The Shanghai Moon Page 21

  “. . . someone has to do it . . .”

  “. . . she say anything about the clients? . . .”

  “. . . no, nothing at all, just she needed a PI . . .”

  David Rosenberg’s hand drifted to a stop, and he opened his eyes. “That’s it. I’m sorry, but that really was it. I had a meeting to prepare for. He promised to think about coming to Zurich with Ruth, maybe in the winter. And we hung up.”

  For a few minutes we all sat in silence, watching a sparrow singing from the scarecrow’s shoulder. I hoped it was belting out the bird version of some Broadway song.

  “Does that help at all?”

  “I can’t see how,” I admitted. “He called me a few hours later and told me something was wrong, but I don’t see anything in your conversation that would make him think that. I’d found out something odd about the clients, and I thought maybe he’d learned it, too, but if you didn’t tell him, I’m not sure how.”

  “What was it?”

  “About the clients? That they’re not who they told Alice they were.” I explained about Horst Peretz and Horst Chen Lao-li. “That’s true, right?” I suddenly thought to ask. “About Jewish names?”

  “Yes, it’s true. But Joel didn’t hear anything about the clients from me.”

  “Well, thank you. If you think of anything else, could you call me?”

  “Of course. So you really do think Joel’s death is connected to this case? Ruth tells me the police don’t.”

  “They might be right. But they’ll have to prove it, before I stop.”

  Rosenberg smiled. “That’s exactly what Joel would have said.”

  David Rosenberg returned to the crowd in the living room. Bill and I stayed on the porch. The day had grown grayer and heavier, and the kids had come back indoors. No one scolded them for getting their clothes dirty.

  “That morning, before he called you,” Bill said, taking out a cigarette, “there were only those two other calls. Rosenberg and Alice. If whatever was ‘fishy’ had come up the night before, wouldn’t he have called you then?”

  “Probably, yes.”

  “So if there was nothing in that conversation with Rosenberg—”

  “Then whatever it was must have been in the call to Alice? Well, but that may not be true. He might have found something on a Web site. His laptop’s gone, so we don’t know where he surfed. Or he might have met someone for a quick cup of coffee. Or just put something together in his head. It doesn’t have to have been on the phone.”

  “Granted.”

  “But it would be worth knowing what he and Alice talked about in detail anyway, is that what you’re thinking?”

  “That, and also, how Joel sounded.”

  “Well, in the process of firing me again, she did say she’d call when she got back today. I guess she’s not back yet.”

  “Possible. But let me remind you, you also implied you’d give up the case.”

  “Ah. And if one of us was fibbing, maybe the other was, too? You think it’s okay to call from here?”

  “Yes. You think it’s okay to smoke?”

  “No.”

  I dialed Alice, got voice mail, and left a message. “I bet she’s ducking me.”

  “She’s probably tired of firing you.”

  “So she should stop. What does ‘Mutt and Jeff’ mean?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Mr. Rosenberg used it about Alice and her sister. It’s one of those cultural references I don’t get, right?”

  “It used to be a comic strip. Two guys very different from each other. They stopped running it more than twenty years ago, so if you don’t get it it’s probably because you’re young, not because you’re Chinese.”

  “You say that as though it makes my ignorance better.”

  “Well, youth is a condition that will change.”

  “Oh, thanks.”

  Leah Pilarsky stepped onto the porch bearing a plate of rugelach. “I thought you might be hungry. Did you talk to David?”

  “Yes, thanks. Though I’m not sure how much good it did.” I stood. “Leah, thank you. We’d better go now. If I can do anything, will you promise to call me?”

  “And you’ll tell us if we can help in your work? I know Joel would want that.”

  I promised I would, thinking that what Joel would really want would be for me to find the bastard who killed him. Silently, I promised I’d do that, too.

  24

  As we drove back to the highway, I pulled Bill’s papers from the envelope.

  “You want to read those again?” he asked. “You’re not depressed enough?”

  “Well, for one thing, you paraphrased some, so I haven’t actually read them. But also, I keep having this feeling there’s something we missed.”

  “What kind of thing?”

  “I don’t know.” I started to go over his translations of Rosalie’s letters again. He was right, they were depressing, but he was also right, I was already depressed. I scanned the ones I’d already read, and was about to slip the last of those back in the envelope and start the first of the ones I hadn’t, when I reached its final paragraph.

  “Bill!” I yelped. “This is it! What we missed! It’s the jeweler!”

  “What jeweler?”

  “Mr. Friedman’s book said the name of the jeweler who made the Shanghai Moon was lost. But here it is! Corens, Herr Corens.” I whipped out my cell phone.

  “What do you—”

  I waved to shush him as I heard, “Friedman and Sons, you’ve reached Stanley Friedman.”

  “Lydia Chin, Mr. Friedman. Do you know a jeweler named Corens? A refugee also, German, I think. He was in Shanghai the same time as Rosalie Gilder.”

  “No, I don’t think so. Why?”

  “Is there an association, a jewelers’ organization—”

  He chuckled. “There are dozens. But the grapevine, it’s better. Shall I check for you?”

  “Would you? It’s important.” I thanked him, pocketed the phone, and, in answer to Bill’s skeptical glance, said, “I know, I know, it’s a long shot.”

  “Even if he finds him. What could he tell us? And if he’s still alive, he’d be close to a hundred.”

  “Right on all counts. But it’s a door.”

  And it was a door that wasn’t locked, because as I was finishing the last of Rosalie’s letters, Mr. Friedman called back.

  “Yaakov Corens, from Berlin, was in Shanghai from 1933 to 1945,” Mr. Friedman told me. “He emigrated to Australia, one of the first to leave after the war. He died in 1982.”

  “Oh.” That deflated me. “Well, maybe that’s not a useful lead after all. But thank you. How did you find that out so fast? That’s some grapevine you jewelers have.”

  “Don’t be impressed. Two phone calls, that’s all I made. One to a friend, he retired as secretary of the International Guild of Jewelry Artists a few years ago. He knows everybody. He knew Yaakov Corens.”

  “And the other?”

  “To Beatrice Gardner.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Yaakov Corens’s granddaughter. She inherited her grandfather’s shop, which was her mother’s before her. She’s a jeweler herself.”

  “Oh, Mr. Friedman! Thank you so much! Can you give me her number? But you didn’t have to call all the way to Australia. Let me pay for that call.”

  “For you, Ms. Chin, if I had to call Australia, I would call Australia. But for this, it was unnecessary. Yaakov Corens left Sydney and came to New York in 1963. Beatrice Gardner has a shop across the street.”

  So there we were, back on Forty-seventh Street.

  Nothing much had changed since the day before yesterday. Couples stopped to peer in windows; messengers locked bikes to lampposts. A chain-draped rapper with rings on every finger came out of a store grinning, glinting gold teeth. Hasidim in flat hats went by deep in discussion, pockets full of fortunes in stones they’d exchanged on a handshake. Or so I’ve been told. That all these men really carried riches o
n their persons struck me as doubtful. But the part I liked wasn’t the value of the stones, anyway. It was the handshakes.

  We found Sydney Gems and Gold in a street-level shop near the end of the block. A young woman smiled and asked if she could help us. From the back counter an older woman said, “It’s all right, Shana. I think I’m expecting these people.” Like the younger woman’s, her crisp white blouse had a buttoned neck and long sleeves.

  “Beatrice Gardner?”

  “That’s correct. Ms. Chin?”

  “Lydia. And this is Bill Smith. Thanks for seeing us.”

  “You come with the recommendation of Stanley Friedman, quite enough for anyone on this street. What can I do for you?” She smiled warmly and shook my outstretched hand. She gave Bill the same warm smile but didn’t offer her hand, which didn’t seem to surprise him.

  “We won’t take much of your time,” I said. “I’d like to ask you some questions about your grandfather.”

  “Yes, Mr. Friedman told me that. Zayde Corens, of blessed memory. May I ask why?”

  “Mr. Friedman didn’t say? It’s about when he lived in Shanghai. He had a jewelry shop on the Avenue Foch, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, that’s correct.”

  “We found his name in a letter written by an Austrian refugee girl. Rosalie Gilder. Does that name mean anything to you?”

  “So.” She looked somberly at us. “People are still searching for the Shanghai Moon.”

  “Then it’s true! Yaakov Corens? He made the Shanghai Moon?”

  Beatrice Gardner refolded her hands. “Mr. Friedman says you’re asking questions for an important reason, and it would be a mitzvah to help you. But if all you want is the Shanghai Moon—”

  “No, that’s not it,” I said quickly. “We do think the Shanghai Moon might be here in New York, but we don’t want it, not really. Someone we know, another detective, was killed, and the Shanghai Moon may be involved. So we need to know as much about it as we can.”

  “Killed?” She paled. “Someone was killed?”

  “A friend of ours. Finding who killed him is the reason we’re asking these questions. So you see, it is important.”

  She didn’t answer me right away. “And the Shanghai Moon? Why do you think that?”

  I told her as much as I thought she needed to know: the find, the fugitive bureaucrat, the letters. She frowned, not at me but into her counter of sparkling gems, as though discussing the situation with them. Finally she looked up and nodded. “I suppose, by now . . . Yes, all right. Zayde Corens made the Shanghai Moon. But he never spoke about it.”

  “He didn’t? He didn’t tell you the story?”

  “Oh, the story he told. Rosalie Gilder and . . . Chen Kai-rong. Did I say that correctly?”

  “Better than I said ‘Yaakov Corens,’ I think.”

  Smiling, she said, “Zayde Corens was a dreamer, a romantic. He told the story many times. He had only daughters, and his daughters had daughters. And I have daughters.” She threw a proud glance at the young woman across the shop. “Zayde loved the story of Rosalie and Chen Kai-rong and told it over and over. The jade, the necklace, how they asked him to combine them. How in a time of trouble and loss, hunger and fear, these two young people wanted a lasting symbol of love and of family. Some were offended by this match, Zayde said. But in the face of the horrors and uncertainties around them, to be asked to create an emblem of hope was to him a great and humbling honor. My grandfather was more proud of that piece than of anything else he ever made.”

  “Then why do you say he never spoke about it?”

  “He told the story, but only in the family, and he said it was our family’s secret. And he would never speak about the Shanghai Moon itself.”

  “You mean about what it was worth?”

  “Even what it looked like. He’d only say, like the moon, round and glowing for children to dream about. Sometimes people, collectors mostly, who knew he’d been a jeweler in Shanghai, would ask him about it, though you’re the first in a long time. He’d say he could tell them nothing about the Shanghai Moon, except that if it existed he didn’t know where it might be.”

  “Did they think he did?”

  “They were always hoping.”

  “They came because they knew he’d made it?”

  “No. Just because they knew he’d been in Shanghai. Written records from that time aren’t so good. If anyone said they’d heard he made it, he denied it. What could they do?”

  “Didn’t anyone know, anyone who was there?”

  “Not so many knew even in the ghetto days who made the Shanghai Moon. Most were too poor, too hungry, too desperate for news of family they’d left behind, to spare attention for such a thing. The story of Rosalie Gilder and Chen Kai-rong was a fairy tale. Or a scandal, depending on who was telling and who was hearing. And to someone looking for the Shanghai Moon years later, what good was the man who made it? Zayde was paid for it and parted with it in 1942.”

  I gazed at a tray of unset rubies and sapphires as I mulled this over. Bill spoke up. “Why wouldn’t he talk about it? Did he ever tell you?”

  “Oh, yes.” Her smile grew soft. “When I was a child that was my favorite part. He was asked not to.”

  “By whom?”

  “A Chinese gentleman.”

  I looked up. “Who was this gentleman?”

  “Zayde wouldn’t say. It was part of the secret. The story went that a mysterious Chinese gentleman came to the shop one afternoon.”

  “In Australia or in New York?”

  “No, here, into this very shop. He and Zayde had tea and talked for a long time. After that day Zayde never spoke about the Shanghai Moon outside the family again. The gentleman, he said, had asked him not to. More than that, the reason for it, Zayde wouldn’t say.”

  “Did the man threaten him? Did he seem frightened?”

  “Oh, not at all. Sad, perhaps. Yes, a little sad. When he told us at dinner about the gentleman, his eyes sparkled as usual—he was a romantic, as I said, and a showman, too; he knew the effect of a story like this—but he had that cheery air adults sometimes wear when they’re hiding distressing things from children.”

  “And you didn’t see the Chinese gentleman?”

  “No, I was just a child, six years old.”

  “Around when was that?” Bill asked.

  “You’re asking me to tell my age?” Her eyes widened in mock horror. Then she smiled. “It was 1967. Early spring. I remember, because I liked the story so much I wanted to dress like a mysterious Chinese gentleman for Purim. But Zayde said if I did, the gentleman wouldn’t be mysterious anymore, and he was part of our family secret. So I dressed like a pirate, to throw everyone off the scent.” She paused, then added, “I admit the story got more elaborate as my sisters and I got older. So maybe the gentleman wasn’t so mysterious, or maybe he and Zayde didn’t talk for so very long. But without doubt it was after that visit that Zayde started to deny to everyone but us that he’d made the Shanghai Moon at all.”

  25

  “So this mysterious Chinese gentleman,” I said to Bill as we headed back to the subway. “One of ours?”

  “Ours being Mr. Chen, Mr. Zhang, or the other Mr. Zhang?”

  “Right.”

  “Why would they?”

  “Why would anyone? Why would you want the jeweler who made the Shanghai Moon not to talk about it?”

  “And why wait twenty years to ask?”

  “Maybe it took him twenty years to figure out who the maker was.”

  “If he was one of ours, wouldn’t he know?”

  “Not necessarily. Two of them were children when it was made, and one wasn’t born yet.”

  Bill lit a cigarette, took a puff, then stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. “Oh, for God’s sake. Even if they did know. Two of them weren’t here.”

  I looked at him, and then, with new respect, at his cigarette. “Of course. Mr. Chen and Mr. Zhang came in ’sixty-six. Then it would have taken t
hem time to find him.”

  “But what about C. D. Zhang? When did he get here? If he sponsored them, he was a citizen already, so he must have been here a while.”

  “But he was a kid, too, when it was made, and of them all, he’d have been the furthest out of the loop. So he might have needed Chen and Zhang to get here before he found out, assuming it was him who cared. ‘He,’ right? Aren’t you going to tell me to say ‘he’?”

  “I wasn’t, no.”

  “Good thing, too. So it still could have been any of them.”

  “Or someone else.”

  “You think?”

  “No.”

  I flipped my cell phone open. It was time we stopped getting the runaround from these Chinese gentlemen.

  Which was an opinion apparently not shared by Mr. Chen or Mr. Zhang. Both Irene Ng at Bright Hopes Jewelry and Fay at Fast River Imports were sorry to inform me their bosses were not available. “I really have to speak to him” and “I know he’s ducking me” didn’t make either man magically reappear.

  “Why won’t they talk to me?” My complaint to Bill was rhetorical, but his answer made sense.

  “You’re representing someone whose clients wanted that jewelry enough to lie about their identity. Chen and Zhang are sure to have their own networks in the jewelry world, and I’ll bet they’re trying to track down Wong Pan themselves.”

  “Well, there’s still one Chinese gentleman left. And we wanted to talk to him anyway.” I poked in another number and spoke to another secretary.

  Miraculously, I heard, “Hold, please,” and then C. D. Zhang’s energetic voice: “Ms. Chin! Good afternoon!”

  “Good afternoon to you, Mr. Zhang. I was wondering if you had a few minutes?”

  “Of course! What can I do for you?”

  “I’d like to come speak to you.”

  “Is this a part of your quest for the Shanghai Moon?”

  “And other things. I can be there in twenty minutes.”

  “Such industry! Please, come! Though beyond what I told you yesterday I don’t see how I can help you.”

  “I’ll explain when I get there.”

  “Ah!” A tiny pause. “Have you made new discoveries?”

  “Mostly I’ve found new questions.”