by S. J. Rozan
A muscular young man with sweat darkening his white tee shirt muttered a curse after that same cab, then turned and made for the subway entrance that was right there. If he’d been watching Steven Wei I hadn’t seen him. Maybe he’d just been waiting a long time, only to have Steven Wei usurp his taxi. Maybe I should take the subway myself: I had a subway map, and obviously cabs were a little hard to come by up here at Wong Tai Sin. They must be hard to come by: Without acknowledging my existence at all, Bill, in his new Hong Kong baseball cap and his sunglasses, came striding fast across the plaza and disappeared into the subway entrance, too.
I stared after him. Now I had three choices: join Bill in whatever he was up to, go somewhere where I could make a phone call—which, according to the guidebook, was not all that easy in Hong Kong, public phones being almost nonexistent—or return to the temple to discuss paper prayers with an old lady.
Bill, I decided, could take care of himself and his business, though I was dying to know what it was and whether it had to do with the young man with the muscles. I wanted desperately to call the Weis, to find out if that’s where Steven Wei had just called and if so what the new instructions were, but the find-a-phone project seemed Least Likely to Succeed and I had to admit there was no reason to expect them to tell me anything except “Go away.” The old lady, on the other hand, was right here.
Except that she wasn’t.
I made the rounds of the other old ladies with their bamboo baskets at the entrance to the fortune-tellers’ area. The first one I talked to put a name to the lady I was looking for—Mo Ruo—after I’d described her, with her sleeveless print blouse, her loose black pants, her pointed straw hat to keep off the sun.
“Mo Ruo works over there,” the old lady told me, gesturing toward a spot near her own. “Left side, second place in.”
It was clear that these ladies had assigned themselves proprietary spots to do their business from, and also clear that they were more than willing to poach on each others’ territory. I slipped a ten-dollar bill—Hong Kong dollars, worth not quite thirteen cents each, but ten of them would be about what one of these ladies made in an hour—into her basket, which bought me her conversation but not her undivided attention. She was wrinkled and bent but persistent, moving stubbornly into the path of anyone who crossed her radar, pushing her folded prayers at people who might need a little boost in their relationship with their chosen gods. “Usually she is here all day, until the temple closes,” she told me about Mo Ruo. “Very eager to make money, always thinking this way.” Unlike anyone else in Hong Kong, I thought, but I didn’t say it.
“Where would she be now?” I asked. “Eating lunch?”
She gave me a contemptuous glance as she took off to chase down a customer. “Mo Ruo eats her lunch here,” she said when I caught up with her. I looked where she pointed, to three other old ladies sitting on newspapers in the shade, their bamboo baskets by their sides, scooping chopsticks in and out of plastic containers of noodles or rice brought from home.
“Can you tell me where she might have gone?” I asked again.
She thrust her chin forward, the old-time Chinese substitute for a shrug.
Nuts to this. I took out a scrap of paper, scribbled my name and the hotel phone number in Chinese characters. “When you see her, will you tell her I want to talk to her?” I put the paper into her basket with another ten-dollar bill. She shoved the bill into a pocket. Then she folded the paper without looking at it and shoved it into another. That told me two things: one, she probably couldn’t read. And two, because of my free ways with ten-dollar bills, she would keep the paper and have someone read it to her, or to Mo Ruo, whenever the time was right.
Okay, next things next. I wished for my cell phone, at home in New York in the bureau drawer keeping my gun company. The gun would have worked in Hong Kong but I couldn’t bring it; I could have brought the cell phone but it wouldn’t have worked. But if I had a cell phone I could call the Weis, to try to find out what was going on. And Bill could call me, and tell me what was going on, if he had a cell phone, too.
I took myself down into the subway entrance and bought a ticket from a machine where you pressed your station on an electronic map and it told you how much money it wanted. I found the right platform—all the important signs were in both Chinese and English—and when the train came I got on it. I stood in the swaying car holding the metal pole and feeling very much at home. I could have been back in New York on the F train, I thought as I glanced around me, except for one thing: Everyone in this car looked like me.
The air-conditioning in the subway car, like all the air-conditioning I’d encountered in Hong Kong so far, was set about five degrees cooler than it needed to be. You didn’t notice it at first—at first, all you did was offer a prayer of thanks to the god of subways, or taxis or hotel lobbies or wherever you were—but by the time you left and went back out into the heat you were, briefly, grateful for the sun on your back. I felt that gratitude on my walk from the subway stop to the hotel, but it didn’t last. By the time I stepped into the hushed lobby the air-conditioning was once again a relief.
Hoping Bill had called, I stopped by the desk to see if I had any messages. I had, but not from Bill. The one message I had was from Steven Wei.
I ripped open the envelope. The message was, “Call immediately,” and included Steven Wei’s home and cell phone numbers.
“The gentleman left a message on your voice mail, also,” the young desk clerk told me, seeming slightly disapproving. “He seemed most anxious to speak with you.” Hurrying across the lobby to the elevator, I guessed that meant Steven Wei had given the desk clerk a hard time.
The little red light on the phone was blinking as I entered my room. Picking up the phone to retrieve the message, I caught sight of myself in the mirror, in my new flowered blouse and my straw sunhat. My God, Lydia, I thought, you look positively Chinese.
The voice-mail message was substantially the same as the written one, and in the background, behind honking horns and the air brakes on buses, I heard the three rings of the temple gong. The second phone call Steven Wei had made from Wong Tai Sin, as I stood on the steps watching him, had been to me.
As Bill would say, ain’t that a kick in the head?
Wondering just where Bill was, I called Steven Wei. I chose the home number, figuring he’d had time to get home in his cab while I was on the subway, but the voice that snapped, “Wai!” into the phone wasn’t Steven Wei’s, it was the voice of Natalie Zhu.
“Where have you been?” she demanded in English when I told her it was me.
“You told us to get lost,” I said. “You didn’t say to sit by the phone. In fact, I got the distinct impression you weren’t going to call.”
“You should have left your cell-phone number,” she reprimanded, ignoring everything else I’d said.
“I don’t have one. Is Steven Wei there? Why did he call me?”
Silently—possibly speechless at the thought of someone in Hong Kong without a cell phone—Natalie Zhu must have passed the phone to Steven Wei, because it was he who spoke next.
“You must come back here immediately,” he said urgently, without greeting or preamble.
“Why?”
“The kidnappers want Harry’s jade.”
Harry’s jade, his legacy from his grandfather? Was that what this was about?
“How do you know?”
“The instructions I received at Wong Tai Sin.” Okay, Steven, just checking. “They will call here again at three o’clock. They want the jade.”
I thought about this. “How do they know about the jade?” I asked.
He was briefly silent, as though he hadn’t thought to ask that. “I don’t know. Can that make a difference? You must bring it here immediately. Please!” The desperation in his voice made me want to reach through the phone and pat him on the back.
“Have you learned anything else? Has the amah come back?”
“No. Only this
one demand. How soon can you be here?”
I checked the room clock. It wasn’t one yet. “I’ll come as soon as I can.” Or almost. “I’ll be there well before three.”
“You cannot—” he was saying as I said good-bye.
I imagined Steven Wei’s round face frowning into the phone in his apartment in the sky. I wondered if anyone had straightened things there, put everything back in its proper place. I felt bad about not rushing right over there, but it wouldn’t have done any good except to reassure Steven Wei. And if I went there now, they’d take the jade from me, thank me very much, and throw me out again. If I timed this right and got there later, when the phone call came, maybe I might learn something.
And of course Lydia Chin’s need to know everything superseded all.
But maybe this time it didn’t. Maybe this time everything really would be better if I butted out.
Sitting on the bed, I took my bag out of the straw carryall and took a small velvet-covered box out of my bag. I opened the hinged lid and stared at the tiny, delicately carved laughing Buddha, apple-green jade against white silk. Then I picked up the phone again and dialed.
The rings stopped after the fifth one, and a voice said, “Wai!” as Natalie Zhu’s had, but this voice was a man’s and it was sleepy. Well, no wonder: Where Grandfather Gao was, it was one in the morning.
“Grandfather, this is Chin Ling Wan-Ju,” I said in Cantonese. “I apologize for disturbing your rest.”
“Ling Wan-Ju? What is wrong?” He was instantly awake, but calm and collected as usual. “You are all right, your partner all right also?”
“Yes, Grandfather, but there is a problem.” I filled him in on the kidnapping, the searched apartment, the temple, and the demand for Harry’s jade.
“Has the child been hurt?” This question, too, he asked in his usual calm manner; but something, maybe just a trick of the long-distance wires, made his voice a little less sure than I was used to hearing it.
“I don’t know,” I said, being honest. “But there’s no reason at this point to think that he has.”
“That is well.” I thought I heard a small sigh of relief from the other side of the world.
“Grandfather,” I said, trying to avoid the unforgivable rudeness of a direct accusatory question, “I am sorry for my lack of understanding. If your expectation that something like this would happen is the reason you sent us here instead of—of someone less professional, I did not comprehend that when we spoke.”
There was a pause. I had offered him an opening; now it was up to him. “No, I did not expect it,” he replied evenly. “The task seemed simple. I hoped for a smooth, harmonious result. But circumstances forced me to consider that the still surface of a glassy lake often conceals jagged rocks.”
Oh, for Pete’s sake. It’s a good thing, I thought, that I love you as much as I do.
“If I understood fully the circumstances to which you refer, I’m sure I could be much more useful in this task.”
“Ling Wan-Ju, I do not fully understand them myself.” Grandfather Gao paused, and I waited. Once again his words filled the distance between us. “The task Wei Yao-Shi left to me, which I have sent you to fulfill, seemed simple. But I knew my old friend a very long time. Something was troubling him, though he would not speak of it. His manner led me to think it would be a wise precaution to entrust my interests, which in this case are his, to those in whose abilities I had the most complete confidence.”
The most complete confidence. Hear that, Lydia?
“I’m grateful that, thinking that way, you chose me, Grandfather,” I said, adding, “Bill feels the same.” Might as well get Bill some good Chinese press while I had the chance. “I do wish I knew exactly what those interests are. It would help me know how to serve them best. Do you think Wei Yao-Shi was worried that something like this would happen?”
“As to Wei Yao-Shi, we can only speculate on his concerns. At this point I do not believe that would be profitable. But remember, Ling Wan-Ju, you have known me all your life. My own interests have not changed. Now tell me: What do you propose to do?”
Confused but dutiful, I answered, “I don’t see that I have much choice. If the price of the child’s return is Wei Yao-Shi’s jade, what can I do but turn it over to them?”
“What, indeed?” Grandfather Gao responded. “The jade itself is of small consequence in this matter. But do you feel this action is sufficient?”
“Is there something else I should be doing?”
“You are the professional in these matters, Ling Wan-Ju.”
Usually that’s my line. And the way he said it—and the fact that I’d known him all my life—made me feel like there was something else to be done, if only Lydia Chin were bright enough to think of it.
So I thought. “Grandfather, tell me this: What is this jade worth?”
“We discussed that in New York, Ling Wan-Ju,” he said, scolding me gently. “Perhaps twelve thousand dollars—American dollars. Fifteen, if the market is right.”
“I just wanted to make sure I remembered correctly,” I said. “Because it doesn’t seem like enough to risk a kidnapping for.”
“No, it does not.”
“Also, something else: How would anyone outside the family know about the jade? Wei Yao-Shi left it with you when he went into the hospital, to give to Harry if he died, but it isn’t in his will or anything, isn’t that right?”
“That is correct. The will names myself as responsible for distributing personal property possessed by Wei Yao-Shi at the time of his death, but does not list this property.”
“Then it would seem that someone inside the family, or at least close to the family, would have to be involved in this.”
“Yes.” Go on, Ling Wan-Ju, you backward but hardworking child.
I suddenly decided not to go on. I loved Grandfather Gao and I trusted him, but I wanted to think on my own for a while. Actually, I wanted to think with Bill, but he wasn’t here. And speaking of that, where was he? “Grandfather, there are some things I want to do,” I said. “I will call you again as the situation develops.” There, that’s your last chance to tell me to mind my own business.
Another brief pause. “Please remember, Ling Wan-Ju, that the safety of the child must be your first concern,” said Grandfather Gao, in a way that made me wonder if I’d somehow implied it was not. “Family was of the highest importance to Wei Yao-Shi.”
Uh-huh, I thought. That must be why he had two of them.
But “mind your own business” was nowhere in sight.
“Yes, Grandfather. I will do my best.”
“I am sure you will.” I thought I could hear a smile in his voice as we hung up, and although it was a strange time to be smiling, the sound of it warmed me in my too-cool room in the Hong Kong Hotel.
I did want to think, but I was Lydia Chin: I could do two things at once. From the desk by the window I pulled out the hotel’s directory of guest services and checked for what I wanted. Of course, I found it. I wanted something else, also, but I had no doubt a little looking downstairs would find me that, too. I dialed Bill’s room, but only got his hotel voice mail. I left a message that I was in the hotel but not in my room, and then I left my room so it would be true.
The Hong Kong Hotel is at one end of one of the biggest, classiest shopping malls in a city that, according to the guidebook, prides itself on constantly redefining luxury shopping. I checked the directory and headed to the third floor, past Italian designer shoe stores, shops with brightly colored bolts of liquidy silk in the windows, stores that sold Qing dynasty bride’s and groom’s painted wedding chests for use as armoires to put the TV in in the modern Hong Kong apartment. As I scurried by I glanced at one shop window where the linen suits and skimpy silk dresses displayed were, by my rough calculations, inexpensive enough for me to consider. They were also, it seemed, shaped for people who, like me and most Asians I know, are, by the standards of American designers, undressably short.
The shop I was looking for was tiny but well located, at a corner where two wide shopping boulevards converged. Its windows were tiny, too, which suited the exquisite, glistening jewels they displayed.
Behind the counter, an old man with wispy white hair and a thick mustache looked up as I came in. He removed the jeweler’s loupe from his right eye, placed the gold chain he’d been examining on a velvet tray, and said, “Good afternoon,” in Cantonese.
“Good afternoon to you, uncle,” I replied.
The courtesy of the old-fashioned reply must have pleased him, because he smiled. “Such a warm day. Have you had tea?” He beckoned to a young woman at the rear of the shop, only about ten feet away.
“Thank you,” I said, as she brought a pot and two tiny cups over on a tray painted with cranes and willow trees. I waited for her to pour for both the old man and me and to replace the pot on the tray. I sipped at the tea, golden in the white porcelain cup. “Your tea is delicious,” I told the old man. “So delicately flavored. The perfect refreshment among so many beautiful things.”
He bowed his head to acknowledge the compliment. “I try in my shop to offer only those items which approach, in some small way, the beauty of their wearers.”
Okay, I thought, enough of this, or I’ll walk out of here with a diamond tennis bracelet it’ll take me a decade to pay off.
“Uncle,” I said, putting my teacup down, “I have a piece of jade whose value I am curious to know.”
He nodded as though this were exactly what he’d been expecting. I got the feeling he’d have done that no matter what I said, because I was the customer, but that he probably felt a little pang as he saw the tennis bracelet fading from my wrist.
