“Kiss me, Max,” she said as she leaned against him. “It doesn’t matter, colleagues or not.”
“You read minds.”
Her finger traced along his inner arm.
“Andra.”
“Max,” she repeated. “You think too much.” She cupped his head, pulling him down to her, and this time the kiss was lush and long, and when it ended only silence breathed between them.
“You’re right.” She breathed. “We shouldn’t have done that.”
His hand traced along her wrist and she shivered.
“This is craziness, all of it.”
“Maybe,” he replied, standing up. “In the meantime, there are few we can trust. The police have no interest in supposition and we have no time to wait for whatever is about to come to us.”
“What are you saying, Max?”
He went to the window. She followed. Her hand brushed against his.
Her gaze followed his into the distance, where outside a fringe of fog swirled around the stark decadence of Victoria Peak. “It’s unbelievable, really, a village of women.” She took a deep breath. “And the one man who says he has seen this village is threatened about reporting what he has seen.”
She sighed, turned around and picked up the satchel, pulling out the doll. She ran her fingers along the doll’s cloth body as he had done what seemed a million times before. The expression on her face changed from calm to surprise.
“Max! There’s something here.”
His fingers brushed lightly against hers as they ran along the age-thinned cloth. The spark from just that brief touch had him fighting not to take her in his arms and take her to places he had so far only imagined. He leaned closer and then felt something subtle yet foreign beneath the doll’s cloth body.
His heart pounded, no longer at the thought of her, but at the thought of what might be hidden inside the doll. “I can’t believe I didn’t feel it before.”
She got up and went over to a small dresser, where she pulled out a sewing kit. “This might be the secret Fu was trying to deliver.”
“I suspect it won’t be that easy,” Max assured her as she returned with a small plastic stitch ripper.
“I suppose you’re right,” she said as she picked up the doll and carefully began to remove inseam stitches. “I can’t imagine what’s here.” She stopped with the ripper poised in midair.
“You’re shaking. Do you want me to finish?”
“Please.” She passed the doll across her lap to his.
Minutes later he gingerly reached into the tiny space he’d created and touched the rough edge of silk and the hard edge of something else.
Her breath softly fanned his cheek as she crowded against him.
Cotton stuffing fell aside to reveal a small, intricately designed pouch. He pulled the drawstring and drew the pouch open. Inside was a small jump drive.
“I’ll get my laptop.” Andra jumped up.
Max turned the drive over between his fingers as she fired up the computer.
“Okay, she’s up. Pop it in.” Her words trembled with excitement.
“Only one file, a Word document and not very large. Interesting.”
“I didn’t expect this.” Andra pointed at the text that came up on the screen.
“Nushu,” Max clarified as the ancient text made by and for women flooded the screen.
“Can you read it?” she asked.
“I brought some translation text with me. I’ll get it.” But the ringing of his BlackBerry interrupted him and alerted him that he had mail.
Call me now.
The message was cryptic, but what did he expect from a ten-year-old? Max looked up at Andra.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I sent a picture of the doll to my niece. I’ll call her later.”
“What are you waiting for? Who knows what she may have.”
Still shaken by their discovery, his fingers slipped on the numbers and he had to try three times before he was through. On the third time, there was only one ring on the other end before a young and breathy voice answered like she had been waiting with the phone in hand for hours.
“Uncle Max. This is way beyond—like anything.” Britt’s words were rushed together, a tumble of excitement. “I sent you another email. There, just now. You should have it. Take a look, would you? I’ll hold.”
When he opened the mail that had only recently arrived from Britt, the picture that filled the computer screen took his breath away. “Britt, honey, where’d you find that?”
“It’s the same, isn’t it? Well, almost. Yours is just older. They’re all the thing. All the girls collect them and inside—”
“Inside.” His voice was a croak of disbelief. Whatever was going on here it was much deeper than just a lost language, and he was grateful for Andra at his side. “Slow down, I’m a little behind. How do you know this?”
“I have one just like it. Well, almost.”
“Almost?” His breath caught at what the child was saying. He’d sent her the picture only on the off chance that she’d seen something similar. That one of her friends had one was a long shot. He hadn’t expected this.
“Yeah. The dolls have a secret compartment that opens and where their heart should be there’s a message. But you can’t decipher it without going online.”
“Why?” Max held his breath and dreaded the answer.
“It’s written in Chinese or something. No. Wait. That’s wrong. My friend Tia says it’s not Chinese—”
“Cantonese,” Max interrupted.
“Yeah, right. Anyway. It’s not that because she can’t read it. She was born in Shanghai, you know.”
“And she speaks Mandarin,” Max supplied. The language of southern China was Cantonese and elsewhere Mandarin. Not that there weren’t a smattering of other Chinese dialects throughout the country.
“Where do you translate the notes?”
“Here.” A drawer slammed, paper crunched and for a moment there was only the child’s rapid breathing. “Okay, got it. Ready?”
“Ready.”
“At www.heartofourdream.com.” Was it possible? Find my heart. Find my girl. Heart of our dream. They were too similar. He scrawled the information down and behind him Andra sucked in her breath in a small gasp. It wasn’t just his imagination.
“Anyway, you go to the website and you get a name for your doll and a message. You see, Uncle Max, that’s the really crazy thing. They all look alike but they are all different. They all have a mark on the bottom of their foot that represents their name. Isn’t that awesome!”
“It is, Britt. And my doll may have a message?”
“Maybe.” The child paused. “Except she’s so old. Maybe not.”
“Maybe computers weren’t manufactured yet.”
“Uncle Max!” The child giggled. “Computers have been around forever.”
“Says you.” He chatted to the child for a while longer before hanging up.
“Unbelievable,” Andra breathed. “She said the doll she has was made in China? That part’s not unbelievable but the rest . . .”
“Precisely.” Max nodded. “A factory in China, possibly even here.”
“It won’t take long to find if there’s a manufacturer here.” She picked up her phone.
“What are you doing?”
“Calling a friend of mine with a daughter Britt’s age. If anyone knows whether the rage has made Hong Kong, she will.” She held the cell to her ear and waited, tapping her finger lightly.
“Rebecca? Andra here.” Andra nodded her head, silently listening as she smiled helplessly at Max.
Max got the hint that Rebecca was a bit of a talker.
“Look, got a question for you. I heard about this fad that was going on in the States and I was looking for a doll for a friend’s child. Thought you might know if you can get the thing here.”
She was silent for a full minute, nodded a few times and tapped her foot.
“Reall
y. That’s fantastic.” Andra was writing something down. “Thanks. We’ll talk soon.”
She stood up and stretched and looked at him with a hint of a smile. In fact, to Max she appeared inordinately pleased with herself.
“There’s one here.” She crossed her arms, as if warding off what was coming next. “In fact, Rebecca has been at the factory. Her daughter’s last birthday party included a tour. She even gave me the address.” She dropped her arms and shrugged her shoulders, rolling them slowly, and grimaced.
“I’m going to see if I can get us into it.”
“What?” He frowned. “The factory?”
“Exactly. The number should be listed. Here.” She began to punch in numbers and in seconds was deep in conversation.
“Well,” he asked after she’d disconnected.
“The manager will meet us later this evening. Just at closing.”
“Brilliant strategy, by the way,” Max replied. “I don’t know if I would have thought to say we were foreign buyers.”
“Providing he believed me. Short notice, is that plausible?” She frowned. “I should make one other call. We need a safe place here in Hong Kong, just in case. I have a friend in Aberdeen.”
“Aberdeen?”
“We discussed that. Max, I think our initial thought was right. We can’t stay here no matter what we’re threatened with. And the police, they’re never going to take the doll or any of our assumptions as anything but that . . .”
“I know the authorities told you to stay put. For tonight possibly, but after that . . . we don’t know where this thing is going. Okay, call them.”
Andra punched in another number, and after a short conversation she tucked the phone into her pocket. “Done. There’s a sampan we can stay on there. At least until things cool down and we come up with a more long-term plan.”
“So tomorrow we’re out of here. I can live with that.”
“We have a plan.”
“We do. Now, let’s get back to this code,” he said and sat down in front of the computer.
A minute later they stared at the screen in frustrated silence. The website was down.
“What’s the luck of that?” He pushed a strand of hair off his forehead and pushed the chair back.
“I can’t believe it.” She looked at him. “We can try to get into the website later. In the meantime, let’s take a look at what’s on the drive.”
“I can’t believe they got Nushu into Word. How?”
“Asia’s full of tech gurus,” Andra reminded him.
“Who might be familiar with Nushu? Seems improbable.”
Andra plopped back on her hands. “It was sent to the only man in the world who might be able to translate.”
“True. Who knows the only woman able to decode what he can’t.” He smiled and he forced his gaze from her lips to her eyes. “You’ll do,” he said gently.
“They aren’t letters but a sequence of numbers,” Andra said five minutes later as she leaned closer and the scent of cinnamon, lemons and something else, subtle and unidentifiable and alluring, drifted around him. He took a deep breath as she focused and the oddly delicate and familiar-looking characters drifted in easy precision across the screen.
“Look here.” The screen wavered and rippled as he touched it, pointing to one set of characters. He turned around. “Anything familiar.”
She shook her head. “I’ll write down the sequences. I don’t know what it means but at least it’s a very good start.”
“Can you decipher them?”
“Given time, I would say yes,” she replied without hesitation. “This is just my initial thought, but do you think these numbers indicate that they may have expanded the language?”
“Nushu is written in verse. Numbers aren’t so prevalent, or maybe they didn’t even exist.” He sighed and turned around to face her. “Until now.” He shrugged.
“We’ll crack this code if it’s the last thing we do.”
“I’d prefer it if you didn’t quite phrase it that way. Seriously, Andra, the possibility of danger is becoming more real the further we venture into this. And I won’t let anything happen to you.”
“Max, I’m not helpless.”
“Maybe not.”
“Definitely not.” She swung back to the computer screen.
He sat down beside her and together they began to go over the possibilities. Max rearranged characters and re-created connections between words, thinking it might be some kind of cryptography or an anagram. After a while the language began to feel like the only reality. The melodic flow of Nushu was delicate, but there was also a rhythm and precision about it that was finally allowing him to make some headway.
“I’ve got something.” Excitement put an edge to his voice. “She makes reference to a village of women exactly as you thought and as Xiu confirmed.”
“Any idea of the location?” Andra leaned over, her chin in her hand.
He turned around to look at her. “Unfortunately, that would be too easy. But there’s something else. It appears that Fu may have had a daughter. And according to this, time is short.”
“Unbelievable!” Andra hung over his shoulder. Her hand rested lightly on his arm. “And if you apply these numbers”—she tapped her notebook where she’d been scribbling for the last few minutes—“it translates to a name! A simplistic code but very effective.”
The silken warmth of her skin on his was all he could register and he quietly savored it, his thoughts far from dolls and mysterious villages.
“Mia Liu, or more correctly, Liu Mia,” Andra decoded, putting the surname first, as was the custom in Chinese culture. “The daughter’s name.”
“And it’s more than likely not her name now.”
“I don’t know, Max. I had a few friends who were adopted out of China and only one of them didn’t keep her original given name, at least as a second name. One even kept her last name as her third name.”
“We couldn’t be that lucky,” Max replied. “And Liu is one of the most common surnames in China.”
“Mia, my girl,” Andra said, “watch out, we’re going to find you.”
Max sighed. “I wish I had your ability to believe on a thread of evidence, or for that matter, your optimism.”
“You don’t need it,” Andra replied. “You have me.”
She stood up when all he wanted to do was pull her against him and hold her forever. Instead, as she walked away fully engrossed in the mystery, he could only listen to her words play over and over in his mind. You have me.
And he truly wished he did.
• • •
Le gazed out the window to where the nearby craggy peak of Mount Victoria had given him so much peace. Their lives had not followed parallel lines, for unlike him, Fu had found her peace in the distant empire she’d built.
On his terrace, red and white lotus flowers bordered the koi pond that shimmered dark and mysterious in the heat of the late afternoon. Beyond that Hong Kong spread in layers, the old world floating at an easier pace against a backdrop of business and modern technology. Le registered it all in a sweeping look that missed nothing.
He was Le and people feared him—for good reason.
Not Fu. He had been a boy when he had known her, and she hadn’t feared him then and he knew she wouldn’t fear him now. At the thought of Fu a hard knot settled in the back of his throat, an overwhelming ache. He had received word of her death only weeks ago. She was the love of his lifetime. And only one thing mattered now that she was gone, and that was her last wish. Nothing would stand in his way to make it happen.
Chapter Ten
“The manager said he’d meet us here at closing,” Andra said later that evening as she glanced at her watch. They stood just off what looked like an alley, in a parking lot where the pavement was dark and unsteady with years of exhaust and grease. Ten feet in front of them was the warehouse, a low-slung, one-story brick building with a few smog-glazed windows as its only adornment.
“I have my doubts whether Mr. Harry Lord will show as requested. I’m not sure he bought my story. And on top of that I’m one hundred percent sure he’s a chauvinist.” She chuckled. “‘Sure, honey, I’ll try to be there,’” she said in a poor imitation of a throaty growl. “We may be stood up.”
“You’ve been sure of that from the beginning.”
“You know, Max, I put in a stint with an investigator while I was in college. One thing that taught me was how to read people.”
“An investigator?” There was disbelief in his voice. “Tell me you’re kidding.”
“I wish I was.” She laughed. “An unusual part-time job. My father hated the idea of me working at all but I wanted to experience life. Or so I thought at the time. Besides, I had an uncle in the business. He taught me a lot.” She smiled at him. “And it looks like it’s finally going to come to good use.”
They walked over to the building. It was their second approach. The first time they had found the front doors locked and no one there to meet them.
She peered into a window. “This place is locked up tight.” She looked at her watch. “And we’ve been waiting here fifteen minutes past the assigned time. He isn’t going to show.”
“It makes no sense. If the factory is open to tours, why would the manager agree to meet us and fail to show?”
The factory’s whitewashed brick exterior glowed in the light spilling from the nearby streetlight. Around them, the unvarnished, short-storied brick warehouses that crowded the area were crusted with city grime. Piles of pipe and discarded steel were stacked in front of the closest warehouse in a large area. A rusted forklift sat in the midst of it all like it had been planted ages ago. The acrid smell of plastics mixed with the slightly rancid smell of mildewed wood and oil made it hard to breathe.
“I don’t trust this, Max. The place shouldn’t be dark like this. Not if he were waiting for us.” She turned around. “Max, give me the flashlight, please.”
He handed it over and she took it, pulled a crate up to the window and stepped on it. “Oh, my God, there’s someone in there.”
Legacy of Fear Page 6
