This Is How It Really Sounds Read online

  They followed her through the living room, in which all sorts of musical instruments were scattered among a couple of big, overstuffed couches and a coffee table covered with abandoned beer bottles. An electric guitar leaned against the wall, and huge black stereo speakers sat in the corners, putting out a steady empty hiss. The place smelled like stale bong water and cigarette smoke. Shirts and pants were laid over the backs of chairs or in piles on the floor. A sliding glass door on the far side of the room was open. He squared up his shoulders as she led them through it. People considered him the best extreme skier in the world; that had to count for something.

  The porch was lit with several hanging lamps, and off to the side, where it was darker, a cluster of people were sitting in a cedar hot tub. When he got closer a voice came from the group, an easygoing, uncaring voice. “Mitch, my man!”

  Mitch leaned over the tub to shake hands, and Harry couldn’t believe it was him at first: the long spirals of white-blond hair, the handsome, square jaw. He’d seen the face on posters and album covers and magazine stands. He’d seen him in music videos dancing across the stage or propped against his guitarist as they leaned into a harmony. It was Pete Harrington.

  Everything felt instantly unreal, and he watched in amazement as the rock star and Mitch exchanged words that suddenly seemed hyper-real.

  “Pete! How goes it? I saw the new video!”

  “What’d you think?”

  “That’s it, man. It’s Pete Harrington! Nothing else need be said!”

  Harry knew, like everyone, that Pete Harrington had just come out with a solo album after leaving the DreamKrushers, and he’d heard the lead song all winter long on the radio in Denver, Salt Lake, Taos, and even Chamonix. “Wreckage.” He couldn’t believe Pete Harrington was sitting six feet away from him without any clothes on. Naked girls were sitting on either side of him, and though the bubbly water made it hard to tell, it seemed like one of the girls was reaching between the singer’s legs. He stretched his hand toward Harry. “I’m Pete.”

  The others in the tub were all watching them, except for a couple that was making out. Harry touched the wet wrinkled fingers. He thought of telling him his whole name, but it would sound stupid. “I’m Harry,” he said.

  “Pete, this man is the best extreme skier in the world! He’s from Alaska!”

  “Cool,” Harrington said. “What’s an extreme skier?”

  “Well…” Harry wanted to explain, but then he got stuck. The singer’s reality seemed to far outstrip his own, and he stood there looking into that dream face, holding his hot damp hand and saying nothing at all. This was Pete Harrington!

  The singer tried to help him out. “Were you in the Olympics?”

  But he was just lost, buried under the weight of all the images of this man, and all the times he’d heard his voice, a voice that had been magnified across the globe at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars by radio stations and satellites and television. He felt like his sense of self was being sucked, whirling, end over end, into the black hole of the other man’s fame.

  Mitch jumped in. “No, Pete. It’s not a race. You climb up to the top of the biggest, scariest slope around and you go down one at a time, going over cliffs, doing flips and helicopters, and whoever does the best line in the best style wins.”

  The star was intrigued, nodded his head gently. Even in the tub, every curl on his head seemed perfectly placed. “Right on, man.” His hand disappeared beneath the surface of the bubbly water and he turned to the girl. “Not now, honey. I’m trying to have a conversation.” He looked back at Harry. “It sounds dangerous.”

  What could he say? I cracked a vertebra dropping a sixty-foot cliff? A powder avalanche can move at a hundred-twenty miles an hour? He cleared his throat. “Can be.”

  Pete Harrington was still looking up at him, waiting for more, but Harry couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t be like boasting. In the face of the singer’s deafening reputation, his own life had been reduced to silence.

  “He’s the best in the world,” Mitch was saying. “He’s won every event he’s competed in for the last five years. It’s not even close. And you should see his movies.”

  “Cool,” the singer said. “What’s it like? Describe it for me.”

  “Well,” he said, shifting from one foot to the other as he looked down at the ground next to him, then looked back into that perfect television face. He was acutely aware that everyone in the hot tub was listening to him. “For instance, the last competition was at Mammoth.” He told them about the run he’d made, from the tight near-vertical chute at the top to his forty-foot jump from one narrow spine down to another, where a mistake would mean landing in a jumble of boulders at sixty miles an hour. He described how he’d been surprised by the crustiness of the snow on the lower spine, and how he’d had to fight to keep from sliding over the edge, then he’d clipped his ski on a rock, and he’d briefly been on one leg before he got control again, and somehow got down the spine and onto the easier part of the run. “So”—he cleared his throat again. They were all looking at him. “It’s kind of like that.”

  Harrington broke the silence. “I’d be shitting bricks.”

  “Well, we’re even then, because I’d be shitting bricks if I had to stand up in front of twenty thousand people and sing.”

  “No, man, you’d be laughing your ass off. It’s a trip! You should come backstage sometime and check it out. You know, I’m a skier, too.”

  “You are?”

  “Yeah, I’m from Seattle. When I was a kid, I was up at Crystal Mountain every weekend. When I got a car I started hitting Mount Baker.”

  “Baker! You’ve gotta be a tree skier.”

  “I’m known to ski the occasional tree run.”

  They talked about Alaska. Harrington’s band had toured Anchorage and Fairbanks before they’d been signed, and they put it together and realized they’d both been in Chilkoot Charlie’s in Anchorage on the exact same night in 1988.

  “Yeah, I really like Alaska. I want to have igloo sex, man. That’s one of my dreams.” One of the girls beside him laughed. “No, really, think about it: You’re in that igloo inside a pile of furs. It’s fifty below outside and the wind’s howling. There’s just the light from an oil lamp, and you’re with some babe. That’s like … yeah!”

  “Sounds like a song!” someone said.

  Harrington wrinkled his eyebrows in concentration, singing, “Ice Queen! Unfreeze my dick. Ice Queen! Come bury my pick! You ever have igloo sex, Harry? Tell me the truth.”

  “No. We’re a thousand miles south of where they make igloos. We have mountains and glaciers and big trees.”

  “Cool,” the rocker said. “Hollow-tree sex. That’s hobbit shit! Yeah!” The people in the tub laughed and the singer looked around at them. It was turning back into the Pete Harrington show. He looked up at Harry. “We should go skiing sometime, Harry. Do you ever ski Tahoe?”

  “I ski Squaw Valley quite a bit. I have to be there this week for a photo shoot.”

  “I’ve been wanting to get up there. Why don’t we meet up and do some runs? You can be my guide. Take me down some of the lines you do. I’ll hire a helicopter. Okay?”

  Harry looked at him, not completely believing what he’d just heard. “You want to do my lines?”

  Mitch broke in. “Pete, trust me: you don’t want to do his lines.”

  “Come on, man! Fucking jumping out of a helicopter, Nam style, and ripping down some big-ass mountain—I could totally get into that!”

  Harry thought of some of the recent heli-runs he’d done for movies. They would be difficult even for an expert skier. For a weekend skier, who knew nothing about moving snow and slope stability, they could be fatal. He could start him off slow, he supposed. Do some in-bounds runs with him to gauge his ability, then take him on some easy lines in the helicopter. It would be a kick in the ass. Skiing with Pete Harrington!

  “Okay. Let’s do it!”

&
nbsp; “Mitch? You in?”

  The producer shook his head wistfully. “I’m shooting something for Aerosmith on Friday. I can’t.”

  “So it’s you and me, Harry.” Pete turned to the girls. “Either of you two want to go?” “I’ll go,” one girl said, and Holly echoed, “I’ll go.” She looked up at Harry and then smiled at her friend. “He’s kind of cute. Skier guy!”

  And instantly, he was swept into that imaginary world. There would be Pete and Holly and her friend, the four of them, and that math was easy to do. They’d ski all day, and at night they’d sit in the hot tub and smoke a couple joints and, well, nothing at all wrong with Holly.

  They were interrupted at that moment by the arrival of someone new: a short woman in a black evening dress with her brown hair piled up in some sort of formal style. She was all of about five feet tall, and she didn’t look happy.

  “Pete!”

  “Hey, Beth. How was the, uh, event?”

  The woman glared down at the two girls beside him in the tub as she answered. “The event went well.” She looked directly at Holly. “And you are…?”

  “I’m Holly!” she said cheerfully.

  “And you’re CeeCee,” she said to the other in a menacing voice. “I already know you.”

  Harry felt uncomfortable, but Mitch waded straight in.

  “Beth!” he said, putting his hand on her shoulder. “I want you to meet a friend of mine. He’s the top extreme skier in the world. His name’s Harry.”

  With great effort she pulled a glittering smile to the surface and said, with an East Coast accent, “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Harry. I’m Beth Blackman, Pete’s wife.”

  Before, it had been stardom that had taken Harry’s voice away. Now it was embarrassment. “Nice to meet you.”

  She turned back to her husband. “Could we talk for a minute? Privately?”

  Harry looked away as Pete got out of the tub and grabbed a towel. As he disappeared into the other room, the singer looked back at Harry and said, “You and me, Squaw, Wednesday: it’s on! Mitch’ll give you the details.”

  “I’ll be there,” Harry said.

  “I’ll be there, too,” Holly said from down below them.

  After that the shouting started, and he and Mitch eased out the front door.

  * * *

  Back at Squaw Valley, he was quietly elated, but he didn’t mention it to anyone except Guy. The plan was to finish the movie shoot early Wednesday morning, then rendezvous with Pete Harrington and the girls at noon at the lodge. He’d tentatively arranged for a helicopter on the following day, Thursday. Harry rounded up an extra avalanche beacon and arranged for Guy to join them, because, let’s face it, if he got buried, he didn’t want to be under there waiting for Pete Harrington to dig him out. Guy, on the other hand—he’d been trusting his life to Guy since they were ten years old. It was an insanely good prospect: ski with a rock star, party with him at night. Mitch said it was a good thing for his career, too: word would get around that Pete Harrington skied with him, and that would give him some extra buzz. He’d call some paparazzi to try to get some shots of them for the tabloids.

  He was busy Monday and Tuesday with the movie: shots of him on things that were steep and dangerous, or throwing front flips off cliffs, upside down in the deep-blue Tahoe sky. They got another six inches Tuesday night, and Wednesday morning came up bluebird. They got out early to take advantage of the light. The movie people had dug out their credit cards and hired a chopper to get him over to another peak, and they had a one-hour window to get the sun exactly where the photographer wanted it. An hour for the setup, one run, and then he’d head back to the lodge to find Pete and the girls. It went faster than they thought, but they’d already booked the helicopter time and the photographer had one more idea, so Harry said he’d do one more line if they hurried. The cameraman pointed out the run and then took his post. It was only eleven: they could shoot it in ten minutes and be back to the lodge, no sweat. To his surprise, it didn’t play out that way. By noon Guy was dead beneath a hundred tons of snow and he was lying in the hospital under heavy sedation. A week later Ski magazine came out with a cover photo of him soaring endlessly through the sky and the caption: “The Greatest Extreme Skier on the Planet.”

  He never saw Pete Harrington again. Mitch advised him to lay low until his leg healed; clumping around Los Angeles in a cast didn’t project the kind of image they were trying to promote. But the heat went away. Mitch tore his ACL and had to take the next winter off, and that was also the season Harry started to lose competitions. Not lose them, like doing badly, because even at less than his best, he was better than almost anyone. But he wasn’t winning them. He got a greeting card from the James Bond agent the next Christmas, but when he called the agent he never heard back, so he let it drop. That was it. When spring came he made his annual move up to Alaska, but when the snow fell again he didn’t go back Outside. He was done. He didn’t even talk about it. The memory of that last run and Guy’s death floated in and out of his mind along with Harrington’s album-cover gaze like the saddest, slowest song anybody had ever written. And for the next twenty years, he never stopped hearing it.

  II

  Fugitive in Shanghai

  1

  Fugitive in Shanghai

  The ironic thing for Peter Harrington was that for an entire decade of his life people teased him about his not being the other Pete Harrington. He was the Pete Harrington who worked at a bank, not the rock star, and he’d heard every witticism that could possibly be crafted around the idea. How dare he cheat on America’s sweetheart! Was the baby in that paternity suit really his? It was a joke because, obviously, he wasn’t the famous one, he was the pale balding one, the Wall Street underling, the nobody working seventy hours a week in a Brooks Brothers suit. That was kind of funny all by itself, right? Then one day he wrote himself a check for three hundred million dollars and cashed it, and the jokes stopped. He had his own big life now.

  “We arrive at the Bund,” Camille said in Chinese, and he repeated her words, struggling with the tones. The whole of Shanghai’s night was wrapped around the gleaming black body of his car. The driver opened the door for him and he stood for a moment and eyed the street as one of the young women on the sidewalk took a few hesitant steps toward him. Then Camille emerged, her smooth thighs tight with the flesh-colored sheen of stockings. Her arms were small, almost girl-like, and her shoulders and waist were fine-boned and delicate. A distant and acquisitive part of him recognized that she was something worth possessing, at least for a while. She stood on the sidewalk and brushed her white linen dress flat as the woman backed away.

  Camille said a word in Chinese under her breath, and Peter Harrington repeated it. “Prostitute,” Camille explained sweetly.

  He’d never been out with Camille before, and technically, they weren’t really “out.” She was his tutor, a setup from Mr. Lau, the Hong Kong financier he and Kell had been working with. Lau had described her only as a good English speaker and “very intelligent,” and Harrington had been reluctant until the moment, a month ago, when she’d shown up at his door with a grammar book. Mr. Lau was a subtle man. Camille had a wide, smooth face, with pale, clear skin and long glossy hair. He guessed her age as late twenties, but it was hard to tell with Chinese women. Her smile was occasional, ironic, detached. She spoke with the vague condescension of someone who knew that her people had been weaving silk when his own ancestors were still wearing animal skins. He liked that about her.

  Camille’s role in the evening was, allegedly, to help him practice his restaurant skills, and he’d made it clear that she would be on the clock the entire evening. He’d taken her to Franck, a bistro in the old French Concession, where the Chinese waiter spoke English with a perfect French accent, right down to the mocking Gallic attitude. They sat in the low-ceilinged dark restaurant and Camille kept puncturing their conversation with little grammar hints and vocabulary: butter, bread, glass, water, cigarette. He du
tifully repeated each of them. He knew she was from Suzhou and that she had other corporate clients, but she always deflected the conversation back to him or to things about China in general, so she remained as opaque as so much else in Shanghai. He was curious to see what Kell would make of her.

  The Bund was a strip of grandiose European presumption stretching for a half mile along the Huangpu River. Garnished with columns and cupolas, the old Customs House and banks dated from the days when Shanghai had been divided among the Japanese, the French, the British, and the Americans, a beachhead for foreign business and intrigue. That Shanghai fascinated Harrington. It was Victor Sassoon’s Shanghai: the real-estate tycoon had built nearly all the signature buildings of the era. His dark art-deco skyscrapers still gathered a sense of strange gothic foreboding about them. Now the Bund had emerged again as a sparkling necklace of international wealth, which was being funneled through the booming city. The most prestigious of the global jewelry and designer names were here, along with nosebleed-expensive international restaurants and bars. It was so new-century and yet so 1930s that whenever Peter Harrington pulled up to the curb he felt he should be getting out of a huge black Packard instead of a Benz.

  They moved across the wide sidewalk to the door of what had once been the Chartered Bank, now a minimall selling diamonds and Ferraris, silk scarves and Swiss watches. They moved past the doorman and waited for the elevator. A young Chinese woman came hurrying past them and began climbing the six flights of stairs to the roof, probably a bar girl who’d snuck in the back way. Camille didn’t even look at her.

  “Have you been here before?” Harrington asked as they stepped into the little cubicle.

  “Of course,” she said. Then she said something in Chinese as the girl disappeared up the stairwell.

  He repeated it after her, then translated, tentatively, “‘The prostitute goes to the Bar Rouge’?”