Skulduggery

by Carolyn Hart

  “I’m so pleased to meet you, Mr. Lee, and you, Dr. Christie. Did Jimmy send you to visit me?” Her English was faintly British in accent, her voice soft and gentle.

  “Not exactly, Miss Chow,” Dan replied. “We are doing a follow-up on Jimmy’s caseload and we wanted to check with all of his clients. Could you describe for us briefly what Jimmy was doing for you?”

  She nodded slowly. On the door to her room a small white card was taped. It bore the name EMILY CHOW in an old-fashioned curling script. She matched that script, her white hair thick and soft, her black dress ankle-length and I guessed that she bought it at least thirty years ago. She wore a cameo brooch at the neck of her black dress, pinning a pale cream scarf. One hand lifted, touched that cameo, then dropped back to her lap. She clasped her hands, clasped them so tightly her hands were rigid.

  Surprised, I raised my eyes to her face. She sat in profile to me on the bed. The smile had slipped away and her face was smooth, impassive.

  She nodded again. “I first met Jimmy several months ago, Mr. Lee. I work as a volunteer at the Chinese Hospital. You know, visiting patients, taking books and puzzles around. Jimmy had come to visit Mr. Wong who used to live down the hall here at the Green Door. Mr. Wong was dying of cancer. I thought it very kind of Jimmy to come and visit an old man who was all alone and dying. I decided, Mr. Lee, that Jimmy had a good heart.”

  It was very quiet in that small cheerful room. She reached down at the foot of the narrow bed and picked up her knitting, soft and fluffy, pink and pale yellow. She began to knit, the needles flashing, clicking softly.

  “I felt in need of someone with a good heart this past week. So I called and asked Jimmy to come and see me.” She looked up from her knitting and her brown eyes measured Dan. “I received word from China that my benefactor had died.” She paused. “Did Jimmy tell you of this?”

  Dan shook his head.

  Her eyes fell away from his face. She looked down at the fluffy mass of wool, seemed almost to speak to herself.

  “It was all so long ago now, so far away. The years pass so quickly, like petals drifting down, dropping so softly you scarcely realize they are gone until the stem is bare. Soon now . . .”

  She did not finish. She was old and she looked ahead. Then, like a grizzled terrier, she shook herself a little, said briskly, “Mr. Lee, I don’t know how it can be of interest to you, but I will explain why I asked Jimmy to come. If you wish to know?”

  We had come here, thrust ourselves upon her. It was clear that she couldn’t be part of Jimmy fleeing down a Chinatown alley, a Peking Man skull in his gym bag. But simple courtesy required us to listen to the problem that she felt must be shared with someone of good heart.

  Dan, I was sure, beneath his smooth impassive lawyer’s face, would have liked to strangle me. It was my insistence that had brought us back to the Green Door. Later, he would likely have something to say about stubborn women, but, here and now, he smiled at her, “Yes, Miss Chow, we’d like to hear.”

  It was a story of duty, duty fulfilled, duty remembered. A story that could only have come out of China.

  Her gentle cultivated voice carried us far from the Green Door, over an ocean, deep into a history that wasn’t ours, that Dan, perhaps, from hearing older family members speak, might have some understanding of. To me, it was new, bizarre, compelling.

  She wasn’t sure how old she was, not within a year or so, for she had been cast off, abandoned by her family.

  “It was not unusual, you see, for girl babies. They were unimportant. Another mouth to feed when the rains hadn’t come and the crop sparse and most of it due the landlord. Many girl children could not be cared for and they were sold into slavery or prostitution. I always felt my family loved me for they left me, you see, at a Presbyterian mission. That’s where I grew up, not too far from Peking, and it was from Mrs. Macdonald that I learned English.” Miss Chow smiled and her smooth ivory-toned face crinkled into happiness. “English and needlework and cooking—and oh so many hymns. We sang as we worked. It was a happy place to grow up.”

  But personal happiness in China was always as fragile and unaccustomed as prosperity—and never long-lived.

  Famine and war washed over the mission. Times were hard and money from Scotland irregular and often long delayed.

  “When I was sixteen, as we counted my birthdays, I knew I couldn’t stay. The Macdonalds had taken in so many cast-away girls. It was time for me to provide for myself. I told Mrs. Macdonald I wanted to go out into the world.”

  Even now, all these long years later, I could hear the sorrow in her voice. Emily Chow had learned about duty, accepted duty early on.

  All the skills she had mastered at the mission were useless in the eyes of most Chinese. Who would want as a wife a girl who had grown up with foreign devils and who spoke their language!

  But Mr. Macdonald returned from a journey to Peking, three days’ walk with word of a home for Emily. She would live in the home of Dr. Tang, a widower, and teach English to his children, rather like a British nanny. Dr. Tang, most unusual for a Chinese in the 1930s, had travelled much abroad and he especially liked England and things English. He had studied medicine in London and returned to Peking to establish a clinic.

  More happy years then with Emily never thinking of the misery throughout China, the quarrels between Communists and Nationalists, the incursions of the Japanese in the North, none of it penetrated the comfortable and cheerful circle of her new home. She taught the son, Lu Chen, and the daughter, Ma-Li, and helped the doctor with his English correspondence, often working as his secretary, and life had fallen into a safe and satisfying routine.

  But no one realized, least of all Emily Chow, that China, with many a twist and turn and rough and dangerous way, was taking the first steps down a road to a new society—a society that hated and feared Westerners.

  World War II began for China in 1937 when the Japanese began pushing down from the North. By 1939, the fighting was widespread and Dr. Tang left Peking for the battlefields, trying to establish some minimal kind of health care for Chinese soldiers. In the northern provinces, the Chinese armies dispersed into the countryside to make guerilla attacks on the Japanese occupation troops. First aid stations for Chinese soldiers were makeshift huts or patched and deserted inns.

  Chinese soldiers died by the millions, died of disease and starvation, dysentery and malaria. There were no corpsmen, no care for the wounded. Only walking wounded, dragging themselves, step by painful step, ever reached a doctor’s care.

  When Dr. Tang came home to Peking in September 1945, Emily scarcely recognized him. His once thick black hair was lackluster and streaked with grey, his plump face gaunt and wrinkled. Exhausted, ill with malaria, he lay close to death. Emily nursed him, begged quinine from old friends and one day, three weeks after his return, she found him sleeping quietly in the afternoon, his fever broken.

  He heard her step. His eyes flickered open and he reached out a weak hand for her to hold. Then, realizing that at last he was home, he struggled to get up, but, try though he might, he was too weak to pull himself up.

  Breathing heavily, his voice scarcely rising high enough for her to hear, he urged her to hurry, to gather up the children and go, to escape while there still was time.

  She reassured him, told him the war was over. She smiled and reached for a fresh cloth to wipe his face, but he shook his head. He was angry now, weak and angry and desperate, and at last he made her understand that he knew the war with Japan was over.

  “But the war for China is just beginning.”

  He knew. He had worked with the Communist armies in the North and he knew they would never stop until the peasant was free and the old China swept away.

  And his heart was with them. But he saw, too, that there was no place in the China-to-come for those who had worked with the West, followed the West. No place for him or his family.

  She and the two children left Peking that week, taking with them a sack
of gold coins, coins that had lain hidden beneath a garden flagstone for eight years of war. Their goal was Hong Kong and, ultimately, the United States.

  “It took us two years to reach Canton,” she said simply. “The fighting, the horror of Civil War . . . I will not tell you the things we saw in those two years.”

  Ma-Li was thirteen, Lu Chen seventeen when they came to Canton. And Ma-Li was sick.

  “I could not speak Cantonese. Everything was disrupted because of the fighting and we would be suspect to the Nationalist forces because we came from Peking. I found a room for us in a quiet part of the city. Ma-Li worsened. She was too sick to travel. I didn’t know what to do for we were so close to Hong Kong.

  Her voice faltered. Her decision, finally, as Ma-Li sank deeper into a fever, was to give Lu Chen half the gold coins. She found a fishing sampan whose owner agreed to carry him to Hong Kong. She told Lu Chen to find the Presbyterian Church in Hong Kong. She and Ma-Li would come there.

  The sampan left before dawn one August morning. She watched the sun come up and spill like liquid gold across the Pearl River delta. She watched until she could no longer see the low squat outline of the sampan.

  Ma-Li rallied toward the end of the week, lifted her head and smiled and managed to eat some beef broth. Smiling, she slipped back into sleep and then the fever returned. She died two weeks and one day after her brother left.

  “I searched for Lu Chen in Hong Kong for five years,” Miss Chow said quietly. Finally, with little hope, she had come to America. It was there that Dr. Tang had wished for them to come.

  It was in 1952 that she arrived in San Francisco, carrying with her the ashes of Ma-Li. Miss Chow found a job as a housekeeper with a wealthy Mandarin family that had fled the Communist mainland. She worked and periodically visited the Presbyterian mission in Chinatown and regularly, twice a year, placed a notice in two of the Chinese newspapers and in the San Francisco Examiner advertising for Lu Chen.

  “But the years pass away,” she said, “and there is never an answer. Did he ever reach Hong Kong or was he robbed and killed on the sampan? If he arrived in Hong Kong, was he tempted to stay on his own, to be a man alone? I don’t know.” She sighed. “I will never know.”

  But she kept his sister’s ashes and continued to hope. Dr. Tang had said he would come to America, find Emily and the two children.

  It was in 1972, after China had once again opened her doors to America, that Emily Chow began to write to Peking. A letter to the Tang home. A letter to the hospitals. A letter to an old family friend. Finally, she dared to address the city government.

  “I received an answer last week. I thought about it all week long. I suppose I have known in my heart for many years. But, still, I did not know what to do. So I asked Jimmy to come.”

  The city informed her, briefly, that Dr. Tang had died in the great flu epidemic of 1948.

  “All these years I have waited. Now it was time to arrange for Ma-Li’s burial.” She nodded toward the corner and I saw the small stone urn that she had guarded for so long. “And I wished to ask Jimmy if he felt I could in peace no longer advertise for Lu Chen. I would like to feel that I have done my duty.”

  Dan reached out to gently pat the hands that held so tightly now to the fluffy mass of knitting.

  THIRTEEN

  One more stop and we would complete our quest. I was discouraged now. We had talked to so many, walked so many blocks, looked into so many lives, and in none of them could I see a trace of Peking Man.

  Annie at Self-Help for the Elderly, the Chan family in Ping Yuen, Yuan Lee’s grief-stricken sister, jovial Buddy at the East Wind Restaurant, Miss Chow at the Green Door Hotel . . . I couldn’t believe any of them had hidden the most famous fossils in history. Only the Middle Kingdom Gallery remained to be visited and its owner certainly wouldn’t need help to sell Peking Man.

  One more time we walked the length of Grant Avenue, passed the groceries, the laundries, reached the string of shops.

  The minute we stepped inside the Middle Kingdom Gallery I felt sure we had made a mistake. This wasn’t the kind of place to look for war booty. A magnificent silken tapestry hung against the wall to our right. An elegant rosewood dining table sat beneath it.

  The sound of our shoes on the highly-waxed wooden floor sounded, to my ears, harsh and intrusive.

  A curtain of beads rustled at the back of the room and a slender young woman in the distinctive Chinese dress, a side-slit cheong-sam, glided toward us, her soft black slippers making scarcely a sound.

  I was sure suddenly that this was not the place for us. If Peking Man had been here, whoever owned this shop would not need Jimmy Lee to sell the fossils. Whoever owned all these beautiful works of art would well know the worth of Peking Man.

  Jimmy must have come for another reason. I wanted to tug on Dan’s sleeve, get us out of here, but he was already asking the girl about Jimmy, if she had talked to him yesterday.

  She smiled and nodded. “Yes, he came just before we closed and talked to Mr. Lee in his office.”

  Dan asked if we could see the owner. The girl disappeared through the beaded curtain and in a moment Mr. Lee came out. He was as spare and elegant as his shop, tall and slender, almost attenuated arms and legs, like a grasshopper. As Dan talked, he hunched himself like a grasshopper, seemed to pull tightly into himself.

  “. . . like to know why Jimmy came here yesterday.”

  The overhead fluorescent light glittered on the owner’s wire frame glasses and I couldn’t see his eyes behind the thick lens. His bony sunken face never varied in expression from the beginning of Dan’s words to their end.

  There was a slight pause when Dan finished then the older man, he must have been fifty at least, began to shake his head.

  “I am so sorry that I cannot help you. There must be a misunderstanding. Mr. Jimmy Lee did not come to my humble store yesterday. It has not been my privilege to meet Mr. Jimmy Lee.”

  Dan frowned.

  There was an odd uncomfortable silence that stretched and spread. He was lying, Mr. Wilkie Lee was lying! The girl must only have said that we wished to see him, not why.

  The silence spread and gathered and grew. I looked at Dan. What was he going to do?

  Mr. Lee cleared his throat and the dry sharp sound was almost shocking in that heavy silence. Silence that pushed and pressured and finally pulled reluctant words from Mr. Lee. “I am a very busy man, very busy this afternoon, I have many things to do. If you do not wish to look at my poor objects then I must bid you . . .”

  Dan interrupted and his voice was lazy and silky and I remembered going to an antique shop in a sleepy Arkansas town once with my Great-Uncle Horace who collected Civil War era photograph albums. There had been just that tone in Uncle Horace’s voice when he asked mildly how much the dealer wanted, oh, for that box of junk over there, near the door, the one with the milk eggs in it.

  It wasn’t the milk eggs he wanted, of course. It was the half-seen weathered album with a velveteen backing and a wooden front studded with rosettes of brass.

  “Maybe I’ve gone about speaking to you in the wrong way,” Dan said. “I know that a man of business and especially a man with your experience would understand that sometimes families will . . . have a little difference among themselves over how something of value in the family should be sold.”

  Another silence.

  Mr. Lee’s cadaverous face didn’t change but his bony shoulders moved a little. “I am always happy to appraise objects . . . of art, Mr. Lee. If you will bring . . . whatever you have to me, I will be happy to look at it.” He nodded his head once, twice. “I do not charge a fee to appraise. If we can work out something advantageous to you then I will expect a small commission. A commission that we can negotiate.”

  “That is very reasonable,” Dan said agreeably. “I will get back in touch with you, Mr. Lee, when I am ready to dispose of this . . . property.”

  When we were outside, away from the oppressive quiet
of the Middle Kingdom, when we were a block down Grant Avenue, deep in the cover of an ordinary Chinatown crowd, tourists, little old ladies, hurried businessmen, I asked, “Dan, what possessed you to do that? Don’t you see, you’ve warned him, made it impossible for us . . .” I broke off.

  Dan took it up. “Impossible to do what?”

  I shrugged. “Prove he talked to Jimmy.”

  “That’s all right. We know that. At least, I’m dammed sure of it.” He grinned. “Ellen, we’re getting somewhere! I feel better than I have since this whole mess started. Until now it’s been like boxing at shadows, nothing to take hold of, nothing to catch onto. But now . . . it’s a whole new ball game. And little Dan’s pitching. By God, we’ve got something started.” He walked a little faster. “And you know what? I’m hungry! Come on, it’s late but let’s go get some lunch. At a Chinese restaurant.”

  He led the way up steep-pitched Sacramento to the Hang Ah tea room and introduced me to the delights of dim sum, a Chinese lunch. The waiter brought tray after tray and Dan selected one dish after another. We started with soft warm buns that enclosed different fillings, barbecued pork, a delicious mixture of peanut butter and sesame seeds, honey glazed pork, shrimp, then steamed dumplings of beef and chopped shrimp, crisp noodles with pork rind and the lightest fluffiest rice I had ever eaten.

  We ate hungrily, talked quickly, and he didn’t convince me.

  “Okay,” I agreed, “the man’s a liar and it’s obvious he talked to Jimmy. But we shouldn’t have let him know we know that!”

  “Sure we should,” Dan answered.

  “Why?”

  “Because if he’s the rat who sent those hoods after Jimmy then he’s been warned that Jimmy isn’t alone. That gives Jimmy some protection until we find him.”

  “Maybe,” I said grudgingly. “But the thing is, Dan, when you push a stick into a beehive, you’re not only liable to stir up the bees, you’re liable to get stung!”