13

TRIUMPH TOWERS

THE PEAK, HONG KONG

Nick and Rachel sat beside each other on deck chairs on the balcony, holding hands as they gazed at the magnificent view. Eddie’s penthouse apartment was like a falcon’s lair high up on The Peak, and below them sprawled the city’s dramatic skyscrapers, followed almost too startlingly soon by the sparkling blue waters of Victoria Harbour.

“This ain’t half bad,” Nick commented, enjoying the cool breeze blowing against his sun-warmed skin.

“Definitely ain’t bad,” Rachel said. It had been two days since she was discharged from the hospital, and she was relishing every moment outdoors. “You know, when Eddie first insisted that we stay with him since Fiona and the kids were away, I got a bit scared. But this has turned out to be such a treat. He wasn’t kidding when he said that staying with him would be like staying at Villa d’Este.”

As if on cue, Laarni, one of the domestic helpers, came onto the balcony with two tall tumblers of Arnold Palmers, complete with oversize ice cubes and paper umbrellas.

“Oh my God, Laarni, you shouldn’t have!” Rachel said.

“Sir said you need to drink more liquids and get well,” Laarni said with a gracious smile.

“You know, I never thought I’d ever say this, but I could get used to this. Laarni is just amazing. Do you know what she tried to do yesterday when I went to meet Carlton for lunch? She insisted on coming downstairs to the driveway with me, where Eddie’s chauffeur was waiting. Then she opens the car door and after I got in, she suddenly leaned into the car, reached over me, and PUT MY SEAT BELT ON FOR ME!”

“Oh yeah, the seat belt thing. I guess you’ve never had that done for you before,” Nick said nonchalantly.

“Jesus, for a split second I thought she was trying to make a pass at me—I was so shocked! I said, ‘Laarni, do you do this for Eddie and Fiona too?’ She said, ‘Yes ma’am, we do it for the whole family.’ Your cousins are so pampered they can’t even put their own seat belts on!” Rachel said in mock outrage.

“Welcome to Hong Kong,” Nick quipped.

Rachel’s cell phone rang, and she picked it up. “Oh! Hello, Father…Yes, yes, thank you—I feel a million times better…You’ll be in Hong Kong today?…Oh, definitely. Around five? Yes, we’re free…Okay then. Safe travels.”

Rachel put down the phone and looked at Nick. “My dad’s coming to Hong Kong today, and he’s wondering if we can meet him.”

“How do you feel about that?” Nick asked. Over the past few days, Carlton had shared with them everything that had happened when he had rushed back to Shanghai to confront his parents, and there had been nothing but silence from the Baos since then.

“I would like to see him, but it’s going to be rather awkward, isn’t it?” Rachel said, her face clouding over a bit.

“Well, I’m sure he feels even more awkward than you do. I mean, his wife is one of the prime suspects in your poisoning. But at least he’s making an overture to come and see you.”

Rachel shook her head sadly. “God, this is all so fucked up. Why do things always get fucked up when we come to Asia? Don’t answer that.”

“Would it make you feel more comfortable if he just came over here? I’m sure Eddie would relish the opportunity to show off his Biedermeier furniture or his humidity-controlled shoe closet.”

“Sweet Jesus, that shoe closet! Did you notice that all his shoes were arranged alphabetically according to brand?”

“I sure did. And you think I’m obsessive with my shoes.”

“I will never say anything about your weird OCD habits again, not after meeting Edison Cheng.”

At four forty-five, Eddie was rushing around his apartment like a madman, yelling at his maids. “Laarni, that’s the wrong one! I said Bebel Gilberto, not Astrud Gilberto!” Eddie screamed at the top of his lungs. “I don’t want the Girl from fucking Ipanema to be playing when Bao Gaoliang arrives—he’s one of my most important clients! I want track two of Tanto Tempo!”

“Sorry, sir,” Laarni called from the other room as she nervously tried to find the song on the Linn music system. She scarcely knew how the damn thing worked, and it was even harder to use the remote with the cotton gloves that Mr. Cheng made her wear whenever she came near his precious stereo, which he kept harping was worth more than her entire village in Maguindanao.

Eddie stormed into the kitchen, where the two Chinese maids were sitting by the small television watching Fei Cheng Wu Rao. They jumped up from their barstools when he entered. “Li Jing, is the caviar ready?” he asked in Mandarin.

“Yes, Mr. Cheng.”

“Let me see it.”

Li Jing opened the Subzero fridge and proudly took out the sterling silver caviar server that filled up an entire shelf.

“No, no, no! You’re not supposed to refrigerate the whole thing! Only the caviar gets refrigerated! I don’t want the whole damn caviar tray to be sweating like a Cambodian whore when it comes out of the fridge! Now wipe it dry and leave it out. Right when our very important politician guest arrives, you put the ice in here, see? And then you lay the glass caviar bowl over it. Like this, see? And make sure you use crushed ice from the fridge, not the cubed ice from the ice machine, okay?”

These maids are useless, absolutely useless, Eddie lamented to himself as he walked back to his dressing room. It didn’t help that his maids never seemed to renew their contracts after the first year. He had tried to steal away some of his Ah Ma’s impeccably trained staff while he was in Singapore, but those servants were more loyal than the Nazis.

Eddie checked for lint on his herringbone jacket for the tenth time in his gilt Viennese Secession mirror. He had paired it with his tight DSquared jeans, thinking it made him look more casual. The doorbell suddenly chimed. Fucky fuck, Bao Gaoliang was early!

“Laaaarni, cue the music! Charity, turn on the accent lights! And Charity, you’re having a better hair day—you answer the door!” Eddie yelled, as he rushed into the formal living room. Nick looked on in amazement as his cousin began doing karate chops on all the tasseled throw pillows, frantically trying to create the perfect fluffed-up look.

Rachel, meanwhile, went to the front door. “I’ll get it, Charity.”

“Nicky, you really need to train your wife to let the maids do what they’re supposed to do,” Eddie said to his cousin sotto voce.

“I wouldn’t dream of trying to change her,” Nick responded.

“Hiyah, this is what happens when you go and live in America,” Eddie said disparagingly.

Rachel opened the door, and standing in front of her was her father looking like he’d aged ten years. His hair wasn’t as meticulously combed as it normally was, and there were heavy bags under his eyes. He reached out and hugged her tightly, and Rachel knew at that moment that there was nothing to feel uncomfortable about around him. They entered the formal living room arm in arm.

“Bao Buzhang, such an honor to have you in my home,” Eddie said cordially.

“Thank you so much for inviting me over on such short notice,” Gaoliang said to Eddie, before turning back to Rachel with a tender look. “I am so relieved to see you looking so well. I’m very sorry that this trip has turned out so badly for you. It was truly not what I had intended when I invited you to come to China. I’m not just talking about your, er, incident. I’m talking about myself, and all the complications that have prevented me from spending more time with you.”

“That’s okay, Father. I have no regrets about this trip—I’ve enjoyed getting to know Carlton.”

“I know he feels the same as well. By the way, I really must thank you for what you did for Carlton in Paris.”

“It was nothing,” Rachel said modestly.

“Which brings me to what I’m really here to talk about. Listen, I realize what a strange situation this must be for both of you. I’ve had many meetings over the past few days with the commissioner of police in Hangzhou, and I just came from meeting his counterpart Commander Kwok in Hong Kong. Now, I believe with all my heart that my wife has nothing to do with your poisoning. I don’t think it’s any surprise to you at this point that Shaoyen has been harboring some issues around your visit, and I can only blame myself for that. I handled things badly with her. However, she’s just not the sort of person who would ever harm a soul.”

Rachel nodded diplomatically.

Gaoliang let out a sigh. “I’m going to do everything in my power to help bring whoever was responsible for this terrible crime to justice. I know that the Beijing police have Richie Yang under twenty-four-hour surveillance now, and the entire city of Hangzhou has been turned inside out with this investigation. I have every confidence that the police are getting closer to the truth with every hour that passes.”

Everyone else remained silent, unsure of what to say after Gaoliang’s monologue, and Li Jing chose this moment to enter the living room pushing a gleaming silver cart with the caviar. Eddie noticed in annoyance that the bottom was filled with ice cubes, and not crushed ice as he had specifically requested. Now the glass bowl sat on the cubes at a slight angle, and he tried not to be distracted by it. Charity followed along with a just-opened bottle of Krug Clos d’Ambonnay and four champagne flutes. Fucky fuck, he’d told the maids to get out the vintage Venini glasses, not the everyday Baccarat!

“Some caviar and champagne?” Eddie said, trying to lighten the mood, all the while shooting daggers at Charity, who wondered what he was so upset about. Did she bring the champagne in too early? He did say to bring it in eight minutes after the important guest arrived, and she had timed it exactly on the grandfather clock. Sir kept glaring at the champagne flutes. Oh shit, she’d used the wrong glasses.

Rachel and Nick helped themselves to some caviar and champagne, but when Gaoliang was offered a glass, he shook his head politely.

“No champagne, Bao Buzhang?” Eddie said, rather disappointed. He would only have served Dom had it been just Nick and Rachel.

“No, but I wouldn’t mind a glass of hot water.”

These Mainlanders and their hot water! “Charity, could you see to it that Mr. Bao gets a glass of hot water at once.”

Gaoliang gazed intently at Nick and Rachel. “I want you both to know that Shaoyen has cooperated one hundred percent with the investigators. She has submitted herself to countless hours of questioning, and she’s even handed over all the surveillance videos in our plant in Shenzhen, where the drug is manufactured, so that the police can analyze everything.”

“Thank you for making this trip to tell me all this, Father. I know how difficult this must be for you,” Rachel said.

“My goodness, it’s nothing compared to what you had to go through!”

Charity entered the living room bearing a tray with a carafe of boiling hot water and one of the antique Venini flutes. She set the tray down next to Bao Gaoliang, and before Eddie could fully process what was happening, she began to pour the boiling hot water into the eighty-year-old venetian glassware. A high-pitched cracking sound could be heard as the glass began to crack down its side.

“Nooooooooooooooooooo!” Eddie suddenly screamed, leaping off the sofa and knocking over the caviar server. A million tiny black fish eggs went flying across the faded antique Savonnerie carpet, and as the other maids ran in to see what the commotion was, Eddie looked down in panic and began to pant. “Don’t move! This rug cost me nine hundred and fifty thousand euros at auction! Nobody move!”

Rachel turned to Laarni and said calmly, “Do you have a Dustbuster?”

After the caviar incident had been resolved safely with nary a casualty to a single knot of carpet, the group took their aperitifs onto the terrace to enjoy the sunset view. Now that Gaoliang had unburdened himself of all he needed to say, the mood had lightened considerably. Eddie stood at one end with Gaoliang, pointing out the houses of every famous tycoon who lived on Victoria Peak and estimating the value of their properties, while Rachel and Nick perched at the corner looking down toward the water.

“How are you feeling, hon?” Nick asked, still concerned about how Rachel was handling everything.

“I feel good. I’m so glad I’ve cleared the air with my father. I’m just ready to go home now.”

“Well, Commander Kwok said we could leave at the end of the week if nothing new develops. I promise, we’ll go home as soon as we possibly can,” Nick said, wrapping his arms around her as they looked at the lights coming on all over the city.

Later that evening, while Nick, Rachel, and Gaoliang were in the middle of dinner with Eddie and his mother, Alix, at the Locke Club, Gaoliang’s cell phone began to ring. Seeing that it was the Shanghai chief of police calling, he excused himself from the table and went out to the foyer to take the call. A few moments later, he came back to the table with an urgent look on his face. “There’s been a huge break in the case, and an arrest has been made. They want us to come back to Shanghai immediately.”

Rachel felt her gut tense up. “Do I really need to be there?”

“Apparently they need you to identify someone.” Gaoliang said gravely.

A little over three hours later, Rachel, Nick, and Gaoliang were back in Shanghai, speeding along in a chauffeured Audi to the Central Police Station on Fuzhou Lu.

“Still no word from Carlton?” Rachel asked.

“Er, no,” Gaoliang said tersely. He had been trying to contact Carlton and Shaoyen even before the chartered jet had departed from Hong Kong, but their phones were both going straight to voice mail. Now he was nervously hitting the redial button to no avail.

They arrived at the station and were escorted upstairs to a reception room ablaze in fluorescent lights. An officer with magnificently droopy jowls came into the room and bowed to Rachel’s father. “Bao Buzhang, thank you for returning so speedily. Is this Ms. Chu?”

“Yes,” Rachel said.

“I’m Inspector Zhang. We are going to take you into an interrogation room, and we would like you to tell us if the person we are holding appears familiar to you. You will see them behind a two-way mirror, and they will not be able to see or hear you, so please do not be afraid to speak up. Am I making myself clear?”

“Yes. Can my husband come in with me?”

“No, that won’t be possible. But don’t worry, you will be with me and several other officers. Nothing is going to happen.”

“We’ll be right out here, Rachel.” Nick squeezed her hand encouragingly.

Rachel nodded and went along with the officer. There were two other detectives already in the first room when she entered. One of them pulled at a cord, and the blinds over a viewing window were lifted. “Do you recognize this person?” Inspector Zhang asked.

Rachel could feel her heart beating furiously in her throat. “Yes. Yes, I do. He was the man who was rowing our boat on the West Lake in Hangzhou.”

“He’s not a real boatman. He paid off the regular boatman so that he could poison the tea you drank while you were on the boat ride.”

“Oh my God! I forgot all about that Longjing tea!” Rachel said in astonishment. “But who is he? Why in the world would he want to poison me?”

“We’re not done yet, miss. Come into the next room.”

Rachel walked into the adjoining room, and the officer opened up another set of blinds. Rachel’s eyes widened in disbelief. “I don’t understand. What’s she doing here?”

“Do you know her?”

“That’s…” Rachel stammered. “That’s Roxanne Ma—Colette Bing’s personal assistant.”