by S. J. Rozan
L. L. Lee held my eyes another moment; then, ignoring the Tang ponies as though we both knew I already knew all about them, he reached over, lifted the tray the men and their table were set on and slowly turned it so I could see them from all sides. “Good friends sharing the pleasures of the day,” he said quietly. “From the Zhou period. They will bring harmony to any household.”
“And those ink washes?” I asked. “The waterfall, and the pool, over there.”
“They are Yuan,” he said. “A single stream, in motion and at rest. It is not usual,” his black eyes returned to me once more, “to encounter an American of such discernment. Your countrymen usually prefer court embroidery, or the furniture of Tibet: large things, brightly colored. Have you had tea?”
“I’m parched,” I said. “Thank you.”
“Please give me a moment.” He vanished into the back. I could hear the delicate clink of cups on a tray, the soft whoosh of water flowing from kettle to pot. He returned with tray, cups, pot, before I could do more than glance at the paperwork on his desk in an attempt to do I don’t know what.
L. L. Lee, with hands long, pale, and clean, pointed me into a black-lacquered chair in front of his scholar’s desk. Latticework railings sharply guarded the desk’s corners so ink pots and brushes wouldn’t fall off, but there were no rails at the back or sides so the scrolls as they were worked on, whether horizontal or vertical, would not run the risk of being crumpled. On L. L. Lee’s desk sat a set of traditional scholar’s tools: brush holder with brushes, some soft and round, some thin and sharp-looking, one with no more than three fine badger’s-hair bristles at its tip; inkstone and grinding stone; water dish; brush rest. Everything was carved and worked: The brush holder was a mountainside, the water dish a gourd. Even the inkstone itself, waiting to be ground into powder, mixed with water, and applied to that most transient of artists’ materials, paper, bore the molded character for longevity.
L. L. Lee poured tea into small white cups with blue flowers on them. “So you have come to Hong Kong from America to visit your brother?” he asked as he handed a cup to me. “A long journey.”
I took up my cup, marveling at its smoothness of glaze, its perfection of shape, its translucency even in the cool dimness. How many reclusive scholars, gregarious court officials, rich merchants’ wives over how many centuries had sipped tea from the cup I held in my hands right now?
“Not so long,” I said. “If it’s to see your family.”
Mr. Lee nodded. “Again, an unusual sentiment from an American. Americans,” he went on, though I had been about to speak, “largely look forward, into the future. They seem to rarely care about the past. They come to Hong Kong not to understand, only to buy: to buy cloth, to buy antiquities, to buy pearls and jade. And Hong Kong is only too eager to accommodate them. Even,” he said, sipping his tea, “when they come to buy entire commercial firms.”
Commercial firms. “Is that so?” I murmured, lifting my own tea to my lips.
“In most cases.” L. L. Lee replied. He sipped unhurriedly from his cup. “On occasion, though rarely in Hong Kong, other values prevail. To take one case, an import-export firm with which I have some dealings has recently learned an American concern wishes to acquire them.”
“Really,” I responded politely. “Does the firm wish to be … acquired?”
“The Hong Kong firm is a family business; I do not believe they will sell. And it would be a bad business proposition for the Americans. Owning a Hong Kong firm can involve serious risk. Nor do I know,” he went on, not interested in any answer I might make, “what value such a small specialized firm could be to anyone. But it is hard to dissuade Americans, once they have made up their minds. Yourself, for example.”
“Me?” I spoke calmly and returned his gaze, but it wasn’t easy.
He paused before answering, taking another sip of tea. “You wish to purchase a gift for your brother,” he said. “Yet you do not know his taste, what he would prefer. Perhaps it would have been better to spend time with your brother, learning about him, about what things he considers important. Possibly you would find a gift unnecessary, time together being the greatest gift of all.”
That was not, it seemed to me, a great way for a merchant to make a sale. I was at a loss as to what to say next; I wasn’t even sure what game we were playing. It was obviously my turn, though, and I was about to take a stab at it when to my immense relief the door at the front of the shop opened, letting in a tidal wave of car horns and jackhammers and, just behind, a flood of swampy air.
I had never realized before just how fond I was of heat and noise.
L. L. Lee looked up, then back at me. He rose from his chair and spoke to the figure who had stepped around the painted screen at the front of the store. “Welcome to my shop. Will you have tea?”
The figure moved toward us, to where I didn’t have to twist around to see him, though I’d known from his silhouette, from the way he walked, that it was Bill. I felt a wash of gratitude just to see his modern-day polo shirt, never mind his face. As he stepped closer, the incense still swirled, the lamplight still glowed, and silence was restored with the click of the latch. Only now it was less the stillness of the air of old China, more the quiet of a softly lit shop with a thick front door.
“Perdoname?” Bill said to Mr. Lee. With a start I realized he was speaking Spanish. Well, that would make it less likely that Lee would identify us with each other. Except I had a feeling it was too late to put one over on L. L. Lee.
“Please join us for tea,” Mr. Lee said again, his long fingers indicating the tea service on the tray.
Bill said, “Ah.” His glance and his smile took in the scholar’s desk, the cups and pot, Mr. Lee and me. “Gracias, no. Please do not let me disturb you.” He had switched to Spanish-accented English, not heavy, just enough to convince. His smile was soft, and even the set of his shoulders was a Latin slouch, radiating a connoisseur’s appreciation of life’s finer things and a refusal to rush. He leaned over a three-story pagoda-roofed pottery building with little chickens and goats in its courtyard.
“Very well. If there is anything you wish in particular to see, please let me know,” Mr. Lee offered formally.
Bill, smiling gallantly, looked directly at me. “Bueno,” he said. “If the lady will not object, perhaps just briefly—?”
“Go right ahead,” I said, putting on my most gracious self. I sipped at my tea to hide my mixture of gratitude and annoyance. The gratitude came from Bill engaging Mr. Lee, giving me a few moments to recover from whatever it was that had made me founder, feel so lost, in this dim shop. The annoyance was because I knew that was why he was doing it, the same as he had touched my hand at the Weis’ when I had felt like I was floating up there in the sky.
Mr. Lee, with a nod to me, approached his new customer.
Bill removed the building’s roof to peer inside. “Exquisite,” he murmured as Mr. Lee reached his side. I smiled to myself; it was rare to hear Bill murmur. “Burial art, yes?”
“Han dynasty,” Mr. Lee responded. “Almost complete.” Bill lifted the top story off the house, then set it carefully down again. I hadn’t known the things came apart.
“Almost complete?” he inquired.
“In the courtyard,” Mr. Lee pointed a slender finger, “a pond, but no ducks. Surely there were once ducks. If such things concern you, I have another, complete, but not as finely crafted.” He reached another, smaller building off a shelf, though his tone had clearly said that if such things did concern Bill then he wasn’t half the customer Mr. Lee had thought him to be.
Bill admired the second house, then turned his attention back to the first, which, I thought, must please Mr. Lee, if anything ever pleased Mr. Lee. They had a brief conversation. Some of it I caught (“Old Hong Kong families, or Taiwanese; this, two brothers, Persian traders,” as Mr. Lee picked up the little bronze game-players I had liked); most of it I ignored in favor of trying once again to read, upside down an
d in Cantonese, the papers on Mr. Lee’s desk.
That attempt got me about as nowhere as it had the first time, and after another exchange or two with Bill, Mr. Lee returned to the desk, sat again, and poured me more tea. Bill continued to study my little bronze game-players, picking them up and examining them closely. Bill knows a lot more about art than I do, so I felt quite clever for having noticed them first.
“About my gift for my brother,” I began to Mr. Lee, feeling able to hold a normal conversation once again. “Hong Kong has produced so many beautiful things. Will you help me choose?”
“Hong Kong has produced none of these things,” L. L. Lee said coldly. “All of these beautiful things, which you admire so greatly but know nothing about, were made in China, in the past. Hong Kong, like America, cares nothing about the past except how to sell it.”
If L. L. Lee spoke to all his customers this way, I thought, no wonder his shop was so crowded. He probably hadn’t sold an antiquity since, well, since the past.
I sipped my tea, searching for something to say. I was saved by, literally, the bell. From the cell phone in my bag came an attention-demanding chirp.
“Oh!” I said, trying to hide my relief. “Excuse me.” I took out the phone, opened it up. “Hello?”
“It’s Mark,” said the voice in my ear. “Where are you?”
“Up on Hollywood Road,” I said, with an apologetic smile at Mr. Lee. I felt Bill move closer to me, still leaning over, looking at bronzes. “I’m shopping.”
“Oh, my God,” Mark said. “You went to L. L. Lee’s, didn’t you?”
“Of course. I’ll be meeting you later, I hope?”
“We’d better. I wanted to tell you about the floater in the harbor. It’s not some drunk fisherman. It’s Iron Fist Chang.”
“Oh,” I said, while Mr. Lee sipped tea and looked into a distance I couldn’t see. “Oh, my. Well, that is a surprise. What’s he been up to?”
“No way to know. But he was beaten, his hands were tied behind him, and he drowned. They’ve got him down at the morgue now for the autopsy, but I don’t think how he died is the big question here.”
“Well, I don’t want to be rude”—Mr. Lee, across the desk, flicked his eyes back to me and made a small gesture with his elegant hand, denying that I was being rude at all—“so let me call you later.”
“Are you talking to Lee? Does he have any idea why you’re there?”
“Of course not, silly.”
I could hear him blow out a breath; I wasn’t sure if it was in relief or exasperation. “I want you here, now.”
Suddenly Mark Quan sounded like a cop. I looked at my watch. “Well …”
“Now.”
Uh-huh. “I guess I could do that,” I said. “Sounds like fun. You’re at your office?”
“Yes. You know where it is? The Main HQ Building, in Wan Chai.”
“Sure. Okay, I’ll be right over. See you soon. Bye.” I folded the phone and smiled at L. L. Lee again. “I’m so sorry. My brother. He ran into an old friend of ours down by the harbor and couldn’t wait to tell me about it. He took him up to show him his office and he wants me to go meet them for a late lunch.” I stood, and Mr. Lee did, too. “I hadn’t even gotten started shopping, either. I’ll have to come back. Thank you so much for the tea.”
L. L. Lee stood and bowed. I excused myself as I brushed by Bill. He moved chivalrously aside for me, then recommenced his study of yet another clay building with dogs and children in the yard. As I pulled open the heavy glass door to rejoin the dust and noise and palpable sunshine of Hong Kong, I felt L. L. Lee’s eyes on my back. I scolded myself for even thinking they pressed like the weight of the past.
I watched Hollywood Road for a good ten minutes, sweating at my vantage point at the top of the escalator stairs, before Bill came ambling along. Because of the bend in the road you couldn’t see this place from L. L. Lee’s door, so I felt safe trotting down the steps and meeting Bill on the sidewalk.
“This is east,” he pointed out as he reached me.
Bill and I have this thing we do when we’re separated while we’re working. Whoever can leave heads north a block or two from the last place we were together and waits in some likely spot until the other one comes along. On Hong Kong’s twisty streets, though, there was a problem. “I wasn’t sure which way was north,” I said, maybe a little defensively. “But this worked.”
“Because your mind is transparent to me.”
I sighed. “Or just plain transparent. He’s on to us.”
Bill stopped in the middle of lighting a cigarette. “Lee? Is that why you left? The phone call wasn’t real?”
“No, I was just getting warmed up. If he’s on to us and he didn’t throw me out, I figured he must have something to say. I was waiting to hear it, even though he’s about as confusing as Grandfather Gao. But that was Mark who called.”
“That’s what I thought.” By way of explanation he added, “You didn’t sound surprised enough for it to have been anybody else.”
“Actually I was surprised, but not because it was him.” I told Bill what Mark had told me.
Bill drew deeply on his cigarette, breathed smoke out into the hazy Hong Kong air. “Shit,” he said. A heavy truck lumbering around the corner scattered a group of pedestrians about to cross the street. Everyone briefly yelled at everyone in Cantonese, and then the truck driver drew his head back into the cab and everyone moved on.
Bill and I moved on too. The sidewalk took a drop steep enough to turn it into steps. People passed us in both directions, young women laughing together, a middle-aged couple arm-in-arm, an elderly woman laboring uphill with a tiny baby on her back. “Shit,” Bill said again.
He doesn’t usually use those words around me. I thought about the weight I’d seen lifting from him while we were drinking tea at the Furama Hotel. This time I touched his hand, just briefly. For a short time as we walked neither of us spoke and there was nothing to hear but cars shifting gears as they strained up the hill, footsteps, conversations, children laughing, a baby crying.
Bill finished his cigarette and tossed it away. “How do you know Lee knows who we are?” he asked.
“He told me some Americans are interested in buying out a family-run import-export firm he does business with, and what a bad idea it is,” I said. “He said it could be risky.”
“It was a threat?”
“Oh, I think so.”
Stepping aside for a woman using a flowered umbrella as a parasol against the unrelenting sun, Bill said, “So Lee does business with Lion Rock.”
“He’s got to get that furniture from somewhere.”
“Umm. That may be how Franklin connected with him in the first place, to set this up with. If it’s Franklin who set it up.”
“Why else would he have called Lee from New York?”
Bill shook his head. I looked at him, but his eyes were fixed on the glitter of the harbor, below.
I said, “And I guess Lee heard about us from Tony and Big John, last night.”
“Probably. They’re Strength and Harmony, he’s Strength and Harmony. But,” Bill said, still watching the water, “that was just your cover story, about buying Lion Rock. It might not be so bad to have him believing that. Do you suppose he knows anything else?”
“You mean, who we really are? If he and Franklin are working together, Franklin would have told him about Grandfather Gao’s emissaries. If he did, it has to be obvious to Lee that we’re the same people. Or at least,” I amended, “that I’m the same person. He probably thinks you’re the Duke of Plaza-Toro.”
“Uh-huh. In other words, waste of effort, that cover.”
“Well,” I said, “it was nice, anyway.”
“Thanks.” He was silent for a few moments. “But he may not know we’re investigators,” he said. “Just that we came from Grandfather Gao. Because Franklin may not know that.”
“That’s true. In which case let him keep believing we represent someone w
ho wants to buy Lion Rock. Keep him distracted.”
“Well, but here’s another question: Why do you think he cares?”
“About someone buying Lion Rock?” I considered the question. “He doesn’t like Americans?”
“Americans have been all over Hong Kong for a hundred and fifty years, doing all kinds of business. Including buying up firms. Including buying up the antiques Lee sells. It’s a hell of a rear-guard action to try and stop the sale of one little import-export operation, if it’s just that he doesn’t like Americans.”
“Well, maybe he’s afraid that new owners would change his relationship with Lion Rock. Raise the prices, or start importing lower-grade stuff.”
“I’d like to know just what his relationship with Lion Rock is. Why he’s got at least one guy working there.”
“You mean Tony.”
He nodded. “And for all we know, three—Big John and Iron Fist could be Strength and Harmony, too.”
“I get the feeling,” I said, “that we’re about to find out more about Iron Fist than we wanted to know.”
A little farther down the hill we came to a main street. We hailed a cab and I told it where to take us.
“We should we call. the Weis, don’t you think?” I asked as the cab lurched into traffic. “Not to tell them about any of this, but to see if they’ve heard anything.”
So I took out my cell phone and did that. Although we both had the feeling that if anything good had happened, the Weis would have called us.
Nothing had happened.
After Steven Wei’s predictably loud and anxious, “Wai!” I identified myself, told him I was calling just to see if things had changed.
“No,” he said, and I imagined his heartbeat slowly returning to normal as he sank dispiritedly into a chair. “No one has contacted us. I don’t know what to think.”
I offered my sympathy, which he seemed sadly grateful to have. Then, because I thought she’d get suspicious if I just hung up, I asked to speak to Natalie Zhu.
“Natalie is not here,” Steven told me.
