He pulled out her cell phone and dialed the Panda Guesthouse just as the hammer came down one last time and people applauded. All he got was an electronic whine, and he tucked the phone back in his pocket. Quickly everyone stood and began heading to the banquet room. David looked around. Bill Tang was still at the back of the room, negotiating with the guards. David had made a terrible mistake in judgment, and he had to act fast. He tried to push his way through the crowd that had suddenly clustered around Stuart to congratulate him on his triumph. It took a few seconds before David realized that Stuart was being congratulated not for the purchase of the cloisonné ruyi but for that of the Site 518 ruyi. Stuart acted charming, effusively accepting praise one moment, then coyly denying that he knew anything about the ruyi the next. “You were in the room,” he said to Nixon Chen. “You saw me drop out.” This elicited raucous laughter from the other well-wishers. Stuart’s show of bidding then dropping out had just been comical pretense for those in the know.
Dr. Ma waited at the end of the aisle. “Mr. Miller, I hope that you’ll return what is China’s to China.”
“If I did that, Dr. Ma, then I wouldn’t have anything in my collection.” Stuart beamed happily.
“I’m not asking for everything, only the Site 518 ruyi.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Stuart
turned to Madame Wang and took her by the elbow. “Come along, dear,” he said, and they swept into the party.
Ma disappeared into the crowd. David edged forward, then stopped. Ma had told him to get the ruyi. Logic told David to stick with Stuart Miller. He might even be able to convince the entrepreneur to give it back of his own free will tonight. David had several persuasive arguments, and Stuart might want to avoid a lengthy—and public—legal battle. But David wanted answers, and instinct told him that the person he needed them from was Bill Tang, who was just now finishing up with the guards, shaking hands, and smiling. David hurried to the elevator, rode it down to the lobby, and found a place to stand where he hoped he wouldn’t be noticed. Sure enough, a few minutes later Bill Tang stepped into the lobby, purposefully strode across the marble floor, and left through the revolving doors. David waited just a fraction of a second, then followed Tang out into the night.
HULAN WAS BONE-TIRED, AND SHE WISHED SHE COULD JUST order something simple from the kitchen, but she’d told Michael Quon she’d meet him for dinner. She peeled out of her sweaty clothes and climbed into the shower. She closed her eyes and let the hot water pound the knots in the back of her neck. Then she turned off the hot tap and let the cool water chill the veins that pulsed just under the surface of her skin at her wrists and at the crooks of her elbows. For the first time since she’d gotten here, she dried her hair with the complimentary blow dryer, then put on a little lipstick and a touch of mascara. She slipped into a simple sheath of pale pink silk and strapped on a pair of sandals.
She found Michael Quon waiting for her on the restaurant’s veranda. The red light from a hanging lantern shone on his hair. The air was hot and wet, but he managed to look utterly cool, utterly serene. Inside the dining room, the Site 518 group huddled together in their usual spot. They were deep into their meal, and bottles of Tsingtao beer rose like a model city in the middle of the table. A couple of the men waved, Angela gave a message-delivered thumbs-up, but that was it.
Michael and Hulan were seated at a table at the back of the room. A waitress gave them menus, but before Hulan could open hers, Michael began speaking to the young woman in Mandarin, asking what was fresh and what the chef would recommend this evening. He’d been here longer than Hulan and had picked up more of the intricacies of the Sichuan dialect than she had, but this wasn’t what surprised her. His Mandarin was quite good. His American English diluted some of the tones, but beneath that she heard something pure, as though he’d spoken Chinese as a child. Still, it wasn’t a Taiwanese accent or a northern accent, either of which she might have expected given his age and that he was an American citizen by birth.
He ordered lettuce soup, bitter melon sautéed with beef and black beans, cold soy sauce chicken, and some China pea greens with roasted garlic in chicken broth. It was not an exotic meal, but it sounded perfect after the day she’d had. The lettuce soup would be simple and rejuvenating, the bitter melon would cut through the dust and dirt of the day, the cold chicken would be refreshing and nourishing, and the pea greens—if straight from the vine, which the waitress promised they were—would be bright and new on the taste buds. The waitress picked up Hulan’s unopened menu and disappeared.
“I hope you don’t mind,” Michael said, switching back to English.
It had been a long time since someone else had ordered a meal for her in a restaurant, and she didn’t mind at all.
The waitress came back with a bottle of local chardonnay and an ice bucket. Michael made small talk with the young woman as she uncorked the bottle, poured a little for him to taste, then filled both wineglasses. The liquid that slipped down Hulan’s throat was crisp and lively. It was the coldest thing she’d experienced since leaving Beijing.
Michael’s seeming disappointment in her at the end of their walk had dissipated, and he effortlessly held up his end of the conversation. In fact, he agreeably answered questions even before she asked them, like how he’d come to be so fluent in Chinese. His parents had left Shanghai, he told her between spoonfuls of soup, and moved to San Francisco at the end of the war. His father had been an engineer, his mother a physician.
“My brothers and I ran around all over the place,” he recalled as the waitress brought their other dishes. “In the summers, we’d go to a theater that played kung fu movies back-to-back on Monday nights, when all the Chinese chefs were off. My favorites were The One-Armed Boxer and Fist of Fury. Have you seen them?”
“We didn’t have a lot of films here when I was young.”
“Then I’m going to have to take you one day, because these are seminal martial arts films.” He said this only half in jest. “My brothers and I had some wild times at those programs. There were all these old bachelor chefs, smoking cigarettes and sipping from pints tucked inside brown paper bags, and then all of us kids, screaming, throwing popcorn, and peeing in the aisles. Afterward the boys would square off. American superheroes like Superman and Batman against the One-Armed Boxer and Bruce Lee—staking out territory, righting wrongs, killing the bad guys, and getting into all kinds of stuff we shouldn’t have.”
“Like what?” Hulan asked, still visualizing little boys wreaking havoc on a movie theater.
“Driving Mrs. Chan, our Chinese-language teacher, crazy.” He brushed a shock of hair from his forehead. “We all grew up speaking Chinese at home, but our parents wanted us to be literate. So off to Chinese school we went. But we were bad! We pulled Mrs. Chan’s laundry off the line so many times that she couldn’t hang it outdoors anymore, which I have to say was a great blessing to all, because her underwear—girdles, I guess you’d have to call them—was scary.” He paused, then added, “Of course you couldn’t be part of the gang unless you peed on Mrs. Chan’s back door. Now, that took real courage.”
“I’m sensing a theme here….”
He lifted his glass and toasted the air. “To silly memories.”
“To bad boys is more like it,” she said, tapping his glass lightly.
She liked listening to him. His candor—which had seemed forward during her interview with him in the hotel lobby because no native-born Chinese man would ever have spoken to her, an inspector from the Ministry of Public Security, so directly—now lifted her spirits. Michael didn’t know anything about her and wasn’t asking questions either. He was harmlessly entertaining, and she imagined how he might relate this evening at some fashionable Bay Area event sometime in the future: a perfect meal with a surprisingly charming and worldly Ministry of Public Security inspector in a picturesque guesthouse on the north shore of the Yangzi during monsoon season.
“So how did you go from being a boy who literally left his mark on what sounds like every street corner in San Francisco to being here at the Panda Guesthouse?” Hulan asked.
“The short answer is I’m a stereotype,” he replied. “My parents expected me to get into a good school and I did. I went to Stanford and got my Ph.D. in math. After graduation I got a job at Hewlett-Packard. You can probably guess the rest. I founded my own company in the early nineties. I took VYRUSCAN public before the bubble burst, and I became a very, very rich man.”
Which seemed a very un-Chinese thing to say.
“In a sense that was only the beginning,” he went on. “When you’ve made a lot of money, you feel compelled to make more. I started a REIT to buy land and do development deals. I put up venture capital in start-ups and was very lucky. But making money’s just a game after a while, so what’s the point? I’m not married. I don’t have children. I’ve provided for my brothers, their children, and their future grandchildren, so who was I building it all for? Once I came to that realization, I retired fully from making money.”
“That still doesn’t explain how you ended up here.”
“When you’re forty-two, retired, and money’s no object, how do you spend your time? Toys? Sure, I got into that. I bought a Boxster. I bought a boat and put it down in Monterey Bay. Oh, and a house, of course. But all that stuff requires work. The boa