Afterburn by Colin Harrison Page A

entrepreneurs (who had built shipping lines or real-estate empires or garment factories) or the managers of institutional power (who controlled billions of dollars not their own). Privately the entrepreneurs disdained the tedious, risk-adverse probity of the managers, who, in turn, stood burdened by the institutional reputations of the dead. True, the managers had not made something from nothing, but they had carried bucket upon bucket of obeisance to nurture a gigantus. As with the distinction between a sapling and an ancient tree, their spreading, limb-heavy corporations had known fierce political winds, diseases of managerial orthodoxy, the insect-hollowing of internal bureaucracy. And yet, Charlie decided, the men were finally more like one another than unlike; each long ago had learned to sell high (1997) and buy low (1998), and had passed the threshold of unspendable wealth, such riches conforming them in their behaviors; each owned more houses or paintings or Rolls-Royces than could be admired or used at once. Each played golf or tennis passably well; each had purchased a Canadian or British passport; each possessed a forty-million-dollar yacht, or a forty-million-dollar home atop Victoria's Peak, or a forty-million-dollar wife. Like the wealthy businessmen on New York's East Side, the Chinese executives hired more or less the same doctors and antique dealers and feng shui mystics to advise them. Each had a slender young Filipino or Russian or Czech mistress tucked away in one of Hong Kong's luxury apartment buildings—licking her lips if requested—or had a secure phone line to one of the ministry buildings in Beijing, or was betting against the Hong Kong dollar while insisting on its firmness—any of the costly mischief in which rich men indulge.
    The men at the table, in fact, as much as any men, sat as money incarnate, particularly the American dollar, the euro, and the Japanese yen—all simultaneously, and all hedged against fluctuations of the others. But although the men were money, money was not them; money assumed any shape or color or politics, it could be fire or stone or dream, it could summon armies or bind atoms, and, indifferent to the sufferings of the mortal soul, it could leave or arrive at any time. And on this exact night, Charlie thought, setting his ivory chopsticks neatly upon the lacquered plate while nodding to the uniformed boy to take it away—on this very night he could see that although money had assumed the shapes of the men in the room (including him, of course—his shoes, his dental work, his very shit), it existed in differing densities and volumes and brightnesses. Whereas Charlie was a man of perhaps thirty or thirty-three million dollars of wealth, that sum amounted to shoe-shine change in the present company. No sir, money, in that room, in that moment, was understood as inconsequential in sums less than one hundred million dollars, and of political importance only when five times more. Money, in fact, found its greatest compression and gravity in the form of the tiny man sitting silently across from Charlie—Sir Henry Lai, the Oxford-educated Chinese gambling mogul, owner of a fleet of jet-foil ferries, a dozen hotels, and most of the casinos of Macao and Vietnam. Worth billions—and billions more.
    But, Charlie wondered, perhaps he was wrong. He could think of one shape that money had not yet assumed, although quite a bit of it had been spent, perhaps a hundred thousand dollars in all. Money animated the dapper Chinese businessman across from him, but could it arrive in the world as Charlie's own grandchild? This was the question he feared most, this was the question that had eaten at him and at Ellie for years now, and which would soon be answered: In a few hours, Julia would tell them once and forever if she was capable of having a baby.
    She had suffered through cycle upon cycle of disappointment—hundreds of shots of fertility drugs followed by the needle-recovery of