by S. J. Rozan
“I wanted to thank you,” I said, after he knew it was me. I spoke in English. “Tony Siu said he’d have killed my partner, but his orders were not to.”
“It was unnecessary.” L. L. Lee’s voice was rock-hard, as before. I found myself thinking of the rows of polished headstones crowded together on Cheung Chau’s southern slopes, with their pictures of the dead.
“I can deliver the boy,” I offered. “Tell me where.”
“That is also unnecessary.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, as if hearing this for the first time. “Tony Siu said you’d gotten what you wanted. I thought that meant you knew I’d found the boy.”
“It did not mean that. Neither you nor the child are of any value to me now.”
“How will you pressure the father then?” I said, in my most gee-whiz voice. I’m just a girl, Lee, just a dumb American-born Chinese, of limited value and limited threat; go ahead, tell me anything.
“Again,” he said contemptuously, “unnecessary.”
“Wait.” I tried to sound as if the light was dawning. “He’s already agreed? Without—?”
“Last night. An American, hollow bamboo, cannot be expected to understand. But the boy’s father is a true Chinese and has a subtle mind. He saw ahead and made things easier for all concerned. I advise you now,” he said, “along with your partner, to leave Hong Kong.”
“Bill can’t travel yet. They didn’t kill him, but they made sure he’d remember them.”
“Do not delay your departure.”
“We’ll go as soon as we can. Did you—?”
“No more questions. All you seek is information. You have no use for knowledge.”
What I did have was the start of a headache and no use for L. L. Lee’s insults. “I called to express my gratitude,” I said. “I’ve done that. Now let me also tell you this.” I thought of Bill’s bandaged face, his back, his night on that boat. “If I ever see Siu or Chou again, I’ll kill them.”
Mark’s eyebrows went up. In my ear there was silence. Then L. L. Lee’s stone voice said, “Good-bye, Miss Chin. I don’t expect to see you again.”
The connection went dead in my ear.
“I’m not sure I’d have done that,” Mark said, as I folded the phone and put it away.
I shrugged. “He can’t take something like that seriously, coming from me. He’d squash me like a bug if he thought I was worth the effort, but he doesn’t. But he’s been warned.”
Mark was smart enough not to say anything. We turned and headed back along the waterfront, walking side by side but without a word. Just before the ferry pier we reached the police station. Mark spoke briefly with the man in charge; Lieutenant Zhang had long since made his report and gone home for some well-deserved rest. I felt like I deserved some, too, but there was more to do. We climbed into the police car that had been arranged, and the uniformed cop in the front saluted Mark and drove us north on Cheung Chau to Tiger Gate Academy.
It was a beautiful drive, through the narrow streets of the town, up through the houses and the hills, over the bald hilltop with its wide and windy view of the sea. The pines in front of the Irish seaman’s house rustled their branches in greeting as we drove up and parked. The young pupil on door duty brought us through the house to the practice area in the garden.
Students in black cotton uniforms stretched, punched, kicked, and practiced the slow, graceful movements that to my mind make kung fu the most beautiful of the martial arts. My own art, Tae Kwon Do, isn’t nearly as ancient, and is much more straightforward, more focused on power and practicality. I looked at Mark, who was following the students’ movements with an appreciative, critical eye. This was his art. Ancient, meditative, graceful. Mastered through years of serious study, the first of them, in his case, in Birmingham, Alabama.
The Tiger Gate master was in the garden too, observing his pupils, calling out commands first to this small girl, then to that boy, then to a pair of teenagers sparring with poles. He nodded when he saw us, crossed the garden to where we stood.
“I’ve come to thank you for your help,” Mark said to him, bowing. I bowed also. “I’d like to see Wei Di-Fen. He can take his son home now.”
The master summoned a young girl who led us to another part of the garden. Here, half a dozen young children were being drilled by a teenager of high rank. Harry Wei was there, his little brow furrowed in concentration, snapping kicks and defensive blocks against an imaginary opponent. Steven sat on a low wall watching, his round face soft and smiling in the sunlight, the relaxed and happy face of the photographs I’d picked up from the floor of the apartment on Robinson Road. This was the first time, I realized, that I’d seen him look like this.
He stood when he saw us, and, smiling, bowed first to Mark and then to me, one hand fisted, the other covering it in the traditional gesture of gratitude.
“Thank you,” he said. “You have given me back the greatest treasure a man can have: his family. I will be in your debt forever.”
To which Mark protested, “No, no, I only did my job,” and I answered something similar about being glad Bill and I could be of some small help. It would have been rude of us to say anything else. To accept his thanks would have been to acknowledge that we’d played as major a part as Steven Wei said we had, which would have been boorish, as well as dangerous: The jealous gods eavesdrop on conversations like this, waiting for a display of pride that will make it worth their supernatural while to bring your world crashing down around you.
But we all knew where the kernel of truth lay. Steven Wei was in our debt. And when Mark called that debt in, in a year, maybe two years from now, Steven would have no choice but to respond.
No matter what world came crashing down.
A small dark figure walked around the house and entered the garden. It was Maria Quezon, looking tired but, like Steven, relaxed. She gave Harry a quick look filled with fierce pride. When she spotted the rest of us her face changed; she brought out an unsure smile. Steven returned her smile, a little unsurely himself at first, but in a few seconds they were beaming at each other like thousand-watt searchlights.
“Maria told me what happened,” Steven said to us, switching into English for Maria’s sake. “She acted very courageously to protect my son.”
“Can you fill us in?” Mark asked. “Remember, I came into this late.”
Maria looked at the ground, color rising in her cheeks. Steven waited, but then spoke.
“During the kidnapping attempt Maria heard one of the men say that our flat was—what is the English, bugged? She managed to slip away with Harry from the kidnappers; she hid but she was afraid to call us. She called her young man, the unfortunate Chang”—Maria, still looking down, shook her head slowly—“and he arranged for her to come here. He was supposed to come to us, to tell us what had happened, avoiding the listening device. She waited but he never called her. Poor Maria panicked, at a loss. When Mr. Smith came she was willing to let him decide what to do, but he disappeared, too, telling her to run away. So she did.”
Maria added, in a soft, clear voice, “I believe I must have been in shock. I did not think at all clearly. I am so sorry,” she added, to Steven.
Hmm, I thought. Sounds awfully thin to me. But I didn’t for a minute believe that Steven believed it. If he’d gone to L. L. Lee, he knew at least part of the truth. This story was for us.
Though, to be fair, Steven Wei did not actually look like a man who had just found out that his uncle had been betraying the family for decades by being involved in criminal activity with a ranking triad member. Or one who knew that this uncle and the woman standing in front of him had put him through hell by arranging and then losing control of the disappearance of his son.
The six little kids finished their drill and lined up in three rows, bowed to their instructor, and then, temporarily dismissed, ran screaming with laughter to splash each other with water from a fountain at the end of the garden. I watched Steven and Maria watch
ing them and thought, maybe what Steven had just told us was what he really believed happened. Maybe his bedrock dedication to family loyalty would not let him think evil of either his uncle or his son’s amah, and maybe this was the story Maria had told him and he bought it.
No, Lydia, I thought, as the master called a break, and the rest of the kids flopped on the grass, ran to the fountain, laughed and teased and poked each other. You’re exhausted, you’re hot, you’re running on empty, and this is not a good time for you to try to think, I lectured myself. Obviously, if Steven Wei knew enough to go to L. L. Lee, he knows most, if not all, of what’s been going on here.
Except, myself said back, answer me this: No matter how much he knew, how did he know to go to L. L. Lee? Maria didn’t know about Lee. Mark didn’t tell him. The only one who knew about Lee was Wei Ang-Ran, and he’d been not-quite-arrested in HKPD headquarters all night.
All right, I said to myself, all right, we’ll make a deal. The deal is: Shut up. This is a question you want the answer to because there’s no such thing as a question you don’t want the answer to, but it’s not an urgent question. Nothing is urgent now because this business is over. Probably when you get some sleep, and talk this over with Bill, or with Mark, the answer will be so obvious you’ll feel dumb for not having thought of it right now. So worry about this later, how about that?
Myself seemed too tired to argue, so the deal was struck.
I waited while Mark checked over the ID Steven had brought with him: passports, birth certificates, fingerprints from a time he’d done an audit for a government agency, school photos of Harry. All this had been gone over by the Marine District cops already, of course, and it all checked out; Mark just wanted to be sure, for himself. In the end, he was, and so was I: This man was Steven Wei, and Steven Wei was this man.
Mark told Steven, the Tiger Gate master, and the Marine District cop still stationed up there that Steven, Maria, and Harry could leave. We shook hands and bowed all around; then he and I climbed into our patrol car and headed back to town.
At first no one spoke as the car tooled along past peaceful houses with terraced gardens snoozing in the sun. Then: “I have to go back to Hong Kong,” Mark said. “I have reports to make, all that sort of thing.” He leaned back against the seat and breathed a tired sigh. His day, which had started yesterday morning, wasn’t over, and he seemed like he was suddenly feeling it.
I touched his hand. “You look exhausted.”
He turned to me with a small smile; then he folded his fingers over mine. “I don’t know about American PIs,” he said, “but this isn’t really the everyday life of a Hong Kong cop.”
“Us either.”
He looked a while longer. “Us?”
I shrugged.
He nodded. We didn’t say anything more on the ride to town. But he didn’t let go of my hand.
Mark took the next ferry back. Now that the case was wrapped up, a sleek, fast-running police launch would have been a luxury difficult to explain.
“It’s okay,” he said. “In fact it’s better. The slower the ride, the more sleep I’ll get.”
I waited for the boat with him; then, just before he boarded, I gave him a quick kiss good-bye. At least, I meant it to be quick. He had other plans for it, and when it ended he was grinning. “Sorry,” he said. “That wasn’t fair.”
“Yeah, you look sorry. I might have to report you for abusing your authority.”
The scar on his lip stood out the way it always did when he grinned, white now in his tired face. What is it with you and men’s grins, Lydia? I asked myself sternly, but myself had been ordered earlier to shut up and had nothing to say.
After the ferry left I turned and walked back along the waterfront street. It was only a few hours since breakfast, but I was starved, so I sat at a small round table outside a Taiwanese teahouse and had one of the thick neon-colored fruit drinks the Taiwanese like so much, and a couple of lemon cookies. I called the hospital, where they told me Bill was asleep but could be discharged later in the day. I watched the boats in the harbor and the strolling couples and the sleeping dogs until my drink was finished, and then I walked up one of the narrow streets into the town.
I went from shop to shop, buying first a sundress, a white cotton sleeveless affair with red piping and a sash that tied in the back. The proprietor let me change in the room behind the shop, which as it turned out was her kitchen. A shower would have been nice, too, but on the other hand the day was promising to be so hot that there was probably no point. I bought a bright blue backpack at the next store and stuffed in it the shirt and pants that had been so crisp and fresh yesterday morning, before the running around and the chasing people and the surf. I bought a bag of oranges and a bottle of wine, and though I was tempted, at the funeral-supplies store, by the paper boats and cars, the TV sets and cell phones, I didn’t know the people I was going to see. So in the end I just bought incense and tiny wine cups, and I set out.
The walk to the cemetery from the center of town was hot and hilly, though most of it was in the shade of wide-leafed palm trees. My steps fell into a rhythm, an easy, relaxed one, and I emptied my mind and just watched the houses and gardens go by me on each side, the tiles and the flowerpots and the trees. I reached the graveyard and passed through the oldest section first, the one with the half-moon graves and no photographs. Eventually I came to the newer areas, and with the aid of posted maps, I found the section that swept down to the sea.
At the bottom of the slope, on the spiky grass plain, twelve graves stood in the front row. The faces of the dead watched me now as they had watched us all at dawn, Bill and Mark and the cops and me. Seabirds called and the sun leaned hotly on my back as I poured a cup of wine at each of the front-row graves, lit some incense, and left an orange. The photos showed old men and old women, mostly, but two were young men and one was a child. Two were named Chin, and I knew I was as much American as I was Chinese when I wasn’t sure if that warmed or chilled me.
After I was done I climbed back up the hill and, again consulting the map, headed for the temple of Tin Hua. The walk there took another hour, some of it in shade, some in the full glory of the morning sun. The path climbed up and down, twisted and turned, taking every opportunity it could find to burst from leafy splendor into a clearing with a breathtaking view of the sea. After the fifth or sixth of these exuberant events, I paused to wipe the film of sweat from my face, to watch the white surf break on the golden boulders along Cheung Chau’s shore, to see the sun sparkle on the deep blue water and listen to the wheeling seabirds’ cries. If I were a path with views like this, I conceded, I’d probably be a little overdramatic and flamboyant, too. I wondered briefly what stone made golden boulders instead of regular gray ones, but I didn’t give it too much thought, because that was the kind of thing that Bill always knew. Although this was Hong Kong, a place so foreign and strange that maybe he wouldn’t have the answer. But if he didn’t, I could ask Mark.
The Tin Hua temple was a smallish affair carved into solid rock, its pagoda roof and half-closed shuttered front making the interior dim and cool. Every inside inch was painted crimson or turquoise or gold, every surface covered with embroidered cloth, statues of Tin Hua and her fellow deities, candles and incense burners and plates of offerings. The air was thick with smoke. Candlelight glanced off gilding and brass offering plates like lights winking on and off in the smoky distance. There was no sound but the surf crashing on the rocks below, but I imagined Tin Hua liked that.
I lit my incense and left my oranges, and then on an inspiration I bought an incense spiral from the monk who seemed to be the temple’s sole attendant. With a slender bamboo pole, he found a spot to hang the spiral on the crowded ceiling, and I lit that too. It was very long and thick; it would burn for a week. After I’d left Hong Kong, I thought, watching my smoke curl and blend with the smoke from other peoples’ offerings, after I was home, back in Chinatown, New York, America, this incense in the Tin Hua temp
le on Cheung Chau Island would still be burning.
It took me another hour to walk back to town, half of that along a flat path by the waterfront. I took a long, long drink from a water fountain on the path, and then stuck my whole head under the cool stream, rinsing my face, soaking my hair, letting water run down the back of my new sundress. By the time I reached the row of colored-roofed restaurants Mark and I had had breakfast in I was totally dry again. I went beyond that row to a shady plaza dotted with large dogs who seemed to think this cool, stone-floored spot was a great place to spend a day this hot. I agreed, so I chose a table at one of the cafés that fronted it. I ordered lunch—fish soup with carrots and noodles, and a pot of tea—and drank another gallon or two of water while I took out my cell phone and called my client.
It was 2 A.M. in New York, but Grandfather Gao’s “Wai!” sounded both calm and alert.
“It’s Chin Ling Wan-Ju,” I told him. “Everything’s fine.”
Grandfather Gao is not the type to sigh with relief, but the barely discernible relaxation in his tone when he spoke was the next best thing. “I am pleased to hear that, Ling Wan-Ju. Can you tell me what has happened?”
I laid it all out for him: Iron Fist, the prayer-seller, Tony and Big John; Wei Ang-Ran, Steven, and Harry; Mark, Maria Quezon, and L. L. Lee. My lunch came and started to cool on my table and I was still talking.
“I am sorry for what your partner has suffered,” was the first thing Grandfather Gao said when my story was done. I took advantage of his continuing, “Please convey to him my sympathy. I am deeply in his debt,” to slurp down some noodles.
“Thank you, Grandfather. He will be pleased to know he’s served you well.” I sneaked a quick piece of fish and, hoping the connection wasn’t quite good enough that he could hear me chewing all the way in New York, asked, “Grandfather, one thing has been troubling me. From what you know about Wei Di-Pen,”—Steven—“does he seem like the kind of man who would make a deal with Lee?”