The Mandarin Club Read online

  It was Lee who harbored the most dangerous desire to challenge the status quo, the one true revolutionary among them. Soon, he would be forced home by events, home to duty and country, home to witness the American invasion, the hordes of capitalist missionaries whose gaudy individualism and raucous style so riled his father and China’s old guard. Lee, alone, was burdened with the foresight to fear the events to come.

  To the rest, it seemed their moment had arrived. Barry was finally going to make some money. Branko would have a real job confronting a formidable adversary. Booth would answer the call to public service, with a decent salary to boot. Mickey would have to get a haircut. Now, it was all to begin.

  So they drank that sentimental New Year’s Eve—rum and scotch and sweet soda pop, a volatile mix that would only prolong wicked hangovers. Rachel could remember the toasts still.

  They pledged to honor each other always, to treasure the time of shared lives lived fully. They swore never to forget. They drank to the future, to the kaleidoscope of possibilities that beguile the young. They toasted to peace, and to prosperity. They drank to each other, to the familial bonds that united them for a time against the forces of chance and change certain to scatter them.

  Just before midnight, Mickey roared his parting shot: “China here we come! And may it someday be said that we Mandarins came to do good. . . and did well!”

  She could hear him still, his voice quavering with an energy that charged the proceedings with danger. Booth had begun to rise in protest. But Mickey, in his tux top, boots, and blue jeans, had waved him off, barreling ahead, Seven-and-Seven in hand.

  “Watch out, or that’ll be our epitaph!” Mickey said, giddy with drink. “Just like those old-time missionaries out to convert the native Hawaiians. ‘They came to harvest souls. Ended up owning all the land!’”

  The challenge implicit in Mickey’s benedictory toast spoke to Rachel for years whenever she questioned her purpose. To change the world for the better? Or just to find a comfortable niche within it? To do good, or simply to live well? Mickey’s riddle remained, a vivid and haunting memory of an otherwise blurry night.

  Years would pass before their once parallel paths would collide and their core principles would be tested: love and honor, duty and country. They would struggle mightily to fulfill their promises, clinging always to visions of how simple things had once seemed so very long ago.

  APRIL

  OPENING DAY

  Rachel survived. Buried beneath the tangle of tubes and a bandage wrap that muffled the disembodied hospital voices, she was nearly certain of one fact—she was alive. Through her pain, she felt uplifted. The prospect of renewal seemed strangely euphoric.

  Drifting in a morphine haze on that day of violence and disintegration, she began to reconstruct the events of the morning. It was Monday, April Fool’s Day—the beginning of a new week, a new season. She had been running late again, Rachel recalled, a recurrent tardiness that set her on edge. It seemed she was late to everything in her life. She hated this fault, the Sysiphusian futility with which she tried to perform too many deeds and was left feeling she had not done one thing well.

  Routine had steeled her since dawn. It was the routine, the familiar—the packing of the school lunch, the signing of a field trip permission slip—that gave her comfort through the tense years after the 9/11 attacks. She had not done the solo mom part well, however, and she knew it.

  Cornflakes and backpacks for Jamie had been a blur. She had failed to be sufficiently amused by the salt-in-the-sugar-jar April Fool’s jokes. The ten-year-old gave her one of those sullen, off-to-the-assembly-line looks as he trudged onto the school bus. His innocence made his modest attempts at mischief all the more endearing: Adam before the Fall. She could not protect him and feared for his vulnerability.

  Rachel was mired in the past, her thoughts stuck in that extended time of communal loss. She was weary of the holy wars in Baghdad and Kabul, in Leeds and London, of living in al-Qaida’s crosshairs and trying to explain it all to her fourth grader. Her mind still replayed the horrific assaults on the nearby Pentagon and New York, recalling the smoke that had hung over Jamie’s soccer field for days, the unending stream of funerals at the crowded National Cemetery. She still avoided the Metro and Amtrak. She still worried about anthrax and the water supply. She took little comfort from all the bio-weapons defense drills held at the local elementary schools; she knew how well “orderly” evacuations had worked in New Orleans.

  The streets of her Arlington neighborhood retained some of the gung ho boosterism from those long months of recovery. Rachel had found some solace in the return of worthy values—that old-fashioned community feeling. But the intoxicating wave of Yuppie patriotism—and the righteous certitude it had brought to her many friends in government—had grown old. Now, when she eyed one of those faded “Let’s Roll!” bumper stickers, it only fed her disquiet.

  As Rachel walked the three blocks back from Jamie’s bus stop, she summoned resources for her daily transition from nurturer to business woman. A swirl of inconvenient emotions weighed upon her.

  It was a bright world all about her, a world of scrubbed faces and lumbering Rockwellian school buses pulling relentlessly forward. There were the neighbors plowing defiantly down the hills and onto the George Washington Parkway in their gargantuan Expeditions and Humvees, red-white-and-blue flags snapping crisply on their antennae.

  Yet she gazed skeptically at the tidy flowerbeds amidst the oaks and whitewashed picket fences. She sensed silent fears lurking behind the cheerful facades, worries of dying parents and moody children, troubled marriages and floundering careers. Fissures, she was sure, ran deep beneath the placid beauty of the suburban idyll.

  Barry was away once more, meeting with some corporate board in L.A., or with some honey in New York. Or maybe he had embarked on his umpteenth IPO tour from Hell, selling Shanghai-produced chips in Vancouver, or Illinois tractors in China. She could picture the land drifting by below the corporate Gulfstream while Barry surfed his e-mail, disposing of little items in his annoyingly precise manner as he pecked at his keyboard.

  Slogging over the Roosevelt Bridge in traffic, Rachel longed for a home in the countryside, away from the constant perils of the capital. She envied the ease of Barry’s escape. He was the man of one thousand exits, the master at avoiding intimacy. Riding in the cool distant blue, that was Barry, all suit, no soul. With whom did he really share his heart? She no longer knew. Once again, she had slept poorly, yearning to be touched.

  She regarded herself dispassionately in the mirror; she felt rushed for the one appointment of the day she looked forward to—breakfast with Alexander. In her haste, she had overdone the rouge on her cheeks. Her dark blonde curls were a bit askew, though the recent highlights were holding. Thick welcoming lips. Strong chin and bright eyes. But a neck that betrayed her. The beginning of long wrinkles undeniably placed her in her forties. She felt pretty enough—the compliments still came, the admiring manly looks that uplifted her as she strode by. She was morning-fatigued already, however, and she was running late, again.

  She would have to drop her car at the garage and go straight to the Willard without checking in upstairs at her Talbott, Porter and Blow office across F Street. She’d have to rush back from breakfast for her partners’ nine o’clock weekly. Mickey Dooley and Lee were supposed to be in town for a ten o’clock meeting on export licenses with their man from the Chinese Embassy. She chaired the firm-wide review of lobbying projects at eleven. Then Senator Jake Smithson was down for a private lunch Talbott had asked her to sit in on—fundraising for his presidential campaign, no doubt.

  Worse yet, it was starting to snow, the spitting seeds of moisture perversely blossoming white. They danced defiantly through the cherry trees along Constitution Avenue, where Rachel sat in her red convertible, punching the program buttons in a vain search for tranquility. Whose wicked sense of contradiction was designing this day? She would ponder the thought many times
before she could finally rest.

  Alexander Bonner would be early. But then Alexander, the first-born, was always early. He savored the dawn hours, country or city; something in the sense of possibility inspired him. “Mornings are like an empty baseball diamond,” he had once explained. “Lines chalked, infield dragged, grass cut, with a clean white ball waiting on the pitcher’s mound.”

  He would begin his days with classical music, preferring the calm of Brahms to the passion of Beethoven, then amble through the newspapers, in no particular hurry. Alexander never rushed things. He was a born observer, Rachel believed, a man who could truly hear you without that annoyingly patronizing smirk effected by so many modern males—the one that said, “OK, this is the part where I pretend to listen so we can then do it my way.”

  Alexander had finished with the serious news and was deep into the day’s special baseball coverage when Rachel finally arrived at the high-ceilinged dining room of the Willard Hotel. She gathered herself at the threshold, watching him in his corduroys and rumpled broadcloth shirt as he chewed his waffle. To her, Alexander seemed very much the bachelor, marked by his loss, sixteen months since his wife Anita had died of ovarian cancer. He sat strong-shouldered, with strands of thinning yellow hair and a gaze still vibrant in its intensity.

  “Happy Opening Day!” She gave him a hasty peck on the cheek and a one-armed hug. “I’m glad you’ve eaten.”

  “Happy April Fool’s Day,” he offered as she sighed and sat, at 8:22 a.m., breathing hard.

  “I’m so sorry. The traffic was a bear.”

  “Hey, I’m the optimist. . . I figured you’d make it. Even ordered breakfast for you.” He gestured smoothly at her plate. “Bran muffin and cranberry juice, right?”

  “Bless you!”

  She pulled at her oversized muffin and the conversation flowed easily, sliding from the personal to the professional.

  Alexander asked first about Jamie.

  “As usual, he’s lost in his daydreams,” Rachel said with a smile. “He creates a whole fantasy world where he hardly hears me when I call.”

  “The boy needs a kid brother—or sister.”

  Rachel grimaced. “It’s hard to explain things to kids these days. Bombs in the subway, anthrax in the mail. Freak dancing. Heck, I was reading to him the other night, that Paul Simon book, At the Zoo. You know, with the lyrics of the old Simon and Garfunkel song? Anyway, he says, ‘Why would a hamster turn on frequently?’”

  “So what did you say?” She had Alexander laughing, wondering at his own lack of parenting skills.

  “What can you say? I just hugged him and changed the subject.”

  As Rachel ate, Alexander sidled up to the work part of their meal. A background interview was ostensibly part of his agenda this day. It was to be off-the-record, yet promised to be perversely stilted for old friends. Alexander’s Los Angeles Times was doing a big series on K Street power brokers, and he had been assigned a sidebar on lawyer-lobbyists with international clients. It was only natural for Rachel, as one of the top lobbyists in the city, to offer some guidance.

  He waited for her to settle in before beginning his queries. “So, I looked up your registrations last night, the Lobbying Disclosure Act forms. Impressive list of foreign clients there.”

  “Sleuthing on-line again, huh?”

  “It’s remarkable what you can access.”

  “Pisses me off what they make me put on the public record. It’s like being on view-cam—having to list every meeting you ever have on Capitol Hill. One sleazeball like Abramoff gets exposed and we all get treated like ex-convicts.”

  “And every campaign donation you ever make. Didn’t realize you had so much extra dough to spread around.”

  “I feel violated when I see all my personal affairs out there. We’re the most regulated industry in America.”

  “Worse than lawyers?” Alexander tested her.

  “Most people think we are.”

  “Speaking of which, how do you work out conflicts at the firm? You know, competing client interests?”

  “They don’t exist.” She smirked, swiping one of his berries, then smacking her lips. “We don’t allow ourselves to get put in that box.”

  “How can you avoid it? Look at your Turkey contract. TPB gets a million a year working for the Turkish Embassy. So what happens when your aerospace clients want to sell fighter planes to Greece?”

  “We just field a different team.”

  “A different team?”

  “Different team, same firm. No big deal. Besides, it’s the Armenian lobby that really goes crazy about our Turkey work. We’re ‘stra-te-gic coun-se-lors.’” She stretched the phrase out as if it offered some special legitimacy. “We advise them on how to put forward their best argument, how to most effectively advocate their cause.”

  “I see. But even such morally neutral work has consequences.”

  “A little judgmental today, aren’t we, Mr. Reporter?” She was eyeing Alexander carefully now. “Actually, I won’t work for just anybody. Wouldn’t work for the Saudis, for one—they treat their women like chattel.”

  Alexander reflected for a moment before pressing. “So, what about conflicts in your Asia business? You’ve registered for the big Hong Kong construction consortium, Mitsubishi, and the Taiwan representatives’ office here. But then you lobby for a bunch of the U.S. corporations selling in Beijing—”

  “That’s mostly on export licensing.”

  “Right. With Mickey Dooley’s company, Telstar.” Alexander was picking at the last of his berries, spearing them carefully with his fork. His fingers were long and nimble, she observed once again, like those of a cellist. “Selling space launch stuff. Pretty sensitive hardware.”

  “Mickey’s been a hero—the guy holds Telstar’s whole China operation together.”

  “He just nailed that enormous satellite contract. Must have made a killer bonus for pulling off that deal.”

  “He earns every dime he gets. Mickey’s been a real pal to me. Never forgets a favor. I’m supposed to see him today, actually. And Alexander, you know, those overlaps—your so-called ‘conflicts’—are not that difficult to manage.”

  The waiters were hovering now, fussing with crumbs on the starched linen. One was scraping with a silver tool, another refilling the water glasses with an awkward splash. Rachel was flustered to look around at their fellow diners and to realize they had gotten a bit intense. With its heavy drapes, oversized flower pots, and dark formality, the Willard felt more like London or New York than Washington.

  “Obviously, the Chinese know you do some work for Taiwan,” Alexander said. “And Beijing doesn’t object?”

  “The Chinese like it that we’re working with competing interests—that we’re playing in the big leagues. Besides, they’ve got parallel interests on trade stuff: Taiwan is the biggest investor on the Mainland today. They’ve sunk almost a hundred billion dollars there. Taiwan has got so many people in Shanghai and Guangzhou that Taipei can’t cross the Communists on anything. It’s like when you think you’re buying a house, but it ends up owning you. So, it’s copacetic.”

  “And if it wasn’t?”

  “We would build a ‘Chinese wall,’ or something,” she offered, smiling demurely. “That’s what lawyers are for.”

  Alexander rolled his eyes. “Don’t you ever feel like you’re selling the same information twice?”

  “What do you do with your Times web sites and your Sunday TV talk show gigs? You guys recycle the same stuff over and over, only in different places. So, you can’t play holier-than-thou with me.”

  “That’s. . . well. . . different.” He could only laugh.

  “If I’m the first to know that Senator Smithson is going to pull a flip-flop on the China trade agreement, there’s no reason I can’t use that information all over town. My job is to be my client’s eyes and ears. I’m not going to apologize for being good at it.”

  They fenced on, Rachel amused, Alexander increa
singly uneasy. She was too close a friend for him to play 60 Minutes interrogator, and there was a limit to where he wanted to go with the reporter/source game. So, as he sipped his tea and carefully regarded this lacquered part of her personality, he tried to turn the conversation away from her affairs at TPB.

  It was Rachel who persisted. “Let me tell you something about Mr. Talbott. Do you know what he does on weekends?”

  “What?”

  “While your caricature of a K Street lawyer has him quail hunting with senators, he’s in some inner city church basement helping with programs he sponsors. He supports about a dozen charities in this town—most of them anonymously. The man is like Ebenezer Scrooge—after he sees the ghost.”

  “Wasn’t there something peculiar about your Mr. Porter, the bank lawyer who makes all those acquisitions?”

  “Alan Porter does all the investment deals, sure.”

  “So half your shop lobbies and the other half works with Porter investing the profits?”

  “Alexander, this is totally off the record, right? Your paper is just doing a case study, an abstract—”

  “Of course.”

  “I’ll come after you, you know, Bonner. I’ll climb in your window at night and beat you about the head and shoulders if you burn me.”

  “Remind me to check the locks.” He found himself amused at the thought of Rachel paying him a nocturnal visit. “Actually, I believe you would.”

  “Damn right, I would.” She stared him down a moment before continuing. “Well, Mr. Talbott is rather indifferent to wealth. Money is just a way of keeping score for him. It’s Porter who runs the books and does the investment deals on the side. So there is your Chinese wall—right down the middle of the firm.”

  They turned briefly to the headlines of the day—the administration’s latest judicial confirmation battle with the filibustering Senate and the endless hearings on the Katrina response. This was just obligatory, though; here they danced to separate tunes. There was an altogether predictable Red State/True Blue chasm dividing their views on all things political. Iraq they had agreed to stop discussing altogether—Rachel backed the unpopular mission to take the fight against terrorism overseas; Alexander condemned the politicized intelligence he insisted had led Washington to prosecute “the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Rachel was a libertarian Republican, committed to small government, low taxes, and support for the commander in chief. Alexander remained a hopelessly pure, Howard Dean kind of Democrat, the only guy she knew still whining about the butterfly ballot, the hanging chads, and the Florida recount.