Chapter 8
Underlings and Underthings
It wasn’t the first time he’d done this. It was exciting in its way, and arousing, and marginally dangerous because of the time and place. Mainly it was an exercise in effective memory and the discerning eye. The hardest part was converting the English units to metric. The perfect female form was supposed to be 36-24-36, not 91.44-60.96- 91.44.
The last time he’d been in a place like this had been in the Beverly Center Mall in Los Angeles, buying for Maria Castillo, a voluptuous Latina who’d been delighted at his error, taking her waist for twenty-four rather than its true twenty-seven. You wanted to err on the low side in numbers, but probably the big side in letters. If you took a 36B chest to be a 34C, she wouldn’t be mad, but if you took a twenty-four-inch waist for a twenty-eight-inch, she’d probably be pissed. Stress, Nomuri told himself with a shake of the head, came in many shapes and sizes. He wanted to get this right because he wanted Ming as a source, but he wanted her as a mistress, too, and that was one more reason not to make a mistake.
The color was the easy part. Red. Of course, red. This was still a country in which red was the “good” color, which was convenient because red had always been the lively choice in women’s underthings, the color of adventure and giggles and ... looseness. And looseness served both his biological and professional purposes. He had other things to figure out, too. Ming was not tall, scarcely five feet—151 centimeters or so, Nomuri thought, doing the conversion in his head. She was short but not really petite. There was no real obesity in China. People didn’t overeat here, probably because of the lingering memory of times when food had not been in abundance and overeating was simply not possible. Ming would have been considered overweight in California, Chester thought, but that was just her body type. She was squat because she was short, and no amount of dieting or working out or makeup could change it. Her waist wouldn’t be much less than twenty-seven inches. For her chest, 34B was about the best he could hope for ... well, maybe 34C—no, he decided, B+ at most. So, a 34B bra, and medium shorts—panties—red silk, something feminine ... something on the wild, whorish side of feminine, something that she could look into the mirror alone with and giggle ... and maybe sigh at how different she looked wearing such things, and maybe smile, that special inward smile women had for such moments. The moment when you knew you had them—and the rest was just dessert.
The best part of Victoria’s Secret was the catalog, designed for men who really, and sensibly, wanted to buy the models themselves, despite the facial attitudes that sometimes made them look like lesbians on quaaludes—but with such bodies, a man couldn’t have everything, could he? Fantasies, things of the mind. Nomuri wondered if the models really existed or were the products of computers. They could do anything with computers these days—make Rosie O’Donnell into Twiggy, or Cindy Crawford obsolete.
Back to work, he told himself. This might be a place for fantasies, but not that one, not yet. Okay, it had to be sexy. It had to be something that would both amuse and excite Ming, and himself, too: That was all part of it. Nomuri took the catalog off the pile because it was a lot easier for him to see what he wanted in a filled rather than an unfilled condition. He turned pages and stopped dead on page 26. There was a black girl modeling it, and whatever genetic stew she’d come from must have had some fine ingredients, as her face would have appealed to a member of Hitler’s SS just as much as Idi Amin. It was that sort of face. Better yet, she wore something called a Racerback bra with matching string bikini panties, and the color was just perfect, a red-purple that the Romans had once called Tyrrian Scarlet, the color on the toga stripe of members of the senatorial order, reserved by price and custom to the richest of the Roman nobility, not quite red, not quite purple. The bra material was satin and Lycra, and it closed in front, the easier for a girl to put it on, and the more interesting for a guy to take it off, his mind thought, as he headed over to the proper rack of clothing. Thirty-four-B, he thought. If too small, it would be all the more flattering ... small or medium on the string bikini? Shit, he decided, get one of each. Just to be sure, he also got a no-wire triangle-pattern bra and thong panties in an orange-red color that the Catholic Church would call a mortal sin just for looking at. On impulse he got several additional panties on the assumption that they soiled more quickly than bras did, something he wasn’t sure of despite being a field intelligence officer of the Central Intelligence Agency. They didn’t tell you about such things at The Farm. He’d have to do a memo on that. It might give MP a chuckle in her seventh-floor office at Langley.
One other thing, he thought. Perfume. Women liked perfume. You’d expect them to like it, especially here. The entire city of Beijing smelled like a steel mill, lots of coal dust and other pollutants in the air—as Pittsburgh had probably been at the turn of the last century—and the sad truth was that the Chinese didn’t bathe as diligently as Californians did, and nowhere nearly as regularly as the Japanese. So, something that smelled nice ...
“Dream Angels,” the brand was called. It came in a perfume spray, lotion, and other applications that he didn’t understand, but he was sure Ming would, since she was a girl, and this was a quintessential girl thing. So, he bought some of that, too, using his NEC credit card to pay for it—his Japanese bosses would understand. There were skillfully arranged and choreographed sex tours that took Japanese salarymen to various places in Asia that catered to the sex trade. That was probably how AIDS had gotten to Japan, and why Nomuri used a condom for everything there except urinating. The total came to about 300 euros. The salesclerk wrapped everything and commented that the lady in his life was very lucky.
She will be, Nomuri promised himself. The underthings he’d just bought her, well, the fabrics felt as smooth as flexible glass, and the colors would arouse a blind man. The only question was how they would affect a dumpy Chinese female secretary to a government minister. It wasn’t as though he was trying to seduce Suzie Wong. Lian Ming was pretty ordinary rather than ordinarily pretty, but you never knew. Amy Irvin, his first conquest at the ripe old age of seventeen years and three months, had been pretty enough to inspire him—which meant, for a boy of that age, she had the requisite body parts, no beard like a Civil War general, and had showered in the previous month. At least Ming wouldn’t be like so many American women now who’d visited the plastic surgeon to have their tummies tucked, tits augmented to look like cereal bowls, and lips pumped full of chemicals until they looked like some strange kind of two-part fruit. What women did to attract men ... and what men did in the hope of seducing them. What a potential energy source, Nomuri thought, as he turned the key in his company Nissan.
What is it today, Ben?” Ryan asked his National Security Adviser.
“CIA is trying to get a new operation under way in Beijing. For the moment it’s called SORGE.”
“As in Richard Sorge?”
“Correct.”
“Somebody must be ambitious. Okay, tell me about it.”
“There’s an officer named Chester Nomuri, an illegal, he’s in Beijing covered as a computer salesman for NEC. He’s trying to make a move on a secretary, female, for a senior PRC minister, a guy named Fang Gan—”
“Who is?” Ryan asked over his coffee mug.
“Sort of a minister without portfolio, works with the Premier and the Foreign Minister.”
“Like that Zhang Han San guy?”
“Not as senior, but yes. Looks like a very high-level gofer type. Has contacts in their military and foreign ministries, good ideological credentials, sounding board for others in their Politburo. Anyway, Nomuri is trying to make a move on the girl.”
“Bond,” Ryan observed in a studiously neutral voice, “James Bond. I know Nomuri’s name. He did some good work for us in Japan when I had your job. This is for information only, not my approval?”
“Correct, Mr. President. Mrs. Foley is running this one, and wanted to give you a heads-up.”
“Okay, tell MP that I’m interested in whatever take comes out of this.” Ryan fought off the grimace that came from learning of another person’s private—well, if not private, then his sex—life.
“Yes, sir.”