by S. J. Rozan
“No,” Alice said, frowning over that. I frowned, too; the question seemed a little insensitive right at the moment. Although I had an insensitive question of my own I’d been looking for a time to ask.
“Alice, Joel was wondering something. About you. It made me wonder, too. I don’t mean to offend you-”
“No, please. If you think it will help discover what happened to Joel.”
I didn’t see how it could, but it seemed like something I should find out, because Joel had wanted to know. “It’s this: Why do you do the work you do? Holocaust asset recovery?”
She smiled. “You mean as a gentile? Don’t worry, I’ve been asked that before. The camp… It was the war that sent us there. We lost so much, as so many people did. As I grew, I learned that what we’d been through, horrible as it was, wasn’t the half of it. I hated that war. But a war that’s over is an elusive enemy. My sister urged me to put it behind me, and I tried, but I couldn’t. I felt-as we were saying earlier-angry and helpless. When the asset recovery movement started to grow, I saw it as a chance to right some of those wrongs.”
“Joel said most people who do the work you do see it as a religious calling.”
“Did he? I suppose, in a way, I do. And not all my clients are Jewish, you know. Most are. But Catholics, Hungarians, Poles, homosexuals, Gypsies-that war had many victims.”
“Wouldn’t your argument really have been with the Japanese?” Bill asked. “That’s who put you in the camp.”
“There’s no reparations movement against Japan, except on behalf of ‘comfort women.’ But Germany and Japan were allies. Prying stolen treasures out of German hands is about the best I can do. For me, it’s enough.”
When there’s not much you can do, something still beats nothing. Well, I could second that.
The desk phone rang. Alice spoke and then, slipping the receiver back, told us, “Detective Mulgrew’s on his way up.”
“Maybe I’ll make myself scarce.” Bill rose from his perch.
“You’d deprive yourself of the pleasure of meeting Mulgrew?” I asked. “And the pleasure of more of the Waldorf’s coffee?”
“Good as the coffee is, from what I hear the one doesn’t begin to make up for the other. And the NYPD doesn’t like crowds.”
That was true. Also, certain elements in the NYPD don’t like Bill. Mulgrew seemed to be the type who’d check around and find some way to get on my case later about the company I keep.
Under Mulgrew’s hand even the door knocker sounded scornful. If Mulgrew was enchanted to see me, he hid it well, but he didn’t boot me out. He even tossed the occasional question at me, though the ones he asked Alice sounded less sharp in tone, less accusatory in content. Maybe that was because she poured him coffee as soon as he sat down, and put two chocolate cookies on the saucer.
Not that he had many questions. The pro forma nature of this interview couldn’t have been more obvious. What did you hire the deceased to do, did he give you any indication he was worried about anything, what did you talk about this morning, can you think of anyone who’d want to hurt him?
“Well, only Wong Pan. If Joel had found him.”
“The Shanghai guy? What about it, had Pilarsky found him?”
“He didn’t say he had,” Alice admitted, “but maybe after I spoke to him-”
“He didn’t get any calls or e-mails. He made three calls: his college roommate, you, and you.” Mulgrew turned to me. “Did he say anything about finding this guy?”
“I’d have told you before if he had, Detective.”
“I’m sure.” Back to Alice: “Any idea where I can find this Wong Pan?”
“If I had,” Alice said with a small smile, “I wouldn’t have hired Joel and Lydia. You do have his photo?” She started for her briefcase, but Mulgrew waved her back to her chair.
“Yeah, she gave it to me,” he said. I sincerely hate being referred to as “she” when I’m sitting right there. “But unless he also pulled the other three jobs in that neighborhood, my money’s not on him.”
“You will look for him, though?”
“Sure.” Mulgrew reached for a lemon bar, devouring it, as he had the other cookies, in a single bite. This was not a detail man. “Thanks for your time.” He stood. “Call me if you think of anything else.” He started toward the door.
“The Shanghai Moon,” I said.
“What?”
“A legendary lost gem. It belonged to the same woman the rest of this jewelry belonged to.”
He stared at me. “A legendary lost gem.”
“It’s famous.”
“Oh, a famous legendary lost gem. And it was part of this find?”
“No.” I was already regretting opening my mouth. But he irked me, his dismissiveness, his put-upon air. “Or, maybe. We don’t know.”
“You don’t know. So why are you bringing it up?”
“Someone may have thought it was.”
“And the connection between that thought and Pilarsky’s murder would be?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did Pilarsky have it? Or know where it was?”
“I don’t know.”
A pause. “All right, I’ll check it out.”
Hah. I could just bet what that meant. Mulgrew barking across the squad room: Hey, any of you ever heard of some jewel called the Shanghai Moon? What about this mutt Wong Pan, from China, where they stole all our jobs?
Alice walked to the door and opened it for him. “Thank you for being willing to come to the hotel, Detective.”
“My pleasure, ma’am. Not often I get to see how the other half lives.”
When we were alone again, I said, “Well, you won his heart.”
“He’s not so bad.”
“Yes, he is.”
“Just overworked, I think. Most policemen are overworked. Not that you seem exactly fresh as a daisy, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“I’m exhausted.”
“You’ve had a terrible day. Why don’t you go home? Take a long hot bath. Something relaxing, maybe lavender. It’ll do you a world of good.”
“You know, that sounds great.” I stood. “We can talk in the morning.”
“Yes, but I think not professionally.”
“What do you mean?”
“Until they catch whoever killed Joel, or until we can be sure his death had nothing to do with Rosalie Gilder’s jewelry, I can’t think of letting you go on.”
My jaw dropped. “You can’t think of stopping me! Joel would hate that, giving up!”
“I’m not talking about giving up, but until we know it’s safe, we have to let the police take over. I’ll call my clients. I’m sure they’ll agree.”
“But that’s just wrong! Mulgrew’s not really looking for Wong Pan, and he didn’t care at all about the Shanghai Moon!”
“He may be right.”
“He’s not right.”
“All the more reason to back off, then, and let his investigation lead him to that conclusion. Really, Lydia, I can’t allow to you endanger yourself. Recovering this jewelry isn’t worth that. I’m sorry, but it’s my decision.”
“But to just give up-”
“Oh, Lydia, please don’t make me say it.”
“Say what?”
Her sympathetic look didn’t alter her unambiguous words. “You’re fired.”
10
I called Bill the the second I disembarked from the Waldorf. “We’re fired!”
“What you mean ‘we,’ Chinese woman?”
“Be serious! This is bad!” I told him about the interview with Mulgrew, and its aftermath.
He asked, “What are you going to do?”
“Are you kidding? If you think there’s any possible way I’m going to forget it and let Mulgrew just go through the motions, you’re every bit as-”
“I didn’t say, ‘Are you going to forget it?’ ” he broke in. “I said, ‘What are you going to do?’ ”
“Oh. Well, when yo
u put it that way.” I rubbed my eyes. “I apologize. I shouldn’t be taking it out on you.”
“That’s what I’m here for. Though I’d be curious to know what I’m every bit as.”
“I’ll never tell. But I’m curious to know something, too. Why did you do that thing you do, sitting off to the side so you can observe someone?”
“I do that?”
“You know, when I play innocent with you, it’s silly. When you do it with me, it’s absurd. Yes, you do that. When you don’t trust someone. Do you have a problem with Alice?”
For a moment he was silent. “There’s something peculiar about her. Joel said so, too.”
“ ‘Off’ is the word he used, and that was because she does this work and she’s not Jewish.”
“And she explained that. But there’s still something.”
“Any idea what?”
“No.”
“Have you eaten yet?” my mother called from the living room as I slipped off my shoes in the vestibule. It’s a standard Chinese greeting, the hospitable inquiry of a famine-prone land. It’s no more looking for a real answer than “How are you?” is in English. But the thought of food right now was enough to curdle my stomach.
“I’m not hungry. Ma, I need to tell you something.” I sat on the couch next to her.
“Ling Wan-ju? What’s wrong?” She shut her Hong Kong fashion magazine, which she studies for ideas for outfits for my sisters-in-law and me.
“It’s Joel, Ma.”
“The one who sings.”
“Ma, he’s dead.”
Her lips compressed into a thin line. She patted my hand. Then, hands back in her own lap, she asked, “What happened to him?”
“Someone shot him.”
“Who did that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Was it because of your case?”
Nothing like the head-on approach.
“I don’t know that either. The police don’t think so.” She nodded and minutely relaxed. I could have left it at that, but I didn’t want to lie to her. “I do, though.”
“Do you?”
“Yes. The client does, too. She wants me to stop.”
A few moments of silence. “Are you in danger, Ling Wan-ju?”
“I don’t know.”
“But it wouldn’t matter, would it?”
“Ma-”
“No, it would not. And what the client wants will not matter either. You will do what you think is the right thing for your friend, even if you must do it all alone.”
I wasn’t going to be alone, but this would have been a particularly bad time to bring up Bill.
“No, you will continue. You will not consider the consequences until they happen.”
“I have no choice, Ma.”
She looked across the room to the cabinet holding my father’s collection of mud figurines: fishermen, farmers, a young woman weaving. People living the lives their parents had lived, and their parents’ parents, unchanging, peaceful, and unsurprising. She stood. “You have a choice, Ling Wan-ju: whether to eat dinner or not. I have jyu sam tong.”
Pig’s heart soup, for reviving the fainthearted. As I followed my mother into the kitchen, I wondered, how had she known?
My mother and I watched a Cantonese soap opera while we ate, a costume drama full of drums and cymbals, Tang dynasty outfits, and complicated hairdos. Trying to follow the story absorbed my attention, as had the running around I’d done all day. It wasn’t until I was alone in my room that the image of Joel open-eyed in his chair flooded back into my brain.
I stood in the middle of the floor, feeling my breath knocked out the same way it had been by the actual sight. I closed my eyes, didn’t try to muscle the picture away, but let it rush in like a tide until, like a tide, it could ebb again.
It did. But tired as I was, there was no way, after that, I was going to be able to sleep.
So I turned my computer on and Googled “Shanghai Moon.”
I didn’t learn much more than I had from Mr. Friedman’s book. No Web site had photos, or even a good description. All agreed the Shanghai Moon’s whereabouts were unknown; few agreed on its last known location. In a chat room I found a breathless account of a brooch seen at an audience with some Bhutanese royals; could this be the Shanghai Moon? Two curt responses: no, and no way. The jade described was apple green. The setting included sapphires. The poster, someone scoffed, must be a newbie even to ask. On another site someone calling himself MoonHunter reported on a private jewelry auction at a swank hotel in Kuala Lumpur, which he’d been invited to by a collector friend. He dwelled a little long, I thought, on the VIP status of the attendees, the lapis fountain, the free Moët, and the stunning waitresses, but that was probably because he had to admit that in the end he’d caught no sniff of the Shanghai Moon. Now that he was in the private auction world, though, he just knew he was on the right track. I didn’t know much about private jewelry auctions, but it rather uncharitably occurred to me that anyone so impressed with celebrities, fountains, and waitresses-and who had to be invited into their presence by someone else-was, just possibly, a gasbag.
After an hour of surfing, I got tired of rehashes of the same rumors. Also, the aroma of greed, the focus on the guessed-at value of the brooch, began to bother me. Where was Rosalie in all this, these discussions of colors of jade? Where was Chen Kai-rong, where was the reason the Shanghai Moon had come into existence in the first place?
I logged off. It was possible this was nothing but a big waste of time anyway. Strictly speaking, only Stanley Friedman’s book even suggested a connection between Joel’s death and the Shanghai Moon. Fingering the jade pendant my parents gave me when I was born, I crawled into bed and fell asleep.
11
The Wonder Woman theme song jarred me out of an indistinct, menacing dream. “Oh ho,” I mumbled, finding the phone and sinking back into the pillow. “Hi, Benedict Arnold.”
Mary said, “Sorry to call so late.”
I checked the clock: not quite midnight. “I’m surprised you have the nerve to call me at all.”
“You’re mad I told Bill about Joel.”
“Good guess.”
“But that means you know I told him, which means he must have called you.”
“No wonder you have that gold shield.”
“So what happened?”
“He wormed his way into my office and into the case.”
“And into your heart?”
“Not so fast, sister.”
“Okay, but you’re working together again?”
“Until we find out who killed Joel. Then I’ll see how he’s behaving.”
“So I did the right thing.”
“You think I’d admit that?”
“I wouldn’t, in your position. Anyway, I really hope it works out. But Lydia, that’s not why I called.”
“If you’re checking up on me because of Joel, I’m okay, truly.”
“I still don’t believe that, but I’m glad to hear it. But that’s not why either.”
There was a tone in her voice I was finally awake enough to hear, and I didn’t like it. “Mary? Is something else wrong?”
“It sort of is. We identified my John Doe.”
“Hey, if I weren’t mad at you I’d say, ‘Great’! Did it make you look smart? Who is he?”
“Not that smart. He’s Chinese, but not an illegal. Not an immigrant at all. Lydia, he’s a cop.”
“A cop? You mean from another department, or from like the FBI?”
“I mean from China. From Shanghai.”
“A cop from China?”
“They’d made contact a few days ago, brass to brass, to say he was coming, but that kind of thing doesn’t trickle down to precinct level until the out-of-town cop gets here. This guy never got that far. Shanghai got in touch when he missed a check-in call home.”
“What was he doing here?”
“Chasing a fugitive.”
“And you’re calling
me in the middle of the night to tell me this. Wait-the light is dawning. It was my fugitive? He was after Wong Pan?”
“Yes.”
“Oh boy.”
“Oh boy, what?”
“Probably nothing. But there may be more going on than you know about.” I told Mary what Stanley Friedman had told us.
When I was done she was silent for moment. “You’re kidding. A mysterious lost fabulous jewel?”
“Just keep an open mind.”
“If you say so. But you don’t know if Wong Pan has this jewel.”
“No.”
“Or if he does, if Joel knew that.”
“No.”
“Or if it has anything to do with this at all.”
“What happened to that open mind?”
“It’s still ajar. Right now I need to speak to Alice Fairchild. She doesn’t answer her phone at the Waldorf or her cell. How do I find her?”
“Mary, it’s midnight! Maybe she sleeps with earplugs. If you want her, go over there and bang on the door. That’s what Mulgrew would do. Speaking of Mulgrew, did you tell him about the Chinese cop? That’s his case, too, isn’t it?”
“Teed him off. He told me I should have figured it out sooner.”
“You should have?”
“And he’s still clinging to his messenger theory on Joel.”
“He thinks this can possibly be coincidence?”
“More like hopes. He did promise they’ll check the forensics at Joel’s office and the cop’s hotel room.”
“Well, I guess that’s all we can hope for. Mary? What was his name?”
“The Chinese cop?”
“Yes.”
“Sheng Yue. Why?”
“I don’t know. He’s dead. We should at least be calling him by his name.”
After we hung up I stared at the ceiling for a while. I thought about Joel, drinking coffee at the Waldorf; about Alice, remembering how I took my tea; about Rosalie and Kai-rong on the deck of an ocean liner. I thought about calling Bill, and while I was thinking, I suddenly found the room bright with sun. And though I hadn’t noticed myself sleeping, I’d woken with an inspiration. I groped for my phone and speed-dialed Mary. “The cop from Shanghai. Sheng Yue. His hotel room’s the one that was registered to Wu Ming? ‘Anonymous?’ ”