As he prepared to celebrate his son’s bar mitzvah, Emanuel felt that he was a man in full. He had flouted convention by living with two wives and dismissed the so-called curse that threatened his children’s lives as “blatant rubbish.”
A natural athlete, David had grown into a tall, dark, and handsome lad (often mistaken for a senior) who regularly took prizes at the English School Foundation where he was enrolled as a day student. Likewise Leah Felicie had flowered into a pretty girl. She attended the Central School for Girls and had a good head for figures, just like her Ma-mah. Together Emanuel’s children had cultivated a retinue of friends, who often turned the mansion into a riot of activity that he loved to complain about.
But he also noticed that despite their new acquaintances the siblings didn’t lose their devotion to each other. Often he would see them in the garden—David seated on a swing reading about horses (he was forbidden from riding them but not from reading about them) and Leah Felicie perched nearby, sketching the world around her—both happy to be in each other’s company.
At last, peace had settled upon his house. The comfort of his children and the truce between his wives gave his personal life the stability he had craved. But the same could not be said about his business affairs: by the mid-1890s opium trading had declined to a few hundred chests per year from its peak of eighty thousand a decade before. Roving crews of illiterate ne’er-do-wells used modified lorcha stripped down into light and nimble ships, some of them steam-assisted, to ply the South China seas like wolves. They raided opium runners regularly and caused insurance and security costs to soar, which in turn ate up profits. Additionally, cheaper harvests from the mountainous regions in China and Turkey had replaced top-quality Patna triple A. Over the years, bloated storage vessels that had crowded the harbour were up-anchored and dismantled, their wooden beams used to build smaller warehouses onshore. Some merchants, like the Sassoons and the Kardoories, wanted out of the trade altogether, and found a willing buyer in the one person who insisted that opium was still a viable commodity.
Emanuel had decided to purchase his competitors’ inventories, gambling that his reading of future demand was correct. Users would prefer his high-quality brand to the cheaper, inferior stuff that had flooded the market. And when users decided to go for something better, he would be ready. Having cornered the entire local supply, Emanuel went from being “one of the many opium traders” to being called the “foremost opium trader in Hong Kong.” In fact, by the mid-1890s, he was the only opium merchant left.
Sitting on two million dollars’ worth of inventory was, at best, a pyrrhic victory. Year after year passed with no change in the public’s demand. They wanted their drugs fast and cheap. Not even his old reliable client, the Generalissimo, was interested. His investment against the future remained idle. And in business, idle money is as useless as tits on a bull. Gossip spread that this was “Belilios’s folly.” The man had blundered. His rivals, the Sassoons and the Kardoories, had bested Emanuel by selling him a fortune in unwanted goods. He had to do something to silence the chattering and the chinwagging blather that reminded him of his school days. He had to show that Belilios’s folly did not make the slightest dent in his portfolio, which now included real estate, shipping, and utilities. As a palpable demonstration of his wealth, he decided to “give back to the community.”
Doing charitable works was not just a cultural obligation but also a handy strategy. It assuaged the guilt of having profited mightily from the sale of a drug that gave him a privileged life while it sucked the marrow out of millions of addicts in China. Following his lead, other Jewish opium traders jettisoned their old ways, shifting their focus from the aggrandizement of filthy lucre to the promotion of a brand-new image as humanitarians. This canny giving back initiative produced no end of willing beneficiaries. Administrators of schools, hospitals, parks, sanatoriums, and orphanages gleefully accepted the gifts. Unlike the rich, charities could not afford principles.
At David’s bar mitzvah reception, held under a massive white tent erected on the western lawns at Kingsclere, Emanuel was proud to call his son “a young man.” David beamed. And to honour the occasion, Belilios père announced a substantial donation amounting to one-third the cost of building a new synagogue. (He would have gladly pledged the full amount if his peers the Sassoons and the Kardoories had not beaten him to it when their own sons were inducted.) Furthermore, he set Leah Felicie’s dowry at $10,000—double the going rate and equivalent to more than double Semah’s. A chorus of applause followed nods of approval and a few gasps of surprise.
Once he had succeeded in besting his contemporaries with donations, Emanuel strove to better them in other ways, regardless of the cost. For Semah, he purchased “The Eyrie” on the Peak as a summer house. It had panoramic views of the harbour and Mount Kellet. From its front yard they could gaze down onto the Governor’s own summer residence, not a stone’s throw away. Gardens were cultivated across the road and a charming belvedere erected a short walk up a hillock. For Pearl, he built a castle-like pile of bricks and mortar overlooking Repulse Bay on the island’s southern shores. Remote and wild, it gained in feng shui what the Eyrie had in stature. But that was not all. Getting and spending became his daily routine, his only drug.
To pay for his insatiable lust for acquiring land, he leveraged one property (or business) to raise the cash needed to buy new ones, gambling on future growth to meet his obligations. Three years after David’s bar mitzvah and as the new century approached, his empire was built like a house of cards. Every piece relied on another to keep the structure erect. Remove one and…
“I don’t understand,” Emanuel said, scratching his head. “This is the biggest land auction in the history of Hong Kong and you’re not interested?”
He was in Li’s home on the hill overlooking Happy Valley. After decades, Li had become proficient in English; Emanuel still could not wrap his tongue around the Chinese language.
“They want too much,” Li said, his mouth downturned, his finger wagging the air. “You ask before. Today same answer—too much!” He slapped the back of his hand on his palm.
“That’s why it will take our pooled resources to make a serious bid,” Emanuel said, bringing the argument full circle for the umpteenth time.
Li said nothing. He looked down at his desk blotter and fingered his moustache.
“Aleandro, what do you say?” Emanuel asked.
“I say it is risky,” Aleandro said.
“Of course it is. Our business was built on risk. That’s what we do!”
“No, no, no, too much,” Li repeated, waving his hand in mid-air.
Emanuel wished he didn’t need partners. But even if he sold all his assets, he would not have enough for this deal. He needed his old friends to kick in some capital for a venture that would make him the undisputed Tai Pan of Hong Kong’s business elite.
“Look, I was in with you on the ground floor and we made a lot of money trading opium. I got you into investing your profits. And what happened? You prospered. We prospered. Now you, Aleandro, you practically own Macau—the real estate, the banking, the coal supply, transportation. And you, Li, you have bought up half this valley, your go-downs store goods all along the Praya, and your ships crowd the harbour. Would either of you have what you have if not for me? You owe me.”
“You also do good—you have riches like we two,” Li said. “Now it is time to stop—enough.”
“Amigo, twenty-five, thirty years ago we were young men. We had nothing to lose. Today? We have everything to lose.”
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime prospect. Three million dollars is a bargain for the land on the Kowloon side—you both know that. We’ll carve it up. Sell off parcels—double the investment. One million from each and we would be the top bid. You both have it—”
“Do you?” Li eyeballed Emanuel.
The two men stared at each other for a long time.
“Don’t worry about me. I can get it.”
“I don’t worry for you. I worry for my daughter, for my granddaughter.” His voice was a throaty growl.
“How dare you. I know how to take care of my family!”
“Family is one man and one woman. You marry my daughter. I am witness,” Li said, pointing a finger at his own nose. “Ale’dro also witness. You have tik her house and give it to gwei-paw—”
“I gave nothing away that was not mine to give.”
“When you marry her, Pearl having whole house—now half-house. Very bad.”
“I built her a castle near Repulse Bay.”
“Not same ting.”
“I purchased the Eyrie for Semah so that the two would each have their own homes.”
“Aiyah.” Li waved his arm dismissively. “You have two wives but you know nothing about women!”
Li got up and walked to the windows overlooking the valley. He opened a window. Emanuel slumped into a chair. Aleandro stood between them.
“Amigo, I have four wives and I don’t understand them any more than you do.”
Li took a deep breath. “They never leave Kingsclere,” he said. “You know why?”
Emanuel looked up blankly.
“Mung-cha—stupid, it is up to man with no wife to tell you why,” Li said, walking back to sit at his desk. He leaned his elbows on the surface and spoke as though he were a professor imparting wisdom to his dullest student. “Kingsclere is prize. Why? Because that is where you live. Possess Kingsclere, also possessing you. And whoever possessing you is winner.”
He leaned back to let that insight settle.
“When first wife arrive, my daughter loses face. When daughter lose face, I lose face,” Li said. “Now you come to me and you want me to give you money? Hey-yow-chee-lay—how dare you?”
Emanuel could see he was getting nowhere and looked at his watch. “I’ll go it alone then,” he said.
“How you do that?”
“I shall take loans using my businesses as collateral.”
“Do not be rash, Senhor.”
“I want this and I shall have it. Even if it means mortgaging everything I own, I shall have it.”
“Amigo, think what you are saying. If you mortgage your businesses you will still be short. Where will you get the difference?”
“I shall sell Kingsclere,” Emanuel said. He stood abruptly, and without looking at his former partners, said: “I shall be at the auction house one month from now. If you show up, I will know I still have partners. If you do not…” He did not need to finish. He nodded. “Good day, gentlemen.”
Emanuel headed for the door of Li’s office.
“Senhor,” Aleandro said. Emanuel stopped and turned to face the mulatto. “You can put up $1 million?
“Yes.”
“And you still have a large supply of opium worth $2 million?”
“Yes,” Emanuel said.
“It is time to put it to work,” Aleandro said. He walked slowly toward Emanuel and hooked his arm around his old friend’s elbow. “Let us walk and talk,” he said.