China Rich Girlfriend (29 page)

After the meal, the elders headed back to the hotel while Pied Piper Richie announced that he was taking us to some ultra-exclusive club started by the director David Lynch. “I've been a member since day one,” he boasted. Nick and I begged off and took a lovely evening stroll along the Seine. Arriving back at the hotel, we passed Mrs. Bing, who was standing at the door of her suite talking furtively to a Chinese maid from housekeeping. Catching my eye, she beckoned us over excitedly. “Rachel, Rachel, look what this nice maid gave me!” In her hand was a white plastic trash bag filled with dozens of bottles of the hotel's Bulgari bath gel, shampoo, and conditioner. “Do you want some? She can get more!” I told her that Nick and I used our own shampoos and didn't touch the hotel toiletries. “Can I have yours, then? And the shower caps too?” Mrs. Bing asked eagerly. We gathered up all our toiletries and headed back to her suite. She came to the door and acted like a junkie who had just been handed free premium-grade heroin. “
Aiyah!
I should have been asking you to collect these bottles for me all week long! Wait a minute, don't go away!” She returned with a bag containing five plastic bottles of water. “Here, take some water! We boil it fresh every day in the electric kettle so we don't have to pay for the hotel's bottled water!” Nick was desperately trying to maintain a straight face when Grandma Bing came to the door and said, “Lai Di, why don't you invite them in?”

We entered her massive suite and discovered Auntie Pan Di, Mrs. Shi, and Mrs. Wen huddled over a large portable hot pot in the dining room. On the floor was a huge Louis Vuitton trunk filled with packets of ramen
in all kinds of flavors. “Shrimp and pork ramen?” Auntie Pan Di asked, stirring a big batch of noodles with a pair of chopsticks. Mrs. Bing whispered conspiratorially, “Don't tell Colette, but we do this every night! We're so much happier eating ramen than all this fancy French food!” Mrs. Wen said, “
Aiyah
, I've had constipation every single day from all this cheese we've been forced to eat.” I asked them why they didn't just go downstairs to Shang Palace, the hotel's Michelin-starred Chinese restaurant, for dinner. Mrs. Shi, who earlier today bought an antique clock
^*2
for €4.2 million at the Kraemer Gallery after looking at it for less than three minutes, exclaimed, “We tried going there after that awful French dinner, but all the dishes were so expensive we walked out! Twenty-five euros for fried rice?
Tai leiren le
!”
^*3

Saturday, June 22

Colette knocked on our door at the crack of dawn and woke us up. Had we seen Carlton? Had he called? Apparently he didn't return to the hotel last night, and he wasn't answering his phone. Colette seemed worried, but Nick didn't think there was anything to worry about. “He'll turn up. Sometimes it takes a while to negotiate with these car collectors—he's probably still in the middle of doing his deal.” In the meantime, Richie invited everyone over to his penthouse suite for sunset cocktails on the roof terrace. “A little party in Colette's honor,” he called it. While the girls spent the afternoon getting spa treatments, Nick and I took a blissful nap on the grass at the Parc Monceau.

In the early evening, we arrived to Richie's party at the Mandarin Oriental only to find that the security men posted by the VIP elevator wouldn't let us through—our names were apparently “not on the list.” After a phone call to Colette, we managed to clear things up and were whisked to the roof terrace, where we discovered that this wasn't just a “little cocktail party” for our group. The penthouse was packed with an extremely glam crowd and decorated like a high-tech product launch. Giant obelisk topiaries festooned with lights lined the parapet, an elaborate stage was set up on one end, and along one side of the terrace stood half a dozen celebrity chefs manning different food stations.

I immediately felt underdressed in my cornflower blue silk shirtdress and strappy sandals, especially when guest of honor Colette made an entrance wearing the enormous canary diamond necklace her mother had just bought and a stunning black strapless Stéphane Rolland gown with a long ruffled skirt that seemed to go on for miles and miles. Mrs. Bing, meanwhile, was virtually unrecognizable with her expertly painted face, her hair swept up into a beehive do, and the biggest set of sapphires set against a red Elie Saab cocktail dress with a plunging neckline.

But the biggest surprise of all—Carlton was there! He made no mention about being MIA for twenty-four hours and seemed his usual charming self. Turns out he knew plenty of people at the party—many friends from the London-Dubai-Shanghai party axis had flown in, and soon I was swept up in a frenzy of introductions. I met Sean and Anthony (two charming brothers who were DJing the party), an Arab prince Carlton knew from Stowe, some French countess who wouldn't stop telling me how disgusted she was with U.S. foreign policy, and then things really got crazy when some famous Chinese pop star showed up. Little did I realize the night was about to get a whole lot crazier.

PARIS, FRANCE

Nick climbed the steps to the uppermost deck of the roof terrace, trying to find a quiet spot away from the crowd below. He didn't particularly enjoy these raucous parties, and this affair seemed even more over the top than usual—every squillionaire within private-jet flying radius was here, and there were far too many outsize egos filling up the space.

A carefully planted row of Italian cypresses started shaking fitfully behind him, and Nick could hear some guy moaning, “Baby…baby…baby ohhh!” He turned around discreetly to leave, but Richie suddenly ducked out from behind the trees, tucking his shirt back into his trousers as a girl skulked off sheepishly in the other direction.

“Oh, it's you,” Richie said unabashedly. “You having a good time?”

“The view's terrific,” Nick said diplomatically.

“Isn't it? If only these stupid Parisians would allow skyscrapers to be built in their city. The views would be unbelievable, and they'd make a killing selling them. Hey, you never saw me up here, okay?”

“Of course.”

“You didn't see that girl, okay?”

“What girl?”

Richie grinned. “You're A-plus on my list now. Hey, I'm sorry for that mix-up downstairs, but I can see why my security wouldn't let you up. No offense, but you don't exactly look like you're dressed for this crowd.”

“My apologies—we were in a park all day and fell asleep. Rachel
wanted to go back to the hotel to change, but I thought this party was just going to be drinks on a rooftop. If I knew you were going to be wearing a burgundy velvet smoking jacket, we would have dressed up.”

“Rachel looks slammin'. Girls can get away with anything, but we guys have to make more of an effort, don't we? You can only get away with dressing this casually if you're flashing a Billionaire Wristband.”

“What's that?”

Richie gestured to Nick's wrist. “Your watch. I see you're wearing a new Patek.”

“New? Actually, this watch was my grandfather's.”
*

“Nice, but you know Pateks are basically considered middle-class watches these days. It wouldn't qualify as a Billionaire Wristband like mine. Here, check this out, my latest Richard Plumper Tourbillon,” Richie said, thrusting his wrist within several millimeters of Nick's nose. “I'm a VIC—very important client—of Richard Plumper, and they let me buy it straight off the display at the Baselworld Watch Show. It's not even going to be available till October.”

“Looks very impressive.”

“This Plumper's got seventy-seven complications, and it's made from a titanium-and-silicon compound that is spun in a centrifuge at such high speeds that it bonds on a molecular level.”

“Wow.”

“I could be wearing a T-shirt and torn jeans with my balls hanging out but still get into any of the hottest clubs or restaurants in the world just by sporting this. Every doorman and maître d' is trained to spot a Richard Plumper from a mile away, and they all know it costs more than a yacht. That's what I mean by Billionaire Wristband, heh heh!”

“Tell me, how exactly do you read the time on that?”

“See those two little spokes with the green stars at the tips?”

Nick squinted his eyes. “I think so…”

“When those green stars align with those gears on the cable-and-pulley system, that's how you tell the hour and the minute. The gears are actually made of unclassified experimental metals that are intended for the next generation of spy drones.”

“You don't say.”

“Yes, the entire watch is constructed to withstand forces up to ten thousand Gs. That's equivalent to being strapped to the outside of a rocket while it's breaking through the earth's outer atmosphere.”

“But if you were actually exposed to such forces, wouldn't you be dead?”

“Heh heh! Indeed. But just knowing your watch would survive makes it worth having a Plumper, doesn't it? Here, I'll let you try it on.”

“I couldn't possibly.”

Richie was momentarily distracted by a text message on his phone. “Wow, guess who just arrived? Mehmet Sabançi! That guy's family basically owns all of Greece.”

“Turkey, actually,” Nick said almost reflexively.

“Oh, you've heard of him?”

“He's one of my best friends.”

Richie looked momentarily shocked. “
He is?
How in the world do you know him?”

“We were at Stowe together.”

“You guys met at a ski resort?”

“Not Stowe, Vermont.
Stowe
—it's a school in England.”

“Oh. I went to Harvard Business School.”

“Yes, you've mentioned that a number of times.”

Just then, Mehmet stepped out of the elevator and onto the terrace. Looking down at the late arrival, Richie said excitedly, “Whew—who is that spectacular babe he brought with him?”

Nick glanced down. “My God…I don't believe it!”

On the main terrace, Carlton leaned against a railing alongside his Cambridge chum Harry Wentworth-Davies, surveying the scene. “You need to try these foie gras cronuts,” Harry yelled into his ear. “Better than crack cocaine. And I couldn't believe that bloke on the telly who goes around the world terrorizing other people's restaurants served it to me.”

“This is how Richie draws his crowd. Heaps of pretentious food and pricey booze,” Carlton said with barely veiled contempt.

“Quite right—this Romanée-Conti isn't shabby at all,” Harry said, swirling his goblet.

“It's a bit too obvious for me, but I will help to deplete as much of these reserves as I possibly can,” Carlton said.

“Not sure you want to get too sloshed tonight, mate,” Harry cautioned. “Shouldn't you be in tip-top condition for the main event later?”

“Quite right. The smart thing to do would be to stop drinking now, wouldn't it?” Carlton deliberated, before downing another glassful in several quick gulps. He scanned the crowd, recognizing most of Richie's cronies who had gathered here. It was a wonder Colette didn't suspect anything. He shouldn't have come tonight. Being here—seeing everyone trying way too hard to have fun—only made him angrier, and he could feel the blood pounding in his temples. Four hours ago he was in Antwerp, and he wished he'd stayed there, or continued on to Brussels and caught the next flight back to Shanghai. Actually, what he really wanted to do was go to England, but Mr. Tin had advised him not to enter the UK for a few years. How did he ever fuck things up to this extent? To be banned from the one place where he felt like he could truly breathe?

“Colette's looking rather spectacular,” Harry said to Carlton, eyeing her as she posed for a picture with Rachel by the pyramid of champagne glasses.

“She always does.”

“That girl she's posing with looks rather like you.”

“That's my sister,” Carlton replied. Rachel was the reason he had come back today. Part of him resented her for it, but he found himself strangely protective of her at the same time. He just couldn't ditch her in Paris like that. It had been like this from the moment they met. He was all ready to hate her, this girl who had come out of nowhere and set off an atomic bomb in the midst of his family, but she had turned out to be nothing like what he had expected. She was different from all the other women in his life, and Nick was one of the few guys he could actually stand being around. What was it? he wondered. Was it that Nick had also gone to Stowe? Or was it the way Nick didn't feel the need to vie for position with Richie like all the other party parasites here tonight?

“You never told me you had a sister,” Harry interrupted his thoughts again.

“I do. She's quite a bit older, though.”

“You look like you could be twins. That's the trouble with you chinks—you never bloody age.”

“We don't for a while, but then there's a tipping point where we go from looking twenty one night to two hundred the next morning.”

“Well, if they all look like your sister or Colette at first, sign me up. Now tell me, what's the deal with you and Colette these days? One minute you're on, one minute you're off, I just can't keep track anymore.”

“I can't either,” Carlton said. He was so sick of the games Colette was playing. All week long, she had been dropping hints every time they passed by a jeweler. He knew that when he refused to go into Mauboussin with her on Tuesday, she had put Plan Richie into action and sent for him to come to Paris. She could be so fucking childish sometimes. As if having Richie here throwing her a party with his daddy's dirty money was going to make him jealous.

Carlton felt Harry jabbing his ribs. “Hey, do you know that girl over there? White dress, nine o'clock.”

“Harry, someday you're going to realize that not all Asians know each other.”

“You can't blame me for getting excited—that's quite possibly the fittest bird I've ever seen! I'm going in.”

“Race you there,” Carlton said. If Colette wanted to play games, he could play too. He gave his jacket lapel a tug, grabbed two glasses of wine from a passing server, and strode confidently across the terrace toward the girl in white. Just as he got to her, Nick suddenly cut in front of him and, to his astonishment, wrapped her in a warm embrace.

“Astrid! What the hell are you doing here?” Nick said excitedly.

“Nicky!” Astrid squealed. “But I thought you and Rachel were in China.”

“We were, but we flew to Paris on the spur of the moment with Rachel's brother and some new friends. Oh, speak of the devil, here's Carlton. Carlton, this is my cousin Astrid from Singapore.”

“Pleasure to meet you.” Astrid extended her hand to Carlton, who was completely stunned by the sudden turn of events.
This extraordinary creature he was about to hit on was Nick's cousin
?

“And this is my great friend, Mehmet,” Nick said, introducing Carlton. “You rascal—what are you doing hanging out with my cousin in Paris?”

Mehmet patted Nick on the back heartily. “It's a complete coincidence! I'm here on business, and we ran into each other at Le Voltaire. I was sitting down at a lunch meeting and who should come through the door but Charlotte Gainsbourg…with Astrid! Of course I had to say hello—I
couldn't resist making all my associates sick with envy. Then Astrid invited me to dinner, and I talked her into making this pit stop.”

By this point, Rachel and Colette had joined the group. “Astrid! Mehmet? This can't be happening!” Rachel shrieked, hugging both of them in utter delight.

Colette was introduced all around, and she couldn't help but scrutinize every inch of Astrid. So this was the couture-wearing cousin that Rachel had told her about. Astrid's sexy gold sandals she recognized as being handmade in Capri by Da Costanzo. Her white patent-leather clutch was vintage Courrèges. Her gold Etruscan-style cuff bracelet with the facing lion heads were Lalaounis. But that little white pleated dress she just couldn't place. My God, it was perfection, the way the linen skimmed her body, just tight enough to drive all the men wild but not so tight it looked vulgar. And those sundial pleats at the neckline to accentuate the sensuality of the collarbone—pure genius. She just HAD to know who designed it.

“I am a fashion blogger—would you mind if I took a picture of you?” she asked.

“Colette's being modest. She is THE most popular fashion blogger in China,” Nick bragged.

“Um, of course,” Astrid replied in surprise.

“Roxanne!” Colette yelled. Her trusty assistant came running over and snapped a few pictures of Colette and Astrid posing together. Then Roxanne began to take notes as Colette quizzed Astrid on everything she was wearing.

“Now, I just need some caption info. I recognize your shoes and your handbag, of course, and the bracelets are Lalaounis—”

“Actually, they're not,” Astrid interrupted.

“Oh. Who did them?”

“They're Etruscan.”

“I know, but who designed them?”

“I have no idea. They were made in 650 BC.”

Colette stared in wonder at the museum artifacts dangling so casually on Astrid's wrists. Now she wanted some herself. “Okay then, most important, tell me which genius designed your fabulous dress. It's Josep Font, isn't it?”

“Oh, this? I bought it today at Zara.”

For the rest of her life, Roxanne would never forget the look on Colette's face.

A few hours later, Rachel and Nick found themselves having a late supper with Astrid and Mehmet at Monsieur Bleu, the brasserie tucked away at the back of the Palais de Tokyo. As Rachel took the first bite of her sole meunière, she looked around the room, taking in the intriguing light fixtures, the marble-backed banquettes, and the shimmering bronze bas-reliefs. “Astrid, we've been eating at super-fancy places all week, but this is by far my favorite meal. Thanks for bringing us here.”

Mehmet chimed in. “I quite agree! There's something about this place that manages to be simple and yet envelopingly luxurious at the same time. It doesn't compete with the food, but one does feel more special just being here.”

Astrid smiled. “I'm so happy you all like it. I wanted to come here because I'm thinking of commissioning the architect of this space—Joseph Dirand—to build our next house. It's actually why I came to Paris.”

“I can't wait to see what he does for you,” Mehmet said.

“Didn't you just move into a new house last year?” Nick asked.

“We did, but we're quickly outgrowing it. We almost bought a historic Frank Brewer house on Cluny Park Road, but it fell through at the last minute. So we've decided to build on a piece of land I have in Bukit Timah.”

Nick looked around the table and chuckled. “I still can't believe the four of us are here together. It's such a small world!”