Reflecting the Sky (16 page)
Read Reflecting the Sky Online
Authors: S. J. Rozan
The beers arrived, clomped down on the table by the young woman who then angrily stood her ground, waiting to get paid. Tony stuck some bills in her hand and waved her impatiently away as she started to make change.
Big spender.
“Our employers wouldn’t want us to go home without seeing the actual operations,” I said. “It’s why we came. So I was keeping Wei Ang-Ran occupied while Bill took a look around. Until you screwed things up for us. Thanks a lot, by the way.” I gave Tony a disgusted look.
He took a pull at his beer bottle. “Why American company wants buy Lion Rock?”
“How do I know? American companies are investing all over Asia these days. That’s not our business. We just do the legwork.”
Iron Fist, who’d sat there looking confused for a while, pulled on Big John’s sleeve for a translation. He got a summary of what was going on. Frowning, he drank his beer.
“So let me ask you this,” Bill said, dropping his cigarette to the street and grinding it under his foot. “What about the operation back there is worth working so hard to keep me from seeing?”
Tony grinned. “Not so hard,” he said. “Stop one bignose spying in windows? Not so hard.”
“Okay,” Bill said. “But why bother?”
Tony slugged back some more beer. “Just, don’t like. Don’t like no ones spying. Wei Ang-Ran say you can see, you can see. Say can’t see, no spying.”
“Are you really that busy back there that it would disturb your operation if we looked around?” I asked.
“Wei Ang-Ran say so busy,” Tony said, then stopped to finish his beer, “must be so busy. Got good idea. Want hear?”
“Sure,” I said. “Tell me.”
“You tell American company, Lion Rock no good. Tell American company, go buy something else. Then you, Big-nose too, you don’t come Lion Rock again.” He pushed back from the table and stood. Big John and Iron Fist did the same, Big John with his beer bottle still in hand. “Because I see you again, no good. Big trouble. Business—” he pointed at Bill “—still not finish.”
Bill said nothing, just returned Tony’s stare with a long look of his own.
“We’ll tell them,” I said. “But I don’t know what they’ll do.”
“Tell them,” Tony repeated. “Don’t see you again.”
He turned and walked away. Big John, drinking his beer, followed. Iron Fist stood looking at us a little longer. Then he turned too, and followed his friends into the night.
“I’m sorry,” Bill said.
The mist was turning to a drizzling rain again. We sat alone at the night market table listening to the percussion on the plastic draped overhead. The young woman had gone back to frying rice for new customers, but they were all at other tables. No one would come sit with us.
“Sorry about what?” I asked.
“Now they’ve made us, and now we’ve lost them. My fault. I’m sorry.”
“If you hadn’t gone spying we’d never have known Iron Fist worked for Lion Rock in the first place.”
“If I were any good I’d have been able to find that out without getting caught.” He leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette. “That was quick thinking, that story you gave them.”
“I was worried about your nose.”
“You don’t think it could stand improvement?”
“I don’t think they were planning to improve it.”
He smoked his cigarette and didn’t answer. The stall’s lightbulbs swayed as the wind picked up, gliding our shadows across the tabletop, though we stayed still.
“Bill?”
He met my eyes.
“You let those guys get to you. You were about to take them on, which would have been crazy. What’s wrong?”
He shrugged. “I didn’t like them.”
“You don’t fight everyone you don’t like. There’s more than that.”
Once again he didn’t answer. Well, maybe he knew he didn’t need to.
“I think,” I said quietly, “that we should call Mark Quan. But I think not from here.”
Bill squashed his cigarette out and stood.
We left the market after a quick consultation with my map. It turned out that following Iron Fist and his pals had done for us what we probably couldn’t have done for ourselves: brought us within four blocks of the bus depot. We dashed through those blocks in a worsening rain. By the time we reached it, the falling drops were big and splashy and the gutters were flowing with fast-moving streams.
And there were no cabs at the bus depot.
Bill, gazing at the deserted cab stand, asked me, “Want to head for the subway?”
I looked into the curtain of rain falling from the edge of the overhang we’d scooted under. “No. We’ll drown before we get there. Let’s take a bus.”
“Which bus?”
A bus pulled in just past the cab stand. I read the big black characters over its windshield and said, “That bus.”
We climbed on behind other soggy people, mostly night market customers, their newly purchased socks and alarm clocks, pajamas and CDs stuffed into plastic bags.
“How do you know we want this bus?” Bill asked while we waited for the lady in front of us to roll up her umbrella.
“The sign says it’s going to Central,” I explained. “That’s where the ferry goes from.”
“You know,” he said, “you’re kind of handy to have around.”
The downstairs of the double-decker bus was air-conditioned. Soaked with rain, I felt like I was walking into a freezer. I led us up the curving stairs to the top deck. As I’d hoped, the air-conditioning didn’t reach up here. We had to choose our seats judiciously, avoiding the ones already rained-on through open windows, but once we got settled, the steamy warmth was kind of cozy and we were almost alone.
“That’s the first time I’ve ever seen you voluntarily give up air-conditioning,” Bill said.
“It’s this semitropical climate,” I answered, “weather of my people.” I took my phone from my bag. “I’m trying to connect with my ancestors.”
“I don’t think,” Bill said, “that you can do that from a cell phone.”
He was probably right; it took me two tries to find Mark Quan, and he wasn’t even related to me. First, as a matter of form, I tried his number at the HKPD. He was gone for the day, they told me, but he’d be in in the morning. Could they take a message, or could someone else help me? Funny, I thought, how that cop tone of voice—guarded, prepared to hear anything, giving nothing away—was the same in the rising, falling, nasal sounds and cadences of Cantonese as it was in hard-edged American English.
I thanked them, hung up, and tried the cell phone number Mark Quan had given me. He answered it with, “
Wai
!” before the third ring.
Wai
!” before the third ring.
“It’s Lydia Chin,” I said. I decided to speak to Mark Quan in English. It was arguably the native language for us both, although I had to admit the same argument could be made for Cantonese. But English gave Bill a chance to get in on what was going on, and it was less likely to be successfully eavesdropped on by the few people up here on the upper deck with us.
“I was going to call you,” he said. “When I got home. I’m having dinner.” Behind his words I could hear the clinking of dishes and the din of many people talking and shouting to each other in an echoing room.
“Is this a bad time?”
“No, no, I’m alone. I’m at my local noodle joint, and it’s noisy, that’s all. And I don’t have much to tell you, anyway. You hear from the family?”
“No. I’d call them but I don’t want to give them a heart attack when the phone rings. We spoke to the uncle about two hours ago, and he said there was no news then.”
“The uncle? Wei Ang-Ran?”
“Right. I’ll tell you about it, but first tell me: Did you come up with anything at all?”
“No. I turned over a few sources, but no one admits to knowing anything about the Wei kidnapping. And if Iron Fist Chang’s involved in anything, we don’t know about it. No one ever heard of him.”
“Did they ever hear of Tony Siu or Big John Chou?”
Mark Quan was silent for a moment. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I know Tony Siu. He’s a comer. Rising triad talent. If Strength and Harmony were a legit business he’d be a management trainee. Did you run into him?”
“I’m afraid we did.”
As the bus turned and twisted through the rain, up hills and down them again, picking up passengers and dropping others off, I watched through the window and told Mark Quan where we’d been and what we’d done.
“Why didn’t you call me?” he said. “When you first spotted Iron Fist Chang? Never mind. I know.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “We should have.”
“Maybe not,” he said.
I glanced at Bill, showing my surprise, but of course he had no idea why. He raised an eyebrow; I turned back to the window, the better to concentrate on the phone. “What do you mean?”
“If I’d put a tail on him and he’d made my man, that might have driven the kidnappers more underground. Maybe those guys didn’t buy your story, but no matter what they said, they didn’t really take you two for HKPD. First of all, who would? And if they had they wouldn’t have gotten up in your faces like that. Now we know more than we did: that Siu might be involved. No, you probably did the right thing.”
Now I knew I was in a foreign country. I said as much to Mark Quan.
He gave a laugh. “I told you, I’m not the most popular guy on the Department. What makes sense to everyone else doesn’t always make sense to me. You have to remember, I’m a stranger here myself.”
“But you’ve been living here for twenty years,” I said.
“You’ve been living in New York all your life,” he retorted. “Does everything there make sense to you?”
That made me grin. My grin made Bill throw me another inquisitive look, and that, unexpectedly, made me blush. I didn’t know what to do, so I looked out the window some more and went on talking to Mark. I gave him more details of our conversation, such as it was, with Iron Fist and his friends.
“I don’t get it,” he said when I was done. “If this is a Strength and Harmony job, there are enough rice-for-brains street punks who’d love me to owe them one that someone should have told me by now. But I’ll go out and stir the soup some more.”
“How do you suppose Iron Fist ended up working there?” I asked. “He’s a movie stuntman, I thought.”
“That’s not uncommon. The film business is spotty, and those guys are used to hard work. A lot of them moonlight on the docks or in the markets for a few extra bucks.”
“And he found out about the jade because Wei Ang-Ran couldn’t keep his mouth shut? That’s how this started?”
Through the phone, in Mark’s silence, I heard dishes clatter, and someone shouted. I pictured him in a large, bright room, waiters rushing back and forth, steam rising from big bowls, families with young children eating, laughing, all talking at once. In my picture, Mark sat at a table on the side, alone.
With a start I realized he’d asked me a question, but I didn’t know what it was. I also realized Bill was watching me with an odd look. Suddenly confused, I didn’t meet Bill’s eyes, and I told Mark I hadn’t heard him: Some interference on my cell phone, I said, though the truth was Hong Kong had this cell phone business worked out much better than we did back home and there hadn’t been a second’s static since I’d bought the thing.
Mark patiently repeated his question. “Did he seem like that to you, the old man? Someone who can’t keep his mouth shut?”
“No,” I said. “No, he didn’t. And he didn’t seem all that fond of Tony Siu, either.”
“Siu’s a hard man to like, from what I hear.”
“I wonder how much Iron Fist likes him?”
“What are you thinking? Some kind of double-cross going on?”
“Maybe. But don’t ask me who’s double-crossing whom.”
“Well, it’s a theory,” Mark Quan agreed. “‘A sweet tongue, a sword in the belly.’” He sighed. “Crime isn’t what it used to be. In the old days you could trust your triad brothers.”
“Maybe you still can, but Iron Fist isn’t one of them, so they can cheat each other and feel okay about it.”
“Well,” Mark Quan said, “I’ll bet I could lock them all up and feel okay about it”
There were some other calls I wanted to make, but not from here. I folded up the phone and filled Bill in on the parts of my talk with Mark Quan that he’d missed. For a guy who’d only heard one side, he seemed to have gotten most of it pretty well.
“What happens now?” he asked.
“Mark doesn’t have an address for Iron Fist, but he’s going to go up to Thundering Mountain in the morning. Tomorrow’s Sunday, but if they’re filming they work seven days, and if not maybe he’ll find someone who can tell him something. I want to call the Weis and I want to call Grandfather Gao, but from the hotel.” I leaned back against the bus seat and closed my eyes. “I’m tired. What did you say before about a brick wall?”
“I said I’d never seen one as cute as you.”
I opened one eye and fixed it on him. “You did not”
“Well, it’s what I meant.”
I closed my eye again. After a while I said, “Where are we?”
“I’m supposed to know?”
“Describe our surroundings.”
“Skyscrapers. Lots of traffic. Neon.”
“Gee, must be Hong Kong. Go on.”
“Other buses. Big lit building. Water.”
“Hey,” I said, opening both eyes, “we’re here.”
Our bus had come around a corner and was waiting its turn to pull into one of the angled, numbered parking slots by the big lit building, which according to its sign in both English and Chinese was the Central bus depot. Other signs, also in both languages, pointed the way to the subway, various buildings people might be interested in, and a number of different ferries. The ferry we wanted was the Star Ferry to Kowloon, and it was the closest one.
The rain had come down to a drizzle again. We trotted across the expanse of wet asphalt that was the bus depot and through a short, moldy-smelling tunnel under the avenue. A ferry was loading when we got to the dock, so we hurried on it. I took the first seat I saw, beside the rail in the middle of the boat. Bill dropped into the seat next to mine.
The boat wasn’t as empty as the upper deck of the bus had been, but it wasn’t the jam-packed commuter container of morning. We sat in tired silence as the ferry cut through the pockets of fog and slid across the dark surface of the harbor. The smell of salt water came to me again, speaking of distances much farther than any I’d traveled, journeys measured in years instead of days, loneliness that could not be measured at all.
“Damn,” I said softly, to myself.
Bill looked at me. “What’s wrong?”
“That little boy. We didn’t do him much good, did we? And we didn’t do Steven Wei or his wife much good, and we didn’t do Grandfather Gao much good, either.”
“We did what we could,” he said.
“It’s not enough.”
He didn’t answer right away, just gazed over the water, watching the lights of the boats that passed ours, on their ways to places we’d never know.
“If the amah’s with the boy,” Bill said finally, “he may be all right for a while. There’s a cop on the case now, and there wouldn’t be if you hadn’t told Grandfather Gao what happened. We know more than we did, and we’ll start again in the morning. There’s nothing else we can do now.”
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