Reflecting the Sky (24 page)
Read Reflecting the Sky Online
Authors: S. J. Rozan
“Probably. They’re Strength and Harmony, he’s Strength and Harmony. But,” Bill said, still watching the water, “that was just your cover story, about buying Lion Rock. It might not be so bad to have him believing that. Do you suppose he knows anything else?”
“You mean, who we really are? If he and Franklin are working together, Franklin would have told him about Grandfather Gao’s emissaries. If he did, it has to be obvious to Lee that we’re the same people. Or at least,” I amended, “that I’m the same person. He probably thinks you’re the Duke of Plaza-Toro.”
“Uh-huh. In other words, waste of effort, that cover.”
“Well,” I said, “it was nice, anyway.”
“Thanks.” He was silent for a few moments. “But he may not know we’re investigators,” he said. “Just that we came from Grandfather Gao. Because Franklin may not know that.”
“That’s true. In which case let him keep believing we represent someone who wants to buy Lion Rock. Keep him distracted.”
“Well, but here’s another question: Why do you think he cares?”
“About someone buying Lion Rock?” I considered the question. “He doesn’t like Americans?”
“Americans have been all over Hong Kong for a hundred and fifty years, doing all kinds of business. Including buying up firms. Including buying up the antiques Lee sells. It’s a hell of a rear-guard action to try and stop the sale of one little import-export operation, if it’s just that he doesn’t like Americans.”
“Well, maybe he’s afraid that new owners would change his relationship with Lion Rock. Raise the prices, or start importing lower-grade stuff.”
“I’d like to know just what his relationship with Lion Rock is. Why he’s got at least one guy working there.”
“You mean Tony.”
He nodded. “And for all we know, three—Big John and Iron Fist could be Strength and Harmony, too.”
“I get the feeling,” I said, “that we’re about to find out more about Iron Fist than we wanted to know.”
A little farther down the hill we came to a main street. We hailed a cab and I told it where to take us.
“We should we call. the Weis, don’t you think?” I asked as the cab lurched into traffic. “Not to tell them about any of this, but to see if they’ve heard anything.”
So I took out my cell phone and did that. Although we both had the feeling that if anything good had happened, the Weis would have called us.
Nothing had happened.
After Steven Wei’s predictably loud and anxious,
“Wai!”
I identified myself, told him I was calling just to see if things had changed.
“Wai!”
I identified myself, told him I was calling just to see if things had changed.
“No,” he said, and I imagined his heartbeat slowly returning to normal as he sank dispiritedly into a chair. “No one has contacted us. I don’t know what to think.”
I offered my sympathy, which he seemed sadly grateful to have. Then, because I thought she’d get suspicious if I just hung up, I asked to speak to Natalie Zhu.
“Natalie is not here,” Steven told me.
That was a bit of a surprise. “She’s gone out?”
“Early this morning. And since then she has called to say she would be detained, and to expect her later this afternoon.”
“Where did she go?”
“She had business with another client that could not be put off.”
On a Sunday? When there’s a kidnapped kid whose parents you’ve put yourself in charge of?
“There was nothing she could do here in any case,” Steven Wei added. I thought maybe I heard in his voice relief that he was, for just a while, alone with his wife. Or maybe I was projecting.
“Nothing,” I told Bill when I hung up. “Except Natalie Zhu went out. To take care of some business, another client who couldn’t wait.”
“Really?”
“Fact or opinion?”
“Fact.”
“That’s what Steven said.”
“Opinion.”
“Not likely.”
“You think whatever she’s doing has something to do with this case?”
“I think wild horses couldn’t have pulled her out of that apartment if it didn’t.”
The main headquarters building of the Hong Kong Police Department, back down the hill and not far from the water, looked like any other Hong Kong skyscraper. An expanse of gray-blue glass, midday sun glinting off it, faced an avenue of roaring traffic. Our cab screeched to a halt at the curb and bounced forward and back while I peeled off bills for the fare. Inside the building, the usual too-cool air-conditioning greeted us like an old friend. Not so the stone-faced police officer at the front desk, who inquired after our business in a way that implied that whatever we said was probably a ruse his vigilance would get to the bottom of. I explained our names and our mission in Cantonese to see if it would soften him up. It didn’t, but a curt phone call upstairs got us visitor badges and a grudging explanation of where to find the elevator and what floor to get off on.
Mark Quan was waiting for us when the elevator opened. He wore a gold badge on his belt and an automatic in a shoulder holster. He said nothing except, “Come this way,” so we followed him through a blue-carpeted warren of office partitions. At scattered desks uniformed and plainclothes cops, mostly Chinese, a few Westerners, mostly men, a few women, typed on computer keyboards, drank from mugs, and insulted each other with the same offhand ease you’d see at the Fifth Precinct on Elizabeth Street, back home. They looked up when we passed, saw we had a cop with us, and went back to what they’d been doing. We were another cop’s case, another cop’s problem.
We stopped at a glass-walled conference room on the window side of a corridor. Mark Quan pushed the door open and held it. I hoped he would give us a map to find our way back to the elevator when we were through. I moved past him into the room, noticing the scent of his aftershave: green and citrusy, not a bit perfumed, but fresh as morning. I wasn’t really surprised that I noticed. I’m a detective; noticing details is my job. I was a little surprised, though, that Mark Quan had so clearly just shaved, in the early afternoon.
I crossed to the window. Below us, water sparkled and ferries plowed and sampans bobbed and yatchs both under sail and under power skimmed across the harbor to the outlying islands for a Sunday picnic. A regatta was going on far off on the horizon, small boats with bright-striped sails all swooping together this way and that like a flock of birds. Beyond the harbor, Kowloon’s gray buildings shimmered in the heat and its round hills blurred into the blue of the distant sky.
Mark pointed Bill and me to chairs and we sat in them, with him across the table. Our backs were to the window and Mark faced it, the brightness of the Hong Kong afternoon lighting his face. That was a good sign, I thought: If he were really mad and wanted to show us who was boss, the first thing he’d do is put us facing the window, so we’d be the ones who had to squint.
Mark looked from me to Bill, then asked, “You want some tea?”
“I just had some,” I said, and in the spirit of full disclosure added, “with L. L. Lee.”
“Great,” Mark said. He turned to Bill. “You?”
“You have coffee?”
“No, but the tea’s so old you might not be able to tell the difference.”
“No, thanks.”
I said, “This is where you tell us we’re trouble, right? Or, in trouble?”
Mark shook his head. “Pointless. And not true.” He picked up a pencil, one of six set carefully around the table next to six ruled pads. The HKPD, ready for anything. “I’m the one in trouble.”
“You are? Why?”
“Well, not yet. I probably have twenty-four hours. After that people will start asking why I haven’t cleared the Chang case yet.”
“Iron Fist? You work that fast here?”
“We don’t do wholesale homicide in Hong Kong. Murder is a retail business here. They expect us to be efficient with it.” He bounced the pencil on the polished table. “I’m supposed to be out pounding the streets already. You don’t get a lot of chances like this on this Department. Every other cop in the joint is jealous. I mean, I wasn’t even on duty, just on call.” He couldn’t suppress a quick grin, the look of a man whose lemons had turned to lemonade all by themselves. “But,” he said, “I stumble, they take it away from me.” He lifted his eyes to the window. From where he sat he could see the gray buildings, the hills, China. He looked once more at us. “I don’t want to lose this chance.”
He threw the pencil down and leaned back in his chair. “But,” he said again, “I go out and look around, I guarantee I won’t be more than ten minutes on the street before someone tells me Chang worked at Lion Rock. I run across Tony Siu there, I have to pick him up because he’s known. Between Siu and old man Wei, someone’s going to tell me something I can’t ignore. And then we have what we didn’t want: the Wei kidnapping public and the Department involved.”
I looked at him, the Alabama-born cop with the American accent, a man surrounded by people who didn’t want him to do, didn’t think he could do well, the job he loved.
I said hopefully, “Maybe Iron Fist’s murder has nothing to do with the kidnapping.”
Mark and Bill both gave me looks, the looks I’d have given either one of them if they had suggested such a thing. Iron Fist had, after all, been at the temple. “Well,” I forged on, “maybe Tony Siu doesn’t know about the kidnapping, anyway. And maybe Wei Ang-Ran won’t say anything, and you won’t officially know.”
Mark shook his head. “It’ll still be obvious cops are poking around Lion Rock. That might scare the kidnappers, or piss them off because they’ll think the family called us in. You heard from the Weis lately?”
“We just talked to them. They haven’t heard anything from anyone.”
“That’s not good.”
“No.”
“Or,” said Bill, “maybe it is.”
Mark and I turned to him. “How?” I asked. “It sounds to me like nobody’s calling because … something’s gone wrong. Because nobody has anything to trade.”
“Meaning Harry’s dead,” Bill said bluntly. “But maybe not. Maybe nobody ever had anything to trade.”
“What are you saying?”
“Look at it,” he said. “It’s been screwy from the beginning. Us getting buzzed up. That park in the middle of the morning. Two demands, equally irrational. And no one willing to produce proof. What if neither of those people has the kid?”
“Then what’s this about?” I said. “And where’s Harry?”
“I don’t know.”
“You have a theory?” Mark asked.
“No. But if I had one, Maria Quezon would be at the middle of it.”
I gave him a long look. “Even if she is,” I said, “that doesn’t mean everything’s okay.”
He returned my look. “Obviously,” he said slowly, “everything’s not okay. I’m just saying that maybe Harry is.”
Maybe, I thought, maybe. I didn’t want to say that, though. I wasn’t sure what I did want to say, so I let my eyes have a chance, saying something to his. Mark waited. Briefly, there was only silence and the sparkling of the harbor.
Then Bill moved his eyes from mine. In a straightforward, businesslike tone, he said, “But I do have a theory about something else.”
He drew a cigarette from his pocket and looked at Mark. Mark shrugged and pointed behind Bill to an ashtray sitting guiltily on the windowsill. Bill leaned back and reached for it.
“Did you know L. L. Lee does business with Lion Rock?” Bill asked Mark, shaking his match out.
“He told you that?”
I didn’t know where Bill was heading, but I gave Mark a brief outline of my conversation with L. L. Lee, finishing with Lee’s advice about Lion Rock: “He pretty much warned me to stay away from the place.”
A female cop in a uniform skirt hurried down the corridor, giving Mark a smile and a wave as she passed. He smiled back. Skirts were not flattering on cops, I decided. Mark said, “Well, I didn’t know, but I’m not surprised. Lion Rock imports from China, Lee deals in Chinese antiquities.”
“And Strength and Harmony has guys working at Lion Rock. Tony Siu and his buddy. And maybe Iron Fist,” I said.
Mark shook his head. “Not Iron Fist. I did some checking with the Triad Task Force. Word is he wasn’t bright enough, or he was too nice a guy, depending on if you’re talking to his enemies or his friends. But Tony Siu definitely, and that other guy, Big John Chou. Chou’s not management material like Siu, but he’s an all-purpose thug. I wonder if Strength and Harmony runs a protection racket on Lion Rock?” he said thoughtfully. “Lee puts his bums inside, then gets some nice discount on his goods for keeping them in check? Maybe he was guarding his own turf when he warned you off.”
Bill said, “I think he was guarding something else.”
“What else?”
Bill shifted in his chair, recrossing his legs. “I had a good look at his shop,” he said. “I don’t know all that much about Chinese antiquities, but I’ve seen some of those things before. Particularly those clay buildings. They had some at a couple of museum shows over the last few years—that show from Taiwan,” he said to me. I nodded; I’d seen them, though I didn’t remember much about them. They were a little crude, a little somber, I thought: not nearly as appealing as my Tang horses. “And I know a gallery that shows them sometimes,” Bill went on. “It took me awhile to dredge up what I know about them, but I have. They’re what a friend of mine calls tomb trash.”
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