Slice medium tomatoes into crescents, cut cherry tomatoes in half, and slice sweet onion into crescents and place in a bowl; add toasted sesame seeds, crushed peanuts, dried shrimp powder, diced chilies, and chopped coriander. Deep-fry garlic and additional onions until crispy and add to bowl. Whisk lemongrass vinegar (or substitute rice wine vinegar), canola oil, fish sauce, lime juice and palm sugar, and pour over salad. Mix gently with hands and garnish with reserved fried garlic and onions and a chiffonade of cilantro. Goes well with a rare steak.
30
Emptiness
Zhen disliked staying in the honey-trap apartment. Her personal flat was in a smaller building in Mid-Levels, where she was surrounded by her books, yoga materials, and comfortable furniture. Staying in this nearly empty apartment was an inconvenience. It, moreover, meant the assassination phase was near, and although she had no compunction about eliminating a target, she was always depressed at the conclusion of an operation. She enjoyed the hunt: engineering first contact, coyly developing the relationship, the heady thrill of seduction, and the dizzying anticipation of the final act, up to the moment she eased a steel needle between the cervical vertebrae of the neck, or looped a silk rope around a throat, or watched a victim’s eyes grow in alarm as the chest-constricting effects of a poison were first felt. But afterward there was an emptiness, a depression, a melancholy. An emptiness that yoga helped relieve.
Zhen always told herself that she worked as a poison-feather bird to feed her stomach, but she practiced yoga to feed her soul. Practice gave perspective, energy, and the strength to accept what she could not change. But there were some things she could indeed change. Her unhappy childhood and subsequent exploitation as a teenaged concubine, and the humiliating scurvy years in Nightingale School and at the Institute in Beijing learning to kill increased her resolve never to let anyone mistreat her again. The first time had been in London, at university, where she had been singled out as a shy exotic by a group of male students, the majority of whom were simply bullies, but one of them had wanted more. Zhen did not bring any of the usual weapons from the institute with her to the United Kingdom, except for two
There was a complicated social protocol as well in the use of fans, ancient Chinese conventions essentially lost on most Britons, but Zhen had studied them because they would be most relevant when she returned to the Orient as a seductress. Drawing a closed fan along the cheek meant “I want you.” Touching the edge of the extended fan lightly with the fingers meant “I want to talk to you.” To tap the lips with a closed fan meant “kiss me.” None of these applied to the rangy British Romeo named Rowdy White who pushed his way into Zhen’s dormitory room one night, and stood amused as she held two puny folded fans in front of her, ready to defend herself. Rowdy’s cumulative experience with fans was limited to the big ostrich-feather variants used by the dancers in the strip clubs off High Street. When Rowdy reached to grab Zhen by the arm the black fan opened with a pop, deflecting his hand. Chuckling to himself, Rowdy again reached for her and the red fan snapped open, blocked his other arm, then folded in the blink of an eye, and snapped down across his wrist. That hurt. He snarled, stepped forward, arms extended, and both fans snapped open with a clatter like pigeons taking flight in a park, and the leading edge of one fan was raked across his face an inch above his eyebrows, slicing his forehead and blinding him as blood streamed into his eyes and down his cheeks. It was
She wasn’t hungry but she made a small pot of
