Emerald City (2 page)

But now their hatred of China, their deep resentment at having to spend the best part of their summer in a land where people blew their noses without Kleenex, had united Melissa and Kylie in steely mutiny against me. “Daddy, why?” had been their refrain from the moment the trip began: the boat from Hong Kong into Canton, the days of waiting for a plane to Kunming that, when it finally arrived, could not have inspired less confidence had we assembled it ourselves. “Why, Daddy?” With time the object of their query had grown more and more diffuse: Why here? Why any of this? They were asking the wrong man.

The buildings of Chengdu were newer, and therefore less pleasing, than those of Kunming. I roamed the streets impatiently, my wife and listless daughters in tow. We drank green tea in a moist enclave beside a Buddhist temple. The fog smelled of chemicals. An Asian girl with strange pale-blue eyes kept staring at us. “Do you think she might be crazy, Dad?” Melissa asked.

“She’s admiring your haircut.”

Melissa glanced at me, thinking I might be serious, then recognized the acid sarcasm that had become my preferred mode of speech with her of late.

“Probably had you for a dad,” she muttered.

“Probably wasn’t so lucky.”

My wife sighed. “She’s blind,” she said. And instantly I saw that
Caroline was right; the girl was drawn by our unrecognizable voices, but her eyes were empty.

“Let’s go to Xi’an,” I said. “It’s supposed to be fascinating.”

Melissa opened our guidebook, scanned the pages, and read aloud: “The Qin Terra-Cotta Warriors are one of the few reasons to visit Xi’an, an urban wasteland of uniform city blocks and Soviet-style apartment buildings, but they are a compelling one.”

“That’s not what I heard,” I said, suppressing an urge to knock the book out of her hands.

“Terra-cotta worriers?” Kylie said.

“Heard from who?” my wife asked.

“The guy who got us the train tickets.”

“They’re thousands of clay soldiers as big as real men,” Caroline explained to Kylie. “A paranoid Chinese emperor had them built underground to protect him after he died.”

“Neat,” Kylie said.

Caroline looked at me. “Let’s go there.”

“Why?” Melissa asked, but no one answered.

Looking downtrodden, Melissa wandered out first from the tea shop. As we followed her, I turned to glance behind me, and sure enough, the Asian girl with the pale-blue eyes was still gazing blindly after us.

I knew—and Caroline knew—that since the investigation began, my status had slipped—or risen—from that of her husband and equal to that of a person she indulged. Gratitude and guilt played a part in this. I’d worked my ass off at the office for years while she puttered away in her sculpture studio. Then, three years ago, Caroline hit the jackpot, landing a piece in the Whitney Biennial. This led to more exhibits, one-person shows in several cities, including New York, and dozens of studio visits from thin, beautiful women and their
sleek young husbands who smelled (like me, I suppose) of fresh cash, or from scrawny, perfumed old bats whose doddering mates brought to mind country houses and slobbering retrievers. Everything my wife had yet to sculpt for the next three years was already sold. We’d talked about my quitting, pursuing anthropology or social work like I’d always said I wanted to, or just relaxing, for Christ’s sake. But our overhead was so high: the house in Presidio Terrace, the girls in private school heading toward college, skating lessons, riding lessons, piano lessons, tennis camp in the summers—I wanted them to have all of it, all of it and more, for the rest of their lives. Even Caroline’s respectable income could not have begun to sustain it. Then let’s change, she’d said. Let’s scale back. But the idea filled me with dread; I wasn’t a sculptor, I wasn’t a painter, I wasn’t a person who made things. What I’d busted my chops all these years to create was precisely the life we led now. If we tossed that away, what would have been the point?

We were still chewing on this when I found out about the investigation. Its architect, the aptly named Jeffrey Fox, had been after my scalp for years because his wife, Sheila, was a ball-buster, whereas mine was lovely and terrific. He was always sniffing around Caroline’s studio, and had bought three of her pieces the year before. “That little turd!” Caroline had shrieked when I told her about the investigation, and night after night we’d sat awake long after the girls were in bed, holding whispered conferences on how I should respond: Write a letter to the board proclaiming my innocence? Mount a counteroffensive against Fox? But no, we decided. The best thing to do, for the moment, was nothing. Let the investigation run its course, and when it turned up nada, question the legitimacy of its having been started at all. In the meantime, take a leave, clear my head, get some sleep. Ha-ha.

The unlikely, intangible result of all this was that Caroline owed
me. I knew it, she knew it, and I won’t lie—this was not a feeling I minded.

My wife and daughters stared morosely from the taxi windows as we sped from the Xi’an airport to the Golden Flower hotel, past block after block of drab apartment buildings and sidewalks lined with limp, dusty trees. The opulent hotel boosted everyone’s spirits; nothing like the sight of uniformed doormen, marble floors, and rich Midwesterners patting their billfolds to renew one’s faith in the bounty of the universe. To my secret delight, not even Caroline cared to accompany me into “old” Xi’an, which, according to the Asian woman in a collegiate headband behind the front desk (no doubt she was the product of classes in how to look and act Western), was where I would find Stuart’s address. I left Caroline sprawled on the bed boning up on Qin Shi Huangdi, the maniac emperor who’d built the terra-cotta warriors—at the cost of many a laborer, she reported; the final masterpiece contained not only the blood and sweat of its sculptors, but occasionally even their flesh.

On the streets of “old” Xi’an I found the lady tea vendors out in force—women whose idea of washing a glass was to sprinkle water on it. I hadn’t let my daughters near these people, convinced that their unwashed glasses harbored all manner of deadly diseases just waiting for the chance to invade my girls’ frail intestines. But I bought myself a glass of tea and sipped it, bought one of those fluffy white buns filled with a suspicious mash of vegetables and scarfed it down, then bought a second. I felt terrific.

I wandered inside a Buddhist temple and heard people chanting to this delicate sound of chimes, and my stomach was fluttery in a way I remembered from childhood, the feeling you had shoplifting, or creeping into the next-door neighbor’s basement. I left the temple, savoring this as I walked to Stuart’s street, when suddenly, from
half a block away, I saw him. He was standing right there on the sidewalk, talking with three old Chinese ladies. My heart leapt—there is no other way to put it. The blood rushed to my face the way it used to when I’d just seen a girl I wanted to put the moves on, and then I stopped dead. What in hell was the matter with me? This was a man, after all—a man who’d ripped me off and made me look like an ass. Was I losing my mind? But already I’d started walking again, toward him.

“Stuart,” I said. He looked blank, and I felt weirdly crushed. “Kunming, remember?” I said. “You got us the tickets.”

“Oh. Right.” He gave a baffled smile. The Chinese ladies moved away.

“We made it,” I said, idiotically.

There was an awkward silence. “So, you still writing about drugs?” I asked.

“This week it’s smuggling.”

“Smuggling what?”

“Antiques. People leaving the country with vases and stuff.”

“You sort of specialize in crime stories?” I asked, my pulse firing like a machine gun.

“It’s an area I know pretty well.”

“From experience.” I couldn’t stop myself.

Stuart cocked his head. “You sort of a would-be journalist?”

“Either that or a would-be criminal,” I said, and burst out laughing.

Stuart said nothing. He took a long look at me, and I saw in his face the first sign of real curiosity.

“Anything to see around here besides those clay warriors?” I asked.

“Not much in Xi’an,” he said. “Tomorrow I’m going to some Buddhist caves outside town that are pretty extraordinary.”

“Is that right?”

“You’re welcome, if you can sneak away,” he said. “But you’d have to stay overnight.”

“Might be doable.”

He named a place at the train station and said he would wait there at ten the next morning. “If you can make it, great,” he said, turning to go.

“I’ll be there,” I said.

Brady bonds, emerging markets: these were much on Cameron Pierce’s mind at Harry Meyer’s stag party, where I met him the first time. Olive-green suit, ponytail, an air of having more cowboy in him than the rest of us. How did Harry know him? Harry was tables away, a wet shirt draped over his head, trashed. It wasn’t long before the strippers showed up, three of them, each with different-colored hair, and while they went to work on Harry, Cameron told me about the limited partnerships he was setting up to invest in African countries: Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Botswana, Zimbabwe.

“You spend much time over there?” I asked.

He’d pulled a red apple from the centerpiece and was eating it with a fierce pleasure that made me want one, too. “As much as possible,” he said, grinning.

“I hear you,” I said. And, on impulse, I told him about my stint with the Peace Corps—something I rarely mentioned to people in the business.

Cameron set down his apple core and leaned toward me so that I could hear him over the hoots and catcalls issuing from our colleagues. “That’s what makes all this bullshit worthwhile,” he said. “Getting out. Seeing what’s really there.” We understood each other then; we were separate from—better than—what surrounded us.

The next week, Cameron Pierce’s lackey made a presentation at
our office. One of our junior traders, Burt Phelps, seemed as interested in the deal as I was but wanted to do more checks on Pierce, or at least wait until Harry Meyer came back from his honeymoon on Bora Bora so we could run it by him. “Feel free,” I said. “I’m going in.” I was operating on pure gut, that great, impulsive organ we traders live by. And because he felt like an asshole, I guess, Burt went in, too. Both of us put up the minimum—twenty-five thousand. The lackey came to pick up our certified checks.

Cameron and I talked on the phone a couple of times after that. He was heading for the Far East. “That’s the place,” he said. “You want to get lost, do it there.” We agreed to have lunch after he got back. My monthly statements started coming in; with returns at twenty percent, I couldn’t complain. Burt was over the moon. Then I guess we sort of forgot about it. I’d got four statements in all when they stopped arriving, but it was two months at least before I noticed, and then only when Burt mentioned it. “Sam, you heard anything lately from Africo?” he said.

The rest was straight out of bad TV: calls to the Africo office hitting a disconnected line; a trip to the Kearny Street address on Cameron Pierce’s business card revealing that Africo, Ltd., had never been there. Nor was it registered with the SEC or anywhere else; ditto for Cameron Pierce and his lackey, whose name I can’t remember now. Harry Meyer, whom we’d forgotten even to consult, had never heard of the guy. “Cameron who? My party?” he said, perplexed. “Someone else must have brought him.” In other words, they were con men. We’d been had. Not that unusual in a business like ours, where guys had so much cash to throw around. But the ones it happened to were usually younger, more junior than me. More like Burt. And it was Burt who’d had the reservations.

In the world of lousy investments, twenty-five grand isn’t much to lose. But I couldn’t get over it. The guy had sat there selling me
on his phony deal, and while I was thinking how much I liked him, how good it all sounded, he was thinking, He’s nibbling, no question. Peace Corps?—oh shit, I’ve got him now! The guys at work teased me about the fine example I’d set; Caroline wrung her hands a little over the money; then they all pretty much forgot about it. But not me. I kept thinking of him, Cameron Pierce, wondering how many “partners” he’d brought in, how many “deals” he’d pulled off in the past. He was somewhere—lying on a beach, smoking cigars, spending our money. At night, while Caroline slept, I’d find myself wondering who he was, really, at the very bottom. Was he anyone?

If I’d really listened to the guy, I decided, I would’ve seen it coming. Hadn’t he practically told me? I’m from another world, he’d said—a place where this one means nothing. I’d assured him that I was, too. But it wasn’t true. I’d played by the rules. And he’d won.

“What kind of bullshit is this?” Caroline said when I’d outlined for her what struck me as a perfectly reasonable plan: while she and the girls visited the Qin terra-cotta warriors the following day, I would take an overnight trip with a total stranger to another part of China.

“The same guy who got us the tickets?” she said. “He lives in Xi’an? Why didn’t you tell me that before?”

“I wasn’t sure how you’d react.”

“Why should I care?”

“You seem to care now.”

“Now that I know you kept it a secret, I care. Now that you’ve decided to disappear with him, yes, Sam, I care.”

We stared at each other, furious. “Is this sexual?” Caroline asked in disbelief.

“Oh, Christ in holy heaven!” I thundered.

My wife studied me. After a long while she said, “We’re not doing this, Sam.”

“Not doing what?”

“Whatever it is you’re trying to do.”

“I’m going with him.”

“Fine,” she said. “We’ll come, too.”

We stood mournfully in the long, snaking line of Chinese peasants waiting to board the train. Melissa and Kylie were doing their best to sulk, but their utter mystification at our sudden change of plans and the appearance of a stranger in our midst interfered with the purity of their displeasure. I went with Stuart to buy the tickets—his, too; it seemed the least I could do after he’d so gracefully agreed to bring my entire family with him to the Buddhist caves. He took off to do an errand before the train left.