Reflecting the Sky (20 page)

Authors: S. J. Rozan

BOOK: Reflecting the Sky

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“Okay,” I said, still dubious, “but what makes you think that even if we find someone who knows her, they won’t think we’re some sort of immigration officials or something and they won’t talk to us?”

“Because like Mark Quan said, both the good news and the bad news is no one would ever take us for locals. I’ll say I knew her family when I lived in the Philippines.”

“You think that’ll work?”

“If I say it in Tagalog.”

I looked at him. “You remember enough Tagalog to do that?”

“You can’t hang around with the local delinquents if you don’t speak their language.”

So we stepped into the ocean of laughing young women and Bill spoke to them, group by group, in a language I couldn’t understand. Their eyes widened in amazement, they smiled and answered and we moved on. Sometimes a woman responded not in Tagalog, whose very sounds and cadences were strange to me, but in Spanish, which, though I didn’t speak it, was familiar from the streets of New York. Bill switched into easy Spanish then, and the women beamed with delight. Not part of these conversations, I watched the young women, their surprise and amusement at the tall Westerner who spoke both their languages; and I watched Bill, watched the small changes in his face, his hands and shoulders, as he shifted from one foreign way of speaking and thinking to another.

“Did you learn the language every place you lived?” I asked him after a time. We had stopped at a vendor’s cart for bottled water. The sun was standing almost directly overhead now and the crowd, almost unbelievably, had grown, as church services let out or late sleepers sheepishly arrived.

Bill wiped his forehead with the back of his hand and said, “I tried. I didn’t want to be an Army brat; I didn’t want to be an American. Language isn’t that hard when you’re a kid,”

“Do you still speak them all this well?”

“I don’t speak Tagalog well. They’re talking to me like you would to a six-year-old, and they think it’s a riot.” He took a long drink of water. “I never spoke much Thai, and I didn’t like German, but I bet I could still speak Dutch if I had to.”

“Dutch?”

“Sure.
Hei, meisje, wil je even een sluipende tulp kopen?”

“What does that mean?”

He winked. “‘Hey, cutie, wanna buy a hot tulip?’”

I smacked him on the arm pro forma, and we went on. Bill’s mood had lightened; but it seemed to me the darkness was still there, lurking behind the sleep-, caffeine-, and in his case cigarette-fueled activity that kept us moving, gave us something to do. I hoped, mostly for Harry Wei, but partly also for Bill, that fishing in this ocean of young Filipinas would turn out to be more than just a way to idle away a sunny morning.

About a half an hour later, we had a catch.

We had left the sun-heated stones of Statue Square for the greener precincts of Chater Garden, where the young women, fastidiously avoiding the planted areas, were seated on every path, plaza, fountain, and footbridge. Their lunches and their CD players surrounded them, and the shopping bags they’d brought these things in hung from the garden fences. The shopping bags had come from home, their employers’ homes, and the Chater Garden fences were decorated with shopping bags carrying the names of the most upscale shops in the world: Bijan, Hermes, Armani, Tiffany bags had come here carrying spicy rice and Spanish music.

We had been walking through the crowd for almost two hours, and I was about ready to give it up and think of something else to do—something that involved air-conditioning—when we hit one group of young women where Bill’s question brought more than shrugs and apologetic smiles. A small, pretty woman, short-haired and quick, lit up at his question, asked him one in return, and laughed at his answer. They spoke some more, both smiling, and then he thanked her and we turned to leave. We didn’t stop at the next group, though, but headed up the path toward a pedestrian bridge.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“There’s a group of women from the area around Cabagan who get together where this bridge hits the one going across there.” He pointed ahead. “The woman who told me that has a cousin from Cabagan. She has lunch with them sometimes. She couldn’t believe a Westerner had ever heard of the place.”

We worked our way to and up the sloped bridge, picking a path between groups of women marveling over photographs and others singing along with crooning CDs.

At the top of the slope, where the intersection of two bridges formed a sort of skyway plaza, eight or nine women sat on mats, their shopping bags propped against the bridge railings. They ate chunks of beef and tomatoey rice from paper plates, offering each other cans of sweet juice drinks and plastic containers full of pickled vegetables. They paid no attention to our approach until we stopped in front of them and Bill, smiling, said something I by now recognized as hello in Tagalog.

Most of the young women smiled back, some looking curious, and one or two of them answered, also in Tagalog. Bill said something which included “Cabagan,” and the response involved smiles and nods, a few giggles, and a question or two. Bill answered the questions and then said something else, and I recognized Maria Quezon’s name among the unfamiliar sounds. Heads turned to one quiet young woman sitting cross-legged against the railing. The others waited, apparently, for her to respond.

She had said nothing when Bill first started asking questions and she said nothing now. She did not smile, but fixed Bill, and then looked me over, with large dark eyes.

She spoke, Bill spoke, she spoke again. Bill shook his head. She said something else, something that seemed to be a question. Bill gave a short answer. She glanced around at her friends, whose faces had lost their cheerful smiles and looked now concerned and confused. She stood, said something to them, and drew Bill off to a place a few feet away. I stayed behind. They spoke briefly. He took out his passport, and then some things from his wallet, and showed them to her. He nodded in my direction. They exchanged a few more sentences, she shaking her head, he speaking low, seeming to repeat himself. When they parted he left her with a card from his wallet on which he’d scribbled something. She came back to join her friends; he gestured me over to him. I nodded to the women, who watched me warily. I went on to where Bill stood, and walked with him over the bridge.

“So?”
I said after about two steps. Coming to another intersection, we turned. We didn’t head back down onto the streets, but took yet another walkway that, ahead, plunged into the side of a glass-walled building.

“That,” said Bill, reaching the door in the building, pulling it open for me, “was Maria Quezon’s sister.”

A blast of cool air rolled out and nearly knocked me over. “What?” I demanded. I went though the door into a short carpeted corridor. My skin tingled in the twenty-degree temperature drop. I turned to Bill as soon as I was inside. “And? So?
What?”

Trying to get through the door also, he bumped into me. Then two Japanese tourists coming in behind him bumped into both of us. We all apologized with smiles and bows, and Bill and I moved over, out of the traffic lane.

I opened my mouth but before I could start again Bill said, “She told me she didn’t know where Maria was.”

“What do you mean, her sister?”

“Remember Natalie Zhu said she thought Maria had a sister working in Hong Kong, but she didn’t have any idea where to find her? Well, you find her where you find the other women from her village. Right there”—he nodded in the direction we’d come from—“at the corner of Bridge and Bridge.”

“Well,” I said, “that’s pretty bright of you, I have to admit. You get genius points. But she doesn’t know where Maria is, so in the end it gets us nowhere.”

“Wrong. She
said
she doesn’t know where Maria is. I swore up and down that not only weren’t we cops or officials of any kind, we weren’t even citizens here, and we didn’t want to get into trouble here any more than she did. But I said we knew about Harry, and I thought Maria was already in trouble, and if she was, we wanted to help.”

“What did she say?”

“What she didn’t say was that she didn’t know what I was talking about, or what did I mean, ‘knew about Harry’? She just told me again she didn’t know where Maria was.”

“Hmm. And you’re thinking if she’s really in the dark she’d ask more questions?”

“Wouldn’t you?”

“Don’t I anyway?” I stepped aside as a middle-aged couple opened the door to go out onto the bridge. A gust of hot humid air tried to sneak in, but the air-conditioning muscled it out again. “So what now?” I said.

“I told her again I wanted to help. I said I was worried about the little boy. I told her I knew about living someplace where you don’t belong and feeling like you have no place to turn when you’re in trouble. I suggested Maria could call me and we could talk.”

Three Americans came in the door, flushed and wilted from the heat. I looked at Bill as they passed us. “You do, don’t you?”

“I do what?”

“You know about living places you don’t belong.”

He shrugged. “We lived in a lot of places when I was a kid.”

“It’s not just that.”

“Not just what?”

“Feeling like you belong. It’s not just the place.”

He didn’t answer and he didn’t look at me.

“And speaking of places,” I said, changing the subject in my usual adroit manner, “where are we?”

“The Furama Hotel. I thought you might want a cup of tea.

“Ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding.”

“What’s that?”

“That’s your bonus genius points being rung up.”

Down the short corridor we turned left, which was the only possibility. The carpet, released from the narrow banks of the corridor, flooded out to become the floor of a grand upstairs lobby, high-ceilinged, dotted with easy chairs, sleek glass-topped tables, and newspaper racks in case you wanted to sit around in cool comfort and catch up on the world.

Or you could sit and look at the actual world through the glass wall on the far side of the lobby. We decided to do that, strolling across the endless carpet to choose a table right up against the glass, with a view of the Chater Garden and the ocean of Filipinas we had spent the morning among. No sooner had we sat down than a young woman in a discreet gray uniform appeared to ask us gravely if there was anything we wanted. I ordered hot tea and Bill ordered iced. Then we settled back in the easy chairs and looked at each other.

“This tropical-climate business,” I said. “I don’t know about it.”

“You’re gorgeous when you sweat. It makes you glow.”

“Uh-huh. I bet I smell good, too.”

“As always.”

“Well,” I said, “my personal hygiene aside, what do we do now?”

“We wait for our drinks before we try to do any more thinking?”

That sounded like a good plan. I leaned back in the chair, feeling my body temperature dropping one slow degree at a time. I was content not to think right now, just to watch the other Sunday tea-takers, the hotel guests checking in and out at the long lobby desk, the waiters and waitresses coming and going. The traffic and the palm trees and the amahs beyond the glass were a sunlit, silent spectacle, and all the sounds I could hear were hushed ones: soft footsteps, quiet conversations, the mild chirp of a cell phone.

A cell phone. Chirp, chirp. From my bag. I yanked the snap open and grabbed the thing out, stuck it to my ear, and shouted,
“Wai!”

“Lydia?” came a tentative voice in my ear.

I dropped my voice to normal speaking tones. “Yes, it’s me. Mark?”

“You sounded so Hong Kong,” Mark Quan said. “I thought I might have the wrong number.”

“I’m adapting. Do you have news?”

“As a matter of fact I do. Not about the boy—that’s your department.”

“No, nothing. I was thinking of calling them but if they’re waiting for a call …”

“I know,” he said. Then, “I don’t suppose you’re anywhere near me?”

“I wouldn’t know. Not only don’t I have any idea where you are, I’m not exactly sure where I am. We seem to be at the Furama Hotel.”

He laughed. “Right down the street. Give me a few minutes. Where do I find you?”

“The lobby on the second floor. Having tea.”

Our tea came exactly as I said that. I folded up the phone and, when the waitress was through laying out the milk, sugar, lemons, and spoons, I told Bill we were expecting a visit from Mark Quan, with something to say.

“He didn’t say what?”

“Not even a hint.”

“Then I don’t suppose there’s anything we can do except drink and wait.”

“You could speak Dutch to me some more.”

“Is that sexy and attractive?”

“No. It’s pretty silly, as a matter of fact. Are you sure your accent’s right?”

“I’m almost sure it’s not.”