Chasing the Monkey King

by D. C. Alexander

  “This is ridiculous,” Severin said as they made their way back to the hotel. “You’re sure there isn’t a street address for this place in all of those documents you have?”

  “No, I’m not sure. There are hundreds and hundreds of pages. But there’s no street address in any of the places you’d expect to find one—on copies of YSP’s invoices, in the company description section of their investigative questionnaire responses, or anywhere else I’ve looked.”

  “Well, look harder.”

  “Why don’t you look?”

  Severin shook his head. “Do you think that maybe YSP was just a front? Something that never really existed as a viable company?”

  “You mean did they borrow some old factory building and trump it up to make it look legitimate for the Commerce investigators’ visit? Wheel in some machinery, some accounting records, and some barrels of sorghum to make it look real, and then wheel it all back out again afterward? I guess if they could have been working from a fake set of records, then it isn’t unreasonable to think the whole operation was fake. But why would they fake that part?”

  “Remember how Bergman and Vladimirovich said that when they start selling their stuff to the U.S., new companies can avoid paying high tariff rates that were already slapped on other companies during previous investigations?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “I suppose that if YSP was just a front, and the real company is located somewhere else, then if YSP got slapped with a punitive tariff at the end of the investigation, the real company could just change the location of its front company the next year, change the name, and request that Commerce conduct a new investigation. It would give them the so-called clean slate that Vladimirovich was talking about. Another chance to get a low or zero tariff rate. Another chance to export to the U.S. without having to fork out a bunch of cash to pay for tariffs previously imposed on a quote-unquote different company.”

  “So the same guys just rename their fake front company, relocate their fake factory, and reboot their quest for a zero tariff rate with the Commerce Department?”

  “With all of those potential customers over in the U.S.? I would. Wouldn’t you?”

  *****

  When they got back to the hotel, the front desk receptionist waved Zhang over and explained that the gas station attendant who’d directed them to the hotel had come by to invite “the American giants” to his family’s house for dinner.

  “What do you think?” Zhang asked Severin.

  “Guy could be a serial killer.”

  “It will probably be awesome. The Chinese rival the Italians when it comes to kick-ass family dinners.”

  “Why not.”

  The receptionist told them they were to meet the attendant at his gas station at 7 p.m. if they accepted. So they did, walking the few short blocks from the hotel. The attendant, whose name was Rong, was talking a mile a minute as he removed a used tire from the back seat of his car—one of the common Volkswagen almost-Jettas—and ushered them in. They drove to the edge of town and across a mile of open farmland, the roads turning to dirt as they did, before arriving in a small village, perhaps four blocks square. Rong’s house was on a corner. It was a one-story place that was attached to the rest of the block of residences, much as row houses are in the U.S. It was constructed of the ubiquitous cream colored brick and terracotta roofing tiles, but had an unusually tall, brown wooden door that looked ancient.

  Rong pulled to the curb, opened the car door for Zhang with a flair one might expect of a royal footman, then ran ahead of them to open his home’s door with a similar panache and proud expression of welcome. Severin entered to see a small family room in which a middle-aged woman, presumably the mother, sat painting her fingernails on a small couch while a boy, maybe 10 years old, played with a toy ship on the floor. She looked up at Severin as he entered and her jaw fell open. She sat frozen, staring. Then the boy did the same. A chattering female voice emanated from a small doorway, probably to a kitchen. A moment later, an old Chinese woman—maybe Grandma—appeared in the doorway, made eye contact with Severin, made a choked ah! sound of surprise, then froze along with the rest of them, staring at Severin as though he had green skin and had just emerged from a flying saucer.

  By now, Rong was coming in the house. He spoke in very emphatic Chinese, no doubt explaining that they would be feeding guests from the United States. And as he did, the expressions on each of his family members’ faces changed from one of perplexity and utter surprise to one of excitement, welcome, and wonder. All of a sudden there was a flurry of activity, with the women jumping around, tidying up, pushing Severin and Zhang to sit on the couch—the best seats in the room—as the boy disappeared into another room, only to re-emerge a minute later wearing a Seattle Seahawks T-shirt. Introductions were made, everyone smiling and nodding politely. Severin and Zhang were brought hot black tea to sip while being more or less interrogated by Rong and his wife and son while his mother finished cooking dinner. The scent of garlic and frying onions drifted in, making Severin’s mouth water as he was peppered with questions. They wanted confirmation of their suspicions that everybody in the U.S. was rich. It was relative, Zhang told them. Had they ever been to the Grand Canyon? Had they ever been on TV? Where were they from? Did they know the Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson? Did they know Bill Gates? Did they have big Buicks?

  Before long, they were seated at a round table in the dining room. It was cramped, lit by nothing more than a single, bare light bulb in a simple, ceiling-mounted porcelain light socket. But the Spartan atmosphere was more than offset by the bounty of food the grandmother had set on the table. There were eight different dishes, leaving Severin to wonder whether they ate like this all the time. There were two different dishes of leafy greens that could have been bok choy, one sautéed with garlic, the other with peppers and scallions. There was, of course, rice. There was a dish of chicken thighs in a savory brown sauce, a dish made up of a medley of fresh vegetables only half of which Severin could identify, and a thick, rich looking soup. There were pork and ginger dumplings floating in a pot of wonderful smelling clear broth. Then there was a dish of something that looked like goose feet.

  “Are those goose feet?” Severin asked Zhang.

  “Yes. They have good meat. After the famines of the 1950s, nothing goes to waste here. Try them. They’re good.”

  Severin did, and was happily surprised to find them delicious. Then he tried the soup, which reminded him of Ivar’s clam chowder. It was delicious too. In fact, everything was. Though aside from the dumplings and bok choy, none of the dishes remotely resembled anything Severin had ever eaten in a Chinese restaurant in the U.S. Everything was fresh, the flavors a perfect balance of salty and sweet.

  “What’s in that soup?” he asked Zhang. “It looks like clam chowder.”

  “I’m sure it isn’t.”

  “What’s the meat in it then? It looks and tastes like chopped clam.”

  Zhang asked, got his long-winded answer from the grandmother, then didn’t say anything.

  “So? What is it?”

  “I’ll tell you after you eat it.”

  “Wallace.”

  “She says it’s good for a man.”

  “Good for a man? The hell does that mean?”

  “Just eat.”

  They lingered over the meal for more than two hours, their happy hosts peppering them with questions about America. As the dishes were cleared, Rong got out three small glasses, then set a bottle of Baijiu on the table that had so much dust on it Severin was sure it was only broken out on very special occasions. They were guests of honor. And Severin did feel honored. He had a great time, filled with that tingle—that childlike sense of excitement, awe, and wonder that often came when he made meaningful personal contact with people in countries and cultures that were foreign to him. He even had, for a fleeting moment, a faint twinkling of hope for the human race.

  TWENTY-TWO

  After their superb di
nner at Rong’s house, and over another bottle of Baijiu back in the empty hotel restaurant, Zhang scrolled back through the electronic case record on his laptop while Severin peered over his shoulder, both of them looking for an address or phone number for YSP or any of its personnel. They scrolled through dozens and dozens of pages, covering YSP’s accounting records, company structure, shipping documents, production processes, and all sorts of perplexing measures of production costs. His eyes red and aching for a break, Severin spotted something as Zhang was about to scroll to the next document. “Wait.” He was looking at a page full of YSP’s answers to written investigative questions posed by the Commerce Department. Part way down the page, a narrative response included the name and street address of YSP’s Seattle-based U.S. importer, Sun Ocean Trading. The paragraph containing Sun Ocean’s name and address was enclosed in hand-drawn brackets. “What do those brackets mean?” Severin asked, already guessing the answer.

  “The information between the brackets is proprietary. That means all parties to the case basically treat it as a trade secret under the terms of a protective order. In other words, only each party’s lawyers are supposed to be able to see it. They aren’t allowed to share it with their clients, or they get disbarred and thrown in federal prison. That way, they have all the information they need to make their legal arguments, but nobody’s trade secrets are given to the competition.”

  “And because the name and address of Sun Ocean are in brackets, they’re supposed to be treated as trade secrets?”

  “Must be. I mean, think about it. Nobody wants to reveal who their customers are, right? Nobody wants them published in the findings of a U.S. government investigation. The competition would be liable to swoop in and try to steal the customers away.”

  “So Sun Ocean’s name and address would have been excluded from the public versions of these documents?”

  “Right. And I can tell you from looking through all these documents that they were excluded from the public versions. Blacked out, deleted, or whatever.”

  “Can you think of any reason why Orin Thorvaldsson would have had access to the proprietary portion of the case record?”

  “He wouldn’t have. Like I said, only the Commerce investigators and the lawyers for the parties to the investigation have access to that.”

  “Then how did Thorvaldsson know the name and address of YSP’s importer, Sun Ocean?”

  “Oh. That’s—that’s a very good question.”

  “The plot thickens once again.”

  “Yes it does. Do you think Kristin might have told him?”

  “What, over Christmas dinner back on Lopez Island? By accident, after one too many glasses of wine? Both the importer’s name and its street address?”

  “Yeah, it doesn’t add up.”

  “It sure doesn’t. Unless … .”

  “Unless what?”

  “Come on, Wallace. Channel your inner Sherlock Holmes.”

  “Why don’t you channel your inner guy who isn’t a condescending ass?”

  “Does the case file have a list of all the importers?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean a list of all the U.S. companies that are importing sorghum syrup from the Chinese companies that are under investigation.”

  “Actually, yeah. I think so. Hold on a minute.”

  Zhang scrolled through the record until he found a different document—one he recalled seeing before, during their flight to Shanghai. It was a memorandum that listed the names and addresses of each of the importers allegedly purchasing sorghum syrup from the Chinese companies under investigation. There were seven. Not counting Sun Ocean, there was one in Flushing, New York, one in Newark, New Jersey, one in Portland, Oregon, and three in greater Los Angeles.”

  “Let me use your laptop for a second,” Severin said. “I want to Google a few things here.”

  “You can’t.”

  “I’m not going to hurt your precious laptop. Come on.”

  “No, I mean Google is blocked in China. There is no Google.”

  “No Google? That’s like saying there’s no oxygen.”

  “It’s part of how the Communist Party keeps information from the people.”

  “Oh. Nice. So then how do you search for stuff on the internet?”

  “They have their own state-filtered, state-monitored search engine called Baidu.”

  “Whatever. It’s not like I’m looking for information on how to join the Falun Gong Tabernacle Choir. I’m sure Baidu will do the trick.”

  One by one, Severin searched the business filings of each sorghum importer through the official government records web site of the U.S. state in which each allegedly existed. When he got to the second of the three Los Angeles-based importers, he muttered, “That sneaky son of a bitch.”

  “What?”

  “Look.” Severin turned the laptop so that Zhang could see what he’d found. It was a page from the California articles of incorporation of an importer called Marshall Quotient Trading. The company had been in existence for 15 years.

  “What am I supposed to—”

  “Here,” Severin said, putting his fingertip on the edge of the line labeled “Incorporator.” Next to it, in beautiful and perfectly legible cursive, was the signature of Orin Thorvaldsson.

  “That sneaky son of a bitch.”

  “Like I said.”

  “What did he tell you his business was again?”

  “Trading. So I guess I can’t call him a liar. Still, it’s awful funny-like that he wouldn’t mention this little tidbit,” Severin added, wondering if he were, in fact, serving as Thorvaldsson’s marionette in a play that was bigger than he’d been led to believe.

  “So he owns a competing sorghum importer?”

  “That’s the way I read it. So maybe the attorneys representing Thorvaldsson’s company broke the law by sharing Sun Ocean’s name and mailing address with Thorvaldsson. Ballsy. They could get disbarred and go to prison for that.”

  “Bergman and Vladimirovich warned us that these cases were dirty,” Zhang said.

  “This whole system of protecting trade secrets depends on the ethical character of the involved lawyers. They have to be trusted not to pass the information on to their clients. That’s a laugh.”

  “And there’s nothing in the State Department’s report to indicate that they knew anything about this, is there? I mean, it doesn’t look like the State Department connected the dots that Kristin’s uncle owns one of Sun Ocean’s competitors.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “What are the implications?” Zhang asked.

  “Well, for one thing, it sheds new light on Thorvaldsson’s possible reasons for hiring me to learn more about what happened.”

  “Was Kristin acting as her uncle’s operative? Getting an unfair peek at the opposition’s books and operations? Trying to see what they were up to? Or worse, working to get Commerce to drop the hammer on them when they might not otherwise have done so? Did YSP figure it out—figure out who she was and what she was up to—and then knock her over the head?” Zhang asked.

  “Could be. And given what the interpreter told us about what went down at the factory—that the Commerce investigators might have uncovered activities that were going to sink YSP’s ship—considering the money that might have been at stake over YSP’s sales to the United States, I hate to say it, but maybe it gives legs to Wesley’s suggestion that somebody from the company got rid of them.”

  “Over sorghum syrup imports?”

  “I’ll grant you, it isn’t cocaine,” Severin said. “But really, what kind of money are we talking about here? Assume I’m dumb for a moment and walk me through the consequences of YSP getting slapped with a high tariff because of the Commerce investigation.”

  “Well, if they were caught in flagrante with a set of fake accounting records, Commerce would drop the hammer and the company’s imports would be subject to the maximum punitive tariff rate.”

  “I know.
But what is the rate? How much money are we talking about?”

  Zhang spent several minutes searching for the final investigation findings that covered all the sorghum producers in China. “Okay, here we go,” he said, scrolling to the conclusion section. “Holy crap.”

  “Holy crap, what?”

  “YSP could have been facing a tariff rate of 354 percent.”

  “Wow. I thought we were talking about peanuts here.”

  “So did I. And get this: According to the memo we were just looking at, YSP sold $7.2 million in sorghum syrup to the U.S. last year. In other words, if Powell and Keen actually caught YSP committing fraud, and if they’d had a chance to report it, I think YSP and/or its importer would have ended up owing the U.S. government more than $25 million.”

  “Wait—twenty-five million dollars?”

  “Unless my math is off.”

  “But you’re Asian, so—”

  “Exactly.”

  “Did the goal posts just move?”

  “They may have.”

  “But we still don’t know where this damned factory is. Here, take my cell phone.”

  Severin had Zhang make a several attempts at calling the interpreter on the theory that she could at least tell them what road the YSP factory—fake or legitimate—was on, and maybe give them a description of the building. She never answered.

  “Maybe she recognizes your cell number,” Zhang said.

  “Good point.” With that, Zhang rose and went to the front desk where he called up to their Shanghai taxi driver’s room. In minutes, the driver was in the lobby loaning his cell phone to Zhang for the equivalent of about $5 in Chinese currency. Zhang tried the interpreter’s number again and, when she promptly answered, was able to keep her on the phone just long enough to learn that the factory was on something called Jinan Road, and that it had corrugated tin walls that were painted white.