The Train to Lo Wu - Jess Row [38]
He falls asleep on the long ride into the city, lying across the backseat with his head propped on his garment bag. When the taxi jolts to a stop his eyes open and he sits up carefully. The car is surrounded by people rushing past, bumping up against the window, and he hears a muffled roar: voices, horns honking, music blaring.
What is it? he says. Is it a riot?
Yih ging lai dou ah, the driver croaks. Causeway Bay. Excelsior Hotel, OK?
When he steps out into the street, he finds himself staring down at a sea of black-haired heads, none higher than his chest. People moving in every direction, weaving, colliding, clutching shopping bags and mobile phones and children; no one looks up at him here. A van turns the corner with brakes squealing, and they scatter out of the way; like ants, he thinks, like cockroaches, and feels ashamed. He makes his way across the street, holding his bags shoulder-high, as if crossing a river. Without quite knowing why, he holds his breath until the hotel’s revolving doors close behind him, and then releases it with a gasp.
There’s no place like it on earth, Wallace Ford tells him later that evening, on the outdoor patio at the American Club, twenty-two stories above Central. From his seat Marcel can see the shining columns of office buildings crowded close together, and between them, the dark shadow of Victoria Peak. The glow of the city turns the sky dusky orange. There’s an otherworldly quality to it, he thinks, as if Hong Kong were one of those cities in science fiction movies, where everyone lives far above the ground. It wouldn’t surprise him to see a spaceship passing silently among the skyscrapers, or a white robot coming out to serve them drinks.
You take New York, Ford says. San Francisco. L.A. Chicago. Even London and Paris—none of it compares to this. The Chinese were living in cities before anybody else on the planet. They’ve got it figured out. It’s not always pretty—or at least we don’t think so. But it works.
He sits back with a grunt of satisfaction and drains his glass. Fifty-three years old, Marcel remembers, and his skin glows like polished copper; he wears a cream seersucker suit, a crisp tailored shirt, and a new pinky ring, a ruby the size of a fish’s eye. Marcel hasn’t seen him in five years, since before he was hired at Peabody Stein Loeffler; it was Ford who gave him his final interview, who motioned him to shut the door to his office and said, confidentially speaking, from one brother to another. Marcel doesn’t remember all of it—a torrent of words, as if Ford had been waiting for years for the right young candidate to appear— but one riff has always stayed with him: Anticipate the next move. It’s the key to good law and it’s the key to surviving in this firm. Always be planning. Always listening. Never act until you understand the whole field; and then strike before anyone notices. Work in the small hours. Let the others wake up to the bad news. He remembers sitting on the edge of his chair, trying to keep up, nodding at the appropriate places. A few times he caught himself thinking, is this for real?
It wasn’t until his first day on the job that he heard Ford had transferred to Hong Kong, almost overnight, without a farewell party or even so much as a good-bye letter. He was disappointed, momentarily, but then felt a strange surge of relief. He can’t protect me, he thought, but he can’t make me his errand boy, either. Better not to be anyone’s protégé.
I think you’re going to like it here, Ford says, catching his glance and holding it for a moment. You like Chinese food?
I grew up on it, Marcel says, remembering the Fortune Kitchen, across the street from his old apartment house in Yonkers. Somehow it seemed there was always a container of sweet-and-sour pork dripping red sauce on