The First Excellence: Fa-Ling's Map (38 page)

Paula was losing her nerve. That’s what it came down to. Her last conversation with the Chinese couple, Miao and Gege, had not gone well. Beyond the obvious language barrier, she had the feeling the pair was hiding something from her. Reading body language was a skill essential to any gambler. There was something in the way Gege would not meet her eyes that set off alarm bells in Paula’s mind.

What if they did not return the boy? That would be inconceivable. For the first time, Paula allowed herself to weigh the suffering caused by her actions. She had seen the joy with which Yvanna and Chris Brahn had welcomed their new son. Hell, she had even begun to feel her own brand of love toward her new daughter, Mei Mei.

Paula was not stupid. That the boy might be in danger was a real possibility, and one she should have come to terms with from the start. In her desperation to recover her own losses, she had not allowed herself to consider the obvious. Stealing the child was one thing, but Miao and Gege would be fools to risk being caught in the act of returning him. From their point of view, doing so added no real value to the plan.

Paula tucked her passport and hotel room key into her pocket. There was no time to lose. Now that the possibility had been considered, she could no longer deny her own responsibility. She could not be a party to murder. If Gege and his cousin would not see reason, then the entire plan would have to be scrapped. She was prepared, if necessary, to turn herself in.

She pulled on her running shoes.

“
Where are you going?” Guy asked. “We were told to stay in our rooms.”

“
I’ll be right back,” she said, shutting the door behind her.

Guy glanced at Mei Mei, who was asleep in her crib, clutching the white teddy bear with the tiny red maple leaf on its chest Paula had brought for her from home. He didn’t need to think. He knew what to do.

He pulled on his own shoes. Ignoring the elevator, he ran down the stairs, confident he would make it to the hotel lobby before Paula did.

He followed her away from the hotel. When she flagged a taxi, he thought he’d lost her, but realised she’d discovered a cab-stand. He got into the next taxi in line, pointing wildly at the car in front of them and hoping the driver would understand he should follow.

“
Where you going?” the man asked in English.

“
Just keep that car in sight,” Guy said.

“
Like in movies.” The driver laughed, but he obeyed, skilfully weaving through the circus that was traffic in Beijing. Fortunately, they only had to follow Paula’s car for a short distance. The chaos of the roads would have made it impossible to track her much further.

She got out at a busy corner and made the rest of her way on foot toward a hotel frequented mostly by Asian businessmen and women. Guy followed her into the lobby and saw her board an elevator. He ran, reaching the elevator in time to see what floor it stopped at, then got onto another. He hoped to confront Paula in the hallway of the fifth floor, but when the elevator door opened she was nowhere in sight.

She had to have entered one of the rooms, but which one? He could knock on every door until he found her. Another option was to simply wait. Eventually she would come out and head back toward the elevator.

Guy pressed his ear against the first door, hearing no sound from inside. The hotel walls were thin. At the next door he heard what had to be a television, a pre-fabbed female voice rattling off what sounded like the Chinese news.

At the sixth door he paused, straining to make out a muffled sound. He was about to give up and move on to the next door when suddenly he heard a shriek escaping from a room from down the hall. It was a woman’s voice, as familiar to him as the back of his own hand, shouting out a single word:
No!

At the Royal Star Hotel, four of the adopting families as well as Fa-ling had gathered in the lobby after being summoned by Cynthia. She was not able to locate the Kaders. That was strange — she was sure they had heard her ask everyone to stay in their rooms until the police arrived.

Cynthia was beyond worrying about her own future. After all, maybe she didn’t deserve to be a guide. She had lost two babies in less than two weeks, one in Nanning and one in Beijing. In Nanning she had been lucky. The child had been returned miraculously unharmed. The lazy police had no doubt scrapped their initial reports, so they wouldn’t have to follow up on the case later. No harm, no foul…

She doubted she would be so lucky in Beijing.

Her mind had already made its way to the most likely scenario. In Nanning the kidnappers had taken Baby Harlan by mistake. The real target had been Baby Brahn all along. Cynthia was no fool. She could smell money on people, after all those years of longing to escape from her own poor existence. She had known from the first day that Yvanna and Christopher Brahn belonged to a class of people for whom money was like air, something to be used without forethought.

On the other hand, despite Ting-lo Harlan’s excellent sense of style and fashion, Cynthia could spot a fellow social climber. Adrian’s wife, she knew, had come from humble Chinese roots, not much different from her own. To Ting-lo, Adrian’s middle class Western existence would have looked like a fantasy. Just the same, it wouldn’t provide the kind of money the kidnappers were after.

If they’d gone to the trouble of following Cynthia’s group all the way to Beijing, then they knew exactly what they were doing. They’d had the Brahn baby in their sights all along.

Cynthia said none of this to the police. To do so would have been to break one of the most deeply ingrained rules of her culture and class:
keep your mouth shut.
She suspected the Brahns had already figured it out. Cynthia remembered how Ting-lo had carried on after the abduction of Baby Anna. She had been inconsolable, crying non-stop even while the police were questioning her.

Yvanna Brahn, on the other hand, while obviously worried, displayed none of that uncontrollable emotion. She huddled quietly with her husband, holding Chris’s hand and speaking to him in low whispers. It seemed to Cynthia the Brahns knew what was going on.

A ransom note would follow. It was only a matter of time.

The Beijing police spoke no English, a fact Cynthia used to her advantage. It would eventually come out that the Kader family was missing from the hotel, and Daniel Brahn’s abduction was a replay of what had already occurred in Nanning, but Cynthia hoped to slow the information from making its way into the public record. She knew it would not help the police to recover Baby Brahn. It would only serve to throw doubt onto her own integrity.

After all, the one thing both incidents had in common was that she had been in charge of the group. She, Xintiao, known to the Canadians as Cynthia, was the common element in both situations. She had set the itinerary, she had hired the buses and she alone had been responsible for the safety of the Canadians.

At one point she saw Fa-ling glance toward her. Cynthia had forgotten Fa-ling spoke both Cantonese and Mandarin. The young woman must have noticed the errors of omission in her translations to the police. Fa-ling had a keen set of ears, and they were now tuned in to everything the guide was saying.

Before the police could question Li Fa-ling, the hotel concierge came running through the lobby toward Cynthia.

“
Miss,” he said in English, “please, there is a letter for you.”

Cynthia felt her face blanch. Such a dramatic event as the hotel manager running toward her waving an envelope could only bring the focus of the police more sharply onto her. If they did not already suspect her of something, this would draw their attention. She did not enjoy the privilege of being a tourist. As a citizen of the Republic, she would be at the mercy of the local law enforcers. She hoped the real kidnappers would be discovered quickly, before it became convenient to blame her for the crime.

She took the envelope from the concierge. Under the circumstances, he did not expect a tip, and she did not think to offer one. She ripped it open, staring at the contents in disbelief.

As she read the words, her head began to feel light and her eyes blurred. She slumped onto the lobby couch. Fa-ling rushed to her, whispering in Cantonese so the police would not understand.

“
What does it say?” Fa-ling asked.

Cynthia showed her the letter.

“
Oh!”

Fa-ling took the paper from Cynthia’s hand and passed it to the elder officer. Although spoken Cantonese differs greatly from the official Mandarin language, the characters for both are identical. The elder officer showed the paper to his junior before pulling a clear plastic bag from his tunic and slipping the note inside.

“
What does it say?” Chris Brahn demanded, approaching the officer. Cynthia stepped between them, her eyes pleading with Chris not to become aggressive with the police. The Beijing force was nothing like what she imagined the Toronto police to be. The Brahn’s money would not smooth the way for Chris, rather it would become an excuse for undue persecution, or worse, blackmail.

“
It’s a ransom note,” Cynthia said. “I will translate it for you.”

“
I think you’d better come with us,” the elder officer said, touching Cynthia’s elbow. Her heart began to beat rapidly, palpitating in her chest as if to mock her given name. The name Xintiao, which meant ‘Heart Palpitations’, had been bestowed upon her by her grandfather. He told the story often of how the first time he held the infant in his arms his heart began to pound.

“
It’s ok,” Fa-ling said, sensing Cynthia’s fear. “We’ll come with you.” She spoke in Mandarin, making it clear to the officers she and the group stood in solidarity with their guide, and they would not abandon her to become a scapegoat.

“
We only have a few questions,” the senior officer said. “There is no need to go to the station at this time. We just want to speak with you away from the group.” He led Cynthia to a spot in the lobby out of hearing from the parents.

“
What the hell is going on?” Chris repeated, watching Cynthia being led away.

Fa-ling had committed the note, including the foreign bank account number, to memory.

“
Please, be calm,” she said. “It is not a good idea to ruffle feathers in this part of the world. I’ll tell you what the note said.” She took a pen from her pocket and reached for a hotel notepad that was lying on a coffee table. Quickly she wrote the details of the ransom note in English onto the top page and tore it off for Chris, writing it a second time for herself, in case she should later forget the specifics.

Where,
she thought,
is Yong-qi at this moment?
No doubt he was dealing with bad guys of his own. His presence would lend a sensible air to this chaos, and his experience might help to recover the child safely.

Fa-ling reviewed the events leading up to the kidnapping, turning over remembered images and bits of information carefully like the pieces of a clarinet which would fit together in only one way to produce the crystal clear sound for which it was named.

Everything in life, every human act and deed, she knew, came down to motivation. In the absence of clear evidence, one had to correctly read human behaviour if one was to guess what another’s motivation might be.

Behaviour was a form of evidence. We are always in one way or another announcing to the world who we really are. We wear our masks and practice the social graces meant to provide a screen to protect us from prying eyes. In the end, we can’t help it — we are driven by an invisible force to express the core of our beings, to speak from the
chi
, as it were.

Fa-ling considered everything she had seen, and everything she had heard since arriving in China. Based on her own understanding, she was certain Cynthia had played no part in Daniel’s abduction.

In fact, she was beginning to form an opinion about the guilty party, though her theory was not grounded in anything she could point to as ‘evidence’.

She did not like the conclusion she found herself drawing. It made sense, though; in fact, it was the only thing about this situation that made any sense at all.

Who else, she wondered, knew the truth about the Brahns? Because of her close connection to the Conservatory of Music, Fa-ling knew who they were, and what kind of money they had at their disposal. She thought about the interaction Chris and his wife had shared with others in the group. Had any of them treated the Brahns with kid gloves, as if they were aware of their heightened social status?

No one had, at least not in front of Fa-ling. However, there was one person who, more than any other, had behaved out of character with the purpose of their trip: namely, to complete the adoption process.

In the absence of hard evidence, Fa-ling filed the thought away. If she raised it, she might cause a world of trouble for an innocent family. She would talk it over later with Yong-qi when he arrived in Beijing.

She would be interested to hear his opinion on the matter.

**

Wang Yong-qi lifted the GPS locating device from the picnic table. A slow smile spread over his face. His partner, Cheng, laughed out loud, until his laughter sparked another coughing fit. Shopei patted Cheng on the back, thinking he was choking, but he waved her hand away.

When Cheng regained his composure, the trio shared a brief moment of victory, grinning at each other as though they had won the lottery. Then Yong-qi stood and motioned for the others to join him.