I arranged to meet Jack back in the bar an hour later and accompanied the bellboy to my room. I felt a twinge of disappointment as I entered – obviously the staff rooms were the ones that previous guests had wrecked. The Rolling Stones must have stayed in mine because it looked like it had been ransacked. Still, I reasoned, once I’d unpacked my things and rearranged the furniture, it would be fine.
I tried to salvage my appearance. After travelling for two days, my eyes were swollen and my hair resembled a burst sofa. I slapped on some foundation, ran a brush through my unruly mane, changed my clothes and went to join Jack. As I entered the bar, I realised that I had a welcoming committee. The other nine expat managers in the hotel had come to view the new exhibit. Jack introduced me.
There were two Australians, Dan and Arnie, both food and beverage managers. Dan was in his fifties and looked like a happy soul, chuckling away at nothing in particular. Arnie was younger, maybe late thirties, and seemed nervous and twitchy, his fingers the colour of burnt toast as he smoked a Dunhill down to the tip.
Heinz was the Austrian head chef and he and his assistant, Hans, both had red hair, huge stomachs and talked in utterly endearing lilted tones.
There were two engineers, both American and somewhere around middle age. Chuck was tall, handsome and – obviously no stranger to the gym – he could have passed for Tom Cruise’s dad. Linden was the complete opposite: short, rotund and chubby faced.
The General Manager was a distinguished, greying Englishman called Harry Southfield. As he pulled out a chair and beckoned me to sit, I immediately felt comfortable. But not for long.
Standing just apart from the others were two fierce looking women. Jack introduced them as Ritza and Olga, who were responsible for the maintenance and housekeeping in the hotel. One German and one Russian, I guessed they were probably both in their late forties and as they stood there with their arms folded, sneering in my general direction, they made me feel as welcome as a fart in a tent. I swear I heard them growl.
‘Well, Jack,’ Ritza snorted, her voice heavily accented, ‘we can see now why you employed her.’ With that, she grabbed Olga and they stormed off, furniture trembling as they swept past. Even the pot plants shook nervously. Somehow, I knew we weren’t going to be best friends.
We had a few drinks to celebrate my arrival. As I studied my new colleagues, it suddenly struck me. They all – except Dan – looked exhausted and depressed, like school teachers at the end of term. I contemplated holding up an airline ticket to anywhere and seeing how high they would jump in desperation to flee this place. It couldn’t be that bad, could it? At least there was Jack.
‘C’mon, Carly, let me show you Champagne,’ he suggested.
I followed him through a maze of corridors, each one less grand than the one before, until we reached an annexe at the back of the hotel, so far from the main reception that it must have been in the next town. Champagne, it transpired, had its own entrance at the back of the complex. As we entered, I gasped out loud. And not in a good way. The club was the biggest dump I had ever seen. I tripped over the holes in the carpet as we weaved between broken chairs and ring-marked tables. The walls were dark brown, the ceiling was dark brown and the furniture matched. There was not a glimmer of glamour or gorgeousness here.
I scanned the room. The staff were shoddily dressed in ancient, sequinned floor length brown dresses, all badly fitting and in need of repair. They lounged around, some smoking in the corner, none of them paying any attention to the customers. And no wonder. The room was packed with women wearing short, tight-fitting but tatty clothing. Some of them were beautiful, some just pretty, but they all had the same hardened, bored expressions under their expertly applied-with-a-trowel make-up. What had I let myself in for?
I examined the men in the club. Jack explained that they were a mixture of local entrepreneurs, Taiwanese and Japanese and Hong Kong businessmen, all of them smoking like trains. Some of them were with women, while others sat and leered at the dance floor where a few of the girls danced in groups with blank, numb, depressed expressions. This place didn’t need a manager, it needed to be closed down
Jack spoke again, disturbing my thoughts.
‘The girls are escorts and here they call them “chickens”. The staff detest them as they’re considered to be lowlifes. As for the men, well, let’s just say that I’m glad that employees in China don’t sue for sexual harassment or our customers would spend their lives in court.’
‘Jack, this place is unbelievable. Peter Stringfellow couldn’t make it work. How did it get into this state?’
He at least had the decency to look a tad embarrassed. He hadn’t exactly given me a full picture of just how dilapidated this club was.
‘There are only two nightclubs in Shanghai. This one was leased by the hotel to a Hong Kong businessman. He used it as a base for his operations when he was in China. We, in the hotel, just took the rental money every month and ignored this place. It’s only now that we’ve revoked his lease and resumed control of it that we’ve realised just how bad it’s become.’
‘What happened to the Hong Kong businessman?’
‘Life imprisonment for drug smuggling.’
Not a surprise.
‘Jack, I think I’ll stay here for a while, if you don’t mind. I’d like to watch what’s going on and see what I can come up with.’
‘Sure. Meet me in my office
