Reflecting the Sky (21 page)
Read Reflecting the Sky Online
Authors: S. J. Rozan
“Well, then.”
I used the lemon and Bill used the sugar, and I wondered if that meant anything about our approaches to life. He didn’t try any more Dutch, or Tagalog, or really do anything at all. He just settled into his chair, sipping his iced tea and watching people as they moved around the leisurely lobby; but the shadow in his eyes, the tightness in his shoulders, though still there, were faded. Maria Quezon’s sister, who knew enough about something to be troubled, to be silent and watchful as she sat with her friends; but was not panicked, not so frightened she had not joined them; who had not asked what it was Bill knew about Harry, and had slipped the card with his cell phone number into the pocket of her cotton skirt: Maria Quezon’s sister had lifted a weight from him, and I found myself silently thanking her.
As we sat quietly in the cool lobby drinking our tea I decided this must be how my cell phone felt when, after carrying it around all day, I plugged it in to recharge its batteries at night. By the time Mark Quan came striding across the carpet, wearing a gray linen jacket and darker gray slacks, moving with that surprising grace, I was ready to pay him some serious attention.
“Hi,” he said, pulling a chair from another table over to ours. The chairs were all on casters, the better to glide without a hitch through the peace of the lobby of the Furama Hotel. “Hotel lobbies R us, huh?”
“Bill found this one,” I said. “We had a hot morning.”
The waitress appeared again. Mark Quan ordered a lemon squash.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“A drink only the British could have invented,” he said. “Too sour
and
too sweet. Tastes terrible, but it works.” He sat forward, forearms on knees. “I got Franklin Wei’s phone records for the last six months.”
and
too sweet. Tastes terrible, but it works.” He sat forward, forearms on knees. “I got Franklin Wei’s phone records for the last six months.”
“And?” I demanded. “Are there calls to Hong Kong?”
He nodded. “Two numbers.”
“Could you trace them?”
“Could and did. One’s the number at Lion Rock Enterprises.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, he’d have that, wouldn’t he? To find out when his father was coming in, or tell him he’d left his socks behind on his last trip. That doesn’t really mean anything.”
“No. But the other’s better. It’s to an antiquities dealer up on Hollywood Road.”
“Antiquities?” I glanced at Bill. “I don’t suppose this antiquities dealer sells jade? Little laughing Buddhas, maybe?”
“No jewelry, as far as I know. Bronzes, ceramics, that kind of thing. All genuine, on the up-and-up, but that’s no surprise. I don’t know much about that stuff, but I do know something about him.”
“The dealer?”
“L. L. Lee.” Mark looked from me to Bill. “A long-term high-up member of Strength and Harmony.”
Bill drew a cigarette from his pocket, then glanced around the lobby.
“It’s a Japanese hotel,” Mark Quan said. “You can smoke wherever you want.”
Bill lit a match, got the cigarette going. The waitress returned with a grayish-yellow drink in a tall frosted glass, placed it on a coaster in front of Mark.
“Well,” I said, “that’s not good news, but I can’t say I’m surprised.”
“I don’t know the guy,” Mark said. “Franklin, I mean. So I don’t have an opinion one way or the other. But it puts Strength and Harmony right in the middle of this, whatever this is. If I had a reported crime here I could round up a bunch of them and start pounding.”
“Maybe I should call the Weis,” I said. “If they haven’t had a ransom call since yesterday afternoon they might be desperate enough to bring the police in.”
“Wait,” Bill said, reaching for the ashtray. “Let’s think about that. If Steven reports the kidnapping, Franklin will hear about it—Steven will tell him next time they talk. Either that or we have to tell Steven not to, which will tell Steven what we think of Franklin. From what I’ve seen, Steven’s not the type to grit his teeth and wait. He’ll go charging off to face down Franklin and things could get worse.”
Mark sipped his drink. “There’s something to that. If this really is Franklin’s game, then he’s put himself in a position to know everything the other side does, or at least, if he gets shut out, to know he’s been shut out, so there must be something going on.”
“So what are you thinking?” I asked Bill.
“We have the police”—he gestured at Mark—“involved already. Rounding up triad members might give us something, but it might not. We may get results we don’t want, and they may not bring us any closer to Harry.”
Mark shrugged. “It’s okay with me. I’d sort of like to have the Department behind me, except,” he grinned, “every time they get behind me I find a knife in my back anyhow. Okay, so let’s think. I may not be able to pick these guys up but I can dig a little deeper than I did last night, now that I know where to look. And I can go up and see L. L. Lee.”
“What did you mean,” I asked, “when you said his business was completely legit and that’s no surprise?”
“Any triad high-up needs someplace to operate from, some legit business that he keeps straight so we don’t have any reason to go poking around. Lee’s known as a cultured man, a guy with a passion for the ancient arts. An antiquities business makes sense for him. He may be laundering money through it, but him being L. L. Lee, I’m sure people have looked into that before and not been able to make anything stick. Probably the business is squeaky clean. But I’ll look again. Okay, what else?”
“We did something interesting this morning,” I said, glancing at Bill. Bill nodded; I. went on, telling Mark what we’d set up. “She may not call,” I ended. “Her sister may really not know where to find her. But Bill got the feeling that she did.”
“Tagalog, huh?” Mark said to Bill. “That’s pretty good. You ought to be a cop.”
Bill shook his head. “Couldn’t take the coffee.”
“Can I find the sister again if I want her?” Mark asked.
“She wouldn’t give me her address and I didn’t want to push it. But her name’s Alicia Carolina Quezon-Aguilera, and she works for a family on the Kowloon side, in one of the new towns.”
“That ought to do it,” Mark said. I started to say something and he stopped me. “No, I’ll stay out of it for now. But if she calls—”
“Yes,” I said.
“Right.” He raised his glass in a toast. “Tagalog, huh?”
Bill raised his iced tea in response, and they drank more or less to each other.
Humph, I thought. But the Furama had no potted plants for me to talk to, so I said to Mark, “Did you check on Natalie Zhu?”
“Yes. If what everyone says is true, there’s someone who won’t have to come back in her next life. Not a hint of a shadow of anything bad. Reputation for complete devotion to her clients, especially the Weis.”
“Well, that’s comforting. And you checked on the Weis’ finances?”
“As far as I could. I think it’s true, they don’t have fifteen million dollars—Hong Kong dollars; two million, American. They don’t seem to have anything close.”
“Could they raise it?”
“I suppose they could borrow against Steven’s share of the business. They’d need the uncle’s permission, but he’d give it. But I talked to a banker I know, gave it to her as a hypothetical situation. She said it would be hard to borrow until the will’s probated. Steven doesn’t really own anything yet. Anyone who was looking for that kind of money would have done better to wait.”
“It’s strange,” I sighed, sitting back in my chair. “The timing on everything involved in this is just wrong.”
“Probably not,” said Bill. “It’s probably right; we just don’t know what it’s right for.”
We drank our drinks, finishing them in silence.
“There’s something I want to do now,” I finally said. “Just a little thing, but as long as we’re here.”
So, after a brief squabble over the bill which Mark won, we all set off.
I was, as I’d told Mark, adapting. And one thing I knew by now was that there’d be an elegant, small, expensive jewelry store somewhere in the corridors of any grand hotel.
We found it with no trouble, a tiny storefront sandwiched between a shop selling Italian leather wallets and keycases and one selling extravagantly wrapped boxes of chocolates and marzipan fruits. The jewelry store’s windows featured pearls, on long strands where each pearl was identical to the others in color and size, in earrings where rubies surrounded them, in brooches where pearl-bodied fish blew diamond bubbles as they swam between strands of twenty-four-karat seaweed. They all shone with that sharp, brighter-than-sunlight glow that Bill had attributed to high-intensity lighting, but I was sure had at least something to do with the nature of jewels themselves.
A bell rang as we entered the shop, and a young man in gold-rimmed glasses and a quietly expensive suit put away his calculator and came forward to greet us. His eyes swept our little party, and then, coming to a decision, he addressed us in British-accented English. He took care to include us all, because it wan’t obvious at first glance which of these gentlemen might be planning to buy me some little pearl fish.
“Good afternoon,” he said. “May I help you? Have you had tea?”
“Yes, thank you,” I answered. “We’ve just finished.” I didn’t want to start with the whole tea business; we weren’t planning to buy anything, and we had other things to do. “I’d like to ask you something, if I may.”
“Of course.” He smiled at the others and turned his attention politely to me, slightly surprised at the lack of subtlety involved in my dealing directly with him, but wanting to make sure we understood his willingness to work within the current world order, whatever it was. I was a little disappointed to see that his glasses glittered with the same bright glint as the jewels in the window. Bill might be on to something, after all.
“My grandfather,” I said, “has always worn a jade pendant, a carved Buddha. Something like the one you have here.” I pointed to a velvet-covered tray in the glass display case. “It’s about three hundred years old and valued at one hundred thousand dollars, Hong Kong dollars. He bought it in Hong Kong twenty-five years ago. Since I arrived in Hong Kong I’ve seen others, like yours—” He slid open the back of the case and withdrew the velvet tray, placing it on the counter, in case what I’d come to do was buy another one. “—but they’re all new.” As he lifted the pale green Buddha by its golden chain and placed it in my hand it seemed the least I could do to add, “Some of them are beautiful, of course.”
The young man smiled, and looked from Bill to Mark, to make sure they both noticed how much I liked this piece.
“What I was wondering was how rare a piece like my grandfather’s is,” I said. “I mean, something that old. If I wanted to buy one like it in Hong Kong now, could I?”
The young man pursed his lips as he considered my question, and some way to answer it that would end with me walking out of here wearing the laughing Buddha I right now held in my hand.
“Yes, it would be possible,” he answered me. “Pieces of that age are rare but not unknown. Hong Kong has a number of shops that deal in those items. Here, of course, we only carry unique pieces, designed and made for us. A customer purchasing a piece here can be assured that he—or she,” he interjected with a smile, “—is the first to own it.”
Good move, I thought, bringing up that first-owner thing. There’s a risk involved in buying old things, if you don’t know whose they were. They might come with some karma you don’t need, left over from the previous owner.
Smiling to acknowledge his consideration for the spiritual life of his customers, I asked, “Where do those pieces come from? The old ones, I mean? Hong Kong people who don’t want them anymore?”
“Most will come from local collectors, or old families,” he said, almost visibly disappointed that I hadn’t risen to the new-and-unique-piece bait. “Others, despite the laws, are imported from China. Many antiquities were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, but many were hidden and preserved. Now all China wants to be like Hong Kong, so China’s treasures are being sold abroad. The government disapproves and tries to stop the trade, but who was it who said ‘To be rich is glorious’?”
The answer to that was Deng Xiao-Ping, but it wasn’t a real question, so I moved on.
“So if I wanted a piece like my grandfather’s,” I asked, “I could find it in Hong Kong?”
“Yes,” he acknowledged. “You could.”
I smiled again as we thanked him and left, because he clearly wasn’t about to tell me where.
We stood, Mark and Bill and I, in the carpeted corridor of the Furama, surrounded by expensive shops and hushed sounds. “Well, guys,” I said, “what now?”
Mark said, “I want to drop in on L. L. Lee.”
“His shop will be open on Sunday?”
Mark nodded. “In the afternoon. If he’s not there, I’ll go up to his place. I always wanted to see it anyway.”
“His place is famous?”
“He lives along Harlech Road, on the Peak. They say he has some of his most valuable antiquities up there, in the house and the gardens. A lot of the houses on the Peak have gates, but Lee’s gates have two Ming lions just inside them, to keep the riffraff out.” Mark grinned. “No cop’s ever gotten past the lions.”
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