well. He thinks the sky is only as big as the top of the well.
Nie sips. “You make it sound so easy!”
“It is easy.”
“Why doesn’t everybody do it?”
“Oh, but everybody does it, all the successful people, I mean. Not exactly this method, but something like this. Tell me about your boss. How does he afford his limousine? Who pays for his beach vacation in Hainan, his gambling trip to Macau, his wife’s jewelry? How come he has such a luscious young mistress?”
“I really don’t think—”
“Ah, maybe your boss is an exception. I wasn’t speaking personally. But look around you. The people who enjoy a good life, they didn’t get where they are by sitting on their ass and obeying every petty regulation!”
As Qin inveighs, he considers that he sounds like his own daughter. She’s a great believer in breaking rules. Ever since she was fifteen she’s been going to nightclubs using a fake ID. Her school report is awful. If she were in a Chinese school, she’d be in serious trouble. But they live in a gated community in the north of Beijing, near the airport, and she attends an international school. The school has a strict policy of not accepting Chinese students, but an exception was made, in return for a generous donation. His own teachers used to recite, “Study hard and improve daily” (he came from a modest background and struggled to get an education), but as far as she’s concerned school is an opportunity for fun and networking—a favorite English word of hers that seems Chinese in as much as it’s composed of two characters. She’s a junior in high school. She’s got it all figured out. She plans to go to the University of Southern California and become a movie producer. “America’s got talent and China’s got money,” she likes to say. She’s going to persuade Chinese billionaires to invest in Hollywood. She’ll take her cut.
The fact is, Qin has had several close shaves. He’s been investigated by the authorities, but so far he’s managed to wriggle out of it. He “covers the mountain with mists and clouds,” as the saying goes. He operates through offshore investment vehicles. He always denies personal responsibility, but if necessary he agrees to pay compensation anyway. Some of his clients, though, they get greedy, they overreach. Sooner or later, he fears, a scandal will break; maybe he’ll only be peripherally involved, but the authorities will be under pressure to lop a tall tree. But it seems to him that his corruption (if that is how it is to be defined) is outside himself—it existed thousands of years in the past, and will exist thousands of years in the future—he can take neither praise nor blame. He’s less concerned for himself than for his daughter. If he falls, then she won’t be able to study abroad, and her dreams will never come true. Let him just stay out of harm’s way for a few more years, he prays, another decade. He thinks of the zodiacal animals, a heavenly menagerie; if he lives through the full cycle again, it’ll be more than he expects. By then her career will be established, and nobody in America will care if a producer’s father is locked up in a Chinese prison, or executed, in fact she might use it to advantage. She’ll hint that her father was a dissident, persecuted for his commitment to democratic values. Personally Qin is happier in his own country—vacationing in New York or London or Tokyo only when his wife and daughter insist—but he accepts that his daughter will be a citizen of the world. And in certain moods he’s an optimist. There’s every chance, provided he plays his cards right, that he’ll rise to greater and greater heights, he’ll be too big to fail, investors will shower his daughter with money in order to get in with him. What he hopes, above all, is that she has a child. He’s no stickler for tradition—Xiaxia can give him a grandson or a granddaughter; she can marry a big-nosed Westerner, for all he cares—but one way or another he wants his lineage to continue. The contemplation of his own mortality consoles him.
“Cheers!” Qin says in English, leaning forward with his whisky raised.
*
“I’ll phone you when I’m done,” Qin tells his chauffeur.
Snow is shunted in heaps and the sky is heavy. The snuffling chauffeur closes his eyes with his mouth open, as if spelled into a deep sleep. The dashboard ornament is a plastic sunflower that raises and lowers its leaves perpetually. Qin advised Nie to admit nothing; there is no reason to panic. But the man has come all the way to Beijing just in order to meet with him. He can’t refuse. Right now he needs a drink.
He’s in a foreign language bookstore, the Bookworm. It’s not just the words that are foreign, the very shapes of the books and magazines, the designs of the covers, come from far away. For good luck he buys a hardback in English—Gets inside the heads of people living in China today, declares the blurb; difficult to tell whether it’s fact or fiction. He goes to the bar, where a red-haired bartender greets him in Mandarin, and he orders a double Glenfiddich. He feels safer here, half in China and half abroad. Sometimes an outsider can understand us in a way we do not understand ourselves. His wife sees a psychoanalyst, who sits in silence while she talks.
Nie comes in, and Qin realizes he’s picked the wrong location. The idea was to bring Nie somewhere he’d be uncomfortable, to give Qin an advantage. But Nie is more than uncomfortable enough already. His face is haggard and his trouser cuffs are soaked. He’s unused to this climate; probably he walked from the subway. What if the accountant were to rant, to assign blame, to confess in public? Many here would not get it, guessing this to be a quarrel between boss and employee, or between father and son, or between lovers; others would relish every word.
Qin springs up and seizes Nie by the elbow. “I’m taking you somewhere more private.” As they leave, a couple is murmuring, “Je t’aime.” His daughter taught him the expression on the Air France flight. Throughout their stay at the hotel on the Champs Elysées, and at the Louvre, and in various department stores, he never had occasion to use that phrase, or indeed any of his minimal French, though quite possibly Xiaxia, strolling by moonlight along the banks of the Seine, spoke it and had it spoken to her. As pretty as his daughter is now, so was his wife in her youth. What did she see in him: Did she perceive, beneath the surface, some kind of beauty? On their wedding night, she conceived. The timing was wrong; he had a career to pursue. Four years later, Xiaxia was born. He has always given his wife everything she’s entitled to. He is faithful—not that sex was ever the center of their marriage; the world holds other desires, far more potent.
The chauffeur steers toward the curb, and, yawning, double-parks. The Audi has an adaptive suspension system; when Qin is at the back, his ride is smooth. But he believes that as soon as he gets out the chauffeur switches the suspension to sporty mode, and as if it were his own takes the vehicle for a spin, feeling every pothole and bump and irregularity of Beijing.
The passengers tramp around a snow drift, their track already flattened and darkened by generations of pedestrians. They enter the wholesale market—multiple levels of consumer goods. They take a series of escalators to the food court on the top floor. Here, at least, it’s most unlikely Qin would encounter anybody he knows.
Neither is hungry.
They sit on plastic chairs. A not very clean table is between them. Two cups of water, left behind by previous diners, stake out the surface. There’s a NO SMOKING sign, and indeed nobody is smoking.
“Help me,” Nie says.
Qin tips his head back and sucks through his teeth. He feels an urge to charge forward, head-butting the accountant till their glasses collide and smash. How ugly Nie is, with his squinty little face and his fading hair! How ugly Nie’s wife is too! How ugly the twins: he’s never seen such ugly girls in his life! What a perfectly ugly family! How he hopes Nie does not go through with the operation: it would be horrible to confront his naked eyes.
Meanwhile
