by S. J. Rozan
“He said, don’t tell anyone,” she added scornfully. She spat on the sidewalk. “Stupid old man. Mo Ruo will tell whoever she wants to.”
Or whoever pays her to, I thought. Though, thinking back on L. L. Lee’s hard, ancient eyes and the icy contempt in his voice when he made it clear he knew how little I knew about the treasures of my own past, I gave Mo Ruo credit for more courage, or avarice, than I might have been able to come up with, if L. L. Lee had told me to keep my mouth shut.
So there I was, standing on a sidewalk next to a smelly but possibly wealthy chicken lady in the shadowed heat of late Sunday afternoon Hong Kong, waiting for the validation of a theory that, if true, would lead me, I had to admit, to pretty much where I was right now. If L. L. Lee had sent Steven Wei to Wong Tai Sin, what of it? That would prove Strength and Harmony was involved in the kidnapping of Harry. This would not be news. And it would not be anything we—me, as a foreign PI without gun or local license, Mark as an HKPD cop with all the resources of the Department available to him—could do anything about. Except sit and wait. Or, as I was doing right now, stand and wait.
Through the glass of the HKPD HQ doors I glimpsed Mark Quan, book of mug shots under his arm, strolling past the reception desk with a wave to the cop behind it. Someone was with him; with a little start, I realized it was Wei Ang-Ran, Steven’s uncle. Well, of course. Mark had been going to ask Wei Ang-Ran to come to the police station to aid in the inquiries; that must be the business he had just finished when I called. The two men were in conversation, Mark inclining his head to catch Wei’s words. Still talking, they pushed through the glass front door.
Mark saw me and, annoyance notwithstanding, smiled.
Wei Ang-Ran saw me and Mo Ruo and, eyes wide, slammed to a halt.
And Mo Ruo saw Wei Ang-Ran, screamed, “The old man! You tricked me! You cheated me!” and with a baleful glance at me that made me wonder what it felt like to be cooked for soup, sped away, arms waving, scattering pedestrians like chickens as she raced down the sidewalk and across the street.
eleven
I charged after Mo Ruo, shouting, yelling, making promises, offering cash. Nothing stopped her. Behind me I heard Mark also shouting, then some scurrying activity, then thudding footsteps as Mark came chasing after us. Mo Ruo had zipped across the street, creating a blast of hornhonking chaos. We stirred it up again when Mark caught up to me, waving his gold shield as though it could protect us from the cars we dashed in front of. Everyone on the street was mad at us, and the people on the sidewalk didn’t think much of us either as we ran past and around them, forcing them to jump aside or be knocked out of the way just as they were recovering from the typhoon of Mo Ruo’s passage.
Mo Ruo turned left and blasted up a side street. Mark pulled away from me, gaining on her faster than I did. I was hampered by my bag, bouncing along over my shoulder. At home I rarely carry one, because it gets in your way in situations like this. In Hong Kong I hadn’t expected any situations like this, I thought as I sped along; still, you’d think Lydia Chin could at least keep up with, if not outrun, an old lady and a chubby cop.
But Lydia Chin couldn’t. Mo Ruo made another turn, this time to the right; by the time I reached the corner, she was gone. Somewhere among the doorways, alleys, open-fronted stalls, and shadowed shops of this narrow street a few blocks from Hong Kong Police Headquarters, she had vanished.
Mark stood in the middle of the sidewalk, looking around, cursing. Locksmiths and sandal-sellers studiously avoided his eye. As I reached him he was demanding of a fruit-juice man whether he’d seen Mo Ruo; he settled for a cup of juice, melon and tangerine, the best the house had to offer, no charge for our gallant police officers, a small thing to apologize for the juice man’s poor powers of observation and deeply regretted inability to help. When I got there Mark pointed at me without a word and I got in on the deal, too.
“She’s gone,” Mark said, his voice disgusted.
I worked at bringing my breathing under control and sipped my juice. We had run maybe five blocks total, in ninety-degree heat and ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent humidity. I was dripping with sweat. Mark was also, I noticed, but his breathing was absolutely normal.
“How could she do that?” I asked, and then on the next breath, “Run so fast? And disappear like that?” Glancing around at the cigarette-sellers and the dusty bookstore and the restaurant with roasted chickens hanging in the window, I added, “Where are we?”
“Wan chai,” Mark said, his eyes still searching the street. “She could have run into anywhere and paid someone to hide her. We can turn the place upside down and maybe shake her out, but I’d have to know why.” He finished his juice and turned to look at me. “Why were we doing this? What’s going on?”
“You mean you chased after her and didn’t know why? And how come you can run that far that fast in this weather and not even be breathing hard?”
He shrugged that off: “Kung Fu. And I’m used to this weather. It’s not that different from Alabama.”
Kung Fu indeed, I thought. I practice Tae Kwon Do, and I’m panting like a dog. The thought crossed my mind that anyone who could run like this might, when it came to Kung Fu, be very, very good.
“And I chased her,” he said, “because you were chasing her.”
Oh. I finished my juice. It was sweet and blessedly cool, and I could have used another, but I wasn’t sure what the protocol was about demanding a second bribe.
“And it could be,” he went on, “that that old lady might have some practice in running away.”
I thought about the speed with which Mo Ruo had led us from the lanes, eager to earn her next two hundred dollars, and I thought about the expensive new umbrella on her dirt floor, and I had to admit he might be right.
“So,” he repeated, “what’s going on? You said she could identify L. L. Lee as the guy who sent Steven Wei to the temple. You said she’d look at a picture if I brought it down. So I brought it down, and she took off. Why?”
Why? Why? Because Lydia Chin is a blind and birdbrained idiot, that’s why.
“Did it take her that long to figure out where she was?” he asked.
“You mean, police headquarters? No, she knew that. I don’t think it was that, and I don’t think it was you.” Before I could say anything else Mark took my arm and moved us a few yards down the sidewalk, away from the juice man who had become elaborately interested in the inner workings of his tangerine press and was ignoring us much too completely.
At our new position in front of a restaurant specializing in poultry, I told Mark what a mistake I’d made: “She said ‘the old man’ had paid her to give Steven the paper. She kept talking about ‘the old man.’ I thought she meant L. L. Lee. I just assumed.” As I said that, I could just hear what Bill would have had to say about assuming. I pushed that aside and went on. “And then just now, when you guys came out, she looked at Wei Ang-Ran as though she’d seen a ghost. Just before she ran away she screamed, ‘The old man!’”
Mark frowned. “Wei Ang-Ran? You’re saying he’s the one who sent Steven to the temple?”
“Not me, Mo Ruo. And you were behind him—you didn’t see his face when he saw her. He was as shocked as she was.” Two men stepped out of the restaurant, trailing behind them a puff of cold air scented with soy and roast duck. “And now she’s gone. And so’s he,” I added glumly, picturing Wei Ang-Ran taking advantage of our Keystone Kops routine to slip away to God knows where.
“I don’t think so,” Mark said.
“You don’t think what?”
He just said, “Come on.” I’d made enough of a mess, so I shut up and followed him. We crossed a street, this time waiting docilely for the light, and took some twists and turns. We were heading back; even I could figure that out.
The sidewalk in front of police headquarters was empty. That didn’t seem like a good sign. But Mark held the door open for me, just as he had for Wei Ang-Ran, and I went inside, and there was Wei Ang-Ran.
>
He slumped, dejected and defeated, on a bench by the window, his back to the Gloucester Road traffic, under the watchful eye of a uniformed cop.
“I didn’t know what the hell was going on,” Mark said. “I didn’t hear what she said. But something spooked her, and just in case it wasn’t me, I thought I’d ask someone to make sure he stuck around. That’s why it took me so long to catch up to you,” he added.
And then to pass me, I thought. And to not even be breathing hard.
“You,” I said, “must be the smartest cop in Hong Kong.”
“Do me a favor?” he asked, as we came to stand in front of Wei Ang-Ran, who didn’t look up. “Tell my boss.”
Wei Ang-Ran accompanied Mark Quan and me back upstairs without a word. Mark brought us back to the glass-walled conference room he and Bill and I had used just a few hours ago. The brief heart-thudding excitement Mo Ruo had provided had taken my mind off Bill and his island; now, back in this room, I found myself craning my neck to see if I could see the Cheung Chau ferry, and absently accepting Mark’s offer of a cup of tea while discreetly pulling out my cell phone to see if it had lost its charge.
Of course, if it had, and Bill had needed something, he could have called Mark. And Mark’s cops would have called if anything had happened, meaning, gone wrong. So probably there was no action at all on Cheung Chau. I drank Mark’s tea, hoping it would help relax the knot that had formed in the pit of my stomach when I watched Bill leave this building and had not, for all my ignoring it, gone away.
Wei Ang-Ran drank some tea, too. He didn’t meet Mark’s eyes, or mine. The glass conference room was full of the dancing golden sparkle of the late-day sun on water, and silence.
“I believe you have something you’d like to say?” Mark finally asked, addressing Wei Ang-Ran in deferential Chinese. Though he spoke gently, I noticed that this time he had seated himself against the window, pointing me to the head of the table, and leaving Wei Ang-Ran to squint against the glass.
Wei Ang-Ran responded only with a small sigh, so I demanded, “Did you kidnap your great-nephew, Hao-Han?”
To which Wei Ang-Ran, looking into his teacup, replied, “I wish I had.”
“The prayer-seller,” I said, my voice sharp. “She identified you. You paid her to give Di-Fen”—Steven—“the paper at the temple.”
“Yes,” he said morosely, “that’s true.”
I banged my cup down, about to demand that he stop mooning around and talk, but Mark threw me a look that stopped me. My show, the look said. Well, so it was. Get on with it then, my look said back. I picked up my cup as Mark turned to Wei Ang-Ran and said respectfully, “Wei Ang-Ran Sinsaang.” Sinsaang meant about the same thing in this context as Taitai had when I’d used it on Mo Ruo. “Sinsaang, you had some part in this. It’s important now that you tell us what happened. For your great-nephew’s sake.”
Wei Ang-Ran sighed again, and I clenched my teeth to keep from grabbing his shirt collar and shaking him. Maybe I should count the number of sparkling waves in the harbor, see how many I got up to before he opened his mouth.
Mark reached over and, far from grabbing the old man’s collar, poured Wei Ang-Ran more tea. The old man sipped at it, then spoke.
“I’m just a practical man,” he said sadly. “I don’t have ideas. I don’t make plans. For our business, my older brother always made the plans. I did as he said. The business always prospered.”
Mark waited, so I waited, too, my toes curling in my sandals.
“For other things, other people have always had ideas. But now, I needed an idea,” Wei Ang-Ran said. “I did my best. This is the sorry result.”
“Why did you need an idea?” Mark asked.
“My nephew, Di-Fen,”—Steven—“is taking over my brother’s responsibilities at Lion Rock Enterprises.”
“That’s not good?”
“It’s very good. My nephew can make plans. It will be very good for Lion Rock, for the future of the business. But just at this time—at this time, it was not good.”
“Why?”
Wei Ang-Ran didn’t answer. He looked again into his teacup as though he wanted to crawl into it and swim away. I gave him as long as I could stand. Then, “I know,” I said.
Both men looked at me, Wei Ang-Ran with a sad nod, Mark with irritation. Well, what was I supposed to do, wait until we all got old?
“The smuggled artifacts,” I said. “Last night you were unloading a shipment from China, including smuggled artifacts. You and your brother have been smuggling for years, working for L. L. Lee, but your nephew doesn’t know.”
Realizing I didn’t know L. L. Lee’s Chinese name, I had to use its English version. But Wei Ang-Ran didn’t seem to have any trouble figuring out who I meant.
He was anxious to correct me on one point, however. “Not my brother. He knew nothing about it. He would not have allowed it. That was the reason I had to hide my crime from my nephew.”
“What was?” Mark asked.
Wei Ang-Ran sighed again. “I was tempted to admit everything to Di-Fen. I considered that. It would have been simple. There would then have been no need for plans. Then none of this …” He faltered, then went on, “But I feared he would not believe his father was not involved. I could not bear to tarnish my brother’s memory in the eyes of his son. Or …”
“Or—?”
“Or his opinion of me,” Wei Ang-Ran admitted. “To my brother, I was always a younger brother, to be taught, guided; but to my brother’s son I am a wise old uncle.” This brought forth from Wei Ang-Ran a wistful smile.
Then: “To be practical,” he said, and looked up at us, as though practicality might be something we would admire under the circumstances, “I also feared his response, for himself. My nephew has many virtues, but he is not a patient man. The man you name is not someone I would wish my nephew to become involved with.”
“The man we name,” Mark said, clarifying. “Lee Lao-Li?”
Well, there was L. L. Lee in Cantonese, in case I ever needed it.
“So …” Wei Ang-Ran started.
“So—?” Mark prompted, after a long interval of silence and glittering water, during which I heroically kept my mouth shut.
“I planned a distraction.” Wei Ang-Ran said this with hushed voice and downcast eyes.
“A distraction? The kidnapping of your great-nephew was a distraction?” Mark spoke with the calmness of a cop who’d heard worse, many times; and he probably had, though I doubted he’d heard stranger. His matter-of-fact approach, or maybe more important, the lack of accusation in his voice, seemed to both surprise Wei Ang-Ran and give him strength.
“That was my plan,” the old man said. “You see how badly it has worked out.”
“What do you mean?” Mark asked. “Badly.”
Wei Ang-Ran looked at Mark, and then at me, as though he were telling us something he was sure we already knew. “Very, very badly,” he said. “I have lost him.”
The story, which Mark pried out of Wei Ang-Ran while I jiggled my foot and sipped my tea and tried mightily to squelch my urge to pace, was this: He had conceived the kidnapping of Harry as a way to keep Steven occupied while he, Ang-Ran, had the last shipment of smuggled artifacts from China unloaded at the Lion Rock warehouse.
“Nothing less than a threat to his family would have kept my nephew from discharging his new responsibilities in the business,” Wei Ang-Ran explained. “From the day of my brother’s death I worried about this, that my nephew would discover the treasures within the expected furniture shipment. He is determined to acquaint himself with all aspects of the business, to not fail in his new responsibilities. Even yesterday evening, not long before you arrived”—turning to me—“he offered to come to the warehouse to help, as I told you. I told him his place was at home with his wife.”
But by that time, Wei Ang-Ran said, things were already disastrous.
Earlier he had enlisted Maria Quezon in his plan. At first she had been surprised and sus
picious, he said, but later had given in and agreed. He had not told her anything about his reasons, only that he wanted her to take Harry to Ocean Park for a day or two. Ocean Park, Mark threw in for me, was a huge amusement complex around the other side of Hong Kong Island. There, Maria and Harry would stay in a hotel, swim at the beach, go on rides, and generally enjoy themselves, all courtesy of Wei Ang-Ran. The only catch was that Maria must not mention any of this to the Weis, and when they came back, must claim to have been kidnapped along with Harry by kidnappers who for some unknown reason gave up and ran away. The large sum of cash Wei Ang-Ran had promised Maria when the whole thing was over, along with a barely whispered but clear understanding about the flimsy nature of Filipina work visas, was expected to overcome any queasiness on her part about the plan.
“At first,” said Wei Ang-Ran, “everything seemed to go smoothly. The shipment came in, the unloading was going well. Because you were coming,” with a nod to me, “I had the idea to ask for my brother’s jade as ransom. That way it would not be necessary for my nephew to involve his bank, which might have raised questions.” He smiled sadly. “I was pleased to have thought of that.”
“Why send your nephew to the temple?” Mark asked.
“Only to keep him busy. Di-Fen must take action; he is a man of plans. I was not sure where that would lead, but to be practical, also to keep his mind from Lion Rock, I supplied steps for him to take. I had … other things planned. Had things not gone so wrong, my nephew would have received further instructions to be carried out.
“But in any case, by tomorrow morning all was to be complete. The shipment of treasures will have been removed from the warehouse. Di-Fen will be welcome there once more. Maria was to have brought the child home, clearly unharmed, even happy from his days at Ocean Park. His tales of rides, bathing beaches, sweets, Maria would explain as their captors’ method of keeping the child happy, easily controllable. Many kidnappings happen in Hong Kong; most end well once the ransom is paid. The kidnapping of Hao-Han was intended to end better even than others, because in the end there would have been no ransom paid. My nephew would have thought no more about it. Everything would be well.”