A half-hour later all three were snuffling and wiping their noses. Konnor on his sleeve, Steven on the balled-up paper napkin the street vendor had provided each with, and Benjiro on the bandana he generally carried in his back pocket. They were all sated and happier, sitting on the wall overlooking the river.
“There’s an old official ‘Friendship’ store on Nanjing road. Should we go take a look inside, just to say we did?” Steven asked.
They walked en masse back across the wide road between the city and the river and headed up Nanjing with what seemed like a few hundred other people out for a stroll. When they arrived at the store, they were greeted and ushered in by uniformed store employees to a multileveled shopping experience unlike one they’d experienced before.
The store was spacious and formal, without being particularly fancy or stylish. It was at least five floors, designed like a giant department store with similarly common items grouped together in sections on each floor. The people shopping were, by Steven’s assessment, ninety percent foreigners with maybe half of those being non-Asian foreigners. It was a rather stark difference between the road they’d just been walking down outside.
Leather coats, jeans, oriental rugs, vases, furniture, appliances, you name it, they sold it. Konnor got really interested as a salesperson helped a customer with a purchase of several items by adding the prices together for a total with what looked like a game of balls set on bars.
“That’s an abacus,” Benjiro told him. “It’s been used for hundreds of years in China to perform simple mathematics, although I have to wonder if it’s more a tourist thing at this point.”
Konnor continued watching as the clerk slid single and multiple balls back and forth and then told the European customer, who had his own small calculator out duplicating the effort of the clerk, that the total was seven hundred sixty-five Yuan. The man continued punching in numbers for another minute before he came to the same conclusion, frowned, and counted out the money in payment. That made Konnor smile and he looked up at the clerk, who smiled back and winked at him.
Meeting Old Comrade Cho
As it closed upon the time Captain Bin told them Old Comrade Cho would be by the monument, the three took their leave of the shopping streets and once again negotiated the many lanes of traffic to get to the park. The new Monument to the People’s Heroes was a tall, modern tri-pod concrete structure, surrounded by open space.
“It has to be at least twenty meters tall. How will we ever find one lonely old Chinaman in an area so large?” Steven said, as much to himself as his companions.
“Yes, I’ll admit I was thinking it was something a bit less dramatic, myself,” Benjiro replied.
The three of them wandered around the area, up close to the statue, but everyone was coming and going. There wasn’t a single man waiting with anticipation among the bustling crowd.
Leading the group slightly away from the structure and toward the river, Steven said, “Okay, let’s think for a minute.”
As Steven mulled over the dilemma, Konnor wandered, pulling Benjiro along like an orbiting planet. “Hey, listen,” he said, “some old-timey music.”
Indeed, as Benjiro listened, he identified the ‘old-timey’ music as jazz, sung by a sultry female voice. “Steven, com’mere,” he said, waving Steven over.
Steven’s heart faltered when he heard the tune. “It’s ‘Fly Me to the Moon’,” he told the other two, “and its Julia’s voice singing.”
Jogging in the direction of the sound, he came upon an elderly-looking man being pushed in a wheelchair by a boy only slightly older than Konnor. A woman, maybe in her thirties, walked beside the chair. The singer’s voice—now Steven could hear that it was a bit tinny but undoubtedly his sister’s—was coming from an inexpensive cassette tape deck sitting in the wheelchair-bound man’s lap.
Steven bowed, then squatted beside the chair. “Captain Cho…” was all he could get out. As odd as it seemed, he had no recordings of his sister’s music, and hearing her voice after nearly fifteen years choked him up.
The old man’s mouth was covered by a mask to try to filter out some of the pollution that played havoc with his already damaged lungs, but Steven could hear the smile in his reply. “Yes, and you are Julia’s brother, Steven. I can still see the resemblance. Who is the rest of your company?” he asked, extending a hand of welcome.
After introductions were made, it was agreed the three guests would all call Old Comrade Cho ‘Cho Uncle’. Cho Uncle’s daughter, whose given name was Tina, Steven and Benjiro would call ‘Cho Tina’ and Konnor would call ‘Ms. Cho’. Cho Uncle’s grandson’s given name was Boon Tee, and all three of the guests would call him Boon Tee.
They visited in the shadow of the monument for over an hour, simply reminiscing about Julia’s signing and her life in China. It became obvious that Julia had made then-Captain Cho her surrogate father when she came to China. More so, it became obvious Cho Uncle thought of her as another daughter. “Of course I love Engineer Tina with all my heart, but it was nice to have a second daughter, if only for a short time,” he told Steven.
“When my mother left him, taking me with her and returning to her parents’ house, my father was very sad,” Ms. Cho told them. “I believe Julia may have filled a void for him for a few years while I grew up and became able to determine for myself whether or not I would visit my father.”
“How in the world did you get recordings of her singing?” Steven asked Cho Uncle.
“We had a tape recorder at the station to take statements and the like,” Cho Uncle replied, “but honestly, people liked to write their own private investigation notes. It was really no problem to borrow the unit whenever I wanted it. I took it to many clubs in the city and used my station to get them to let me record her.”
“I would love to hear more recordings. Maybe there’s a way for me to copy them for our father,” Steven said, also thinking it might be a good entrance to visit more about Julia’s death.
“We’re planning on having dinner this evening. Please join us. There’s a small restaurant near his old station run by a family that’s been cooking there since he was Captain. Dad loves their steamed dumplings and their scallion pancakes, but they have great eel noodles as well,” Ms. Cho said.
Steven glanced at the other two in his group. Clearly Benjiro was up for anything, but he didn’t want Konnor’s time in Shanghai to be a bust. It didn’t seem like it was going to be, since Konnor and Boon Tee were busy chatting quietly a few feet away.
“We’d love to join you,” he answered.
Dong Mian
Cho Uncle was on his forth rice wine when Steven gave up trying to match him glass for glass. “You go ahead, I can’t do it,” he said when the waiter came to answer Cho Uncle’s subtle nod.
Cho Uncle just smiled and replied, “I’ve given up those coffin nails, but I can’t give up everything.” He glanced over at his grandson, in deep conversation with Konnor, and added, “Plus the wine dulls the ache a bit.” Steven silently toasted him with the last of his glass.
“How often did you visit Julia, Steven?” Cho Uncle asked him.
“Three times. They were great visits, especially the last one. By then she really knew her way around the city,” he answered. “She knew the clubs. The old ones, the new ones, hell, she even knew the bouncers. And they knew her. The piano players were crazy for her and she’d started to wrap them around her fingers. She’d walk in and they’d invite her to sing as a guest when the other singers took a break. I never thought about it, but I suppose she made more than a couple of singers jealous.”
“Oh, maybe. She did have a voice created for jazz. I don’t see that having anything to do with what happened though,” Cho Uncle said, looking at Steven significantly.
“No, I’m sure not, but I bet she made a few of them nervous.”
“She sang a lot of Billie Holiday songs,” Cho Uncle remembered. “Billie Holiday, and then she loved any song with ‘Moon’ in the titl
e.”
“She told me once that the reason she loved ‘Moon’ music was because she knew her family was looking at the same moon she was, no matter that they were a thousand miles away,” Steven said.
Cho Uncle dug another cassette out of his pocket and set the tape player on the table. “Here’s one the crowds used to really eat up,” he said, pushing the tape in and punching the play button. Julia’s voice came across the table to him, singing the 1931 jazz standard ‘All of Me’.
The table, and in fact the small restaurant, quieted down while she sang. When the song was over Konnor said, “Aunt Julia had a great voice, Daddy!”
“That was the first time you heard your aunt sing, Konnor?” Ms. Cho asked him.
“Yes, ma’am; she died before I was born,” he answered.
“How long will you be in Shanghai, Steven?” Ms. Cho asked.
“Only a few more days. We’ll sail home from here later this week,” he answered.
“You need to come to the house. It’s tiny but cozy, and Dad can play some of the other songs for you,” Ms. Cho said.
Steven glanced at Cho Uncle and saw that he was smiling and nodding, so he answered, “I would love to, Ms. Cho. I have other things I’d love to chat with your dad about as well.”
“You realize my memory probably isn’t what it used to be, right?” Cho Uncle asked.
“You’re all I have left over here of my sister, and I’d like to leave after this trip knowing I’ve turned over every stone and checked every buried slug. Then I can go back to my life and quit following whispers, as my son calls it.”
Cho Uncle didn’t smile, but the look of understanding was obvious in his eyes.
As they were leaving the restaurant that evening, Cho Uncle flipped the two tapes he was carrying of Julia’s performances to Steven and said, “Here, take care of these for me.” It was all Steven could do to catch them and not let his mouth drop open.
When the three of them were out of earshot of the Cho family, Steven said, “All right, where do you think we can buy a cassette player at this time of night?”
“It’s China; they make half the electronics in the world; we should be able to come up with something. Let’s head back to Nanjing and Beijing roads,” Benjiro answered.
Not three hundred meters up Nanjing they found a large electronics store, went inside and chose a compact cassette player that came with headphones. Steven purchased a small set of battery-enhanced speakers that plugged into the headphone jack as well, and they were on their way.
As it turned out, there was more than just one song on each tape. Both of them had nearly an hour of music. Together, they provided Steven with memories, Konnor with an education regarding his unknown aunt, and Benjiro with relaxation and meditation for the evening.
After Konnor was asleep, Benjiro asked Steven, “So what is it you hope to ask Cho Uncle? I thought you spent time here right after Julia died?”
“I did spend almost a week, but it was right after a rather gruesome dual murder, and somehow I was not considered as innocent as I obviously knew I was,” Steven answered. “Since there was a strong drug influence in the murders, the Chinese drug police suspected anyone who wasn’t Chinese and who had access to come into and out of the country. I’d met Captain Cho more than once before, but it wasn’t his place to dismiss me as a suspect until the drug police were satisfied. The fact was, I was able to leave there primarily because the captain I was sailing under was highly respected and threatened to make noises about harassment if they didn’t wrap up my involvement in the investigation. His company’s business was more important than whatever the police thought my involvement might have been.”
“What happened after you left?” Benjiro asked.
“That was the rub. As far as I could tell, nothing. At least that’s the level of information I got after I returned to the Philippines,” Steven answered with a sigh. “When I got back there was an official report stating that the death was due to an overdose and that Julia and her drug provider were both found dead in her apartment. That’s what we received with her returned body. It was devastating to Dad. Not only that, but we couldn’t even get any information regarding her drug provider slash lover, as they called him. No matter how many more letters I wrote or who I wrote them to, there was no additional information. Any reply simply stated that the case was closed and we had received the official report already.”
“I remember the time of her death,” Benjiro said. “Not real well, because that was a tough time in my own life, with my own addictions, but still, I remember.”
“To get back to your original question, I hope to get some answers to the questions I asked in my letters years ago,” Steven said. “Who was this supposed drug provider slash lover and who were his associates? They had to come up with something or someone that he was associated with. If I can get my hands on those names, maybe I can take another step forward.”
“Yeah, maybe. Why do you think that this Captain Cho has more information than he shared with you in the past? And if he does have more than he shared, why do you think he’d share it with you now?” Benjiro asked.
“All valid points. And I don’t know the answers. I suppose they might not have known any more than they gave us, but they must have known who this Orlando was, right? They wouldn’t even give us his last name,” Steven answered. “But I thing Cho Uncle might be more inclined to give up more information now that he’s not on the force anymore, and I’m guessing he’s not real active in the party since he retired.”
With renewed hope but increased anxiety, Steven paced around the hotel room he shared with his son and friend. “I just know that the Captain Cho I met would know Orlando’s name. His full name. Especially if he was interested in Julia like his daughter, so much so that he wandered around making recordings of her in the clubs she sang in.”
Road to Recovery
Tomakita sat up in bed and started a note to Benjiro. He preferred the old-fashioned pen and paper form of communication. He was quite adept at composing in his head, determining the letter’s primary and secondary objectives, building detail around the objectives, clarifying, educating, backing up statements with what seemed like inalienable facts. He would toss in observations and interactions with others that backed up the suggested conclusions he wished his readers to come to, thinking they’d gotten there all by themselves.
In general, those tactics and skills were used for his professional life to a much larger extent than his personal life, but the truth was he hadn’t really had a personal life until recently. Every now and then he found himself wondering what happened when he turned seventy-five. So many of his compatriots, the ones that made it beyond the end of THE war, were quietly growing fat, drinking themselves into a haze, turning their memories into a muddy slurry of oblivion, watching television. Worst of all, talking of only the past to other people that were from the past and continued to live there.
Rather than taking Tomakita another step toward the grave, as the ongoing march of birthdays seemed to accomplish with his old associates, his own seventy-fifth birthday made him more aware of life, his own in particular but also the lives of others around him. In his case, it made him keenly aware of younger men around him. He realized for the first time in his life that he wanted more from a man than the satisfaction of lust he’d craved. He’d thought of it as an expression of power. Maybe it was more now that he took time to let the feeling roam around in his head.
His seventy-fifth had been celebrated in high style with the commanding views only gained in the captain’s suite of Asiatic Cruise Lines, one foot above the South China Sea for every year he was celebrating. The party had been extravagant, expensive, and exhilarating. It was the evening he’d met the much younger Japanese/Filipino yoga master by the name of Benjiro for the first time.
He looked wistfully over at the elegantly-carved burled wood dresser in his recovery room. The silk yoga suit Benjiro gave him as a belated birthday present a week a
fter meeting him was neatly folded on top. It was one hundred percent silk, primarily black with a masculine but gentle, finely-embroidered pattern over the entire back of the shirt and around the top of the pants. When Tomakita wore it he felt energy flowing into him from the universe. He felt like his youth was being given back to him. It was the centerpiece of the altar to rejuvenation and new life where Benjiro represented the path of enlightenment.
Tomakita set the pen down again. Again, this was not the day that he would be ready to spin the tale of his newfound youthful organs and the life they gave to him. He didn’t feel guilty. That wasn’t an emotion he was aware of ever having. However, he did know that it would take care to craft a story his lover, an intelligent and thoughtful man, would both understand and accept.
Instead, he decided to review his final specification for the pancreas donor that was needed next. With any luck this Captain Zimmermann, whom his transplant doctor put him in touch with for the liver, would be able to find another donor with just the right requirements.
#
With the liver donor, it was the first time Tomakita would do business with Captain Zimmermann, so he’d had his personal attendant take him to meet the donor on board the Captain’s ship.
Tomakita didn’t expect a Filipino. He chalked it up to missing Benjiro when he saw such a resemblance that he was intrigued enough to agree to be taken on a tour of the ship when the young captain offered. He knew Filipinos were considered notoriously good sailors, but this one really had outfitted himself with quite a boat. He hadn’t seen the name, but it could have easily been called Smuggler’s Paradise.
“Hayashi, sir, may I offer you scotch? Or possibly some excellent green tea, direct from the Yame region of Fukuoka Prefecture? It is on its way to the US CEO of a large electronics firm,” Captain Zimmerman asked.
“Maybe until I utilize your commodity I should request the green tea, Captain,” Tomakita answered.
One Fish, Two Fish, Big Fish, Little Fish: Silver Dawn (Smugglers In Paradise Book 2) Page 10
