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spark of life. And her voice that too remained poised and youthful. The overall effect was of a vital and indomitable woman looking and speaking through a grotesque paper mask. 'Come through to the dining room,' she said. 'Everything's set.'
    Eddie and Brian were carrying dishes in from the kitchen. Eddie grinned his not-quite-friendly grin and asked me how I was doing. Brian, distracted by my arrival, lost the plot and began orbiting the table, anxiously sniffing the food on each plate. Obviously this meal was something he found profoundly unconvincing - a charade he might yet penetrate, given brains enough and time. Either Eddie had been having a little joke with me, or Money had changed her mind about serving eels. Crispy duck was followed by red mullet in a hot ginger sauce, a dish of bitter melon, and a salad of cucumber and beansprouts and about half a ton of salt. I'd forgotten how much of a taste I'd acquired for the Hong Kong style: I ate so fast I hardly spoke. Plus, I was trying to soak up Zoe's too-generous glass of rum. My insides were okay but my head still felt like it was bobbing about near the ceiling rose. When I swallowed it lashed about at the end of my rubber umbilical neck.
    'It's quite an early one,' Money said/ 'Isn't it, Eddie?'
    'Yeah,' said Eddie, poking experimentally at his mobile phone.
    'My husband did the choreography.'
    It had always puzzled me, the simple pride Money took in talking up hher sons' films. As though she didn't know full well where they came from, or what they had involved. I wondered what the commissioning editor at Channel 4 would think - some silk-tie innocent, scoffing posh school dinners in the Union - were he suddenly to be confronted by Eddie's smile, Brian's drowned eyes, their arms, their burned and shredded backs.
    I tried to get her to talk about Jimmy, I suppose to show Zoe I cared.
    'Privacy came naturally to Jimmy,' Money said. 'It's very hard, now that he's gone, to know what to do for the best.'
    'Zoe tells me his father doesn't understand what happened.'
    'Zhenshu's senile,' she said, flatly, refusing my easy sympathy. There were other things on her mind.
    'Most of these are businesses I've never heard of. I'm beginning to think some of these so-called managers are taking me for a ride.'
    I nodded and grunted, my mouth full of rice scented with lotus flowers. I felt awkward, listening to Money's business problems when her children were in the room. Not that Brian or Eddie were paying any attention. Some communication was taking place between them, some wordless, piquant traffic. They seemed to stir and turn their heads and move their hands in unison, as though this unlooked-for and unprecedented screening had triggered old routines in them.
    'The tax office sent me another reminder.'
    I dragged my attention back to Money. She was still on about her financial worries.
    'I know they're going to fine me but it's the interest they charge that frightens me.'
    A whole case of rum couldn't have made that evening any more surreal than it already was. Each year organised crime launders about twenty billion US dollars through Hong Kong; not a little of it passed through Jimmy Yau's hands at one time or another. And here was his widow, worrying over her annual tax return.
    The first, stylophoned bars of FŸr Elise burst from Eddie's jean-jacket. He took out his mobile and thumbed it. 'Hello?'
    'Edward, turn that thing off.'
    'Seb? Right - '
    'Ed - '
    'Cool.'
    'Edward, we're eating.'
    Smoothly, Eddie got up from the table and walked to the window, phone still pressed to his ear. 'Eleven thirty, mate. Yeah. Kickin'. Rice grains fell from the lap of his linen trousers. Everything was 'cool' with him. 'Big', or, even 'wicked'. Things were 'happening' with him. His laughter was clipped, anxious, and coke-fuelled. Brian, meanwhile, sat watching his younger, smarter brother the grub who had usurped him - with eyes flat and impenetrable as steel plate.
    'It takes me the whole of