Read Reflecting the Sky Online
Authors: S. J. Rozan
Reflecting the Sky (25 page)
This was a phrase I didn’t know, and, I thought, an unattractive one. Mark was regarding Bill quizzically. Clearly the idea that Bill knew anything at all about Chinese antiquities had not crossed his mind. With me it was different. Though I’ve known him a long time now, there are still things about Bill that surprise me; but they’re not the same things that surprise other people.
“Tomb trash?” Mark asked, and I chided myself for being secretly glad I wasn’t the only ignorant person in the room.
“Otherwise called burial art, but not made as art,” Bill said. “They’re for graves. They go back about a thousand years. You buried them with people so they could have a home—and chickens and ducks and servants—in the next world.”
Mark and I looked at each other. “We do that in paper now,” I said. “Not bury things, burn them. Money, and houses. And,” remembering my father’s funeral, “clothes. And kitchen things.” My father had been a chef, so my mother had bought and burned paper knives and a wok for him to use in the next world. And because he had never had a car but always wanted one, my oldest brother, Ted, had bought a red paper Ferrari, and burned that.
“So,” I asked, “you’re saying Mr. Lee’s buildings were dug up out of graves?”
“They must have been. And some of the other things in his shop—those little game-players, say.”
I thought of the happy little men at the table. “They sent friends along with you?”
“Everybody needs a friend,” Bill said. “But the point is, if the things in Lee’s shop are genuine, they’re a thousand years old. And it’s not legal to export them from China. Remember what the jeweler told us—this is a trade the government tries to stop?”
Mark and I were both silent a moment. Mark said slowly, “That’s true. During the Cultural Revolution they couldn’t smash things fast enough, the older the better. Now they’ve rediscovered them, and rediscovered that tourists will come to see them. The jeweler was right, you can’t export antiquities now.”
“But Lee’s selling them in the open in his shop,” I said. “How can it be legal to sell them here if it’s illegal to export them from China?”
“It’s legal to sell anything here,” Mark answered. “Except drugs, and even that was legal once. If you can get it in, you can sell it or ship it out.”
“But this is China, now. Don’t the same restrictions apply?”
Mark shook his head. “Special Administrative Region.”
“What does that mean?”
From Bill: “That means: whatever the capitalist running dog market will bear.”
Mark agreed. “It’s meant that for a hundred and fifty years, and they’re making too much money to change the rules now. Customs here is supposed to stop goods that are illegal to export from the country of origin, but if they miss them, tough luck Pro forma, Lee would have to have papers for his stuff, but it can’t be very hard to forge those.”
“What kind of papers?”
Bill, again: “Something that says the things he’s selling have been floating around outside China for long enough that the government can’t demand them back.”
“Old family papers,” said Mark. “Customs stamps from eighty years ago. Bills of sale proving something was bought in Rangoon in 1953.”
Bill said, “And I’m sure he does. I asked him where he got these things—who would give up such treasures, I wanted to know. Old Hong Kong families, he told me. Or Persian traders. Persian traders.” He shook his head and Mark rolled his eyes. I gave a disbelieving snort, but no one noticed me.
“So,” Mark said, “what you’re saying is, L. L. Lee’s goodies are newly coming out of China and someone’s bringing them out for him.”
“And who better to do that than an established import-export firm?”
“Lion Rock. In the furniture crates.”
“In the furniture,” Bill amended. “The buildings come apart.” I thought of him in L. L. Lee’s shop, lifting the roof off, removing the top story of the courtyard house. “All the pieces are relatively small,” he said. “Tape them up in dark corners, slip them into drawers. Bribe an official now and then not to look too closely. If people are raiding graves, they’re shipping out stuff there’s no record of, so no one’s going to be looking for it.”
“Then when it gets here,” Mark said, getting into the spirit of the thing, “Lion Rock bribes the customs people on this side to release the shipment quickly, without examining it much. This is Hong Kong, time is money, the respectable Wei brothers have customers waiting.”
“And your customs people are probably preoccupied with drugs like everyone else,” Bill said.
“They are. And if Lion Rock were bringing in drugs the Wei brothers would be a lot richer, and the bribes would be bigger. Any customs officer could see that.”
“So,” said Bill, “they move Lion Rock’s stuff to the front of the line. They take a few extra bucks home and they don’t have to start crowbarring crates.”
“And they can get back to looking for the big drug bust that’ll make their name.”
It was time for me to elbow my way back into this conversation. “That would explain why Wei Ang-Ran shut the warehouse door. And why Tony Siu was so unhappy with Bill looking in the windows. Because they were unloading the shipment from China.”
Bill and Mark, as though they’d just remembered I was in the room, looked at me and nodded. Okay, you guys are so smart, I thought. “And?” I said. They both looked at me. “So what does it mean?” I asked. “What about Harry?”
Smart guys. Neither of them had an answer to that.
“But,” Mark said, “one thing it means is that I need to talk to Wei Ang-Ran. I can’t avoid it”
“You’re going to Lion Rock?”
He thought. “No. I’ll call him and ask him to come here. ‘To assist with our inquiries.’ A neat phrase we learned from the Brits. That’s what you guys are doing now, by the way. And I want to ask you guys to do something else, too.”
“What’s that?” I asked, although I had a feeling I knew.
“Except for staying in contact with the Weis, could you back off? I have a homicide, maybe smuggling, possible Triad involvement, an unreported kidnapping. What I don’t have is any way to explain it if you either screw things up or get hurt.”
“We won’t—”
“But you might get hurt.”
He grinned. I met his eyes and to my surprise felt my cheeks warm up. Well, I thought, I’ve never been thrown off a case so elegantly before.
I didn’t want to agree. I didn’t see how we could do anything else. I didn’t know exactly what to do.
Then, in the Hong Kong Police Department fifteenth floor conference room above the blue and sparkling harbor, Bill’s cell phone rang.
The phone’s ring electrified the air. Just about everyone we knew in Hong Kong with Bill’s number also had mine, and most of them were more likely to call me than him. Except one. Bill fumbled the phone from his pocket, flipped it open and barked, “Hello!”
Silence. Then Bill, leaning forward, took a breath and answered what had been said to him, calmly, softly, and in Tagalog.
I grabbed one of the HKPD’s pencils and scribbled
Maria Quezon
on one of the yellow pads, showed it to Mark. I added,
Or her sister
. He nodded.
Maria Quezon
on one of the yellow pads, showed it to Mark. I added,
Or her sister
. He nodded.
The next few minutes were hallucinatory: silence, alternating with Bill, someone I knew well, speaking a language I couldn’t understand at all, in a glass-walled room with ships floating by in the harbor on one side and Chinese cops strolling through the corridor on the other. I didn’t know what Bill was saying or hearing, whether this call was good or bad, whether everything would be all right now or just get worse.
I stayed still, close to Bill, in case he had a question or needed something. Mark pushed back his chair and went silently to the door, to keep out any stray cops with an urge to say hi. One thing about a cell phone: You don’t know where you’re calling. The last thing Maria Quezon or her sister needed to know was that Bill was in the cop house.
Occasionally, as the time went on, I caught a few English words, usually after Bill made a halting attempt to put something together in Tagalog, something he couldn’t manage. His voice, even as he switched languages back and forth, remained calm and steady throughout: the tone you would use to talk a jumper down off a bridge. Unless you saw him, you wouldn’t have known about the lines concentration was carving onto his face, the tension in his shoulders as he leaned forward in his chair, elbows on knees, eyes focused on the carpet.
The conversation lasted a few minutes if you asked my watch; if you asked me, it lasted years. An ocean liner crawled across the water, inching its way from the confines of the harbor out to the South China Sea.
Finally, after saying something that sounded no different in tone or. meaning from anything else he’d said before, Bill listened for a few moments, then lowered the phone, thumbed the off button, and ran a hand over his face.
“Jesus,” he breathed. He looked up at me. “That was Maria Quezon,” he said, about as redundantly as I’d ever heard anyone say anything.
“What did she say?” I whispered. Mark, though he hadn’t moved, seemed full of action, like a parked dynamite truck.
“She says Harry’s all right.”
Please, I thought, let it be true. “What happened? What’s it about?”
“She wouldn’t tell me.”
“That whole time? What was she saying?”
“Some of that was me checking her out—I asked things about the Wei apartment, I asked what she knew about why we were here—and then when I was convinced it was really her, I had to convince her I was okay. She’s scared, almost hysterical. That’s why I kept speaking Tagalog—I figured she’d be most likely to trust me in it.” He gave a rueful grin. “She speaks English.”
“She does?”
“The Filipinas all do,” Mark said, finally crossing the room. “Where is she?”
“I don’t know,” Bill answered. “But she wants to meet with me.”
“Out of the question,” said Mark.
Slowly, Bill brought his eyes to Mark. “It’s not a question.”
“She’s the link to the kid,” Mark said. “And a homicide I have to assume is connected until someone proves otherwise. I can’t let a civilian—”
“She said me, no one else. It was hard enough—”
“You can’t—”
“You don’t—”
“Wait!” I snapped at the two of them. “Before you start. What did she say?”
Bill stood, partly to stretch, and partly, I’d have bet, because Mark was standing already. What happened, I wondered, to the buddy-movie, no-girls-allowed spirit of ten minutes ago?
“She said Harry’s all right,” he repeated.
“He’s with her?”
“She wouldn’t tell me. She says he’s still in danger. She’s claiming she didn’t kidnap him, she rescued him, but she’s not bringing him back or telling anyone where he is until she’s sure it’s safe.” He looked out the window at the ocean liner, barely visible now on the hazy horizon. “She asked me to tell his parents he’s okay.”
“We’ll do that,” I said. “In a minute. Do you have the feeling she’s telling the truth?”
Mark shot me a look and seemed about to speak. This was, after all, his turf; it wasn’t my job to say what we would do, or when. My eyes still on Bill, I waved my hand to silence Mark. It would be absolutely unproductive if the testosterone really started flying.
Bill looked at me. “That Harry’s all right, yes. About what happened and how much she had to do with it, I don’t know.” He turned back to the window. “She wants to meet me on a place called Cheung Chau, but I don’t know if that’s where she is now. It’s one of the outlying islands?” He phrased that as a question and turned to Mark to ask it. Maybe it was a peace offering, I thought, so I waited for Mark’s answer.
Mark hesitated. Then, “About an hour by ferry,” he said. The cop temporarily took over from the male beast challenged in his lair, and Mark pointed out the window to the left. “Ferries every hour from here, twice a day from Lantau. Or if you have a boat, or hire one, you can get there from anywhere: Kowloon, any of the other islands. She could be anywhere.”
“She told me the three o’clock ferry.” Bill looked at his watch.
“I can’t let you do it.”
“Look,” Bill said, facing Mark squarely, “I could have not told you any of this. I could have said she was just making contact, then walked out of here and gotten that ferry. Christ, I could have said it wasn’t her. I’m giving you everything I have but she’s the only link to the kid and I’m going to meet her.”
“Everything she said could be a lie,” Mark said. “For all we know she’s working for Strength and Harmony and they’ve decided you’re a bigger catch than the kid. Or you’re trouble and it’s time to get you out of the way.”
“Then why not me, too?” I asked.
“He’s big and Western and he’s a man, and he was the one questioning the Filipinas. That could have set off someone’s alarm bells. You’re just another Chinese woman. You could be his local guide, for all they know. I’m sure they hardly noticed you. Sorry, but this is Hong Kong. That’s how it works.”
“What about last night?” I wouldn’t give up. “Strength and Harmony would know that I was the one dealing with Tony and Big John.”
“Because you speak Cantonese. So you’re his translator, big deal. Or maybe Maria Quezon has something going on the side and Strength and Harmony’s not involved. I don’t know. I agree we need to find out and I agree someone’s got to keep this date.” To Bill he said, “She’s never met you. I’ll send a cop.”
“Her sister will have described me. You have a Western cop my size who speaks Tagalog you can brief and mobilize in twenty minutes? Forget it. I’m out of here.”
“Wait,” I said.
“No.” Bill knew what Wanted. “She said alone.”
“Not alone.”
“Her sister would have described you, too. It’s too risky.”
“No,” said Mark.
“Crap,” said Bill.
“I can’t let you.”
“You can’t stop me.”
“Yes, I can.”
“Then arrest me.”
“Oh, knock it off, you two,” I ordered. “How do men ever get anything done?” I turned to Mark. “He’s right and you know it. He has to go. But not alone. Send a cop to watch his back.” Before Bill could speak I added, “From a distance. So she doesn’t get spooked.” Then to Bill: “I don’t suppose she’s actually meeting the ferry?”
He seemed about to say something else, then gave it up and answered my question. “No. She said she’d call me once the ferry docked.”
“So she may send you somewhere else from Cheung Chau. She may even be on this side, waiting to see if you do get on the ferry, alone. So your man stays way back,” I said to Mark. “And you,” I said to Bill, “you don’t let her get you into any situations where your back can’t be covered.”
Our eyes met. Mine told him what I was asking; his told me what he was going to do.
Bill turned to Mark. “I don’t want to see your man at all. I don’t want to know he’s there.”
Mark didn’t answer. His jaw was set, and the scar on his lip that usually became more obvious when he smiled was white and sharp now, though he was about as far from a smile as a man could get.
“You’ll call the Weis?” Bill asked me. I nodded. He kissed me on the cheek. He looked at Mark. Then he moved between us to the door, and strode fast down the corridor without looking back.
Suddenly I found myself worried that Bill wouldn’t be able to find his way back to the elevator, or to the Cheung Chau ferry. I wanted to go after him, to be with him, to help.
I mentally shook myself. Bill’s ability to find his way around was not the problem.
But I still wanted to go with him.
I turned and said as much to Mark, but he might not have heard me: He pushed past and went striding through the door himself. I hurried after him, prepared to stop him from stopping Bill, but that wasn’t what was on his mind. He twisted through the partitions, past desks and Xerox machines, until he pulled up at a cul-de-sac where three plainclothes cops sat shooting the breeze in Cantonese.
They greeted Mark with grinning advice to each other: “Look out, it’s Quan.” There were inquisitive nods for me, but Mark had no time for that. He addressed himself in Cantonese to the youngest and most cheerful-looking of the cops. “You busy, Shen An-Se?”
“Just finishing my reports, Sergeant,” the young cop said, half curious, half defensive.
“Forget it. You see that tall European who just left here?”
All the cops nodded. Anywhere else a man walking through an office might not be noticed at all, but these were cops. They could tell you the color of Bill’s shirt and the design on his belt buckle.
“He’s making the three o’clock Cheung Chau ferry,” Mark said. “Follow him, but stay way back. He’ll be watched; don’t let them see you, don’t let him see you. He may go somewhere else from Cheung Chau. Stick with him. Ko Pan,” he turned to a tall, thin cop dangling his feet off Shen’s desk, “go along. If he meets someone—probably a woman—you take her if they split again. Invisible, guys. The point is invisible.”
The two cops stood immediately. Shen grabbed his jacket and shrugged into it. “What’s up, Sergeant?”
“I don’t know. We’re looking for a seven-year-old boy, maybe with the woman, but if you see him, don’t move in, call me. Call me anyway when it’s safe. I want to know what’s happening.”
“This guy,” Shen said. “He could hire a boat, to Lamma or someplace.”
“Then get an urge to fish,” Mark suggested. “Or grab a local girl for a romantic boat ride. Be creative, Shen, but stay with him.”
They were off. The third cop, slipping Mark a disappointed look, left also, to find someone else’s desk to sit on.
“You can’t go,” Mark said to me, his gaze following Ko and Shen. He’d switched back into English to answer what I’d said in the conference room doorway, what I’d thought he hadn’t heard.
“I know,” I said.
He watched his cops; I watched him. He let his shoulders relax. The male beast, I thought, reasserted as ruler of his lair, with other members of the pack out doing what they were supposed to do. I wondered what Grandfather Gao would say about that.
“Those guys,” I said. “You said you were unpopular around here, but they don’t seem to have a problem with you.”
“Unpopular with the bosses,” he said. “The young guys like to work with me. Something exciting could always happen, and if there’s a screwup, Quan was giving the orders and they were just being good cops, and everyone knows about Quan.”
Mark led me through the office warren to a partitioned corner far from the windows. “Is he always like that?” he said as he gestured to a chair in front of the desk and dropped himself into one behind it.
“Bill?” I said. “Yes.”
“Must make him hard to work with.”
“No. It makes him easy.”
Mark gave me a long look. “Those guys are good,” he finally said. “Ko and Shen. You don’t have to worry.”
“Do I look worried?”
He didn’t answer that. “What are you going to do now?” he asked.
“Sit here and worry. What about you?”
He picked up a pencil and bounced it on the desk the way he had on the conference room table. “Before all that, I was going to call Wei Ang-Ran and invite him to help with our inquiries. I think I’ll do that. That ferry won’t get to Cheung Chau for over an hour anyway.”
Something suddenly hit me. “I’m starving,” I said.
Mark grinned. He left his chair, went around the partition, and came back with a steaming teapot and two paper containers that, for all that they were covered with Chinese characters and the smiling faces of Chinese children, looked suspiciously like Cup-o-Noodles to me. He tossed me a container and poured the hot water in after I’d torn the top off. Sitting again, he opened his desk drawer and handed me a pair of chopsticks. I stirred the stuff around.
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