“I understand,” said Sally tentatively.
“Naturally, this makes them suspicious of other men,” said Xan. “To penetrate another organization, therefore, we must sometimes use cunning.”
“‘Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected,’” said Sally confidently. “Sun Tzu.”
Xan smiled. “Well said, little dragon. There is no mystery, then, as to why you are here.”
“No, Master Xan,” replied Sally. “None.”
A life without mystery, thought Xan, studying Sally for the second time that night. Such a life begins here.
“Very well,” he said, as if to himself. Reaching behind him, Xan produced a folder of heavy brown paper, its texture and weight suggesting it had been handmade. Sally had seen folders like it before, always containing photographs and backgrounds of men she was supposed to follow in the city.
“The shan chu wanted me to give you this,” Xan said simply, sliding the folder in front of Sally.
Sally looked up from the folder. The shan chu was the head of the school. No, the head of the clan. The Master of the Mountain. The Dragon Head.
Sally knew she wasn’t going to just follow a man around Hong Kong. This was something more important. She opened the folder, not sure what to expect.
The first thing she saw was a photograph, black and white, taken with a long lens. The man in the picture looked Japanese. He was standing next to a white delivery truck on a busy city street with a cigarette in his right hand, his eyes screwed up against the smoke. Sally guessed he was maybe forty-five. Even from a distance, his features looked coarse and unfriendly. Sally was about to look at the rest of the file when she felt a sudden and unexpected revulsion.
“Who is he?” she asked, looking up to find Xan staring at her with an odd expression on his face. If she didn’t know him so well, she would have sworn it was one of concern.
Though their eyes were locked, Xan seemed to be looking somewhere far away when he finally answered.
“Little dragon, he is the man who killed your parents.”
Chapter Twenty-two
San Francisco, present day
Of the countless Chinese restaurants with Hunan in their name, only one served tourists by day and gangsters by night.
Located in the middle of Grant Street, Freddie Wang’s restaurant was a known haunt for criminals, but since Freddie routinely swept the place for bugs and never handled transactions on the premises, he managed to keep the place open despite its questionable clientele. The trick was convincing law-abiding citizens to clear out before the conversations in the dining room turned to drugs, gambling, and prostitution.
So Freddie started giving away fortune cookies with very special fortunes inside. The cooks and waiters studied each table, then ran back to an old man crouched in the kitchen who wrote custom fortunes. A young girl on a date might get a fortune warning her that the young man sitting across the table was in the midst of an outbreak of genital herpes, while a family of nervous tourists from the Midwest might open their cookies to find a prophecy of an impending earthquake. There were no lucky numbers or promises of wealth and happiness at Freddie Wang’s place.
Cape took a seat in a corner booth, where he waited for almost an hour, watching the tourists clear out one table at a time, some engaged in heated arguments about what they’d just read about each other. By nine o’clock he was alone in the dining room, sipping Tsingtao from a bottle and watching the waiters clear the tables. When the last of the tablecloths had been removed, a lone waiter walked across the room and set a small plate in front of Cape, a single fortune cookie resting on its plain white surface. Cape cracked open the cookie and let the crumbs fall out of his hand as he read the small slip of paper.
Come upstairs, gwai loh.
Cape suppressed a smile as he made his way to a narrow stairway beside the entrance to the kitchen. His last time here, he had been with Sally, and his fortune was part threat and part insult. He was moving up in the world, now rating a simple invitation laced with disdain. The call from Harold Yan had done the trick. Freddie may not like Cape, but at least he’d talk to him.
At the top of the stairs, a thick-waisted man named Park waited impassively next to a door, wearing dark glasses and a suit that cost more than Cape’s car. Park spent all day, every day searching people, and he was getting sick of it. His name meant cypress tree, and recently he’d been having dreams that roots were growing from his feet from standing around so much. With a brusque gesture, he indicated Cape should raise his arms, then pushed him roughly against the wall and patted him down. When he got to Cape’s waist he hesitated, feeling a strange bulge on his right side. Reaching under the tail of Cape’s sport coat, he pulled a wad of yellow rubber from beneath Cape’s waistband. He took off his sunglasses and screwed up his face as the thing unfolded in his hand.
It was a rubber chicken.
“I brought that as a present to Freddie,” said Cape over his shoulder. “Figured the guys in the kitchen could do wonders with it, especially with the right sauce.”
The guard threw the chicken back at Cape but caught himself before following through with his fist. He’d clearly been given orders.
“Should I have brought cat instead?”
The guard grabbed him by the collar and turned him to face the door, then twisted the knob and shoved him forward. Cape raised his hands in time to avoid opening the door with his face.
It was dark inside, the only light coming from an old lamp with a green shade sitting on a desk. The cloying smell of incense filled the room, and thick tendrils of smoke curled in the subdued light. Behind the desk sat Freddie Wang, his long gray hair sprouting from a high forehead, his dark eyes squinting through the smoke as Cape stepped forward.
“I hear you died last year,” said Freddie, his voice like dry reeds cracking in the wind.
Cape shrugged. “I heard that, too,” he said. “Turns out I just had a bad case of food poisoning….I think I got it at this restaurant, as a matter of fact.”
Freddie cackled, which quickly turned into a wracking cough. A gnarled right hand moved into the pool of light and snatched a lit cigarette from a carved wooden ashtray, then scuttled back out of sight like a cockroach. As the tip of the cigarette glowed red in the darkness, Freddie’s cough subsided.
“If you got food poisoning here,” he said slowly, “you’d stay dead.”
Cape nodded but didn’t say anything, moving to sit in one of the two straight-backed chairs in front of Freddie’s desk. As he turned to sit, Cape noticed a stolid-looking man lurking in the shadows behind him and to the right. He had long black hair pulled tight into a ponytail and hands that looked too big for his body, jutting out from the sleeves of his suit like oven mitts. Although they came in all shapes and sizes, Freddie always had protection.
“So what you want?” asked Freddie testily.
Cape noticed Freddie’s accent came and went depending on his mood and realized taking a seat without being asked had irked his host. Freddie didn’t like visitors.
“I want your wisdom,” said Cape pleasantly.
“Fuck you,” said Freddie. “You think you kiss my ass, tell a joke, I tell you stories?”
“Nah,” said Cape. “I think that if you tell me stories, then I leave you alone.”