Ghost Hero (26 page)

“You’re wrong! We can take Haig down. At least we can try. Just give us a chance. If we screw up, we come out looking like idiots and your so-called options are still open. What could we make worse?”

It was a persuasive argument, I thought, but it didn’t move Dr. Yang. He looked like he was struggling not to explode out of his chair, leap the desk, and stomp Jack into a puddle.

Chinese standoff, I thought, in the loaded silence that followed. Locked eyes across the generations. Kind of like me and my mother.

“Dr. Yang,” I said, reaching for an answer I thought I was starting to see, “Doug Haig isn’t the only threat here, is he? These paintings have put Anna in some other kind of danger, too. Something to do with Samuel Wing, or Xi Xao, or whoever he is. So something to do with the Chinese government. Is it about her husband? Mike Liu? Is he at risk, or is she, because of these paintings?”

Dr. Yang’s face got darker. I braced for an explosion but it didn’t come. Without warning he slumped back against his chair. “Not Anna.” He spoke low, sounding defeated. I was surprised to see him that way and I wasn’t sure I liked it. “The only threat to Anna is the one you know. Nor Mike. The man in danger is Xi Xao.”

19

“Xi Xao?” I asked. “Samuel Wing?”

After a silence, the professor nodded. “The man who came to you calling himself Samuel Wing is a career PRC government official and a ranking Party member. For the last nine years he’s been in New York, assigned to the Cultural Section of the Chinese Consulate, but at the time of the Tiananmen Square protests he was a middle-level commissioner working out of the central government offices in Beijing.” His words rasped; he reached for his tea, by now long cold. “His father and mine were sworn brothers. Not related by blood, but as close as if they had been. Xi Xao is older than I, but we were each our parents’ only child and we lived on the same lane. We grew up as elder and younger brother, as close as our fathers were.

“I was in Tiananmen Square when the tanks came, trying to persuade my friend and my students to leave. However, my motives didn’t matter. Like the true protestors, I was fired on, I ran, and the next day orders had been issued for my arrest.

“I went into hiding, moving furtively from place to place, thinking I’d be discovered every minute. Almost hoping for it, because at least that would end the fear. But I wasn’t. When weeks had passed and government vigilance had slackened, I went to Xi Xao for help. It wasn’t the right thing to do. It put him in an impossible position. But there were … reasons.” He looked away. “My wife was pregnant. If I had been arrested she might have been, also. A baby born in a Chinese prison…” He trailed off, but it wasn’t a sentence he really had to finish. “Xi Xao helped me hide, and, finally, with false documents, helped Yu-feng and myself leave the country. As an obligation of friendship, his and mine, and our fathers’, too.”

Dr. Yang stopped and picked up his cold tea. “Three days ago he came to see me. He’d heard these rumors, about the new Chaus, and he was bothered. He’d rather that whole era did not get stirred up again. I told him I hadn’t heard anything, but that I’d look into it, something that in his position he couldn’t risk doing.”

“So you came to me,” said Jack.

“Yes, Jack. I went to you.” Dr. Yang drank his cold tea in small, deliberate sips. Just before he spoke again I realized what he was really doing: refilling his reservoir of steely resolve. Now he once more looked around the room, impaling each of us with his you-fail eyes. As though this were a group thesis exam and he were asking the question on which our doctorates would rise or fall, he said, “Do you understand what will happen to this man, my friend, who saved my life, and my wife’s, and my daughter’s, if this becomes known?”

Jack, the only one of us to actually have a doctorate, and thus to have been through this before, was first to break the silence. “Yes, sir, I think we do.”

“Do you, Jack? Well, let me make it clear.” The tea and the break had worked; we were back to full frontal Bernard Yang in all his ferocious glory. “He’ll be called back to China. He’ll be tried, and he’ll be executed. Executed. Are any of you prepared to take responsibility for that? I didn’t think so. Then do as I say. Get up now and leave.” He waved us away with the back of his hand. “Don’t repeat what you’ve just heard, go about your business, forget Chau Chun. It will be better for everyone.”

I looked at Jack, and at Bill. A brief flurry of eyeball discussion, and then I turned to Dr. Yang. “Professor, if Xi Xao were the only person with a stake in this, we might agree to back off. But he’s not. There’s my client, who brings the American State Department in. There are Chinese gangsters who claim to have an investment, in what we’re not sure, but they’re part of this one way or another and they care enough to shoot guns around.”

“Is that who shot at Jack yesterday?”

“Maybe. They for sure shot at him last night.”

“Last night? You didn’t tell me that.” Dr. Yang sent a look at Jack, who shrugged.

“Yes,” I said. “In Queens. They said they wanted to ‘talk.’ We scared them off—Jack did—and we’re not sure what they’re really up to, but it can’t be good. And there’s Doug Haig, and of course, you and your daughter. Our turning our backs won’t make any of those people go away, or make the situation any less complicated.”

“And your continuing to stir up these waters?” Dr. Yang said scornfully. “You can see a way that that will help?”

“If you stir the water vigorously enough,” I said with care, “you can drag mud up from the bottom. In all that swirling, muddy water, a lot of things might be able to escape.”

I didn’t dare look at Jack or Bill, though I could hear Bill softly stifling a snort, and from the corner of my eye I saw Jack’s eyebrows shoot up. So what? The look Dr. Yang was giving me had gone from angry disdain to guarded interest. The interest was tinged with desperation, true, but then, his position was desperate. I pressed on before he had a chance to regroup. “When we came in here, we had a plan,” I said. “Now we have new information, so we need to amend it. But I think we can still make it work.”

“You
think
? ‘Make it work’? No. That’s unacceptable.”

“Sir,” said Jack, cutting me and my frustration off, “Doug Haig gave you until tomorrow morning to answer him. He’s expecting you to stew, look at your options, realize you don’t have any, and agree. All we’re asking you to do is not answer him until then. For our part, once we have things worked out, we won’t make a move until we run the whole plan by you. If you’re afraid it’ll make things worse or you just plain think it won’t work, we’ll drop it and you can handle things however you want.” Jack gazed evenly at Dr. Yang across the desk. “Fair enough?”

After a very, very long silence, Dr. Yang spoke. “Will my daughter be in danger at any time?”

“Danger? You mean, physical danger?”

“There are gangsters and guns involved. From what you say.”

The “from what you say” wasn’t lost on Jack, but he didn’t rise to it. “I don’t think they have any interest in Anna. The biggest danger she’s in is to her career, and it’s from Haig.”

“And Xi Xao?”

“We understand.” Jack leaned forward again. “Please, Dr. Yang. Give us a few hours. That’s all we need.”

Another long silence. Then, almost imperceptibly, Dr. Yang nodded.

*   *   *

Back outside, us Three Musketeers stood near the fountain, where a trio of jugglers tossed bowling pins and baseball bats back and forth. “So, what do you think, guys?” I said. “Can we run this scam and not jeopardize Xi? I didn’t like his threats and bribes and all, but if his life’s at stake I guess I can cut him some slack.”

Jack said, “I think we can, just the way we set it up. Whatever excitement it creates about the old days, it’ll die down when we’re through and everyone will look silly. That’s the whole point, isn’t it?”

He and I looked at each other, and then both of us turned to Bill. “What do you think?”

“I’m with Jack. If this works no one will be looking past it.”

“If?” said Jack. “Hold it, I didn’t sign on for ‘if.’ We’re not doing ‘if.’”

“Fine.
When
this works. How’s that?”

“Much better. Because after all, isn’t this a plan of Lydia’s? So the chances of it working, aren’t they like one hundred percent?”

*   *   *

So we split up. Each of us had work to do. And I had to change.

“Hi, Ma,” I said, leaving my shoes by the door and entering the living room in my slippers.

“Oh, have you come home in the middle of the day? Why, are you ill?” She must not have been too terribly worried because after a glance she went back to ironing in front of the TV, watching two handsome Chinese actors in Tang Dynasty outfits having a low-voiced discussion. The camera lingered on them so portentously that it could only mean a conspiracy was in the making and an emperor was going to fall. Or else these two guys would end up with their heads chopped off.

“I’m fine, Ma. I just need some things.”

She didn’t say a word, so why did I hear disapproval?

In my room I put the phone on speaker, turned the computer on, and called Linus.

“Cuz!” he greeted me. “Just about done. You want to see it?”

“I sure do.”

“’K, here comes the link.”

I opened my e-mail, found the Web site URL he’d sent, and clicked on it. “Wow, Linus, I’m impressed. You did all this in two hours?”

“Hey, it’s what we do here. I used a template I had from some other site I made for a guy. This one wasn’t a big deal, ’cause it doesn’t really say anything.”

“I can see that.” I was scanning the Chinese text.

“You sure that’s okay? I mean, I just stole chunks from Chinese Web sites, I don’t even know about what.”

“Positive, it’s fine.”

“But in case your guys want to check a little deeper I put in a couple of links, like to the University, and to some artists. Even if they don’t read Chinese they can tell they’re links, so they can click. I also put in a bunch that don’t work, they give you an error message. So it looks like they’re supposed to be live but it’s a crappy Web site.”

“Excellent.”

“And I paid a few bucks to a couple of search engine companies, so this site’ll come up first if you Google him. The real guy, he doesn’t have a site, so you lucked out there. He does have a Wikipedia page, so I put a link on it.” Linus burst into song: “If you liked it then you shoulda put a link on it!”

“Okay, thanks, Linus.”

“Sorry. Anyway, the University, I couldn’t hack their site to put a link back to here.”

“I thought you could do anything. No, I’m just kidding, we don’t need that.”

“My Chinese isn’t good enough, is all,” he said defensively. “I could totally hack it if it was English. But I know some guys. Do you—”

“No, really, the people this is for, their Chinese is way worse than yours. I don’t see them bothering with the University site, and if they do they won’t be able to navigate it so they won’t know what they’re not finding. Listen, really, Linus, thanks. The whole thing looks great. Especially the picture.”

“Just a little Photoshop,” he said modestly. “So, Cuz, who is that guy? Is he really another Chinese PI?”

“I’ll tell you all about it. Later.”

“That’s what Trella said you’d say. Does Bill know about him?”

“Know what about him?”

“That’s what Trella said you’d say! Dudess!” I heard him call across the room. “I owe you five bucks! So, Cuz, you need me anymore?”

“I don’t think so, but I don’t know,” I answered truthfully.

“If you do, you know where to find me. I’m going back to bed.”

I changed my clothes, called Jack, got his voice mail, and left him a message to check the new Web site. There was no point in telling Bill that, but I called him anyway, just to say it was done and that I was heading out.

“You okay?” he wanted to know.

“Raging adrenaline. And my feet hurt in these heels.”

“I’ll be right over.”

“To carry me?”

“No, to watch you walk.”

I hung up and headed uptown, passing through the living room where my mother did a double take based on my outfit. “Why do you look so nice?” she asked suspiciously.

“I need a reason?”

“Many daughters would not. Do you have a date with the white baboon?”

“Have you ever known me to dress up for him?”

If she’d been anyone else I’d have had her. That I didn’t put on heels and a skirt for Bill should have signaled a lack of interest in what he thought of me, and should also have reassured her because he wasn’t getting any free peeks at my legs.

But this was my mother. “Pah. When you see him you look like a gang boy but he doesn’t stop calling you. He is a hyena with no understanding of beauty.”

I splurged on a cab, because of the shoes.

Outside Baxter/Haig I smoothed my skirt, elegantly mussed my hair, and pulled back the heavy glass door. I gave Nick Greenbank a sweet, sweet smile. He returned a scowl and muttered, “He’s here.”

“Yes, I know he is,” I said.

Little Nicky called the back office. When he hung up he jabbed his head in that direction, with a spreading smile so nastily predatory I began to wonder if Doug Haig had said to send me in, the bear trap was set. Nevertheless, I sashayed to the back where I was met by jittery Caitlin. She knocked on Haig’s private door, got a barked, “Come!” and opened it.

And there was the bear trap: Mighty Casey Woo.

20

Woo sat in a chair in the corner of Doug Haig’s inner office, where the take-out coffee he was sipping didn’t threaten the art. He smiled at me, a smile uncomfortably similar to Nick’s.

Doug Haig, meanwhile, sat examining a gold-and-pink pastel drawing just long enough for me to get it that the work on his table was far more important than I was and then slipped it with great care back into a portfolio, at which moment he finally looked up at me.

“Mr. Haig,” I said, blasé and serene. Or I hoped I conveyed that impression. My heart was racing and my brain was outpacing it in an attempt to deal with this turn of events. “Thank you for seeing me.” I nodded to the corner. “And Mr. Woo. What a nice surprise.” I pulled out a chair at Haig’s worktable, sat primly and waited.