Mandarin Plaid

by S. J. Rozan

  Bill, missing a chance to be obnoxious, didn’t comment on the oysters.

  At the corner we waited for the light to change. We crossed the street, and I finished my story on the other side.

  “What’s your take?” Bill asked, turning to walk east.

  “You don’t have to walk me home.” We were much closer to his Tribeca apartment than we were to Chinatown.

  “If I don’t, I’ll have to sit around at my place waiting for you to call when you get there.”

  “I won’t.”

  “I know. And then I’ll worry all night. I won’t be able to sleep. My health will deteriorate, I’ll get to be a nervous wreck, probably turn psychotic. I’ll cause mass havoc and destruction. You’ll be responsible for the senseless acts of terror I’ll unleash on an unsuspecting world.”

  “Is this part of your plan to be obnoxious?”

  “Is it working?”

  “I’d have preferred a crack about the oysters.”

  “Don’t think I didn’t think about it.”

  I gave up and we fell into step together, east toward Chinatown.

  “So,” he prompted. “Your take on Roland?”

  “What about yours?”

  “Mine? I’ve never met the guy.”

  “I know. But what’s your take on the situation?”

  “Hmm,” he said. “Okay. Two possibilities. One: he’s just some guy who heard your name a few days ago after years, then saw you on the street and decided to get back into your life. Then he realized there was something in it for him when his girlfriend disappeared.”

  “What’s the other?”

  “That he heard your name a few days ago after years and then planted himself in front of you on the sidewalk for a reason that, since he heard your name from the client in this case, we can assume has something to do with this case.”

  “That’s the idea I can’t shake,” I said. “Do you think it could be true?”

  “I think either one could be true. But I think we’d be nuts not to check it out.”

  “That’s just what I figured! That’s why I said I’d take his case.”

  “How do you want to go about it?”

  “This is something I’ll have to do alone. No one in that community will talk to you.”

  He sighed. “Why should they be different from the rest of the civilized world?”

  “The way I’m going to start,” I went on, thinking out loud, “is the way I’d go about it if this really were the case.”

  “Meaning, if what Roland said he wanted were what he really wanted?”

  “Yes. Which it may be.”

  Bill lit a cigarette noncommittally. “Well,” he said, “there are a few things I can profitably do on the other case, in the meantime.”

  “Like look into Dawn’s finances?”

  “That’s one. I’d like to be able to either verify her story, or torpedo it.”

  “Be my guest. Let me know.”

  We turned onto Mulberry and walked down it, quiet together. Funny, I thought. The buildings here are as old, older, than Washington Square Park, but the soft mist haloing the streetlights in Chinatown didn’t make me think of anything further back than my own childhood, than the nights when, sleepy and full, I’d been carried up the stairs by my father after a cousin’s wedding banquet or a village association feast; the nights, later, after a date or a party when I’d walked home down these echoing empty sidewalks, escorted by the guy I’d gone out with or by one of my brothers—or, some uncomfortable times, by both—to the old brick building on Mosco Street. And then up the three flights of stairs to the apartment where my mother was inevitably awake, waiting.

  Which I’d have given good odds she was right now.

  “Bill?” I said, as we neared my door. “What did you think of Dawn?”

  He took a moment before he answered. “Would it bother you if I said I liked her?”

  “No.” I shook my head. “I just … I can’t believe she can do what she does, and like herself.”

  He zipped up his jacket; the night had turned colder. He asked, “How many people do?”

  I didn’t like the question. I didn’t answer it.

  “The dress she was wearing?” I said, as I turned the key in the lock. “It was a Genna Jing.” I gave his hand a goodnight squeeze, and went home.

  NINETEEN

  My mother was awake.

  She was in her nightgown, a pastel-flowered thing of the type my brothers buy her for Mother’s Day when they don’t have any good ideas. To her credit, she had the grace to try to look as though she’d been asleep and had just happened to get up for a midnight snack as I walked in the door. I didn’t believe it, but I appreciated the effort.

  “Well, you’re home,” she said, as I slipped off my black heels in the entryway and pulled on my embroidered slippers. “How is your brother?”

  I appreciated that, too, that she asked the proper, family-oriented question first, before the one I knew she’d stayed awake to ask.

  “Fine, Ma,” I said. I considered saying a quick goodnight and heading straight to bed, but that would be too mean. I joined her in browsing at the open fridge door.

  As soon as I got there, of course, my mother found what she wanted—a Saran-wrap-covered bowl of mango pudding—and closed the door. “You children always let the cold out,” she scolded me. I gave up on the thought of leftover soy sauce chicken and reached for a banana from the fruit bowl on the table.

  After downing two quivering lumps of pudding, my mother finally spoke again.

  “Oh,” she said offhandedly, looking with great interest at the glistening orange stuff in her bowl, “and how is Roland Lum?”

  Ah, we’d come to the point. Once we’d gotten through this, I could go to bed.

  “He’s fine,” was my opening gambit.

  “Did you send my regards to his mother?”

  “Of course,” I said, though I was pretty sure I hadn’t. If Roland was a good Chinese son, he’d convey my mother’s greetings to his mother the next time he saw her, safe in the assumption that I was meant to tell him to do that and forgot. If he wasn’t, he wouldn’t, even if I’d remembered.

  “And his business is going well?” my mother asked politely.

  “It seems to be,” I answered.

  “Oh, didn’t you talk much about business?”

  Uh oh, I thought, red flag. “Actually, no. The truth is, Ma, he wants to hire me.”

  I’d thought this idea would put a damper on her enthusiasm, but my mother is a woman of eternal hope.

  She smiled, swallowing the last of the pudding. “Hire you,” she repeated. “Ling Wan-ju, you must learn not to be so difficult.”

  “Me?” I said, aggrieved. “I wasn’t difficult. I agreed. I took his case.”

  “His case.” She kept smiling, and she made it sound as if I’d said “his ticket to the moon.” “If Roland Lum thinks that to keep seeing you he has to make up a case and hire you, you must have been very difficult. You’re lucky he’s so persistent.”

  I carefully peeled the last of my banana while I contemplated the wonders of the human mind. “Okay, Ma,” I said, finishing the banana and dropping the peel in the trash. “I’ll work on it.”

  I kissed her and went to bed. She shuffled down the hall in her nightgown and slippers, humming to herself. I could have made an effort to convince her that, whatever Roland was up to, it wasn’t an elaborate subterfuge for the purpose of spending time with me; but with my mother, especially on this topic, there’s not much point in offering her truth or reality if they conflict in any way with what she already knows.

  In the morning while I showered, I formulated a plan.

  The first part of it had nothing to do with either case, and I’d actually formulated it the night before: it was to go up to the dojo and take the early-morning advanced form class. A little more sleep would have been nice, too, I thought as the alarm poked its annoying electronic beep into a mist-draped dream that fa
ded immediately away. But I was feeling smoke-filled and slow from my late, frustrating night among Manhattan’s in crowd. I was also still mad at myself over the streetfight two days ago that maybe I didn’t actually lose, but I couldn’t have been said to have won. And I was still mad at Andrew for making the assumption that little sisters were by nature pathetic, and at myself for making the assumption that big brothers were bound to be right.

  Class helped. Practicing form, repeating the traditional moves in their prescribed combinations, again, again, again, with no involvement with anyone else, nothing but the relentless, exhausting effort to perfect yourself: that helped. By the end of class I wasn’t anything near perfected, but I was sweaty and my mind was sharp. I waited my turn for the tiny shower, bowing to the higher ranks who went before me and the lower ones who waited until I was through. By the time I was dressed—a three-minute operation here; you didn’t take up any time or space you didn’t need—my hair, I noticed, was dry.

  Back out on the sunny street it was still early. Bill can say what he wants about the pleasures of late-night jazz joints and darkened bedrooms where you can burrow under your blankets and sleep until noon. If you ask me, there’s nothing like the clean morning air and a day whose promises are all still ahead.

  I stopped for a cup of tea and some raisin toast at a cafe halfway back to Chinatown. While my tea was steeping I called the number Roland had given me, the number where they claimed not to know Peng Hui Liang. It took eleven rings to get someone to the phone. That would make sense if this number were an immigrant rooming house, some tenement’s divided basement where a dozen invisible illegals slept on mattresses in rooms without windows, all sharing a single filthy toilet at one end of the hall and a grease-covered hot plate at the other.

  The young man who finally answered the phone grunted angrily into it, in Cantonese. “Yes?” he barked. “What do you want?” I’d probably woken him, and I felt bad about that. The new immigrants work too hard, and sleep too little, to have to put up with being annoyed on their few hours off by an ABC like me.

  I asked for Peng Hui Liang in my most whispery, apologetic Cantonese. The man on the other end of the phone snarled, in Cantonese considerably less apologetic, that no one of that name lived there. I told him meekly that Hui Liang was my cousin and asked if he could please tell me where she’d gone. He growled that no one of that name had ever lived there.

  “Please,” I said hastily, before he could hang up. “I have a message from her older brother. I promised to deliver it, but I can’t find her. What can I tell her brother, if I fail?”

  There was a brief silence on the other end of the phone.

  “Her cousin?” the man grunted.

  “Peng Mei Zhi,” I said shyly.

  Silence again. Then, “Flu Shing. She’s moved. She quit her job. It’s a house on Main Street, near a beauty parlor. I don’t know the number.”

  “Does she have a phone?” Pushing your luck, Lydia, I thought.

  He thought so, too. “A house on Main Street,” he said impatiently. “Near a beauty parlor. That’s all I know.”

  “Does she live with someone? Maybe one of the sewing ladies from her factory?”

  “I don’t know! She’s gone.”

  “Do you know where she works now?” It would be surprising if she’d found another job so soon after leaving Roland’s factory, but if she was enterprising it was possible.

  “No. Why don’t you go out to Flu Shing and bother them?” He added, just a touch more softly, “Good luck finding her. For her big brother.”

  Then he hung up.

  Flu Shing, I thought. That well-known section of New York’s largest outer borough, where so many new Chinese immigrants—and Korean and Indian, too—made their first homes in New York.

  Flushing. In Queens.

  Something was bothering me about that conversation, I realized as I went back to my table, but I wasn’t sure what it was. I munched my raisin toast, squeezed lemon into my Irish Breakfast tea—the perfect thing with raisin toast—and watched the rhythm of the streets change, as the nine-to-fivers disappeared into their offices and people on more singular, erratic missions took their places on the sidewalk. The early-morning mist had all burned off and the sun was sharp. It spread a light that was still white, not yet started on the transit through yellow to thick gold to red that marks the day.

  When I was finished I headed to the second part of my plan. I could go out to Flushing later, if I had to. But right now I had something else I wanted to try.

  In New York, Forty-seventh Street has for years and years been the center of the jewelry trade. It still is, and black-coated Orthodox Jews trading diamonds on a handshake are still a common sight in Midtown. But Canal Street is coming up fast. Some of the gold and the stones that used to go through Amsterdam to Forty-seventh Street now come through Taiwan and end up on Canal, where Taiwanese and, lately, Hong Kong merchant families have set up bright, glass-fronted shops to sell engagement rings and lucky pendants.

  The family of my mother’s old friend-and-rival Mrs. Chan is one of those. Like my mother, Mrs. Chan sewed in Chinatown sweatshops when she first came to America, and for years after that. That was where they’d met. Also like my mother, Mrs. Chan gradually and grudgingly retired, permitting her children to support her, making only the occasional guest appearance back at Mr. Leng’s to help out at times of especially heavy volume. They had to do this, they both insisted with deep sighs, because the new Fujianese girls who come from China now don’t know anything at all.

  But three years ago Mrs. Chan’s husband’s cousin from Taiwan opened not one but two jewelry stores, one on either end of the stretch of Canal that runs through Chinatown. Mrs. Chan immediately decided she would be more much useful overseeing operations in one of the stores than teaching a new, exasperatingly young crop of seamstresses the fine points of double-stitching.

  Not that Mrs. Chan knows anything about jewelry. But she can be found six days a week in the westernmost of her husband’s cousin’s stores, on a high stool at the counter where the gold chains are, smiling a silent smile, keeping an eagle eye on everything that happens inside the store and outside up and down Canal Street.

  That was how she’d seen me and Roland Lum going into Maria’s. And that was why I wanted to talk to her.

  The store, Golden Dreams, had just opened for the day when I walked in. The chrome-edged jewelry cases formed a tight ∪ along the sides and back of the narrow, spare space, glittering with bracelets and rings, diamonds and jade and colored gems. The white walls were bare except for two framed scroll paintings, horses in the mist on one, a duck and a drake on the other. Up high in the back, discreetly placed, General Gung, whose heavenly job it is to watch over business enterprises, sat on his red-and-gold altar above his pyramid of oranges and his sticks of incense.

  The two young men behind the counters smiled helpfully as I entered. I smiled back, but I had come to see Mrs. Chan. She was seated exactly where I expected to find her, surveying the store and the street from behind the counter where lengths of gold chain were set out on white satin.

  In the manner of Chinese women everywhere, Mrs. Chan didn’t break into an effusive grin when she saw me, just a small smile, but one that made her chubby cheeks bunch up and her eyes glow.

  “Ling Wan-ju,” she said. She reached across the counter to take my hands in her small, pudgy ones. “How long it’s been since I’ve seen you! Much too busy to spare a visit to your old auntie, is that it?”

  “No, Auntie,” I answered, smiling back, speaking Cantonese, as she had. “I know how hard you work here in the store, running Uncle Wen’s business for him. I haven’t wanted to take up your time.”

  She nodded, pleased; that was the appropriate response, though she knew it wasn’t likely to be true.

  “And how is Uncle Wen’s business?” I added politely. “The stores seem to be prospering.”

  “Oh, we’re not bankrupt yet,” she said with pursed lip
s, waving away any idea that things were going well. You never know what malevolent spirits, lurking jealously nearby, might overhear a chance remark and in a spiteful moment decide to change your luck. “Winter was very slow, even Christmas. We’re hoping things will be better soon.”

  “I hope so, too,” I told her.

  She smiled in a knowing way. “Well,” she said, “and how are things with you, Ling Wan-ju? I spoke to your mother recently. She said you are doing very well in your field.”

  Leave it to my mother. What I do for a living is a daily aggravation to her, but let it never cross anyone’s mind that I’m anything but the world’s biggest success at it.

  “I’m fine, thank you, Auntie. Actually, I came this morning to ask you something.” We had now been talking long enough that it was not unreasonable of me to get to the point.

  “To ask your old auntie something? Well, I’m flattered.” She shifted on her stool, sitting a little straighter.

  “You see everything from here, Auntie,” I said, indicating the store and the street. “You know everything that goes on.”

  “I see some things,” she admitted. “Although I’m so busy in the store I have no time to watch the comings and goings of strangers.”

  “But when people aren’t strangers, sometimes you might notice them,” I suggested.

  “Sometimes.”

  I smiled bashfully. “Roland Lum,” I said. “He’s not a stranger to you.”

  “Of course not. I’ve known Roland Lum since he was a baby. And his factory is so close, right over there.” She smiled back at me, a sideways, sly smile, as though she knew why I was asking about Roland Lum.

  “Well,” I said, hesitating, as though I were uncomfortable, “I was wondering about something about him.”

  Mrs. Chan didn’t answer, just waited, her face a composed picture of helpfulness.

  “I don’t know if you know this,” I said to her, “but I’ve been seeing Roland lately. Just once or twice,” I added quickly, so she’d know I wasn’t jumping into anything.

  “Oh, really? Your mother didn’t tell me,” she said innocently, as if she hadn’t been the one who’d told my mother.