You don’t.
You let them find you.
He looked up from his cup and saw that Chin was also sitting back and relaxing. He didn’t seem to mind Neal’s silence or be bothered by it. He was just drinking tea.
You let them find you, Neal told himself. Why would they want to do that? Depends on who “they” are. If “they” are Li and Pendleton, maybe they find you because you’re making such a pain in the ass of yourself that they have to deal with you. If “they” are the same people who almost canceled your reservation in Mill Valley, maybe they find you because they can find you, and they tie up a loose end.
That’s me, Neal thought, the quintessential loose end.
He poured another cup of tea for himself and Chin, then sat back in his chair. He was sitting in a place where old men combined their pleasures by taking their pet birds to tea. He could take a few moments to enjoy it. Besides, the game had changed. The second cup of tea was much stronger, the third stronger yet, and then the pot was empty. Chin turned the lid upside down on the pot and the waiter picked it up and returned a minute later with a fresh pot.
“Maybe I can’t find her,” Neal said. “But I can look for her.”
“True.”
Neal poured the tea.
“Maybe I can make a big show of looking for her.”
Chin took some tea and swilled it around in his mouth. Then he tilted his head back and swallowed. “Then maybe the unfriendly people who are looking for you will find you.”
“That’s the idea.”
If they missed me once, they can miss me again. But I won’t miss them this time.
“That’s a crazy game.”
“Do you want to play?”
“Absolutely.”
Chin got up and signaled for the check.
“You ready?” he asked Neal.
“Not yet.”
“You need something?”
“I need to sit here and finish the tea and listen to the birds sing.”
The birds must have heard him because they launched into an avian symphony of particular virtuosity. Even the old men stopped their conversations to listen and to enjoy the moment. When the crescendo died down, everyone laughed, not in derision but in the joy of a shared pleasure.
Neal Carey was dog-tired, jet-lagged, culture-shocked, and snakebit, but at least he knew what to do next.
7
He checked into the Banyan Tree properly this time, via the lobby and the registration desk. He whipped out the Bank’s plastic-so what if they tracked him down?-tipped the bellhop, and settled right back into his room. He poured himself a neat scotch, left a wake-up call for seven o’clock, and read two chapters of Fathom before dropping off.
Angels watched over him in his sleep. The angels in this case were not the winged spirits that one Father O’Connell used to tell him about when a younger Neal would help him find his way back to the rectory from the Dublin House Pub. Neal would listen patiently, if skeptically, to the old priest’s description of a guardian angel that followed you everywhere, as he relieved Father O’Connell of all his pocket money and decided that maybe these angels existed after all. The angels now were a bunch of Hong Kong Triad thugs who had thrown a loose protective net around Neal, and who prowled the hotel corridor, watched the entrances and the sidewalks, blocked the stairway leading to Neal’s floor, and did it all without being noticed.
Neal had insisted on that as the price for accepting protection at all.
“This won’t work if I’m traveling in a mob,” he had told Ben Chin. “I have to look like an easy target.”
“A slam-dunk,” agreed Ben, who after all, had attended UCLA. “Don’t worry. My boys will lay back.”
So Neal slept soundly until the phone rang at seven. He showered and dressed-white shirt, khaki slacks, indestructible blue blazer, no tie-and went downstairs to the dining room. He stopped off in the gift shop and picked up the South China Daily and the International Herald Tribune. The latter provided him with sports news to read as he tossed down four cups of coffee, two pieces of white toast, and three scrambled eggs.
He went back up to his room and the package was waiting on his bed, just as he had arranged. He didn’t know how Chin had managed to get all of it done in one afternoon and evening, but it was all there: five hundred flyers with the photo of Pendleton and Li Lan at dinner, and a message in Chinese and English reading, IF YOU HAVE SEEN THESE PEOPLE, CONTACT MR. CAREY, and going on to give his hotel number and extension. There was also a neatly typed list of all the art galleries that might handle Li Lan’s sort of work. There were about three dozen listings with addresses and phone numbers.
Chin had even grouped the galleries geographically, starting in Yaumatei and working down the Golden Mile, and then across the Hong Kong Island.
The first gallery was in the hotel and looked unlikely, but it was a good place try out a new lie.
“Good morning,” Neal said to the clerk behind the glass counter.
“Good morning. Are you enjoying your stay in Hong Kong?”
She was a Chinese woman, in her mid-forties, Neal guessed, and she was wearing an elaborately embroidered padded jacket that looked more like a uniform than her own clothing. The gallery sold a lot of jewelry and cloisonne and exhibited some large oil paintings of Hong Kong subjects: the view from Victoria Peak, Kowloon at night, sampans in the harbor. They seemed more like expensive souvenirs than artistic expressions.
“Very much,” Neal answered. “I’m hoping you can help me.”
“That is what I am here for.”
“I’m a private investigator from the United States, and I am looking for this woman,” he said, handing her a flyer.
She looked at it nervously. “Oh, my.”
“The woman, Li Lan, is an artist. A painter, to be precise.”
“Is she in some kind of trouble?”
Some kind.
“Oh, no, quite to the contrary. You see, I represent the Humboldt-Schmeer Gallery in Fort Worth. We would like to discuss a major showing of Miss Li’s work, but she seems to have changed her place of residence and we cannot seem to locate her through normal channels. Hence the reason for my disturbing you. Would you, by any chance, happen to know her?”
“There are so many artists in Hong Kong, Mr. Carey…”
“As there should be in a place of such beauty.”
“I am afraid I do not know this one, and I am sure we do not sell her work.”
“Thank you for your time. May I leave this flyer with you, in case you should remember something?”
“Yes, of course.”
“My telephone number is right there.”
“In the hotel… very convenient.”
“There is of course a modest reward, and a healthy sum of money in it for Miss Li, if we can locate her.”
“I understand.”
So will Miss Li, if she gets the word. The name Neal Carey will ring a clanging bell. Hi, remember me? Last time you saw me I was dead.
He hit three more galleries in the next hour, working his way north up Nathan Road. None of them sold Li Lan’s paintings, nor had the staffs ever heard of her. Neal made a turn south and headed back down, picking up four more galleries on side streets before he got back to the hotel. The first clerk dismissed him perfunctorily as unlikely to buy anything, the second was a polite young Chinese man who displayed great interest but offered no useful information. The third was an avant-garde place where the young owner thought she might have met Li Lan at a gallery showing on the island once, and the fourth spoke no English at all, but took a flyer. During this entire walk, Neal caught a glimpse of Ben Chin only once, and another time he thought he saw the Doorman in a crowd of people in front of him.
Neal stopped at the hotel desk to check for messages. There weren’t any, so he headed south down Nathan Road, into the heart of the expensive tourist district of Tsimshatsui. The day had turned hot and sunny. Tourists, shoppers, and the regular denizens crowded the sidewalks. Neal visited three galleries within the next six blocks. Nobody in any of them had ever heard of an artist named Li Lan, and nobody recognized the woman in the photograph. Neal left the flyers behind.