Reflecting the Sky (11 page)
Read Reflecting the Sky Online
Authors: S. J. Rozan
“I have not changed my mind about the police,” Natalie Zhu repeated. “They are not capable of finding Harry without taking action so obvious that the kidnappers will be alerted. But you are in a different position.”
“What do you want us to do?”
“As I say: Find Maria Quezon. You are professionals, trusted by Gao Mian-Liang; that is a high recommendation for your abilities. Perhaps you can proceed without arousing suspicions. I am not familiar with your usual terms of employment, but whatever they are I will accept them. I would ask, however, that you report to me anything you find, however insignificant it seems. Nothing you do must endanger the child. Because you are not from Hong Kong, it is possible you may miss the implications of your actions. But as you say, I do not believe this is simple. Some action must be taken. Will you accept?”
Darn tootin’, I wanted to answer, to balance Natalie Zhu’s formal manner and the fact that I knew she was saying all this to me from three hundred feet in the sky; but I restrained myself. “Yes,” I told her. “We’ll take the job.”
I asked for information on Maria Quezon; she gave me very little. Maria had lived with the Wei family for all of Harry’s seven years, except for an annual two-week trip back to the Philippines, where she had family in the mountain village of Cabagan. She had come recommended by someone, but Natalie Zhu didn’t know who; her sister also worked in Hong Kong, but Natalie Zhu didn’t know where. She had a boyfriend, but Natalie Zhu didn’t know him. She surely must have friends among the other amahs, although Natalie Zhu had no idea of how to go about finding them, since there were one hundred thousand Filipinas in Hong Kong looking after other people’s children. Li-Ling Wei might possibly know, but again, she did not want Li-Ling or Steven to know what we were doing.
“Steven’s strength is also his flaw,” she said. “He is a devoted family man, very loyal. Harry, Li-Ling, and now the expected little one are central to his life. His loyalty extended, of course, to his father, and extends to his uncle. I am honored to say it extends also to myself; and after so many years, to Maria Quezon as well. He will not hear a bad word against any of us. Unfortunately, not everyone returns such devotion in kind.”
Unfortunate indeed, I thought. “I’d like to look through her things,” I said. “In her room. She’s bound to have something that will give us a line on her boyfriend or her sister, something to start with.”
“No,” Natalie Zhu said calmly. “As I said, I cannot allow Steven or Li-Ling to know about this. I will look through her room myself, at the first opportunity. I will let you know what I find.”
I didn’t like that as much, but you don’t argue with a door after it’s slammed shut. “All right,” I told Natalie Zhu. “Call us if you find anything. And if anything happens.”
She gave me the number of her cell phone, the better for secret-keeping, and hung up. I flipped my phone closed and said to Bill, “We’re hired.”
“Well, I’m impressed,” he said. “You really knew she was going to call?”
“From the look she gave me as she was throwing us out. I got the feeling she had something to say, and since she wasn’t saying it there, I thought she’d try later.”
“So what are we hired to do?”
“Find the amah.” I gave him a rundown of Natalie Zhu’s request and her reasoning. “What do you think?” I asked when I was finished.
He lit another cigarette, looked across the park. Two of the amahs, chattering away, were packing up their diaper bags, strollers, and children. “I think it’s bullshit,” he said.
“Funny, I had that same thought. Which part?”
“All of it. Why she doesn’t want Steven Wei to know what we’re doing. Loyalty to the amah only goes so far, when your kid’s at stake.”
“Maybe she’s afraid he thinks nothing should be done at all. Just to sit tight and follow directions.”
“Did you get the feeling he did any thinking for himself when she was around?”
“No,” I said. “And that’s another thing. Sneaking out onto the balcony. Laying it on thick about how good we must be if Grandfather Gao sent us. What happened to the I-give-the-orders, this-is-how-it-is Natalie Zhu we used to know?”
“So what do you think the point is?”
“To use us find Maria Quezon for some other reason, something Steven Wei wouldn’t like. Or—”
“—or to keep us busy. To get us out of the way.”
The amahs pushed their strollers past us on their way out of the park. One of the toddlers, the one who’d fallen, was already asleep, cookie crumbs sticking to his round cheeks.
“And she thinks this will be sure to do it,” I said. “Two Americans looking for a Filipina in Hong Kong. This could keep us
seriously
out of the way. Why would she want to do that?”
seriously
out of the way. Why would she want to do that?”
“So we won’t interfere with whatever she’s doing.”
“Which would be what?”
“Or,” he said, not answering my question, “there’s another possibility. Maybe she’s not trying to keep us from interfering with her. Maybe she’s trying to interfere with us.”
“With us, with what?”
“Whatever it is we were sent here to do.” Bill mashed his cigarette on the side of the bench. “I wish to hell I knew what that was.”
The cloud cover from the Peak had crept downhill while we’d been sitting here, making the air no cooler but even more unpleasantly sticky. Without the drama of strong sun and sharp shadows, the buildings surrounding the little park were revealed as neglected and shabby. I could see the rust on their metal windows and the cracks in their concrete. A truck straining up the hill left a bloom of exhaust to mix with the damp mist and drift in our direction.
“Grandfather Gao sent us,” I said. “That’s all she knows about us. If she’s trying to distract us it must be because she thinks he had something more in mind than Harry’s jade and old Mr. Wei’s funeral arrangements. You don’t suppose,” a new thought hit me, “that all of this is for our benefit?”
Bill didn’t answer right away. “No,” he finally said. “Or: Maybe it is, but if it is, the parents aren’t in on it. What they’re going through, worrying about their kid, they’re not faking that.”
Well, I thought, you’re more of an expert than I am. I suddenly wanted to take his hand, hold it just a minute; but I knew that was the last thing he’d want, so I pretended instead that I didn’t see what was in his eyes and I said, “I’m calling Grandfather Gao.”
Bill didn’t answer. I took the cell phone out again, but before I tried to call New York on it I called the hotel, just to check, though I wasn’t sure who besides Grandfather Gao himself would have called me.
Someone had, though. I scribbled down the number, thanked the desk clerk, pressed the OFF button, and turned to Bill.
“You’ll never guess.”
He waited, then decided to do it my way. “Steven Wei.”
I shook my head. He went on guessing, and I went on shaking my head. “Li-Ling Wei. Franklin Wei. Iron Fist Chang. The old lady, whatever her name was. The fortune-teller. That god from the temple, Wong Tai Sin. Sorry, wrong number.”
He was out of guesses. I told him: “The police.”
The Mandarin Oriental Hotel was just easing out of the afternoon tea business and into the cocktail hour when Bill and I arrived. As soon as we walked into the stately cool of the lobby, I wished I were back in one of my own sharply pressed linen shirts instead of this street-stall flowered blouse, and I wished Bill were still wearing a jacket and tie.
The Mandarin Oriental stood in placid peace on one of central Hong Kong’s busiest avenues like a dowager duchess rising above the hysteria of her household staff. Outside, the building was serious-looking stone, and on the inside dark polished wood, beveled glass, and marble all exuded an air of outpost-of-empire that would take generations to wear away.
Bill and I were admitted by a white-gloved doorman and, when we asked our way to the Clipper Lounge, were gravely shown to a grand staircase by a lobby attendant who must have spent all his spare time shining the buttons on his uniform. The other women I saw, both Chinese and non, were all impeccably turned out, including the kind of high-heeled strappy sandals I would wear only in an emergency. The men, I was surprised to see, generally wore polo shirts—always with some recognizable logo—or dress shirts open at the neck. Few jackets, few ties. Considering it was about two hundred degrees outside, I guessed that made sense. I glanced at Bill. Maybe he didn’t look so out of place, then. Maybe it was just me.
From the top of the stairs Bill and I turned right along a wide mezzanine. Our steps in the plush carpet made no sound to distract our attention from the elegant jewelry stores with diamonds and jade sparkling in their tiny show windows or the tailor’s shops where you could choose a bolt of the finest cloth in the morning, have a fitting in the afternoon, and take your new handsewn suit home with you on the evening plane.
Thinking of the jewelry shop in the mall by the Hong Kong Hotel, I said to Bill, “Look at how those jewels glow and sparkle. They did that in the old man’s shop, too. They sort of call to you, don’t they? As though they were alive. As though they could tell you something, if you spoke the language.”
He peered into the window of the shop we were passing. “High-intensity lighting,” he said. “That high, that close, it would sparkle off tin.”
I looked also, first at him, then at the little lights tucked up above the glass. Another time, I might have made some crack, maybe about the limitations of Western rational thought; and Bill would have come back with something equally silly, probably including a half-real pass at me. But there had been a few occasions for wisecracks and passes in the last few hours that Bill had uncharacteristically let slide. Uncharacteristic, but not completely surprising. Over the years I had seen him in these darker, distant moods more than once. These were the times when I was reminded why he lived alone, and why that was a good idea.
So we walked in silence to the end of this elegant alley and came to the Clipper Lounge. Large potted palms screened groups of low tables and chairs from the unwanted sight of one another and string quartet music was piped in at just the right volume to make conversation easy to hold but difficult to overhear. A stunningly beautiful Chinese woman, much younger than I, sipped a pink drink from a tall-stemmed glass as she sat with a silver-haired Westerner; they were speaking French. Three Japanese businessmen drank beer, ate peanuts, and enthusiastically talked, smoked, laughed, and interrupted each other. I wondered if Bill recognized them from the Tokyo airport smoking lounge, but I didn’t get a chance to ask. A smiling man, polo-shirted under his pale linen jacket, was waving us over from behind a potted palm. We headed in his direction, me strolling nonchalantly as though street-stall blouses were quite the thing on the boulevards of Paris, where I normally frequented.
When we got there the smiling man held out his hand and said, “Lydia Chin? I’m Mark Quan.” The potted palm said nothing.
I offered Mark Quan my hand, told him I was pleased to meet him, and introduced Bill. We shook, we smiled, and then Detective Sergeant Mark Quan of the Hong Kong Police Department Detective Bureau invited us to sit down.
“What can I get you?” he asked, waving a waiter over. He was speaking perfect American English; in fact, it seemed to me to have a tiny touch of Southern drawl.
“Can I still get tea?”
“This is the Mandarin Oriental.” Mark Quan winked. “You can get anything you want.”
He was a stocky man, sun-bronzed in his white Armani Xchange polo shirt, cream-colored linen jacket, and tan khakis. He looked in his early thirties, a little chubbier, maybe, than he ought to be, but with an ease to his movements that gave me the idea that thinking fat was the same as soft might in this case be a mistake. That idea was reinforced by the fact that his friendly smile was knocked a little cockeyed by the faded scar on his upper lip.
He ordered my tea and a gin and bitter lemon for himself. Bill ordered a beer.
“Did you have trouble finding the hotel?” Mark Quan asked when the waiter had marched solemnly away to fulfill his sworn duty to bring us our drinks or die. “You’re new to Hong Kong, right?”
“No, the traffic was just heavy. It took a little longer than I thought,” I answered, matching him small talk for small talk.
“I thought you might rather come here than to the Bureau office,” he said. “It’s comfortable here, and the refreshments are better.” He smiled ruefully. “It’s a little-known fact that the tea in Hong Kong police stations is as bad as the coffee in American ones.” He settled back in his upholstered chair across the low table from us. The table was a wood-and-brass affair with hinges and handholds. It looked like something the English carried around to have tea on in the far-flung colonies. “So.” Mark Quan smiled expectantly at me and Bill. “What can I do for you?”
I gave Bill a quick, confused glance. He raised an eyebrow, asking me if I wanted him to take the question so I could watch and listen, but I decided not to do it that way. I said to Mark Quan, “I don’t understand. We’re here because
you
called
us.
”
you
called
us.
”
“Well, sure,” he said. “I was asked to extend you every courtesy. A drink at the Mandarin Oriental’s a good beginning, but it can’t be all you need. Life’s never that easy.”
“To extend us—Who asked you to do that?”
Mark Quan gave me an inquiring look; then his face relaxed into a smile. “I guess he didn’t tell you he was calling me?”
“Whoever he is, no, he didn’t.”
“That’s like him,” Mark Quan said. “Never gives anything away. Doesn’t tell you anything you don’t need to know, or half of what you do. Kind of drives you crazy sometimes, doesn’t it? But he’s almost always right.”
There was only one man I knew who fit that description, and he fit it perfectly. “Gao Mian-Liang? Gao Mian-Liang called you?”
“That’s right,” Mark Quan said. “Grandfather Gao.”
Bill lit a cigarette. I felt like I needed one, too.
“I guess it’s a lot less of a surprise to me than to you,” Mark Quan went on.
Uh-huh, I thought, I guess.
Bill dropped the match into an ashtray, where it lay in the middle of the hotel’s gilded logo. “He’s called you before, then?” Bill asked, probably just to give me time to get used to this.
“He’s been calling me like this for years,” Mark Quan said. “Nothing for months, then just a suggestion: Pick up this pickpocket, look into that cash transfer. ‘Although the crowing of the cock does not bring the sunrise, he fails in his duty if he remains asleep.’”
Clearly the same Grandfather Gao.
At that moment our intrepid waiter returned from his mission, discreetly triumphant. He set down a porcelain tea service, including tiny silver tongs to grab tiny sugar cubes with, and poured Bill’s beer into a long thin glass. Mark Quan’s drink came decorated with a sunburst of lemon. I poured myself some tea through a silver strainer that had a bowl of its own to sit in while it waited to be needed again. I sipped; the tea was keemun, strong and slightly sweet, so I added a slice of lemon from a fan of them on a plate. I must have been running on fumes, I realized, as I sipped again and felt every cell in my body perk up like plants that have been waiting desperately for the man with the watering can.
“Detective,” I said, “can you explain this from a little closer to the beginning? How do you know Grandfather Gao, and why does he call you?”
Mark Quan sipped from the frosted glass. “He was friends with my dad in the States before we moved here.”
“You’re not from Hong Kong?”
He grinned. “Actually I was born here. My folks moved us to Birmingham, Alabama, when I was six months old. But my dad grew up here and always wanted to come back. I was just out of high school when he and Ma decided to make the big move, so I came along to see what it was all about.”
“I guess you liked it.”
“Well, you know.” He shrugged. “I just never felt like I fit in Birmingham.”
I was surprised to hear myself think, I do know. I drank some tea and asked, “And Grandfather Gao?”
“My dad’s a Chinese doctor. In Birmingham he ran a grocery store; on the side, he treated practically every Chinese person in Alabama. He used to go up to New York to buy herbs from Grandfather Gao. A few times he took me with him. They’d drink tea and talk, and I’d sit there in the middle of all those jars and drawers feeling like I was on the moon. I never understood a word Grandfather Gao said. It was all Chinese nature metaphors. But I liked the shop. It was quiet and it smelled good, and he always gave me tea, like I was a grown-up, too. And candy.”
I found myself smiling, thinking about the dark shelves, the porcelain jars and the small wood drawers with red Chinese characters painted on them—and Grandfather Gao’s nature metaphors. “I grew up around the corner from the shop. I used to go there all the time.”
Mark Quan grinned. His eyes met mine; then his grew wide. “Wait,” he said. “Wait, I remember you! You were that little kid!”
“What little kid?”
“That was you!” His smile expanded to light up his whole face. The scar on his lip, it seemed to me, became more obvious the bigger his smile grew. “We played chess. My dad and Grandfather Gao, and you and me. There was a blizzard and we couldn’t go home. Remember?”
“The blizzard?” I said. “That big one? When I was seven?” My mind flew back, leaving the potted palms and string quartet music for the snow-silenced streets of Chinatown at twilight, twenty-odd years ago. “I stopped at Grandfather Gao’s shop about five, on my way home from Chinese school.” I looked from Mark Quan to Bill. “I was so excited. I wanted to tell him about the snow—the snowbanks were bigger than I was, and it was snowing so hard you could barely see the streetlights.” I stared at Mark Quan. “And there was a man and a boy there, having tea and sweets. I was embarrassed, bursting in with all my noise, trailing snow into the shop. But Grandfather Gao seemed delighted and asked me to stay. He said his guests lived far away and couldn’t leave because of the storm, and he’d be grateful if I would stay and help him entertain them. I felt so important. But then Grandfather Gao and the man started a game of Chinese chess, and he suggested I play chess with the boy. And I thought, oh, but this is a big boy like my brothers. He won’t want to play chess with a little girl. I thought Grandfather Gao would be so disappointed in me, because I couldn’t do what he wanted me to.”
“But he wasn’t,” Mark Quan said.
“No.” I smiled. “The boy took out the board and the pieces and played with me just as though playing chess with a seven-year-old girl was a normal thing for a big boy to do. That was
you?
”
you?
”
“It was.” Mark Quan, still grinning, took another drink. “I was eleven. And you beat me.”
“You beat him?” Bill spoke for the first time in what seemed like ages. “Grandfather Gao’s guest?”
“He was so nice!” I said. “He didn’t treat me like an annoying pest or anything.” As though it had just happened, I remembered the way my stomach had clenched when I thought I’d have to disappoint Grandfather Gao, and the gratitude I’d felt when the boy, without skipping a beat, agreed to play with me. “I wanted to play my best,” I told Mark Quan. “To give you a real game. I didn’t want you to think you were stuck playing with a baby.”
“It was a good game,” said Mark Quan. “I’m glad it didn’t occur to you to let me win.”
Bill said, “To her? It never does.”
They gave each other a boys-only look. I shrugged and looked at the potted palm to see if it had anything to say.
“After chess, Grandfather Gao made us dinner,” Mark Quan said. “In the little kitchen in the back of the shop. And we ate right there on the table with the carved lion’s feet.”
“Shrimp with water chestnuts!” I said. “I felt so grown up, a dinner guest.”
I remembered that meal: Grandfather Gao calling my parents for permission for me to stay; the warmth of the shop and the aromas of food stir-frying in the wok while the blizzard blew outside; and later, getting bundled back into my winter jacket and boots so the two men and the boy could walk me home, the men talking quietly, the boy and I throwing snowballs, laughing and falling down in the deep, soft snow.
“That was a magical night,” I said.
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