The Secret (40 page)

At least he had the sensitivity not to bring Chang Li.

Or maybe she was not available.

“I had supposed,” I said to Zhang, “you would stay in Guangzhou and escort Liz McAllister to your shops.”

“This I did for two days,” he said. “Your young woman asks many questions.”

“Good,” I said. “That’s her job.”

“She is a very intelligent young woman.”

He did not offer a run to Macau or an overnight stay on the boat. We were at home before midnight.

I wish, though, that I had known who owned the boat we were on that evening.

*   *   *

We flew from Hong Kong to Beijing—my father, Vicky, and I, with Charlie Han—and landed on an airport that did little credit to the People’s Republic. We were treated courteously and efficiently and moved to our waiting limousine with no trouble, but the airport terminal was shabby. Someone told me later that they are building a new one. I hope so.

The drive to our hotel was uninteresting, on an expressway that might have been seen in Los Angeles except the Chinese characters on the signs—which were also in English.

Our hotel was the Sheraton Great Wall. It was even more opulent than the hotels in Shenzhen and Guangdong.

Even so, it told me something about China: There was a serious unemployment problem there. The hotel was overstaffed. We would observe that one little girl did nothing all day but run a dry mop over the marble floors of the lobby. Twenty minutes after she had mopped a given area, she would be back to do it again. You could not press an up or down button to call an elevator. A young man in blue blazer would do that for you. You could not press the button for your floor. He would step in and do that for you. On your floor you could not take an ice bucket to the ice machine. You hardly got out your door before someone in blue blazer would appear to take it for you.

Liz was there, luxuriating. She moved into my father’s room, rather than him moving into hers. The hotel staff noticed. When they returned to their room at night,
two
servings of hot water and
two
sets of tea bags would be waiting.

Liz introduced my father to ginseng tea. He acquired the taste, as I had.

The first Beijing store would be in the Sheraton Great Wall hotel, in a mall just off the lobby. It was far more open than any Cheeks store in the States. People strolling along the marble-floored corridor would have a full view of the merchandise, the clerks, and the customers. In fact, there was no door, no windows; the store was open to the mall, and it would be open twenty-four hours a day.

The store was already open and doing business, even though we were there for its official opening.

I suppose I have to admit that we remained coy about our inventory. We still kept what we thought of as bolder items—especially fetishist things—halfway concealed. The Chinese were realistic. If a pair of panties was attractive and might sell, they displayed it, no matter that it had no crotch at all. Mannequins stood about in leather handcuffs and leg restraints, some of them clothed in fetishist rubber and vinyl. Westerners gawked. The Chinese were interested or not interested and regarded our merchandise as they would any other.

The first night in Beijing Bai Fuyuan took us to dinner in a club that featured Chinese opera. The performance on the stage was highly stylized—I thought stiff. The performers wore makeup so heavy that you could not tell when one came on stage if it was an actor you had seen before or a different one. They sang, much of it falsetto. They gesticulated wildly. The dancing was athletic, involving leaps. For us it was all but impossible to follow the story lines, even though the programs summarized them in English.

It was a memorable experience. I wouldn’t want to see much more of it, but I was glad I had seen this much.

My father was bored.

Over dinner he presented Liz a gift. When she opened the box and found a black sheer-and-satin teddy, she blushed deeply. It had been custom made to fit her, in Hong Kong, on the order of Charlie Han. I tried, but I frankly could not imagine how she would look wearing it.

The next day we attended the formal opening of the shop, which was held not in the shop but in a meeting room in the hotel. It was much like the show I had attended in Guangzhou. My father spoke briefly and said the same sort of thing I had said in Guangzhou. That night he saw himself on Beijing television, speaking Chinese.

The next day we set out in limousines to drive north of Beijing to the Great Wall of China, stopping along the way for a visit to the famous Ming tombs.

“There’s something funny going on here,” my father said as we rolled out of Beijing.

He and I, Vicky and Liz, sat in the backseat of the car. In front was a chauffeur and an interpreter. A glass separated the front and back seats. I was not sure the interpreter and chauffeur could not hear. I gestured that that might be the case, and my father nodded.

He went on. “The stuff Bai sends to the States is a shade off our colors. What he’s selling in Beijing is an exact match of the original color. What’s he got in mind?”

I suggested an answer. “He could prove that what we’re selling in the States, labeled ‘Made in Hong Kong,’ was in fact made in China, since the color is wrong.”

“Which gets him what?” my father asked.

“It’s not all odd colors,” Vicky said. “I noticed a few items in the shop that are exact duplicates of our items.”

“I’d like to know why that is,” my father said.

“Well, let me ask Liz a question,” I said. “What about Zhang Feng’s chips? Do they follow Malloy’s designs absolutely? Or are there little differences?”

“There are little differences,” she said. “Nonperformance differences. Zhang’s chips do precisely what Tom designed them to do, without question. But there are small differences in layout. An expert can tell how Zhang’s chips differ. To be perfectly frank with you, some of Zhang’s differences improve performance—which he would use to explain if you asked him why he deviated from the Malloy design.”

“He would say he improved on it,” my father commented.

She nodded. “He would say he improved on it.”

“Okay,” I said. “Bai Fuyuang could say his all-but-imperceptible deviations from our color standards
improve
our merchandise, make it more attractive.”

“Then,” asked my father, “why is some of the merchandise in his Beijing store dyed to our exact specifications?”

“Easy,” said Vicky. “He’s selling some merchandise he’s not manufacturing in China.”

“Meaning…?”

“Meaning he’s ripping us off somewhere, some way.”

We had to pause to think about that. The implications were too complex to be considered in a minute’s thought.

*   *   *

What can I say about the Great Wall of China? What can I say that hasn’t been said? Just this—that you don’t climb the Great Wall; you climb
on
it. There are places where it has been restored to make climbing possible for the average man or woman. Where we went, you were lifted to the Wall on a modern cable car. From the station at the top you could climb and walk a half mile or so in either direction. I’m glad I did it. I am not glad my father tried. He was too old for it, and even with help he could not do it.

That experience made me more aware than I had been before of my father’s age. I knew he was beyond the age when he could do anything and everything, but seeing him struggle, flushed in the face, on those irregular stone steps made me acutely aware of his vulnerability.

And, I suppose, of my own.

57

JERRY

I did not tell Therèse that I fooled around with Liz. I am not sure she would have found that particularly distressing. What counted for Therèse was that we had a pleasant home in a pleasant place where she could indulge in her pleasant activities and never be challenged. What is more, she had an identity. Maybe for the first time in five decades she was not the girl who had been stripped, had her head shaved, and had been marched naked through the streets of Lyon. She was Mrs. Jerry Cooper, a gentle, intelligent, amusing Frenchwoman, married to an odd American who sold scanties. To our neighbors in Fort Lauderdale we were a little eccentric and the more interesting for it.

Did I love Therèse? Absolutely. She was a comfort and a companion, and I knew I was lucky to have her.

Liz had nothing to do with that, and Liz understood. Big and gawky though Liz might be, she was smart as hell. She needed respect and got it, but she needed affection also, and men could take advantage of her. I determined I wouldn’t. So it wouldn’t be that way, I made sure we understood each other, from the beginning. I would enjoy her. I hoped she would enjoy me. But she was never to imagine I was in love with her, and she was not to allow herself to fall in love with me. That was how it had to be.

Liz was one hundred percent at liberty to involve herself with another man, anytime. I had one reservation, which I did not mention to her. She was not to give herself to my son, Len. And I think she had thought about it.

Her reaction to being given a sheer black teddy, sized for her big body, was endearing. She wore it that night in our hotel room in Beijing and every night after that until I gave her other things. Back in Hong Kong I asked Charlie Han to have panties—including crotchless ones—and bras made up for her. It amused Charlie, I am sure, to have a strip panel made up for Liz.

What in the world would she do with it? Charlie must have smiled and wondered.

Len described Liz with the word Rubenesque. I didn’t know what that meant. I even had to ask him how to spell it. He showed me some pictures in an art book, to illustrate. So okay, she was Rubenesque, but I would rather have had her than some stringbean model—or, for that matter, any little Chinese girl I saw. Liz McAllister was a
woman,
all woman, every pound of her.

Len used another word. He said her hooters were enormous. I guess they were. I liked her big, shiny-pink nipples. She had an ample tummy with a deep, dark navel, a fleshy butt, and chubby arms and legs. She had a forest of pubic hair. It took some convincing to get her to show all these things. But when she did, and when I praised them, it made her ingenuously happy.

It was easy to make Liz happy.

She gave sloppy head, bobbing up and down energetically, with enthusiasm, and slavering, and watching her do it was almost as good as feeling it.

And she could talk about anything. She had the education I had never had myself but had seen to it that Len had. If Len had told her she was Rubenesque, she would have known exactly what he meant.

Hell. Liz was a fun girl. I was going to be in Hong Kong another ten days after we returned from Beijing. She was supposed to go back to Houston. I decided to keep her with me. Apart from everything else, she would be company on that long, long flight.

*   *   *

Len pressed Charlie Han on the question of why Bai Fuyuan could not match our colors precisely, and also on the question of why some of the merchandise in the Beijing store did match.

“I’ve been worrying about that,” Charlie said.

We were at dinner at Mozart Stub’n, the Viennese restaurant I looked on as a refuge from Chinese cuisine. Vicky and Liz were with us. The place was within walking distance from our apartment building, and we had become known there.

“If he can make some items with exactly matching colors, why can’t he make others?” I asked.

“It’s not a matter of some items and other items,” said Vicky. “It was different examples of the same items. I looked very closely. The same panty or teddy was piled up with those slightly nonmatching colors.”

“Which means…?” I asked.

“Which means,” she said, “that not all his merchandise comes from his establishments in China. He’s somehow getting his hands on some of
our
merchandise.”

“I think he’s not matching the colors because he doesn’t want to match them,” said Len. “He’s got some reason for wanting to be able to distinguish what he makes for the Cheeks label from what is made here and elsewhere.”

“I wish we could prove that,” I said.

“Why bother?” Charlie asked. “The line is making a nice profit, so…”

“I’m going to talk with Henry Wu,” said Len. “I want to know if the dyes he uses for us are unique.”

“I wouldn’t want Bai to think he can pull a fast one on us,” I said. “He had better understand who he is dealing with.”

*   *   *

The next day we received an invitation to dinner from a man I had never met and Len had never met. His name was Yasheng Lin, and he was identified to us by Charlie Han as a Hong Kong billionaire.

I should have done more homework on Hong Kong billionaires. I had supposed that the world’s real money men lived in the States chiefly, with a few in the U.K. maybe some in Germany, and a few in France—with, I should add, some in Japan.

I’d had no idea who lived on the Peak.

A Mercedes limousine picked us up at our apartments and set off on a climbing route that would take us to the highest elevations of Hong Kong.

We arrived at a compound. Like everyone else, I suppose, I had seen the
Godfather
movies and carried in my mind an image of the Coreleone compound. The Yasheng compound was the same, for real.

A wall surrounded it. We entered through a gate ostensibly guarded by a turbaned Sikh but in fact guarded by ominous little Gurkhas hovering in the shadows.

Inside the compound we faced an Edwardian mansion. But the compound also contained at least half a dozen homes on a private street inside the walls. Just inside the gate was a garage that housed three Rolls cars and three more Mercedes. To its left was a broad swimming pool faced by cabanas.

“I wanted you to see,” Charlie Han said before we left the car, “how Hong Kong billionaires live.” Then he added ominously, “The Honorable Yasheng Lin could buy Gazelle, Incorporated out of pocket change.”

I glanced at Len. He stared at me. What had led Charlie Han to make that statement?

As we entered the mansion, the word
taipan
came to mind. This, surely, had been the home of some rich and powerful British trader. I wondered how long it had been owned by a Chinese.