He knows, Jin Li realized, he knows I'm here.
5
Pain, pain, go away, come back and kill me another day. Bill Martz rose as he always rose now, with pain in his back and knees and feet, not to mention pain between his ass and his balls, which meant his prostate gland was acting up again. He winced as he stood, found his slippers, then inspected his naked self in the bathroom mirror. You look like a hairless orangutan, he thought. He pissed with great relief into the bathtub, which he did whenever he could. No aiming, just fire, let the maid clean up after him. Pissing with freedom was an increasingly important activity to him, even imbued with existential significance, and he cared little what anyone thought. At cocktail parties and dinners at private homes, he often pissed into the bathtub instead of the toilet. Or even in the sink. What were they going to do to him? Nothing! He was Bill Martz!
Connie was making breakfast. His fourth wife. He often wondered why they were together. Once a month or so he forgot her name. She was twenty-eight years younger than he was and the difference showed every day. One of those women who had collected and instituted into their regimens so many beauty secrets that they appeared to be aging at one-tenth the rate that normal people did. Glowing! Bubbly! Peppy! He resented her youthfulness even as he absolutely required it as a condition of their marriage. Soft, bouncy, firm. And he wasn't just talking about her breasts or face or ass. Nope. It was a grim and insufficiently recognized truth that as women drifted into and out of menopause, their sexual selves suffered mightily. No matter what the women's magazines chirped. Looseness. Dryness. Discomfort. Pain. Connie was old enough that menopause was out there, lurking on the horizon in a few years, but he was confident that her ob-gyn had all sorts of endocrino-logical tricks up his sleeve. He'd better. Bill Martz had seen (wife number two) what happened otherwise and it was not a happy thing. He was too rich to be afflicted by a dry vagina!
Why had he married Connie? Why, really? She was beautiful, but so were lots of women. She made him feel good. Well, sure. But why had he actually married her? They weren't going to have any children and he had gotten the snip back in his fifties between marriages two and three, when he was running around so much that he couldn't keep the women straight in his head. He had married Connie because he was lonely and she was there. Simple as that. He didn't love her, not really. He was fond of her, yes. Terrible word, 'fond.' He had loved his first wife passionately, but she had died of breast cancer at forty-two, and thereafter he had been able only to approximate a decreasing percentage of that original feeling with subsequent women. So, no, he didn't really love Connie. And he doubted she loved him, not if he knew anything about women, though he appreciated her willingness not to make it an issue. Why should she love him, anyway? He wasn't particularly lovable. He wasn't particularly anything, except rich. And nasty. Vanity Fair had once devoted a whole article to how nasty and rapacious he was, and not one word was libelous. He was a nasty, rapacious orangutan who pissed into his bathtub instead of the four-thousand-dollar toilet. I used to be charming, he reflected, back when I cared what people thought of me. Why'd Connie marry him? The moan-ay, of course. The security. But Connie was still just young enough to have children. And why shouldn't she? She had every right to have them. He understood that marrying him might have been a disastrous decision for her. At this he felt a distinct sadness for her, what she'd missed. He had four grown children and they were his only consolation. The rest of it all could go to hell.
Really, his wife was wasting her life by being with him. If he had any courage he would tell her this. She was still pretty enough to go out on the remarriage circuit and grab a reasonably decent guy-someone with, say, eighty or a hundred mil. He and Connie had sex about twice a month, thanks to the beautiful pills science provided to guys like him, but he had to admit it wasn't great. Connie wasn't the problem. She was fine, or would be fine. He didn't have it, the juice, the mojo, the mustard. The act itself was ghostly, a tissue of sensation atop thousands of earlier iterations. He couldn't feel the pleasure in its originality, his cock no longer the time-travel device it used to be. His rational mind was never overwhelmed. In fact, he smelled death on himself-a sour, exhausted whiff. Whether this was mere aging or his problem in particular didn't matter. There was no pill for it, no woman for it, no end of it, no antidote for it — except big action! Making decisions, risking, winning, taking the hit when it came, feeling the force of money. Money as wind, fire, stone! Money as beauty, ugliness, and pain! Money as fear and hatred and love! Only with money were his instincts perfect, his reflexes untouched by age, his passion endless. He couldn't explain this and it certainly wasn't admirable, but it was true.
He pulled his robe tight and shuffled into the kitchen. Connie was there with two plates of eggs. The house staff arrived at nine, so she usually made breakfast. He sat carefully. Connie had put cushions on every chair in the house for him. She knew his prostate hurt. They'd fought about him not going to the doctor. Drove her nuts. And maybe that was why he didn't do it. Forcing his old guy's death-smell decrepitude upon her, a kind of rich man's sicko dominance. I didn't used to be like this, Martz thought, poking his head out the open window and looking down. He could see the morning runners in Central Park, the maples leafing out in the late spring.
He pulled his head back in. 'I want to give you some carefully considered advice,' he announced grandly. God, did Connie look good. Five hundred sit-ups a day, yoga, tennis, swimming three times a week in the pool in the apartment house, free weights-all her old habits from her modeling days.
She bustled about happily. 'I like your advice.'
'I think, number one, that I am very lucky to have you around. This isn't about what's good for me. Number two, I think that you are probably wasting your life hanging around an old man like me who can't really fuck you decently anymore, who is crabby and achy and full of his own compacted, neurotic, self-important, and irresolvable bullshit. Okay? You are young enough that you could go find somebody and five years from now you could be feeding a couple of beautiful little children some breakfast, instead of an old man. This is the truth, lady. I'm turning into a rotting bag of meat, Connie, and somebody is going to have to wipe the drool and the shit off of me. Why should it be you? The answer is that it shouldn't. My advice is that you get a quick divorce, nothing contested, and start meeting guys. I'd give you enough money so that you didn't have to worry about anything. Hell, I'll double whatever is in the prenup that you made me sign, and you could actually have a decent life and not hang out with an old bum-admittedly quite rich-like me. Who isn't even charming anymore.' He patted his place mat. 'That's my morning speech. Now, where's my coffee?'
Connie silently set a cup down in front of him, along with a neat stack of the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Asian Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the business sections of the Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, Chicago Tribune, and Washington Post. He read them each day as a rich man, which was to say as if they were the sports pages. Across the city, no more than a few hundred men like him, all possessed of meaninglessly grand wealth and old enough to feel as he did, played the game against each other, against younger men, against technology, information, and the passing of days. They played it as long as they could, and then, if they were smart, they took their winnings at the right moment and retired to Normandy or Palm Beach or a ranch in Montana or someplace nothing much mattered anymore. If they stayed too long in the game, they got cut open, even wiped out. That insurance guy, what's his name, lost $600 million. Should have eased out, let the scandals fall on the shoulders of younger men.
And maybe Bill would do this. But not yet. He had to fix his little huge problem with the hedge fund. He had leveraged his flagship, Martz New Century Partners Fund, into a goddamn $352 million position on Good Pharma and needed to unwind the position before something bad happened. He no longer cared whether he made money; he just wanted out even, or at worst with just a haircut. Lose $20, $30 million, okay, he could live with that, make it up elsewhere. That kind of money could be hidden from the investors easily enough. But he was down $107 million in just over thirty days on the position, and against the prudent and obvious advice of his young, high-priced princelings, he had doubled the bet late, thinking the stock would bounce up, but it had only drifted down further. The kind of error an amateur made. Pure gambling. Now they were whispering about him, he knew it, talking behind his back, saying Big Bill is sucking on a land mine right now… Big Bill's lost his fastball… Something was wrong with Good Pharma and somebody knew what it was. And wasn't telling Bill Martz. Somebody like that slick fuckwad Tom Reilly. I'm too old to be worrying about being vulnerable to the fate of one small bullshit drug company, he told himself. Too old, too rich, and too smart. Or certainly one would think so, except that he'd taken an unnaturally large position in Good Pharma, expecting that it would give him a fat boost by year's end. All his researchers had reported it was on the verge, great stuff in the pipeline, synthetic skin, cartilage pills, things like that.
Connie put his eggs down. 'I put in that dried red pepper we found in Mexico last winter.'
