The Trail to Buddha's Mirror - Don Winslow [50]
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