by S. J. Rozan
Well, I’d worry about that later; now, back to business. I opened my bag to take out the jade to show Steven and Li-Ling. They were both clearly having trouble keeping themselves together; the jade might reassure them a little. But before my hand closed on the box, the intercom at the front door buzzed.
Steven Wei threw a look at Natalie Zhu, then jumped up and grabbed the handset. Li-Ling rose awkwardly from her chair and stood with her hands pressed together. “Yes?” Steven barked in Cantonese. “What?”
The desk man spoke; Steven Wei seemed to be having trouble understanding him. “What?” he repeated. “Who?”
The answer came. Steven Wei lowered the handset, looked blankly around the room. Natalie Zhu began to stand, ready to take over and handle whatever situation this was. But Steven raised the handset again, spoke to the desk man, and hung up. He turned to face us.
“I told them to let him come up.” He spoke woodenly, waiting for a response.
“Who, Steven?” Natalie Zhu said sharply.
Steven Wei looked at her as though her question were as incomprehensible to him as whatever it was the desk man had said. He gestured helplessly at the intercom and repeated what he’d been told. “It’s Franklin Wei,” he said. “From New York. My brother.”
Bill lit a cigarette; otherwise, no one moved and not a word was said in the Wei apartment until the doorbell rang. When it did, I was the one standing closest to it, so I was the one who opened it.
A round-faced man stood in the hall wearing a Ralph Lauren polo shirt, khakis, and a tentative smile. My eyes widened before I could help it. Except for another inch in height and a pair of horn-rim glasses, I could have been looking at Steven Wei. The unlined face, the short, neat haircut, the way the smile lit up his face—a smile I had seen on Steven Wei just once, standing in this same hall—they were all the same.
“Hello,” he said in Cantonese. “I’m Wei Fu-Ran. Franklin. Are you Li-Ling?” He held a large bunch of flowers and a box of chocolates; he offered me both.
“I’m Lydia Chin,” I answered in English, not responding directly to anything he’d said in Chinese. “You’d better come in.”
Franklin Wei’s eyebrows came together as he heard my tone of voice. He waited politely for an explanation, but the smile remained. He entered the apartment and caught sight of his brother, Steven.
Under other circumstances, it could have been a funny moment. Two men, nearly identical, unaware of each other’s existence until a month ago, one of them completely astounded by the other’s unexpected arrival, the other about to be shocked by the situation he was walking into. This could make for a great Chinese comic opera setup, except a comic opera wouldn’t center on a kidnapped seven-year-old boy.
Where to start? Well, there was the obvious. In English, I said, “Franklin Wei, this is Steven. Steven Wei, this is Franklin.”
Franklin Wei shifted the chocolates to his left hand and held out his right. Steven Wei, on autopilot, put out his own hand, and they shook, brother to brother, man to man.
“I know. It’s a shock,” Franklin said to Steven, continuing in English. His English had the cadences of a native New Yorker’s; his Chinese, like mine, had the ease of being raised among native speakers. Obviously neither language was a foreign one to him; I wondered which he thought in. “I called your office. When they told me you were home, I couldn’t resist the surprise. Sorry.” He grinned.
I wasn’t sure, if things had been different, whether Steven would have enjoyed the joke, but he wasn’t returning his brother’s grin now. Franklin Wei glanced around the room, then back at Steven. “Did I interrupt something? Hey, I really am sorry. This was really rude of me, huh? I just thought it would be kind of a kick …” He trailed off in the silence.
This seemed manifestly unfair to Franklin. Here he was thinking that the frowns and the furrowed brows in this room were because he hadn’t called before he came. Someone should clue him in. He was, after all, family.
“There’s a problem, Dr. Wei,” I said. “It has nothing to do with you.”
Natalie Zhu stirred in her chair. I expected her to stand up, stop me, to take charge and take over, but all she did was watch me, and wait.
So I went on. I introduced everyone in the room: Bill, Natalie Zhu (whom I called first by her Chinese name, and then Natalie), and the real Li-Ling. Then I said to Franklin, “We’re in the middle of a bad situation.”
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “Did I screw something up?”
“No. But your arrival may be one more shock than anyone was ready for.” I told him about the kidnapping, and the frightening complication of the new phone call. As I spoke I kept waiting for someone to stop me, to tell me this was not any of Franklin Wei’s business and certainly none of mine. But Li-Ling Wei just stared at the floor, as though she was being forced to listen again to something she had not wanted to hear the first time; and Steven Wei, glancing occasionally at Natalie Zhu, saw that she was making no move to end my telling of the story and said nothing himself.
“Jesus,” Franklin Wei said softly when I was through. “Damn.” He looked at his brother. “I’m really sorry.” There, I thought, how’s that? You fly all the way to the other side of the world and wind up saying nothing but I’m sorry. “Is there anything I can do?”
Steven Wei shook his head. “There is … we’re waiting for the next phone call. At three o’clock.” He looked at his watch, as did everyone else, when he said that. “A few minutes,” Steven Wei said unnecessarily.
Franklin Wei took a handkerchief from his back pocket to wipe sweat from his face. The movement rustled the paper around the bouquet of flowers he still held. Li-Ling Wei seemed to awaken at the sound. She stood and, moving slowly but steadily, took the flowers and chocolates from the man who looked so like her husband. Bowing in thanks, she carried them into the kitchen, returning with the flowers in a vase of water.
Franklin Wei looked at me. “I know who you are now,” he said. “Grandfather Gao told me you’d be here. You brought Dad’s jade. And the ashes.”
“That’s right,” I said.
“Truth is,” he said, “I was kind of surprised Dad wanted to be buried here. Not as amazed as when I found out about you guys—” Franklin turned to Steven, trying for a smile “—but the way Dad felt about the old traditions, the way he used to laugh at all that? It just surprised me, him wanting to come back here. So I thought I’d come along … well, hell, man. I wish it weren’t like this.”
Steven Wei obviously wished it weren’t like this, too. I was a little thrown hearing Franklin Wei, high up here in the air above Hong Kong, refer to “Grandfather Gao,” but I thought, why not? Given the longtime friendship between Grandfather Gao and old Mr. Wei, Grandfather Gao must have been a frequent visitor at the Weis’ Westchester home. A lot of Chinatown kids used the honorific Grandfather for Gao Mian-Liang, so why not this sunny, suburban, all-American Chinese boy?
Steven Wei was thrown, too, but by something else. “Laugh at the old traditions?” he said. “Father?” As he spoke, my mind returned to this morning’s search of the apartment, to the room with the wall safe. I saw the camphorwood trunk, the armoire, the teak bench so like the one in Grandfather Gao’s shop. The bed had been narrow, piled with brocade bolsters between the curving head- and footboards, and on the deep red wall, next to a pair of painted scrolls, hung a small shrine to Tin Hua, goddess of the sea. The room was quiet, dark, full of the pull of years. It was of a different nature from the pale-blue-and-ivory sleekness of the rest of the apartment, and I had assumed it had belonged to old Mr. Wei. “My father loved the old ways,” Steven was saying. “He was never so happy as when he was telling us stories about the home village or talking in the tearoom with his friends. He loved the old music, and the classic texts.”
Franklin and Steven Wei looked at each other. And ending any immediate chance of either finding out more about the other’s view of the man they both called father, the telephone rang.
This time, as in the morning, the shrill chirps came from the cell phone in Steven Wei’s pocket. He whipped it out. “Wai!” As he listened to the response from the other end of the line, Natalie Zhu came and stood before him. She made no move to take the phone from him, but her presence seemed to challenge him into steeliness, and when he was through listening, his voice was controlled and calm.
“What proof do I have that you are holding my son?” he asked in Chinese. “Let me speak to him.”
An answer; then, “No, that is not enough. I have gotten another call. Someone else also claiming to be holding my son and his amah.” Pause. “With a—different demand. I will bring the jade wherever you like if you bring my son to me at the same place, but I will not turn the jade over to you before I see him.”
Pause. “Yes, I have the jade. I can—No, it—” To whatever went on at the other end after that, Steven Wei managed only fragmented replies. Then suddenly he lost his composure and shouted, “Wai! Wai!” into the phone. He shouted once more, then stopped.
Face flushed, he lowered the phone and looked around the room. “He said if we don’t give him the jade we’ll be sorry. Then he hung up.” Realizing he’d spoken in Chinese, he repeated himself in English.
“Did he offer proof?” That was Natalie Zhu, sticking to the important point.
Steven Wei shook his head. “He said he thought this was a transaction between gentlemen. That he’d been behaving as one, but if I chose not to do so, he could behave … in other ways.” He looked at Natalie Zhu. “Do you think that means—?” “Did he say he would call again?” She cut him off.
“Yes.”
Natalie Zhu, arms crossed over her silk blouse, kept her eyes on Steven Wei for a while. Then she turned deliberately to face me, Bill, and Franklin Wei.
“I’m sorry,” she said, not particularly sounding it. “We must speak privately. Dr. Wei, it is unfortunate that your arrival has come at this bad time. The situation will no doubt be resolved soon. We will let you know as soon as there is happy news to report. Miss Chin, please leave the jade. We will call you.”
So here we were, getting thrown out of the Weis’ apartment again. I opened my mouth to object, though I wasn’t sure on what grounds besides Lydia Chin’s need to be in on everything. Then, meeting Natalie Zhu’s eyes, I abruptly stopped. I did some quick mental flip-flops, then decided.
After all, Grandfather Gao had told me to do what I thought was right. And if none of this had ever happened and everything had been okay to begin with, Steven and Li-Ling Wei would be effectively in charge of this jade by now anyhow.
Taking the velvet box from my bag, I handed it, not to Natalie Zhu, but to Li-Ling Wei. One hand over her huge stomach, she opened it. Both Steven and Franklin Wei looked in at the laughing Buddha gleaming on his white silk.
Franklin smiled. “I remember when Dad got that,” he said. “I must have been, I don’t know, five. He brought me one, too, not a Buddha, just this thing.” He reached under his shirt and pulled out a gold chain from which dangled a pointed jade amulet, faceted and about an inch long. “It was the only old-timey thing I ever saw him do. I haven’t worn it since I was like twelve, just put it on when I decided to come here. Seemed like, I don’t know, a cool thing to wear to Hong Kong.”
Steven Wei slowly reached under his own shirt and pulled out an amulet exactly like it. “I don’t remember a time when Father did not wear his jade,” he said. “Or a time when I did not wear mine.”
“I want to talk to you,” I told Bill, standing on the sidewalk on Robinson Road, after, to the rattle of jackhammers in the swampy heat, we had put Franklin Wei in a taxi.
“I’m at the Peninsula,” Franklin had said. “Will you call me? I mean, if anything happens?” Gesturing upward in the general direction of the twenty-sixth floor, he added, “They might not think of it.” They might not, I thought; or they might, but that didn’t mean they’d do it. We’d taken the hotel’s phone number and given him our cell phone numbers in exchange. We’d given them to the Weis, too, Steven Wei nodding in distracted thanks, Natalie Zhu raising a barely discernible eyebrow as she found out we’d actually gone out and gotten cell phones since this morning.
Now, to me, Bill said, “Where?”
“How about the park? The scene of the crime.”
“Maybe.”
“Not the park? You want to go somewhere else?”
“No, the park’s good. I meant maybe it’s the scene of the crime.”
“You really don’t buy the idea that this is what it looks like?” I asked as we headed downhill to the little park that, according to Steven Wei, Maria Quezon and Harry went to all the time.
“What the hell does it even look like?” I raised my eyebrows at the short-tempered growl in his voice, but said nothing. He shook a cigarette out of the pack, lit a match as we passed under the fronds of a huge palm tree growing on a wall. “The kid grabbed the day—just about the hour—we show up from New York. Two ransom demands, one for more money than the family has, one for less than the risk is worth.”
“You think that’s true, that they don’t have that much money?”
“Maybe it’s not. Maybe they’re not sure about us and he was being cagey. Shouldn’t be hard to find out.”
“All right,” I said, “but if the first call was from phony kidnappers, what was the point of sending Steven Wei to Wong Tai Sin? If that was you, wouldn’t you just want to get in and get what you could before the real guys call and Steven realizes he’s been had?”
“Yes,” he said shortly. “So, assuming that one of the calls is real and that’s the one that sent Steven Wei to the temple, who made the other one, and how did they find out the kid was taken?”
“Assuming.” I turned to look at him. “You think maybe neither is real?”
“I don’t know what I think. If that was the real call, why wouldn’t they prove they had the kid?”
“Maybe,” I said slowly, “something’s happened to the kid.”
“I thought of that.” Bill said, his voice lower. He gazed down the hill, across the harbor. “But even if the kid’s already dead, they’d know what he was wearing. If he had birthmarks, they’d know that. Missing teeth, whatever. They could have tried to fake it.”
“Maybe they don’t think that fast. Maybe they’re nervous. Maybe they’re not pros.” I stepped aside for a sweating woman pulling a grocery cart up the steep sidewalk.
Bill didn’t answer me directly. He said, “There are a few other things I want to know. I still want to know why the apartment was wrecked.”
“And who let us up.”
“And who paid the old lady prayer-seller at Wong Tai Sin.”
“And how your friend Iron Fist Chang fits in.”
We walked between wooden gateposts holding up a red arch with the characters for “Kwong Hon Terrace Garden” painted on it in gold. The concrete-paved park nestled between low, old buildings, ran through the block and ended in another arched gateway to another street. Small children shrieked as they ran through sprays of water from the mouths of three bronze frogs. Half a dozen Filipina amahs shared sliced papaya and cans of coconut soda, giggled and gossiped, called to their charges. We sat on a concrete bench in the shade of a banana tree. I stared at the bananas, growing upside down just the way they’re supposed to.
“Old Mr. Wei,” Bill said. “I want to know what he was worried about. I want to know what we were sent here to do.”
I looked at him, watched his eyes follow an amah as she jumped up to comfort a toddler who had slipped in the bronze frogs’ pool. She picked the child up, hugged and cajoled him, gave him a slice of papaya, and sent him, giggling, back to his friends. I touched Bill’s arm. “I’m sorry,” I said.
He turned to me, surprised. “About what?”
“This.” I waved my arm around. “Everything’s so—confusing. So illogical and unreasonable. So Chinese.”
“Do you mean to tell me,” he said, taking the cigarette f
rom his mouth, “that when you’re being confusing, illogical, and unreasonable, it’s genetic?”
“You know what I mean.”
He shook his head. “I don’t. No offense, but you people are no different from anybody else. Everyone wants the same thing, in the end.”
“Which is?”
“To protect what you love.”
A trickle of sweat slid down my cheek. I wiped it away and asked, “That’s what it’s all about? Love?”
Bill didn’t answer. I said, “What about greed? Revenge? Wanting to make someone suffer? Those things aren’t about love.”
“No,” Bill said. “They’re about protection.”
The amahs talked and laughed in the shade and the children ran and splashed in the frog pool. Bill and I sat silently until his cigarette was done.
“Okay,” I said, “suppose you’re right. I’m dubious, but suppose. Who’s protecting what around here?”
“I don’t know,” Bill said. “But I can think of a few people to ask. The uncle. The desk man. Iron Fist. The old lady.”
As my cell phone rang, I added, “And the new client.”
Bill’s questioning look held me as I answered the phone in English with a businesslike “Lydia Chin speaking.”
Natalie Zhu wasn’t impressed.
“We can speak in English if you prefer it, Ms. Chin,” she said dryly, in Cantonese. “Or perhaps you’d rather Chinese?”
Oh, all right, I thought. So I wasn’t fooling you. Big deal. It was worth a try. “Let’s stay in the habit of English,” I said, as cool as she was. “For my partner.”
“Fine,” she agreed, switching languages. “Can you talk freely?”
“I’m in the park at Kwong Hon Terrace. No one’s near but Bill. And you?”
Bill had his eyes on me, waiting to be filled in, so I mouthed “Natalie Zhu” for him and watched him raise his eyebrows.
“I am on the balcony,” Natalie Zhu answered, and I had an image of her steely small form, cell phone pressed to her ear, standing in the hot breeze on the twenty-sixth floor, commanding the view over Robinson Road, the roofs of the Central skyscrapers, the harbor. “I told Steven I had to make some calls putting off other work in my office as long as this situation continues. You are not surprised at my calling you?”
