The Trail to Buddha's Mirror - Don Winslow [49]
“Local color,” Chin answered. “I thought you might enjoy it.”
Neal looked around the large room. The customers were all men, mostly older, most of them accompanied by brightly colored songbirds in bamboo cages. Some of the cages looked like they cost a small fortune. They featured sloping rooflines with carved dragons painted in shiny colors. Some had swinging perches with gilded chains and ivory bars. A few of the really old men had their pets perched proudly on their wrists. The birds—and it seemed to Neal that were hundreds of them—sang to each other, every warbling tremolo inspiring a choral response. As the birds exchanged tunes, the old men chatted happily with each other, doubtless swapping bird anecdotes and heredities. The men seemed to know each other as well as the birds did, and all parties were enjoying their social outing. The teashop was a riot of sound and color, but Neal noticed that it wasn’t really noisy.
“Quite a place,” Neal said.
“They used to be all over Hong Kong,” Ben said, “but keeping birds is dying out with the old people. Now there are only a few Bird Teahouses.”
A waiter came over, wiped the table with a wet towel, and set out two handleless cups.
“What kind of tea do you want?” Chin asked Neal.
“You order for me,” answered Neal, who drank at least one cup of tea a year and was only vaguely aware that there was more than one kind.
“Let me see … you are tired but need to concentrate, so I think maybe a Chiu Chou tea.” He said to the waiter, “Ti’ kuan yin cha.”
“Houde.”
“I ordered a very strong Oolong tea. It will keep you awake. Alert.”
“That would be a refreshing change. So what do we do now?” “Give up.”
“Can’t.”
“Why not?”
Neal listened to the cacophony of birdsong, chatter, and rattling cups for few moments before he answered.
“There are other people looking for her and her friend. I think the same people might have reason to be looking for me. These other people do not have kind intentions—they’ll kill her, her friend, and me if they have to. I don’t know why. I do know that I have to find her, warn her, and find out what this is all about before I can get back to a normal life.”
A normal life. Right.
“How did you get involved in this?”
Neal shook his head.
Chin tried again. “Mark told me it’s a drug thing.”
“I don’t think so.”
The waiter came back and set a pot of tea on the table. Chin took the lid off, sniffed the pot, and put the lid back on. He filled Neal’s cup and then his own.
Neal sipped the tea. It was strong all right, slightly smoky and bitter. But it felt good going down, warm and soothing. It occured to him that he hadn’t really stopped moving since the bullet had buzzed past his head, that he was wandering in the dark without a plan, moving for the sake of motion, making assumptions based on himself, not on the subject.
He took a long draught of the tea. So what do you know? he asked himself. You know that Li Lan and Pendleton have skipped out on you again. Back up. Skipped out on you? Why do you think you have anything to do with it? Maybe they already know about the danger and that’s what they’re running from. Running? Maybe they’re not running at all. Maybe they came to Hong Kong and simply changed living quarters. The one-room apartment was small even for lovers.
So how do you find them? They’ve taken off in the most densely populated area of the most densely populated city in the world, so how do you find them?
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.