“You,” I said with all the dignity I could collect, “will never learn anything. Anyway, the ceremony should be interesting. The half-brother will be there.”
“What, from New York?”
“Dr. Franklin Wei. He’s an orthopedist, in case you get your foot stuck in your mouth. Grandfather Gao says he’s planning to go to the funeral.”
“This is getting better and better. Why doesn’t he take the jade? And the letter? And the ashes?”
“According to Grandfather Gao he’s a little irresponsible. Married and divorced three times. Sequentially, not simultaneously.”
“I was about to ask.”
“I know you were. A wild and crazy guy.”
“Me?”
“Dr. Franklin Wei. New girlfriend every six weeks. Known at all the best clubs and hot spots. Cancels office hours to go to the ball game. May or may not actually show up in Hong Kong. Grandfather Gao didn’t want to risk it. Besides, it seems a little weird for him to be the one responsible for taking his father’s jade to the son of his father’s other son, under these circumstances.”
“I think this whole thing is a going to be a little weird.”
“Are you telling me you’re coming?”
He pulled on the cigarette again. “You remember, of course, that the last time we left town together you got hurt?”
“So did you.”
“Not as badly as you.”
“Whose fault was that?”
“Mine, no doubt.”
“If that’s an apology,” I said, “I accept.”
“I just wanted you to know what you’re getting into.”
“I’ll sign a waiver. So you’ll come?”
“Well, I’d still like to know why he wants me to. Besides the water buffalo thing.”
I gave him a look a little more serious than the ones I’d been giving him. “You’re thinking he’s expecting some kind of trouble?”
“The thought had crossed my mind.”
“Mine, too,” I said. “I tried to ask him. I said whatever small skills you and I might have, we were honored to put them at his disposal. I said we would exercise all our powers to accomplish the task he was setting us, and I was sure we could be most successful on his behalf if he were to tell us about any special concerns he had so we could prepare ourselves to meet them.”
“Elegant, setting aside the
small.
And?”
I shook my head. “He said, ‘Ling Wan-Ju, storm clouds often pass without rain, just as a dam can fail and flood a village on a clear, fine day.’”
“Well, that clears that up.”
“You know Grandfather Gao never actually says everything he means. He thinks it works better if people find things out for themselves. And when he does talk,” I admitted, “half the time it’s in nature metaphors like that that I never understand.”
“And that’s why you’re so crazy about him?”
“I’m crazy about him, as you so delicately put it, because he’s wise, and kind, and fair. And he’s a wonderful herbalist, and he makes great tea, and he never treated me like a dumb kid, even when I was one. And you,” I told him, “should consider this: He’s the only Chinese person of my acquaintance, with the possible exceptions of my brother Andrew and my best and oldest friend Mary, who would consider giving you the time of day.”
“Well, you said he was wise.” He squashed his cigarette out. “You don’t think he could be setting us up?”
I was appalled. “Absolutely not! Grandfather Gao would never do anything to hurt me! If he’s expecting trouble, and he wants to hire us, it’s because he thinks we can handle whatever it’s going to be. Which is another reason I
have
to take this job. I can’t let him down if he’s thinking like that.”
Bill met my eyes and held them without speaking for almost longer than I could stand it. Then he looked back down and did some more cigarette-squashing. “When does he want us to leave?”
“Thursday! Thursday Thursday Thursday!
Well?”
“What does your mother have to say? Not about the job, but about me going?”
“My mother?” I was surprised at the question, but I answered it with the truth. “You can’t expect her to feel anything but pure horror at the idea of me flying to the other side of the world with you.”
“I suppose not.”
“On the other hand, like I told you, she secretly thinks working for Grandfather Gao will keep me out of trouble for a while, and she’s always wanted me to go to Hong Kong. She says if I saw Hong Kong maybe I would understand better.”
“Understand what?”
“She never says. But I’m sure it has something to do with my shortcomings as a Chinese daughter.”
“So she approves?”
“She would walk off a cliff if Grandfather Gao suggested it, especially if it was for the good of her children. But she still doesn’t like the idea of me going alone with you. She had a solution.”
“Which was?”
“For her to come.”
I enjoyed the expression on his face when I said that almost as much as I like his grin.
“Oh, my God. What did you say?”
“What could I say? She’s my mother. But luckily Grandfather Gao said no.”
“You said yes?”
“She’s my mother.”
He stared. “And I thought I knew you. My God, a guy’s friends can turn on him.”
“Besides, I wasn’t sure you were coming.”
“I’m not sure I should. You might be lying. We’ll get to the airport, and there’ll be your mother, with her shopping bags and that flowered umbrella to hit me over the head with—”
“I’m going to hit you over the head myself unless you tell me whether you’re coming.”
I stopped pacing and stood in front of him, resisting the urge to stamp my foot.
“Well,” he said at last, “it’s certainly tempting. The other side of the world on someone’s else’s nickel? A chance to spend a week in a hotel with you?”
“Separate rooms.”
“A city where everyone smokes, where the weather’s tropical, where I can relive some of the high points of my misspent youth?”
“On separate floors.”
“Where the girls in the tight cheongsams sip mai-tais in booths in dim smoky bars until the Mama-sans call them over for you?”
“Separate hotels.”
“Where the Tsingtao flows like water and every other basement’s an opium den?”
“Separate land masses. Me on the Hong Kong side, you in Kowloon.”
“Well, when you put it that way,” he said, “how could I possibly turn it down?”
He hadn’t turned it down, and neither had I. At the crack of dawn Thursday we were on a plane, and after thirteen hours in the leather upholstered, private-video-screened, nearly flat-reclining business-class seats Grandfather Gao had provided for us, we were in Tokyo. We had a two-hour layover, during which I sipped green tea and tried to look dignified while fighting a combination of excitement and exhaustion, and Bill drank beer and wandered off to the smoking lounge to sit puffing with the Japanese businessmen. Then another four-hour flight, and then, sometime near midnight, we came roaring in over all those skyscrapers and neon and landed on Lantau Island, in the shiny new Hong Kong airport. A car, also arranged by Grandfather Gao, met us and took us to the Hong Kong Hotel on the Kowloon side, where we spent the night in different rooms on separate floors. And now, after a breakfast of waffles and bacon for Bill and congee with pickled vegetables and preserved eggs for me—when in Rome, after all—here we were on the Star Ferry, about to dock.
The ferry creaked and rocked and was hauled in and tied by weathered Chinese men in uniforms that looked like the sailor suits an uncle had once given my brothers. My mother hadn’t liked those suits—“Pah. Dress little boys like soldiers.”—but my father had said that since Ted, Elliot, Andrew, and Tim were nothing alike in any other way, it was good occasionally to see them dressed alike. There was no sailor suit for me, of course.
Bill and I hurried along with the rest of the crowd, down the wooden ramp, up the concrete one, and onto the sidewalk outside the terminal. I tried not to gape at the rickshaw men, as leathery and wrinkled as their rickshaws were red and gleaming. Now, they were just another tourist attraction, the tips for posing for photos their only income, because now it was illegal to pull rickshaws in Hong Kong. But I thought of them, younger, stronger, just as poor, trotting through exhaust-spewing traffic yoked to their two-wheeled carts in heat like this. I looked at Bill and couldn’t help asking, “Were they still pulling rickshaws when you were here before?”
“They weren’t illegal yet. But I never took one.”
“I thought that was the kind of thing American sailors did on leave.”
“American sailors on leave have more … urgent … things to do. Come on, here’s a cab.”
We were taking a cab to the Weis’ apartment, although on the map it looked like just the kind of long walk I love, especially in a city I’m new to. But both Bill and the guidebooks I’d been reading like crazy over the last week said Hong Kong, especially the Hong Kong Island side, was not made for the convenience of pedestrians. Our plan was to meet the Wei family and their attorney at the apartment, give Harry his jade and Mr. Wei’s brother his letter, and arrange a date for the ceremony involved with placing Mr. Wei’s ashes at the mausoleum. It wasn’t much of a job, but it was what we’d been sent all the way here by Grandfather Gao to do, and I didn’t want to screw it up in any way. There’d be plenty of time for exploring later, and plenty of exploring I wanted to do.
I gave the cab driver the Weis’ address and settled back to watch the city go by. It was a little unnerving to watch it go by on the wrong side of the road, because Hong Kong people were taught to drive by the British; but everyone here seemed to have the hang of it, so I relaxed.
Our cab left the skyscraper-crowded Central district and started to work its way uphill. Hong Kong Island is basically a mountain rising out of the sea, and according to the guidebooks, the more money you have, the higher up you live. The Weis—the Hong Kong Weis, anyhow—lived in a high-up, high-rise neighborhood called Midlevels, where, especially in the newer buildings, money started to show.
The New York Wei, Dr. Franklin Wei, lived on Park and Seventy-first. Money showed there, too.
The road curved and twisted as it climbed, snaking through banyan, palm, and banana trees that shaded people, most of them Chinese, trudging the steep streets. The shadowed alleys and open windows of the older neighborhoods hunched between the impossibly tall, slender buildings that grew more numerous as we approached the address we were headed for. When we finally got there, to No. 10 Robinson Road, there was almost nothing anymore but towering apartment houses, taller and slimmer than I’d ever seen, white concrete or tan or pink with window glass tinted brown or blue against the sun.
We paid the cab and stood to look around a minute before we went in, because as Bill pointed out, we were still early. Well, he was the one with the dependable watch.
“Look how skinny these buildings are,” I said, raising my voice over the jackhammers that were hard at work on this side of the harbor, too. “And they have pipes on the outside. We don’t do that in New York, do we?”
“Plumbing doesn’t freeze here,” Bill said. “If you run the pipes up outside, the walls inside can be thinner and there’s more space in the apartments.”
I looked at the pipes, slim tubes grouped in rows of four or six, fastened back to the building wall every story or so, and thought about how crowded life would have to be, to make you care about another four inches inside your apartment.
We went into the glassed-in, air-conditioned lobby through a door opened for us by a uniformed doorman who didn’t seem at all impressed by my gray linen slacks and blouse or Bill’s navy blue suit. Ha, I thought, what you don’t know. The security man at the curved granite desk—different from the security man who stood discreetly by the bronze-doored elevators—phoned up to the Wei apartment to say we were coming. Then the elevator security man took over, turning a key to send us to the twenty-sixth floor. The elevator whooshed us up silently, barely giving us time to admire the polished granite cab walls with the number 10 chiseled into them.
At twenty-six we got off and turned right down the carpeted hallway. Framed prints of Hong Kong harbor from a century ago, when the bustle was just beginning, hung on the walls. Tiny junks and sampans in them slipped in and out among the anchored British navy ships and the merchant ships flying a dozen different flags, none of them Chinese. One of the prints showed a view of the harbor from the hill we were on, a view all the way across to Kowloon. I wondered how much of the harbor you could see from the Wei’s apartment.
I got that answer as we approached the door to 26C. Through the foyer archway into the living room I could catch a glimpse of sliding doors with drapes half-closed against the morning sun, and a sliver of a harbor view glittering in the slot between two of No. 10’s high-rise neighbors. I could see this because the apartment door was standing open.
Bill and I glanced at each other. I stepped up to the door and knocked. There was no response, so I knocked again. I called out “Yau mo yen ah?”—“Is anyone there?”—and then as an afterthought added “Hello!” but still nothing. I gave Bill another look, then stepped inside.
Bill came up close, to watch my back: That’s how we do this wherever we do it, whoever’s in front, whoever’s behind. As my heart sped up and I stepped through the foyer into the Weis’ living room I sensed rather than saw Bill’s hand reach into his jacket just as mine moved toward my belt, but we both came up empty. American PIs, no matter how licensed you are, can’t bring guns into Hong Kong. Last week, in between reading guidebooks and studying maps, I had checked on that. Bill and I had agreed that this didn’t sound like a job that really needed an investigator; but on the other hand, that’s what we were.
And besides, we might have been wrong. Hong Kong, New York, or Dnepropetrovsk, a room that’s been tossed is a room that’s been tossed. And this one had been.
Once through the foyer the living room revealed itself in all its messed-up glory. Pictures off the wall, sofa cushions strewn around, drawers opened and their contents dumped. A vase of hibiscus blossoms, formerly resident on the coffee table in the center of the room, lay in a puddle on the pale blue carpet.
My heart now pounding, I met Bill’s eyes again. He nodded. Since I was closest to the sliding doors I edged over and inched back the drapes to see the full extent of the balcony outside. It was as wide as the living room and no one was on it. In fact it was a good bet no one was in the apartment—that is, no one who had done this—because if they were still in the middle of their work they wouldn’t have left the door wide open. But someone might be here, someone scared or hurt. We could have backed out, gone downstairs, and called the police, but it would take them time to get here. We’d do that as soon as we had a quick look around.
The quick look revealed nothing. Three bedrooms and a dining room, a maid’s room off the kitchen, all of them empty, all of them wrecked. Not much was broken, but breaking things makes noise. Everything had been opened, turned upside down, gone through. But no one was hiding under a bed or cowering in a closet, and, though I wouldn’t have said I was expecting it, I found myself letting out a long breath when no one was found lifeless in a pool of blood, either.
Still watchful, having touched almost nothing, Bill and I moved back out into the hall.
“Well,” I said, picturing Grandfather Gao glancing at his watch in the room behind the herb shop in Chinatown, sipping at his evening tea and imagining everything going well here, “I guess we’d better go learn how you call the Hong Kong police.”
Bill was about to answer, but the discreet ring of the elevator chime made us both spin around. A roundheaded, open-faced man in his thirties and a gray-haired woman stepped into the hall, talking and heading our way. They saw us; the man smiled, shifting his briefcase to his left hand so he could thrust his right forward for a handshake. “Miss Chin and Mr. Smith?” He smiled. His English was accented but clear. “I was told you’d come up. I’m Steven Wei; I’m sorry to be late. Didn’t—?” He stopped when he saw the open door, looked quizzically from Bill to me.
“Don’t go in,” I said. “There’s a problem.”
“A—what does that mean?” Steven Wei threw a glance at his own threshold, where Bill’s arm across the doorway blocked his way.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Wei,” I said. “Someone’s been here. The apartment’s been searched. No one’s there now,” I added. “But we’d better call the police.”
“Searched? What do you mean no one’s there? Where’s Li-Ling? Where are Harry and Maria?” He pushed past Bill, who dropped his arm without protest. Steven Wei stopped two steps into the room. I couldn’t see his face, but his body looked like he’d walked into a wall. “What happened here?”
“I don’t know.” I stepped in beside him. “The door was open when we got here. We knocked, no one answered, and we came in. It looked like this.”
“How do you know no one’s here? Li-Ling! Harry!” His voice held the rising tones of panic. He started toward the bedrooms.
I grabbed his arm. “We looked.”
He stopped. “What?”
“In case someone was hurt, or—we looked. There’s no one here. Mr. Wei, we’d better call the police.”
“No. No police.” That came not from Steven Wei, but from the woman he’d come off the elevator with. She was tiny, with large almond eyes behind delicate gold-rimmed glasses, and these were the first words she’d spoken. She couldn’t have weighed more than eighty pounds, and although the wrinkles around her eyes and mouth put her age close to sixty, the gray in her short hair would have been the only thing to keep her from being mistaken, from the back, for a twelve-year-old girl. Her voice was soft but her words were peremptory. “We will go inside.”
She stood waiting for Bill, not, it seemed to me, out of politeness, but to make sure he was going to do as she’d said. He gave me a quick look, read my eyes, and did it. She stepped in behind him and shut the door.
She glanced rapidly around the room and then, as though she didn’t need to see any more, said, “Steven. Come, sit down.” She indicated a carved wooden chair with an upholstered seat, as though Steven Wei needed instructions in his own living room, and then righted its mate for herself.
“Who are you?” I asked, not moving.
“Zhu Nai-Qian. Natalie Zhu. I am Steven’s attorney. Sit down.” Natalie Zhu’s Chinese accent was much more pronounced than Steven Wei’s, but it didn’t keep me from understanding what she said, and what she meant by it: I’m In Charge Here.
Bill moved to the far wall and leaned casually beside the sliding doors. From there he could see the apartment door, plus both other ways into this room; so I perched on the edge of the cushionless couch. Natalie Zhu flicked her eyes from the cushions on the floor to me with a slight rise of her delicate eyebrows. Probably she would have slipped a cushion under her tiny behind before depositing it on a couch frame. But I was better padded, and I’d sat down already. I crossed my legs as though Lydia Chin sat around on cushionless couches all the time.
“I think we should call the police,” I said again.
“No.” Natalie Zhu dismissed that idea and, for the moment, me. “Steven, we were expecting to meet Li-Ling here? And Maria, with Harry?”
Steven Wei swallowed. “Ten o’clock.” He reached into his pocket, pulled out a cell phone. “I’m going to call them.” He punched in a set of numbers. After a few moments he swore in Cantonese, ended that call, and punched in another set. He listened, then lowered the phone, looking like he wanted to throw it through the window. “Li-Ling’s said to leave a message. That probably means she hasn’t got it with her. Maria’s just rings and rings.”