Tahoe Hijack

by Todd Borg

  “You have to understand that the San Francisco Library is very dramatic. I kept looking at the design of the building. Compared to the library where I grew up, I’ve never even… Well, never mind where I’m from. Anyway, Grace led me through the place and we went up and down, but I couldn’t even tell you what floor we ended up on. There were lots of shelves and lots of books and, except when Grace was pointing in a book, all I saw was the building. Kind of like modern art.”

  I gave Anna a quick explanation of the hostage crisis that ended with the hostage taker’s death. I explained how the hostage taker had a tattoo and did knife tricks, and how he also accused Thomas Watson of killing Grace. I told Anna that when I went to talk to Thomas Watson, he thought that the hostage taker was a man named Nick O’Connell, a man who did knife tricks and had a number tattooed on his wrist.

  “So we believe it was Nick O’Connell who drowned,” I said. “O’Connell’s knife tricks sound like your attacker. And his connection to Grace through Thomas Watson adds more credibility to the idea that it was he who came after you.”

  “But we don’t know for a fact that O’Connell was my stalker,” she said. “Maybe lots of sickos spin knives. Maybe there is a gang someplace where their group identity is all about knife tricks.”

  “That could be,” I said. “The knife twirling is an unusual marker, and it could just be a coincidence. But the fact that O’Connell both twirled knives and also knew about Grace’s murder is very compelling. Two coincidences like that are rare. Add in the tattoo and it becomes more rare. Your stalker may well be dead.”

  “I want to think so,” Anna said. “You don’t know how much I want to think so. Tell me, why do you think this Nick O’Connell hijacked the boat? Why would he go to so much trouble to get you to catch the killer of my mother?”

  “We don’t know why. No doubt he had some kind of serious beef with Watson and wanted the pleasure of seeing the law come down on him. But that wouldn’t justify his actions. So we really don’t know.”

  Anna didn’t say anything.

  “Is there anything else about your stalker that you can think of?” I asked.

  “Not really,” she said. “He wore a mask. Twirled the knife. Had the tattoo. Wanted a journal I don’t have. Wanted it enough to kill me for it.”

  “Anna, I think you should consider giving all of this information, your whole story, to the police. Depending on where you are living, you could maybe get some protection. If, for example, you are staying in San Francisco or are willing to go to San Francisco, I could help get you into a safe house. They have a couple of places that no one knows about, places that are provided by private citizens, places that cops don’t even know about. Or, if you came to Tahoe, we have some options here, as well.”

  “You think my attacker may have been the dead hijacker, yet you still talk about a safe house?”

  “Basic principle,” I said. “Always be cautious, always err toward safety. Consider all the evidence with an open mind, but don’t believe it until it’s been proven. This is a strange case. You’ll want to lie low until we figure it out.”

  She was quiet for a bit. “I thought about going to the police. A hundred times over the last three years. But then I’d have to once again reveal who I am and where I live. Right now, most of my customers pay me online. I deposit the few checks I get into the ATM machine. No one knows who I am. I get my cash from a different ATM. But my bank is small, so if I changed where I live, I’d probably have to change banks. Which means I’d have to give a new bank info like my address. That info would go into the databases. If my stalker is someone other than the dead guy, someone who has some kind of connection, if he could call someone he knows at the bank…”

  “They’re pretty secure,” I said, immediately regretting the statement.

  “Right,” she said with obvious derision. “That’s why hackers routinely get a hundred thousand social security numbers at a time out of bank computers. That’s why those geeks get into the Pentagon’s computers and steal military secrets. Because computers are so secure.”

  “You’re right. Sorry.”

  Anna didn’t respond. I’d stepped over the line.

  “Look, Anna, let me look into this and see what I can find out,” I said, knowing there was little if anything I could discover based on what she’d said.

  Again, no response.

  “Is there a way I can reach you that’s faster than email?”

  “If I feel like it, I’ll call you,” she said and hung up.

  FIFTEEN

  There was a knock at the door. Spot growled, which meant it wasn’t someone he knew.

  A FedEx driver handed me a package, had me sign for it. The return address was Joe Breeze’s SFPD office. Spot walked next to me, sniffing it as I carried it to my little kitchen table and pulled open the tear strip.

  The journal was as I remembered it, a cloth-bound notebook about 5 inches wide by 8 inches tall. The cover cloth was a faded purple silk with a large purple-black stain that was shaped like a mottled eggplant and went from the edges of the pages up across the lower half of the cover.

  I flipped through the pages, revisiting the mildew smell and the rows of Chinese characters that were mostly blurred beyond recognition. It was a poignant sight, countless hours and maybe years of careful work lost when the journal had gotten soaked.

  I dialed my friend Doc Lee’s cell number, got his voicemail and left a message. He called back a half hour later.

  “I was in the ER when you called,” he said, his small voice delicate and precise. “I’m on break.”

  “I’m working on a case that involves a notebook with Chinese writing in it. I’m wondering if you could look at it. Any chance you’d like leftover chicken stir-fry for lunch?” I asked.

  “I grew up eating leftover chicken stir-fry,” he said. There was no judgment in his voice, just observation.

  “Then you could demonstrate your cross-race tolerance of culinary hubris. White guys, as you no doubt know, think they are the best chefs around.”

  “You’re a funny guy. When I taste it, I’ll probably think you meant culinary malfeasance. My shift is over soon. I’ll be there in an hour and,” he paused, “fifty minutes.”

  I hung up thinking that while Doc Lee’s fetish for precision didn’t make him everybody’s favorite bud, I would want nothing else if I were on the operating table, and he was slicing through my insides.

  Just before the appointed time, I put the previous evening’s leftovers on the stovetop to warm.

  Spot put his nose all over Doc Lee when I opened the front door an hour and fifty minutes later.

  “He’s smelling the ER,” Doc Lee said as he held his arms out and above Spot like a pelican drying its wings. He moved into my cabin, heading for the rocker. “Antiseptic and blood. Intriguing for a dog.”

  “Spot, let the doctor alone,” I said. Spot ignored me. As Doc Lee sat down, Spot started sniffing his neck and ear. I pulled him away and pointed to the braided rug in front of the woodstove.

  Spot looked at me, then slowly turned two circles, lay down and sighed.

  “What is this case?” Doc Lee asked.

  I handed him the journal. “A woman named Grace Sun was found murdered in San Francisco three years ago. She had this tucked in her shirt. It could be that she was trying to hide it from her killer. The hijacker on the Dreamscape claimed that his purpose in taking Street hostage was to convince me that a man named Thomas Watson was Grace’s killer. So the two are connected.”

  Doc Lee had opened the notebook and touched the pages as if they were written in Braille. “Sounds complicated,” he said.

  “Yeah. We never knew why Grace was murdered. Thomas Watson says he didn’t murder her, even though his DNA matches that of skin tissue found under Grace’s fingernails.”

  “Pretty bold claim for him to make when you’ve got his DNA.”

  “Right. So I’m trying to understand what the hijacker had to do with the case.�
��

  “And then the hijacker drowned,” Doc Lee said. “Quite the enigma.”

  I nodded. “Maybe this notebook can provide some information about why Grace was murdered.”

  “Of course, you had other people investigate this back when it happened.”

  “We had a couple of Berkeley profs look at it,” I said. “One was an archivist. He thought the paper was over a hundred years old and probably made in China during the early or mid-nineteenth century. The other prof teaches Asian Studies and knows Mandarin. He said it looked like the journal was written by a man who was a miner by trade. He thought the journal was a diary that focused on the man’s work. But so much of it was blurred that he couldn’t tell much.”

  Doc Lee was flipping pages. “Looks like it was dropped into water. Dirty water.”

  “Yeah. What do you think? Can you read any of the blurred characters?”

  “Not much. First, I should say that I’m not a hanzi expert.”

  “Is that what the Chinese characters are called?”

  “Yes. As kanji is to Japanese, hanzi is to Chinese. In fact, kanji was originally derived from hanzi.”

  “You’re fluent in Mandarin, right?”

  “Yes. It’s a long tradition in my family even though we’ve been in this country for six generations. Everyone always speaks both Mandarin and English at home.”

  “Did you learn to write in Mandarin?”

  “Yes, but I didn’t do it enough to get very good.”

  Coming from Doc Lee, I imagined that that still made him an expert.

  I gestured at the journal. “Can you tell from the blurred characters if that is written in Mandarin, or is written Mandarin the same as other Chinese dialects?”

  “The answer to your first question is, yes, it appears to be Mandarin. The answer to your second is that all the different kinds of Chinese languages share the same written hanzi. The characters are interchangeable. But the words vary. While the various Chinese languages are often referred to as dialects, they are dissimilar enough that they should probably be called separate languages.”

  Doc Lee paused, flipped some pages. “Chinese is really a huge family of languages. Nearly three hundred different tongues. The languages are all related, and over the centuries the Chinese government has used its influence to make the hanzi characters universal. It is similar to the way the Romance languages all use the same Latin alphabet. And they even share a bunch of words.”

  “Words that are the same in both English and, say, Spanish,” I said.

  “Right,” Doc Lee said. “Take the word international. It is spelled the same in English, French, and German and nearly the same in Spanish and Italian. And it means the same thing in each language, too. That also happens with some different Chinese languages. And like Dutch and German, some Chinese languages can be understood by speakers of a few very similar languages. But most people can still only understand their own language. Also, Chinese is one of the language groups that are tonal. Many words can be said with different tones or pitches. A high tone, a medium tone, a low tone. Tones can also rise or fall. Of course, we use different pitches and rising or falling tones in English, too, but they give us different inflections or nuances in our meaning. Whereas, in Chinese, the different tones give entirely different meanings to the words. So pronunciation of words varies widely from one Chinese language to the next.”

  Doc Lee turned another page in the journal. “While this is Mandarin, it isn’t contemporary. There are some unusual constructions that suggest its age. But as you said, the journal was made one hundred or two hundred years ago.”

  “What can you tell me from it?”

  Doc Lee stared at a page, flipped forward a few pages, squinted at it hard, then turned toward the end of the journal and spent quite a long time.

  “The first part is in one pen, and the second part was written with multiple pens. The style of the characters and the style of the writing in each part are both a bit different as well. I think this journal was written by two different people.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said. “The Berkeley prof didn’t say anything about that.”

  “Berkeley professors are busy. How much did you pay him or her?”

  “Him. And I don’t think we paid anything.”

  “Well, there’s your answer,” Doc Lee said.

  “I’m not paying you,” I said.

  “I thought I was getting a stir-fry lunch.”

  “Leftovers don’t usually constitute remuneration,” I said.

  “Chicken stir-fry leftovers do. Unless you kill it.”

  I thought about my bread from the night before, sitting like a heavy field rock in my kitchen garbage can. “I would never kill food,” I said.

  “That’s what I thought,” Doc Lee said.

  “What else can you glean from the journal?” I asked.

  “Glean,” Doc Lee said. “Is that a cop word?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, there are comments in here about mining, as the professor said. About digging in the riverbeds. Directing the water to wash away the sediment. And there is a reference to some kind of a land dispute, but whatever he wanted to say about it got blurred. The name mentioned is Mulligan.”

  “Like the Chinese writer was involved in a dispute with an Irish miner?”

  “Ninety percent of it is blurred, but yes, that’s what I’d guess.” He paused. After a minute, he spoke.

  “This presentation is somewhat formal. As if the writer had a fair amount of education. But if he was a miner, it would be very unusual for him to be educated. Most of the miners who came from China during the Gold Rush were uneducated farmers. Just like most of the white settlers who came west from the East Coast. Same with all of the people who emigrated to the U.S. from Europe during the same era. They were mostly motivated by a search for a better life. Of course, there were some educated people who struck out for the New World. But most of the educated had good positions in society, and they tended to stay where they were.”

  “Yet you think that notebook was written by someone with a formal education.”

  “Not formal in the sense of having gone to school. But perhaps this person’s parents tried very hard to educate him at home. For example, see these few clear characters in the middle of this blurred page?” He held the book up for me to see.

  “What does it say?” I asked.

  “There isn’t a literal English translation for it. But the writer is sort of saying that the food that Caucasians eat is abhorrent.”

  “As opposed to saying that white man’s food sucks,” I said.

  “Yes, exactly. The way it is written doesn’t seem like something from the journal of an uneducated miner.”

  “Can you tell anything about the content? What the man is saying regardless of the style?”

  “What the journal is about…” Doc Lee’s voice trailed off. He flipped pages. “The blurred characters make it seem very disjointed. Let me study it for a bit.”

  I took that to mean that he wanted quiet.

  I went into the kitchen nook, served the rice and stir-fry into bowls and brought them out to the living room along with two Sierra Nevada Pale Ales.

  We ate in our laps. Spot lifted his head and sniffed the air long and hard, nostrils flexing, brain circuits calculating the chances of the possible reward that might come from lying still to curry my favor versus getting up and generating my admonishment.

  I don’t think of myself as a glutton like Spot, but I was done with my food and beer by the time Doc Lee had taken his fifth careful bite. He drank his beer like Street does, in tiny sips. When he dabbed at the corner of his mouth with the tip of his little finger, I realized I’d forgotten napkins. I jumped up, went to the kitchen, tore off a paper towel, and brought it out to him.

  “Sorry. Like eating with the Philistines,” I said.

  Doc Lee put his index finger inside of the paper towel and wiped his lips in the same precise arc that a woman us
es to put on lipstick.

  He continued to flip pages as he ate. Now and then he made a hmmm sound. Once, a slight intake of breath.

  I brought my dishes back to the kitchen and fetched a second beer. I watched as Doc Lee looked at the book. He was to some degree the classic Asian-American cliché. Brilliance combined with studiousness. I didn’t know his family and hence had no idea of what combination of nature/nurture produced him. But his first-in-every-class history was easy to see in the picture before me. Doc Lee could no more sit and tell jokes and guzzle beer with the boys during Monday Night Football than he could ride a bull in a Cheyenne rodeo.

  In time, he spoke. “As I already said, I think that this is really two journals,” he said. “The first two-thirds or so were written by one man, the last third by another.”

  “You say man. Do you mean to be gender-specific?”

  “Yes. Partly, of course, because the first part appears to be the diary of a miner, and nearly all of the miners were men. And partly because the style of the way the characters were written is masculine. Although he doesn’t state his gender that I can see.”

  “You can tell whether the writer was male or female just by looking at the Chinese characters?”

  “Usually, yes. Not so much the character choices in terms of voice or content, but the style of the handwriting. It is the same as when you look at something written in English. Experts will tell you that handwriting does not reveal gender or age or income or anything else. But of course what they really mean is that handwriting cannot reveal these things conclusively. Yet, by some mysterious connection between genes and motor skills, writing style does in fact tend to reveal gender, whether in Roman cursive or Chinese characters. In all of the scientific journals I keep up with, I still haven’t read a satisfactory explanation of how that comes to be. Nevertheless, in the same way that facial structure suggests boy or girl, handwriting does the same.” He gestured with the journal. “For the same reason, I think the last third of the journal was also written by a man, although I think that this second man was not a miner but a construction laborer specializing in masonry.”