by S. J. Rozan
After a few rings the call was answered by the solemn young man who’d let me in and brought tea: houseboy, bodyguard, whatever he was. He put me through, immediately, to Lee.
“I’ve found what you wanted,” I said without any of the niceties respectful courtesy would require.
L. L. Lee paused before he spoke. “You’ve done that fast, for one who did not know where to look.”
“I was lucky.” I curtly dismissed that. “I’m ready to make the trade. What should I do?”
“I cannot make arrangements.”
No, of course not. In my mind I saw, resting on his scholar’s desk, his clean, thin-fingered hands. “Then tell Tony Siu to call me. He has my number.”
I hung up. It was a lot easier to be rude to L. L. Lee, I reflected, when he was miles away over the sea.
It wasn’t five minutes, all of us sitting in tense silence in the master’s study, before my phone rang again.
“Hey, sweetie. I hear we have business to do.”
I gritted my teeth; I felt like Tony Siu’s voice was grating against my bones. I stood because I couldn’t sit, and answered him. “I’m ready to meet.”
“Prove it.”
I took the phone to where Harry was sitting, his head resting now on Maria’s shoulder. He put it to his ear, and I leaned close and listened in.
“Wai?” Harry said.
“Hi,” said Tony Siu. “My name’s Tony. Who are you?”
“Wei Hao-Han,” Harry responded promptly.
“Who’s there with you?”
I pointed at myself. Harry’s brow creased. “A lady,” he said. “I can’t remember her name.” I smiled at him and put my finger to my lips, hoping he’d understand not to say any more. His look became confused, but luckily Tony Siu wasn’t a patient man and moved on.
“Where are you, Wei Hao-Han?”
“I can’t tell you.” Harry grinned. “It’s a secret.”
I took the phone back. I saw Mark smiling at Harry and whispering, “Thank you.” Harry smiled back and snuggled up closer to his amah.
“All right,” I said to Tony Siu, “that’s enough.” I walked over to the French doors, as Mark had, to be beyond Harry’s range.
“Better be the right kid,” Tony Siu said to me.
“You won’t know until we make this trade, will you? Let’s set it up.”
“Get yourself a boat. We’ll do it on the water.”
“Are you crazy? It’s the middle of the night. I don’t know anything about boats.”
He laughed. “They have two hundred sampans in the harbor. Wake a fisherman.”
“I don’t like that,” I said. “A witness. The ocean. There must be beaches around here you could land on where no one would see you. I thought smugglers used to land here all the time.”
“A witness to what? You’re bringing out my nephew, I’m sending back a dumb gweilo who got himself banged up in a boating accident. You pay the fisherman enough, he’ll swear that’s what he saw. Hell, give him enough whiskey, he’ll think that’s what he saw.”
“I don’t want to do this on the water.”
“I know,” Tony Siu said in mock sympathy. “You’re worried about boating accidents. Because they can be pretty bad, after all. People get killed in boating accidents all the time.”
“Let me talk to Bill.”
“Well …”
“Your boss wants this trade, Tony.” I stared through the glass to the palms and the moonlight. “He wants it a lot. I want it, too, but only if there’s something to trade for.”
Briefly, no more words came through my phone, but I could hear sounds, nothing I could make out but enough to convince me Tony hadn’t hung up.
Then Bill’s voice, scratchy and weaker than I was used to. “Lydia?”
“It’s me,” I said. “Are you okay?”
“Hanging in.”
“Good,” I said. “Good. It won’t be much longer.”
Whether he answered or not I didn’t know, because Tony’s grating voice was back. “Out here, sweetie. On the water.”
I clenched my teeth and agreed. “How do I know where you are?”
“Around the south side of the island. Get your fisherman to pass the smuggler’s cave, the Tin Hua temple, all that shit. Tell him to head east along the south coast. Tell him to hang, I don’t know, three lamps on the port side, one starboard. I’ll spot you. When I do I’ll call again.”
“This will take time,” I warned. “I’m not in town. I have to get to the harbor, find someone to take us, come around the island.”
“Then you’d better get moving.”
“Give me your number. I don’t like the ocean. I want to be able to call you.”
A laugh. “No.”
After that we had nothing more to say to each other, so Tony Siu and I hung up.
Lieutenant Zhang had a talk with the master, involving phones and numbers, then made another call back to the station and after that one to Hong Kong Telecom. When he was through, we had an open conference line between the master’s cell phone and mine. Any call coming to my phone would ring here too, so that the fiction that Harry was with me could be maintained.
At the same time Mark used his cell phone to call Ko and Shen again. He told them we were headed to a rendezvous with Siu’s boat around the south side of Cheung Chau, somewhere east of the Tin Hua temple. He described to them what our sampan would look like, three lights hanging on one side and one on the other. They were in those waters now, they said; they hadn’t spotted Tony Siu’s boat but they’d keep looking, and they’d try to pick us up coming around.
I knew all this was necessary and I tried to stay calm while it was going on. I paced and breathed, working on controlling the adrenaline rushing through my blood, trying to save some for later when I’d need it. I wasn’t doing all that well: My skin felt prickly and I was just about ready to explode when Mark finally said, “Let’s go.”
The plumbing van drove us back through the night, rising briefly once more to the bald and windy hilltop. I wondered as I gazed over the lights of the boats sprinkled on the sea which one Bill was on, and why it didn’t look different from any of the others. Then we were under the trees once more, then among the houses, then in the town.
The colored lanterns still outlined the waterfront street, but most of the cafés and restaurants were closed now, most of the strolling couples gone. We pulled up to the harbor where the fishing fleet lay at anchor. A thin mist had gathered on the surface of the sea. The sampans and trawlers floating next to the dock appeared solid and substantial, their cabins dark and no sound to be heard but the creaking of wood and the lapping of water. Beyond the first boats an endless number more seemed to spread out over the water, growing less and less real, more faint and ghostly as the distance to them grew.
Waiting at the end of the pier where the police launch had docked—it was gone now—was a sampan, weathered green paint on its sides and cracked glass in its cabin windows. Mark spoke briefly to Lieutenant Zhang, then saluted him before climbing aboard. He reached out an automatic hand to help me, and I took it, not quite as sure of my ability to get onto this boat as I’d been about getting out of the last one.
The sampan’s engine gave a soft growl, coming to life without anything near the aggressive roar of the police launch. We turned in the water, putt putting as we picked our way carefully among the other boats. They appeared and disappeared again as we approached and then passed them in the mist. Then their ghostly, silent presences became fewer, and we were once again at sea.
Besides the sweatshirted, unshaven, chain-smoking helmsman who guided the boat from a rudder near the engine, and besides Mark, there were three other cops aboard, sitting in the cramped cabin. This sampan was one of Marine District’s undercover boats, used to patrol the waters around the out-islands for smuggling and other illicit seaborne activities. According to Mark, the putt-putting little engine had all the power of the launch, but now was not the time to give
the game away by using it.
Mark and I went below and introduced ourselves. We shared a pot of tea with the men in the cabin while Mark went over with them what we expected and what we intended. I half listened as they exchanged Cantonese cop talk; Mark was the highest rank aboard, but these men were experienced in seagoing matters, and there was the inevitable—though veiled and always polite—jockeying. Then, because I couldn’t sit still, Mark and I came out on deck again. We stood leaning on the rail as the mist thickened and thinned. It smelled salty and damp, floating by in soft gray patches and glowing white where it was most dense, especially on our port side, where it reflected the three hanging lights.
“Will they find us?” I asked Mark, my voice startlingly loud over the putting of the engine and the soft whoosh of water parting for us. I spoke more quietly: “In this fog?”
“We’ll keep close to the shoreline. So will they. They’ll find us.”
We did keep close. The lights of Cheung Chau’s coast broke through the mist on our port side, and sometimes the lights of other boats, on both sides. Every time another boat drifted out of the fog I tensed, even though Mark told me the cave and the temple were half an hour away, and the island’s south coast stretched east for an hour beyond that. I couldn’t help it. I had told Tony Siu I didn’t like boats, which was not true when I said it but was growing truer by the second. Maybe if the air were clearer, maybe if I could see to the distance the way I had from the hilltop, I wouldn’t mind so much. Or if there were a path, a road you had to stick to, like on land. But right now the water seemed very strange to me: a surface from which going up was impossible and going down deadly, above which floated a mist too insubstantial to touch but solid enough to block all sight, on which you could wander anywhere without any more reason to do one thing than another because everything in all directions was the same.
Mark took off his jacket and slipped it around my shoulders. I looked at him in surprise.
“You were shivering,” he said.
“Is it cold?”
“I guess. If you’re not used to it.”
Which meant no. But I was glad for his jacket, because I had been shivering.
The mist thinned as we came around the southern headland, and we could see the shore. The helmsman pointed out the smuggler’s cave, which looked like just a mass of rocks to me. After a while, outlined against the sky, rose the curving eaves of the temple for the worship of Tin Hua, protector of sailors and those lost at sea. Tin Hua was not a goddess I knew well; my mother never had much reason to take us to pray for sailors when I was a child. But all goddesses liked oranges and incense, and I found myself silently promising Tin Hua the best of both, and whatever else her special joy was, if only this worked out.
But it seemed like she didn’t hear me. We putted up the coast, and my phone didn’t ring. We reached a spit of land jutting into the sea. There the coast turned south again, and we went around a point where the light of a lonely lighthouse blinked slowly on and off. We drifted east some more, and then turned around, heading back along the south shore the way we’d come. My phone didn’t ring. Mark, from his cell phone, called Lieutenant Zhang. Everything on land was as it had been. Steven Wei had not yet arrived at Tiger Gate Academy, nor had anything else of note happened there. We briefly considered my calling L. L. Lee, but decided against it for now.
“They may have spotted us already,” Mark said, and the helmsman, through his cigarette smoke, nodded. “They may be just making sure.”
Mark made another call. Ko and Shen had found us, and were paralleling our trail, staying as far from us as they could while keeping us in sight. The helmsman smoked and steered. Mark sat on the deck, against the wall in the shadow of the cabin’s overhanging roof, where he wouldn’t be seen. I had never been on a sampan before, never realized how small they were, how many ropes and buckets and things crowded the deck, so you couldn’t pace. The boat had a fishy smell. I asked the helmsman if actually fishing was part of their undercover work. He laughed and said the HKPD boats, when not in use, were available to cops on a sign-out basis, for day fishing trips. He offered to take Mark to fish for shark on their next mutual day off.
We reached the Tin Hua temple, made another leisurely turn, and headed up the coast once more. A breeze had come up and blown the mist away. Ahead of us, in the east, I could see a thin white line on the surface of the sea.
“The sun’s coming up,” I said to Mark. “It’s morning. Where are they?”
Mark looked at his watch. “The sun rises early on the water, in the summer. It’s only four-thirty. It’s only been a few hours.”
The coast of Cheung Chau, I saw now, was steep here, all rocky hills and grassy headlands black against the starry sky. The thin line on the horizon grew, a rose blush starting to color it. No one spoke. Boats at anchor rocked as we slipped by them, some of them starting to show lights in their cabins as fishermen woke to prepare the day.
The stars began to fade. The line on the horizon was striped with crimson and the sky was turning from black to gray when I took my phone from my pocket. “Something’s wrong,” I said. “I’m calling Lee.”
I should have taken the thing out sooner. As Mark was nodding his agreement, it started to ring.
I flipped it open. “Wai!” I yelled into it. “Wai!”
“Hi, sweetie. How’s the boat ride?”
“Where are you?” I barked. “What’s going on?”
“Just calling to tell you your merchandise has been delivered.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We just dropped it off. You can pick it up any time.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Change in plans.”
“What change in plans?”
“No trade.”
“What?”
“We don’t need what you’re bringing.”
Mark was on his feet now, jarred there by the confusion in my face and voice.
“What do you mean, you don’t need it?”
“Like I said: change of plans.”
“Your boss wanted a trade.”
“My boss says he got what he wanted. He doesn’t need the kid anymore.”
“Got what he wanted? What does that mean?”
“It means I can get off this stinking boat. Look, sweetie, you want your merchandise or not? Me, I wanted to dump it in the ocean, but my orders were to give it back.”
I swallowed. “Yes. Yes, of course I do.”
“Thought so.” I could hear his mocking smile; I wanted to jam it down his throat. “There’s a place where the cemetery comes almost down to the sea. Your fisherman will know.”
“What—?”
“See you, sweetie.” And Tony Siu hung up.
I looked at Mark. “They don’t want the trade.”
“What?”
“L. L. Lee says he got what he wanted; he doesn’t need Harry. Tony Siu said they just left Bill on land.”
“Where?”
“Where the graveyard comes down to the sea.” I looked at the helmsman. From behind his cigarette he nodded, turned the boat, and, after a few words with Mark, gunned the engine to full HKPD life.
Mark flipped open his own cell phone as one of the cops, feeling the change in the engine, stuck his head from the cabin to ask what was happening. The helmsman told him. Mark was by then on the phone with Lieutenant Zhang.
Their conversation was brief, Mark having to shout over the roar of the engine. When it was over Mark shut the phone and filled me in.
“I don’t know,” was the first thing he said, standing close to me, almost yelling. “I don’t get it. Harry’s still at Tiger Gate. Steven Wei came an hour or so ago, with all the ID you could ask for. I told them to keep him there in case it’s not really him, but he’s made no move to leave, so if he’s up to something I have no idea what it is. Zhang’s sending men to the cemetery, and he’s calling Shen and Ko in.” He nodded to the sea, to the sharp lines of masts and the dia
gonal rigging I could see now cutting across the stripes of the dawn. He added, “We’ll get there first.”
The wind whipped my hair around. I pushed it from my eyes. “Could it be a setup? At the cemetery?”
“Why? Siu had all the cards, doing the trade on the water. The cemetery’s not a great place for it, if you’re thinking about an ambush—where would he hide?”
“What if he knew there were cops involved?”
He shook his head. “The water’s still the best place.”
I didn’t like my next idea but I spoke it out loud anyway. “Maybe he’s lying. Maybe there’s nothing at the cemetery at all. He knows you’re involved and he’s trying to distract us, while he grabs Harry from Tiger Gate.”
“I thought of that. I asked Zhang to double the guard there, just in case, but if that’s it, why call at all? We were enough out of the way just sailing up and down the coast.”
The helmsman swung the boat around and pointed it straight toward shore. Against the sky, now a pale, gentle gray, what looked like a craggy headland swept down to a low cliff above a thin stretch of beach. We drew closer. With a suddenness you could almost hear, the sun burst above the horizon, hitting the headland like a golden searchlight, and I saw that the crags were not rocks. They were graves.
A Chinese graveyard isn’t like a Western one. Traditionally Chinese people buried bodies in temporary graves for seven years, until the bones were bare. The final, permanent grave, the real one, held only the bones, cleaned and placed lovingly in an urn. Now almost everyone’s cremated, and it’s the ashes that go in the urn, but the result is the same. A Chinese grave isn’t six feet long. The stone slab on the ground that covers the urn is shorter than the headstone is tall, and it has two little side pieces that make the whole thing a private altar, where relatives come to light incense and bring offerings—real ones like wine, and paper ones to burn. So Chinese graveyards, like Chinese cities, are much more densely packed than Western ones. And there’s another difference, an innovation of the last hundred years. From ancient times the name of the dead has been inscribed on the headstone. Now along with the name, there’s often a picture, a photograph silkscreened onto a tile and set into the stone.
