Reflecting the Sky (28 page)

Authors: S. J. Rozan

BOOK: Reflecting the Sky

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Never mind, Lydia. You’re busy. You have a job of your own; do it.

Three or four doors scattered around the periphery of this choked courtyard suggested ways out, or deeper in. At a loss for any brighter idea, I was about to start trying them when a small flurry of action caught my eye. Opposite the alley mouth I was standing in, a crooked, tin-sided shack clung to the wall of a concrete building like a child afraid to let go of its mother. A couple of chickens had wandered into the shack’s open door, an angry voice was screeching at them to get out. They ran—one even flapped its wings—as a round figure dashed, arms waving, into the light, screaming that such scrawny, ill-tempered chickens weren’t good for anything but soup anyway and the only reason they weren’t soup yet is that they weren’t much good for that, either.

“Taitai!”
I called. “Mo Ruo
Taitai!” Taitai
strictly speaking means wife; the way I was using it now, it meant what ma’am would have meant back home: a word of respect to open a conversation with an older woman you don’t actually know.

The figure in the doorway stopped with her flabby arms in midwave and looked at me. I hurried across the courtyard, scattering chickens as I went.
“Taitai!
I am Chin Ling Wan-Ju! You called me at my hotel.”

Her eyes had widened in surprise when she first heard me yell. Now as I said my name they narrowed, and I was hit with the uncomfortable feeling she was deciding just what I was good for, like the chickens. “You called me,” I repeated, stopping before her. “I gave one of the other ladies my number and asked you to call. I gave her ten dollars.” I added that to remind Mo Ruo that just knowing me could be profitable. I was speaking to her in Cantonese; even if she knew English, I calculated I had a better chance of her trusting me in her language than in mine.

Mo Ruo, with a black-toothed grin, grunted, turned, and gestured for me to follow her into the shack.

It was dim, darker than the alley, and it smelled bad, worse than the courtyard. The one window was grimy; the dirt floor was damp in spots. I just about made out a cot with a metal box under it, a shelf with a few battered bowls, a rickety card table with a chair on one side and a low stool on the other. A torn jacket hanging from a peg for when the weather got colder, and an incongrously new-looking, well-made umbrella: that was what Mo Ruo had. I found myself wondering who had put the umbrella down for an unguarded moment in what public place.

“So. You have come to Mo Ruo.” The old lady eyed me from the shaky chair, waiting for me to sit on the stool. Her greasy gray hair came to an uneven line about the level of her chin, as though she had hacked it off herself with a dull scissors. The pattern on her sleeveless blouse was so faded I couldn’t tell what it had once been.

The stool wobbled in the dirt and I turned it, resetting its legs so I wouldn’t fall over. “Yes,” I said. “I have some questions I would like to ask you.”

Mo Ruo’s narrowed eyes took me in another few moments; then she leaned over and pulled the metal box out from under the bed. She opened its top, pawed through it, and lifted out a battered book, some charts, and a clutch of other papers so old, torn, and grease-stained I would have had trouble reading them. She held out her dirt-streaked hand and waited.

I took out ten dollars. Her eyebrows lifted. She laughed derisively, stuffed the bill into her blouse, and held out her hand again. More? I thought. So fast? Then I looked again at the papers and charts and I caught on.

She was waiting for me to show her my palm.

“I don’t want my fortune told,” I said.

She frowned. “You have come to Mo Ruo. Mo Ruo will tell your fortune. Not like the cheats at the temple, oh, no.” She spat in the dirt, repeated, “Mo Ruo will tell your fortune.” She stuck out her hand again.

“No,” I said. “I have a different question.”

“A question. What question?”

“Yesterday, at the temple,” I said, “you approached a young man. You gave him a paper to read, but it wasn’t a prayer.”

At first she didn’t answer me. Then, carefully, as though tasting a dish to see what it needed, she said, “No.”

“Yes. A young man. He looked at your paper, then made two phone calls. Then he left in a taxi. Who gave you the paper to give to him?”

“No.”

“One hundred dollars.”

Mo Ruo showed her black teeth again. “So much money.”

“If you tell me.”

She kept her chicken-appraising eyes on me for a few moments. “If telling you is worth one hundred dollars,” she finally said, “it is worth two hundred.”

Well, Lydia, that’s what you get. I took two one-hundred-dollar bills from my wallet and placed them both on the table. “Who?”

With surprising speed Mo Ruo reached over and tried to lift the bills, but my hand was on them. Leaving her hand covering them also, she smiled. “The old man.”

I let go of one of the bills. “His name?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s not worth two hundred dollars. Describe him. Tell me what happened.”

Without removing her hand from the remaining bill, without losing the mocking smile, she said, “He came to the temple. I saw him, watching the prayer-sellers. He picked Mo Ruo. He could tell Mo Ruo was the best, that Mo Ruo would find his young man, that Mo Ruo would not fail the way those other fools would.”

“What did he want you to do?”

“He gave me a paper. It looked like a prayer but it was not a prayer.”

“What did it say?”

“I did not read it.”

Oh, sure, I thought, but since I already knew what the paper said, I let it go.

“What did he tell you to do?”

“Give the man the paper.”

“That’s all?”

“No more.”

“How did you know what the man would look like?”

“He showed me a picture.”

“All right. What did he look like himself, this old man?”

She gave me the chin jut. “An old man. Thin, with white hair. Old men, pah. All the same to Mo Ruo.”

My money had been on L. L. Lee anyway; now I was sure of it. “If you saw a picture of this old man, would you recognize him?”

“Mo Ruo does not forget.”

Can’t tell old men apart, but does not forget. Still, it was worth a try. “I want you to come with me. I want you to look at a picture.” Mark Quan, I was sure, could dig up a photo of L. L. Lee.

Mo Ruo tugged at the hundred-dollar bill still on the table. I released it and it disappeared into the faded blouse.

“No,” she said.

Sighing, I said, “Another hundred dollars.”

I was not a bit surprised when, with a reappearance of the black-toothed grin, Mo Ruo said, “Another two.”

Our trip out of the lanes was quicker than my trip in. Mo Ruo led the way, trotting along with an energetic quickness I would not have suspected, slipping in this door and through that courtyard, never once looking back to see if I was with her. We emerged at the knife-sharpener’s and turned down the row of cooking huts. I waved at the squid man, who let out a cackle of delight when he saw the company I was keeping. Mo Ruo threw a scowl in his direction and told me, “Pah. Disrespectful turtle’s egg. His fish is no good.”

We climbed the stairs out of the jungle and reentered high-rise, high-traffic Hong Kong. I had to stop and clear my head, readjust, but Mo Ruo hoofed it toward the temple, plowing through crowds of her fellow pedestrians as though she expected them to flap their wings and hop out of her way. She seemed to have no trouble with the transition from the twisting, hidden pattern of the lanes to the bright broad grid of boulevards. Maybe it was because she did it every day, I thought as I hurried to keep pace with her. Or maybe the two were not actually as different as I thought them.

Just before we reached the temple I managed to flag down a taxi. Mo Ruo climbed in with obvious satisfaction. I gave the driver the address as a street number instead of the building’s name, in case Mo Ruo had an aversion to police headquarters. She settled back in the taxi seat, clearly gratified that her own importance had been acknowledged in the form of transport I’d chosen. Her joy didn’t keep her from screeching at the driver to watch how he turned, or at pedestrians who dared cross a street we were barreling down. The driver made it his business to hurry; he was probably noticing, as I was, that the rank smell of Mo Ruo’s little tin hut had not come entirely from the hut. When we arrived, I broke Hong Kong protocol and tipped him, to cover the cost of the time he was going to have to take out of his busy day to air out his cab.

Mo Ruo, nodding in pleasure at having been brought to the Hong Kong side in a taxi, followed me along the sidewalk almost into the building before she caught on. Eyes popping, she slammed to a halt.

“Aiyeee!” she howled. “Where do you bring me? Oh, no, Mo Ruo is not coming here!” She spun on her heel and hurried away down the sidewalk. Why, I thought, oh, why couldn’t I have gotten one of the other old ladies, one who didn’t know how to read?

“Taitai!”
I called. I raced after her. “Mo Ruo
Taitai
! There is nothing to fear! Just to look at a picture. That’s all you need to do here, just look at a picture!”

Scurrying, she waved me away. I caught up with her at the corner. Luckily the whizzing traffic made it impossible for anyone to cross.
“Taitai—”

“Police!” she spat. “Not Mo Ruo, talk to police! Go away, police!”

“I’m not a cop,” I said. “I just need your help. They won’t even know who you are. I won’t tell them your name.” Desperately I offered, “Another hundred dollars.”

That stayed her headlong plunge into traffic. “You are not police?”

“No. It’s just, this is where the old man’s picture is.”

I expected her to continue balking, on the logical basis that if the picture was at police HQ the man pictured was probably a criminal, and therefore someone to avoid fingering, as that might make him mad. But that didn’t seem to bother Mo Ruo. Maybe she thought of herself as a match for any lowlife, and maybe she was right. Two things happened. She demanded the expected: “Two hundred dollars.” And, with the shrewd, mocking smile of the person with the upper hand, she said, “They can bring the picture out.”

I agreed to the two hundred, glad that Hong Kong dollars were worth only eight to the American: Still, they were mounting up. About the other, I said, “Maybe. Maybe they can. I’ll find out. But if they can’t, you have to agree to come inside.”

“Maybe,” she echoed me, and I knew what that meant: If she did, it would cost me another two hundred dollars.

We backed off from the street corner, although Mo Ruo would not come all the way to the front door. The sun was low now, glowing from behind the Peak, and Gloucester Road was in shadow. Heat still rose from the baked concrete sidewalks, but the glare was gone from the chrome of rushing cars and the glass of lofty towers. Accepting Mo Ruo’s compromise sidewalk position, I dialed Mark Quan from my cell phone.

“Wai!”

“It’s Lydia,” I said, but I said it in Cantonese, so Mo Ruo wouldn’t think I was trying to put one over on her and dash off again.

“Lydia? What is it?” Mark demanded, responding also in Cantonese, his quick and wary. “Did you hear from your partner?”

“No,” I said. “Did you hear from your cops?”

“No. I’d have called you if I had. Why aren’t you speaking English?”

Hearing him say he’d have called me, I knew it was true, and I also knew something else: I could trust Mark Quan to do what he said he’d do. And I knew he wasn’t sure he could trust me to do the same.

And I wasn’t either.

And I wished I were.

But that wasn’t the point here. Come on, Lydia, I thought, you have a skittish old lady on the sidewalk ready to bolt, and a simple request. Worry about whatever it is you’re worrying about later.

“I’ll explain, but not right now. Do you have a photo of L. L. Lee?”

“Do I—sure, I guess so. Why?”

“I think I have a witness who can identify him as the man who sent Steven Wei to the temple.”

“A witness? What kind of witness?”

“The prayer-seller.”

“From the temple?”

“I’ll tell you all about it, but she’s kind of nervous. I think we should show her the picture soon, before she changes her mind.”

I had the feeling that
we
had not passed him by, but all he said was, “So bring her here. Where are you?”

“On the sidewalk outside. Can you bring the picture down?”

“Can I do what?”

“I told you, she’s kind of nervous. She doesn’t want to come in.”

Mo Ruo stood near me, picking her teeth and darting glances in all directions. “It’ll only take a minute,” I said. “Please?”