The Secret

by Harold Robbins

Sir Arthur smiled tolerantly. “Hong Kong has a population approaching … oh, six and a half million people. How many people are murdered in New York per million, per year? Or in Boston or Philadelphia? Or Washington? This sort of thing is rare. But Charlie Han took unusual risks.”

  “In falsely labeling goods?” I asked.

  “No. That is common. In stealing from Yasheng.”

  “It is common…” my father repeated.

  “You should have secured the services of a Hong Kong solicitor from the outset. There are ways to shield yourself from the consequences of such misdemeanors. Actually, Han had you reasonably well protected. It was he who was violating the law. Of course, he was your employee…”

  “Let me change the subject,” I said. “You seem to know a great deal about us. What do you know about our business relationship with Zhang Feng?”

  “I know who Zhang Feng is. More than that—your relationship, I know nothing.”

  “Can we trust him?”

  “So far as you can trust any man. Zhang is one of the new breed of Chinese capitalists made possible by Deng Xiaoping. It is my impression that Zhang would not go so far as to mislabel goods. On the other hand, he is sharp. If you have a contract with him, I would be sure it is nailed down at all four corners.”

  I left my chair and went to stare down at the street. Hong Kong was a strange mixture of great high-rise office buildings and old stone buildings from the colonial days. Sir Arthur kept his office in one of the old buildings, not far from the law courts.

  “To what extent can we trust Yasheng Lin?” I asked.

  “To the same extent you can trust Bill Gates,” said Sir Arthur. “He will not lie, cheat, or steal. On the other hand, he will take whatever advantage there is to be taken. He is voracious. He is the fourth generation of his family to own and build businesses in Hong Kong. He is an empire builder.”

  “He has an empire,” I said.

  Sir Arthur smiled. “Are you a student of history, Mr. Cooper? Can you name me an empire builder who was ever satisfied with his empire and did not want a bigger one? Napoleon? Rockefeller?”

  “Well, then … did he have Charlie Han murdered?” my father asked.

  “Directly … no. He simply put out the word that Charlie Han was no longer under his protection. That is all it would have needed. Han was hated by many.”

  “And in twenty-four hours…?”

  Sir Arthur nodded.

  “It’s too damn melodramatic,” my father said. “A dark and foggy night on the Hong Kong waterfront—”

  “They don’t kill with guns here,” said the solicitor. “Guns are not allowed here, so they kill with knives, sometimes with machetes. It can be brutal, but it doesn’t happen nearly as commonly as murder happens in some American cities.”

  “As I told you on the telephone,” I said, “we will probably need to employ a new agent. Have you anyone to suggest?”

  “Tentatively, yes, I do,” said Sir Arthur. “You need someone familiar with the sewing trades, someone who can inspect merchandise for quality. I have in mind a young woman. Her name is Xiang Yi, often called Lily Xiang.”

  * * *

  We met Lily Xiang in the dingy office of a small sewing company on Yee Woo Street in Wan Chai, not far from the waterfront and not far from where Charlie Han was killed. She was manager of the company and knew fabrics and the cutting and sewing trades very well. She had been with the company four years and was reasonably well content with her job, but she would be receptive to an offer of a better job.

  She was a plump woman with coarse black hair un-stylishly bobbed just below her ears, round, dark-rimmed eyeglasses, and a cigarette constantly in a corner of her mouth. She wore a pair of gray sweat pants and a white T-shirt.

  Sir Arthur had arranged the meeting, so Lily knew why we were there.

  “I know the Cheeks line,” she said brusquely, almost immediately, having taken no time for amenities. “Maybe you don’t know this, but we make certain items for you.”

  She picked up a pair of sheer white panties decorated with glistening rhinestones and showed them to us. They sold well in the States. The next item she showed us—a black lace bra with generous cutouts to show the nipples—did not sell nearly as well, but we had no complaint about how it was made.

  “We do items made with sheer fabrics,” she said. “Panties, nightgowns, teddies, negligées, and so on. We don’t do things that require elastic fabrics or vinyl. I like to think we make feminine things. You know: loose and soft and provocative. The kind of stuff that flatters a woman, for herself and for her man.”

  “Which doesn’t describe our whole line,” I said.

  “No,” she said without hesitation. “It doesn’t. I wear Cheeks things myself, but you show a good many items I wouldn’t want to put on.”

  “What will you wear if you come to work for us?” my father asked bluntly.

  “Well … not what you see me in here,” she replied. She slapped at her pants. “Work clothes. What do you want me to wear?”

  “I want you to represent our company,” my father said.

  “Understood.”

  “We will ask you to confine your smoking to private times and places,” I said.

  “Can do.”

  “How much are you being paid here?” I asked.

  “A hundred eighty thousand,” she said.

  I looked at my father. “She means Hong Kong dollars,” I told him. “Meaning, she is being paid … a little more than twenty-three thousand U.S.”

  “We’ll double it,” my father said blandly. “I want you to start tomorrow. Your first job is to locate an office. Bring the lease to us. Find an office big enough for you and a secretary. Like you, the office will represent our company.”

  We were not as careless as this might sound. Sir Arthur Xu had briefed us thoroughly on Lily Xiang.

  * * *

  When we returned to the apartments on Arbuthnot Street, we found we had a visitor. Zhang Feng had come to Hong Kong. When we arrived he was sitting at the Sphere IV.

  He was a little nervous, since Vicky had told him emphatically that he could not smoke in our apartments. In fact, as Vicky had told me, he had stepped outside on our balcony to smoke, but being twenty-three floors above the street with only a waist-high barrier between him and a plunge, he had given up his smoke and retreated indoors.

  I had wondered if he were associated with Bai Fuyuan. Apparently he was not. He said he didn’t know Bai was dead. But he knew Charlie Han was dead and how he got that way, and he was troubled.

  He tried to speak to me apart from the others. My father and Vicky decided there was some reason for that, and invited Liz to go across to the other apartment while Zhang and I talked in the office.

  “Chang Li called me,” Zhang said.

  “I saw her,” I told him. “Charlie shaved her head.”

  “She wants help,” he said.

  “That shouldn’t be too difficult to arrange,” I said. “Between us we should be able to come up with something.”

  “Such as?”

  “The night we went to Macau, that was Charlie’s boat, wasn’t it? And Chang Li was working for Charlie.”

  “That was Charlie’s business, partly: to provide entertainment. That girl is one of the finest he ever had.”

  “So he married her, as we might put it,” I said. “He shaved her head so she wouldn’t be attractive to other men.”

  “Charlie Han was a fool,” said Zhang. “It only makes her more attractive. A prominent actress here in Hong Kong shaved her head … and got better roles than she’d ever had before. There is something intriguing about—”

  “She wants to work for Yasheng Lin,” I said.

  “Every girl wants to work for Yasheng Lin. But he is not in the business of hiring girls like her.”

  “You are, apparently,” I said. “You hired her with Charlie’s boat, to entertain me.”

  “We have done good business together, haven’t we?” he
asked. “Mr. Malloy’s Sphere Four is impressive. I understand it is doing well in the States.”

  “It has just been introduced. So far it is doing all right.”

  Zhang walked to the window and stared toward the Bank of China Building. A tropical rain had begun to fall. In fact, a typhoon was in the forecast.

  “You wonder if I am owned by Yasheng Lin,” he said.

  “The question has occurred to us.”

  “I am not. He doesn’t own everything. He owned Charlie Han and Bai Fuyuan. If he chose to raid you, he could probably own you—your Far Eastern operations, in any case. He controls more assets than many nations do.” Zhang shrugged. “On the other hand, it is more difficult for him to exert his influence inside China.”

  “He is not the only Hong Kong billionaire,” I suggested.

  “He is not even the largest.”

  “So…”

  “Anyway. My reason for coming to see you,” said Zhang. “Mr. Malloy has contacted a Taiwanese supplier and is talking to him about buying certain electronic components from him. It must not happen. This could destroy our relationship. My government will tolerate a great deal, but not that. You must choose between a relationship with China and one with Taiwan.”

  “That choice has already been made,” I said.

  “Then rein in Malloy, please.”

  * * *

  We did. I discussed it with my father after Zhang left, then called Tom Malloy in Houston and gave him the only direct order he had so far received from us.

  “Okay. You’re the boss, pardner,” Malloy said. “But there is a problem.”

  “Which is?”

  “We got a congressman here in Texas that’s got a strong opinion about doing business with China. He figures we oughta do business with the non-Communist Chinese.”

  “You tell the congressman that I guarantee him one hundred thousand dollars support for his next campaign—provided he shuts his mouth on this deal.”

  “You’re talking his language, pardner.”

  “Liz will be with you in a few days. Is there anything you want to tell me that she’s going to report?”

  “I figger everything’s going damn well. Sphere Four is pickin’ up steam.”

  “Would it if we didn’t have chips at Zhang Feng’s prices?”

  “You make your point very persuasively.”

  “And our microprocessors?”

  “Sometime next year two percent of all the cars sold in America will have engines controlled by our microprocessors.”

  “Kee-rist!” I said to my father after I hung up the telephone. “In five years we may be a high-technology company!”

  By now the rain was pouring hard. We could barely see the bright lights on the Bank of China Building. He stood at the window and watched. I could guess what he was thinking: It was all so alien, all so much beyond his experience.

  “Don’t be too confident,” he said. “We’re also getting to be a company completely dependent on Hong Kong and China. That’s chancy, Len. That’s damn chancy.”

  * * *

  The storm kept us in the apartments, where we didn’t have much in the way of fancy dinner. We ate frozen things that night: pizzas and lasagna.

  The kids were a bit afraid. Catherine looked out at the wind-driven rain and wondered. “Could it get so bad it could break through our windows?”

  “Sissy! Sissy!” mocked J. J, though his own eyes were wide and wondering as he heard the wind whip rain against the glass sliders of the living room.

  It was not Greenwich, Connecticut, for damn sure—though I had been there when a hurricane glanced off the town.

  After the kids were long asleep and Vicky and I were in bed, aware that the worst of the monsoon had passed and that it was moderating, she talked about what my father had said.

  “This place isn’t us, Len,” she said. “It can never be us. I have to wonder, the way your father does, if we aren’t getting too dependent on it. I mean, what the hell are we doing? Catherine is learning two dialects of Chinese!”

  “You want her to learn Spanish?” I asked.

  “I want her to be an American.”

  “I’d much rather,” I said, “she would be a Chinese-speaking American than a Spanish-speaking American.”

  That was all I had to say.

  That night Vicky did her special thing for me. I felt her warm lips slowly sucking my entire scrotum into her mouth. We lay together that way for some time, she using her tongue to massage me gently, until I thought I might explode. Abruptly she moved to the tip of my cock and used her tongue on that, more vigorously. Finally she slipped down until she had the whole thing in her mouth and sucked hard on it. I did explode!

  60

  JERRY

  I called Therèse. I can remember when placing a call from one side of Paris to another was dicey, when calling Los Angeles from New York was a matter of calling an operator, giving her the number, and answering a ring half an hour later when she’d gotten the call through. They called that “long distance.” By the mid-nineties, calling Fort Lauderdale from Hong Kong was a matter of punching in the numbers. Within five seconds the phone rang. Therèse answered, and I told her I would be home in a few days.

  She told me someone had run over the alligator on the street. It had risked crossing one too many times, and a driver who didn’t give a damn had run over it and killed it. I can’t pretend that I cared, though I had come to think of the creature as something of a neighborhood pet and realized I would miss it, sort of. I had never imagined it would bite me, and since I didn’t have a dog or cat …

  “Honey babe, I miss you,” I said. “I wish you were out here, in Hong Kong.”

  That was a lie. Liz was with me.

  “I not want to travel so far much, anymore,” Therèse said. “Hong Kong long way.”

  She told me about a bridge game she had played, then about the herons and their chicken necks. Friends had invited her to go on their boat for a cruise to Miami.

  Therèse would be all right. I would, in fact, see her soon. The truth was, we would fuck: we seventy-some-years-old citizens. We would do it, and we would like it. Once. Then again sometime. Not too often. Not nearly as often as I would have liked.

  Okay. Liz was a sloppy cocksucker. She left me wet with her spit as she ran to the bathroom to rinse out her mouth.

  But, God, I would have missed her if I hadn’t had her! I had become too much involved with her.

  Watching her run to the bathroom, fat butt bouncing, was a special small pleasure.

  I could keep her. Sure. Yes, I could. But for how long? I had to think about that.

  * * *

  Then there was Len. The boy was—Christ! I should have been proud of him. And I was.

  But there was something. He wasn’t what I was. He wasn’t what Buddy was. And maybe he was right, too. He wasn’t reckless. He planned carefully and was not reckless.

  Had I been, though? I guess not.

  But I wasn’t about to be run out of Hong Kong. By God, I wasn’t going to be! Son of a bitch, I wasn’t going to be!

  Any more than I’d been run out of Philadelphia.

  This girl we’d hired. Lily. She was damned smart. I couldn’t believe what she told us one day within a week after we hired her:

  “We’re missing something,” she said. “There’s a marketing ploy that’s not in use. I don’t know how you can use it, but I want you two gentlemen to be aware of it. Maybe you can find a way to sell merchandise with it.”

  At this point it was no more sweat pants and T-shirts. No more cigarettes dangling out of her mouth. She was wearing a dark blue miniskirted cheongsam. We sat over lunch in Luk Yu Tea Shop, the famous dim sum restaurant. As she wielded chopsticks with confidence and pretended not to notice that Len and I wielded ours more awkwardly, she talked business.

  “I don’t know how you advertise this,” she said, “but do you have any idea why many girls wear crotchless panties under tight jeans? Hey! Crotc
hless panties under tight jeans!”

  We shook our heads.

  “Tight jeans,” she said. “Bare pussies. Can you guys, being men, imagine how that feels? Rough, tight denim rubbing your private parts, every step you take. Hey! Girls come!”

  “Why not no panties at all?” Len asked.

  “Rear-end hygiene, Lennie. C’mon!”

  I understood what she meant. So did Len. But she had asked the right question. How did we advertise it? I couldn’t think of a way, and I doubted Len could, either.

  By that day Lily had visited all of our suppliers and was satisfied that no one was ripping us off more than was conscionable. She had rejected one small batch of merchandise. Charlie, she said, had been letting some stuff through that was not up to standards—not much, just a little, presumably in return for a percentage.

  “He couldn’t help himself,” she said. “I know the type. He considered that day lost when he didn’t manage to cheat somebody. He must have been an endearing man,” she added slyly.

  * * *

  Len took me to Kowloon Tong that evening, leaving behind a suspicious Vicky and Liz. We sat down in a courtyard open to the sky, where we had what the Kowloon proprietors imagined was a French-style dinner—snails, borscht, sole, and wine—in the company of a shyly beautiful little Chinese girl.

  Len introduced her as Li, Mrs. Charlie Han. She was delicately lovely, with appealing almond eyes. But she had a dramatic characteristic, too. She had only a spare bristle of hair on her recently shaved head. I was supposed to imagine that I had been brought here to meet Charlie’s widow, but I was not fool enough to buy that. It was obvious to me that Len had had her. It would have been obvious to Vicky, too, and I resolved that the two should never meet.

  Well, what was I supposed to expect? I mean, Vicky was as fine a woman as any man was ever married to, but—Okay. So long as this did not get out of hand. Which obviously it had if he thought it necessary to introduce her to me.

  “I want to do something for Li,” he said solemnly. “I want you to do something for her. She was sold to Charlie. She’d been put on an open-air market and sold!”

  “I can imagine.”