the carpet. Bizarrely, the pantry had a fixed line phone with a speaker where we could take a conference call in private. There was no line out, but the phone could accept incoming calls through the switchboard downstairs – but the call didn’t come in on time, so we sat there and waited in silence. The water boiler for tea was still steaming gently on a Formica-topped table in the corner, so it was stiflingly hot and as damp as a sauna. On the wall above the boiler, condensation was dripping down the glass frame of a famous photograph of Chairman Mao relaxing with a cigarette on top of Mount Lushan in a large wooden deck chair. As I leaned over the phone, I felt droplets of sweat gathering on the end of my nose. After a few more minutes, I called down to the operator only to discover that a foreigner had called several times earlier but she couldn’t understand what he wanted and hung up. I asked her to transfer the next foreign-language call up to our extension and after another few minutes we were connected. It wasn’t a good start; the receptionist had already put the phone down on Winchester several times, so he was spluttering with irritation before we even started.
Mina kicked off with a summary of the last few days while I sat on the edge of the table and listened. Once she had finished, I leaned down towards the phone and explained that the Chinese side seemed very fixed on putting in the second line. But Winchester was having none of it.
‘We went through all of that in March,’ he said. ‘We’ve closed the syndicate on the basis of this first deal. We can’t just go back and ask for more money; it would completely ruin our credibility.’
‘Well, perhaps we can do something less formal with the second line and get around it that way,’ I said.
‘What does that mean?’
‘Maybe we can stick to the existing deal for the first line and do something a bit vaguer for the second.’
‘Vaguer!?’
‘Well, often Chinese parties reach slightly vague agreements while they figure out what they really need to do. It’d buy us a bit of time. We can sign up the first line and do something less formal on the second.’
‘Less formal! Vague! Have you completely lost your mind?’ he raged. ‘We’re dealing with some of the biggest institutional investors in Europe. They’re not going to botch together some hare-brained scheme just to keep the Chinese happy. Less formal!’ he snorted. ‘The directors would all have hernias!’
After a few more minutes of haggling, we were instructed to go back to Wang and tell him that the deal had to stay the same. But when Mina explained it to Wang, he just replied calmly, ‘Bu xuyao tan le’ – no need to discuss then – and quietly gathered his papers. We protested, of course. Why couldn’t he just sell the second line to another buyer? We waved our arms in the air and threw papers onto the table; we pleaded and cajoled; we used flattery and promises, threats and excuses, but they were all useless. Wang just stood up and calmly left the room.
When we managed to get through to London to report this latest development, a jumble of voices burst furiously from the speakerphone in front of us, all demanding that the Chinese needed to go back to the original deal. When the clamour died down, one of them said, ‘You’ve just got to go back in there and tell them that they have to go back to the existing agreement.’
‘But we’ve already done that three times and Wang won’t agree.’
‘Do it again. Just insist on it. Don’t they understand that this sort of behaviour will ruin their reputation in the City?’
‘What!’
‘It’ll ruin their reputation in the City.’
‘Right,’ piped in a second voice. ‘Deutsche Bank is underwriting the whole deal!’
‘I shouldn’t think Wang has ever heard of Deutsche Bank before this deal!’ I said.
‘What?’
‘Yeah,’ Mina added. ‘Wang just told me he needs to show a copy of Deutsche Bank’s certificate of incorporation to the local Commercial Bureau here in Quzhou. They want to check out they’re real.’
After a brief moment of stunned silence, a sort of strangulated yell came out of the phone. ‘Anyone who hasn’t heard of Deutsche Bank is a cretin! Don’t they realise that Deutsche Bank was founded under the Treaty of Augsburg?!’
After a brief moment to gather his wits, another one said, ‘They must be out to stiff us. We spent months arguing about that second line in March and they wouldn’t put it in. This has to be about price or something.’
‘Yeah, or perhaps they’ve closed the factory? I read somewhere last week that everyone’s stopped buying fridges in China.’
‘What?!’ I said.
‘Or maybe there’s been a fire,’ said another.
‘Or perhaps it’s exploded!’ said a third. ‘I hear factories are always exploding in China.’
‘It could have been nationalized!’
‘Right,’ said another. ‘I saw a report about the government seizing a property business in Shanghai. They’d had riots there about some unfinished apartments.’
‘Hang on!’ I spluttered. ‘Can we try to get back to reality here? People are still buying fridges in China and the factory hasn’t exploded. There hasn’t been a fire and the factory can’t be nationalized because the government already controls it! No one has ever mentioned price, so why would they want to stiff you? We have to figure out what they really want. Try to look at it from their side. Wang’s sitting in a medium-sized town way out in the sticks in China working in some old broken-down chemical factory minding his own business and shuffling bits of paper, and then you all come along and offer him a hundred million bucks if he installs a few incinerators. Why would he want to stiff you?’
‘Bunch of yahoos, if you ask me,’ someone muttered in the background.
‘Look,’ continued another more sharply, ‘this deal has changed so many times, the syndicate’s already wobbling. If we just go back and ask them to double their money, it’ll blow the whole thing out of the water.’
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘but something must have happened to change the situation here. We need to take a bit of time to find out what that is. Wang’s in a different world; it makes no difference to him personally whether this deal gets done or not, but if you get it right, your investors will make a fortune. Whatever happens with this deal, Wang’s salary will just stay the same. But if something goes wrong later, he’ll get blamed by his boss. All his housing and his pension and his kid’s education are organized by the factory. Wang’s never going to risk all that for something where he’s got nothing to gain. If we try to put pressure on him, he’ll just clam up and do nothing.’
‘Absolute bollocks!’ I heard someone say in the background just before a click as the phone cut off. Then there was silence.
I looked at Mina.
‘So where does that leave us?’ I asked after a few moments.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said, rolling her eyes with a sigh. ‘We’ll get a nasty email in the morning.’
