girlfriends from prying too much. If she was seeing anyone else, her kay poh*5 friends might surely want to tag along, but the mere mention of the Shangs intimidated them from asking too many questions.
While the ladies decided to spend the morning sampling all the free gourmet delicacies at Harrods’ famed Food Halls, Eleanor, discreetly dressed in a chic camel-colored Akris pantsuit, racing green MaxMara swing coat, and her signature gold-rimmed Cutler and Gross sunglasses,*6 left the swanky building on Knightsbridge and walked two blocks east to the Berkeley hotel, where a silver Jaguar XJL parked in front of a row of perfectly round topiaries awaited her. Still paranoid that her friends might have followed her, Eleanor glanced around quickly before getting into the sedan and being whisked off.
At Connaught Street in Mayfair, Eleanor emerged in front of a smart row of townhouses. Nothing about the red-and-white-brick Georgian façade or the glossy black door hinted at what awaited beyond. She pressed the intercom button, and a voice responded almost immediately: “May I help you?”
“It’s Eleanor Young. I have a ten o’clock appointment,” she said in an accent that was suddenly much more British. Even before she had finished speaking, several bolts clicked open, and an intimidatingly thickset man in a pinstripe suit opened the door. Eleanor entered a bright, stark antechamber, where an attractive young woman sat behind a cobalt blue Maison Jansen desk. The woman smiled sweetly and said, “Good morning, Mrs. Young. It won’t be a minute—we’re just calling up.”
Eleanor nodded. She knew the procedure well. The entire back wall of the antechamber consisted of steel-framed glass doors leading into a private garden courtyard, and she could already see a bald man in a black suit crossing the garden toward her. The pinstripe-suited doorman ushered her toward the bald man, saying simply, “Mrs. Young for Mr. D’Abo.” Eleanor noticed that both of them sported barely visible earpieces. The bald fellow escorted her along the glass-canopied walkway that bisected the courtyard, past some neatly trimmed shrubbery, and into the adjoining building, this one an ultramodern bunker clad in black titanium and tinted glass.
“Mrs. Young for Mr. D’Abo,” the man repeated into his earpiece, and another set of security locks clicked open smoothly. After a short ride in the elevator, Eleanor felt a sense of relief for the first time that morning as she at last stepped into the richly appointed reception room of the Liechtenburg Group, one of the world’s most exclusive private banks.
Like many high-net-worth Asians, Eleanor maintained accounts with many different financial institutions. Her parents, who had lost much of their first fortune when they were forced into the Endau concentration camp during the Japanese occupation of Singapore in World War II, had instilled in their children a key mantra: Never put all of your eggs in one basket. Eleanor remembered the lesson over the next few decades as she amassed her own fortune. It didn’t matter that her hometown of Singapore had become one of the world’s most secure financial hubs; Eleanor—like many of her friends—still kept money distributed among various banks around the globe, in safe havens that would prefer to remain unnamed.
The Liechtenburg Group account, however, was the jewel in her crown. They managed the biggest chunk of her assets, and Peter D’Abo, her private banker, consistently provided her with the highest rate of return. At least once a year, Eleanor would find some excuse to come to London, where she relished her portfolio reviews with Peter. (It did not hurt that he resembled her favorite actor, Richard Chamberlain—around the time he was in The Thorn Birds—and on many an occasion Eleanor would sit across Peter’s highly polished macassar ebony desk and imagine him in a priest’s collar while he explained what ingenious new scheme he had put her money in.)
Eleanor checked her lipstick one last time in the tiny mirror of her Jim Thompson silk lipstick case as she waited in the reception lounge. She admired the huge glass vase filled with purple calla lilies, their bright green stems twisted into a tight spiral formation, and thought about how many British pounds to withdraw from her account on this trip. The Singapore dollar was on a weakening trend this week, so it would be better to spend more in pounds at the moment. Daisy had paid for lunch yesterday, and Lorena covered dinner, so it was her turn to treat today. The three of them had made a pact to take turns paying