“But I need you to stay in your office and handle New York for me.”
She sighed. “I’m due to pick up my son from school.”
“Need a car, a new car?”
“Everybody needs a new car.”
“Just stay there a few more hours, Jane. You can pick out a Mercedes tomorrow morning and charge it to my account.”
“You’re a charmer, Charlie.”
“I’m serious. Charge my account.”
“Okay, will you please tell me?”
Of course he would, not only so that she could score a bit of the action herself, but because he needed to get the news moving. “Sir Henry Lai just died. Maybe fifteen minutes ago.”
“Sir Henry Lai …”
“The Macao gambling billionaire who was in deep talks with GT—”
“Yes! Yes!” Jane cried. “Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“It’s not just a rumor?”
“Jane. This is Charlie you’re talking to.”
“How do you know?”
“Jane, you don’t trust old Charlie Ravich?”
“Please, Charlie, there’s still time for me to make a play here!”
“I saw it with my own—”
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
“—eyes, Jane. Right there in front of me.”
“It’s dropping! Oh! Down to sixty-four,” she cried miserably. “There it goes! There go ninety thousand shares! Somebody else got the word out! Sixty-three and a—Charlie, oh Jesus, you beat it by maybe a minute.”
He told her he’d call again shortly and stepped out of the cab, careful with his back, and walked into the club, a place so informal that the clerk just gave him a nod; people strode in all day long to have drinks in the main bar, a square room with many of the famous black-and-white AP and UPI photos of Asia: Mao in Beijing, the naked little Vietnamese girl running toward the camera, her village napalmed behind her, the sitting Buddhist monk burning himself to death in protest, Nixon at the Great Wall. Inside sat several dozen men and women drinking and smoking, many of them American and British journalists, others small-time local businessmen who long ago had slid into alcoholism, burned out, boiled over, or given up.
He ordered a whiskey and sat down in front of the Bloomberg box, fiddling with it until he found the correct menu for real-time London equities. He was up millions and the New York Stock Exchange had not even opened yet. What do you know about war, Mr. Ravich? Please, tell me. I am curious. Ha! The big American shareholders of GT, or, more particularly, their analysts and advisers and market watchers, most of them punks in their thirties, were still tying their shoes and kissing the mirror and reading The New York Times and soon—very soon!—they’d be buying coffee at the Korean deli and saying hello to the receptionist at the front desk and sitting down at their screens. Minutes away! When they found out that Sir Henry Lai had collapsed and died in the China Club in Hong Kong at 8:45 p.m. Hong Kong time, they would assume, Charlie hoped, that because Lai ran an Asian-style, family-owned corporation, and because as its patriarch he dominated its governance, any possible deal with GT was off, indefinitely. They would then reconsider the price of GT, still absurdly stratospheric even after its ride down in London, and they would dump it fast.
Maybe it would go that way. He ordered another drink, then called Jane.
“GT is down almost five points,” she told him. “New York is about to open.”
“But I don’t see panic yet. Where’s the volume selling?”
“You’re not going to see it here, not with New York opening. People may think New York will buy before they know the news. I’ll be sitting right here.”
“Excellent, Jane. Thank you.”
“No, thank you.”
“Oh?”
“I got in with my own account at sixty-four and out at sixty-one, so I made a nice sum this afternoon, Charlie.”
“Why didn’t you hold?” he asked. “I think it’s going down further.”
“Maybe I don’t have your guts.”
“Jane. Jane. You think old man Charlie is going over the edge—I can hear it in your voice.”
“Not at all. Call me when you’re ready to close out the play.”
He hung up, looked into the screen. The real-time price of GT was hovering at fifty-nine dollars a share. No notice had moved over the information services yet. Not Bloomberg, not Reuters.
He went back to the bar, pushed his way past a couple of journalists.
“Another?” the bartender asked, perhaps noticing the scar on Charlie’s hand.
“Yes, sir. A double,” he answered loudly. “I just got very bad news.”
“Sorry to hear that.” The bartender did not look up.
“Yes.” Charlie nodded solemnly. “Sir Henry Lai died tonight, massive heart attack at the China Club. A terrible thing.” He slid one hundred Hong Kong dollars across the bar. Several of the journalists peered at him.
“Pardon me,” asked one, a tall Englishman with a riot of red hair. “Did I hear you say Sir Henry Lai has died?”
Charlie nodded. “Not an hour ago. Terrible thing to witness. I just happened to be standing there, at the China Club.” He tasted his drink. “Please excuse me.”
He returned to the Bloomberg screen. The Englishman, he noticed, had slipped away to a pay phone in the corner. The New York Stock Exchange, casino to the world, had been open a minute. He waited. Three, four, five minutes. And then, finally, came what he’d been waiting for, Sir Henry Lai’s epitaph: GT’s price began shrinking as its volume exploded—half a million shares, price fifty-eight, fifty-six, two million shares, fifty-five and a half. He watched. Four million shares now. The stock would bottom and bounce. He’d wait until the volume slowed. At fifty-five and a quarter he pulled his phone out of his pocket, called Jane, and executed the option to sell at sixty-six. At fifty-five and seven-eighths he bought the same number of shares he’d optioned, for a profit of a bit more than ten dollars a share. Major money. Sixteen million before taxes. Big money. Real money. Elvis money.
The whiskey was finding its way around his brain, and now he was prepared to say that soon he would be drunk.
IT WAS ALMOST ELEVEN when he arrived back at his hotel, which loomed brightly above him, a tinkle of music and voices floating out into the gauzy fog from the open-air swimming pool on the fourteenth floor. The Sikh doorman, a vestige from the days of the British Empire, nodded a greeting. Inside the immense lobby a piano player pushed along a little tune that made Charlie feel mournful, and he sat down in one of the deep chairs that faced the harbor. So much ship traffic, hundreds of barges and junks and freighters and, farther out, the super-tankers. To the east sprawled the new airport—they had filled in the ocean there, hiring half of all the world’s deep-water dredging equipment to do it. History in all this. He was looking at ships moving across the dark waters, but he might as well be looking at the twenty-first century itself, looking at his own countrymen who could not find factory jobs. The poor fucks had no idea what was coming at them, not a clue. China was a juggernaut, an immense, seething mass. It was building aircraft carriers, it was buying Taiwan. It shrugged off turmoil in Western stock markets. Currency fluctuations, inflation, deflation, volatility—none of these things compared to the fact that China had eight hundred and fifty million people under the age of thirty-five. They wanted everything Americans now took for granted, including the right to piss on the shoes of any other country in the world. The Chinese could actually get things done, too; they were rewiring with fiber-optic cable, they were tearing down Shanghai, a city of fourteen million, and rebuilding it from scratch. The central government had committed a trillion dollars to the effort, bulldozing any neighborhood deemed standing in the way of progress. If you didn’t like it, and announced as much, the Chinese tied you spread-eagle to a door for a month or so. With a hole to shit through. They knew America didn’t care—not really. There was too much money to be made—he could see that right now, the boats on their way north, the
slide of time.
But ha! There might be some consolation after all! He pushed back in the seat, slipped on his half-frame glasses, and did the math on a hotel napkin. After commissions and taxes, his evening’s activities had netted him close to eight million dollars—a sum grotesque not so much for its size but for the speed and ease with which he had seized it—two phone calls!—and, most of all, for its mockery of human toil. Well, it was a grotesque world now. He’d done nothing but understand what the theorists called a market inefficiency and what everyone else knew as inside information. If he was a ghoul, wrenching dollars from Sir Henry Lai’s vomit-filled mouth, then at least the money would go to good use. He’d put all of it in a bypass trust for Julia’s child. The funds could pay for clothes and school and pediatrician’s bills and whatever else. It could pay for a life. He remembered his father buying used car tires from the garage of the Minnesota Highway Patrol for a dollar-fifty. No such thing as steel-belted radials in 1956. Charlie-boy, I’m going to teach you how to fix a broken fan belt. Kinda useful thing to know. See, you could be on some road somewhere and … He’d shown his father an F-105 in 1967, told him that NASA would make it to the moon in a couple of years. His father had never believed it. He’d told his father that he’d carried a small nuclear warhead in test flights in 1970. His father had never believed that, either. You cross borders of time, and if people don’t come with you, you lose them and they you. Now it was an age when a fifty-eight-year-old American executive could net eight million bucks by watching a man choke to death. His father would never have understood it, and he suspected that Ellie couldn’t, either. Not really. There was something in her head lately. She was going some other direction. Maybe it was because of Julia, but maybe not. She was anxious and irritable these days, jabbering at him about retirement communities, complaining that he traveled too much. She seemed distracted, too. She bought expensive vegetables she let rot in the refrigerator, she kept changing her hair color, she took Charlie’s blood-pressure pills by mistake, she left the phone off the hook. He wanted to be patient with her but could not. She drove him nuts.
HE SAT IN THE HOTEL LOBBY for an hour more, reading every article in the International Herald Tribune and eating a piece of chocolate cake. He wondered how Mr. Ming knew about the quad-port transformer. The factory Ming was financing would initially manufacture Teknetrix’s existing line of datacom switches, not the Q4. It was possible, of course, that one of the company’s salesmen had bragged about the Q4, or the tech research people had let slip some information at one of the industry conferences. His main competitor, Manila Telecom, might know of the research on the product—Charlie’s company certainly knew of theirs.
He wouldn’t worry the question now. Julia was more important. He checked his watch and finally, at midnight, decided not to wait for her call and pulled his phone from his pocket and dialed her Manhattan office.
“Tell me, sweetie,” he said once he got past the secretary.
“Oh, Daddy …”
“Yes?”
A pause. And then she cried.
“Okay, now,” he breathed, closing his eyes. “Okay.”
She gathered herself. “All right. I’m fine. It’s okay. You don’t have to have children to have a fulfilling life, I just keep reminding myself. It’s a beautiful day outside. I can handle this. I don’t want you to worry about me.”
“Tell me what they said.”
“They said I’ll probably never have my own children, it’s probably impossible, they think the odds are—I haven’t even told Brian, I’m just sitting here, not even—I mean, I can’t work or think or anything, all I know is that I’ll never hold my own baby, never, just something I’ll never, ever do.”
“Oh, sweetie.”
“We really thought it was going to work. You know? I’ve had a lot of faith with this thing. They have these new egg-handling techniques, makes them glue to the walls of the uterus, and they say it increases the odds.”
They were both silent a moment. He rubbed absentmindedly at the scar on his hand.
“I mean, you kind of expect that technology will work,” Julia went on, her voice thoughtful. “It’s the last religion, right? They can make a sixty-three-year-old woman give birth. That’s the actual record. They can pull sperm out of a dead man. They can clone human beings—they can do all of these things and they can’t—” She stopped.
The day had piled up on him, and he was trying to remember all that Julia had explained to him previously about eggs and tubes and hormone levels. “Sweetie,” he tried, “the problem is not exactly the eggs?”
“My eggs are pretty lousy, also. You’re wondering if we could put my egg in another woman, right?”
“No, not—well, maybe yes,” he sighed, the thought of it abhorrent to him.
“They don’t think it would work. The eggs aren’t that viable. You could have someone go through a year or two and fail, just on the basis of the eggs.”
“And your tubes—”
She gave a bitter laugh. “Daddy, they could poke the perfect eggs of some eighteen-year-old girl into me. But the walls of my uterus are too thin. The eggs won’t stick.”
“Right.”
“I’m barren, Daddy. I finally understand that word. I can’t make good eggs, and I can’t hatch eggs, mine or anyone else’s.”
He watched the lights of a tanker slide along the oily water outside. Say something useful, he thought. “I know it’s too early to start discussing adoption, but—”
“He doesn’t want to do it. At least he says he won’t,” she sobbed.
“Wait, sweetie,” Charlie responded, hearing her despair, “Brian is just—Adopting a child is—”
“No, no, no, Daddy, Brian doesn’t want a little Guatemalan baby or a Lithuanian baby or anybody else’s baby but his own. It’s about his own goddamn penis. If it doesn’t come out of his penis, then it’s no good.”
Her husband’s view made sense to him, but he couldn’t say that now. “Julia, I’m sure Brian—”
“I would have adopted a little baby a year ago, two years ago! But I put up with all this shit, all these hormones and needles in my butt and doctors pushing things up me, for him. I mean, I’ve done Lupron nine times! I made myself a raving Lupron bitch nine times, Daddy. That has got to be more than any other woman in New York City! And now those years are—Oh, I’m sorry, Daddy, I have a client. I’ll talk to you when you come back. I’m very—I have a lot of calls here. Bye.”
He listened to the satellite crackle in the phone, then to the return of the dial tone, then the announcement in Chinese to hang up. His flight was at eight the next morning, New York seventeen hours away, and as always, he wanted to get home, and yet didn’t, for as soon as he arrived, he would miss China. The place got to him, like a recurrent dream, or a fever—forced possibilities into his mind, whispered ideas he didn’t want to hear. Like the eight million. It was perfectly legal yet also a kind of contraband. If he wanted, Ellie would never see the money; his brokerage and bank statements were filed by his secretary, Karen, and Ellie could barely be troubled to sign the tax returns each April. She had long since ceased to be interested in his financial gamesmanship, so long as there was enough money for the necessities: Belgian chocolates for the elevator man at Christmas, fresh flowers twice a week, the farmhouse and pool in Tuscany. But like a flash of unexpected lightning, the new money illuminated certain questions begging for years at the edge of his consciousness. He had been rich for a long time, but now he was rich enough to fuck with fate. Had he been waiting for this moment? Yes, waiting until he knew about Julia, waiting until he was certain.
He called Martha Wainwright, his personal lawyer. “Martha, I’ve finally decided to do it,” he said when she answered.
“Oh, Christ, Charlie, don’t tell me that.”
“Yes. Fact, I just made a little extra money in a stock deal. Makes the whole thing that much easier.”
“Don’t do it, Charlie.”
�
�I just got the word from my daughter, Martha. If she could have children, it would be a different story.”
“This is bullshit, Charlie. Male bullshit.”
“Is that your legal opinion or your political one?” She was tough, old Martha.
“I’m going to argue with you when you get back,” she warned.
“Fine—I expect that. For now, please just put the ad in the magazines and get all the documents ready.”
“I think you are a complete jerk for doing this.”
“We understand things differently, Martha.”
“Yes, because you are addicted to testosterone.”
“Most men are, Martha. That’s what makes us such assholes.”
“You having erection problems, Charlie? Is that what this is about?”
“You got the wrong guy, Martha. My dick is like an old dog.”
“How’s that? Sleeps all the time?”
“Slow but dependable,” he lied. “Comes when you call it.”
She sighed. “Why don’t you just let me hire a couple of strippers to sit on your face? That’d be infinitely cheaper.”
“That’s not what this is about, Martha.”
“Oh, Charlie.”
“I’m serious, I really am.”
“Ellie will be terribly hurt.”
“She doesn’t need to know.”
“She’ll find out, believe me. They always do.” Martha’s voice was distraught. “She’ll find out you’re up to something, then she’ll find out you’re advertising for a woman to have your baby, and then she’ll just flip out, Charlie.”
“Not if you do your job well.”
“You really this afraid of death?”
“Not death, Martha, oblivion. Oblivion is the thing that really kills me.”
“You’re better than this, Charlie.”
“The ad, just put in the ad.”
He hung up. In a few days the notice would sneak into the back pages of New York’s weeklies, a discreet little box in the personals, specifying the arrangement he sought, the benefits he offered, and Martha would begin screening the applications. He’d see who responded. You never knew who was out there.
Afterburn: A Novel Page 6
