The Trail to Buddha's Mirror (16 page)

Neal had insisted on that as the price for accepting protection at all.

“This won’t work if I’m traveling in a mob,” he had told Ben Chin. “I have to look like an easy target.”

“A slam-dunk,” agreed Ben, who after all, had attended UCLA. “Don’t worry. My boys will lay back.”

So Neal slept soundly until the phone rang at seven. He showered and dressed—white shirt, khaki slacks, indestructible blue blazer, no tie—and went downstairs to the dining room. He stopped off in the gift shop and picked up the
South China Daily
and the
International Herald Tribune.
The latter provided him with sports news to read as he tossed down four cups of coffee, two pieces of white toast, and three scrambled eggs.

He went back up to his room and the package was waiting on his bed, just as he had arranged. He didn’t know how Chin had managed to get all of it done in one afternoon and evening, but it was all there: five hundred flyers with the photo of Pendleton and Li Lan at dinner, and a message in Chinese and English reading,
IF YOU HAVE SEEN THESE PEOPLE, CONTACT MR. CAREY
, and going on to give his hotel number and extension. There was also a neatly typed list of all the art galleries that might handle Li Lan’s sort of work. There were about three dozen listings with addresses and phone numbers.

Chin had even grouped the galleries geographically, starting in Yaumatei and working down the Golden Mile, and then across the Hong Kong Island.

The first gallery was in the hotel and looked unlikely, but it was a good place try out a new lie.

“Good morning,” Neal said to the clerk behind the glass counter.

“Good morning. Are you enjoying your stay in Hong Kong?”

She was a Chinese woman, in her mid-forties, Neal guessed, and she was wearing an elaborately embroidered padded jacket that looked more like a uniform than her own clothing. The gallery sold a lot of jewelry and cloisonné and exhibited some large oil paintings of Hong Kong subjects: the view from Victoria Peak, Kowloon at night, sampans in the harbor. They seemed more like expensive souvenirs than artistic expressions.

“Very much,” Neal answered. “I’m hoping you can help me.”

“That is what I am here for.”

“I’m a private investigator from the United States, and I am looking for this woman,” he said, handing her a flyer.

She looked at it nervously. “Oh, my.”

“The woman, Li Lan, is an artist. A painter, to be precise.”

“Is she in some kind of trouble?”

Some kind.

“Oh, no, quite to the contrary. You see, I represent the Humboldt-Schmeer Gallery in Fort Worth. We would like to discuss a
major
showing of Miss Li’s work, but she seems to have changed her place of residence and we cannot seem to locate her through normal channels. Hence the reason for my disturbing you. Would you, by any chance, happen to know her?”

“There are so many artists in Hong Kong, Mr. Carey…”

“As there should be in a place of such beauty.”

“I am afraid I do not know this one, and I am sure we do not sell her work.”

“Thank you for your time. May I leave this flyer with you, in case you should remember something?”

“Yes, of course.”

“My telephone number is right there.”

“In the hotel … very convenient.”

“There is of course a modest reward, and a healthy sum of money in it for Miss Li, if we can locate her.”

“I understand.”

So will Miss Li, if she gets the word. The name Neal Carey will ring a clanging bell.
Hi, remember me? Last time you saw me I was dead.

He hit three more galleries in the next hour, working his way north up Nathan Road. None of them sold Li Lan’s paintings, nor had the staffs ever heard of her. Neal made a turn south and headed back down, picking up four more galleries on side streets before he got back to the hotel. The first clerk dismissed him perfunctorily as unlikely to buy anything, the second was a polite young Chinese man who displayed great interest but offered no useful information. The third was an avant-garde place where the young owner thought she might have met Li Lan at a gallery showing on the island once, and the fourth spoke no English at all, but took a flyer. During this entire walk, Neal caught a glimpse of Ben Chin only once, and another time he thought he saw the Doorman in a crowd of people in front of him.

Neal stopped at the hotel desk to check for messages. There weren’t any, so he headed south down Nathan Road, into the heart of the expensive tourist district of Tsimshatsui. The day had turned hot and sunny. Tourists, shoppers, and the regular denizens crowded the sidewalks. Neal visited three galleries within the next six blocks. Nobody in any of them had ever heard of an artist named Li Lan, and nobody recognized the woman in the photograph. Neal left the flyers behind.

Two hours and four more shops found him down at Star Ferry Pier, the southernmost point of Kowloon. He could see the gray skyscrapers of Hong Kong Island ahead of him across Kowloon Bay. Victoria Peak loomed above the high-rises like a watchful landlady. Neal spotted the Doorman ahead of him on the runway to the ferry. The Doorman glanced at him nervously, his eyes flicking ahead to the ferry and behind Neal to his boss. Neal read the gesture: Was he planning to board the ferry and cross over to Hong Kong Island? That would take special arrangements. Neal pivoted back toward Nathan Road and strode away from the pier. He could feel rather than see Chin’s net shifting northward, and knew that the Doorman would be running to retake the lead position. Neal slowed down to make his job a little easier in the midday heat.

Neal decided that he would hit the galleries on Hong Kong Island the next day. It was time to become a slower prey and let the predator catch his scent. If anyone was out there sniffing the air, they could hardly miss it. Just to make sure, he turned east along Salisbury Road and headed for the Peninsula Hotel. If there was a place to see and be seen in Kowloon, it was the Peninsula.

The Peninsula Hotel had once been the end of the road, a place where weary travelers stayed before boarding the Orient Express for the long trip back to the West. Its architecture was classic British colonial: a broad veranda, large columns, and white paint. The veranda, now enclosed in modern glass, sheltered a tearoom and featured a view of the bay and Hong Kong Island. The locals who were jaded to that panorama came for a vantage point from which they could observe just who was taking tea with whom, and what romantic liaisons or commercial conspiracies could be inferred from the comings and goings in the Peninsula lobby.

Neal paused halfway up the broad steps to the Peninsula and stood gawking at the view, which was his way of announcing to Chin, the boys, and whoever else was interested, “Hello! I’m going into the Peninsula Hotel now!”

The waiter sat him at a single table in the middle of the enormous tearoom. Neal ordered a pot of coffee, an iced tea, and a chicken sandwich and then settled in to do what everybody else was doing, surreptitiously checking each other out.

It was a well-heeled crowd, the prices at the Peninsula being somewhat steep, and the room had a self-congratulatory air that added to the incestuous feeling. The customers were mostly white, with a sizable minority of conservatively dressed Chinese who had yet to lose the slightly defensive expression inherited from the days when they had been welcomed only as waiters. A large tourist contingent, mostly gray-haired Europeans, rounded out the crowd. The chatter was subdued and desultory; people were too busy looking over their companions’ shoulders to engage in any really direct conversation.

Neal could just make out the Doorman loitering in the outer lobby, and he didn’t so much as lift an eyebrow when Mark Chin took a single table nearby and began to ogle every woman in the room who looked like she might be under eighty years of age.

Neal polished off the meal, paid the exorbitant check, and took his sweet time getting up and leaving. He hit five more shops on his way back to the Banyan Tree. Li Lan’s name didn’t ring a bell in any of them, not a tinkle or a chime.

He worked his way back to the Banyan Tree. He wasn’t surprised to see the Doorman lurking in the hallway outside his room.

“How are you doing?” Neal asked him.

The Doorman nodded and smiled shyly.

“Okay,” he said, trying out the word.

“Okay.”

Jesus, Neal thought, he looks about twelve years old.

Then it occurred to him that he had been younger than that when he started working the streets for Friends.

The Doorman was still standing there, as if he wanted to say something but was afraid.

“You want to come in?” Neal asked.

The Doorman smiled. He didn’t understand a word.

“A drink? Uhhh … Coca-Cola?”

The Doorman tapped his wrist and then pointed at Neal’s. Neal looked at the inexpensive Timex watch he had bought at least three years ago.

“The watch? You like the watch?”

The Doorman nodded enthusiastically.

Neal took it off his wrist and handed it to the Doorman. Apparently the Doorman didn’t rate a watch in the peculiar pecking order of the gang. The Doorman strapped it to his wrist and held it up to his face to admire it.

Shit, why not?

“Listen,” Neal said. “I need it now. I’ll buy one tomorrow and you can have this one. Or you can have the new one, okay?”

He held out his hand for the watch. The Doorman took it off his wrist and put it in Neal’s hand. He looked fucking heartbroken.

“Tomorrow,”
Neal said. Hell, how do I explain? He traced his index finger along the dial of the watch and moved it in a circle twelve times. “Tomorrow?”

The Doorman grinned and nodded.

Neal pointed at the Doorman’s wrist. “Tomorrow it’s yours. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Okay. I’m going to grab some sleep.”

The Doorman bowed and backed off around the corner. Neal went into the room and made himself a scotch. He sipped at it while he tried to read some
Fathom
and then gave up and flopped down on the bed. He was beat.

The phone woke him up. The digital clock on the radio said it was four-twenty in the afternoon.

“Hello,” he said.

“Stop it.”

“I haven’t even started, Lan.”

“Stop it. You do not know what you are doing.”

“Why don’t you come here and tell me?”

There was one of those long silences he was getting so used to on this gig.

“Please,” she said. “Please leave us alone.”

“Where are you?”

“Someone will get hurt.”

“That’s why I’ve been trying to find you. At first I thought you set me up for a bullet in the old hot tub the other night. Now I think maybe the shot was meant for Pendleton.”

He didn’t get quite the reaction he expected, a gasp of horror or a gush of gratitude. It was almost a laugh.

“Is that what you think?” she asked.

“Maybe it’s what I hope.”

“I am asking you again—please leave us alone. You are only helping them.”

“Helping who?”

“Stop this stupid searching you are doing. It is too dangerous.”

If he hadn’t been half asleep, he could have mumbled something really slick like, “Danger is my business, baby,” but instead he asked, “Dangerous for who?”

“All of us.”

“Where are you? I want to talk to you.”

“You
are
talking with me.”

Oh, yeah.

“I want to see you.”

“Please forget us. Forget me.”

No, Li Lan, I can’t do either of those things.

“Lan, I’m going to start again tomorrow. I’m going to hit every gallery and shop in Hong Kong. I’m going to pass your picture around the entire city and I’m going to make a spectacle of myself doing it unless you agree to meet me tonight.”

Pause, pause, pause.

“Wait one moment,” she said.

He waited. He could hear her speaking, but could not make out the words. He wondered if she was talking to Pendleton.

“The observatory on Victoria Peak at eight o’clock. Can you be there?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

“Aren’t you going to tell me to come alone?”

“You are foolish with me. Yes, come alone.”

She hung up.

Neal felt his heart racing. If this is love, he thought, the poets can keep it. But three and a half hours sure seems like a long time.

He ordered a wake-up call for six o’clock and lay awake until the phone rang.

Getting to Victoria Peak wouldn’t be too tough, Neal thought. Getting there alone would be impossible. That’s what Ben Chin had told him, anyway.

“No way,” Chin had said, with a firm shake of the head. He knocked back a hit of Neal’s scotch with equal firmness.

“My checkbook, my rules, remember?”

“That was different.”

“How?”

Neal had a scotch of his own sweating on the side table, untouched after the first sip.

“You weren’t putting your butt on the line. Cousin Mark would be really pissed if I let you get killed.”

“I’m not going to get killed.”

“Why does she want to meet you at the Peak? Why not here at the hotel?”

“She’s afraid and she doesn’t trust me. She wants to meet in a public place.”

“Let her meet you on the ferry, then.”

“You can’t run away on a ferry.”

“That’s what I mean.”

Neal sat down on the bed and slipped into his loafers.

“I’m not going up there trailing your whole crew.”

“You’ll never know we’re there.”

“I told her I’d be alone.”

“Did she tell you she’d be alone?”

Good point.

“No, I think she’ll be with her friend.”

“I think she’ll be with a whole bunch of friends. You should be, too.”

Neal stood up and put on his jacket.

“No.”

“Okay. Just me.”

“No.”

“How are you going to stop me from following you?”

There was always that.

“Okay, just you.”

Chin smiled and polished off his drink.

“But,” Neal said, “you stay in the background, out of sight and out of earshot. I want to talk to her alone. Once we make the meet and you see that it’s safe, you back off. Way off.”