“You’ll need a lot of food,” I warned him.
“I figured.”
“Hello, Miss Yee, how nice to see you again.” Max removed his furry cap as he greeted Susan, who was behind the cash register of the store. “This is still a family business, I see. Do you work here full-time?”
“I help out as much as I can,” she said. “But I’m at school a lot.”
“Susan’s a grad student in architecture,” said John.
I was a little surprised by how humble the shop was, since the Yees were a prominent family. Although clean and cheerful, it was a tiny storefront, and when I looked around at the stock, it was all just cheap souvenirs, the sort of tacky junk I would never waste my hard-earned money on. Susan was a student, and Ted was an impoverished indie filmmaker, so Lily and her offspring presumably relied on the income from the store. Did this place really support them?
“As an architect,” Max asked Susan, “do you take an interest in feng shui? I notice the door is slightly tilted, and a mirror faces it. Are these deliberate choices, or happenstance?”
“If I’m not being tested on something or assigned it as a project, then I don’t have time to take an interest in it,” Susan said. “I have a heavy course load.”
She certainly found time to harangue her brother in public, though, I thought.
“Ah.” Max nodded politely. “No doubt your mother appreciates your help here.”
“No doubt,” said Susan, obviously not in a friendly mood tonight. I saw an open textbook behind the cash register, along with a notebook, a big cup of coffee, and some pens and highlighters, and I realized she probably wanted to get back to her studying.
So I asked, “Is Ted here? He’s expecting me.”
“Yeah, he’s around. He said you’d be trying on some of the dresses we’ve got here. For his film.” She rolled her eyes when she said the final word. Then she looked toward the back of the shop and bellowed at the top of her lungs, “Ted! Esther and John are here! Ted! TED!”
I winced at her volume.
There was a pause, and then we heard very faintly, from somewhere in the distance, “Send them up!”
“Up where?” I asked Susan.
She pointed to the back of the shop. “Go around the corner, past the shelves, make a left, go up the stairs there, make a sharp right, up more stairs, double back, and you’ll find him.”
“Oh, good,” said John. “As long as it’s simple.”
She added, “Shout for Ted if you get lost.”
“Is your mother here, by any chance?” asked Max.
“My mother?” she said in surprise. “Yeah, somewhere. She’s doing inventory. I haven’t seen her for a couple of hours. Maybe Ted knows where she is.”
Susan sat down and started reading her textbook, which I took as a clear indication that she wanted us to go away now. So we did.
At the back of the shop, we went around the corner, into another room, and walked past a bunch of shelves featuring beautiful Chinese dolls, the kind the look like court ladies from an imperial dynasty. I was puzzled by why this merchandise, so much nicer than the stuff I’d already seen, wasn’t in the front of the store—or even in the window. My perplexity deepened as we made a left and found ourselves in a section of the shop stocked with a fine array of religious carvings, statues, and little altars. This was quality stuff, a whole different level of merchandise than the cheap trinkets in the front of the store. I began to realize how deceptive the humble storefront was—and how capable this place probably was of supporting the Yee family, after all.
Looking around, John said, “I’m sure this stuff used to be in the front of the store. And the cheap stock that’s there now used to be in the basement.” He shrugged. “I suppose Mrs. Yee decided to shake things up a little.”
Recalling the obsession that Fenster & Co. had with thieves, I said, “I wonder if the reshuffle had something to do with shoplifters? It’s pretty easy to walk out of a store with something that’s shelved only four feet from the door. Maybe Lily decided it was good business to use the front of the store for the cheapest stuff.”
“Maybe so,” said John.
It seemed a shame, though, given how much nicer most of Lily’s merchandise was than you’d guess upon looking in the window. A lot of people must walk right past this place who would come in and browse if they had any idea what nice stuff lay further inside, where passersby couldn’t see it. Well, maybe Yee’s had a reputation that ensured people came inside, anyhow.
“Oh! Wrong way, I guess,” John said in surprise as we turned a corner and found a staircase that was going down rather than up. “I must’ve got turned around.”
“Understandable,” said Max. “I’m feeling rather disoriented.”
“Let’s double back and try going in the other direction,” I suggested.
As we did so, John said, “They’ve really changed things a lot since the last time I was here. Everything’s in a different place.” He laughed wryly and added, “It seems like even the walls and stairs have moved.”
“How long ago were you here?”
“Two or three years, I guess. I hadn’t really seen Ted for a while before he asked me a few months ago if I’d work on his film. We lost touch when he was touring with the band, and ever since he got back, I’m always in class or in the lab.”
“He was in a band?”
“Before he was a filmmaker, he was a bass player,” said John. “That didn’t really work out, though, and his mother had to send him money to get home from Kansas or someplace like that.”
“And what did he do before the band?” I asked, suspecting that Ted may have been through several professions by now.
“He tried art school for a while, but . . . well, you know.”
I had a feeling I did know. However, although I didn’t think Ted had much talent, he did have a lot of enthusiasm for filmmaking, and he had invested tremendous commitment and energy in ABC. So maybe he’d stick with this career choice. It made no difference to me, though, just as long as he at least stuck with it until this film was finished or the money ran out—whichever came first. I wondered how Ted’s meeting had gone this evening with his potential new backer.
We made a sharp right—and found ourselves facing a wall of carved masks, rather than a staircase.
“Ted?” I called, recalling Susan’s advice. “Ted!”
“Up here!” he responded, his voice still pretty faint. “Find the stairs!”
“Find the stairs?” I muttered. “Well, thanks for that helpful tip.”
“This place is astonishing,” said Max. “One really can’t tell from the street how big it is.”
“Enormous is more like it,” I said, looking down a very long aisle in hope of seeing some stairs.
“Oh, yeah, it’s a big store,” said John. “Well-known, too. I guess Yee’s has been here for at least fifty years.”
Although a fairly regular shopper in Chinatown, I had never been to Yee & Sons before. But I came to this neighborhood to buy food and practical goods at cheap prices, not art and souvenirs, so this wasn’t the sort of place I usually went into.
As I turned down a shorter aisle, then went around another corner, still without seeing a staircase, I noticed that another reason this wasn’t the sort of place I shopped was that most of the stock was well out of my price range. Some of it might even be out of Max’s price range, I realized, as I eyed an elaborate antique couch from (according to its label) nineteenth-century Hong Kong which cost tens of thousands of dollars.