Reflecting the Sky (26 page)

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Authors: S. J. Rozan

BOOK: Reflecting the Sky
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“Smells awful.”
“Tastes worse.”
I sighed. “I thought all the food in Hong Kong was supposed to be good.”
“You thought this trip was going to be a cinch,” he pointed out. “A nice, relaxing vacation.”
“No,” I said, “I don’t think I really did.”
“Because of Grandfather Gao?”
I nodded and filled my mouth with noodles. Even hungry as I was, I couldn’t persuade myself this meal was any better than lousy.
“When this is all over,” Mark said, “I’ll take you to this seafood place near Happy Valley where your fish is swimming until they cook it for you. And you have to buy bottled water if you want it, but beer is free.”
“Bill will like that part,” I said. “If he’s invited?”
Mark shrugged. “Table for three, could get a little crowded.”
I thought maybe I wouldn’t answer that. I scooped in more noodles and said, “What kind of a place is Cheung Chau?”
Mark picked up noodles in his chopsticks and let me get away with the change of subject. “It’s got a big fishing fleet. It used to be just an island with a fishing village, but now people retire there, villas and everything. There are a couple of schools and academies because land’s available. A Buddhist college, a music school. About half a dozen martial arts schools, the old kind where academics fills as little of the day as they can get away with and the kids practice kung fu the rest of the time.”
“Is that the kind of place you went to?”
“Me?” He seemed surprised at the question. “I learned kung fu in Birmingham.”
“Oh.” I went back to my mediocre noodles.
“People go to Cheung Chau for the day, to go to the beach or to hike,” he went on. Lifting another noodle mass, he added, “It’s got a huge graveyard.”
So much for the picture I’d just begun to paint of an idyllic resort. “Graveyard?”
“Great
feng shui
—covers the whole hilltop down to the sea, good ocean breezes, water wherever you look. You can’t get buried on Hong Kong anymore, land’s too valuable. There’s the big mausoleum at Sha Tin on the Kowloon side, but on Cheung Chau you get a real grave if you want one, not just a file drawer.”
“Don’t be disrespectful. That’s where old Mr. Wei’s getting buried, Sha Tin. As soon as this is over.” The idea of this being over brought me back to something, and thinking about graveyards wasn’t something I wanted to do right now, anyway. “I told Bill I’d call the Weis. To tell them Harry’s okay.”
Mark asked, “What if it isn’t true?”
“Bill thought it was. I think it’s only fair that they hear about it. And,” I added, “if I call them I can find out if they’ve heard anything.”
Mark chewed thoughtfully. “Assuming Maria Quezon is telling the truth,” he said, “then look at this: She won’t tell anyone where the kid is until she’s sure it’s safe. Not even the parents. So she doesn’t really trust them. But she wants them to know he’s okay. So she doesn’t think they’re part of it. What does that mean?”
“Maybe she thinks if they get him back they won’t be able to protect him from something like this happening again.”
“Like if Steven Wei’s brother’s involved.”
“Or Strength and Harmony.”
“Or both.”
“And she can?”
“Obviously she doesn’t think she can, or she wouldn’t be taking the risk of meeting Smith.”
Maybe it was something in my face when he said
risk
; this time he was the one who changed the subject. “What are you going to say if you call them?”
“Not very much.”
So I called the Weis from Mark’s desk phone, trying to preserve my cell phone’s charge so Bill, if he needed to, could call it. And I didn’t tell them very much.
“I wanted you to know,” I said carefully, after Steven Wei’s excited
“Wai!”
and the dispirited greeting when he found out it was only me, “that we’ve been in contact with Maria Quezon. She says Harry’s okay.”
“Maria?”
he shouted into the phone. I pictured him shooting to his feet, mashing the phone to his ear, trying to get closer to this news.
“Where is she? Where is Hao-Han?”
In his excitement Steven Wei reverted Harry’s name to Cantonese, I noticed, though we were speaking English. “I don’t know,” I told him. “We’re supposed to hear more later.” That was hedging, but I wasn’t sure how to explain to him that Bill, the big foreigner, was on his way to meet the amah, who claimed to have his son; and that he, Steven, wasn’t going because the amah, who loved his son like her own, wouldn’t allow it.
“What do you mean
later?
” Steven demanded. “What happened? How did you find them? Who took them?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know that. We were only able to contact Maria because we were able to find someone who knows her, and passed the word along that we wanted to speak to her.” I offered him that almost unrecognizable description of our morning in the Filipina sea. “We haven’t actually found her, and we don’t know where she is; she called us, on the cell phone.”
Steven Wei took a moment to digest this. “Passed the word to someone who knows her? But that would seem … but it sounds as if … as if she’s not being held.”
“As if she took Hao-Han and ran away,” I finished for him.
“No,” he said firmly. “That cannot be true.”
“Steven—” I began gently.
“No. Maria loves Hao-Han. She is a part of this family. She would not put my son in danger any more than we would.”
Well, that’s what Natalie Zhu said you’d say. “She told us,” I said, “that she was saving him from danger.”
“Saving him? From what danger?”
“That’s something else she didn’t say. Do you have any idea?”
“I … no,” he said. “This is all difficult for me to understand. I just want my son to come home. Can you—?”
“I’ll do whatever I can,” I said. “How is Li-Ling?”
“Resting. With her condition, this has been very hard for her.”
“I’m sure. Go tell her what I said. I’ll call you as soon as I hear anything else.” Casually I asked, “Has Natalie Zhu come back, or called?”
“No. I expect her soon. Why do you have to wait until you hear from Maria? Why can’t you go to her, or to these people who know her? Who are these people? And why hasn’t she contacted us?”
“We can’t go to her,” I lied, although at that very moment, we were. “And I don’t know why she hasn’t called you.” Except that in one sense or another, she doesn’t trust you. “But tell me something else: Have you heard from anyone? Either party making ransom demands?”
“No. No one at all. We were beginning …” He trailed off, clearly reluctant to tell me what they’d been beginning to do, or more likely, to think. “How did you find these people, the ones who know Maria? You’re new to Hong Kong. How could you do something we could not do?”
Well, for one thing, you didn’t try.
“We were lucky,” I said. I decided it was time I got out of this conversation before the asides I was making to Steven in my head started coming out of my mouth. “Let me get off the phone, in case she calls again,” I said, feeling a little bad because that wasn’t about to happen, not on this phone, but I knew it would work. “I’ll call you as soon as I hear anything else, I promise. I just wanted to let you know.”
“Wait,” Steven said, but when I did, he didn’t have anything for me to wait for.
“The phone,” I said gently.
“Yes,” he finally said. “But you will call immediately when you hear something? Anything at all?”
“Yes,” I promised again. “Yes, I will.”
I hung up. Mark and I met each other’s eyes over the remains of reconstituted noodles.
“He sounded relieved,” I said. “Surprised. And confused.”
“That all makes sense.”
“So what’s not to trust?” I asked. “A family man of strong loyalties, a father worried sick. What’s on Maria’s mind?”
“Let’s hope your partner finds out.”
I was about to correct Mark, to say that Bill and I weren’t partners, we just worked together sometimes, but I stopped myself as I remembered that wasn’t true. It had been, for a long time; but a little while ago, things had changed. Boy, Lydia, I thought, the next thing you’ll forget is your own name. Well, it’s the damn harbor, I thought back. The windows and the glittering water and the charging, smelly traffic; the crowds and the incense and the small hushed shops; the kidnapped seven-year-old and the roast pigs at the temple; the street signs and store signs and bus signs all in Chinese.
“Are you okay?” Mark asked.
I was startled to hear his voice in all the swirling confusion. I realized I had closed my eyes. I opened them and there was no confusion, nothing swirling, just Mark’s solid desk and the office partitions and the quiet comings and goings of cops.
“Jet lag,” I said.
“It never stops,” he said, in a gentler voice than I’d heard him use before.
“Jet lag?”
“No. Hong Kong. You think if it just
stopped
for a minute, or even slowed down, you could get a handle on it, see what was going on around you. But it never does.”
I rubbed my forehead, surprised to discover the beginnings of a headache. “I feel like it keeps me from thinking,” I said. “Everything racing around. I feel like
I
can’t stop, either.”
“You can use it,” Mark said. “You can let it pull you along, instead of doing all the work yourself. Or you can keep still and let it flow right around you. But you have to keep your eyes on where you’re going, or you’ll drown here.”
If you knew where you were going, I thought wearily, that might work. Mark, watching me, said, “Maybe you should go back to the hotel and get some sleep.”
With Bill on some boat on the way to some cemetery island? I thought, you have to be kidding. Bill doesn’t even like boats, from when he was in the Navy. “No,” I said. “I can’t do that. But the hotel, that reminds me.” Without asking, I picked up the phone on his desk again. “I want to see if Grandfather Gao called me at the hotel.”
Mark made no move to stop me, probably because it was Grandfather Gao, so I dialed the Hong Kong Hotel. According to the desk clerk, I did have a message. He put me through to the voice mail in my room and I waited, prepared—maybe even a little hoping—to hear Grandfather Gao’s familiar calm voice.
But that’s not who it was.
At first, in fact, I had no idea who it was, although the scratchy Cantonese voice identified herself at once. “Mo Ruo is speaking. Come to Number Eleven, Po Kong Lane. I can tell you many things.” Then the hang-up click. It wasn’t a voice I recognized. Frowning, I pressed the button to replay the message, trying to pry the name Mo Ruo from the recesses of my brain. On the third replay I got it, and it sent a sizzle up my spine that thoroughly woke me up.
I hadn’t recognized her voice because I’d never spoken to her before, though I very much wanted to. Mo Ruo, the old lady prayer-seller from the temple at Wong Tai Sin.
As I hung up the phone Mark asked, “Who was it?”
Oh, I thought. No. Sorry. If I tell you, you’ll tell me not to go. This is the woman who may be able to tell us who sent Steven Wei to the temple, and you’ll tell me not to go.
“The front desk,” I said, lying out loud, apologizing silently. “Something about my room charges, but I can’t figure out exactly what they’re telling me. And you know what? I don’t care. I’ll worry about it later.”
I stuck my chopsticks back into my noodles, now cold and congealed. I poked them around a little, then stood. “I’m going out. I need to move. Maybe I will go back to the hotel. I’ll try to stay out of trouble,” I said, seeing Mark about to speak. “Let’s make a deal: I’ll call you as soon as Bill calls me, if you call me as soon as your cops call you.”
Mark stood also, and eyed me. “You sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine. Just antsy. What are you going to do now, bring Wei Ang-Ran in?” Maybe discussion of his next move would deflect any curiosity he might have about mine.
He nodded. “I’m going to call him right now. Do you think you can find your way out?”
“No problem,” I said, with more confidence than I felt. “Talk to you soon. Thanks for the so-called lunch.” I waved as I rounded the partition, and, with not so very many false moves and dead ends, worked my way out of the maze.
 
It would be best to get out of the building, I thought, before consulting my map. Not that I felt paranoid in any way, but it might also be good to walk a block or two, to where I couldn’t be seen from any of those big HKPD windows.
The dusty hot walk along Gloucester Road was like a stroll on a narrow, afterthought sidewalk next to any major expressway anywhere in the world. The cars roared and whished, honked and swerved, and I felt like a mutant life-form that had emerged unexpectedly and for which, therefore, no provision had been made.

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