The Millennial Reincarnations: A Novel
Page 20
And there’s no time to write that sort of thing – not here, not now, not at the beginning of the twenty-first century, anyway, where audiences want ever faster-paced, ever more immediate and accessible worlds into which like morning birds preying on the earthworms sliding across the muddy grass of the park they can swoop towards and from which they can just as quickly take flight.
And it was the desire to forget the broken home I had created, the burnt out career-path I had failed to harness at its moment of highest potential, and moreover it was the remnants of a deeply-regretful, morning desire to fulfill the life Alyssa never had – the one I had deprived her of – that led me one freezing morning, hours ahead of the greatest snowstorm to collide in 79 years with the island on which stood the semi-antique spires of New York City, to take flight from the wreckage of my life to China, from where I would never return.
From there I willed and pushed and righted myself to only look forward, and never consider the past again, if only to honor the two lives I had taken, however regretfully, in whatever model car, travelling through whatever karmic storm as I had been whipped up into.
Ω
But currently the trauma couldn’t distract me from my mission-at-hand. Wen wrongly assumed my mission was, like anyone else’s in China, money. It wasn’t hard to see why: despite all my success, I was fifty-three and facing a temporary dearth of liquidity for the first time in years. And it was true that the sick man in the back of the navy blue Bentley could help me out of that problem; he was, after all, China’s – and maybe the worlds, if you counted all his undeclared offshore holdings – richest man.
In recent months, restaurants had folded, luxury hotels had emptied, and illegally-built high-rise flats along the coast to service the non-Chinese middle-class which had once been the backbone of the region’s economy had been left unfinished in a temporary halting of Chinese economic growth. Although its fixtures were not permanent, all this meant that advertising revenue – on which the prosperity of my publications and TV networks depended – had been sucked like a star into a black hole in a collision of fates.
The old man I had come to see – who in turn had come to show-off his underage Swedish bride-to-be – was called “Redflag” Zheng, and there was no part of Shanghai’s economy or political landscape in which he wasn’t somehow involved. But the truth was that I was not in any serious distress – at least not financially; my reasons for orchestrating the meeting were for once, personal. Still, I hadn’t let anyone become the wiser – except Emmanuella “Feng” Constantine, my only true confident and the aunt to the billionaire’s bride-to-be. In turn, Emmanuella’s real connection to the boney blonde girl in the car was a confidence that only I shared.
Suddenly, a great cheer and applause burst out as the frail Zheng exited swiftly from his Bentley, ushered into the club behind the shield of the militant cavalier of his bodyguards, who only moments earlier had committed a seemingly forgotten murder.
As I strained to see where inside the club Zheng was headed, Wen jabbed me in the ribs and steered my gaze back towards the window. Flanked by a less-ostentatious phalanx of civil protection, a fragile blonde child emerged from the back of the car. A tragically fashionable bohemia chiseled at her fine bones, while her small breasts clung to her short black one-piece and her blonde curls fell dramatically about her shoulders. She was genetically-perfect, a figure from a master-race created a century into the future. Gliding along the surface of the red carpet in tall black Manolo Blahniks, she was less a physical conquest than she was a porcelain replica of a human being.
Inside the club, she sidled up to Zheng discreetly, gently taking his arm. Oddly, the couple made a fitting pair, in a way. The man whose sixty-fifth birthday everyone was here to celebrate (everyone but me) looked sick, condemned by decades of self-abuse to a terminal physical condition. His Swedish bride-to-be also looked sick, but it was a sickness of a psychological kind that possessed her, the result of a decade of some other exogenous type of abuse. It was in her eyes, which were a dead grey-azure, like the lights in the club.
“What a pretty pair,” said Wen with his most heavily accented Chinese sarcasm, directing us away from the window now and into a quieter corner through an indoor alcove. We seated ourselves on a plush red leather couch. “And what a pretty plan you have going – dare I say it, audacious. But how do you intend on competing with the amorous attention of Miss. Teen Sweden?”
“I have a connection here,” I replied.
“Of course. Milliken?” Taylor Milliken was the club’s owner, an ostentatious, snotty, though ultimately eager-to-please American we both knew well. I had thought of approaching Milliken about setting me up with Zheng, but his schmoozer charm came with too much potential collateral damage for such a pivotal meeting.
“Not Milliken. It’s someone on the inside, not connected to Milk.” I did not mention any connection to Emmanuella, of course.
I could see that that the admission surprised Wen. Milk, this old-school discotheque masquerading as a top-notch society hangout, was on the surface of it about the only tangible connection I had to Zheng, an immensely private and shielded tycoon. “After I thought about it a while, I realized there is someone here else who’s an insider of sorts in Zheng’s court.”
Wen glared at me, not all together kindly. His residential property construction business could desperately use an infusion of fresh capital, and the fact that I was hiding a key contact from one of my best friends in the city struck him as unkind, I could see.
“There’s no way I could have set you up with Zheng – not just now,” I said. “You know that: this evening can’t be a free-for-all Goldman Sachs-style capital raising milk round. We’ll both end up with nothing, Wen.” Wen leaned into me, close enough so that I could smell his Burberry aftershave and see a chink of dry blood on the sallow skin of his neck where he had cut himself wet-shaving.
“In a way,” Wen croaked, “you’re an imposter here in Shanghai, you know. Always digging things up, always looking for the fault-lines, the cracks in everything. That’s what got you in this trouble in the first place. You can’t publish, month-on-month, great eulogies on the demise of the real estate market in a town whose fortunes are built on the real estate business. You cannot say ‘growth is dead,’ not in the streets, but especially not on the front of your magazine for all the country to see. Look around here: it’s all we have. Commerce is all this city is made up of –”
“Wen, that’s also what made me so successful here. You know that; I am not a fraud! My news stations tell it like it is – that’s how most of these people have made their money.”
“That was true in a time when the economic cycle was on the up, when the only critical things to write about were those outside this place. But now you are challenging it from the inside, and people are hating you for it.”
“Thanks.” But I knew he had a point. “And don’t be upset about Zheng – you’ll get your turn, I promise. How long have we been friends?”
“You are more an acquaintance than a friend,” said Wen, truthfully.
“Don’t be resentful, not now, Wen –”
“I’m not resentful,” Wen said quickly. “But be careful. The more you dig around here, the closer you get to someone digging you your own grave. And when they decide to do that, it won’t matter any longer whether it’s boom or bust. It won’t matter whether you have the highest connections in the senior-most ranks of the communist party, or to Zheng. They’ll pay. In China, there’s always money in the bank to eliminate an unwelcome visitor. In fact, there’s even enough to eliminate a welcome one.”
Wen was right, even if the central core of his message was slightly tired. But I couldn’t hold it against him for giving me some hard advice when he thought that I’d left him out of such a substantial introduction while assuming that the principal reason I was here to meet Zheng was as superficial as something to do with getting additional equity financing or a commercial bank loan.
I was here in this Shanghai nightclub, surrounded now by these schoolgirl prostitutes on the hunt for lonely billionaires – in order to confess to the sin which had led me here to China, and which in turn had been (if only indirectly) responsible for all the success I had never deserved. Even if it hadn’t been intentional or criminal, my sin was still in every sense a venial one.
As I had contemplated the matter, slowly at first, and more increasingly as time had passed, it had occurred to me lately that this was a sin for which in that sense I owed Zheng every last Yuan renminbi in my pocket and even my right to abide here – which I had decided I would offer him, if he asked for it – before it was his moment to die.
For certainly my money (not for a man as wealthy as Zheng) and even my leaving China and my foregoing all the material gains I had amassed here over the years, if it came to that – could, I knew from personal experience – ever provide any suitable recompense for the sin I had committed against the ailing billionaire. Thirteen years ago, I had been at the hands of the wheel of the car that had killed Zheng’s only daughter.
Awkwardly, I knew the only reason I was able to revisit the tragedy and face making an apology was that since then I had had another daughter who was now ten years old. For Zheng, no such joss arrived.
The One Child Policy stood tall and powerful, more powerful even than the richest man in China.
CHAPTER IX
Number One Sister
Ω
September, 2012
DAYS TURNED into nights, and the planetary acrobatics that is manifest in the seasons’ solar-lunar interplay across the oval sphere of that great heated bluey rockface that lies interposed between the sun and the Martian springtime somewhere out in non-navigable hyper-space, Sofia found her bearings again.
The gradual hum of this new years’ return-to-life had come to bear witness once again to the picturesque springtime citysides that rambled about the world and she felt more at ease out of China, far away from the new empire’s culturally dying spirit and materially nascent soul, breathing in its last breath of polluted oxygenated atmosphere while spitting out the fleshly liquid of its first hydrogen-babble, burbling and gurgling back the bitter spit of the womb from which it had just emerged and into which its mind was bound back into simultaneously in a flash, in either case exposed somehow; naked.
The country behind her was in someway always in front of her, she knew, lying submissive before the forces of nature that intended to suck it into to its inevitable destiny to greatness and meekness is equal yet unevenly distributed side-servings, but she managed to put the past out of her mind. Almost.
At first she travelled from Shanghai to Dubai’s coastline, making the brief scheduled stop she had secretly agreed with her Uncle Redflag to make in order to create the appearance of putting new roots down, and then, after a month or so, one cool night, the Arab sands whisked into the air by an icy wind-draft that had circled down South East from the Sahara menacingly for the past fortnight, only to be sliced into ribbons of varying degrees by the force of the tides crashing into and being sucked out of the Gulf, torn between two seas, one Mediterranean and one Asian, much like this city, Dubai was, at some point in the early hours of what appeared to be a mild but was in fact the makings of a scorching day outside, she was ferried onto the giant Emirates Boeing Dreamliner in her designer clothes, her icy blue eyes protected from the sun’s first rays and from the glares of the public at large she was ushered straight to her double bed and awoke in New York City.
The Manhattan afternoon as a cloudy one for September, but still she kept her icy blue eyes well protected behind her dark Coco Chanel lenses, except to declare herself a free citizen – free enough at least to enter the free world, but still afraid, afraid that those eyes, which were so rare for a Eurasian girl and maybe even the only ones in China, some often said, shouldn’t go unnoticed in the brief period she exposed them.
But exposure is what New York City was, she found, with its parlors and strip clubs and plays and night spots and drink and drugs and Italian restaurants and Spanish Bodegas and Jewish banks and she bathed for the first time in years in the silent pleasure of anonymity, feeling guilty for not putting on a show for even the tamest of schoolboys whose glances she caught occasionally as they marched across Central Park back to their mansionettes in time for social occasions that Shanghai, for all its expos and galas and riches and factories and golden wealth and flashing neon characters, she knew would never be able to entertain.
Even if by chance Shanghai managed to host a party twice as grand in a skyscraper built one hundred times the height of that middle finger New York had erected as a symbol of chest-thumping defiance to the rest of the world over Ground Zero’s once plummeting soulfire, it would still, any function in China, she knew, somehow instinctively, would contain the signs of social retardation somehow, the result of it being hosted by a Mandarin-Communist factory-working intellect of some bastard billionaire’s son. For all the neo-Capitalism that had been exported to the billion plus people, not one would be able to get on the guest list of the many parties all over the New York Tri and in the States beyond here to which the invitations she was delivered daily accumulated but gave her no cause for RSVP even in the event she was promised the most esteemed VIP enclosure.
Her peers in Shanghai, most of them full-Chinese, she knew would rip them open, unable to control the temptation of face for status’ sake, unable to divine the two concepts which a latitude interposed, but Sofia left them unopened, unreturned, gathering dust on the pinewood floors of her magnificent Tribeca duplex discreetly tucked away behind one of the buildings that recently had housed some Master of the Universe who had apparently somehow only very recently threatened to blow a hole in the bottom of the vault when a line zigged where it should have zagged. At that She sometimes imagined all the paperwork that China’s Treasury Bonds incurred on the overburdened American bureaucratic system, it’s antiquated technology from 1962 processing chad by chad the countless IOUs from the free world silently accumulating interest upon interest upon interest until no one could remember any more what was owed and what was repaid, except for fact that something was owed to China, but was never likely to be honored unless the world’s most populous country built an army of human men who obeyed like dogs and loved like skunks and attacked upon command like vicious cow-eating Amazonian ants, and died like machines, precise and rhythmic and without a heartbeat.
Ω
Sofia was surprised by the reaction that she received from the man Uncle Redflag had set her up to see, the one who her Uncle promised would help to retrieve the video in time. When they had first met over brunch one Saturday in a restaurant on the corner of 2nd Avenue and 11th Street, the good looking young man who introduced himself as Ryan stood and shook her hand formally.
“This is not a job you can do just by bribing the cops or whatever – someone has you in a hold.”
“Why you?” was her first question, slightly incredulous for the fact that he was nearer her age – maybe late twenties, she guessed, at most, as opposed to someone she had imagined. Someone her Uncle’s age.
At first he had not understood the question. “It’s OK,” Ryan had answered her with a smirk, waving off the gesture of proffering his help as if this was no-big-deal. “Forget about it. I like your Uncle. He’s done me favors inside China. China’s hard to access you know – not because your technology is advanced or anything. Because rather it’s so low tech. We went past that stage a decade ago.”
“Did you understand me properly?” Sofia was incredulous: who did this young man think he was.
“I think so – and I told ya,” replied Ryan, pausing to
take a sip of his Latte. “I like your Uncle and although I don’t owe him, he’s been good to me.”
Sofia’s eyes remained staring, her expression serious, her icy blue irises catching the sun and looking cold and unchanging from that emotion.
“Hey – it’s OK,” said Ryan. “When I find it the video goes straight back to you, I promise. I’m not gonna look, I assure you. Just the start to ma-”
“Oh for crying-out-fucking-loud!” Sofia snapped all of a sudden. “I don’t mean why you would pick to work for us! I mean why should I think you are any good at all?”
Ryan considered the question for a moment, his deep green eyes offset against his high cheek bones and black wavy hair. Sofia was annoyed that he was devastatingly handsome, as it distracted her from her … purpose.
“Well?” she stammered, slipping up and speaking first.
“Are you serious? Your Uncle hasn’t told you anything about me at all?”
“He said you would more than make up for that. So far that’s a bargain that you appear unable to keep,” she said tartly.
Ryan laughed a soft chuckle, but it continued longer than one that was just for show; he was genuinely amused.
“Hey, look. I-I-I’m … I’ve worked with your Uncle on various projects for years. Let’s put it this way: I am the one who designed your bank's internal software, security, the new blockchain you’re creating, all of it. I also designed all the betting systems you have, internally and online, and fixed them so they skewered the house bias towards Americans. You see, the Chinese casinos, they are great for Yanks. If only Yanks knew it. Because people like your Uncle, they gotta make someone win. Someone’s gotta win the prize and go shouting about it. Who better than a Yankee, right? I mean, we’ll come back from Macao and make a movie of the thing. But you – I mean, the Chinese. They will go and buy a massive house somewhere and just live out their days investing it badly and spending it unwisely but telling nobody other than the immediate community they live in and become patriarch in. So we win at your casinos. It’s great – but you know, the irony. We think that the Chinese casinos are rigged. Of course they are, but in our favor!” Ryan laughed again, genuinely, and Sofia allowed herself a smile temporarily at the story. It sounded so like the Americans – the odds were stacked in their favor, finally for once, somewhere overseas, but the whole country was warned off that particular event.