Chinese.'
And why not? The Chinese were reverse-engineering America's F-18 fighter jet, illegally buying old versions and spare parts in an effort to figure out how to manufacture the plane. They had stolen U.S. nuclear missile technology so that they could blow up Taiwan after they bought it. They were building the world's tallest building. They understood capitalism better than Americans, because they had seen it arrive, loved it as a new toy.
'I said you're obsessed with the Chinese.'
He nibbled a cracker. 'I heard you, Ellie. My hearing is still pretty good for a guy about to be buried alive.'
'You think the Chinese know something we don't?'
'Yes.'
She returned, carrying his drink. 'What?'
'They know what time it is.'
'Sweetie'-she looked at him beseechingly-'that may be true, but it has nothing to do with where we live the next ten years.'
Of course. He took her hand, raised it to his lips. 'Don't bother about me,' he said. 'I'm just-I saw a man die in Hong Kong. Heart attack. I tried to help him, but he was gone. I haven't seen someone die for a long time…' Except in his dreams, which occasionally came back to him, the villagers and water buffalo and smoking pieces of trucks flung fifty feet into the air-but that was an old story, a story everyone had forgotten.
'Maybe we should talk about this after dinner.'
He tasted the drink. Not quite right. 'What will we say?' he badgered her. 'That I agree? That I see it your way?'
'That would be expecting the impossible.'
She wasn't going to back down, he saw. He put out his hand. 'Come here.'
She smiled warily. 'Oh no.'
'Come on. I'm your old pal, remember?'
'I know what you're doing.' But she came over to his chair.
He pulled her closer. 'You should have married someone nice.'
She shook her head in disgust. 'I don't want someone nice. Never did.'
He pulled her tight against him, laid his hand on the back of her dress. Her rear was loose and fat, yet he loved it anyway. 'But nice lasts a long time. You think you don't really want a man who is nice, and then thirty years with a bad man go by and you realize that nice would have been, yes, rather nice after all. All the other things wear out '-he rubbed her ass vigorously, watching her smile-'but nice? Well, nice keeps on going.'
'Oh, please.' But she was letting him kiss her.
'The mistake you made,' he whispered in her small pink ear, 'was that you married someone who was rotten. A mistake women often make, even the smart ones. They like the rotten guys.'
'You were never rotten.' Her face was happy, her eyes were closed.
He moved his hand between her legs. 'Am I in the game here?'
She opened her eyes. 'You want to be?'
'I always want to be in the game.'
She contemplated him. 'All right.'
'Now?'
'After dinner.'
Two hours later, Ellie lay under the covers, her flesh a sentimental landscape.
'Downtown or uptown?' he asked.
'Stay up here.' She pulled his arms.
Despite the estrogen pills, she still had lubrication problems, and so dipped her hands into a small jar of petroleum jelly she kept in their bedside table, and worked herself and him.
'My hands are cold,' she said.
'It's all right.' He hadn't ejaculated in two weeks.
'Come on now,' she said.
He pressed into her and she began to finger herself gently, lips pursed, eyelids fluttering. He counted strokes. Usually about forty-five strokes and Ellie would come, then again after another fifteen or twenty, and again after another ten. Very dependable, his wife, at least in this respect. At stroke twenty-three he paused. Twenty-three? What was the meaning of twenty-three? Manila Telecom's percentage market share? Something like that. Maybe MT's management had been talking to Marvin Noff, bad-mouthing Teknetrix, maybe trying to-
'Don't stop,' Ellie breathed, 'not now.'
He resumed, the blood pounding in his ears. At forty-four, Ellie lifted her chin and cried out, banging her palm on his chest.
'Keep going,' he whispered. 'The woods are burning.'
Ellie took a breath, spit on her fingers, then went at it again. She cried out sweetly and then pulled on him. 'Now,' she commanded.
But as he pressed, he felt himself soften. He shifted his position, but it didn't work.
'Want me to lift my legs?' Ellie asked in the dark.
'Sure.'
She raised her knees up, slipping one hand behind each to hold them, something she had started to do in her forties, and he pressed again, but it was no good.
She felt the change. 'You want me to help?'
He exhaled. It didn't seem worth the trouble. 'I'm a dead dog,' he said, rolling off.
She rubbed his back. 'Jet-lagged is what I think.'
'Maybe.' He wondered how soon he'd see the responses to his advertisement.
'You thinking about Manila Telecom?'
'We have to get that plant going.'
'You will.'
'We've got some leeway built into the schedule but not that much.'
She held his penis, rubbing it with her thumb the same way the money changers in Shanghai fondled fat wads of dollar bills. Eight million, he thought, but no hard-on.
'Sweetie?'
Her dutifulness depressed him, and he brought her hand to his chest.
They lay there in the darkness until he heard Ellie's breathing flatten out. He was running on China time, not sleepy, not even close, and after a few minutes, he got up and wandered into the office off the bedroom and stood at the window watching the taxis pulse through Central Park. He would have Jane transfer all of the GT proceeds to his private account at Citibank. There was no need to mix the sum with his other investments, and he could ask Ted Fullman, his private banker, to segregate half the money for capital-gains taxes. Don't let me touch it, Ted. There was plenty of money, piles of it. After he died, Ellie could live to one hundred and forty if she liked, and there'd be millions left over, thanks to the Teknetrix stock, which had first been offered at a laughable two and a half dollars a share, and now, sixteen years later, had reached one hundred and fifty-four dollars, not correcting for splits. And Julia was well provided for, Martha Wainwright having drafted all the documents that would paper over his grave. No, the Sir Henry money was genuinely superfluous; he could turn it into cash and hand it out in the Port Authority bus station if he so desired and his life would be unchanged; the sum would merely have moved through him in its endless transubstantiation, the regular heartbeat of a Hong Kong billionaire becoming dirty bills fluttering through Manhattan, a fortune atomized, only to reappear somewhere else in the future.
How strange to be so rich, so comfortable. He had never expected it. On the wall, next to the old photos of Charlie standing stiffly, painfully, with the Secretary of Defense, with Nixon himself, next to the Silver Star, the Distinguished Flying Cross, and the Purple Heart, hung the framed Air Force T-shirt he'd been wearing when he was rescued-torn, rotted, stained with blood. The colonel at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines, where Charlie had been flown within ten hours of being found, had ordered the shirt retrieved from the base hospital and had it mounted and framed with a small brass plaque that noted the dates of Charlie's capture and release. While almost everything in his life had continued to change-Ellie, Ben, Teknetrix, China, how men and women made babies-the
