EPThttp://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?topic_id=394307
+ Show Spoiler [l is for the way you look] +
Sometime in 2011
Politics, as they say, is a cruel, jealous mistress. Maybe that's why Old Zhang was single. Not just single--he never made a move. Never ever, ever. Bad mission efficiency, I say, but he would always sit there, one eye on us, another on his phone, flipping through whatever work he had for the day.
Here he was, this hotshot forty-year-old cadre of vice-ministerial rank, with a resume longer than my--well, you get the idea--straddling a corner couch in some dark, strobe-lit Beijing nightclub, sipping on a cocktail glass filled with ice water, paying for everyone else's drinks while twentysomethings around him pissed away mommy and daddy's money trying to get laid. Sure, sometimes a girl or two or three would crowd him, ask him what he did, try to get a rise out of the old man, but soon they'd grow tired of his monotonic, monosyllabic answers and leave.
He said he liked to hang out with us, that we made him feel young again. Once, as he was leaving the club and walking us to his black Audi, his Burberry trenchcoat flapping behind him like the wings of an enormous bat, I thought I caught him wiping away tears with one gabardine sleeve.
Then he met Persephone. It was one of those moments, you know? Something corny out of a Matthew McConaughey flick. One minute, Shenghan was sitting at our table, making love to his ice-water martini, the next, he was talking to Ms. Fang.
Talking.
To a girl.
With complete sentences.
I nearly dropped the scotch and advocaat I was bringing back from the bar.
We had just wrapped things up with Persephone that last Friday. I'd installed a keylogger into her laptop and swapped her cell for a hacked model. I was going to let her go that night, break it to her gently. Shenghan solved that problem for me.
Mr. Zhang stopped joining us at the club. A few months later, I caught him at a coffeeshop, holding her hand. She had a ring.
The old man and I never mentioned Persephone with each other, even though she was a newly important piece of his personal jigsaw puzzle, and a fading piece of mine. Instead, we busied ourselves with work. I was his bagman by that point, gathering dirt for Old Man Zhang on a dozen other people.
Then I got transferred to the Third Bureau, hunting people doing what I used to do. Takes a thief, as they say. My initial assignment was in Shenyang. It was there that I had another first: Zhang Shenghan and I would have to work with each other on an official basis. We pretended like we were friendly strangers instead of strange friends. It worked.
The firm was some research bureau with a prototype factory attached. They had trouble making high-performance turbine blades for the engines of fighter jets--more trouble than normal, and they thought something was up. All the bad news had drained their balance sheet, too, and Shenghan's equity fund had been brought in as a white knight. The old man told me that before he would open his purse, however, he "needed to figure what the fuck was going on out there."
For once, my official duties and side business coincided. Promotion and a payoff? Hell fuckin' yeah.
But life, as they say, is never that easy.
Read part 11 here (it's a little NSFW):
http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?id=395278
