A Drop of Chinese Blood (29 page)

“You worry too much. Go buy a postcard or something.”

I was in the bookstore, browsing through the picture books, when someone tapped me on the shoulder. I tensed.

“
Calmati
, Inspector. It’s only me.”

“I don’t know Italian,” I said, “but I hope that means we’re going to run away together to a cabin in the Swiss Alps.” I caught myself. “No, not the Swiss Alps. The Italian Alps. Can you cook? Never mind. Food is irrelevant.” I turned around.

“Very nice to see you,” Tuya said. “I hurried over here to say good-bye. My boss was angry when he found out about what happened in that shed. You OK?” She was standing naturally, all limbs properly arrayed.

“Fine,” I said. “Too bad I have to leave in a hurry like this. I was hoping we’d have a chance for a cup of salty tea or something.” I wondered if I could fold her up and put her in my carry-on bag.

“I can’t stay; I have to get back to the office. Nice thought about the cabin, though. Maybe I’ll call you sometime. Or you can call me.”

“I don’t have your number.”

She put something in my hand. “Now you do.” She pulled a book from the shelf. “This one is nice. It will help you remember.”

“You going to roll out of here?”

She smiled. “I think I’ll walk. Good-bye, Major. Take care of yourself.”

When I got back to where my uncle was sitting, he was sketching on a small piece of paper. “It’s a collapsible bookshelf for a ger. See how broadening travel is?”

“We’re boarding,” I said. “You want the window seat?”

3

My uncle was tense and distracted until we took off. “These things…” He indicated the airplane. “Very ungainly looking until they leave the ground. I hope they’ve done the math right on flight.”

“Put your seat back and relax. There’s nothing we can do about it now.” I figured I’d make conversation for a few minutes until the sound of the engines calmed him down. “What was the story about that Kazakh woman’s missing mother?”

“A tale she tells strangers on whom she has set her sights, according to Batbayaar. She got that locket she pulls from her blouse from an itinerant vendor near a place called Tsambagarav Mountain where her people live. Maybe it’s in that book you bought at the airport. They train eagles, which goes a way toward explaining the looks those men gave us.”

“We’re supposed to think she didn’t know anything about the seal?”

“That’s what I wondered. Batbayaar’s view was that she probably did know something. She and the doctor’s nurse are related in some obscure and distant way. They both work, off and on, for the South Koreans, who, as I told you, are nosing around for investment opportunities.”

“What? Batbayaar told me she was part of a Kazakh intelligence team.”

“That, too. And, for a while, they were apparently both working for someone Batbayaar could identify only as ‘K.’” My uncle closed the window shade. “You wouldn’t know who that was, I don’t suppose.”

“Are we still in Mongolian airspace?”

“Funny, that’s the same question Lin Piao asked.”

“Never mind Lin Piao. What about that bottle of pills the doctor gave you? Have you opened them yet?”

“They’re in my suitcase.”

“They’re where? Your suitcase went into checked baggage. We’ll probably never see it or that bottle of pills again. I told you, there was something funny about them.”

“Maybe one or two.” He looked around. “Where are the exits on this plane? Is there one up front? I don’t like the thought of having to crawl backward in an emergency.”

“We’re not going to fall out of the sky, don’t worry.” I thought it over. “So, Mr. Naranbaatar didn’t die of natural causes after all.”

“Of course not.”

“The nurse?”

“You can speculate; I’m not going to bother at this altitude. What’s clear is that your predecessor didn’t have much luck under the cloak of Naranbaatar, that he had a lot of people hoping he would drop dead, and that there was no way he was going to get home.”

“You don’t care who killed him?”

“There were a hundred arrows in the air at the same time, all aimed at him. It really doesn’t make much difference which one actually hit a vital spot.”

“Maybe not, but maybe if we knew it would tell us where the seal is. We still have to worry about the seal, you know. You said Batbayaar told you the nurse and the Kazakh woman are related. The Kazakh woman said she knew something about the seal. I’d say she knew because the nurse told her.”

“Reasonable, but the South Koreans could have mentioned it to them. Seoul seems to have had some inkling about the seal. There is probably a need to put it under a microscope to see if it is really counterfeit and, if so, who dropped it into their carry-bag on the way to Ulan Bator last month.”

“The list can’t be infinitely long. Who had motive? Who had expertise to forge a government seal? Who had access to the prime minister’s official baggage?”

“I know a fish who had the answer to all of those questions.”

“But he’s dead.”

“As a doorknob.” My uncle raised his window shade again and looked out at the featureless landscape below. “Next time we’re here I want to go to that statue we passed, and then to the mountains out west.” He pulled a postcard from his pocket and waved it at me. “A lot of interesting trees there.”

PART III

Chapter One

My first day back at work, no one would look me in the eye. Li Bo-ting seemed especially out of sorts. He didn’t come to my office to say hello. There wasn’t even the standard short memo from him on the desk welcoming me back. When I called him to ask for the past several days of daily logs in order to catch up on what had happened in my absence, Li paused and then said they weren’t available.

“Not available? Where are they, getting their nails done? I’d like to see the logs, Bo-ting, now. If they’re not up-to-date, don’t worry. Just bring them over. And tell Mrs. Zhou to bring in some tea.” Mrs. Zhou responded more favorably to Li Bo-ting than she did to me.

There was another pause, this one definitely more uncomfortable than the first.

“Li? You there?”

“I wouldn’t mind getting something to eat. Why don’t we meet in five minutes out front?”

As a rule, there’s no sense barking at people, least of all my deputy. “Fine, I’ll look at the logs when I get back. Where is the new man, Jang, by the way? He wasn’t at the duty desk when I came in. He’s supposed to be here by 7:00
A.M.
, or is he doing his nails, too?”

“See you in five minutes.”

Li was always efficient, and sometimes brisk, but he was rarely this abrupt. Whatever was bothering him wasn’t trivial. I thought longingly of Tuya’s ability to get out of tight spots. The phone rang, and for an instant I hoped by some miracle it might be Tuya.

“Go ahead,” I said.

“You made it back, I see.” The sultry voice of Madame Fang reached out and caressed my right ear.

“I did, and I’m glad to be home.” I would have been less surprised if it
had
been Tuya. “Can I be of service?”

“What did you have in mind?”

I looked up at the clock behind my desk, with the junction box and all its special connections. This was a conversation I didn’t need recorded. “I’m about to leave for an appointment. If there’s something you need to discuss, maybe we can meet later today. You want to come in here?” I knew she wouldn’t.

Throaty laughter over a phone is never appealing, but hers managed to break the mold.

“In that case,” I said, “let’s meet somewhere else.”

“Two o’clock,” she purred. “Should I bet that you won’t be on time?”

“Don’t bother.” I hung up.

It would have been smarter to tell her to get lost. Meeting Fang Mei-lin at Gao’s place, which was the only thing she could have meant by asking about making a “bet,” was a very bad idea no matter which way I looked at it. What was she doing calling me, anyway? Her links were with my uncle. If she wanted to see him, why didn’t she go over and knock on his door? She’d been there before.

Li Bo-ting threw away a cigarette as I came out the door. He rarely smoked, so if I hadn’t already known he was nervous, the cigarette would have told me.

“Not good for you, Bo-ting.”

“Better than a bullet in the back of the head,” he said, but he didn’t laugh. “Come on, just walk for a bit.”

I figured he wanted a chance to think, so I fell in step beside him without another word. After fifteen minutes of turning into alleys, doubling back, and ducking into rear entrances and coming out the side doors of old buildings, I thought it was fair to say something.

“Are we there yet?”

“You’ll see. Getting tired?”

“I’m right beside you, aren’t I?” Only I wasn’t. He had vanished. I stopped to look around. There was a low whistle, and as I turned to locate the source, I saw Li’s head barely above ground level.

“Stay with me,” he hissed. He had gone down a stairway into what looked to be the basement entrance of an abandoned warehouse. The door was old, but judging from the way it glinted in the sun, the lock had been replaced not long ago. Li found a key in his pocket and motioned me to go ahead of him.

2

When I came to, it occurred to me that the Mongolian way of putting someone down had its advantages. My head was throbbing so hard that my jaw ached, but after I opened my eyes I saw I was much better off than Li. He was lying next to me, with a bullet hole in the back of his head.

“Too bad about your deputy.”

The voice rang a bell, but a bell wasn’t what I wanted to hear at the moment. I closed my eyes again and thought about all of my creditors that would never get paid. “Never smart, murdering an MSS officer,” I said quietly in order not to give my headache more noise to feed on.

“If killing one is bad, imagine what sort of trouble two will cause.”

That brought forth a low chuckle to my left. To my right, a throat was cleared. If I had to guess, I’d guess there were three of them, but I didn’t really care. It wouldn’t take three of them to pull the trigger if that’s what they wanted to do next.

“Untie the bastard.” The bell had turned into a gong parading back and forth across the room, reverberating in my skull.

“What?”

“I said, untie the bastard. How come I have to repeat things for you all the time? Are you deaf? Maybe we should cut off an ear and show it to the doc.”

“I heard you fine. You said untie him. I just don’t think it’s such a good idea, that’s all. But you’re the boss.”

“You bet your tattooed ass I’m the boss. And I’m not kidding about your ear.”

Out of the haze that was clearing from my vision, I recognized the man standing over me as a member of the noodle shop quartet. “Hey, Wong,” I said feebly. “Long time no see.”

“Fuck your mother,” he said. He pulled a knife from his belt and cut the terrycloth ties around my wrists. “Get up.”

“You mind if my head stops spinning first?”

He kicked my leg. “Yeah, I mind. Get up.”

“Easy.” The voice across the room stopped driving marlinspikes into my brain. “We’ll deal with him later. Let’s move out. I don’t like it here. Too confining. Reminds me of prison. Go on, help him up.”

Wong grabbed my collar and yanked me to a standing position. “Don’t even move sideways without my say-so.”

The sudden move set back my vision, but I could make out what was at my feet. I looked down at Li. “What about him?”

“It never fails—he’s a talker, I should have known. Put a sock in his mouth.”

3

I was in the backseat of a car, trying to make the dizziness go away and not to vomit. There was ringing in my right ear, but the voice beside me was crystal clear.

“I’m on retainer, you might say. I do some work; I withdraw some funds. It’s all on the up-and-up.”

“Sort of like a lawyer,” I said, trying to be conversational.

“Yeah, you might say just like a lawyer.”

“Not a lot of lawyers threaten noodle shop owners with bodily harm.” What the hell, I wasn’t in polite company. No reason to be polite.

“Oh, you’d be surprised. They don’t eat noodles with their golden chopsticks, but they know that lots of other people do. There’s money in noodles if you know what you’re doing.” My memory clicked in, and so did the voice.

“You are the noodle racket king, I take it?”

“Take it any way you like.”

The driver laughed.

The dizziness cleared. I found myself wedged between Wong and the noodle king. When we emerged from the garage into the light, I could see that the area around Wong’s eyes was scarred from the boiling water the cook had thrown in his face. Up front, I saw two hands on the steering wheel. They must have ditched the man the cook had cleavered.

“You’ll notice you’re not handcuffed.” The noodle king had a way of sounding like he was granting big favors.

“I noticed.”

“Not gagged, either.”

I nodded, but kept my mouth shut.

“We want to drive out of town without anyone noticing; here we are, four businessmen on an outing. It would look odd with three of us in back, it might attract attention of a traffic cop, so Wong here is going to move up in front. First, he has a present for you.”

Before I could react, Wong jabbed a needle in my thigh. I watched him press the plunger, and then I wasn’t here, there, or anywhere. My vision was still good, and my hearing was fine, but I couldn’t make my muscles pay attention. It wasn’t paralysis. It was as if all will to move or speak had disappeared. My body felt like air.

Wong put his face in front of mine and looked into my eyes. “OK, it’s good for two hours.” He opened the door, climbed out of the car, then reached in to drag me over to where he had been sitting. “Comfortable?” He put my hands in my lap. I could only look straight ahead. When my head sagged, the noodle king propped it up again.

“What about the neck? They didn’t fix the neck thing yet, did they?”

Wong slammed the door, slid into the front seat, and we drove out of a fenced lot filled with shipping containers onto the street. The driver took a couple of quick turns; from the look of things I had the feeling he was heading for Aidan Road.

“We call it our velvet rope,” the noodle king said helpfully, like he was a docent and I was a paying visitor at his Museum of Triad Technology. “That medication doesn’t leave any marks. It’s better than terrycloth even, nothing to suggest a corpse has been bound and gagged. We tried tape, but tape is the worst; there’s always some sort of residue. No one wants residue.”