This Is How It Really Sounds Read online

  “Very good!” Camille said.

  He laughed at her. “You are so wicked!”

  That elicited a smile from her.

  A wall of techno music tumbled over them as the doors opened into the bar’s scarlet-lit interior. Harrington thought it was less music than a relentless procession of electronic tones and drum rhythms calculated to produce subliminal discomfort and desolation, but that was the Bar Rouge. “Rouge” like on the face of a 1930s prostitute, the financier thought, but maybe he’d just done too much vocabulary. The walls were mirrored and the darkness was alleviated only by washes of red from the hidden recesses of the ceiling. A dance floor made of frosted glass glowed in the middle of the room, empty, while crow-like men and women gathered around low black tables along the perimeter.

  “They’re probably outside,” Harrington said, touching Camille on the back of her arm to guide her.

  As they moved into the room, Harrington brushed against a group of Russians drinking a toast, stepped between a trio of Italian businessmen chatting up two Chinese girls. The men eyed Camille as she passed, looked questioningly at him. That’s right. And she’s not a hooker.

  They stepped through the sliding glass door out onto the roof, and the dull buzz of the city replaced the music. The warm air had lost its summer moisture and felt exciting against his skin. The view was stunning: the eighty-story obelisks of Pudong were washed with intense neon tones of green, fuschia, violet—all of it glistening on the silvery back of the Huangpu River. A world-class view by any standards, looking down on a world-class crowd. The feeling came over him again, as it always did, that he was standing in old Shanghai, with its spies and opportunists and global riffraff. There were Japanese executives in sport coats and ties, a couple of dark-skinned Africans, and some men who might be Indian or Pakistani. French tourists, Israeli backpackers, flight crews, trust-fund babies, Communist elites in designer clothes. Sprinkled in: the Chinese bar girls with their fake Prada handbags and Hermès scarves. So old Shanghai. “Whenever I come in here I feel like I’m stepping back to 1935,” he murmured to Camille. “It’s so sordid and elegant at the same time.”

  She smiled at him, and he couldn’t tell if she was agreeing or if she thought he was silly. He shouldn’t have waxed quite so poetic. Maybe he’d overplayed it. “Let’s find my friends,” he said, and they pushed further into the crowd.

  The Bar Rouge was a slightly dangerous place for him to be seen with Camille. A lot of Nadia’s friends came here: models from Eastern Europe trying to work their way up to New York or Paris. If a friend of Nadia’s spotted them he would have a hard time explaining Camille away as his tutor. Although, to be honest, he was tiring of Nadia. Beneath her beauty she was a girl from a small town in the Czech Republic with a high school education, and her three years of modeling hadn’t left her particularly wise in any field other than names on clothing. In her best photos she was exquisitely, impossibly beautiful, and it was that image he was trying to possess, the impossible one. In real life, without makeup and stylists, she was a pretty girl of twenty-three with a taste for brand names and the good sense to stay quiet and let her beauty speak for her.

  He spotted Kell across the roof and started toward him. Kell was shorter than most of the people around him, but his wide body radiated a muscular density. With his thick auburn hair and combative South Philly accent, Harrington saw him as the kind of Celtic horse trader that two thousand years ago would have sold the Romans horses during the day and stolen them back at night. He was talking with a dark-haired man Peter didn’t know and a couple of Chinese girls that Kell had probably picked up. Kell had a taste for the bar girls that wallpapered the Bar Rouge and the M1nt Shanghai and the Yongfoo Elite Club. They were always here, though they could have been excluded easily enough. They had varying degrees of institute English, except for a few university girls who spoke well and could just about put over the idea that they had real careers. They weren’t all prostitutes, exactly. Some were simply girls trying to cobble together a relationship with a rich foreigner from which would spring money, gifts, meals in expensive restaurants, and, the jackpot, a marriage proposal and a permanent round-trip ticket to the rest of the world. Kell always said that if you called them prostitutes, he could make a very good case for calling a lot of the women he’d known back in New York prostitutes also. “The bottom line,” Kell said, “is that we all make the best deal we can with what we’ve got. Money makes me more interesting. A pretty face and hot body make a woman alluring and mysterious. If you put Nadia in an ugly body, would you give her a second thought? Don’t answer, because I don’t want to hear you lie to me.” That was one thing about Kell: you didn’t like what he said, but it was hard to prove him wrong.

  Now Kell was motioning to him, and to Harrington’s surprise the unknown man waved to him as if they knew each other. Harrington was still drawing a blank on him, smiling daftly as he got closer, and then finally, just as they shook hands, the face snapped into place with a surprise that made him rear back a few inches.

  “Paul Gutterman! Is that really Paul Gutterman?”

  The newcomer beamed at him. “Peter Harrington! The rock star! Kell told me he had a surprise for me, but I didn’t expect him to pull you out of his hat!”

  “Kell’s got a big hat. What the hell are you doing in Shanghai?”

  His eyes flickered slightly to the side. “Just seeing the sights, Peter! Everybody talks about Shanghai, and I had to see for myself.” He noticed Camille and turned to her. “I’m sorry. I’m Paul Gutterman. Peter and I started at Goldman Sachs together, back before he was notorious.”

  He hadn’t seen Gutterman in at least ten years. He was stuck in his memory as a slim young man with pale skin and dark wavy hair. Slightly nervous, slightly intense in his manner. They had indeed started at Goldman at the same time, but Gutterman had always been just a step or two behind him their entire six years together: his accounts a bit smaller, his access to the bosses less fluid. He didn’t live in the city, like the other young fellows out to conquer the world, but instead commuted in from Long Island, always eager to get back to his heavyset young wife. Gutterman was the specter of the going-nowhere career that inspired Harrington to work extra late and extra hard. Now his old rival had gained weight, no longer the reedy man with the boyish face of fifteen years ago. “So what’s going on, Paul? How’s…” He miraculously pulled down the name of Gutterman’s wife. “Diane?”

  Gutterman’s pallid features lost their shine. “We’re separated now, actually.” An uneasiness took hold of him. “You know”—he shrugged—“things happen. People change…” He recovered. “What about Sheila? Is she here in Shanghai?”

  “No, that’s over.”

  “Yeah,” Gutterman said. “I guess I read about that.” His next words were almost smug: “You had a kid, didn’t you? A little boy?”

  A sharp and familiar sense of dread swept through Harrington’s body. He could feel Camille looking at him. “Conrad. He’s thirteen now. They’re living upstate.” He shuddered. “So what brings you to wicked, wicked Shanghai?”

  “Well…” A weakness undermined Gutterman’s voice. “This is supposed to be where the action is, right?”

  “Did Goldman send you over? I mean, are you still with them?” Harrington could see Kell behind Gutterman’s back, drawing his finger across his neck in the “Cut!” sign.

  “Not exactly.” Again, Gutterman’s eyes flicked to the side. “I’ll tell you later. What are you doing here?”

  Harrington let it go. “Me? Not much. Kell’s got a couple of schemes going, and I help out a little bit on that.”

  “Your last scheme got you number three on New York magazine’s list of ‘Ten Most Deserving of Indictment.’”

  Harrington fielded it perfectly. “You mean I’ve slipped to number three?”

  “Hey!” Kell defended him loudly. “Peter here just helped some boys with very pricey educations find out exactly how smart they really were. They sho
uld be thanking him.”

  Camille had moved closer into the group. “Tell me about this.”

  “It’s complicated,” Kell said.

  “I understand complicated things,” she answered calmly.

  “It’s so complicated,” the lawyer lied, “that even I don’t understand it, and I’m his partner.”

  “Let’s just say Peter and Kell had a few unhappy counterparties when they closed down their last venture,” Gutterman explained.

  “Hey. Hey!” Kell raised his arms. “Everything I did was completely legal at the time I did it.”

  Camille smiled. “I can see you are a man of great virtue!”

  “And I can see you’re an excellent judge of that.”

  He tilted his empty glass to his mouth, and his eyes watched hers above the rim.

  “Thank you, Kell.” Harrington turned to Camille. “I’ll explain it later, if you’re interested, but it’s a fairly boring story. I’ll get us some drinks. Kell, you’re having water, right?”

  “Yeah, with a side of scotch.”

  He took their orders and wove through the crowd to the bar at the roof’s center. This had been a mistake. Kell could be the earthiest, most magnetic man you’d ever met, but tonight they’d gotten the other Kell, the foulmouthed Irish drunk from South Philly. Gutterman threw him, too. There was something furtive and broken about him, and having him bring up the New York magazine story didn’t feel accidental. He’d buy the drinks and get Camille out of here in fifteen minutes.

  “Helluva scene, isn’t it?”

  The American voice came from behind him, and even without seeing its owner, he could tell it belonged to a different time. He turned to find himself staring slightly upward into the visage of a very old man. It was a face that didn’t fit in at the Bar Rouge, a square, aged face made large by its receding line of snow-white hair and eyes slightly yellowed by a vast number of years. He had to be at least in his late seventies, dressed in an old-fashioned-looking tweed sport coat and a tie held down by a clip with some sort of regimental insignia on it. What was he doing here? Harrington had lost his father a year before, and the stranger brought on a pang of nostalgia. “Yes, it is a hell of a scene. Is this your first time in Shanghai?”

  The old man smiled. “Not exactly.”

  “Oh? When were you here before?”

  The old man smiled. “Well, to give you an indication, the last time I stood on this roof it was the Chartered Bank.”

  Harrington looked at him. “You mean, like … sixty years ago?”

  “Sixty-four. I was here off and on from forty-six to forty-nine. I left a few weeks before Liberation.”

  The financier cocked his head. “No!”

  “I wouldn’t lie to you.”

  Harrington laughed. “That’s amazing!” The old man seemed to be alone, and the line to get drinks was a long one. It wouldn’t hurt to chat him up. “Let me buy you a drink and you can tell me what you were doing here sixty-four years ago.”

  The man had been in Shanghai on some other business after the war and what was then called the Chartered Bank had hired him to keep an eye on their staff. “They were having some irregularities, so they put me on as a teller. We had a little table and chairs set up on the roof, and we’d come up and have some drinks after closing time. Of course, the view was a little different then”—he motioned toward the giant picket of rainbow-lit skyscrapers across the river from them—“but it was nice.”

  “Did you find the thief?”

  “Oh yeah. It was a Chinese teller, but it turned out he was put up to it by one of the British vice presidents. He was keeping a girlfriend in high style at the Grosvenor. They put the Chinese guy in jail and sent the British guy back to England. Never prosecuted him.” He grinned. “Funny how that works.”

  Harrington imagined the bank as it had been back then, with brass-barred teller windows and secretaries behind big black typewriters. The old man had traveled through that most distant and exotic land, the Past, a place he could never visit no matter how much money he had. “What was Shanghai like in 1946?”

  “Hard,” he answered. “Real hard. Communists fighting the Nationalists. Everybody scrambling to pick up as many pieces as they could before things settled down, or fell apart. Whatever you wanted, you could get it: opium, women, a passport, a brand-new Packard. You could hire a killer for ten bucks.” He added cheerfully, “A hundred bucks for a really good one.” He tapped Harrington’s sleeve and nodded toward the bartender. “You’re up.”

  Harrington ordered drinks for his group and a Manhattan for the old man, then turned back to him. “So … I’m sorry, what’s your name?”

  “Ernie.”

  “I’m Peter. Ernie, what brings you to Shanghai again?”

  “The Chinese government’s getting together a bunch of World War Two vets next week in Beijing, and they want to give me a plaque or something. Last hurrah, I guess.”

  “Are you here alone? Didn’t they assign someone to look after you?”

  “Yeah, but he’s not much help. He just wanted to park me at the hotel. I thought I’d come up here and see what’s new.”

  “And what’s new?”

  The elderly tourist raised his eyebrows. “Everything!” Then he smiled. “Nothing.”

  Harrington was beginning to hope the drinks wouldn’t be ready too quickly. Ernie had been in the War, that last righteous war that was really worth fighting, so that six decades later its few survivors were sainted by an aura of heroism and sacrifice. Ernie told him he had trained for winter warfare with the Tenth Mountain Division. “Then, once I got really good at skiing and climbing, they sent me to the jungle in western China. Go figure that one.”

  The old man answered Harrington’s questions about the war as if he was describing a package tour of Europe and Asia. He’d worked around Kunming for a time, training Dai tribesmen to kill Japanese, then raided with Merrill’s Marauders in Burma. He’d done a stint in Indochina before they transferred him back to Yan’an to help the Chinese irregulars harass the Japanese rearguard. He’d had lunch with Mao Zedong. Twice.

  Ernie went on, “After the war, things were all mixed up here. We were backing the Nationalists, but we wanted to maintain some ties with the Communists in case they won. Discreetly, you know. I had a lot of relationships with the Communists from my days in Yan’an, so Uncle Sam sent me to keep an eye on things.”

  “For the CIA?”

  “This was before the CIA. It was just a bunch of OSS guys who were kept on in a group called External Security Detachment Forty-four. The CIA picked us up when it was chartered in forty-seven.”

  Harrington examined the old man carefully. The OSS had been the agency of commandos and counterspies during World War II, parachuting behind enemy lines, assassinating Nazi officials, training partisans. He realized that he was standing in the presence of a rare and precious object, rarer than a thirty-thousand-dollar watch or a limited-edition luxury car. He had met plenty of artists and models and billionaires and bankers. But he hadn’t met any spies. He hadn’t met any living legends—that is, real legends, and not just men who were “legendary” on the Street because they’d made a lot of money or ruthlessly built a company. He’d met his share of those, and they were depressingly like him. He glanced over at his group. Kell was gesticulating with great animation to Gutterman and their two Chinese dates, while Camille was looking slightly bored with all of them, gazing out at the synthetic aurora glistening off the twisting tin sheet of the river. The whole scene on the rooftop felt suddenly cheap and empty. He heard the old man’s voice behind him.

  “So what do you do, Peter?”

  He usually enjoyed answering this question, or, more usually, half-answering it, as if he was too modest to claim his identity as the notorious Peter Harrington. Now, the query seemed almost like an accusation. “Oh, it’s actually rather stupid. I had some good luck in the bond markets.” He shrugged. “It’s not like winning World War Two.”

 
The bartender turned to them, the last cocktail in his hand. He put them all on a tray, and Harrington dug out eight hundred yuan to cover them, waving off the change. He thought of inviting Ernie over to meet his friends, but as he imagined Kell’s drunken prognostications, or Gutterman’s edgy laugh, he couldn’t bear to do it. At the same time, he didn’t want to let the man go. He slid the Manhattan over to the elderly spy. “How long are you in Shanghai, Ernie?”

  He wasn’t sure, he said. He was supposed to be in Beijing next week. If he felt up to it, he might fly out to Kunming. He had an old friend there … Tomorrow, he thought he might kick around the Bund, take a look at some of the old places, see what was left. He’d like to hire a driver who spoke English. How did one go about doing that here?

  “One doesn’t,” Harrington said. “One uses my driver, who not only speaks English but is a native-born Shanghainese.”

  It took Ernie a moment to understand. “Peter, I didn’t want—”

  “No! Absolutely. You’re taking my car. In fact, why don’t we do this: I have to get back to my date right now, but why don’t you let me take you to lunch tomorrow? I’ll pick you up at your hotel and we can have lunch at the Peace Hotel. That was the Cathay back then—”

  “The Cathay,” Ernie repeated. There was something about the way he said it. “I know the Cathay well.”

  “You’ll have to tell me about it over lunch. We can take a walk along the Bund, eat lunch, and then you can have my driver for as long as you want. How would twelve noon be?”

  Ernie started to protest one more time, then just smiled modestly. “That’d be swell!” They exchanged contact information, and Harrington threaded his way through the crowd to his group. When he turned back to look, Ernie had moved to the edge of the roof and was staring out at the view, alone.

  * * *

  Kell had already gulped down most of a whiskey he’d cadged off a waitress and had wrapped his arm possessively around his date. “You took long enough!” he said. “What’s the story with Grandpa over there? Did he lose his tour group?”