Reflecting the Sky (7 page)
Read Reflecting the Sky Online
Authors: S. J. Rozan
“Yes.”
“A nervous young man,” he commented.
A bent old woman approached the nervous young man. She was selling paper prayers from a bamboo basket. Wei shooed her away, but she didn’t go. Holding out a folded paper from her basket, she tapped him on the wrist with it and spoke. At first he snapped at her impatiently. Then, in what looked like midword, he stopped and snatched the paper from her hands. He unfolded it quickly as the old woman scolded him, her palm up, demanding payment. Distractedly, reading his piece of paper, he thrust a bill at her and she scurried away.
My eyes still on the far stalls, I reached into my own pocket for my own bills. I glanced down, counted out three times Wang Wo’s usual fee, and placed it on his card-table desk.
“You have seen all you needed to see?”
“No,” I answered. “But I don’t think the rest can be seen from here. I have to move on now.”
“As is often the case,” Wang Wo replied. I suspected that of being a nature metaphor, too, but this wasn’t the time to worry about it. Steven Wei turned to leave the area. I stood to follow. Wang Wo handed me a piece of paper with Chinese characters on it.
“What’s this?”
“Your fortune,” Wang Wo said. “It is not why you came here, but our paths often lead us not where we meant to go, but where we need to be.”
I stuffed the paper in my pocket and hurried off to find out where Steven Wei needed to be.
Steven Wei, with long quick steps, headed out of the temple grounds. The new instructions on the old lady’s folded paper would tell him where and when to deliver the ransom, or maybe they just said to go home and wait for the next phone call. I didn’t think I’d get very far following him, though I was certainly game to hail a taxi and try. What I really wanted to know was who else was interested in the movements of Steven Wei.
Because I hadn’t seen anybody. Try as I might, from fortune-tellers to customers to skeptics just strolling down the path, no one but me and the old lady—and Bill, wherever he was—had seemed the least bit interested in Steven Wei.
That was strange. Why send him here if not to make sure he’d follow orders, be at the right place at the right time without cops on his tail, because that’s what you want when the ransom is delivered? And how could you make sure of that if you weren’t watching?
Well, there could be one other reason: not a dry run, but a wild goose chase. Something to keep Steven Wei occupied while something else was going on.
What else? Who knew? Standing on the temple steps above the sloped plaza, I watched Steven Wei whip the cell phone out of his pocket and shout briefly into it. He ended that call, then punched in another number and spoke some more, seeming frustrated and impatient as this second conversation went on. A gong from the temple rang slowly three times, underscoring the traffic and the hurrying and Steven Wei’s impatience. Snapping the phone shut, Wei fidgeted at the curb until a cab swung around the corner. He stepped into the street, it screeched to a stop, and he was gone. I looked around for another one, but there weren’t any. I had to content myself with recording the license number of the one that was driving Steven Wei off.
A muscular young man with sweat darkening his white tee shirt muttered a curse after that same cab, then turned and made for the subway entrance that was right there. If he’d been watching Steven Wei I hadn’t seen him. Maybe he’d just been waiting a long time, only to have Steven Wei usurp his taxi. Maybe I should take the subway myself: I had a subway map, and obviously cabs were a little hard to come by up here at Wong Tai Sin. They must be hard to come by: Without acknowledging my existence at all, Bill, in his new Hong Kong baseball cap and his sunglasses, came striding fast across the plaza and disappeared into the subway entrance, too.
I stared after him. Now I had three choices: join Bill in whatever he was up to, go somewhere where I could make a phone call—which, according to the guidebook, was not all that easy in Hong Kong, public phones being almost nonexistent—or return to the temple to discuss paper prayers with an old lady.
Bill, I decided, could take care of himself and his business, though I was dying to know what it was and whether it had to do with the young man with the muscles. I wanted desperately to call the Weis, to find out if that’s where Steven Wei had just called and if so what the new instructions were, but the find-a-phone project seemed Least Likely to Succeed and I had to admit there was no reason to expect them to tell me anything except “Go away.” The old lady, on the other hand, was right here.
Except that she wasn’t.
I made the rounds of the other old ladies with their bamboo baskets at the entrance to the fortune-tellers’ area. The first one I talked to put a name to the lady I was looking for—Mo Ruo—after I’d described her, with her sleeveless print blouse, her loose black pants, her pointed straw hat to keep off the sun.
“Mo Ruo works over there,” the old lady told me, gesturing toward a spot near her own. “Left side, second place in.”
It was clear that these ladies had assigned themselves proprietary spots to do their business from, and also clear that they were more than willing to poach on each others’ territory. I slipped a ten-dollar bill—Hong Kong dollars, worth not quite thirteen cents each, but ten of them would be about what one of these ladies made in an hour—into her basket, which bought me her conversation but not her undivided attention. She was wrinkled and bent but persistent, moving stubbornly into the path of anyone who crossed her radar, pushing her folded prayers at people who might need a little boost in their relationship with their chosen gods. “Usually she is here all day, until the temple closes,” she told me about Mo Ruo. “Very eager to make money, always thinking this way.” Unlike anyone else in Hong Kong, I thought, but I didn’t say it.
“Where would she be now?” I asked. “Eating lunch?”
She gave me a contemptuous glance as she took off to chase down a customer. “Mo Ruo eats her lunch here,” she said when I caught up with her. I looked where she pointed, to three other old ladies sitting on newspapers in the shade, their bamboo baskets by their sides, scooping chopsticks in and out of plastic containers of noodles or rice brought from home.
“Can you tell me where she might have gone?” I asked again.
She thrust her chin forward, the old-time Chinese substitute for a shrug.
Nuts to this. I took out a scrap of paper, scribbled my name and the hotel phone number in Chinese characters. “When you see her, will you tell her I want to talk to her?” I put the paper into her basket with another ten-dollar bill. She shoved the bill into a pocket. Then she folded the paper without looking at it and shoved it into another. That told me two things: one, she probably couldn’t read. And two, because of my free ways with ten-dollar bills, she would keep the paper and have someone read it to her, or to Mo Ruo, whenever the time was right.
Okay, next things next. I wished for my cell phone, at home in New York in the bureau drawer keeping my gun company. The gun would have worked in Hong Kong but I couldn’t bring it; I could have brought the cell phone but it wouldn’t have worked. But if I had a cell phone I could call the Weis, to try to find out what was going on. And Bill could call me, and tell me what was going on, if he had a cell phone, too.
I took myself down into the subway entrance and bought a ticket from a machine where you pressed your station on an electronic map and it told you how much money it wanted. I found the right platform—all the important signs were in both Chinese and English—and when the train came I got on it. I stood in the swaying car holding the metal pole and feeling very much at home. I could have been back in New York on the F train, I thought as I glanced around me, except for one thing: Everyone in this car looked like me.
The air-conditioning in the subway car, like all the air-conditioning I’d encountered in Hong Kong so far, was set about five degrees cooler than it needed to be. You didn’t notice it at first—at first, all you did was offer a prayer of thanks to the god of subways, or taxis or hotel lobbies or wherever you were—but by the time you left and went back out into the heat you were, briefly, grateful for the sun on your back. I felt that gratitude on my walk from the subway stop to the hotel, but it didn’t last. By the time I stepped into the hushed lobby the air-conditioning was once again a relief.
Hoping Bill had called, I stopped by the desk to see if I had any messages. I had, but not from Bill. The one message I had was from Steven Wei.
I ripped open the envelope. The message was, “Call immediately,” and included Steven Wei’s home and cell phone numbers.
“The gentleman left a message on your voice mail, also,” the young desk clerk told me, seeming slightly disapproving. “He seemed most anxious to speak with you.” Hurrying across the lobby to the elevator, I guessed that meant Steven Wei had given the desk clerk a hard time.
The little red light on the phone was blinking as I entered my room. Picking up the phone to retrieve the message, I caught sight of myself in the mirror, in my new flowered blouse and my straw sunhat. My God, Lydia, I thought, you look positively Chinese.
The voice-mail message was substantially the same as the written one, and in the background, behind honking horns and the air brakes on buses, I heard the three rings of the temple gong. The second phone call Steven Wei had made from Wong Tai Sin, as I stood on the steps watching him, had been to me.
As Bill would say, ain’t that a kick in the head?
Wondering just where Bill was, I called Steven Wei. I chose the home number, figuring he’d had time to get home in his cab while I was on the subway, but the voice that snapped,
“Wai!”
into the phone wasn’t Steven Wei’s, it was the voice of Natalie Zhu.
“Wai!”
into the phone wasn’t Steven Wei’s, it was the voice of Natalie Zhu.
“Where have you been?” she demanded in English when I told her it was me.
“You told us to get lost,” I said. “You didn’t say to sit by the phone. In fact, I got the distinct impression you weren’t going to call.”
“You should have left your cell-phone number,” she reprimanded, ignoring everything else I’d said.
“I don’t have one. Is Steven Wei there? Why did he call me?”
Silently—possibly speechless at the thought of someone in Hong Kong without a cell phone—Natalie Zhu must have passed the phone to Steven Wei, because it was he who spoke next.
“You must come back here immediately,” he said urgently, without greeting or preamble.
“Why?”
“The kidnappers want Harry’s jade.”
Harry’s jade, his legacy from his grandfather? Was that what this was about?
“How do you know?”
“The instructions I received at Wong Tai Sin.” Okay, Steven, just checking. “They will call here again at three o’clock. They want the jade.”
I thought about this. “How do they know about the jade?” I asked.
He was briefly silent, as though he hadn’t thought to ask that. “I don’t know. Can that make a difference? You must bring it here immediately. Please!” The desperation in his voice made me want to reach through the phone and pat him on the back.
“Have you learned anything else? Has the amah come back?”
“No. Only this one demand. How soon can you be here?”
I checked the room clock. It wasn’t one yet. “I’ll come as soon as I can.” Or almost. “I’ll be there well before three.”
“You cannot—” he was saying as I said good-bye.
I imagined Steven Wei’s round face frowning into the phone in his apartment in the sky. I wondered if anyone had straightened things there, put everything back in its proper place. I felt bad about not rushing right over there, but it wouldn’t have done any good except to reassure Steven Wei. And if I went there now, they’d take the jade from me, thank me very much, and throw me out again. If I timed this right and got there later, when the phone call came, maybe I might learn something.
And of course Lydia Chin’s need to know everything superseded all.
But maybe this time it didn’t. Maybe this time everything really would be better if I butted out.
Sitting on the bed, I took my bag out of the straw carryall and took a small velvet-covered box out of my bag. I opened the hinged lid and stared at the tiny, delicately carved laughing Buddha, apple-green jade against white silk. Then I picked up the phone again and dialed.
The rings stopped after the fifth one, and a voice said,
“Wai!”
as Natalie Zhu’s had, but this voice was a man’s and it was sleepy. Well, no wonder: Where Grandfather Gao was, it was one in the morning.
“Wai!”
as Natalie Zhu’s had, but this voice was a man’s and it was sleepy. Well, no wonder: Where Grandfather Gao was, it was one in the morning.
“Grandfather, this is Chin Ling Wan-Ju,” I said in Cantonese. “I apologize for disturbing your rest.”
“Ling Wan-Ju? What is wrong?” He was instantly awake, but calm and collected as usual. “You are all right, your partner all right also?”
“Yes, Grandfather, but there is a problem.” I filled him in on the kidnapping, the searched apartment, the temple, and the demand for Harry’s jade.
“Has the child been hurt?” This question, too, he asked in his usual calm manner; but something, maybe just a trick of the long-distance wires, made his voice a little less sure than I was used to hearing it.
“I don’t know,” I said, being honest. “But there’s no reason at this point to think that he has.”
“That is well.” I thought I heard a small sigh of relief from the other side of the world.
“Grandfather,” I said, trying to avoid the unforgivable rudeness of a direct accusatory question, “I am sorry for my lack of understanding. If your expectation that something like this would happen is the reason you sent us here instead of—of someone less professional, I did not comprehend that when we spoke.”
There was a pause. I had offered him an opening; now it was up to him. “No, I did not expect it,” he replied evenly. “The task seemed simple. I hoped for a smooth, harmonious result. But circumstances forced me to consider that the still surface of a glassy lake often conceals jagged rocks.”
Oh, for Pete’s sake. It’s a good thing, I thought, that I love you as much as I do.
“If I understood fully the circumstances to which you refer, I’m sure I could be much more useful in this task.”
“Ling Wan-Ju, I do not fully understand them myself.” Grandfather Gao paused, and I waited. Once again his words filled the distance between us. “The task Wei Yao-Shi left to me, which I have sent you to fulfill, seemed simple. But I knew my old friend a very long time. Something was troubling him, though he would not speak of it. His manner led me to think it would be a wise precaution to entrust my interests, which in this case are his, to those in whose abilities I had the most complete confidence.”
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