by S. J. Rozan
Well, that’s what Natalie Zhu said you’d say. “She told us,” I said, “that she was saving him from danger.”
“Saving him? From what danger?”
“That’s something else she didn’t say. Do you have any idea?”
“I … no,” he said. “This is all difficult for me to understand. I just want my son to come home. Can you—?”
“I’ll do whatever I can,” I said. “How is Li-Ling?”
“Resting. With her condition, this has been very hard for her.”
“I’m sure. Go tell her what I said. I’ll call you as soon as I hear anything else.” Casually I asked, “Has Natalie Zhu come back, or called?”
“No. I expect her soon. Why do you have to wait until you hear from Maria? Why can’t you go to her, or to these people who know her? Who are these people? And why hasn’t she contacted us?”
“We can’t go to her,” I lied, although at that very moment, we were. “And I don’t know why she hasn’t called you.” Except that in one sense or another, she doesn’t trust you. “But tell me something else: Have you heard from anyone? Either party making ransom demands?”
“No. No one at all. We were beginning …” He trailed off, clearly reluctant to tell me what they’d been beginning to do, or more likely, to think. “How did you find these people, the ones who know Maria? You’re new to Hong Kong. How could you do something we could not do?”
Well, for one thing, you didn’t try.
“We were lucky,” I said. I decided it was time I got out of this conversation before the asides I was making to Steven in my head started coming out of my mouth. “Let me get off the phone, in case she calls again,” I said, feeling a little bad because that wasn’t about to happen, not on this phone, but I knew it would work. “I’ll call you as soon as I hear anything else, I promise. I just wanted to let you know.”
“Wait,” Steven said, but when I did, he didn’t have anything for me to wait for.
“The phone,” I said gently.
“Yes,” he finally said. “But you will call immediately when you hear something? Anything at all?”
“Yes,” I promised again. “Yes, I will.”
I hung up. Mark and I met each other’s eyes over the remains of reconstituted noodles.
“He sounded relieved,” I said. “Surprised. And confused.”
“That all makes sense.”
“So what’s not to trust?” I asked. “A family man of strong loyalties, a father worried sick. What’s on Maria’s mind?”
“Let’s hope your partner finds out.”
I was about to correct Mark, to say that Bill and I weren’t partners, we just worked together sometimes, but I stopped myself as I remembered that wasn’t true. It had been, for a long time; but a little while ago, things had changed. Boy, Lydia, I thought, the next thing you’ll forget is your own name. Well, it’s the damn harbor, I thought back. The windows and the glittering water and the charging, smelly traffic; the crowds and the incense and the small hushed shops; the kidnapped seven-year-old and the roast pigs at the temple; the street signs and store signs and bus signs all in Chinese.
“Are you okay?” Mark asked.
I was startled to hear his voice in all the swirling confusion. I realized I had closed my eyes. I opened them and there was no confusion, nothing swirling, just Mark’s solid desk and the office partitions and the quiet comings and goings of cops.
“Jet lag,” I said.
“It never stops,” he said, in a gentler voice than I’d heard him use before.
“Jet lag?”
“No. Hong Kong. You think if it just stopped for a minute, or even slowed down, you could get a handle on it, see what was going on around you. But it never does.”
I rubbed my forehead, surprised to discover the beginnings of a headache. “I feel like it keeps me from thinking,” I said. “Everything racing around. I feel like I can’t stop, either.”
“You can use it,” Mark said. “You can let it pull you along, instead of doing all the work yourself. Or you can keep still and let it flow right around you. But you have to keep your eyes on where you’re going, or you’ll drown here.”
If you knew where you were going, I thought wearily, that might work. Mark, watching me, said, “Maybe you should go back to the hotel and get some sleep.”
With Bill on some boat on the way to some cemetery island? I thought, you have to be kidding. Bill doesn’t even like boats, from when he was in the Navy. “No,” I said. “I can’t do that. But the hotel, that reminds me.” Without asking, I picked up the phone on his desk again. “I want to see if Grandfather Gao called me at the hotel.”
Mark made no move to stop me, probably because it was Grandfather Gao, so I dialed the Hong Kong Hotel. According to the desk clerk, I did have a message. He put me through to the voice mail in my room and I waited, prepared—maybe even a little hoping—to hear Grandfather Gao’s familiar calm voice.
But that’s not who it was.
At first, in fact, I had no idea who it was, although the scratchy Cantonese voice identified herself at once. “Mo Ruo is speaking. Come to Number Eleven, Po Kong Lane. I can tell you many things.” Then the hang-up click. It wasn’t a voice I recognized. Frowning, I pressed the button to replay the message, trying to pry the name Mo Ruo from the recesses of my brain. On the third replay I got it, and it sent a sizzle up my spine that thoroughly woke me up.
I hadn’t recognized her voice because I’d never spoken to her before, though I very much wanted to. Mo Ruo, the old lady prayer-seller from the temple at Wong Tai Sin.
As I hung up the phone Mark asked, “Who was it?”
Oh, I thought. No. Sorry. If I tell you, you’ll tell me not to go. This is the woman who may be able to tell us who sent Steven Wei to the temple, and you’ll tell me not to go.
“The front desk,” I said, lying out loud, apologizing silently. “Something about my room charges, but I can’t figure out exactly what they’re telling me. And you know what? I don’t care. I’ll worry about it later.”
I stuck my chopsticks back into my noodles, now cold and congealed. I poked them around a little, then stood. “I’m going out. I need to move. Maybe I will go back to the hotel. I’ll try to stay out of trouble,” I said, seeing Mark about to speak. “Let’s make a deal: I’ll call you as soon as Bill calls me, if you call me as soon as your cops call you.”
Mark stood also, and eyed me. “You sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine. Just antsy. What are you going to do now, bring Wei Ang-Ran in?” Maybe discussion of his next move would deflect any curiosity he might have about mine.
He nodded. “I’m going to call him right now. Do you think you can find your way out?”
“No problem,” I said, with more confidence than I felt. “Talk to you soon. Thanks for the so-called lunch.” I waved as I rounded the partition, and, with not so very many false moves and dead ends, worked my way out of the maze.
It would be best to get out of the building, I thought, before consulting my map. Not that I felt paranoid in any way, but it might also be good to walk a block or two, to where I couldn’t be seen from any of those big HKPD windows.
The dusty hot walk along Gloucester Road was like a stroll on a narrow, afterthought sidewalk next to any major expressway anywhere in the world. The cars roared and whished, honked and swerved, and I felt like a mutant life-form that had emerged unexpectedly and for which, therefore, no provision had been made.
Eventually, in the semishelter of a building’s recessed entrance, I pulled out the Kowloonside map. Po Kong Lane was no place I’d ever heard of, but my guess was that it was close to Wong Tai Sin temple. I studied that corner of the map, and eventually, in an area of twisting narrow streets dividing tiny uneven blocks one from another, I found it.
I took the ferry across the harbor and the subway up to the Wong Tai Sin stop, calculating that, as in New York, the subway would be faster than a cab, even on Sunday. Impatient with
what felt like the ferry’s unhurried, aimless drifting, I was right up in the front of the crowd at the ramp when we docked, and I hustled through the plaza where only yesterday morning I’d stood openmouthed by the water, bowled over by the vast Hong Kong skyline. Today I didn’t give it a look. I had someplace to go, and like everyone else in Hong Kong, getting where I was going was more important than being where I was.
The subway took forever to come (though my watch claimed it was only four minutes) and forever to get to Wong Tai Sin (though again, my watch, thinking it could fool me, said fifteen). And exactly what’s your hurry, Lydia, I asked myself. The old lady will be there or she won’t, and she’ll tell you something useful or she won’t, and what are you going to do about it if she does? Call Mark Quan at the police station, when you wouldn’t even tell him where you were going? Or call Bill on his cemetery island, when God only knows what he’d be in the middle of that you’d scare off with the ringing of a phone?
I checked my watch again as I climbed the subway stairs, making that now-familiar Hong Kong transition from too cold to much too hot. Bill wouldn’t even reach Cheung Chau for another twenty minutes, so there was no point in any of the worrying I was telling myself I wasn’t doing. At the top of the subway steps I stopped for a moment to look around. The temple was still there, its golden roofs glittering in the sun above the courtyard wall; and above the roofs loomed the high-rises with their laundry flying proudly in the breeze. I scurried up the temple steps and stuck my nose into the fortune-teller’s area to make sure Mo Ruo wasn’t there, chasing after Wong Tai Sin’s faithful with her paper prayers. Of course she wasn’t: If she’d been planning to come to work today, she would have told me to meet her there, and not in Po Kong Lane, which I expected was her home.
Sunday was a day of rest for much of Hong Kong’s workforce. The crowds in here were thicker than yesterday, and paper prayers seemed very much in demand. An odd day, I thought, for a prayer-seller to choose to take off.
I trotted back down the steps and headed east, past the temple forecourt, the incense stands and the clothing stalls where I’d bought my blouse, now hanging safely in the closet of the Hong Kong Hotel where it could embarass nobody. Beyond the stalls the view opened up to show, on the other side of six lanes of roaring traffic, a huge housing development of high-rise apartment buildings, and lower ones with restaurants and shopping malls on multilevels, and parks and playgrounds, movie theaters and an auditorium; and ahead, on both sides of the road, more of the same. Slim high-rises stood in clusters with shorter buildings at their feet, like tall reeds among heavier, more tangled aquatic plants, all growing through the surface of an asphalt lake. A few miles down the road, garish against the soft green hills, a stand of pencil-slim white-tiled buildings with side walls striped in bright red or blue or yellow had the smug look of cultivated plants in a formal garden overlooking the chaos at the edge of the wood.
Between them and the stand of high-rises closer to me, I could see an area the concrete gardeners seemed to have forgotten. Unruly stretches of corrugated metal roofs undulated above two- and three-story steel-sided huts patched together with tar paper and plywood. Bursting exuberantly through the rudimentary, twisting pathways between them, palms and broad-leafed rubber trees sent cheerfully chaotic nods to their more organized brethren in the carefully spaced rows of the housing development parks. Television antennas stuck out at inexplicable angles from the roofs, and balconies and walkways clung so precariously to the tilted walls that I wondered how anyone dared walk along them, much less operate or patronize the upstairs barbershops, tailor’s shops, shoemakers or dentists or TV-repair shops I could see from the raised sidewalk I stood on. I also wondered if this sprawling, untended patch had street signs at all, or if I was going to have to ask directions of this person or that as I wandered through it, searching for Po Kong Lane.
I descended from the sidewalk down the one steel stair that provided entry to this place over the moat of jungle shrubbery. Everyone else on my raised sidewalk hurried right by, taking the direct route from Modern Hong Kong to Modern Hong Kong. I was the only person going somewhere else.
I wasn’t the only person there when I got there, though. Like any jungle, this one was teeming with life.
Hidden by the palm trees and roofs from the sight of the raised sidewalk, but close enough that I was almost knocked over by the intensity of aroma the minute my feet hit solid ground and I left the belching traffic exhaust behind me, was this jungle’s Restaurant Row.
I could smell delicious things stir-frying in woks, deep-frying in oil, dry-frying on flat steel plates. Spices and soy sauce and sesame oil all called to me, reminding me what a poor excuse for lunch Mark Quan had provided. Ahead, facing a path crowded with customers, a row of tin huts without so much as shop signs or tables was doing robust business.
Me, too, I decided, making a beeline for a hut where skewers of root vegetables and squid sizzled in pots of hot oil. I ordered two skewers and got them in a flash. The proprietor slipped them into a paper bag for me, jutting his scraggly-bearded chin at the bottles and dishes of sauces, seeds and spices at the end of the counter. I paid him, thanked him, sprinkled sauce into the paper bag, and asked him for Po Kong Lane.
He gave me a good-natured, curious glance as he stirred and fried. “You want to see someone in Po Kong Lane?”
“Mo Ruo,” I told him.
“Ah? Do you know Mo Ruo?”
“No. Can you tell me how to find her?”
He smiled and shook his head. “Better if I don’t tell you how to find Mo Ruo. You’ll come back, complain, tell everyone my fish is no good.”
“I’ll tell everyone your fish is sensational.” I pulled a chunk of squid from a skewer with my teeth. It was salty, chewy, rich and spicy. “Whether I find her or not.”
“You say that now, because you haven’t found her.”
“Is she that bad?”
“Oh!” he said innocently. “She’s a venerable old woman. She’s someone’s mother.”
“But not yours.”
“No,” he grinned. “Not mine.” He pointed along the line of food stalls with his iron paddle. “Do you see the knife sharpener’s stall? Turn just beyond it. Walk to the wet market, go between the stalls to Po Kong Lane. Mo Ruo lives beyond the egg-seller’s.” He picked up another skewer, slid vegetables and squid down its length. “Maybe she’ll be there, maybe not. Don’t blame me if you don’t find her.” He dropped the skewer into the oil, where it hissed and spun. I could have sworn he winked at me, but winking is not particularly Chinese. “Don’t blame me if you do.”
The knife-sharpener’s, the wet market, the egg-seller’s. With each step I left behind the Hong Kong I was just coming to know and moved more deeply into the Hong Kong that used to be.
The knife-sharpener shooting sparks off the blade grinding on his wheel didn’t give me a glance as I passed his stall and turned right, through a lane so narrow I would have thought it led only to his backyard. I stepped carefully over the ditch flowing down the lane’s center. Brown water carried soggy leaves and stems, scraps of paper, bits of plastic wrapping, and other things I didn’t look closely at. The heavy, moldy smell of damp concrete and soggy earth was everywhere. A black chicken scurried out from a doorway and ran ahead of me down the path.
I could see the sky only in fragments: Above my head, walkways draped from building to building like steel jungle vines, and rooms hung across the alley as though gigantic birds had built swollen nests on the sides of the buildings, supporting them back to the walls here and there by clusters of random bamboo poles.
On my right and my left as I walked along, open doorways, some with doors and some without, led into dim passages, or sometimes directly into rooms. I could see tiled floors and slanted stairs, or wobbly-walled alleys with daylight at their ends, where they connected to other lanes or opened into washing-hung, junk-piled courtyards. Some rooms were homes, dark little one-room dwellings or relatively grander
downstairs kitchens with stairways to upstairs bedrooms. Toddlers crawled on floors; TV sets lit dark interiors with an eerie blue light. From one of the kitchens an old woman snapping the tops off green beans gave me a silent stare as I passed. A few doors down three undershirted men sat around a table and a fourth stood over them with a kettle in his hand in what I realized must be a tea shop; they stared also, cigarettes dangling from their lips or held between thin fingers. I didn’t return any of these stares; their stares weren’t rude, according to Chinese custom, but it would have been a direct challenge if I, a young female stranger, had stared in return, and I had no reason to get into a fight with any of these people.
Quite the contrary. If the wet market didn’t turn up soon, I’d have to give up on what the squid-seller told me and start asking the people around me for Po Kong Lane.
But I wasn’t quite ready to do that yet. I had been right to worry about the lack of street signs: Occasional characters painted on peeling walls were the only hint of where I was, but since none of the lanes or alleys they called out were on my map, they weren’t much help. But the squid man had said just keep going, so I kept going. And with a breathtaking abruptness that reminded me of how a meandering stream, minding its own business in the forest, can unexpectedly plunge over a waterfall, my dark little alley ended and shoved me out into the wet-market clearing.
A wet market is a place where vegetables and fruit are sold. It doesn’t have to be big, which this one was not, although the clearing was wide enough that a ragged-edged circle of blue sky, hemmed in by tilted walkways and leaning rooms, actually showed overhead. It doesn’t have to be clean, either, which this one was also not: Sodden leaves, squashed oranges, and broken melon husks littered the muddy ground around the warped plywood sheets set on oil drums that served as vendors’ tables. Mothers with babies on their backs picked through limp greens wilting in the late-day heat. Sharp-prickled fruits were mounded in wicker baskets on the ground, watched over by a walnut-skinned woman who had no teeth. Furtive flies lifted off a pile of tangerines one wing-flap ahead of a young child with a flyswatter. The place, busy with shoppers buying and haggling, had the thick, overripe aroma of a garbage dump. I wondered if, back here in these lanes, hidden from neon-filled, bustling Hong Kong as much by the straight-ahead glances of the rushing people on the sidewalk as by the steel roofs and overgrowth, anyone ever collected the trash.