The Stone Monkey

she was worried that more exposure to seawater would deteriorate the paper so much it couldn’t be read. Crime scene work, Rhyme had often told her, was always a compromise.
    Captain Ransom walked onto the bridge. “There’s another chopper on the way here for you, Officer.” He carried two large Styrofoam coffee cups, covered with lids. He handed her one.
    “Thanks.”
    They peeled the lids off. His contained steaming black coffee.
    She laughed. In her cup was fruit juice that was mixed, she could smell, with a generous slug of rum.

Chapter Thirty-eight
    Feng shui, which literally means wind and water, is the art of trapping good energy and luck and repelling bad.
    It’s widely practiced around the world but because of the astonishing number of rules and the rarity of the ability to assess the dynamics of good and evil there are very few truly talented feng shui practitioners. It entails far more than just arranging furniture, as Loaban’s assistant had suggested, and the Ghost’s apartment had clearly been done by a master. Sonny Li knew plenty of feng shui practitioners in China but he had no idea who here in New York could have prepared the Ghost’s apartment so expertly.
    But rather than race around like Hongse in her yellow car to track down someone who could help him, Li remained true to his Taoist way.
    The way to use life is to do nothing through acting, the way to use life is to do everything through being . . . .
    And so Detective Sonny Li went into the fanciest bubble tea shop he could find in Chinatown, sat down at a table and slouched back in the chair. He ordered a cup of the odd beverage: tea sweetened with sugar and lightened with milk. In the bottom of the tall cup were large chewy black pearls of tapioca that you sucked up through a wide straw and ate. Like the famous (and equally expensive)foaming iced tea popular in Fuzhou, this was a Taiwanese creation.
    Sonny didn’t much care for the tea but he kept it in front of him to buy the right to sit here for what might be a long time. He studied the chic room, which had been planned by some too-clever designer. The chairs were metal and purple leather, the lighting was subdued and the wall-paper fake Zen. Tourists would breeze into the place, drink down their tea and then hurry off to see more Chinatown sights, leaving behind huge tips, which Sonny Li at first thought was their forgotten change; tipping is rare in China.
    Sitting, sipping . . . Thirty minutes passed. Forty-five.
    Do everything through being  . . .
    His patience was finally rewarded. An attractive Chinese woman in her early forties walked into the tea shop, found a seat near him and ordered a tea.
    The woman wore a beautiful red dress and high, narrow heels. She read the New York Times through stylish reading glasses with narrow rectangular lenses and blue frames no thicker than a pencil line. Most of the Chinese women shopping here in Chinatown carried cheap plastic bags wrinkled from many uses. But this woman carried one made of flawless white paper. Inside was a box tied with a gold cord. He deciphered the name on the side of the bag: SAKS FIFTH AVENUE .
    She was exactly the sort of woman Sonny Li wanted yet knew he would forever be denied. Sleek, stylish, beautiful, hair shiny and dense as a crow’s black pelt, a lean face with some Vietnamese features beautifully sharpening the Han Chinese, keen eyes, bright red lips and Dowager Empress nails to match.
    He looked over her dress again, her jewelry, hersprayed hair and decided, Yes, she’s the one. Li picked up his tea, walked to her table and introduced himself. Li sat, though the chair he chose was near but not actually at her table, so that she wouldn’t be threatened by his presence. He casually struck up a conversation with her and they talked about the Beautiful Country, about New York, about bubble tea and about Taiwan, where she’d been born. He said casually, “The reason I troubled you—forgive me—but perhaps you can help. The man I work for? He has bad luck. I believe it is because of how his apartment is arranged. You obviously have a good feng shui man.”
    He nodded at the emblems that had told him that she indeed followed feng shui diligently: an ostentatious bracelet of nine Chinese coins, a pin in the likeness of the homely goddess Guan Yin and a scarf with black fish on it. This was why he had selected her—on this evidence, and because she was obviously rich, which meant that she