Hidden Moon

2

Even a man with short legs will take long strides. He walks along the street, you tag along behind, simple as can be. A man can be followed at a reasonable distance, comfortably. I once followed someone we suspected of trafficking in bad medicine for two days. The weather was good. It was a pleasure to be outside. I almost bought him dinner afterward, he made it so easy. But women are different. They amble, they saunter, they stop for no particular reason to look at nothing at all. It is impossible to adjust your pace, to anticipate what they will do, and so you end up running up their backs if you aren’t paying attention. It does no good to find yourself standing next to the woman you are tailing. She won’t turn her head to look, but she’ll notice you out of the corner of her eye, and then you might as well go home.

If I was going to get serious about the bank robbery case, I had to make up for lost time. Someone didn’t want us to be on it, whoever was floating those stories about Yang and the British visitor. But someone else did want us on it. The only thing I had to go on was the weeklong silence, and the fact that people who seemed to be connected with the robbery, or to know something about it, were disappearing. Or turning up dead. Silence never meant quiet, not on these sorts of cases. It meant a frantic, ferocious struggle in offices I never visited, on phones I never called, in places I had no wish ever to see.

Getting Yang in the clear, and pulling everyone else in the office to a safe place, required our getting traction on the robbery case. Whether that meant actually solving it, I didn’t yet know. Either way, we had to be seen pursuing it, and to do that, we had to start up the active investigation with something simple. Jumping too far ahead would suggest that we realized this was more than a robbery. The easiest, safest thing at this point was checking each one of the bank clerks. Little Li was too conspicuous. Yang didn’t like crowds, and anyway I couldn’t put Yang out on the street now; he’d be followed by a train of people from a special group whose purpose and place in the scheme of things we didn’t know. It was unlikely there would be a move against him; it was too soon for that. But sometimes people get desperate out of sequence, and if they did, they might try something against Yang.

Luckily, the weather was good, and I liked walking at sunset this time of year. The light was pure, and the air was very soft. How bad could it be, following a young woman and watching the sun go down?

I picked up the first clerk as she left the bank at dusk. The files said she came from an unremarkable family, and there was nothing in her background to excite suspicion, except that her grandfather had gone south during the war. There was a vague note about tragedy on her mother’s side, but no details. You’d have thought someone would have included a page on that; maybe it had fallen out. Tragedy was leverage, or weakness. Her school records seemed fine. She wasn’t married, but she lived in her own apartment rather than with her parents. That was a little unusual; it probably meant that someone was keeping her. The one thing in the file that grabbed me was the entry under her employment. She had been hired at the bank about two months ago.

The clerk had long hair and wore a trench coat that went to her ankles. It was slit in the back. The tiny picture in her file showed her to be plain looking-small oval face, sharp chin, wide-set eyes, high forehead. I couldn’t see her face very well as she came out of the bank, but I thought I recognized the chin. She had on dark brown high-heel shoes but couldn’t walk in them very well, so it meant we would not be going too fast. It wouldn’t be much trouble to keep her in sight, even as the light faded and the moon climbed into the night. I kept back about seven or eight meters. Once I dropped my keys and pretended to hunt for them while she stopped to talk to an older man. I didn’t get a good look at him, but when he walked away, he moved slowly, as if his feet hurt.

From the route she was taking, I felt pretty sure that the clerk was headed for a bus stop near the train station. That was a guess, but it seemed a good one. If nothing else, it let me walk as if I really had a destination in mind in case she started noticing me. If I needed to, I could drop back a little. I didn’t even have to look at her anymore; to anyone watching, it would appear we simply happened to be heading to the same place.

Getting too congratulatory over your own technique is never a good idea. Keeping back is smart, until it isn’t. I lost her for a long minute in a crowd of people unloading onto the sidewalk from a broken-down tram, but I just kept walking toward the train station and finally picked her out of the gloom again about ten meters ahead.

When she went down the steps of an underpass, I gave her an extra twenty seconds. The underpass was dark, and you could lose someone in there. I wanted to see her come up the other side. A minute passed, then two. She didn’t emerge. People were streaming up and down the steps, but she wasn’t one of them. Finally, I went down. No one was stepping over a body; people weren’t swerving to avoid someone standing still. She wasn’t there, she hadn’t climbed up the other side, she hadn’t doubled back and come up the steps where I was waiting. She was gone.