Reflecting the Sky (5 page)

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Authors: S. J. Rozan

BOOK: Reflecting the Sky
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The room fell silent again; no one, it seemed, was willing to talk much about Harry’s future, right now.
And in the silence the phone rang again.
This time it wasn’t the ivory-colored telephone on the laquered desk. The rings, insistent and shrill, came from Steven Wei’s pocket. He whipped out his cell phone, fumbled it open, and said,
“Wai! Wai!”
He listened, his face reddening. He started to speak, stopped abruptly, listened briefly again, then shouted,
“Wai!”
into the phone once more. He lowered it, staring at it as though it had done something unprecedented and traitorous.
He looked up at the rest of us. “They hung up,” he said.
“Who was it? What did they say?” Natalie Zhu demanded.
Steven Wei paused a moment. “He said Harry and Maria were being … well taken care of. And if I did what I was told they’d be home soon.”
“A man?” I asked.
“What did he tell you to do?” Natalie Zhu said, with a sharp glance at me.
Steven Wei looked at me, too, and for a moment didn’t speak. Then he said, “At noon, at Wong Tai Sin. To be at the fortune-tellers’ stalls. Alone.”
“With the ransom?”
He shook his head. “He said I would receive instructions there.”
Natalie Zhu frowned. Steven Wei said to no one in particular, “Why don’t they just want the money now? Why prolong this?”
Nobody else answered, so I did. “It’s standard. A dry run, to be sure you’ll follow instructions. Alone, no cops, on time, everything. If you do it right, next time will be the real thing. This might indicate that they’re pros, that they’ve done this sort of thing before.”
Steven Wei just stared at me. So did Natalie Zhu.
With a quick look at Bill, I told them, “We’re investigators. Private cops, you might say. We’ve dealt with things like this before.”
Steven Wei and Natalie Zhu looked at each other. “Things like this?” Steven Wei repeated. “Kidnapping?”
“Dealing with this sort of thing is the kind of work we do.”
The strict truth was, it was the kind of work Bill had done. I’d never handled a real kidnapping before. But we were partners now, so I was entitled to claim his experience. And it wasn’t like I didn’t have experience of my own to bring to this partnership. Like for example, I was the one who spoke Chinese.
Steven Wei, in Chinese, said something low and fast to Natalie Zhu.
She answered in English: “That’s a good question.” She turned to me. “Steven finds it an interesting coincidence, as I do, that you should happen to be here just now, if this is true. Why did Gao Mian-Liang send investigators?”
That wasn’t exactly what Steven had said, but it was close enough. “I’m not sure what you mean,” I said, though I was.
“She means,” Bill said from his post by the window, “that we could have engineered this whole thing.”
“I did not mean to suggest—”
“Sure you did, and I would, too, in your shoes,” he said. “Gao Mian-Liang sends us to drop this jade thing off with Harry, and we see a chance to make a few bucks on the side. We pay the amah to take Harry to the movies, pay some hotel bellboy to phone in a ransom demand, and let on that we’re experts in this kind of thing. But you don’t want us involved, so you tell us to get lost. Which is what you’re about to do, right?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “You pay the ransom, we collect it, and then there’s another phone call saying something went wrong. So Harry has to be rescued, and we do that heroically, and the grateful family lays another large sum on us. We split it with the bellboy and the amah, go home rich, and everyone’s happy. That’s what they’re thinking. If I were you,” he turned to Steven Wei, “that’s what I’d be thinking.”
That was what Steven Wei was thinking, because that was more or less what he’d said in Chinese to Natalie Zhu. Being Chinese, and therefore congenitally reluctant to give direct offense, he started to deny it; but his words sounded just a bit pro forma, though he didn’t get past, “I don’t … There is not …”
“Mr. Wei,” I said, “if that’s what you’re thinking, I can understand it. In fact I can see why you might hope it was true, because in that case there’d be no real danger. But it isn’t. We don’t know where Harry is. But,” I said, trying to choose my words carefully, “we’d like to do anything we can to help get him back.”
Maybe Steven Wei was about to answer, or maybe not, but the door flew open. We all turned to see the pretty woman from the photo on the desk, her expensive perm disheveled, her carefully made-up face flushed, standing in the doorway, looking at all of us. She was sweating heavily, possibly because the day’s heat was hard enough to handle even if you weren’t, as she was, obviously pregnant.
Steven Wei jumped up and went to her. “Li-Ling!”
“Is Hao-Han back?” Li-Ling Wei spoke in Chinese. Her eyes swept the room, looking for something she clearly did not find.
“No.” Steven and Li-ling Wei stopped before each other. He took her hands in his. “A phone call came.”
Steven Wei, in Chinese, told his wife about Wong Tai Sin, noon, the fortune-tellers.
Li-Ling Wei listened, her eyes widening. When Steven was through Li-Ling looked quickly at Natalie Zhu, who did not speak. Her eyes went back to her husband. Gripping his arm, as though for support, she looked at me and Bill. Clearly trying to compose herself, she spoke in English. “You’re the Americans. With Harry’s jade.”
“Lydia Chin,” I answered her. “This is my partner, Bill Smith. I’m very sorry about this situation, Mrs. Wei.”
“Yes,” she said, and then, “Thank you,” as an afterthought. She looked around her, at the room I’d attempted to straighten, at the people in it. She seemed to have run out of words.
Natalie Zhu took up the slack. Looking pointedly at her watch, she said, “Steven will need to leave soon for Wong Tai Sin. Li-Ling, you will stay here with me.” She turned to me. “Thank you for your offer of help. We will call you if we need you.”
That was the “get lost” Bill had mentioned. I was of two minds about that, but Bill had made his up already. He offered Steven Wei his hand, said, “Anything we can do,” nodded to Natalie Zhu and Li-Ling Wei, and walked through the room to the door.
“You’ll let us know?” I asked. “As soon as something happens?”
Steven Wei just looked at me, then nodded. Natalie Zhu said, “We will call you. Thank you.”
I felt her eyes on me until the door closed behind us.
As we stood waiting for the elevator among the prints of the harbor, I said to Bill, “I guess this is the dam flooding the village on a clear day.”
“Or,” he said, “it could be the storm cloud passing without rain.”
“I’m not sure I understand that, but before the elevator comes, tell me this: Are you sure leaving there was the right thing to do?”
“Positive. And for the same reasons you do.”
“Which are—?”
“Well, we couldn’t have stayed anyway if they wanted us out, and insisting would only have made them distrust us more than they’re already inclined to. I don’t know what our role in this is supposed to be, but there’s no point in alienating anyone without a good reason. And besides—”
“Besides,” I said, “if we don’t leave now we won’t get to Wong Tai Sin before he does.”
“Right.” Bill and I exchanged a look, the elevator came, and we headed back to the tall stone-lined lobby, and Robinson Road.
Like most residential areas, Robinson Road wasn’t a great place to catch a cab. It took us three blocks of rapid downhill striding to find a small business district, and another half-block sprint to seize a cab someone else had just gotten out of. The back of my linen blouse was already damp when we climbed in. The air-conditioner in the cab was going full blast; it wasn’t the freshest air in the world, but it was cool.
“Wong Tai Sin,” I told the driver.
“What place in Wong Tai Sin?” he asked me in Cantonese as he pulled away from the curb.
Steven Wei had been ordered to the fortune-tellers’ stalls; that could only mean one thing. “The temple,” I said.
I settled back against the cab seat and said to Bill, “That little boy. He’s only seven. Do you suppose he’s scared?”
“Yes,” Bill said, and that was all he said.
Out the window, I could catch a glimpse of the harbor every now and then as our cab made sharp turns to switchback down the hill. Well, if we were going to do anything for Harry, it could only be by doing our job.
“Thanks for that nonsense with the ashtray,” I said. “That was to keep them from thinking about your answer to the English-or-Chinese question and whether it really went for both of us, right?”
“Right. And thanks for rearranging the furniture so I could watch them while they were watching you.”
“You’re welcome. Learn anything?”
“Well, you know these Chinese: inscrutable. How about you, when they were speaking Chinese? That’s the kind of Chinese you speak, right?”
“Luckily, yes, in Hong Kong they speak Cantonese. On the mainland they speak Mandarin, and I’d be as ignorant as you.”
“Never. So—?”
“Nothing, really. Everything they said in Chinese was pretty much what they translated for us. The bit about us being a little suspicious included a reference to Grandfather Gao that was edited out of the English version.”
“What about him?”
“About the Three Brothers tong. Some of the New York tongs are associated with Hong Kong triads. Kidnapping is apparently a triad industry here, so they were wondering if there was a connection.”
“Is there?”
I turned to stare at him. “Between Grandfather Gao and this? Of course not.”
“You sure?”
“Of course I’m sure! First of all, Three Brothers is sort of well known for refusing to connect with any of the triads. The Weis might not know that, but I do. Second and more important, old Mr. Wei was Grandfather Gao’s oldest friend. There’s no way Grandfather Gao would do anything to hurt him, even after he was dead. But …”
“But what?”
“I want to call him as soon as we can. We have to tell him what happened, for one thing. And I need to ask him if this is his storm cloud, or his flood, or whatever, or if this is a total surprise to him and he really just sent us here for our health.”
“Maybe you’re here for the water crisis, and
I’m
here for
your
health.”
I scowled at this thought. “A bodyguard?”
“Don’t get mad at me, I’m just following orders.”
“Those weren’t your orders.”
“That you know of.”
I shot him a look. “You didn’t—”
“—talk to Grandfather Gao without you? No, of course not. But it makes sense.”
“Does not.”
“Does too. How about if we don’t take the repeats?”
That effectively stopped my clever retort, so I turned to look out the window. We had come down the hill back to the commercial center of Hong Kong Island. Our cab slipped in and out of the swirling traffic, cutting off trams, buses, and other peoples’ cabs. Large neon signs in Chinese and English hung overhead like the fruit of some rampant electrical vine at the height of its midsummer abundance.
Bill’s hand went to the crank at his window, to let in some sticky hot air. Then he looked at me and gave up the idea.
“You like this weather, don’t you?” I said as a peace offering. After all, if he really had been sent to watch over me, it wasn’t his fault. Except that he took the job. Except that it was me who’d demanded, back in his apartment that night, that he agree to come.
He said, “It comes from being badly brought up.”
“Or it’s practice for where you’re going in the next life.”
“Saudi Arabia?”
“That’s not what I meant, but close enough.”
“Okay. Can we get back to work?”
“Well, all right.”
“Good. Now answer me this: Steven Wei and Natalie Zhu. Why didn’t they throw us out right away, as soon as they were sure we were who we said we were? We’d come to do a job, we couldn’t do it, now they had problems. Why not kick us out, thank you, good-bye?”
“Oh, I think he wanted to. But she wanted to check us out. She was watching us, just like we were watching them.”
“You suppose she found out any more than we did?”
I looked at him, wondering what there was to find out about us, and how you went about it.
“Okay,” Bill said, moving on. “Tell me where we’re going.”
I did. “Wong Tai Sin.”
“Which is obviously on the Kowloon side, because we’re about to go into the tunnel. Is that all I get?”
“Wong Tai Sin,” I told him, passing on some of my guidebook knowledge, “is one of the first new towns they built here, up by the border between Kowloon and the New Territories. There’s a huge temple there, also known as Wong Tai Sin.”

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