by S. J. Rozan
“The more I know, the more I can see trouble coming before it gets here.”
“And then what?”
“‘Of the thirty-six stratagems, the best one is ‘running away,’” I said, quoting a famous line from the Three Kingdoms period.
“Boy,” Mark Quan said. “You sound like Grandfather Gao.”
“I’m a little shocked myself,” I admitted. “I’m not sure where I dug that up from.”
“Chinese school?”
“Probably. Did you have Chinese school in Birmingham?”
“Every day after school-school, when I was a kid. There were only eight or nine of us, in old Mr. Ko’s house. He tried to teach us the old songs, painting, calligraphy, all that. I liked the music, but my calligraphy was awful. Mr. Ko said pigeons made more legible characters scratching in the dirt than I did with a brush and ink.”
“That’s about how bad mine was. But what a mean thing to say.”
“It didn’t make me mad, only curious. I walked around for months after that trying to read what the pigeons were writing.”
In the end, Mark Quan promised to call me if I promised to keep out of trouble. I negotiated to try to keep out of trouble—I didn’t want to get to be an earthworm too, for not keeping a promise—and we hung up. I pulled off my clothes, slipped under the covers, and just managed to turn off the light before I was completely, totally asleep.
eight
When the phone woke me the next morning I had absolutely no idea where I was. I didn’t actually even know it was morning, until the white streak glowing in the gap where the curtains didn’t quite meet told me. I stuck my hand out from the sheets and groped for the thing making the odd double ring. That was a sound I’d only heard in movies up until yesterday.
“Hello?” I croaked into the receiver when I found it, and then, as a flash of insight finally hit me, added, “Wai?”
“Breakfast in twenty minutes,” Bill announced.
“No way.”
“Half an hour?”
“Maybe. What time is it?”
“Eight-thirty.”
I pushed myself into a sitting position. “You sound suspiciously chipper. I thought I was the morning person around here.”
“I’ve been up since six. I went out and walked around. I have an idea.”
“You did? You do?”
“I did and do. Meet me in the coffee shop in half an hour and I’ll tell you about it.”
So I did, and he did.
“I want to go look for the amah,” he said, buttering a piece of toast.
I sipped my tea—good strong black English tea, though the so-called coffee shop, actually an elegant oasis of potted plants and silver samovars, also offered various scented Chinese and green Japanese teas to suit every tourist palate—and considered this.
“Well, Natalie Zhu did hire us to do that,” I said. “And if there’s anything to my crackpot theory from last night, the amah would be key. But I’m not sure this actually qualifies as an idea.”
“Why not?”
“For one thing, if the kidnapping’s real, then she’s being held wherever Harry is, and we won’t be able to find her.”
“But if we can find her, it’ll mean it’s not real. And we might begin to get a handle on what’s going on.”
I dipped a steamed pork dumpling into vinegary ginger soy sauce and bit into it. The pungent meat was wrapped in dough of the perfect thickness and doneness. I washed it down with tea and attacked the next one. “Our theory was that Natalie Zhu hired us to find the amah just to keep us out of the way,” I reminded Bill. “Because it was something she thought we couldn’t do.”
“I know,” he said. “I think she’s wrong.”
“What do you have in mind?”
He salted his scrambled eggs. “Last night you asked me about living in the Philippines. That started me thinking. One of the kids I knew there, he had four aunts working here. They would get together on their day off with other women from their neighborhood in Manila and write letters home. I remember that because he used to tell me the funny stories his aunts put in their letters. We thought Hong Kong must be the weirdest place in the world, if even half of those stories were true.”
“Lucky for them they all had the same day off.”
“That’s the point. They all do.”
“All do what?”
“All the Filipinas. They’re heavy Catholics. They all had Sundays off. They’d go to Mass and then meet for lunch on the Hong Kong side, in the park by Statue Square. I asked around this morning. Seems that’s still true.”
“And you’re thinking, today is Sunday?”
“Bingo.”
“They may all have Sundays off,” I said, “but they can’t all go to the same park for lunch anymore. Aren’t there like a hundred thousand of them?”
“Uh-huh,” he said. “And they all still do.”
I finished my dumplings before Bill polished off his eggs and bacon. While I waited for him, I called Franklin Wei’s hotel on my cell phone. Neither Franklin nor Steven had called me yet, which didn’t mean they hadn’t spoken to each other, just that I wasn’t on the top of either of their lists. The hotel connected me with Franklin’s room.
“Hello?”
“It’s Lydia Chin,” I said, nibbling on a strip of bacon I’d liberated from Bill’s plate.
“Oh,” Franklin said. “I was going to call you but I wasn’t sure you’d be up yet.” He sounded a little less brash, more distant, than yesterday.
“Did you speak to Steven?”
“Late last night. He told me about Dad’s jade.”
“And asked if you were the one who made the switch?”
“Yes.”
“And were you?”
“I—no, of course not.”
“I wasn’t either. Just for the record.”
“He said you’d said that.”
“But he doesn’t believe me.”
“I’m not sure he believes me either. He’s in a bad position. Why should he believe anybody?”
Well, I thought, he could believe me because I really didn’t have anything to do with it.
“He said Grandfather Gao said it wasn’t him either,” Franklin Wei went on. “He also told me the phony jade is worth more than the real one?”
“Seems that way. Do you have any idea what’s going on?”
“God, no.”
“Why didn’t one of you call me last night, after you’d spoken to each other? Steven promised you would.”
“It was two A.M. I couldn’t sleep; I’d been out to a club. I got his message and called right away when I got back. We decided there was no point in waking you at that hour to tell you nothing. Have you spoken to him today?”
“No. That’s why I’m calling you. I don’t want to get them all excited when the phone rings, and then it’s only me.”
“I know,” he said. “I was dying to know what was going on last night but I didn’t want to call for the same reason. That’s why I finally went out.”
“I understand you did call yesterday, though,” I said. “To offer them money, for the ransom.”
“Well, yeah.”
“That was generous of you.”
“Well, money,” he said. “I mean, this is my brother’s kid.”
After breakfast Bill and I left the hotel, bracing ourselves for the moment the revolving door expelled us into the heat of the Hong Kong morning. Sunday in Hong Kong, I discovered, was not all that much different from Saturday, my only point of comparison. We headed for the ferry along the same streets we’d taken yesterday, and though fewer of the people charging along were dressed in business clothes, the traffic was as relentless and the jackhammers were once again in full rattling voice. I had showered and put on loose tan slacks and a crisp white cotton shirt, and I was walking around in sandals, but I could feel the film of sweat start on my forehead before we’d gone half a block.
“Hot here,” I said to Bill.
&n
bsp; “Great, huh?” was his answer.
We threaded through the crowds of people, mostly Chinese, all intent on being somewhere other than where they were and getting there fast. As I hurried with them I said something to Bill and got no answer, I turned back and saw that he’d stopped to light a cigarette and was a few yards behind. I waited, watching him as he shook out the match and made his way along the sidewall. He was a head taller than almost everybody else, and muscular in a broad-shouldered sort of way instead of slight like most of the people around us. But that didn’t keep them from pushing and shoving past him as though he were some kind of moving park statue left over from colonial days, some large Western figure of no current importance whose name no one remembered anymore.
“You okay?” I asked as he reached me.
“Sure,” he said, raising an eyebrow. “Do I look not okay?”
“You look tall,” I said.
“Sorry. I’ve been meaning to work on that”
“No problem.”
We dropped our coins in the turnstile and went up the stairs and down the ramp to the ferry, old hands at this now. We took seats at the front and watched the Hong Kong Island skyline swell as it approached.
Yesterday’s rain was just a memory. A few high wispy clouds floated over Victoria Peak and I could see some more far out to sea, but Kowloon, the harbor, and Hong Kong Island glittered and sparkled in the hot, bright sun. Later in the day, as car exhaust, cooking fumes, and smoke from factories with Sunday shifts swirled and rose, the air would probably thicken and blur, but for now the shadows were sharp and the sky was about as blue as anything I’d ever seen.
“I called Mark Quan last night,” I said to Bill. “After you left. I thought he should know about the jade.”
“What did he say?”
“He’s going to call the NYPD.”
“About the jade?”
“About Franklin.” I told him about Mark’s idea that Franklin would have to be working with someone in Hong Kong to set up the kidnapping, if he’d really done that.
“Okay,” Bill said. “That’s probably a good idea, getting the phone calls. But tell me this: If Franklin is behind this, why did he come to Hong Kong? He wouldn’t be on anybody’s mind at all if he hadn’t shown up here.”
“Good question.” The ferry passed a fishing boat with nets mounded on its deck. “And why did he offer Steven money for the ransom, if he’s trying to make money off the ransom?”
“So he could look like a good guy and still make a million bucks. It’s actually a pretty clever move.”
“Okay. But it still doesn’t explain the jade.”
“As far as that goes, there is one dumb, mundane explanation I thought of last night.”
“Yes?”
“Old Mr. Wei, at some point, gets into a bind. Sells his jade for some quick cash. He’s embarassed so he doesn’t tell anyone. His ship comes back in, he buys another piece as close to the original as he can find. Figures no one but him will ever know.”
I looked at Bill as the ferry cut its engine and headed for its slip. “I hate that.”
“Why? It knocks one of these problems right out of the box.”
“The one that Grandfather Gao and Mark Quan think is the key to the whole thing.”
“Maybe they’re wrong.”
“Maybe,” I sighed. “Or maybe it would all become clear to me if I thought in Chinese.”
“In that case,” he said, “it will never be clear to me.”
We walked the same way as yesterday, along the covered walkway, past the rickshaw men, through the wide tiled passage under the street. But this time when we came out we didn’t hail a cab. We didn’t need to; the underground passage came out just where we needed to be.
And Bill was right.
We stood on the edge of Statue Square. On the far side of the paved and fountained plaza, behind a colonial-era building with stone columns and a portico, a park stretched away to our left. Palm and pine trees waved in the breeze, walkways arched over roads, and skybridges threaded tall buildings together. On our right loomed the Mandarin Oriental, still imperturbable, as placid and unflustered on this bright morning as she had been yesterday when traffic zoomed around her through the misty afternoon. There was no traffic today: The avenue was closed. But the Mandarin Oriental seemed uninterested in the change. Stolid, regal, and focused on higher things, she took no notice whatsoever of the young women in their bright-colored clothes who sat on rattan mats or newspapers or the occasional folding chair tucked against her flanks, in the shade of her awnings and her pedestrian bridge, on the wide walls of the fountain pool in the square beside her, on the paving stones, benches, paths, and every other surface in the square and the park, on the sidewalks and the closed street itself as far as the eye could see.
There were thousands of them. Mostly they clustered in small groups, five, ten, a dozen; mostly they were animated, giggling, talking, handing photos around; mostly, they were young, energetic, smoothing their hair as the breeze mussed it up and laughing in the sun.
And mostly, they were eating. The aromas of roast meats and sauces pungent with unfamiliar spices made my mouth water, and as I watched plastic containers being popped open and paper plates being passed I wondered how many breakfasts I could really eat. Here and there a group was done with their meal, or maybe was not starting until they finished the business of prayer Quiet circles of young women held each others’ hands and stood, heads down, silently or speaking in whispered unison. And scattered through the massive crowd, reaching for the other extreme, CDs played while women laughed and waved and called to each other, taught each other new steps in dances to the music of home.
I stood on the edge of this sea of women, reluctant to wade in. “We’ll be intruding,” I said to Bill.
He looked in the same direction I was looking, out over the square and the park. “We usually do,” he said. “That’s pretty much our job.”
That was something I couldn’t argue with. “How are we planning to do this?” I asked.
“We stroll through the crowd asking if anyone knows Maria Elena Quezon from Cabagan.”
“I’m beginning to get that needle-in-a-haystack feeling.”
“I don’t think it’s that bad. I’m betting they get together in hometown groups, the way my friend’s aunts did. Someone must know where the women from Cabagan hang out.”
“Okay,” I said, still dubious, “but what makes you think that even if we find someone who knows her, they won’t think we’re some sort of immigration officials or something and they won’t talk to us?”
“Because like Mark Quan said, both the good news and the bad news is no one would ever take us for locals. I’ll say I knew her family when I lived in the Philippines.”
“You think that’ll work?”
“If I say it in Tagalog.”
I looked at him. “You remember enough Tagalog to do that?”
“You can’t hang around with the local delinquents if you don’t speak their language.”
So we stepped into the ocean of laughing young women and Bill spoke to them, group by group, in a language I couldn’t understand. Their eyes widened in amazement, they smiled and answered and we moved on. Sometimes a woman responded not in Tagalog, whose very sounds and cadences were strange to me, but in Spanish, which, though I didn’t speak it, was familiar from the streets of New York. Bill switched into easy Spanish then, and the women beamed with delight. Not part of these conversations, I watched the young women, their surprise and amusement at the tall Westerner who spoke both their languages; and I watched Bill, watched the small changes in his face, his hands and shoulders, as he shifted from one foreign way of speaking and thinking to another.
“Did you learn the language every place you lived?” I asked him after a time. We had stopped at a vendor’s cart for bottled water. The sun was standing almost directly overhead now and the crowd, almost unbelievably, had grown, as church services let out or late sleepers sh
eepishly arrived.
Bill wiped his forehead with the back of his hand and said, “I tried. I didn’t want to be an Army brat; I didn’t want to be an American. Language isn’t that hard when you’re a kid,”
“Do you still speak them all this well?”
“I don’t speak Tagalog well. They’re talking to me like you would to a six-year-old, and they think it’s a riot.” He took a long drink of water. “I never spoke much Thai, and I didn’t like German, but I bet I could still speak Dutch if I had to.”
“Dutch?”
“Sure. Hei, meisje, wil je even een sluipende tulp kopen?”
“What does that mean?”
He winked. “‘Hey, cutie, wanna buy a hot tulip?’”
I smacked him on the arm pro forma, and we went on. Bill’s mood had lightened; but it seemed to me the darkness was still there, lurking behind the sleep-, caffeine-, and in his case cigarette-fueled activity that kept us moving, gave us something to do. I hoped, mostly for Harry Wei, but partly also for Bill, that fishing in this ocean of young Filipinas would turn out to be more than just a way to idle away a sunny morning.
About a half an hour later, we had a catch.
We had left the sun-heated stones of Statue Square for the greener precincts of Chater Garden, where the young women, fastidiously avoiding the planted areas, were seated on every path, plaza, fountain, and footbridge. Their lunches and their CD players surrounded them, and the shopping bags they’d brought these things in hung from the garden fences. The shopping bags had come from home, their employers’ homes, and the Chater Garden fences were decorated with shopping bags carrying the names of the most upscale shops in the world: Bijan, Hermes, Armani, Tiffany bags had come here carrying spicy rice and Spanish music.
We had been walking through the crowd for almost two hours, and I was about ready to give it up and think of something else to do—something that involved air-conditioning—when we hit one group of young women where Bill’s question brought more than shrugs and apologetic smiles. A small, pretty woman, short-haired and quick, lit up at his question, asked him one in return, and laughed at his answer. They spoke some more, both smiling, and then he thanked her and we turned to leave. We didn’t stop at the next group, though, but headed up the path toward a pedestrian bridge.