Reflecting the Sky

by S. J. Rozan

  Bill and I hurried along with the rest of the crowd, down the wooden ramp, up the concrete one, and onto the sidewalk outside the terminal. I tried not to gape at the rickshaw men, as leathery and wrinkled as their rickshaws were red and gleaming. Now, they were just another tourist attraction, the tips for posing for photos their only income, because now it was illegal to pull rickshaws in Hong Kong. But I thought of them, younger, stronger, just as poor, trotting through exhaust-spewing traffic yoked to their two-wheeled carts in heat like this. I looked at Bill and couldn’t help asking, “Were they still pulling rickshaws when you were here before?”

  “They weren’t illegal yet. But I never took one.”

  “I thought that was the kind of thing American sailors did on leave.”

  “American sailors on leave have more … urgent … things to do. Come on, here’s a cab.”

  We were taking a cab to the Weis’ apartment, although on the map it looked like just the kind of long walk I love, especially in a city I’m new to. But both Bill and the guidebooks I’d been reading like crazy over the last week said Hong Kong, especially the Hong Kong Island side, was not made for the convenience of pedestrians. Our plan was to meet the Wei family and their attorney at the apartment, give Harry his jade and Mr. Wei’s brother his letter, and arrange a date for the ceremony involved with placing Mr. Wei’s ashes at the mausoleum. It wasn’t much of a job, but it was what we’d been sent all the way here by Grandfather Gao to do, and I didn’t want to screw it up in any way. There’d be plenty of time for exploring later, and plenty of exploring I wanted to do.

  I gave the cab driver the Weis’ address and settled back to watch the city go by. It was a little unnerving to watch it go by on the wrong side of the road, because Hong Kong people were taught to drive by the British; but everyone here seemed to have the hang of it, so I relaxed.

  Our cab left the skyscraper-crowded Central district and started to work its way uphill. Hong Kong Island is basically a mountain rising out of the sea, and according to the guidebooks, the more money you have, the higher up you live. The Weis—the Hong Kong Weis, anyhow—lived in a high-up, high-rise neighborhood called Midlevels, where, especially in the newer buildings, money started to show.

  The New York Wei, Dr. Franklin Wei, lived on Park and Seventy-first. Money showed there, too.

  The road curved and twisted as it climbed, snaking through banyan, palm, and banana trees that shaded people, most of them Chinese, trudging the steep streets. The shadowed alleys and open windows of the older neighborhoods hunched between the impossibly tall, slender buildings that grew more numerous as we approached the address we were headed for. When we finally got there, to No. 10 Robinson Road, there was almost nothing anymore but towering apartment houses, taller and slimmer than I’d ever seen, white concrete or tan or pink with window glass tinted brown or blue against the sun.

  We paid the cab and stood to look around a minute before we went in, because as Bill pointed out, we were still early. Well, he was the one with the dependable watch.

  “Look how skinny these buildings are,” I said, raising my voice over the jackhammers that were hard at work on this side of the harbor, too. “And they have pipes on the outside. We don’t do that in New York, do we?”

  “Plumbing doesn’t freeze here,” Bill said. “If you run the pipes up outside, the walls inside can be thinner and there’s more space in the apartments.”

  I looked at the pipes, slim tubes grouped in rows of four or six, fastened back to the building wall every story or so, and thought about how crowded life would have to be, to make you care about another four inches inside your apartment.

  We went into the glassed-in, air-conditioned lobby through a door opened for us by a uniformed doorman who didn’t seem at all impressed by my gray linen slacks and blouse or Bill’s navy blue suit. Ha, I thought, what you don’t know. The security man at the curved granite desk—different from the security man who stood discreetly by the bronze-doored elevators—phoned up to the Wei apartment to say we were coming. Then the elevator security man took over, turning a key to send us to the twenty-sixth floor. The elevator whooshed us up silently, barely giving us time to admire the polished granite cab walls with the number 10 chiseled into them.

  At twenty-six we got off and turned right down the carpeted hallway. Framed prints of Hong Kong harbor from a century ago, when the bustle was just beginning, hung on the walls. Tiny junks and sampans in them slipped in and out among the anchored British navy ships and the merchant ships flying a dozen different flags, none of them Chinese. One of the prints showed a view of the harbor from the hill we were on, a view all the way across to Kowloon. I wondered how much of the harbor you could see from the Wei’s apartment.

  I got that answer as we approached the door to 26C. Through the foyer archway into the living room I could catch a glimpse of sliding doors with drapes half-closed against the morning sun, and a sliver of a harbor view glittering in the slot between two of No. 10’s high-rise neighbors. I could see this because the apartment door was standing open.

  Bill and I glanced at each other. I stepped up to the door and knocked. There was no response, so I knocked again. I called out “Yau mo yen ah?”—“Is anyone there?”—and then as an afterthought added “Hello!” but still nothing. I gave Bill another look, then stepped inside.

  Bill came up close, to watch my back: That’s how we do this wherever we do it, whoever’s in front, whoever’s behind. As my heart sped up and I stepped through the foyer into the Weis’ living room I sensed rather than saw Bill’s hand reach into his jacket just as mine moved toward my belt, but we both came up empty. American PIs, no matter how licensed you are, can’t bring guns into Hong Kong. Last week, in between reading guidebooks and studying maps, I had checked on that. Bill and I had agreed that this didn’t sound like a job that really needed an investigator; but on the other hand, that’s what we were.

  And besides, we might have been wrong. Hong Kong, New York, or Dnepropetrovsk, a room that’s been tossed is a room that’s been tossed. And this one had been.

  Once through the foyer the living room revealed itself in all its messed-up glory. Pictures off the wall, sofa cushions strewn around, drawers opened and their contents dumped. A vase of hibiscus blossoms, formerly resident on the coffee table in the center of the room, lay in a puddle on the pale blue carpet.

  My heart now pounding, I met Bill’s eyes again. He nodded. Since I was closest to the sliding doors I edged over and inched back the drapes to see the full extent of the balcony outside. It was as wide as the living room and no one was on it. In fact it was a good bet no one was in the apartment—that is, no one who had done this—because if they were still in the middle of their work they wouldn’t have left the door wide open. But someone might be here, someone scared or hurt. We could have backed out, gone downstairs, and called the police, but it would take them time to get here. We’d do that as soon as we had a quick look around.

  The quick look revealed nothing. Three bedrooms and a dining room, a maid’s room off the kitchen, all of them empty, all of them wrecked. Not much was broken, but breaking things makes noise. Everything had been opened, turned upside down, gone through. But no one was hiding under a bed or cowering in a closet, and, though I wouldn’t have said I was expecting it, I found myself letting out a long breath when no one was found lifeless in a pool of blood, either.

  Still watchful, having touched almost nothing, Bill and I moved back out into the hall.

  “Well,” I said, picturing Grandfather Gao glancing at his watch in the room behind the herb shop in Chinatown, sipping at his evening tea and imagining everything going well here, “I guess we’d better go learn how you call the Hong Kong police.”

  Bill was about to answer, but the discreet ring of the elevator chime made us both spin around. A roundheaded, open-faced man in his thirties and a gray-haired woman stepped into the hall, talking and heading our way. They saw us; the man smiled, shifting his brief
case to his left hand so he could thrust his right forward for a handshake. “Miss Chin and Mr. Smith?” He smiled. His English was accented but clear. “I was told you’d come up. I’m Steven Wei; I’m sorry to be late. Didn’t—?” He stopped when he saw the open door, looked quizzically from Bill to me.

  “Don’t go in,” I said. “There’s a problem.”

  “A—what does that mean?” Steven Wei threw a glance at his own threshold, where Bill’s arm across the doorway blocked his way.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Wei,” I said. “Someone’s been here. The apartment’s been searched. No one’s there now,” I added. “But we’d better call the police.”

  “Searched? What do you mean no one’s there? Where’s Li-Ling? Where are Harry and Maria?” He pushed past Bill, who dropped his arm without protest. Steven Wei stopped two steps into the room. I couldn’t see his face, but his body looked like he’d walked into a wall. “What happened here?”

  “I don’t know.” I stepped in beside him. “The door was open when we got here. We knocked, no one answered, and we came in. It looked like this.”

  “How do you know no one’s here? Li-Ling! Harry!” His voice held the rising tones of panic. He started toward the bedrooms.

  I grabbed his arm. “We looked.”

  He stopped. “What?”

  “In case someone was hurt, or—we looked. There’s no one here. Mr. Wei, we’d better call the police.”

  “No. No police.” That came not from Steven Wei, but from the woman he’d come off the elevator with. She was tiny, with large almond eyes behind delicate gold-rimmed glasses, and these were the first words she’d spoken. She couldn’t have weighed more than eighty pounds, and although the wrinkles around her eyes and mouth put her age close to sixty, the gray in her short hair would have been the only thing to keep her from being mistaken, from the back, for a twelve-year-old girl. Her voice was soft but her words were peremptory. “We will go inside.”

  She stood waiting for Bill, not, it seemed to me, out of politeness, but to make sure he was going to do as she’d said. He gave me a quick look, read my eyes, and did it. She stepped in behind him and shut the door.

  She glanced rapidly around the room and then, as though she didn’t need to see any more, said, “Steven. Come, sit down.” She indicated a carved wooden chair with an upholstered seat, as though Steven Wei needed instructions in his own living room, and then righted its mate for herself.

  “Who are you?” I asked, not moving.

  “Zhu Nai-Qian. Natalie Zhu. I am Steven’s attorney. Sit down.” Natalie Zhu’s Chinese accent was much more pronounced than Steven Wei’s, but it didn’t keep me from understanding what she said, and what she meant by it: I’m In Charge Here.

  Bill moved to the far wall and leaned casually beside the sliding doors. From there he could see the apartment door, plus both other ways into this room; so I perched on the edge of the cushionless couch. Natalie Zhu flicked her eyes from the cushions on the floor to me with a slight rise of her delicate eyebrows. Probably she would have slipped a cushion under her tiny behind before depositing it on a couch frame. But I was better padded, and I’d sat down already. I crossed my legs as though Lydia Chin sat around on cushionless couches all the time.

  “I think we should call the police,” I said again.

  “No.” Natalie Zhu dismissed that idea and, for the moment, me. “Steven, we were expecting to meet Li-Ling here? And Maria, with Harry?”

  Steven Wei swallowed. “Ten o’clock.” He reached into his pocket, pulled out a cell phone. “I’m going to call them.” He punched in a set of numbers. After a few moments he swore in Cantonese, ended that call, and punched in another set. He listened, then lowered the phone, looking like he wanted to throw it through the window. “Li-Ling’s said to leave a message. That probably means she hasn’t got it with her. Maria’s just rings and rings.”

  He stood abruptly, looked around, a man who wanted to take some action but didn’t know what to do. “What … how could this have happened? The security men … Who let these people upstairs?” He stood and headed for the speaker by the front door.

  “Steven.” Natalie Zhu spoke calmly, but the tone of her voice stopped Steven Wei in his tracks. “There is no point in that at this moment. You will find your doorman was bribed, or one of your maintenance men was involved. What will this tell you? There will be time for that later. Sit down.”

  Steven Wei stood for a moment, his hand stopped in midreach for the speaker handset. He slowly turned and returned to his chair.

  Li-Ling Wei was Steven’s wife; Bill and I knew that. “Who’s Maria?” I asked.

  “Maria Quezon,” Steven answered mechanically, a beat late, looking around as though he were unsure where the question had come from. “Harry’s amah. She’s Filipina.”

  “An au pair, you would call her,” Natalie Zhu added.

  I’d call her an amah, just like you do, I thought. What makes you think I don’t know what amah means? And Bill, for your information, used to live in the Phillipines.

  I took a deep, slow breath. Calm down, Lydia, I told myself. Don’t take your adrenaline rush out on these people.

  “And they’re not here,” I said. “And they don’t answer their cell phones. And the apartment’s been ransacked. The police—”

  “Calling the police would be a mistake.” Natalie Zhu looked right at me. “With respect, Ms. Chin, you are not from Hong Kong. You cannot be expected to know how to handle … situations … like this.”

  “I know that this house is torn apart and three people are missing,” I retorted. “And I know kidnappings for ransom aren’t uncommon here.” There, I thought, let’s get it on the table.

  “True,” Natalie Zhu agreed, unruffled. “And victims are usually returned unharmed once the ransom is paid. Unless the families involve the police.” Emphasis, it seemed to me, on the unless.

  “But those families are rich.” Steven Wei shook his head. “I’m not rich. Who—?” He lifted his hands, his words all tangled.

  Natalie Zhu looked at him. The look may have been sympathetic, but her voice was sharp. “Someone with an exaggerated idea of your wealth. The death of your father was widely reported; Lion Rock is a respected, established firm. Also, the kidnapping may have been easy, which makes the risk less.”

  Steven Wei didn’t answer, just looked at her, as though he hadn’t understood a word she’d said.

  “What do you mean, easy?” I asked.

  Natalie Zhu turned to me. “If they had help.”

  “The amah?”

  “It is possible.”

  “No,” Steven said. “It’s not. Maria—”

  “Maria has been with you all of Harry’s life, Maria loves Harry like her own son, yes, of course,” Natalie Zhu said almost contemptuously. “Steven, she may have a brother in trouble, a sick mother at home—you have no idea, have you?”

  Steven Wei looked a little sick himself.

  “What are you suggesting?” I said. “We just sit here and wait?”

  Natalie Zhu looked straight at me, then turned her head deliberately to Bill, so that we’d know she hadn’t forgotten he was there, too. “Yes,” she said.

  We didn’t wait long.

  And we didn’t wait silently. Natalie Zhu, turning back to me, said, “We have been assuming you are the emissaries sent from Gao Mian-Liang with Harry’s jade. Is that correct? May I see some identification?”

  “And we’ve been assuming you’re Steven Wei and his lawyer,” I said, handing her my passport. “But I suppose you might be impostors.”

  Bill caught my tone and gave me a glance as he handed her his passport, and Steven Wei’s face reddened, but the corner of Natalie Zhu’s mouth tugged upward and a quick look flashed in her eyes, something like approval, I thought. “Yes, we could.” She snapped her briefcase open—she carried no handbag—and took out her identity card, motioning for Steven Wei to do the same.

  “Natalie …” Steven Wei’s prote
st flared and faded, a spark unable to set a fire.

  “Steven, she is right.” She flipped through my passport and handed it back. “She is also Lydia Chin. Thank you. I do not mean to offend, but of course, in a situation like this …”

  “Of course.”

  She looked from me to Bill and back again. “Do you speak Chinese, or shall we continue in English?”

  “English, if you don’t mind,” Bill said before I could answer. “Can I smoke?” No one said anything. “I guess that’s a yes,” Bill said. He bent down to pick something up off the floor. “Is this an ashtray?” It seemed to me that the object in question could be nothing else. Both Steven Wei and Natalie Zhu looked at it, Wei finally nodding.

  “If we’re not calling the police,” I said, “maybe Mr. Wei could look through the apartment and see if anything is missing?”

  Steven Wei, looking lost, cast a look at Natalie Zhu. She met his eyes; something unspoken passed between them. Natalie Zhu said, “A good idea,” and stood. Wei looked anything but happy, but he stood, too. He gave one long look around the living room, then moved heavily toward the bedrooms.

  I followed, saying nothing, but watching where he looked, where he searched. He opened certain drawers, certain jewelry boxes: In one bedroom, the one that held a large painted Chinese armoire and a carved teak bench, he moved a heavy camphorwood trunk away from the wall to reveal a safe. Spinning the combination, he looked inside, sifted through the contents, and closed the safe again.

  “Nothing is missing,” he finally said, standing in the hallway, looking around. “There’s not much of great value, and nothing is gone.” He met my eyes, looked away, looked back, as though it were important that I comprehend what he was about to tell me. “We live comfortably. But I’m not a wealthy man, nor was my father. I don’t understand this.”