“I will never, never, never listen to you again.”
In Interview One at the Fifth Precinct, Bill and I watched Mary pace, or more like stomp, back and forth. Bill wasn’t saying anything, probably because he’s smarter than I am. I tried every now and then to apologize, or explain, or offer some optimistic angle on the situation, but eventually even I could see that every word I spoke was making things worse.
“Bullets flying all over the park!” Mary fumed. “You idiots almost got killed! And now Alice Fairchild’s gone, and the shooter’s gone, and citizens could have been shot, and cops could have been shot! And we have nothing!”
She yanked out a chair, took a breath, and said, “All right, go over it again. This time with details.”
“Only if you’re really going to listen.”
“Listen? So you can try one more time to twist everything and make me think it was okay to let you walk head-on into this ludicrous-All right! All right. I’m listening.”
My words edged out as though any quick sound might detonate her. When she sat seething but silent, I got more articulate, expanding the outline we’d already sketched. I told her everything Alice had said, including her plan to return the Shanghai Moon to Mr. Chen.
“My God, that’s insane! I’m surprised you didn’t go along with it.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Really? Now that I think about it, I’m surprised you didn’t dream it up. And you didn’t make her tell you where Wong Pan is, or how they get in touch?”
That was more like a disgusted statement of fact than a question, but I answered it anyway. “I don’t think she knows where he is. Obviously they talk by phone. If you tapped her cell-”
“You think we haven’t tried? She’s a lawyer and an American citizen and not a terrorist. You tell me where to find a judge to authorize that.” She turned to Bill. “What about you?”
“Me? If I were a judge I’d authorize it. I’d authorize anything you wanted.”
Mary stared. “Oh, the homegirl and the stand-up comic! What a team!”
“I’m sorry,” Bill said. “I’m not giving you a hard time.”
“No? What was that, then?”
“I don’t mean to. But I have nothing to add to what I already added to what Lydia said.”
“You’re both useless, you know that? The only good thing is, no one was hurt. I don’t mean you two. I’m tempted to hurt you myself. But citizens or cops. Next time someone sets you up to shoot you, Lydia, have them do it someplace private, okay? Oh, now, what could possibly be funny?”
“I just remembered how careful I was not to scratch my head. But Alice adjusted her hat right before the shots. Maybe she was using the same signal.” When all Mary did was stare, I said, “Okay, it’s the adrenaline talking.”
Maybe to keep my foot from getting any deeper into my mouth, Bill asked, “Mary? What if Lydia wasn’t the target?”
“What, you think it was you? Some yellow power gang doesn’t want whitey in the park?”
Being more generous than I am, he ignored her sarcasm. “If Alice set it up, why put herself in the middle? Whoever fired those shots could easily have done it while we were waiting. Maybe she was the target.”
“Alice? Who, Wong Pan? You say he needs her to unload the Shanghai Moon.”
“She thinks he does. But what if he’s decided he doesn’t? If he’s figured out who Chen is, or doesn’t care because he’s found another buyer?”
Mary glowered but stopped yelling, so I chimed in. “Or he doesn’t care because, buyer or not, Alice knows too much. Maybe he trailed her to the park.”
“How did he pick her up?”
“She’s probably not the world’s best track-coverer. Maybe he hung around the Waldorf dressed as a bellhop. Okay, I don’t mean literally, but it couldn’t have been real hard.”
“Well, this is just great. We’re saying Wong Pan killed two people, he just tried to kill another, we don’t know where he is, we don’t know where Alice is, and we don’t know what’ll happen next.”
“We may,” said Bill.
“What are you talking about?”
“She seemed pretty serious about wanting to make up for what happened. Manic about it, even. She may try it anyway.”
“What? Returning the Shanghai Moon to Chen?”
“It’s possible.”
“But if she didn’t set you guys up, she must have figured out by now she was the target and Wong Pan was the shooter.”
“So? Suppose she calls him, says, ‘Knock off trying to kill me, we’ll both make a fortune.’ She says to deliver her share to a post office box or something. He’d agree, with no intention of cutting her in, but she’ll have no intention of collecting. She’ll wait until Chen has the Shanghai Moon. Then she’ll call the cops.”
“That sounds crazy.”
“She may be crazy,” I pointed out. “Even she said so.”
Mary let a few moments pass. “So with the surveillance I have on Chen, I may get something yet.” She stood. “You two? Get out. Go home. Pretend we never met.”
“You want a cup of tea?” Bill asked as we left the precinct.
“No. I want to do something useful.”
“At one A.M.?”
“With my life. Maybe I should join the Peace Corps.”
“Maybe you should go home and go to bed.”
“How would that be useful?”
“You’d wake up fresh and sharp, ready to go out and fight crime.”
“Or create it. One thing Alice said is true: It just keeps getting worse and worse.”
“That’s your fault?”
“I’m not helping.”
“You don’t know that.”
“May I point out I just got us into a situation where bullets were flying all over a public park? My best friend lost a collar she’d have looked good making. The jewelry I was hired to trace hasn’t turned up, and some innocent old men might be about to get caught in a dangerous sting dreamed up by a client I’ve lost track of, who’s admitted to being involved with someone who’s admitted to being a killer. The killer, let me also point out, of the man I was working with.”
“For.”
“What?”
“You were working for Joel. He got you involved in this case.”
I stopped and eyed him accusingly. “Are you trying to tell me I’m not the center of the universe?”
“Of course you are. But things also happen on the periphery of the universe that have nothing to do with the center.”
“You,” I pronounced, “are full of baloney.”
“No argument from me.” Bill checked his watch and fished his phone from his pocket.
“It’s one A.M. Who’re you calling?”
He was busy identifying himself to whoever he was calling, so he didn’t answer. He listened. He said, “Are you sure?” and “Thank you.” He clicked off and turned to me. “Bingo.”
“Bingo what?”
“I told you I was doing legwork. That was payoff.”
“For?”
“Well, I got to wondering: If Wong Pan killed Joel, how did he get past security and up to Joel’s office?”
“In that building it’s not hard.”
“No, but it might be worth knowing. So I hit the Chinese restaurants around there and showed his photo. Nothing. But one’s open all night. They told me to call back when the night manager was in. He just had a look at the photo. He says that guy got a takeout order of General Tso’s chicken a few mornings ago. He remembers because the guy didn’t seem to care what he ordered. And he didn’t seem to care what it cost. And he ordered in Shanghai-accented English.”
I called Mary. “I have a peace offering.”
“What? A Trojan horse?”
I told her anyway. “He pretended to be a deliveryman,” I finished. “I bet no one in the building even registered they saw him.”
“How did Bill get this?” Mary wasn’t done being mad yet. “He didn’t throw around words like ‘government’ and ‘INS,’ did he?”
“More likely words like ‘fifty bucks.’ But Mary, this is something Mulgrew should have thought of. You can give it to Captain Mentzinger.”
“Why? So he’ll think you guys are smart?”
“No. So he’ll think you are.”
By the time we hung up, she was on her way to being mollified, though she wasn’t about to admit it.
“So are you good like this all the time, or what?” I asked Bill as we headed down a sweltering and silent Elizabeth Street.
“Modesty forbids the truth.”
“I’m annoyed at myself, though. I should have thought of this.”
“It’s a good thing you didn’t. If you thought of everything, what would you need me for?”
I was a little surprised when I came up with a couple of answers to that. But not when I kept them to myself.
Then I did go home. Which turned out to be odd in its own way.
My mother keeps three of the five locks on our door locked at any given time, changing the formula weekly, on the theory that the bad guys will lock the unlocked ones as they pick them. Pulling my key gently out of the last one, which rattles, I stepped in, slipped off my shoes, and tiptoed into the living room. I was halfway across before I remembered there was no need: My mother wasn’t here. “Oh,” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything smarter. I flipped the light on. Everything looked the same as when we’d left. And why shouldn’t it? I got ready for bed, trying to think if I’d ever spent the night alone in this apartment. When I was a kid and Ted and Elliot were in high school, my parents would visit cousins, leaving us alone for a night or two, but there were five of us. In college I had my own apartment in Queens for two years, and I’ve stayed in hotels, and house-sat and pet-sat for friends lots of times, so I’ve spent the night alone in a lot of places. None of that ever seemed weird.
But this did.
I woke later than usual, after a night of uneasy dreams: shifting images of dark places, a sense of trying to cover a long distance in time I knew was too short. A hovering, sneering, disembodied moon face. In the kitchen I found no boiled water: Well, who’d have put the kettle on? I did that, then whipped it off to dump out the extra water I’d run to make the quart for my mother’s thermos. I waved to old Chow Lun leaning on his pillow and, after investigating the fridge, sliced some scallions for congee.
Drinking tea, I ignored the echoing emptiness of the apartment and tried to decide what to make of the day. I didn’t get far before the red kitchen phone rang.
“Hey, Lyd, it’s Ted.”
My heart pounded. “Everything okay with Ma?”
“Sure. She just wanted me to check up on you.”
“On me? What could have happened to me since last night?”
“Whatever you thought was going to happen to her. But this isn’t real, right? That something dangerous is going on? It’s a trick to get Ma to come back out here, isn’t it?”
Two of my brothers don’t like my job because they worry about me; one enjoys the idea of a PI sister, and besides, he says I should do whatever I want; and one thinks I never do anything right at all and wants me to leave this profession before I embarrass the family. Ted, the eldest, is in the first group. I deflected his question with another.
“Is she driving you nuts?”
“No, she settled right back in downstairs. Went out first thing this morning to check on her melon vines.”
“Oh.” I felt a pang I couldn’t explain. “Is that why she didn’t call me herself?”
“The kids are helping her stake them. But she wanted me to tell you she talked to Clifford Kwan’s mother this morning. Isn’t that Armpit?”
“Yes, remember him?” Ted’s eight years older than I am, so our memories of childhood are sometimes different. He, for example, remembers our mother with dark hair. By the time I came along, her older children had already turned her whole head gray. Or so she tells it.
But this time Ted and I were singing the same tune. “Sure I do. Nasty little brat. I guess he never straightened out?”
“Not even close. Why do you say that, though? Did Ma say something about him?”
“Only that I should tell you he’s breaking his mother’s heart worse than ever, or something like that. He was supposed to go out to Leonia for a big family picnic this afternoon, but he called and said he couldn’t make it. His brothers and sisters are all going, so his mom’s upset.”
“Me, I think she should count her blessings.”
“Yeah, but you know mothers. She really wanted him to go because his nephews will be there and she thought playing with them might awaken some family feeling in him.”
“Not likely. There’s no one on what passes for Armpit’s mind but himself.”
“That may not be entirely accurate.” Ted’s a professor of organic chemistry, so he can be a little pedantic. “His excuse broke his mother’s heart even more. He said something important was going on in Chinatown today that he had to be there for. He wouldn’t tell her what, but he said his new brothers needed him.”
“His new brothers? He used those words?”
“According to Ma, that means the White Eagles. Don’t you think she’s exaggerating, though? Clifford? In a real gang?”
I just said, “Maybe.”
“His mom asked, what did he mean his new brothers needed him, what about his old brothers? But Clifford said they’d never liked him anyway.”
I was sure they hadn’t and were better men for it. I thanked Ted, hung up, and speed-dialed Mary.
“No” was how she answered.
“It’s today,” I said before she could hang up.
“What is?”
“Whatever the White Eagles are up to. Armpit canceled out on a picnic at his mom’s.”
“Canceled out on a picnic? And that makes you think-”
“He said something big was happening. In Chinatown, today. That his new brothers needed him for.”
“That could be a wet T-shirt party.”
“You know I’m right.”
“I know you’d better stay away from the White Eagles. I’ll check it out, but if it turns out to be anything, I don’t want you there.” Then she said it again in Cantonese.
“Hey, that was good.”
“You want to hear it in Spanish?”
“I think I get it. But Mary, what about Mr. Chen and Wong Pan?”
“What about them?”
“Mary! You said you’d keep an eye on Mr. Chen! Because Wong Pan might-”
“Okay, okay, I was just giving you a hard time. We’re surveilling his shop. If he leaves we’ll follow him. You keep away from him, too.”
“Oh, you’re acting like such a cop! And ‘surveill’ isn’t a word, you know.”
“And you’re acting like an English teacher! Thinking of changing professions?”
“No, teaching’s way too dangerous for me.”
Mary emphasized the danger I’d be in if I were anywhere near the White Eagles today-“and I don’t mean from the White Eagles”-and we said good-bye, in a manner I thought was fairly civilized for threatener and threatenee. I briefly debated whether it was too early to call Bill, decided to call anyway, and had just punched his number on the kitchen phone when my cell phone rang.
“Smith,” came the rumble in my kitchen phone ear.
“I’ll call you back.” I hung up that one up and flipped open the other.
“Good morning, Ms. Chin. David Rosenberg here. I hope I’m not calling too early?”
“Mr. Rosenberg! Good to hear from you. No, it’s not too early at all. How can I help you?”
“I’ve just had a call from one of my reporters in Zurich. He’s been doing the background on Alice Fairchild that you asked for. Nothing he’s found so far is particularly surprising, but I thought you’d like to hear it.”
“Yes, I certainly would.”
“Born Shanghai 1938. Father James Fairchild, mother Frances Fairchild, both Methodist missionaries. One sister, Joan Fairchild Conrad, born 1939. I met her years ago.”
“Yes, I remember you mentioned that.” I tucked the phone onto my shoulder and plopped congee into a bowl. “You said they were Mutt and Jeff. Different from each other.” Lydia Chin, queen of the cultural reference.
“Very much. Joan’s thin and frail, which I gather she always was, and more so lately, some kind of chronic lung problem from those days. Although before she retired she taught high school, so I imagine she’s got a certain toughness. I remember her as humorous and outgoing. The type with a twinkle in her eye.”
“Where does she live?”
“Sharon, Massachusetts. Outside Boston. Her husband died six years ago.”
“Is that where Alice grew up, around Boston?”
“Yes. The Fairchilds left China in November 1945, as soon as they could after the camps were opened. They were put on one of the first ships out-both children were sick, it seems. The family settled in Sharon. Alice went on to law school-unusual for a woman of her day-and married. They divorced after eight years, apparently on amicable terms.”
“Does she have children?”
“No.”
David Rosenberg went on detailing Alice’s career, including her move to Zurich in the eighties and her growing expertise in Holocaust asset recovery. “She’s written a few articles for law journals on the fine points of that work. I’ve asked my staff to pull them. I’ll send them to you.”
“I’d appreciate that. Anything else?”
“Well, I took a look at her financials. Not my reporter, me, from here. It just seemed like the thing to do.”
“Good instincts.”
“I may be hidebound management now, but I did start out pounding the pavement. However, I have to admit everything I found seems in order.”
“So she’s not mortgaged to the hilt, anything like that?”
“Hardly. Not wealthy, but solid. She did take a hit five years ago when the capital markets fell. She’d overreached. For an estate planner it was a touch reckless, the sort of speculation that’s all right when you’re young and have decades to recover, but later you advise clients against it. Maybe she was feeling cocky.”
“But it didn’t cause her problems?”
“If things had gone her way, she’d be much closer to wealth than she is. But even though it was a large sum, she also kept a reasonable amount back. She can certainly maintain her lifestyle on what remains. Maybe that’s why she did it.”
“Why?”
“She was getting older, she had enough to live on. Why not take a flutter?”
“I guess I can see that. So it looks like she’s more or less what she claims to be.” And a number of things she didn’t mention, besides. “Do you have contact information for her sister? Just to be thorough.”
He did. I thanked him, hung up, and dialed Joan Conrad née Fairchild’s number, not sure why. After all, if I was looking for reasons to be suspicious of Alice, I didn’t need to go back any further than this week.
My mother’s always saying old women don’t need much sleep. That may be true, or maybe Joan Conrad was just, like me, an early riser. In any case, she certainly sounded chipper answering the phone.
“Good morning, Mrs. Conrad,” I said in my best outside-Chinatown accent. I felt bad already that I was about to lie to her. But what was I supposed to do, tell her her sister was a jewel thief and a forger and I was a PI snooping into her past? “My name’s Liz Russell and I’m a doctoral student at Columbia doing research for my thesis. I’m studying modern Chinese history with a focus on the Chinese civil war as it overlapped with World War II. I understand you were in Shanghai in those years, and I wonder whether you’d have time to answer a few questions.”
“Well, my goodness.” There followed a brief pause as Joan Conrad digested everything I’d thrown at her. “Tell me again, dear-you’re writing a thesis?” Her voice was chirpy and soft, like a breathless bird.
“Yes, ma’am. I’m focusing on the relationships among the Japanese occupiers, their German allies, and the two sides in the civil war.” I was on a roll. “I know you were a child in those years-”
“My, I certainly was. However did you find me?”
“I have records from some of the Japanese internment camps. They’re not complete, but I’ve been trying to track down people who were young enough then to give me a chance of finding them now.”
I heard a chuckle. “You mean we old fossils who haven’t yet shuffled off this mortal coil.”
“Oh, I-”
“That’s all right, dear, it’s not news to me that I’m gaining on Methuselah.” A delicate coughing fit interrupted her. I heard another voice in the room, and waited. Joan Conrad returned. “I’m sorry, dear. Yes, thank you, Maria, please leave it here. Yes, I promise I’ll drink it all!” To me again: “Such a tyrant! But a wonderful girl, my Maria.”
“Your daughter?”
“Heavens, no. My caregiver. That’s the word they use now. I think it’s lovely, and she does give me such good care! But I’m sorry, you were asking about Shanghai, weren’t you? For your thesis. About the Japanese and the Germans.”
“And the camp.”
“Oh, but I was such a little girl when we went to the camp. I didn’t know anything about the Japanese except that they sent us there. The Germans, and the Chinese armies-why, they might as well have been on Mars. It was the Americans we were waiting for. Waiting and waiting.”
“That’s all part of what I want to know. How much the people in the camps knew about what was going on and how that was reflected in the camp society. First, can you verify for me which camp your family was in? It was you, your parents, and your sister, right?” I could have asked more directly, but I didn’t know how good Joan Conrad’s memory was, and I didn’t want to plant suggestions.
Apparently, though, her memory was fine. “They called it Chapei camp. The buildings had been built as Great China University, but it hadn’t been that in years.”
Bingo! Keeping my voice level, I said, “Chapei, yes. That camp particularly interests me for my research because it’s one of the few where they held Germans.”
“Germans?”
“For example, a woman and child. A Frau Ulrich, wife of a German officer.”
“Oh, you mean poor Mrs. Ulrich! Goodness, I haven’t thought of her in years.” Another round of coughing broke into Joan Conrad’s reminiscences. “Excuse me, dear.”
“Are you all right?”
“Oh, yes, of course. Mrs. Ulrich!” she marveled. “My, she was beautiful. But I think she was the only German I knew.”
“And her child, isn’t that right?”
“Did she have a child?” A note of doubt wavered in Joan Conrad’s voice. Maybe her memory wasn’t so perfect after all.
“The child died about a year after they’d come to the camp. A few months after Mrs. Ulrich herself.”
“Died. Yes, I suppose so. I think that’s right.” After a moment, in a steadier voice, Joan Conrad said, “Mrs. Ulrich was a friend of my mother’s, you know.” She continued in her cheerful vein; I guessed she was back on solid ground. “She lived in the next room. Oh, but they weren’t really rooms! The building we were in had been a dormitory, you see. Most families had individual rooms, but when we came those were occupied. We were put into the big lounge with some other families. The men were given asphalt boards and old wood, and everyone hammered and sawed. They divided it like a rabbit warren, a room for each family and sometimes dividers inside those, too. Mrs. Ulrich was there without her husband, so my father and some of the others built her room. You could hear everything-people talking, babies crying. Even the men snoring! At the mission in Shanghai my sister and I…” Again, a hesitation. “We’d each had our own rooms there. But the camp, with everyone on top of each other! And the food was monotonous and didn’t taste good. At first it was an adventure, but then I wanted to go home.”
Joan Conrad’s description of Chapei Camp sounded just like Rosalie’s account of the Jewish refugees’ shelter. Displaced people, on top of each other, disoriented, frightened, and missing home: everyone’s story the same.
But not exactly the same. Sometimes there were surprises. Like the fact that Frau Ulrich, wife of the intended recipient of the Shanghai Moon, had lived in the same room as Alice Fairchild.
“Mrs. Conrad, can you remember anything about Mrs. Ulrich? I’m interested in her case.”
“Oh, I was so young… but I remember she was glamorous! The women I was used to were missionaries, very plain, you see. Mrs. Ulrich worked at keeping up appearances. She’d brought cosmetics to the camp, rouge and powder and all sorts of things missionary children didn’t see. She hadn’t packed very practically. As though she weren’t intending to be there long. Nobody was, of course not, but we weren’t allowed to bring much, so most people packed clothes and personal items, practical things. But now that I think of it, Mrs. Ulrich had a number of suitcases. I don’t know how many, but more than one. We were only allowed one each, the Japanese made that rule. I remember because my sister and I had to both sit on my suitcase to close it again after I opened it to sneak my teddy bear in. But Mrs. Ulrich had more.”
“Maybe because she was German? Maybe the Japanese treated her better than they treated Americans, could that be?”
“You know, dear, I think you’re right. I do remember the guards bowed to her. Not that that kept them from ordering her around. And she certainly didn’t feel well treated. I was a bit frightened of her, actually, as I think about it. Oh, such times are coming back to me!”
“Why were you frightened?”
“She was angry. All the time, so angry. My mother was usually able to calm her with a word or a cup of tea, but she never stopped being angry even when she didn’t act it. Children sense that sort of thing.”
“Angry at who? The Japanese?”
“Whom, dear,” Joan Conrad said mildly. “At the graduate level there’s really no excuse for sloppy grammar and syntax.”
“Yes, my adviser is always telling me that. Whom was Mrs. Ulrich angry at?”
“With whom was she angry, you mean. Partly the Japanese, of course, the way all the adults were. She was also furious with her husband. I remember that! He wasn’t in the camp. I think she might have lost him, though I’m not sure. But, no, that must be wrong, because I can’t imagine she’d speak so badly of him if he’d passed away! And she did harp on it. What a stupid, greedy man he was. She’d say that to anyone who’d listen. That it was his fault they were there at all-” She stopped. “They! She said ‘they’! ‘We,’ I mean. Oh, I can hear her, that soft German accent she had. Not one of the grating ones, but the other kind. ‘Vee vouldn’t be here iff he vassn’t so greedy.’ It would have been nice to listen to her if I hadn’t felt frightened. But she said ‘we’! If her husband wasn’t there, you must be right. She must have had a child, mustn’t she? Oh, my. And toys. In those suitcases, toys, yes, yes. The little wooden horse, I still have it, over there on the shelf with my teddy bear. From one of her suitcases.” Again, Joan Conrad’s voice faltered. “The wooden horse… And Alice, Alice has a top… In any case, if she had toys she must have had a child. But I don’t remember. I’m sorry, my dear. I was young… some of those memories…”
“I understand. The camps were difficult places, I know.”
“Harder for the adults than the children, though. Children are so resilient! We played marbles and tops in the dust. We made up games and had dolls that we brought with us or that our mothers made from sticks and rags. Even when we were ill, and we were ill most of the time. Dysentery, croup… That’s where my cough came from-and here it comes again.” I waited while she coughed; then she laughed. “That was well timed, wasn’t it?”
“You seem very comfortable with your memories of those days, Mrs. Conrad.”
“Oh, children adjust. It just became our life. It was hardest toward the end, when there wasn’t much to eat… to this day I can’t bear sweet potatoes. I can’t get over the idea they have worms in them! The scariest part, I think, was that the adults were frightened. During roll call, when if you’d done something against the rules you’d get summoned for punishment. You never knew if you’d done anything until then, you see. Or the Japanese would order us to assemble when something had happened that made them angry, in the war, I mean, not the camp. Then someone would get punished, an American or English person would be beaten, because of where their country’s planes had dropped a bomb. Sometimes rations would get cut, or there’d be no water for a day or two. Of course, I didn’t know about those things then, I mean the reasons why these scary things happened. For us, for the children, it was just our life. And Alice always took care of me, so I was shielded more than most.” She paused. “Oh, dear. Is any of this what you wanted to know? Am I helping you at all?”
“Oh, very much. This is fascinating. May I ask you about something specific that’s come up in my research? Something curious?”
“Yes, of course.”
I took a breath and, trying for no change in my voice, asked, “Mrs. Conrad, have you ever heard of a gem called the Shanghai Moon?”
“The Shanghai Moon… That rings a faint bell, but no more. Is it something I should remember? Oh, dear.”
“Maybe not. It’s just something I’ve come across. It was a brooch, very valuable, and there was a rumor it was in Chapei Camp.”
“The Japanese had it, you mean?”
“No, actually, the story I read said a prisoner might have had it.”
“Oh, I don’t think that’s possible. None of us had anything valuable. The Japanese took all that, you see. For safekeeping, they said, though of course it never came back.”
“What if someone had hidden it? Didn’t anyone conceal anything?”
“In the beginning, I think so. A widowed friend of my mother’s hid her wedding ring. But when her children got sick, she sold it to the camp commander for medicine. And another woman, alone and very beautiful… Miss Montgomery, she’d been a Sunday school teacher, yes, that was her name! One day she was gone, and I heard some adults say the Japanese had suddenly discovered she wasn’t American, but Swiss, and put her on a repatriation ship. The way they were talking, I knew something was odd, but I didn’t know what. Later I learned everyone thought she’d bought her way out of the camp. She had nothing valuable, though, and I couldn’t imagine what she’d sold.” Mrs. Conrad said that sadly, letting me know that now, she could.
“So the Shanghai Moon…?” I said gently.
“No, dear, I don’t know about it. But I don’t think anyone in the camp had it. No matter how much they might have wanted to hold on to it when they arrived, after the first year, or the second, they would have given it and much more to get out.”
We talked some more, Joan Conrad offering whatever memories she had, me gently steering the conversation, until I was finally convinced she had no further light to shed.
“Mrs. Conrad, I want to thank you very much. You’ve been an invaluable aid to my research. If I can ask you one more thing?”
“You may, dear. You certainly may.”
“Yes, thank you. Your sister, Alice. I’d like to speak to her, too. Can you tell me how to find her?”
“Oh, Alice lives in Zurich now. She’s a lawyer. But you may be lucky. She’s in the U.S. at the moment, in New York. Isn’t that where you said you were?”
“Yes, at Columbia.”
“Good for you! You must be quite bright, studying at such a prestigious university. All the more reason to take care with your language usage. Yes, Alice is staying at the Waldorf-Astoria. Do you know where that is?”
“Yes, I do.”
“I’m not sure how much longer she’ll be there. She was up here yesterday, just for the day.”
Oh? When she said she was in Washington?
“She comes over every few months. She’s such a dear, but my goodness! I’ve told her she doesn’t have to make that costly long trip just to tell me to take my medicine! Maria will certainly do that!” She laughed. “But Alice has always taken such good care of me, since we were little. And now that I’m alone… Well, I do enjoy seeing her, so I suppose I don’t put my foot down the way I ought. In any case, try her at the Waldorf.”
“Thank you, I will. Could I-may I also have her address in Zurich? In case I miss her?”
“Of course you may.” She all but audibly beamed at my self-correction. “I’ll get it for you.” I heard the phone clunk down, and before long she was back. She read off an address and phone number in Zurich, both the same as on Alice’s card.
“Thank you. And I have just one more question.”
“Ask as many as you like. This has been so interesting. You know, when we came back, what with the horrible news from the concentration camps in Europe, and the prisoner of war camps in the Philippines and so on, no one wanted to listen to us talk about our war. Most people didn’t even know where Shanghai was. My parents never spoke about the camp, either. I suppose they didn’t want to bring up bad memories. And our family had other things to adjust to, after all. Alice and I had never been to America. We saw snow! And we were both sick when we got here. Then we got well and we started going to school and that was that. So I haven’t talked about it very much at all. So many memories! Even if most of them are muddled.” She stopped, coughed, then said, “Yes, I’m sorry, dear. You had another question?”
The needle on my guilt-o-meter had flown into the red zone, but I asked my question anyway. “After people died, what became of the things they’d brought with them? Mrs. Ulrich, for example. What would have happened to her suitcases?”
“Her suitcases?” A pause. “This won’t sound very nice, I’m afraid. I don’t remember about Mrs. Ulrich’s things specifically. But when people passed on, their things were… divided up. None of us had enough, you see. Clothes, or shoes, blankets, toiletries, medicines. Hairbrushes or sewing kits. Even the suitcases themselves-people made furniture from them, and cribs for the babies. So that would have been what happened. When poor Mrs. Ulrich took ill she died very quickly, a matter of days, I think. My mother was probably in charge of deciding what to do with her things, and they were put to good use, I’ve no doubt about that.”
I thanked her, promising to call again if my research needed anything else, and hung up. It crossed my mind she might call Alice and gush about the nice young graduate student from New York who was so interested in Shanghai. Well, it couldn’t be helped. What possible rationale could I give for asking her to keep mum?
I poured a cup of tea and thought about Mrs. Ulrich’s things being put to good use. It was likely they had been, but unlikely that, if she’d had the Shanghai Moon, anyone had knowingly ended up with it and kept it secret all these years. Why would they? But unknowingly? Could someone have it now-sewn into Mrs. Ulrich’s sewing kit, concealed in one of her many suitcases the way Rosalie and Paul had hidden Elke’s jewelry? Could it be languishing in some airless attic, tossed onto a moldy pile of World War II keepsakes? That was possible, and if so it was as good as gone forever. But that left Bill’s question unanswered: If Frau Ulrich had had the Shanghai Moon, or even knew where to find it, why hadn’t she used it to buy her way out of the camp?
So probably she hadn’t had it and couldn’t have laid her hands on it. But it was clearly way beyond coincidence that Alice had been locked in the same camp, in the same room, with the Ulrichs. Especially since that fact, like so many other things-say, the existence of the Shanghai Moon itself-was one Alice had failed to mention. But if something from those days gave her a clue to where the Shanghai Moon was now, why had it taken this long, and the discovery of Rosalie’s other jewelry, to get her moving on it? And if, as Wong Pan claimed, it had been in a secret compartment with the other jewelry all along, and he had it now, what was I supposed to make of Alice’s relationship with the Ulrichs? Or of Zhang Li’s contention, echoed by his brother C. D. Zhang, that it was stolen in a robbery in 1949?
I called Bill.
“Who’re you?” he drawled.
“I’m sorry.”
“And I’m pissed off. Pleased to meet you.”
“Are you really?”
“Pleased to meet you? I already know you. So I wasn’t surprised that you called and woke me to tell me you’d call me back. So no, I’m not really pissed off.”
That being the case, I told him about my morning.
“Whoa. You’ve been busy. Maybe there’s something to this early morning thing after all.”
“You think?”
“No. But this business about Alice Fairchild and the Ulrichs-God, I wish I knew what it means.”
“So do I. The other thing I wish I knew is what the White Eagles are going to be up to this afternoon.”
“You think this is it? The big score?”
“Don’t you? Mary said we have to stay away. But-”
“No buts. If the NYPD is all over it, we’re not. For one thing, it may have nothing to do with us, with this case. And come on, Mary will tell you all about it.”
“If she ever starts speaking to me again.”
“Doesn’t she owe you one, for calling me in the first place?”
“She doesn’t see it like that. Bill?”
“Uh-huh?” I could hear the snap of a match as he lit a cigarette.
“Do you think my mother could have done that on purpose? Called Armpit’s mother to see if she could find out anything to help me?”
Silence while he drew in that first nicotine hit. “I’d say yes.”
“But this is my mother!”
“Did she have any other reason to speak to Armpit’s mother?”
“Not that I know of. But…” I couldn’t think of anything more to explain my inability to believe this than “This is my mother.”