by Paul Mason
“Yes but where from?”
“Well, technically it’s from mining. When the mines were privatised, anybody with any connection to mining got rich. Except the miners, of course - poor bastards. Talk to any mining engineer, surveyor, coal haulier, geologist and it’s the same story. Right after privatisation-well, guess what? - clapped-out old mines with no reserves suddenly struck new seams. Guys who didn’t want to work there anymore were paid out for their shares at ten times market value: I mean ten times market, not IPO, and that can literally mean a million - yuan of course. Then the property boom started. As you may have noticed, it’s hit a slight hiatus now...”
She’d seen Ordos from the air as they’d choppered in: a grid pattern resembling the computer game Second Life, in which everybody is engaged in buying land and building unfeasibly tall, egotistically designed skyscrapers. But like Second Life, deserted.
Most of the tower cranes were static, caked in desert dust. There were migrants hanging around in builders’ overalls, hard-hats slung from their belts: mean, confused and hungry; or huddled into dirt-faced groups gambling for matches on the pavement right next to rows of chauffeur-parked SUVs.
“It’s an absence of working capital,” Khünbish shrugged. “Because of the fiscal stimulus, the banks have been ordered to start throwing money at infrastructure, not real estate. There’s even a speculative bubble in infrastructure land right now, but actual cash to pay builders on apartment blocks and office space?”
He shook his head ruefully.
“And beyond technically?”
He looked at her with his relentless smile. She shifted herself about one millimetre in a way that signified she was probably going to sleep with him.
“Where does the money really come from?”
“Well,” he ordered them two more drinks with a flick of his eyebrow, “you sure you don’t want anything stronger in that?”
“No thanks; you were saying?”
“Well, actually a lot of people did make money out of coalmining but then, right after the dotcom crash, the Rare Earth boom began. So we’ve had this unprecedented raw materials boom here, and when you consider what happened in the commodity markets in financial year 07...”
“Ah but,” she smiled politely, “didn’t the central government place severe restrictions on the production of Rare Earth in 2005? Because of the environmental damage? Don’t I remember that?”
“Yes, how very environmentally responsible the Communist Party became that year,” Khünbish took a slurp of wine. “And if supply goes down, as all those Western textbooks tell us, and demand is inelastic, price must go up.”
“And is demand inelastic?” She let her eyes shine into his for a moment.
“Who wants to know?” His face hardened. “I’ve been getting calls about your news crew from-you want a list? - Okay: the Inner Mongolian cops who’re not happy with this policing incursion from Tang Lu. Top of that, the wai-ban here are very concerned about your well-being - particularly because you seem to be missing a member of your team.”
She knew this already because Carstairs had been sending her texts about bedside visits from rancid-breathed officials, during which he had feigned sleep or sedative-induced idiocy.
“Finally, some gentlemen in the Rare Earth processing business have been very keen to know about your future itinerary.”
“Would these gentlemen be from something like an industry body perhaps? A chamber of commerce?”
“More like a cartel,” he breathed, adjusting his stance to try and conceal the mountain his erection was making in his pants.
~ * ~
8
Oktyabr Khünbish’s apartment was an endless penthouse decorated in that mind-softening beige and grey popular with the super-rich. The objets d’art were 14th century Mongol, the spirits in his cocktail cabinet mid-20th: Cutty Sark, Stolichnaya. The surround-sound was playing something lush and heartrending from the soundtrack of an Almodovar movie, though to Chun-li, who had never seen one, it just oozed-like Khünbish himself-sleaze.
Khünbish had entered the room already grappling with the straps of her floral top and stumbling over his own erection. Chun-li was by this time well down the path of wu-wei, using circular mental blocking patterns to turn Khünbish’s sex-monologue back and around again to various details she needed to clarify:
“Why does the Rare Earth cartel have a problem with my team? We’re not covering the resources issue, only the pollution issue?”
“Ah,” his breath was a mixture of Chardonnay and Sobranie smoke, “that’s because probably everybody in the metal mining business right now is very touchy about the connection. There is some trouble out along the river. Heavy squads stocking up with weaponry and cash. Last thing anyone wants, little doll, is the arrival of news cameras - or a white guy lost in the desert.”
She breathed hot into his neck and he plunged three rough fingers down the front of her jeans, making her squeak. She had never tried wu-wei in this situation before and Khünbish, hairy and slightly paunchy, she noticed now that he had his shirt off, was generating slightly more karmic energy than she had anticipated.
A minute later they were both standing naked on a white sheepskin rug, silhouetted against a skyline of unfinished office towers. She bent backwards, mussing her hair up with soft wrists and revealing her unshaved armpits.
“I am a bit traditional,” she murmured. “I don’t like to shave my body hair. Hope you don’t mind.”
Khünbish whacked her in the face with the back of his hand, hard as steel. She blinked back the flashing stars and wiped tears off her face.
“I am also a bit traditional,” he said.
She forced herself to run her fingertips along his balls and shaft.
“Ha!” he grabbed her hair. “I’ve just taken two thousand milligrams of Man’s Treasure so my little brother is good for ninety minutes before he even thinks about ejaculation. Your cunt will be raw! Your chrysanthemum will change shape permanently!”
Chun-li shuddered. She had had three boyfriends since university, all of them shy, romantic types. None had shown any particular interest in her chrysanthemum. She had only schoolkid fables and ethnic stereotypes to go off for handling an hombre like Khünbish, and he was living up to all of them.
“What’s the problem in the desert?” she whispered, working hard to maintain the action-of-non-action as he sunk his teeth into her breast.
“Ha! Too much information, not enough fucking. Let’s fuck first and do information later.”
She shivered. Khünbish undug his fingernails from her ass and picked up a remote control. A whole wall of the apartment began to slide back revealing, spotlit on a dais, a lifesize replica of a - no, in fact an actually deceased and stuffed - pinto horse. The horse was frozen in the moment of rearing up on its hind legs, revealing what looked like a steel replica of an erect horse penis glinting beneath its belly. As she stared at it, horrorstruck, Khünbish approached, flipping the pages of an ancient manuscript, suddenly transformed from sex pervert to antiquarian book enthusiast:
“This is the famous erotic tract by Danzan Ravjaa,” he whispered reverentially. “Genuine early copy. It contains all of Ravjaa’s 108 tantric sex positions: tonight we’re going to attempt number 103.”
His thick finger traced the outlines of a black-and-white lithograph showing what they had to do. It did not look much fun but, she was relieved to see, it put the female participant well away from the penis of the horse.
She swung her right foot into the left stirrup, mounting the horse backwards and, as the drawing indicated, positioned her ass high in the air, her head down over its haunches. The horsehair was rough and the stirrups made her feet cold.
Khünbish swung himself athletically - as the drawing instructed-into a position she had last seen performed by an Olympic gymnast on the rings: head to the floor, feet pointing to the sky, body rigid and braced against the side of the horse, one arm clutching the antique Mongolian saddle
for support and the other clutching - ah, now she understood - the horse’s rigid metal thing.
Khünbish hit a remote control button in the saddle and the Almodovar slush music gave way to a grassland soundtrack of jingling reins and horses’ hooves.
“Who buys the Rare Earth that is illegally produced? Who is the cartel’s main customer?” Chun-li demanded, feeling that the action-of-non-action may have gone far enough.
“No more impudent questions, bitch!”
He began thrusting wildly in the general direction of her chrysanthemum, but missing-his paunchy frame shuddering with the effort of remaining rigid and upside down.
Chun-li-who had read about this trick in the classical Chinese novel “Plum in Golden Vase “-spat on her palm and cupped it just at the entrance of the hole Khünbish was aiming at.
“Whore! Bitch! Nobody!” his voice rose to a yodel as he made what he thought was an entrance.
At the touch of another button the sound of weird tribal yells, bells and drums pushed the speaker system to distortion point.
“The cartel, sells, to the global market,” he panted. “The price is inflated because production has been capped!”
She began to pant in unison with him, allowing her face to remain in that bored, quizzical expression she imagined the 17th century concubines had worn in “Plum in Golden Vase”. In her mind she recited couplets from it.
“Cartel... evades export controls. Market capitalisation of Western miners stays low. Massive, one-way, bet. All... depends” his penis was jerking around wildly in her hand now and she began yelping to encourage his flow of thought.
“All. Depends. On.”
He switched to some ancient steppe language as he ejaculated, blubbering and incoherent. Chun-li faked an orgasm, keeping her mind focused on an eighth-century lyric of sadness, and her face still as a lake in winter.
Khünbish collapsed below the neck of the horse, where he clung now, like a forlorn circus rider, as the steppe cacophony segued seamlessly into the kind of trickling-stream-plus-birdsong music they play in mental hospitals to calm things down.
He put on a gallant show of helping her down from the horse and then socked her in the face again, making a high-pitched whistle start in her ear, before throwing her over his shoulder and dumping her onto a purple-grey Ligne Roset sofa.
“It all depends on what happens with GM,” he panted.
“The crops?”
“The automobile company, idiot!”
He grabbed her hair and twisted it. She had a chilling premonition that he was intent on killing her.
“Wait,” she whispered, feeling his thumb probing up into a region she had hoped he was done obsessing with.
“You are too hasty. The tao of Danzan Ravjaa will work better if you slow down.”
She wriggled off the sofa and grabbed the neck of a champagne bottle from a bucket of ice, pushing him in the chest so that he sank back, sweating, onto the upholstery. She flicked her own hair back, slick with perspiration, and climbed slowly on top of him.
“Close your eyes,” she promised, hoarsely. He did.
Chun-li rubbed herself against his thigh, tipped the bottle vertical and took a mouthful of icy bubbles. She bent her head to his and kissed him, dribbling the cold champagne between his lips, which he began to swallow eagerly.
“Maybe this will cure your concussion,” she stroked his hair. He smiled cruelly, forming the intent to whack her in the face one more time and mulling over the alternatives of killing her or selling her across the border to some casino guys in Macao. He would...
But the Rohypnol was taking effect now, sending long, deep Delta waves across his brain while the Russian truth drug, SP-17, was also working fast, making him feel like telling her lots of other stuff he had planned not to. She had cracked open the capsule hidden in her false tooth and spat the whole (she hoped) contents into his, together with about 250 ml of Crystal.
She felt his dick shrivel and his body temperature plummet. She found a cashmere throw to cover him and stroked his brow a little while he began to burble about GM, Toyota, scandium, yttrium and the fifteen lanthanoids, and the assholes of the cartel, and the bitches at the club who were never grateful even if you let them go free after three years’ indentured labour, and had she ever thought of hospitality work? And his horse Jalayir, and there was gonna be trouble, and, and ...
Five minutes later, showered and fragile, Chun-li slipped through the fire door into a concrete passage linking the penthouse to the building’s emergency stairs. It would trigger an alarm somewhere and a call from security to Khünbish but he was stone cold and comatose.
She clattered down one flight of steps. There was the sound of distant shouting deep below. She kicked open the fire door to the 19th floor and left it swinging, the velvet corridor beyond it empty, except for a few trays of room service trash. She slalomed to the 17th floor, quietly jimmied the fire-door open and slipped through, closing it gently to the echo of Khünbish’s bodyguards sprinting up the stairs.
The corridor was dim-lit, black, its walls lined with lamb’s fur. There was an expertly faked equestrian oil painting in the distance, more room-service detritus, some Qing dynasty porcelain in the wall sconces. Several of the doors were open, emitting pools of harsh top-light, raucous laughter and wedges of cake-thick smoke that gave away their occupants’ profession: Communist officials on a business trip.
Chun-li edged her way along the corridor, adopting the persona of a hotel functionary and allowing wu-wei to make her seem unremarkable to those who caught sight of her.
Two men in business suits came staggering out of a room, marching a woman on tiptoe between them by means of fingers pushed vertically beneath her jaw. Her face was red with stress. They were young men, slightly handsome. At the door of another room stood a garishly made-up woman, her hair in a pile on her head and her bare arms clutching the doorpost to retain balance, vomit trickling from her mouth. Behind another door there were sounds of a card game fuelled by white liquor, just at the moment of hollow-faced shame when somebody has fleeced somebody else.
At the last door before the elevator there was a mixed crowd gathered to watch, and place bets on, four middle-aged men attempting to jerk themselves off onto the face of a waitress. The floor was scattered with 50-yuan bills, popcorn, the men’s pants, some towels, discarded beer bottles. The crowd was firing jokes at the jerking-off team, mainly concerning their inability to ejaculate on target, and Chun-li, as she slid past, recited to herself the last lines of the Liang-chou Prelude:
“By icy peaks and snowy balustrades prepare to feast; how many people live to see such times of peace?”
The fire door burst open and two security goons hit the corridor with high-powered flashlights and chewing gum breath. The Bukkake-spectating group scattered to their rooms. But Chun-li was already gone, swooshing silently past sixteen floors of shimmering, soul-less architecture in the capsule elevator.
The driver had filled the van with the smoke from cheap cigarettes and the stench of sweat. Dawn was filtering into the blackened sky. It was thirty-two degrees. Her jaw ached and her pussy tingled, but at least now she knew what was going on.
~ * ~
9
“You like Oreos?” Miss Lai zipped the tent shut behind her, throwing a pack of biscuits in Brough’s direction. It was pitch dark.
“I figured you’re probably a whisky guy. All I could find was this.” She swung a plastic half-bottle of Yamazaki between finger and thumb.
He was struggling to see through the cloud of sand the wind had hurled in behind her. She had an LED light strapped to her forehead, which was blinding him. She poked him in the stomach through his sleeping bag.
“You could lose some weight, Brough.”
She shuffled herself next to him, kicking him with her boots as she struggled to extract two battered paper cups from her knee pocket. Brough, on one elbow and blinking against the light, managed to get the whisky open with his teeth
and pour two shots.
“You try exercising when you spend most of your life in a hotel. Er. What are you doing?”
She had slid down beside him and slipped the jacket off her shoulders, downing the whisky with the same deft movement as she tossed her hair back.
“You know how many AA batteries this unit gets through in one week?”
He blinked.
“You know? AA batteries. Bzzzzz.” She mimed switching on a vibrator.
They were close enough to taste each other’s breath. He reached out, instinctively, to stroke her hair but she clamped the flat of his hand between her fingers and bent it backwards so it felt like his elbow was tearing out of its socket.
“You are breakin’ the rules, Mister. No sex allowed. No lookin’ at people’s boobs. No objectification.”