Mr Lü wasn’t much of a talker, perhaps because of his long, solitary career in the underground. He didn’t smoke either. Apparently during the 1970s, when China was engaged in the ‘resist America, aid Vietnam’ movement, Mr Lü was in Vietnam on active service, gathering intelligence. There was this one time, in the lobby of his hotel, that a young woman gave him a cigarette. Not long afterwards he collapsed and almost died … From that day on he swore off booze and cigarettes. Whenever he went out, he was always smartly dressed, a camera hanging around his neck, a watch with a metal bracelet on his wrist, the appropriate hat for the season upon his head, two fountain pens in his chest pockets – he looked like a tourist. Were these things he carried with him weapons, tools of the trade … Well, I couldn’t say. When I asked him, he said no, they weren’t, but how could I believe him? He was an old hand at the spying game, Old Potato; you could believe what you saw, but not what came out of his mouth.

Mr Lü had a fascinating photo album. It was pretty old-fashioned; the cover was made from hand-woven coarse cloth, the pages were as yellow as could be and the binding was stitched together with hemp; the whole thing looked like something better off in the bin. When you looked through it, it was really odd. I say it was a photo album, but most of it wasn’t actually photographs. Rather, it was overloaded with all manner of scraps of paper and clippings. The title page was adorned with half a cigarette paper with some handwritten notes on it. They read:

How wonderful it is to wake up in the morning and find out that one is still alive. Every operation could be our last. The work we do is the most secret and the cruellest there can be; an inopportune sneeze could mean our heads will roll. But death isn’t frightening, since survival is not part of our calculations. Hello there! I am fine right here.