54
JERRY
Our neighbors had been right in telling us that alligators would climb the bank from the canal, nose up to our fence, and then slip back down to the water. Our neighbors to one side had no fence, and an occasional ’gator would reach the street and even enter our driveway. I was tempted to run one over with the car, but I was also told that wildlife fanatics would demand my prosecution.
On the other hand, Therèse had cultivated the friendship of two or three great white herons. She bought chicken necks for them and tossed those out for the herons to feed on. They made no mess. They found the chicken necks on the grass by the pool and gulped them in one swallow. They flew away, did their business somewhere else, and returned—as if they knew better than to dirty the lawns of their benefactors. On the other hand, when they did not find their chicken necks when they thought they should have them they would peck on our glass doors and make a hell of a noise.
This is the kind of thing that held my attention in my retirement in Florida. Do I have to say I was bored? Well, I was, and no amount of fishing or bridge playing—which Therèse had gotten me into with a few neighbors—made me less bored.
Len came home from his latest trip to Hong Kong and flew down to meet with me. We sat on the lanai and watched Therèse’s herons—whom she had named Jake, Pierre, and Lizzie, God knew why—while we talked.
“The problem is, as I see it,” I told him, “we are venturing into two situations where we don’t know much and where we can take one hell of a beating.”
“In the one,” he said, “we are expanding into a field, technology, where we don’t know much; and in the other we are expanding in a field where we know everything, but we will be doing it by joining a partner who wants to lie, cheat, and steal.”
“In an area of the world where we are even more ignorant than we are in the area of technology,” I said.
“We can repair our ignorance of technology,” he said. “And of China, too.”
“This Liz you’ve hired and that professor who is consulting can help us with that,” I said. “Charlie Han knows something of the ways of China. But does he know enough?”
“‘In ways that are mean and tricks that are vain, the heathen Chinee are peculiar,’” Len recited from Bret Harte.
“Whatever that means,” I said. I didn’t know the quotation. I never did get much education.
“The Chinese will play by their own rules, some of which they will make up as they go along,” said Len. “We have to count on that, whether we’re dealing with Zhang or Bai.”
“Well…”
“On the other hand,” he said, “we can import computer chips with Chinese prices, inspect them thoroughly, test them, and install them on Sphere microprocessor boards, which Sphere can then sell at a price reflecting what we paid for the chips. It makes us highly competitive.”
“That’s Zhang’s point, isn’t it? So, what about Malloy’s damned computer?”
“Zhang Feng thinks we should do it. Full of Chinese components, it will sell at an attractive price. If it’s as good as he thinks Malloy is capable of making it, it will be a good front for our microprocessor business.”
I was dubious. “On this one, I’m going to say it depends on how much money we have to put in it. You said that Zhang once said he’d put up the majority of it. Then he said twenty million—”
“Let’s think of another point,” said Len. “If we put up a majority of the dollars, we control Sphere. If Zhang puts up more than we do, he controls Sphere.”
“Not necessarily,” I said. “If Zhang puts up fifty million, he lends it to us, and we buy the stock. A fifty-million-dollar loan is not going to buy him any position in Gazelle.”
Len smiled. “As Zhang always says, we can negotiate.”
* * *
After Len went to bed in the guest room, I sat alone on the lanai, drinking a glass of red wine and pondering.
The night when Uncle Harry and Aunt Lila came to my family’s apartment to tell me my father and mother had been killed, I was broke. That is, I would be shortly, because Harry and my girlfriend, whom he later married, would fuck me out of the few dollars I might have had from my father’s life insurance, and some proceeds from his numbers running. I wasn’t broke, but I was stupid and soon was broke.
I went to work for a pittance and had nothing but a pittance until things got worse—I was drafted. I might have died in combat but for my perforated eardrum that got me classified One-B: noncombatant. In the army I used my skills as a hustler, so that when the war ended I had a stash of money, a beautiful, loving girlfriend, and prospects. I got the North American franchise for Plescassier water, and Uncle Harry tried to fuck me out of that. With the help of guys like Frank Costello and Meyer Lansky I fucked Harry royally, to the tune of two million dollars.
The two million funded the Cheeks shops. From then on I was in the ladies’ undergarments business, as Buddy scornfully put it sometimes; and by now I had so much money I could afford to risk, say, fifty million dollars on microprocessor chips. If I lost it all, it wouldn’t break me, or even come near it.
But it was a very strange turn of fate. From selling sexy scanties I was going into a high-tech industry I knew nothing about. If Giselle had been alive she would have reminded me that when I went into lingerie I had known nothing about that, either. Or about marketing, which had proved to be the key. I’d had to learn.
Well … maybe I wasn’t too old to learn something about this new field. Low-tech to high-tech!
* * *
I should have been more comfortable with the Bai Fuyuan proposition. There was nothing high-tech about that.
In the morning, Len and I talked about it.
“It troubles me,” Len said, “that Bai Fuyuan and Zhang Feng offered almost identical propositions on manufacturing Cheeks goods in China and sneaking them out and back in again as Hong Kong goods.”
“I did what you suggested on the telephone,” I told him. “I had Middleton find out everything he could about Bai and Zhang, focusing on the possibility that they are some way associated. They could find no evidence of it—though God knows the Chinese could find ways to conceal that.”
“I think there’s another possibility,” said Len.
“Which is?”
“That this way of doing business is so common that many operators do it. They are offering the same kind of deal because many rascals do it, and it is an accepted way of working.”
“So what happens to the round-eyes who gets caught?” I asked.
“We’ll have to shield ourselves.”
“I suppose that can be worked out.”
“Let’s be clear about something more,” Len said. “You’ve been in business for a long time and were around when things were done differently. Was it ever, in your observation, a common practice for businessmen to offer girls to sell their deals? I mean, offer girls’ tails to soften up the guy on the other side of negotiations?”
I shook my head. “I have known it to happen. I couldn’t say it was ever common.” I frowned and tried to remember. “Yes, I’ve known it to happen. If you think that’s because I’m so much older than you and was around when things were different, forget it. If anything, it’s more likely today than it was in the 1950s.”
“Well … Zhang Feng will set you up with a girl.”
“You didn’t…?” I asked.
“No,” Len said simply.
“I didn’t think you were that dumb.”
“The other real problem is,” said Len, “are you willing to go to China and shill for Bai’s merchandise?”
I shrugged. “What the hell?”
* * *
We decided to go to Houston again. Therèse had been disappointed with it and was not interested in going this time. Vicky felt she should not leave the kids with Maria any more than was necessary and told Len go on without her. Both women had met Liz McAllister by then and were not concerned about their husbands traveling with
her without their wives.
This guy Tom Malloy was something else again. And so was his wife, the one-time Oilers cheerleader. Hell, for that matter so was Texas something else again, and so was Houston, even if “there are no Texans in Houston.”
The Malloys insisted we must be their guests in their suburban home, and so we wound up in three separate guest bedrooms—Malloy having, not very subtly, determined that neither Len nor I would want to share a bed with Liz. (“I mean, fellas, she’s one helluva woman, ain’t she? I got a sister about her size.”)
Warned by Len, Liz and I brought along swimsuits and the kind of clothes we would need if we were badgered into going to a rodeo—everything but the hats, which we were willing to let the Malloys provide.
Even if it was a business meeting, the Malloys wanted to hold it around the pool, where we would sit sipping bourbon poured over chipped ice.
Len had taken Liz to a Cheeks shop in Manhattan and had her fitted into one of our international-orange swimsuits. There was nothing that girl could have done to conceal her bulk—and, dammit, I wouldn’t have wanted her to; she was handsome in her way and should not have been made to feel she was flawed. The suit uncovered her hips and butt and stretched tight over other parts and left her looking … well, large, but with a grace in the way she carried herself.
Malloy had by now offered a business plan for building Sphere IV and bringing it to market. With American components strictly, it could not be sold for less than $2,895, bare. With GMT parts from China it could go on the market at $1,695, bare. With more RAM, whatever the hell that might be, and greater speed in its CPU, again whatever the hell that might be, it could come up to $2,895, but would then have what the computer community liked to call “blinding speed.”
Malloy talked to Liz about “modems” and about “monitors” and about “CD ROM drives,” which terms my son seemed to understand. I became more painfully conscious that a whole new world existed of which I was ignorant.
“Do you want to fly out to Hong Kong and go over to Guangzhou and see how he manufactures chips?” Len asked.
“Do you want to know what you’re going to find?” Malloy asked. “Tell ’em, Liz.”
“Guangdong Micro-Technology will be an office,” she said. “Likely in an office that does a hundred other kinds of business. The chips come in from twenty or more little shops where people labor over designs to make the tiny CPUs. Zhang Feng has them under contract. He supplies a design from some genius designer who is paid little. The shop does the work. I’ve never been to China, but I understand this is how it works. It’s a cottage industry, so to speak.”
“A cottage industry in so sophisticated…?”
“Once a design is made, making the chip is a matter of very tedious labor,” she said.
“Americans,” said Malloy, “automate the making of chips. But automation costs money. When you have, as they have in China, an endless supply of labor, you have much less need to automate.”
“Well,” I said. “Tell me the downside of this. If their chips pass muster, why not use them?”
“Why not?” said Malloy. “The only thing that bothers me is that we may become dependent on these Chinese chips. What if Zhang Feng doubles his price a year from now?”
“Easy enough, I think,” said Len. “If Zhang doubles his price, we buy from someone else. I’d bet Bai Fuyuan can supply the same. If not he, someone else. Once we enter the market, we’ll get proposals from all sides.”
“Quality, quality, quality, darling,” said Liz. “Everything must be tested, tested, tested. I’d raise our estimated price on machines with Chinese components to include the cost of quality control.”
* * *
Len told me I was lucky the Malloys didn’t insist on dragging us off to a rodeo. Instead, as the sun set, guests began to arrive, and we were to be subjected to a Texas-style pool party, with barbecue.
I’m going to say something first about the barbecue. I’m not entirely sure how they did it. An immense piece of beef—a whole side—was put in a pit where wood smoldered and generated heat. The meat cooked slowly for a very long time; it was cooking all the time we sat at the pool talking business, at least. It was ready when we were ready, and I have never eaten anything better—though it makes a Jewish boy from Brooklyn blush to admit it. The Chinese should learn to do Texas barbecue. And to make the sauce.
It was served on handsome plastic plates from Neiman Marcus, with baked beans, corn on the cob, and all the potato salad or coleslaw you could pile on. With frosted schooners of ice-cold beer. It was lucky we were in swim-suits and by the pool, because our monogrammed napkins were sometimes defeated by our dribbling, and we could best clean ourselves with a plunge in the pool.
The guests were Texans, even if there were supposed to be none in Houston. It was amazing to see how many men had found football cheerleaders for wives. Malloy was not alone in that, though he was fortunate in having found one with brains. They walked around in their skimpy bikinis and open-toed-high-heeled shoes, cowgirl hats, and gaudy gold jewelry.
Well, not all. I didn’t see a woman who would have been taken for a matron back East. But some bikini-clad women had about them a certain hard-bitten charisma, suggesting that money didn’t buy you out of every disappointment.
Texas is a hardscrabble place, and the bar girl who had said there were no Texans in Houston had been wrong, but had known what she was talking about.
A man with too much beer in him came on to Liz. I watched him pat her on the fanny and talk quietly to her. Unhappily, she was flattered by the attention and tolerated him. Starved for attention, she let him fondle her. And then … I don’t know what he said, though it was easy to guess; she stiffened and said something definite to him. He slinked away.
I kept an eye on Liz after that. The big, gawky girl was out of place and visibly uncomfortable. She wandered around the pool, finding it difficult to join in conversations.
I took a little concern in the amount of beer Liz was drinking. I tried to get Len’s attention but couldn’t without being noticeable. Finally I went to her side.
“Liz, how ya doin’?”
“’Kay, Jerry. Thanks for asking.”
“Are you as bored as I am?” I asked her.
“Probably worse,” she answered.
Gently, I took her beer mug from her hands and set it aside on a table. She looked at me quizzically but said nothing. I guided her away from the party crowd, to a white-painted wrought-iron bench at the edge of the light and beyond the reach of the talk. We sat down and were silent for a few minutes, just watching the party, where by now people had begun to push each other into the pool.
Liz began to glance at me—to glance, in fact, back and forth between me and the party. And finally she broke our silence.
“Jerry,” she asked solemnly, “would you like a nice blow job?”
I was stunned and for too long a moment was unable to answer.
“I mean it,” she said quietly. “I’d enjoy going down on you. I really would enjoy it.”
I drew a deep breath. “Is it a good idea, Liz?” was all I could think of to say.
“It’s a damned good idea. I do it very well, I’ve been told.”
“I’m surprised that you do it at all.”
“Huh! If you’re me and you don’t want to be lonely, you do it. The word got around at the university—Michigan—that Liz McAllister would suck cocks. I had dates after that. Of course, that’s all they wanted.” She sighed, deeply, audibly. “I just didn’t want to be lonely,” she whispered tearfully.
“You want to come with me to my room?”
“Yes…”
“And sleep with me?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. But you don’t have to give me a blow job. You aren’t going to be alone tonight, but you don’t have to do … anything.”
We went to my room and to my bed. There, slipped under my door, I found a telegram. It was from Hugh Scheck.
&nb
sp; FORGIVE THE QUAINT METHOD OF COMMUNICATION. HAVE BEEN UNABLE TO REACH YOU BY PHONE OR FAX. I KNEW YOU WOULD WANT TO KNOW ASAP THAT BUDDY HAS BEEN SHOT. HE IS IN LINCOLN HOSPITAL IN CRITICAL CONDITION AND IS ASKING FOR YOU.
Hugh met me at LaGuardia, and by the time we reached the hospital he had briefed me on what had happened. Buddy was the victim of a drive-by shooting. The police thought it was not a random shooting but was meant to kill him specifically.
As we rode in a cab to the hospital, I suppose Hugh found me oddly silent. I was thinking about Buddy, specifically about the day I met him. I was working in Uncle Harry’s store, and Buddy wandered in as if by chance. He made small talk, and quickly I realized that this street-smart guy was offering friendship. I couldn’t imagine why. Two guys couldn’t have been more different. But at that time in my life I was happy to have anyone offer friendship.
We reached the hospital. The doctors just shook their heads, but they let me in to see him.
I had to remember that Buddy was five to seven years older than I was and so was in his late seventies. He lay there attached to tubes and was a terrible reminder of how the human body can be reduced from everything to nothing in one cruel moment.
I spoke his name.
He opened his eyes and looked at me.
“I’m told it’s gonna be okay,” I lied.
“B’lieve that y’believe in the tooth fairy,” he muttered. He sighed. It was a rattle. “But I been layin’ here, half dreaming, and my mind goes back to Paris. Those were good days, weren’t they? Giselle … and Therèse … and Ulla. You fucked Giselle’s little sister and wound up married to her. Those were good days.”
“Every day I ever spent with you was a good day, Buddy,” I whispered tearfully. “You saved my life, you know. When Chieppa and Filly tried to kill me, I used what you taught me: how to cut with a razor. How many times did you make me practice that move?”
“You were a good kid, but you weren’t smart. I tried to make you smart.”
“Why? Why did you want to do that for me, Buddy?”
“I gotta tell ya somethin’. I’m glad you got here in time.”
The Secret Page 29
