The Stone Monkey

changed the subject. “Can someone tell me? There’s a statue I want to see. Maybe you can tell me where it is.”
    The man nearest Wu asked, “Statue? Which one? There are statues everywhere here.”
    “It’s very famous. It’s of a woman and she’s holding her accounts.”
    “Accounts?” another man asked.
    “Yes,” Wu explained. “You see her in movies about the Beautiful Country. She’s on an island somewhere, holding a lantern in one hand and a book of her business accounts in the other. She’s holding the torch so she can read her register at any time of the night or day and see how much money she has. Is that here in New York?”
    “Yes, she’s here,” one man said but he began laughing.Several of the others did too. Wu joined in though he had no idea what was so funny.
    “You go down to a place called Battery Park and take a boat out to see the statue.”
    “I will do that.”
    Another man laughed. “To the lady of accounts.” They all emptied their glasses and resumed the game.

Chapter Fifteen
    Amelia Sachs returned from the witness’s apartment in Chinatown and Rhyme was amused to see the harsh look with which she studied Sonny Li when he announced with consummate pride that he was a “detective with public security bureau in People’s Republic of China.”
    “You don’t say,” she responded coolly.
    Sellitto explained to her about the Chinese cop’s presence.
    “You check him out?” she asked, closely studying the man, who was nearly a foot shorter than she.
    Li spoke before the detective could. “They checked me out good, Hongse. I’m clean.”
    “Hoankseh? What the hell’s that?” she barked.
    He held up his hands defensively. “Means ‘red.’ Only that. Nothing bad. Your hair, I’m saying. I saw you on beach, saw your hair.” Rhyme believed that there was the dabbling of a flirt in his crooked-tooth smile.
    Eddie Deng confirmed that the word meant only the color; there was no secondary, derogatory meaning to it.
    “He’s okay, Amelia,” Dellray confirmed.
    “Though he oughta be in a holding cell,” Coe muttered.
    Sachs shrugged and turned to the Chinese cop. “What’d you mean about the beach? You were spying on me?”
    “Not say anything then. Afraid you send me back. Wanted chance to get Ghost too.”
    Sachs rolled her eyes.
    “Wait, Hongse, here.” He held out some crumpled dollars.
    She frowned. “What’s that?”
    “On beach, your bag, I’m saying. I need money. I borrow it.”
    Sachs looked into her purse, snapped it shut loudly. “Jesus Christ.” A glance at Sellitto. “Can I collar him now?”
    “No, no, I am paying back. Not thief. Here. Look, all there. Ten dollar extra even.”
    “Ten extra?”
    “Interest, I’m saying.”
    “Where’d you get it?” she asked cynically. “I mean, who’d you steal this from?”
    “No, no, it okay.”
    “Well, there’s a defense for you. ‘It’s okay.’ ” Sachs sighed, took the money and handed back the questionable ten.
    She then told the team what the witness—John Sung—had said. Rhyme relaxed a bit more about his decision to keep Sonny Li when he heard that Sung confirmed the information Li had given them, bolstering the Chinese cop’s credibility. He was troubled, though, when Sachs mentioned John Sung’s story about the captain’s assessment of the Ghost.
    “ ‘Break the cauldrons and sink the boats,’ ” she said, explaining the meaning of the expression.
    “ ‘Po fu chen zhou,’ ” Li said, nodding grimly. “That describe Ghost good. Never relax or retreat until you win.”
    Sachs then began to help Mel Cooper log in the evidence from the van, cataloging it and carefully filling out chain of custody cards to show at trial that the evidence was accounted for and hadn’t been tampered with. She was bagging the bloody rag she’d found in the van when Cooper looked at the sheet of newsprint on the table underneath the bag she was holding. He frowned. The tech pulled on latex gloves and extracted the bloody rag from the plastic. Using a magnifying glass, he looked it over carefully.
    “This’s odd, Lincoln,” Cooper said.
    “ ‘Odd’? What does odd mean? Give me details, give me anomalies. Give me specifics!”
    “I missed these fragments. Look.” He held the cloth over a large sheet of newsprint and caressed it carefully with a brush.
    Rhyme couldn’t see anything.
    “Some kind of porous stone,” Cooper said, leaning over the sheet with a magnifying