End of Days

by Frank Lauria

  CHINA CLUB, HONG KONG

  SEPTEMBER 7, 1999

  He would survive. Yes, Charlie promised himself, he’d survive this, too—his ninth formal Chinese banquet in as many evenings, yet another bowl of shark-fin soup being passed to him by the endless waiters in red uniforms, who stood obsequiously against the silk wallpaper pretending not to hear the self-satisfied ravings of those they served. Except for his fellow gweilos—British Petroleum’s Asia man, a mischievous German from Lufthansa, and two young American executives from Kodak and Citigroup—the other dozen men at the huge mahogany table were all Chinese. Mostly in their fifties, the men represented the big corporate players—Bank of Asia, Hong Kong Telecom, China Motors—and each, Charlie noted, had arrived at the age of cleverness. Of course, at fifty-eight he himself was old enough that no one should be able to guess what he was thinking unless he wanted them to, even Ellie. In his call to her that morning—it being evening in New York City—he’d tried not to sound too worried about their daughter Julia. “It’s all going to be fine, sweetie,” he’d promised, gazing out at the choppy haze of Hong Kong’s harbor, where the heavy traffic of tankers and freighters pressed China’s claim—everything from photocopiers to baseball caps flowing out into the world, everything from oil refineries to contact lenses flowing in. “She’ll get pregnant, I’m sure,” he’d told Ellie. But he wasn’t sure. No, not at all. In fact, it looked as if it was going to be easier for him to build his electronics factory in Shanghai than for his daughter to hatch a baby.

  “We gather in friendship,” announced the Chinese host, Mr. Ming, the vice-chairman of the Bank of Asia. Having agreed to lend Charlie fifty-two million U.S. dollars to build his Shanghai factory, Mr. Ming in no way could be described as a friend; the relationship was one of overlord and indentured. But Charlie smiled along with the others as the banker stood and presented in high British English an analysis of southeastern China’s economy that was so shallow, optimistic, and full of euphemism that no one, especially the central ministries in Beijing, might object. The Chinese executives nodded politely as Mr. Ming spoke, touching their napkins to their lips, smiling vaguely. Of course, they nursed secret worries—worries that corresponded to whether they were entrepreneurs (who had built shipping lines or real-estate empires or garment factories) or the managers of institutional power (who controlled billions of dollars not their own). And yet, Charlie decided, the men were finally more like one another than unlike; each long ago had learned to sell high (1997) and buy low (1998), and had passed the threshold of unspendable wealth, such riches conforming them in their behaviors; each owned more houses or paintings or Rolls-Royces than could be admired or used at once. Each played golf or tennis passably well; each possessed a forty-million-dollar yacht, or a forty-million-dollar home atop Victoria’s Peak, or a forty-million-dollar wife. Each had a slender young Filipino or Russian or Czech mistress tucked away in one of Hong Kong’s luxury apartment buildings—licking her lips if requested—or was betting against the Hong Kong dollar while insisting on its firmness—any of the costly mischief in which rich men indulge.

  The men at the table, in fact, as much as any men, sat as money incarnate, particularly the American dollar, the euro, and the Japanese yen—all simultaneously, and all hedged against fluctuations of the others. But although the men were money, money was not them; money assumed any shape or color or politics, it could be fire or stone or dream, it could summon armies or bind atoms, and, indifferent to the sufferings of the mortal soul, it could leave or arrive at any time. And on this exact night, Charlie thought, setting his ivory chopsticks neatly upon the lacquered plate, he could see that although money had assumed the shapes of the men in the room, it existed in differing densities and volumes and brightnesses. Whereas Charlie was a man of perhaps thirty or thirty-three million dollars of wealth, that sum amounted to shoe-shine change in the present company. No, sir, money, in that room, in that moment, was understood as inconsequential in sums less than one hundred million dollars, and of political importance only when five times more. Money, in fact, found its greatest compression and gravity in the form of the tiny man sitting silently across from Charlie—Sir Henry Lai, the Oxford-educated Chinese gambling mogul, owner of a fleet of jet-foil ferries, a dozen hotels, and most of the casinos of Macao and Vietnam. Worth billions—and billions more.

  But, Charlie wondered, perhaps he was wrong. He could think of one shape that money had not yet assumed, although quite a bit of it had been spent, perhaps a hundred thousand dollars in all. Money animated the dapper Chinese businessman across from him, but could it arrive in the world as Charlie’s own grandchild? This was the question he feared most, this was the question that had eaten at him and at Ellie for years now, and which would soon be answered: In a few hours, Julia would tell them once and forever if she was capable of having a baby.

  She had suffered through cycle upon cycle of disappointment—hundreds of shots of fertility drugs followed by the needle-recovery of the eggs, the inspection of the eggs, the selection of the eggs, the insemination of the eggs, the implantation of the eggs, the anticipation of the eggs. She’d been trying for seven years. Now Julia, a woman of only thirty-five, a little gray already salting her hair, was due to get the final word. At 11:00 a.m. Manhattan time, she’d sit in her law office and be told the results of this, the last in-vitro attempt. Her ninth. Three more than the doctor preferred to do. Seven more than the insurance company would pay for. Good news would be that one of the reinserted fertilized eggs had decided to cling to the wall of Julia’s uterus. Bad news: There was no chance of conception; egg donorship or adoption must now be considered. And if that was the news, well then, that was really goddamn something. It would mean not just that his only daughter was heartbroken, but that, genetically speaking, he, Charlie Ravich, was finished, that his own fishy little spermatozoa—one of which, wiggling into Ellie’s egg a generation prior, had become his daughter—had run aground, that he’d come to the end of the line; that, in a sense, he was already dead.

  And now, as if mocking his very thoughts, came the fish, twenty pounds of it, head still on, its eyes cooked out and replaced with flowered radishes, its mouth agape in macabre broiled amusement. Charlie looked at his plate. He always lost weight in China, undone by the soy and oils and crusted skin of birds, the rich liverish stink of turtle meat. All that duck tongue and pig ear and fish lip. Expensive as hell, every meal. And carrying with it the odor of doom.

  Then the conversation turned, as it also did so often in Shanghai and Beijing, to the question of America’s mistreatment of the Chinese. “What I do not understand are the American senators,” Sir Henry Lai was saying in his softly refined voice. “They say they understand that we only want for China to be China.” Every syllable was flawless English, but of course Lai also spoke Mandarin and Cantonese. Sir Henry Lai was reported to be in serious talks with Gaming Technologies, the huge American gambling and hotel conglomerate that clutched big pieces of Las Vegas, the Mississippi casino towns, and Atlantic City. Did Sir Henry know when China would allow Western-style casinos to be built within its borders? Certainly he knew the right officials in Beijing, and perhaps this was reason enough that GT’s stock price had ballooned up seventy percent in the last three months as Sir Henry’s interest in the company had become known. Lai smiled benignly. Then frowned. “These senators say that all they want is for international trade to progress without interruption, and then they go back to Congress and raise their fists and call China all kinds of names. Is this not true?”

  The others nodded sagely, apparently giving consideration, but not ignoring whatever delicacy remained pinched in their chopsticks.

  “Wait, I have an answer to that,” announced the young fellow from Citigroup. “Mr. Lai, I trust we may speak frankly here. You need to remember that the American senators are full of—excuse my language—full of shit. When they’re standing up on the Senate floor saying all of this stuff, this means nothing, absolutely nothing!”
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  “Ah, this is very difficult for the Chinese people to understand.” Sir Henry scowled. “In China we believe our leaders. So we become scared when we see American senators complaining about China.”

  “You’re being coy with us, Mr. Lai,” interrupted Charlie, looking up with a smile, “for we—or some of us—know that you have visited the United States dozens of times and have met many U.S. senators personally.” Not to mention a few Third World dictators. He paused, while amusement passed into Lai’s dark eyes. “Nonetheless,” Charlie continued, looking about the table, “for the others who have not enjoyed Mr. Lai’s deep friendships with American politicians, I would have to say my colleague here is right. The speeches in the American Senate are pure grandstanding. They’re made for the American public—”

  “The bloodthirsty American public, you mean!” interrupted the Citigroup man, who, Charlie suddenly understood, had drunk too much. “Those old guys up there know most voters can’t find China on a globe. That’s no joke. It’s shocking, the American ignorance of China.”

  “We shall have to educate your people,” Sir Henry Lai offered diplomatically, apparently not wishing the stridency of the conversation to continue. He gave a polite, cold-blooded laugh.

  “But it is, yes, my understanding that the Americans could sink the Chinese Navy in several days?” barked the German from Lufthansa.

  “That may be true,” answered Charlie, “but sooner or later the American people are going to recognize the hemispheric primacy of China, that—”

  “Wait, wait!” Lai interrupted good-naturedly. “You agree with our German friend about the Chinese Navy?”

  The question was a direct appeal to the nationalism of the other Chinese around the table.

  “Can the U.S. Air Force destroy the Chinese Navy in a matter of days?” repeated Charlie. “Yes. Absolutely yes.”

  Sir Henry Lai smiled. “You are knowledgeable about these topics, Mr.”—he glanced down at the business cards arrayed in front of his plate—“Mr. Ravich. Of the Teknetrix Corporation, I see. What do you know about war, Mr. Ravich?” he asked. “Please, tell me. I am curious.”

  The Chinese billionaire stared at him with eyebrows lifted, face a smug, florid mask, and if Charlie had been younger or genuinely insulted, he might have recalled aloud his war years before becoming a businessman, but he understood that generally it was to one’s advantage not to appear to have an advantage. And anyway, the conversation was merely a form of sport: Lai didn’t give a good goddamn about the Chinese Navy, which he probably despised; what he cared about was whether or not he should soon spend eight hundred million dollars on GT stock—play the corporation that played the players.

  But Lai pressed. “What do you know about this?”

  “Just what I read in the papers,” Charlie replied with humility.

  “See? There! I tell you!” Lai eased back in his silk suit, running a fat little palm over his thinning hair. “This is a very dangerous problem, my friends. People say many things about China and America, but they have no direct knowledge, no real—”

  Mercifully, the boys in red uniforms and brass buttons began setting down spoons and bringing around coffee. Charlie excused himself and headed for the gentlemen’s rest-room. Please, God, he thought, it’s a small favor, really. One egg clinging to a warm pink wall. He and Ellie should have had another child, should have at least tried, after Ben. Ellie had been forty-two. Too much grief at the time, too late now.

  In the men’s room, a sarcophagus of black and silver marble, he nodded at the wizened Chinese attendant, who stood up with alert servility. Charlie chose the second stall and locked the heavy marble door behind him. The door and walls extended in smooth veined slabs from the floor to within a foot of the ceiling. The photo-electric eye over the toilet sensed his movement and the bowl flushed prematurely. He was developing an old man’s interest in his bowels. He shat then, with the private pleasure of it. He was starting to smell Chinese to himself. Happened on every trip to the East.

  And then, as he finished, he heard the old attendant greeting another man in Cantonese.

  “Evening, sir.”

  “Yes.”

  The stall door next to Charlie’s opened, shut, was locked. The man was breathing as if he had hurried. Then came some loud coughing, an oddly tiny splash, and the muffled silky sound of the man slumping heavily against the wall he shared with Charlie.

  “Sir?” The attendant knocked on Charlie’s door. “You open door?

  Charlie buckled his pants and slid the lock free. The old man’s face loomed close, eyes large, breath stinking.

  “Not me!” Charlie said. “The next one!”

  “No have key! Climb!” The old attendant pushed past Charlie, stepped up on the toilet seat, and stretched high against the glassy marble. His bony hands pawed the stone uselessly. Now the man in the adjacent stall was moaning in Chinese, begging for help. Charlie pulled the attendant down and stood on the toilet seat himself. With his arms outstretched he could reach the top of the wall, and he sucked in a breath and hoisted himself. Grimacing, he pulled himself up high enough so that his nose touched the top edge of the wall. But before being able to look over, he fell back.

  “Go!” he ordered the attendant. “Get help, get a key!”

  The man in the stall groaned, his respiration a song of pain. Charlie stepped up on the seat again, this time jumping exactly at the moment he pulled with his arms, and then yes, he was up, right up there, hooking one leg over the wall, his head just high enough to peer down and see Sir Henry Lai slumped on the floor, his face a rictus of purpled flesh, his pants around his ankles, a piss stain spreading across his silk boxers. His hands clutched weakly at his tie, the veins of his neck swollen like blue pencils. His eyes, not squeezed shut but open, stared up at the underside of the spotless toilet bowl, into which, Charlie could see from above, a small silver pillbox had fallen, top open, the white pills inside of it scattered and sunk and melting away.

  “Hang on,” breathed Charlie. “They’re coming. Hang on.” He tried to pull himself through the opening between the wall and ceiling, but it was no good; he could get his head through but not his shoulders or torso. Now Sir Henry Lai coughed rhythmically, as if uttering some last strange code—“Haa-cah … Haaa! Haaa!”—and convulsed, his eyes peering in pained wonderment straight into Charlie’s, then widening as his mouth filled with a reddish soup of undigested shrimp and pigeon and turtle that surged up over his lips and ran down both of his cheeks before draining back into his windpipe. He was too far gone to cough the vomit out of his lungs, and the tension in his hands eased—he was dying of a heart attack and asphyxiation at the same moment.

  The attendant hurried back in with Sir Henry’s bodyguard. They pounded on the stall door with something, cracking the marble. The beautiful veined stone broke away in pieces, some falling on Sir Henry Lai’s shoes. Charlie looked back at his face. Henry Lai was dead.

  The men stepped into the stall and Charlie knew he was of no further use. He dropped back to the floor, picked up his jacket, and walked out of the men’s restroom, expecting a commotion outside. A waiter sailed past; the assembled businessmen didn’t know what had happened.

  Mr. Ming watched him enter.

  “I must leave you,” Charlie said graciously. “I’m very sorry. My daughter is due to call me tonight with important news.”

  “Good news, I trust.”

  The only news bankers liked. “Perhaps. She’s going to tell me if she is pregnant.”

  “I hope you are blessed.” Mr. Ming smiled, teeth white as Ellie’s estrogen pills.

  Charlie nodded warmly. “We’re going to build a terrific factory, too. Should be on-line by the end of the year.”

  “We are scheduled for lunch in about two weeks in New York?”

  “Absolutely,” said Charlie. Every minute now was important.

  Mr. Ming bent closer, his voice softening. “And you will tell me then about the quad-port transformer you a
re developing?”

  His secret new datacom switch, which would smoke the competition? No. “Yes.” Charlie smiled. “Sure deal.”

  “Excellent,” pronounced Mr. Ming. “Have a good flight.”

  The stairs to the lobby spiraled along backlit cabinets of jade dragons and coral boats and who cared what else. Don’t run, Charlie told himself, don’t appear to be in a hurry. In London, seven hours behind Hong Kong, the stock market was still open. He pointed to his coat for the attendant then nodded at the first taxi waiting outside.

  “FCC,” he told the driver.

  “Foreign Correspondents’ Club?”

  “Right away.”

  It was the only place open at night in Hong Kong where he knew he could get access to a Bloomberg box—that magical electronic screen that displayed every stock and bond price in every market around the globe. He pulled out his cell phone and called his broker in London.

  “Jane, this is Charlie Ravich,” he said when she answered. “I want to set up a huge put play. Drop everything.”

  “This is not like you.”

  “This is not like anything. Sell all my Microsoft now at the market price, sell all the Ford, the Merck, all the Lucent. Market orders all of them. Please, right now, before London closes.”

  “All right now, for the tape, you are requesting we sell eight thousand shares of—”

  “Yes, yes, I agree,” he blurted.

  Jane was off the line, getting another broker to carry out the orders. “Zoom-de-doom,” she said when she returned. “Let it rip.”

  “This is going to add up to about one-point-oh-seven million,” he said. “I’m buying puts on Gaming Technologies, the gambling company. It’s American but trades in London.”

  “Yes.” Now her voice held interest. “Yes.”

  “How many puts of GT can I buy with that?”

  She was shouting orders to her clerks. “Wait…” she said. “Yes? Very good. I have your account on my screen…” He heard keys clicking. “We have … one million seventy thousand, U.S., plus change. Now then, Gaming Technologies is selling at sixty-six even a share—”