Never Enough by Joe McGinniss Read Free Book Online Page B

were trillions of dollars worth of distressed assets scattered all over the continent. It was a bonanza beyond belief.
    Rob was constantly in motion, taking close-up looks at the companies he’d flagged as possible targets for Goldman’s ministrations. One week he’d be in Seoul, Taipei, and Singapore; the next in Jakarta, Bangkok, and Kuala Lumpur. On occasion, he’d take a meeting in Shanghai or Beijing. No one counted the hours they worked, nor the far fewer hours per week that they slept. It was a vultures’ feeding frenzy. Rob had never experienced such exhilarating, exhausting times. He knew he was in the middle of something historic. He also knew that if he slowed down somebody else would beat him to the next pot of gold.
    Rob and Nancy established a presence in the expat community. They joined the United Jewish Congregation, whose membership, a brochure said, consisted of “business and professional people who will be in Hong Kong for two to five years.” It was, in other words, an investment banker’s synagogue. They joined the Aberdeen Marina Club, which described itself as “a privileged haven” for expats. They sent Isabel to the Hong Kong International School—the most prestigious day school in Hong Kong—where she’d be surrounded by other wealthy expat children.
    And still Nancy felt lost and isolated, reluctant to venture beyond the bars of her gilded cage. When she did, it was to shop at stores such as Gucci, Hermès, Dolce & Gabbana, Louis Vuitton, Versace: places that did not seem foreign, because she knew them well from New York.
    One of her problems was transportation. Yes, Parkview was only fifteen minutes from Central, but how to get there? She had the Mercedes in the Parkview garage, but she was terrified of taking it on Hong Kong’s narrow, twisting secondary roads or on the spanking new urban highways where she so easily could get lost. Public transportation was not an option. Hong Kong’s public transportation system was considered among the world’s best: swift, safe, reliable, and clean. But there was no way Nancy was going to crowd onto a bus or subway car with all those jabbering Chinese who would look at her and see not the gorgeous, wealthy young wife of a Goldman Sachs investment banker, but merely a gweilo . Eventually, she worked up the courage to grit her teeth and drive. Until then, she spent almost as much on taxi fares as she did in the shops that were her destination.

    In the summer of 1998, at the start of Rob and Nancy’s second year in Hong Kong, Nancy’s mother, Jean, had cancer surgery. She lost half a lung but received a favorable prognosis. By fall, she was well enough to fly to Hong Kong with her new husband, a travel agent. Jean had two days to visit Nancy before boarding a cruise ship bound for Singapore. She was taken aback—very aback—by her first glimpse of Parkview. Nothing had prepared her for its scale, nor for its vulgar excesses, its ostentatious opulence.
    The thought of her daughter living in such a place worried Jean. She feared that Nancy would lose herself amid the pretension, would vanish into Parkview’s sumptuousness only to reappear as a stranger dripping baubles, unrecognizable even to herself.
    But Jean knew better than to say this. She knew how Nancy reacted to anything she perceived as criticism even in the best of times, which Jean sensed these were not. Nancy spoke of Rob only to complain about him. He was almost never home. When he was, all he did was criticize. He was constantly scolding her for not paying enough attention to the children.
    On the second and last day of Jean’s visit, Nancy was in the middle of explaining how unreasonable and demanding Rob was when two-year-old Zoe, who had been playing on the floor nearby, began to scream. Zoe was more temperamental than Isabel. She would melt down at the slightest provocation, sometimes apparently for no reason at all.
    Jean was full of grandmotherly love, but screaming