by S. J. Rozan
I said, “I’m sure that’s true.”
“But,” he said, “I can sniff around and see if anyone knows anything they might want to tell me. I’ll feel better if I check up on Natalie Zhu, just to make sure she’s on the level. And I can see if the Department knows anything about Iron Fist Chang. Once I find out what his story is, I’ll probably go over and see him myself.”
To get that started, Mark Quan took his cell phone off the place on his belt where uniformed cops wear their guns—Mark Quan’s gun was under his left arm, if the faint bulge in his linen jacket meant anything—and called HKPD HQ. He spoke in Cantonese, quick and assured, but, I noticed, American-accented.
“Okay,” he said when the call was through. “They’ll run him through the computer. If anything comes up I’ll let you know.”
“What about the amah?” I asked.
“I can try to check her out, but we won’t get anywhere unless we get lucky. The problem with the Filipinas is that their lives are such open books.”
“What do you mean?”
“They can’t get into Hong Kong unless they have the right papers and mostly they live in with their employers. If they get in any kind of trouble they get shipped home. The PRC government doesn’t want them here; there are thousands of Cantonese girls right over the border who’d love to have those jobs. That didn’t bother the British, but it annoys the hell out of Beijing.” Mark Quan grinned. “So, I guarantee all I’ll find on Maria Quezon is her passport number and her address, which in this case will be the Weis’. But I’ll look.”
“What about the sister? Natalie Zhu thought her sister worked here, too. Can you find her?”
“I can look. But Quezon is like Smith.” He switched the grin to Bill. “Of the hundred thousand amahs here, five thousand of them must be Quezons. And one or the other of them, or both, could be married and using the husband’s name.”
I thought for a minute. “Why do they call them amahs? That’s not a Cantonese word. Is it from what they speak in the Philippines?”
Mark Quan looked blank.
Surprisingly, Bill took the question. “It’s from the Portuguese,” he said. “For nurse. The British picked it up in the glory days of Empire to refer to their native servants. First in India, then all over Asia.”
“All servants from the inferior races being basically the same?” I asked.
“I think that’s the general idea. In the Philippines they speak Tagalog,” he added.
“You know,” I said, “you’re kind of handy to have around.”
We left the Mandarin Oriental with Mark Quan, walking out into the steamy heat of early evening. I felt a warm damp film condense on my skin as soon as we stepped onto the sidewalk. The air was hazy, thick with humidity, car exhaust, and construction dust. Ignoring the honking, swirling traffic, an electric streetcar rattled to a halt down the block. People swarmed onto one end and off the other. Tugging on its overhead lines, the car started up again, carrying passengers from place to place on the route it was tethered to.
“I’ll call you if I find anything,” Mark Quan said. “And you’ll call me if you hear from the family?”
We said we would, and then we said good-bye, watching him walk through the heat toward the building, a few blocks away, that held the headquarters of the HKPD.
“Your Grandfather Gao sure seems to get around.” Bill lit a cigarette as we stood, an unmoving two-person island in a churning sea of people, on the sidewalk outside the hotel.
“He sure does.” I turned to look at him. Our eyes met. “You look tired,” I said.
“Only from the point of view of your boundless manic energy.”
“No, from the point of view of anybody who can see you. Are you feeling jet-lagged?”
“I’m feeling suddenly totally beat, like I ran into a brick wall, which I think is the same thing. But if you’re asking me if I want to pack it in for the day, the answer is no.”
“Even if there’s nothing else we can do?”
“But there is.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. But you have a plan.”
“I do? How do you know?”
“‘Each water buffalo knows well the song of the little bird on his own rump.’”
I narrowed my eyes in suspicion. “Who told you that?”
“A water buffalo down at the Bronx Zoo. I met him one fine summer day. I asked him how his rump was, and we got to talking, about little birds, things like that …”
I threw him a look over my shoulder as I started to walk away. “Well, if you want to hear my song, hurry up,” I said.
Because, of course, I did have a plan.
six
The plan involved a trip to the east end of Hong Kong Island, which, after a hard look at the traffic, we decided to make by subway as far as we could and by cab after that. As far as we could get by subway, according to my handy Laminated Detailed City Map of Hong Kong Island (companion piece to the Laminated Detailed City Map of Kowloon and the New Territories, also in my bag at the moment along with a few other potentially useful items) was the very last stop.
The Hong Kong subway was a quieter, smoother ride than the subways of home. The ads in the stations and the cars were in Chinese, and the smiling people in the ads were Chinese, as were the largely unsmiling people in the subway cars themselves. Students and grandmothers and office workers, shop girls and street sweepers, sat on stainless-steel benches or held on to poles with the same tired shoulders and empty stares as people on the IRT at the end of the day. Bill and I stood in the middle of the car, me indistinguishable from the rest of the crowd, Bill standing out because of his height and his features. There, I thought, now you know, and was immediately shocked at myself and pretended I’d never thought it.
We came up out of the subway into more soggy heat, grayer now that the low sun was behind the hills and the mist had thickened. The area we were in was grayer, too. Facing us was a park, largely concrete, where a group of teenage boys played hard, graceless basketball on one of a half-dozen courts. An asphalt soccer field was empty, climbing equipment for the little kids empty, too, at this dinner hour. Behind us to the right and left loomed residential high-rises displaying, even in the twilight, the same shabby concrete and fading paint as the buildings around Kwong Hon Terrace Garden, though these were obviously much newer. These huge housing projects—they called them estates here, but I knew a project when I saw one—had replaced a lot of buildings that had been here a lot longer, but some of the older structures still crouched among the project towers and filled the blocks from here to the harbor: three- and four-story factories, warehouses, industrial buildings of various grim and squat aspects. This was the working waterfront and this was its landscape.
It was not the greatest place in the world to get a cab. After ten minutes of standing around, watching no cabs whatever cruise by, I began to wonder just how lost we’d get if we tried to walk the mile or so to where we were going. But Bill had a much more brilliant idea.
“There’s a bus depot over there,” he said, pointing. “You can usually get a cab at a bus depot.”
“How do you know that’s a bus depot?” Here, well off the tourist or foreign-businessman track, almost no English was to be seen on street signs, store signs, or outdoor ads, except the occasional MARLBORO or CHIVAS floating among Chinese characters at stores whose window displays could have told you the same thing.
“A lot of buses turning that corner,” Bill said. “With different route numbers on them.”
Like most of the world, Hong Kong does its numbers the Western way.
Bill would have no idea where any of those buses were coming from, but he could see they were converging from a lot of different places. “Good old-fashioned detective work.” I nodded approval. “Let’s go.”
It was a bus depot, and there were cabs there, and five minutes after getting in one we had reached our destination. Out of habit we went half a block beyond. I paid the driver,
rounding up to the nearest Hong Kong dollar because I couldn’t stand the idea of not tipping a cabbie at all, even though all the guidebooks said you don’t in Hong Kong.
“This begs the question of how we’re going to get back,” Bill pointed out as the cab’s red taillights drifted away down what I still thought of as the wrong side of the street.
“We can walk back,” I said. “Now that we know the way.”
“Uh-huh.”
We backtracked down the sidewalk of Fung Yip Street until we reached the building we’d come to see, a flat-roofed, three-story structure of soot-covered brick that had probably once been red. Most of the windows in the nearby buildings were dark, but the windows of this one were shining a harsh fluorescent white. They provided enough light in the mist-soaked evening to illuminate the painted Chinese characters on the large wooden sign above the door and the smaller English words below them. They both read LION ROCK ENTERPRISES.
I tried the handle on the scarred wooden door, it turned and opened. Bill and I stepped into a small reception area, cooler than the steamy outdoors but not refrigerated like so many indoor Hong Kong spaces. A door in the mustard-yellow wall facing us led to the building’s interior; that must be the Lion Rock warehouse itself. That door and a window and closed door into another office to our right were the only surfaces in this room not covered with pinned-up clipboards, charts, schedules, and calendars. At the center of this cramped, paper-covered space stood a battered steel desk holding a computer from which a young woman looked up, blinking in surprise. A nameplate on her desk read, NG JING-YI in Chinese. Below, in English, it said JEANETTE NG.
She looked at us and made her choice. “May I help you?” she asked, as Jeanette, in English.
So much for blending in. “Wei Ang-Ran, please,” I answered.
“Your name?” She reached for the phone.
“Chin Ling Wan-Ju. This is Bill Smith.” I added in Cantonese, “Wei Ang-Ran is not expecting us, but tell him we bring greetings from Gao Mian-Liang.”
Jeanette/Jing-Yi raised an eyebrow at my switch in languages. She pressed a button on her phone. Through the window to our right I saw a thin old man pick up the phone on his desk. He looked up at us as Jing-Yi spoke: With him she used exclusively Cantonese. I gave him a quick bow of my head; he bowed back. Through the window I watched him hang up the phone, add fresh water from a steaming teakettle to the pot on his desk, and do a few other things in his office. Then the door opened and the thin old man came out.
“Ah! Chin Ling Wan-Ju. Mr. Smith.” He greeted us with the resolutely polite air of a man caught at a bad time but determined to fulfill the requirements of hospitality. “Gao Mian-Liang told me I might expect you during your time in Hong Kong. Please come inside.”
I nodded to Jeanette/Jing-Yi, and we followed him into his office.
The Mr. had been in English, but you’d have to have been listening hard to know that. Everything else was Cantonese, which he continued in as he closed the door behind us. “Have you had tea? Please.” He pointed to two vinyl-covered chairs opposite his cluttered desk, so we sat as he added two small clay teacups from a bottom desk drawer to the cup and pot already in front of him. In here, as in the outer office, a door in the back wall led into the rest of the building. You couldn’t see the warehouse floor right now, because that door was closed. But it hadn’t been closed until Wei Ang-Ran had closed it just before he came out to greet us.
Wei Ang-Ran turned to Bill. “Very sorry,” he said with an apologetic wave of the hand and an accent so thick it took me a second to realize he was speaking English. “My English, not so good. Not need speak, always too lazy learn.”
“That’s all right,” Bill said. “I’m too tired to listen, anyway.”
Wei Ang-Ran took that in with a courteous, blank look, so I translated. He nodded in polite appreciation and said in Cantonese, “Then you must have some tea.” Since he was pouring steaming tea into the little clay cups as he said that and gesturing for Bill to take one, I didn’t think that needed me.
“I wanted to convey greetings to you from Gao Mian-Liang without further delay,” I told him, holding the clay cup in both hands and sipping from it. The tea was dark and aromatic, quite bracing as it flowed through my system. I wondered if it was helping Bill. “Also to bring you the letter your brother sent to you. Even though,” I continued, “this is a difficult time for your family.”
The old man’s face clouded over. “Ah. You know about Hao-Han.”
“We went to deliver your brother’s bequest to the child this morning, as we were instructed. We were at the apartment when the first phone call came.”
Wei Ang-Ran shook his head. “The death of my brother brought sadness to his son, but an old man’s death is to be expected. For one’s child to be in such danger … Still,” he looked up, “we have every reason to hope that the situation will be resolved, the child returned without harm. Have we not?”
I wasn’t sure what we had, but he was waiting for me to respond, so I agreed. From my bag I drew the fat brown envelope Grandfather Gao had given me, with Wei Ang-Ran’s name in Chinese characters on it.
The old man looked at it without movement. I began to feel a little foolish just sitting there holding it out. With a start, as though he’d suddenly realized he’d made his guest uncomfortable, Wei Ang-Ran reached and took it from me. He held it in both hands as he stared at it.
“So thick,” he said. “So much advice, so many things my brother has to say to me.”
“I’m sure his words will be comforting,” I said.
“Perhaps. But right now—no, I cannot read this now.” He slipped open his desk drawer and placed the envelope in it. “I am now the head of this family. To accept advice or comfort from my brother after I have allowed such a thing to happen … Zhong xiao dao yi. You understand.” He smiled sadly at me and shut the drawer.
I did understand. “Zhong xiao dao yi,” my mother’s elder sister would say, scowling and wagging her finger, when I backtalked my mother or when my brothers fought. Once, memorably, I’d come home from the park with badly skinned knees and elbows and she’d used it on the brother who was supposed to have been watching me. Country, family, and friends is how it translates; what it means is “do the right thing.” These are your obligations, it says, the threads of obedience and loyalty, protection and care that weave you into your place in the world. You give and are given to, you owe and are owed. Break one thread—through evil intent or casual carelessness, by deliberate action or mere inattention—and the whole fabric defining you will unravel.
These obligations do not change with death or circumstances. If your elder brother passes on, you nevertheless still owe him honor and deference. And if his grandson is kidnapped, you have failed utterly in your responsibilities in both directions.
That was about as Chinese as it got, and I had no answer to it. Briefly, we sipped our tea in silence. “You are a very diligent man,” I finally observed. “Your staff also, most industrious. Your neighbors have closed for the day, yet you are still here, working so late.”
His chin jutted forward, that Chinese shrug. “This becomes necessary at certain times. A shipment of furniture has just come in from China.”
“Another goes out in a few days, is that correct? Wei Di-Fen”—Steven—“told us that. He said he came here this morning to examine some papers needed with the shipment.”
“Yes.” Wei Ang-Ran looked down into his teacup. “I wish I had not asked him. If he had been at home with his family this trouble could have been averted.”
In the silence that followed the old man looked quite forlorn, so I answered him.
“This trouble was caused by someone’s greed,” I said. “Not by your diligence. The people responsible, if thwarted today, would have chosen another time. You cannot blame yourself.”
Wei Ang-Ran did not seem convinced, and conversation once more came to an uncomfortable halt
As the old man reached for the teapot t
o refill the cups, Bill turned to me. “Listen, tell Mr. Wei it’s not him, it’s jet lag, but I’m falling asleep here. I’m going to go out, have a cigarette, walk around the block. I’ll be back in a minute.”
“Are you sure?” I asked. “Do you want to go back to the hotel?”
“No, you stay and visit.” He shrugged. “I can’t understand a word you’re saying anyway.”
Wei Ang-Ran and I had been speaking Chinese, so I was sure that was true. Just as Bill and I were now speaking English, to the confusion of Wei Ang-Ran.
I explained the situation as Bill stood. Wei Ang-Ran stood also, bowing to Bill, who bowed back in a big, Western kind of way. He left the office, smiling at Jeanette Ng as he let himself out the heavy front door.
I turned back to the old man. “Permit me to express my condolences on the death of your brother. I imagine you were close, having worked together for so long.”
He sighed. “I shall miss his conversation, his counsel. In a world of constant change he understood what was of lasting importance. Since childhood I have attempted to follow his lead. Now I must continue alone.”
“It must be a difficult prospect, to run such a busy, prosperous business by yourself.”
“Fortunately, it will not come to that. Wei Di-Fen has left his position to assume his father’s responsibilities here. He is a serious young man, most assiduous.”
“Will it be easy for him to take over his father’s work?”
“His understanding grows daily. More important, his dedication is great. If not for this unfortunate situation, he would be here now. In fact, he offered to come tonight, as much must be done to prepare the shipment for New York. But his heart is clearly at home with his wife, waiting for word of his son. I would not allow him to come. But I assure you nothing less serious would have kept him away.”
“You spoke to him recently? Is there news?”
