“Tree branches can be swept away on the river’s current,” he answered. “Still they are not water.”
“What did he say?” Bill asked after I hung the phone up and leaned back against the headboard.
“Maybe I should speak to him in English from now on. This Chinese business is exhausting.” I detailed the conversation for Bill.
“Great,” he said. “Franklin likes to help but he makes decisions fast and screws things up. Steven has a valuable piece of jade that was not his father’s and someone, somewhere, has a piece less valuable, except that someone else somewhere else may be willing to trade a young boy for it. And the older Wei brothers may or may not be all wet. Is that accurate?”
“Yes,” I said, “it’s just perfect.”
“I,” he said, standing, “am going to bed. I’m hoping that what seems like
Alice in Wonderland
stuff now will make complete sense after a night’s sleep.”
“You think so?”
“No.” Hands in his pockets, he looked over at me. I thought he was about to say something, but he just stood there, and then he left.
I sat on the bed sipping orange juice and looking at the door for a while after it closed behind Bill. Then I picked up the phone again and called Mark Quan.
“You never sleep?” was his response when I told him it was me. Behind him I heard music, American jazz played on saxophone and drums.
“I do, and I wish I were. But I thought you should know the latest.”
“They’ve heard from the kidnappers?” His voice quickened. The music stopped abruptly; he must have turned it off.
“No. But Steven Wei just called me.” I told Mark Quan about the jade, about the call to Grandfather Gao, about my theory about Franklin.
“Goddamn,”
he said. “This is unbelievable.”
I said, “I keep wondering whether it would make sense if I weren’t jet-lagged, exhausted, and in a completely foreign country.”
“It wouldn’t,” he said. “I’m none of those things, and it makes no sense to me.”
“Did you understand this place?” I asked suddenly. “Hong Kong, when you first got here?”
“Understand it?” Mark Quan seemed surprised at the question. “I’m not sure I understand it yet. Everyone’s always telling me Hong Kong is different from every place else. All I know is Birmingham, but it’s true, it’s real different from Birmingham. But do you mean you think this Wei case is so weird because of Hong Kong?”
“I …” I tried to think what it was I meant. “It fits,” I said. “Hong Kong seems to know what it’s doing, but I can’t figure it out. All the confusion, the hurrying, the stopping and starting. The temple courtyard that people can watch from their apartment windows next to their laundry. The pipes down the outsides of the buildings. It’s all on purpose, but I don’t get the logic of it. Like this case. All this stuff must mean something, but I don’t know what it is.”
“Well,” he said. “I don’t either. But I’m just a cop. I’m like one of those windup Godzilla toys. Put me on a case and I just keep going until I get to the end of it or I fall over.”
I had to stifle a giggle, because Mark Quan did sort of resemble one of those round Godzilla robots with the flashing eyes. I pictured the robot in a linen jacket, with a tiny gun under its arm, stomping across the night market tabletop.
“If you were wound up now,” I asked, “where would you go?”
“This jade,” he said. “This jade is the key. I know it is.”
The same as Grandfather Gao, I thought.
“But I don’t know what I can do about it right now. Meanwhile, I’m interested in your idea that Franklin Wei knew about Steven and his family. I don’t much like Franklin for the kidnapper, but I can’t seem to unearth anyone who can point a finger at Strength and Harmony, which is what I’d really like. At least this would be something to follow up.” He was silent for a few moments. “I think I’ll call the NYPD.”
“The NYPD? Why?”
“For a printout of Franklin’s phone calls. Maybe he’s been calling someone here—if he’s involved in this, he’d have to have set it up before he got here.”
Of course. And if I were thinking, I’d have thought of that, too. “Will you call me when you get it?”
Mark Quan paused. “Now you have me in a tough position. You brought me into this case; I wouldn’t know anything about it if it weren’t for you, so I owe you. But I’m a cop and you’re not and I live here and you don’t. Anything happens to you, I’m an earthworm for the next dozen lifetimes, not to mention all the unpleasant things that would happen to me in this one.”
“You’re telling me to stay out of it now?” I bristled.
“No, that would be dumb. The Weis aren’t about to call me; you’re the only one who’s keeping me informed. I need you to stay in it, at least until we figure out what it is. What I’m telling you is to stay out of trouble.”
“The more I know, the more I can see trouble coming before it gets here.”
“And then what?”
“‘Of the thirty-six stratagems, the best one is ‘running away,’” I said, quoting a famous line from the Three Kingdoms period.
“Boy,” Mark Quan said. “You sound like Grandfather Gao.”
“I’m a little shocked myself,” I admitted. “I’m not sure where I dug that up from.”
“Chinese school?”
“Probably. Did you have Chinese school in Birmingham?”
“Every day after school-school, when I was a kid. There were only eight or nine of us, in old Mr. Ko’s house. He tried to teach us the old songs, painting, calligraphy, all that. I liked the music, but my calligraphy was awful. Mr. Ko said pigeons made more legible characters scratching in the dirt than I did with a brush and ink.”
“That’s about how bad mine was. But what a mean thing to say.”
“It didn’t make me mad, only curious. I walked around for months after that trying to read what the pigeons were writing.”
In the end, Mark Quan promised to call me if I promised to keep out of trouble. I negotiated to try to keep out of trouble—I didn’t want to get to be an earthworm too, for not keeping a promise—and we hung up. I pulled off my clothes, slipped under the covers, and just managed to turn off the light before I was completely, totally asleep.
When the phone woke me the next morning I had absolutely no idea where I was. I didn’t actually even know it was morning, until the white streak glowing in the gap where the curtains didn’t quite meet told me. I stuck my hand out from the sheets and groped for the thing making the odd double ring. That was a sound I’d only heard in movies up until yesterday.
“Hello?” I croaked into the receiver when I found it, and then, as a flash of insight finally hit me, added, “
Wai
?”
“Breakfast in twenty minutes,” Bill announced.
“No way.”
“Half an hour?”
“Maybe. What time is it?”
“Eight-thirty.”
I pushed myself into a sitting position. “You sound suspiciously chipper. I thought I was the morning person around here.”
“I’ve been up since six. I went out and walked around. I have an idea.”
“You did? You do?”
“I did and do. Meet me in the coffee shop in half an hour and I’ll tell you about it.”
So I did, and he did.
“I want to go look for the amah,” he said, buttering a piece of toast.
I sipped my tea—good strong black English tea, though the so-called coffee shop, actually an elegant oasis of potted plants and silver samovars, also offered various scented Chinese and green Japanese teas to suit every tourist palate—and considered this.
“Well, Natalie Zhu did hire us to do that,” I said. “And if there’s anything to my crackpot theory from last night, the amah would be key. But I’m not sure this actually qualifies as an idea.”
“Why not?”
“For one thing, if the kidnapping’s real, then she’s being held wherever Harry is, and we won’t be able to find her.”
“But if we
can
find her, it’ll mean it’s not real. And we might begin to get a handle on what’s going on.”
I dipped a steamed pork dumpling into vinegary ginger soy sauce and bit into it. The pungent meat was wrapped in dough of the perfect thickness and doneness. I washed it down with tea and attacked the next one. “Our theory was that Natalie Zhu hired us to find the amah just to keep us out of the way,” I reminded Bill. “Because it was something she thought we couldn’t do.”
“I know,” he said. “I think she’s wrong.”
“What do you have in mind?”
He salted his scrambled eggs. “Last night you asked me about living in the Philippines. That started me thinking. One of the kids I knew there, he had four aunts working here. They would get together on their day off with other women from their neighborhood in Manila and write letters home. I remember that because he used to tell me the funny stories his aunts put in their letters. We thought Hong Kong must be the weirdest place in the world, if even half of those stories were true.”
“Lucky for them they all had the same day off.”
“That’s the point. They all do.”
“All do what?”
“All the Filipinas. They’re heavy Catholics. They all had Sundays off. They’d go to Mass and then meet for lunch on the Hong Kong side, in the park by Statue Square. I asked around this morning. Seems that’s still true.”
“And you’re thinking, today is Sunday?”
“Bingo.”
“They may all have Sundays off,” I said, “but they can’t all go to the same park for lunch anymore. Aren’t there like a hundred thousand of them?”
“Uh-huh,” he said. “And they all still do.”
I finished my dumplings before Bill polished off his eggs and bacon. While I waited for him, I called Franklin Wei’s hotel on my cell phone. Neither Franklin nor Steven had called me yet, which didn’t mean they hadn’t spoken to each other, just that I wasn’t on the top of either of their lists. The hotel connected me with Franklin’s room.
“Hello?”
“It’s Lydia Chin,” I said, nibbling on a strip of bacon I’d liberated from Bill’s plate.
“Oh,” Franklin said. “I was going to call you but I wasn’t sure you’d be up yet.” He sounded a little less brash, more distant, than yesterday.
“Did you speak to Steven?”
“Late last night. He told me about Dad’s jade.”
“And asked if you were the one who made the switch?”
“Yes.”
“And were you?”
“I—no, of course not.”
“I wasn’t either. Just for the record.”
“He said you’d said that.”
“But he doesn’t believe me.”
“I’m not sure he believes me either. He’s in a bad position. Why should he believe anybody?”
Well, I thought, he could believe
me
because I really
didn’t
have anything to do with it.
“He said Grandfather Gao said it wasn’t him either,” Franklin Wei went on. “He also told me the phony jade is worth more than the real one?”
“Seems that way. Do you have any idea what’s going on?”
“God, no.”
“Why didn’t one of you call me last night, after you’d spoken to each other? Steven promised you would.”
“It was two A.M. I couldn’t sleep; I’d been out to a club. I got his message and called right away when I got back. We decided there was no point in waking you at that hour to tell you nothing. Have you spoken to him today?”
“No. That’s why I’m calling you. I don’t want to get them all excited when the phone rings, and then it’s only me.”
“I know,” he said. “I was dying to know what was going on last night but I didn’t want to call for the same reason. That’s why I finally went out.”
“I understand you did call yesterday, though,” I said. “To offer them money, for the ransom.”
“Well, yeah.”
“That was generous of you.”
“Well, money,” he said. “I mean, this is my brother’s kid.”
After breakfast Bill and I left the hotel, bracing ourselves for the moment the revolving door expelled us into the heat of the Hong Kong morning. Sunday in Hong Kong, I discovered, was not all that much different from Saturday, my only point of comparison. We headed for the ferry along the same streets we’d taken yesterday, and though fewer of the people charging along were dressed in business clothes, the traffic was as relentless and the jackhammers were once again in full rattling voice. I had showered and put on loose tan slacks and a crisp white cotton shirt, and I was walking around in sandals, but I could feel the film of sweat start on my forehead before we’d gone half a block.
“Hot here,” I said to Bill.
“Great, huh?” was his answer.
We threaded through the crowds of people, mostly Chinese, all intent on being somewhere other than where they were and getting there fast. As I hurried with them I said something to Bill and got no answer, I turned back and saw that he’d stopped to light a cigarette and was a few yards behind. I waited, watching him as he shook out the match and made his way along the sidewall. He was a head taller than almost everybody else, and muscular in a broad-shouldered sort of way instead of slight like most of the people around us. But that didn’t keep them from pushing and shoving past him as though he were some kind of moving park statue left over from colonial days, some large Western figure of no current importance whose name no one remembered anymore.
“You okay?” I asked as he reached me.
“Sure,” he said, raising an eyebrow. “Do I look not okay?”
“You look tall,” I said.
“Sorry. I’ve been meaning to work on that”
“No problem.”
We dropped our coins in the turnstile and went up the stairs and down the ramp to the ferry, old hands at this now. We took seats at the front and watched the Hong Kong Island skyline swell as it approached.
Yesterday’s rain was just a memory. A few high wispy clouds floated over Victoria Peak and I could see some more far out to sea, but Kowloon, the harbor, and Hong Kong Island glittered and sparkled in the hot, bright sun. Later in the day, as car exhaust, cooking fumes, and smoke from factories with Sunday shifts swirled and rose, the air would probably thicken and blur, but for now the shadows were sharp and the sky was about as blue as anything I’d ever seen.
“I called Mark Quan last night,” I said to Bill. “After you left. I thought he should know about the jade.”
“What did he say?”
“He’s going to call the NYPD.”
“About the jade?”
“About Franklin.” I told him about Mark’s idea that Franklin would have to be working with someone in Hong Kong to set up the kidnapping, if he’d really done that.
“Okay,” Bill said. “That’s probably a good idea, getting the phone calls. But tell me this: If Franklin is behind this, why did he come to Hong Kong? He wouldn’t be on anybody’s mind at all if he hadn’t shown up here.”
“Good question.” The ferry passed a fishing boat with nets mounded on its deck. “And why did he offer Steven money for the ransom, if he’s trying to make money off the ransom?”
“So he could look like a good guy and still make a million bucks. It’s actually a pretty clever move.”
“Okay. But it still doesn’t explain the jade.”
“As far as that goes, there is one dumb, mundane explanation I thought of last night.”
“Yes?”
“Old Mr. Wei, at some point, gets into a bind. Sells his jade for some quick cash. He’s embarassed so he doesn’t tell anyone. His ship comes back in, he buys another piece as close to the original as he can find. Figures no one but him will ever know.”
I looked at Bill as the ferry cut its engine and headed for its slip. “I hate that.”
“Why? It knocks one of these problems right out of the box.”
“The one that Grandfather Gao and Mark Quan think is the key to the whole thing.”
“Maybe they’re wrong.”
“Maybe,” I sighed. “Or maybe it would all become clear to me if I thought in Chinese.”
“In that case,” he said, “it will never be clear to me.”
We walked the same way as yesterday, along the covered walkway, past the rickshaw men, through the wide tiled passage under the street. But this time when we came out we didn’t hail a cab. We didn’t need to; the underground passage came out just where we needed to be.
And Bill was right.
We stood on the edge of Statue Square. On the far side of the paved and fountained plaza, behind a colonial-era building with stone columns and a portico, a park stretched away to our left. Palm and pine trees waved in the breeze, walkways arched over roads, and skybridges threaded tall buildings together. On our right loomed the Mandarin Oriental, still imperturbable, as placid and unflustered on this bright morning as she had been yesterday when traffic zoomed around her through the misty afternoon. There was no traffic today: The avenue was closed. But the Mandarin Oriental seemed uninterested in the change. Stolid, regal, and focused on higher things, she took no notice whatsoever of the young women in their bright-colored clothes who sat on rattan mats or newspapers or the occasional folding chair tucked against her flanks, in the shade of her awnings and her pedestrian bridge, on the wide walls of the fountain pool in the square beside her, on the paving stones, benches, paths, and every other surface in the square and the park, on the sidewalks and the closed street itself as far as the eye could see.
There were thousands of them. Mostly they clustered in small groups, five, ten, a dozen; mostly they were animated, giggling, talking, handing photos around; mostly, they were young, energetic, smoothing their hair as the breeze mussed it up and laughing in the sun.
And mostly, they were eating. The aromas of roast meats and sauces pungent with unfamiliar spices made my mouth water, and as I watched plastic containers being popped open and paper plates being passed I wondered how many breakfasts I could really eat. Here and there a group was done with their meal, or maybe was not starting until they finished the business of prayer Quiet circles of young women held each others’ hands and stood, heads down, silently or speaking in whispered unison. And scattered through the massive crowd, reaching for the other extreme, CDs played while women laughed and waved and called to each other, taught each other new steps in dances to the music of home.
I stood on the edge of this sea of women, reluctant to wade in. “We’ll be intruding,” I said to Bill.
He looked in the same direction I was looking, out over the square and the park. “We usually do,” he said. “That’s pretty much our job.”
That was something I couldn’t argue with. “How are we planning to do this?” I asked.
“We stroll through the crowd asking if anyone knows Maria Elena Quezon from Cabagan.”
“I’m beginning to get that needle-in-a-haystack feeling.”
“I don’t think it’s that bad. I’m betting they get together in hometown groups, the way my friend’s aunts did. Someone must know where the women from Cabagan hang out.”