by Don Winslow
“Fuck!” Neal yelled.
The apartment was empty. Not merely unoccupied, but empty. No clothes, no cooking utensils, dishes, pictures, old magazines, toilet paper, toothbrushes… A bare bed and an old rattan chair were the sole occupants of the one-room apartment.
Neal looked out the window at the balcony. Nothing. He turned around to see Ben Chin standing in the open doorway. Chin looked angry, a lot angrier than he should have been, but Neal didn’t notice it. He was too pissed off.
“Go get the Old Mother,” Chin said to the Doorman in Cantonese. Then he turned back to Neal and said, “It looks like you missed her.”
“No kidding.”
“She must have just left. Apartments don’t stay empty long around here.”
“She took the time to clean it.”
Chin laughed. “Maybe. It’s more likely, though, that the neighbors stripped it the second she walked out the door.”
Pretty goddamn inconsiderate of the neighbors. Didn’t they know I’d want to search for clues?
Neal heard the old woman squawking in the staircase. The Doorman brought her into the room. At Chin’s signal he shut the door behind them.
“Are you a ghost?” Chin said to her in Cantonese. He walked across the room and opened the window. “Can you fly?”
Neal didn’t understand the words, but the threat was fairly clear. A thug is a thug is a thug, and his techniques vary little from culture to culture.
“Come on, Ben,” Neal said, feeling more tired than he had for years.
Chin ignored him.
“Answer me,” he said to the old woman. “Are you a ghost? Can you fly?”
She glared at him with a look that spoke more contempt than fear. She didn’t say anything.
“Why did you make me climb four flights of stairs for nothing? Huh? Why didn’t you tell me she had left?”
Her answer was a variation on the “you didn’t ask” theme.
“Where did she go?”
“How would I know?”
“Let’s see if you can fly.”
The Doorman grabbed her from behind and put his hand over her mouth to stifle her shriek. Neal stepped in front of the window.
“Tell him to let her go,” he said.
“Stay out of it.”
“I’m paying the bill, I give the orders,” Neal answered.
“I’ll give you a refund. Now get out of the way.”
Neal slammed the window shut. He realized his knees were trembling and he knew that if Chin wanted to throw the woman out the window he could do it. Shit, he thought, if he wants to throw me out the window he can do it.
No real witty, intimidating threats came to him, so he settled for, “What could she tell us anyway?”
“Everything,” Chin said. “The old bag has probably been sitting downstairs for forty years. She sees everyone who goes up and everyone who comes down. If she hears someone fart, she knows what he ate for lunch.”
Chin stepped up to the woman and poked her in the chest. “Tell me.”
She broke into a long monologue.
“What man? What kind of man?” Chin asked.
The question inspired another soliloquy. When she was finished, Chin signaled the Doorman to release her. She sank to her knees on the floor and gasped for air, looking up at Neal with an expression of unmitigated hatred.
Chin wasn’t much friendlier when he said, “Okay, Mr. Gandhi. Old Woman Know-Nothing says your babe was here with a kweilo-a white guy-for just one day. Do you think this old hag wouldn’t notice that? Do you think that anybody on this whole block wouldn’t notice that? She says another guy came to visit both days. A Chinese. She says the three of them left together this morning, but she doesn’t know where they were going, and she had better be telling the truth.”
Neal plunked himself down on the windowsill. He was tired and angry and he didn’t like the smug look on Chin’s face.
“Okay,” Neal said, “so you got out of her that they were here, and now they’re not, and they left with a Chinese man. Hell, they should be easy to find now. All we have to do is find a Chinese man.”
Chin looked at him like he was thinking about the window again. Neal looked at the Doorman and pointed to the door. Chin nodded his okay and the Doorman left.
“And something else,” Neal said to Chin. “I don’t like the way you work. You’re on a job with me, there are certain things you don’t do-I don’t care if it’s your turf and your language. One of the biggest things you don’t do is you don’t rough up old women, or any women, or anybody unless you have to. And by ‘have to’ I mean only if we’re in actual, physical danger. Now if you can’t deal with that, fine-walk away right now and I’ll finish the job myself.”
The silence that followed was about as long as a “Gilligan’s Island” rerun.
“You don’t know how things work here,” Chin said quietly.
“I know how I work.”
“If you had talked to me that way in front of my crew, I would have had to kill you.”
Neal recognized a peace offering when he heard one. He had to give Chin back some face.
“I know. That’s why I sent him out of the room. To tell you the truth, I was pretty scared.” He gave Chin his most self-deprecating laugh.
Chin laughed back and the deal was done.
“Okay,” Chin said. “Your checkbook, your rules.”
“Okay. Now what?”
Chin thought for a second.
“Tea,” he said.
“Tea?”
“Helps you think.”
“Then tea it is. I need all the help I can get.”
Chin pulled a money roll out of his pants pocket, peeled a $10HK bill off, and handed it to the old woman.
“Deui mjyuh,” he said. (“I’m sorry.”)
She stuffed the bill inside her blouse and scowled at him.
“Cigarette!” she demanded.
He gave her the pack.
The teashop was more like an aviary. It seemed to Neal that every other customer in the place was carrying at least one cage with a bird in it.
“I feel so underdressed,” Neal said to Chin as they sat down at the small round table. The Doorman had gone in before them, secured the table, and left. The rest of the crew waited outside, patrolling the sidewalk and observing every customer who came in.
“Local color,” Chin answered. “I thought you might enjoy it.”
Neal looked around the large room. The customers were all men, mostly older, most of them accompanied by brightly colored songbirds in bamboo cages. Some of the cages looked like they cost a small fortune. They featured sloping rooflines with carved dragons painted in shiny colors. Some had swinging perches with gilded chains and ivory bars. A few of the really old men had their pets perched proudly on their wrists. The birds-and it seemed to Neal that were hundreds of them-sang to each other, every warbling tremolo inspiring a choral response. As the birds exchanged tunes, the old men chatted happily with each other, doubtless swapping bird anecdotes and heredities. The men seemed to know each other as well as the birds did, and all parties were enjoying their social outing. The teashop was a riot of sound and color, but Neal noticed that it wasn’t really noisy.
“Quite a place,” Neal said.
“They used to be all over Hong Kong,” Ben said, “but keeping birds is dying out with the old people. Now there are only a few Bird Teahouses.”
A waiter came over, wiped the table with a wet towel, and set out two handleless cups.
“What kind of tea do you want?” Chin asked Neal.
“You order for me,” answered Neal, who drank at least one cup of tea a year and was only vaguely aware that there was more than one kind.
“Let me see… you are tired but need to concentrate, so I think maybe a Chiu Chou tea.” He said to the waiter, “Ti’ kuan yin cha.”
“Houde.”
“I ordered a very strong Oolong tea. It will keep you awake. Alert.”
“That would be a refreshing change. So what do we do now?” “Give up.”
“Can’t.”
“Why not?”
Neal listened to the cacophony of birdsong, chatter, and rattling cups for few moments before he answered.
“There are other people looking for her and her friend. I think the same people might have reason to be looking for me. These other people do not have kind intentions-they’ll kill her, her friend, and me if they have to. I don’t know why. I do know that I have to find her, warn her, and find out what this is all about before I can get back to a normal life.”
A normal life. Right.
“How did you get involved in this?”
Neal shook his head.
Chin tried again. “Mark told me it’s a drug thing.”
“I don’t think so.”
The waiter came back and set a pot of tea on the table. Chin took the lid off, sniffed the pot, and put the lid back on. He filled Neal’s cup and then his own.
Neal sipped the tea. It was strong all right, slightly smoky and bitter. But it felt good going down, warm and soothing. It occured to him that he hadn’t really stopped moving since the bullet had buzzed past his head, that he was wandering in the dark without a plan, moving for the sake of motion, making assumptions based on himself, not on the subject.
He took a long draught of the tea. So what do you know? he asked himself. You know that Li Lan and Pendleton have skipped out on you again. Back up. Skipped out on you? Why do you think you have anything to do with it? Maybe they already know about the danger and that’s what they’re running from. Running? Maybe they’re not running at all. Maybe they came to Hong Kong and simply changed living quarters. The one-room apartment was small even for lovers.
So how do you find them? They’ve taken off in the most densely populated area of the most densely populated city in the world, so how do you find them?
You don’t.
You let them find you.
He looked up from his cup and saw that Chin was also sitting back and relaxing. He didn’t seem to mind Neal’s silence or be bothered by it. He was just drinking tea.
You let them find you, Neal told himself. Why would they want to do that? Depends on who “they” are. If “they” are Li and Pendleton, maybe they find you because you’re making such a pain in the ass of yourself that they have to deal with you. If “they” are the same people who almost canceled your reservation in Mill Valley, maybe they find you because they can find you, and they tie up a loose end.
That’s me, Neal thought, the quintessential loose end.
He poured another cup of tea for himself and Chin, then sat back in his chair. He was sitting in a place where old men combined their pleasures by taking their pet birds to tea. He could take a few moments to enjoy it. Besides, the game had changed. The second cup of tea was much stronger, the third stronger yet, and then the pot was empty. Chin turned the lid upside down on the pot and the waiter picked it up and returned a minute later with a fresh pot.
“Maybe I can’t find her,” Neal said. “But I can look for her.”
“True.”
Neal poured the tea.
“Maybe I can make a big show of looking for her.”
Chin took some tea and swilled it around in his mouth. Then he tilted his head back and swallowed. “Then maybe the unfriendly people who are looking for you will find you.”
“That’s the idea.”
If they missed me once, they can miss me again. But I won’t miss them this time.
“That’s a crazy game.”
“Do you want to play?”
“Absolutely.”
Chin got up and signaled for the check.
“You ready?” he asked Neal.
“Not yet.”
“You need something?”
“I need to sit here and finish the tea and listen to the birds sing.”
The birds must have heard him because they launched into an avian symphony of particular virtuosity. Even the old men stopped their conversations to listen and to enjoy the moment. When the crescendo died down, everyone laughed, not in derision but in the joy of a shared pleasure.
Neal Carey was dog-tired, jet-lagged, culture-shocked, and snakebit, but at least he knew what to do next.
7
He checked into the Banyan Tree properly this time, via the lobby and the registration desk. He whipped out the Bank’s plastic-so what if they tracked him down?-tipped the bellhop, and settled right back into his room. He poured himself a neat scotch, left a wake-up call for seven o’clock, and read two chapters of Fathom before dropping off.
Angels watched over him in his sleep. The angels in this case were not the winged spirits that one Father O’Connell used to tell him about when a younger Neal would help him find his way back to the rectory from the Dublin House Pub. Neal would listen patiently, if skeptically, to the old priest’s description of a guardian angel that followed you everywhere, as he relieved Father O’Connell of all his pocket money and decided that maybe these angels existed after all. The angels now were a bunch of Hong Kong Triad thugs who had thrown a loose protective net around Neal, and who prowled the hotel corridor, watched the entrances and the sidewalks, blocked the stairway leading to Neal’s floor, and did it all without being noticed.
Neal had insisted on that as the price for accepting protection at all.
“This won’t work if I’m traveling in a mob,” he had told Ben Chin. “I have to look like an easy target.”
“A slam-dunk,” agreed Ben, who after all, had attended UCLA. “Don’t worry. My boys will lay back.”
So Neal slept soundly until the phone rang at seven. He showered and dressed-white shirt, khaki slacks, indestructible blue blazer, no tie-and went downstairs to the dining room. He stopped off in the gift shop and picked up the South China Daily and the International Herald Tribune. The latter provided him with sports news to read as he tossed down four cups of coffee, two pieces of white toast, and three scrambled eggs.
He went back up to his room and the package was waiting on his bed, just as he had arranged. He didn’t know how Chin had managed to get all of it done in one afternoon and evening, but it was all there: five hundred flyers with the photo of Pendleton and Li Lan at dinner, and a message in Chinese and English reading, IF YOU HAVE SEEN THESE PEOPLE, CONTACT MR. CAREY, and going on to give his hotel number and extension. There was also a neatly typed list of all the art galleries that might handle Li Lan’s sort of work. There were about three dozen listings with addresses and phone numbers.
Chin had even grouped the galleries geographically, starting in Yaumatei and working down the Golden Mile, and then across the Hong Kong Island.
The first gallery was in the hotel and looked unlikely, but it was a good place try out a new lie.
“Good morning,” Neal said to the clerk behind the glass counter.
“Good morning. Are you enjoying your stay in Hong Kong?”
She was a Chinese woman, in her mid-forties, Neal guessed, and she was wearing an elaborately embroidered padded jacket that looked more like a uniform than her own clothing. The gallery sold a lot of jewelry and cloisonne and exhibited some large oil paintings of Hong Kong subjects: the view from Victoria Peak, Kowloon at night, sampans in the harbor. They seemed more like expensive souvenirs than artistic expressions.
“Very much,” Neal answered. “I’m hoping you can help me.”
“That is what I am here for.”
“I’m a private investigator from the United States, and I am looking for this woman,” he said, handing her a flyer.
She looked at it nervously. “Oh, my.”
“The woman, Li Lan, is an artist. A painter, to be precise.”
“Is she in some kind of trouble?”
Some kind.
“Oh, no, quite to the contrary. You see, I represent the Humboldt-Schmeer Gallery in Fort Worth. We would like to discuss a major showing of Miss Li’s work, but she seems to have changed her plac
e of residence and we cannot seem to locate her through normal channels. Hence the reason for my disturbing you. Would you, by any chance, happen to know her?”
“There are so many artists in Hong Kong, Mr. Carey…”
“As there should be in a place of such beauty.”
“I am afraid I do not know this one, and I am sure we do not sell her work.”
“Thank you for your time. May I leave this flyer with you, in case you should remember something?”
“Yes, of course.”
“My telephone number is right there.”
“In the hotel… very convenient.”
“There is of course a modest reward, and a healthy sum of money in it for Miss Li, if we can locate her.”
“I understand.”
So will Miss Li, if she gets the word. The name Neal Carey will ring a clanging bell. Hi, remember me? Last time you saw me I was dead.
He hit three more galleries in the next hour, working his way north up Nathan Road. None of them sold Li Lan’s paintings, nor had the staffs ever heard of her. Neal made a turn south and headed back down, picking up four more galleries on side streets before he got back to the hotel. The first clerk dismissed him perfunctorily as unlikely to buy anything, the second was a polite young Chinese man who displayed great interest but offered no useful information. The third was an avant-garde place where the young owner thought she might have met Li Lan at a gallery showing on the island once, and the fourth spoke no English at all, but took a flyer. During this entire walk, Neal caught a glimpse of Ben Chin only once, and another time he thought he saw the Doorman in a crowd of people in front of him.
Neal stopped at the hotel desk to check for messages. There weren’t any, so he headed south down Nathan Road, into the heart of the expensive tourist district of Tsimshatsui. The day had turned hot and sunny. Tourists, shoppers, and the regular denizens crowded the sidewalks. Neal visited three galleries within the next six blocks. Nobody in any of them had ever heard of an artist named Li Lan, and nobody recognized the woman in the photograph. Neal left the flyers behind.
