by S. J. Rozan
“Hi, Jack. Want a dumpling? Oh, you didn’t say you brought people. Hi, I’m Francie See.” She shifted the chopsticks to her left hand where the bowl was and stuck out her right.
“Lydia Chin,” I said as we shook. “And this is Bill Smith.”
“Good to meet you. You folks want some dumplings? I have lots.”
“No, thanks,” Jack said. “We just had some great noodle soup.” I was a little sorry to hear him turn her down; the dumplings, seared and glistening with sesame oil, looked great.
“At Lucky Gardens?” Francie See asked.
“No, in Manhattan.”
“Oh, right, I should have known.”
“You outer-borough people, so touchy. Listen, Francie, we’re looking for Anna Yang. Is she here? Bill and Lydia wanted to see her work.”
“I don’t think so. Unless she came back.” Francie See stepped back to peer down the corridor. “Her door’s closed. Want to see mine instead?”
“Sure,” said Jack, as though seeing art were why we’d come. “Still doing landscapes?”
“In a way.” She led us back in the direction she’d come from. “That’s Anna’s studio, down there past the kitchen,” she said over her shoulder. “She came in this afternoon and I thought she was staying to work but she left pretty fast. I got the feeling she was upset about something. Did she know you were coming?”
“No. Bill and Lydia just met her, and we were in the neighborhood so I suggested we come over. Is she okay?”
“I don’t know what’s going on. You could ask Pete, they’re pretty tight.” Francie See turned through an open door. “Voilà.” She waved the chopsticks, then used them to lift a dumpling. “Hope you don’t mind if I eat. I’m starved.”
“No, go ahead,” I said, looking around. Pinned to the walls, covering a table, and on three easels, were watercolor paintings, in every shade of blue imaginable, and all of them paintings of water. Oceans, fog, mist, clouds, waves, pools, pounding rain, racing brooks, water in every possible form, including glaciers, steam, and ice cubes. Serene, threatening, chilly, boiling, soft, hard, fast, and slow, changing from painting to painting but all water and all blue.
“Wow,” said Jack. “This is what one of my professors would’ve called ‘bloody-minded.’”
“Just tightening my focus,” Francie said. “It’s all about water, Jack. The twenty-first century’s all about water.”
“You always were so cutting-edge, Francie.”
“I am, aren’t I? Besides, something’s got to wash down these dumplings. You sure you don’t want any?”
The guys shook their heads, but I couldn’t stand it. “I’d love one.”
“That’s what I’m talking about.” Francie grinned and pointed to a jar of chopsticks beside a can of brushes.
“I don’t believe you,” Jack said. “After that soup?”
“Adrenaline makes Lydia hungry,” Bill said.
“Adrenaline?” Francie asked. “You get a rush looking at art?”
I fetched some chopsticks and dug a dumpling from the bowl she held out.
“Bill does,” Jack said. “The jury’s still out on Lydia. But we had some excitement on the way here. We were sort of mugged.”
“Seriously? Are you okay?”
“We’re fine,” I said, biting down on the salty, gamey dumpling. “I was sort of mugged, and Jack saved me.”
“Ooh, Jack, you caveman, you. But you’re okay?” Francie asked me.
I nodded, swallowed, and said, “This is great.”
“Day job. I’m the dumpling queen of Lucky Gardens. See, this is why you should move to the outer boroughs. No one gets mugged in Flushing.”
“For your information,” Jack said, “we were in Flushing, not all that far from here.”
“Oh. Well, I’m lying anyway. Why do you think we have all that fancy electronic stuff on the doors? None of the windows below ten feet open, either. And we have alarms on the skylights, in case someone tries a Mission: Impossible.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“Yeah, I guess it’s good. It cost a fortune, though. A lot of people resisted, but that was partly because the security commissar’s that jerk, Jon-Jon Jie. Oops, he a friend of yours?” Her smile made it clear she didn’t care if he was or not.
Jack shook his head. “Seen his work, but don’t know him. You have commissars?”
“It’s funnier than ‘committee chair.’ Of course it would help if Big Yellow Hunter had a sense of humor. There were people holding out because he wouldn’t shut up. We had to take an actual vote. Appalling. And now look, after all that, he’s moving out.”
“I didn’t know he had a studio here.”
“Down the hall. He came in with us because he thought we were the hip place to be. As though anything could make him hip. But now he’s kissing us off for some high-rent broom closet in Chelsea. I say good riddance and he can take the armory with him.”
“Armory?” I said. “He has guns in there?”
“He says he does. And bows and arrows, and spears. In case a buffalo herd charges through here, I don’t know. Let his new A-list gallery worry about it.”
“A-list gallery?” said Jack. “You don’t mean Baxter/Haig?”
“You heard?”
“Eddie To said Doug Haig was just leading Jie on.”
“That’s what we all thought, but the deal’s gone through. As of a few hours ago. Ink’s still wet. He’ll be Baxter/Haig’s first Chinese-American. Everyone’s disgusted. Jon-Jon’s the kind of gateway drug that’ll make Haig allergic.”
“Haig’s already allergic. I can’t believe he’s opening the sacred precincts to a hyphenated artist. And it’s Jie? I only saw one show of his, but it was garbage.”
“Literally. He buys Gucci’s scraps.”
Jack shook his head. “Are you sure this is true? Say what you want about Haig, but he has an eye. I’ve never known him to show bad work.”
“Ah, well, he’s not showing him yet, is he?”
“What do you mean?”
“There are reasons to put a horse in your stable even if you’re not planning to ride him.” Bill looked over from a painting he’d been examining. Francie said, “Sorry, it’s Jon-Jon’s Texas thing. I couldn’t resist.”
“No problem,” said Jack. “Can you translate, though?”
“Jon-Jon’s from money.”
“You’re saying he bought his way into Baxter/Haig?”
Francie put the empty dumpling bowl into a paint-streaked sink and turned the faucet on. Reaching for a stained towel to wipe her hands, she paused and cocked her head as water splattered and overflowed the bowl. I followed her gaze, admiring the way light glinted off the rivulets. “Mmm,” Francie said. Leaving the water running and the bowl where it was, she unpinned an ice floe from an easel and laid it on a table. Dragging the easel to the sink, she said, “Just before the rumors about Jon-Jon’s knighthood started, we’d been hearing a better rumor: that Haig was in trouble. Whoever’d loaned him the money to buy Baxter out wanted it back, plus. Or so we heard.”
“We heard that, too. Who was it, do you know?”
“No.” Francie fingered through the jar of brushes. “But inquiring minds agree it was Chinese money.”
“Really? Listen, Francie, it sounds like you hear a lot of rumors. Have you heard that there are unknown Chau Chuns floating around?”
“Chau Chun? Who’s that? Wait—Tiananmen? The Ghost Painter or something?”
“Ghost Hero.”
“I thought he was dead.”
“He is.”
“I haven’t heard anything about him.” She pushed a rolling table over to the easel she’d just set up. Crowding it were pots of cobalt, azure, teal, turquoise, indigo, aquamarine. “That must not have made it out here to the boonies.”
“All right,” said Jack. “I can see we’re losing you. We’ll let you get back to work.”
“Nothing personal.”
“Of course not. I t
hink we’ll find Pete, just to make sure Anna’s okay. Which studio’s his?”
“At the very end. Two down from Anna.” Francie pinned a sheet of paper to the easel. “You can help him celebrate.”
“Celebrate what?”
“That he’ll be able to breathe again. So will Anna. As soon as Jon-Jon packs up his mangy hides and moves out from the studio between them.”
We left Francie’s studio and headed along the corridor. “That was cool,” I said. “I always wondered where artists get their ideas.”
“Just turn on the faucet, they flow right out,” Bill said.
“I was surprised she barely knew who Chau was, though. I guess you’re right—this generation doesn’t necessarily know him. That would explain how Anna could have a couple of Chaus, real or fake, pinned to her studio wall and no one here would notice.”
“It explains how she could, but it doesn’t explain why she does.”
Jack stopped at a black door that said ANNA YANG in small neat red letters and, below them, in equally precise Chinese characters. He knocked, then tried the door, but it was locked. “Well, she’s not here to ask.”
“Too bad,” I said. “Do you have her phone number?”
“Yes. But I want to talk to Pete before we call her.”
Bill, examining the door, said, “Maybe not too bad.”
Jack looked at Bill. “What?”
“No one’s here on this end of the building,” Bill pointed out. “Except that guy Pete, who you’re going to see. Francie’s all the way down there with the water running and someone on the other side has music on. Why don’t you two go talk to Pete?”
Jack frowned. “I don’t know.”
“No. And what you don’t know can’t hurt you. Go.”
So we went, past the studio that was still, briefly, Jon-Jon Jie’s—with a curling fragment of brown and white cowhide tacked to the door—and knocked at the open door of the studio beyond it.
Inside, a thin young Asian man in a blue work shirt sat drawing loose, fast pencil lines on a sheet of paper. He glanced up sharply. His intense, silent stare made me think maybe we should get lost. We might be interrupting an artist in the middle of an inspiration. But he relaxed, though he didn’t smile. “Jack. Hey, what’s up?”
“Hey, Pete. This is Lydia Chin. Lydia, Pete Tsang.”
“Hi,” I said. Pete Tsang, sharp dark eyes on me, nodded.
“We were looking for Anna,” Jack told him, “but Francie See said she came and went. She also said she seemed upset. I just wanted to make sure she’s okay.”
Pete put his pencil down. “I didn’t see her, just heard her. Sometimes when she gets in I take a break, we have coffee or something before she sets up. I was half-waiting, but she just locked up again and left.”
“So you don’t know what was wrong?”
“Could be nothing’s wrong. Maybe she just came in to get something.”
“When we saw her before she was headed here, said she had a lot to do. But maybe you’re right. I’ll call her.” Jack turned to me. “Pete’s a painter.” I might have guessed that from the two large canvases, one in burning yellows, one in jagged reds, on opposite sides of the studio. Jack asked Pete, “What are you working on? Anything new?”
“Nothing right now. Planning something out, but I’m not ready to start.” Pete didn’t elaborate, and his glance flicked back to the sketch on his desk. He seemed taut, Pete Tsang did, like an arrow waiting for the bowstring to snap.
It occurred to me, if this case didn’t end soon I’d be talking in nature metaphors, myself.
That wasn’t my immediate problem, though. That was that it was clear Pete Tsang would rather we left. Which would leave Pete Tsang alone with his studio door open, two down from Anna Yang’s, and who knew what was going on there? Jack, obviously thinking along the same lines, had strolled over to examine the yellow canvas. I looked around. There was nothing remotely intelligent I could say about Pete Tsang’s paintings. That was my lack of art vocabulary, not the paintings. I liked the huge range of colors I could now see within what had seemed at first like two or three shades of a single color; and I liked the suggestion of small, shadowy human forms I thought I saw. The canvases struck me as radiating the same tightly coiled vigilance the painter did. Maybe; but that wasn’t a promising conversational path. Then I spied a flyer tacked to the wall: a photo of a handsome young Asian man with wire-frame glasses, smiling on a sunny day. Below the picture, heavy black type read FREE LIU MAI-KE! At the bottom was a Web site address.
“Mike Liu,” I said. “Are you involved in that?”
Pete looked me over as though maybe he’d missed something the first time. “You know about him?”
“He’s that poet. He’s married to Jack’s friend Anna, who we came to see. ‘The world calls this China’s century, but if China’s people are denied the right to think and to express their thoughts, if they cannot count on basic human rights and human dignity, China’s century will be worthless dust.’ He got seven years.”
Jack’s eyes were on me. Pete Tsang asked, “Are you an artist?”
“No. But I’m Chinese.”
“You followed Mike’s case?”
“The sentence was outrageous. It would have been a joke if it hadn’t been a tragedy.”
Pete looked at me another few moments, then reached to a long counter holding neat cans of brushes and pencils. He picked up a couple of sheets of paper, which turned out to be the same flyer as on the wall. “Have you been to our Web site?”
“No.”
“Check it out. There’s a rally next week. It’ll be big. Important. You’ll want to be there. Jack, you will, too.”
Jack didn’t say anything, but he walked over and took a flyer.
“You think it’ll help?” I asked. “The Chinese government doesn’t respond to much. Rallies and letter-writing, with other dissidents it sometimes looks like they don’t even notice.”
Pete’s hard gaze held me. “I don’t know. But I know doing nothing won’t work.” After another moment: “And this time, I’m pretty sure they’ll notice.”
He stood up and walked to the door, where he just waited. So we actually had to leave. By then I wasn’t too worried. Bill’s fast, especially when he’s breaking the law.
Jack and I walked back down the hall the way we’d come. We both threw quick looks at Anna Yang’s door, saw nothing but her name. We waved to Francie See as we passed her studio. She didn’t respond, just kept feathering pale blue onto the emerging painting on her easel.
Jack said, “I didn’t know you could do that. Quote Mike Liu.”
“I read the open letter.”
“I read it, too. But I can’t quote it.”
“I can do it in Chinese, too. You want to hear?”
Jack sighed. “No, I believe you.”
“But actually,” I admitted, “I read it twice.”
We turned the corner and found Bill lounging on an entryway sofa, leafing through a book on the history of Chinese fireworks. A FREE LIU MAI-KE flyer, I now noticed, was pinned to the bulletin board.
“Hey,” Bill said, getting up. “How’s Pete Tsang?”
“Curt,” said Jack.
“Handsome,” said I.
“Really?” said Jack.
“I’m just reporting.” I handed Bill the flyer as we headed for the door. “He wants us to come to a rally next week. He says it’ll be big.”
“For Anna Yang’s husband?” Bill looked at Jack.
“Lydia can quote his whole manifesto by heart. In two languages.”
“I’m translating it into Italian, too, right now in my head. No, seriously, that passage is the only part I can quote. It just grabbed me.” I repeated the passage for Bill. “And now that we’re outside”—which we were, on the sidewalk under the Flushing stars—“tell!” I wheeled on Bill. “Are they there? In Anna’s studio?”
“The Chaus?”
“No, Jimmy Hoffa and Judge Crater! Of cour
se the Chaus!”
“No.”
I stopped. “No? Wait. No?”
“Not on the walls, and as far as I can see, not in the file drawers. That wall you’d have seen from about where Shayna took the photo? It’s empty.”
“Maybe they’re what Anna came to get.”
Jack said to Bill, “What about you? Will there be any way for Anna to know you were there?”
“If I didn’t know you were asking that question out of concern for your friend Anna’s nerves,” Bill said, lighting a cigarette, “I’d take offense.”
“Bill does a very clean B and E,” I reassured Jack. “It’s a point of pride with him. And you’re sure that’s where they were, the Chaus? Those papercuttings were for sure Anna’s?”
The question had been for Jack, but Bill nodded. “I saw the ones in the photo. They’re still there. It’s just the Chaus that’re gone.”
“Well, damn,” I said. I’d have said more, but my phone rang. An unfamiliar number, so I answered in both languages. The voice that replied, speaking in English, was not unfamiliar, but I was glad it was on the phone and not up close and personal.
“Chin Ling Wan-ju, my apology. I think we start on bad foot. I don’t try to scare you, just want to talk.”
I covered the phone and whispered to the guys, “Mighty Casey.” To Casey himself, I said, “How did you get this number?”
“Just want to talk,” he repeated. “About your client.”
“Okay, we’re talking.”
“No, we meet. Have tea, be civilized.”
“Your driver almost ran me down, you pointed a gun at me, you tried to kidnap me, and you shot at my friend. You might have tried this ‘civilized’ approach first.”
“I say, I apologize. Sometime, get too … involved, my work.”
“Who are you?”
“We have tea, I explain.”
I thought. “Okay. Tea. In a public place.”
A pause. “Yes. Okay. You come alone.”
“So do you. And,” I added, “not tonight. Tomorrow. In daylight.” After, maybe, we’d heard from Linus, or one of Bill’s cop friends, and I had some idea of with whom I was having the pleasure.
That didn’t seem to bother him. In fact, he sounded amused. “Tomorrow, nine o’clock. Sun up high enough?”
