Five Star Billionaire: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

the skyscrapers of Lujiazui ranged like razor-sharp Alpine peaks against the night sky. In the daytime, even the most famous buildings seemed irrelevant, obscured by the perpetual haze of pollution; but at night, when the yellow-gray fog thinned, Justin would sit at his window watching them display boastfully, each one trying to outdo the next: taller, louder, brighter. A crystal outcrop suspended high in the sky, shrouded by mist on rainy days; a giant goldfish wriggling across the face of a building; interlocking geometric shapes shattering into a million fragments before regrouping. He knew every one by heart.
    Buildings were in his DNA, he sometimes thought. They had given him everything he ever owned—his houses, his cars, his friends—andeven now, they shaped the way he thought and felt. The years were rushing past, whatever he had left of his youth surrendering to middle age, yet bricks and mortar
—real estate
—remained a constant presence. When he revisited his earliest memories, trying to summon scenes of family life—his mother’s protective embrace, perhaps, or praise from his father—the results were always blank. They were present in his memories, of course, his parents and grandmother, hovering spectrally. But, just like in real life, they were never animated. All he could see and smell were the buildings around them, the structures they inhabited: cold stone floors, mossy walls, flaking plaster, silence. It was a world from which there had been no escape. A path had been laid down for him, straight and unbending. He had long since given up hope of departing from this track, indeed could not even remember any other option—until he came to Shanghai.
    The summer of ’08 had been notable for its stillness, the unyielding humidity that lay trapped between the avenues of concrete and glass. He had arrived in Shanghai expecting a temperate climate, but summer had stretched far into September, and the pavements were sticky with heat, the roads becoming rivers of exhaust and steam. Even in his gated compound in Pudong, with its American-tropic-style lawns and palm-filled gardens, the air felt lifeless.
    He had known little about Shanghai and assumed that it would consist solely of shopping malls and plastic reproductions of its history, its traditional life preserved in aspic, as it was in Singapore, where he went to school, or else inherently Third World, like in Malaysia, where he grew up. It might be like Hong Kong, where he had begun his career and cemented his reputation as an unspectacular yet canny businessman who would hold the reins steady as head of the family’s property interests. Whatever the case, he had assumed he would find it familiar—he had spent his life in overcrowded, overbuilt Asian cities, and they were all the same to him: Whenever he looked at a tower block, he saw only a set of figures that represented income and expenditure. Ever since he was a teenager, his brain had been trained to work in this way, calculating numbers swiftly, threading together disparate considerations such as location, purpose, and yield. Maybe there was, in spite of everything, a beauty in the incisiveness of his thinking back then.
    But, in fact, during those initial few weeks it was not easy for him to get any sense of Shanghai at all. His driver picked him up at his house anddrove him to a series of meetings relieved only by business lunches, each day finishing with the soon-familiar flourish of a banquet. He lived in a development called Lisson Valley, which was owned by his family. This, together with a more modest development in Hongqiao and a condominium block in Xintiandi, was all that his family owned in the largest city in China, and they had decided that they needed to expand, which was why he had been sent here. They had spent a hundred years in Malaysia and Singapore, and now they needed to branch out in a serious way—like the great Jewish families of Europe in the nineteenth century, his