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.'
'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 supertankers. 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
