by S. J. Rozan
Mark sighed. “I doubt it. You and I know he’s lying about being the brains behind this, but the government isn’t going to think it’s funny. A lot of people are going to want to talk to him. How long ago was this thing televised?”
“Maybe half an hour.”
“Guaranteed there’s screaming and yelling all over headquarters right now. Give them another half hour, I’d be surprised if the cops I send are the only ones who show up.”
They weren’t, though they were first. Within three minutes a glance out the stately front doors showed me a patrol car firmly ensconced in the Peninsula’s curving driveway. The driver politely and completely refused the doorman’s, and then the night manager’s, requests to remove to somewhere where he wouldn’t make the guests nervous.
Leaving Bill in the bar where he could watch the grand staircase and the elevators, I strolled to the back and side entrances. They were covered too. Well, all right: No one was going to enter the Peninsula in the next half hour who was either known to the police or was particularly concerned about becoming known. That should buy enough time for Mark to get here, and then at least Franklin Wei would be safely in police custody. At that point, from what Mark said, Franklin’s troubles would be just beginning, but this was, after all, his own bright idea.
A pair of plainclothes detectives, badges on their hips, strode into the lobby about twenty minutes later. A little discussion with the desk clerks and then with the increasingly distressed-looking night manager, a little flashing of the badges, and they got what they wanted, which was obviously Franklin’s room number. They headed for the elevator in the reluctant company of the night manager. This was good if they were real cops, not good if they were Strength and Harmony ringers. Bill and I stood to follow them, though what use we’d be if these were the bad guys I wasn’t sure. But we didn’t have to find out. Before they got to the elevator or we got to them, Mark himself pushed through the Peninsula’s revolving door.
He saw the detectives crossing the lobby and called to them. They stopped and waited for him and the three of them had a brief discussion, which the night manager listened to with growing dismay on his face. They started for the elevator again. Bill and I joined them in time to hear the taller of the two detectives say, “I guess we should have known this one was yours, Quan. The guy’s crazy.”
Okay, so they were real cops. Mark gave him the Chinese chin-jut and introduced Bill and me to them. The elevator door opened and we all got in.
“Civilians?” the tall detective said significantly, but he got no answer from Mark. I just smiled, faced front, and watched the numbers light up. The cops were speaking Cantonese, so Bill had no idea what was going on, but on the other hand, they had no idea why his face looked the way it did, so I guessed they were even.
At the seventh floor we all followed the night manager down the hall to Franklin’s room. Mark knocked, identified himself, knocked again, waited. Franklin didn’t answer. One more knock; Mark told me and Bill to stay back. He and the other cops pulled out their guns. The night manager looked as though he wanted to run to the lifeboats. But this was his ship and he stayed on the bridge. He produced a key and unlocked Franklin’s door.
The cops swept in. In the carpeted hall I waited: for a shout, a shot, a loud fight, a quiet arrest. But there was nothing, because Franklin wasn’t there.
The three cops made a survey of every inch of the room and were out in half a minute. As we charged down the hall Mark yanked out his cell phone and started barking orders at the cops in the cars outside. No one even thought about the elevator except the night manager, who stopped there and then watched openmouthed as the rest of us swept by him to the stairs.
Bill couldn’t run; he was being left behind. He yelled Mark’s name. Mark turned. “Alone,” Bill shouted down the carpeted corridor. “Somewhere deserted and alone.”
I wasn’t sure what that meant, and at first it seemed as though Mark, stopped still in the corridor, wasn’t either. Then Mark’s eyes widened. He nodded and took off.
When we hit the lobby the other detectives each headed to a side door. Mark took the front and I went with him.
The patrol car was gone from the front, sweeping the area as Mark had ordered. Mark stopped outside just briefly, then ran forward again. I chased after him.
We crossed the busy avenue in front of the Peninsula, Mark ordering me to go back inside and then, when that didn’t work, grabbing my arm to at least keep me from dashing across the street against traffic. When we finally got to the other side Mark sped across the plaza, zigzagging his way among the Cultural Center buildings. I followed, under shadowy bridges and beside high blank walls, until we burst onto the harborfront promenade where I had stood wordless next to Bill at my first sight of the Hong Kong skyline.
Without stopping Mark headed left, along the promenade, away from the ferry. Away from everything, I realized as I ran after him. Strolling families and fried-dough vendors became fewer, the tiled promenade narrower and emptier. A few hand-holding couples here, a pair of night fishermen there. The air was hot and thick. My breath began to burn in my chest. My tired legs pumped, feet slamming the tiles, but I was well behind Mark when I spotted Franklin Wei, far up ahead.
Franklin leaned on the railing gazing across the harbor at the glittering neon skyline. On the black water fishing boats and sampans cut white lines across the city’s shimmering reflection. Above the blazing neon, a thick dark cloud shrouded the Peak, cutting it off from the rest of Hong Kong.
“Franklin Wei!” Mark shouted as he ran.
Franklin didn’t turn, didn’t move. He just stood there, staring across the harbor. And when a figure stepped from the shadows much closer to him than Mark or I, raised his arm, and, in Tony Siu’s voice, called Franklin’s Chinese name—“Wei Fu-Ran!”—he didn’t move then, either.
Mark shouted a warning. Siu spun toward us. The gun in his hand glinted. Mark hit the tiles and so did I.
A bullet screamed over our heads. Mark fired back; his shot flew useless into the night. Siu turned back to his business, to Franklin. He fired. Franklin jerked forward into the railing. Another shot. Now Franklin half turned. I couldn’t see his eyes; I don’t know what he saw, what was reflected in them. He slumped slowly to the ground and didn’t move again.
Tony Siu, his work done, raced away along the waterfront. Mark jumped to his feet and sped after him. I heard another pair of shots, but neither figure stopped. Siu turned, charged down a walkway that would take him back to the crowded, frantic streets of Kowloon. He was far ahead, running as fast as Mark.
I stood and ran again too, hesitating when I reached the place where Franklin lay. But I couldn’t help Mark: I had no gun, I didn’t know the streets, didn’t know the shortcuts or the hiding places, the merchants or the landlords. I didn’t know anything, here, in Hong Kong.
I dropped to my knees next to Franklin Wei. Franklin’s open eyes were blank and glittering. Automatically I felt his neck for a pulse. There was nothing. Blood was seeping from beneath him, flowing along cracks and joints, pooling on the tiles. Two fist-size stains on his chest spread as I watched them, merging into one, surrounding the amulet lying on his shirt like a sea of blood circling an island of jade. Feet pounded, sirens howled, voices called, but I sat unmoving, seeing only the neon skyline of Hong Kong reflected in Franklin Wei’s blood.
Two days later, in the morning under a bright, hot sun, there was a double funeral at the mausoleum on the breezy hilltop in the New Territories town of Sha Tin.
We climbed a broad switchback staircase through lush mountain greenery in the company of chanting Buddhist monks. They rang gongs and tapped bells as the wind cleared the early clouds from the azure sky. At the top, among the gilt-touched crimson columns in front of the wall’s wide sweep, Steven Wei, dressed in mourner’s white, lit sweet, thick incense for his father and his brother. The rest of us did the same. We bowed, sometimes chanted, circling the open altar to stand our incense sticks in
the sand of the burner and, at the iron cauldron beside it, to add our paper funeral gifts to the fire.
Li-Ling, heavy with the expected child, held Harry’s hand as he dropped Hell Notes—paper money made to send to the dead—and paper rice bags into the flames. Wei Ang-Ran was next, also sending money, and a paper feast of fish; Natalie Zhu sent books and an image of Tin Hua, which curled and darkened and sprang suddenly into the air before it fell to ashes. Maria Quezon had brought Hell Notes and a set of recipes, in her own hand, for Filipino dishes old Mr. Wei had enjoyed. Mark was there; like Bill, he had brought only money, feeling it presumptuous to offer anything else. I had one gift beyond money. At a funeral supplies store on the shrine-sellers’ street in Mong Kok I had found a paper image of Sun Wu-Kong, the Monkey King: joyful trickster and thief, laughing fighter, courageous companion. I put that in the fire for Franklin Wei.
As the monks, chanting, placed the two urns of ashes in the mausoleum wall, I gazed over the emerald hillside to the white waves and dark boats on the water far below. Old Mr. Wei had asked to be brought from America to be buried in this sunny, breezy place next to his second wife, Steven’s mother. Now his first son was buried here too, their photographs added to the numberless others on the curving wall, forever looking out over the green hills and the sea.
I turned back to watch Steven bowing, to listen to him saying the prescribed prayers. He had been shocked and sickened to hear of Franklin’s crime, his betrayal of his father and family, his death on the Kowloon waterfront. But Franklin was his older brother and there was no question about his funeral. All the proper rites were performed, everything done correctly, as filial loyalty demanded.
Filial loyalty, of course, was what had brought on Franklin’s death. It was Zhong xiao dao yi, and Bill had seen it before Mark or I had. Franklin had calmly left the hotel by a side door—the cops had been watching for suspicious people going in, not tourists going out; none of them had Franklin’s description—and walked down to the waterfront, and waited. Announcing that he would provide names and details the next day insured that Strength and Harmony would have to do something about him immediately. Lion Rock, as Bill had said in Franklin’s hotel room, was useless now to L. L. Lee, though Lee himself had not been identified and had nothing to deny. Self-protection had required Franklin’s removal and honor had required revenge. L. L. Lee had gotten both. And the death of Franklin settled his score with the Wei family.
Steven, performing his filial rites, knew nothing about any of this.
I watched him, and watched Wei Ang-Ran, next to him, bowing, placing incense in the burner as sweet-smelling smoke swirled around him. I was afraid Wei Ang-Ran, driven by guilt, would tell Steven the truth. What a shame that would be, what a waste.
And Wei Ang-Ran might have, but for one final, stunning fact.
When the last incense stick was lit and the last gong rung, the monks stayed to tend the fire and the family prepared to leave. The Weis were planning to gather for the traditional postfuneral meal. Mark and Bill and I had been courteously invited, but declined, as we thought right. As the others started back down the hill, Wei Ang-Ran hung behind.
“Please wait,” he said to me in Cantonese. “I have something I must show you.” He included Mark and Bill in his look.
So we waited, letting Wei Ang-Ran draw us to a secluded bend in the curving wall. Once the rest of the family, descending the staircase, was out of sight, Wei Ang-Ran reached his hand under his shirt collar and pulled out a pendant on a slim gold chain.
“What’s that?” I asked.
And he answered, “My brother’s jade.”
The sun beat down and the soft breeze blew and I stood with my mouth open, as speechless and staring as the high wall’s rows of photographs of those who would never be confused again.
Finally coming back to life I said, “You’ve had it all this time?”
“In one sense,” he said. “In another, no.” His voice was barely above a whisper and his eyes were sad.
“What does that mean?”
“The envelope you brought me that I would not open. My brother’s final advice, I thought, his final words to help me. It was my guilt, as you now can understand, as much as my fear for Hao-Han, that kept me from reading it. My brother was kind, a good man; I could not bear the thought that, dying, he had considered me. After what I had done, what I had been doing for so long! After the way I had deceived him!” Wei Ang-Ran gazed out over the hills and the ocean. He turned to us and spoke again. “This morning I opened it. The envelope, as you recall, was thick. We spoke about that: So much advice, so many worthy words, I thought.
“But that was not the case. Protected in many layers of fine rice paper was my brother’s jade. With it, the business card of a Chinatown jeweler. Also, a single proverb, in my brother’s hand.” He smiled a smile full of a lifetime’s regret and quoted the proverb to me: “‘A man’s love for another must extend to the crows on his roof.’”
I knew this one. When I was a child my father had quoted it to me at those times—fairly common—when I had been brought to tears by the scoldings of my aunt, my mother’s older sister who lived with us. He had been telling me that I must love my aunt despite her faults; and he was also, I knew, telling me that my aunt loved me that way too.
And Old Mr. Wei had been telling his brother the same thing.
“Do you see?” Wei Ang-Ran asked me. “Do you see? He knew.”
“Knew?” I managed. “About the smuggling?”
“Yes.” He carefully replaced the jade Buddha under his shirt, out of sight. “I told you,” he said, “I had once, for Strength and Harmony, smuggled three jades similar to my brother’s out of China. They went to New York, to a Chinatown jeweler.”
“The jeweler whose card—?”
“Exactly. My brother must have known when they came in. I can only think now he knew when all the shipments came in. Clearly he knew also where they went He visited the jeweler himself, where he bought one of the three. So many years ago …” He shook off the memory, the amazement. “That was the jade he sent to Hao-Han. His jade he sent to me. To tell me he knew. To tell me he forgave me.”
I looked at the old man’s wrinkled brown face. The breeze had stopped; the hilltop was hot and still and silent.
“Will you tell your nephew?” I asked.
“No.” Wei Ang-Ran’s answer was soft but sure. “My punishment in this life will be to bear this burden alone for my remaining days. What my punishment will be in the next life I do not know.”
He bowed to me, and to Mark, and to Bill. He turned to follow his family down the hill.
Mark and Bill and I had an early lunch at a floating restaurant Mark knew: not one of the huge, garish ones the tourists go to but a place that was nothing more than a dozen picnic tables under bright canvas umbrellas on a barge. The kitchen consisted of a few huge woks and steamers also in the open air, and on this barge they turned out the best shrimp har gow and the best steamed crabs in Hong Kong. That was according to Mark. I would have to have done a lot of eating to test this claim, and though I was willing to try, time did not allow it: Bill and I were leaving in the morning.
“That’s what Grandfather Gao meant,” I said, cracking a crab claw as the barge rocked gently. “When he said when I found the answers to my unanswered questions I’d know what to do. But I couldn’t even remember what my unanswered questions were.”
“One was the two jades?” Bill asked.
I nodded, pulling a lump of crab out of the shell. “And the other was what Franklin had really been up to. If I’d thought to ask that—”
“Nothing would be different,” Mark said.
“I don’t know. Maybe we could have stopped him. Grandfather Gao said Franklin was a guy who acted before he thought.”
“Not this time,” Mark said. “He knew when he called that press conference how it would end.”
“And he just stood there. Waiting.”
There was quiet on th
e barge for a while. I didn’t know what Bill and Mark were thinking. I was wondering whether I would have had the courage to stand there, waiting.
“Now I want to ask you something,” Mark said. “When you found the answers, you’d know what to do about what?”
“Me? About not warning Steven you were planning to pounce on Lion Rock to bring down L. L. Lee.”
“You told Grandfather Gao I asked you to do that?”
“Of course. What’s so funny?”
“So did I.”
“You did? Why?”
“For one thing, in case he didn’t like it, I wanted him to know it was my idea, not yours. For another,” he shrugged, “getting Lee that way—I just wanted to be sure it was right.”
“What did he say?”
“About getting Lee, if I could live with it, that was up to me. About what I asked you, he said, ‘A fast-moving stream will find its own course.’”
“He didn’t.”
“He did.” Mark grinned, and the scar on his lip practically blazed in the sun. “Of course, by now I knew that about you anyway.”
I looked at Bill, beside me; he was grinning too.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” I said. I went back to my crab. “Well, I’m sorry you didn’t get Lee, but I’m not sorry Steven and everyone else can go happily on with their lives now. And Lee did lose his smuggling operation.”
A small cloud, carelessly drifting, meandered across the sun. The day went briefly dim. In my mind rose a picture of the scholar’s study on the Peak, its pools of lamplight and its hunter’s carpet. And L. L. Lee motionless in the carved dark chair, his face hard, his voice stony.
Then the cloud, probably shocked to see where it was, scuttled away, and sunlight flooded down again.
I poured myself some tea, steaming and strong. The hell with L. L. Lee. I was sitting in the sunshine on a barge in a crowded harbor, eating a really great lunch with two of my favorite people. I was not going to worry about L. L. Lee.
