A Tale About a Tiger and Other Mysterious Events Read online

  "That may make it harder."

  "It's necessary."

  I thought, letting the carpeted silence settle in the room.

  "I can see a way to do this," I finally said. "It may work. I'll need to bring my partner in."

  Kimball seemed taken aback. "I didn't know you had a partner. I was told you were a sole proprietor."

  "I am. So is he. But we work together well, and we work together a lot. If it makes you feel better, think of him as someone I'm hiring to work on the case. It'll cost you the same either way."

  "There's an issue of privacy here, Miss Chin."

  Janet, whose issue it apparently was, nodded, her face very serious.

  "Mr. Kimball, there's an issue of privacy in every case I take. The only way I can think to pull this off—and it's a long shot— will involve two people and some money. And some risk. Bill and I know how to watch each other's backs. Do you want us to try?"

  "What are you thinking about?" Kimball asked.

  I shook my head. "I want to try it out on Bill first. If he thinks it might fly, I'll outline it for you before we start."

  "And you'll keep me apprised throughout the course of the investigation? I really will require that, Miss Chin."

  "I understand that, Mr. Kimball."

  "And your partner? He's a sole proprietor also, you say? No staff to share this with, no chance of accidental slips?"

  "He's been an investigator for twenty years. I think he's learned to keep his mouth shut." Something they don't teach lawyers, I thought. Along with manners.

  "All right," John Kimball said. "Talk to him and get back to me."

  "Fine," I smiled. "Now, so that we all know what we're talking about, shall we discuss fee?"

  The air was cool and breezy but the sun was warm when I came out onto Park. I found a pay phone on the corner, called Bill.

  He was at his office, and picked up the phone.

  "Smith," he said.

  "Chin," said I.

  "So what?"

  "I'm wearing heels."

  "I'll be right over."

  "I'll buy you lunch."

  "That's your best offer?"

  "Wear a tie."

  It would have been a shame to waste the outfit, so we met at the Mesa Grill, a southwestern place in the Flatiron district where the clientele and the prices are usually too upscale for me, but the food is good.

  I took the bus down Fifth; there was a limit to my splurging. The restaurant was bright and airy, ceiling fans spinning, stainless steel handrails and bar. Stainless steel was becoming a theme of the day.

  Bill was waiting when I got there, at a balcony table. We could watch the comings and goings from there. There was, as far as I knew, no need for that in our present circumstances, but it was the table I'd have chosen if I'd gotten there first, too.

  He stood when he saw me, but he didn't pull out my chair. Bill's twelve years older than I am, and sometimes there's tension between the things he does because they're ingrained, and the things I can put up with. But mostly we've worked it out.

  "Hi," I said. He leaned to kiss me. He had on a gray sport jacket and a black knit tie. "You should wear a tie more often."

  "You should take me to lunch more often. What's the occasion?"

  "We have a wealthy client."

  "What you mean we, white man?"

  "No, you're the white man. I'm the Chinese woman."

  "Did I get that wrong again? Damn."

  The waiter came, bringing blue corn chips and salsa loud with cilantro. We ordered, and he left. Bill asked, "Who's our mysterious benefactor, and how do you know I'll take the case?"

  "For the same reason he knew I'd take it. You won't be able to resist." I told him who, and what.

  When I was through, he was quiet, sipping a Mexican beer. "Mitch Ellman," he mused.

  "You see?" I said. "You can't resist the chance to nail the little worm, can you?"

  "He was acquitted," Bill said.

  "Oh, come on! You don't believe there's any chance he didn't kill her, do you?"

  He put his beer down on the sand-colored tablecloth. "No," he said. "I don't."

  The waiter came with lunch. Mine was mesquite-grilled salmon with a yogurt-dill glaze, though as Bill pointed out none of that was native to the southwest except the mesquite. He had a chickpea and tomatillo tortilla.

  "You're only eating that because you can pronounce it," I accused.

  "Possibly true," he agreed. "I'll examine my motives in the small, dark hours. Do you have a plan for Mitch Ellman?"

  "I do." I tasted my fish. It was smoky and smooth. I ate a baby carrot and told Bill my plan.

  He nodded a few times while I was talking, asked a few questions. When I finished, we ate in silence for a while, and I knew he was going over it in his head, looking for trouble spots we would have to deal with.

  "It could work," he said, as I reached my fork into his plate for a bite of tortilla. "You should wear a wire." He thought. "Unless you're afraid he'll find it?"

  "He'll never get that close, if that's what you're really asking."

  "Of course it is."

  "Relax."

  "Okay."

  So we decided to do it. Bill had a few more suggestions, and we played around with the plan through the warm apple tart, which we shared.

  There were risks, of course, and we discussed what they were and how to minimize them. Then we went on. That's one of the great things about Bill: he never suggests, as everyone else who claims to care about me does constantly, that I should avoid something just because it's dangerous.

  Over his coffee and my peppermint tea Bill said, "Tell me about the client."

  I'd already told him who the client was, but I knew he didn't mean that.

  "Him?" I asked. "Or her?"

  "Which one did you dislike more?"

  "I didn't really dislike her,” I began.

  "No," Bill said. "But she gave you hives."

  "Well, she's such a cliché. The terminally shy Chinese girl, afraid of bringing disgrace to her family but dynamite in bed. I have a cultural issue with that."

  "I wouldn't touch it. What about him?"

  "You're the one who should have a cultural issue with him. Pompous rich white guy, patronizing and totally unsympathetic."

  "What's the issue?"

  I gave him a narrow-eyed stare. "If I didn't know you to be, deep in your heart, the perfect model of a caring, empathic, anti-macho post-feminist male—"

  "Yo, my sister, you wanna step outside?"

  "You and who else?"

  "Every other anti-macho post-feminist male in here."

  We looked around at the cutting-edge crowd of photographers and architects finishing their lunch.

  "Well," Bill said, "maybe not. Let's get back to John Kimball."

  "Pompous rich—"

  "I heard that part. So why is he bothering?"

  "With this case? I get the feeling he thinks he's stuck. And resents it, by the way. He's a friend of the family."

  "Why didn't he just send her home? 'Thank you, Janet, but there's nothing that can be done about that case anymore. I suggest you go home and forget it.' "

  "You underestimate the terminally shy Chinese. It took her months to work up to this, and I'm sure the only way she did it was by convincing herself it was more important than saving face. So following up on it becomes The Correct Thing To Do. She'd lose face in her own mind if she let it drop now."

  "And you think he knows that?"

  "She may have told him she'd go to the police or something if he didn't help her. We can be very insistent."

  That, of course, was all wrong, but it seemed right to us at the time.

  When we left the restaurant Bill went back to his office and I went across Fourteenth Street to Paterson Silks. The next few moves were mine; I'd call Bill when everything was set.

  And, of course, I'd call John Kimball, to keep him apprised.

  At Paterson I bought a few yards of w
ine-colored raw silk. I bought thread, light-weight silk for a lining, and a pattern, and took them home to my mother.

  "This is what people wear now?" she sniffed, examining the pattern.

  "Fancy Hong Kong ladies," I said. "Businesswomen. That's a very high-class suit."

  She gave me a long, appraising look. "If you let your hair grow," she said, "if you did something about your nails, and put some color on your face…"

  "I'll fake it, Ma. Can you make the suit?"

  She gave me a look full equally of disapproval and disappointment. "Ling Wan-ju," she said, "did you ever bring me a pattern I couldn't make?"

  It took her four days to make the suit, and it was very high-class indeed. I could never have afforded it at a toney boutique uptown, but my mother spent thirty years as a seamstress in a sweatshop in Chinatown, and the truth is that everything that's sold at those toney boutiques is made in the sweatshops of Chinatown.

  By the time the suit was ready the operation was ready, too.

  I had called the CCA Film Program, spoken to the Director, Harry Lang. I explained who I was and what I wanted. He believed every word of it. Three days later, in my new suit, a pale pink blouse, and a little too much gold jewelry, I was sitting in a fluorescent- lit classroom, being introduced to a special meeting of directing students by Harry Lang.

  "This is Ms. Lydia Chin, of Black Tiger Films in Hong Kong," he told the eighteen or twenty students who had gathered to meet me. CCA, on West Forty-Fifth Street, is one of those specialty institutes you find on every other block in New York. A CCA degree, students hoped, would get you a foot in the door in TV or film; or, in the case of the acting students, in to see agents and casting directors you would otherwise not get close to. CCA did, in fact, have its share of well-known alumni; but it wasn't UCLA.

  "And this," Harry Lang went on, "is her American associate, William Smith."

  "Hardball Productions," Bill said, giving them a California smile. He was California all the way, tan jacket, linen shirt, ironed jeans, cowboy boots. He even wore tiny round sunglasses, and a thin silver chain around his neck with a tiny silver rattlesnake hanging from it.

  "I don't know how many of you are familiar with Black Tiger," Lang was saying. "They're a fairly new studio. About four years old, am I right, Ms. Chin?"

  "Not even," I said with a smile and a British accent, because Hong Kong English is British English. "Closer to three-and-one-half."

  "Yes," said Lang. "Well, for such a short time, you have an impressive record." He was holding in his hand our impressive record, which I'd made up and had printed yesterday, along with the letterhead it was printed on. Copies had been distributed to the students as they arrived.

  "Thank you," I said. "You have to understand that in Hong Kong there is a time pressure which perhaps is not felt in Hollywood." I smiled knowingly at Bill. He smiled knowingly back.

  "The Hong Kong film industry has experienced explosive growth in the last decade," I told the students. "To stay competitive a studio must produce quantity as well as quality. It is not unusual for a director, under contract to a studio, to make four films a year."

  I looked out over my audience, saw all their little eyes light up.

  Mitch Ellman's little eyes, in the second row from the back, were as bright as anyone's.

  He was, I noticed, wearing the ponytail again.

  "However," I went on crisply, "you have all probably heard of Hong Kong's difficulty in holding on to talented professionals in these troubled times. Fear of 1997 is rampant, and many people have, unfortunately, chosen to leave the island.

  "There has developed quite a competitive situation in regards, especially, to directing talent. Many studios, faced with rising demand and a shrinking talent pool, have, I regret to say, resorted to the use of… mediocre talent."

  Bill grinned. Mediocre, his face said, was a kind word.

  "But Black Tiger refuses to do that," I said. "I don't know how many of you are familiar with our films." I looked around the room. All the glowing little eyes were trying hard to look familiar. "If you know us, you will know that there is a… philosophy, a series of threads that runs through our work."

  I could almost hear the mental keyboards clicking as resumes were rewritten to highlight philosophical threads running through people's work.

  "This is a hard world, ladies and gentlemen," I told them, sweeping the room with a long, slow glance. I let my eyes rest, for a moment, on Mitch Ellman's.

  A smile touched the corners of his mouth and his gaze merged with mine with a presumptuous intimacy.

  It made me want to get up and sock him.

  Bill, seeing our eyes meet, frowned slightly, uncrossed his legs, crossed them the other way. I shot him a swift look, began again.

  "Black Tiger is unafraid of the darkest recesses of this world. We believe it is the mission of the media—even the so-called entertainment media—to lift the curtain from the hidden pain in the human soul." I went on like that for a while. They ate it up.

  "However," I said, building to my finale, "it takes a particular sort of artistic vision to do what we do. An unflinching vision, a courageous vision. Without that, works of our sort can become mere exploitation films, violence and sex, blood and fear without meaning. Vision in Hong Kong," I swept the room again, "is becoming scarce. I have come to America in search of vision."

  Bill and I searched for vision in the halls of CCA for two days, and a dreary search it was. In a stale screening room with a sticky carpet we saw at least one work by each directing student, including four who had not made it to the meeting. We asked for a second film from five of those students, and viewed them with the student present. We discussed, commented, asked the student to explicate. We heard some thoughtful, intelligent presentations, and we heard a lot of nonsense.

  And we heard, of course, from Mitch Ellman.

  We heard from him last, because we set it up that way. Two others of the final five were also good-looking blond men, and I displayed a great deal of interest in their work. I made eye contact when we talked, touched their manly arms with my manicured fingertips. Bill smoked and grew progressively more sarcastic and nasty in his questions and commentary. At one point, in the middle of a film, he got up and stalked out. Just before Mitch Ellman's turn we had a fight.

  "I don't know how you people do it in Hong Kong," Bill's snarling voice was loud, "but the casting couch is passé, here."

  "Don't be ridiculous," I answered airily. "That was very interesting work. A fresh approach—"

  "Approach? You practically ran him over. And there was nothing fresh about it. You have a very stale technique."

  "It worked on you."

  "My mistake."

  "I can't believe you're jealous of men twenty years younger than yourself."

  "I can't believe you're making cow eyes at men ten years younger than yourself."

  That was an exaggeration, but anything for art.

  "I think we'd better have the next one in." My voice was icy. "Don't you agree?"

  He gave me a silent stare. Then he stood abruptly, stuck his head out the already-open door, and called, "Ellman!"

  Mitch Ellman, cassette in hand, came in struggling to keep his face straight.

  "Hello, Mitch." I gave him a warm smile, ignored Bill as he sat heavily in the row in front of me. "What do we have?"

  "Hello, Ms. Chin," Ellman grinned, his eyes catching mine as though there were already secrets between us. "Hi, Mr. Smith." You couldn't miss, in the way he addressed Bill, the derisive generosity of the young toward the over-the-hill.

  Bill didn't miss it. He turned, gave Ellman a long, cold stare, turned back to the screen.

  "This is called 'Within Wheels'," Ellman said, putting his tape into the VCR. He sat beside me, smiled at me as the lights went down.

  As it had when our eyes first met, my skin crawled now, so near Mitch Ellman. The way he leaned a little too close; the way his teeth seemed pointed when he smiled; the way his
eyes held mine too long every time they met: I wanted to get up and move, to put actual, physical distance between us.

  I didn't. I sat there, smiled back, and he rolled the film.

  His second film was like his first, dark and pretentious, filled with rats and trash cans and lonely beer bottles rolling in the gutter and steam rising from street grates in the rainy New York night. I asked him whispered questions all through the thing, forcing myself to lean close, to touch his hand. Bill kept his eyes fixed on the screen; you could see the anger expanding and surrounding him like the blue halo of cigarette smoke he was producing.

  "Mitch," I smiled again when the lights came up, "I like this very much. Let me see ... do I have your resume?"

  "Oh. Yeah, sure," Mitch Ellman said eagerly. "I gave it to you yesterday." He produced another copy while I fanned through the papers in front of me. I read it over, nodded, passed it to Bill. Bill barely glanced at it, dropped it onto the chair next to him.

  I shifted my eyes to the back of Bill's head, then to Mitch again. "I think," I said, "that I shall have to call you, Mitch."

  "Great," he said, seizing onto my eyes. "When?"

  "Soon," I told him, indicating Bill. "Thank you for coming."

  "Sure," Mitch Ellman grinned. "Sure."

  Bill grumped and glowered as we left CCA, kept it up the whole time we were hailing a cab. It was rush hour on the west side; it took a while. He stood in the street with his arm in the air, wearing more California clothes—a rumpled linen jacket over a white

  T-shirt—while I stayed demurely on the sidewalk in a blue silk dress my mother made me last year.

  "How're you doing?" I asked when we were safely and privately in the cab.

  He leaned back against the seat. "I could do without the cowboy boots," he grinned.

  "They make you look sexy."

  "They do?"

  "No, wait, I meant bowlegged."

  "I thought bowlegged men were supposed to be sexy. It's because their—"

  "I don't want to hear why. I can guess."

  "You want to investigate?" He lifted his sunglasses and leered.

  "No." I leaned back against the seat of the cab, too. "I also don't ever want to see another movie."

  "That'll make you a cheap date."

  "And speaking of cheap," I said, "that's a pretty chintzy place, CCA. Where's the glamour? Where's the glitz? Where's the excitement of life in the fast lane?"