MANDARIN PLAID (Lydia Chin/Bill Smith series) (19 page)

Mrs. Chan’s face darkened. “Who told you this? Some gossipmonger.”

“I just wanted to know,” I said quickly, “what she looks like. If you’ve seen her, I mean. Is she pretty? I … If he’s serious about her, then I won’t … well, you know. Get any more involved with him.” I looked down at the counter, not meeting her eyes.

Mrs. Chan clucked her tongue. “Oh, Ling Wan-ju! A seamstress in Roland Lum’s factory? Whoever told you that must be someone very jealous.”

I looked up. “Jealous?”

“To say something so untrue.” Mrs. Chan’s face had taken on a scowl of righteous indignation on my behalf.

“It isn’t true?” I said.

“Roland Lum,” she told me, pointing out to the street, “is always alone when I see him. Coming to the factory, going home. Out during the day, on business. Such a shame, such a handsome man, but always alone.”

I thought for a moment, and asked her, “Maybe he sees Peng Hui Liang at night? When you aren’t here to see?”

She sniffed, almost offended. “We stay open into the evening.
And your uncle Wen often needs me here for some time after closing.” Meaning, you can’t be seriously suggesting there’s anything that goes on on Canal Street that I don’t see.

And I wasn’t. But this was an unexpected twist. I wanted to cover my bases as completely as I could.

“Maybe he’s interested in her,” I said, sounding unconvinced. “Maybe he wants to be involved with her, but she just hasn’t gone out with him yet.”

Mrs. Chan tapped sharply on the counter with her red-lacquered fingernail. “Now you stop this foolishness, Ling Wan-ju. You and Roland Lum are perfect together. The person who told you this nonsense either was trying to upset you, or got hopelessly confused when she heard Roland Lum complaining.”

I said, “Complaining?”

“Roland Lum has been complaining to the ladies who work for him for months. Teasing them. Mrs. Wong tells me.”

“Teasing them about what?”

“Complaining,” she said, “that they do their work so well he can’t fire them, which is too bad, because none of the young ones are single and none of the single ones are young. How will he ever find a wife, he asks, if the only women he sees all day are his little sisters and his old aunties?”

T
WENTY

S
o Peng Hui Liang, the soon-to-be mother of Roland Lum’s child, didn’t work at his factory. Whoever she was, and whatever reason Roland had for wanting me to find her, she wasn’t some sweet young Fujianese seamstress he’d been coming on to between the Singers and the steam press, and squiring around Chinatown, not even just down Canal Street to a cheap Chinese-run Bowery hotel. Then who was she, and what was Roland’s game?

I contemplated these questions as I walked along Canal Street in the spring breeze, smelling the water scent from the East River. Sometimes, for all your senses are able to tell you, New York might be landlocked. We could be living in a prairie town somewhere, a city on the plains where the land rolls away in all directions, mile after solid, endless mile. And then, other times—bright spring mornings when the smell of water carries on the breeze and the cawing sea gulls race the clouds from west to east—you suddenly know you’re clinging to the shores of the continent, wrapped by rivers blending into the sea. At the ragged end of one place and time and the beginning of another.

Who was Peng Hui Liang? And why had she left Chinatown and moved to Flu Shing, to a house on Main Street near a beauty parlor?

I skidded to a stop on the street, creating a three-Chinese pileup.

She hadn’t.

Over my apologies to the people who’d rear-ended me and theirs to me, I heard in my head my conversation with the man on the other end of the phone number Roland had given me, and I knew what was wrong with it.

It was in Cantonese.

The new immigrants, the ones who live four or five to a tiny basement room waiting to make their fortunes, stick together as all immigrants do. The Fujianese, particularly, are a tight group. Many of the Cantonese who came here in the fifties and sixties, as my parents did, have remained poor; but they live in their own more permanent slums. They don’t bunk with the Fujianese.

And they don’t speak it, either.

Just as the Fujianese, required by law in the People’s Republic to learn Mandarin, and Fujianese-speaking at home, have no reason on earth to speak Cantonese.

Cantonese. The language I was raised on. Me and Roland Lum.

Roland, according to my mother, had had to learn basic Fujianese just to give orders in the factory, because all the new young women—the ones my mother and Mrs. Chan had no patience with—were from Fukien.

Whoever that man on the phone had been, I was willing to bet
he hadn’t been Peng Hui Liang’s roommate. He probably didn’t even know her.

If she was even real.

I hurried to the phone on the corner and called Bill. I wanted to tell him what had happened and what I thought it meant. I also wanted to tell him what I was about to do next, and how he could help.

He wasn’t there.

I left a frustrated message with his service and hung up, wondering just where he was, and why. He’d said he was going to be checking on Dawn Jing’s finances this morning. That was telephone work, the kind you do from home. So why wasn’t he home?

I called my own machine, to check my messages in case he’d called to tell me what he was up to, but there weren’t any. I hung the phone up more sharply than it deserved and stood staring into the bright blue morning.

Okay, Lydia, you’re on your own. Big deal. You like being independent, in the general way of things. The question is, how are you going to pull this off without help?

What I wanted to do was to find out why Roland Lum was paying me to look for a woman who at best wasn’t who he said she was. And maybe didn’t exist. And why he’d had some Cantonese-speaking juvenile delinquent friend of his try to send me off on a wild-goose chase to Queens.

There were two routes I could see to the answer. I could confront Roland and demand to know, but somehow I had a feeling that that was the more likely dead end. Or I could sneak around behind his back, sniffing into his life, poking around in places he didn’t know I was.

The Lydia Chin way.

I walked a ways uptown, into Soho, just to help me think. I window-shopped in art galleries, gourmet coffee stores, and boutiques. I admired a long-sleeved black silk evening dress whose skirt changed abruptly at the wide part of the mannequin’s hips into the sheerest lace. I wondered where you’d wear something like that. It made me think of Genna. I decided I needed a cup of tea, so I walked down the block to the Korean deli to pick one up. I threaded my way into the shop past big white buckets of tulips and daffodils.

As I was paying for the tea, my idea hit me.

I hurried outside and zipped across the street to the pay phone. I called Bill again. He was still out. I called my machine, but it didn’t know any more than I did. Some partner, I thought. Some employee. Some pal.

So, without advice, encouragement, or backup, I called Roland Lum.

The phone rang a few times; then, behind Roland’s loud “Hello!” I heard, as I had before, the factory noises of my childhood.

“Roland? It’s Lydia.”

“Lydia! Hey, what’s up?”

“I have something you might be interested in.”

“Yeah?” he said cheerfully. “What?”

“I think I found Peng Hui Liang. But there’s a problem.”

As I expected, there was a second of silence, a beat and a half Roland missed. Then he bounced right back. “Hey, that’s great! But what do you mean, problem?”

“I can’t tell you over the phone. I think you should come here.”

“God, Lydia, I’m up to my butt in work.”

“This is important, Roland.”

“Well …” he sighed. “Where are you?”

“Uptown. Amsterdam and Ninety-third.” I wanted to say, Flu Shing, you rat, but I didn’t think I could get him to go all the way out there. And I didn’t really care where he went, as long as he left the factory.

“Ninety-third? Does it have to be now?”

“I think it would be a good idea.”

“You can’t come here?”

“If I could I would.” And as soon as you’re gone, dearie, I will.

“What’s this about?”

“Not over the phone, Roland.”

He sighed again. In the background I heard the hiss of the steam press.

“All right. Give me the address.”

“Amsterdam and Ninety-third, on the northwest corner. Great Wall. It’s a Chinese take-out place.” It was, too. I’d eaten General
Tso’s chicken from there a couple of times, visiting friends on the Upper West Side. The food was good, but the place was remarkably inconvenient to get to from Chinatown.

Up until right now, that had always been a disadvantage.

I gave him ten minutes, just to make absolutely sure our paths didn’t cross. During that time I pretended to anyone who cared, including myself, that I was truly interested in shop windows full of cabbage-rose-patterned pantyhose and shoes with wide, high Plexiglas heels.

I figured Roland for a taxi kind of guy. If traffic wasn’t a problem, he could make it to Amsterdam and Ninety-third in twenty minutes. I gave him an upper limit of five increasingly ticked-off minutes waiting for me while the impassive-faced counterman at Great Wall, who didn’t know me from a hole in the ground, folded dumplings. Then another taxi home, another twenty minutes.

What I had to do at the factory could take less time than that, or more, but forty-five minutes at the outside was the time I had. I only wished I knew what it was I was going there to do.

I was heading into Roland Lum’s factory in the same spirit Bill and I had invaded Wayne Lewis’s taped-off apartment: because it was there. Physical evidence: this was one of the things I’d learned from Bill, one of the things he’d learned from the police captain uncle he’d lived with. Every crime leaves physical traces. Always, every time. A crime is an aberrant event, a break in routine. It will leave marks behind, something outside the pattern. That’s what Bill was looking for, standing so still inside Wayne Lewis’s door: the pattern, then the marks. You just have to be able to see them, he says. And then to understand what they mean.

After my ten minutes, I went back to the phone. I dialed the factory number again and held my breath.

It took longer before someone answered this time, and it wasn’t Roland. Another man barked a greeting into it, in Cantonese.

Cantonese is what I responded in. “INS!” I told him, urgent warning in my voice. “INS is coming! Inspectors on the way. All the factories on Canal Street. They’re here now. At your place in five minutes. Hurry!”

I hung up fast, as I would have if I’d been making an illicit warning call from a factory under siege by the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

I searched through my wallet to make sure I had the cards I’d need, thinking it was just like me to start this sting without checking on the props first. But they were there, because it was also just like me never to clean out my wallet. I’d used this gag a year and a half ago in the service of a completely different investigation. I stuck the cards in my pocket and strode up sunny Canal Street, fast but not as fast as I wanted to go. I held myself back to give Roland’s employees time to disappear. By the time I reached the factory, just within the five minutes I’d warned the man on the phone it would take, it was a safe bet the place would be practically a ghost town.

At the grimy concrete building with the open-front cheap clothing store at sidewalk level, I straightened my jacket and started to run my hand through my hair to organize it, then realized that not only didn’t I need to do that anymore, I actually couldn’t. I set my face into a stony look and pulled open the door.

The elevator was down a short hallway whose ceiling and walls were decorated with peeling paint. Just inside the door, and again at the front of the elevator, boards showed through where the linoleum had been rubbed away under generations of impatient feet. I marched straight into the elevator, flashed one of the cards from my pocket, and demanded, “Lum’s.”

The elevator man, a middle-aged Chinese fellow who’d been sipping tea from the cover of his stainless-steel thermos when I charged into his domain, opened his eyes wide as he was hit by the jolt of fear my Jillian Woo, INS Inspector business cards usually inspire.

“Now!” I commanded fiercely, to forestall the possibility of his suddenly forgetting how to run the elevator.

He swallowed his tea, pulled the elevator gate shut, and threw the ancient lever that started the motor. He kept his fearful eyes on me, and I kept my steely ones on the walls moving past us behind the gate, all the long, slow way up to the fifth floor. When we got there he closed the gate and started down almost before I’d stepped out into the factory.

Roland Lum’s factory, as it had been when his father had run it, was considered a model place, working there thought to be a plum job. That meant that the walls had been painted sometime in the last ten years, the toilet worked, the barred, rice-papered windows could be opened for ventilation, and there was heat in the paint-encrusted radiators. It didn’t mean the whine and growl of the machines wasn’t so loud and relentless that it was possible to hold a conversation; or that the air wasn’t full of fine, invisible cotton dust that made you cough all day; or that you didn’t work hunched over at the same machine doing the same painstaking, crashingly boring task for ten or twelve hours a day, six or sometimes seven days a week, trying to cram your lunch into ten minutes and your bathroom break into two because you’re being paid by the piece and time is literally money.

The place wasn’t huge. Two dozen industrial sewing machines pretty much filled it up, with the steam press over by the wall. The table where the thread-snipper usually sat was right next to that, because snipping the loose threads is the last operation before a garment gets pressed and hung in plastic on the pipe-rail racks. Thread-snippers are generally young; you need good eyes to do that job. Piles of fabric crowded the aisles, and rows of bare fluorescent fixtures pressed like cloud cover overhead.

The different machines, some stitching seams, some doing more demanding work like attaching collars or finishing buttonholes, would normally, in the middle of the day like this, each be whining and thumping at its own rate, as the operators changed bobbins and broke threads with their teeth. And the thread-snipper would be moving her endless pile of garments from left to right as she finished each, ready for the steam press or the skilled hand-finisher.

But the thread-snipper wasn’t there. A lot of people weren’t there. Just as I’d figured, Roland Lum’s factory was almost deserted. Seven middle-aged women sat at new industrial sewing machines in a room set up for two dozen, looking for all the world as though they were so engrossed in their work they hadn’t even noticed my arrival. A young man in the back, a hand-finisher whose talents probably netted him an extra fifty cents an hour, placidly skated an iron back and forth over the sleeve of a gauzy blouse. He, apparently, didn’t notice me either.

Guaranteed to be citizens, all.

A fiftyish man whose skin hung as loose on his face as his vest and shirt did on his body stepped out from behind an ancient wood desk in the corner of the factory, to greet me.

“Yes?” he said in Cantonese, his face a polite blank. “Can I help you?” His was the voice I’d heard on the phone, the man I’d warned.

“INS,” I snapped. I gestured at the near-empty room. “Where’s everyone else?”

He looked around, as though taking employee inventory. “Everyone is here.”

I gave him my best scornful look.

“Oh,” he said, his eyes enlightened with sudden understanding. “The boss. He’s away. He’ll be back in about an hour.”

“I’ll bet he’s away. Okay. I want their papers. Names, addresses. I want your time cards and payroll book. Get your records together, then send these people in one at a time. I’ll be in there.”

Without waiting for his permission, I turned and stalked into Roland Lum’s office.

It was a cramped and messy half-enclosed space where a paper-piled desk sat surrounded by file cabinets and two old oak chairs. Papers were stuck to the walls and stacked on the file cabinets; some had settled like leaves on the floor. I knew the factory manager couldn’t object to me being in here, because it was the only place I could talk privately to his employees, trying to get them to tell me the truth about how much they were paid and what hours they were made to work.