A while later, I stepped outside and was instantly shrink-wrapped in humidity for the fleeting moment before I slid into the gleaming silver Mercedes, chilled to the temperature of a walk-in refrigerator. The leather seat was stiff and unyielding, the icy bottled water in the cup holder so cold it made my teeth ache. When I typed the Wi-Fi password taped above the door handle into my phone, a picture of a sleeping Henri arrived from Maria, the sweat-matted hair plastered to his forehead, a sure sign he’d been crying. The guilt that gushed through me was a viscous, toxic sludge. I checked my email to see if Oli had written, but he had not.
Traffic slowed to a standstill, and the driver explained that flooding had closed one of the highway lanes. Outside my hermetically sealed box, a couple on a motorcycle, clad in makeshift rain ponchos fashioned from garbage bags, squinted miserably into the storm. A red-faced man in a tiny electric car leaned on the horn and then lowered his window and hacked out a wad of phlegm.
I popped in my earbuds and pulled up a Chinese podcast on my phone to get the language in my head, which would have made Winnie scoff. Stop worrying, she’d chided. You’re not there to have deep conversations, you’re there to demonstrate that we care enough about this partnership to show up in person. For once you don’t have to be the top student. Just get on that plane and go.
Was I surprised she was back to cracking jokes as though we were old friends again? Not really, Detective. You’d know better than I—isn’t that the mark of a successful gangster? Utterly charming and utterly ruthless from one moment to the next?
Case in point, in that car, I stretched out my legs and listened to a strikingly charismatic ex–con man explain how he’d convinced Chinese housewives to hire him to murder their cheating husbands so that he could abscond with their life savings.
The next time I opened my eyes, the rain had cleared, and pale streams of light battled through the clouds. The car stopped before a gate that slid back to let us through. The driver drove up to the factory’s main entrance, parked, and hurried around to open my door.
A tall man with a prematurely receding hairline bounded down a short flight of stairs to greet me. He was dressed more casually than the driver in a tight Prada polo shirt. In rapid, Chinese-accented English he said, Hello! I’m Kaiser Shih, deputy manager of Mak International. How was your flight? You flew in from San Francisco, right? I just got back from L.A. last week. It’s my favorite city in America. Well, after Las Vegas, of course.
He led me through the glass doors and into an elevator that deposited us before a bright, tastefully furnished conference room. A young woman with a ballerina bun sat at the head of the table, rapidly thumbing a phone in a Goyard-monogrammed case. She was none other than Mandy Mak. Dressed in one of her trademark suits, with an asymmetrical neckline and a full, knife-pleated skirt, paired with shiny red patent stilettos that perfectly matched her lipstick, she looked like a movie star playing a CEO in a Hollywood rom-com. Next to her was a plump man in a threadbare shirt, which contrasted starkly with the thick rope of gold ringing his squat neck. This, Kaiser Shih told me, was Manager Chiang, head of the new counterfeits factory.
Introductions were made. I asked after Boss Mak, and Mandy stunned me by throwing her arms around me and thanking me for arranging the appointment with Oli and the transplant team.
In contrast, Manager Chiang soberly shook my hand.
I told him I’d heard great things about his work.
Not at all, not at all, he replied.
He’s being modest, said Mandy. Do you know why his replicas are so good? He managed to hire a floor chief from Dior’s main factory here.
The man said mildly, That is true.
We sat down at the table and went through the motions of finalizing the terms of our new agreement, after which another round of handshakes ensued.
Manager Chiang excused himself to get to another meeting.
Came from nothing, Kaiser Shih told me. Dropped out of school in the fifth grade and worked his way up—the Chinese dream.
Mandy had to leave soon after that to catch a flight to Milan for a trade show, but not before instructing Kaiser Shih to show me around the premises.
I’m sorry to miss the dinner tonight, she said, but Kaiser Shih and the others will take good care of you. Enjoy! Have a glass of champagne for me! She swished out of the room on her four-inch heels.
Kaiser Shih led me through a pair of glass doors beyond which some of the world’s finest handbags were made. The rooms were pristine and well-ventilated, giving the rows of uniformed workers—young women, all of them, with their hair pulled back beneath hairnets, their mouths and noses shielded by medical-grade masks—the precise, efficient air of surgical nurses.
In the samples room, he held up a fifties-style frame bag in bottle-green glazed leather and told me, Marc Jacobs, Spring 2020, dropping next year.
As the tour progressed, I studied irregularly shaped panels of leather laid out across tabletops like antique maps. I watched workers stitch Tory Burch labels into patterned clutches, those navy-blue twin T’s that, by now, I knew by heart. Turning a corner, I nearly walked into a rack of Prada Saffiano leather totes, hanging there as casually as whole roasted ducks in a Chinatown window.
Facetiously Kaiser Shih said, Tell no one you saw these, or Prada will have my neck. He had an infectious laugh, resonant and flowing like a sudden surge of water from a tap.
Maybe it was dehydration from the long flight, or mild poisoning from the deadly Chinese smog that the Western press constantly lamented, or maybe it was psychological—my slowly burgeoning guilt breaking through the layers of rationalization. Whatever the case, my head began to throb. I grew wobbly and fatigued. Following Kaiser Shih up yet another staircase, the toe of my shoe caught on some minuscule overhang, and down I went.
I’m so sorry! he said. Are you all right?
I said I felt completely out of it and perhaps the pollution was to blame.
Could be, he said. Foreigners always complain about it. He gazed at me with such pity and tenderness that I wondered if we might be different species—he, so healthy and resilient, I, so vulnerable and weak.
He suggested taking me back to the hotel to rest, but I insisted on seeing the counterfeits factory; after all, I’d come all this way.
Outside, the clouds had dispersed, and the noonday sun hit me full in the face. We crossed the courtyard, skirting puddles, and followed a narrow path through a thick cove of trees to a small concrete structure at the very edge of the compound, hidden away from the eyes of international and local inspectors alike. In contrast to the rest of the buildings, this one needed a paint job, and its windows were marred by iron bars, thick curtains.
Once inside, I saw the giant nets strung across the stairwells, as though for a circus trapeze.
What’s all this? I asked, and then the answer came to me.
Worker safety, Kaiser Shih said.
My stomach roiled.
We climbed to the top floor and he pulled out a ring of keys and unlocked a heavy door. Here we are.
The room that opened up before me was blisteringly hot, though the women at the sewing machines, many inexplicably clad in long sleeves, appeared oblivious to the temperature. One or two of the women, past middle age, with more white in their hair than black, glanced my way, then returned to pushing flaps of glazed bottle-green leather across their machines.
You see? Kaiser Shih said, pointing. Ours will be ready as soon as Marc’s.
A corner of the room was reserved for an office, and someone waved at me from one of the desks. It was Ah Seng, the man who had taken me to that creepy apartment building back in January. As I returned his wave, a girl in the opposite corner of the room caught my eye. She couldn’t have been older than fourteen, and when she raised a handkerchief to mop the sweat at her hairline, I saw that her first two fingers were missing. I tasted acid in the back of my throat. My struggle to breathe in the thick swampy air was exacerbated by the fleece blankets tacked over each window. I’d naively mistaken them for curtains from down below.
Kaiser Shih touched my elbow and asked, All right?
I swallowed hard. He waved over the foreman, formerly of Dior, a lanky man with pockmarked cheeks.
Meet Ms. Wong from America, Kaiser Shih said.