by S. J. Rozan
I stood in the heat in the center of the clearing, surveying the shoppers, the sellers, the cabbages, the flies. Between the stalls to the egg-seller’s, the squid man had said. Okay; but which way was that? From where I stood I could see at least four ways out of this marketplace. I was about to ask a chubby bald man behind a table of parsnips and carrots, when the black chicken I’d seen on the path darted out of the alley I’d come from and into another one. Well, all right, I thought. You’re a chicken; I’ll bet you know where the eggs are.
And so she did. I walked over to the mouth of the chicken’s alley. Faded red paint on a rough concrete wall told me this was Po Kong Lane. I blinked, trying to adjust my eyes back to the dimness as I followed the chicken inside. Maybe twenty feet in I found, on my left, another opening, this one leading to a dizzy-angled slot between two buildings. A middle-aged man with a thick head of hair and scratched, dusty glasses squatted there next to three baskets, each holding a pile of eggs.
He looked up from the newspaper he was reading as I said, “Excuse me,” and waited to be presented with my egg box, so that he could pack up my purchase for me.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not buying eggs. I’m looking for Mo Ruo.”
For a moment he didn’t respond, just blinked at me from behind his heavy, smudged glasses. I thought of the jeweler in the Furama Hotel. He’d had sparkling glasses and a golden bird’s nest brooch with tiny pearl eggs in it, and I hadn’t bought anything from him, either.
Silently, not rising from his squat, the egg-seller pointed his newspaper over his shoulder. I thanked him, but he’d gone back to his reading by the time I stepped gingerly over the baskets and was on my way.
It wasn’t a long way. At the other end of this narrow lane was a dirt-floored courtyard about the size of my hotel room but much more crowded, strewn with junk and motion. My friend the black chicken was there, scratching on the ground along with a dozen or so colleagues. Black smoke rose from an old oil drum, someone’s cooking fire; I didn’t know what they were burning, but it had an acrid, chemical stink. Between that and the stench of the chickens I was dubious about the fate of the laundry flapping overhead. Three or four tinny radios tuned to different stations, a couple of TVs, and at least one screaming baby provided a steady background to the erratic hammering and sawing coming from somewhere off to the left. I had thought it was hot when I’d come out of the subway, hotter in the lanes; but no breeze could reach into this hidden, stagnant world. Even Bill would hate it here, I thought, wiping my brow. Bill. I looked at my watch. Bill’s ferry would have docked on Cheung Chau ten minutes ago. My phone hadn’t rung. I guessed that was good. Unless it was bad.
Never mind, Lydia. You’re busy. You have a job of your own; do it.
Three or four doors scattered around the periphery of this choked courtyard suggested ways out, or deeper in. At a loss for any brighter idea, I was about to start trying them when a small flurry of action caught my eye. Opposite the alley mouth I was standing in, a crooked, tin-sided shack clung to the wall of a concrete building like a child afraid to let go of its mother. A couple of chickens had wandered into the shack’s open door, an angry voice was screeching at them to get out. They ran—one even flapped its wings—as a round figure dashed, arms waving, into the light, screaming that such scrawny, ill-tempered chickens weren’t good for anything but soup anyway and the only reason they weren’t soup yet is that they weren’t much good for that, either.
“Taitai!” I called. “Mo Ruo Taitai!” Taitai strictly speaking means wife; the way I was using it now, it meant what ma’am would have meant back home: a word of respect to open a conversation with an older woman you don’t actually know.
The figure in the doorway stopped with her flabby arms in midwave and looked at me. I hurried across the courtyard, scattering chickens as I went. “Taitai! I am Chin Ling Wan-Ju! You called me at my hotel.”
Her eyes had widened in surprise when she first heard me yell. Now as I said my name they narrowed, and I was hit with the uncomfortable feeling she was deciding just what I was good for, like the chickens. “You called me,” I repeated, stopping before her. “I gave one of the other ladies my number and asked you to call. I gave her ten dollars.” I added that to remind Mo Ruo that just knowing me could be profitable. I was speaking to her in Cantonese; even if she knew English, I calculated I had a better chance of her trusting me in her language than in mine.
Mo Ruo, with a black-toothed grin, grunted, turned, and gestured for me to follow her into the shack.
It was dim, darker than the alley, and it smelled bad, worse than the courtyard. The one window was grimy; the dirt floor was damp in spots. I just about made out a cot with a metal box under it, a shelf with a few battered bowls, a rickety card table with a chair on one side and a low stool on the other. A torn jacket hanging from a peg for when the weather got colder, and an incongrously new-looking, well-made umbrella: that was what Mo Ruo had. I found myself wondering who had put the umbrella down for an unguarded moment in what public place.
“So. You have come to Mo Ruo.” The old lady eyed me from the shaky chair, waiting for me to sit on the stool. Her greasy gray hair came to an uneven line about the level of her chin, as though she had hacked it off herself with a dull scissors. The pattern on her sleeveless blouse was so faded I couldn’t tell what it had once been.
The stool wobbled in the dirt and I turned it, resetting its legs so I wouldn’t fall over. “Yes,” I said. “I have some questions I would like to ask you.”
Mo Ruo’s narrowed eyes took me in another few moments; then she leaned over and pulled the metal box out from under the bed. She opened its top, pawed through it, and lifted out a battered book, some charts, and a clutch of other papers so old, torn, and grease-stained I would have had trouble reading them. She held out her dirt-streaked hand and waited.
I took out ten dollars. Her eyebrows lifted. She laughed derisively, stuffed the bill into her blouse, and held out her hand again. More? I thought. So fast? Then I looked again at the papers and charts and I caught on.
She was waiting for me to show her my palm.
“I don’t want my fortune told,” I said.
She frowned. “You have come to Mo Ruo. Mo Ruo will tell your fortune. Not like the cheats at the temple, oh, no.” She spat in the dirt, repeated, “Mo Ruo will tell your fortune.” She stuck out her hand again.
“No,” I said. “I have a different question.”
“A question. What question?”
“Yesterday, at the temple,” I said, “you approached a young man. You gave him a paper to read, but it wasn’t a prayer.”
At first she didn’t answer me. Then, carefully, as though tasting a dish to see what it needed, she said, “No.”
“Yes. A young man. He looked at your paper, then made two phone calls. Then he left in a taxi. Who gave you the paper to give to him?”
“No.”
“One hundred dollars.”
Mo Ruo showed her black teeth again. “So much money.”
“If you tell me.”
She kept her chicken-appraising eyes on me for a few moments. “If telling you is worth one hundred dollars,” she finally said, “it is worth two hundred.”
Well, Lydia, that’s what you get. I took two one-hundred-dollar bills from my wallet and placed them both on the table. “Who?”
With surprising speed Mo Ruo reached over and tried to lift the bills, but my hand was on them. Leaving her hand covering them also, she smiled. “The old man.”
I let go of one of the bills. “His name?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s not worth two hundred dollars. Describe him. Tell me what happened.”
Without removing her hand from the remaining bill, without losing the mocking smile, she said, “He came to the temple. I saw him, watching the prayer-sellers. He picked Mo Ruo. He could tell Mo Ruo was the best, that Mo Ruo would find his young man, that Mo Ruo would not fail the way those o
ther fools would.”
“What did he want you to do?”
“He gave me a paper. It looked like a prayer but it was not a prayer.”
“What did it say?”
“I did not read it.”
Oh, sure, I thought, but since I already knew what the paper said, I let it go.
“What did he tell you to do?”
“Give the man the paper.”
“That’s all?”
“No more.”
“How did you know what the man would look like?”
“He showed me a picture.”
“All right. What did he look like himself, this old man?”
She gave me the chin jut. “An old man. Thin, with white hair. Old men, pah. All the same to Mo Ruo.”
My money had been on L. L. Lee anyway; now I was sure of it. “If you saw a picture of this old man, would you recognize him?”
“Mo Ruo does not forget.”
Can’t tell old men apart, but does not forget. Still, it was worth a try. “I want you to come with me. I want you to look at a picture.” Mark Quan, I was sure, could dig up a photo of L. L. Lee.
Mo Ruo tugged at the hundred-dollar bill still on the table. I released it and it disappeared into the faded blouse.
“No,” she said.
Sighing, I said, “Another hundred dollars.”
I was not a bit surprised when, with a reappearance of the black-toothed grin, Mo Ruo said, “Another two.”
Our trip out of the lanes was quicker than my trip in. Mo Ruo led the way, trotting along with an energetic quickness I would not have suspected, slipping in this door and through that courtyard, never once looking back to see if I was with her. We emerged at the knife-sharpener’s and turned down the row of cooking huts. I waved at the squid man, who let out a cackle of delight when he saw the company I was keeping. Mo Ruo threw a scowl in his direction and told me, “Pah. Disrespectful turtle’s egg. His fish is no good.”
We climbed the stairs out of the jungle and reentered high-rise, high-traffic Hong Kong. I had to stop and clear my head, readjust, but Mo Ruo hoofed it toward the temple, plowing through crowds of her fellow pedestrians as though she expected them to flap their wings and hop out of her way. She seemed to have no trouble with the transition from the twisting, hidden pattern of the lanes to the bright broad grid of boulevards. Maybe it was because she did it every day, I thought as I hurried to keep pace with her. Or maybe the two were not actually as different as I thought them.
Just before we reached the temple I managed to flag down a taxi. Mo Ruo climbed in with obvious satisfaction. I gave the driver the address as a street number instead of the building’s name, in case Mo Ruo had an aversion to police headquarters. She settled back in the taxi seat, clearly gratified that her own importance had been acknowledged in the form of transport I’d chosen. Her joy didn’t keep her from screeching at the driver to watch how he turned, or at pedestrians who dared cross a street we were barreling down. The driver made it his business to hurry; he was probably noticing, as I was, that the rank smell of Mo Ruo’s little tin hut had not come entirely from the hut. When we arrived, I broke Hong Kong protocol and tipped him, to cover the cost of the time he was going to have to take out of his busy day to air out his cab.
Mo Ruo, nodding in pleasure at having been brought to the Hong Kong side in a taxi, followed me along the sidewalk almost into the building before she caught on. Eyes popping, she slammed to a halt.
“Aiyeee!” she howled. “Where do you bring me? Oh, no, Mo Ruo is not coming here!” She spun on her heel and hurried away down the sidewalk. Why, I thought, oh, why couldn’t I have gotten one of the other old ladies, one who didn’t know how to read?
“Taitai!” I called. I raced after her. “Mo Ruo Taitai! There is nothing to fear! Just to look at a picture. That’s all you need to do here, just look at a picture!”
Scurrying, she waved me away. I caught up with her at the corner. Luckily the whizzing traffic made it impossible for anyone to cross. “Taitai—”
“Police!” she spat. “Not Mo Ruo, talk to police! Go away, police!”
“I’m not a cop,” I said. “I just need your help. They won’t even know who you are. I won’t tell them your name.” Desperately I offered, “Another hundred dollars.”
That stayed her headlong plunge into traffic. “You are not police?”
“No. It’s just, this is where the old man’s picture is.”
I expected her to continue balking, on the logical basis that if the picture was at police HQ the man pictured was probably a criminal, and therefore someone to avoid fingering, as that might make him mad. But that didn’t seem to bother Mo Ruo. Maybe she thought of herself as a match for any lowlife, and maybe she was right. Two things happened. She demanded the expected: “Two hundred dollars.” And, with the shrewd, mocking smile of the person with the upper hand, she said, “They can bring the picture out.”
I agreed to the two hundred, glad that Hong Kong dollars were worth only eight to the American: Still, they were mounting up. About the other, I said, “Maybe. Maybe they can. I’ll find out. But if they can’t, you have to agree to come inside.”
“Maybe,” she echoed me, and I knew what that meant: If she did, it would cost me another two hundred dollars.
We backed off from the street corner, although Mo Ruo would not come all the way to the front door. The sun was low now, glowing from behind the Peak, and Gloucester Road was in shadow. Heat still rose from the baked concrete sidewalks, but the glare was gone from the chrome of rushing cars and the glass of lofty towers. Accepting Mo Ruo’s compromise sidewalk position, I dialed Mark Quan from my cell phone.
“Wai!”
“It’s Lydia,” I said, but I said it in Cantonese, so Mo Ruo wouldn’t think I was trying to put one over on her and dash off again.
“Lydia? What is it?” Mark demanded, responding also in Cantonese, his quick and wary. “Did you hear from your partner?”
“No,” I said. “Did you hear from your cops?”
“No. I’d have called you if I had. Why aren’t you speaking English?”
Hearing him say he’d have called me, I knew it was true, and I also knew something else: I could trust Mark Quan to do what he said he’d do. And I knew he wasn’t sure he could trust me to do the same.
And I wasn’t either.
And I wished I were.
But that wasn’t the point here. Come on, Lydia, I thought, you have a skittish old lady on the sidewalk ready to bolt, and a simple request. Worry about whatever it is you’re worrying about later.
“I’ll explain, but not right now. Do you have a photo of L. L. Lee?”
“Do I—sure, I guess so. Why?”
“I think I have a witness who can identify him as the man who sent Steven Wei to the temple.”
“A witness? What kind of witness?”
“The prayer-seller.”
“From the temple?”
“I’ll tell you all about it, but she’s kind of nervous. I think we should show her the picture soon, before she changes her mind.”
I had the feeling that we had not passed him by, but all he said was, “So bring her here. Where are you?”
“On the sidewalk outside. Can you bring the picture down?”
“Can I do what?”
“I told you, she’s kind of nervous. She doesn’t want to come in.”
Mo Ruo stood near me, picking her teeth and darting glances in all directions. “It’ll only take a minute,” I said. “Please?”
“Outside police headquarters?”
“Yes.”
A moment of silence. Then: “We don’t have a lot of PIs in Hong Kong,” Mark said. “I never really understood before why American cops think they’re such a pain.”
“Please?”
“Oh, why not? I’m just about finished with what I was doing anyway. HKPD, here to serve the public. Sure, I’ll be right down.”
“Thanks,” I said, but he’d alr
eady hung up.
I spent the impatient waiting moments trying to hold Mo Ruo’s attention so she wouldn’t scram. The first thing I did was take two more one-hundred-dollar bills from my wallet and slip them into my pocket. The gesture was not lost on her.
“Someone’s coming down with the picture,” I said. “But first I’d like to ask you something else.”
She eyed my pocket hungrily.
“I just wondered,” I said. “Why didn’t you go to the temple today?”
No answer.
“Did the old man tell you not to? He paid you enough to stay away for a while? He paid you a lot of money?”
I thought that would get her, and it did. “A lot of money! Pah, a cheap old man! He would not give Mo Ruo nearly as much as he should have. He was very anxious that this job be done, but was he willing to pay for it? Scarcely!”
“But he did pay you to leave the temple as soon as you gave the young man the prayer? To stay away for the next few days?”
“He paid me,” she grudgingly confirmed. “He said to me, stay away from the temple for three days, or I would find trouble. As if Mo Ruo were afraid of trouble!”
She said the word as though trouble were something that should be afraid of Mo Ruo.
But she wasn’t finished on the subject of the old man. “Three days!” she complained. “Mo Ruo makes a great deal of money in three days, I told him. To stop work for three days!”
“So he paid you for those three days?”
“Not enough,” she repeated.
This explained why I hadn’t been able to find her when I went back to the fortune-teller’s area yesterday, after Steven Wei raced off in his taxi. It also implied that L. L. Lee expected this whole thing to be over in three days. It also made me briefly wonder how much money Mo Ruo actually made. Maybe prayer-selling was as lucrative as she said it was. Maybe she was one of those nutty folks who turn out to have millions of dollars stuffed in the mattress when they die.