CLOUDS ONLY LOOK SOFT. As relieved as I felt to be getting home – even after seven years in Hong Kong, it still seems odd to regard this skyscraper-pincushion as home – I dreaded the final approach, and the bumpy surprises lurking under the uppermost layer of fluff.

‘I hate this part,’ the boy in the seat next to mine said.

The Airbus A340 lurched and dropped through a patch of empty air. During the interval of hideous bouncing that followed, the boy groaned, shut his eyes, and put his head back, teeth in a clench. His forehead shone with sweat. He’d been a polite if somewhat restless travel companion, becoming one with his MP3 player as soon as we’d reached cruising altitude.

He’d caught my eye in the boarding queue; he looked vaguely familiar. I’d guest lectured at a couple of universities during my first year in the territory: western art, conservancy, that kind of thing. When it comes to buying and selling, Hong Kong has plenty of experts on all aspects of Chinese art, but there was little profit in preservation. Maybe he’d been a student, but judging by his looks I guessed I had probably just seen his face on a magazine cover. If he was a student, he’d either tell me or not.

In ostentatious Hong Kong, where banks push wealth management services as vigorously as America’s financial institutions thrust unlimited credit at the borderline-destitute, it wasn’t unusual for a young Chinese – I guessed seventeen or eighteen, although he could have been much older – to travel alone. But it was unusual for well-groomed young Chinese to twitch. I’d thought he was coming off a speed-enhanced hedonism spree. He seemed unable to stay still, jumping up every thirty minutes or so to use the washroom. Two hours into the flight, I suggested we swap seats. Better to surrender the aisle than have him climbing over me after the lights went down.

Everything about him said money: the Dolce&Gabbana cardigan over a T-shirt from agnès b., the Marc Jacobs bag at his feet, the accent that was more London than local. His fashionably tousled hair was too perfectly untidy. Marmoreal skin worthy of the light in a Vermeer completed the effect: he knew he was flawless, and exfoliated accordingly. But I saw rebellion in one detail: gold studs adorned his left ear, nailed through the lobe and along the cartilage, which had to have hurt. He was someone who could afford to do whatever he damn well pleased, though, far from carefree, he gave off an air of desperation, like a small animal trapped in the jaws of a predator.

‘Shit,’ the boy said through his teeth as the aircraft hit another patch of dead air.

‘Couldn’t have put it better myself,’ I said, white-knuckling the armrest.

The aircraft steadied and the captain announced that he had commenced our descent and we were on our approach to Chek Lap Kok. I tightened my seatbelt.

‘We’re going to be early,’ I said.

The boy visibly relaxed. ‘Nice. I thought I’d be facing a tight connection.’

I nodded. I knew the torture of trying to do a mile with a pre-WiFi laptop and carry-on in under fifteen minutes. I pondered one of life’s little mysteries: why do connecting flights always depart via the gate farthest from the one through which you arrive? My travel agent soon learned not to cut it close.

‘I like your accent,’ I said. ‘Are you local? I had you pegged for a Hong Kong guy until you opened your mouth.’ ‘No lah! Not Hong Kong boy lah, I grew up in Lon Don and speak the Queen’s Eng Lish ah,’ he said in a perfect singsong Hong Kong staccato. I started laughing. He did too.

‘If my parents heard me talk like that, they’d both die on the spot. Or they’d kill me. Or both. Maybe they’d die first and then kill me.’

I’m not the type to jabber at strangers: a friendly word or two, sure, but I won’t offer heart and soul to someone with whom I have nothing in common but proximity. But he did remind me of a former student and he seemed to want to talk a little. We’d part company in a few minutes anyway, in all probability never crossing paths again, so why not chat with the guy?

I asked him, ‘Where are you off to next?’

‘Seoul,’ he said. ‘It’s about a four-hour flight. Then I’ve got another connection, to Vancouver. Then Calgary.’

‘Jesus!’ Airline travel makes people look older, not younger, but I remained convinced he could not yet be out of his teens. This alarmed me. ‘Are you doing a term paper on masochism or something?’

‘No, no. Nothing like that,’ he said, laughing again. ‘I’m just, I don’t know. Relentless. Do you ever have that feeling you’ll die if you slow down for too long? That you’ll be in danger if you stop?’

I shook my head. ‘Ancient Chinese curse? Hungry ghosts will eat you up if they catch you?’

‘No, it’s more modern than that,’ he said.

He didn’t elaborate. A silence grew between us.

‘I travel a lot too,’ I ventured. ‘But for work. I’d just as soon stay home and watch Lost on DVD. I never get any time for television. The thing is,’ and I lowered my voice to a confidential tone, ‘it’s my passport. If it isn’t stamped often enough, it feels neglected. Then it develops emotional problems and starts acting out, and I have to send it back to therapy, which isn’t cheap. Neither are the antidepressants. That shit adds up. So it’s not about me; it’s about the mental health of my passport.’

He laughed again, which made me feel good. The thing about hitting forty is that while you feel young, others don’t see you that way. I believe a true measure of one’s youth is the ability to make young people laugh, not out of politeness or pity, but because you genuinely cracked them up. It helps if you know how hard it is to be young in Hong Kong: parents brandishing rusty, austere ideals about tradition, filial piety, and duty to Family Inc; kids desperate to get away but unable to afford the ridiculous rents; marriage not desired for its own sake but as the only way of escape, a mirage though that may be. I don’t envy them their futures.

He had wide eyes that should have been furrowed at the corners from smiling a lot, but instead they looked sad. He should have been partying in Ibiza or Ko Samui or Punta del Este or wherever gap-year kids were getting fucked up or just fucked these days. I made a living focusing on minuscule details, and I could see a lot was going on with him, none of it good.

I hadn’t noticed that we’d stopped talking until he cleared his throat and asked above the pre-touchdown instructions, ‘So, you were on holiday in Dubai?’

‘No, just transiting. A friend, a South African guy, used to live there. Hated it. Said it was apartheid all over again, but weirder. They hate having to ship workers in from poor countries to do the dirty work.’

He chuckled. ‘It’s the white robes. What are those things called? I’m always suspicious of anyone who wears white. It’s not the death thing, but how can you wear white robes all the time and claim to be making an honest living? I don’t think so.’

‘I don’t think so either,’ I said. ‘I kind of wanted to see the workers’ camps while my friend was in Dubai, but I also knew I’d get depressed. Anyway, after he moved back to Cape Town, I didn’t see the point. No, I was in Rome and Milan.’

When the wheels hit the tarmac, I thought of Hong Kong’s old Kai Tak airport, which had been decommissioned a few years before my arrival. Legend has it that on the final approach passengers could almost count the T-shirts and brassieres drying on people’s balconies, or see into apartment windows and tell what the inhabitants were having for dinner. That sounds a bit far-fetched, but I’d like to have seen for myself.

As we taxied toward the terminal, the boy was talking about transiting Rome on his way to Athens ex-Madrid. Picking Alitalia had been a mistake, he said. In Italy, he’d encountered strikes, incompetence, indifferent airline staff, and mountains of unclaimed luggage.

‘I watched the check-in person put the wrong tags on my bag – ATH is Athens; AUH is Abu Dhabi. My Italian’s not that bad, but I had to jump onto the conveyor belt and grab it back. That got their attention and they called security, I told him what the Alitalia people had done, and he just laughed and walked away.’ He shrugged. ‘We might have been in Rome at the same time.’

‘Then Athens to Dubai?’

He shook his head. ‘Athens to … Belgrade? Yeah. Belgrade. Nice coffee; very sweet. And then, umm, I get mixed up when I fly too many short hauls in Europe. You know: If it’s Wednesday, I must be in … and you can’t remember, so you have to look at your itinerary. Long haul’s better.’

‘When was the last time you were home?’

He needed to think for about ten seconds.

‘A month?’

He stabbed at the power button on his iPhone. ‘Shit. Battery’s dead again.’

The second the plane came to a stop, passengers leapt from their seats and overhead bins began to disgorge their contents onto the heads below. A large South Asian woman two rows up was nearly brained by a faux Vuitton bag large enough to carry a Great Dane.

I extended a hand. ‘Good luck on your travels. I hope you’re able to catch up with yourself. My name’s Robert Rivenbark.’ Out of habit I took a card from the case I kept in the inside pocket of my jacket. He accepted it straight-backed with both hands, an East Asian custom I rather liked. We both smiled when we recognised the reflex cultural shift we’d just done.

‘Jason Chiu,’ he said. He didn’t comment on the quality of the paper (washi, oyster grey, engraved not printed), but I could tell he knew what he was holding and roughly how much it had cost. He proffered one of his own expensive cards – it said merely jason chiu on one side and the Chinese characters for his name on the other. This confirmed my impression of wealth: he had Daddy’s platinum card and had gone on the lam. He didn’t strike me as spoiled or obnoxious, just a kid who’d gotten fed up with the never-ending stream of tutors, household staff and other busybodies who herded him through life. ‘Art conservator? That sounds impressive.’

‘Not really. It’s just me, my assistant, and a shared receptionist. Anyway, take care. Enjoy … wherever you’re going.’

* * *

My partner Kai Ming was still in Milan on his own business trip. These were grim, frenzied occasions for him: endless meetings, stupidity in three languages, sleep deprivation. Being an art dealer sounds more uplifting than it is. The glamour exists mostly in the minds of people who, if asked, would credit Gerhard Richter with inventing the earthquake measurement scale. Despite Kai Ming’s immersion in auctions, museums, galleries, masterworks, and restaurants that feature world-famous chefs, the concentrated vapidity of some of the people around the art could leach the cobalt blue right out of a Raoul Dufy sky.

I hadn’t been to Italy in years. Since Kai Ming’s associations with that country were of fatigue, meetings with morons, and the grey industrial blah of the north, he’d never consent to a vacation there. Rather than waiting forever to see the Eternal City again, I’d taken matters into my own hands. I had stayed in his room in Milan, joined him for dinner the one night he could carve out of his schedule, explored the city for a few days, then flown down to Rome on my own.

It took three days for my internal clock to approximate that of my watch, and I was still a little off kilter when my assistant, Ada, came into the work room of our office in an anonymous Wan Chai building and read from a Post-it: ‘She says she’s the personal assistant to a Mrs Chiu, who needs to talk to you urgently about her son, Jason. Does any of that make sense?’ Ada tapped the note on her paint-stained thumbnail. ‘She’s on hold.’ Then my memory clicked.

‘Robert Rivenbark,’ I said into the cordless Ada handed me.

‘Good afternoon, Mr Rivenbark. My name is Beatrix Wong.’ Her English name rhymed with ‘theatrics’. One gets used to that sort of nominative surrealism in Hong Kong, but I still needed half a second to decode her pronunciation.

‘You sat next to my employer’s son on a recent flight back from Dubai, if I’m correct?’

Light dawned. ‘Yes, I believe so. Why? Is he all right?’

‘That’s the subject his mother would like to discuss with you. He seems to be … not himself … and we were hoping you might be of assistance.’

He must not have made his connecting flight, then. I figured he had been intercepted. His parents had probably made a call and had him picked up by airport security. Easier than ordering take-out. ‘What’s the matter with him?’

‘We don’t know. We do know you are the last person he met before we … located him. Mrs Chiu would appreciate a few moments of your time.’

Jaded long-time expats are often heard to remark upon how the quality of spoken English in Hong Kong is not what it used to be since the 1997 handover. Even so, certain words are weighed with the degree of care one associates with gold. ‘Appreciate’ is one such word. I agreed and Beatrix said a car would be in front of my building ‘momentarily’. ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘No problem.’

* * *

I found Jason’s mother and her impatience in a Bentley at the kerb as I stepped out of the building’s air-conditioned cocoon into the wet air outside. She was making an effort not to be seen with me; otherwise we could easily have met at any one of the grand hotels surrounding the district. In a city as insular as Hong Kong, the rich take their privacy wherever they can get it. Questions and rumours spread like new strains of the flu. No-parking zones are popular for meetings. After all, what’s a ticket to someone whose investments yield more than the GDP of a small country?

The driver pulled away from the kerb with such yacht-like smoothness I had to look out the windows to be sure we were moving.

‘You met my son,’ she said as the car intimidated its way through the traffic, headed it seemed for a scenic circuit of The Peak.

‘Yes, but only briefly. We talked for maybe fifteen minutes before landing. ‘Is he okay?’

‘No, he’s not okay,’ Mrs Chiu said, rather curtly I thought.

‘What’s wrong with him?

‘That we don’t know.’ Having regally presumed our conversation would, as a matter of course, remain confidential, she went on. ‘As soon as we got him home from the airport, he managed to find his car keys. He ate a meal, took a shower, got in his car and started driving, all over the Island, Kowloon, the New Territories, everywhere. If he decides to cross over to the Mainland … ugh, the idea of it. It’s so lawless there, and he has a nice car.’

‘Driving? For three days?’ None of this made sense to me, but that might have been a symptom of my jet lag. Hong Kong is a place where anything can and does happen. ‘He must stop somewhere to sleep,’ I suggested.

‘He says he hasn’t slept in more than a month.’

I watched the play of light and shadow on her face. She had the looks of a pop star who’d matured gracefully, without Botoxing herself unrecognisable along the way. I didn’t see any hint of the vapidity or craziness I’d been looking for. I wanted some explanation for Jason’s condition, but she gave nothing away. When I’d mentioned my encounter with Jason to Kai Ming over the phone, he’d surprised and unsettled me by disgorging a wealth of information gleaned from the local gossip magazines to which he was only slightly ashamed to be addicted. The Chius were rich. Obscenely so. The patriarch was in his sixties and had come out of nowhere to build a hugely profitable jewellery chain. Perhaps more importantly, he was renowned among knowledgeable parties on both sides of the law for the rarity and quality of his gemstones. No dabbler in fake jade, Chiu had business interests throughout mainland China and Southeast Asia: gold, gemstones from Burma, teakwood. The tabloids had for years speculated about the source of his wealth, but he kept meticulous records and no illegalities had ever been proven.

Kai Ming had more. Originally from a village southeast of Kunming, near Yunnan Province’s famous Stone Forest, Chiu came to Hong Kong in the early 1950s, just another refugee from the upheavals in the People’s Republic. He told one reporter he had ‘seen the writing on the Great Wall’

– crackdowns, mass starvation, unimaginable suffering. In his heart, he wanted to be a businessman, not a Party official. So he left his family with promises he’d get rich and send for them. The ones he left behind all died in the famine that accompanied Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward. Chiu has returned to his village at least once a year ever since, to pay his respects. His was not an unusual story.

The current Mrs Chiu was the third, the previous two having absconded with staggering amounts of loot, never to be heard from again. For all his towering achievements, the plutocrat was, it seemed, unlucky in love. The woman sitting next to me on the hand-tooled calf-skin upholstery didn’t seem the gold-digger type. According to Kai Ming, she took her social duties more seriously than a mere tai-tai, had mothered Chiu’s only child, and clearly saw herself as a future matriarch, no small ambition given her origins as an American-born Chinese who couldn’t have been much older than me.

‘You believe him?’

‘You’ve met Jason. He’s a well-mannered boy, but he can be a little intense.’

Jason had walked out of his French class at HKU, gone straight home, packed a couple of bags, and had the driver take him to the airport. At the Cathay Pacific ticket office, he bought a ticket to Bangkok. From there he flew to Amsterdam, criss-crossed Europe, and eventually settled into a long-haul routine: Buenos Aires, Stockholm, Montréal, London … he circled the globe several times. His mistake? Returning to Asia. The family had been keeping close tabs on his movements and pounced as soon as he deplaned at Chek Lap Kok.

‘Is he still out there driving?’

‘Not now. Our household manager took his keys.’

‘And where is he now?’

‘In his rooms.’ She fished in her purse for her mobile phone, presumably to confirm he was where she wanted him to be, but stopped herself. ‘Do you know anything about this? Did he say anything to you on the plane?’

‘Nothing at all, I’m afraid.’ I had already gone over our conversation in my head, but I couldn’t recall anything that might be of use to her. ‘I’m sorry if your time has been wasted.’

She shook her head and looked out the window for a few seconds before speaking with a haunted expression similar to the one I’d seen on Jason’s face. ‘Nobody told me there would be times like this,’ she said, lowering her guard. The car cruised on in silence. I had long since quit trying to figure out where we were. If you’re not paying attention, one block of office buildings and street-level retail looks much like the next. ‘I came from a rich family and married into a richer one. I thought that meant I’d be insulated from …’

‘Reality?’

She turned back to look at me. ‘You could say that, yes. But something is happening to Jason. He says he hasn’t slept in over a month and I believe him. Do you know how frightening that is?’

I told her I couldn’t begin to guess, and apologised again for failing to offer her the comfort of a logical, plausible explanation.

The Bentley slowed to a halt outside my building.

‘I won’t keep you,’ she said. ‘I’ve taken up enough of your time as it is.’

* * *

A shadowy movement near the emergency exit interrupted my thoughts as I keyed in the pass code to my office. Jason Chiu. ‘I’ve just come from a mobile meeting with your mother,’ I said, turning to face him. He looked poster-boy sharp for someone who hadn’t slept for more than a month. ‘She’s worried about you.’

‘I know. She almost lives in that Bentley.’

‘Is spying on each other what your family does for fun?’

‘No. My father works, for fun. He makes money, for fun. And my mother spends it. That’s what she does for fun.’

‘Sounds exciting. How’d you get down here? Your mother said she had your car keys.’

‘I discovered something called the MTR,’ he said, laughing in rich-boy self-deprecation. I couldn’t tell the extent to which he was joking.

‘Look – I’ve got to admit I’m curious about you. You won’t come into my office to talk?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t like to stay in one place for too long.’

‘Who are you really? Jason Bourne?’

We both laughed.

‘I just wanted to tell you to be careful. I’ll be in touch. Gotta go.’

‘This is all getting a little melodramatic, isn’t it?’ I called after him as he disappeared through the emergency exit.

‘You don’t know the half of it,’ he said as the echo of his shoes clattering down the concrete stairwell swallowed him up.

* * *

An avalanche of work buried me for the next couple of weeks. I finished a Carrie Graber for a local businesswoman who’d discovered the artist at an exhibition in San Francisco and amassed a significant collection of her work. The painting had been knocked off the wall by a new domestic helper (now unemployed): the impact had broken the frame, deforming slightly both stretcher and canvas. Next was an ‘emergency’ in Shanghai, where a Mainland plutocrat had me perform surgery on an enormous Rothko that had fallen during a party at his penthouse. The fate of his drunken guest was unknown.

Despite the economic turmoil in the world, there was still a demand for

my services. Wealth can be fleeting but art is eternal. For me, that means coffee and late nights, antacids and anxiety. I’d almost forgotten about the wandering Chiu until I got an email:

I hiked the Dragon’s Back trail a couple of times. Not as pretty as it used to be. Ruined a good pair of shoes. Stanley is a good place to walk, but I liked the old Stanley more, before they wrecked it will all the touristy stuff. Now I’m under ‘house arrest’. They won’t let me go out. I’m not feeling so great, anyway. It’s like being in jail, but the food is better and nobody’s molesting me. My father’s doctors keep giving me shots. I still can’t sleep. I don’t know why, but I feel like I’m getting slow and cold. I think I’ll start painting …

He went on like this for several more paragraphs. I dashed off a short, friendly response. His reply came less than twenty minutes later:

I’ve painted myself into a corner. Literally. My parents are pissed. I ran out of canvas. So I painted the floors and the walls. Now I can’t leave my room because the pictures on the floor are wet. My mother says she’s calling the doctors again.

I leaned back in my chair and surveyed how busy I could make myself until the next job came. The room was an organised chaos of cardboard boxes, assorted solvents and paint in tubes, pots and bottles, brushes and trays and cluttered bench space.

* * *

‘Are you going to turn off your laptop and watch a movie with me?’ asked Kai Ming. He had brought back a stack of DVDs from the Mainland – all the latest Hollywood movies, minus the fancy packaging, for a fraction of the usual price. Piracy? Intellectual property is a relatively new concept in Asia. I’d learned to regard our movie collection as a novel hallmark of Hong Kong life I’d not anticipated prior to moving here. Besides, Hollywood isn’t exactly running out of money.

He was watching the news on one of the terrestrial Cantonese channels. Now and then, when I understood what the newscasters were saying, I looked up. I’d have preferred quiet, but his Chinese love of background noise usually overruled my western appreciation of silence as golden.

‘Yeah. I think I’ve hit the wall for the day.’ I closed my Vaio and opened the bottle of Shiraz on the coffee table. I was unscrewing the Stelvin cap when something on the TV distracted me; I recognised a name and caught enough for a red flag to start waving. ‘Holy shit, is she saying what I think she’s saying?’

Kai Ming nodded. ‘That kid you were talking about. His mother. Earlier today. They’re saying it was a reaction to some medication she took.’

‘In other words, she took the whole bottle.’

‘And washed it down with alcohol, I bet.’

* * *

Chiu senior phoned me himself the next morning. Next to me, Kai Ming grumbled, still half asleep. His hair had left an ampersand-shaped indentation on his forehead. I wanted to ask why Mr Chiu didn’t just talk to his son, but I had a feeling Jason had been put in cold storage at some expensive private clinic. Faking coherence at nine o’clock on a Saturday morning, prior to caffeine, is beyond me, so I shut up and let him talk. He outlined the situation much as his late wife’s assistant had: I was one of the last people she’d spoken to, and I’d also spent time with their son. He wanted to meet with me. Now, of course.

‘That will be difficult,’ I said, looking at the bedside clock and realising he was not a man who took ‘no’ for an answer. Nor was I one to jump at someone’s order. ‘Have your driver pick me up at noon. I assume you know where I live.’

Without waiting for him to say yes, I thanked him, hung up, turned off the phone, and trudged through my morning ablutions too preoccupied to taste the coffee or appreciate the shower. I left our flat at the appointed time and found the same Bentley waiting downstairs. Oversight, happenstance, or psychological warfare? When dealing with people like these, mere mortals could never hope to know. The same driver greeted me, pale and quiet today; he nodded in curt acknowledgment when I offered my condolences. During the winding drive along Peak Road, I wanted to say more to him, as if I needed to ameliorate things somehow. Although I had only a tangential role in this family drama, I couldn’t help feeling as if I’d been the match that lit a stack of dynamite.

The house seemed bigger on the inside than it looked from outside – all polished timber hallways and closed doors and high ceilings. My shoes, which I was not asked to remove, echoed as I followed a succession of near-silent staff to a room of cavernous proportions. Floor-to-ceiling bookcases overflowed with what appeared to be valuable English first editions; a handsome desk backed onto a window that framed, or would have framed if the air had been clearer, the cityscape below. I was offered tea and seated in a hand-crafted leather armchair.

Double doors on the far side of the room swung open and Mr Chiu entered at a brisk pace. ‘I have a long day ahead of me, so I’d like to keep this short. I believe you’re a man who appreciates art. Is that correct?’

Short, indeed. ‘I’m a conservator,’ I said. ‘Paintings and paper, mainly. I know the difference between a Mondrian and a place mat, if that’s what you’re asking.’

‘How about sculpture?’ Clearly he’d found the beat and liked dancing to it, but I didn’t think the conversation was leading to papier-mâché and pipe-cleaner art. Yet.

‘Less. It’s not really my thing, but I know what I need to know. Henry Moore, Rodin, Claes Oldenburg. The obvious ones. Miro did some that I like. Calder’s mobiles and stabiles, if those count.’

‘Why not.’ He made it a sentence, not a question. ‘And I trust you’re keeping up with the economy.’

‘Who isn’t? We’re all surfing the financial tsunami, aren’t we? Trying not to drown?’

‘Clever,’ he said. ‘Yes, the crisis has made surfers of us all. I like that better than armchair economists, which seems to be the western media’s favourite phrase at the moment.’

I waited for something to happen.

‘Has my son ever mentioned a curse?’ Chiu asked.

I nodded.

‘I do not know how much you know, nor do I care. I have learned that curiosity, particularly in a curious person such as yourself, Mr Rivenbark, can be difficult to control. It tends to lead to questions, questions that seek answers. My son and my wife chose to talk to you. Perhaps they told you things they should not have.’

‘Do you have a point, Mr Chiu? You said you have a long day ahead. So do I.’ My long day ahead involved going back to bed, but he didn’t need to know that. Hubris annoys me. I find it easier to deal with the rich if you come at them with the same level of self-importance. He clearly saw me as no threat but wouldn’t have heard a word I said if I hadn’t spoken to him with impatient condescension.

‘Indeed,’ he said. ‘Very well. I would rather tell you this myself than have you poking around in my affairs. Tell whomever you like, but know that no one will believe you. There is nothing to prove what I say is true – my money has made sure of that – and Hong Kong is full of expats gone a little crazy in the head, wouldn’t you agree?’ I held my silence.

‘I made a bargain in my youth, Mr Rivenbark, a bargain far worse than your culture allows you to imagine. Others before me struck a similar deal. It was a terrible time to be in China, and I wanted to be something other than a nameless peasant boy with no future.’

‘You sold your soul to the devil,’ I said without thinking.

‘China was old before your culture’s absurd red imp was ever dreamt up to scare little children. No. It wasn’t my own soul that I sold. And now I derive considerable benefit from this youthful … arrangement that I made. Instead, others pay the price.’

‘I’m not sure I believe in curses,’ I said.

‘You will.’

He indicated for me to follow him and he made for a narrow doorway set between two of the bookcases. In the adjoining room, with a vaulted ceiling and a skylight for illumination, there was a large object covered with a sheet.

‘If you look under the sheet, you will find a sculpture, or a statue … please forgive me for not being entirely clear on the difference.’

I pulled back the cover. Question crowded out question, but words wouldn’t come. At first I thought I was looking at cold, pale stone in the rough, as it would appear before the artist went to work. As I studied it, patterns emerged. The work had already been done: a truly impressive piece, in fact; a work of genius. A feature here, a feature there, and slowly I saw emerging from the stone the figure of a nude, a young male, and … fantastic … the more I looked, the more I saw until …

‘What do you see, Mr Rivenbark?’

Although I tried, I could not speak.

‘Look at the left shoulder,’ he said from much closer behind me. I hadn’t heard his footsteps. ‘Do you see it?’

The stone had a lunar luminosity, free from veins, smooth as polished marble. The precision of the tousled hair, the slight gap in the mouth: all the details were of a young man who had just dozed off, but was not resting easy.

Then I saw what Chiu was talking about – a faint indentation, a needle mark.

‘Yesterday afternoon,’ Chiu said. ‘I think the doctor had to give him diazepam to relax his muscles enough to let … how shall I put it … to let nature take its course.

‘In the past, they would give in once they understood what was going to happen. They’d take opium or drink wine to accelerate the process and get it over with. Older generations understood the inevitable, I think. Times change, don’t they? I thought his mother would understand. She was prepared to do anything to have the lifestyle I offered. There’s a rare disease that causes the body to produce bone where there should be muscle tissue. That’s what our family doctor thought Jason had. He knows better now. He gave Jason a shot, and as you can see … my wife was a bit upset by what she saw.’

White noise roared through my head. This must be what a lobotomy feels like, I thought with a terrible randomness and certainty. I couldn’t believe it, and yet here it was, unarguable and self-evident.

‘We spoke, and Jason said he couldn’t fall asleep, but he never hinted …’

Chiu waved a hand. ‘Sleeplessness is a stage. As the brain tries to resist the change it produces a state of constant mental alertness and no longer requires sleep to regenerate. What is there to regenerate? Jason didn’t know, but I believe he guessed. Travelling against the Earth’s rotation helps slow things down. Not an option until the jet age. I can’t say I’m surprised he worked that out. He was a remarkably intelligent boy. I shall miss him.’

We both stood looking at what Jason had become.

‘Jason is now lost in China,’ Chiu said, ‘or should I say, lost to China. So far as anyone will ever know, he crossed the border at Lo Wu late last night, intending to go to Shanghai. He never arrived. People disappear in the Mainland all the time. We hold out hopes for a ransom demand, or news of a sighting, but we can only fear the worst. Pragmatism will prevail and all will be forgotten.’

‘What about this? You’re not going to smash it to bits and pretend it never existed.’ I was torn between fury at Chiu for what he had authored, and fascination with the fact that there are things beyond our control, forces at work we can never understand.

‘I’ll arrange for him to be transported to Yunnan. There’s a place in the Stone Forest where quite a few of the karst formations look … human. He’ll be right at home.’

Before I left, I scribbled a note and left it on Chiu’s desk for him to find later. Riding back, I wasn’t sure whether I’d done the right thing. The image of a forest of ossified offspring appalled me. Imagine: becoming your own tombstone. It wasn’t a fate I would want, for myself, or anyone.

We can only do as much as we can at any given moment, and if something seems like a good idea at the time … sometimes it is. We can always torture ourselves with doubts and second-guessing later.

I left him Kai Ming’s private number at the gallery. Jason made an exceptional statue, and Chiu was clearly a man who believed in the virtues of commerce.