MANDARIN PLAID (Lydia Chin/Bill Smith series) (24 page)

She swiveled her chair around again, hung up the phone and stood. “Your ‘ransom’ money will be here in half an hour. My banker thinks I’m purchasing art on the black market. He’s thrilled with the prospect.”

“Mrs. Ryan,” Genna said earnestly, having one more try, “what we’ve said is true. John’s in danger. This money is for him.”

“Miss Jing, you can continue with this ridiculous story for your own entertainment if you want, but it really doesn’t make any difference to me. You’ll get your money, and you’ll walk out of my son’s life. Then he’ll no longer be in danger.”

She smiled at Genna, a smile as cold and stabbing as winter sun flashing off snow. “You may wait in the foyer,” she told us. “You’ll pardon me if I don’t sit with you. Helga will let me know when Peter’s messenger arrives.” She stood waiting for us to move, to herd ourselves back to the foyer.

And we did. We sat on striped-silk chairs while Mrs. Ryan stalked down the hall I’d been taken along on my first visit here. She disappeared, but the unruffled Helga appeared at almost the same instant, taking up a respectful post across the foyer from us. I was sure she was there to make sure we didn’t stuff our pockets full of Mrs. Ryan’s valuable knickknacks, but to Helga’s credit she didn’t stare at us, didn’t seem to even notice us. She stood blankly eight feet from the door as though she had nothing else to do all day but await the arrival of one million dollars.

T
WENTY
-E
IGHT

T
he million dollars came. It came in a rectangular package the size of a phone book, carried up by a mustached man in a uniform like the concierge’s. Helga thanked him and brought us and the package to Mrs. Ryan, who was two rooms away in the wood-paneled study. Mrs. Ryan cut the brown paper wrapping to reveal the piles of green inside. She leafed through one package of bills, counting them, and then counted the packages. Then she taped the paper up again and held out the package to Genna.

“Now get out of my house,” she said.

Genna’s hands moved, as if trying to express something for which she had no words. I had words myself I was trying not to express. Genna’s hands gave up; she took the package. Turn and leave, Lydia, I told myself, just walk away, and I was two steps into that when Helga reappeared in the doorway.

“Telephone, ma’am,” she told Mrs. Ryan. “For the young ladies.”

“You left this number?” Mrs. Ryan’s eyes flashed angrily at Genna. “How dare you?”

Helga said, to the space between us, “It’s young Mr. Ryan.”

Genna’s eyes flew open. Mrs. Ryan’s mouth set.

I lunged for the phone.

“John? Where are you? Are you all right?”

“Lydia?” John’s voice sounded strained but controlled. “I don’t know where I am. I’m blindfolded. They say they’ve been watching and they know my mother’s banker just sent over a package. They say it had better be their money.”

“It is their money, John. Are you people listening? Are you on this line? Stay calm and tell us what to do.”

Genna reached for the phone, to take it from me, but I shook her off and stopped her with a look.

“There’s no one on the line but me, Lydia,” John said. “It’s a cellular phone. They said it’s stolen, so you can’t trace it. They told me to tell you that.”

“What else did they tell you?”

“They say to tell you to bring the money. They said … they said soon.”

“I want to talk to them.”

“They won’t let you. I’m supposed to give you instructions.”

“All right.” Roland would know that I’d recognize his voice if he spoke to me. This was no time to say anything about that, though, no time to let Roland know I already knew. We’d deal with that after the exchange was made. “Tell me where to go.”

But before he could, the phone was wrenched from my hand.

“John?” Mrs. Ryan snapped into the receiver. “Where are you? What’s going on?” Silence. Then, “Who are you? Put my son back on the line. Of course I don’t, not a word—It can’t—Wait! What—John? John! Yes, yes, all right.” With no words and a look on her face I hadn’t seen before, Mrs. Ryan handed the phone back to me.

“John?”

“Lydia?” I could hear John draw a ragged breath. “An abandoned building in Alphabet City.”

“Are you all right?” I asked him.

“My mother didn’t buy it, I guess,” he said. His voice was tighter than before. “She needed convincing.”

I shot a look at Mrs. Ryan. Her face was pale.

“Alphabet City,” I said into the phone. “Where?”

He gave me a Third Street address. “You put the money in the basement, in the boiler room. Then you leave. They’ll pick it up. Then they’ll let me go.”

“No.”

“Lydia—”

“Tell them no. You and the money, at the same time. They walk away with the money when I walk away with you.”

The murmur of voices came to me faintly through the phone. I strained to hear but I couldn’t make anything out.

John came back. “They say no.”

“Then I say no. Tell them there’s no point in arguing this one. I’m not paying for merchandise I haven’t seen.”

“I’m the damn merchandise, Lydia!”

Genna and Mrs. Ryan were both staring at me. Genna’s mouth was partly open. I turned away from them. “I know that, John,” I said quietly. “I’m trying to save your life.”

More murmuring on the other end of the phone. Then John said, “Okay. Come to the building, now. Alone. They say you know what will happen if you try anything tricky—”

“And so do they, if they do. Tell them that.”

A sudden click. John was gone.

“What’s happening?” Genna managed.

“I’m leaving.” I hung the phone up and took the package from her. “I have to take them the money.”

Mrs. Ryan’s arms were folded across her chest as they had been when we came in, but now she seemed to be less containing herself than holding herself together. Or maybe she’d suddenly realized what a cold place this was that she lived in. “My son,” she said to me, in a voice used to giving orders, not used to this. “If any harm comes to him, so help me—”

I turned and walked out of the room. Genna hurried after me. We left Mrs. Ryan standing in the study, finishing her threat to an empty room.

T
WENTY
-N
INE

Y
ou can’t come,” I told Genna as we rode the elevator down. “It’s too dangerous.”

“I don’t care, Lydia.” Genna’s eyes pleaded with me. “I’m not scared.”

“Not just dangerous for you,” I said. “For John. They said I should come alone. It’s too risky, Genna. You can’t come.”

The elevator doors slid apart and we marched quickly through the formal lobby. Joseph the concierge watched impassively as the doorman pulled open the street door for us.

I surveyed the street for a pay phone. There aren’t all that many on York Avenue. “Come on,” I told Genna, and dashed down the block to the one I’d spotted, on the far corner. I dropped a quarter in and called Bill’s number. I didn’t expect him to be there, just hoped for a miracle, but I didn’t get one; his service picked up. I had nothing really to say to them—tell him I’m making a ransom payment and trying to get a kidnap victim back safely, ask him to call me, maybe we can do lunch? I left a message that I’d called and that he should call Genna. Then I called my machine, and heard his voice.

“Lydia,” he said. “Something. I’m following it up. I’ll call again.”

Beepers, I thought. After this is over, assuming everyone’s still standing, Bill and I have to get beepers.

“What’s going to happen?” Genna asked me. I guessed her whispery voice was as strong as she could make it.

“Here’s exactly what’s going to happen,” I said. “When I get where I’m going, I’ll give them the money. They’ll turn John over to me. They’ll leave and then we’ll leave.”

Boy, did that sound easy.

“I want to come.”

“No. Go back to your studio.”

“That’s what John said! I wanted to go with him to drop the money and he said, go back to the studio. And look what happened!”

“Genna. No. Go on back. Keep trying to call Bill, and give me half an hour. If I don’t call you, call Francesca Rossi at the Thirteenth Precinct. Tell her what happened. She’ll send the cops.”

“Lydia—”

“Genna!” I barked. I stopped myself, seeing her flinch. “I’m sorry,” I said in a softer voice. “But please. You can’t come. We don’t have time to argue about it.”

I hailed a cab and climbed in. As it pulled away from the curb, I turned and saw Genna out the back window, standing on the sidewalk, pale face staring after me. I turned away again. As storefronts and streetlights flew past, I was struck by the courage it had taken for her to do as I’d said, to not come, to go home and wait. Courage I
didn’t think I’d have had, if the strained voice on the other end of the phone had, for example, been Bill’s.

Third Street and Avenue C was probably as picturesque right now, on a beautiful early-spring afternoon, as it ever got. That’s what I was thinking when the cab dropped me at the corner, where grimy walk-up tenements, some abandoned and some not, were packed shoulder-to-shoulder as if, at the end of a weary day, they needed to borrow each other’s strength to stand. A plastic shopping bag, ballooned by the wind, skittered by on the sidewalk as I walked up the block to the address I had.

I was on the north side of the street because the address was on the south side. I wanted a chance to survey the area, just to look around, just to see. I wanted to check the building out from top to bottom before I descended into the depths of it.

Across the street from the place I was looking for, I stopped and stood. The building I was going into was one of the abandoned ones, with plywood hammered into the holes where the windows had been and now, in places, knocked out again so pigeons and squatters could move freely in and out. The door lay flat on its back next to the gaping doorway. Not a place I’d have chosen to spend a spring afternoon, but a place I might have headed for if I’d needed to lay low—like for example if I’d kidnapped someone and was waiting for my ransom money.

I stood still across the street from this place, letting my eyes wander along the sidewalks, over the rooftops. No one seemed to be watching me particularly, unless this was a pretty sophisticated operation and the staggering junkie at the corner or the twelve-year-olds playing hooky from school to get in a game of stickball were part of it.

Good, I thought. That’s that, then. Nothing to do now but just go on in there, Lydia. Just go on in.

I gripped the money package tighter, squared my shoulders, and went on in.

It wasn’t a nice place. Stray cats and dogs, or maybe stray people, had left the pungent aroma of urine floating in the air above the thicker scents of molding food and rotting wood. I kicked an aluminum take-out container as I moved cautiously along the dank, dim
hallway. It scraped, something scurried into the shadows, and rice spilled across my shoe.

Yum. Okay, Lydia, I ordered myself, find the way to the basement. Maybe, I suggested, you could try looking under the stairs to the upstairs. I did that, and I found a door. I thanked myself very much and pulled it open.

“Who’s that?” came John’s shout.

“Lydia Chin,” I answered. “I brought what I was supposed to bring.” I don’t know why I said it like that; I just had trouble yelling down the cellar steps, “I have a million dollars in a little package here.”

“You’re alone?”

“Of course I am.”

“Come down,” John ordered.

I creaked my way down the steps. About halfway down, the sunshine that had been willing to come a few tentative feet into the hallway refused to go on. After that the only light came from a thin line that leaked around the basement door, half off its hinges in the areaway under the sidewalk. Gee, I thought, I could have come in that way, if I’d only known.

“Back here,” John’s voice called, so when I reached the bottom I headed back there, away from the door and the thin line of light.

There was light in that direction, too, though, a softer yellow patch spilling across the dusty concrete floor from a room near the back of the building. I stopped and turned toward it when I got to the doorway it was spreading from. I didn’t go in, because the lamp that was making it was pointed directly into my eyes and I couldn’t see a thing.

“Well, look at this,” Roland Lum’s jaunty voice said, from somewhere beyond the light. “She really is alone.” The light swung away. I blinked, and now I could see.

Before me, standing in front of a rusting hulk of a boiler, were two black-hooded, ninja-masked figures, one taller, one smaller, both holding guns. Their shadows swayed under the swinging metal-reflectored lamp one of them had just let go of. Seated beside them, blindfolded, hands tied behind him to the chair he was in, was John Ryan. Crusted blood stained his cheek.

Ninja masks. Ninja masks and black clothes. I thought of the
hard cobblestones of the West Village, and I wanted to rush over and slug whichever one of these figures was Roland Lum.

But I didn’t. “I’m alone,” I echoed calmly, standing balanced and relaxed. What I said was a little bit of a lie. My gun was with me, clipped in its holster onto my belt, covered by my loose jacket. Part of me wanted its reassuring weight, its cool smoothness, in my hand right now, but the other part knew that we were all safest if it stayed where it was. “I have the money,” I said. I held out the package in both hands, so they could see that that was all I held.

The figure closest to me gestured with its gun at the other one, who came forward and took the package. Black-gloved hands ripped the paper, rifled through the packs of bills inside. The figure nodded.

“Okay,” I said, keeping my tones controlled and reasonable, as though I’d just paid the agreed-upon price for a pound of perch and was ready to have it wrapped to take home to my mother. “That’s the deal. Untie John now, and we’ll leave.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” the shorter figure said. That was, it turned out, the one with Roland’s voice.

John turned his blindfolded face toward the voice. “You—”

The figure’s gloved hand smacked John sharply on the back of the head. “Shut up.”

John didn’t. “What—”

The figure hit him again, harder. John’s head dipped; before he’d lifted it again black gloves had stuffed a filthy-looking towel into his mouth and taped it around with adhesive tape. John made strangled noises, kicking in his chair. The ninja-masked figure leaned heavily on John’s shoulder, letting the gun dangle casually.

“People know where I am.” I addressed the ninja masks with no change in tone. “They’re giving me time, not a lot of it, and then they’re going to call the police. If you keep to the deal, you have a chance of getting away, but if you don’t, you won’t.”

The shorter figure shook its head. “Other way, I’m afraid. And it’s your own fault. I tried to keep you out of it. I really did.” The left hand, the one that wasn’t holding the gun, peeled the ninja mask off. The face underneath was, completely unsurprisingly, Roland’s.

“You knew, didn’t you?” he said. His smile was half regretful, half pleased, like an actor in a play that had been panned except for
his own exceptional performance, singled out universally for praise.

I nodded. Keep it going, Lydia, run out the clock until Genna calls Francie, and Francie sends the Marines. “If you knew I did, why the masks?”

“We thought you might not be alone. We didn’t see any point in advertising.”

“Who’s that?” I asked, pointing at the figure by his side.

“Forget it,” Roland said. “You don’t need to know.”

“Did you shoot at me in the park?” I asked. “Or did you steal the sketches in the first place?”

“Why don’t we just say I was doing great until you came along? I should have known you’d screw me up. But honestly, Lydia, I didn’t know you were any good at this. All I remembered was that you were a pest. I mean, you were always underfoot when I was hanging out with old Elliot, but you didn’t really make trouble, you were just annoying. You were even kind of cute, for a kid sister.”

Annoying?
I thought.
Cute?
I felt hot blood rush to my cheeks. Then, calm down, Lydia, I told myself. He has a gun. He can call you whatever he wants.

“But when I started screwing you up,” I said, “you tried to scare me off? In the Village?”

“I tried.” He grinned, shamefaced. “And you know, you fight okay. I didn’t really want to hurt you, but maybe I should have. Scaring you sure didn’t work. Does it ever?” he asked, as an afterthought, just friendly and interested.

“Not really.” See, Lydia Chin can strut, too. “So then you invented Peng Hui Liang?”

The grin turned rueful. “I really thought that was going to work. I thought it would appeal to your white knight thing. Did nasty old Roland really knock up some poor FOB? Can Lydia find her and save her from him? Tune in next week.”

“Then I was supposed to go running all over Queens so you could finish up. And then John followed you and this new opportunity fell in your lap.” I pointed to John. Gagged and blindfolded, the tilt of his head told me he was following our words closely, nevertheless.

“Yeah,” Roland said easily. “And you should have done it. Even
if you tipped to it. I went to a lot of trouble to get you out of the way. Maybe you should have gotten out of the way. Did you ever think of that?”

“I thought of it.”

“Instead of sending me on a wild-goose chase all the damn way uptown and then screwing around in my factory.”

When he said that, Roland’s face lost its affability, went hard, as I’d seen it do in the restaurant at the waiter’s mistake.

“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” I said.

Something made a soft, scraping sound. All of us jumped a little, then relaxed. Nerves, Lydia, I thought, as my pulse raced. Rats in the shadows. Stay calm, please, or at least calm-looking.

Roland shrugged. “Well, I don’t care. Factory’s over. I hate that stupid place. Dust and the noise and the damn ladies gossiping, running like scared chickens from the INS. How’d your mom stand it all those years, Lydia?”

There was a simple answer to that, I thought: she had to. But it hadn’t really been a question, and Roland went right on.

“And for what?” he demanded. “So my brother and my sister can come to me all the time, oh big brother, you have to help us out, you have the factory, I need tuition, I need to buy a house. You ask your brothers for money all the time, Lydia?”

“No.”

“Because it gets on your fucking nerves, let me tell you,” he went on, as if I hadn’t answered. “If they think I’m ending up like my old man, busting my ass seven days a week and then popping off out of nowhere so my sister can drive a Benz and my brother can sit around a pool in Malibu, they’re fucked.”

“That’s what this is? Your ticket out?”

“Damn right. And Lydia, it’s too bad, but you’re the only thing in my way.”

“I’m not in your way, Roland. Take your money and leave.”

Roland laughed. “And what? You couldn’t leave it alone when you didn’t know what was going on. You’re sure as hell not going to just wave bye-bye now.”

“It’s your only chance, Roland. Leave now. I won’t follow you.”

“But you’ll know. And you’ll tell, because you’re a good little
detective. I’d offer you money, come in with us, but I don’t think you’ll do it. And besides,” he considered, then shook his head, smiling, “I don’t want to share.”

He lifted the gun slowly until it was pointed right at my heart.

“You’re not going to kill me, Roland.”

“You’re wrong, Lydia. The first one wasn’t very hard. The second one’s got to be easier.”

The first one. “Did you kill Wayne Lewis?”

Roland smiled. “Of course I did,” he said.

At that John began to kick again.

Roland’s face snapped from friendly to furious. “Shut up, I said!” He lifted his gun and smashed it down by John’s ear. John’s head drooped. He started to raise it slowly, then let it drop again. He made a choking sound, but he didn’t kick anymore.

Roland’s expression relaxed, and the smile came back. I looked at John, now still in his chair, and then back at Roland. Of course you did, I thought. Now tell me
why
.

But I didn’t say that. What I said, quietly but trying not to sound scared, trying not to sound as if any of this was anything out of the ordinary, was, “I meant it, about the police coming. You’d better leave now or you won’t be able to get away.” While I spoke, I breathed levelly and watched his eyes, watched as Sensei Chung had taught me, watched for the telegraphing flash of motion that comes fractions of a second before the punch or the kick or the shot, the flash that always comes from the eyes. If you’re watching, that warning is sometimes enough.