China Trade (17 page)

“It could just mean sloppy recordkeeping at the Kurtz. Just because it’s porcelains doesn’t mean it has anything to do with us.”

“That’s true.” I poured more jasmine tea and warmed my fingers around it. “Okay, let’s think about something else.”

“Can I suggest a topic?”

“Not a chance. Now: You called before Steve did, and you said you had something interesting, which obviously wasn’t him because he hadn’t called you yet.”

“Your deductive powers amaze me.”

“I practice. What was the other thing?”

“I got a call from Franco Ciardi.”

“Your shady art dealer friend?”

“You’d break his heart if he heard you call him that. Yes, him.”

“What did he want?”

“To see me.”

“Why?”

“He said he’d rather not say over the phone.”

“What is this, everyone in New York thinks their phones are tapped? Did you go see him?”

“He said late this afternoon. Want to come?”

“Are you kidding? I wouldn’t miss it.”

“Great. He’s about ten blocks from the Kurtz, so we can make an evening of it on the Upper East Side.”

“Good,” I said. “Now, do you want to hear how I spent my morning?”

“You weren’t home in bed?”

“Hey, I’ve been working on this case too, you know. I mean, I’m not just a potted plant.”

I told Bill about my visit with Mr. Gao to the home of Mrs. Hsing.

“Stolen porcelains and Golden Dragons,” he said when I was through. “I get the idea we have a theme going here.”

“Does that cup sound familiar to you?” I asked. “I had the feeling I’d seen it, or a picture of it, but it’s not in the file.”

“I don’t remember it, but I’ll think. But I do think you’re right: This has got to be related. Even if the cup isn’t a Blair collection piece, the fact that the dead Golden Dragon was messing with it can’t mean nothing.”

The radiator whistled weakly under my window as I thought about a nineteen-year-old kid whose whole life had been reduced to that: He was “the dead Golden Dragon.”

“Bill? She loved him. His mother. It was so sad to see her. She just wanted to keep the last gift he’d given her. She was so torn between that and doing what she had to to keep his memory and her family’s name from being disgraced.”

“That’s understandable,” he said quietly.

“I’m not even sure she knew he was a Golden Dragon. She told us he was a college student.” A thought struck me like a blast of icy air in a stuffy room. “Bill?”

“What is it?”

“Would studying electrical engineering teach you how to disarm an electronic security system?”

“Is that what he was studying?”

“Yes. It would, wouldn’t it?”

“It could. You’re thinking he could be the thief?”

“Well, I was sort of thinking that anyway, assuming that’s one of our cups. Weren’t you?”

“Uh-huh. But then who’s Lee Kuan Yue? The guy Hsing fenced the stuff to?”

“And then Hsing double-crossed him? Possible. Maybe we should look into Mr. Lee.”

“Here’s something else: Would this mean this was a Golden Dragon job and Trouble lied to you?”

I thought about that. “I don’t see why he would. What was I going to do about it? No, if the Golden Dragons had
done it Trouble would have been bragging. Maybe Hsing was operating on his own.”

“Do they do that, the gang kids?”

“They’re not supposed to. It’s very bad; the
dai lo
loses face. But Mary told me Hsing was a loner, not well liked even in the gang.”

“If he had been operating on his own, would that explain why the Golden Dragons haven’t retaliated for his murder?”

“You mean, Trouble just sort of wrote him off?” I considered, sipping the cooled remains of my tea. “No, I don’t think so. It’s like family. You may not like someone, but you’re obligated to take care of them. If you didn’t manage that, you’re supposed to avenge them. But it would explain why the Main Street Boys killed him.”

“Because he was poaching.”

“In their rented territory.”

“Okay,” Bill said. “Let’s work on the theory this Hsing kid stole the porcelains. Where are they? Is there a way we can get a look around his apartment?”

“Actually, his mother did that. She said that she searched everywhere for the other cup after Lee said there was one. In case her son had been saving it for a gift for another occasion, or something. She didn’t find anything.”

“Do you think we can believe her?”

“Why would she lie?”

“To protect her son’s reputation?”

“She was the one who called Mr. Gao. If she’d actually found anything that says her son was a thief she’d never have called him. She’s torn because she doesn’t believe it but she’s afraid it might be true.”

“All right. Assuming he stole them and did something with them we don’t know about yet, here’s another question: why?”

“Why? Because they trade in the five-figure range, according to Dr. Caldwell.”

“Would he know that? An electrical engineering student, a gangster? If he could disable an alarm like that, why not
knock over a jewelry store on Canal Street? He could fill his jacket pockets and be doing a lot better than he could with two heavy crates of porcelains.”

“Maybe he was a porcelain kleptomaniac and he stole the stuff from everybody who had some, CP and Lee and who knows who else,” I offered brightly.

“How did he know CP had some?”

“Oh.” I deflated a little. “Someone told him?”

“Uh-huh. Who?”

“Oh, I don’t know. That’s too hard.” I rubbed my forehead, suddenly tired. “Bill?”

“What is it?”

“I’m going to have to tell Mary, aren’t I?”

“Tell her what?”

“They don’t know why Hsing was killed. This could be why.”

“It could be.”

“I promised her if I actually made a connection, I’d tell her. God, Nora’s going to hate that. And Tim. He’ll say he knew from the beginning I wouldn’t be able to keep it quiet.”

Bill didn’t say anything.

“Do you think it would be terrible,” I asked, “if I didn’t tell her until tomorrow?”

“Giving us a chance to wrap up the case?”

“Well, we could, if we get a lucky break and find out where he hid them.”

“If he’s actually the guy,” Bill said.

“You mean, if that actually is one of our cups.”

“Right.”

“You know what I think?” I asked.

“What?”

“I think we need to go see Mrs. Blair.”

N
I N E T E E N

M
rs. Blair, of course, was the most likely person to be able to tell us if the cup Mrs. Hsing so desperately did not want to give up was from the Blair collection. I could ask Dr. Browning, but he might not remember, or might not have gotten to it. He’d claimed, when Bill and I had talked to him, to have looked at everything in all the boxes, but this cup hadn’t been in the photographs, and, judging from the state of his apartment, methodical precision wasn’t his style.

It was, however, Mrs. Blair’s.

I very much wanted to see her. Before that, though, I wanted to do some other things.

One was eat. I was starving. Healing always gives me a big appetite; I’d discovered that when I was eight and I broke my wrist in the schoolyard running away from Tim, who was following me around everywhere just to annoy me. “You should have paid no attention to him,” my mother had scolded me, as she bustled around the kitchen and I examined my brand-new cast at the kitchen table. My brothers, including Tim, were still at school; they’d had to stay and finish the day. I was home in the early afternoon being plied with tea and sizzling rice crust.

It was after that incident that my father decided all his children needed the discipline that the study of martial arts provides. The Kung Fu academy in Chinatown where he sent my brothers didn’t take girls, so, outside the community, he found a Tae Kwon Do school for me. By the time he died five years later I was the only one of his children still practicing.

Right now, I was stiff and sore and too hungry to focus my thoughts. In my desk’s top drawer I keep various boxes with
various things in them. From the business card box, which was divided up into sections, I took a couple of the cards with the Taiwan address. The kind of gag I was planning to use I’d used before.

I locked my office, but before I did I climbed up to the closet shelf for the .22 Smith & Wesson I keep there and rarely use. I checked it, loaded it, and stuck it in my pocket. A .22 is almost not a real gun and I liked my .38 a lot better, but the Smith & Wesson had two advantages. One, it was small, light, and could be carried around in a roomy pocket so a person with bruises all over her didn’t have to wear a holster.

And two, I, not the Golden Dragons, had it.

I left, headed to the Peacock Rice Shop. There I ate Seafood Chow Fun Soup and pondered Bill’s question: If Hsing Chung Wah was our thief, where were the Blair porcelains now? If he was, of course, and we could find the answer to that one, then maybe the case would be over and the rest of this wouldn’t matter. The Golden Dragons’ delay in avenging Hsing’s murder; the Main Street Boys’ lack of interest in squeezing CP; the mysterious Lee Kuan Yue; Roger Caldwell’s visit to Mrs. Blair; and whatever Steve Bailey and Franco Ciardi had to offer, would all be irrelevant, useless, not of interest.

And the guy who’d been following me.

And my brother Tim’s knowing I’d been to see Trouble.

All coincidental, innocent of any involvement in the Case of the Purloined Porcelains.

It could turn out that way.

Except that every ounce of p.i. instinct I had was yelling that it wouldn’t.

The Peacock Rice Shop isn’t on Mulberry Street, but nothing in Chinatown is far from anything else, so after I’d eaten my soup and drunk some restorative tea I strolled over to Mulberry to see what the importers were importing this year.

I knew where I was going, because from my office, before
I’d gone to eat, I’d looked up import-export businesses in the Yellow Pages, called the three on Mulberry Street, and asked for Lee Kuan Yue. At the third they told me he was on the other line and would I like to hold? No, I said, I’ll speak to him later.

Now it was later. I paused before entering Spring Moon Imports, admiring the silk shirts and large porcelain vases in the front window. The day wasn’t quite as cold as the past few had been, the sun peering through small breaks in the clouds every now and then as though it were trying to decide whether this day was something it wanted to get involved in. It was already past two, though, and, being winter, it wasn’t long until evening; if I were the sun I’d figure it wasn’t worth it.

Inside the shop a few customers were browsing up and down the stainless steel shelves, looking through neat piles of silk and cotton clothing and tablecloths, displays of porcelain teacups and painted bells. Cases down the center of the airy, mirrored store held jade and enamel jewelry and hair ornaments.

I browsed with the other customers for a short time, then approached a saleswoman at the jewelry counter and asked to see Mr. Lee. The saleswoman looked younger than I was, with long straight hair pinned back by a silver and topaz clip. She cheerfully called over the manager and conveyed my request.

“Of course.” The manager, a smiling, short man, folded his hands in front of his gray suit. “I’ll see if he’s free. You are … ?”

“Chin Ling Wan-ju,” I said, speaking, as he had, in English, using my Chinese name and my Chinese accent. I handed him one of the business cards I’d taken from the box in my desk. “I’d like to see him about the possibility of a business venture.”

The manager went to check on Mr. Lee. I spent the few minutes he was gone examining jade bracelets with the help of the cheerful saleswoman. I had just chosen a particularly pretty piece of cloudy jade with a small gold lotus flower inset as a birthday present for Elliot’s daughter when the manager came
back and said Mr. Lee would be very pleased to meet me and was on his way down. As the bracelet was being gift wrapped, a tall man in his mid-fifties approached us through the doors from the back of the shop.

“Miss Chin.” He greeted me in the traditional way, one hand folded over the other and a small bow. I extended my hand and we shook. “Please let me offer you some tea.”

“I won’t trouble you,” I said, but he insisted it was no trouble, and soon we found ourselves in his office in the back, sipping a lovely pale oolong out of small white cups. Mr. Lee’s office, like the store, was airy and modern. Papers and pens were neatly arranged on his glass-topped desk; a computer hummed on one corner of it.

After a few minutes of general chat, so that neither of us would seem rude and only interested in business, we got down to business.

“My family has a small firm in Taipei,” I told Mr. Lee, keeping the Chinese accent going, “dealing in antiquities and
objets d’art
from Asia. We haven’t until now done business outside of Taiwan, but my eldest brother has decided this is a propitious time to explore the possibility of expanding. He’s sent me here on what you might call an exploratory expedition. I’m searching for business partners—firms who might be interested in bringing our goods to the American market.”

Lee Kuan Yue smiled in an interested way. “And what, may I ask, led you to us?”

“Spring Moon Imports is an established, respected firm, the sort of concern we would be honored to be associated with.” I smiled also. I had no idea if that was true, but it’s the kind of thing people’s vanity always lets them believe you believe if you tell them you do.

“Well,” Lee Kuan Yue said, “we’re always interested in new sources of merchandise for our customers. Can you tell me more about the kinds of items your family deals in, Miss Chin?”

“As I said, our specialty is Asian art and antiquities. We’ve recently acquired some small Indian bronzes, and we have
some lovely Thai shadow puppets, for example. But your inventory here is all Chinese, isn’t it?” I looked around innocently, though there was nothing to see in the office except a few framed pictures and calligraphy scrolls.

“Yes, we deal exclusively in Chinese goods.”

“And may I compliment you on your jade, by the way. We don’t deal much in jewelry, but we have somewhat of a reputation for high-quality Chinese porcelains of varying antiquity, from imperial ware from the Tang period to some exceptional export porcelains made for the British and American markets.”