Jade Woman

15

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I don’t know about you, but formal gatherings make me nervous. If anyone’s going to spill his wine or spray gravy, it’s me. Mr. Clumsy. And I’ve no conversational sense.

Where others are graceful, I’m your stupid blurter. Most can let discussions flow, I crash-bang-wallop in. Joe Incongruity. You can imagine the state I was in, heading from visiting the antiques view to a jade-woman’s party, the supreme of all feminine artistry, beauty, training. Not only—only!—that, but some vast antiques scam was brewing and hung on the meeting’s success. As did my own survival. Nearly forgotten that.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a golden pleasure dome decree okay, but it can’t have been a patch on the Thousand Diamond City, part of HK’s pricey complex. Bellboys milled, super-duper majordomos strutted, pretty waitresses flitted. Plush carpets, gorgeous tapestries, gilded balustrades, fountains—it was a palace of delights. It was costly opulence so clever, it could have looked ordinary. I was ushered into a private room, without having to open my mouth, and given some dry white wine in a glass that wobbled in my hand.

Some thirty people stood about, mostly visitors. The few Chinese included Dr. Chao, Marilyn, one of Leung’s thin unsmiling men, two bonny girls in tight cheongsams who did instant job-lot introductions, Sim with a pudgy jokey shipper everybody seemed to know called Ramone, and a quiet middle-aged smiler with an old-fashioned winged collar called Sun Sen. And Ling Ling.

She was exquisite, a superb butterfly. Of course she was surrounded by blokes, all striving to make an impression. I stood shuffling, desperate to leave, but her eyes transfixed me.

“Good evening, Lovejoy. Marvelous of you to come!” She passed nearby, making me breathless.

“Hi, there!” people said during introductions, but beaming at Ling Ling. Everybody jostled in her wake, one or two tourist women circulating defeated nearby. I mumbled something or other, tried to duck aside and bumped into the smiler they’d introduced as Sun Sen.

“Evening, Lovejoy.” His voice was a mere whisper. “You will observe Ling Ling.”

“Will I?” I was narked. Even incidental nerks were giving me orders now. “Who says so?”

“I do.” He paused, smiling still. I took him in. His smile was a non-smile. The skin had an odd sheen. His fingers were spindled, askew. His ears were knobbly somehow. You got the impression of someone assembled from spare parts, a kit. “I’m Dr. Chao’s deputy.”

My throat constricted. The Triad’s vice king of vice. “Okay, er, sir. Right.”

“You will of course stay for dinner… ?”

Sweating despite the conditioned air, I nipped into the melee surrounding Ling Ling.

He’d said “observe,” and humility’s my strong point. Ramone (“Head shipper for BG, y’know?”) with company logos on his tie, cuff links, buttons, talked incidentals as a way of filling time while Ling Ling talked with the mob mothing about her lovely incandescence. I pretended to listen to his Californian accent but homed in on the jade woman’s words.

She was being attended in double shuffles by Marilyn and Dr. Chao alternatively. She was brilliant, never at a loss. It was a lesson in total knowledge, quintessential skill. I was awed by her brains.

“A neurosurgeon!” she exclaimed to one shaky old coot. “How wonderful! But aren’t you the ones who refuse to admit that the significance of computational neurosciences for cognitive theory has been exaggerated?”

He was delighted. “Well, my dear…”

He lasted a second before another groveling fawner shoved in. A Polish shipbuilder, after a graceful interchange about where exactly in Poland he was born, got “Isn’t that near the Niepokalanow monastery? How very original! Don’t they run the only monk-operated fire brigade in Christendom?”

“Why, yes!” He was over the moon. “You must visit—”

A Canadian politician got the next zinger: “How I sympathize with your language predicament. Your Bill 101, the Charter for the French Language, has such reverberations, has it not? Easy for Premier Levesque’s Parti Quebecois government to enact in 1977, but doesn’t guardianship of one language imply suppression of others…

?”

More delight, more awe, while I thought, Christ, I’m out of my league here. She spotted without even looking the emblem of a Papal Order on an Italian merchant’s tiepin. To his effusive greeting—“I greet the most virtuous…”—she responded, “Virtutem verba putes?” adding for us serfs, “You suppose virtue consists merely of words?” The sweet put-down modestly included herself; she could have been yodeling for all any of us cared. Scintillating, wittily, she constantly shifted ground as different businessmen made it through the scrum to grab a word. She was instantly into cinema history for a movie critic: “Why was that makeup artist Maurice Seiderman omitted from the screen credits of Citizen Kane? A rift between him and Orson Welles?” She even captivated a Filipino magnate fresh from Singapore who was compiling a report on Asian tourism.

“You will find that we are not like Singapore, welcoming tourists by the throat,” she said, touching his arm confidingly. “To Hong Kong currency is a blessing, so anyone is welcome.”

“Not paupers,” I muttered aside to Ramone.

“We have our own supply of those, Lovejoy.” Ling Ling smiled at me. I reddened.

Hearing like a bloody bat too.

The thrash went on for an hour while adulation ran amok. Eventually the main group were smoothly given the sailor’s elbow. I dithered, wanting out, but Sim was observant and nasty, and two of those thin goons were hovering ominously by the doorway. We were down to Ling Ling, Sun Sen, Marilyn, Sim, and Dr. Chao.

Sim and Dr. Chao stayed behind as we went through to a subdued alcove in a large nightclub restaurant. Our—well, Ling Ling’s—arrival was a sensation. The applause and exclamations of wonderment were noted with significant glances exchanged amongst the visitors.

The rest of the evening was superfluous. The Triad’s two purposes were accomplished: to impress the guests with the syndicate’s affluence and organization, and to let them in on the fact that Ling Ling belonged.

For myself, I had two purposes of my own. They too were achieved. One, to be absolutely certain that Ling Ling had no divvying gift—she hadn’t even quivered at a delectable gold Renaissance ring worn by the Italian merchant. Two, I had finally established the hierarchy of the Triad: Dr. Chao No. 1; Sun Sen No. 2. Fatty was about No. 3, the lieutenant in charge of local affairs. Sim, through Marilyn, ran the lesser hoodlums, including me. I put Ling Ling as probably co-regent, head of the women.

The meal was about twenty dishes, brought one after the other. Each guest helped himself from the central dish into his own bowl. First the dreaded thousand-year-old egg to herald a pricey occasion, then the succession: shark’s-fin soup, a huge carp cleverly boned and reassembled as new, hot mixed vegetables, “rice birds”—cooked whole in a potatolike vegetable scooped out to accept the poor mites, snake, a duck disturbingly made to a lifelike look after boning and stuffing so your chopsticks met only cooked meat, seafoods with mild elusive tastes and runny sauces, different fruits…

Amid the nosh a light bantering talk went on. Only money, percentages, general stuff.

Not a single antique was mentioned. I got on with the food.

It’s hard not to gorge, but I was starving. To my shame I finished up the lone eater, with other guests jesting away but Ling Ling gently encouraging. She kept pointing out the history of each dish, which historic poet had liked what—she’d somehow sensed my innate queasiness about raw grub and steered clear.

“Finally, millet soup, Lovejoy,” she said when I was replete.

“No more, please.” I was bulging.

“Please. May I insist? There’s a reason…”

If you’ve never tried this trick, have a go. One bowl, reluctantly forced down, miraculously restores you to normal. It’s astonishing. Two minutes and I felt sated but not uncomfortably so. She smiled her approval.

“We love to see appetites, Lovejoy. It is a pleasure to see a man eat so. You have given this poor restaurant great esteem. I am indebted.” Even Marilyn was smiling.

“Oh, ta.” Done something right for once. Oddly, we were given an orange to end with, in a brown paper bag. I felt daft, but took mine because Ling Ling took hers. No coffee, strange to say. And the instant the last dish was done we all rose and said so-long. No after-dinner chat’s the local rule. I was deflected from walking back with anyone in particular by Sun Sen, who asked if I’d accompany him instead. It was a ruse. As soon as the visitors had left, grinning and waving, Sun Sen turned to me and said unsmilingly, “You may go now, Lovejoy.” I wasn’t to talk to the visitors alone. I was narked. What the hell had I been made to go for?

Class dismissed.