Reflecting the Sky (10 page)

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Authors: S. J. Rozan

BOOK: Reflecting the Sky
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This time, as in the morning, the shrill chirps came from the cell phone in Steven Wei’s pocket. He whipped it out.
“Wai!”
As he listened to the response from the other end of the line, Natalie Zhu came and stood before him. She made no move to take the phone from him, but her presence seemed to challenge him into steeliness, and when he was through listening, his voice was controlled and calm.
“What proof do I have that you are holding my son?” he asked in Chinese. “Let me speak to him.”
An answer; then, “No, that is not enough. I have gotten another call. Someone else also claiming to be holding my son and his amah.” Pause. “With a—different demand. I will bring the jade wherever you like if you bring my son to me at the same place, but I will not turn the jade over to you before I see him.”
Pause. “Yes, I have the jade. I can—No, it—” To whatever went on at the other end after that, Steven Wei managed only fragmented replies. Then suddenly he lost his composure and shouted,
“Wai! Wai!”
into the phone. He shouted once more, then stopped.
Face flushed, he lowered the phone and looked around the room. “He said if we don’t give him the jade we’ll be sorry. Then he hung up.” Realizing he’d spoken in Chinese, he repeated himself in English.
“Did he offer proof?” That was Natalie Zhu, sticking to the important point.
Steven Wei shook his head. “He said he thought this was a transaction between gentlemen. That he’d been behaving as one, but if I chose not to do so, he could behave … in other ways.” He looked at Natalie Zhu. “Do you think that means—?” “Did he say he would call again?” She cut him off.
“Yes.”
Natalie Zhu, arms crossed over her silk blouse, kept her eyes on Steven Wei for a while. Then she turned deliberately to face me, Bill, and Franklin Wei.
“I’m sorry,” she said, not particularly sounding it. “We must speak privately. Dr. Wei, it is unfortunate that your arrival has come at this bad time. The situation will no doubt be resolved soon. We will let you know as soon as there is happy news to report. Miss Chin, please leave the jade. We will call you.”
So here we were, getting thrown out of the Weis’ apartment again. I opened my mouth to object, though I wasn’t sure on what grounds besides Lydia Chin’s need to be in on everything. Then, meeting Natalie Zhu’s eyes, I abruptly stopped. I did some quick mental flip-flops, then decided.
After all, Grandfather Gao had told me to do what I thought was right. And if none of this had ever happened and everything had been okay to begin with, Steven and Li-Ling Wei would be effectively in charge of this jade by now anyhow.
Taking the velvet box from my bag, I handed it, not to Natalie Zhu, but to Li-Ling Wei. One hand over her huge stomach, she opened it. Both Steven and Franklin Wei looked in at the laughing Buddha gleaming on his white silk.
Franklin smiled. “I remember when Dad got that,” he said. “I must have been, I don’t know, five. He brought me one, too, not a Buddha, just this thing.” He reached under his shirt and pulled out a gold chain from which dangled a pointed jade amulet, faceted and about an inch long. “It was the only old-timey thing I ever saw him do. I haven’t worn it since I was like twelve, just put it on when I decided to come here. Seemed like, I don’t know, a cool thing to wear to Hong Kong.”
Steven Wei slowly reached under his own shirt and pulled out an amulet exactly like it. “I don’t remember a time when Father did not wear his jade,” he said. “Or a time when I did not wear mine.”
 
“I want to talk to you,” I told Bill, standing on the sidewalk on Robinson Road, after, to the rattle of jackhammers in the swampy heat, we had put Franklin Wei in a taxi.
“I’m at the Peninsula,” Franklin had said. “Will you call me? I mean, if anything happens?” Gesturing upward in the general direction of the twenty-sixth floor, he added, “They might not think of it.” They might not, I thought; or they might, but that didn’t mean they’d do it. We’d taken the hotel’s phone number and given him our cell phone numbers in exchange. We’d given them to the Weis, too, Steven Wei nodding in distracted thanks, Natalie Zhu raising a barely discernible eyebrow as she found out we’d actually gone out and gotten cell phones since this morning.
Now, to me, Bill said, “Where?”
“How about the park? The scene of the crime.”
“Maybe.”
“Not the park? You want to go somewhere else?”
“No, the park’s good. I meant maybe it’s the scene of the crime.”
“You really don’t buy the idea that this is what it looks like?” I asked as we headed downhill to the little park that, according to Steven Wei, Maria Quezon and Harry went to all the time.
“What the hell does it even look like?” I raised my eyebrows at the short-tempered growl in his voice, but said nothing. He shook a cigarette out of the pack, lit a match as we passed under the fronds of a huge palm tree growing on a wall. “The kid grabbed the day—just about the hour—we show up from New York. Two ransom demands, one for more money than the family has, one for less than the risk is worth.”
“You think that’s true, that they don’t have that much money?”
“Maybe it’s not. Maybe they’re not sure about us and he was being cagey. Shouldn’t be hard to find out.”
“All right,” I said, “but if the first call was from phony kidnappers, what was the point of sending Steven Wei to Wong Tai Sin? If that was you, wouldn’t you just want to get in and get what you could before the real guys call and Steven realizes he’s been had?”
“Yes,” he said shortly. “So, assuming that one of the calls is real and that’s the one that sent Steven Wei to the temple, who made the other one, and how did they find out the kid was taken?”
“Assuming.” I turned to look at him. “You think maybe neither is real?”
“I don’t know what I think. If that was the real call, why wouldn’t they prove they had the kid?”
“Maybe,” I said slowly, “something’s happened to the kid.”
“I thought of that.” Bill said, his voice lower. He gazed down the hill, across the harbor. “But even if the kid’s already dead, they’d know what he was wearing. If he had birthmarks, they’d know that. Missing teeth, whatever. They could have tried to fake it.”
“Maybe they don’t think that fast. Maybe they’re nervous. Maybe they’re not pros.” I stepped aside for a sweating woman pulling a grocery cart up the steep sidewalk.
Bill didn’t answer me directly. He said, “There are a few other things I want to know. I still want to know why the apartment was wrecked.”
“And who let us up.”
“And who paid the old lady prayer-seller at Wong Tai Sin.”
“And how your friend Iron Fist Chang fits in.”
We walked between wooden gateposts holding up a red arch with the characters for “Kwong Hon Terrace Garden” painted on it in gold. The concrete-paved park nestled between low, old buildings, ran through the block and ended in another arched gateway to another street. Small children shrieked as they ran through sprays of water from the mouths of three bronze frogs. Half a dozen Filipina amahs shared sliced papaya and cans of coconut soda, giggled and gossiped, called to their charges. We sat on a concrete bench in the shade of a banana tree. I stared at the bananas, growing upside down just the way they’re supposed to.
“Old Mr. Wei,” Bill said. “I want to know what he was worried about. I want to know what we were sent here to do.”
I looked at him, watched his eyes follow an amah as she jumped up to comfort a toddler who had slipped in the bronze frogs’ pool. She picked the child up, hugged and cajoled him, gave him a slice of papaya, and sent him, giggling, back to his friends. I touched Bill’s arm. “I’m sorry,” I said.
He turned to me, surprised. “About what?”
“This.” I waved my arm around. “Everything’s so—confusing. So illogical and unreasonable. So Chinese.”
“Do you mean to tell me,” he said, taking the cigarette from his mouth, “that when you’re being confusing, illogical, and unreasonable, it’s genetic?”
“You know what I mean.”
He shook his head. “I don’t. No offense, but you people are no different from anybody else. Everyone wants the same thing, in the end.”
“Which is?”
“To protect what you love.”
A trickle of sweat slid down my cheek. I wiped it away and asked, “That’s what it’s all about? Love?”
Bill didn’t answer. I said, “What about greed? Revenge? Wanting to make someone suffer? Those things aren’t about love.”
“No,” Bill said. “They’re about protection.”
The amahs talked and laughed in the shade and the children ran and splashed in the frog pool. Bill and I sat silently until his cigarette was done.
“Okay,” I said, “suppose you’re right. I’m dubious, but suppose. Who’s protecting what around here?”
“I don’t know,” Bill said. “But I can think of a few people to ask. The uncle. The desk man. Iron Fist. The old lady.”
As my cell phone rang, I added, “And the new client.”
Bill’s questioning look held me as I answered the phone in English with a businesslike “Lydia Chin speaking.”
Natalie Zhu wasn’t impressed.
“We can speak in English if you prefer it, Ms. Chin,” she said dryly, in Cantonese. “Or perhaps you’d rather Chinese?”
Oh, all right, I thought. So I wasn’t fooling you. Big deal. It was worth a try. “Let’s stay in the habit of English,” I said, as cool as she was. “For my partner.”
“Fine,” she agreed, switching languages. “Can you talk freely?”
“I’m in the park at Kwong Hon Terrace. No one’s near but Bill. And you?”
Bill had his eyes on me, waiting to be filled in, so I mouthed “Natalie Zhu” for him and watched him raise his eyebrows.
“I am on the balcony,” Natalie Zhu answered, and I had an image of her steely small form, cell phone pressed to her ear, standing in the hot breeze on the twenty-sixth floor, commanding the view over Robinson Road, the roofs of the Central skyscrapers, the harbor. “I told Steven I had to make some calls putting off other work in my office as long as this situation continues. You are not surprised at my calling you?”
“Did you expect me to be?”
“I had hoped you would not. I had hoped an understanding had passed between us.”
I wouldn’t exactly call it an understanding, I thought, just a direct look in the eye, just held an extra second, just a little more contact than was necessary if all you were really doing was throwing us out.
“I understood you would call,” I told her. “I don’t yet understand why.”
“You are investigators,” she said. “Sent by Gao Mian-Liang. Wei Yao-Shi”—Old Mr. Wei—“always spoke most highly of Gao Mian-Liang. Now tell me: Why did Gao Mian-Liang send you here?”
I answered honestly. “He told us it was to deliver the jade and a letter to Mr. Wei’s brother, and to bring Mr. Wei’s ashes.”
“Pardon me, but that seems unlikely.”
“To us, too. Earlier today I called and told him what had happened and asked him, in view of the situation, if there was anything further he could tell us. He said there wasn’t, but that we should do whatever we felt needed to be done.”
A pause as she digested the fact that I’d told Grandfather Gao that Harry had been kidnapped. She might have made an issue of it, but all she said was, “And what do you feel needs to be done?”
“I’m not sure. But I can’t say, Ms. Zhu, that I think this is just a simple kidnapping, or that getting Harry back is going to be as easy as meeting a ransom demand.”
“Nor do I.”
Oh, really? “Well, then,” I suggested, “why don’t you tell me what you do think? And tell me why you’re calling us in secret, instead of speaking to us in front of Steven and Li-Ling?”
“What I think, Ms. Chin, is that Maria Quezon is involved in this. I am speaking in secret because Steven would never permit me to ask that you make her the target of an investigation. But I believe if you find Maria, you will find the child.”
Steven wouldn’t permit it, I thought. Since when does Steven tell you what to do?
“You were the one opposed to calling the police,” I said. “Your position was, play along and everything will be all right. Why have you changed your mind?”
“About the police, I have not. That would be dangerous. But I believe circumstances now warrant that some action be taken.”
“Circumstances?”
“You would make a good attorney, Ms. Chin. You ask questions to which you very well know the answers in order to hear them from your opponent. Circumstances. Two ransom demands, a refusal to prove that the child is being held. You say you are now in Kwong Hon Terrace Garden. Tell me, do you think it would have been possible to abduct Harry and Maria by force from that park at nine o’clock in the morning without the police hearing about it even before we did?”
Filing away
opponent
for later, I had to admit as I looked around that that last question was a very good one. There were the amahs over by the frogs. There was a pair of Chinese grandmothers who had come in after we had, parking strollers beside a bench and fanning themselves with paper fans. There were three shirtless teenage boys doing chin-ups on the swing set, probably hoping some girls would happen by to impress. It was July; school was out; in the morning, before the day got really hot and most people retreated to air-conditioning, this park was probably even more crowded than this. No, it wasn’t likely a kidnapping could have happened here, or on the crowded streets with their narrow sidewalks on the way to here, and go unnoticed and unreported.

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