Nine Dragons (27 page)

Consequently, he grew to have a paternal involvement in her studies. Whether in person on visits to Hong Kong or early every Sunday morning—for him—on their weekly overseas phone call, Bosch’s routine was to discuss Madeline’s schoolwork and quiz her about her current assignments.

From all of this came an incidental, textbook knowledge of Hong Kong history. He therefore knew that the place he was now heading toward, the New Territories, was not actually new to Hong Kong. The vast geographic zone surrounding the Kowloon peninsula had been added by lease to Hong Kong more than a century ago as a buffer against outside invasion of the British colony. When the lease was up and the sovereignty of all of Hong Kong was transferred from the British back to the People’s Republic of China in 1997, the New Territories remained part of the Special Administrative Region, which allowed Hong Kong to continue to function as one of the world’s centers of capitalism and culture, as a unique place in the world where East meets West.

The NT was vast and primarily rural but with government-built population centers that were densely crowded with the poorest and most uneducated citizens of the SAR. Crime was higher and money scarcer. The lure of the triads was strong. Tuen Mun would be one of these places.

“Many pirates were here when I grew up,” Sun said.

It was the first either he or Bosch had spoken in more than twenty minutes of driving as each man had lapsed into private thoughts. They were just entering the city on a freeway. Bosch saw row after row of tall residential structures that were so plainly uniform and monolithic that he knew they had to be government-built public housing estates. They were surrounded by rolling hills crowded with smaller homes in older neighborhoods. This was no gleaming skyline. It was drab and depressing, a fishing village turned into a massive vertical housing complex.

“What do you mean by that? You’re from Tuen Mun?”

“I grew up here, yes. Until I was the age of twenty-two.”

“Were you in a triad, Sun Yee?”

Sun didn’t answer. He acted like he was too busy engaging the turn signal and making important checks of the mirrors as they exited the freeway.

“I don’t care, you know,” Bosch said. “I only care about one thing.”

Sun nodded.

“We will find her.”

“I know that.”

They had crossed a river and entered a canyon created by the walls of forty-story buildings lining both sides of the street.

“What about the pirates?” Bosch asked. “Who were they?”

“Smugglers. They came up the river from the South China Sea. They controlled the river.”

Bosch was wondering if Sun was trying to tell him something by mentioning this.

“What did they smuggle?”

“Everything. They brought in guns and drugs. People.”

“And what did they take out?”

Sun nodded as if Bosch had answered a question rather than asked one.

“What do they smuggle out
now
?”

It was a long moment before Sun answered.

“Electronics. American DVDs. Children sometimes. Girls and boys.”

“And where do they go?”

“This depends.”

“On what?”

“What they want them for. Some of it is sex. Some is organs. Many mainlanders buy boys because they have no sons.”

Bosch thought of the wad of toilet paper with the bloodstain on it. Eleanor had jumped to the conclusion that they had injected Madeline, that they had drugged her to better control her. He now realized that they could have extracted rather than injected, that blood-typing would require a withdrawal of blood from a vein with a syringe. The wad could have been a compress to stop the blood after the needle was removed.

“She would be very valuable, wouldn’t she?”

“Yes.”

Bosch closed his eyes. Everything changed. His daughter’s abductors might not be simply holding her until Bosch kicked Chang loose in Los Angeles. They might be preparing to move her or sell her into a netherworld of dark choices from which she would never return. He tried to push the possibilities out of the way. He looked out the side window.

“We have time,” he said, knowing full well he was talking to himself and not to Sun. “Nothing’s happened to her yet. They wouldn’t do anything until they heard from L.A. Even if the plan was never to give her back, they wouldn’t do anything yet.”

Bosch turned to look at Sun and he nodded in agreement.

“We will find her,” he said.

Bosch reached behind his back and pulled out the gun he had taken from one of the men he had killed in the Chungking Mansions. He studied it for the first time and immediately recognized the weapon.

“I think you were right about those guys being Vietnamese,” he said.

Sun looked over at the weapon and then back at the road.

“Please do not shoot the gun in the car,” he said.

Despite everything that had happened, Bosch smiled.

“I won’t. I don’t need to. I already know how to use this one and I doubt the guy was carrying a gun that didn’t work.”

Bosch held the weapon in his left hand and looked down the sight to the floor. He then held it up and studied it again. It was an American-made Colt .45, Model 1911A1. He had carried the exact same gun as a soldier in Vietnam almost forty years before. When his job was to drop down into the tunnels and seek out and kill the enemy.

Bosch ejected the magazine and the extra round from the chamber. He had the maximum eight rounds. He checked the action several times and then started to reload the gun. He stopped when he noticed something scratched into the side of the magazine. He held it up closely to try to read it.

There were initials and numbers hand-etched in the black steel siding of the magazine, but time and use—the loading and reloading of the weapon—had nearly worn them away. Angling the surface for better light, Bosch read
JFE Sp4, 27th
.

All at once, Bosch remembered the care and protection all tunnel rats had placed in their weapons and ammunition. When all you went down into the black with was your .45, a flashlight and four extra ammo clips, you checked everything twice and then you checked it again. A thousand feet into a line was not where you wanted to find you had a weapon jam, wet ammo or dead batteries. Bosch and his fellow rats marked and hoarded their clips the way surface soldiers guarded their cigarettes and
Playboy
magazines.

He studied the etching closely. Whoever JFE was, he had been a spec 4 with the 27th Infantry. That meant he could have been a rat. Bosch wondered if the gun he was holding had been left behind in a tunnel somewhere in the Iron Triangle, and whether it had been taken from JFE’s cold, dead hand.

“We are here,” Sun said.

Bosch looked up. Sun had stopped in the middle of the street. There was no traffic behind them. He pointed through the windshield at a government apartment tower so tall that Bosch had to lean down beneath the visor to see its roofline. Open walkways along the front of every floor offered views of the front doors and windows of what must have been three hundred different dwellings. Laundry hung over the walkway railings at different intervals on almost every floor, turning the drab facade of the building into a colorful mosaic that differentiated it from the duplicate buildings on either side of it. A sign in multiple languages over the tunnel-like entrance at center announced incongruously that the place was called Miami Beach Garden Estates.

“The address is on the sixth floor,” Sun said after double-checking the Chungking Mansions registration form.

“Park it and we’ll go up.”

Sun nodded and pulled past the building. At the next intersection he made a U-turn and drove back, pulling to the curb in front of a playground that was surrounded by a ten-foot fence and crowded inside with children and their mothers. Bosch knew he had parked there as an edge against having the car stolen or vandalized while they left it alone.

They got out and walked along the fence line until turning left toward the entrance to the building.

The tunnel was lined on both sides with mailboxes, most of which had popped locks and small graffiti insignias scrawled on them. The passageway led to a bank of elevators where two women holding the hands of small children waited. They paid no mind to Sun and Bosch. A security guard sat behind a tiny counter but never looked up from his newspaper.

Bosch and Sun followed the women onto the elevator. One of the women inserted a key at the bottom of the control board and then pushed two buttons. Before she pulled the key Sun quickly reached over and hit the 6 button.

The first stop was on six. Sun and Bosch moved down the walkway to the third door on the left side of the building. Bosch noticed that against the railing in front of the door of the next apartment down was a small altar with an ash can that was still smoking following a sacrifice to the hungry ghosts. The odor of burnt plastic was in the air.

Bosch took a position to the right of the door where Sun had stopped. He swung his arm back underneath his coat and gripped the handgun but didn’t pull it. He felt the clotted blood in the wound on his arm break free with the movement. He was going to start bleeding again.

Sun looked at him and Bosch nodded that he was ready. Sun knocked on the door and they waited.

No one answered.

He knocked again. This time louder.

They waited again. Bosch glanced out over the playground to the Mercedes and saw that so far it had been left alone.

No one answered.

Sun finally stepped back away from the door.

“What do you wish to do?”

Bosch looked down at the smoking ash can thirty feet away.

“There’s somebody home next door. Let’s ask them if they’ve seen this guy around.”

Sun led the way and knocked on the next door. This time it was opened. A small woman of about sixty peeked out. Sun nodded and smiled and spoke to her in Chinese. Soon the woman relaxed and opened the door a little bit wider. Sun kept talking and soon after that she opened it all the way and stood aside so they could enter.

As Bosch stepped over the threshold Sun whispered to him.

“Five hundred Hong Kong dollars. I promised her.”

“No problem.”

It was a small two-room apartment. The first room served as kitchen, dining room and living room. It was sparely furnished and smelled like hot cooking oil. Bosch peeled five hundred-dollar bills off his roll without taking it out of his pocket. He put the bills under a dish of salt that was on the kitchen table. He then pulled out a chair and sat down.

Sun remained standing and so did the woman. He continued his conversation in Chinese, pointing at Bosch for a moment. Bosch nodded and smiled and acted like he knew what was being said.

Three minutes went by and then Sun broke off the interview so he could summarize for Bosch.

“She is Fengyi Mai. She lives here alone. She said she has not seen Peng Qingcai since yesterday morning. He lives next door with his mother and his younger sister. She has not seen them either. But she heard them yesterday afternoon. Through the wall.”

“How old is Peng Qingcai?”

Sun communicated the question and then translated the response.

“She thinks he is eighteen. He doesn’t go to school anymore.”

“What’s his sister’s name?”

Another back and forth and then Sun reported that the sister’s name was He. But he didn’t pronounce it the way Harry’s daughter had.

Bosch thought about all of this for a few moments before asking the next question.

“She’s sure it was yesterday that she saw him? Saturday morning? What was he doing?”

While Bosch waited for the translation he watched the woman closely. She had maintained good eye contact with Sun during the earlier questions but she began looking away while answering the latest questions.

“She is sure,” Sun said. “She heard a sound outside her door yesterday morning and when she opened it, Peng was there, burning an offering. He was using her altar.”

Bosch nodded but he was sure there was something the woman had left out or was lying about.

“What did he burn?”

Sun asked the woman. She looked down the whole time she gave her answer.

“She said he burned paper money.”

Bosch stood up and went to the door. Outside he turned the ash can over on the walkway. It was smaller than a conventional water bucket. Smoking black ash spread across the walkway. Fengyi Mai had obviously burned a sacrifice within the last hour or so. He grabbed an incense stick from the altar and used it to poke through the hot debris. There were a few pieces of unburned cardboard but for the most part it was all ash. Bosch pushed it around some more and soon uncovered a piece of melted plastic. It was charred black and shapeless. He tried to pick it up but it was too hot.

He went back inside the apartment.

“Ask her when she last used the altar and what it was she burned.”

Sun translated the answer.

“She used it this morning. She also burned paper money.”

Bosch was still standing.

“Ask her why she’s lying.”

Sun hesitated.

“Ask her.”

Sun asked the question and the woman denied lying. Bosch nodded when he received her answer, then walked over to the table. He lifted the dish of salt off the five bills and put them back in his pocket.

“Tell her we pay nothing for lies, but that I’ll pay two thousand for the truth.”

The woman protested after hearing Sun’s translation but then Sun’s demeanor changed and he angrily barked at her, and the woman clearly got scared. She put her hands together as if to beg his forgiveness and then walked into another room.

“What did you tell her?” Bosch asked.

“I told her she must tell the truth or she would lose her apartment.”

Bosch raised his eyebrows. Sun had certainly kicked it up a notch.

“She believes I am police officer and you are my supervisor,” he added.

“How’d she get that idea?” Bosch asked.

Before Sun could answer, the woman came back carrying a small cardboard box. She went directly to Bosch and handed it to him, then bowed as she backed away. Harry opened it and found the remains of a melted and burnt cell phone.