by S. J. Rozan
“How do you suppose Iron Fist ended up working there?” I asked. “He’s a movie stuntman, I thought.”
“That’s not uncommon. The film business is spotty, and those guys are used to hard work. A lot of them moonlight on the docks or in the markets for a few extra bucks.”
“And he found out about the jade because Wei Ang-Ran couldn’t keep his mouth shut? That’s how this started?”
Through the phone, in Mark’s silence, I heard dishes clatter, and someone shouted. I pictured him in a large, bright room, waiters rushing back and forth, steam rising from big bowls, families with young children eating, laughing, all talking at once. In my picture, Mark sat at a table on the side, alone.
With a start I realized he’d asked me a question, but I didn’t know what it was. I also realized Bill was watching me with an odd look. Suddenly confused, I didn’t meet Bill’s eyes, and I told Mark I hadn’t heard him: Some interference on my cell phone, I said, though the truth was Hong Kong had this cell phone business worked out much better than we did back home and there hadn’t been a second’s static since I’d bought the thing.
Mark patiently repeated his question. “Did he seem like that to you, the old man? Someone who can’t keep his mouth shut?”
“No,” I said. “No, he didn’t. And he didn’t seem all that fond of Tony Siu, either.”
“Siu’s a hard man to like, from what I hear.”
“I wonder how much Iron Fist likes him?”
“What are you thinking? Some kind of double-cross going on?”
“Maybe. But don’t ask me who’s double-crossing whom.”
“Well, it’s a theory,” Mark Quan agreed. “‘A sweet tongue, a sword in the belly.’” He sighed. “Crime isn’t what it used to be. In the old days you could trust your triad brothers.”
“Maybe you still can, but Iron Fist isn’t one of them, so they can cheat each other and feel okay about it.”
“Well,” Mark Quan said, “I’ll bet I could lock them all up and feel okay about it”
There were some other calls I wanted to make, but not from here. I folded up the phone and filled Bill in on the parts of my talk with Mark Quan that he’d missed. For a guy who’d only heard one side, he seemed to have gotten most of it pretty well.
“What happens now?” he asked.
“Mark doesn’t have an address for Iron Fist, but he’s going to go up to Thundering Mountain in the morning. Tomorrow’s Sunday, but if they’re filming they work seven days, and if not maybe he’ll find someone who can tell him something. I want to call the Weis and I want to call Grandfather Gao, but from the hotel.” I leaned back against the bus seat and closed my eyes. “I’m tired. What did you say before about a brick wall?”
“I said I’d never seen one as cute as you.”
I opened one eye and fixed it on him. “You did not”
“Well, it’s what I meant.”
I closed my eye again. After a while I said, “Where are we?”
“I’m supposed to know?”
“Describe our surroundings.”
“Skyscrapers. Lots of traffic. Neon.”
“Gee, must be Hong Kong. Go on.”
“Other buses. Big lit building. Water.”
“Hey,” I said, opening both eyes, “we’re here.”
Our bus had come around a corner and was waiting its turn to pull into one of the angled, numbered parking slots by the big lit building, which according to its sign in both English and Chinese was the Central bus depot. Other signs, also in both languages, pointed the way to the subway, various buildings people might be interested in, and a number of different ferries. The ferry we wanted was the Star Ferry to Kowloon, and it was the closest one.
The rain had come down to a drizzle again. We trotted across the expanse of wet asphalt that was the bus depot and through a short, moldy-smelling tunnel under the avenue. A ferry was loading when we got to the dock, so we hurried on it. I took the first seat I saw, beside the rail in the middle of the boat. Bill dropped into the seat next to mine.
The boat wasn’t as empty as the upper deck of the bus had been, but it wasn’t the jam-packed commuter container of morning. We sat in tired silence as the ferry cut through the pockets of fog and slid across the dark surface of the harbor. The smell of salt water came to me again, speaking of distances much farther than any I’d traveled, journeys measured in years instead of days, loneliness that could not be measured at all.
“Damn,” I said softly, to myself.
Bill looked at me. “What’s wrong?”
“That little boy. We didn’t do him much good, did we? And we didn’t do Steven Wei or his wife much good, and we didn’t do Grandfather Gao much good, either.”
“We did what we could,” he said.
“It’s not enough.”
He didn’t answer right away, just gazed over the water, watching the lights of the boats that passed ours, on their ways to places we’d never know.
“If the amah’s with the boy,” Bill said finally, “he may be all right for a while. There’s a cop on the case now, and there wouldn’t be if you hadn’t told Grandfather Gao what happened. We know more than we did, and we’ll start again in the morning. There’s nothing else we can do now.”
“If we hadn’t come here at all this wouldn’t have started.”
“You mean, because of the jade? If we hadn’t been the ones to bring it, someone else would have. It may be the jade but it’s not us.”
I looked at him. “And you don’t even think it’s the jade, do you?”
Still looking across the harbor, he shook his head. “No. The jade’s part of it, but it’s not the point. Even if that was the real call. I don’t know what the point is, but it’s not as simple as that.”
Behind us the neon crowning the office towers blurred into softly glowing halos of color floating in the misty night sky. Ahead, the lights of Kowloon shone from streetlamps and windows much more earthbound than the soaring structures on the Hong Kong side.
When the ferry docked we walked slowly back to our hotel. The rain had stopped, the traffic was thinner, and the jackhammers were silent, but the sidewalks were still narrow and packed, the horns still honked, and the store windows were still brightly lit, waiting for the strolling crowds to stream in and buy. Young couples holding hands stood in front of shops displaying the latest European and American fashions, the newest CDs, the most digital electronic gear. The night may be made for romance, I thought wearily, but in Hong Kong I was getting the idea romance was made for shopping.
The hotel lobby was a cool relief. We checked the desk for messages, but there weren’t any. Bill asked if I wanted anything, a drink, a cup of tea.
“A shower,” I sighed. “What I want is a shower and dry clothes. I’m going to go do that and then call the Weis and Grandfather Gao. Then I’ll call you. You’ll be in your room?”
“Yes. Then what?”
“Then maybe I’ll see if I can sleep. What are you going to do?”
“Pretty much the same, I think. That way we can get started early in the morning.”
“When we get started,” I asked, “what are we going to do?”
He shook his head as the elevator came. “I don’t know. But I’m too tired to think. You’ll have a great idea in the morning.”
“I will?”
“Uh-huh,” he said. “You always do.”
The elevator doors closed and we stood in silence; then they opened on my floor, so I got out. I turned to look at Bill, feeling like I had something else to say, but the doors were closing and I didn’t know what it was. I stood there for a minute while the elevator took him to his room three floors above. Then I wondered what I was doing there and headed down the hall.
My room was cool and quiet, lit by the bedside lamp the chambermaid had left on when she’d turned down the bed. The drapes were closed, but I opened them, and I stood looking out across the bright lights of Kowloon and the busy waters of Victoria Harbor to
the multicolored, mistdraped Hong Kong waterfront in the distance. My room looked toward the harbor, toward the island where the first foreigners had come, toward the tumultuous, clamorous, frantic empire they had built, an empire that had outlasted Empire itself. Bill’s room faced the other way, across Kowloon, to the hills, to China. Funny, I thought, that it should be that way.
I showered in the big marble bathroom and dried myself on the soft thick towels feeling more and more bone-tired every minute, and more and more guilty that Grandfather Gao’s hard-earned cash should be putting me up in such style while I was accomplishing nothing. Slipping into my yellow silk robe—made in China, bought in Chinatown, no doubt imported through Hong Kong—I left the bathroom ready to face the phone calls I needed to make.
But the little red light on my phone told me someone had beaten me to it.
I picked up the phone and pressed the button for the voice-mail message. Maybe it was Bill. Or Grandfather Gao. Or the Weis, with news.
But no. According to the voice mail, it had been my mother.
Talk about guilt, Lydia, I thought. Your mother just spent about a million dollars calling overseas—your mother, who never met a pencil she couldn’t sharpen down to an inch or a piece of Scotch tape she couldn’t reuse—and you didn’t answer because you were in the bathroom smoothing freesia-scented lotion on your legs.
Before I could talk myself out of it I called her back.
“It’s Ling Wan-Ju,” I said in Chinese when she answered the phone.
“Ling Wan-Ju! I called you only ten minutes ago! I had to speak to a machine!”
“I’m sorry, Ma. I was here, just in the bathroom. How are you?”
“I am well! How was your day in Hong Kong?”
“You don’t have to yell, Ma. I can hear you fine.” I knew that wouldn’t stop her: She yells into any phone that’s making a call farther than Queens. “My day was interesting, Ma.”
“Interesting?” She sounded instantly suspicious. “Have you done successfully what Grandfather Gao sent you to do?”
Not hardly, I thought, but I answered, “We’re working on it.”
“Ling Wan-Ju! You will not disappoint Grandfather Gao in this?”
Was I that obvious? “We’re doing what we can, Ma,” I said, trying to sound reassuring. “The job turns out to be more complicated than we knew.”
She sniffed. Modern technology, it’s amazing, I thought: I can hear my mother sniffing with disdain from halfway around the world. “Perhaps, Ling Wan-Ju, you are distracted.”
I knew she didn’t mean by the bright lights. “No, Ma, it’s not that. There’s just more to this. I’ve talked to Grandfather Gao; he understands.”
“Ling Wan-Ju,” my mother said decisively, “you will succeed in your task. You must ignore distractions; you must act as though you are traveling alone.”
Wishful thinking, Ma, but go right ahead. “I’ll do what I can,” I told her.
“You will succeed.” She said it again, and, because it sounded less like a prediction than a command, I both thanked her and promised to try.
“Now you must hang up,” she ordered. “This call, much too expensive. Ling Wan-Ju, do not call me again from Hong Kong.”
Oh, sure, I thought. And hear about how I didn’t for the rest of my life?
“Just don’t you call me,” I said. “Because you can’t tell when you’ll get me in.”
As if that hadn’t been why she’d called in the late evening, Hong Kong time, just to make sure I was safely tucked in my room.
So, two Chinese women across the globe from each other, each satisfied she’d understood the other though neither of us had actually said what she’d meant, my mother and I said good-bye.
Now, I thought, to the other calls. I rearranged the pillows behind my back and reached for the phone again, but before I picked it up my bag started to chirp.
The cell phone. Not a lot of people had this number, and all of them were connected to this case. I lurched off the bed, dug the phone out of the bag, and stuck it to my ear.
“Hello? Wai?”
“Lydia Chin!” It was Steven Wei, yelling in English, sounding livid. “How could you do this? Where is my father’s jade?”
Taken aback, I frowned at the flowered bedspread as I sat back down. “I don’t understand. What are you talking about?”
“My son’s life may depend on this! How could you do this?” he demanded again. “Where is my father’s jade?”
“The jade?” I tried to follow this. “I left it there. You don’t have it anymore? It’s missing?”
“Missing? No, the jade you left here is not missing. But it is not my father’s.”
“Not—what do you mean?”
“You know full well,” he said, almost hissing in fury. “It is similar, so much so that no one saw at first what is obvious now. But Li-Ling has been keeping it, opening the box again and again, gazing at the jade as though—in any case, it was she who first noticed. The veins in the stone, slight differences in the Buddha’s smile. This jade is not my father’s! You have substituted a piece, no doubt of lower value, thinking to keep my father’s jade for yourself. At a time when a child’s life is in the balance—!”
“Wait,” I said. “Just wait a minute. First of all, the jade I gave you is the jade Gao Mian-Liang gave me in New York. I didn’t substitute anything, and it was never out of my possession from the minute I got it until I gave it to you. Second, just before I gave it to you, I had it appraised. It’s worth twenty thousand American dollars, so even if it isn’t your father’s, it’s not a cheap substitute. Third, you and your family have been under a lot of strain. Isn’t it possible you’re mistaken?”
“Mistaken! No, it is not possible we’re mistaken! If not for all the confusion at the time you left it we should have seen this immediately.” He paused, and I heard him taking a breath. When he spoke again it was in lower, calmer tones. “Natalie also thought perhaps we were mistaken. So we compared this jade to the insurance photographs we had taken some years ago of various family possessions. The photographs of my father’s jade are large and very clear. This is not that piece.”
He paused again. I was trying to get my tired brain to think. He said warily, “You say you had this piece appraised? Why did you do that?”
“I was trying to understand why the kidnappers would take such a risk for what’s actually not a very large reward. I thought maybe the jade was worth more than I’d been told. But it wasn’t. At least,” I said, “this jade isn’t. Maybe the real jade, your father’s jade, is.”
“We had it appraised at the time of the insurance inventory,” Steven Wei said. His tone was less furious, less sure. “One hundred and fifteen thousand dollars—that is, almost fifteen thousand, American,” he said. “That was the appraisal.”
“Well,” I said, “even with inflation, that makes the substitute piece worth actually more than the real one.”
Steven Wei paused, wordless.
“When you had it appraised,” I said, “was there anything unusual about it? Was it a special piece in any way, something that maybe added to its value?”
“Special?” he said. “No. An antiquity, rare enough to be valuable, but not unique.” His voice was fading back to the dull, hopeless sound it had had this morning. Poor Steven, I thought. What a relief it must have been to think you’d found something to fight.
There was another pause. I heard Steven Wei relating what we’d said to someone in the room.
The next voice I heard was Natalie Zhu’s. “We must call Gao Mian-Liang in New York,” she said. “If there has been a substitution not made by you”—And I could tell she was reserving judgment on that—“perhaps he can shed some light on it.”
Hello to you too, I thought. But I agreed. “I’ll call him right now.”
“We will call him. A conference call.”
Well, okay. “I’ll have to call the desk to find out how to do that.”
“There is no need.
We can place the call from here. Steven has the number.”
Gee, I thought, I get the feeling you don’t trust me. “All right,” I said, “but first tell me: Has there been any further contact with the kidnappers?”
“There has not.”
There wasn’t really anything I could say to that.
“I will place the call immediately,” Natalie Zhu said. “It will be five or ten minutes until the overseas conference operator calls you.”
“All right.” About to hang up, I added, “I would appreciate it if the call was in English. I want my partner to be part of it”
“Gao Mian-Liang speaks English?”
“Yes.”
“Very well.”
I hung up the cell phone and grabbed the hotel one. I dialed Bill’s room number.
“Come down here right away,” I said as soon as he answered.
“To your room?” He was incredulous. “You want me to come to your hotel room?”
“No, but you’d better. But only for a phone call.”
“This is a phone call.”
“Hurry up.”
I hung up so he’d have to hurry. Then I got up and quickly got dressed. I was tucking a yellow striped tee shirt into my slacks when he knocked on the door.
“That was fast,” I said as I let him in. He was wearing a tee shirt, too, a plain white one. I suddenly wondered if that was the tee shirt he slept in, if he’d been in bed when I’d called. Or maybe he hadn’t been in bed. Or maybe he had but he didn’t sleep in a tee shirt. Or maybe it was none of my business.
“You said to hurry,” he reminded me. “Are you okay?”
“Oh, just fine. I hate this place and everything about it.”
“What’s wrong?”
I told him about the jade.
“Jesus,” was his comment. He took the omnipresent pack of cigarettes from his back pocket, then looked around. “This is a no-smoking room, isn’t it?”
“Sorry.”
He pushed the pack back. “Maybe self-denial will make a man out of me. What the hell is going on around here?”
“Not only don’t I know, I can’t imagine.”
