by S. J. Rozan
But I didn’t get to take them.
Behind and below me I heard a soft click. I froze and listened. In a moment, a tiny creak; silence, creak, silence, creak.
Someone else was creeping up the stairs.
I had surveyed and recorded in my head the layout of the place as I came up the stairs, the way I always do—I learned that from Bill—though there wasn’t much to it: a hallway with doors. I retreated fast to the door that seemed the most likely, grabbed its knob, and was rewarded as I deserved. It was unlocked; but it was a damp and ammonia-smelly janitor’s closet.
I left the door a little ajar and peered out, in time to see the other guy who was trying to infiltrate this little tête-à-tête. He did what I’d been doing: slinking down the hall, pausing before he reached H. B. Yang’s office, flattening himself against the wall.
I silently pushed open the door I was lurking behind, noiselessly walked up to him, and without a sound pressed the barrel of my .22 into the small of his back. He was taller than I, but I managed to pull up my Cantonese accent and the bad grammar that went with it and whisper in his ear, “You make some noise, they know you here. You want that? No? Then come with me.”
He must have not wanted that, because he let me pull him backward into my concrete-floored den. I steered him toward the slop sink end, shut the door, and flipped on the light. Under the single bulb screwed into the ceiling I examined my prize: Cao Zhi, the sharp-faced waiter who at that moment should have been endlessly plonking teapots onto tables on the floor below. As I should have been pushing a cart.
“You surprise, see me?” he asked, giving me the curled-lip sneer again, maybe so I would recognize him. “Want shoot me, go ahead.” He pulled a cigarette from the pocket of his maroon waiter’s jacket and lit it up. The smoke mingled harmoniously with the scents of ammonia and mold.
“No,” I said, slipping the gun back into the holster on my ankle. “I know was you: smell cigarette smoke.”
He watched the gun disappear. “Oh,” he said. “You so smart, know so much.” With narrowed eyes, he looked at me past his cigarette. “So now you tell me, why you up here, instead do your job? Want learn more things to know?”
“Why you up here, Cao Zhi?” I snapped. “I think you knew everything already. I come for ask boss for raise. Hear you sneaking behind me, wonder, what great Cao Zhi need with sneaking?”
He tapped ash onto the floor without looking. “You think I believing stupid story like that?”
“So what, what you believing? This your job, decide whether believing dim sum ladies?”
“My job?” Cao Zhi shook his head. “No, my job carry plates, tea, watch people eat, carry more tea. Big Brother Yang Hao-Bing pay, I shut up, carry plates. Someday, in great America, have own restaurant, pay other people carry plates.” He dropped his cigarette on the floor and squashed it with his foot.
“Then why you spying on Yang Hao-Bing?”
“Not spying on Yang Hao-Bing. Spying on you.”
“On me?”
“Not so easy, shut up, carry plates, get pay. Other people making trouble. Like, dim sum ladies sneaking up stairs, could be trouble. Better check, why sneaking.” He folded his arms across his chest. “So: why you up here? Don’t telling me, ask for raise. Why you have gun: Yang Hao-Bing doesn’t give raise, you shoot him?”
I shrugged. “You know lies, must know truth, also.”
“Know more than you,” he said, unperturbed. “Know you not dim sum lady, not FOB from Hong Kong. Know you have meeting with boss, Big Brother Yang Hao-Bing, have tea with him. Know you Chin Ling Wan-ju, born in Chinatown, New York. Police. Know enough?”
Cao Zhi and I looked at each other, him leaning his thin body against the slop sink, arms folded, me standing by the door.
“Not police,” I finally said. “I’m a private investigator. I work for Yang Hao-Bing. There were some things he wanted to know so he hired me.”
He nodded, as though this information was no more surprising to him than the abrupt change in my accent.
“What things Yang Hao-Bing want know?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“So. You sneaking up here for spying on boss who hires you?”
“Not everyone tells the truth all the time,” I said, “not even the boss. Sometimes I have to find out things my own way.”
“Like by listening, what boss says to visitor?”
“Maybe.”
“What Yang Hao-Bing want to know, hire you for finding out?” Cao Zhi said, fingering the scar on the side of his face. “About waiters disappear?”
The shadows from the bulb glowing in the ceiling made it difficult to make out his expression, but it seemed to me that though it wasn’t friendly, the sneer was temporarily gone.
“What do you know about the waiters?” I asked.
The sneer came back. “Know they stupid men. Have job, place to live, food to eat. Not enough, for stupid men. Have big plan, cheat gangsters, make lots of money. Now look.” He spread his arms wide. “Disappear.”
I kept my voice steady. “You know where they are, don’t you?”
“Me? Just Cao Zhi, only waiter.”
“Don’t give me that. How do you know who I am?”
“I ask Li Rong.”
“Who’s he?”
“Big man, top of escalator. Used to waiter. Too important now, doesn’t carrying plates. Guard Yang Hao-Bing against bad people.”
“And why did you ask him? Do you ask him about all the new people who come to work here?”
“Only, they come day before, go upstairs, see big boss.”
“You saw me do that?”
“Shut up, carry plates, see a lot.”
I nodded. “Okay. You knew who I was. Why didn’t you call me on it as soon as I got here?”
“I want knowing why you come.”
“Why? Unless you’re involved in something that you think might be the reason. Cao Zhi, I know why the men are hiding. I know about the heroin they stole.”
Cao Zhi held up both hands and shook his head. “You know, don’t say. Already too much knowing. Cao Zhi never involves in something. Carry plates, get pay.”
I looked at him steadily. “Yang Hao-Bing isn’t the only person I work for. I’m looking for the waiters because I want to help them. Before Yang Hao-Bing hired me I was already looking for them, working for Lee Bi-Da. You know, the lawyer who was hurt in the explosion, when Ho Chi-Chun was killed.”
In the dingy room Cao Zhi’s eyes seemed to take on an expression of weighing and balancing. “Working for Lee Bi-Da? Why Lee Bi-Da looking for waiters?”
“Ho Chi-Chun was a client of his before he disappeared,” I said, and then, afraid Cao Zhi might not know the word client, I restated it: “Ho Chi-Chun had already asked Lee Bi-Da for help, on other things.”
“Other things.” He gave a snort. “Stupid union, get him killed anyway. Get everyone excited, thinking can making more money, find some good, easy way.” He narrowed his eyes at me and said, “Lee Bi-Da, lawyer, can help them?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I know he wants to try. And whatever, it might be safer for the ones still alive if they let him try. They don’t want to end up like Ho Chi-Chun.” I didn’t mention that it was going to be a couple of weeks at the least before Peter was in any position to help anyone.
Cao Zhi wasn’t budging yet. “Suppose you finding them. Tell Yang Hao-Bing?”
“Before he hired me,” I said carefully, “I was working for Lee Bi-Da.”
Cao Zhi thought about this while I waited. If I had just come out and said No, I won’t tell Yang Hao-Bing, he wouldn’t have believed me; I had, after all, taken the job, and Yang Hao-Bing was a powerful man. It would take more than two seconds’ thought to decide to ignore what he wanted.
But first loyalties were important. Peter’s interests might win out over Yang Hao-Bing’s if I gave the situation the consideration it deserved, and I let Cao Zhi mull over that possibility.
<
br /> “I bring you,” he said at last. “They telling you about trouble, you help them. Better help,” he warned.
“I’ll try,” I said. “I really will. Where are they?”
With a sneer, he said, “Home.”
Eighteen
“Home?” I stared at Cao Zhi in the rancid dampness of the janitor’s closet. “Home, China? Where?”
“China?” Cao Zhi spread his arms expansively. “Home, Chinatown, New York, America. Wonderful place, everything here, everyone happy. Stupid men have place for sleep, no rain, food to eat, no work to do. Ah? Maybe not so stupid.”
I was trying to think up an answer to that when the soft slap of footsteps in the hallway silenced us both. We stared at each other as the steps went by. They quickened into the trot of a person descending a staircase. A sudden surge of restaurant hubbub and its equally sudden muffling let us know the door below had opened and closed, and with it my chance to find out what had brought Joe Yee here to see H. B. Yang.
But maybe now it didn’t matter. Maybe I’d made an end run around these guys, unearthed the Rosetta stone of missing waiters, found the golden key that fits the silver lock. Whatever the cliché was that fit the situation, maybe I’d done it.
“Okay,” I said when we were surrounded by silence again. “Can we go to the waiters now?”
“No.” Before I could object he said, “I ask them. Maybe want seeing you, maybe don’t.”
“You said you’d take me to them.”
“I ask them. You give me number for call you, maybe tomorrow. Now, finish work. Push cart. Carry plates.” With the sneer I was growing to feel I’d known since childhood, he shoved himself off the slop sink and stood before me.
I gave him some more argument; he gave me some more stonewalling. Finally, I gave him my number.
Then, with the caution of people trying to sneak away from where they weren’t supposed to be in the first place, Cao Zhi and I inched open the janitor’s closet door, tiptoed down the hall, crept down the stairs, and successfully reemerged into the chaos and din of the dining room floor. I grabbed my cart, he lifted a teapot, and we found ourselves very much in demand for people who didn’t seem to have been missed.
By three-thirty, quitting time, I was bursting with impatience, which distracted me from my aching shoulders. Cao Zhi, however, gave me a sneer even broader than his regular one, and as we all sat down to lunch together he made some rude remark addressed to no one in particular about new people who didn’t know what they were doing and so made everyone else’s work harder.
I sighed and reached for the platter in the middle of the table to pick out some pieces of pork with ginger. Turning my chopsticks around to use the end I hadn’t eaten from, I served some also to Pei-Hui, who smiled at me.
“Don’t be upset,” she said. Although Cantonese could be heard in scattered conversations from the other tables, at our table Pei-Hui and I were the only ones speaking it. “You’re learning very well.”
“Why is he so difficult?” I asked. “Why can’t he be nice?”
“In China,” she said quietly, “I have heard, he was different. A political organizer, a student. He was arrested for his writings about government corruption. The police wanted him to tell them things about some of the other students, but he would not. He had … a difficult time. Finally, he was released, ill. It was months before he was well again.” She spooned shrimp fried rice onto my plate, then onto hers. “He was arrested a year later, a second time.”
My chopsticks hovered above my plate as I asked, “What happened?”
“He was sentenced to twenty years in prison. But he escaped.”
“Escaped?”
Pei-Hui nodded. “Escaped somehow, came to America. Changed his name, now he’s Cao Zhi. Now, he is always angry. He wants only to work, then go home to sleep.”
I looked curiously across the table at Cao Zhi. Carry plates, get pay, he had said to me upstairs, among the cleansers and the mops. But not so easy. Other people making trouble.
Like coworkers with big get-rich dreams. And private eyes sneaking around. I wondered what it was like to be a man who’d had big dreams once, of changing his world, and had seen what they’d brought him—a difficult time—and now only wanted to be left alone. I wondered, then, what had gotten Cao Zhi involved with the waiters, this man who had told me Cao Zhi never involves in something. I watched him across the table, reaching his long arms to the platters, stabbing his chopsticks into the food as he exchanged curt, crabby-sounding comments in Fukienese with the waiters on either side of him. Rubbing his jawline scar, Cao Zhi glanced up and caught my eye. He curled his lip and muttered something to the man on his right. The man looked at me, snickered, and muttered something back. They both smiled unpleasantly. I went back to my lunch, thinking about China.
After we’d finished, the dim sum ladies once again cleared the tables as the waiters and busboys, dishwashers and chefs swallowed their last cups of tea and hurried back to work. I did my share, carrying plates to the kitchen and napkins to the laundry cart, and we made, as we had yesterday, short work of it. Finally, there was nothing for me to do but leave. Cao Zhi, of course, had to stay and work the evening before he could even propose to the waiters that I come and see them.
As I pulled on my jacket and headed down the stairs to the outside I realized Bill hadn’t come to lunch today, either. Well, too bad; he might have missed his chance to order dim sum from me and my stainless steel cart. If Cao Zhi really took me to the waiters tomorrow, this case might be over; and not a moment too soon, if you asked me.
Outside, I stood for a few moments, just breathing in the late-spring air and watching people come and go, people in a hurry to do this or that and people only strolling, people going home, leaving home, buying food for their families, people with no families to buy food for. I ambled around the corner from Dragon Garden, and there, where no one from the restaurant would see me, I took off the glasses and checked my beeper to see if Bill had called. He hadn’t, so I continued on to the corner and called him. My eyes followed the antics of a four-year-old who giggled as his grandmother chased him down the sidewalk while I listened to Bill’s phone ring a few times before his service picked up and asked if they could help me. I just said to tell him I’d called. I hung up as the grandmother caught up to the laughing little boy and swung him in her arms. Well, I could hardly expect Bill to be sitting around waiting for me to call. I’d talk to him later; right now I was going home.
But I wasn’t. The human brick wall from the top of Dragon Garden’s escalator appeared on the corner I had just come around and, as I watched, stood looking bewildered, peering up and down the crowded blocks. Then he spotted me, and his face filled with a mixture of contempt and relief.
“Hey!” he yelled, pointing, as though he’d caught me red-handed at something.
“Me?” I asked, looking around, then back at him, just for his benefit.
“Yeah, you. The boss wants to see you.”
“Mr. Yang wants to see me?”
“What are you, stupid or deaf or something? He wants to see you now. Come on, let’s go.”
He looked ready to charge on over and tuck me under his arm like a football, and as much as part of me just wanted to see him try it, my better, smarter self won out.
“Okay, sure,” I said with a syrupy smile. “Of course, why not?”
He escorted—more like surrounded—me along the sidewalk, up the stairs, and back through the break room. Not until we hit the wallpapered door on the far side of the dining room did he step away, seeming satisfied now I wouldn’t break and run—or anyway, wouldn’t succeed if I did.
“Thank you, Li Rong.” I smiled again as I turned the doorknob, entered the stairway, and left him standing, arms folded, mission accomplished. He was looking very pleased with himself, not wondering for a minute how it was that I knew his name.
I, of course, was not nearly as cheerful and relaxed about this turn of events as I appear
ed to be. If I hadn’t been sneaking around up here, having urgent conversations with a waiter in the janitor’s closet just a few hours ago, I might have felt some of Li Rong’s self-confidence as I mounted the stairs, listening to the fifth, seventh, and ninth ones squeak. As it was, I was worried I was about to get my head handed to me on a noodle platter.
“Chin Ling Wan-ju,” H. B. Yang greeted me in Cantonese, standing up from his desk as I knocked on his open office door. He was smiling, but I wasn’t sure that meant anything. “Come in, please, sit down.”
I did those things. I couldn’t help noticing that the iron tea kettle sat idle on a cold-looking burner and the blue-and-white teapot was nowhere in sight.
Nevertheless, H. B. Yang’s leathery face beamed at me. “How have you been getting along with my staff?” he inquired.
“Very well, Uncle.”
“Excellent. How do you find the work? For a new employee I understand your progress has been quite good.” He looked amused, as though he’d found my cart-pushing abilities were an extra added bonus he’d gotten for hiring me.
“I haven’t had a problem with it,” I reported, trying not to bristle at his amusement, though my shoulders protested that I was not being entirely truthful.
“That’s fine,” H. B. Yang said. “I imagined a fine young woman like yourself would be quite capable of handling such work. Now, tell me, please, what progress have you made on the project for which I employed you?”
“I have made some progress, I believe,” I said in what I hoped was a noncommittal way.
“Ah,” he said. “You have found what I seek?”
“No,” I said. “But I believe I’m getting closer.”
“Very good,” he said. “Please tell me what you have found thus far.”
The little hairs on the back of my neck, short as they were, rose. Not everyone tells the truth a// the time, not even the boss, I heard myself telling Cao Zhi not ten feet from here, not four hours ago.
“Uncle,” I said carefully, “I have found only paths to follow. I have gone some way down some of them, but taken none to its end. I believe one of these paths may lead to what you seek. However, I do not yet know which. I have no wish to mislead you with false direction. You have asked me to accomplish this task for you. I will try faithfully to do what you ask.”