This Is How It Really Sounds (32 page)

The food came, and the conversation turned to family and hobbies as they began to eat. Mr. Lam, it turned out, played badminton. He'd even competed in the Olympics.

“I'm impressed!” Kell said.

“But that was more than thirty years ago,” Lam returned modestly. “Now my son beats me!” He motioned to his partner. “Mr. Wu likes to ski. He is a fanatic.”

Harrington sensed an opening at last. “I live for skiing! A few years ago, I took the entire winter off and skied at Aspen every day. I got in a hundred twenty-six days!”

Wu smiled broadly. “I am jealous! In my best winter I only skied fifty-four days!”

“Really! Where?”

They began to compare resorts. Mr. Wu had skied in Switzerland and the French Alps, also in Harbin, though he made a face in answer to Harrington's query about the Chinese areas. They both liked Gstaad. Harrington talked about the resorts in Utah and Colorado and the quality of the snow.

“I would love to ski in America,” the Hong Kong man said eagerly.

“Did you ever do any backcountry skiing?”

Mr. Wu made a face. “I'm too old to go walking up a mountain! That's for young people, like you! But isn't it dangerous? With avalanches?”

“No!” Harrington overplayed his expertise a bit. He'd only gone backcountry skiing three times. “If you're careful, you've got an excellent chance of
not
dying in an avalanche.”

Kell piped up. “The only thing dangerous for him is squash.”

Mr. Wu didn't understand.

Harrington was surprised his partner had gone there, but he had no choice but to follow his lead. “This bruise,” he said, pointing at his nose, smiling. The lie felt almost completely natural, and he was relieved to be able to get the whole matter of his swollen face behind him. “I was playing squash and my opponent accidentally hit me in the face on his backswing.”

The effect of the anecdote was immediate. The two Hong Kong men visibly stiffened. Mr. Wu smiled uncomfortably. “Yes,” he said, “that is unfortunate.”

Harrington flailed at it, knowing somehow that he was making a mistake even as the words left his mouth. “It's embarrassing, because people always assume it's something far more interesting than that.”

Wu gave him a strange, bulging-eyed nod, as if he were holding his breath, and both Chinese men turned to eating again, throwing the table into a paralyzed silence. With Kell's help, the conversation resumed, though in a stilted and slightly formal way. The lunch dragged on awkwardly for another twenty minutes. Then the two Chinese men excused themselves with a promise to do more analysis on the venture. Kell watched them go, then turned back to his partner. “What the hell happened there?”

“You had to bring up my nose! Just for laughs!”

“You don't think they were wondering? They were looking at you cross-eyed from the second they walked in. What the hell's going on?”

“I told you I did
not
want to come to this—”

“
That's not your choice!
You're goddamned Peter Harrington, the big, bad, famous wolf! They want to look you in the eye and know they're part of your pack and not one of the sheep!”

“Maybe I'm tired of being Peter Harrington! Did you ever think of that?”

Kell regarded him silently for a moment. “Is there something I need to know, Peter?”

“Yes! Know that I'm not coming to any more meetings this week!” Harrington stood up. “Next week, I'm available for whatever dog-and-pony show you want to stage.”

As he crawled through traffic back to his house, he wondered if the Hong Kong men had known all along. It almost seemed that way. That would explain their reaction when he'd told them the squash story. No one wanted to invest two hundred million dollars with someone who lied to them in the first hour of their acquaintance. But how would they have found out? Even if someone had posted cell-phone videos of an assault on the street, how would they have known who he was and gotten word to the two men so quickly? He was seized by the nonsensical notion that somehow Gutterman had seen it, and with that he imagined something even more horrible: that Conrad, his son, would see it, too. Good God!

When he got back to his house, he frantically searched himself on the Internet. It was the usual stuff, with his own name and the musician's battling for the top rankings. Just like always. He felt a lessening of the panic that had been stealing up on him, and the reprieve spurred him to write an e-mail to Conrad. He tried to write his son every couple of weeks, but within a few sentences his efforts always ended up the same way: if he told about his life in Shanghai, it would remind his son that he'd abandoned him. If he asked about school, it would come off as an accusation. He didn't dare ask Conrad about his health or invite him to come visit. In the end, all he had was another stilted, unsent draft, saved along with a half dozen just like it.

*   *   *

The call came from Kell the next morning. He was surprised at Kell's tone: dry and demanding. “I think you'd better come down here.”

“What's up?”

“I think you know what's up.”

He responded in kind. “Actually, I don't. Why don't you tell me?”

“This is a face-to-face-type conversation. Just meet me here at the office.”

“I have an appointment with my trainer at nine.”

Kell sounded urgent, almost angry. “Cancel it!”

He showered and shaved. The swelling was almost completely gone now: there was only a slight puffiness and a shadow under both his eyes. At least that part of the experience was behind him. Yes, he'd been attacked, and he'd been shaken up by it, but he hadn't been seriously hurt, and it really hadn't changed anything. He'd rather just forget about it.

He wondered if the meeting had to do with Gutterman. Gutterman must have asked for more, or wanted some other sort of perk to buy his silence. Or maybe the investigators had already uncovered the link between Gutterman and Kell, and he was trying to figure out how to respond.

The traffic was parked, so Ma dropped him off at the station and he battled through the morning crowds, cheerful that his face was healing. Maybe he'd get together with Camille.

Kell greeted him soberly and asked his secretary to hold his calls.

“So,” Kell began when they were alone. He didn't even give Harrington a chance to take a seat. “I think I figured out the problem with Red Dragon yesterday. Sit down and watch this.”

The conference room had a large flat-screen monitor that was connected to Kell's desk computer. They used it for making presentations. Harrington sat down as the screen came alive with the operating system, to be immediately replaced by a Chinese Web site with a video embedded within. He recognized the architecture as that of the Bund. In the center of the picture was a man in a leather jacket with long blond hair, viewed from the rear. He started to get a sick feeling. Kell set it in motion.

The man was walking along the Bund, with the camera slightly behind him and then moving up to the side. It was definitely Pete Harrington, striding along and staring straight ahead with a purposeful air. If he'd suddenly turned to the camera and started singing, it could have been a music video from fifteen years ago. The cameraman said words that sounded like “Pete Harrington” in a slurred English, then muttered something in Chinese. A platoon of Chinese ideograms appeared at the bottom of the photo, then faded out.

Kell translated: “That says, ‘American musician Pete Harrington.'” The financier started to speak, but Kell raised his hand. “Keep watching. It gets better.”

He knew what he was going to see. The rock star walked on as the camera's point of view slipped up in front of him, then to his side again, then behind him, filming all the while. The musician seemed to spot something, and his step wavered; then he stopped for a few seconds before continuing on at a slightly slower pace. Now a little knot of three men became visible in patches between other pedestrians. A second crowd of Chinese characters appeared on the screen, and they too disappeared.

“That said, “‘American financial boss Peter Harrington.'” To his horror, he saw himself fill the frame, looking at Harrington joyfully, extending his hand, saying, audibly, “I know who you are! I really like your music!”

Harrington felt shame at the words, that Gutterman had been proved right about his Pete Harrington obsession, but he couldn't look away. Just as he'd remembered it, the musician growled, “Yeah, well … You're a fucking dirtbag!” More characters appeared on the screen, translating the dialogue.

The next part was excruciating. His attacker stepped forward and hit him with a blow that was industrial in its directness and efficiency. Even on the video, with the traffic noise and the voices all around, he thought he could hear the impact, like a wet slapping sound. His head rocked back, and he took several drunken steps to his rear before sitting down heavily on the sidewalk, clutching his nose. Harrington was kicking him. There were the fragments of Ernie and Mr. Ma's legs in the left side of the frame, and then his attacker was walking away, with one last pan toward where he lay on his back, rolling to his side and sitting up as blood poured from his nose. And then Pete Harrington's back, disappearing into the crowd.

One last Chinese ideogram filled the screen as it faded to black, and Kell's voice was flat as he translated it: “Justice.”

Harrington sat there without speaking, overcome with self-revulsion. Kell picked up the silence.

“I put in a call to Guardian Services this morning. They're the people in Palo Alto who do our online reputation management. I asked them to see if something was out there, and they picked this up in a search of your name in Chinese. It was posted on a Chinese Web site, and on that site it's only searchable in pinyin, which is how I imagine our friends from Red Dragon found it. There's another one out there, too, from a different angle. Do you want to see it?”

Harrington didn't answer, and Kell went on, his voice iced with a disagreeable irony. “So you can imagine why our guests yesterday were feeling just a wee bit ill at ease, and why they found your story about the squash accident so very, very reassuring.”

Harrington said in a low voice, “I told you I didn't want to go to that meeting!”

“You told me shit!” his partner shot back. “How could you blindside me with this? I'm your partner! And I'm supposed to be your friend!”

“I'm sorry! It was embarrassing.”

“You're goddamned right it was embarrassing! Four of us sitting at a table, and I'm the only one who has no idea that you've just gotten your ass kicked by a washed-up rock star! What does that say about us?”

“Oh. I see: you're the real victim here.”

“I
am
a victim here! Couldn't you at least have thrown up a block or tried to hit him back? You look like a complete jackass!” Kell caught himself, bowed his head with closed eyes. “I'm sorry,” he said, opening them. “That was out of line. Goddamned Gutterman is driving me crazy. You're the victim, and you were embarrassed, and you figured it would all blow over in a couple of days. I get that. It's everything else I don't get. First of all, why him?”

“He was holding eight million dollars in Crossroads when it collapsed. I think he decided to get revenge.”

“Revenge? Are you kidding me? How did he find you?”

“I don't know. I thought I was keeping a low profile, but obviously I can be found.”

“So this was premeditated.”

“I have no idea. From that video it looked like he spotted me on the street and went straight for me.”

“I don't buy that. Who's the old guy standing next to you at the beginning?”

“Ernie? I met him at the Bar Rouge, remember? I invited him to lunch.”

“Maybe he's the one who set you up.”

“No. Ernie tried to stop him, but his ankle gave out and he got in Ma's way.”

“So he tried to stop him, but the only guy he stopped was your bodyguard.”

“Come on: he's an old man!”

“What's he to you? Why'd you ask him to lunch?”

“Because he's interesting! Okay? He was in the OSS in the Second World War, and he was in Shanghai from 1946 to '49. He has a lot of stories to tell, and I wanted to hear those stories. Is that wrong? Does everything have to be about money or available women?”

“You're implying that all I care about is money and women?”

“Have we talked about anything else in the last three months?”

The lawyer nodded his head evenly. “Fair enough.”

“I'm definitely suing.”

Kell answered calmly but decisively. “No. You won't.”

“Why not?”

“You have no venue. The Chinese legal system will have zero interest in trying to extradite a foreign national from the United States for a fistfight, and any economic damage you suffer would be either in China or in the Caymans, where Metropolitan Partners is incorporated. There's no venue.”

“What about as a human rights violation? People sue in U.S. courts for that, don't they?”

“Peter Harrington, multimillionaire, suing for a human rights violation? You really want to whack that tar baby? This video's already got six thousand views in China. It'll go to six million the day after you file suit. Metropolitan Partners doesn't need that kind of publicity.”

“Can't Guardian do something about it?”

“I asked them that. They can keep it off YouTube—that's easy—but there's a million smaller sites out there with lower standards. There's no copyright violation here. You could try some sort of legal full-court press and harass anyone who posts it, but that's playing Whac-a-Mole. If you're not a major movie studio, that's going to get tiring. Another strategy is to try to bury the links, but that takes time, and if it goes too big, you can't control it. I set up an eleven o'clock conference with Guardian so you can get it straight from them.” Kell hesitated and seemed about to broach a new topic, but stopped himself. “Let's just see where it goes. We'll see what Guardian can do. Maybe the whole thing will die down.”