Reflecting the Sky

by S. J. Rozan

“An hour ago. No, I am sorry to say there is not.”

  He lifted the teapot to refill the cups again. Probably, I thought, he can’t wait until that pot is empty. That would be my signal to leave, courtesy on my side and hospitality on his having both been satisfied.

  I murmured my thanks and lifted the cup to my lips. A sudden loud pounding on the back wall door almost made me spill tea all over my street-stall shirt.

  Wei Ang-Ran seemed as startled as I was. “Yes?” he called in Cantonese. The flew door open and Bill stumbled in unceremoniously, shoved by a well-muscled, red-faced young man.

  Bill turned to face the guy and I could see from the set of his shoulders that this was about to be trouble. “Hold on,” I said quietly in English. “What happened?”

  Wei Ang-Ran, on his feet, was asking the same question in Chinese. I stood, too, listening with one ear to the young man explaining in rapid and angry Chinese that he had caught this gweilo trespassing in the alley, spying through the windows, that if the gweilo hadn’t repeated Wei Ang-Ran’s name over and over as though he knew him he would right now be getting the beating he deserved, and if Wei Ang-Ran would deny knowing such a despicable person as was most surely the case, the beating would commence immediately. In my other ear was Bill, asking me in English to apologize to Wei Ang-Ran, saying that he hadn’t intended to cause trouble, that he was just trying to satisfy a possibly rude but innocent curiousity.

  “I used to be a longshoreman,” he told me. “The logistics of an operation like this interest me. I wanted to see what was going on. I was really just looking for something to keep me awake.”

  I was attempting a simultaneous translation of Bill’s apology for Wei Ang-Ran, so that made three of us talking at once in the small, cluttered office. That plus the hum of the air-conditioner and the shouts, thumps and occasional mechanical noises from the now-open warehouse door did nothing to calm the situation. Jeanette Ng was on her feet staring through the window.

  Wei Ang-Ran looked from one of us to another, back and forth.

  “I am very sorry,” I repeated. “Especially at this time, it is unforgivable to have caused you any concern. My partner deeply regrets his error. He asks your forgiveness for the disturbance. His mistake was ignorant, not ill-intentioned. He regrets also taking this young man from his work. If the young man were to return now to the tasks he has so responsibly stayed late to perform, we will leave immediately, so as to cause you no further trouble.”

  Wei Ang-Ran nodded slowly. He listened to the young man—who apparently called himself Tony, which Wei Ang-Ran struggled manfully to pronounce—make angry accusations for another few minutes. Then he thanked him, rather formally, I thought, considering who was boss here, for his watchfulness and care, and instructed him to return to his duties. Tony shut his mouth and stood silently with his angry bulk in the doorway. After a long, contemptuous look at Bill, he gave a brief nod of the head—more agreement than obedience—to Wei Ang-Ran, turned, and pulled the warehouse door closed behind him.

  “I am sorry,” I said one final time. “We will leave immediately.”

  “There is no need,” Wei Ang-Ran replied politely. “Mr. Smith clearly meant no harm. More tea?”

  “Thank you, no,” I said. “We have kept you from your work for too long.” I stood, gathering my bag. “You are fortunate to have such dedicated employees.”

  The old man smiled, a bit sadly, it seemed to me, but didn’t answer. “Please apologize to Mr. Smith if he was treated less than courteously. I hope he was not hurt?”

  I did the translation for Bill, then Bill’s answer for Wei Ang-Ran. “He says he was not, but that if he had been, he would have deserved it.” Wei Ang-Ran smiled at that.

  “Please once more accept our apologies,” I said. “I hope we meet again soon under happier circumstances.”

  Wei Ang-Ran bowed, I bowed, Bill bowed. Wei Ang-Ran walked us to the heavy front door of Lion Rock Enterprises, and stood in the doorway watching us down the block. I wondered if that was politeness, or if he wanted to make sure we were really gone.

  “Where are we going?” I asked Bill as he headed left from the door. Daylight was now completely vanished. The mist had turned to a very fine rain, clouding streetlights, polishing pavement. I felt the tiny drops falling on my shirt, but I didn’t mind because it was just as hot out here in the dark as it had been in the sticky afternoon.

  “You’re the one who said we could walk back because now we knew the way.” He kept going, not fast but steadily, his eyes searching the empty pavements ahead as though he expected something.

  I hurried after him. “I also once tried to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge.”

  “Did I buy it?”

  “No, you were smarter then. And speaking of the past, you were never a longshoreman.”

  “I was a sailor,” he offered as our footsteps fell into their usual rhythm.

  “Even I know that’s not the same thing. And you don’t look sleepy to me. Not nearly sleepy enough to need a walk around the block.”

  “I’m not. As a matter of fact, I’m wired. That was a hell of a cup of tea.”

  “Iron Buddha tea,” I told him. “Gave you the strength to get up and do what had to be done?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And that was?”

  “I just wanted a look around. Wasn’t that why we went there?”

  “Of course that was why we went there. Find anything?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What?”

  “Iron Fist Chang.”

  I stopped still. “What?”

  “Come on. He’s probably still there.”

  I closed my mouth and caught up again. “What do you mean, you found Iron Fist Chang?”

  “I was—what did that guy say?—spying through windows. There’s a crew unloading crates and boxes, and one packing stuff up again in other boxes.”

  “The shipment coming in and the one going out.”

  “I guess. Anyway, between the forklift, guys yelling at each other, and the radio going, I didn’t hear that guy sneaking up on me.”

  “I’m not sure you can call it sneaking. You’re the one who was trespassing.”

  “If you want to look at it that way. Anyhow, Iron Fist’s on the unloading crew.”

  “You’re positive it’s him?”

  “I tailed him for a hour. I may not be able to tell you the color of his eyes but I sure as hell know the way he moves.”

  “He’s Chinese; his eyes are brown. What’s he doing here?”

  “Unloading crates. Maybe the stuntman business is slow right now.”

  “Let me rephrase that: What’s he doing here?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

  We had made our way to the other side of the block. The lighted windows above the loading dock in the midblock building would have told me without the little sign—this one in Chinese only—that this was the rear entrance to Lion Rock Enterprises. Both steel truck doors were down, but light leaked around their edges onto the steel-canopied concrete platform.

  We crossed the street to someone else’s doorway, someone who’d shut down and gone home at a decent hour, and in the small shelter of its recess settled in to wait. Bill leaned back against the door, hands in his pockets, perfectly still. His deliberate control, his restrained, tight-muscled calm, made me sure he was desperate for a cigarette, and only not lighting one so the glow wouldn’t be spotted from across the street. Some other time, I would have poked fun at him about that, about his ability to control the jitters but not the addiction they came from; but some other time, I’d have been sure he’d see what was funny. Right now, I wasn’t sure what he saw, so I just watched the rain fall steadily, illuminated by streetlights and the distant, pale windows of the housing project’s towers.

  “What makes you think he’ll come out this way?” I finally asked.

  “What’s his other choice, the front door? Laborers don’t use the front door. Anyway, the timeclock’s back
here. I saw it.”

  “How did you know that’s what it was?”

  “Certain things are the same all over the world.”

  True, I thought. And certain things are different. “And what makes you think he’s still in there?”

  “He’s on the unloading crew. They’re not finished.”

  “And what makes you think he’ll be out before morning?”

  His eyes moved to me, then back to Lion Rock. “They’re almost finished.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  After another few minutes, during which the rain fell and I shifted my weight and Bill didn’t move, I said, “This could explain how someone who wasn’t in the family knew about the jade. Something as simple as Wei Ang-Ran mentioning his great-nephew’s inheritance to his trusty employees.”

  “Did you get the feeling,” Bill asked, “that he trusted that particular employee?”

  I looked at him. I couldn’t really see his face, shadowed against the dim streetlights, the far-off windows and the falling rain. “I did think there was something strange in how they spoke to each other,” I said. “But that was in Chinese.”

  “If you can’t understand the words, you look for other things.”

  It was half an hour before Iron Fist Chang came out the rear door, in the company of three other sturdy, tiredlooking men. The rain had changed back to a drifting mist by then. Through it we watched them light cigarettes and amble down the stairs, one turning right at the sidewalk with a brief wave, the other three heading left.

  “Look,” I said, following the three-man group with my eyes. “That’s your pal Tony, the one who wanted to beat you up.”

  “Right. And the one in the white tee shirt’s Iron Fist Chang.”

  “Who’s the huge one?”

  “You’re asking me?” he said, gratuitously irritable. I thought about how long it had been since he’d had a cigarette and tried not to get annoyed.

  Bill and I gave the group a block’s lead—there wasn’t much chance of losing them on sidewalks this deserted—and followed along.

  The three talked and smoked—I wondered if that drove Bill nuts—as they turned left, right, left again, then crossed a wide street where I imagined the traffic, now sparse, must be a nightmare during the day.

  “Don’t you suppose this is something Mark Quan would be interested in?” I asked Bill as we walked. “Iron Fist working for Lion Rock?” We were keeping close to the buildings a block behind, for the shadows.

  “I bet.”

  “But we didn’t call him.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Because we figured he’d tell us not to do anything on our own,” I said. “Cops being cops all over the world. And we figured if he took over he’d come on like gangbusters and scare them off. Cops being cops all over the world. But I wonder if we’re right?”

  Bill looked over at me, then returned his gaze to the men ahead. “Cops are cops,” he said. His voice, it seemed to me, was quiet and calm, controlled in the same way his stillness in the doorway had been. “All over the world.”

  The three men up ahead suddenly stopped. The big one, the one whose name we didn’t know, glanced at his watch. They held a quick sidewalk debate. Iron Fist took out a cell phone and made a call, stepping away from the others. Finished, he stuck the phone into his pocket. The group turned to double back in our direction.

  They were over a block way, but Bill and I pressed against a steel gate at the mouth of an alley as they came down the sidewalk. My heart raced. If they passed us it was big trouble; we weren’t hidden well enough for that, and we had nowhere to go. I tried on and threw out ideas, grabbed wildly for ways to talk ourselves out of a confrontation with three muscled men on an empty night street if it came to it. Where were those teeming Hong Kong masses when you needed them?

  But at the corner they made a left, down a smaller street, into an area of lit shop windows and glowing signs.

  We gave them some distance, following in time to see them turn into one of the storefronts in the middle of the block. Sheets of paper Scotch-taped to the windows of the fluorescent-lit establishment advertised various cheap soups and noodle dishes. Like a lot of shops in Hong Kong, this place kept its door propped open as though air-conditioning were free, presumably so the scent of ginger and the hiss of frying dough could reach out into the street and coil around passersby along with the cool air.

  It worked on us, even though the closest we came was across the narrow street.

  “Jesus,” Bill muttered. “That smells good.”

  “Not to mention how not hot and not sticky it feels.”

  He looked at me. “You’re really miserable, aren’t you?”

  “Miserable? It’s a hundred degrees out and I’m just about soaked, only I can’t tell if it’s rain or sweat. You’re not even uncomfortable?”

  “As a matter of fact it’s just occurred to me I’m uncomfortably hungry.”

  I sighed. Across the street, the three men were ensconced at a table in the back of the noodle shop, drinking beers and exchanging remarks with the tee-shirted chef. Well, we certainly couldn’t eat there.

  But this was Hong Kong. And night was falling. According to everything I’d heard and read, we might have another option.

  I peered up and down the street, and sure enough, two blocks on, where this street ended at another one, I spotted what I’d hoped to see.

  “Well,” I said to Bill, “as usual, your needs come first” I headed up the block.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” Bill said, striding to catch up with me. “Whose bright idea was it to come to Hong Kong in July in the first place?”

  “Grandfather Gao’s.”

  “You notice he’s not here.”

  “Yes,” I said, turning to look at him. “I noticed that.”

  The street where Iron Fist’s dining establishment sat ended at a curved and even narrower one, and if Bill thought Iron Fist’s place smelled good, he must have been in heaven on Hong Ping Street.

  During the day this area was probably a lot like the one around the Lion Rock warehouse. The buildings were the same squared-off red brick or sooty concrete, with big steel-and-glass windows where there was manufacturing, small windows or none at all where the space was used for warehouses. But now, at night, something entirely different had taken over.

  The guidebooks, and my mother, had told me about this: the night markets of Hong Kong.

  Where I grew up, in New York’s Chinatown, they practically roll up the sidewalks at night. At least, they roll up the action on them. The restaurants stay open, but the fishmongers, the vegetable merchants, the jewelers and tee-shirt men and toy sellers all pack up their tables, their boxes, and their awnings. The ones prosperous enough to actually have storefronts pull down their steel shutters, and they all disappear into the night.

  When I was a kid I used to wonder where they all went. Standing here on Hong Ping Street, I’d have believed it if you’d told me they all come here.

  Red-and-blue-striped plastic fabric thrown up on aluminum poles made impromptu rain shelters crowding both sides of the street. Under them, hawkers shouted the virtues of wares mounded on folding tables. Strings of bulbs glowing with power stolen from utility poles brought out the garish colors of fake Calvin Klein tee shirts and knock-off Swatches. Women’s bright flowered dresses swayed from cables overhead while windup toys spitting sparks from their eyes chased each other across tabletops, tripping over cheap eyeglasses, rubber sandals, and painted teapots. From above displays of portable CD players speakers blared dueling Canto-pop and American rap into the crowd.

  That was the scene along Hong Ping Street. A bit more to the point, however, was what was happening right here at the intersection.

  With the market stretching away in both directions, a series of temporary fabric roofs had staked their claims to small sections of asphalt, each holding half a dozen tables set around a huge bubbling wok. The crowd of shoppers was so thick, even on this soggy nigh
t, that it was difficult to make our way to seats at one of these improvised restaurants. Bill drew some stares as we sat down at a table, especially from the four men already there, but staring isn’t rude in Chinese culture, and this was a good spot to eat in and watch the door to Iron Fist’s restaurant from. When the men came out I expected they’d head back to the street we’d all been on when they’d suddenly detoured for dinner. Bill and I, if we hurried, would be able to make it back there after them in time to see them reach the corner and make their next decision.

  The young woman at the wok, her hair plastered to her forehead and neck by sweat, called over to us for our order. Bill finally got to light a cigarette as I took a quick look at the bowls in front of her, each holding mounds of chopped vegetables, fish, or meat, and shouted back. She dumped this and that into the wok, stirred as the wok sizzled, then added rice and kept stirring. With a flat paddle she scooped the mixture into two big bowls, squirted some sauce on them, and left the wok just long enough to bring them over. I asked how much, she told me, and I paid her.

  In the U.S. you couldn’t have made a phone call for what this dinner cost.

  “What are we eating?” Bill asked, squashing his cigarette out. The men at our table watched intently as he picked up his chopsticks. “Smells great.”

  It did. “Fried rice with scallions, tofu, cabbage, and peas.” I tasted mine. The saltiness of soy sauce blended with a dark, mushroomy taste. “I don’t know what’s in the sauce.”

  I reached into the center of the table for the communal teapot, the same stainless-steel pot as on countless restaurant tables back home. I poured steaming tea into a cup, swirled it around, and dumped it onto the street; then I did the same for another cup, and poured tea for me and Bill. My mother still cleans cups this way, the traditional way, in Chinatown restaurants; legally mandated high-temperature automatic dishwashers mean nothing to her.

  The men across from us dug their own chopsticks into their own fried rice, resuming their meal but not taking their eyes off Bill.

  “Well, find out,” Bill said, swallowing. “So you can cook this for me when we get home.”

  “Oh, right.”