Fortune Is a Woman - Elizabeth Adler [4]
The chests and cabinets were lacquered white and dotted with the tall vases she kept filled with fresh long-stemmed white roses, whatever the season. The designer had told her she had used at least fifty different shades of white to create her effect, and the apartment cocooned Annie in a feeling of lightness and luxury and well-being, far away from the brown oilcloth and threadbare Turkish carpets of her youth. And she knew she would not have any of it if it were not for the Mandarin and Francie. And of course, Josh—who was the beginning of it all. It was all due to fate, or happenchance, as they would have called it in Yorkshire, and nothing seemed so far away as the place that had been her home for the first twenty-six years of her life.
But tonight her mind wasn’t on her past, nor the sumptuous decor and the sparkling nighttime view; it was on Francie. Picking up the copy of the San Francisco Chronicle she sank into a sofa, rereading the gossip column she had already read half a dozen times that day. It was headed DEATH OF THE MANDARIN, LAI TSIN.
The Mandarin Lai Tsin, a notoriously mysterious businessman, died yesterday at the estimated age of seventy, though no one knew his age for certain. He was said to have been born in a small village on the banks of the Yangtze River in China, and no one knows how he came to the United States, only that he arrived in San Francisco before the turn of the century and quickly made his first fortune as a merchant, using the old Chinese loan system of rotating credit.
But it was his scandalous liaison with Francesca Harrison, daughter of Nob Hill millionaire Harmon Harrison, the Yankee founder of one of our most important banks and top San Francisco socialite, that enabled the Mandarin to move into areas impenetrable to the Chinese in those early days. It was Francie Harrison who fronted all Lai Tsin’s business dealings here in the U.S. and also in Hong Kong, and it’s said by many that she was the guiding force that turned the Mandarin into a billionaire.
Lai Tsin was generous with his fortune, creating foundations to finance schools for Chinese children, endowing scholarships at the nation’s top colleges and universities, as well as building hospitals and orphanages. It was said that he was trying to make up for his own deprived childhood and lack of education. If so, then he did not succeed, for not one of the colleges he endowed ever gave him an honorary degree, and he was never a member of the board of any of his schools, orphanages, or hospitals.
The Mandarin was a private man whose life—apart from his very public liaison with his so-called concubine—remained a secret. But the biggest secret of all now is whether the ever-youthful and still beautiful Francesca Harrison will inherit his fortune—and how much it is worth.
San Francisco waits with bated breath to hear the latest episode in the saga of San Francisco’s most mysterious, most notorious, and richest man.
Annie wondered if Francie had read the piece, and how much the gossip still hurt her. Annie hadn’t attended the Mandarin’s funeral at sea, even though she had known and loved him as long as Francie; she had understood Francie was carrying out the old man’s last wishes and saying a special, private good-bye.
Impatiently throwing the newspaper to the floor, she picked up the phone, called reception and ordered her little dark-green Packard to be brought to the front. She threw the soft fur-collared velvet coat over her shoulders, stuffed the copy of the Chronicle into her pocket and took the elevator back down to the lobby.
She stopped in the lobby for a quick word with the duty manager. “Have Senator and Mrs. Wingate already left?” she asked casually, pulling on her gloves.
“Yes, ma’am, about a half hour ago.”
As she swept through the tall glass doors, she nodded good evening to the top-hatted doorman, then climbed behind the wheel of the little green