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.
* * *
*1 Actually, it was Prince Roland Bonaparte, and he was Napoleon Bonaparte’s grandnephew (Rachel is still too hungover to get her facts straight).
*2 An exceptional Louis XV long-case clock by Jean-Pierre Latz, almost identical to the one made for Frederick the Great of Prussia at Neues Palais in Potsdam.
*3 Mandarin for “That’s insane.”
17
THE MANDARIN ORIENTAL
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 ma?tre 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.”