She narrowed her eyes in thought as she opened a tin of cat food. Face it, Grace. You want the case. It’s a reputation maker. Whoever hears the case will be queen of the heap.
And not only that, it was the perfect bridge to meeting Nick again.
She called Crosby at home and left a voice-mail message. After cleaning up the kitchen, she decided that it was to too nice a day to waste in front of a monitor and keyboard banging out legal reasons. She would bike down to Chinatown and pick up a few grocery items for dinner; she was out of sesame oil, soba noodles, and green tea.
A stroll through Chinatown was like a stroll down memory lane. The hanging barbecued ducks in the window and boxes of fish and dried goods displayed on racks on the sidewalk reminded her of her many childhood trips to Vancouver’s Chinatown with her mother. Stopping in front of a shop window full of spices and dried herbs, she stared momentarily at her reflection in the glass. While she had inherited her father’s thick wavy brown hair, her facial features were a composite of her parents, a blend of West and East.
She made a mental note to call her parents on the weekend, when they were back in the country. Now that they were retired they spent their summers travelling, and for the past month they had been visiting her mother’s ancestral village of aging aunts, uncles and cousins. It was no holiday of pleasure. It was more a pilgrimage of guilt and obligation to those left behind the Bamboo Curtain.
Last year they had spent a month in Israel. It had been William Wine’s second trip to the Red Sea in his sixty-nine years. His father, Grace’s paternal grandfather, had been born Aaron Weinstein, but changed the family name when they emigrated to Canada. Aaron Weinstein had opposed Hitler at a public rally, and was jailed as a political enemy of the Nazis. In 1941, he, his wife and their children escaped from Germany with the Gestapo on their heels. Only after they had arrived safely in England did they learn that Hitler was deporting Jews to the death camps. Their entire families were gassed at Auschwitz. After the war they sailed for Vancouver. But it was not a happy tale of survival and immigration. They were never able to cope with the fact that they had left parents, brothers, sisters, and cousins behind in Germany to perish.
In very British Vancouver, with their German accents, they tried to pass themselves off as the English Mr. and Mrs. Wine. But their son William, Grace’s father, knew the act was wearing thin. When he married Kim Wang, he abandoned his adopted English name, assumed her family name and converted to Buddhism. He tried hard to erase his past, because he was ashamed to be Jewish; it humiliated him that he came from a race of people that were despised and hunted down. Completing school forms for Grace and her sister distressed him; he could not bear even to write the word “Jew”. When Grace turned sixteen, he had confessed to his daughters that they were half Jewish. He explained that he had renounced his Jewishness to protect them. The story of how he and his two brothers, sister and parents had left Germany tumbled from his lips. For the first time, he talked about the remorse and shame he still felt because he had been unable to save the lives of his cousins, his grandparents, and his aunts and uncles.
It was ironic, really, Grace reflected, as she surveyed the traditional medicines displayed on the shelves of a Chinese drugstore. Her father was a physician, who had practised medicine as a family doctor for over thirty years. He had helped others, but was unable to help himself. He never got over his nightmares or his distrust of people.
When she was seventeen, without asking her father’s permission, Grace took the original name of her paternal grandfather as her own, hyphenating it with her Chinese name. She was who she was; she was proud of her Jewish ancestry. Her father told her he admired her courage, but he himself would never acknowledge his background. Fifty-eight years after fleeing Germany, he had never gone back.
But he and Kim had been to China several times. Kim Wang’s family was less dysfunctional, but they too had a history of political persecution. Grace’s grandfather, Rei, had served the last emperor in the Forbidden City, and in 1925 the warlords who were controlling Beijing had put him under house arrest. Then during the Japanese invasion Rei’s past with his emperor employer brought him under the scrutiny of the Japanese, and he was imprisoned. His daughter, Kim, spent her childhood in various labour camps until she escaped in a bold act of defiance. She was sixteen, and had been sent to a farm commune between Canton and Hong Kong. One day when the Revolutionary Guards were absent from their post, she decided to make a break for freedom.
The way Kim remembered it, she had walked until she found herself in a village with a train station. When the train pulled in, she sneaked aboard and rode it to the end of the line. From there she walked in the dark to avoid the checkpoints and the border control guards and their dogs. It was a starless night when she finally reached the ocean with the bright lights of Hong Kong beckoning to her. There was no one with a boat to take her across, and so, being young, strong and fearless, she decided to swim. She was in the water for many exhausting, despairing hours before reaching the city, but in the end she made it to shore.
She found work in the sweatshops and managed to learn English on the side. It was in the textile factory that she met and married her first husband, a Shanghanese. After their marriage, they emigrated to Canada where he was sent to manage a China-sponsored retail operation in Vancouver. The marriage was difficult, and Kim enrolled in a nursing program to learn a trade, in order to support herself. After her graduation she and her first husband separated amicably, and a year later she met William Wine at the Vancouver General. They married, and two years later Grace was born.
Kim Wang had travelled a long way from her days in the gulag, and she had reinvented herself more than once. At the age of fifty-five she had assumed the role of matriarch of the Vancouver Benevolent Society. Grace had always admired her mother, who was in every sense her own person. Long ago, Kim had freed herself from the restrictions that prevented her from living the kind of life she wanted. She had escaped from a prison camp and travelled to a new country. She had chosen the man she wanted. And all in the days before women’s lib.
Grace could not say the same about her own life. Shame on you, she chastised herself. As a beneficiary of the women’s movement, she had had it easy, compared to her mother. And what did she have to show for it? House, mortgage, career, cat … but no husband. No Nick.
She sighed. She’d better get over to the office, do some serious work this afternoon. Work late. Get her mind off romance.
Crossing the park, Grace remembered that Mark Crosby lived a short walk from the office. Now that she’d decided she wanted to work on the case — wanted to see Nick again, truth be told — it occurred to her that she should drop in on him tomorrow. His plane got in at eight, and by nine he’d be home. Then she could tell him she was taking him up on his offer to work on a case together as long as he didn’t think she was taking him up on his other offer. She was eager, now, to speak to Crosby and make sure he didn’t give the second chair to anybody else.
The drive-by shooting made headlines in all the papers. The public was outraged and the immigration department’s toll-free number was ringing off the hook. Television, print, and radio reporters were calling the investigative and enforcement unit for interviews and updates. One of the support staffers wheeled the television from the conference room straight into Nick’s office. Nick flicked it on with the remote.
The mayor was quick off the mark, holding a press conference about last night’s shooting. “Our system of deporting undesirables is obviously not working. There are too many people abusing the system. Criminals from all over the globe know Canada has an open door policy….”
Nick knew exactly where the mayor was going. His remarks about cleaning up crime in the metropolis were very familiar. City elections were two years away, but he was already working on his re-election strategy. Now the mayor was joined by another elected official and the police commissioner himself. They took turns offering sound bites to the press.
Nick called Rocco Corvinelli into his office.
Rocco looked sharp in his suit and tie. Nick had hired him fresh out of grad school with a psychology degree,