by S. J. Rozan
“Who called what?”
“Flower houses.”
“How would I know?”
“Uh-huh. ‘When we were leaving (the Sikh winked again!) Kai-rong asked if I’d enjoyed myself and whether I was happy. I said yes yes yes! I had a wonderful time!
“ ‘But if by happy, he meant satisfied-no, I’m not satisfied. Tomorrow I’ll be expected to resume my life as prisoner. Calligraphy, embroidery- no no no no no!!! Crowds, music, laughter-this is the life I want! And the life I’ll have.’ ”
Turning the page, I found a new date, which meant a new entry. I closed the book and took a breath.
“You’re stopping?” Bill protested. “I want to know if she got it.”
“Got what?”
“The life she wanted.”
“You’ll have to wait. This translation stuff is tiring, you know.”
“Even for a genius?”
“I’m immune to flattery.”
Barely audible above the swirling voices and Cantopop Muzak, my phone chirped the ringtone of an unfamiliar number. Who invented this device, I wondered, and did he really do us a favor? Well, maybe he did. The caller turned out to be Anita Horowitz.
“When Zayde was dozing I opened the box. There’s a set of letters. They’re mostly from Rosalie to her mother, but they’re in German, so I can’t read them. And there’s one from someone else to her, in German, too. That one was mailed to her in Shanghai, General Delivery, but the ones to her mother don’t have addresses or stamps. They were never mailed.”
“No?” I thought about that. “Anita, I’d love to read them.” For the case, of course. Strictly for the case. “May I?”
“If you think it would help. I can make copies when I pick up my son from Little League. Zayde won’t notice them gone for that short a time. Can you come out and get them?”
“Absolutely! Thanks!”
When I clicked off, Bill asked, “What are you so excited about?”
I told him what Anita had found. “Though I have to admit I’m not so excited about driving back out to New Jersey right now. And I think my mother wants me home for dinner.”
“Your mother always wants you home for dinner.”
“Yes, but…” He was right, of course. At a loss to explain what was different now, I settled for “I’ve been away.” Which, I realized, was the same nonexplanation I’d offered Joel about Bill.
“I’ll go.”
“Back to Teaneck? By yourself?”
“It’s my fate. To be alone, solitary, by myself, while you-”
“Don’t start that stuff.”
“Oh, okay. But I’m the one who reads German. I’ll go get the letters and settle in with my German-English dictionary.”
“Sounds cozy.”
“Not as cozy as-oh, right. Never mind. You go home and rack up karma points by having dinner with your mother.” He gave me a smile and a kiss on the cheek, and left me at Tai-Pan.
19
I called my mother on the way home to ask if we needed anything. She seemed a little thrown; maybe it was the “we.” She recovered fast, though, and assigned me choy sum, peanuts, and soft tofu.
Making tofu’s a cottage industry in Chinatown. Everyone has a favorite back room, basement, or fourth-floor walk-up where someone’s granny stirs vats and scoops the silky stuff into a container you bring along. The place I like is a Baxter Street hole-in-the-wall. If the route there took me right by Bright Hopes, was that my fault? I told myself I wouldn’t go in unless I saw Mr. Chen out on the shop floor.
I didn’t. In fact, the shop was already closed. I turned up Baxter, but I was hit by a nagging sense I’d seen and ignored a familiar face. I don’t like to be rude unless I mean to be, so I looked over my shoulder, scanning the choreography of the street. No, I was wrong.
No, I was right. Not someone I knew. But a familiar round face, with what must be a seriously guilty conscience: As soon as our eyes met, he was off.
“Wong Pan!” I surged past three teenage girls whose linked elbows dammed the sidewalk. “Wait!”
For a fat man, he could move. He cut through traffic and I charged after, jay-running across Canal. “Wong Pan!” Had he found Mr. Chen? Had they spoken, made a deal? Knowing Wong Pan was likely a killer, would Mr. Chen do that?
For his mother’s jewelry? Damn right he would.
“Stop!” I yelled, but of course Wong Pan didn’t stop. No one stopped him for me, either; by the time my shouts registered, people had already sidestepped out of his way. I was gaining on him, though. He slipped down Walker and turned on Lafayette. Just before the courthouse I went into overdrive, did a broad jump, and got hold of his shirt. I spun him around and threw us both off balance. He grabbed me, we did a jig, neither of us fell, and then one of us felt a gun in her ribs.
I stopped moving. “You won’t shoot me here.”
“I shoot you where I have to.” He put an arm around me. His gun lurked under my jacket. “Smile like you glad see me.”
“I am glad to see you. I’ve been looking for you. You killed my friend.” I showed my teeth in imitation of Mulgrew.
“I kill you, too. Stay away. Don’t wanting more trouble.”
“No, you have enough already. This would be the time to turn yourself in.”
He laughed like ice cracking. I was never so lonely for my gun in my life. “Sorry, your friend.” He shoved his moon face close to my ear. “All I want is get my money, go away. You leave me alone, no one else get hurt, too. You don’t, remember this: For me, nothing to lose.”
A sudden hard push and I was face-to-face with a brick wall. By the time I spun around, Wong Pan was gone.
* * *
I don’t know if it was true about the karma points for eating dinner with my mother, but I hoped so, because I needed them. Mary, hearing what had happened, hit the roof.
“You let him get away?”
“He pulled a gun and mashed me into a wall!”
“So? You were okay with chasing him down the street without calling us, why not try for the collar, too?”
“I didn’t have time to call you!” Stop, Lydia. Breathe. “You’re right. I’m sorry. But Mary, anyway, now we know for sure he’s here. And that he killed Joel.”
“That’s supposed to make me feel better, a known killer on the loose?”
“And we know he knows about Mr. Chen.”
“No, we don’t.”
“What else was he doing down here?”
“What you thought originally he’d be doing. Trying to sell his jewelry.”
“Rosalie’s jewelry.”
“What?”
“Nothing. But what if he does know about Mr. Chen? Or finds out? They could have a secret deal.”
“You’re asking me to put a surveillance on Chen?”
“I wouldn’t ask you for the time of day.”
“You wouldn’t get it, either. But it’s not a bad idea. Even if it was yours. You think you can stay out of trouble until morning?”
She hung up without my answer. I think she was afraid of what I’d say.
On the way to actually pick up the tofu, I called Bill and filled him in. Unlike Mary, he was neither surprised nor annoyed that I’d chased an armed suspect down the street.
“It’s unlike you to lose him, though.”
“It’s the jet lag. Do you think I should warn Mr. Chen? Tell him not to do business with him and call if he turns up?”
“Of course.”
“Do you think it’ll do any good?”
“No.”
It especially wouldn’t do any good if Mr. Chen didn’t pick up his voice mail, because that was as close to him as I got.
Dinner, though delayed, was delicious. I didn’t tell my mother about Wong Pan. We talked about some cousins in the Philippines she’d just heard from, and others in Sidney who never write. I mentioned seeing Clifford Kwan, at which my mother heaved a major sigh about the grief Clifford caused his mother by being willful and selfish. Se
nsing landmines, I steered the conversation elsewhere: the progress of the melons in Ted’s backyard. After dinner she cleared the table while I did the dishes, with minimal instruction from her on which was the dish sponge as opposed to the counter sponge, and how hot the water had to be.
The sky’s vibrant blue had softened to lilac and I’d just dropped the sheaf of diary Xeroxes on my desk when the Bonanza song rang out. “I’m going to have to give you a new ringtone,” I told Bill. “That one’s getting on my nerves.”
“If I apologize, will you meet me uptown?”
“I won’t accept that apology because you had nothing to do with the ringtone. Does that mean I can stay home?”
Apparently it didn’t. “Half an hour. At Columbia. To see a friend of a friend.”
Once, you had to pass a gate to get onto the Columbia campus, a placid academic island amid Manhattan’s surf and riptides. Now university buildings line Broadway and the side streets, too. But the gate still stands, opening ornamentally, if unnecessarily, to the old quad. I met Bill there.
“It took a lot of blind faith to get me out again tonight,” I informed him.
“I appreciate that. Dr. Edwards called me right before I called you. He’s a busy guy, but he has time tonight after his evening class. You okay?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Something about your face meeting a brick wall.”
“I’m fine. Just a little furious. This Dr. Edwards is who?”
“Remember I said I was calling a friend? One of the handball regulars is a Columbia prof.”
“This is him?”
“A friend of his. The go-to guy on modern Chinese history.”
A lamplit brick walk, a security guard, and an elevator later, Bill and I poked our heads into a book-lined office. Book-paved, and pretty much book-furnished, too, except for the computer on the desk and the Manchu ancestor painting on the wall. Though if the rangy sixtyish man whose cowboy boots rested on the desk was Bill’s friend’s friend, they weren’t his ancestors. Unless black Africans had come farther along the Silk Road than I knew. Admittedly, they weren’t my ancestors either: The eyes and hair were the same, but the pale skins and formal silks marked these people as aristocrats, from a time when my ocher-faced forebears would have been lucky to find burlap to tuck around themselves while they worked the fields.
At the rap of Bill’s knuckles the man lifted his eyes from a lapfull of papers. “Hey! You Smith? This your partner?” He swung his boots off the desk and shook hands with us both. “William Edwards.” He bustled around, shifting books to the floor. “Go on, sit. They’ll behave.”
“The books?” Bill asked.
“They like chairs better, but they’re adaptable. So you’re a friend of Larry’s?”
“Handball.”
“Is he as cutthroat there as here?”
“He kills me.”
“And then stands over your corpse and cackles, right? So. Larry the molecular biologist tells me you’re interested in a minor CCP official from the early years of the People’s Republic. Like he knows what that means. He doesn’t know what any sentence means that doesn’t include the words ‘electron microscope.’ ”
“He says you’re the expert.”
“Wonder what that’s gonna cost me? But hey, a call for book-larnin’! Let’s get it done before Google digitizes everything and I’m obsolete.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “A minor CCP official?”
Professor Edwards tapped the pile of books at his elbow. Some had English titles, some Chinese. From what I could see they were summaries of reports on this, minutes of meetings of that, and proceedings of plenary sessions about the other. “When Larry speaks, I jump. Reason I didn’t call until tonight, I was busy looking your boy up.”
“Our boy?”
“Chen Kai-rong.”
“He’s in there?” I was surprised.
“References to him. Sketchy, but better than a poke in the eye. You guys are really detectives? How come you’re interested in stuff I can’t even get my students to care about, and if they don’t care they don’t pass?”
Bill looked to me to take the lead, so I said, “We have a case. Everything about it seems to point to what went on back then, but we don’t know much about then. I didn’t even know Chen Kai-rong was a Communist Party member, much less an official.”
Dr. Edwards nodded. “Intelligence Services. Though even with that, his background would’ve made him a shooting gallery duck during the Cultural Revolution. Reading between the lines, he was in for some serious reeducation in the countryside, and he’d have been wiped from the historical record. But he was lucky, he died.”
I wasn’t sure that meant Chen Kai-rong was lucky, but if it meant there was information on him, maybe we were.
“When did he die?”
Professor Edwards consulted a sheet of scribbled notes. Like the books, some were in English, some in Chinese. I guessed it had to do with the text he was taking them from. “In 1966. Just as the Red Guards picked up steam. According to the Party press release, ‘he struggled heroically against a short, powerful illness.’ That wording would’ve meant heart disease or cancer.”
“Any reason to think otherwise?” Bill asked.
“Hah! You mean foul play?”
“I’m not sure what I mean. Just wondering.”
“I don’t think so. They had other press releases for that. Worded one way, they did it; another way, someone else did. I’d say this fellow died of natural causes.”
“What in his background would have brought the Red Guards down on him?” I asked. “His European wife?”
“That wouldn’t have helped, though it looks like she was long dead by then. You know about her? Rosalie Gilder? I didn’t find much on her, besides letters cross-referenced at the Jewish Museum.”
“We have those.”
“Cool. I did dig up an internal CCP report that says they had a son, who by the way Chen sent to the U.S. not long before he died. Chen died, I mean, not the son. That was a good call-the Red Guards wouldn’t have found a Eurasian endearing. And furthermore, Chen was raising, and also sent here, a nephew, his sister’s son, whose father was a Nationalist general who further furthermore had been a collaborationist general-and was once accused of being a Commie spy, which the Red Guards would have liked but it was a big fat lie-before he, the general, switched horses in mid-war.”
“Wait,” said Bill. “I’m lost.”
“Larry always complains about that, too. It’s the dazzling footwork.”
“I followed the son and the nephew,” I said, “but the General? General Zhang was accused of being a Communist?”
“In ’forty-three. He was fingered to the Japanese as a Red spy. He escaped and ran like hell to Chongqing to prostrate himself and his money at the feet of Chiang Kai-shek. Listen, you know all these people? What do you need me for? Did Larry send you here to flatter me for some nefarious reason? He wants my chair, tell him he’s gonna have to learn Chinese.”
“I’ll mention it,” Bill said. “We do know something about these people-General Zhang, Chen Kai-rong, and Rosalie Gilder. A little about Kai-rong’s sister, Mei-lin, too. We’re trying to fill in the blanks.”
“What’s blank?”
“For one thing, we know Kai-rong left Shanghai in 1943,” I said. “ ‘Fled’ was how it was put. But not why.”
“Hah! I can help you with that. And the answer to your first question-the stain on his revolutionary rep-is in the answer to this one, too! There, was that melodramatic enough?” He yanked out a volume and with a warning finger dared the rest of the pile to crash to the floor. It didn’t.
“Okay.” He flipped pages. “In my hand, a compendium of intelligence reports from the U.S. Navy base at Qingdao. Where the beer comes from. German breweries nationalized by Mao. Irrelevant to your boy, but the best thing about Qingdao. During World War II, the U.S., as I’m sure you know”-with a stern look that said he was sure we didn�
��t know-“was in China, training and supporting Chiang Kai-shek’s troops against the Japanese. After the war Chiang went back to the brawl that really interested him: arm-wrestling Mao. Chiang showed us love, so we stayed, in the business of holding Chiang’s coat, until even the blind-meaning the U.S. military-could see Chiang was headed for the hard fall. Then we cleared out, end of ’forty-eight. With me so far?”
I felt like turning down the speed on the fan, but there wasn’t any fan. “Yes.”
“The U.S. Navy not being allowed to blow stuff up, they needed a hobby. They whiled away their time seeing which trusted comrades were double-agent material. Your boy was one they looked at.”
“Chen Kai-rong was a double agent?”
“No. They thought about flipping him, but they changed their minds.” He tilted his chair back, clomped his boots onto the desk, and cleared his throat theatrically. “ ‘August 30, 1948. File report on Chen Kai-rong, Lieutenant, People’s Liberation Army (formerly Red Army). Born: 1917. Home: Shanghai. Father, Chen Da, merchant. Mother died 1929. Sister, Chen Mei-lin, born 1922, married 1939 to Zhang Yi, General, Nationalist Army, formerly General, Army under Wang Jingwei.’ You know who that was?”
“The puppet government leader,” Bill said.
Oh, you’re so smart, I thought. I bet you just read that yesterday.
“I just read that yesterday.”
“In my book?”
“Yes.”
“Ding ding ding ding ding! So you get it, this General Zhang was a collaborator. ‘Chen joined CCP secretly, 1935. Sent by father to Oxford, 1936. Returned to Shanghai 1938. Married Rosalie Gilder, Austrian Jewish refugee, 1942. One son, Lao-li. Also raising sister’s son, Zhang Li.
“ ‘Chen holds Lieutenant’s rank but work for CCP has been in intelligence. In guise of war profiteer, made numerous trips to Japanese-occupied territory 1938-1943, as courier between Red Army and Shanghai CCP station. Very successful in concealing CCP involvement during that time. However, February 23, 1943, arrested, presumably on a tip (unconfirmed) and taken to Number 76.’ ” Dr. Edwards looked up. “Number 76. You know what that was?”
