Walking Shadow

by Robert B. Parker

  "Yeah, it is," I said.

  "But it probably got Craig Sampson killed."

  CHAPTER 36

  "We are going to a gong sifong," Mei Ling said. It was early evening. We were in Hawk's Jaguar, in Boston, parked on Harrison Ave down back of the Tufts Medical Center, mid Chinatown, outside of a large red brick city housing project.

  "Chinese lady has a rent-controlled apartment, and she has turned it into a place for bachelors. It is, of course, illegal," Mei Ling said.

  "I'm shocked," I said.

  "My cousin lives here with nine other men. Everyone else here is a waiter, they have gone to work. I have promised him you will not tell anyone."

  "Promise," I said.

  "Any good takeout around here, Mei Ling?" Vinnie said.

  "I don't know," she said.

  "I have never come here to eat."

  "Place on the corner looks all right," Vinnie said.

  "Chicken with cashews?"

  Hawk nodded. He looked at Mei Ling. She smiled.

  "We be here, Missy," he said.

  Mei Ling nodded and got out with me. Vinnie got out too, and we headed toward the Bo Shin restaurant on the corner of Kneeland. We went into the apartment building. The gong sifong was on the third floor. There was no elevator.

  "Many Chinese men who come here cannot afford to bring their wives," Mei Ling said, as we walked up the stairs, "especially the illegal ones."

  "Your cousin illegal?"

  "Yes, sir. They come here, live as cheaply as they can, pay off the smugglers, send money home, and save up to open a business and bring their family."

  The building had all the usual public housing charm. No expense had been spared on cinder block and linoleum and wire mesh over the ceiling fixtures. We knocked on a blank door with no number, and a slight Chinese man in a white shirt and black pants opened the door and smiled at us and bowed. Mei Ling spoke to him in Chinese.

  "My cousin's name is Liang," Mei Ling said to me.

  Liang bowed again and put his hand out.

  "How do you do?" he said.

  I shook his hand. He backed away from the door and gestured us in. For a minute I was disoriented. The entry door led almost at once to a blank plywood wall. A hallway ran right and left, parallel to the outside corridor, punctuated with plywood doors, padlocked shut. The only light came from the bare bulb in a wall sconce at the far end. Liang led us along the plywood hallway to the last door and into his room. It was so narrow I could have touched both walls with my fingertips. It was maybe seven feet long and was filled almost entirely with a pair of bunk beds, one above the other. There were two suitcases under the bed, and several shirts and pants on hangers flat against the wall. Light came from one of those portable construction lights with spring clamps attached to the head frame of the bunks. I had seen better-looking graves.

  "How much you pay for this?" I said.

  Liang looked at Mei Ling. She translated. He answered. "Liang pays one hundred dollars a month," she said.

  "So does the other man." She nodded at the top bunk.

  "And there's four other cubicles like this?" I said.

  Mei Ling translated. Liang nodded.

  "Rent-controlled, the place costs the landlord maybe two, two fifty a month," I said more to myself than to Mei Ling. There were no surprises here for Mei Ling.

  "Gives her seven fifty, eight hundred a month profit."

  Liang spoke to Mei Ling.

  "He wants to show us the rest," Mei Ling said and we followed him along the hall to the kitchen. There was an ancient gas refrigerator in there, and a gas stove, and a darkly stained porcelain sink.

  The faucet dripped into the sink. The refrigerator didn't work. The stove did, but there was no evidence that anyone used it. Past the kitchen was a toilet with no seat, and a shower stall with no curtain.

  "He got a job?" I said to Mei Ling.

  "Yes. He sells fruits and vegetables," she said.

  "From a stand. He could afford to live better, but he doesn't choose to. He chooses to save his money."

  She spoke to Liang. He answered with a lot of animation.

  "He earned $31,000 last year, and saved $25,000. He pays no taxes. He has already paid off the smuggling fee. Next year he says he will bring his wife from China."

  "Ask him how he got here," I said.

  Mei Ling talked. Liang looked at me covertly as she spoke. He answered her. She shook her head. Spoke again. Liang nodded and spoke for several minutes.

  "Liang is from Fujian Province," Mei Ling said.

  "He saw the local official, who arranges such things. He sent Liang to Hong Kong, and then to Bangkok. From Bangkok, Liang flew to Nicaragua. He went in a truck to Vera Cruz, Mexico, and went on a boat to the United States."

  "Where'd he land?" I said.

  "Liang was brought ashore in a small boat at night in Port City.

  He stayed there for a week and then came to Boston. The trip took him three months."

  We were standing in the dismal kitchen, with the steady drip of the leaky faucet the only sound other than our voices. Several cockroaches scuttled across the one countertop and disappeared behind the stove. I looked at Liang. He smiled politely.

  "Three months," I said.

  "Some it takes much longer," Mei Ling said.

  "They have to stop each place and work. Some have to smuggle narcotics, or go back and smuggle others in to pay for their passage. If there are women, they often have to be prostitutes to pay."

  "Does he know the name of the man in Port City in charge of the smuggling?"

  She spoke to Liang. Liang shook his head.

  "He says he doesn't," Mei Ling said.

  "You believe him?"

  "I don't know," Mei Ling said.

  "But I know he will not tell you."

  "Lonnie Wu?" I said.

  Liang looked blank.

  "Of course it is," I said.

  "We all know it. But even if Liang would tell me it was, he wouldn't say so in court."

  "Yes, sir," Mei Ling said.

  "That is true."

  I looked around me.

  "This was originally a studio apartment," I said.

  "Now ten men live here."

  "Yes, sir."

  I shook my head. I wanted to say something about how this wasn't the way it should be. But I knew too much and had lived too long to start talking now about "should."

  "Send me your huddled masses," I said.

  "Yearning to breathe free."

  CHAPTER 37

  Most of the people who came to Brant Island, north of Port City, did so in the daytime, and came to watch birds. They crossed the narrow causeway in the sunshine and went to the rustic gazebo with their binoculars and waited to catch sight of a bird they'd never seen before. It was deep black when we came. And cold. Vinnie stayed with the car, parked out of sight off the road behind some scrub white pines and beach plum bushes. Hawk and I walked to the island with Mei Ling between us. There was no moon. The island was only about a hundred feet from shore, but the steady wash of the ocean against the causeway and the cold press of the darkness made it seem remote. It was our fourth night of watching, and the first in which there was no moon. We reached the little gazebo. It offered a vantage point but very little in protection from the cold wind off the water. Hawk leaned against one of the columns that held the gazebo's roof up, and Mei Ling stood very close to him, her hands pushed as deep as she could get them into the pockets of her down coat. I began to look at the ocean through a night scope.

  "How can he see?" Mei Ling said to Hawk.

  "Off a nine-volt alkaline battery in the handle," Hawk said. I glanced at him. Like that explained it. He grinned. And Mei Ling looked at him as if now she understood. I went back to looking at the ocean. The sea sound was loud where I stood. But in the surreal circular imagery of the scope, the waves moved silently. If they came once a month and this was our fourth night, our chances were about one in seven. Maybe better since
there was no moon.

  "What does he expect to learn here?" Mei Ling said.

  She didn't address me directly because in her view I was busy, and shouldn't be interrupted. The result was that she talked about me as if I weren't there.

  "Won't know," Hawk said, "till we see it."

  "But to come out here every night and watch the ocean. They might not come for weeks."

  "They might not," Hawk said.

  "They might have showed up the first night," I said.

  The surface of the water was never still, alternately engorged and prolapsed, smoothing, ruffling, cresting as it came to shore, until the waves fragmented on the rocks, and yet always waves forming and coming on, always changing, always the same… Maybe two hundred yards out on the dark ocean, dark against the dark sky, was the opaque silhouette of a ship. There was no arrival. It simply appeared in the lens and sat motionless. I took the scope down and handed it to Hawk.

  "On the horizon," I said, "about one o'clock."

  Hawk looked, swept the scope slowly along the horizon and stopped and made a small adjustment and held.

  "Yessiree bob," he said in a flat, midwestern twang. Hawk could sound like anyone he wanted to. He handed the scope to Mei Ling.

  "On the horizon," he said.

  "Around where one o'clock would be if it were a clock face."

  Mei Ling looked. It took her a minute, but she found it. She seemed thrilled.

  "Doesn't have to be smuggling immigrants," I said.

  "No, it doesn't," Hawk said.

  We waited in the darkness and the wind and the cold with the waves moving below us. We took turns looking through the glass, and then, finally, we heard the soft thump of an engine. We couldn't find it until it was close and then we picked it up. It was a wide flat launch open to the elements with the engine housing in the middle of the boat. Crowded tight into it were people. The engine thump was the only sound the boat made. The people were silent. The boat bumped in close to the rocks, so close that I could see the buffer bags that the crew tossed over to fend off the rocks. The boat motor kept running, and the boat stayed headed in against the jumble of granite that helped form the breakwater below us. The people scrambled off, most of them carrying nothing, a few carrying small suitcases or paper bags, or small bundles. It looked dangerous.

  We stayed motionless in the gazebo, watching the dark figures in the night, only a few yards away. They were barely visible. No one spoke. They moved in a single file along the rocks and up onto the causeway. Someone led them across the causeway. There might have been a hundred of them. When the last of them scrambled up the rocks, the launch backed away and moved slowly parallel to the shore, south around the point opposite Brant Island and out of sight. I looked through the scope at the horizon. The ship was gone. I glanced at the causeway. The people were gone.

  The cove below Brant Island was empty and soundless except for the ocean, which was ceaseless.

  All of us were quiet as if in the aftermath of a somber ritual we neither sought nor understood. The ghostly procession drifting soundless and phantasmagoric through the near-lightless night seemed more than merely illegal immigrants, though surely they were that. There was something antediluvian in the spectral progress from the sea to the shore and into the darkness that all three of us must have felt though none of us spoke of it.

  "The last boat from Xanadu," I said.

  CHAPTER 38

  When I went through my office mail I always made a pile of mail that I intended to open, a pile of the bills to be paid on the thirtieth of the month, and threw away the junk mail unopened. There was always a lot of junk mail. There was a package wrapped in brown paper, with no return address on it. It had been addressed in green ink, and been mailed in Boston two days prior. I put it in the mail-to-be-opened pile. Vinnie and Hawk were there. Vinnie was cleaning his shotgun.

  "Fucking barrel's going to rust through, we don't stop going to Port City," Vinnie said. Hawk was reading his book. He nodded without taking his eyes from the page.

  "What's the name of the book," Vinnie said. He wasn't wearing his Walkman and he was restless.

  "On Race," Hawk said.

  "Yeah. How come you reading that?"

  "The brother's a smart man," Hawk said.

  "That racial shit bother you?" Vinnie said.

  I was done with the throw-away mail and turned to the package.

  The envelopes that might have checks, I saved for last.

  "You got a problem with me being black, Vinnie?"

  "No."

  "Me either. So at the moment I got no racial shit to be bothered by, you know? I try to work on that level."

  I opened the package. It was a videotape cassette. It was labeled "Jocelyn Colby." I turned it over. There was nothing else. I didn't have a videotape player.

  "Either of you got a VCR?" I said.

  Hawk shook his head.

  "Already seen "Debbie Does Dallas,"

  " he said.

  "I had one," Vinnie said.

  "Old lady took it with her when she split."

  Hawk said, "Didn't know you was married, Vinnie."

  Vinnie grinned.

  "I didn't either," he said.

  "Probably why she split."

  I picked up the phone and called Susan.

  "I have a video tape that I would like to view on your machine," I said when she answered.

  "If I brought an elegant lunch, perhaps you'd like to take a break from healing the loony and watch it with " me.

  "It's not one of those disgusting porn thingies, is it?"

  "I don't know, it came in the mail and it says Jocelyn Colby on it."

  "I have a two-hour break," Susan said.

  "One to three."

  "You disappointed it's not a disgusting porn thingie?" I said.

  "Yes," she said and hung up.

  Hawk and Vinnie dropped me off and waited out front. I went in her side door and had fed some of the elegant lunch to Pearl while I waited. When Susan came up the front stairs from her office at five past one, I had the tape in the VCR. And the elegant lunch laid out on one of the upper shelves in her book case, to discourage Pearl. Susan kissed me, kissed Pearl, and looked at the lunch.

  "Is this a submarine sandwich I see before me?" she said.

  "Yes," I said.

  "No onions."

  "Elegant."

  When she was working she was much less flamboyant in her makeup and clothes.

  "I am not the focus of the therapy," she said when I once asked her about it. Today she wore a dark blue pants suit with a white blouse and pearls. Her makeup was discreet."

  "Even if I were sane," I said, "I'd spend $100 an hour just to come and look at you."

  "It's a hundred and a quarter, but I could get you a rate," she said. She went to the kitchen and came back with two place mats, knives and forks, and cloth napkins. She laid out our lunch on the coffee table.

  "There's napkins with the subs," I said.

  Susan looked at me pityingly, and then turned to glare at Pearl, who was stalking the sandwiches. Pearl seemed at ease with the glare, but she didn't get closer. I pointed at the cassette in the VCR.

  "Do you know what's on it?" Susan said.

  "Nope, I was waiting for you."

  Susan slipped a sliced pickle out of her sandwich and took a bite of it.

  "Roll 'em," she said.

  I pressed the play button on the remote control and there was a moment while the VCR cranked up that the tape ran for a while with nothing on it, then suddenly there was Jocelyn Colby tied to a chair with a white scarf over her mouth. She squirmed against the ropes, her eyes, above the scarf, wide with fear. And that was it.

  The tape ran for about five minutes. There was no sound except the muffled noise she was able to make through the scarf, no message, merely the picture of Jocelyn struggling in captivity. The screen went blank though the tape continued to roll. After it had rolled blankly far enough to persuade me it contained
nothing else, I stopped it, and rewound it.

  "There was someone," Susan said.

  "We were wrong."

  I nodded.

  "How will you find her?" Susan said.

  "Let's run the tape again," I said and pressed the play button.

  Jocelyn was wearing a black slip and black high-heeled shoes, or more accurately one black high-heeled shoe. The other shoe lay on the floor in front of her. The strap of her slip was off her left shoulder. There was no bra strap. Her ankles and knees were bound with clothesline. Several loops of the same rope around her waist held her in the chair. The white scarf appeared to be silk. It covered her face from nose to chin. Her dark hair had fallen forward and covered her right eye. In the background of the picture was the corner of a bed. The light seemed natural and seemed to come from Jocelyn's left. Her hands were out of sight behind her back, but from the way she squirmed in the chair it appeared that they were tied to the chair. The chair itself was a sturdy oak straight chair, the kind you find in libraries. The wall behind her was a sort of neutral beige. It was blank.

  I ran the tape maybe five more times while Susan sat forward, her chin on her hands, studying it. There was nothing else to see.

  I shut it off.

  "What does he want," Susan said.

  "If it's a man," I said.

  Susan shook her head impatiently.

  "He or she. What does the kidnapper want? Why did he send you this tape?"

  "I don't know. It lets me know he's got her."

  "There was no letter with the tape?"

  "No. Maybe we'll hear something in a while."

  "I don't get it," Susan said.

  "I think that's my mantra," I said.

  "Will you notify the police?"

  "Have to. I'll get a copy made of this tape and go to Port City and give the original to DeSpain."

  "What else will you do?"

  "I'll look into Jocelyn's background a little more. Rummage through her apartment."

  Pearl came and put her head in Susan's lap. Susan stroked Pearl's head and turned toward me again.

  "I know you value restraint," Susan said.