Reflecting the Sky - Softcover

Rozan, S. J.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312981341 ISBN 13: 9780312981341

Verlag: Minotaur Books, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

S. J. Rozan is widely regarded as one of the finest crime writers to emerge in the past decade. Praised by critics and colleagues alike, her works have been finalists for most of the major awards and have won both the Shamus and the Anthony Awards for Best Novel. Now, with Reflecting the Sky, she has written her finest, most broad-ranging novel to date.

Lydia Chin, a Chinese-American private investigator in her late twenties, is hired by Grandfather Gao, one of the most respected figures in New York City's Chinatown, for what appears to be a simple task. Lydia, along with her professional partner Bill Smith, is to fly to Hong Kong to deliver a family heirloom to the young grandson of a recently deceased colleague of Grandfather Gao. They arrive in Hong Kong safely but before they can deliver the heirloom, the grandson is kidnapped and two, separate ransom demands are made. While the family of the kidnapped boy tries to freeze them out, Lydia and Bill must quickly learn their way around a place where the rules are different, the stakes are high, and the cost of failure is too dire to imagine.

 

Reflecting the Sky is a 2002 Edgar Award Nominee for Best Novel.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

S.J. Rozan is the author of six previous novels featuring Bill Smith and Lydia Chin. She has won both the Anthony Award for Best Novel and the Shamus Award for Best Novel (the only other woman besides Sue Grafton to win the Shamus), and has been nominated for the Edgar Award. An architect, she was born, raised, and lives in New York City.

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Reflecting the Sky

one

Damp, soupy heat washed over me as I pushed out through the revolving door. The bright morning glare was already hazed up by the shimmering exhaust of a river of cars, buses, and trucks. I looked left, looked right, got my bearings, and headed briskly down the sidewalk.

"Come on!" I turned to yell to my partner, Bill Smith, who still stood, looking a little groggy, his hands in his pockets, just gazing around. "Relive your misspent youth some other time! I don't want to be late."

With muttered words I was just as happy not to hear, he lurched down the sidewalk after me. Jostling, rushing pedestrians, many of them yelling into their cell phones, hurried past in both directions, making me feel like I had to work to keep my footing or I'd be tossed on their tide and swept away. Bill caught up to me as I stopped at the first corner, waiting with a crowd eight deep for the light to change.

"Late is extremely unlikely," he grumbled, taking advantage of the momentary halt in our forward charge to light a cigarette. "Impolitely early, maybe. We're twenty-five minutes ahead of even your obsessive-compulsive schedule. Will you slow down? And how do you know where you're going? I thought I was supposed to be your native guide."

"I don't know what you're supposed to be doing," I said as the light turned green and the crowd surged forward, "but it can't be guiding me around a place you haven't been in for twenty years."

A horn blasted as the last stragglers from our pedestrian stream leaped up onto the curb to avoid being mashed by a bus. The hiss and rumble of tires, the squeal of bus brakes, and the endless rattle of jackhammers from nearby construction made conversation difficult, but I was tookeyed up to talk, anyway. The wind shifted, stirring the smells of diesel fuel and salt water into the scents of softened asphalt and frying pork already thick in the air. They were exciting smells, and it was an exciting morning, all the rushing, rumbling, surging, and yelling in the brightness. Though I didn't see, really, why I should be so affected by it. I've spent my entire life negotiating traffic, noise, glare, and sidewalks. I'm Lydia Chin, born and raised in Chinatown, a genuine native New Yorker.

Of course, this wasn't New York. This was Hong Kong, City of Life.

Life, pork, exhaust, and pedestrians. Bill matched his pace to mine and we hurried down the sidewalk in the sticky heat. Being from Chinatown, I was better at this business of threading through dense, moving crowds of Chinese people than he was, though the streams on the sidewalks of home had never flowed this fast. We kept being separated, coming together, getting pushed apart again. But we both knew where we were going--he because he had been here before, on R and R leaves in the navy; me because I had been studying maps for a week--and we ended up together and exactly where we wanted to be, at the turnstiles of the Star Ferry.

At which point I glanced at my watch, and then, because I know my watch, at his. "Wait," I said. "As you so accurately, although crabbily, pointed out, we're still early. The ferries run every eight minutes. Let's take the next one. I want to see."

He raised his eyebrows and sighed theatrically, but I didn't care. Leaving him to follow, I zipped past the English-language bookstore, the Japanese snack shop, the newspaper vendors and the public bathrooms. The ferry terminal buildings gave way to an open promenade with a railing, and suddenly there was the Hong Kong skyline shining across the harbor.

It was as though someone had unrolled New York, slapped it with dozens of huge, neon brand-name signs visible even in the hazy sunshine, and spread it against a backdropof mountains along a waterfront so long I had to turn my head way to the left and then way to the right to see the ends of it. Water sparkled in the sun, lapping against the seawall we were standing on. The frothy wakes churned up by barges, fishing boats, great white yachts, and tiny green sampans heading both ways through the harbor crisscrossed the trails of ferries plowing back and forth across it, from Hong Kong Island, where we were going, to the tip of the Kowloon Peninsula, where we were. The ferry we'd almost taken tooted its horn as it nosed out of its berth, and from way off to the right came a much deeper sound, some other horn saying something in the universal language of ships.

"Close your mouth," Bill said. "People will know you're a tourist."

"I'm not a tourist. We're here on business. And why didn't you tell me it was this huge?"

He gazed across the harbor. "When I was here, it ended about there." He pointed with both hands at the limits of a much shorter waterfront. "And none of the biggest skyscrapers were there, and neither was that." That was a low, swoopy building, all metallic curves and wings, shining in the sun, right in the center, right on the water. "But the impression was the same. I stood there with my mouth open, too."

"My mouth is not open. I'm Lydia Chin. Stuff like this doesn't impress me," I said, unable to take my eyes from the view across the water.

"I know," Bill said. "That's one of your best characteristics, how hard you are to impress." He looked at his watch. "Now we're right on schedule. We'd better go, or we actually will be late, and you'll blame me."

"Well, it'll be your fault," I said, tearing myself away from the skyline, turning to hurry back to the ferry. "You're the one with the good watch."

"Maybe that's why I'm here," Bill said as we dropped our ridged coins in the ferry turnstile and headed with therest of the crowd up the stairs. "Because I have a watch that works."

"That's an expensive timekeeper." I trotted down the wooden ramp onto the boat and took a seat at the very front so I could see us sail across the harbor. "A business-class ticket and a week in a fancy hotel? It would have been cheaper for Grandfather Gao to buy me a Rolex."

"Or he could have put me in the same hotel room as you. That would have saved him a bundle. In fact, maybe we have a fiduciary duty to our client--"

I gave his fiduciary duty a dirty look and turned back to the opposite shore; we had started to move.

As the harbor breeze blew my hair around, I watched the edges of the skyline sharpen out of the haze. The buildings grew larger and Bill sat silent beside me, watching them too. It really wasn't clear to either of us why he was here. It wasn't, actually, clear to me why either of us was here.

 

What had seemed clear a week ago when I'd first heard this idea was that I was probably hallucinating and had lost my mind. Either that, or Grandfather Gao had lost his; but even suggesting that idea to myself made me so queasy from guilt that I had to calm myself with another sip of his tea.

I still couldn't believe it, though. "You want me to go to Hong Kong?" We were sitting at the low, lion-footed table in Grandfather Gao's Chinatown herb shop, surrounded by the dark wood cabinets with their small drawers, the brass urns and ceramic jars, the mingled smells of sweet incense and dried herbs that were as familiar to me as the flowered upholstery, family pictures, and spicy aroma of my mother's cooking in the Chinatown apartment where I grew up.

"With your partner," Grandfather Gao replied. His voice was its usual calm, somber self, but even in the shop's peaceful shadows I could see him smile at the excited squeak in my voice. He used to smile that same smile whenI was seven, when I made that same excited squeak.

I tried to control myself and act dignified. I liked to think I'd changed in the years since I used to come bouncing into the shop,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Minotaur Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2002
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0312981341
• ISBN 13: 9780312981341
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 384
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar