editor of The Toxic, who had been at university with our Trev. He asked if I could send some clippings and "pop down to London for a chat." That was my first break. ROBIN ROBBINS, diary editor of The Toxic, was the first posh person I ever got to know well. He had a posh person's affectation of using language that either exaggerated or minimized the amount of effort involved in doing something. In his world, ...