Satori - Don Winslow [32]
19
HAVERFORD SAT and watched Solange pack.
It didn’t take long — she actually owned very few things. The rest of it — the books, the art, the fine kitchen equipment, even most of her wardrobe — had been bought and paid for by the Company and would be sold.
The bottom line was, after all, the bottom line.
She’d taken her eviction stoically, only putting up a small argument.
“But where will I go?” she asked when Haverford came to shut down the house.
He shrugged his lack of an answer. The gesture evoked what they both knew — she’d been hired for a certain job, for a certain period of time. The job was over and the time was up, and she should have thought of her future earlier.
And her concern was a bit disingenuous. Certainly she knew that a woman of her beauty, charm, and doubtless sexual talent would always find a man willing to pay for them. She had done it before and would do it again, and the money he had paid would be more than sufficient to tide her over.
“And how will Nicholai find me?”
As a piece of acting it was beautiful. I was almost convinced for a second there, Haverford thought, smiling at himself and recalling what his father had said after rescuing him from a youthful entanglement with a Broadway dolly that he thought he was in love with.
“All actresses are whores,” Haverford Senior had pronounced, “and all whores are actresses.”
This one certainly is, Haverford thought, watching Solange dab at her eyes with a handkerchief. “How will Nicholai find me?” He didn’t enlighten her that, in the unlikely case that her emotions were genuine, she needn’t trouble herself over them.
Now she folded a negligee into her suitcase, paused, and trained her remarkable eyes on Haverford. “Perhaps you and I, we could make an arrangement?”
He had to admit that he was tempted. What man wouldn’t be? She was incredibly beautiful and would no doubt be a revelation in bed, but there was no way that he could justify her continued presence in the house to the cold-blooded Company number-crunchers.
“We have an arrangement, my darling,” he answered. “You performed a service — brilliantly — and I paid you.”
“You treat me like a whore,” Solange said, snapping the suitcase shut.
Haverford saw no need for a response. In any case, he had just received word from his sources in Beijing that Hel had made his rendezvous on the Jade Isle and been duly spotted from the White Pagoda.
20
MEN ARE FOOLS, Solange thought as she left the house in Tokyo.
A few tears, the sparkle of an eye, the twitch of a hip, and their brains are as easily turned off as an electrical switch.
Haverford was smarter than most, but just as blind.
Like the rest, he sees what he wants to see and nothing more.
Nicholai, on the other hand …
Dommage.
What a shame.
21
THE PROBLEM WITH the “new” China, Yuri Voroshenin thought as he sipped a vodka and looked out his window at the Legation Quarter, is that there are no more prostitutes.
Which was damn inconvenient.
The “old” China threw no such obstacles between a man and his needs, to put it mildly. Shanghai, for instance, had some marvelous brothels. But the People’s Republic was ferociously bluestocking when it came to sexual matters, and all the pleasure girls had been swept off to factories or farms.
This was a damn poor allocation of resources and a gross violation of the economic precept of “highest and best use.”
Voroshenin remembered a different Beijing, the halcyon days of the 1920s and ‘30s when the Bada Hutongs of Tiangao, just south of Tiananmen Square, blossomed with “flowers and willows” and the old Xuanwu District’s narrow alleys teemed with teahouses, opium dens, opera theaters, and, of course, brothels.
Those were the nights when a man could go out and get a good dinner and a few drinks, take in an opera, and then attend to his less aesthetic tastes afterward, sometimes with one of the actresses he had seen