“Zhang’s a scrawny bugger,” said Serena, “but I expect he’s pretty strong. He’s about my height and weight, according to his file. Being a man, he doesn’t have hips, which will make your job easier. You may have to undo his belt, but after that it should be easy to pull his pants down. I’ll do it in slow motion to show you. She grabbed me by the arm, caught me off balance and had me over her knee as she sat in one of the chairs. “Of course, you wear braces,” she said. “But what you’ll need to do is grab the back of his pants like this, and pull all the way down his thighs.” She mimed the motion. “Now try it on me, but slowly.”
Once I got the belt loose the pants fell to her ankles, revealing minimalist underwear. She pulled up the pants. “The trick, I think, will be a combination of fast finger work, maybe while he is still standing, and then violent ripping. If Zhang is wearing braces himself, it’s easy. You’ll just have to tear off the buttons.”
We practiced for three hours. It reminded me of learning to pitch a curve. You ignored how weird it felt until it came naturally.
“Now we get to the character-building part,” she said finally.
By this she meant actual spanking. I said I didn’t think that was necessary. “You should do the bomb course,” she said. “They tickle your nose with a feather and make you practice not sneezing. Sit.” She draped herself over my knees. “Open palm, one cheek at a time.” I gave her two perfunctory smacks and she was out of my grasp. “You don’t expect him to cooperate, do you? If you leave his head free he’ll probably bite you. You have to hold me by the collar, or even better, by my hair.” We did it again. She squirmed free. “Remember that, on the day, whoever is taking the pictures will need time to come into the room, or out of hiding, or however you have it set up, and get shots from various angles, to get his face as well as what you are doing to him, and that will take fifteen or twenty seconds at the least. So you’ve really got to control me.” She paused. “Are you getting tired, sweetheart? See that clock? This time I want you to whale the daylights out of me, and don’t let me go for thirty seconds.”
Her backside turned red. My hand stung.
“One more time,” she said, “and from the beginning. All one motion. No mercy. Pretend I’ve been really shitty to you. There must be a girl who did that to you once.”
It was as if she had opened the door of a secret closet. When I had her across my knees, I kept it up for forty-five seconds. I forgot about the time. Memories flooded in: Serena herself choosing the sofa in Bali, Amanda retreating to her own bedroom, my mother’s weary gaze.
I stopped suddenly. Serena essentially fell off my lap, and then stood up, and re-belted her trousers and tucked in her shirt. “I hate having my hair pulled,” she said.
“But you said…”
“I know.” A tear ran down her face. “Just hold me.”
When I obeyed she sobbed. She was done in a minute. “You did just what I told you and it had just the effect I expected,” she said. She was still holding on to me. “The worst part, in training, is when the instructors make you feel they don’t care a fig about you, couldn’t care less that you hurt. They leave you in whatever ghastly position they’ve put you in, and go off for a tea break, as if they’ve forgotten all about you. They do it on purpose, which you know. But they stay away long enough that you start to wonder what’s happened. And keep staying away to see if you panic. And you feel so alone.”
We went upstairs to find the sandwiches and bottle of wine Serena said would be there. I began to shake so badly I cut myself.
“Simon says you’re an orphan,” I said, as Serena administered first aid.
“Simon’s a merchant banker,” she said. “They make stuff up.”
We could have talked more about feeling alone, but I was happy to let the topic drop. Serena was doing enough to my emotions without any additional data.
She insisted I leave first. “There’s stuff I have to do,” she said.
“I recall,” I said, but she didn’t react.
I got back to Claridge’s early Tuesday evening and ordered grilled Dover sole from room service. Amanda called, which was a surprise. It had to be the middle of the night in Hong Kong.
“How is London, dear? Should we buy a flat? You could go whenever you want, then.”
I told her London property prices were almost as absurd as Hong Kong’s.
“We have lots of money, Wendy.”
I didn’t like he sound of that so I called Julia. “It’s all right,” she said. “I was awake. It’s still daylight in New York, which is where my body thinks it is. But come back as soon as you can. The dashing Mr. Chao is still absent, and Amanda is getting worse. She wants to sell her stock. She says if there is any question of the takeover not succeeding, it would be better to take the profit now. She says she wants to buy a yacht and sail away like father. I’m no psychologist, but that sounds like a metaphor for suicide. You’re trading at twenty-one, by the way.”
“Amanda doesn’t understand,” I said. “I still have Henry’s proxy.”
“Not if he’s declared dead. If Mercury weren’t making himself scarce, I expect Amanda would be asking him to help her hire a lawyer.”
“You’ve been talking to Sam.”
“He’s my banker too, you know.”
I paused. “Well, you can’t just show up at the stock exchange and sell five billion Hong Kong worth of shares.”
“Sam says she could. Between the hedge funds and Mercury’s friends he says Amanda could unload your family’s whole position at twenty inside an hour. ‘Off-market placement,’ he calls it.”
“Sam hasn’t told me that,” I said.
“The subject only came up at dinner last night,” said Julia. “Amanda had a fit of politeness and asked Sam over. She says he’s the family’s banker.”
“How does Amanda know Sam?”
“She said he came to dinner a month ago – and that he brought a Thai supermodel who said she had good clothes sense.”
“Of course he did. And that’s why she invited him.” I had a sudden thought. “I hope Sam was discreet with Amanda.”
“Sam is good at his job,” said Julia.
I felt reproached.
As my plane took off from Heathrow the next day, and sleep overcame me, it was hard to think about anything except Serena’s tears. Over Kazakhstan, however, or wherever it would have been, I got a leftover dessert and a coffee from the flight attendant who was awake and assessed the situation.
Mercury was making Amanda miserable by staying away, but it had the useful side-effect of preventing her from making any decisions. My main concern was Zhang. Song had probably been telling me as much. She couldn’t be explicit because she had to preserve her own options.
Zhang must have lured Henry into China. Perhaps this “Su Ling” whose name was in his night stand had had Henry’s child. Zhang had finally told him about her, and that was why Henry had gone back. He would probably be detained there until Zhang got the proxy revoked and delivered Pearl River Bank and its secrets to the high priests. Whether Zhang was doing this for money or to gain favor in Beijing or because he was deeply screwed up I could not say. But to get Henry back, I had to humiliate Zhang. Now that I knew how, I looked forward to it.
To get me “on steroids,” Serena had had to humiliate herself, or since it was her job, and humiliation didn’t exactly enter into it, she had to submit herself to something painful. One had to admire her for that. My visit to the safe house, I mused, was like a visit to a psychiatrist. I’ve never been to a psychiatrist but I have done a lot of reading. Serena had opened me up to my own feelings. To achieve that, she had allowed me to hurt her. She had commanded me to hurt her. I had never done anything remotely like that to anyone – in daydreams, yes, but not actually. Even as an athlete, I had always chosen a “passive” role: goalie and pitcher, the latter traditionally being a player who “can’t hit.” But now I was numb. Presumably there would be after-effects.
&nb
sp; 15
I had assumed my “humble Canadian” would mind that I’d gone to London for help, even if he and Simon were confederates, so I didn’t complain when he kept me waiting in his conference room the afternoon after I got back. I studied the prints on the walls. They were reproductions of the sort of watercolors my Boston grandmother had. She liked to remind people of the family connection with the Far East, liked to be reminded of it herself, I suspected, but in a quiet way: no heavy-handed conversational references, no “Great grandfather came back with this from Shanghai.” I concluded she was ambivalent about the subject. She was pretty definite about most things.
Sam came into the conference room. We shook hands. He looked grave. He apologized for being late. He listened to the apologies I was surprised to hear myself offer, for leaving town without telling him.
“Everybody has stuff they have to do,” he said.
He seemed to understand, even though I hadn’t fully explained myself. Maybe that was his way of saying I didn’t need to. He seemed to care about me. This must be how he got so many beautiful women into bed: he paid attention to them.
We sat down. He paused before speaking.
“I looked up your dad in one of those computer databases,” he said. Leaning forward: “Do you know what I’m going to say? Do you know this story?”
“He was killed in the Vietnam War,” I said, which was what I’d been told.
“He was a prisoner of war in Vietnam. For several years. He killed himself after he was rescued.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“When he got back to the United States, he was put into a veterans’ hospital that specialized in psychological injuries. Your mother came up to see him a few times. He seemed to be getting better. They stayed in a hotel in Washington and she got pregnant with you. Then one day, two months before you were born, he went up to the roof of the hospital and jumped off.”
“They never told me that.”
I felt angry. Sam went quiet. He swung his chair around, so as to look out the window and give me privacy.
“My job, in case you hadn’t noticed, is to look after you. Your job seems to involve getting kicked in the stomach. Something told me I should do some research, and I seem to have been right. I’m sorry I dumped this on you, but it is better you hear it from me, because anything I can find on the internet, the enemy already knows.”
“Why hasn’t anything been in Mosquito?”
“Good question. Good you can think tactically under emotional pressure. No, I’m serious. Not everyone can do that. The answer is that they’re holding it in reserve, I expect.”
Sam changed the subject. Or maybe it was all one story. I looked out the window while he talked.
“In the spirit of full disclosure, I should also tell you that I took Julia over to Macau last weekend . I thought she should see it: the fort, the Jesuit church, the English cemetery – all so unlike Hong Kong, which erases a bit of history every week. And of course, the billionaire gamblers and their mistresses, all that money washing around like a caricature of Hong Kong. I thought that, as a private banker, she might find that interesting too.”
“And?”
“She was very nice to me.” Long pause. “I am, you know,” he said at last, “your only friend in this town.”
I thought about wise old Cedric.
“Julia’s a friend,” I said, surprising myself.
“She wants to go back to New York.”
“Oh.”
“Do you,” said Sam, again shifting gears, “how shall I say this…appreciate women? I’m not asking if you’re gay, because you obviously aren’t. I mean, does the sight of a fit young woman, at a table across the room in a restaurant – maybe she turns to ask the waiter a question and you see how good her figure is – does that give you the same pleasure as a well-played saxophone? For example.”
“I hadn’t thought about it that way, but yes. Definitely yes.”
“We need to have a drink.”
Sam took me to a restaurant in Lan Kwai Fong that I’d never heard of. The bar was directly across the street from a health club. You could watch girls peddling on the exercise bikes, wires dangling from their earplugs, reading finance textbooks, dreaming of becoming rich.
“I’ve been thinking about Lucy,” I said, “wondering what sort of life she has.”
“The girl who stripped in Zhang Hai Ming’s apartment?”
“You think it was his?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Does anything matter?” I said.
I wasn’t expecting an answer. I was expecting to shed tears, actually, but they didn’t seem to be coming. If Sam was my keeper, it would be all right to let him see me cry.
“Yes, actually,” said Sam. “I think the fight you’re about to be in matters.”
“About to be in?”
“The exciting part will start quite soon.”
“Oh good.”
“If it would help, you know, with what I’ve told you this afternoon, with what you have to face, if it would make you laugh more, I can arrange prodigious sex. Totally discreet.”
“Why would that be a good idea – though by the way, thank you?”
“I figured you’d say that.”
“It will be sufficient if you make me laugh.”
“Now, that would be good. Laughter restores your karma. Girl in India explained it to me.”
“Nice of her.”
“Girls tend to be nice to me.”
“Like Julia?”
“Oh, shit, Wendy, I shouldn’t have said that. I just didn’t want you getting any extra surprises.”
“But you did take her to Macau, and she was nice to you?”
“Of course. She had a good time. We both had a good time. Living under the same roof with your missus is hard work. You asked me to look after her, if you recall. And she did need a break. But she’s sweet on you, of course.”
“How do you…um, spend a weekend with someone who is…sweet on someone else, and have a good time? How does she – not that it’s any of my business?”
“Wendy, come on. There’s the physical, the emotional and the spiritual. You just have to remember which class of ticket you’ve got.”
“Interesting,” I said, which was the best I could manage.
“Let’s pick up those girls over there,” said Sam.
“We can’t.”
“I know. It would be in Mosquito tomorrow. It would not help your cause.”
“They look stupid,” I said.
“Not your type? Mine neither. What about that TV girlfriend of yours? She’s smart. What’s her name?”
“Helen Fong. I’d forgotten about her.”
“Bet you a hundred dollars I can get her on the phone. I expect she remembers you.”
“She’s on the air right now,” I said. “Evening news.”
“But you’ve forgotten about her.”
“Bad idea.”
“You have a responsibility –” said Sam.
I tried to cut him off: “I don’t want to be –”
“I don’t want to be five feet five,” said Sam, “but that has not prevented me from giving women pleasure – many women, by the way – as God meant me to. You have to overcome your circumstances. You are tall, good-looking, rich, intermittently intelligent, and I am optimistic about your sense of humor.”
I must have looked doubtful, because Sam changed his line of attack. “Who do you think Mercury is currently fucking? Because it isn’t Amanda, if that makes you feel any better, and it certainly isn’t Lillian.”
“No idea.” I was glad it wasn’t Amanda. Some part of me wanted to believe that whatever relationship she had with Mercury was of less weight than her marriage, that she would never abandon her family’s side of the fight. Family is massively important in Chinese culture. The only problem was that Amanda hadn’t exactly been raised to be Chinese. She hadn’t been raised, full stop. She could play the part of a tai-tai,
but I sometimes thought I was more Chinese than she was.
Sam named Mercury’s lover. She was a divorced Englishwoman in her thirties with the right sort of accent and a lot of money. She’d been a model as a girl, and claimed to have slept with “three Double-0-Sevens” – actors who’d played Bond, that is – but wouldn’t say which ones. Mosquito generally knew which billionaire was currently buying her jewelry. So long as Mercury was never seen with her in public, and ended the liaison inside of six months, his reputation as a man would be enhanced. Poor Amanda, was my first thought.
“Interesting,” I said. “He’s more self-confident than I’d have guessed. But how do you know this, Sam?”
“There was an item in this morning’s Mosquito linking them. Julia told me about it. It was in a code that only a tai-tai would be able to decipher. Amanda was evidently mortified.”
“What a bastard!” I exclaimed. “But Amanda wouldn’t have explained the code to Julia.”
“Amanda retreated to her bedroom. But she left her copy of Mosquito behind. Song translated it for Julia.”
“Julia asked her to? I thought Song was giving her the silent treatment.”
“According to Julia, Song volunteered the information. ‘Missy upset with Mosquito,” was how she put it.”
“But why in the world did Mercury do that to her? He knows all her friends will see it.”
“Chinese vote for the person they think will win,” said Sam. “You taught me that, remember. An expensive mistress is the mark of a winner. I know the woman at Morgan Stanley who is advising Mercury on the bid. She wears a lot of jewelry, which she lets people believe has been given to her by a grateful client – grateful for her good advice, you understand. She’d have no difficulty reminding Mercury of the tactical importance of looking like a stud just now.”
“It just doesn’t fit my sense of Mercury,” I said.
Sam chose his words carefully. “Mercury is not without standing in the community.”
“You know, Sam,” I heard myself saying – sounding like the hero in a cowboy movie, feeling foolish but after two gin and tonics not minding – “I believe I’d like to take him down a peg.”
The Daughters of Henry Wong Page 13