“Hhhhmmmmm-ahhhh-mmmnnn!”
Milana breathed out hard.
Her moans and heavy gasps began to fill the acoustics of the bedroom a decibel or so louder than she had intended for them to, but now that she was finger-fucking her wet pussy and teasing her clit till her sex dripped over the floor and onto the inside of her skirt, she felt a certain lack of control crawl over her. She imagined Lora being this little body, crawling over her, radiating a wet heat onto her clitoris, her sister’s little nipples brushing against her own.
With that Milana buckled hard against her fingers, the fingers of her left hand feeling further into her cum-hole and almost flicking against her g-spot as her clit continued to throb.
Fingered by the pump-action of her fingers, her chest was now heaving in great whoops-haaauuups, up and down in gasps.
“Oh-my-Ghhhoooo-ggrrr-Ohhh Goood! Fuuuuggggrrr –” she cried out again, this time on purpose, just to hear the blasphemies in her desperate voice.
A sort of mini-orgasm rose, and subsided, and she had thought that was all there was to come, but then another, much more powerful, overwhelming series of contractions set off a much greater one.
“Jeeeesss-us- uhhh-uhhhh-ohhhmmmm-hmmmmhnnn! Ohhh, sweet Jesus, yes, Loraaaaa-Gooooood! Mmmnnn-ahhhhhhggrrrr!”
As she came hard and uncontrollably, she abandoned what discipline she had been exercising over her body, and Milana watched her pussy drip-drip-drip its cum down between her legs over the inside of her dress until it soaked through onto the couch. When she looked up, she noticed that a few of the other girls were grinding themselves against their fingers, their young faces flushed, their lust unconsciously permeating the veneer of their mianzi.
CHAPTER VI
Banker, Player, Milanaire
Ω
July, 2008
DAME MING-HUA looked sternly at the account statements that lay open before her and said to her ex-husband’s half-nephew, Konrad Von Kyburg-Winterthur, “This is a problem that I always said would come and hurt us one day. There’s not enough money left.”
“Too much is tied up in properties and stocks – there’s only around a hundred million RMB in cash right now. In dollar terms, that’s what, ten, eleven million –” Konrad searched his head for the US dollar figure and instantly regretted vocalizing the first answers that came to him; he was always clumsy with exchange rates.
“A little over thirteen million dollars,” said Dame Ming-hua. “We will have to forego at least that alone in obliging the additional payments back to the bank on the pending loan defaults that’ll arise as a result of the huiling to the sorority committee members in Beijing.”
“Do you think that was wise? Accommodating the committee just so that Me Minzhen could be made sorority Dame?” asked Konrad delicately, using Chanel’s Chinese name followed by the appropriate cousin prefix. “Would it not be more advisable to focus on settling the ransom before doing anything, else?”
A glare of incredulity crept across Dame Ming-hua’s wrinkleless face. “And what would you have advised me to do instead? Have that Lixue Lai girl take over the most important position any girl can hold during her early 20’s in the whole of China? Give the sorority I built away so that one day, when I’m no longer around to take care of things, my daughter can beg like a peasant at the table of the Feng Lee family?”
“No, I suppose not, Jin Ming hua,” said Konrad deferentially. Not for the first time, he cursed to himself at having to address the matriarch and half-owner of his employer with the Chinese title Jin, specifically ascribed to a mother’s brother’s wife. If Dame Ming-hua would permit him to address her as his real Aunt, with the more intimate pronoun Yi, as she was known to his half-cousin Sofia and distant – albeit considerably older – cousin Redflag, his whole miserable life would be that much easier. Then it would look like they were blood-relatives. Instead, it was obvious to everyone that what separated them amounted to his grandfather’s previous infidelity and Dame Ming-hua’s own divorce.
To some, it might seem like an insignificant detail, but here in China it was one that carried with it sizeable social consequences, indicating that there was a certain distance between him and Zengky Bank’s Chairwoman.
When he’d first come to work here, five years ago, everyone had assumed that he could make the lady do things. Officers from the Board had come down to greet him. He’d been the only twenty-one-year-old graduate at the bank with his own office. But as the days had worn on, it became apparent that wasn’t the case. Dame Ming-hua never listened to his advice, and everyone had seen it. With the passing of days had come the gradual erosion of his mianzi, until he had become what he was now, an inconvenient problem – the twenty-six year-old who couldn’t be fired but who no one wanted anything to do with. Thus he was stuck where he was now, running Zhengky’s commercial loan outfit, while in his estimation, the less-able Redflag – who was Chanel’s other first-cousin – was sat at the top of the pyramid as company President. All because of a shit-humping pronoun, he thought in Mandarin.
“Sometimes you have such horrible ideas, so empty of courage, Sheng Konrad. Just like your Uncle. Too passive; yes, not aggressive enough – that’s your problem, you know. You need to get a bit more of a fighting spirit about you,” continued Dame Ming-hua, making a little fist and thrusting it towards him in a feigned mock punch as she said the words fighting spirit. “Sixiang jianding huozhe shi yizhi jianding! That’s the way progress is made, Sheng Konrad.”
With a willpower and volition that is unswerving. Well, we’ll see about that now, won’t we, thought Konrad to himself smugly. Now you’ve got to pay the ransom for the video of Cousin Sofia, or else all your efforts will be for naught.
“At any rate, my offer was already well-deserved by the committee members. They had a hard enough time getting Sofia, with her half-mongrel white devil heritage, in at the top of the sorority in the first place. The fact that two years later she suddenly abdicated, leaving a gaping hole in the sorority which they have so delicately nurtured since I became Dame twenty-eight years ago … it was a hard kick to the teeth.
“The problem still stands though, how I’m going to get my hands on the ten million dollars they’re asking for in order to get the video back. Even then, I wonder whether it’s worth it sometimes, you know. In this day and age, it’s probably not the only copy that’s out there now. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that it was already lurking on the internet somewhere, buried as a link on someone’s HaiSoc page, just lying there waiting to be broadcast.”
“No, certainly not,” said Konrad quickly. “It would have made headlines by now. Even if some of it was barred for censorship reasons, the gist of it would be front-page news.”
Dame Ming-hua looked at her nephew-in-law with a curious expression. “You seem very certain about that, Sheng Konrad.”
“I am. There’s just no way. I mean – there’s just no chance that something like this wouldn’t already be at the very least the subject of discussion among the higher-up social circles. I’ve heard nothing, so far.”
“Yes, I suppose you’re right about that,” Dame Ming-hua responded distantly. She sighed. “That still leaves the problem we face currently unresolved: getting our hands on the money to pay the filthy ransoms.”
Getting your hands on the money to pay the filthy ransoms, thought Konrad. But he remained silent.
Ω
“What?! No!” Chanel glared at her mother with a mixture of misery and fear.
“Oh, little girl, I better hear a ‘yes’ out of you soon or you better shut your greasy mouth! You’ll get the money back. Of course you’ll get it back! When have I not provided you with everything that you’ve needed? In fact, all these years, have I not raised you to have more than everything you need?”
“But that’s not Zheng money – it’s my Kyburg money! And since Papa remarried and had two more children, you know that’s probably the last I’ll ever see out of him,” she grumbled feebly.
The open palm of Dame Ming-hua’s left hand met Chanel’s right cheek in a loud THWACK!
“Young girl, would you stop whining like a spoilt little brat! When your mother asks this simple request of you, your mother, who’s shown you every generosity conceivable to woman for all of your life, you don’t answer me back insolently. You comply willingly. If I had ever spoken to my mother in that tiresome little-girl whine at your age there would have been consequences to that action far worse than this! Did I not show you much mianzi with your sisters just last week? Did I not show you up to be all that Shanghai society could ever imagine to be: the luckiest, the most elegant young woman in the whole of the land? Do you not think that such a display of grandeur – which was all for you! – cost something of a pretty penny? And your idea of renquin for such sacrifice is to whine at your mother when she calls upon you for a simple request?”
So Chinese, thought Chanel. Although she was only a quarter Swiss, sometimes she wished that she was with her father living a western existence in Europe, free from the societal constraints of mianzi and of the obligatory renquin – the granting of and paying back of favors – that upheld it.
As if in direct response to her stream of thoughts, the immaculate lady’s manicured hand, crowned with a cluster of gold-and-diamond jewelry, landed on Chanel’s reddening cheek with another THWACKKK! This second strike was much more painful than most of the regular ones she delivered, coming as did, rarely, as a follow-up to a precursory smack, and Chanel’s eyes became awash with real tears now, springing up from a more physical plane than the usual crocodile tears she shed when her mother admonished her with the sting of her palm.
“I should not even need to point out to you that this request is not just for the sake of my own face,” said Dame Ming-hua, regaining her usual composure of unflustered serenity. “It’s principally for the sake of yours! Perhaps I should have educated you better in this way. For that this is at least in part my own fault. I’ve given you too much. Over the years I think in some ways I’ve succumbed to your every want too casually; I’ve fulfilled your various fantasies time and again, no matter how whimsical or how lacking in substance they might be.”
Chanel’s eyes were still flooded with her tears, although she tried as hard as she could to hold onto them, sniffling back the mucus in her throat in a series of repressive snnoooahhhhrrrs.
Dame Ming-hua noticed her daughter’s obvious discomfort and settled on a gentler tone. “When a family like ours, which amounts to an international institution, my darling – when we undergo a crisis, everyone pays for it. That’s how institutions work. It’s only the sons-of-white-devils who don’t understand that. For if no one in the institution pays for the mistakes of the institution, then it becomes impossible to grow, except by means of illicit activities, which we do not engage in.” She paused for a second, her mind going back to the huilu she had made to the committee and to Theo Farrell’s Chief Executive, made to oblige her request of the unusual – and, the American had reminded her – unprecedented, not to mention highly public – promotion for Sofia. “Well, at least, the sort of activity in which we engage only in a limited capacity and in defense. Never to enrich ourselves.”
“I understand, Mama,” said Chanel, although her heart was still racing inside her chest. Despite her mother’s more compassionate approach, she could feel the salty tears returning to the front of her eyes. Deep down, she felt guilty as sin, and desperate, too. Angrily, she mentally cursed her dip-shit excuse for a boyfriend, Taylor. If it wasn’t for him, she’d be able to oblige her mother’s request. Now, it would be her fault that the family name would suffer the disgrace which the Great Dame had only narrowly averted thus far – and not without a little pinch, either.
Her mother noticed the odd look in her daughter’s eyes and misinterpreted it as a lack of comprehension of the seriousness of the issue, however.
“I’m not convinced you do, darling little daughter,” she said, her tone remaining kindly but firming up a little into something that came out as more business-like. “Perhaps then it’s only reasonable that I give you the context of my request more thoroughly. Follow me,” she said, leading Chanel down the wide, spiraled staircase amid which a vast, multi-tiered chandelier shimmied like an indoor breeze.
She followed her mother into the magnificent study. She barely went in here these days, but once, maybe ten years ago now, when they’d first moved into the opulent new mansion, she remembered spending weeks playing on the floor while her mother worked the phone relentlessly at her desk.
It was a wide, oval-shaped room, filled with antique hand-carved teak and mahogany tables, chairs, cabinets, chests of drawers and a scattering of musical instruments from Chinese operatic history. On the wood-paneled walls were hung a series of oversized Chinese artworks of similar antiquity. The paintings were ornamentally elegant, even if their guiding sources of inspiration were anything but, being as they were depictions of the dramatic transitions of power in Middle Earth over the ages as the Emperor continued to reincarnate into bodies born outside the bloodlines of those in line to the ruling dynasties; each of the painters’ skilled brushstrokes telling the familiar stories in picture form of how the arrival of these heaven-sent leaders had been forecast by a rash burst of natural disasters that flooded, froze, and dried out the earth of the vast, mountainous terrain that constituted the domain of the incumbent dynastic powers, murdering its inhabitants by force or by starvation, acting like a mass-executioner sent down from outer space and guiding the new Mandate bloodily into battle until his fate rested atop the throne for the generations that passed until the time of his subsequent reincarnation as a layman.
“Come and look for yourself,” said Dame Ming-hua, motioning her daughter towards the seat opposite herself at her desk. Both of them were now analyzing the numbers on the various account statements that lay on the desk, which Dame Ming-hua had turned around, to face Chanel. This was the closest her mother had ever gotten to opening up the Zheng family’s true financial position to her. Considering this for a moment, Chanel felt a pang of regret laced with guilt surge up inside her.
“If you add the balances together of our various cash accounts, you’ll see that there’s about one hundred eighty million RMB in there right now. That’s about thirty million dollars, give or take. Now, in order to get Sofia the promotion in Dubai I had to commit twelve million dollars of that to the Board of Theo Farrell –”
“You mean; the Americans take huilu too?” Chanel’s gaze was wide and naïve, and for a second it reminded Dame Ming-hua of when she had been a little child, maybe six or seven years old. Back then, she had still been married to Rudolf Kyburg, Chanel’s father, the two of them building Zhengky’s awesome presence up like a pair of mercenaries, hand-in-hand in constant day-to-day combat with the oncoming crowds of European and American businessmen looking to build ugly factories and glitzy shopping malls in Shanghai’s back yard.
“Of course the Americans accept money under the table, darling. They’re people, after all. Just because they trumpet the importance of their rules and regulations about everything and outwardly shun bribes, doesn’t mean they don’t share the same wants as we do. In many ways, it’s much easier to bribe an American than it is a Chinese person,” she laughed. “They’re very direct about their requirements, even if their costs are always outrageous. Of course, owning a bank with a dual Chinese-Swiss presence helps a great deal here.
“Anyway, there’s another thirteen million dollars that we have to set aside for the huilu to the party officials that installed you at the head of the sorority.” She let this sink in in her daughter’s head. “It can’t come as a surprise to you that we had to pay for that, surely?”
“No, it doesn’t,” she began quietly. But then something occurred to her: if this money already been made as payment for huilu, so to speak, then why was it still sitting in her mother’s bank account? Delicately, so that she didn’t offend her mother’s mianzi for a second time t
his afternoon, Chanel asked: “So when you give huilu in this sort of – um, in this amount. Do you just transfer cash then? As in, it’s just a straight payment?”
Dame Ming-hua smiled. She could see through the veil of the question. “No, darling daughter, of course not! Absolutely never – NEVER! – do you make a multi-million renminbi or dollar bribe like that. The authorities would notice something so blatant in a second! Not even that – a millisecond! It’s all computerized these days.
“It’s not the same as paying off the cops when you fail a drink-driving test. It’s far, far more serious than that.” Dame Ming-hua looked at her daughter sternly, who nodded complicity.
“But I suppose it’s time I told you how it works. After all, it’ll have to be you one day who does all this. Eventually,” she added wearily, letting a moment of brief silence fall between the two of them.
“So the way it’s done is via the use of credit lines, at least for those of us lucky enough to own financial institutions within which we can make that happen.” Chanel smiled at her mother as she said this, conspiratorially.
“So let’s say you want to pay off Mr. – hmmm –” A frown formed over Dame Ming-hua’s brow as she searched for a hypothetical name; she didn’t want to expose her daughter to too much right now. Fraud, the category within which the practice of bribery fell under, was, after all, a practice that was punishable by death in China if you were caught at it. Usually getting caught just meant upsetting other party members – another reason her father had been going berserk, and for which she had needed to offer the sorority committee members the big cash advances, which her dumb nephew-in-law Konrad had failed to appreciate. What a dimwit he was, thought Dame Ming-hua, before she said: “Sorry darling, what did you say?”
The Millennial Reincarnations: A Novel Page 14