The Daughters of Henry Wong

by Harrison Young

  “Shall we call him ‘Sam’?” I say.

  “Fine. ‘But you don’t really know Sam,’ says her boyfriend. Sam was just visiting London on business, you see. ‘That’s the point,’ says the girl, who has gotten way into the concept. ‘You have to do this with someone you find interesting but have never gone out with.’ Sam’s friend tells his girlfriend she’s crazy, so she shrugs and next day she calls Sam at his hotel and asks him if he’d like to ‘do a Sunday afternoon.’ ‘Do we know each other well enough?’ says Sam, who knows right away what she’s suggesting. ‘If we did it wouldn’t be the same,’ she says. So they make a date for the next morning.

  “When Sam gets to her flat, it’s all cleaned up and she’s very nicely dressed: stockings, high heels, grey wool skirt, a stylish jacket with a high collar, touch of perfume. ‘I like this,’ says Sam. ‘Let’s find out what else you like,’ she says. And she does.

  “Fortunately for Sam, the girl does not write a column for The Sunday Times, but she does have a lot of girlfriends, and she challenges them all to find a man to do a Sunday afternoon with. When they have, she says, she’ll give a dinner party for everyone. ‘No, no,’ says one of the other girls. ‘I think it has to be uncool to disclose the identity of anyone you’ve done a Sunday afternoon with.’ ‘Right,’ says another of her other friends, ‘and that way there aren’t any complications.’ And pretty soon, being the sort of English girls they are, they’re all making up rules about how it should work. For example, no alcohol. It dulls the senses – and being inhibited is part of the deal. For example, you undress on the other person’s home court, so to speak. For example, the girl has to be really well dressed and made up, turn off her cell phone, take the fixed phone off its hook, and pay complete attention to the guy.”

  “So all over London, men are being offered hand jobs by strangers.”

  “No, you don’t understand yet,” says Sam. “Not strangers. You have to know someone at least a bit or undressing in front of them isn’t so…strenuous. Transcendence, yes, but no oblivion. The woman is supposed to show enormous interest in what pleases the man, but keep him just short of that. Lasts longer. More intense. More relaxing, actually. The woman is attentive but also in control. She can bring him to a climax if she chooses to, but perhaps it will be better next time if they wait.”

  “Can you do it the other way round?”

  “It’s trickier, but it can work. The woman has to propose it. ‘Would you give me a Sunday afternoon sometime?’ is how she puts it. If she’s offering to do it to him, she says, ‘You want to come by for a Sunday afternoon tomorrow?’ She says that even if tomorrow is Tuesday. And if he’s offering to be the victim, he says, ‘Would you be willing to do a Sunday afternoon?’ Where there is diction, there is culture.”

  “And this is what’s hot in London right now?”

  “‘Hot’ isn’t the right word. The whole idea is balance: sensation and discipline, formality and abandon. A very well dressed girl taking infinite pains over her best friend’s older brother, who she could never sleep with, you understand, but quite enjoys torturing, so to speak. A young merchant banker in a pin-striped suit entertaining his female office mate’s mother, who is only forty-two after all, and blushes terribly, and it blew his mind completely when she suggested it, and never giving his office mate the slightest inkling is part of the pleasure.

  “There are three sensations going on at once. Don’t smirk, Wendy. You asked, and just possibly we are dealing with an advance of Western civilization here. First of all, there is the anxiety of doing something inappropriate and potentially embarrassing, which I must tell you does make your blood race. Then there is the opportunity for physical connoisseurship: all your nerve endings awake and drinking in what is happening. And finally there is the warmth that overtakes you as you realize that the other person is totally engaged in creating this world of physical and psychological sensation for your benefit – though of course also for their own amusement – and that you can abandon all responsibility for what happens next.”

  “If you’re only supposed to do Sunday afternoons with someone you wouldn’t think of going to bed with, isn’t proposing it a bit tricky?”

  “Part of the thrill. And since you are only supposed to do a Sunday afternoon with someone you don’t know that well, you have license to propose it to…anyone you fancy.”

  “What happens when you’ve had a series of Sunday afternoons with someone, and the thrill is gone?”

  “Depends on your point of view,” said Sam.

  “How so?”

  “Is sex the point of intimacy or is intimacy the point of sex?”

  “Hmm,” I said.

  Sam scooped an oyster out of its shell. “I get drawn whenever I’m in London, for example. We’ve become friends. She’d never have the money to hire a model.”

  “What’s she do for a living?”

  “She’s seventy,” said Sam.

  26

  In retrospect, I always think of that evening with Sam as “R & R,” the “rest and recreation” break the U.S. Army gave its soldiers halfway through a year-long tour in Vietnam. They flew you out of the country for five days in Taipei or Hong Kong or if you were married, Hawaii. My father was captured two weeks before he was scheduled to go. My mother had to cancel her trip, as she often mentioned.

  To be fair, I hadn’t been in “combat” up to then, although bankers like to talk about the merger and acquisition business as if it were war. But when I got home from the Mandarin, the situation had gotten, as Lieutenant Dartmouth put it, “more interesting.”

  There were police cars and an ambulance on May Road again. I raced up the path in terror, but the little boys were fine. Dartmouth had killed Notre Dame. He said it was self-defense. His hand hurt. The police seemed to be remarkably calm about the whole affair. It seemed that the Notre Dame who had shown up at the Castle was an impostor. He had slit his real self’s throat in a toilet in the airport. Dartmouth had become suspicious because Notre Dame didn’t care who’d won the Nebraska-Michigan football game, which had implications for the national rankings. He was prepared to explain, but I cut him off.

  The police had found the real Notre Dame’s body, but because he was operating under cover, they’d had no idea who he was. Or so the senior policeman who came to call on me the next day said. I was coming to the view that Hong Kong’s police force reached conclusions as quickly or slowly as it suited them. Amanda’s autopsy had almost been an afterthought, for example, and now they’d sent some crucial bit of her to a pathology lab in London.

  After the police went away with their corpse, I gave Dartmouth a drink and sat with him in Henry’s library.

  “Lotta books,” he said. He’d come to America when he was thirteen.

  “You O.K.?” I said.

  “Well, I’ve never killed anyone before, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Or had someone try to kill you?”

  “Oh, that. We’re trained for that.”

  We both thought about that for a while. “Do you have a theory?” I said.

  “It was a pretty flaky operation, considering the objective was so nasty.”

  “You don’t have to be virtuous to be incompetent, eh?”

  “I’d never met my real partner,” said Dartmouth, ignoring my cynicism. “But there was no way for them to know that. It was a big risk. I guess he was supposed to kill me right away if I said ‘Who are you?’ just like he tried to when I asked him what a wide receiver is.”

  “What was he supposed to accomplish?”

  “Snatch your kids, I expect.”

  “And who was he working for?”

  “Someone who wants you to let that other bank take you over, I guess. But killing people? Kidnapping children? I mean, who really cares that much about a bank?”

  “Are you hungry?” I said.

  “I have to go, I think.”

  “No, answer my question. You have done a lot in the last two hours. You must b
e ravenous. And my housekeeper is a very good cook. I expect she’ll be willing to feed you now.”

  “Yeah, but I’m supposed to, like, melt away and wait for instructions.”

  “I don’t think you understand. Whoever wants to kidnap Philip and Tommy presumably still wants to.”

  The other thing I’d noticed about the Hong Kong police was that they didn’t seem to want to stick around. Under the circumstances, they should have offered some protection. But I didn’t want to ask.

  “Oh, right,” said Dartmouth.

  “So I need you fed and rested and here tonight.”

  “Can she do Kung Pao chicken?”

  I took my turn standing guard at 3 a.m. Somewhere I’d gotten the idea that people are sleepiest then, making it the point of maximum danger. I thought about calling Sam, just to cheer myself up again, but I decided I didn’t want to know if the telephone line had been cut. And I didn’t want him to know I was in a funk.

  Finally I forced myself to pick up the phone. The dial tone was still there. Anyway, Lieutenant Dartmouth was sleeping on the floor between Philip and Tommy.

  I woke the next morning thinking about Sam and his extraordinary self-possession. He was comfortable with his emotions, however dangerous they were. He could put himself on the edge of whatever – embarrassment, disappointment, physical danger probably – and then conduct his affairs with total assurance. This concept of “Sunday afternoons,” was characteristic. I imagined him walking into a strange living room, looking around with interest. What books, what paintings, what shade of fingernail polish? How to make her laugh and relax as he takes off his shirt?

  Song came in with scrambled eggs and the newspapers. I suppose she thought I needed nourishment. The “accident near Wong Castle, involving an illegal immigrant” hadn’t gotten the noisy coverage I expected, and the murder of “real” Notre Dame at the airport wasn’t mentioned.

  Dartmouth stuck his head in my door a moment later. “Sorry to barge in, sir, but I thought I should tell you I’m to stay for now.”

  “That’s good news.”

  “I went for a little walk a couple of hours ago and got instructions.”

  “Message in a hollow tree?”

  “That sort of thing.” He paused. “The bad news is that coming back down the steps from Barker Road…”

  “Yes?” He seemed to be waiting for Song to leave. “Go on,” I said. “If I couldn’t trust Song, I’d be dead already.” She turned away and started straightening things on my chest of drawers, but not before I saw the edge of a smile.

  “There’s someone out there,” said Dartmouth.

  I said nothing so he went on.

  “He’s up the hill a bit, fifteen yards into the woods, or jungle, or whatever you call all those trees and vines and bushes. He’s very good: sits very still, all in black. I missed him completely on the way up, but on the way back, it was first light, and he moved just as I was starting down the steps. Then a taxi came along Barker Road and lighted me up and I lost him – or her.”

  “Her?”

  “Could have been. Skinny but with hips was the snapshot that stayed in my head. But it was probably a fern or something.”

  “‘Snapshot that stayed in your head.’ Is that something they teach you in spy school?”

  “Not allowed to say, sir, but yes. Learn to remember your first impression. We see a lot more than we realize. I’m actually a soldier, by the way. Notre Dame – the real one that is – was a spook.”

  The doorbell rang. It was a senior policeman. Song put him in the library while I put on my long Chinese robe and slippers. He apologized for calling so early. I apologized for not being properly dressed. He said he knew I’d had a busy twenty-four hours. I offered him tea. He accepted, saying he had been up most of the night himself. As we talked, he kept looking around the room.

  “This is where you do TV,” he said finally.

  “Yes,” I said, “sitting in that chair over there. Would you like to sit in it?”

  He sat down cautiously, just for a moment, and then stood up again. “TV camera over there?” He pointed to a bit of duct tape that had been left sticking to the wooden floor.

  “Yes,” I said, “and Helen Fong sits beside me in that chair.” I realized he was a homicide detective by training, and liked to work out where everyone had been standing or sitting, and what they could and couldn’t have seen. And he was now in a position to say honestly that he had “questioned Mr. Jonathan Lee,” even if the discussion had been irrelevant.

  It emerged that the Hong Kong police decided Wong Castle needed guarding. If it was all right with me, a constable would be posted at the front door, and another on May Road, at the foot of the path. I said that would be fine.

  “It will keep sightseers away,” said the senior policeman, who presumably had been sent by someone even higher up to determine my attitude. He finished his tea and departed.

  Dartmouth had been listening from the living room, keeping himself out of sight. “Don’t they realize an attack would come from above, where they do not propose to post a copper?” he said, coming into the library as soon as the front door clicked shut. “That’s where your watcher was too.”

  “The ways of the Hong Kong police are a constant wonder, Lieutenant Dartmouth, but I would interpret this offer of protection as ass-covering. If I, for example, were to be attacked, they need to be able to say that they anticipated trouble but were overwhelmed. They aren’t committing to actually protecting me.”

  “I’d heard that the Hong Kong police were pretty good.”

  “They are. They aren’t corrupt, either, which is quite an accomplishment in a city like this one. And I do conclude from this visit that somewhere in the organization there is a genuine desire to keep me and my family alive. They just aren’t sure what they are dealing with.”

  Some years later, with the benefit of Cedric’s tutoring, I realized that the police had ruled Amanda’s death a suicide simply because that was the safest conclusion.

  “That inspector clearly thought he was dealing with a celebrity,” said Dartmouth.

  “Mr. Jonathan Lee is a celebrity,” said Song in her radio English, walking in with the copy of Mosquito she had gone down to Central to buy. There was a picture of Sam and me having dinner, under the headline, “Big Wendy, Small Advisor Plot Strategy.” Zhang had “helpers” everywhere.

  “Teapot friend called,” she said, reverting to pidgin. “Want lunch definite today.”

  I went back to my room to shave and dress. Song had chosen an interesting way to refer to Cedric, given what the teapot in question had accomplished, but I let that pass, as several other thoughts were tugging at my consciousness – and all at once, like Sam’s “Three Sensations.”

  The first was that Mercury Chao could not possibly have arranged to have the real Notre Dame killed. Nor would he have sent false Notre Dame to kidnap the little boys. He might have been prepared – though I had come to doubt it – to watch Amanda die of a broken heart, like whichever emperor it was who had his enemies hung up in cages, where they starved to death. But he would never soil his hands with overt violence.

  The mark of real power, of course – in China and everywhere else in the world – is that things happen that benefit you with no evidence of your involvement. You don’t even have to give orders. Your enemies inexplicably drop dead when you are temporarily out of town. So Mercury would like the idea that Wong Castle was under threat without his having spoken about it. But an intelligent man in his position would have been alarmed – would have said to himself, this was not what I planned. What am I getting into? But Mercury was stupid, and not only about his racehorses.

  He’d allowed Xiao Ng to make too many loans that financed property speculation in Shenzhen and Shanghai. Thanks to Julia, we’d called attention to the resulting trends in Chao Yinhang’s financials – in our response to Mercury’s initial offer, and again in our proxy statement. Some of Mercury’s unnamed allies, who w
ere prepared to commit or commission murder, wanted Chao Yinhang to win so it could keep financing their wobbly property ventures. Also in the shadows were people who wanted Chao Yinhang to prevail so they could get their hands on whatever information they might find in Pearl River’s files, and use it politically. Of these partners in crime, the future chairman of the Jockey Club who thought he bought horses well was unlikely to be the one calling the shots.

  My second realization was that Zhang Hai Ming, who had so visibly abandoned our camp as the first enemy arrows rained down, had been silent since then. I hadn’t even seen him anywhere – a fact I had missed because every time Mosquito had a picture of me, I felt like I heard him speaking. But what was he saying, actually? Wendy is “big” – meaning powerful. Wendy is pulling the strings. Wendy gets what he wants, including his wife’s half-sister. Wendy has a plan. None of this would hurt me in the anonymous tendering and voting that would determine the future of the two banks. And what was Mosquito saying about Mercury Chao? Nothing whatsoever – though he used to be a regular visitor to its pages. It was as if Mercury had ceased to exist. But that could just be a way of hedging his bets. I still didn’t have Zhang’s votes, and I needed them.

  And finally, there was Sam, and what he hadn’t said at dinner. He hadn’t mentioned Julia once. Which meant they were in communication. If they hadn’t been, he presumably would have asked me if I’d heard from her. It would have been a reasonable question. He was “her banker too,” as they’d both said. One had to assume they were talking about me.

  At the time these thoughts all seemed exciting, especially coming at once the way they did. I seemed to be learning to “think Chinese,” as my “teapot friend” sometimes put it – learning to imagine other people’s motives and feelings, to hear the things that weren’t said, to understand behavior. At the time I thought of this purely as a cross-cultural achievement, but it also represented stirrings of emotional growth. As a girl I’d once briefly and disastrously dated screamed at me in a Boston restaurant, “Empathy, Wendy, for Christ’s sake!” I’d never been good at that.