A barefoot old woman in a loose cotton shirt and trousers, brown as a nut, with a lined, seamed face, sculled the tourists over. The restaurant was one of a half dozen in the harbor, all built on barges. Permanently anchored, covered with Victorian gingerbread painted in bright, gaudy primary colors, the restaurants somehow still managed to bear a faint resemblance to a pagoda.
These much-photographed temples of capitalism made Jake smile. Callie’s mood, however, was somber; she hadn’t smiled all morning.
After they had given the waiter their order — the waiter seemed to know an extraordinary amount of English, although Callie chatted with him in Chinese — Jake and Callie Grafton were left in semiprivacy with glasses of wine. They were seated in a booth by a window that looked across acres of fishing boats and the residential sampans of the boat people. Beyond the harbor were rooftops and high-rises, all the way up the mountain.
“You don’t seem too happy about your glimpse into China Bob’s affairs,” Jake said tentatively.
“I’m sorry. I’ve got no right to be such a stick in the mud.”
“Not your fault. The guy was a probably a shit.”
“Sssh! People might be listening.”
“I hope not.”
“Let’s just say he was a foul, evil man who made his living on the misfortunes of others.”
“That would be fair.”
“The tape was really hard to figure out,” Callie explained, “and I don’t think I’ve got it yet. I would say that at least half of the tape is made up of his side of telephone conversations. When he was silent too long, the tape stopped and one hears that infuriating beep, and the first few words of his next sentence are missing.
“Of course, he also had conversations with people in his office, and sometimes during those conversations he would take telephone calls.
“The tape is full of beeps, missing words, mumbled words, incomprehensible garble, and Chinese spoken too fast for me. Sometimes Chan and a visitor would both speak at the same time… sometimes they both shouted at the same time. Everyone around here smokes, have you noticed that?”
“Yes.”
“They talk with cigarettes dangling from their mouth” She sighed. “The tape needs to be gone over by experts. All I got were snatches of conversation, words and phrases, sometimes a bit of give and take, usually just bits and pieces.”
“And you don’t know who killed Chan?”
“No. There is a beep — which means the tape was stopped — then a bit of a phrase, incomprehensible, and the shot. Nothing after that. The tape stops.”
“Before that, what was on the tape?”
“Someone talking about an import permit for computers.”
“Okay.”
“And before that, an argument about money. It seems someone gave Chan money to give to people — I think in America — and he pocketed at least half of it, according to the man who shouted at him.”
“You said Chan was into human smuggling?”
“That was the subject of several conversations, I think. Hard to be sure. I got the impression that it would be better for everyone if the cargo didn’t survive the voyage.”
“You aren’t crying for China Bob?”
“I wouldn’t mind throwing a shovelful of dirt in his face.”
“Hmm.” Jake took a sip of wine.
“Where’s the tape now?” Callie asked. “Did you leave it in the room?”
“It’s in my pocket.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“Along with a pistol I took off a guy who was following me this morning when I went jogging.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“Nope. A little automatic. Loaded.” Jake removed the man’s wallet from another pocket and passed it to Callie. “See if you can figure out who this guy is.”
She ignored the money, Hong Kong dollars equivalent to about forty dollars American, and examined each of the cards. “I don’t know many Chinese characters,” she said tentatively, “but none of this stuff looks like an official ID card. I would think that in Hong Kong everything is in English and Chinese.”
She returned the documents to the wallet and passed it back. Jake took out the money and put it in his shirt pocket, so he could leave it on the table after lunch as a tip.
As they were eating lunch he realized that two people were watching him and Callie from the kitchen door and whispering together. One was a man who didn’t look like he was kitchen help.
After a few minutes the man took a seat at an empty table by the door and devoted himself to studious contemplation of the menu.
“When we get back to the hotel,” Jake said to his wife, “I want to see if I can get you a flight back to the states.”
“I don’t want to go back alone.”
“And I don’t want you in the middle of a civil war. I’m going to have a heart-to-heart talk with Cole, and then I think I’ll go back, too. Sending me over here to root around was a bad idea from the get-go.”
“You’re worried about the man who followed you this morning, aren’t you?”
“I’m getting worried about everything. We’re in way over our heads.”
As they rode the sampan back to the tour bus, he slipped the wallet into the water. When no one was looking, he did the same with the pistol.
Callie reached for Jake’s hand. “Come on, Romeo, hold my hand. We’re smack in the middle of an exotic city and I could use a little romance.”
Lin Pe rode the tram down Victoria Peak. It was but a short walk from Rip and Sue Lin’s house to the tramway, and the motorman always stopped on the way down when he saw her standing there. She stepped aboard and wedged herself in among a earful of plump, rosy-pink Germans. With barely a lurch the car continued its descent of the steep grade.
At the bottom she set off on foot, walking quickly, her small purse clutched tightly in her left hand.
Huge buildings rose on all sides, towering palaces of glass and steel. Around them traffic swirled on multilane streets that could be crossed only at over- or underpasses. Hiking the concrete canyons was strenuous, but Lin Pe could remember dawn-to-dark days in the rice paddies from her youth. Nothing could be as strenuous as those lean times, with too much work and not enough to eat.
The human sea thickened as she approached the bank square. Acres of people crowded the sidewalks and spilled into the streets. Most seemed content to stand right where they were since the bank square wasn’t all that big. Still, Lin Pe pressed forward, worming her way through.
There were some soldiers about, but they were standing back, well out of the way. Lin Pe walked right by them and edged her way carefully into the middle of the square, where she finally found a tiny area of unoccupied concrete and sat.
The bank loomed before her like a dark, black cliff, blocking out the sun. When she looked straight up she could see a patch of blue sky.
She folded her hands in her lap and spoke to the woman beside her. They chatted politely for a moment — both had money in the closed bank — then fell silent, each lost in her own thoughts.
When Lin Pe had been very young there had been a man. He had worked hard and given her six children. One died in infancy; the three eldest she left behind with his parents after he died. The two youngest, Sue Lin and Wu, she carried away, one in each arm, when she decided she must go. Without her man, burdened with the children and his parents, both of whom were vigorous enough then but growing older, she would never be able to make it. She had too many children ever to attract another man. So she left.
She sat in the square thinking about the children she left behind, as she did for a few minutes every day. Finally her mind turned to fortunes. Thinking up fortunes had been the most important thing in her life for many years now, and she returned to it whenever the world pressed in.