Afterburn: A Novel

by Colin Harrison

  The others nodded sagely, apparently giving consideration, but not ignoring whatever delicacy remained pinched between their respective sets of lacquered chopsticks.

  “Wait, I have an answer to that,” announced the young fellow from Citigroup. “Mr. Lai, I trust we may speak frankly here. You need to remember that the American senators are full of—excuse my language—full of shit. When they’re standing up on the Senate floor saying all of this stuff, this means nothing, absolutely nothing!”

  “Ah, this is very difficult for the Chinese people to understand.” Sir Henry scowled dramatically. “In China we believe our leaders. So we become scared when we see American senators complaining about China.”

  “You’re being coy with us, Mr. Lai,” interrupted Charlie, looking up with a smile, “for we—or some of us—know that you have visited the United States dozens and dozens of times and have met many U.S. senators personally.” Not to mention a few Third World dictators. He paused, while amusement passed into Lai’s dark eyes. “Nonetheless,” Charlie continued, looking about the table, “for the others who perhaps have not enjoyed Mr. Lai’s deep friendships with American politicians, I would have to say my colleague here is right. The speeches in the American Senate are pure grandstanding. They’re made for the American public—”

  “The bloodthirsty American public, you mean!” interrupted the Citigroup man, who, Charlie suddenly understood, had drunk too much. “Those old guys up there know most voters can’t find China on a globe. That’s no joke. It’s shocking, the American ignorance of China.”

  “We shall have to educate your people,” Sir Henry Lai offered diplomatically, apparently not wishing the stridency of the conversation to continue. He gave a polite, cold-blooded laugh and looked about the room. The laugh was repeated and the room relaxed.

  “But it is, yes, my understanding that the Americans could sink the Chinese Navy in several days?” barked the German from Lufthansa.

  The man should have known better. “That may be true,” answered Charlie, “but it is also irrelevant. Sooner or later the American people are going to have to recognize the hemispheric primacy of China, and that—”

  “Wait, wait!” Lai interrupted good-naturedly. “You agree with our German friend about the Chinese Navy?”

  The question was a direct appeal to the nationalism of the other Chinese around the table.

  “Can the U.S. Air Force destroy the Chinese Navy in a matter of days?” repeated Charlie. “Yes. Absolutely yes.”

  Sir Henry Lai smiled. “You are knowledgeable about these topics, Mr.”—he glanced down at the business cards arrayed in front of his plate—“Mr. Ravich. Of the Teknetrix Corporation, I see. What do you know about war, Mr. Ravich?” he asked. “Please, tell me. I am curious.”

  The Chinese billionaire stared at him with eyebrows lifted, face a smug, florid mask, and if Charlie had been younger or genuinely insulted, he might have recalled aloud his years before becoming a businessman, but he understood that generally it was to one’s advantage not to appear to have an advantage. And anyway, the conversation was merely a form of sport: Lai didn’t give a good goddamn about the Chinese Navy, which he probably despised; what he cared about was whether or not he should soon spend eight hundred million dollars on GT stock—play the corporation that played the players.

  But Lai pressed. “What do you know about this?”

  “Just what I read in the papers,” Charlie replied with humility.

  “See? There! I tell you!” Lai eased back in his silk suit, smiling at the other men, running a fat little palm over his thinning hair. “He has no direct knowledge! This is a very dangerous problem, my friends. People say many things about China and America, but they have no direct knowledge, no real—”

  The conversation! There it went! He had heard virtually the same talk the night before, in Shanghai, and he was not interested, again, in who controlled what percentage of the container-shipping ports in Hong Kong’s harbor, or whether Shanghai would supersede Hong Kong and why, or the future of retail banking in China, or conditions in western China, where peasants still toiled in medieval suffering, or when a nominally democratic Taiwan might be reunited with a nominally Communist China. And he was especially not interested in the balance of trade between China and the U.S. Why discuss it? Everyone in the room, even the fucking waiters, for God’s sake, most of whom were probably speculating in the Chinese stock markets or smuggling stolen truck engines, knew! Knew that the Chinese would and could do as they wished. It was their world—if not now, then soon.

  Mercifully, the boys in red uniforms and brass buttons began setting down spoons and bringing around tea and coffee for dessert. Charlie excused himself and headed for the gentlemen’s restroom. The boys watched him, not gawking at his height—the Chinese were getting taller, Charlie had noticed—so much as trying to understand the subtle hitch in his stride, why he stepped across the carpet with deliberate care, like a man who had been taken apart and then not quite been put back together. Well, let them stare. It didn’t bother him, for he no longer actually limped, this accomplishment having taken ten years and eight operations, one a spinal fusion, one an artificial knee joint, one of them botched. And he had learned that it was simply easier if he kept his weight at about one hundred and eighty; above that, the old pains returned to his back and leg, bringing with them certain other old pains of a different nature, and on the whole, he had decided that he was far more interested in the wide, unfurling future than in his own small past. That past could go to hell; the future was the thing.

  The future, in fact, would be most improved by the news that his daughter was going to have a child. Please, God, he thought, it’s a small favor, really. One egg clinging to a warm pink wall. He and Ellie should have had another child, should have at least tried, after Ben. Ellie had been forty-two. Too much grief at the time, too late now.

  In the men’s room, a sarcophagus of black and silver marble, he nodded at the wizened Chinese attendant, who stood up with alert servility and attended to a silver tray of colognes, breath mints, hair sprays, combs, brushes, and toothpicks. Charlie chose the second stall and locked the heavy marble door behind him. The door and walls extended in smooth veined slabs from the floor to within a foot of the ceiling. The photo-electric eye over the toilet sensed his movement and the bowl flushed prematurely. He was developing an old man’s interest in the regularity of his bowels. He unbuckled his pants and eased down, careful always to favor the right side of his back, the old problem there so unforgiving that he had spent years learning to play golf as a left-hander.

  He shat then, with the private pleasure of it. He was starting to smell Chinese to himself. Happened on every trip to the East.

  And then, as he finished, he heard the old attendant greeting another man in Cantonese.

  “Evening, sir.”

  “Yes.”

  The stall door next to Charlie’s opened, shut, was locked. The man was breathing as if he had hurried. Then came the sound of pants being unbuckled, some loud coughing, an oddly tiny splash, and the muffled silky sound of the man slumping heavily against the wall he shared with Charlie.

  “Sir?” The attendant knocked on Charlie’s door. “You open door? Open door?”

  Charlie buckled his pants and slid the lock free. The old man’s face loomed close, eyes large, breath stinking.

  “Not me!” Charlie said. “The next one!”

  “No have key! No have key! Climb!” The old attendant pointed to the top of the wall between the stalls, pushed past Charlie, stepped up on the toilet seat, and stretched high against the glassy marble. His bony hands pawed the stone uselessly. Now the man in the adjacent stall was moaning in Chinese, begging for help. Charlie pulled the attendant down and stood on the toilet seat himself. With his arms outstretched he could reach the top of the wall, and he sucked in a breath and hoisted himself. God, how his arms had gotten weaker. Grimacing, he pulled himself up high enough so that his nose touched the top e
dge of the wall. But before being able to look over, he fell back.

  “Go!” he ordered the attendant. “Get help, get a key!”

  The man in the stall groaned, his respiration a song of pain. Charlie threw his jacket to the floor and stepped up on the seat again, this time jumping exactly at the moment he pulled with his arms, using the ancient knowledge of a boy, and then yes, one and two, he was up, right up there, hooking one leg over the wall, his head just high enough to peer down and see Sir Henry Lai slumped on the floor, his face a rictus of purpled flesh, his pants around his ankles, a piss stain spreading across his silk boxers. His hands clutched weakly at his tie, the veins of his neck swollen like blue pencils. His eyes, not squeezed shut but open, stared up at the underside of the spotless toilet bowl, into which, Charlie could see from above, a small silver pillbox had fallen, top open, the white pills inside of it already scattered and sunk in the water—scattered and sunk and melting away.

  “Hang on, guy,” breathed Charlie. “They’re coming. Hang on.” He tried to pull himself through the opening between the wall and ceiling, but it was no good; he could get his head through but not his shoulders or torso. Now Sir Henry Lai coughed rhythmically, as if uttering some last strange code—“Haa-cah … Haaa!-cah … Haaa! Haaa!”—and convulsed, his eyes peering in pained wonderment straight into Charlie’s, then widening as his mouth filled with a reddish soup of undigested shrimp and pigeon and turtle that surged up over his lips and ran down both of his cheeks before draining back into his windpipe. He was too far gone to cough the vomit out of his lungs, and the tension in his hands eased—he was dying of a heart attack and asphyxiation at the same moment.

  The attendant hurried back in with two waiters and Sir Henry’s bodyguard. They pounded on the stall door with something, cracking the marble. The beautiful veined stone broke away in pieces, some falling on Sir Henry Lai’s shoes. Charlie looked back at his face. Henry Lai was dead.

  The men stepped into the stall and Charlie knew he was of no further use. He dropped back to the floor, picked up his jacket, and walked out of the men’s restroom, expecting a commotion outside. A waiter sailed past with a tray of salmon roses; the assembled businessmen didn’t know what had happened.

  Mr. Ming watched him enter.

  “I must leave you,” Charlie said graciously. “I’m very sorry.”

  Mr. Ming rose to shake hands.

  “My daughter is due to call me tonight with important news.”

  “Good news, I trust.”

  The only news bankers liked. “Perhaps. She’s going to tell me if she is pregnant.”

  “I hope you are blessed.” Mr. Ming smiled, teeth white as Ellie’s estrogen pills.

  Charlie nodded warmly. “We’re going to build a terrific factory, too. Should be on-line by the end of the year.”

  “We are scheduled for lunch in about two weeks in New York?”

  “Absolutely,” said Charlie. Every minute now was important.

  Mr. Ming bent closer, his voice softening. “And you will tell me then about the quad-port transformer you are developing?”

  His secret new datacom switch, which would smoke the competition? No. “Yes.” Charlie crinkled his face into a mask of agreeability. “Sure deal.”

  “Excellent,” pronounced Mr. Ming. “Have a good flight.”

  The stairs to the lobby spiraled along backlit cabinets of jade dragons and coral boats and who cared what else. He hurried past Tiffany glasswork and mahogany paneling. Don’t run, Charlie told himself, don’t appear to be in a hurry. But he was holding his coat-check ticket before he hit the last step. In London, seven hours behind Hong Kong, the stock market was still open. He pointed to his coat for the attendant and then, after dropping thirteen floors in the club’s elevator, nodded at the first taxi waiting outside. The back door opened mechanically, and he jumped in.

  “FCC.”

  “Foreign Correspondents’ Club?”

  “Right away.”

  It was the only place open at night in Hong Kong where he knew he could get access to a Bloomberg box—that magical electronic screen that displayed every stock and bond price in every market around the globe. He pulled out his cell phone and called his broker in London. He kept his trading account there so that he could straddle the Asian, European, and American markets.

  “Jane, this is Charlie Ravich,” he said when she answered. “I want to set up a huge put play. Drop everything.”

  “This is not like you.”

  “This is not like anything. Sell all my Microsoft now at the market price, sell all the Ford, the Merck, all the Lucent, all the Wal-Mart and Deutsche Telekom. Market orders all of them. Please, right now, before London closes.”

  “All right. Now, for the tape, you are requesting we sell eight thousand shares of—”

  “Yes, yes, I agree,” he blurted, for the purposes of the automatic recording device. “Just hurry.”

  Jane was off for a moment, getting another broker to carry out the orders. “Zoom-de-doom,” she said when she returned. “Let it rip.”

  “This is going to add up to about one-point-oh-seven million,” he said. “I’m buying puts on Gaming Technologies, the gambling company. It’s American but trades in London.”

  “Yes.” Now her voice held interest. “Yes.”

  “How many puts of GT can I buy with that?”

  She was shouting orders to her clerks. “Wait …” she said. “Yes? Very good. I have your account on my screen. All those stocks are going to cash. We’re filling those at the market, waiting for the—yes. The sells are showing up …” He heard keys clicking. “We have … one million seventy thousand, U.S., plus change. Now then, Gaming Technologies is selling at sixty-six even a share—”

  “Is the price dropping?”

  “No, no, it’s up an eighth last trade, two minutes ago, in fact.”

  “How many puts can I buy with one-point-oh-seven?”

  “Oh, I would say a huge number, Charlie.”

  “How many?”

  “About … one-point-six million shares.”

  “That’s huge, all right.” A put was the option to sell a stock at a certain price by a certain time. Because the cost of each put was a fraction of the share price, a small amount of money could leverage a huge sum.

  “You want to protect that bet?” Jane asked.

  “No. The stock is going down.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Buy the puts, Jane.”

  “I am, Charlie, please. The price is stable. Yes, take this one …” she was saying to a clerk. “Give me puts on GT at market, immediately. Yes. Hang on, Charlie. One-point-six million at the money. Yes. At the money. I’m giving my authorization.”

  The line was silent a moment. He had just spent more than a million dollars on the right to sell 1.6 million shares of GT at $66 a share.

  “You sure, Charlie?”

  “This is a bullet to the moon, Jane.”

  “Biggest bet of your life, Charlie?”

  “Oh, Jane, not even close.”

  Outside his cab a silky red Rolls glided past, its license plate indicating it was owned by an officer of the People’s Liberation Army. Hong Kong was like that now, the PLA—vulgar and dangerous and clever—getting rich, forcing corruption through the pipes. “Got it?” he asked.

  “Not quite. You going to tell me the play, Charlie?”

  “When it goes through, Jane.”

  “We’ll get the order back in a minute or two.”

  Die on the shitter, Charlie thought. Could happen to anyone. Happened to Elvis Presley, matter of fact.

  “Charlie?”

  “Yes.”

  “We have your puts. One-point-six million, GT, at the price of sixty-six.” He heard the keys clicking. “Now tell me?” Jane pleaded.

  “I will,” Charlie said. “Just give me the verbal confirmation for the tape.”

  While she repeated the price and the volume of the order, he looked out the window to
see how close the taxi was to the FCC. He’d first visited the club while on leave in 1970, when it was full of drunken television and newspaper journalists, CIA people, Army intelligence, retired British admirals who had gone native and were no longer welcome in their own clubs, crazy Texans provisioning the war, and just about every other expat lonesome for conversation; since then, the rest of Hong Kong had been built up and torn down and built up all over again, but the FCC still stood, tucked away on a side street.

  “I just want to get my times right,” Charlie told Jane when she was done. “It’s now a few minutes after 9:00 p.m. on Tuesday in Hong Kong. What time are you in London?”

  “Just after 2:00 p.m.”

  “London markets are open about an hour more?”

  “Yes,” Jane said.

  “New York starts trading in half an hour.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll be able to watch the market from here, Jane.”

  “Yes.”