The Daughters of Henry Wong

by Harrison Young

  “I speak better Mandarin than Mercury does. I can even write educated Chinese, which he cannot.”

  “This is not Harvard, Wendy. No one cares about that.”

  She was right and I knew it. Amanda was right more often than I had ever been willing to admit. But as so often, I hid behind cleverness. “What group do you include in ‘no one’?”

  “Everyone who matters.”

  “Our customers?”

  “Wendy, do the math. Zhang Hai Ming, pig though he is, probably will get a court to declare him free to tender his shares, and even if you can get Julia to show herself, you’ve still only got thirty-two percent. Intelligent investors will know that – and above twenty dollars, the grandmothers you charmed on television will all tender.”

  Amanda was waving her hand for emphasis, and people were beginning to look in our direction. I hoped I could calm her down by speaking quietly: “Who is Julia?”

  9

  Before I could recruit Julia, Serena recruited me. I have come to believe I was her first such captive.

  Sam called the morning after Chao Yinhang’s bid was announced. “There’s some boring technical stuff we need to get you briefed on,” he said. “Do you mind if I have the associate do it?”

  “Serena could never be boring,” I replied, seized with an intense recollection of how good she had looked in Amanda’s low-cut party dress. If “Lucy” had been Serena, I would have been toast.

  “I’ll tell her you said so,” said Sam.

  Five minutes later her perfect accent was on the phone. Would it be all right if she multitasked? We needed to talk but she also wanted to see the view from the Peak, and she was about to go back to London.

  “Take the tram,” I said. “It’s another tourist experience you should have. It goes right by the Castle. You catch the one that leaves the terminal at ten thirty and I’ll get on at the May Road stop.”

  We walked around Lugard Road, the asphalt path that circles the Peak about two hundred yards below the crest. It is named after an early twentieth century Governor who was sent to Hong Kong as a sort of consolation prize after creating Nigeria and then losing an argument with London about how vigorous a punitive expedition to launch in response to the slaughter of two British officials. Serena knew about him. She accumulated useless facts the same as I do.

  “I went to some lectures on colonialism,” she explained.

  Going counter-clockwise around Lugard Road, you get increasingly spectacular views on your right and some amazing old houses on the left. Serena oohed and aahed – and explained the Takeovers Code. It had been modified recently. It was like the “City” version in London, but there were some tricky differences. We were allowed to critique their bid and they had to print our comments and their response in a revised document. They could increase their bid, but the amount of cash per share could not be reduced. None of what she said felt important. Besides, it was what Sam took care of.

  Three-quarters of the way round, where Lugard Road turns into Harlech Road and a third road goes downhill toward Pokfulam Reservoir, there is also a flight of stone and concrete stairs up into the brush.

  “Follow me,” she said, and disappeared.

  I found her sitting on a step several turnings up the hill, holding her high heels in her hand.

  “I hate these things,” she said.

  I had a momentary vision of Serena running barefoot through a forest like Diana the huntress. She patted the spot beside her and I sat down.

  “Nice view,” she said, and indeed there was a break in the trees that let you see the subsidiary peak, High West, and a ship coming in the distant entrance to the harbor, and the islands beyond that.

  “I found this trail on the map.” She produced a Walkers’ Guide to Hong Kong, as if to prove it.

  “O.K.,” I said, “but why didn’t you wear, uh, walking shoes?”

  “Sort of a Psmith and Graves emblem. Have to keep up with the boss.”

  “Would you smoke cigars if Simon did?”

  “Probably. I tend to overdo things. Speaking of which, right now, would you please give me a long and serious kiss?”

  I’d been thinking so hard about how nice that would be that I obeyed immediately. As I did so, she put her arms around my neck and let her shoes tumble down the stone steps. I heard footsteps coming up the path, and then laughter and then Mandarin being spoken as the intruders retreated.

  “Works every time,” said Serena. “They were just following us on spec, I hope, so I thought we should give them an explanation why two people dressed for business would be strolling on the Peak on a work day.”

  “We’re having an affair?”

  “And I’m your spymistress.”

  I pondered that for a moment. I should have laughed at dialogue that perfect, but I was infatuated. “I thought you were a high flier in the City.”

  “That too, and it’s the best possible excuse for going overseas on short notice.”

  For a moment, neither of us spoke. Serena stood up and retrieved her shoes. “I have a confession to make,” she said as she sat down.

  “The last girl who said that was setting me up for blackmail.”

  “Go on.”

  I told her about Lucy. She made me go over it twice, listening with a physician’s impersonal attention to detail.

  “Do Sam and Simon know about this?”

  “Actually, no.”

  “Well, if Zhang Hai Ming tries another stunt like that, you let me know.”

  “Let you know?”

  “I do the boring technical stuff.”

  “Is that what that just was?” I said. Neither of us could manage a laugh, so I went on. “You think it was Zhang?”

  “Who else?”

  “I guess I’ve avoided thinking about the whole thing. I found it very painful, to be honest.”

  “That’s your weakness, Wendy, being honest. We will have to work on that.”

  “So what about your confession?”

  She reached in the pocket of her dress and pulled out one of the jade and diamond earrings.

  “Keep it,” I said, surprising myself.

  Serena raised an eyebrow. “You and I are going to have secrets?”

  “More secrets,” I corrected her. “If you like.”

  “I like.”

  “So what do you want me to do?” I said. For a ridiculous moment I imagined being sworn in as Agent Double-O-Seven-and-a-half, and the Queen knighting me – which made me think about my father’s “not bad” medals.

  “Go to work,” said Serena, “sit at Henry’s desk, and ask Henry’s secretary to bring you anything she’s been holding for his return, and go through it carefully.”

  Cedric’s exact instructions, but I thought I’d keep him out of the conversation. “Sam told me I was supposed to be acting unconcerned,” I said. “I’ve been working from home a lot.”

  “Well, now you’ve been bid for, I think it would be reasonable for you to start showing up at the office. You might even start wearing a normal business suit, though I suppose that’s your business. What you are looking for, not to be totally mysterious about it, is – no, let me start again. There is a system by which people who need to get out of China rather badly, and who are very unlikely to get permission to do so – human rights, that sort of thing – disappear somewhere in the interior, spend a short time in Hong Kong getting false papers, and then fly to Canada. We believe that Henry plays a role, among other things by funding the system. We don’t know exactly what he does, and we don’t care, but we also don’t want him to stop.”

  “Is Simon part of ‘we’?”

  She hesitated. “Not officially.”

  “Sam?”

  “He’s not even British. You know what he reminds me of? A little pug dog: small and ugly and hopeful. Can you believe he brought that model to your house for dinner?”

  “I believe they spent the night together.”

  “Did he tell you that?” Serena was ful
l of scorn.

  “No. She did. When she called to say ‘thank you’ Amanda was out. ‘Oh, please thank your wife for letting me wear her jewelry. I felt so sexy I did not stop fucking Sam until four in the morning.’”

  “He must have paid her to say that.”

  “I live in Hong Kong. I have asked around. He turns out to be famous.”

  I had asked around – went into the bar at the Hong Kong Club to do it. Gin and tonic. Peanuts. “I’ve hired an investment banker. Amusing fellow. Ever heard of him?” Quite an awkward experience, but people seemed happy enough to talk to me. Being on the TV news had made me interesting, I guess.

  “I will have to regard him in a new light,” said Serena.

  “I’m sure he’ll like that,” I said.

  “Now don’t you say a word to the little pug. He’s not my type.”

  Another thought occurred to me. I told her my suspicions about Phyllis. If there were serious secrets in the bank, should I fire her?

  “No way,” said Serena cheerfully. “You want Mercury and Amanda to keep assuming you’re clueless.”

  We were both silent. As this new information about Henry’s vocation sank in, I wondered whether he had set out to make me clueless – practicing calligraphy in my office! – so that when some day I succeeded him as chairman of the bank, no one would suspect ornamental American Wendy of managing a clandestine enterprise.

  “You’re it,” Serena said, tapping me on the shoulder, and she scampered barefoot up the steps to the summit.

  “About Zhang,” I said, as we walked back down the long curves of Mount Austin Road to the tram station, “what is he really up to?”

  “We are curious about him too,” said Serena. “He goes into ‘real China,’ as I think of it, all the time. Also to Taiwan. Also to Canada. But he may just be hyperactive.”

  “About ‘the system’, as you call it,” I said finally. “It gets people out?”

  “Forty or fifty, by our count. But we don’t really know.”

  “Henry doesn’t work for...how, shall I say it?...Her Majesty?”

  “No.”

  Serena finally paused to put on her shoes. Finding out she was a spy – and for that matter a tomboy – didn’t make her any less desirable. Nor did the thought that she was a rookie. She might have taken first class honors at Oxford, but she dismissed Sam too easily. I hoped she knew what she was doing. Courage and innocence are an irresistible combination – and for her purposes, highly effective: I wanted to see her again; I wanted to help her. I was now her agent – whatever that entailed – and I was elated.

  10

  “I am the other daughter of Henry Wong,” she announced, standing in front of half a dozen microphones in a meeting room at the Mandarin, television lights making the gilded screen on the wall behind her blaze.

  The week earlier, the day after kissing Serena, I’d flown to New York to meet Julia. Zhang had won his court case while I was away, meaning our position had weakened.

  So she “showed herself,” to borrow Amanda’s phrase, as soon as she arrived. “Julia Found,” read the headline in the South China Morning Post, over photographs of her and of Henry’s sailboat.

  Her presence turned Mercury’s takeover bid into a contest.

  Amanda insisted that Julia stay at the Castle. “She’s my half sister. What would people think if I made her live in the Peninsula the way she planned?” Amanda regarded her father’s indiscretion as an embarrassment, which was why I’d never heard about Julia, but now she was putting a good face on it.

  So for a few days we had reporters and television crews hanging around at the foot of the path. They didn’t seem to know about the steps up to Barker Road, so I had Henry’s Rolls collect Julia there when she wanted to go out.

  “Too spoiling,” said Julia, who wore flat shoes and didn’t mind the hundred and seventeen steps.

  “Too conspicuous,” said Amanda.

  “You have a Rolls too,” I said.

  For the most part, they got along. It didn’t help, though, when Mosquito ran a cartoon of the two of them sitting on the terraces at opposite ends of the Castle, each wearing little princess crowns, Julia besieged by reporters and photographers, Amanda looking peeved.

  “Other Daughter,” as Song took to calling her, could have been my sister rather than Amanda’s. She was tall, with the same I want to say colorless skin, had the same straight black hair as me, the same general roundness of face and body. I found her attractive, though I don’t think Julia thought herself so.

  Her mother, now deceased, had been an American woman for some reason married to a British civil servant, a district officer in the New Territories who died of a snakebite, believe it or not. She’d stayed on, and supplemented her pension by running a bookshop in Wyndam Street. One day in 1967, according to Julia, Henry wandered in. Her mother treated him courteously, so he asked her to teach him to read English. He could already speak it, after a fashion. The liaison lasted four years. When she became pregnant with Julia, Henry had already married Agnes, so she moved to New York and had Julia there. And perhaps because Julia looked Eurasian, her mother gave her Henry’s last name. Soon thereafter Henry put a parcel of stock in trust for Julia, with her mother to receive the dividends during her lifetime. With splits and acquisitions and roughly thirty years of prosperity in Hong Kong, Julia Wong now owned approximately 70 million shares, making her a wealthy woman.

  What she’d done about her fortune was try to ignore it. She’d graduated from Vassar in 1993, and joined the old Morgan Guaranty Trust as a corporate lending trainee. She’d been good at banking, to her mother’s considerable amusement. Her mother wouldn’t tell her who her father was, or what he did. “You’d just embarrass him,” she said. Julia had reasoned that he probably lived in Hong Kong, and her favorite theory was ship-owner.

  When her mother died in a motorcycle accident in 1996 at the age of fifty-five, and Julia was allowed to learn what was in the family portfolio, she looked in Morgan’s credit files to find out about Pearl River Bank. She probably should have diversified, she told me, but she’d hung onto the stock out of sentiment. She’d had the executor send Henry a formal notice of her mother’s death, which evidently prompted his confession to Amanda regarding Julia’s existence, but out of respect for her mother’s wishes, she had never attempted to contact her father.

  When I told Julia, at our first meeting, in an expensive restaurant on Madison Avenue, that Henry would certainly be proud of her, she burst into tears. So I told her I hadn’t really had a father either, and came close to crying myself. We went back to her apartment and I let her give me too much cognac and she agreed to come to Hong Kong and help defend “the family bank.” The weight of her personal fortune had caused her to shift from corporate lending to private banking, which seemed to make her mistress of her own schedule.

  “I do everything on the phone, anyway,” she said. “And maybe I can find some new clients.” She had a way of holding on to life loosely, which I supposed came from her mother.

  At lunch in the Mandarin Grill, I asked Sam to help me explain the situation to Julia.

  “He’s my banker,” I told her.

  “I’m hers too,” said Sam with a smile. It was technically true, as it was Pearl River Bank that had retained Psmith & Graves, and although I held Henry’s proxy, I personally owned far fewer shares than Julia did.

  There was one of those charity balls on Saturday, and I thought Julia would be interested to see it. They are so over-the-top, so perfectly Hong Kong, with thousand-dollar giveaways at every place, a samba orchestra flown in from São Paulo, tai-tais in diamonds whose husbands are billionaires talking about the ten-dollar Gucci knock-offs they’d picked up at the Lo Wu shopping center in Shenzhen. At the last minute Amanda decided she was sick. I didn’t want to disappoint Julia, who had gone out and bought a dress for the occasion, so the two of us went anyway. Amanda didn’t object. But the papers were full of “Big Wendy and Mystery Julia” –
not just Mosquito, but the Chinese press as well, which had pictures two days running. I gathered that Orchid didn’t know what she thought about this.

  Sam, on the other hand, thought the publicity was terrific. “The way you look alike confuses the punters.” He cut the best photos and headlines out of the papers and had them framed for Julia.

  I realize I have skimmed over my first encounter with Julia. I waited until I was in New York to call her, and found her at work.

  “This is Jonathan Lee,” I said.

  “Called ‘Wendy,’” she replied. Nice voice.

  “You read the papers,” I said.

  “I was expecting your call.”

  “I didn’t know you existed until four days ago.”

  “We should probably have dinner,” she said.

  I asked her to pick the restaurant.

  My first thought when she came in – I’d made a point of being early – was what a nice job she did of looking good while looking like she hadn’t taken any trouble: a gray silk sleeveless dress that came in a little at the waist, large pearl earrings, hair that seemed to fall into place of its own accord. When I noticed, at some point during the evening, that she wasn’t wearing a watch, my first thought was that it was a form of politeness, a way of saying she was in no hurry.

  “Tell me about yourself,” she said. “I’ve read about the bid already.”

  Tell I did. She was a good listener – all the way through three courses and back to her apartment for coffee and liqueurs. I should probably say explicitly that we didn’t go to bed. I thought about it – and she would have declined – but I was saved by the confused notion, two brandies into the conversation, that it would have been wrong, so soon after kissing Serena. Also I needed the moral high ground vis-à-vis Amanda, Serena somehow being irrelevant to that calculation. But we did share a few secrets. I told her I barely communicated with my family, that although I lived in luxury I was not personally wealthy, that I worried about my sons. She told me about her first boyfriend, when she was sixteen, and why she couldn’t have children, about the impossibility of keeping her wealth hidden, about missing her mother.