Coming back into the little family room area, he stopped short when he saw a bag of cassette tapes open on Cho Uncle’s lap, the old man digging through them to choose a specific one before placing it into the tape player sitting on the side table next to him.
Cho Uncle looked up when Steven stopped in the doorway. “I would like to hear your sister’s voice as I tell more of this miserable story, Steven. Come and sit down again. This old man has wasted enough time accepting the story of others who knew better.”
Cho Uncle then started the entire story from scratch again.
He told of the unknown Filipino with powerful connections who had secured a one-floor walk-up for an unknown singer, snatching it from a probable long list of non-party member Chinese who likely waited for years for a private apartment that was safe, an apartment which did not require the tenant to be a mountain goat. He’d initiated an investigation into this connected Filipino and found it was shut down quickly. However, after almost forty years at his job, he knew how to investigate below the surface and outside of the system as well.
This man, Orlando Bautista, turned out to be the son of a diplomat. A diplomat from the Philippines who was well-connected.
When the unknown singer turned up, Captain Cho expected a voice with a larger than life ego. When she moved into his block the reality was very different. Julia was a beautiful young lady with the voice of a sultry angel, and at least with him, no swollen ego at all.
Julia came to Shanghai alone, and while Cho Uncle could see she was excited and grateful for the apartment, it was also obvious she hadn’t known it was extraordinary luck. She didn’t know the level of favor her sponsor pulled in for her in securing it. Partially because of this she found the Chinese around her standoffish or downright hostile and was lonely when she wasn’t working. Captain Cho befriended her, at first to continue his below the surface investigation, but he continued the friendship simply because she reminded him of the company of his daughter, which his estranged wife was depriving of him.
Julia was smart and beautiful, with a gorgeous voice, but she was also kind, she didn’t put on airs and she treated her elders with respect. She enjoyed visiting with Captain Cho and told him that he reminded her of her father, not in looks or musical talent, but in his own kindness and his desire to see the right thing done in his area of responsibility.
Of course Captain Cho and Steven met, more than once during Julia’s time in Shanghai, and Captain Cho acknowledged that, but he didn’t dwell on it. That made sense to Steven since he, himself, was there.
Captain Cho met Boris, as well.
“Your brother and you are both different, and the same,” he said. “In fact, I saw similarities in all three of you. The truth was, Boris had something that I was unable to see in either one of you.” Cho Uncle continued, looking Steven directly in the eyes, “He had the self-preservation gene.
“Oh, Julia was determined. She knew what she wanted and would work hard to get there. But she didn’t have the self-preservation gene. I’ve seen it before. When someone has that gene, there isn’t anything that will stand in their way. Nothing and nobody,” Cho Uncle finished.
“Your brother, Boris, I traced immediately back to the Mayor of Manila,” Cho Uncle said, chuckling. “Well, actually he traced himself back to the mayor. He was carrying a paper written by the mayor requesting he receive ‘special handling’.” He chuckled again. “I bet after I saw that he didn’t show it to anyone else. That’s not a way to blend in, which I’m pretty sure he wanted to do. Oh, and also, it was clear after a while that Boris knew Orlando, therefore I assumed that the Mayor, the diplomat and these two, were somehow all connected.”
With that, Cho Uncle took a break to sip his now cooling tea, flip the cassette tape over, and stare off into the corner of the room. Steven had learned more in the last half-hour than in the last fourteen years. It was a lot to digest, but he still had questions.
“Cho Uncle, am I to understand that this powerfully connected Filipino, Orlando, is the same person that was found dead of an overdose alongside my sister?” Steven asked.
“That he was, Steven. I am sorry if you never knew that. I still believe that his father, the diplomat, must have spent every last favor he had stored up making sure that the story was as hushed up as possible. There was almost no real investigation that happened. The party intervened and put their own personally appointed investigator in charge. He was quite good, but unfortunately his primary focus was obfuscation,” Cho Uncle answered.
“Orlando, now he had quite a contingent of friends. I spent plenty of time wandering aimlessly around after him—at least, I tried to make it look aimless,” Cho Uncle said, again chuckling, “and he met folks from everywhere. Any country, you name it, I probably had a record of him meeting someone from there. And packages, man, he gave and received gifts from all over. I never really had a reason to stop him for anything so I never knew what any of it was. Hell, it could have been tea and cookies, for all I knew.” Here Cho Uncle looked directly at Steven again and said, “But I doubt it.
“Your brother, Boris, hung around with Orlando, but mostly in clubs where Julia sang. I suspect they had business together besides your sister, but to be honest, I don’t have any proof of that either. The one time I was sure I had stumbled on something, I was outmaneuvered by him with the help of a greasy Scandinavian port company owner. It took me over a year to track down that fella after I saw him hustle Boris into an abandoned building, but track him down I did. He ran a one-dock, two-person import/export shipping operation. Mangos in, office machine parts out. Stupidest setup I’d ever seen, but apparently he knew which palms to grease. Officially, no one would set foot in there. I also must tell you that this was the reason you had so much trouble when you came to identify Julia. The drug police, and I, believed you must have had something to do with the crime, the same as they believed Boris was involved. You finally convinced me otherwise, but I don’t think they ever fully dismissed the idea. It took both me and Captain Villanova’s arguing in your favor to get them to let you leave. I think mostly they just wanted to wash their hands of the situation and knew that with you gone they could sweep the rest of the mess under the rug, so to speak.”
Steven was beside himself with excitement. He really had learned something on this trip. Maybe he could give his father, as well as himself, some closure after all. As he’d learned when questioning ship hands regarding missing cargo or any other questionable offense, often silence won the day. Even though he was excited, he said nothing and eventually Cho Uncle started talking again.
“Unfortunately, that’s nearly where my intelligence ends,” he said. “I really don’t have much on your sister’s actual death, besides being among the first people on the scene. I didn’t get to interview anyone after twenty-four hours. I didn’t get access to the file notes. I didn’t read more than the summary of what you were sent. And I guess we both know a good crime fiction writer probably made most of that up.”
Now Steven had to speak up. He asked, “You said ‘nearly’. That means there might be something else you know?”
Cho Uncle looked hard at him and sighed, saying, “I guess you’ve come this far. You deserve to know everything I can tell you.”
Cho Uncle continued, describing the night he’d been called to Julia’s apartment on a noise complaint, only to find both Orlando and Julia dead of an apparent overdose of opium. This was all in the brief report Steven and his family received. “However,” Cho Uncle said, “what never made it into any official report were the rope bruises on both their wrists and ankles, as well as multiple contusions on Orlando’s head. Now, I haven’t seen dozens of overdose deaths, but I’ve seen a few. I have never seen a situation where two people supposedly died of overdoses, had ropes bruises from clearly just hours before they died, and no suspicious activity was involved.”
Steven was not an emotional person, but the image caused him to put his hands over his face and weep. Cho Uncle
was an old man. He’d seen his share of disappointment and sadness in his days at the block police station and he was neither embarrassed nor distressed by an honest show of emotion. When Steven was able to pull himself back together Cho Uncle said, “Again, I am truly sorry, Steven. Julia left early and unfairly.”
“Thank you, Cho Uncle. I appreciate you sharing these parts of her life honestly with me. I must try to find a way to use the information to help ease my father’s burden, and rest assured, I will do it in a way that cannot bring any harm back on you,” Steven said. “I must ask you one more question. My son, my friend, and I had a bad experience in Hong Kong earlier on our journey. The stop there was supposed to be a simple tourist stop, but it turned into a night of terror when Konnor was abducted for a short time.”
“Abducted…that’s very bad. Obviously he escaped; how?” Cho Uncle asked.
“It’s a story better not lived again. Suffice it to say he is quick-witted, fast, and exceptionally lucky,” Steven answered. He thought about it for one more minute, deciding that this man had just shared enough information to have himself, and maybe even his family, killed from two or possibly three different directions. If there was someone to trust in this situation, it was him. “I have one more thing to show you. Anything you can tell me about it would be helpful.”
Steven pulled out the money clip. He had removed the remaining, assumed counterfeit, bills that it had been stuffed with. Silently, he handed it over for Cho Uncle to look at.
Cho Uncle looked at both sides of the clip. He turned on the lamp beside his chair, picked up a magnifying glass, and studied the engraved sides. “This is bad news. You know that, though, right?” he said.
“Yes,” Steven agreed. “I did a little studying, or rather Benjiro did a little studying in Taipei. I think just the counterfeit bill held in this clip nearly got him killed when he showed it to the wrong person in a bank there. It did get another person from the bank, who tried to warn him of the danger, killed.”
“So you know these symbols are Triad symbols?” Cho Uncle asked.
“I suspected, but now I know,” Steven answered. “It was such a random event in Hong Kong, I’m sure it was not connected directly to Julia, but what I wonder is could her death somehow be connected to the Triad?”
“Speaking frankly, the Chinese drug police think most every crime, beyond petty theft and actually using drugs, is somehow connected to them,” Cho Uncle answered. “Being a block policeman all my career, what would I know?”
“It took you thirty seconds to know it was bad news. All I am asking for is your humble but experienced opinion,” Steven said, prodding him.
With a sigh Cho Uncle answered, “I agree that your Hong Kong incident seems unrelated to Julia. A connection there seems like a long shot. However, in my opinion, Julia and Orlando’s death was likely Triad-related. Their death looked very much like a ritual killing done to teach someone a lesson. Since they never tracked down the people who did it, or those whom it was supposed to teach, I guess you may never know. But yes, I believe it was related. For what it’s worth, the Chinese Drug Police also thought the Triad was responsible.”
Cho Uncle handed him back the money clip. “Put that away and be extraordinarily careful who you show it to again. The Triad’s tendrils run deep and far. They tend to encourage unquestioning loyalty. Even a very close friend, one whom you trust implicitly, could trade your life for the reward he might get for finding that piece.”
By the time Benjiro and the boys got back to the Cho’s apartment, Cho Uncle, Ms. Cho and Steven were all sitting in the little family room, sharing a beer and listening to one of Julia’s mix-tapes.
Chance Encounter
In the Philippines the ‘-ber’ months all mean the same thing: preparation for Christmas. It doesn’t matter if it is September or November, fully one third of the year is spent in the preseason mode. Marge had known this for a long time and it made planning trips to be with her family of choice for Christmas much easier. This trip would begin mid-September and end mid-October. Sometimes that’s the way it had to be when there were two important families involved.
She’d been coming to the Philippines for forty years. The logistics were getting easier even as she got older.
However, this year was special. She was meeting Boris.
Early in the year she’d received a letter, posted from Singapore, from Boris. It was long, full of memories, and said, essentially, nothing new. He hadn’t seen or talked to his family since Julia’s death, as far as Marge knew, and his letter was clearly sad. At least that was clear to her. The only request he’d made in the letter was that she not disclose to any of his family that she’d had any contact with him. “Not to be dramatic, but if they find out we’ve been in contact I will have to break it off again, and to be honest, I don’t want to break it off. I miss you, I miss them, and you are the only way I’ll get any information about them now.”
Whether or not Boris meant it, the letter was dramatic from that standpoint, and traumatic for Marge in several others. Boris gave her news about where he’d been…in general. He was never specific enough for her to pin him down to a location, and he asked about his family in ways that made it clear he didn’t have other connections with them. Finally, he continued to say nothing about why he had cut ties with them since Julia’s death. If she did ask, it was as if the question was blacked out of any letter she’d sent. There was no pretext of the typical Asian ‘answer without answering’; it was as if she never asked and he never read it.
At first Marge felt like a spy. Observing and interacting with Boris’ father, siblings, nephews and nieces and then reporting back to Boris. But she got over that. She eventually took what she was given, a pen-pal relationship with the troubled son of Sophia, her long-dead best friend.
Boris obviously trusted her and enjoyed her letters, as well as the pictures she sent him. He told her he didn’t take many pictures and that he continually traveled, sailed specifically, in his work, but he did send her a couple from Singapore of Sentosa Park and the Merlion statue. Typical tourist shot from some restaurant of a statue she’d probably never see and didn’t care too much about.
This year she would travel from Seattle to Tokyo to Manila, where one of the Ramos family would meet her and take her the rest of the way to Zambales. They would decide where she would stay and she would let them.
In her last letter Katie told her that Gilberto was getting white-haired, pudgy and was slowing down significantly. “I’ve taken over the restaurant and turned it into a Sari-Sari store. Orlan is making tourist trinkets, but he’s actually sold lots of larger ticket art pieces. I’m not even sure why I keep selling Coke and Doritos when all we need is one high-end tourist a month to make it go,” Katie said. “Dad’s still living there, but that might end soon. Steven has a place here now that he, Betts, and Konnor stay at when Steven’s in town. They’re trying to get him to move into their cottage, since there’s room.”
#
Marge sighed. She’d flipped the page on the novel four times now, but she kept having to go back because she couldn’t remember the conversation or who was having it one page ago. Her eyes darted from the underage teen slouched against the wall, music blasting from ear buds so loudly she could hear it ten feet away, to the Asian couple with the toddler that raced around the waiting area screaming, to the business man in the suit and white shirt with the tie covered in multi-colored tree frogs. She hoped if she sat next to any of them it would be the tree-frog-tie guy. It was a loud tie, but it probably wouldn’t keep her awake.
When the gate agent started making movements like he would start to board soon, Marge checked to be sure she still had the cane borrowed from her neighbor. Hell, she turned sixty-five this year, and even though she didn’t feel any different than she had at fifty, she was going to pre-board the moment they made the announcement for anyone needing extra time or assistance. The wait to board was the toughest part of the flight. Once on, she could
relax with the best of them. She loved reading and movies, but the restaurant/waiting area didn’t give her much opportunity for either.
#
When the lights came on in the plane and the attendants started handing out warm towels, she woke up surprised. Sleeping never came easy on these flights, so even a couple hours was a bonus. The movies on the flight were great. Good Will Hunting and Men In Black, along with the meal service, made the first six hours go by in a snap. It was always the last six that dragged for her, so sleeping was a bonus. As bad as it was, this would be her last chance for a month to get American food for breakfast that truly was American, so when they asked if she wanted eggs and potatoes or rice and fish, she took the eggs and potatoes. They were bad, too.
Her eyelids felt like they were retaining water, they were so heavy, and she scraped at the front of her teeth just to see if there really was a layer of fuzz on them as her tongue indicated. A cup of airline coffee later, her eyes were still droopy, but she was wide awake so she went and stood in the line for the bathroom just for something to do.
After a miserable, jostling visit to the toilet, she wondered again how parents changed their infant or toddler in the closet-sized restroom or how anyone having the slightest bit of a weight problem was able to either prepare to go to the bathroom or assure themselves everything was back in place after having completed the task. Thank goodness she wasn’t one of those women that had to go to the bathroom every ten minutes.
When the plane finally landed in Tokyo she retrieved the borrowed cane from the overhead compartment and filed off with the other hundred and fifty passengers. They were herded through the glass-enclosed hallways directly to another baggage-scanning security point. Two things Marge never understood about this set-up in Tokyo. Number one, where was she, or anyone else coming off the plane for that matter, supposed to get any dangerous weapons between the time they were security-scanned and boarded in Seattle and the time they deplaned in Tokyo? Number two, why did it always smell the way she imagined a high school boy’s locker room smelled when it was full of boys who had just finished running sprints on a hot summer day? Oh well, no one wanted her opinion on the first question and there was no one to ask regarding the second one.
One Fish, Two Fish, Big Fish, Little Fish: Silver Dawn (Smugglers In Paradise Book 2) Page 12
