The Court (38 page)

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 restroom. 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 photoelectric 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 are 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—”

“How many puts can I buy with one-point-oh-seven?”

“Oh, I would say a huge number, Charlie.”

“How many?”

“About … one-point-six million shares.”

“That's huge.”

“You want to protect that bet?” she asked.

“No.”

“If you say so.”

“Buy the puts, Jane.”

“I am, Charlie,
please.
The price is stable. Yes, take this one…” she was saying to a clerk. “Give me puts on GT at market, immediately. Yes. One-point-six million at the money.
Yes.
At the money.” The line was silent a moment. “You sure, Charlie?”

“This is a bullet to the moon, Jane.”

“Biggest bet of your life, Charlie?”

“Oh, Jane, not even close.”

Outside his cab a silky red Rolls glided past. “Got it?” he asked.

“Not quite. You going to tell me the play, Charlie?”

“When it goes through, Jane.”

“We'll get the order back in a minute or two.”

Die on the shitter, Charlie thought. Could happen to anyone. Happened to Elvis Presley, matter of fact.

“Charlie?”

“Yes.”

“We have your puts. One-point-six million, GT, at the price of sixty-six.” He heard the keys clicking.

“
Now
tell me?” Jane pleaded.

“I will,” Charlie said. “Just give me the confirmation for the tape.”

While she repeated the price and the volume of the order, he looked out the window to see how close the taxi was to the FCC. He'd first visited the club in 1970, when it was full of drunken television and newspaper journalists, CIA people, Army intelligence, retired British admirals who had gone native, and crazy Texans provisioning the war; since then, the rest of Hong Kong had been built up and torn down and built up all over again, but the FCC still stood, tucked away on a side street.

“I just want to get my times right,” Charlie told Jane when she was done. “It's now a few minutes after 9:00 p.m. on Tuesday in Hong Kong. What time are you in London?”

“Just after 2:00 p.m.”

“London markets are open about an hour more?”

“Yes,” Jane said.

“New York starts trading in half an hour.”

“Yes.”

“I need you to stay in your office and handle New York for me.”

She sighed. “I'm due to pick up my son from school.”

“Need a car, a new car?”

“Everybody needs a new car.”

“Just stay there a few more hours, Jane. You can pick out a Mercedes tomorrow morning and charge it to my account.”

“You're a charmer, Charlie.”

“I'm serious. Charge my account.”

“Okay, will you
please
tell me?”

Of course he would, but because he needed to get the news moving. “Sir Henry Lai just died. Maybe fifteen minutes ago.”

“Sir Henry Lai…”

“The Macao gambling billionaire who was in deep talks with GT—”

“Yes! Yes!” Jane cried. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“It's not just a rumor?”

“Jane, you don't trust old Charlie Ravich?”

“It's dropping! Oh! Down to sixty-four,” she cried. “There it goes! There go ninety thousand shares! Somebody else got the word out! Sixty-three and a—Charlie, oh Jesus, you beat it by maybe a minute.”

He told her he'd call again shortly and stepped out of the cab into the club, a place so informal that the clerk just gave him a nod; people strode in all day long to have drinks in the main bar. Inside sat several dozen men and women drinking and smoking, many of them American and British journalists, others small-time local businessmen who long ago had slid into alcoholism, burned out, boiled over, or given up.

He ordered a whiskey and sat down in front of the Bloomberg box, fiddling with it until he found the correct menu for real-time London equities. He was up millions and the New York Stock Exchange had not even opened yet. Ha! The big American shareholders of GT, or, more particularly, their analysts and advisers and market watchers, most of them punks in their thirties, were still tying their shoes and kissing the mirror and soon—very soon!—they'd be saying hello to the receptionist sitting down at their screens. Minutes away! When they found out that Sir Henry Lai had died in the China Club in Hong Kong at 8:45 p.m. Hong Kong time, they would assume, Charlie hoped, that because Lai ran an Asian-style, family-owned corporation, and because as its patriarch he dominated its governance, any possible deal with GT was off, indefinitely. They would then reconsider the price of GT, still absurdly stratospheric, and dump it fast. Maybe. He ordered another drink, then called Jane.

“GT is down five points,” she told him. “New York is about to open.”

“But I don't see
panic
yet. Where's the volume selling?”

“You're not going to see it here, not with New York opening. I'll be sitting right here.”

“Excellent, Jane. Thank you.”

“Not at all. Call me when you're ready to close it out.”

He hung up, looked into the screen. The real-time price of GT was hovering at fifty-nine dollars a share. No notice had moved over the information services yet. Not Bloomberg, not Reuters.

He went back to the bar, pushed his way past a couple of journalists.

“Another?” the bartender asked.

“Yes, sir. A double,” he answered loudly. “I just got very bad news.”

“Sorry to hear that.” The bartender did not look up.

“Yes.” Charlie nodded solemnly. “Sir Henry Lai died tonight, heart attack at the China Club. A terrible thing.” He slid one hundred Hong Kong dollars across the bar. Several of the journalists peered at him.

“Pardon me,” asked one, a tall Englishman with a riot of red hair. “Did I hear you say Sir Henry Lai has
died?
”