by Vann Chow
"Just give it. We'll bring it down later," Mr. Qi cut me short.
"Not just him," Mr. Seymour said to his crew. "All of you, put your cell phones on the table."
It was a peculiar situation. My years of experience watching Hollywood crime movies had taught me that the present situation resembled an unlawful transaction. High security, restricted cell phone usage and off-the-grid meeting location, all these could only mean one thing — I had been punked. Mr. Qi was not simply selling ThirftyEP to another bank, he was selling it to a middleman who was accompanied by a group of dangerous thugs. I saw in my mind's eyes how I got tied up and thrown into the ocean, how Mr. Qi got shot in the head, and how the yacht exploded to fake an accident so they wouldn't have to pay us anything. Then there were also images of how police officers stormed on board and arrested all of us for committing business crimes. My head swam with all the worst-case scenarios.
"Holy moly cannoly," I mumbled. I should never have agreed to come. I should never have gotten into the car this morning. I couldn't believe that I hadn't managed to find an excuse not to come here in the one-hour-long drive.
"Relax." Marsha was sitting downstairs and she saw me coming down absent-mindedly. She was wearing a bathrobe over a swimsuit and her hair was wet. "It's going to be fine. Otherwise, Mr. Qi wouldn't let me be here."
She had a point. Seeing her here really helped my nerves a lot. "Do you know these people upstairs? Do you know Mr. Seymour?"
"Mr. Qi has lots of business partners. I wouldn't know all of them even if I try," she said with a smirk. Her reply made me wonder what else Mr. Qi was involved in, but the thought only made me anxious again. "Let me make you a coffee."
She offered me the best coffee I had ever had. It could of course also have been because she was the one who made it.
Not long after I had consumed the coffee, Mr. Qi and Mr. Seymour, accompanied by one of his men carrying a briefcase, came down and signaled me into the office, a closed room with no window. I had been in here many times with Mr. Qi, but I only made this observation now. How tension sharpened our senses, I thought to myself.
"Show me what you've got." Mr. Seymour got to business immediately. I did not mind that he was not the type for idle chitchat. I wanted this to be over as soon as possible.
I spent the whole night yesterday trying to solve the last known bug on ThriftyEP. With the pressure and the caffeine I had just consumed, I found my hands shaking as I typed some commands into my laptop to pull up the web application.
"Just show us what you've shown me yesterday, and I will explain them," Mr. Qi suggested. That was a great suggestion, because I feared that my lips would tremble should I have to talk through the features myself in English, to a man who looked like an evil villain in a James Bond movie.
The product demonstration was over fairly quickly, because unlike in Bilious, Mr. Seymour had no technical question for us. The only thing he asked was whether the application was ready.
"We haven't test...tested it yet in production. We've only tested it in sandbox envir... environment..." I stuttered.
"Why's it not in production? What the hell is sandbox?" Mr. Seymour was apparently not very knowledgeable about software development.
"It's okay, sir," the man Mr. Seymour brought along to the meeting said. "Our clients will have development teams themselves to take care that it is properly tested, I am sure." He looked up at me and winked. I wasn't sure whether it was just a twitch in his eye or it was some kind of signal. I looked down at the keys on my laptop.
"Good." Mr. Seymour was pleased. "Jackson, hand them the money."
Jackson, the man who winked at me, then laid the briefcase on the table and opened it to show the contents to Mr. Qi. In it, as I expected, like I said from having watched way too many crime movies, contained stacks after stacks of dollar bills.
"There's six hundred thousand dollars in here. Want to count it?"
"No, I trust you," Mr. Qi said. "It wasn't the first time we do business together."
Mr. Seymour produced a USB stick and poked it towards my face. "Put all the source code into the USB stick."
Again I search for confirmation from Mr. Qi, who nodded. In less than five minutes, I copied ThriftyEP into the USB stick and made thousands of dollars for Mr. Qi. I wondered what I have been doing all these years, when I could have made so much more money with just a week's worth of work. Mr. Qi's driver was right.
Fingers still trembling, I handed the USB stick to Mr. Qi, half expecting it to be snatched away immediately before we would both be gunned down. It was an anti-climax to see that the business transaction concluded peacefully when Mr. Qi simply handed the USB stick to Jackson, and the two of them left the room with the briefcase of money still on the table, and both of us unharmed.
I let out a sign of relief when Mr. Qi followed them out to send them off.
"Ka-ching! Told you it's gonna be fine." Marsha poked her head into the office and said playfully. She definitely spotted the briefcase full of money on the table but she didn't bet an eye, whilst I had to fight every urge to take out my cell phone and take a selfie with the money. "Want to eat breakfast? You looked pale. I guess you didn't have time for food this morning, did you?"
Chapter 31
I felt like doing something else than being cooped up in my office in front of the computer now that I had finally delivered ThriftyEP. While I certainly still had a lot of work from the rest of Project Dragon One, I really didn't feel like working much more since we made that sale, so I QQ-ed my soccer buddies and organized a game.
It was my first soccer practice since my injury. My arrival was welcomed by a round of applause by my teammates from the Pudong Hero Number 4 team, the oldest amateur team of the club.
My mates were being especially lenient on me during the practice, which led me to make three assists and two goals when the game concluded. That made me feel really good about myself. I hadn't been able to sleep much after 'the yacht thing', weary that the bad guys or the law enforcement people would catch up to us. Physically exhausted after such a long break without doing much exercise, I was hopeful that I could finally get a good night sleep tonight.
Brother Fei came over to pat me on the back while I was lost in thoughts. It landed a bit harder than we both expected on a patch of skin that was still healing from my burning accident. When he saw me flinched in pain, he apologized profusely. "Just sit down for a moment," he suggested.
Everyone gathered around us, all sweaty and exhausted from having played under the unyielding sun to get a sip of water from their water bottles. The wife of Brother Guo, our team captain, came over from the watcher's stand with a box of Chinese donuts covered in melted sugar. I grabbed one unapologetically and received a kind smile from her, which I later found out was a smile of satisfaction for giving her a free pass to inquire into my personal affairs with no qualms.
"I heard that you're living with a woman now from Brother Fei. Why didn't you bring her along?" Women had an incredible nose for romantic story even when it was buried by hideous domestic violence. I gave Brother Fei a look and he returned me the most innocent shrug he could ever manage.
"Maybe some day."
"Don't ask too much. He probably doesn't want to talk about it," Brother Fei hissed back at the captain's wife, thinking back to the strange incident that broke out in our house previously, when I almost killed a guy for sleeping with my 'wife'.
"How much did you tell everyone?" I squinted at him, who shrugged again and swore he said nothing unnecessary.
"She's now in Sichuan," I explained to the inquirer and the curious onlookers. "Preparing for our wedding at the end of the week." It was unseemly for decent Chinese man and woman to live together without any plan of getting married. To prevent unnecessary torrents of moral lectures from all the married couples in the soccer team, especially Brother Guo and his wife who liked to set the example for everything to us 'youngsters', I volunteered that piece of information.
"Yes, I have heard of that, too," the captain said, to which his wife nodded.
"And you would have to wear a ridiculous traditional outfit in pink silk with yellow pom pom balls and a white turban laced with gold threads on your head, or something like that." Brother Lui joked. His imagination was not too far off from reality though, I suspected.
"Is your wife from a minority group? Or is she from one of the big cities in Sichuan province?"
"From some place called Lizhou," I replied, my brows furrowed, because I had no idea whether it was mountain range, a mongolian moving village, or a house on the tree. "She doesn't look like she belongs to a minority group," I conjectured. She couldn't have been. No way, I thought to myself.
"Do you mean you don't know?" The captain's wife asked. "You didn't want to know who you're marrying?"
"Young people these days," Brother Guo sighed and shook his head as he took a second bite of his wife's sugar donut with red bean filling.
"Hey, didn't you say your wedding is at the end of the week?!" Little Buddha, a small guy in our team with incredibly tough headbutt, picked up the breaking news instead. "Why are we not invited?"
"It's gonna be in Sichuan, do you want to go?" Brother Chong elbowed him in the ribs. "Airplane, hotel, and red pockets. One less invitation means one less red pocket given out." He was talking about the customary money guests of a wedding were supposed to give to the wedding couple should they be invited to the banquet.
"He's our friend," Little Buddha argued. "One red pocket? I think you need at least two or three red pocketssss!"
"Why haven't you told us?" The captain's wife brought us back to the issue at hand. "We should in the least prepare some wedding gifts for you, or for your house, to start you off good on your new life together."
"They have everything, except maybe a new television and television cabinet," Brother Fei commented but nobody heard him, or they chose to ignore him, because television and television furniture were not exactly in the price range of gifts they had in mind.
"Did you meet her on the internet?" Little Buddha asked. "Is that why you're ashamed of it?"
I smiled, my face reddened from his question. The group laughed knowingly in unison.
"But no, we're serious. Do you really don't want us there?" Brother Lui asked.
"No, no, no, no..." I defended myself, beginning with my usual multiple, drawn-out No's. "Of course, you're all welcomed. My father-in-law is arranging everything for us since neither of us lived over there and he kind of wants it to happen as soon as possible. I only found out two months ago myself." I inflated the time I knew about the wedding from one day to a month to make our lack of planning for the fake marriage that neither of us cared too much of not too obvious.
"Who's gonna be your best man?" Brother Chong asked. Now that was a question that never entered my mind.
"It's obviously none of us here," Little Buddha said, as he scanned each and every one of our faces to see if he could pick out from our expressions whether one of us was lying about being not invited to my 'secret wedding'. He was satisfied after the scan, unable to discern from the group's body language who was the mole. "Who's your best man, Jong? He needs to organize one last party for us before you go, you know?"
"Where are we going?" Brother Guo asked cheerfully.
"I know this hotpot place with really hot waitresses," Brother Chong replied but sensed how Brother Guo's expression changed since his wife was within earshot of the discussion, so he added, "and unlimited sliced lamb and beers. Cheap beers though. Nothing really fancy."
When party was mentioned, everyone chimed in with their opinions as I watched from the side. Funny how my soccer mates were more interested in the name of my best man and partying, than the name of my wife. I guess boys are always going to be boys.
Chapter 32
Because money doesn't grow on trees, I went to work even though there were a million things I needed to organize for the wedding. I had not been giving the preparation any attention because of ThriftyEP.
Marvey noticed how distracted I was during the afternoon’s conference call , and stole a glance of my screen. I was trying to book plane tickets to Lizhou, but the flight booking site kept trying to correct Lizhou to Luzhou, both located in Sichuan. Luzhou was a proper city with skyscrapers and a football stadium, among other modern architectures much like what one would see in many parts of modernized China engaged in building frenzy due to recent widespread prosperity from a strong economy, while Lizhou was an ancient town stuck in the past. Image search on Baidu revealed the town that was established around 100 BC to be a place straight out of the movies. The only female Emperor of China in five thousand years of Chinese history came from Lizhou.
"That's beautiful!" Marvey said as she muted the phone when she saw a picture of the colorful Thousand Buddhas Cliff that was on the tourist guide of the Lizhou's official website. Seeing how enthusiastic she was, when she asked me why I was looking up Lizhou, I spilled the beans of my very last-minute wedding to her without reserve. There was of course an ounce of hope that she would be so interested in it that she would make the trip to Sichuan together with me, being a student of China and all.
"I'd love to come with you! That would be fabulous!" She gave me a hug, which she explained was a congratulatory hug in case I should misunderstand her intentions. I supposed it happened quite a lot with Americans, who even freely give out meaningless hugs on the streets just because they were bored. "Let me tell Kelvin!"
I bit my lips. "I haven't told him yet myself."
"He's your best friend. And you haven't told him yet? Is it because of me? It is because of me, isn't it?"
For someone smart enough to attend Harvard, she was quite dumb in this affair.
"You have to tell him!" She insisted. "If you don't tell him, I will do it myself."
Before I could protest, she had already dialed Kelvin's number and told him about my wedding in Sichuan and extended, without my permission, an invitation to come along.
"He said yes!" Marvey said in joy. I meant, who would let up a chance to go on a faraway trip with a woman like Marvey. I nodded to acknowledge the news but Marvey had already shoved her phone to my face.
"Hey," Kelvin spoke first. "Congratulations."
"No, thanks," I replied.
"I know, I know. All of these are part of the sham, but it's a wonderful excuse for some fun, just go along with it." Kelvin gave me advice as if our relationship did not change a bit in the last months. "I'm not trying to tell you what to do, of course."
At least he knew his place, I thought to myself.
"Give me a break, Jong," He said again when I did not reply. "I honestly thought you wouldn't care anymore because Marv said you did not make any move while you were in the US with her. And when you're back in China, you married Paula. I mean, I know it begun with the intention to help Paula and Jessie with their Shanghai residency but how was I supposed to know that that was the only reason? Paula and you really got along well...I thought you've found your happy ending, and it was my turn to find mine. If I have been selfish and did anything that is hurtful to you, I apologize. Besides, you have nothing to worry about anymore." He cleared his throat to say the words to come next, "Marvey already turned me down. She doesn't think we could work."
"Zhen de jia de? (It's that true?)"
"Sadly it is true," he replied. "I think she has a point. Girls who like you could not possibly be my type. How could they be normal when they couldn't tell you are a lunatic?"
"Tskk," I hissed at his attempt to make Marvey's rejection of him less embarassing.
"So are we good?"
"Liu Bei said..."*
"Ok, I get it."
"Good." There were many things between sworn brothers that needed not to be spoken out loud. "So you're coming along?" I couldn't be happier now that the air
was cleared between us.
"Yes. I will tell my secretary to book our flights for us."
"Are you sure? It's not very polite to use her like this."
"She's my dad's secretary, which by extension, is my secretary because in a few years, who knows, she might be reporting to me. It's a family company after all. My dad wouldn't just give it to someone else." Kelvin explained with pride how his dad's personal secretary, among other resources of his dad's company, was de facto under his command.
I had always warned him not to be so sure of these things. China is no longer a feudal society since many, many years. The mediocre performance of the accounts under his control and the unjustifiably huge expenses were going to have a rather negative impact on the succession decision when his dad eventually abdicate from the throne as the Chairman of the company. Since we had just gotten on better terms, I did not want to upset the equilibrium again by reminding him of his shortcomings, so I replied a simple 'thank you' and we hung up.
Marvey was overjoyed that the conversation went so well. Needless to say, she was as excited as I was about the imminent trip together to Sichuan. "It's the number one touristic district of China. It has been classified as a 5A tourist area by the Chinese government!"
"How'd you know these things?" I honestly did not know that, being Chinese myself.
"Well, I have found out that only foreigners know these kinds of things." She shrugged it off. "Anyway, who was this 'Little Babe' that you were talking to Kelvin about? And what did she say?"
I snorted. "His name is Liu Bei, not Little Babe. How did you even come up with that?!"
"That's what you said!"
"That's not what I said. It's 'L-i-u B-e-i'," I repeated. "It sounded totally different! Did you think we are talking about some girl?"
"The two of you have so many secrets together behind my back. How do I know what you're talking about?"
"Liu Bei was the emperor of the Shu kingdom."