Brother Fish

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘I was the hostess always beside Big Boss Yu. Of course, at most of these lavish affairs the end purpose was to win friends and influence people – in other words, to raise capital among the European taipans for Big Boss Yu’s various business enterprises. Although he never allowed them to invest in raisins, he was building a shipping empire and was getting deeply involved in real estate and construction in the French Concession. I imagine I had the right looks and posh accent to match the snootiest of taipan wives, and spoke French fluently as well. He insisted I dress in the very latest haute couture fashion. Madame Peroux did my hair and nails every week. And as I never drank more than two glasses of champagne, Big Boss Yu knew I would be discreet in all things involving his business.

  ‘When the three gangsters joined him we had already built a considerable raisin empire and now I asked for and received a two per cent commission, which may not sound like a great deal but which amounted to a fairly large sum of money. This only came about because I let it be known that I wasn’t pleased with the way Big Boss Yu had simply taken the crockery business away from me. Sears, Roebuck & Co., the giant mail-order house in Chicago, had just put in a huge order that meant we could clear all our debts in the crockery business. The order couldn’t be filled without my knowledge and Big Boss Yu sold the business to the three villains as being free of debt. He simply told me to hand over the books and the keys to the office. Angered, but unable to do anything but obey his instructions, I went to see him in order to ask politely for some sort of an explanation.

  ‘“Loh yeh, how have I offended you?” I asked him.

  ‘“Offended? You have not offended me, No Gin.”

  ‘“Then why have you taken the crockery business away from me?”

  ‘He smiled, but I could sense that he was embarrassed. “I have other plans for you, my child.”

  ‘Although I knew I couldn’t ask him what these were, I asked, “Am I to continue to be worthless, loh yeh?”

  ‘“Worthless? That is not so.”

  ‘“But it is clear that I am,” I insisted.

  ‘“What are these riddles you are talking, No Gin?” he asked, feigning annoyance to cover his embarrassment.

  ‘“Why do I receive no recompense for the work I do, and why do you now make me lose face by taking away from me what I have started and made profitable?”

  ‘“It is the way things are. I need the capital, you lack for nothing.”

  ‘“And I must hand over to the new buyers immediately?”

  ‘“Yes.”

  ‘“And the order from Sears, Roebuck & Co., that is to be cancelled?”

  ‘“Of course not! What are you talking about?” he cried angrily.

  ‘“It cannot be filled without my personal supervision, loh yeh,” I said, keeping my voice respectful.’

  Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan smiled. ‘And that was how I was given a two per cent commission in the raisin business. I would only discover much later that the three gangsters, presumably along with Big Boss Yu, were exporting opium while also conducting a legitimate business.’

  Jimmy’s and my eyes must have been as round as saucers, because she paused before continuing. ‘I’d built the ideal front, and now many of the china vases and pots contained false bottoms where the opium was packed. It was a perfect system – the bottom of the pots were so perfectly sealed and glazed that you would need to break the pots to discover the opium. The Chinese agent in San Francisco, using a code involving certain patterns in the glaze, selected the opium vases and the remainder of the consignment went on to the wholesaler or to the customer. I imagine that a small mountain of broken Chinese crockery must be buried somewhere in San Francisco.

  ‘Then, after five years, disaster struck. The grape crop in California failed for two years running and the huge demand from China had used up the surplus the Sun Maid Raisin Growers possessed. We were about to run out of raisins.’

  ‘But didn’t the fact that the birthrate of boys had not increased catch up with you?’ I asked. ‘After all, in five years this must have become reasonably apparent.’

  Again, she smiled before answering me. ‘You are right to think that, Jack. But few things in this world are wrought by logic alone. Every boy born was credited to raisins and every girl was the result of eating too few. Superstition, when combined with hope, is a very powerful medium.

  ‘Big Boss Yu had sunk most of his capital into shipping raisins up and down the China coast and had increased his fleet considerably, and now stood to go bankrupt. The Chinese – well, old-fashioned taipans like Big Boss Yu – did not see that natural occurrences such as failure of the Californian grape crop were predictable, and so they seldom carried sufficient insurance against disaster. Everything was put down to luck – bad joss and good joss. Bad joss came about as a consequence of somebody wishing you downfall and, like all Chinese taipans, Big Boss Yu had made lots of enemies.

  ‘Fortunately I had seen it coming, and I had Sir Victor Sassoon to thank for this. While I seemed to have a natural bent for business I knew very little about predicting trends or playing the market. He once explained to me that both trends and disasters are usually predictable. Shanghai, for instance, was under-developed even though buildings were going up at a steady rate and popular opinion thought otherwise. He could see his money safe for the next ten years, and would continue to invest in real estate.

  ‘“But how can you make these predictions?” I asked.

  ‘“The commodity markets,” he replied, with absolute confidence. “What do we have that someone wants? How many ‘someones’ are there? Can we supply it at a competitive price? Is it a long-term need? Who may be in a position to undercut us once we have developed the market?”

  ‘“But what has this to do with real estate?” I persisted.

  ‘“Everything, my dear. Wealth is created at the source of the commodity – that is, in Shanghai. Wealth creates the need to expand, and real estate and infrastructure are the key to expansion. Looking at what southern China can sell to the world at the right price and time will determine if I build a second grand hotel or another giant structure on the Bund. Because we can answer all of the questions I’ve just posed to you, I know I will continue to be successful. Shanghai is now the fifth-biggest seaport in the world and the chief manufacturing centre in China. We have eighty-two cotton mills and 124 cotton-weaving mills, ship-building yards, twenty china and porcelain factories, paper mills, canneries, leather-making businesses, tobacco and cigarette-producing factories and a host of other exporting industries, almost all of which answer the criteria I’ve just given you. Moreover, we sit on a throne of silver. We have the greatest concentrated silver hoard on earth. So we have capital as well as product. Finally, we have cheap and, most importantly, intelligent labour – a total of 400 000 skilled workers.”

  ‘“Does it work the same way when you import?”

  ‘“My dear child, of course!” He paused, then added, “For example, your raisin business is particularly vulnerable.”

  ‘“Why? The Sun Maid Raisin Growers has a huge surplus.”

  ‘“And you have an almost limitless market. So far, so good. But what if the Californian grape crop fails?”

  ‘“But it hasn’t in five years!”

  ‘“Are you insured if it does?”

  ‘“I don’t know – the company accountant takes care of those things.”

  ‘“Well, if I know anything about Big Boss Yu you’re probably under-insured. Do you have a second and third source of supply?” I shook my head. “Better look into that,” he suggested. “Agricultural products depend on good rains, and the weather is seldom predictable. The nature of your market is such that if you cannot continue to supply it, it will almost certainly die.”

  ‘Well, I went to see Kwok-Bew, the taipan who owned, among other things, Sincere – Shanghai’s biggest department store. At the age of fifteen his family had sent him to Australia to learn about department stores from Anthony Hordern’s, and he
still maintained several agencies in Australia. He was an old man at this stage and looked frail, but, with an introduction from Big Boss Yu, he received me most cordially and promised to put me in touch with the right people. Then, through another quite unexpected source – a visiting Portuguese dessert and sweet-wine importer – I got the same information in regards to South Africa. After the failure of the Californian grape harvest I knew Sun Maid had sufficient raisin reserves for another year, but I took the precaution of ordering consignments from Australia and South Africa. Big Boss Yu made it known that he wasn’t at all happy with the idea, and gave me a thorough dressing-down.

  ‘“Next year California will be good again,” he insisted.

  ‘“That is possibly true, loh yeh, but we will have used all their surplus and they have to resupply their own markets.” But he wouldn’t hear of it and refused to finance the raisins from Australia and South Africa, so I was forced to pay for both consignments, which took my entire two per cent commission savings and a loan from Sir Victor at a generously low interest rate. When disaster struck a second year in California I owned sufficient raisins to supply most of the market, but also to make a considerable amount of money.

  ‘I also faced a new problem – the raisins from both countries were different in appearance to those from California. The South African ones were a lighter brown and the Australian ones were almost gold in appearance, made from a seedless grape known as Muscat Gordo Blanco. I was afraid the Chinese would reject them. So it was back to Sapajou for another two posters – “Golden Boy” for the South African raisins and “Double Golden Boy” for the crop from Australia. We priced the South African product the same as the Californian and the Double Golden Boy a little higher, advertising the latter as twice as potent as the raisins they’d previously been eating, and because only one in ten million Golden Boy seeds produced a single Double Golden Boy plant.

  ‘Big Boss Yu had been wrong and I had been right. And while he would never have acknowledged this openly, he was forced to agree that Sun Maid would need to first supply their own depleted and profitable market and so a surplus sold virtually at a loss was unlikely to occur over the next few harvests. I argued that he had too much of his shipping tied up and should sell half his fleet while using the other half to distribute our newly sourced raisins only to the major markets. That is, the bigger cities along the China coastline where the peasants could afford to pay a slightly higher price for the new Golden Boy and Double Golden Boy product. I proved to him that this would result in much the same profit margin.’

  ‘Yo’ a very smart busi-ness woman, Countess,’ Jimmy said.

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that, James. It was a mixture of commonsense, luck and most of all Sir Victor Sassoon. I had, in effect, become his acolyte, learning from the master.’

  ‘How did Big Boss Yu react to this? I thought he regarded Sir Victor as in your past?’ I asked.

  ‘Quite right. But in Shanghai it was quite impossible for the two men not to meet constantly and, as Big Boss Yu’s hostess, it was almost impossible not to fraternise in public. Besides, I had saved Big Boss Yu from certain bankruptcy and so my good joss was holding. What he was not aware of was that I had become Sir Victor’s mistress.’

  Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan must have seen the sudden shocked look from both of us. ‘Why are you surprised? I was not unattractive and could talk his kind of language and, besides, I’d been in love with him from the age of sixteen. But, of course, even though he was a bachelor, I wasn’t able to be seen in public with him and our affair had to be kept very quiet lest Big Boss Yu hear about it. I was in so many ways still naive and knew very little about men – and even less about loving one while being beholden to another. If it had become known that I was the mistress of Shanghai’s most powerful European taipan while also a partner of the most powerful Chinese taipan, so great would have been the loss of face for Big Boss Yu that I could easily have lost my life.’

  ‘An’ yoh been scared, Countess?’ asked Jimmy.

  ‘I was so very much in love that nothing mattered. I’m not sure if I ever thought it through. They say that love is blind, and I was most certainly blind to the danger I faced. The irony, of course, is that I’m sure I wasn’t the only gal to share Sir Victor’s monogrammed silk sheets. I’m not even sure he loved me in return. He once told me that when you are a billionaire you are at a huge disadvantage in loving a woman, not knowing whether she is with you because she loves you or for what she can gain from the relationship. This I found very sad.’

  She looked pensive in reflection so I took the opportunity to place a little more wood on the beach fire.

  ‘I don’t suppose I was any different in his eyes,’ she continued after a few moments. ‘For while I couldn’t be seen on his arm, and wasn’t kept by him in a private apartment or even given any of the usual expensive baubles, I was obtaining advice that was turning me into a wealthy woman. Which, I must say, he appeared to enjoy. It may even have given him a perverse satisfaction, in an indirect sense, that he was interfering in Big Boss Yu’s affairs.

  ‘My success didn’t go unnoticed even though, in the Chinese tradition, as a woman I was required to be modest and in appearance reliant on a male. I gave all credit for my success to Big Boss Yu, as expected. As inevitably happens in business, I made enemies. In my case three very powerful ones – the Three Musketeers of the French Concession and, in particular Smallpox “Million Dollar” Yang. By advising Big Boss Yu to terminate importing raisins from Sun Maid, the ship that carried the raisins was no longer available for the export of cheap crockery and, of course, unbeknownst to me, opium.

  ‘It would have been useless to point out that with no surplus raisins available in California the charter ship the Sun Maid Raisin Growers Association used would no longer be calling into Shanghai anyway. It was all my fault as far as Smallpox “Million Dollar” Yang was concerned. The opium trade relied entirely on a carefully created network of foreign Chinese being at the place of destination. San Francisco possessed a large Chinese population and was also the major city from which the Triads operated. They would have to find another ship that travelled between San Francisco and Shanghai on a regular basis. The three gangsters had no sooner created an operation that worked successfully than I had inadvertently pulled the plug on them. In the eyes of Smallpox “Million Dollar” Yang, the youngest and most dangerous of the three, I had deliberately sabotaged their operation. Big Boss Yu would no doubt have been caught in somewhat of a dilemma when he decided to take my advice, but giving up his share of the profits made from the exported opium would have been preferable to being seen to go bankrupt. He was, after all, the unofficial Chinese boss of Shanghai, a position he would never under any circumstances jeopardise.

  ‘Again in the Chinese tradition, I wasn’t made aware of the enmity towards me from the three gangsters. I confess that I had taken the trouble to avoid them wherever possible, perhaps still smarting a bit from the fact that they’d taken over the crockery export business. But, as with everyone else, I had always played my role as the polite and respectful hostess and erstwhile employee, and now as a very junior partner in Big Boss Yu’s San Peh Steam Navigation Company.

  ‘Sir Victor urged me to take half of the money I’d made and invest it in the security of the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong while starting a business of my own with the remainder. “Money lying around in a bank is making other men rich, my darling. A dollar that doesn’t do a good day’s work is no different to a human who is lazy, and the end result will be exactly the same – nothing good comes of either. You know about raisins and crockery, but is there anything else that would interest you?”

  ‘Without hesitation, I replied, “Caviar.”

  ‘“Caviar, eh? What an extraordinary answer.”

  ‘“My family was in caviar for four generations. We were the official suppliers to three tsars.”

  ‘“And what do you personally know about caviar?” he asked, lying back against th
e pillows on the bed with his hands clasped behind his head.’

  I don’t know about Jimmy, but I’d never imagined Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan as an object of desire. This was silly, because she was still an attractive woman in her late forties and it wasn’t hard to see that she must have been a stunner in her twenties. It’s just that we so often judge people by the circumstances under which we meet them. It was difficult for me to imagine Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan lying between silk sheets having just made love to one of the world’s richest men.

  She laughed. ‘“Know about caviar? Nothing, Victor,” I replied, “except what I’ve read in my father’s papers and what he told me as a child.”

  ‘“Hmmm. From the Caspian Sea, isn’t it?”

  ‘“Yes – that’s where my family is from.”

  ‘“If my geography is correct, getting it to Vladivostok and then to Shanghai and from there back to Europe . . .”

  ‘“America – that’s where the nouveaux riches are.”

  ‘“Nevertheless, am I not correct – it will have to come three times, perhaps four times as far as if it were sent through the Black Sea?”

  ‘“If I can get the very finest – the golden eggs of the sterlet sturgeon – it simply won’t matter,” I said to him. “You drink Krug regardless of price.”

  ‘“That’s true, I guess.”

  ‘“If I put Krug and a cheaper though highly respectable champagne in two glasses, could you tell the difference?”

  ‘“Probably not, although there are many who can.”

  ‘“Not, I imagine, too many in America.”

  ‘“What you’re saying is that it’s all in the perception – what is thought to be the best is the best?”

  ‘“The Chinese peasant wants to believe raisins will give him male children and that Double Golden Boy will increase his chances even further. While caviar appreciation may be at a more sophisticated level, the eggs of the sterlet sturgeon are gold in colour and therefore different. What we perceive is what we believe.”