THE MOST IMPORTANT THING YOU'LL EVER READ ABOUT CHINA
Fact or Fiction?????????????
"Doctor Baumgartner." This female voice--one-part nasal, two parts whine--grated my left eardrum.
"Is Joy Baumgartner there?" I inquired.
"This is Joy." Her voice sounded anything but joy.
"Emil Rubitski suggested I phone you to..."
"You want to talk about China, right?"
"Yeah, I..."
"My consulting rates are two hundred and fifty dollars per hour."
"I thought we might have lunch," I said, "and..."
"It's the same."
"I see. How about if I take you to lunch to figure out what it is you know that's worth two hundred and fifty dollars an hour?"
"How long a lunch?"
"A couple hours.'
"It'll be five hundred dollars."
"Whoa. What if we only talk about China for an hour?"
"What else would we have to talk about?"
"The weather?"
"Read it in the paper," said the un-playful Baumgartner.
"All right, I'm in for one hour. Can you come to my office?"
"Where is it?"
"Near Mexico Ave. Near AU."
"Fine, but it'll cost you an hour travel time."
"Jesus, what are you, a lawyer?"
"That's exactly the point," whined Baumgartner. "Lawyers charge for their expertise. They run a meter. I'm an expert on China. You want to learn what I know about China. Why shouldn't I run a meter?"
"Don't you folks at CSS generally like to share your expertise?"
"For the purpose of promoting CSS, yes. In general, no. Are you a potential contributor to our programs?"
"Absolutely. Me and Morton Levi."
Silence.
"You work for Morton Levi?" asked Baumgartner.
"With Morton Levi."
"Hmm. I suppose that qualifies. Okay, lunch tomorrow. The Palm. One o'clock. I have another call waiting." She disconnected me.
I utilized the dial tone to phone Emil Rubitski.
"This Baumgartner, Emil. Is she a ball-buster or what?"
"You think I don't know this?" said Rubitski. "The first rule new fellows learn when they arrive at this Center is, Don't Turn Your Back On Joy."
I chuckled.
"No joke," snapped Emil. "It's a known fact that she keeps a loaded pistol in her purse."
Baumgartner wasn't at the Palm at one o'clock. I stooled myself at the bar, Beefeater, olives.
Eight minutes later, the maitre d' pointed me out to a short rotund woman with tussled blonde hair, betrayed by dark-brown eyebrows.
"Hi, doc," I said. "I'm Jay."
Baumgartner sized me up. "Let's sit at a table," she said before turning on the maitre d'. "A good table at the front."
"Of course."
I followed the brazen Baumgartner to a good table.
"I'd like to meet Morton," Baumgartner announced, rearing her rump. "If you're working for him, and it involves China, and you want my knowledge and expertise, I should meet directly with him. I only operate at the highest level."
A waiter passed.
"Vodka tonic," snapped Baumgartner. "Slice of lime, not lemon." She turned to me. "When will you introduce me to Morton?"
"I didn't know we'd graduated from if to when."
"Without him," said Baumgartner, "we're back to two hundred and fifty dollars an hour."
"Plus lunch?" The Palm wasn't cheap.
She didn't even smile. "We're already here."
"So we are. Tell you what, if I don't get you in to see Morton, I'll pay your fee."
Baumgartner shook her head. "You pay. If I meet Morton, I refund you."
"Will you take American Express?"
"No. But I'll take a personal check." This was supposed to be a compromise.
"I don't have my checkbook here. Will you invoice me?"
Baumgartner glanced at the menu and pushed it aside. "What exactly is it Morton wants to know about China?"
"I'm interested in princelings," I said. "Specifically, Yao Li."
"Yao Li has no testicles." Baumgartner spat this with matter-of-fact delight.
"Do you mean that metaphorically?"
"No, I mean it physically. When Yao Li was at Shanghai Textile University during the Cultural Revolution, he got beaten up by his classmates. They pounded on his testicles. The Doctors had to remove them to prevent hemorrhaging. Surgical castration." Baumgartner smiled for the first time, as if castration was her prescription for men in general. "I have it on high authority that Yao Li drinks a daily brew of cow dung and lizard skin to compensate for lost masculinity. He carries a steel ball--the size of a golf-ball--wherever he goes. He grips it to strengthen his fingers. When he gets into brawls, he smashes his steel ball against the skulls of his opponents." Baumgartner sipped a vodka tonic, set before her by the waiter, who now hovered for an order. Baumgartner waved him away. "We're not ready." She returned to me. "Yao Li has a vengeful streak, a characteristic he got from his father, Yao Lo, China's intelligence chief. You did know that, didn't you?"
I nodded.
"His father's nickname within the inner Council of Leaders is Trickman."
"Does the son, Yao Li, have a nickname?"
Baumgartner regarded me with a school-marmish contempt. "Are you interested in substance or gossip?"
"You're the one who brought up nicknames."
"Dickhead," snapped Baumgartner.
"Excuse me?"
"That's Yao Li's nickname: Dickhead. As I was saying before you interrupted, Yao Li has a vengeful personality. When he became powerful, he used his influence to confiscate Shanghai Textile University's campus and relegate them to several ramshackle buildings near the airport."
The waiter tiptoed back for an order.
"I want the two-pound lobster," said Baumgartner.
"Crab cakes," said I.
The waiter beat it.
"Trickman and Dickhead have their own private security force of Kazaks, a mountain tribe of Turko-Mongol origin. They are warriors, descended from the Golden Horde of Genghis Khan. It was the Kazaks who--with fixed bayonets--put down the student rebellions. Trickman takes the view that his generation sacrificed the lives of twenty million comrades to conquer China. Anyone who wants to take it from them--or their children, or their children's children--has to lay down twenty million lives. Trickman has devised a new strategy for Chinese domination of the world."
I waited for Baumgartner to say water.
"Money," said Baumgartner. "Trickman's favorite saying is Money oils civil society. Trickman spent a whole career in intelligence, posing as a banker in Britain, Germany, and Switzerland. He decided that money is the route to power, not tanks. Trickman concluded that if Hitler had had Wall Street, the Nazis would have won World War II." Baumgartner paused. "The Chinese secretly admire Hitler's sense of destiny. Trickman's new strategy is to connect to high finance. That's why Hong Kong--just the way it is, a capitalist financial center--is so important to them. But the real key to Trickman's financial strategy is people. Think about it: China possesses the cheapest, largest labor pool in the world. One billion workers. A quarter of this planet's population! Have you noticed that more than half of almost everything you see in the malls these days is made in China? China has become an economic force simply because it has turned five-sixths of its one-point-two billion population into a slave labor force. Foreign capital is flowing into China to exploit labor, encouraged by China's two hundred million-member elite. Our media would have us believe that because of this new connection to the West, China will evolve into a free market economy. Dumb bastards. It won't. What we're looking at is national socialism, Chinese-style. It was the late Deng Xiaoping who originally conceived China's economic reform. He shrewdly forged an alliance between the Chinese Communist Party and sixty million Chinese who reside outside of China, mostly throughout Asia--the lords of the Pacific Rim, as they are known. It is the money-management skill of these Chinese expatriates, these Pacific lords, that perpetuates oppression in China. Human rights? They don't exist--except for fifty million Communist party members and their one hundred and fifty million relatives. It is in China's national economic interest to oppress its dissidents and peasants and keep a billion people confined to laboring for the world while the pay-offs go to the oppressors."
Anger flashed in Baumgartner's eyes. She took this whole situation personally.
"Through its billion-person labor force," she continued, "and now through Hong Kong, China intends to manipulate world money. In so doing, it has embarked on a policy to make corporate America--who they perceive as the real government of the United States--to become dependent on cheap Chinese labor. Meanwhile, the expatriate Chinese, with their liquid cash, are strategizing corporate takeovers in the US."
"If what you say is true..." I started.
"It's true." Baumgartner narrowed her plucked eyebrows at me.
"Why isn't our government doing anything to counter this policy?"
"Counter this policy?" Baumgartner rolled her eyes. "Our elected government loves this policy!"
"Why?"
"Why indeed." Joy snorted contemptuously. "A few reporters are onto this, but the mainstream media continues to stick to press releases, or they're turning a blind eye. The reason why is this: old-fashioned deal-making. The president's financial supporters are cutting amazing business deals with the Chinese. You see what's happening here? The Chinese are playing our own so-called revolving door system against us. And, to this end, they're using their corrupt underground to help them."
"Oh?"
Baumgartner nodded vehemently. "Remember how our CIA teamed up with the mafia to try to overthrow Castro? Trickman is doing the same thing. He has recruited the Triad, China's notorious criminal underground."
"To do what?"
"Export contraband into the United States. Drugs and guns."
I'd forgotten, until this movement, what Samantha Wakefield of SIS had told me about Chinese gunrunning through Scrogg Island. I filed a mental note to nudge Pikestaff about that. Then I remembered Johnny Wang. "Do you know the name Johnny Wang?" I posed.
"Do I," spat Baumgartner, obviously disgusted by all she knew--or her inability to do anything about it. "Johnny Wang is a mobster. And he's also Yao Li's constant companion. Johnny Wang is homosexual. He and the castrated Yao Li are lovers."
My appetite departed as crab cakes arrived.
Baumgartner dug into her lobster, cracking and crunching and sucking each appendage. "Money, not gunpowder. That's the new Chinese weapon of choice." She pushed her plate aside. All that was left of the lobster was a shell and two beady eyes. "Our country is for sale," hissed Baumgartner. "Literally. US soil. Do you have any idea how fast Chinese communities proliferate?"
I shrugged. "Not really."
"Ha! Check out San Francisco. No, fly up to Manhattan and see how Chinatown has expanded into Little Italy. Pretty soon, Little Italy won't exist. The Italians can't afford the new rents, so the Chinese scoop up everything. They multiply and spread out. If anyone brings this to the surface, they're categorized as bigots. So in the interest of political correctness, no one says a word. But don't think because they're achieving their objectives with financial clout that they've renounced military might. Sure, they're smuggling their surplus guns into the US for baoli..."
"Baoli?"
"Chinese for keep the profit. They're lining their own pockets and promoting gangland violence and moral decline in our cities. Back to my point: they've embarked on a major hi-tech military build-up. For the first time, China is building aircraft carriers. Aircraft carriers! These are offensive, not defensive weaponry. They're buying fighter planes from Russia. They're designing a new class of nuclear ballistic submarine. And they're building intercontinental ballistic missiles with multiple warheads. Why doesn't anybody in this town ask why? Because they're all cashing in, one way or another, that's why. Even the people in government. Once they see how much the private sector is making off China, they quit government and go into business as brokers--the revolving door at high speed. The Chinese are building a war machine that will soon equal our own, with money they're getting from us. Money they get from forcing their fourteen-dollar-a-month labor pool to mass produce GI Joe and Barbie dolls. I'm not kidding. GI Joe is now made in China. Barbie, too. Our toy industry has moved to China. Ninety-five percent of everything you find in Toys-R-Us is manufactured by the Chinese, paid for in dollars. And they're using those revenues--our dollars--not to enrich their workers, but to build long-range nuclear missiles."
"What about the princelings?" I asked.
"Ah, the new generation of spoiled brats, born with silver chop sticks up their ass?" Baumgartner belched. "They've never had to fight or sacrifice for anything. They haven't had to suffer like their parents or grandparents. And they're all educated in the West. Do you see the irony here? We teach these princelings everything we know about stocks and bonds and securities and big money. Then they take what they learn back to China and use it against us! Not only do we encourage them to study here, we give them scholarships!"
"Yao Li went to Harvard, right?"
"Ha! That's what he wants the world to believe. Yao Li did a summer session at Harvard. That's another trick. Summer sessions at Ivy League colleges are easy to gain admission into--you just sign up and write a check. So they come over for a summer, take a couple of classes and claim they went to Harvard or Yale or Princeton. They use this to open doors throughout Asia--and even here in the United States. Yao Li tells everyone he went to Harvard on the basis of one summer-session course in business law, which he didn't even complete. He spent most of the time getting drunk in Cambridge. But don't believe me. Ask the woman confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life because Yao Li crashed his BMW convertible into her Honda. He was drunk. She was seventeen, very talented, and had her whole life ahead of her..." Baumgartner trailed off, clenching her teeth. "The State Department covered it up and the Chinese Embassy shanghaied Yao Li back to China. That's the reason he didn't finish summer-school." She paused. "I'd kill him with my bare hands."
"Why do you take this so personally?" I asked.
"It is personal." Baumgartner's eyes darkened, nostrils flaring. "The young girl Yao Li crippled is my sister."
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