Read Reflecting the Sky Online
Authors: S. J. Rozan
Reflecting the Sky (32 page)
I heard a thud, and a groan. “No!” I shouted into the phone.
“Oh, yes,” Tony Siu’s voice came back. “I don’t like this guy at all.”
“What do you want?”
“I told you, I want the kid.”
“Why?”
“Fuck you, sweetie. All you need to know is that I’m offering an exchange of merchandise. What I have here is damaged, maybe, but still usable. I thought of you because last night you seemed to care. It’s too late for that nose, by the way, but it wasn’t so great anyway.”
“Tony, I can’t—”
“By morning, sweetie. What I want isn’t even yours, so what’s your problem? Unless,” he said, as if something had just occurred to him, “unless you don’t care. Unless you, or whoever the hell it is you work for, don’t really give a shit what happens to this motherfucker. Tell me, because if that’s true I’ll just go on, have a little fun out here, not bother you anymore.”
“No,” I said. “No. I’ll see what I can do. Leave him alone.”
“Well, no, that’s not part of the deal. In fact, this merchandise is losing its value as we speak. I’d recommend you get moving.”
“Tony, if he’s hurt—”
“What?” A mocking laugh. “What? You’ll do what?”
Another thud, another groan.
Another laugh.
“Get moving, sweetie,” Tony said.
My stomach churned; I squeezed the phone so hard I thought I’d break it. “How do I contact you?”
“I’ll take care of that. You have enough problems.” One more laugh, then silence.
I lowered the phone and folded it.
“Lydia?” Mark came around the desk. I felt his hands warm on my arms. “Sit down. You’re shivering. What happened? Yang!” he called over the partition to another cop, his voice taking on the cadences of Cantonese. “Bring me some tea in here.” Back to English: “Lydia, what happened?”
I looked up at him. “They’re on a boat. They want Harry in exchange for Bill.”
A uniformed cop came around the partition with a steaming cup of tea. Mark nodded at me. I wrapped my hands around the teacup. So damn cold in here, I thought: Why do they keep every place so damn cold?
“Better?” Mark asked.
I realized it was the second time he’d asked that. I nodded, sipping.
“That was Tony Siu?”
Another nod.
“Is Smith all right?” Mark asked quietly.
I shook my head, all I could do.
“But he’s alive? You spoke to him?”
“Yes.”
“All right.” Mark crouched in front of the chair I sat in. “All right. We’ll do everything we can. Tell me what they said.”
I gave him what I could, Tony Siu’s words so glaringly bright in my mind that I couldn’t clearly see them.
Mark didn’t move until I was done. Then, perching on the edge of his desk, he picked up a pad and made some notes. “Who’s your cell phone carrier?”
I told him.
“Smith’s too?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. I can put a trace on those, maybe triangulate. It’s a long shot but worth trying. Shen knows what the launch looks like, and Smith says they’re still off Cheung Chau. I can call Marine District; they have boats, and Cheung Chau’s theirs. They can be looking for the amah, too.” He breathed deeply. “Siu said, until morning.”
“Mark, what are we going to do? Even if we find Harry, we can’t turn him over to them!”
“Of course we can’t. But if we find him we can talk to them as people with something to trade. Draw them out, bring them to us.”
Something to trade, I thought. Damaged merchandise.
“But,” Mark asked, “why the hell do they want him?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “If the whole thing was a phony kidnapping set up by Wei Ang-Ran, why are they suddenly trying to make it a real one now?”
“Maybe,” Mark said, tapping his pencil on the pad, “they heard about the second ransom demand, the one you’re trying to tell me Franklin was behind, and they realize there’s two million U.S. to be made by whoever has the boy.”
“Trying to tell you. You don’t think so?”
“You told me Grandfather Gao said Franklin’s impulsive but not malicious.”
“Maybe he had an impulse to make two million dollars.”
He shook his head. “It doesn’t fit. And we have him calling L. L. Lee from New York. If you told me he was part of the smuggling operation, I’d think about it. But not this.”
Franklin working with his father’s brother to smuggle artifacts out of China? Maybe. Maybe not. I didn’t give a damn about that now. Something else had just broken through my thoughts, something very dark lit up by Tony Siu’s glaring words.
“Beaten up and thrown into the water with his hands tied, to drown.” I stared at Mark. “Isn’t that how Iron Fist Chang died?”
Mark nodded but he didn’t look at me, and I realized he’d already thought of that but hadn’t told me.
“Work something else out with me,” he said. I didn’t know if he really wanted something else worked out, or if he just wanted to change the subject. I sipped my tea; it was bitter and overbrewed, but it was warming me up. My mind began to work again; I felt as if a wave had crashed over me, making it hard to see or hear. It was receding now, and I could think again, though everything looked different, strange, rearranged by the tide.
“If Siu and Chou heard about the second demand, whoever the hell made it, and Franklin’s offer,” Mark said, “how?”
“Maybe they didn’t,” I said slowly, exploring the landscape around me, the new shapes of things turned up by the waves. “Maybe they didn’t hear about the demand. Maybe
they
made it.”
they
made it.”
Mark gave me a long skeptical look, then shook his head. “They knew the boy was gone and they decided to get in on the take?”
“Why not?”
“Because the question’s the same. How did they know?”
Odd the number of things you can see, things that were hidden but always there, once the tide goes out
“The Weis apartment was a wreck when we got there,” I said, still speaking slowly. “Mark, it hadn’t been searched. It had been bugged.”
“Then why—?”
“To hide their traces. Maybe they broke something, spilled something, I don’t know. They couldn’t hide the fact they’d been there, so they made it look like something else.”
“Siu and Chou? They were in on it from the beginning? Wei Ang-Ran’s lying?”
“I don’t think so. Maybe they found out from Iron Fist.”
“Wei Ang-Ran says he only involved him after, to make the phone call.”
“All right, I don’t know how they found out, but suppose they did. They bugged the apartment, so they knew everything that was going on. They made the second demand themselves.” And, I thought to myself? And so what, Lydia? Does this help find Harry? Does it help Bill? “What’s the difference?” I heard my voice rising, getting a little wild. Breathe, I thought, control, breathe. “Mark, we need to find Harry. We need to find Bill.”
Mark looked at me, saw in my eyes my need to be up and moving.
“All right,” he said, looking down at the pad in his hand. “I’m going to get these things started. Then we’ll go up and see the Weis. Then we’ll go to Cheung Chau.”
“The Weis won’t talk to you.”
“I have another case now. Two: Smith, and Iron Fist Chang. These guys want Harry in exchange for Smith, now I can go see the Weis. They can deny anything’s wrong if they want. But at least I can tell them I think their place is bugged. If they let me I can send someone up to sweep.”
I nodded. “Mark?”
“What?”
“Thank you. And thank you for not telling me, ‘Don’t worry, everything’s going to be all right.’”
“It will,” he said, “if I can make it.” He ripped the sheet off his pad. “Hold on,” he said. “This will take a few minutes.” He gave my hand a quick squeeze, the way he had back in the conference room. I didn’t feel quite as hopeful now, but it still helped. Then he left.
I sat without moving in Mark’s cubicle, listening to the sounds of cops coming and going. Police stations never stop, I thought. You have to keep doing this, do it forever, over and over, because the bad guys, men like Tony Siu, never stop either. Maybe this isn’t really the world. Maybe it’s the afterlife, some kind of purgatory where the punishment for being evil in your last life is to be endlessly, futilely, hopelessly battling evil in this one.
I tried to remember whether any of the stories I’d heard as a child, any of the ancient tales my father had told, had said anything about that. It was true that the tales said you went on in death according, one way and another, to how you’d been in life. That’s why my mother had sent chef’s knives to my father, why those pottery houses in L. L. Lee’s shop had ducks and chickens and servants. Although I’d rather have the little game players sent into the afterlife with me; I’d rather have friends.
A thought shot straight through me, almost throwing me out of the chair. L. L. Lee. Oh, my God, Lydia. Bill would do better with those little bronze game players for friends than he’s doing with you.
But one good thing about this thought being so late in coming: Mark wasn’t here when I had it.
I grabbed the pad Mark had left behind and scribbled him a note.
I’m sorry, it said. I thought of something and I have to do it alone. I’ll call you.
I’m sorry, it said. I thought of something and I have to do it alone. I’ll call you.
I propped the pad against his lamp and hurried out of the cubicle, finding my way to the elevator by memory and prayer.
I was afraid Mark, or another cop, or someone, would see me and stop me, but no one did. I walked past the security desk and found myself outside, pushing through the soft blanket of evening heat. I hailed a cab and in Cantonese told the driver, “The home of Lee Lao-Li, on Harlech Road.” Maybe L. L. Lee’s place was as famous as Mark had said and the driver would know right where to go. If not, we could cruise the Peak, looking for Ming lions inside gates on Harlech Road.
But the driver did know, although the look he gave me in the mirror expressed his doubts about whether, once we found those gates, I’d be allowed through them. I got his point. I’d never in my life felt so wrung out, damp, rumpled, and used-up, and I knew I looked it. It felt like a million years since I’d put on crisp linen and set out with Bill for the Filipina sea.
I set my phone to vibrate instead of ring, settled back against the seat, and tried to think of nothing as the cab climbed from the glittering neon and whipping traffic of Central through the high-rise residential neighborhood on the hillside above and from there into the leafy darkness of the Peak.
Here, the road snaked beside rough stone walls, under banyan trees as wide as I was tall, under stands of rubber and maple and shaggy-barked pine with the lights of houses glowing between them. Here, money bought distance from your neighbors, from the smells of their dinners and the noises of their children playing and crying. It bought gardens that were more than pots on windowsills, gardens with paths and palm trees, ponds and benches, where you could stroll and think. It bought rooms where you could read, or study a bronze figure, without having to fold up a daybed or move the breakfast dishes from the table. What money bought here was the privilege of slowing down.
The cab made a couple of turns on roads that, as far as I could see, did not have road signs. My phone jiggled on my hip twice as we drove. Both times I snatched it up, hoping, but both times the number on the readout was Mark’s, at the station. I let the voice-mail message tell him I’d call him back as soon as I could.
Finally, as though he did it every day, the driver pulled to a stop at a pair of iron gates. Just inside them two huge curly-maned stone lions, the female on the left with her paw on her cub, the male on the right with his paw on the globe of the world, watched us with glaring eyes and snarling mouths.
The driver took my money and looked me over once again. “Do I wait?” he asked.
I thought. “Yes.” Just because I wanted to see L. L. Lee didn’t mean he was home. And if he was, and I saw him, I still wanted to be able to get down from here fast, and go with Mark to Cheung Chau.
I gave the driver fifty Hong Kong dollars for his waiting time, wondering as I got out whether he’d disappear with it and leave me alone in the dark. Well, if that happened, I’d worry about it later. I pressed the bell. After a foot-tapping wait, during which I was slightly surprised to find that the cab did not drive away, but even turned its radio on and its engine off, a voice issued forth from the speaker set into the gatepost. It asked me in Chinese who I was and what business I had.
“I am Chin Ling Wan-Ju,” I told it. “I wish to speak to Lee Lao-Li about a gift for my brother. Also about Lion Rock Enterprises.”
That should identify me for L. L. Lee. I tapped my foot some more in the quiet dark, listening to leaves rustling against each other and cicadas whirring. What had been the haze of early evening below was drifting mist up here on the Peak. It floated across the road and paused lazily in the treetops, as though it had nothing urgent to do, no worries, no fears. The speaker didn’t say anything more, but finally, just as I was about to jab the button again, a soft electronic click preceded the silent, slow opening of the gates.
I hurried up the path. Probably, a corner of my mind said, this was a lovely place, especially now, as twilight changed to night. Gravel crunched peacefully underfoot; more statues hid, pale among the greenery; here and there a lantern shone softly, to show the way, and pine and palm trees shadowed a fragrant flower border. Yes, lovely. I charged through it as fast as any Hong Kong citizen on a crowded sidewalk at high noon.
The house loomed before me as I came around a curve in the path. A square white house, I was surprised to see, stucco with a dark tile roof, big windows with wooden shutters: nothing Chinese about it at all. But then, the mansions on the Peak had been built by Europeans, not Chinese, and they, like anyone, had built the houses of home.
Columns flanked the front door, sheltering a porch and lifting a balcony over the treetops. The view from there must be spectacular, Hong Kong Island falling away below you, the sea to the south, the out-islands. Maybe from that balcony you could even see Cheung Chau. But not on a night like this, with a blanket of mist hiding from view everything below. And most nights on the Peak, from what I’d read, were like this.
I tried to guess the age of the house, but I’m not good at that. The 1920s, maybe, or a little earlier. That was the kind of question I always asked Bill; these were the things he always knew.
I climbed the three steps; as I reached the door, it opened. Apparently, once you were inside the gate, there was no need to ring any more bells; the hospitality of L. L. Lee was yours.
Of course, that also meant someone was at all times keeping careful track, on that lovely path, of exactly where you were.
A young man in a navy tunic and pants, black hair brushed straight back from his solemn face, held the door as I walked through it, then closed it quietly behind me. Bowing, not once speaking, he turned and walked across the wide marble foyer to another heavy wooden door, which he opened also, and held.
My sandals slapped against the marble as his silent footsteps had not. The sound abruptly stopped when I crossed through the door and onto a cream-colored carpet where huntsmen rode the forest, sending arrows after elephants and deer. A prince and his courtiers galloped from the left, bows taut, banners flying. They were matched exactly, arrows and horses, men and dogs, by another prince and more men-at-arms coming from the right. The luster of the carpet in the soft lamplight made me understand it was not wool, but silk.
“Do you like the hunt?” asked a voice, speaking in English, not loud but hard as stone. Across the room, L. L. Lee sat in a carved chair in a pool of light. The three walls surrounding him were open wide to the night, their shuttered doors thrown back. Sweet scents and soft sounds floated in from the garden to drift around the lacquered furniture and brush against porcelain jars holding slender yellow blooms. The age of the house my own ignorance kept me from knowing, but this room was different. It might be newly built, finished even yesterday: no matter. It was ancient, the scholar’s study unchanging through two thousand years of the Chinese past.
I crossed the carpet and stood before L. L. Lee. “No,” I answered him, in Cantonese. “Shedding blood for pleasure has never appealed to me.”
“The hunters hunt from necessity; the people must be fed. That it also gives them pleasure is a fortunate thing.”
“It’s all the same to the prey.”
“Speak to me in English. As you told me earlier, your Cantonese is poor.”
“My Cantonese,” I said, switching into English, “is the language I was raised in. But as you say.”
He nodded. “Sit.”
I did, on a mahogany bench scattered with cushions. The young man returned, opening the solid European door in the solid European wall to enter this Chinese garden pavilion. He carried tea things on a tray. He set the tray on an ebony table, bowed, and left.
When the young man was gone, L. L. Lee lifted the pot, swirled it in the traditional gesture of welcoming a guest, and poured golden, sweet-smelling tea into tiny cups. The pot was small and white, painted with plum blossoms in the snow. Plum blossoms also circled the cups, both inside and out.
He waited for me to taste the tea. It was as sweet as it smelled, tropical, mild, for evening. He lifted his cup after I drank from mine, sipped his own tea, then spoke.
“Why have you come to see me?”
The formal grace of ritual hospitality did nothing to soften the stone in his voice.
“Two men who work for you—they call themselves Tony Siu and Big John Chou—are holding my partner,” I said, in a measured, hard voice myself. “He’s injured and they’re threatening to kill him. They’re demanding that I give them the great-nephew of Wei Ang-Ran, the man who smuggles antiquities from China for you, in exchange. I don’t know where the boy is and if I did I wouldn’t turn him over to men like that. I want them to release my partner and I want to know why you want the boy.”
I didn’t have to identify Wei Ang-Ran for L. L. Lee; he knew perfectly well who he was. I did that to cut out any dancing around we might otherwise have to do, about what I knew, about who he was.
“Your partner.” He nodded. “The Spaniard.”
“That was a ruse. He’s as American as I am. We came here to bring a gift to the boy from his grandfather, who recently died in New York.”
In the slight lift of his eyebrows and the nod L. L. Lee gave me, I read a connoisseur’s cold appreciation of skill in an art he doesn’t care for. “A ruse. Well done, then.”
“I’m sure he’ll thank you if he gets the chance.”
“What do you want?”
“I told you: I want them to let him go. I want to know why you want the boy.”
“What are you offering?”
I’d been expecting that. “I don’t know.” I took a breath. “Whatever reason you have for wanting the boy, maybe I can help you achieve your goal another way.”
L. L. Lee’s eyes rested on me then, and we sat in silence for a time, in this room both indoors and out, open and enclosed, solid and here and ancient and legendary.
“No,” he said. “Your value is limited. This is the way you will be most useful.”
My cheeks blazed. No, Lydia! I ordered myself: Think why you’re here. Forcing myself calm, I spoke. “There must be another.”
“This is the way I choose.”
“Why? To accomplish what?”
“That is not your concern. You must find the boy.”
“My partner—”
“Will live, if you find the boy.”
“I think,” I said, trying to keep my voice hard, “that Tony Siu will kill him before morning.”
Another long look. Then: “No. That will not happen.”
“You can promise that?”
“Yes.”
“And that he won’t hurt him further?”
A pause, and then a nod. “Yes.”
“And if I can’t find the boy?”
“Then I can promise nothing.”
L. L. Lee put his teacup down. A tendril of mist from the branches of the pines outside crept into the room, wandering past a scroll painting of pine trees and mist.
“This is about the smuggling,” I said. “You intend to use the boy to pressure his father into continuing smuggling for you.”
“A father,” he said, as if instructing me on a law of nature, “will look for a way to express gratitude at the rescue of his son.”
Rescue. But I let it pass. “How did you know the boy was missing?”
“I was told.”
“By Tony Siu?”
“By someone who knew.”
“How do you know the father will do as you want?”
“Indebtedness is a powerful motivation.”
“So is fear.”
“For many people.”
“How did Tony Siu know to go to Cheung Chau?”
His stony gaze rested on me. “Shall we sit here until morning, discussing the past?”
“No.” I stood. “But I have until morning. And I have your promise.”
L. L. Lee spoke not another word, nor took his eyes from me, as I crossed the hunter’s carpet. The door to the room I opened myself. The silent young man pulled wide the front door as I crossed the marble hall, and shut it without a sound behind me, leaving me standing alone on the porch facing the path through the trees.
I raced down the path as quickly as I’d come up it. Outside the iron gates, which swung wide as I reached them and closed when I was through them, my cab was still sitting, engine off, radio on. Whatever the fare for the ride down the mountain, I decided, this cabbie was getting double, protocol be damned. I told him where I wanted to go and pulled out my cell phone. Twice more during my talk with Lee it had shaken discreetly on my hip. I’d glanced down, but both times it was Mark. I hadn’t answered.
Now, without listening to the messages, I called him back.
“Wai!”
“Mark?” I said, closing my eyes against the blast to come. “It’s Lydia.”
It came. “Where the hell are you?” Mark roared.
It was obvious nothing I said would be okay, but I gave him the truth anyway. “Up on the Peak. I went to see L. L. Lee.”
“You went to—Jesus Christ, Lydia! You sit there handing me this shit, Siu and Chou, Franklin Wei—you just couldn’t wait until I was out of the room, could you?”
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