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shut the door quietly behind him.

Four

    F ield’s cubicle was as spartan as his life here. Apart from his telephone and Lena Orlov’s file, which he’d taken out of Registry earlier, there was a huge pile of papers and journals that he was required to “keep an eye on” with “a view to censorship,” as Granger had put it. Apart from the
China Weekly Review
and the
Voice of China,
Field was required to read
Shopping News
and the
Law Journal.
It was tedious work. Detective Sergeant Prokopieff, his neighbor here and in the housing complex, did most of the big newspapers and journals and all the ones that might conceivably be of any interest, leaving Field with the dross.

    On top of the file was a letter that he’d written earlier to his sister and he decided to check through it before dropping it into the mail room on his way down to the registry and the fingerprint lab. He gazed into the middle distance for a moment, then shook his head and took out his fountain pen, ready to make corrections.

    Dear Edith,
he’d written,
I’m so sorry it has taken me all this time to put pen to paper. I have penned a note to Mother, but don’t know whether she will have passed it on or if you’ll have had time to get up to see her.

    In case you haven’t, I’ll give you as much of the story as I can manage. Apologies if I’m repeating myself.

    I arrived here three months ago and went straight into basic instruction, which involves everything from weapons training (necessary) to the rudiments of the Chinese language (hard, but essential, as our pay is based, to a degree, on our proficiency) to the topography of the city and even the mysteries of street numbering.

    I ought to tell you a bit about the journey out, but it was uneventful. I shared my cabin with an Indian and all his luggage(!) and I can’t say it was the most comfortable voyage, but it was good to see Colombo, Penang, and Hong Kong.

    I’m now working in the Special Branch, the “intelligence” department. I’m surprised to be here, but I’ll come to that in a minute.

    I want to tell you something of this city, but it is hard to know where to begin or what to say. It is like nowhere else I’ve ever been, a cross between the solid majesty of modern Europe or America and the worst kind of barbarism of the Middle Ages.

    Field looked up, confronted again with an image of the doorman’s head rolling in the dirt. The doorman, Lena, his father . . .

    It is true to say that, though the city assaults your senses at every turn, it is what I’d expected. It is exciting in a way that is hard to do justice to in a letter. It pulses with life and a sense of the possible. I feel I should be more shocked than I am by the poverty and violence, but so far it only adds to a sense of the exotic.

    I think of it as like Venice in its heyday, the source of all the art you so love, a mercantile metropolis—the city of the future in the land of the next century, as people here like to say.

    My salary is, as yet, very poor, allowing me to survive, but no more. I
will
get on, though, and make some money here. I will send some to Mother as soon as I can, since I know you . . . well, I know how it is (please don’t show this letter to her).

    I
will
return to take you and Arthur to Venice.

    The same foolish fantasy of our childhood, you may think, but I can tell you, Edith, that, out here, I feel you can dare to dream and anything seems within reach. The city has an energy that is hard to describe—don’t they say the same of New York, that it is built on quartz? Nobody has done us any favors in life, but I intend to make my own luck.

    I do my duty and I take pleasure in bringing justice to a land where it would be all too easy for there to be none, but more than that, I feel I belong. Maybe it is because no one really does belong here.

    Am I making any sense?

    I was trying to explain the city. The big groups here are the Americans and British and they’ve built the