Reflecting the Sky

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Authors: S. J. Rozan

BOOK: Reflecting the Sky
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sadly,
for my mother
 
thank you to:
 
Steve Axelrod, my agent
Keith Kahla, my editor
who have no crows on their roofs
 
Susanna Bergtold, Nancy Ennis, Sui-Ling Tsang, and Jill Weber
who were there in person
 
Richard (the Muse) Wilcox
who was there in spirit
 
Denise Bigo, John Douglas, Jennifer Jaffe, Tina Meyerhoff,
Larry Pontillo, and Tom Savage
who know the truth about swiftly running water
 
Charles Doherty
who is one of the gifts of Hong Kong
 
Steve Blier, Hillary Brown, Monty Freeman, Max Rudin,
Jim Russell, and Amy Schatz
who will take on any body of water
 
Betsy Harding, Royal Huber, Barbara Martin, Jamie Scott,
and Keith Snyder
who will take on any body of words
 
Doreen and Jonathan Chou,
Edna Quan and Anthony Siu,
Sandra Gong and Victor Sloan,
Howard and Marilyn Smith,
and the HKPD’s Jean Chan Sui-mui
who could not have been more generous
 
and
 
hghnola and spencyr
who
 
Damp, soupy heat washed over me as I pushed out through the revolving door. The bright morning glare was already hazed up by the shimmering exhaust of a river of cars, buses, and trucks. I looked left, looked right, got my bearings, and headed briskly down the sidewalk.
“Come
on
!” I turned to yell to my partner, Bill Smith, who still stood, looking a little groggy, his hands in his pockets, just gazing around. “Relive your misspent youth some other time! I don’t want to be late.”
With muttered words I was just as happy not to hear, he lurched down the sidewalk after me. Jostling, rushing pedestrians, many of them yelling into their cell phones, hurried past in both directions, making me feel like I had to work to keep my footing or I’d be tossed on their tide and swept away. Bill caught up to me as I stopped at the first corner, waiting with a crowd eight deep for the light to change.
“Late is extremely unlikely,” he grumbled, taking advantage of the momentary halt in our forward charge to light a cigarette. “Impolitely early, maybe. We’re twenty-five minutes ahead of even your obsessive-compulsive schedule. Will you slow down? And how do you know where you’re going? I thought I was supposed to be your native guide.”
“I don’t know what you’re supposed to be doing,” I said as the light turned green and the crowd surged forward, “but it can’t be guiding me around a place you haven’t been in for twenty years.”
A horn blasted as the last stragglers from our pedestrian stream leaped up onto the curb to avoid being mashed by a bus. The hiss and rumble of tires, the squeal of bus brakes, and the endless rattle of jackhammers from nearby construction made conversation difficult, but I was too keyed up to talk, anyway. The wind shifted, stirring the smells of diesel fuel and salt water into the scents of softened asphalt and frying pork already thick in the air. They were exciting smells, and it was an exciting morning, all the rushing, rumbling, surging, and yelling in the brightness. Though I didn’t see, really, why I should be so affected by it. I’ve spent my entire life negotiating traffic, noise, glare, and sidewalks. I’m Lydia Chin, born and raised in Chinatown, a genuine native New Yorker.
Of course, this wasn’t New York. This was Hong Kong, City of Life.
Life, pork, exhaust, and pedestrians. Bill matched his pace to mine and we hurried down the sidewalk in the sticky heat. Being from Chinatown, I was better at this business of threading through dense, moving crowds of Chinese people than he was, though the streams on the sidewalks of home had never flowed this fast. We kept being separated, coming together, getting pushed apart again. But we both knew where we were going—he because he had been here before, on R and R leaves in the navy; me because I had been studying maps for a week—and we ended up together and exactly where we wanted to be, at the turnstiles of the Star Ferry.
At which point I glanced at my watch, and then, because I know my watch, at his. “Wait,” I said. “As you so accurately, although crabbily, pointed out, we’re still early. The ferries run every eight minutes. Let’s take the next one. I want to see.”
He raised his eyebrows and sighed theatrically, but I didn’t care. Leaving him to follow, I zipped past the English-language bookstore, the Japanese snack shop, the newspaper vendors and the public bathrooms. The ferry terminal buildings gave way to an open promenade with a railing, and suddenly there was the Hong Kong skyline shining across the harbor.
It was as though someone had unrolled New York, slapped it with dozens of huge, neon brand-name signs visible even in the hazy sunshine, and spread it against a backdrop of mountains along a waterfront so long I had to turn my head way to the left and then way to the right to see the ends of it. Water sparkled in the sun, lapping against the seawall we were standing on. The frothy wakes churned up by barges, fishing boats, great white yachts, and tiny green sampans heading both ways through the harbor crisscrossed the trails of ferries plowing back and forth across it, from Hong Kong Island, where we were going, to the tip of the Kowloon Peninsula, where we were. The ferry we’d almost taken tooted its horn as it nosed out of its berth, and from way off to the right came a much deeper sound, some other horn saying something in the universal language of ships.
“Close your mouth,” Bill said. “People will know you’re a tourist.”
“I’m not a tourist. We’re here on business. And why didn’t you tell me it was this
huge
?”
He gazed across the harbor. “When I was here, it ended about there.” He pointed with both hands at the limits of a much shorter waterfront. “And none of the biggest skyscrapers were there, and neither was that.”
That
was a low, swoopy building, all metallic curves and wings, shining in the sun, right in the center, right on the water. “But the impression was the same. I stood there with my mouth open, too.”
“My mouth is not open. I’m Lydia Chin. Stuff like this doesn’t impress me,” I said, unable to take my eyes from the view across the water.
“I know,” Bill said. “That’s one of your best characteristics, how hard you are to impress.” He looked at his watch. “Now we’re right on schedule. We’d better go, or we actually will be late, and you’ll blame me.”
“Well, it’ll be your fault,” I said, tearing myself away from the skyline, turning to hurry back to the ferry. “You’re the one with the good watch.”
“Maybe that’s why I’m here,” Bill said as we dropped our ridged coins in the ferry turnstile and headed with the rest of the crowd up the stairs. “Because I have a watch that works.”
“That’s an expensive timekeeper.” I trotted down the wooden ramp onto the boat and took a seat at the very front so I could see us sail across the harbor. “A business-class ticket and a week in a fancy hotel? It would have been cheaper for Grandfather Gao to buy me a Rolex.”
“Or he could have put me in the same hotel room as you. That would have saved him a bundle. In fact, maybe we have a fiduciary duty to our client—”
I gave his fiduciary duty a dirty look and turned back to the opposite shore; we had started to move.
As the harbor breeze blew my hair around, I watched the edges of the skyline sharpen out of the haze. The buildings grew larger and Bill sat silent beside me, watching them too. It really wasn’t clear to either of us why he was here. It wasn’t, actually, clear to me why either of us was here.
 
What had seemed clear a week ago when I’d first heard this idea was that I was probably hallucinating and had lost my mind. Either that, or Grandfather Gao had lost his; but even suggesting that idea to myself made me so queasy from guilt that I had to calm myself with another sip of his tea.
I still couldn’t believe it, though. “You want me to go to Hong Kong?” We were sitting at the low, lion-footed table in Grandfather Gao’s Chinatown herb shop, surrounded by the dark wood cabinets with their small drawers, the brass urns and ceramic jars, the mingled smells of sweet incense and dried herbs that were as familiar to me as the flowered upholstery, family pictures, and spicy aroma of my mother’s cooking in the Chinatown apartment where I grew up.
“With your partner,” Grandfather Gao replied. His voice was its usual calm, somber self, but even in the shop’s peaceful shadows I could see him smile at the excited squeak in my voice. He used to smile that same smile when I was seven, when I made that same excited squeak.
I tried to control myself and act dignified. I liked to think I’d changed in the years since I used to come bouncing into the shop, interrupting Grandfather Gao in the middle of weighing out herbs for a customer or reading his Chinese newspaper, to tell him about some event or idea of enormous importance to a grade-school child. After all, I’m twenty-eight, a PI with her own practice, a licensed professional. Even if my license is in a profession my entire family abhors.
So I sipped my tea calmly and regarded my prospective client professionally. He wore a dark suit and tie, with a gloriously starched white shirt, as always. His thin black hair was combed straight back from his high forehead. He reached an age-spotted hand to the teapot and poured for me, and it suddenly occurred to me that maybe I’d changed in all these years, but Grandfather Gao hadn’t, not one bit.
“I hope this is a convenient time for this journey, Ling Wan-Ju,” he went on, as though this were a normal conversation. Because we spoke in Cantonese, as we always did, he used my Chinese name, as he always had. “Your partner also, I hope he is free?”
By my partner, he meant Bill Smith. Although, unlike my family, Grandfather Gao does not regard Bill as the human equivalent of the primrose path to hell, it was still a shock to hear him suggest that Bill accompany me to the other side of the world.
Nevertheless, resolving to regain my cool professional demeanor, as befits a private investigator about to be sent overseas, I said, “Grandfather, of course I’ll do anything you ask. But you know I’ve never traveled. I may not be the right choice to perform this task for you, whatever it is.” It was killing me to say this, since I was already seeing myself in a window seat on the New York-Hong Kong flight, but it was always best to come clean with Grandfather Gao.
“Your partner has traveled,” he answered, unperturbed. “I have considered this carefully, Ling Wan-Ju. A stream undisturbed flows easily to the sea, but a stream can be diverted, set on another course. You are a person in whose ability to find the correct course I have a great deal of confidence.”
I blushed from my toes to the roots of my hair. Grandfather Gao did nothing but sit in his chair and sip tea. I sipped tea, too, and tried to act as though people who meant to me what Grandfather Gao did said things to me like he’d just said every day of the week. When I found my voice, I said, “Thank you, Grandfather. What is the task?”
He didn’t speak right away, but looked into the shadows of his shop. Behind him, tendrils of smoke wandered into the air from the three sticks of incense burning at General Gung’s shrine, high on the wall.
“When I was a boy in China,” he said, bringing his eyes back to me, “two other boys in the village were as close to me as brothers. We were constant companions, inseparable. One of those boys was your grandfather.”
I knew that. That was why, when my parents came to America, Grandfather Gao had looked out for them, finding them the apartment my mother and I still lived in, getting my mother her first sewing job, arranging for English lessons for my oldest brother, Ted, who, along with my next-oldest brother, Elliot, had been born in Hong Kong. That was why, along with lots of other Chinatown kids whose families had been split apart when some came to America and some stayed behind, though he wasn’t really ours, we had always called him “Grandfather.”
As though he were reading my mind—a sense I had with disconcerting frequency—Grandfather Gao said, “When we were fourteen, I left China in the company of Wei Yao-Shi, the third companion of our boyhood days. Your grandfather remained in the village. We never saw him again.”
“My father always said grandfather couldn’t bear the thought of living anywhere but where his family had always lived.”
Grandfather Gao nodded. He paused, looking not at me and not, I thought, at the dark wood or the parchment scroll his eyes seemed to rest on. “I came immediately to America,” he said. “Wei Yao-Shi remained in Hong Kong for some years. He brought his younger brother, Ang-Ran, out of China. The two established an import-export firm.” Now he looked at me. “When your parents left China, it was Wei Yao-Shi who sponsored them in Hong Kong.”
He stopped speaking; I waited, wondering about the slight note of worry I thought I heard behind his calm, decisive voice.
“When the Wei brothers’ firm began to do business in America,” he began again, “Wei Yao-Shi came here. He opened an office. He married. He did not live in Chinatown, but bought a house in Westchester. Though he continued to spend a good part of each year in Hong Kong, he became … quite American. When you were small, Ling Wan-Ju, you met my old friend Wei Yao-Shi. He, like I, followed the progress of your family, for the sake of our friend, your grandfather.”
This was news to me. Seeing my expression, Grandfather Gao smiled. “His reports to your grandfather were quite satisfactory.”
Well, good, I thought, not sure I was quite comfortable with being watched and reported on, even if the reports were satisfactory.
“Your grandfather died many years ago in China,” Grandfather Gao said. “Now Wei Yao-Shi has died here in New York.”
At General Gung’s shrine the incense smoke seemed to shudder, as though a breeze had found a way into the shop’s cool recesses. “I’m sorry, Grandfather.”
“Thank you, Ling Wan-Ju. He was, of course, as I am, an old man.”
I didn’t at all like what that implied. “Grandfather—”
He silenced me with a look. “The seasons will change, Ling Wan-Ju. The leaves will fall.”
I knew better than to get involved when the nature metaphors began. I sat in silence, waiting for him to go on.
“Wei Yao-Shi left me with a task to accomplish. A letter to be given to his brother in Hong Kong. A keepsake to be delivered to his young grandson, also there. His own ashes, to be taken home for burial. I would like you, with your partner, to do these things for me.”

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