by S. J. Rozan
That was a bit of a surprise. “She’s gone out?”
“Early this morning. And since then she has called to say she would be detained, and to expect her later this afternoon.”
“Where did she go?”
“She had business with another client that could not be put off.”
On a Sunday? When there’s a kidnapped kid whose parents you’ve put yourself in charge of?
“There was nothing she could do here in any case,” Steven Wei added. I thought maybe I heard in his voice relief that he was, for just a while, alone with his wife. Or maybe I was projecting.
“Nothing,” I told Bill when I hung up. “Except Natalie Zhu went out. To take care of some business, another client who couldn’t wait.”
“Really?”
“Fact or opinion?”
“Fact.”
“That’s what Steven said.”
“Opinion.”
“Not likely.”
“You think whatever she’s doing has something to do with this case?”
“I think wild horses couldn’t have pulled her out of that apartment if it didn’t.”
The main headquarters building of the Hong Kong Police Department, back down the hill and not far from the water, looked like any other Hong Kong skyscraper. An expanse of gray-blue glass, midday sun glinting off it, faced an avenue of roaring traffic. Our cab screeched to a halt at the curb and bounced forward and back while I peeled off bills for the fare. Inside the building, the usual too-cool air-conditioning greeted us like an old friend. Not so the stone-faced police officer at the front desk, who inquired after our business in a way that implied that whatever we said was probably a ruse his vigilance would get to the bottom of. I explained our names and our mission in Cantonese to see if it would soften him up. It didn’t, but a curt phone call upstairs got us visitor badges and a grudging explanation of where to find the elevator and what floor to get off on.
Mark Quan was waiting for us when the elevator opened. He wore a gold badge on his belt and an automatic in a shoulder holster. He said nothing except, “Come this way,” so we followed him through a blue-carpeted warren of office partitions. At scattered desks uniformed and plainclothes cops, mostly Chinese, a few Westerners, mostly men, a few women, typed on computer keyboards, drank from mugs, and insulted each other with the same offhand ease you’d see at the Fifth Precinct on Elizabeth Street, back home. They looked up when we passed, saw we had a cop with us, and went back to what they’d been doing. We were another cop’s case, another cop’s problem.
We stopped at a glass-walled conference room on the window side of a corridor. Mark Quan pushed the door open and held it. I hoped he would give us a map to find our way back to the elevator when we were through. I moved past him into the room, noticing the scent of his aftershave: green and citrusy, not a bit perfumed, but fresh as morning. I wasn’t really surprised that I noticed. I’m a detective; noticing details is my job. I was a little surprised, though, that Mark Quan had so clearly just shaved, in the early afternoon.
I crossed to the window. Below us, water sparkled and ferries plowed and sampans bobbed and yatchs both under sail and under power skimmed across the harbor to the outlying islands for a Sunday picnic. A regatta was going on far off on the horizon, small boats with bright-striped sails all swooping together this way and that like a flock of birds. Beyond the harbor, Kowloon’s gray buildings shimmered in the heat and its round hills blurred into the blue of the distant sky.
Mark pointed Bill and me to chairs and we sat in them, with him across the table. Our backs were to the window and Mark faced it, the brightness of the Hong Kong afternoon lighting his face. That was a good sign, I thought: If he were really mad and wanted to show us who was boss, the first thing he’d do is put us facing the window, so we’d be the ones who had to squint.
Mark looked from me to Bill, then asked, “You want some tea?”
“I just had some,” I said, and in the spirit of full disclosure added, “with L. L. Lee.”
“Great,” Mark said. He turned to Bill. “You?”
“You have coffee?”
“No, but the tea’s so old you might not be able to tell the difference.”
“No, thanks.”
I said, “This is where you tell us we’re trouble, right? Or, in trouble?”
Mark shook his head. “Pointless. And not true.” He picked up a pencil, one of six set carefully around the table next to six ruled pads. The HKPD, ready for anything. “I’m the one in trouble.”
“You are? Why?”
“Well, not yet. I probably have twenty-four hours. After that people will start asking why I haven’t cleared the Chang case yet.”
“Iron Fist? You work that fast here?”
“We don’t do wholesale homicide in Hong Kong. Murder is a retail business here. They expect us to be efficient with it.” He bounced the pencil on the polished table. “I’m supposed to be out pounding the streets already. You don’t get a lot of chances like this on this Department. Every other cop in the joint is jealous. I mean, I wasn’t even on duty, just on call.” He couldn’t suppress a quick grin, the look of a man whose lemons had turned to lemonade all by themselves. “But,” he said, “I stumble, they take it away from me.” He lifted his eyes to the window. From where he sat he could see the gray buildings, the hills, China. He looked once more at us. “I don’t want to lose this chance.”
He threw the pencil down and leaned back in his chair. “But,” he said again, “I go out and look around, I guarantee I won’t be more than ten minutes on the street before someone tells me Chang worked at Lion Rock. I run across Tony Siu there, I have to pick him up because he’s known. Between Siu and old man Wei, someone’s going to tell me something I can’t ignore. And then we have what we didn’t want: the Wei kidnapping public and the Department involved.”
I looked at him, the Alabama-born cop with the American accent, a man surrounded by people who didn’t want him to do, didn’t think he could do well, the job he loved.
I said hopefully, “Maybe Iron Fist’s murder has nothing to do with the kidnapping.”
Mark and Bill both gave me looks, the looks I’d have given either one of them if they had suggested such a thing. Iron Fist had, after all, been at the temple. “Well,” I forged on, “maybe Tony Siu doesn’t know about the kidnapping, anyway. And maybe Wei Ang-Ran won’t say anything, and you won’t officially know.”
Mark shook his head. “It’ll still be obvious cops are poking around Lion Rock. That might scare the kidnappers, or piss them off because they’ll think the family called us in. You heard from the Weis lately?”
“We just talked to them. They haven’t heard anything from anyone.”
“That’s not good.”
“No.”
“Or,” said Bill, “maybe it is.”
Mark and I turned to him. “How?” I asked. “It sounds to me like nobody’s calling because … something’s gone wrong. Because nobody has anything to trade.”
“Meaning Harry’s dead,” Bill said bluntly. “But maybe not. Maybe nobody ever had anything to trade.”
“What are you saying?”
“Look at it,” he said. “It’s been screwy from the beginning. Us getting buzzed up. That park in the middle of the morning. Two demands, equally irrational. And no one willing to produce proof. What if neither of those people has the kid?”
“Then what’s this about?” I said. “And where’s Harry?”
“I don’t know.”
“You have a theory?” Mark asked.
“No. But if I had one, Maria Quezon would be at the middle of it.”
I gave him a long look. “Even if she is,” I said, “that doesn’t mean everything’s okay.”
He returned my look. “Obviously,” he said slowly, “everything’s not okay. I’m just saying that maybe Harry is.”
Maybe, I thought, maybe. I didn’t want to say that, though. I wasn’t sure what I did want to say, so I let
my eyes have a chance, saying something to his. Mark waited. Briefly, there was only silence and the sparkling of the harbor.
Then Bill moved his eyes from mine. In a straightforward, businesslike tone, he said, “But I do have a theory about something else.”
He drew a cigarette from his pocket and looked at Mark. Mark shrugged and pointed behind Bill to an ashtray sitting guiltily on the windowsill. Bill leaned back and reached for it.
“Did you know L. L. Lee does business with Lion Rock?” Bill asked Mark, shaking his match out.
“He told you that?”
I didn’t know where Bill was heading, but I gave Mark a brief outline of my conversation with L. L. Lee, finishing with Lee’s advice about Lion Rock: “He pretty much warned me to stay away from the place.”
A female cop in a uniform skirt hurried down the corridor, giving Mark a smile and a wave as she passed. He smiled back. Skirts were not flattering on cops, I decided. Mark said, “Well, I didn’t know, but I’m not surprised. Lion Rock imports from China, Lee deals in Chinese antiquities.”
“And Strength and Harmony has guys working at Lion Rock. Tony Siu and his buddy. And maybe Iron Fist,” I said.
Mark shook his head. “Not Iron Fist. I did some checking with the Triad Task Force. Word is he wasn’t bright enough, or he was too nice a guy, depending on if you’re talking to his enemies or his friends. But Tony Siu definitely, and that other guy, Big John Chou. Chou’s not management material like Siu, but he’s an all-purpose thug. I wonder if Strength and Harmony runs a protection racket on Lion Rock?” he said thoughtfully. “Lee puts his bums inside, then gets some nice discount on his goods for keeping them in check? Maybe he was guarding his own turf when he warned you off.”
Bill said, “I think he was guarding something else.”
“What else?”
Bill shifted in his chair, recrossing his legs. “I had a good look at his shop,” he said. “I don’t know all that much about Chinese antiquities, but I’ve seen some of those things before. Particularly those clay buildings. They had some at a couple of museum shows over the last few years—that show from Taiwan,” he said to me. I nodded; I’d seen them, though I didn’t remember much about them. They were a little crude, a little somber, I thought: not nearly as appealing as my Tang horses. “And I know a gallery that shows them sometimes,” Bill went on. “It took me awhile to dredge up what I know about them, but I have. They’re what a friend of mine calls tomb trash.”
This was a phrase I didn’t know, and, I thought, an unattractive one. Mark was regarding Bill quizzically. Clearly the idea that Bill knew anything at all about Chinese antiquities had not crossed his mind. With me it was different. Though I’ve known him a long time now, there are still things about Bill that surprise me; but they’re not the same things that surprise other people.
“Tomb trash?” Mark asked, and I chided myself for being secretly glad I wasn’t the only ignorant person in the room.
“Otherwise called burial art, but not made as art,” Bill said. “They’re for graves. They go back about a thousand years. You buried them with people so they could have a home—and chickens and ducks and servants—in the next world.”
Mark and I looked at each other. “We do that in paper now,” I said. “Not bury things, burn them. Money, and houses. And,” remembering my father’s funeral, “clothes. And kitchen things.” My father had been a chef, so my mother had bought and burned paper knives and a wok for him to use in the next world. And because he had never had a car but always wanted one, my oldest brother, Ted, had bought a red paper Ferrari, and burned that.
“So,” I asked, “you’re saying Mr. Lee’s buildings were dug up out of graves?”
“They must have been. And some of the other things in his shop—those little game-players, say.”
I thought of the happy little men at the table. “They sent friends along with you?”
“Everybody needs a friend,” Bill said. “But the point is, if the things in Lee’s shop are genuine, they’re a thousand years old. And it’s not legal to export them from China. Remember what the jeweler told us—this is a trade the government tries to stop?”
Mark and I were both silent a moment. Mark said slowly, “That’s true. During the Cultural Revolution they couldn’t smash things fast enough, the older the better. Now they’ve rediscovered them, and rediscovered that tourists will come to see them. The jeweler was right, you can’t export antiquities now.”
“But Lee’s selling them in the open in his shop,” I said. “How can it be legal to sell them here if it’s illegal to export them from China?”
“It’s legal to sell anything here,” Mark answered. “Except drugs, and even that was legal once. If you can get it in, you can sell it or ship it out.”
“But this is China, now. Don’t the same restrictions apply?”
Mark shook his head. “Special Administrative Region.”
“What does that mean?”
From Bill: “That means: whatever the capitalist running dog market will bear.”
Mark agreed. “It’s meant that for a hundred and fifty years, and they’re making too much money to change the rules now. Customs here is supposed to stop goods that are illegal to export from the country of origin, but if they miss them, tough luck Pro forma, Lee would have to have papers for his stuff, but it can’t be very hard to forge those.”
“What kind of papers?”
Bill, again: “Something that says the things he’s selling have been floating around outside China for long enough that the government can’t demand them back.”
“Old family papers,” said Mark. “Customs stamps from eighty years ago. Bills of sale proving something was bought in Rangoon in 1953.”
Bill said, “And I’m sure he does. I asked him where he got these things—who would give up such treasures, I wanted to know. Old Hong Kong families, he told me. Or Persian traders. Persian traders.” He shook his head and Mark rolled his eyes. I gave a disbelieving snort, but no one noticed me.
“So,” Mark said, “what you’re saying is, L. L. Lee’s goodies are newly coming out of China and someone’s bringing them out for him.”
“And who better to do that than an established import-export firm?”
“Lion Rock. In the furniture crates.”
“In the furniture,” Bill amended. “The buildings come apart.” I thought of him in L. L. Lee’s shop, lifting the roof off, removing the top story of the courtyard house. “All the pieces are relatively small,” he said. “Tape them up in dark corners, slip them into drawers. Bribe an official now and then not to look too closely. If people are raiding graves, they’re shipping out stuff there’s no record of, so no one’s going to be looking for it.”
“Then when it gets here,” Mark said, getting into the spirit of the thing, “Lion Rock bribes the customs people on this side to release the shipment quickly, without examining it much. This is Hong Kong, time is money, the respectable Wei brothers have customers waiting.”
“And your customs people are probably preoccupied with drugs like everyone else,” Bill said.
“They are. And if Lion Rock were bringing in drugs the Wei brothers would be a lot richer, and the bribes would be bigger. Any customs officer could see that.”
“So,” said Bill, “they move Lion Rock’s stuff to the front of the line. They take a few extra bucks home and they don’t have to start crowbarring crates.”
“And they can get back to looking for the big drug bust that’ll make their name.”
It was time for me to elbow my way back into this conversation. “That would explain why Wei Ang-Ran shut the warehouse door. And why Tony Siu was so unhappy with Bill looking in the windows. Because they were unloading the shipment from China.”
Bill and Mark, as though they’d just remembered I was in the room, looked at me and nodded. Okay, you guys are so smart, I thought. “And?” I said. They both looked at me. “So what does it mean?” I asked. “What about H
arry?”
Smart guys. Neither of them had an answer to that.
“But,” Mark said, “one thing it means is that I need to talk to Wei Ang-Ran. I can’t avoid it”
“You’re going to Lion Rock?”
He thought. “No. I’ll call him and ask him to come here. ‘To assist with our inquiries.’ A neat phrase we learned from the Brits. That’s what you guys are doing now, by the way. And I want to ask you guys to do something else, too.”
“What’s that?” I asked, although I had a feeling I knew.
“Except for staying in contact with the Weis, could you back off? I have a homicide, maybe smuggling, possible Triad involvement, an unreported kidnapping. What I don’t have is any way to explain it if you either screw things up or get hurt.”
“We won’t—”
“But you might get hurt.”
He grinned. I met his eyes and to my surprise felt my cheeks warm up. Well, I thought, I’ve never been thrown off a case so elegantly before.
I didn’t want to agree. I didn’t see how we could do anything else. I didn’t know exactly what to do.
Then, in the Hong Kong Police Department fifteenth floor conference room above the blue and sparkling harbor, Bill’s cell phone rang.
ten
The phone’s ring electrified the air. Just about everyone we knew in Hong Kong with Bill’s number also had mine, and most of them were more likely to call me than him. Except one. Bill fumbled the phone from his pocket, flipped it open and barked, “Hello!”
Silence. Then Bill, leaning forward, took a breath and answered what had been said to him, calmly, softly, and in Tagalog.
I grabbed one of the HKPD’s pencils and scribbled Maria Quezon on one of the yellow pads, showed it to Mark. I added, Or her sister. He nodded.
The next few minutes were hallucinatory: silence, alternating with Bill, someone I knew well, speaking a language I couldn’t understand at all, in a glass-walled room with ships floating by in the harbor on one side and Chinese cops strolling through the corridor on the other. I didn’t know what Bill was saying or hearing, whether this call was good or bad, whether everything would be all right now or just get worse.