Mandarin Plaid

by S. J. Rozan

  “I think so,” I said slowly. “Though I don’t know how.” Actually, I had some idea how, but I didn’t want to share it with Brad and Andrew before I’d gone over it with Bill.

  “Listen,” I said to Brad. “There’s another thing. Genna got a call this morning—do you know about that?”

  “A call? There were lots of calls before I left, but none that stood out. Who was it from?”

  “The people who stole the sketches.”

  His face paled. “Oh, my God. Did I pass that on to her? What did they want?”

  “I don’t know. I was hoping you did. I—”

  Andrew’s phone rang, slicing through the loft like a sudden cold wind. Bill’s back stiffened and his head went up. Mine did, too.

  Which just goes to show how good our instincts are. It was Genna.

  “She wants to talk to you,” Andrew said, bringing the portable phone over to where I sat.

  I grabbed it. “Genna? What happened?”

  “Oh, God, Lydia.” Genna’s voice sounded thin and tight as a wire. “They called again. It’s all terrible. I wanted to call you right away, but John—God, why did I listen!—anyway, I’m waiting for them to call but I don’t know what I’m going to do, because I haven’t got that kind of money—”

  “Genna!” I said as sharply and loudly as I could, as I heard her words break into sobs. “Don’t! Get control of yourself, Genna. Tell me what happened. How much money do they want?”

  I heard Genna draw in a ragged breath. In a shaky voice she said, “A million dollars.”

  “A million dollars?” I practically shouted. Bill, Andrew, and Brad all stared; Andrew’s mouth dropped open. Then everyone leaned closer to me, as though that would help them hear the words spilling jerkily into my left ear. “For your sketches?” I asked, unbelieving.

  “No, not for the sketches, of course not!” Her voice got wilder. “Oh, Lydia, please help me! You have to go with me to Mrs. Ryan. Please, will you?”

  “You’re going to ask Mrs. Ryan for money?”

  “She’s the only person I know who has money like that!”

  “Why would she give it to you?”

  “She has to,” she wailed. “They’ll kill him if she doesn’t.”

  I suddenly went cold. “Kill who?”

  “John.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  I filled in Andrew, Brad, and Bill in rapid-fire shorthand as Bill and I got ourselves together and waited for the elevator.

  “We’re coming,” Andrew said, as it arrived.

  “No way.” Following Bill, I stepped inside. “Don’t argue, it’s too serious. I’ll call you as soon as I can. Really, Andrew.” I kissed his cheek and pushed the DOOR CLOSE button.

  Miracle of miracles, it worked.

  The elevator had barely landed before Bill and I had shot out the door and were racing up the street and down the avenue to Genna’s building. Her elevator was slower and the wait was excruciating, but we finally got to her floor. Genna was at the empty front desk, waiting for us, and she swept us into the conference room and yanked the glass door shut. None of us sat.

  The conference room was more chaotic than last time, more fabric pinned to the walls, more boxes of buttons and buckles piled on the table. An armless, headless dressmaker’s dummy leaned drunkenly in the corner, swathed in Genna’s crinkly gold cloth.

  “What happened?” I asked, as soon as the door was closed.

  Genna’s soft skin was ashen, her eyes red and her makeup smudged; but she was still beautiful. Her ruby-nailed hands twisted around each other as she said, “They called. This morning.”

  She stopped, as though that was information we could have done something with. But it wasn’t. “And?” I prompted.

  She swallowed, realizing she was going to have to go on. “I wanted to call you right away, but John—” Her voice broke, but she lifted her head and continued. “John didn’t want to. He said you hadn’t … hadn’t done us any good the first time.”

  I couldn’t argue with that.

  She swallowed again. “He said he’d do it himself.”

  “Do what?”

  “Make the payoff. They told us where to bring the money. He went to do it.”

  “How much money?” Bill asked.

  She frowned at him as though she didn’t understand the question. But she answered it. “Fifty thousand dollars. The same as before.”

  “Where’d you get it?”

  “John got it. From his bank. Oh, what’s the difference?” she burst out. “It all went wrong, and now they have John and they’re going to kill him if I don’t give them a million dollars!”

  “What went wrong?” Bill pressed.

  “Oh, stop!” Genna entreated. She turned to me. “Lydia, do we have to talk now? I’ll tell you later. On our way. Because they said there’s a deadline—”

  “When?” I asked.

  “Eight hours from when they called. Tonight.”

  I glanced at Bill. His eyes told me what he wanted. “There’s time then,” I said. “It will help if you tell us what happened.”

  Genna slapped the back of the chair next to her with a small, impatient gesture. She looked toward the ceiling, fighting back tears. “They called,” she said, her words forced from a tight, constricted throat. “This morning. They said they were ready to deal again.”

  “Man or woman?” asked Bill.

  She looked at him, not in a friendly way. “A man.”

  “Did you recognize the voice?”

  “Of course not!”

  “Go on, Genna,” I said, to come between them.

  She set her mouth and brought her eyes back to me. “They told us where to bring the money. The same amount as the first time.” Flicking her eyes to Bill, she said, “We went to John’s bank. He took it out, in cash the way they wanted, and he went to take it to them.”

  “Where?” Bill asked.

  “The East Side. A phone booth at Thirty-fifth and Third. He was supposed to just leave it. He promised that was all he’d do.”

  I asked her, “That was when you called me the first time?”

  She nodded. “After he left. I thought … I’m not really sure what I thought. Except that you could help. I wanted … I’m not sure.” She seemed about to say something more, but she didn’t. Her eyes wandered from me, to the window, to the fabric-pinned walls. Then, as though she’d been going on fuel she’d suddenly run out of, she slumped into the nearest chair. Her eyes brimmed with tears; she squeezed them shut, tried not to cry.

  I sat down, too, so she wouldn’t feel like we were looming over her. Bill pulled out a chair and perched on the arm. “What went wrong?” he asked, in a very gentle voice.

  She opened her eyes to him with something like surprise. With a catch in her throat, she said, “He followed them.”

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “They said so. When they called. They were really mad. ‘Twice,’ they said. ‘You tried to screw us twice. That’s not very smart.’ I tried to tell them we didn’t have anything to do with that other time in the park, we didn’t even know who took that money, but they didn’t believe me. ‘Anyhow it doesn’t matter,’ they said. ‘Talk to your girlfriend, jerk.’ Then they put John on. ‘I’m sorry, baby,” he said. ‘But I was just so pissed that anyone would do this to you. I wanted to find them and break their necks.’ ”

  Genna put her hand to her mouth and once again fought against tears. “Then—” her voice broke. She started again. “Then they took him away. And the man came back. ‘So he thought he was Rambo, your boyfriend. Charging in here, what a jerk. But you’re lucky.’ I asked him why. I didn’t feel lucky. ‘Because his momma’s rich,’ the man said. He sounded to me as though he was smiling. I hated him. ‘So you get another chance.’ They told me not to tell the police. They’d probably be mad that I even called you. But if we’d called you in the first place John wouldn’t have … anyway, they said to bring a million dollars to them in eight hours or Joh
n …” She lost her battle for control and broke down into sobs.

  I rose from my chair, went and put my arm around her. Bill handed her a handkerchief. After a short while her shoulders stopped shaking. She wiped her eyes and blew her nose.

  She seemed ready to talk again, so I asked, “Where? Where do you have to take the money?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, in that deep, cloudy voice you get when you’ve been crying. “They said they’d call and tell me. So now,” she blew her nose again, then looked helplessly at her hands, “I have to go see Mrs. Ryan. To ask her for the money.”

  My eyes met Bill’s. Then I turned back to Genna.

  “Maybe we should go to the police,” I said gently.

  “No! Lydia, we can’t! They told me not to!”

  “Genna,” I said, “we think we know who’s behind this.”

  She didn’t answer at first, just stared. Then she whispered, “What? Who?”

  “Roland Lum,” I said. “The factory owner, in Chinatown? He’s involved somehow. If he didn’t steal the sketches, he probably knows who did. He knows something, anyway, and the police should—”

  “No!” She shook her head wildly. “No police! I don’t even care who it is! I just want John back.” She pressed the back of her hand to her mouth. “I shouldn’t have called you. I’m doing this wrong. Oh, God.”

  “No,” Bill said, calm and reassuring. “No, it’s all right.”

  She raised her eyes to his, probably more for the tone of his words than for their meaning.

  “There’s nothing the police could do now,” he said. “They’d go to the factory and to wherever Roland lives, but you can bet he’s not there. At best they’d be useless, at worst they’d alert him. Later, when we find out where the payoff is supposed to be, let’s rethink calling them. But not now.”

  Genna nodded. She wiped her eyes again, then stood and began to pace the conference room, but stopped after a few steps, her face confused, as though her action made no sense to her. She stood, looking helpless and lost, surrounded by her work.

  “Okay,” I said, standing. “We’ll go. Together.”

  Her smile was so full of relief and gratitude, I was embarrassed to have it shining on me.

  “I’ll wash up quickly,” she said. She took hold of the door handle.

  “Wait,” Bill said. “Tell me one more thing.”

  She turned to him.

  “The phone booth. Where?”

  “Thirty-fifth and Third.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “You think I could forget that?”

  “No, I’m sorry. What corner? Northeast, northwest … ?”

  She looked quickly from me back to Bill. “Why?”

  “I’ll go there,” he said. “Maybe I can pick up a trail.”

  “No! That’s dangerous for John. That’s how they caught him—he was following them.”

  “I’m better at this than he is,” Bill said matter-of-factly. “And they won’t be expecting anything from that end. I won’t get too close. But it could be important.”

  Genna looked at me. “Lydia? Do you think this is a good idea?”

  “Yes,” I said quietly.

  Genna’s eyes went down to the carpet. “On Third. The west side of the street, up the block toward Thirty-sixth. In front of the cleaners.”

  “All right. Let’s keep in touch,” Bill said to me. “My service, your machine. What’s Mrs. Ryan’s phone number?”

  Genna gave it to him. She went to the washroom to splash cold water on her face and repair her makeup. Bill and I talked briefly while he waited for the elevator.

  “You think she’ll give them the money?” he wanted to know.

  “For her own son?”

  “You’re the one who met her.”

  “I can’t believe she wouldn’t. You think John’s all right?”

  He had no way to answer that question, and we both knew it.

  “I’ll see you later,” he said. He kissed me quickly as the elevator door opened. Then he got inside and left.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Genna and I caught the next elevator. From the door of her building, I dashed to Sixth Avenue and stuck my arm in the air. A cab swerved across two lanes of traffic to screech to the curb for us. Genna and I piled in the back and told the Sikh cabbie to take us to York as fast as he could. He grinned, and drove as if he’d been waiting for a challenge worthy of his skills all day.

  “God, Lydia,” Genna said in a tight, strained voice as the cab sped up Park Avenue. “Why did John do that?”

  “You mean, why did he follow them?”

  “Why didn’t he just leave the money? What’s wrong with him?”

  Genna was perched on the edge of the seat, as though if she leaned back her weight would slow the cab down.

  So, I realized, was I.

  “I don’t know,” I said automatically, and knew I was lying as soon as I said it. I went on, telling the truth. “But I would have done it. Bill would have, too. Some people—I don’t know, we can’t hold ourselves back.”

  “You don’t want to,” she said, peering through the window as if she could stare the other cars, the ones that were delaying us, into nonexistence.

  “What?”

  “You don’t want to. If you hold yourselves back you never get that rush. It’s not that you can’t keep out of trouble. You like it.”

  I didn’t know how to answer that, or even if I had to. Or even if she was talking to me.

  “But John’s not like that,” she went on. Our cabbie blew a blast on his horn and charged through a narrow gap in the traffic.

  “He’s not?” I was surprised. “I thought he was a hothead. That scene he made, when you wouldn’t take his money—”

  “No. He blows up at people, and he wants his way. But he looks before he leaps.”

  My thoughts went back to the bright and noisy interior of Maria’s on Canal, and a pastry Roland Lum and I had shared. “That’s not what I’d heard about him.”

  Genna shot me a look. “From who?”

  Good point, Lydia, I mused. Consider the source.

  The cab made a sharp right that threw me against the door and Genna against me. She and I didn’t speak again until, after another few minutes of the kind of driving that leaves a lot of honking horns behind you, we slammed to a stop in front of Mrs. Ryan’s York Avenue building. Genna threw the grinning cabbie a twenty, and we scrambled out without waiting for change. It was almost too bad, I thought, to reward that kind of driving; but he’d gotten us here.

  The delicate side chairs were still lined up with nervous precision along the edge of the lobby carpet. Genna spoke to the concierge, who called upstairs, had a conversation we couldn’t hear, and then waited an interminable time with the handset pressed to his ear. Genna tapped her foot and threw looks around the lobby as though she might find something there, something beyond framed prints of lighthouses and trout, something that might help.

  The concierge finally hung up his handset. He said, “I’m sorry. Mrs. Ryan isn’t in.”

  Genna looked at me, sudden fear widening her eyes. “Oh, my God. What do we do now?” she whispered.

  “Yes, she is.” I pushed past Genna and put both hands on the concierge’s polished counter. “If she’s not there, what was the long wait about? That was when the maid went to ask if she’d see us. Well, this is critical. It’s about her son. Call her again.”

  The man fixed his eyes on me. They were blue, and bored. “Mrs. Ryan,” he repeated, “is not in. To you.”

  “Call her again,” I repeated, too. “Tell her Lydia Chin has been speaking to Roland Lum, Wayne Lewis, and the man who makes silver buttons.” I didn’t mention Brad; it didn’t seem to me that Genna needed to hear about that right now. “Tell Mrs. Ryan her son John will know everything they told me in about five minutes if she doesn’t let us up. Go ahead, do it,” I demanded as he hesitated. “She’ll thank you.”

  He spoke low into the handset,
keeping his eyes on me but not letting us hear what he was saying. While he spoke to Mrs. Ryan, Genna spoke to me.

  “Lydia? What are you talking about? What man who makes silver buttons? What do you mean, John will know everything in five minutes?”

  “That part was the bluff,” I whispered to her. “I’ll tell you about the other part when we get a chance.”

  The concierge replaced the handset again. He looked at us with new respect, or at least new something. “East elevator,” he said. “Twenty-third floor.”

  When we stepped out into the tiny, hushed lobby, the door to Mrs. Ryan’s apartment was open and the sturdy woman who had let me in the first time was standing there waiting for us. That made three times in one day people had been waiting for me at elevators, I thought. I’d always thought it must be great to be eagerly anticipated everywhere you went. Now I wasn’t so sure.

  We stepped down the three steps into the formal living room. The room’s huge mantlepiece was carved from gray-veined white marble, and furniture upholstered in blue silk sat regally on miles of ice-white carpet, but nothing in the room was as cold as the eyes of Mrs. Eleanor Talmadge Ryan, who waited for us at the far end.

  She stood, silk-bloused arms folded, near where the glass of the French doors revealed an empty terrace and the wide spring sky and sparkling river beyond. Her eyes swept Genna coldly and perfunctorily, and then dismissed her with contempt. They came to rest on me, and I found myself wondering why she wasn’t wearing a sweater over that thin silk blouse, in a room where I suddenly had to suppress a shiver.

  “What can you possibly have been thinking?” She spat each word at me through clenched teeth. There was no preamble, no greeting.

  “Mrs. Ryan—”

  “I only instructed Joseph to allow you up because I was not prepared to have you make a public scene in the lobby. I have no such qualms about my own home. If you are not out of here and on your way in thirty seconds, I shall call the police.”

  She dropped her arms and stalked to the ornate desk that held the phone.

  “That will be dangerous for John,” I said.

  “What? How dare you? Is that a threat?”