The Secret (30 page)

“There is a perfectly simple solution,” said Hugh, fixing a quizzical eye on the trail of spilled coffee and the shattered cup. “We get rid of the young woman by promoting her. You fired your regional manager in San Francisco. Send Ms. Gillis out there as his replacement. She’s capable. She can handle it.”

And so it was done.

Len remained as the company’s chief operating officer. But he understood which side his bread was buttered on. I figured by the time I had to stop interfering he would have matured; he would be ready to run the business on his own.

*   *   *

Therèse and I had dinner with Vicky and Len that evening. A heavy snow was falling in New York, and I was glad we had two tickets for Fort Lauderdale on a flight leaving before noon the next day.

Len was glum, but I was in a jolly mood. When we had our before-dinner drinks in hand, I raised my glass and proposed a toast. “To the business that’s gonna grow beyond any dream I ever had. To my son, who’s gonna lead that growth. And—” I paused and laughed. “To my Uncle Harry! Thank you, Uncle Harry, for teaching your nephew to be a fuck
er
and not a fuck
ee!
”

The three others frowned. Vicky and Therèse had no idea what I meant. Len did, sort of. Vicky would insist that he explain, and he’d have to use what was in his genes to put a gloss on what I’d said. It was a good test.

I knew he could do it. He’d better use what was in his genes, because he was going to face other problems damned soon.

47

LEN

As more and more of our manufacturing shifted to the Far East, I spent more and more time in Hong Kong. Our apartment there was in Mid-Levels, a name that refers to the mountainous nature of Hong Kong. The waterfront districts of the city are called Sheung Wan, Admiralty, Central, Wan Chair, and Causeway Bay. Upward there is Mid-Levels, and far above is the Peak. The Peak is the home of the beyond-luxurious estates of Hong Kong’s many billionaires.

Our apartment was in a building on Arbuthnot Street, about a hundred yards up the street from a grim, gray stone building called Victoria Prison. A little more down the slope one came to Hollywood Road. A short walk on that brought one to an interesting feature of Hong Kong: a mile-long escalator that carries people up and down from the upper ends of Mid-Levels to the waterfront.

The apartment was on the twenty-third floor of a thirty-story building. It was nicely appointed, with parquet floors and modern appliances. Real estate is grotesquely expensive per square foot in Hong Kong, so what was really a luxury apartment had only one bathroom. The building had just two apartments on each floor, and when the apartment across the hall became available, we took it too.

That gave us room for something we very much needed: a maid and nanny. The girl we hired was, naturally, a Filipino. She spoke fluent Spanish, reasonably good English, and a bit of Chinese. We gave her a room in the second apartment and generally left the doors open between the two, though we locked them at night and when all of us were away, since the elevator did stop in the foyer between the apartments. The children played happily back and forth between the apartments.

I converted the living room of the second apartment into an office.

We also had enough space for Therèse and my father to live with us when they came out.

Our quarters were idiosyncratic but comfortable. We spent four months of the year in Hong Kong at first, then more.

We tried to avoid the summer months, when the heat and humidity were oppressive. We had to remember that this was a subtropical city, with a climate not unlike Miami’s.

Naturally, I spent much time with Charlie Han. He was our man in Hong Kong, to begin with, but he was also my entry into Hong Kong business.

Speaking Chinese was not the point. Every businessman in Hong Kong spoke perfect English. Their secretaries spoke English. The clerks in stores spoke English. The only language inconvenience I ever had was with cab drivers. Sometimes Charlie would scribble where I wanted to go in Chinese characters, and I would show his note to the driver.

Though my son Jerry, whom we called J. J., was not yet three years old, Vicky decided he should learn Chinese. The earlier a child begins to learn a language, the easier it is for him. Therèse thought he should learn French, but Vicky pointed out that for every one person who could speak French, fifty could speak Chinese. English and Chinese, she said, were the languages of the future and would be essential in business.

I won’t go into the next big question: whether J. J. should be introduced to Cantonese or Mandarin. Vicky decided that, too. It was to be Mandarin Chinese, which eighty or ninety percent of the Chinese spoke.

Vicky began to absorb herself in Chinese culture—something unhappily reminiscent to me of Sue Ellen.

“We’ve got to see something of that country, Len.”

“We’ll go on a tour sometime,” I said.

“Sometime soon.”

“Sometime soon.”

I had business in China. With Charlie Han along to be my interpreter, I made my first venture onto the Mainland by boarding a train at Kowloon Station and traveling about forty minutes through the New Territories and across the border to Shenzhen.

That city was astonishing. In the course of no more than five years it had grown from a town of a few thousand people to a city of three and a half million. This was the result of Deng Xiaoping’s creation of the New Economic Zone, a free-enterprise and free-trade zone in Guangzhou Province. Capitalism flourished there as it flourished nowhere else in the world—for the time being.

Shenzhen was a city of high-rise buildings and luxury hotels, plus of course gridlock traffic made more difficult by tens of thousands of motorbikes and bicycles weaving through the lines of cars and trucks.

We had come there to meet a businessman by the name of Bai Fuyuan, and we did meet him in the dining room of our hotel. The Guangdong Hotel is as luxurious as the Mandarin Oriental in Hong Kong, which means as luxurious as
any
hotel in the States or Europe.

Bai Fuyuan was a rather ordinary-looking Chinese man, with a great mole on his cheek a la Chairman Mao. I guessed his age as fifty, though I had difficulty judging the ages of Chinese people. He wore an impeccably tailored, tropical-weight, double-breasted white suit, with a maroon paisley handkerchief in his breast pocket.

He ordered champagne, and champagne is all we had to drink throughout the dinner. The very finest French champagne, Dom Perignon Rose. Bottle after bottle. Bai was paying, and we drank it like water.

“You have a highly successful merchandising operation in the States,” he said. “It is so successful that you have a large amount of accumulated capital and are looking for investment opportunities.”

He then proceeded to review our financial position. A Wall Street investment banker could not have known more about us than Bai Fuyuan knew. He knew our gross sales, our net profit, the details of our balance sheet, the names and some of the characters of our officers and directors. He knew where we were most successful—the Northeast—and where we were least—the Southwest. He guessed why:

“The Cowboy girls … how do you call them? You have just made a deal to outfit Cowboy cheerleaders. A very good move.” I was astonished. No one was supposed to know about that deal, which we had just made. “The Cheeks merchandise is not suitable for wearing under tight blue jeans. Incidentally, I would be interested in hearing from you an offer to sell me, say, a thousand dozen pairs of skintight blue denim jeans. I think I have a market for them. If you have not a good, economical source, then let us talk about a deal whereby we make the jeans here and sew in the Cheeks label. The label is not unknown here, you know.”

Charlie Han spoke. “I understand there are Cheeks knockoffs for sale in Shanghai.”

“You should be flattered,” said Bai. “Only the best is knocked off for the Chinese market. Gucci, Hermes, Versace … Hart, Schaffner & Marx … Rolex. The government tries to control that. It is not easy.”

“I imagine there is little market for Cheeks merchandise in China,” I said.

“Ah! Forgive me, but you are wrong. We are a nation of a billion and a quarter people. There are Chinese living in the hinterlands who still live as Pearl Buck described. There are men and women here and there who still wear Mao suits—though have you seen any on the streets of Shenzhen? Ours is a confusingly complex country. But I can tell you there are scores of millions of Chinese who make a market for Cheeks lingerie. Look at the girls on the streets! What are they wearing? Black vinyl miniskirts, Izod shirts. What do you think they want to wear under? There is a market here for your line.”

I had to admit I had not seen a Mao suit since I arrived in China—though that had been only hours ago. I had not seen oppressed people trudging to their jobs. I had seen girls with helmets on their heads, clinging to the young men at the handlebars of motorcycles. This was young China. Somewhere, I suppose, there were girls wading in the rice paddies. Not here.

“You were thinking about investment, Mr. Bai,” said Charlie Han.

“Yes.
Investment,
” said Bai. “In the old days, the days of Mao Tse-tung, we used to hear on the radio the endless repetition of a … I suppose we could call it a mantra. It went, ‘A handful of Party persons in power, taking the capitalist road…’ They were criminals, as Mao would have had it. But today, Little Bottle—”

Little Bottle was the meaning of Xiaoping.

“—has turned us all into capitalists. I can offer you investments, gentlemen. For example, you considered investing in a little feeder airline serving three or four states in the American Midwest. Suppose I offer the chance to invest in a regional airline that will serve Guangzhou Province, with service to Hong Kong and Beijing?”

“We know nothing about how airlines are licensed and controlled in China,” I said.

Bai Fuyuan smiled. “Everything in China is licensed and controlled by … how say?… dollars.”

“Meaning?”

“Capitalism is a new idea for us—new, that is, since 1949. We run by no rules. The only rule is: make money! We have no labor rights, no women’s rights, no worries about pollution rules.… We make money the way your robber barons did a century ago. Today, China is the best investment opportunity anyone ever dreamed of.”

“Difficulties in getting your profits out?” I asked.

“Well … some controls. Like all others, they can be avoided. It is usually a matter of some money placed correctly.”

“An airline,” said Charlie Han. “That impresses me as a very big commitment for a company just ready to dip its toes. What else can you offer, Mr. Bai?”

Bai shrugged. “I own a company that copies American videotapes. Our government and yours has agreed that will not happen.” He shrugged. “If I don’t, somebody else will.”

“I’m not quite ready,” I said, “to get into that kind of business.”

“Or CD disks?”

“Or CD disks.”

“We weave wool and manufacture lovely sweaters. They are without labels. You can put in whatever label you like. I can sell you as many as you wish, quality assured.”

I glanced at Charlie. He nodded, almost imperceptibly.

“It is something we can consider,” I said.

“The label must, however, read, ‘Made in Hong Kong.’ There are certain, shall we say, prejudices to overcome. To Americans, ‘Made in China’ means made in Taiwan.”

“Which means made in China,” said Charlie. He was a diplomat.

Bai smiled and nodded. “There will be some small problems in getting the unlabeled sweaters from here to Hong Kong. We can overcome those. And we can negotiate a mutually agreeable price.”

*   *   *

After dinner and half a dozen bottles of Dom Perignon among the three of us, Bai suggested a visit to a nightclub. We went to a very expensive club, designed to separate suckers from as much cash as possible. The lighting, the décor, the furnishings, the food, the drink, the personnel: all were superb and conspicuously costly. That club compared to the Lido in Paris for elaborately staged shows. Businessmen—a few Europeans and Americans, but mostly Japanese—sat on couches with hostesses cuddling up to them, drank champagne and tea, and ate hors d’oeuvres, mostly fruit, from platters placed on low tables. Though most of the hostesses were Chinese, a few were Australians and even Brits. Blondes were especially prized.

Though I didn’t ask for her, I found myself attended by a lovely Eurasian girl in a microskirt and halter. The other men were also attended to by Chinese beauties. We sat on a pair of facing, leather-upholstered couches, with a knee-high table between.

“You American, yes?”

“I am American, yes.”

“My father American. GI. You believe?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“Many do not. Many … well, you know. Where in America you from?”

“New York.”

“Ah, New York! Is the most American place!”

She wasn’t there to make conversation. She never said her name. She let her skirt hike back until I could see her panties. They were not from Cheeks.

Bai explained the whole deal. She could leave the club with me and go with me to a hot-sheet hotel, or even to the Guangzhou Hotel, if I paid the club a fee to release her for the evening and then paid her whatever we might negotiate. I would also have to pay the floor woman in the hotel a fee for allowing me to bring a girl to my room.

“What a hell of a way to make a living,” I muttered to Charlie.

He was not concerned. He had already made a deal with his girl, who was, oddly, a natural blonde, an Australian.

“It’s the way the world goes, Len,” he said. “You may as well take advantage of it. If you don’t, somebody else will. You can’t change anything.”

What kind of guy am I? I don’t know. Here was a pretty little girl available to me for not a lot of money. Did I handle it the way I did because of loyalty to Vicky? I’d like to think so.

I paid the club’s fee for taking out one of its girls. I took her out on the street, where I hailed a cab. Before she got in, I pushed into her hands a thousand Hong Kong dollars—say a hundred and thirty American—and I got in alone and closed the door.