China Trade (5 page)

He shrugged. “Some guys. They don’t got Chinatown turf. Their
dai lo
come to me, says he want that corner, pay me rent plus percentage. I say, why not? Not much money that corner, telling the truth. Maybe I making more this way. Certainly, easier. Trouble, Big-Shot Landlord!” He smiled the smile with all the teeth in it.

“When?”

“When they start? Maybe six month, maybe more.”

“So that’s Main Street Boys’ turf now?”

“Oh, little private eye getting smarter!”

I had a brief flash of the look he’d have on his face if I poured the tea in his lap, but it probably wasn’t hot enough anymore to do any permanent damage. In which case, the hell with it. “How far?” I asked instead.

“Couple buildings each direction. Little piece, let them getting started. Some day soon, retire, just collecting rent!”

Well, why not? All over the city, middlemen make a fortune without doing much work. It has something to do with controlling the means of production.

“So you think the Main Street Boys did this?”

“Maybe did, maybe got cheated and someone else did. Not important to me. I get rent, plus any from extras going on.” That, I assumed, meant the floating gambling parlors and any drug deals done on that corner.

“Who’s the Main Street Boys’
dai lo?
”

He shrugged. “Guy call Bic.”

“Bic?”

“Sure. Always got cigarette. Got burn, too. On face. He says from lighter, explode one day while light cigarette.”

That would make it easier to know him if I found him. “How do I find him?”

Trouble grinned. Then, as though talking about Bic had reminded him of something macho he’d forgotten to do, he went through an elaborate cigarette ritual himself. He took out his pack—Camels—and drew a cigarette without haste. He tapped it on the pack, stuck it loosely on his lower lip, lit a match, cupped it with both hands, sucked on his cigarette until it glowed.

Then he shook out the match and dropped it in my tea.

“You need boyfriend.” He grinned. “Maybe I let you talk one my boys. But now, you leave. Don’t come back this place. Go be private eye somewhere else.”

He stood, blew an unhurried cloud of smoke in my direction, and, turning, strolled behind the curtain.

I stood too, and put my jacket on, taking exactly as much time to do it as it usually takes. I tucked my hair carefully into my hat. I pulled on my gloves, making sure the cuff of each sleeve covered the wristlets. I zipped my collar up to my neck, and even snapped the snap I usually leave open up there. Then, when I was good and ready, I crossed the room, pulled open the glass door without looking back.

As they say in the Bronx: Later for you, my man.

F
I V E

I
stomped home, changed my clothes in a storm of pants and shirts and sweaters and socks. My mother wasn’t home, which was a good thing. She would have had something to say about how I could keep a better temper if I met a better class of people, which I would if I were in a better profession.
Then I would have snapped at her, which would have been undaughterly of me and would have made me feel guilty, which would have made me even angrier.

I walked, very fast, north and west from Chinatown practically all the way to Bill’s Tribeca apartment before I stopped and called him. “I’m a couple of blocks away, in a bad mood,” I said.

“Sounds like a phone booth to me.”

“Don’t start.”

“Not with you,” he assured me. “What do you want to do?”

“Complain.”

“Okay, go ahead.”

“Are you kidding? It’s freezing out here.”

“You want to come up here?”

“Good guess.”

“Well, come on,” he said. “But give me time to find my asbestos jockey shorts.”

I scurried as fast as I could past the loading docks and factories, which are increasingly, these days, interrupted by art galleries and restaurants. This part of town may never be fashionable, but there’s the kind of cutting-edge glamour to it that Soho had in its early days. Or so they tell me.

Bill’s lived here since long before that, and I don’t think he thinks much of cutting-edge glamour.

“It’s me, freezing,” I said into the intercom at the bottom of Bill’s stairs.

“Is it safe to let you up?”

“Did you hide everything I could throw and break?”

“Yes.”

“Then open the door.”

The buzzer buzzed, and I climbed the two flights of slanted wooden stairs to where he waited at the top, leaning in the open doorway to his apartment.

“It better be warm in here,” I said as I pushed past him into the living room.

“It will be as soon as the steam coming out of your ears
heats the place up.” He locked the door behind me and said calmly, “I made hot water, if you want tea.”

I dropped my hat, gloves, and coat on the sofa, and went straight to the kitchen, which is just a sort of bulge off the living room anyway. I pawed through the cabinet until I found some Lapsang Souchong, which is smokey and dark and murky, just the way I felt.

I brewed a cup in silence. Bill took my coat and things to the closet. He folded some sheet music that was open on the piano and slipped it onto a pile; then he closed the piano, both the top and the keyboard, the way he always does when someone comes over. He poured himself a mug of coffee and settled on the sofa to wait.

I carried my tea to the big reading chair, curled my frosty toes under me, and sipped. About halfway through, my toes and fingers and mood began to thaw.

“Were you practicing when I called?” I asked Bill.

“Yes.”

“What were you playing?”

“Bartok. Sonata.”

“What does that sound like?”

“Like a mess. I just started learning it.”

I was feeling a little more human. “I’m sorry I interrupted. I know you hate that.”

He sipped his coffee. “Tell me what happened.”

“You’re a man. You won’t get it.”

“Probably not. But I’m here and I’ll listen. Unless you want to go down to Shorty’s and take your chances, I’m your best bet.”

I put my cup down and told Bill about my interview with Trouble.

Bill lifted his eyebrows. “That’s really his name?”

“Of course that’s not his name. His name is probably Scholar Reaches the Peak or Rarest Bamboo Arrow or something. He thinks ‘trouble’ is a big mean western word. Macho jerk. He wouldn’t have treated me that way if I were a man. He wouldn’t have treated
you
that way. Damn you all!”

I got up and started to pace. Luckily it’s a long thin apartment.

Bill lit a cigarette, sat and smoked it while I passed him going north and then going south. When I was headed north again he said, “Listen.”

“I’m listening, but I’m not standing still.” I paced to the window, turned around again.

“Okay, that’s reasonable,” Bill said. “Look, Lydia. He’s a jerk. But it sounds to me as though it worked out pretty well.”

“Why, just because he didn’t try to kill me and I learned something?”

“There’ve been times I’d have settled for half that. Either half. But no. Because you accomplished something: You got him to underestimate you. That’s the best thing that can happen to you in this business.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Oh yeah. You’re right: He wouldn’t have treated me that way. He probably wouldn’t have talked to me at all. He talked to you because he doesn’t think you’re a threat. He won’t be looking over his shoulder for you and he won’t go around warning other tough guys about you. I don’t know if he’ll be any more use to us in this case, but you’re in about as good a position as you could be, if he is.”

I stopped pacing, hands in my pockets, and poked at the rug with my toe. “You think so?”

Bill stood and went to the closet for our coats. He tossed mine over to me, and my hat at the same time. I pulled them both out of the air, hardly stretching.

“Come on.” Bill grinned. “Let’s go uptown.”

We took the subway up to the Upper East Side. Bill has a car, but within Manhattan nothing’s faster than the subway, and you don’t have to park it when you get there.

The usual crowd was on the train: boisterous high school kids who should have been in high school, standing though there were plenty of seats, swiping each other’s baseball caps;
yuppies, male and female, with short hair, wool overcoats, and suits, checking their watches impatiently; tired-looking swing shift workers carrying plastic bags and the
Post;
and the unshaven homeless guy jingling a paper cup full of change, who pointed out that he did not steal, rob, or take drugs, and apologized for interrupting our evening. It was just past noon. Bill gave him a dollar.

The subway had been overheated, and when we came out onto Lexington a bitter wind ambushed us as though it knew we didn’t belong there.

“Jesus,” Bill muttered, hands deep in his pockets as we waited for a light to change. The steam from his breath was snatched away by a gust.

“I’m going to buy you a hat,” I told him. My words were muffled by the collar of my coat, which was up to my nose.

“You know I won’t wear it.”

“It’ll be a nice, manly, macho hat,” I promised. I looked around for one, as an example. The only men in sight were wearing a ski jacket and stocking cap; a navy topcoat and fedora; and an open jacket and no hat at all. The stocking cap was striped, red and white, about four feet long with a pom-pom at the end. I pointed at it. “Like that.”

The light changed. The stocking cap and fedora came east, Bill and I went west, and the hatless guy seemed to be having trouble making up his mind. Well, that’s what he got. At the last possible moment he dashed west, too.

“Do we know anything about Roger Caldwell?” I asked Bill as we headed toward Roger Caldwell’s museum.

“He’s been at the Kurtz for eight years. He was a curator of decorative arts at the Met before that.”

“What’s his reputation?”

“Knowledgeable and ambitious. The Kurtz was small potatoes before he got there. Now it’s world-class.”

“But still small.”

“Still small,” Bill agreed.

“You have a personality profile?”

“Well-bred, polite, scores high on the social graces.”

“How come you know so much?”

“How come you ask me if you don’t think I know so much?”

“I wanted to see how far you could go.”

“With you? All the way, in a minute.”

“Be serious.”

“I am.”

I frowned. “Let’s go back to ‘How come you know so much?’ ”

“I figured you’d want to know, so I called around. Is that a better answer?”

“Much.”

The Kurtz Museum was the second limestone mansion in from the corner on Fifth. It had a broad bay front, a marble staircase up from the sidewalk, and a tall front door painted an elegant dark green. It also had a huge, polished brass doorbell, which I wanted to ring, in case a butler would come open the door; but a sign said the museum was open, so we just walked in.

A thin, middle-aged woman in a blue wool suit sat in the marble-tiled entrance hall behind a spindly desk. Her graying blond hair had a nice wave to it, every one of those hairs seeming to know exactly where to go. She smiled a professional, impersonal smile without parting her lips.

“Hi,” I said, glad I’d gone home and changed from my gangster-meeting clothes to an uptown outfit. “I’m Lydia Chin, and this is Bill Smith. We have an appointment with Mr. Caldwell.” I knew that was true because I’d made it this morning before my date with Trouble.

“Just a moment.” Her voice was pleasant, but I was disappointed that she couldn’t speak without parting her lips, too. She said something into the discreet, flat phone on her desk, then thanked it graciously. “Go right up.” She nodded toward a marble staircase that curved up from the entry hall. “Dr. Caldwell’s office is on the third floor.”

“Oh,” I said to Bill, as we started our climb.
“Dr
. Caldwell.”

“Isn’t everybody?”

We passed a statue in a niche, a naked Greek person with a spear. Along the short hallway on the second floor cases holding dishes and teacups were centered nicely under still lifes in tones of brown and gold. The stairway to the third floor curved too, and instead of a niche there was a small stained glass window glowing intensely red and blue.

On the third floor the walls were cream colored and the doors were beautifully polished wood. One was open and the rest were closed. “How about,” I suggested to Bill, “that one?”

We went in that one, and inside it looked like everyone else’s office: file cabinets and computers and two desks and two young people, a man and a woman, with executive assistant written all over them.

The young man, who wore round tortoise-shell glasses and a great blue bow tie with electric green dots, seemed to have been waiting for us. “Hi,” he said as we walked in. His greeting was so enthusiastic he practically made two syllables out of hi. “You’re here to see Dr. Caldwell?”

“Yes,” I agreed. I introduced us to him.

“And you’re from … ?”

I gave him a card. His face bloomed into a grin as he read it. “Oh, no, really? Private investigators? Trish, look!” He passed the card to the young woman, then turned his grin back to me. “What’s this about? Oh, no, wait, I know. You can’t tell me.” He lowered his voice. “It’s confidential, right?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh, no, I understand.” He nodded conspiratorially, as though there were people who didn’t understand but none of us here was one of them. “Just one second. I’ll tell Dr. Caldwell you’re here.” He jumped up from behind his desk, snaked around it, and stuck his head through a door at the end of the room. The young woman, whose golden hair hung in a French braid down the back of her silk blouse, smiled in an appraising way and went back to her keyboard.

I suddenly became acutely aware of my short, asymmetrically cut, stick-straight, very Asian hair, my total lack of
makeup and nail polish, and the fact that I look twelve when I’m insecure. I was working on not being insecure when the blue and green bow tie reappeared, followed by another bow tie in a muted blue plaid. This one was worn by a smiling, medium-height man with sandy hair and the kind of strong, straight profile it takes generations of playing squash and going to Harvard to produce.