The Millennial Reincarnations: A Novel

by Daniel Mark Harrison

  “Mr. Railly. Your example – let’s suppose it’s Mr. Railly I wished to bribe in this way.”

  “Alright, that’s a fine example, yes. Suppose you found yourself in need of a McIntyre report for something; a mine, or something like that, which you needed to have approved by a major consulting company before you sold it to an American company. Except there was a problem – let’s say the mine had only one ton of gold when you had promised the company that it had eight tons inside it, and you needed Mr. Ross Railly’s company to give you an evaluation of the mine using numbers that were slightly more in keeping with your estimation of its contents.

  “Well, the way you’d do that is to set Mr. Railly up a company where he is the sole shareholder and Director – for this you’d just use a standard Swiss company or even a British company, if you like – neither of which will arouse any suspicion at all. Then you’d set the company up with an account in Switzerland at Zengky and ask him to deposit a nominal sum; say, a hundred thousand dollars. After that, you’d fill out an application for the company to obtain a credit line for the amount of huilu you’d agreed to give him, which would get approved, obviously.

  “Mr. Railly would then use that credit line, which his company wouldn’t pay back. At that stage, the loan becomes known as a NPL, or non-performing loan,” her mother explained, using the English.

  “Basically, it’s a bad investment decision by the bank: it’s a write-down that the shareholders of the bank are obliged to pay for ultimately. Now for those stupid American banks, which are all public companies, write-downs are a very public news item indeed. But we’re private. It’s just Rudolf and me – your father – who owns the bank, after all. So when there’s a write-down, it’s him or it’s me that makes good on the payment. So, when we want to pay someone for certain services that they provide to us in an unofficial capacity, we effectively give them credit, don’t make a fuss when they fail to repay the loan balance, and then let the bank write-down the amount, for which we make payment ourselves. Does that make sense?”

  “I guess it does. But if they default on the loan – doesn’t that show up on their credit record then?”

  Dame Ming-hua laughed loudly and expansively. She rubbed her eyes; her contacts were drying them out. Slowly, she opened her drawer and took out her contact-lenses case and placed them inside the solution. She then picked her fine, gold-rimmed glasses and rested them on the front of her nose. They gave her an elegant, worldly look, as if all the contents of the universe’s most secret information lay behind her dark Chinese eyes. Looking at her, Chanel was reminded of something Sofia often used to say: that the Chinese eyes were often an enigma, like the black-and-white two-dotted swirl of the yin and yang symbol melting into its own infinity, the inner motions and workings of the minds behind them unreadable except for their core elements.

  “With money like this – there is no such thing as a credit record, darling. When it comes to handing out multi-million-dollar loan packages, you’re a little beyond the stage of checking in at the credit bureau to see if the borrower has paid his electricity bill on time last month.”

  Chanel felt stupid for asking the question but her mother consoled her. “It’s good that you are asking these things, however. As I say, this’ll become your job one of these days.

  “The big advantage to servicing huilu in this way, aside from the fact that it’s almost impossible to ever get caught doing so, is that you always maintain control over the receiver of the bribe, seeing as, in theory, you can call in the loan, assuming the bank hasn’t already written it off yet. That’s why you want to draw out the term of the loan as much as possible – so, say, you make it a ten-year term loan instead of a one-year term loan. That way you have the receiver on the hook for repayment for ten years. Of course, he’s unlikely to repay you, but you can considerably damage his mianzi – and he knows that. Usually, no one notices that there’s this power-advantage in place until you most need it, so happy are they just to have the money. That’s the best part. It’s a secret weapon, in many sense of the word.

  “So the money that you see in our accounts has all been spoken for. You might say, ‘but given that you’re going to write it down in so-and-so number of years into the future, why do we need to have it on account today?’ Let me tell you something fundamental here to being successful: never – ever – purchase what you cannot afford to pay for today.

  “So, you see – going back to our little prime crisis here,” Dame Ming-hua joked. “We owe twenty-five million dollars in write-downs on the Theo Farrell and the sorority committee payments, and we have thirty million in cash right now available. That leaves five million. But then there’s this.”

  She threw another piece of paper across the table at Chanel. It was a ransom for the video of Sofia for ten million dollars.

  “I can get three million dollars immediately on loan, no problem. Any more than that, and it’ll take at least 45 days to organize. But we don’t have that time because, as you can see, the ransom sum is due by the end of the month. That’s the reason I’m asking you to temporarily dip into the two-and-a-half million dollars, or whatever it is, that you have been given from your father, just to tide us over this one hurdle.”

  It was an entirely reasonable request, of course, given that Chanel wasn’t even being asked to pay for the ransom itself, merely to loan her mother money which, in all honesty, was more the product of her own work than anything else anyway, given that her father had probably received it out of his share of the bank’s earnings. It was especially reasonable seeing as it was Chanel’s mianzi anyway that her mother was looking to save here: right now, a public video of Sofia in a sex-a-thon would completely undermine the power bridge that she was in the process of building. Everything about this request was not just reasonable, in fact, but sensible. Logical.

  The problem was that the last time she had checked, Chanel had only half a million dollars of the money left in her account.

  Ω

  Konrad withdrew from Jasmine’s sticky, warm pussy and watched as the foreskin of penis flaccidly retreated over its tip. Without warning, he pulled her down over his chest from the kneeling position she had been assuming while he had been pumping her full of his semen into a state of frenzied, squealing orgasm.

  “Jin Ming-hua came to see me today,” he said eventually.

  Jasmine raised her head towards Konrad, and brought her lips up to touch his. “Fiiiinally! How long did that take her?”

  “I know, I know. She almost had me at one point when she said that she didn’t think there was much point in paying the ransom, since the file was probably out there somewhere already.”

  “She’s going to pay it, though, right?”

  “I hope so. I mean – she doesn’t have a lot of cash left right now after having to make good on the various parties that got caught in the crossfire.”

  “Wh-” began Jasmine, but then she went silent.

  “Hmm?”

  “Nothing,” she said. But the look of consternation on her face betrayed her.

  “C’moooon.”

  “I was thinking – do you think there’s any chance Dame Ming-hua will just go to the official route. The police, I mean. That could be really serious, Kon.”

  Konrad waved a palm in the air over their heads, dismissively. “What, now that she’s gone and paid twenty-odd million in huilu to both America and China’s biggest corporate executives? More chance of her releasing the file herself than that happening now. Although, I must admit, I’d actually really LOVE to see tha –”

  Conrad’s laughter was drowned out by an unpleasant, piercing whine: beside him, a series of long, loud, jangling riiiiiiinggggs rang out into the room. Startled, Jasmine jumped up into a sitting position in bed, clasping the scented sheets tightly around her breasts.

  Konrad picked up the phone’s handset beside him, and gave Jasmine’s naked back a gentle, reassuring patter with his free hand.

  “Yeah?” he said. T
hen: “No, thanks, but can you have someone bring up some cigarettes. Marlboro – thanks. They just want to know if we wanted to have the welcome basket brought up.” Both of them laughed, since they were only booking the room for the afternoon, but, as per Chinese law, they’d paid for the entire night.

  “Seriously, what’s bothering’ you this time?” asked Konrad, a little irritation showing in his voice now. “I know it’s not just that.”

  “When do you think we can tell people about us. Not have to sneak around like this, like – I dunno, like … teenagers, behind everyone’s backs.”

  “Soon enough, but definitely not right now. There’s too much risk in people connecting us right now.”

  “There’s not, really. I hardly think anyone suspects you of blackmailing your own family, Kong.”

  “No, but my name is definitely among those who are considered to be responsible. It’s no secret that Chanel and I aren’t exactly cozy with each other.”

  “I’m gonna change that, I swear.”

  “Don’t worry about it. It’ll never happen. Too much bad blood between us – literally speaking.”

  “Don’t say that,” said Jasmine weakly.

  “There’s also the not-so-small issue of the fact that I own twenty percent of HaiSoc! In that sense, I’m one of the very few names who would actually be able to make good on a threat like getting the file out there in the first place. And you – now you’re the First Lady of the Sorority. How the hell do you think that all looks once you piece together the fact that them two are fuckin’ each other? It’s really conspicuous.”

  Jasmine frowned miserably. At times she wondered whether it was all worth it. It had only been a joke to begin with – a sort of friendly dare between the two of them, before they had become lovers, aimed at testing and exploiting Sofia’s reputation for drug-infused promiscuity. But once the thing itself had gotten underway and Sofia had begged for it to stop, which, in the heat of the moment, they just hadn’t thought to do, both Jasmine and Konrad realized that they all stood a huge amount to win or lose as a result. The whole thing had suddenly taken on a completely new dimension of seriousness.

  Although Jasmine had only been dating Konrad for four months, since just after the time when they’d begun talking about pulling off the Sofia thing together, she was starting to feel really attached to him. As if he might be the one for her, even. Not now, of course, but one day.

  For now, she had to make do with these hotel sessions they had together three or four times a week, depending on their separate schedules. It cost a shit load of money, meeting like this, but that was the least of her concerns.

  “Cheer up, Mindy-mouse,” said Konrad, sweetly. “The future’s rosy.”

  “I hate it when you call me that,” she mock-grumbled.

  “I know you do, Mindy,” he teased her again. “So how’d the big sorority meeting go?”

  Jasmine’s face lit up like a light. “Oh yeah! You really won’t believe this,” she said, and after the doorbell sounded and Konrad lit a cigarette, she told him all about the previous night at the Zheng’s place, being sure not to leave out a single secret, sordid detail.

  Ω

  “I let you invest with me because I thought that there was a certain bond of trust between us; a certain … brotherliness, I guess,” Mason said angrily.

  Konrad leaned forward, flustered. He had known this day was soon coming. In fact, he’d been counting down the days since his cousin Chanel – the wench! – had kicked Lixue Lai out the sorority. Mason bit on his lip hard; that meant that his notoriously volatile temper was reaching the point of bursting.

  “There is, Mason. That’s why I got the company close to fifty million Yuan in unsecured loan funding. That isn’t easy, you know –”

  Mason waved a hand dismissively and cut his banker, and largest minority shareholder, off. “I know that. There’s no need to run through the things you’ve done for the benefit of the company. The stock you’re holding will be worth a significant number of times the effort you’ve put in on our behalf.”

  “I can’t deny that, Mason. But neither can I allege to have had any part to play in the current dilemma with your sister.”

  “They’re your fucking family!”

  “I know they are, but it’s no secret that Chanel and I are hardly what you would call confidantes,” said Konrad, rephrasing the same conclusion he had preached to Jasmine only last night. For a moment, he thought about her long, slender, Eurasian body, how the gushing wetness of her pussy felt when it enveloped his cock while he yanked hard on her ponytail, just the way she liked it. He loved the way her large mouth moaned in an oval “O” shape when she was coming to orgasm, the way that she secreted a few squirts of female cum when it did …

  “… and she was crying her fucking eyes out – are you even listening to me?”

  “I’m sorry, Mason, what was that you were saying. Look: I can’t help you if you’re having a fit!”

  Mason breathed deeply and begun again. “I said, for the last few weeks my sister has been bawling her eyes out – she thinks that she’s somehow damaged my family’s mianzi here in Shanghai, and in China more generally.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Konrad said, using the opportunity to humor the founder and largest shareholder in HaiSoc Co Limited. “I somehow think it would take a great deal more than a silly girl’s society to damage your standing and credibility, Mase.”

  “Yes, well, that might be the case.”

  “It is the case! Your company – our company, even – is about to go public and make some of the country’s biggest venture capitalists rich beyond – well, beyond anything that anyone else has made them in the past five years or more even.”

  Mason’s expression hardened again. “All the more reason to be delicate about the way that shit-fucking Chanel should treat my delicate, pure pearl of a sister!”

  Konrad smirked inwardly to himself. Not as delicate or pure a pearl as you think, pal, he thought to himself. Only last week according to Taylor she had been at Milk, eating the face off some girl who was still in high school. Mason assumed that because his sister was never seen on the arm of another boy, she was holier-than-thou. But that was only because she was into girls. Sofia and her had had a steamy on-and-off affair, even as the former sorority Dame had outwardly been making overtures towards dating Easton. Sometimes, Konrad reflected not for the first time, Mason could be so immature about society, given how much of a genius he apparently was in synching it all up together online.

  “Either way, my loyalty to the Kyburg family has been stressed immensely –”

  “Don’t put me in the same bracket as Chanel, Mase. She’s not even a legitimate Kyburg – that whore is the bastard grand daughter of my granddad’s mistress! Only I am the legitimate Kyburg! Hence the royal prefix Von – the others are’ll bastards, I’ll swear to it!”

  “Then why is it that she is the one in line to your entire family’s empire, and to the place at which you work?” asked Mason.

  Konrad sighed. “My mother was killed in a tragic accident. Given that I was just a baby then, my grandpa, no doubt egged on by his whore-for-a-secretary Tian Meizhen, who was Chanel’s grandma, gifted the entire Kyburg Bank and Insurance Company to Rudolf Kyburg, her father.”

  “You got nothing?”

  “Not a lot, really – no,” lied Konrad. The truth was, the deal had been one both his own biological grandparents had struck together: while Rudolf had inherited the comparably meager Kyburg financial services companies that were mostly in Asia, Konrad’s mother Anna had been given his mother’s much grander Winterthur banking empire. Back in the day, it had been one of the largest European banking presences in the world. Except his Swiss uncles, who had been the caretakers of the whole Von Winterthur institutions after his mother had been raped and beaten to death by his vagabond father. The uncles had made a series of calamitous management decisions that had forced him into selling the pieces off in a garage sale at seve
nteen years old to what was by then the Zheng-merged Kyburg conglomerate, Zhengky Bank.

  It was only the commercial loans department and some of the European depositary services that were still worth anything – low-revenue and unexciting businesses as far as the future of banking were concerned. Thus, while Konrad had recouped a few million dollars, it was nothing on the hundreds of millions he had been raised to expect.

  The thought of all of that still hurt – here he was, an employee of Zengky Bank, running the remnant mid-office bits and pieces of his previously imperial full-scale banking superpower. That’s why he’d seized the opportunity to help Mason make his online company such a success – it was a chance for him, the genuine Von Kyburg lineage, to restore his previous dominance of this bastard Zheng-Kyburg riff-raff that Dame Ming-hua had created when she’s birthed Chanel.

  “It still doesn’t change things; I need to know I can trust you, or I’m going to dilute your stock substantially. You’ll end up making a couple million RMB – pocket change – instead of a couple billion.”

  “Y-you can’t do that! Not after – after everything I’ve done to help you!” Konrad spluttered. “N-not after I’ve invested my own capital for Christ sakes!”

  “You’ll be rewarded on what you invested, don’t worry,” said Mason coolly, enjoying displacing the banker’s usual air of unflustered confidence. “But that’s not a lot compared to what others have contributed, and what others even now are begging to commit. As far as I’m concerned, your shares are just my insurance policy, now – they’re my insurance that you’ll get me what I need. Get it for me – and you can keep them, undiluted. Fail to do so, however and I’ll dilute you back to the amount of your original investment. You’ll make something, and you won’t lose any money, of course, but it’ll hardly be anything to write home about. In that sense, it’s worth thinking hard about my request – after all, it’s worth nearly half a billion dollars to you in real terms.”