by S. J. Rozan
“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.”
“Catchy. And we’re going to the town, or the temple?”
“The temple. To watch Steven Wei at the fortune-tellers’ stalls.”
“They let fortune-tellers into the temple?”
“That’s one of the reasons you go to the temple—to get your fortune told.”
“Really? Where I come from, fortune-tellers get the evil eye from good, upright churchgoing folk.”
“Where you come from, the unexplained occurrences of daily life are pretty much ignored in favor of a more abstract theology.”
“Wordy but true. So as the expert on the unexplained, maybe you can enlighten me about a few more questions I have.”
“Please let me try.”
“One: If the object of kidnapping the kid was to kidnap the kid, who tossed the place and why?”
“I’ve been wondering that myself,” I admitted. “Especially since nothing seems to be missing.”
“According to Wei.”
“According to Wei. So either they didn’t find what they were looking for, or he didn’t find that they found it. Or he was lying to us about nothing being missing.”
“Or something else.”
“What else?”
“Don’t know.”
“Great.”
“Want to hear my next question?”
“Desperately.”
“Were the kidnappers just waiting around outside, hoping the amah would bring the kid out sometime, or did they know something?”
“You don’t buy this loves-him-like-her-own-son business?”
“Maybe I do; I’m just not sure what that kind of love means.”
I looked at him, but I couldn’t read his expression. That’s more rare now than it used to be, but it still happens sometimes.
“And,” he said, “If Steven Wei and Natalie Zhu were at the warehouse, and Li-Ling Wei, Maria, and Harry were out in the park, who told the guy at the desk to send us up?”
Some of Bill’s questions were ones I had thought of, and some were new to me, and I had some of my own. We discussed them all the way to Wong Tai Sin.
The drive took us along expressways bordered by green hills with variously colored concrete buildings erupting from their slopes. Thin, sinuous roots of banyan trees reached over the rough mortar of concrete block retaining walls as though searching for a less precarious footing. Our discussion was underscored by the plaintive words and bubblegum tunes of Canto-pop from the driver’s radio. Concrete and glass towers sped by on either side of the road, horns honked and the sun streamed through the haze, and finally the cab pulled up to a small, sloped plaza and let us out.
Soot-streaked pastel-green apartment buildings loomed above us, belligerently facing the white and pink ones across the road. People came and went through the plaza in all directions. Some just strolled and talked, some hurried to the street, some negotiated prices for incense and oranges and red paper prayers at a string of stalls leading up to a large carved temple gate. And some, like us, walked through the gate and into the temple of Wong Tai Sin.
“My God,” said Bill as, through the gate, we climbed the steps and got a good look around. “This is as wild as a tent meeting.”
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”
“Someday I’ll take you to a tent meeting. Is this it? Where the action is?”
We had reached a large open courtyard in front of a huge painted and gilded pavilion. In the pavilion’s dim and smoky depths I could just about make out the larger-than-life, or at least larger-than-human, carved wooden statues of Wong Tai Sin himself—who cures diseases, foretells the outcome of horse races, and is said to be very generous with his help if you’re a follower of his—and half a dozen of his fellow gods. The midday sun pouring down met the incense smoke rising up, and this was definitely where the action was.
People crowded the stone courtyard, some alone, others in family groups, many kneeling on newspaper or mats they had brought. A few Westerners were scattered here and there—tourists watching the goings-on—but most of these people had come to do business. Bowing, waving incense sticks around, or just holding them out to their chosen gods, they murmured prayers of request or thanks. More incense smoldered in a giant bronze burner. A breeze pushed the sweet-smelling smoke this way and that; a cloud of it engulfed us and my eyes began to tear. Someone tapped a gong, the deep sound rising through the whine of the traffic from beyond the gates and the conversations, prayers, and rustling of paper as offerings were unwrapped.
Incense sticks in little cups on the paving flanked the offerings: piles of oranges or bottles of wine, here and there a roast chicken. Bill and I watched one young man and woman—newly married, perhaps, and hoping for children—as they knelt together on a mat. Before them, on a mat of its own, placed where the gods could appreciate the expense and effort, was a whole roast pig. The young man watched intently as the woman shook a wooden box of prayer sticks until one fell to the ground. He picked it up. They both studied the characters on its side, the young man copying them onto a scrap of paper; then he stood and hurried off through the crowd.
“Where’s he going?” Bill asked.
“To see the fortune-teller.” I glanced at my watch. “Okay. It’s half past eleven. Steven Wei will be here soon, but he probably won’t dare come too early, in case he’s not supposed to. We have a little time. Let’s do what we can.”
We trotted back down the steps through the temple gate to the incense-sellers’ stalls, and beyond them. I was taking a guess, but I was right. The incense and paper prayers gave way rather abruptly to tee shirts, plastic sandals, housewares, soft
drinks, pots and pans. Bill took off his jacket and tie and bought a cheap Adidas knock-off bag to stuff them into. He slipped on his sunglasses and bought a new black baseball cap that said HONG KONG in bright colors. In the next stall he picked up a disposable camera on a strap and hung it around his neck. That was about all we could do for him. I bought a big straw hat and a loose blue flowered shirt. A quick woman-to-woman conversation with the stall’s owner about the embarassing scent of sweat on my linen blouse got me the chance to quick-change into the shirt behind a rack of dresses in the back of the stall. I chose a large straw carryall, dropped my shoulder bag and blouse inside, put on my own sunglasses, and that was about all we could do for me.
We hurried back up to the temple courtyard. “Okay,” I said, looking around. “He’ll come in here, and the fortune-tellers are over there.” I pointed to another row of stalls, permanent ones with the same metal roll-down doors merchants use to guard against evildoers in New York. At this busy time of day, almost all the doors were up, the fortune-tellers open for business. “You stay here and wait for him. Try to look like just another pushy rude American tourist. Think you can do that?”
“In my sleep,” Bill said. “Where are you going?”
“To get my fortune told.”
The fortune-tellers’ stalls stretched out in a line along the curving perimeter of the temple grounds, nestling against the wall dividing the temple from the towering apartment buildings that surrounded it. With their laundry poles stuck at cocky angles beside their bathroom windows, the apartment buildings seemed to be flying the banners of a hundred different tribes.
I walked quickly down the avenue of stalls to my destination, the stall at the end. From there, because of the curve, I would be able to see anyone who came into the fortune-tellers’ area, and anything that went on there.
About half the fortune-tellers had customers: middle-aged women, young men, a mother and her children, all bent intently over the charts or books the fortune-teller had spread in front of them. Almost all the fortune-tellers, I realized as I passed them, were men. Some of them included, on their signs, assurances in English that their English was good (TELL YOUR FORTUNE, ENGLISH OR CHINESE), that they were not fly-by-night (TWENTY YEARS SAME PLACE), and a few indicated that they were not merely neutral passers-on of occult information, but active partners in your hopes and dreams (FORTUNE TOLD HERE, ALWAYS GOOD RESULT!). The Chinese was much the same, some of the stall owners going so far as to have posted yellowing newspaper articles about the time they had accurately predicted a winning lottery number or counseled against a marriage where the would-be groom had later been unmasked as a notorious international cad and scoundrel.
The end-stall proprietor, however, was a purist. A middle-aged man with glasses and thinning hair, his signs were in Chinese only; and while his overhead banner declared him to be Wang Wo, a practitioner of the numerological method of divination—because at Wong Tai Sin you got your choice, and the meaning of the characters on your prayer stick could be different depending on the system of reading them—he made no claims of past accuracy nor offered any guarantees of satisfaction.
I sat down before him with a smile and a nod. He nodded professionally back and stubbed out the hand-rolled cigarette he’d been working on when I came over. He took a battered book with rice-paper pages from a neat pile on the folding table that served as his desk and held out his hand for the paper with my copied prayer-stick characters.
“I’m not here to get my fortune told,” I said in Cantonese.
Still looking at me, he slowly withdrew the hand that was waiting for my paper. “Ah?”
“No. But I’ll pay you three times the cost of telling my fortune to let me sit here until I’m ready to leave.”
Wang Wo regarded me. “The temple of Wong Tai Sin has a beautiful garden with benches on paths, others in pavilions, for those who wish to sit.”
“You can’t see the fortune-tellers from there.”
He smiled. “You find us so interesting?”
“Fascinating.”
Crossing one leg over the other, he brought the book into his lap. “You will keep me from doing business.”
“I’ll pay for your lost business.”
He pointed the book behind me. “There is a bench there, for customers waiting. You could sit for free.”
“If you had no customer in the stall, it would appear strange for me to be sitting there.”
“So. You want to watch the fortune-tellers, but you do not want to be watched.”
“That’s right.”
Wang Wo continued to look at me. To avoid the rudeness of returning his look with a direct stare, I glanced up the line of stalls to check the action—of the kind I was interested in, there wasn’t any—and then let my eyes travel over Wang Wo’s own stall. I took in the incense wafting from the small shrine to Kuan Yin, Goddess of Mercy, the books and papers piled on gray metal shelves, and the gold and black characters on the red scrolls that hung on the walls.
Wang Wo spoke. “Perhaps, in that case, you should permit me to tell your fortune after all. That way you will appear to be a real customer.”
That way I would be a real customer, I thought; but it wasn’t a bad idea, and if it was what it took to get Wang Wo to let me sit here, why not? “Yes, all right,” I said. I repositioned my chair to make viewing along the curve easier. “I don’t have a prayer stick,” I told Wang Wo.
“There are many ways to understand one’s fate,” he answered. He reached onto a shelf behind him for a complicated chart, divided into a lot of small segments, each filled with numbers and Chinese characters. Eyes on the chart, he asked me for my place of birth, and the date, including the exact hour which, because these things are important to my mother for this very reason, I happen to know. I gave him the answers, keeping an eye out for Steven Wei.
Wang Wo wrote a few things down while consulting the chart, then flipped open the battered book and wrote more things down from its pages. Then he looked up at me.
“‘Swiftly running water does not reflect the sky.’”
A Chinese nature metaphor. Swell. All the way to Hong Kong, and this is what I get. I glanced at Wang Wo, then went back to the Steven Wei watch. “What does it mean?” I asked.
“That is for you to discern, in regard to your own life. You can be guided by this fortune, or not, as you wish; its truth remains, regardless of whether you choose to understand it.”
Boy, I thought, you sound like you went to the same Obscure Conversation Academy as Grandfather Gao. Then both Wang Wo and Grandfather Gao were pushed to the back of my mind by the sudden appearance on the scene of Steven Wei.
In monogrammed shirt and dress slacks but minus jacket and tie, Steven Wei had entered the fortune-tellers’ area and stopped in front of the stalls at the end of the row. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, wiped his brow with a handkerchief, looked left and right and left again, waiting for something to happen. I waited, too. I didn’t see Bill, but he could easily have a fix on Wei from the temple courtyard, where he wouldn’t be visible from here. I scanned the strollers, sitters, and customers in the fortuner-tellers’ area, looking for the answer to the important question: Who else was watching Steven Wei?
Wei looked at his watch, wiped the sweat from the back of his neck, shifted some more. I could feel Wang Wo’s eyes following mine to their target.
“You have found what you were watching for?”
“Yes.”
“A nervous young man,” he commented.
A bent old woman approached the nervous young man. She was selling paper prayers from a bamboo basket. Wei shooed her away, but she didn’t go. Holding out a folded paper from her basket, she tapped him on the wrist with it and spoke. At first he snapped at her impatiently. Then, in what looked like midword, he stopped and snatched the paper from her hands. He unfolded it quickly as the old woman scolded him, her palm up, demanding payment. Distractedly, reading his piece of paper, he thrust a b
ill at her and she scurried away.
My eyes still on the far stalls, I reached into my own pocket for my own bills. I glanced down, counted out three times Wang Wo’s usual fee, and placed it on his card-table desk.
“You have seen all you needed to see?”
“No,” I answered. “But I don’t think the rest can be seen from here. I have to move on now.”
“As is often the case,” Wang Wo replied. I suspected that of being a nature metaphor, too, but this wasn’t the time to worry about it. Steven Wei turned to leave the area. I stood to follow. Wang Wo handed me a piece of paper with Chinese characters on it.
“What’s this?”
“Your fortune,” Wang Wo said. “It is not why you came here, but our paths often lead us not where we meant to go, but where we need to be.”
I stuffed the paper in my pocket and hurried off to find out where Steven Wei needed to be.
three
Steven Wei, with long quick steps, headed out of the temple grounds. The new instructions on the old lady’s folded paper would tell him where and when to deliver the ransom, or maybe they just said to go home and wait for the next phone call. I didn’t think I’d get very far following him, though I was certainly game to hail a taxi and try. What I really wanted to know was who else was interested in the movements of Steven Wei.
Because I hadn’t seen anybody. Try as I might, from fortune-tellers to customers to skeptics just strolling down the path, no one but me and the old lady—and Bill, wherever he was—had seemed the least bit interested in Steven Wei.
That was strange. Why send him here if not to make sure he’d follow orders, be at the right place at the right time without cops on his tail, because that’s what you want when the ransom is delivered? And how could you make sure of that if you weren’t watching?
Well, there could be one other reason: not a dry run, but a wild goose chase. Something to keep Steven Wei occupied while something else was going on.
What else? Who knew? Standing on the temple steps above the sloped plaza, I watched Steven Wei whip the cell phone out of his pocket and shout briefly into it. He ended that call, then punched in another number and spoke some more, seeming frustrated and impatient as this second conversation went on. A gong from the temple rang slowly three times, underscoring the traffic and the hurrying and Steven Wei’s impatience. Snapping the phone shut, Wei fidgeted at the curb until a cab swung around the corner. He stepped into the street, it screeched to a stop, and he was gone. I looked around for another one, but there weren’t any. I had to content myself with recording the license number of the one that was driving Steven Wei off.
