by S. J. Rozan
Zhang looked me over, and I wondered if this was the moment Mark had said was coming, when someone asked just what I was doing there. I also wondered how it felt for Mark to say Lieutenant, to hear himself say it, addressing someone so young. But Zhang just gave me a brief nod and shook my hand. This was Mark’s case; Zhang was just providing requested assistance, Marine Region helping out Wan Chai. If Mark’s civilian screwed things up, that would be Mark’s problem.
We followed Zhang along the dock. The night was warm but wide, without the palpable weight of Hong Kong’s city heat. Stars glittered overhead. The air smelled of distances and the sea. In the harbor’s circling embrace the fishing fleet of Cheung Chau rocked softly at anchor. Couples, hand-in-hand, strolled the waterfront under lanterns of red, yellow, blue, and green. Small groups, largely Chinese but some Westerners, largely men but some women, sat at café tables, drinking bottled beer, talking or playing chess but mostly just watching the couples and the harbor and the night. Large dogs were everywhere. They wandered, sat, scratched themselves. None of them seemed to be any particular breed, none of them were leashed and none of them seemed to have an argument with any of the others. Like the people, they were meandering, amiably visiting, going no place in particular because where they were was just fine.
And there were no cars. Where the dock we were on met the waterfront street, a van idled, the Chinese characters for Emergency Plumbing Repair painted on its sides. It was the only vehicle in sight.
“What is this place?” I asked Mark, marvel in my voice. “It’s like a negative. It’s the total opposite of Hong Kong.”
He shook his head. “It’s the rest of Hong Kong. We try not to let the tourists know about places like this.”
“Selfish of you.”
“Can you blame us?”
I couldn’t. The softness of the night and the slow quiet rhythm of the strolling couples and sleeping dogs were even working on me, making me think the world could be an okay place and the things I was worried about might turn out okay, too.
Lieutenant Zhang reached the idling plumbing-repair van and, sliding open the side door, stood aside politely, waiting for Mark and me to climb in.
Mark did, so I did too. Zhang shut the door and went around to the passenger side. He got in the front seat and gave an instruction to the driver, who, unlike Zhang, was not in uniform. This undercover plumbing van was probably his regular gig. He shifted smoothly into gear and we began to roll down the waterfront street.
Mark said to me, “They don’t have cars here, except the Marine District patrol cars, two fire trucks, and an ambulance. And service vans. Siu and Chou are probably still at sea on the south side of the island, but I thought it was a good idea if we didn’t go roaring up to Tiger Gate Academy in a patrol car.”
The van didn’t roar, but it traveled at a good clip. In less than two minutes we’d manuevered along the waterfront and entered what Cheung Chau probably thought of as its downtown: narrow lanes of two- and three-story stucco-sided, balcony-hung buildings, their ground-floor storefronts largely shuttered now, their upper-floor living quarters glowing with the soft yellow light of domestic tranquillity or, occasionally, the cooler blue light of television.
Within another two minutes we’d emerged from town and begun to climb into the hills. At first the houses along the curving road sat in companionable closeness, though often behind fences. But gradually they grew apart as their gardens got bigger, tiled courtyards with well-tended potted plants giving way to jungly undergrowth. Leafy trees and pale flowers glowed faintly under the moon, which had risen when I wasn’t looking. I was glad to see the moon: it was almost full, and I knew from the few times I’d been on a boat myself that the moon gives a lot of light at sea. It might help Mark’s cops, Shen and Ko, spot the boat where Tony Siu was holding Bill. And whatever was going on on that boat, seeing the moon and the light it gave might help Bill too.
“Does the school know we’re coming?” I asked Mark, speaking in Cantonese so Lieutenant Zhang wouldn’t think I was trying to cut him out of the discussion.
“Yes,” Mark said. “Lieutenant Zhang spoke to the school’s master. He thought it would be worthwhile to find out if they’d taken on any new pupils in the last day or son.”
“Have they?”
“Four. Saturday’s a popular day for kids to start. Two of the new ones are seven-year-old boys. Neither is called Wei Hao-Han or Wei anything else, but the school doesn’t ask for much proof of ID. It’s probably not a big problem, kids’ faked identities at kung fu schools.”
I agreed it probably wasn’t.
“One of these two boys was brought here by his folks,” Mark went on, “who went back to Kowloon. The other came with his Filipina amah. She took a room in a guest house nearby. Lieutenant Zhang asked the master to call the amah, get her to the school without saying why.”
“Good,” I said. “That’s very good.”
Lieutenant Zhang, who had heard every word of this from the front seat, shook his head to acknowledge, by denying it, the compliment.
The van kept climbing, bouncing along over roads more and more deserted. Houses, gardens and trees grew fewer and farther apart. As we reached the crest of the hill they disappeared completely. It was treeless at the top, flat and rocky and bald. Cheung Chau’s northern slopes fell away below, surrounded by endless black ocean. White surf frothed in the glow of the moonpath and the sea was dotted with the lights of ships as the sky was with stars. I could see the horizon curving, bending, reaching for the farthest distances, to connect them to here.
Then we headed down again, and the trees grew more numerous and the houses reappeared. “Where’s the graveyard?” I asked Mark as we drove under an arch of palms. “You said Cheung Chau had an enormous graveyard.”
“Around the other side of the island,” he told me. “The south side.”
We bounced along in silence for a while after that, until the road forked off to the right under a painted wooden gateway in the old style. The characters for Tiger Gate Kung Fu Academy were emblazoned overhead. We drove under the gate, curved around a little more, and pulled up in front of a white villa, a three-story affair on a rise overlooking the sea. French doors opened onto a tile porch running all the way around it and stars winked through the pine trees towering above it.
“Built by an Irish seaman in the 1870s, they say,” Mark told me as the van stopped in front of the door. “Jumped ship, married a local girl. Her father gave them a fishing boat for her dowry, figuring a gift that expensive would give him big face and at the same time make sure the gweilo fell on his ass. The guy kept the boat tied up in port for six months while he crewed for nothing for one of her brothers. When he’d figured out how they fish here he took his boat out. Ended up owning his own fleet and making a fortune. He and the girl had nine little freckle-faced Chinese children. Built this house and brought his in-laws here to live with them. Built an ancestor altar and everything, very respectful.” He added, “The locals love that story.”
“Is it true?”
“Who knows? Every time a kid with freckles is born here you hear it, though.”
The driver stayed in the van while the rest of us piled out into the scent of flowers and the sea.
The front door was flanked by male and female lion figures, smaller than L. L. Lee’s but probably just as capable of guarding the door. Lieutenant Zhang pounded the brass knocker. Before the echoes had died away the door was opened. A young man bowed to us and showed us in.
Down a short hallway on the left a teak door stood open. The room it led to faced the rear of the house. There were French doors on that side, too, and through them, as we stepped into the room, I saw a wide, lighted courtyard where children and teenagers, both boys and girls, threw punches, snapped kicks, and practiced the fierce faces and fiercer concentration serious martial arts required.
I was last into the room, last to bow to a handsome, muscled man of perhaps forty, in polo shirt and khakis, who
se formal manner and calm, controlled movements reminded me of the sensei at my own Tae Kwon Do dojo back home. I was last also, therefore, to see the pretty Filipina woman perched on the edge of a chair, her arm protectively around the shoulders of the little boy standing next to her. The woman’s face was flushed; she sat in thin-lipped anger, based in fear and edged with defiance, at the sight of Lieutenant Zhang’s uniform and the gold badge on Mark’s hip. The boy, though obviously confused, did not seem to share her anger or her fear. His face was wideeyed with interest in the three strangers who’d come to see him, and his face, as in the photos in the Robinson Road apartment, was a cheerful, seven-year-old version of his father’s face, and his grandfather’s—and, I now realized, his half-uncle’s and his great-uncle’s, too.
I knew him right away, and to me it was redundant when Mark, crouching in front of him, said, in Cantonese, “Hello, Wei Hao-Han. I’m Quan Mai,” and Harry Wei politely answered, “Hi.”
thirteen
The rest wasn’t easy but it was predictable. The master of Tiger Gate Kung Fu Academy, used to the heavy responsibility of acting in loco parentis for his pupils, took the calm but unmovable position that whoever Harry was, he was here under the master’s care and was going nowhere until someone could prove both a legal and a moral right to make decisions on his behalf. The amah who had brought him here had given false names both for him and for herself, and the authorities in the person of Mark and Lieutenant Zhang were now accusing her of something very close to abduction, although a quiet agreement Mark and Zhang had made as we left the van was keeping the actual term from being used so as not to back anyone into a corner. The amah had, therefore, forfeited that right.
However, the master explained courteously over tea and sweets brought in by two young pupils, this did not mean that Mark or Lieutenant Zhang by virtue of their badges had acquired it.
I, a foreign stranger, was completely out of the running.
Mark and Zhang could have insisted, of course. What the master was doing was technically abduction also: a private citizen holding another citizen against his will, or, in this case, against his parents’ will, Harry himself seeming to have no problem with the idea of a long stay at Tiger Gate. They could have threatened with arrest—or, the master being the quietly unintimidatable man he seemed to be, actually arrested—everybody in sight, and carted them all, including Harry, off to the main Cheung Chau police station.
But the master wasn’t really the problem. Even if he had been willing to hand Harry over to us, we couldn’t have just waltzed out with him into a situation as chancy as the one Mark had in mind. The plan was for me to let L. L. Lee know I had found Harry and to set up the trade for Bill, which would turn into an ambush of Siu and Chou arranged by Lieutenant Zhang. The danger to Harry would be minimal, but you couldn’t involve a child in that sort of thing without the permission of his parents.
Which, not surprisingly, they would not give.
As we sat in the master’s study drinking his clear green tea and watching his pupils finish their evening practice session in the garden, Mark called the Weis in their high-rise apartment on Robinson Road.
Steven Wei’s joy and relief could be felt flooding out from Hong Kong Island to wash in waves over Cheung Chau. I imagined his half of the conversation while I listened to Mark’s half: first, his identification of himself and an instruction to Steven to take his cell phone out into the hall. Second, the question, “Has the sweeper been there? Were there other bugs?” Third, whatever the answer to that, the statement, “I’ve found your son. He’s fine,” followed by, “Yes—I—You—” Then Mark, smiling, gave up and handed his cell phone to Harry.
The seven-year-old put the cell phone to his ear in an offhand, practiced way. Speaking in Cantonese, he quickly dispensed with a respectful greeting to his father and launched into an excited description of Tiger Gate Academy. He seemed surprised when twice he was interrupted with a question to which his answer was, “Yes, Baba, I’m fine.” At the next interruption, his face fell.
“But I don’t want to come home,” he objected, in response to what he’d heard. “I want to stay here.”
Forget it, Harry, I thought. That’s a losing proposition.
Harry seemed to figure that out, because he spoke a few more sentences which included phrases like, “Yes, Baba,” then gave Mark back his phone. Maria Quezon put her arm around him again, giving him a comforting squeeze.
Mark, back on the phone with Steven Wei, explained the situation at Tiger Gate: the master’s position, which Mark referred to in such terms as responsible and correct, and our need for action.
Steven Wei seemed to agree that the Tiger Gate master was doing precisely the right thing. He agreed to hire a boat if possible, or at any rate take the next Cheung Chau ferry, and present himself at Tiger Gate Academy with documents to prove to the master’s satisfaction both Harry’s identity and his own.
What he did not agree to was Harry’s being involved in any way with any scheme that was dangerous on any level.
Mark had a long discussion with Steven, most of which he carried on standing off by himself at the French doors to the garden. There, the last of the pupils were rolling up the mats and taking down the hanging bags. I couldn’t hear what Mark was saying but I watched him, patient, formal, asking, stating, responding, reassuring.
This is a good cop, I thought. This is a cop who should be promoted, maybe even given his own command, not be fracturing regulations on some out-island, politely requesting assistance from the young Lieutenant Zhang and waiting for the ax to fall.
Finally, Mark took the cell phone from his ear, still looking out at the now-empty practice area. He folded the phone and slipped it into his pocket. Turning, he returned to where the rest of us sat. He requested that Harry leave the room for a few moments. The master summoned an older girl who escorted Harry away.
Mark spoke to the master. “The boy’s father will be here as soon as he can, with identification papers for both of them. He has agreed to stay here in hiding with the child until our operation is concluded. We may also need your assistance in other ways. Will you permit this?”
Providing none of these ways endangered Harry or any of his other pupils, the master agreed.
To Lieutenant Zhang Mark said, “I’d be obliged if you would station a man here also.”
Zhang made a call, to get someone up here who could stay.
To Maria Quezon Mark said, “Wei Di-Fen”—Steven—“has been told only that you brought the boy here to take him out of danger. Since the situation isn’t resolved, I’d appreciate it if you don’t say anything more right now. You can say that you don’t know who set up the original plan to kidnap Hao-Han, that you ran away with the boy because you panicked.”
Maria Quezon, in no position to argue, agreed.
To me Mark said, “We have to talk.”
Mark and I, with the master’s permission, went out into the garden. Lieutenant Zhang, his phone call concluded, joined us. The garden smelled of the sea. We stood at the edge of the moonlit courtyard practice area under the breeze-stirred leaves of a palm tree.
“We can do this,” Mark said. “We just have to plan it out carefully.”
“What are you thinking?” I asked.
“He won’t let us take Hao-Han anywhere”—speaking in Cantonese for Lieutenant Zhang’s benefit, Mark used Harry’s Chinese name—“but he’ll let us put him on the phone with Siu. I want you to call them now. Tell them you found him. Say you’re ready to set up the trade. Let them talk to him.”
“What’s the setup?”
“We’ll try to make them come to you. If we’re good, we can have Hao-Han on the phone from here, no matter where you are, to keep them convinced he’s with you until it’s too late.”
“They’ll want to see him before they make the exchange.”
“I just want them on land. They still don’t know you’ve got us involved. Lieutenant Zhang can set up whatever he needs to
as soon as we know where the meeting place is.”
Lieutenant Zhang, clearly already weighing strategies, nodded.
“What if they won’t land? What if they want me to hire a boat and go find them?”
Mark considered. “They might. Try to talk them out of it. If they insist, we’ll send you on a police boat. We’ll put as many of Lieutenant Zhang’s men in it as it can hold.”
“All right,” I said slowly. “All right. It’s not great, but it’s not like I have anything else more brilliant. But I can’t call Tony Siu. I don’t know his number. The only one I can call is L. L. Lee.”
So I called L. L. Lee.
Before I did, Mark and Zhang and I talked a little longer, although not much of it was me: Mostly, it was two cops considering places I could suggest for the exchange, places on Cheung Chau that would sound remote and isolated to Tony Siu, but would actually offer Zhang’s men good cover and possibilities for an ambush.
Then Mark, Lieutenant Zhang, and I went back into the master’s study. Harry had returned and was sitting on his amah’s lap. Tiger Gate’s other pupils had gone to bed, and Harry, only seven, seemed to be flagging.
Mark crouched down before him. “Hao-Han,” he said, “we’re going to make a phone call. The man we’re calling will want to talk to you. I’d like you to say hello, tell him your name if he asks, but don’t tell him where you are. It’s supposed to be a big secret.” He grinned at Harry. “Okay?”
Harry smiled back and nodded.
I flipped open my phone and dialed L. L. Lee’s number on Hong Kong Island, on the Peak.
