Naked Ambition - Dan Roberts

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own personal gain.

      The forty-eight-year old Chen was a rather restrained man. In both attitude and action he was a man in control, guarded, almost choreographed in his movements and always careful in his personal appearance and presentation. But when it came to his private life, especially his personal goals, he had unconstrained ambition—an ambition that allowed him to live an adventurous life that most others would only dream about.

      If there was one thing that Chen wanted with a passion, it was to be an important man; an influential man involved with influential people. To be associated with people of influence in the political and financial arena was his ultimate objective. From his perspective, to attain a certain level of wealth and power was essential only as a step toward being accepted by—even sought out by—those who held the greater reins of power and wealth of the world.

      Chen was, indeed, a rich man, flushed with a wealth that he had made through mostly disreputable means, using skills that seemed to come naturally to him. That is not to say that he was uneducated. In fact, part of his success was due to his being schooled in some of the best institutions of learning in the world. His father, a British citizen, had worked for the diplomatic corps as a communication attache, a position that was never explained to Chen but one that he questioned as he grew older. The question—is my father a spy?—never crossed his lips but was very much in mind throughout his teenage years. Because his father’s assignments were of relatively short duration, Chen’s family moved several times during his childhood. Therefore, his elementary and secondary years were spent in some of the best private schools in England, France and Germany. From there, Chen studied at the highly ranked University of Hong Kong where he focused his attention and energies on law and political science.

      After receiving his baccalaureate degree, he went to France where he entered the University of Paris—the Sorbonne—to refine his knowledge of the arts. It was there that he met a young woman with whom he fell in love. Glenna Holden was an American, the lone child of an affluent couple from the suburbs of Chicago. She was intelligent, fun-loving and extremely beautiful. One of the qualities that Chen loved about Glenna was that she could easily move back and forth between social settings. She was comfortable with herself and competent whether dressed in jeans, hanging out at clubs listening to jazz, or in high heels, wearing an elegant Gucci gown, exhibiting all the polish and charm one would expect from a woman of social means.

      Based upon what seemed like an instant mutual attraction, it took less than a month for the relationship to take on roots. In less than five months after they first met, they were married. Announcing the official union to Glenna’s parents was difficult, especially when done through a long distance phone call. As could be expected, the Holdens were upset, not at all pleased with the coupling of their daughter with this unknown quantity, this ‘Chinaman.’ Glenna reminded her parents that Chen was only half Chinese, being the offspring of a Chinese mother and a British father. But that made no difference. Mr. Holden, especially, was vehemently opposed to the marriage and said so in words that Glenna had never heard her father use before. Yet, after several more months, Glenna’s father got used to his daughter being a married woman and, eventually, warmed to the idea of her having a husband with ‘international roots.’

      It was during his one and only visit to their small Parisian apartment that Glenna’s father and Chen became quite interactive, communicating on many different levels about a number of subjects of interest to Mr. Holden. Within the time span of the visit—three days—Chen had made great inroads into the heart and mind of his once emotionally distant father-in-law. It did not take long for Mr. Holden to move from opposition to the marriage to very much liking the young man he now affectionately called ‘son.’ In seeing how Chen made his daughter happy, Glenna’s father, just before flying back to Chicago, gladly deposited $50,000US in a Paris bank account as a wedding present to the young couple.

      Whenever Chen recalled the memories of his not-quite-twelve months with Glenna in Paris, he always came to the same conclusion: those months were the happiest time of his life. Sadly, that happiness was short-lived. For Chen, all the joy of life came to a screeching halt when one rainy Wednesday evening Glenna was tragically run down—killed—by a drunken driver.

      As alive and bright and carefree as the months before the accident had been, those that followed were filled with darkness and despair. Rather than seeing the world as a place to be explored with an invitation to see new horizons and meet exciting people, joining with them in the dance of life, Chen now found the world as a foe to be fought, an adversary to be pushed back, an enemy that seemed to always hover over him, ready to destroy any glimmer of hope for happiness.

      Entrenched in a state of malaise, Chen didn’t know what to do for the future, a future that challenged him with grief each day as he awoke from long nights of agitation and restlessness. And so he did nothing. That is, nothing that most people would consider useful. Not wanting to stay in a lonely apartment for fear he would kill himself, he began walking the many streets and neighborhoods of Paris, stopping by bistros and bars to drink away the day and the night—and his troubles. In doing so, he began to mingle with the people who frequented these establishments. They were the common people, mostly men, who one would find in the various communities to the north of the city. Chen especially liked the environs of the Quartier Pigalle, a rather raucous, artistic neighborhood near Montmartre, a locale known for its sex shops and topless cabarets.

      Chen’s wanderings—and his alcoholic binges—eventually brought him into a circle of men who enjoyed gambling, especially the playing of poker. He had tried his hand at it when at the university but never on a serious level, certainly not with an eye to making it his profession. However, after several months, Chen found that he was good at the game, which he played for seemingly endless hours—day and night. In fact, he was so good at it that he found that he could actually make money from the playing of it. Within a short time he was bringing home his winnings in a small bag. Every night, with bleary eyes, he would count out the cash, put it in a safe place, then take it to the bank at the end of the week, as if depositing a paycheck.

      Within a year, Chen was earning several times the average wage of most professional young men his age. In fact, over the next couple of years he did so well at the poker table that his name became legendary throughout all levels of the gambling community of Paris, mingling with some of the shadowy, mafia-types as well as being invited to the private games of the more sophisticated, upper class gentlemen. Occasionally, through his interaction with those men, he found himself overhearing talk about politics or business, inside information that could be useful to him in the present and the future.

      As good as he was at gambling, he found that it was his innate instincts that seemed to be the magic that made all the difference. His knowledge and education aside, somehow he just knew how to connect with people in such a way that they trusted him. He was a natural conversationalist, being able to address most any topic and was able to do so in a number of languages. He was, after all, fluent in English, French, Italian, German and several Chinese dialects including Mandarin.

      It did not take long for Chen to become a wheeler-and-dealer of information that others found valuable, and that that information—news that people wanted or needed for whatever reason—could be sold. Or given away. He found that even free information was a powerful asset for his future. As he gave freely of news that was not yet public, he recognized that people would be beholden to him, making them indebted to him for some future want or need of his own.

      Over the next decade, Chen became a very well-known man among people of influence in a variety of social settings. Not just Paris. but places like London, New York and Rome, to name a few. He also became very wealthy, a wealth that he was constantly assessing. Daily he would inventory his assets in his mind; weekly he did the same on his computer. However, that inventory was not just a long list of financial statements or an accounting of material goods; it was also his storehouse of information that he would carefully go over. Equally important were the vast numbers of people—human resources—who were indebted to him for favors he had done for them. In the end, it was the human element—those people who he used as steppingstones to further his climb to wealth and power—who brought him to the position he was in today, one that enabled him to cause political or economic calm or havoc across the globe and in doing so make

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