Rare Earth

by Paul Mason

  Chun-li’s phone was buzzing. It was a text from Georgina. Had she seen what was on the TV news?

  Now Commerce Secretary Zhou explained that the factory has already cleaned up 56.9% of its pollution, consistently beating the targets set by central government, and was now in transition to carbon-neutral production through an offsetting scheme to plant saplings in the middle of the Kubuqi Desert. He was pleased to announce that the first two families had been moved out already. There was no sign of the grey-faced man or the silk-jacket woman.

  Now Hyacinth Deng spun around, with her back to the Tang Lu Nickel Metal Hydride chimneys, standing just where Brough had stood for his piece to camera.

  She checked her watch. It was five past seven - “the time when a cloud of steam is emitted every night”, she confided chattily to the camera.

  “The local people know it is harmless, because chlorine gas is scientifically proven to dissolve within 440 seconds of emission. But they will be very happy to move to a more salubrious neighbourhood, to live a healthier life.”

  She cracked a joke with the presenter in the studio, which struck Brough as very slick.

  The white cloud approached over her shoulder and Hyacinth, giggling, gave a wink to the crowd, who could not resist her fizzy smile and give an equally effervescent cheer as the cloud engulfed her.

  “Text message from Georgina. May have to re-edit our piece,” Chun-li’s voice had become lifeless. “That’s why never pre-warn Chinese officials about story.”

  “Is this out of the textbook too?” The beer had made Brough lightheaded.

  “Chapter 19,” Chun-li said flatly.

  “Is there a Chapter 20?”

  She let her face go blank and sighed, coming as close as Brough had ever seen her to despair.

  ~ * ~

  7

  The heat on Wangfujing Street was fierce despite the dark, like somebody holding a hair dryer to the small of his back. Brough strode quickly - past sixty-foot LED screens flickering with dreams of social harmony and mobile telephony; past the tourist choo-choo train with a cartoon face and robotic jingle; past the street girls who stood beneath the silver birch trees launching smiles, sighs and hip-swings at him with an intensity he had only experienced before on the Malecon, in Havana.

  He had gone to the men’s toilet in the hotel bar and decided to not come back. No reporter equals no re-edit.

  He needed to kill time. He saw golden arches and an arrow indicating a 24-hour McDonald’s somewhere inside a shopping mall. He sprinted up the steps, but not fast enough to evade a girl in Adidas shorts who tagged behind him.

  “Sir do you speak English, what country are you from-is it maybe Sweden?”

  He carried on upwards, striding two steps at a time, which she mimicked with her own scrawny legs, catching up with him.

  “Sir...”

  “Why are you asking me that question?”

  She shrugged and strode past him, legs first, into the McDonald’s strip-light, looking for somebody else to hit on, but finally settling into the corner with her friend, similarly dressed, both flashing him regular sideways glances.

  He approached the counter and pointed to a quarterpounder-with-cheese on the picture menu they held up. Within a few seconds it was on a tray under his nose, smelling Western, greasy, assembled hours ago.

  He picked a two-seat table put there for sad parties of exactly half that number. The Coke tasted like shit, as it always does. He picked the gherkins out of the burger: they were hard and fresh, not soft and pickled like at home. He ate a stone-cold salt-sodden french-fry. He bit a semicircular chunk out of the burger. There was some kind of chili sauce in there, which dripped down onto the table.

  There was a text on his phone from Georgina:

  “R U there?”

  And an earlier one.

  “Come back 2 room. Need 2 re-track.”

  He switched the phone to divert-all-calls. They would need to re-track if they wanted to acknowledge the massive counterclaim implied in Hyacinth Deng’s propaganda piece.

  In a rare departure from his usual chaotic mode of operation, Brough had persuaded Allegro to download everything: the whole of Carstairs’ rushes, his own Cancer Village shots, Li Qi-han’s recording of Xiao’s bribery attempt plus - an added bonus - Chun-li’s secret recording of Li Qi-han’s confession in the hotel bedroom, done sneakily on her mobile phone and only revealed that afternoon, and only to Brough. He had on the USB stick now enough material for a 15-minute film on the whole story, plus a feature article in the New Yorker or some such upmarket outlet.

  He would start pitching first thing tomorrow. Right now there were only three ways of dealing with that Hyacinth Deng report. You stick to your guns and expose the Chinese TV report for what it is: a whitewash job. Or you bottle out and acknowledge it as a valid counter-claim. The third way is you get Zaccarelli to rule your whole report legally indefensible, remove any reference to chlorine and tacitly accept the Chinese version of the story. By the time he was halfway through the quarterpounder, Brough was pretty sure which one of these options Georgina would take.

  But if Brough was gone and could not be found that only left a fourth option; run the piece as made. Failing that, bin it, leaving a seven-minute hole in the programme and the channel looking “like cunts” - as the industry parlance puts it - for failing to cover the environmental issue.

  A woman rustled past his table in tracksuit bottoms, a petrol-blue silk jacket, large diamond crucifixes hanging from each ear and clumpy heels: she paid no attention to Brough, McDonald’s, nor any one of the Chinese nighthawks slumped over the greasy tabletops. She sat down at the table next to Brough’s, pushing her hair off an oversized pair of sunglasses, and began to poke at a McFlurry with a pink spoon. She did this with such delicacy and intelligence that Brough was mesmerised. He began, in his mind, to construct a life for this lonely and beleaguered woman.

  After a minute she turned to Brough and peered at him through the narrow gap between her fringe and spectacles:

  “S’matter? We all look the same to you now or sumpin’?”

  It was Miss Lai.

  “Is this a coincidence?”

  “Oh sure - frickin’ MBAs from NYU, yep, we come here all the time weeknights jus’ter study the micro-economic synergy between the sex industry and fast food.”

  Her voice had become sharper, angrier than he’d remembered it.

  “What happened to you?”

  “Huh!” She slid onto the seat facing his. “Impounded the Chiang-Jiangs. It’s gonna take us weeks to get that stuff back. Cartel’s lying low right now in any case. Once the mothership flies in, the lights go off - just like the end scene in Close Encounters. You get your story?”

  “I’ve got a bad feeling about what happened to the leaders of that strike.”

  “Yup. This is China. Jumping off buildings is like the new Olympic sport. You finished?”

  He tried to catch her gaze through the iridium sheen of her sunglasses.

  “Your report? Did it go out yet?”

  Brough explained that Chinese TV had just put out a blatant propaganda job conflicting with his report on key details and that the text messages alerts pinging and buzzing out of his shirt pocket were the sound of his managers panicking.

  “So what? Just ignore Chinese TV. They put out one version of the truth, you put out another. Nobody cares. You’re Western: no Chinese people gonna believe your story; no Westerners gonna believe Chinese TV. You mention Rare Earth much?”

  “Tried to.”

  “The report mentions Rare Earth, right?” She flipped her sunglasses onto her head.

  “What are you doing tonight?”

  “Ha!” she shouted “You askin’ me for a date, Mister date-o-birth Nineteen Sixty Four?”

  The two street girls in the corner stopped guzzling the dregs of milkshakes and laughed out loud.

  “No!” he whispered. “I am asking if you know anywhere I can go to stop these guys trackin
g me down.”

  He held up his cellphone, which now had anxious texts from Georgina, Chun-Yi, Allegro, Twyla and even one from a U.S. number saying: “Mr Brough we need urgently to communicate. J. Zaccarelli.”

  Miss Lai snatched the phone from his hand and flipped it through the air to the girls in the corner, who shouted something in Chinese that made her laugh.

  “You’re a dog-fuckin’ cheapskate, according to them.” Lai sniggered and in a mock Chinese accent: “Why you no have iPhone? Oh I forgot,” she rummaged in her bag and pulled out his Blackberry, which she slid across the table with a midnight-blue fingernail.

  “Your cellphone got stolen. You got mugged in Mai-Dong-Lau. You got took to Nancy Kiang...”

  “What?”

  “That’s your story - they can’t fire you on account-a getting rolled by two purty girls in short-shorts...” She swished out of her seat and let her glasses slide down, precariously, to the tip of her nose.

  “Rolled?” said Brough, puzzled.

  “Oh yeah, sorry, I forgot!”

  And she aimed a back-hand strike at Brough’s forehead, too light for brain damage but whippy enough so that the diamonds in the skull ring she was wearing drew blood, which Brough had to stare at for a few seconds, smeared across his fingers, before working out that he should probably say next:

  “And who exactly is Nancy Kiang?”

  ~ * ~

  8

  The bouncers at the Nancy Kiang Club are legendary: wing-chun trained, obviously, but banned from pumping iron or developing that hard-staring eye that thugs at the wiry end of body morphology use to compensate for lack of bulk. In their Nehru shirts and Marc Jacobs sandals they reminded Brough of the busboys at some boutique hotel in Tribeca.

  This being Wednesday, and before midnight, there was a mixed gay-straight Chinese crowd downstairs taking a Lindy Hop class, sipping blue martinis in a Deco ballroom salvaged more or less whole from Canadian Pacific’s ill-fated cruise liner RMS Empress of China.

  “Hiya chica!” The maitre de, a guy wearing skin products and dressed head to foot in Armani black, caught Lai’s waist as they crossed on the sweeping staircase.

  “Longtaaaaym. You wanna booth or you goin’ alfresco? And,” stylus poised over a handheld electronic guest list, “your friend’s name is?”

  Lai whispered something to him and he made a face at her signifying the word “ghastly”.

  They reached a roof garden themed like a 1930s brothel in Shanghai: dotted with palms, strewn with opium couches, lit by lampstands of polished steel. On the low sofas Western women lounged who were a shade too blonde and tanned; and taut-skinned Western guys flashing twenty-thousand-dollar chronographs from beneath their Lanvin cuffs.

  Lai pointed out the global finance director of a major bank, the entire corporate social responsibility team of a luxury car marque, three Italian soccer players of declining skill and their Malaysian girlfriends, a famous Parisian dee-jay, a minor Eurocrat and his two boyfriends, the Russian military attaché, plus three undercover Venezuelan ladies getting ready for their mid-week group-sex encounter with some Colombian anti-aircraft guys.

  Subtly interspersed with the Westerners were svelte Chinese women, lithe young Chinese men and - rare, hardly participating in the glamour, almost fading into the gloom-the avuncular faces of middle-aged Chinese businessmen: agents and fixers for Western firms, discreet go-betweens for the CCP and Western capitalism.

  Oh, and an ill-dressed, wan-faced table full of lost-looking expat Western journalists.

  “Well I never, Davey Brough! My word! What have you done to your head? And who’s your friend?”

  In the alabaster glow Brough could only just make out Terence Stansgate’s face, but his strangulated English accent was unmistakeable.

  “I heard you were in Beijing!” said Stansgate. “Heard you scooped the whole Beijing press corps with a story about some preposterous substance called Rare Earth! Come and sit down, matey, with your charming companion..,”

  Stansgate introduced a mousy English girl who was the Beijing correspondent for an American newspaper, a South African bruiser and his Aussie buddy who were camera crew for a news agency and already leering-drunk, a Swedish shoot-producer working for an Arab TV network; and-as politely as possible-their various Chinese companions, gay and straight, male and female. Miss Lai drawled politely at them in Mandaringlish, stressing crucial terms like “web-two-zero” and “seedcapital”, picking the flesh off a langoustine that the maitre de had personally delivered, sizzling, together with a slipper of Krug in a diamante ice bucket, compliments of the house.

  “They like you here,” said Stansgate.

  “My dad commands, like, a whole division in the PLA?” said Miss Lai, gaily.

  “In the north?” Stansgate let the outside of one eyebrow rise a millimetre, indicating a subtextual question only a true Beijinger should understand.

  “In the south,” said Miss Lai, letting her own perfectly plucked eyebrow arch to indicate a subtextual answer. At least Brough would not have to waste time playing the perpetual foreign correspondent’s guessing game about the local press corps, known as Which One Is The Spy?

  Brough’s Blackberry, its email clogged with messages he would read when he cared about the world again, had been bleeping to signal the arrival of new texts ever since he’d fired it up: jokes from his mates in England about football and politics; “welcome to the network” junk. He glanced at it now to check the time. It was 20:30 local, half an hour until they would have to record the show. There was a message from Chun-li.

  “David. Please reply. Major problems. Help.”

  “Why am I here?” he mumbled to Miss Lai’s ear, pouring himself a second flute of champagne.

  “Gotta introduce you to some people. Maybe have to take you down to the Toi-kish Bath later and, y’know, have another try at, y’know, getting the trigger sequence right on, well, y’know...”

  His Blackberry rang. It was Chun-li.

  “How did you know to ring me on this?” He spoke sotto voce.

  “Georgina leave the hotel one hour ago to meet you in McDonald’s but instead her credit cards get stolen by two young girls. Also punched in nose and clothing ripped.” There was a quiet laugh in Chun-li’s voice. “So logical conclusion is that motorbike lady has returned into your life and restored possession of your Blackberry.”

  “Hey honey my guests are arriving we gotta go join ‘em,” Miss Lai squirmed next to him.

  “Be very careful with motorbike lady,” said Chun-li.

  “I will.”

  ~ * ~

  9

  Miss Chi had arranged her hair into a 1940s-style French braid and wore a vintage polka-dot dress that ended not far below her waist, with nothing but legs between that and a pair of orange Puma trainers. Miss Lai, losing the silk tunic on a visit to the bathroom and at the same time acquiring a persistent sniffle, was showing a bare midriff, sapphire navel stud and white leather brassiere. Ail this amounted to a clear semiological statement that, once the business part of the evening was over, they would be going to some place even cooler than Nancy Kiang for drugs and Dubstep, and minus Brough.

  Brough sat wedged between them, in an alcove, feeling like a character from a time-travel comedy: wearing the wrong clothes for the era and being the human vehicle for somebody else’s joke.

  Four young Chinese men had joined them, also clad for clubbing. They had that muscle-bound sullen confidence Brough recognised from rich-kid rowing types in England: square jaws, sprawled limbs, eyes dazed in wonder at the world and in ignorance of their own naiveté. They explained to Brough in languid American English their various unique and promising attributes; their degree specialties, dance-music tastes, favourite holiday destinations, love of Ayn Rand and Spotify; hatred of France, CNN and Amnesty International.

  Kid One broached the subject of Rare Earth with Brough, hearing on the grapevine that he had run into trouble out West and hoping that everything was goin
g to be OK. Kid Two detailed his father’s stock-brokering business in Macao. Kid Three ventured the opinion that “not enough was known” in the West about the sheer scale of the Chinese “position” in the global Rare Earth supply chain. Kid Four offered Brough the use of his father’s villa up by the Great Wall, architect-designed and with a heated open-air lap pool, should he ever stray up that way. Brough told them the story of Tang Lu and explained how Chinese TV had just simultaneously scooped and sabotaged his story. They, in response, tended to nod and gaze in an eye-dulled awe at Lai and Chi, and at Brough, and at the clientele of Nancy Kiang, swapping the occasional homophobic sneer with each other in Mandarin.