“Circuitously, yes. I wasn’t sure you were serious. You didn’t sound worried.”
“I didn’t think he was serious, so I wasn’t.”
“Are you now?”
“I honestly don’t know. The guy—he said his name was Samuel Wing—told me he represented some people who wanted me to stop looking for the Chaus. He wouldn’t say who or why they cared but he was ready to hand me ten thousand in cash and when I turned him down he sweetened the offer. When I threw him out he suggested I reconsider or else, but there was no or else.”
“That was when he didn’t mention your mother? Now I get it.”
“Yes.” I pointed at my phone. “That was his cab driver. I left him a message before. He dropped Wing, or whoever he is, on Twelfth and Forty-second and saw him go into the building on the northeast corner.”
“Oh,” said Bill. “Damn.”
“What?” Jack demanded.
I asked, “You’ve never been to the mother ship, have you?”
“Hong Kong,” Jack said. “Not the mainland. Why?”
“You don’t need a visa for Hong Kong. I haven’t been to the mainland, either. But I’ve had relatives go back and forth over the years. Sometimes they need someone to pick up visas, papers, something, at the Chinese Consulate here.”
“At the— Is that it? Where Wing went?”
“Forty-second and Twelfth. Northeast corner. There’s nothing else there.”
Silence covered our table in the clinking and slurping around us. “You called it,” Jack said. “You said, from the mainland, but here a long time.”
“You knew about this guy?” Bill asked Jack.
“You’d have known, too, if the bar you were in hadn’t been quite so hushed,” I retorted. “Listen, you guys. The Chinese government?”
“Or, one diplomat, freelancing,” Bill said.
“To what end?”
“The same end as our other interested parties? He sees a chance to hit it big?”
“Well, but hold it,” Jack said. “Maybe we’re jumping to the wrong conclusion. Why can’t it be just one guy, a civilian, doing two errands in one afternoon? Trying to buy you off: bad. And picking up papers from the Consulate: innocent. Unrelated.”
I shook my head. “Nice try, but too late in the day. They close to the public at three. I’ve been on lines there often enough. If he got in the building this late, he works there. But come on. The Chinese government?”
Bill shook his head. “If he’s really a diplomat he’s got to be freelancing. If the Chinese government wanted you to knock something off they’d go to our government. The State Department or the CIA.”
“Maybe they tried, but the State Department doesn’t want to do the PRC’s dirty work.”
“I have to think they’d rather do that than let the PRC do its own, going up in the face of an American citizen.”
“Or maybe this is about something the PRC doesn’t want to share with the State Department,” Jack said.
“Like what?” I asked.
“Chau was a political pain when he was alive. Maybe he’d be a pain again if he were alive again.”
“But then, wouldn’t Wing be trying to buy my information, not scare me off? Wouldn’t he want to find out where the paintings are and whether he has a problem?”
Bill said, “Not if he knows already.”
“Oh.” I stopped a spoonful of salty broth on its way to my mouth. “Oh.” I was considering the ramifications of that when my phone rang again. In some restaurants this much cell phone usage might fetch dirty looks, or even get us ejected. But this was a Chinatown noodle dive. Half the customers, the waiter, and Tau at the front, were working their own hustles on their own cell phones. “Linus,” I answered it. “You have something?”
“I’m still working. But I found some stuff you want right away.”
“I do? Tell me.”
“I don’t know what you’re into, but you might want to, like, tiptoe. First, that phone number. I hit a wall. But not a regular wall. My phone company dude said, ‘Dude, you can’t have that and you don’t want it.’”
“What does that mean?”
“Well, see, most of what my phone company dudes do for me, it’s technically, you know, illegal?”
“Technically?”
“Yeah, but, see, there’s like a line. Stuff they’ll do, and the other stuff. Like, this number, giving me anything about it, it’s not just illegal. It’s, like, deeply illegal. You dig?”
His earnestness as he tried to explain the nuances was almost funny. “Okay, I get it, and back off it. I don’t want you doing anything deeply illegal because of me. But what does it mean?”
“It means it’s, like, a government phone.”
“It’s like a government phone? Or it is a government phone?”
“No, not it is, necessarily. But it’s, like, a phone the Feds care about. Guys like me can’t trace it and neither, by the way, can the NYPD, unless the Feds say they can. Not the owner or the call history. By ‘can’t,’” he added quickly, “I mean my phone company dude won’t help. But I know some other dudes. Serious guys.” Reestablishing his bona fides. “You want me to find someone, or what?”
“Don’t sound so eager. I don’t think we need to. Just tell me, is this the kind of protection a foreign diplomat’s phone would have?”
That made him pause. “’Zactly. What, you’re like, Dancing with Spies?”
“It would be a spy?”
“Not necessarily. Actually, probably not a spy, they’d have their own tech. This, it’s just to be polite. Something our guys do for VIPs when someone asks them to, so when they make a date to go to, like, Stringfellows, it doesn’t end up on Page Six. But what I mean, they don’t just do it for anybody. If this dude that has this phone is from somewhere else, he’s probably pretty high up in whoever’s government we’re talking about. What’s going on?”
“I’m not telling you so you don’t have to deny anything.”
“Hey! Uncool! I—”
“Did you say you had something else?”
“Oh, man, I should hold out on you until you talk. Uh-oh, Trella’s giving me a look. Never mind, here’s the rest: the government. They’re, like, everywhere. Your Dennis Jerrold dude? That’s where he works. But not some foreign government. Our government. He’s with the State Department.”
12
Linus filled me in, I told him to keep digging, hung up, and turned to the guys. “Hoo boy.”
“What’s up?” Bill echoed himself from my last phone call.
“I wish I knew.” I told them what Linus had said about Samuel Wing’s phone, and then about Dennis Jerrold. “Chances are this won’t surprise you, but Linus says Jerrold’s on the China desk. Cultural affairs. Mid-level. Not a newbie, but not senior.”
Jack gave his drawn-out, “Re-eally?” Then he said, “But the PRC guy, Wing, he is senior. According to Linus.”
“To have that phone protection. Seems that way.”
Jack looked at Bill. “You said if the PRC government wanted to stop Lydia, they’d have gone to the State Department. Well, here’s the State Department.”
“But not trying to stop me,” I objected. “Dunbar, or Jerrold or whoever he is, is the one who got all this started in the first place.”
Bill said, “Unless he’s freelancing, too.”
“You think there’s that much of that going around?”
“It makes sense. Otherwise why meet you in a tea shop and use a phony name? If the State Department wants to find the Chaus, they have all kinds of resources. Why go to a PI? But if Dunbar heard about the Chaus in the course of his work and is trying to get over without his bosses finding out, that makes the stakes pretty high if he gets caught. Even if he’s not committing a crime, it would be the end of his diplomatic career.” Bill turned to Jack. “I wonder if your client’s working for someone’s government, too.”