the the second I disembarked from the Waldorf. “We’re fired!”
“What you mean ‘we,’ Chinese woman?”
“Be serious! This is bad!” I told him about the interview with Mulgrew, and its aftermath.
He asked, “What are you going to do?”
“Are you kidding? If you think there’s any possible way I’m going to forget it and let Mulgrew just go through the motions, you’re every bit as—”
“I didn’t say, ‘Are you going to forget it?’ ” he broke in. “I said, ‘What are you going to do?’ ”
“Oh. Well, when you put it that way.” I rubbed my eyes. “I apologize. I shouldn’t be taking it out on you.”
“That’s what I’m here for. Though I’d be curious to know what I’m every bit as.”
“I’ll never tell. But I’m curious to know something, too. Why did you do that thing you do, sitting off to the side so you can observe someone?”
“I do that?”
“You know, when I play innocent with you, it’s silly. When you do it with me, it’s absurd. Yes, you do that. When you don’t trust someone. Do you have a problem with Alice?”
For a moment he was silent. “There’s something peculiar about her. Joel said so, too.”
“ ‘Off’ is the word he used, and that was because she does this work and she’s not Jewish.”
“And she explained that. But there’s still something.”
“Any idea what?”
“No.”
“Have you eaten yet?” my mother called from the living room as I slipped off my shoes in the vestibule. It’s a standard Chinese greeting, the hospitable inquiry of a famine-prone land. It’s no more looking for a real answer than “How are you?” is in English. But the thought of food right now was enough to curdle my stomach.
“I’m not hungry. Ma, I need to tell you something.” I sat on the couch next to her.
“Ling Wan-ju? What’s wrong?” She shut her Hong Kong fashion magazine, which she studies for ideas for outfits for my sisters-in-law and me.
“It’s Joel, Ma.”
“The one who sings.”
“Ma, he’s dead.”
Her lips compressed into a thin line. She patted my hand. Then, hands back in her own lap, she asked, “What happened to him?”
“Someone shot him.”
“Who did that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Was it because of your case?”
Nothing like the head-on approach.
“I don’t know that either. The police don’t think so.” She nodded and minutely relaxed. I could have left it at that, but I didn’t want to lie to her. “I do, though.”
“Do you?”
“Yes. The client does, too. She wants me to stop.”
A few moments of silence. “Are you in danger, Ling Wan-ju?”
“I don’t know.”
“But it wouldn’t matter, would it?”
“Ma—”
“No, it would not. And what the client wants will not matter either. You will do what you think is the right thing for your friend, even if you must do it all alone.”
I wasn’t going to be alone, but this would have been a particularly bad time to bring up Bill.
“No, you will continue. You will not consider the consequences until they happen.”
“I have no choice, Ma.”
She looked across the room to the cabinet holding my father’s collection of mud figurines: fishermen, farmers, a young woman weaving. People living the lives their parents had lived, and their parents’ parents, unchanging, peaceful, and unsurprising. She stood. “You have a choice, Ling Wan-ju: whether to eat dinner or not. I have jyu sam tong.”
Pig’s heart soup, for reviving the fainthearted. As I followed my mother into the kitchen, I wondered, how had she known?
My mother and I watched a Cantonese soap opera while we ate, a costume drama full of drums and cymbals, Tang dynasty outfits, and complicated hairdos. Trying to follow the story absorbed my attention, as had the running around I’d done all day. It wasn’t until I was alone in my room that the image of Joel open-eyed in his chair flooded back into my brain.
I stood in the middle of the floor, feeling my breath knocked out the same way it had been by the actual sight. I closed my eyes, didn’t try to muscle the picture away, but let it rush in like a tide until, like a tide, it could ebb again.
It did. But tired as I was, there was no way, after that, I was going to be able to sleep.
So I turned my computer on and Googled “Shanghai Moon.”
I didn’t learn much more than I had from Mr. Friedman’s book. No Web site had photos, or even a good description. All agreed the Shanghai Moon’s whereabouts were unknown; few agreed on its last known location. In a chat room