Hunger of the Wolf (18 page)

In Rome she sent an usher to ask him to leave. She could not play with him in the theater. He was happy to leave, he said. He would never want to upset Miss Thibodeau. But he was there at the next concert in Berlin, and at the next in Stuttgart, where, after the performance, a few of the stagehands, drunk, emerged to tease him as he sat in the front row, mildly smiling. Lavinia watched as her coterie swirled about him, this strange man who just kept showing up. Her friend Rosette,
who maintained the lorikeets, stripteased drunkenly in front of him but again there was no reaction. They spoke to him in French and he didn't answer. He couldn't answer. He smiled mildly.

The tension resolved itself in China, half accidentally. George stepped off the plane in Peking to a greeting committee of a single Chinese official, a man no taller than five feet, radiating concentration and poise. “You are Mr. Wylie, are you not? The American businessman?” he asked from the tarmac at the foot of the plane. The little man's English was fluid, inflected with Oxford.

“I'm George.”

“My name is Pi-Lin.”

A proffered handshake awkwardly met a bow. George returned the bow as Pi-Lin extended a hand.

“The people of China would like to demonstrate to you the wonders of the worker's paradise.”

George mentioned that he had a concert to attend.

“I will personally escort you to the concert of Madamemoiselle Thibodeau after the tour. Your bags have been quite taken care of.” They strolled through customs. The guards, catching the faintest glimpse of George's guide, deferred instantly, although the man wore the same gray-green Mao costume with cap that everyone else was wearing and was physically distinct only insofar as he was shorter than the others. “As the chairman says, our bureaucracy is our great strength,” Pi-Lin said as they passed the final gate into a Jeep driven by a flinty-faced military officer. How had they even known he was coming? And what was he doing? The little Chinese man startled George out of the reverie he had fallen into at Carnegie Hall. It was as if his father had picked him up at the airport. What does it all mean, son?

They first visited a pharmaceutical factory that smelled of candy and
ammonia, where George was lectured for half an hour in Chinese about the virtues of socialism while six hundred workers, wearing face masks the entire time, listened in rapt tranquility. They visited a school, where George was honored by an assembly of a thousand children singing what Pi-Lin explained was a poem written by Chairman Mao about dawn rising red in the East. They visited a construction site, little more than a patch of bald ground, where three men in hard hats pointed at the dirt and Pi-Lin described the immense tracts of convenient modern housing that would rise from it. George smiled mildly wherever they went. He was good at visiting grim institutions he didn't understand. It was his regular job, after all.

The tour concluded with a banquet. More than a hundred men and women sat around an ovoid table smoking perpetual cigarettes and slurping vodka from teacups.

“And where are we now, Pi-Lin? Who are all of these people?” George asked. They had grown familiar over the course of the day.

“These are your people, Mr. Wylie. These are the editors and publishers of all the newspapers.”

“They drink and smoke like editors and publishers, I'll give you that.”

Among the chattering Communists, as unexpected as a baseball through a skyscraper window, Lavinia Thibodeau in her hallucinatory scarlet dress arrived like luxury itself, like the refutation of utilitarianism personified, like elegance refined into a goddess. George's throat went dry in gratitude and anxiety. He had no idea what to say. If only he could play music to her instead.

Pi-Lin, scrupulously suppressing his obvious pleasure at having orchestrated the awkwardness, offered introductions.

“Miss Thibodeau, welcome. This gentleman has traveled a great distance
to see you perform. We are truly honored to be able to have two such luminaries from the West together with us.”

“The honor is ours,” Lavinia said.

“A pleasure,” George said, stupidly, to Lavinia.

“I'm sure it is.”

He leaned in, his words flustering around her almost tangible odor of lavender. “I want you to know that I had no part in organizing this. It's as much a surprise to me that you're here as it is to me.”

“It's no surprise to me,” she said. “You seem to show up wherever I go.”

That was all the conversation they were allowed, being displayed like fragile white trophies at opposite ends of the banquet table. The distance between them, George thought, was roughly the same as the distance between his seat in the front row and Lavinia onstage, a narrow abyss. The journalists swooped up dozens and dozens of delicacies, then a Communist Party delegate gave a thirty-minute speech about how the printing press had been invented in China. Before they left, Pi-Lin presented the guests with fountain pens decorated with Chairman Mao's face set against a rising sun. Then they rose, and Lavinia left, turning to the back of the room without even a gesture his way. He had missed some kind of chance. The last rustle of her red dress out the doorway was like watching a species go extinct.

George and Pi-Lin drove back through the dimly lit streets crowded with evening loungers squatting against the walls or around lamplit mahjong conversations.

“How powerful are you?” George asked his quiet host.

Pi-Lin pondered the question like a fable. “It is impossible for anyone in China to answer that question precisely.”

“I want to know who I owe. Was meeting Miss Thibodeau your idea or the party's?”

Pi-Lin nodded, paused before he spoke. “There are certain elements within China, even within the party, that imagine that someday there will be a connection.”

“A connection between what?”

“That is exactly the question. Between systems? Between continents?”

Out the window, a seven-year-old girl was selling red peonies from a steel bucket. “Stop the car,” George ordered. Pi-Lin barked at the driver, and before he could be stopped, George leaped out, bought the whole bucket with a roll of bills, and brought them back to the car. “I must support any capitalist in China on principle,” George explained.

At the hotel, George handed Pi-Lin a business card. A name on a piece of luxury paper. A vaguely defeated smile passed over Pi-Lin's gaze as he held the card, then a restored determination visibly thickened in him. “If there's anything I can do for you,” George said. His host bowed.

*  *  *

After Peking, the Thibodeau entourage never looked George's way again, not in Singapore, not in Honolulu, not in Sydney. He followed the music all the way to Quebec City, the final stop on the world tour. Lavinia played the “Duet for Piano and Lovebirds” for the last time, and all the old fans, who remembered her as a young girl wrapped in the azurine blue of her father's politics and the farmers' sky and the Church's heaven, booed her as she began to play. They had come for order. She gave them the beginning of their revolution. They spat, stomped out the door hurling insults and their Playbills, hurling seat cushions, ripping the fine netting, spuming rampant sugar water and bird shit. The tune of accidental beauty dissolved into riot. The birds flew away, perching in the rafters and then escaping through the high windows into the winter air, into the freedom that would surely kill them.

George sat in the wreckage, smiling mildly. There was nobody else but him. After the sixty-three epiphanies, after so many concert halls in their antique frosty glamour, the shuddering taxicabs, George's mission had its satisfaction. Through the torn netting, her eyes mascara-soaked, Lavinia Thibodeau floated to the seat beside him, and into his ear whispered the words: “I suppose we should eat something.”

*  *  *

WylieCorp had barely noticed the absence of George. Lee was running North America just fine and Dale was in the middle of buying the two largest media companies in England, becoming, in the process, one of the most powerful men in the country almost accidentally.

His first big purchase was NWM. North West Media was a bankrupt mess. The conglomerate of international investors that controlled the license for television in England's northwest, particularly for Manchester, were willing to sell NWM for the price of its debt, 3.56 million pounds. Dale Wylie sent letters personally to all the executives of WylieCorp, which included the editors of the newspapers, offering to let them in on the stock he was raising for the purchase. Nobody could understand what Dale understood: NWM couldn't win at virtue. They had been trying to compete with the BBC, producing worthy news programming along with expensive dramas. They were fighting for the wrong territory. While the company drifted in the limbo between fire sale and bankruptcy, Dale cannily rounded up the syndication rights to dozens of American shows. The costs for these shows—shows like
Gunsmoke, McHale's Navy, Combat!, The Jetsons, The Lucy Show, The Beverly Hillbillies,
and
The Virginian
—were almost nothing. NWM held the only license for the region. Dale paid a few hundred thousand pounds, on extended contracts, for the lot. Local shows, required for a broadcast
license, were produced on the cheap—documentary programs that spun single news stories into hour-long discussion panels and rock-and-roll variety acts. Essentially for no outlay in risk, Dale Wylie controlled a fifth of English television.

On the day of purchase, Dale imported a cost-cutting army from the American branch of the company. He himself immediately fired one-third of the staff. Within three months, the profits had already paid off the syndication rights, and Dale announced himself by purchasing a house in Kensington Palace Gardens. The rising property values meant that he could mortgage the property immediately after the purchase, several times, for a much higher price than he paid for it. The NWM deal made him an unignorable sum of money, and so easily that not even Lord Fallis's influence could exclude him any longer.

A letter from this period of conquest survived at North Lake:

13 November 1963

The Countess of Strathmore

Haverford House

Dear Mr. Wylie,

As you may well guess, the purchase in Kensington Palace Gardens, much more even than the annual report on North West Media, for which success let me congratulate you, has provoked an intense groundswell of gossip. I'm afraid that it will not all be to your liking. However, since you've requested all pertinent information, I will record it here.

I received a letter from my cousin, Georgette de Villiers, in which she guardedly enquired as to your situation, both financial and matrimonial. I responded with caution. To be specific, she asked about “the recent American émigré, who is I believe some
kind of an oil baron.” She attached a well-circulated letter from Baron Whitefield, which contains a description, which he claims he received from the Waburtons of Pennsylvania: “He is, whatever he may claim about Scottish origins, a filthy Jew and everybody knows it.” Baron Whitefield goes on to describe, in his inimitably crass style, that “all the bitches are in heat for his money.” I feel confident in assuming, from this comments, that the prospects of your marrying are much discussed in London society.

The purchase of such a magnificent domicile is deeply resented. The previous owner is claiming openly that the price was too high not to sell, but that he regrets the sale already. He reportedly told Lady Asquith who told Mr. Fey that “he pities the old place,” presumably for whatever improvements you are planning to make.

So these two subjects are the dominant motifs, your plans to marry and your plans to renovate. You may, of course, provide me with any information about your intentions which you wish me to disseminate. If I might add my own gloss of the above remarks, they are nothing to trouble you, Mr. Wylie. They are the typical assessments that any new entrant into society must face.

I will send you any new information as it arrives.

Yours truly,

C. S.

The house in Kensington Palace Gardens was chaperoned by embassies, a squat and unloved princess of property maintained by a caretaker as lonely and devoted as a lighthouse keeper. Dale was never there. He was never in Abermarley either. He lived with the money as the money rolled drunkenly into the offices of NWM, which were grubby even by the standards of Wylie buildings, scratched out of repurposed factories on
the outskirts of Manchester. There, in the pulsing twilight of that harbinger city, Dale made the deal that established him as one of the most powerful men in the world.

Lord Fallis sold him
The Record of London
. Dale had never fantasized such a possibility. He had hoped to buy the string of rural papers and possibly the handful of radio stations that the Fallis holdings controlled in the southeastern counties. But never the
Record
. Lord Fallis was a friend of Prince Philip, and he ran the
Record
much the way the British aristocratic families had been running their declining estates. Every morning, at around ten, a chauffeur brought him to the Fleet Street offices, where the elevator was held (while his employees took the stairs) so he could whisk himself directly to the top floor. He kept his four moronic sons on the board. They all arrived by chauffeur, too. Lord Fallis's workday consisted of reading the other newspapers, lickspittle conversations with the sitting prime minister, and the occasional disemboweling of an editor. Long lunches, good sherry, and a hearty measure of influence—why would anyone cede such a life to another? In an interview a decade earlier, Lord Fallis himself had bristled at the notion of abandoning his duties: “Offering to sell
The Record of London
would be like offering one's wife to a houseguest,” he had said.

The influence of the paper made such minor considerations as its profitability seem ludicrous. The
Record
selected who was going to be the leader of the Conservative Party in England.
The Record on Sunday
, its sister publication, doled out definitive theater and restaurant reviews—the terror of the city. What was the profitability of the Church of England? Or of the royal family? Or of the cliffs of Dover? The paper had been losing money steadily for decades, but it was impossible to change its financial structure, given its social position and the strong union that controlled every aspect of the printing shop and the newsroom. Dale
speculated that Lord Fallis was just tired of losing money. His friends thought that money was not so much the problem as his waning interest in the cause of Conservative politics and his waxing interest in a twenty-four-year-old Argentine masseuse. Editors at the
Record
believed a distaste for his sons was the secret motive. He knew his four boys were all disasters-in-waiting, this line of argument went, so he ensured that they would destroy only the family fortune and not his beloved
Record
—a flattering attribution of motive. Whatever Lord Fallis's reasons for selling, Dale was the only obvious buyer. With the NWM profits cresting over several hundred thousand pounds a week, and looking to rise, he was the only man with the resources to broker a deal.