EPTNick told me to forget you.
Then he'd told me to run. But when I hung up the cheap Nokia on his excited Belgian-accented chatter, I'd rung your number, dying words of advice be damned. The second sentence in our phone call had been an offer to pay for my ticket here with your frequent flyer miles. I should have ran. You only had enough miles in that account to pay for a one-way fare.
I remember Nick leaning against the padded bar in the dark lounge of a Shanghai hotel, some street he called Avenue Joffre, his hands describing different spheres of influence, internal rivalries, the arc of a particular political career, a point of weakness he had discovered in the armor of some city development corporation.
For Nick, it ran in the family. His dad had run guns in Lebanon, and now Nick was running money out of China, a middleman between the great socialist vanguard and their appetite for Vancouver real estate and British boarding schools.
I see Nick grinning, talking fast, dismissing my ventures into inter-faction disputes with a shake of his head. Noblesse, he said, have to find that Nobility. He made you remember the capital N. Noblesse was Nick's grail, that essential fraction of bloodline, nontransferable, locked in the veins of China's revolutionary offspring.
You can't put N down on paper, Nick said, can't punch Noblesse into a financial model. The money was in finding the right racehorse to bet upon. Nick was smooth, the severity of his dark English suits offset by a boyish forelock that wouldn't say in place. I never liked the way the effect was ruined when he stepped back from the bar, his right shoulder skewed at an angle no Savile Row tailor could conceal. Someone had run him over with a minibus in Tianjin, and nobody quite knew how to put him back together again.
I guess I went with him because he said he was after that nobility. And somewhere out there, on our way to find the Red bluebloods, I found you, Alex.
The Buena Vista Inn is a two-star footnote in the foggy hills above Jiangbei International. Square concrete boxes fifteen feet high and sixty feet across, tossed about like a toddler's Lego blocks in the lush hills off the main highway to the airport. Each bungalow has a new South Korean flat-screen mounted flush against identical bamboo bookcases. I spend whole days watching Thai singing contests and old Chinese war movies. Sometimes I hold your gun in my hand.
Even now, I can hear the jets, laced into holding patterns over Jiangbei. I close my eyes and imagine the sharp, white contrails fading, losing definition.
You walked into a bar in Sanlitun, the first time I saw you, eyes cut open by Colombian blow and a three-and-a-half million won worth of plastic surgery. Sky-blue, faux-Nordic contact lenses, Asian cheekbones. I remember you dumping your purse out on the bed, later, in some hotel room, pawing through your makeup. A crumpled wad of hot pink renminbi, glitter-encased AR eyepiece, Australian passport with a gold kangaroo inlay, and the Czech nine-millimeter.
That night, while we practiced your act, you told me your story. Your father had been a cadre in Beijing, but now he was disgraced, disowned, cast down by the Party Organization Bureau, final arbiters of who gets promoted and who doesn't. That night, your mother was Japanese, and I listened as you spun out those summers in Osaka for me, the pigeons in Starlight Square like a soft, brown carpet. I never asked what your father might have done to earn his disgrace.
The next morning, I watched you dress; watched the swing of your dark, straight hair, how it draped downwards, a perfect vertical, every strand in parallel. Now the Party is going to kill me.
The boxes of Buena Vista are varnished in cream stucco, concrete blocks under storybook pastels. Paint flakes away when I pound on the walls, looking for the bugs I know are there. I look up as the jets rise out of Jiangbei, passage home, distant now as the moon. Nick was quick to see how we could use you, but not sharp enough to credit you with ambition, much less revenge. But then he never lay all night with you on the beach at Qinhuangdao, never listened to your nightmares, never heard an entire imagined childhood shift under those stars, shift and roll over, your child's mouth opening to reveal some fresh past, always the one, you swore, that was really and finally the truth. I didn't care, holding your hips while the sand cooled against your skin.
Once you left me, ran back to the beach saying you'd forgotten our key. I found it in the door and went after you, to find you ankle-deep in the surf, your smooth back rigid, trembling; your eyes far away. You couldn't talk. You were shivering. Gone. Shaking for different pasts and a better future. Baby, you left me here.
You left me all your things. This gun. Your makeup, all the shadows and blushes capped in plastic. Your Samsung tablet, a gift from Nick, with a script you authored. Sometimes I play that back, watching each actor cross the little silver screen.
A Japanese front man. A Cayman Islands shell company. A San Jose startup. Two different Vancouver real estate firms. A New York brokerage. A D.C. law firm. A London hedge fund. Six accounts spread across four Geneva banks. Plane tickets to Frankfurt International, season tickets to Bayern Munich. And a new job in Zurich.
Expensive, Xandra, but then Suisse was footing our bills. Later, you made them pay even more, but by then you were already gone.
Wang drew up that list for you. In bed, probably. Wang Youhui. Argent had him. Suisse wanted him.
He was hot. Noblesse oblige, and lots of it. Nick followed princelings the way certain London neighborhoods follow footballers. Nick wanted Wang Youhui so bad he could taste it.
He'd sent me to Hong Kong three times before you turned up, just to have a look-and-see at Wang. Not to make a pass or even to give him a wink and a nod. Just to watch.
Wang showed all the signs of having settled in. He'd found an Australian girl with a taste for Burberry jackets and saving earthquake orphans. He'd bought a new penthouse in a very expensive building on a very expensive hilltop. He'd even learned to drive on the left. I came back and told Nick we'd never touch him.
You touched him for us, baby. You touched him just right.
Our Suisse contacts were like specialized cells protecting the parent organism. We were mutagens, Nick and I, dubious agents adrift on the dark side of the Yangtze.
When we had you in place in Singapore, we offered them Wang. They didn't even blink. Dead calm in an Upper East Side hotel room. They said they had to think about it.
Nick then spoke of Suisse's primary competitor in the recapitalization game, let it fall out naked, broke the protocol forbidding the use of proper names.
They had to think about it, they said again. Nick gave them three days.
I took you to Phuket a week before I took you to Singapore. I remember you with your hair tucked back into a gray baseball cap, your high Mongol cheekbones reflected in the windows of the yacht. Strolling down Soi Bangla to the pre-1997 harbor, past the glass-roofed Mercado selling betel nuts out of Cambodia. The old Ritz, warm in our room, dark, with all the soft weight of Asia pulled over us like a quilt. I could enter you in your sleep. You were always ready. Seeing your lips in a soft, round O of surprise, your face about to sink into the thick, white pillow--archaic linen of the Ritz. Inside you I imagined all the neon, the crowds surging around Lan Kwai Fong, wired electric night. You moved that way, rhythm of a new age, dreamy and far from any nation's soil.
When we flew to Singapore, I installed you in Wang's wife's favorite hotel, Bencoolen Street. Quiet, solid, the lobby tiled like a marble chessboard, with brass elevators smelling of lemon oil and small cigars. It was easy to imagine her there, the distinct patterning on her Burberry jackets reflected in polished Carrara product, but we knew she wouldn't be there, not this trip.
She was off to the Genting Highlands, and Youhui was in Singapore for a conference. When the rest of the Argent team checked in, you were out of sight. Mr. Wang arrived an hour later, alone.
Imagine an alien, Nick once said, who's come here to identify the planet's dominant form of intelligence. The alien has a look, then chooses. What do you think he picks? I probably shrugged. The corporates, Nick said, the multinationals. Then a long pull from a mug of Trappist ale. The blood of a corporation is power, not people. The structure is independent of the individual lives that comprise it. Capital as a life form. Not the Noblesse lecture again, I said.
Argent isn't like that, he said, ignoring me.
Argent was deep, invisible, ruthless. An atavism. Argent was all N.
I remember Nick talking about the nature of Wang's connections. Four great-grandparents who all were high-ranking guerrilla commanders in the Long March, a grandfather who had been the Premier, an uncle who was now the General Secretary. Pure, Nick called it, pure influence. He said Wang was indispensable, the kind of epicurean dealmaker who can make two phone calls in an afternoon and cement a multibillion dollar merger--or scuttle it entirely. Privatization rights, Nick said, his throat tight with the sheer wealth of it, the high, thin smell of tax-free, riskless billions that clung to those two words.
Suisse wanted Wang, but his N was deep enough to worry them. They wanted him to work in isolation from his homeland. I went to Zurich, to the old city, by the See. I found a private bank that was still handling African dictators' accounts left over from the cold war. I bought it, with Suisse's money, then installed a swarthy Greek to finish the set-up.
Alexandra, I remember you in Bahnhofstrasse, sometimes. Close my eyes in this box and I can see you there--all the glitter, crystal maze of the boutiques, the smell of new clothes. I see your cheekbones ride past chrome racks of Parisian leathers. Sometimes I hold your hand.
We thought we'd found you, baby, but really, you'd found us. Now I know you were looking for us, or for someone like us. Nick was delighted, grinning over our find: such a pretty new tool, bright as any scalpel. Just the thing to help us sever a stubborn nobleman, like Wang, from the jealous parent-body of Argent Accord. You must have been searching a long time, looking for a way to get back at him for all those nights down Sanlitun. Nights you carefully cut from the scattered deck of your past.
My own past had gone down years before, lost with all hands, no trace. Nick--well, I understood. He had a late-night habit of emptying his wallet, shuffling through his identification. He'd lay the pieces out in different patterns, rearrange them, wait for a picture to form. I knew what he was looking for.
I guess you were doing the same thing with your childhoods. In Buena Vista tonight, I choose from your deck of pasts.
I choose the original version, the famous Chaoyang hotel room text, recited to me that first night in bed. I choose the disgraced father, the Party man. The Party. How perfect. And the Japanese mother, the summers in Osaka, the soft blanket of pigeons in the Starlight Square afternoon.
I came in out of the gentle kiss of a Swiss winter into a heated Hilton room. Snowflakes dissolving, clinging cold to the small of my back while I read the message you'd relayed through Nick. You were in all the way: Wang would leave his wife. It wasn't difficult for you to communicate with us, even through the clear, tight film of Singaporean surveillance; you'd shown Wang the perfect little place for bubble tea. Your favorite waiter was white-haired, kindly, walked with a limp, and worked for us. You left your messages under the linen napkin.
All day today I watched a small helicopter cut a tight grid above this adopted country of mine, the land of my exile, Buena Vista Inn. Watched from my bedroom window as its patient shadow criss-crossed the glittering emerald hills. Close. Very close.
I left Zurich for Berlin. I met with a Swede in a bar and began to arrange for Wang's defection. It would be a complicated business, intricate as the brass gears and sliding mirrors of Victorian stage magic, but the desired effect was simple enough. Wang would send a pre-arranged message to all his clients one day. Then he would throw his headset into the Strait of Malacca and vanish. The Argent-arranged girlfriend who followed him constantly would be politely trapped at Genting.
They know how to do business promptly in Berlin. I was even able to arrange a last night with you. I kept it secret from Nick; he might not have approved. Now I've forgotten the town's name. I knew it for an hour on the autobahn, under a gray Rhenish sky, and forgot it in your arms.
The rain began sometime towards morning. Our room had a single window, high and narrow, where I stood and watched the rain fur the river with silver needles. Sound of your breathing. The river flowed beneath low, stone arches. The street was empty. You said something about Europe being a museum.
I'd already booked your flight to Zurich, out of Tempelhof, under your newest name. You'd be on your way when I pulled the final string and dropped Wang out of sight.
You'd left your purse on the dark old bureau. While you slept, I went through your things, removed anything that might clash with the new cover I'd bought for you in Berlin. I took the Czech nine-millimeter, your tablet, and your passport with the gold kangaroo. I took a new passport, Korean, from my bag, a Google eyepiece registered in the same name, and tucked them into your purse.
My hand brushed something flat. I drew it out, held the thing, a USB drive. Antique, no labels.
It lay there in the palm of my hand, all that death. Latent, coded, waiting.
I stood there and watched you breathe, watched your breasts rise and fall. Saw your lips slightly parted, and in the jut and fullness of your lower lip, the faintest suggestion of a love bite.
I put the flash drive back into your purse. When I lay down beside you, you rolled against me, waking, on your breath all the eighteen-carat night of a new Asia, the future rising in you like a bright fluid, washing me of everything but the moment. That was your magic, that you lived outside of history, all now.
And you knew how to take me there. For the last time, you took me.
While I was shaving, I heard you empty your makeup into my bag. I'm Korean now, you said, I'll want a new look.
Mr. Wang Youhui went missing in Singapore, in a quiet street off Bencoolen, two blocks from his wife's favorite hotel. On a clear afternoon in October, in the presence of a dozen expert witnesses, Mr. Wang vanished.
Somewhere, offstage, the oiled teeth of Victorian clockwork. I sat in a hotel room in the Frankfurt and took the Swede's call. It was done, Wang down the rabbit hole and headed for Zurich. I poured myself a drink and thought about your legs.
Nick and I met in Capitol International a day later, in a sushi bar in the China Eastern terminal. He'd just stepped off a SwissAir jet, exhausted and triumphant.
Loves it there, he said, meaning Wang. Loves her too, he said, meaning you.
I smiled. You'd promised to meet me in Sanlitun in a month.
Your cheap little gun in Buena Vista Inn. The chrome is starting to peel. The machining is clumsy, blurry Czech stamped into rough steel. The grips are dark gray plastic, molded with an eagle on either side. Like a child's toy.
Nick ate sushi in the terminal, high on what we'd done. The shoulder had been giving him trouble, but he said he didn't care. Money now for better doctors. Money now for everything. Somehow it didn't seem very important to me, the money we'd gotten from Suisse. Not that I doubted our new wealth, but that last night with you had left me convinced that it all came to us naturally, in the new order of things, as a function of who and what we were.
Poor Nick. With his blue oxford shirts crisper than ever, his Savile Row suits darker and richer even better tailored to his crooked frame. Sitting there in the airport bar, dabbling raw fish into a little ceramic rectangle holding horseradish, he had less than a week to live. Dark now, and the boxes of Buena Vista are lit all night by floodlights, high on metal masts daubed with brown paint and fake leaves. Nothing here seems to be what it is. Everything is masked.
Those last few days in Beijing, Nick and I had adjoining suites on the fifty-third floor of the Hyatt. Or, rather, we had the entire fifty-third floor to ourselves. No other guests. No contact with Suisse. They paid us, then erased us from official corporate memory.
But Nick couldn't let go. Wang was his baby, his pet project. He'd developed a proprietary, almost fatherly, interest in Wang. He loved him for his Noblesse. So Nick had me keep in touch with my Greek friend, who was willing to keep a very partial eye on Wang's boutique shop for us.
When he patched in, he was in a sailboat. Swans fluttered back and forth behind him, white specks against the blue See and red tile roofs. Someone was moving security into Zurich, he told us. Nick nodded. After less than a dozen calls, I saw the change in Nick, a tension, a look of abstraction. I'd find him at the window, staring down fifty-three floors into Tuanjiehu Park, lost in something he wouldn't talk about. Ask him for a more detailed description, he said, after one particular call. He thought a man our contact had seen entering Wang's shop might be Brunner, Suisse's leading equities man.
That was Brunner, Nick said, after the next call. Another call and he got an even bigger fish: Uncle Wang himself, General Secretary to one and a half billion people. By then, it was obvious that Wang the Younger was setting up something massive in Zurich. Nick shook his head. He was a professional, a specialist, and he saw the quick strokes of Suisse as rubbing nerves in Beijing in exactly the wrong way.
Christ, he said, pouring himself a Blue Label, if word of this ever gets out to the others in the Politburo... He shook his head.
It's over, I said. Not our problem. You've sold them Wang. Now forget about it.
He drank his scotch and shrugged. You're right, it's over.
I did go to bed, but the phone woke me. Zurich again, the white static of an old-fashioned encrypted satellite link, a rush of Greek, my friend too frightened to use fiber-optics.
Suisse didn't freeze our credit, they caused it to evaporate. Fairy gold. One minute we were millionaires in the world's hardest currency, and the next we were paupers. I woke Nick.
We're fucked., he said. They're all dead. Sweet Jesus.
I watched him slit his battered suitcase apart with a butterfly knife. He had three gold bars glued in there with rubber cement. Soft plates, each one proofed and stamped by some extinct African government. I should've seen it, he said, his voice flat.
I shook my head. I think I said your name, maybe in hope, maybe in anguish. And that's when Nick told me to forget you.
Suisse wants us dead. They'll assume we crossed them. Get on the net and check our credit.
Our credit was gone. The Cayman Islands bank denied that either of us had ever had an account. And this is when Nick told me to run.
So we did. Out a service door, into the Beijing traffic, and down into Sanlitun. That was when I understood for the first time the real extent of Suisse's reach.
Every door was closed. People I'd done business with for two years saw us coming, and I'd see steel shutters slam behind their eyes. We'd get out before they had a chance to reach for the phone. The surface tension of the underworld had been tripled, and everywhere we'd meet that same taut membrane and be thrown right back. No chance to sink.
Suisse let us run for most of that first day. When we tried to split up, they sent someone to break Nick's back a second time. He was still giving me his last words of advice--then, silence. I didn't seem them do it, but I saw him fall. We were in a Wangfujing department store an hour before closing, and I saw his arc off that polished mezzanine, down into all the wares of the new, new China. They missed me somehow, and I just kept running. Nick took the gold with him, but I had ten thousand Renminbi in my pocket. I ran. All the way to the airport, all the way to Chongqing on your ticket, all the way to Buena Vista.
Now it's time.
Come with me, Alex. Hear the neon humming on the road to Jiangbei International. A few late moths trace stopmotion circles along the floodlights that shine on my box. And the funny thing, baby, is how sometimes you just don't seem real to me. Nick once said you were ectoplasm, a ghost called up by the extremes of economics. Ghost of the new century, congealing on a thousand beds in a thousand Hyatts, a thousand Westins.
Now I've got your gun in my hand, jacket pocket, and my hand seems so far away. Disconnected. I remember my Greek friend forgetting his English, trying to get it across in four languages I barely understood, and I thought he was telling me Zurichsee was on fire. Not the See. Wang the Elder, Brunner, and our friend Wang Youhui. Fusion, he was whispering, tiny nuclear device. Smart Nick, he put it together on the run. I didn't even have to mention finding the drive in your bag in Germany.
Someone had mounted a silent coup, he said. Then the other generals and ministers had given you the drive. And you finally got your revenge.
Revenge for the sins of the Wang family against your family, a family feud now playing out in a thousand state-owned boardrooms and regional Party offices across Asia. And the wave of privatizations? They would happen--but under the auspices of Argent Accord, S.A. Argent. Deep, invisible, ruthless--Noblesse oblige.
And I was shouting at that Greek voice, asking, pleading, begging for what happened to the girl, to Wang's woman. Vanished, he said.
The whir of Victorian clockwork.
So Nick had to fall, fall with his three pathetic plates of gold, and snap his spine for the last time. On the floor of a Wangfujing department store, every shopper staring in the instant before they screamed.
I just can't hate you, baby.
And the helicopter is back, no lights at all, landing in the access road from the airport. I can see the dark suits disembarking. Could be Suisse, could be Argent, could be the Party.
But I just wish--I just wish it were you.
