Fallen Masters (18 page)

“And how would you do that?”

“By mobilizing the good within and among us,” Dave said.

Hong Kong

Francis Chun Yin was half-British and half-Chinese (the product of a colonial-era marriage) and all entrepreneur. By age twenty-three he had established himself as the top bond trader in his company, and within a few years he took his newfound wealth and invested it in a technology firm that wanted him as CEO.

He stood out among his peers in school and in his profession, not only because he was much taller than average, but also because he had a zest and love of life that seemed unique. Girls were always attracted to him, and he was an unfailing gentleman, but he hadn’t ever married. As he approached his thirty-fifth birthday, he began to question himself and to look inside, asking,
What is my purpose? Why have I been able to accumulate so much in so little time? Where am I going?

Two months earlier, Francis Chun Yin journeyed into the mainland. He called it a pilgrimage, though it was really a tour of manufacturing plants that he controlled and various financial headquarters that he had worked with over the past decade. It would change his life in ways he could never have predicted.

In Guangdong Province, toward the end of a grueling month of tours, meetings, conferences, and decision making, he came to Shenzhen, a city of 12 million, for the last week of his visit. His company’s largest manufacturing center—more than a factory, a kind of city within a city—was located there, amid the teeming, busy population that fueled a booming economy for the nation, even as the world’s major Western economies were floundering and teetering on the edge of collapse.

Bleary eyed, the tall Eurasian entrepreneur, dressed in jeans and a polo shirt, asked to be shown the inside of the plant. After some initial resistance, he received the official guided tour. He asked for more. He wanted to see more. He wanted to see it all.

Perhaps he shouldn’t have been shocked. There had been news reports, especially in the United States, about the conditions at the mammoth factories in China that employed hundreds of thousands of workers each. He learned about worker burnout and suicides. People came up to him as he walked the factory floor to tell him their stories. He gave them his email address and phone number so they could register complaints. That was when he learned that workers were denied access to electronic communications, period: No cell phones. No email. No contact with the outside world. It was illegal.

In his hotel room after four nonstop days of touring and personally speaking to hundreds of managers and workers, he made a decision.

Francis returned to Hong Kong and immediately issued a set of decrees of workers’ rights and privileges—and expectations—that would free them from the virtual slavery he had witnessed in Shenzhen. Every person would be given a smartphone—the same kind manufactured in the very plant he had visited. He called the provincial governor to inform him of what he was doing and announce that he was prepared to face the consequences of his actions. By then, he hoped, it would be too late for the government to do anything about it. He spent every waking and working hour from that point on determined to give
his
workers some real hope for their own lives and those of their families. It may not have made any financial sense, but Francis knew that this was the right decision and one that needed to be made now.

CHAPTER

34

Long Island

Charlene might have eaten lunch—she couldn’t remember. She had listened to music most of the afternoon, classical, and now she was looking at a book of art. What held her attention for the moment was
The Night Café,
a painting by Van Gogh.

The picture was dominated by the pool table that sat in the middle of the café, on a wide-plank floor. There were also, around the edge of the café, and the picture, a few scattered tables with condiments. A waiter in white was standing next to the pool table, while a man and woman, seeking as much privacy as they could, sat at the back corner table. There was a sleeping man at another table, while two more men were engaged in conversation at a third.

Charlene got the impression that the conversation was low, malicious, and conspiratorial. That impression was aided by Van Gogh’s own comments about the painting.

In my picture of the “Night Café” I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad or commit a crime. So I have tried to express, as it were, the powers of darkness in a low public house, by soft Louis XV green and malachite, contrasting with yellow-green and harsh blue-greens, and all this in an atmosphere like a devil’s furnace, of pale sulfur.

Ryan had been particularly intrigued with this painting, and tried to buy it from the Yale University’s Art Gallery, but they wouldn’t sell it.

“Charlene, go upstairs, take a shower, and get dressed. We are going out tonight!”

The words were spoken by Pamela Johnson, who had just burst unannounced into the room.

Pamela, who had a Ph.D. in theology, was a frequent television guest any time the conversation had to do with such things as religion in our society, theological concepts, religious history, or even the occult. Thin and striking, she was an African-American woman who reminded many of a young Diana Ross, with dark eyes and amazing cheekbones.

Dr. Johnson was the first of six children her mother had borne, only two of whom, Pam and her brother Julius, had the same father. Pam’s mother and father were married, and though they struggled to survive—Pam’s mother was a maid for the Rail Haven Motel, and her father worked at the Scott County Milling Company in Sikeston, Missouri—they had a small house in a modest neighborhood and life was hard but good. When Pam was nine, her father was killed when he fell from the top of one of the grain elevators while trying to change a vent cover.

She shared that early experience of loss with her friend Charlene.

After that, Pam’s life changed drastically. Unable to keep the modest home in a middle-class, integrated neighborhood, Pam’s mother was forced to move to Sunset, a neighborhood so bad that the police never came into the area. Pam witnessed murders, saw drugs sold and used on the street. She was beaten up three times by her mother’s boyfriends, all of whom became fathers of Pam’s younger half siblings.

Very early in life, Pam developed a love for reading, and found that she could lose herself in a good book, whether it was a novel or book of philosophy or history. She was a straight-A student at school, given special attention by several of her teachers who saw her potential and realized the reality of her life.

When Pam said she wanted to go to college, her mother, who had been trying to talk her into dropping out of high school, laughed at her.

“You ain’t never goin’ to ’mount to nothin’, ’cause there ain’t no one in our family that ever has,” Doris Johnson declared. “And as for goin’ to college you can just get that idea out of your head right now. You may as well say you want to go to the moon. It ain’t possible.”

“Mama, we have gone to the moon.”

“Yeah? Well, you ain’t goin’ to college.”

Doris Johnson was wrong. Some of Pam’s teachers got together and secured enough scholarship funding for Pam that she was able to attend Washington University in St. Louis. Graduating with a straight 4.0 average, Pam continued her education until she earned a doctorate. Now a tenured professor of theology at Drew University in New Jersey, she was a much sought-after speaker and consultant.

It was Sue who had introduced Pam to Charlene, and they had been fast friends ever since. Through all Pam’s trials and tribulations, she had hung on to her faith—and now, when asked, she would say that the Ph.D. in her name stood for “Power to heal disasters.” That was her remedy for everything—that, and her unwavering faith in God.

“Hi, Pam,” Charlene said. “Look, I really don’t feel like going anywhere. But if you want to visit for a while, that would be all right.”

“Maybe for you, but it’s not all right for me,” Pam said. “What do you think? That I want to sit around you while you’re in the blue funk? Girl, I’m not going to let you bring me down. I told you, we’re going out.”

“Going out, where?”

“Columbia University is holding a lecture for alternative thought and belief tonight, and there are going to be speakers on all sorts of subjects, from faith to quantum physics. There is even going to be a psychiatrist there who will be speaking on reincarnation and past-life regression therapy.”

“Oh, I don’t think so…,” Charlene said. “Really, Pam, I thank you for thinking of me, but I’m not in the mood.”

“Sue!” Pam called.

Sue came into the sunroom, though, as there was no sun now, the room was illuminated by a couple of table lamps.

“Sue, get this woman’s clothes ready. She’s going out tonight.”

A broad smile spread across Sue’s face. “Oh, Charlene, good for you.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” the world-famous singer protested.

“It’s going to do you a world of good,” Sue said. “What do you think? The blue Celine, or the red Van Noten?”

“I
really
don’t want to go,” Charlene said.

Pam held the telephone in her hand, and she dialed Dellafiore’s Restaurant. “Yes, I’m calling for Stardust Enterprises,” she said when the phone was answered. “I’d like the private back room, please, for four people. Yes, that is correct, Stardust Enterprises. Just a moment.” Pam covered phone. “What’s the code number?” she asked.

Sue started to answer but Pam held up her hand, indicating that she wanted Charlene to answer.

“Zero two eight seven,” Charlene said.

Pam smiled, then repeated the number into the phone. By forcing Charlene to answer, it meant Charlene had agreed to go. “Seven o’clock,” she said.

While closing the phone, she made a shooing motion to Charlene. “Hurry and get ready,” she said.

“I’ll wear the black—,” Charlene started to say, but Pam interrupted her.

“No black,” Pam said. “You’ll wear the red Van Noten.”

“The blue Celine,” Charlene compromised.

Forty-five minutes later, Charlene and Pam were sitting in the backseat of a Cadillac Escalade. The back windows were so darkly tinted that nobody could look in. Raymond Evans, who, in his younger years had driven race cars for Ryan, was driving.

“I don’t know why I let you talk me into this,” Charlene complained. “Really, I am going to be such a wet blanket.”

“No, you aren’t,” Pam said. “I’m not going to let you be. If you are too much trouble, why, I’ll just reach over and pinch your nose.”

Charlene laughed. “You would, too, wouldn’t you?”

“In a rabbit-running minute, I would,” Pam said.

“Rabbit-running minute? Is that one of your academic expressions?”

“Nope. It comes right out of swamp-east Missouri,” Pam said.

Charlene laughed again. “You’re going to make me feel better no matter what, aren’t you?”

“That is my intention,” Pam said.

When the giant SUV pulled up in front of the restaurant, a dozen paparazzi were on hand. Cameras began flashing as Joseph, the owner of the restaurant, greeted Charlene and escorted her inside. Despite the melancholia that had enveloped Charlene for so long, she was able to muster a smile and wave to the paparazzi and those who just happened to be passing by and recognized her.

The patrons of Dellafiore’s Restaurant were used to famous people coming through the doors, from show business folks to sports figures to high-profile politicians. They considered it gauche to gawk, but Charlene St. John was different. In the time since her husband had died, Charlene had become nearly a complete recluse. She had kept up with the business by releasing two albums in the last two years, both of which went platinum, and the pay-per-view concert and a few other performances and personal appearances. But two years had passed since her last major tour.

Because of that retreat from the public eye, even Dellafiore’s most jaded diners looked up from their meal to see Joseph escorting Charlene and her friend to the back of the restaurant.

As she passed by one of the tables, the diner there, a well-known television actor, smiled and spoke to her.

“Hello, Charlene. How are you doing?”

Charlene smiled back at him. “Hello, Michael,” she said. “I’m doing well, thank you.”

Once they stepped into the private dining room and the door was shut behind them, the restaurant owner escorted them to a private elevator. The elevator led to a basement hallway and exited two blocks down and behind the location of the restaurant, near the delivery entrance where Charlene’s driver, Raymond, was waiting. Charlene hugged Joseph, who had clearly done this for a few “special” patrons before, and she and Pamela proceeded to what was to be a life-changing event.

CHAPTER

35

Raymond drove expertly through the city traffic until he reached the campus of Columbia University. Pam led Charlene to Pupin Hall, then into the lecture auditorium itself. The lights had been dimmed inside, with the only illumination being small floor lights to enable passage up the aisles. Because it was dark, and because so many of the attendees were interested in the upcoming program, no one noticed her, and Charlene and Pam were able to take their seats without bother.

The seats were padded and comfortable, and as Charlene sat there she thought of the enticing food aromas she had experienced at Dellafiore’s. Tables were extremely difficult to get there, but she had used the restaurant as a ruse to enable her to come here unobserved. Now her several days of eating nothing but peanut butter and jelly sandwiches caused her stomach to revolt. She had been that close to real food, but had simply walked by it without so much as an appetizer. She should at least have taken some cheese.

The barely audible conversations from the audience and the soft whisper of the air-conditioning made Charlene sleepy, but before she drifted off, Pam glared at her as if she were a child misbehaving at Mass. The thought made them both laugh.