A Bitter Feast

by S. J. Rozan

  “You’re not,” I said. “But that’s not what I meant. Listen calmly: I just had a visit in my office from someone who thought it would be a good idea to forget about Chi-Chun Ho and his roommates.”

  “You did? Who?”

  “I don’t know. It wasn’t a friendly visit.” I told him how it had gone. My heart began to pound again as I spoke. My aching stomach muscles contracted; I concentrated on relaxing them as I glanced toward the window with the cardboard now taped over the hole in the glass.

  “Jesus Christ.” I’d given Bill an abbreviated, softened version, but he knew me too well to buy it; sharp anger and worry rang in his voice when I got through. “Are you all right? I’m coming over.”

  “No, don’t. I’m fine. I just wanted to tell you to be careful. I don’t know how he found out about me, but it may be that he knows about you, too.”

  “What do you mean, you’re fine? I’m coming over.” He completely ignored everything else I’d said.

  “Don’t. I have to go out, to see Peter. And I really am fine. He didn’t hurt me. I guess he just wanted to scare me.”

  “Did he?”

  “Me? I’m Lydia Chin. Nothing scares me.”

  I waited for the sarcastic answer, the joke response that shows he’s playing along with my game, the return volley shot I always got from Bill. It didn’t come. Through the phone, behind his silence, I could hear the violin start to soar, to connect its dissonant notes into lines that didn’t sound like melodies, but still were heading someplace. The piano moved with it, changing key, helping without getting in the way. “We should talk,” Bill finally said.

  “Sure,” I said, confused. “Of course. But I need to talk to Peter first. He’s the one who hired me to look for these guys.”

  “Not exactly, according to you.”

  “Doesn’t matter. But I’m worried that the guy who came to see me might go looking for him, too. Hang up so I can call him.”

  “You’re sure you’re all right?”

  “Yes. Now get off my phone.”

  “You’ll call me as soon as you’ve talked to him?”

  “If that’s the price of getting my phone line back.”

  As we hung up, I heard the violin approaching, once again, the deeper, calm rhythms the piano had never abandoned, although under the line of the violin the piano, it seemed to me, had changed key. I wasn’t sure whether I liked that piece. I’d have to remember, I told myself, to ask Bill what it was.

  Peter was in his office; he answered his own phone, the way he always did. He has a paralegal who comes in part-time, but generally, Peter likes to work alone.

  “It’s Lydia,” I said. “Are you okay?”

  “Me? Sure. Why shouldn’t I be?”

  “You should be. Is your door locked?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Stay there, and don’t let anyone in but me. I’ll be right over.”

  I hung up and, leaving the door open so anything going on in my office would be heard by the travel ladies, I headed for Peter’s. Mei-Lei, Ava, and Andi vowed to stay all night if necessary, waiting for the locksmith to come.

  I picked up four scallion pancakes and some soy sauce chicken from one of the cooking carts that line Canal Street. This was not, I insisted to myself, the growling hunger I always feel after pounding fear has passed, after my heartbeat slows and my skin stops prickling danger warnings. The soy sauce chicken had nothing to do with the sweat I’d wiped away; the scallion pancakes were unrelated to the breathing I’d had to force back to normal in my office. It was just that it was lunchtime.

  I buzzed at Peter’s street door, and he let me in.

  “Lydia, what’s going on?” he asked when I got up to the office. “And what’s that?”

  “Lunch,” I said. “You have tea?”

  He put some water on to boil. I set the plastic lid from the scallion pancakes on his side of the desk as a plate and put two and a half pancakes on it. The aluminum bottom and the other pancake and a half stayed with me.

  “Has anybody strange been to see you?” I asked as he took some chopsticks out of his pencil cup and handed me a pair.

  “Besides you?”

  “Don’t be funny. Let me ask you another one: has Chi-Chun Ho turned up?”

  “I would have called you if he had.”

  “That’s what I thought.” I bit into a piece of salty, crispy pancake. “Peter, someone just came to my office and suggested I forget about the waiters who disappeared. Who would he have been?”

  “What do you mean, suggested?”

  “He wasn’t polite. And he didn’t say why he cared.”

  “Wait. Is that what you meant, to lock my door?” His eyes, behind their thick glasses, drilled into me. ‘What happened? Did you get hurt?” He started to stand.

  “Sit down. I’m fine. He just wanted to scare me—which, of course, is impossible.”

  “I know it is. Someday that’s going to get you killed. Really, what happened?” He reached to the windowsill for the now-boiling water and poured it over tea leaves in a porcelain pot.

  “Really,” I answered, “he told me no one was interested anymore in those four men, especially not me. He told me to go look for a husband instead.” I batted my eyelashes at him.

  “He didn’t hurt you?”

  “No.” Well, not much, I thought, and what’s a little white lie between friends? “He hasn’t been here?”

  “No one’s been here.”

  “Hmmm.” I pushed some rice out of its take-out container onto my improvised plate and topped it with a darkly gleaming chicken wing.

  “Who was he?” Peter asked. “You don’t know?”

  “He was Fukienese, I think. And big.”

  “You never saw him before?”

  I never saw him, period, but I kept that to myself. “No. He hasn’t been here?”

  “You asked that twice already.”

  “Well, here’s why: I’m only looking for those guys because I work for you. If someone scares me off, you can always get another P.I. The real thing to do would be to scare you off. How come he hasn’t tried?”

  “Because he doesn’t know about me?” He poured tea into two mugs and handed one to me. I sniffed at it: a delicately smoky Assam.

  “Then how does he know about me?”

  “Did you do anything today he might have caught on to?”

  “I did two things. I went to Elmhurst and got into those guys’ apartment, and I—”

  “Lydia! What? You broke in there?”

  I sighed heavily. “Oh, Peter, of course not. I talked my way in using just another one of Lydia Chin’s brilliant pretexts. What did you expect me to do when you hired me?”

  “It wasn’t quite like that, if you remember.”

  “Irrelevant. Anyway, I went there, and then I followed a trail I found there to Brooklyn.”

  “Brooklyn?”

  “Cobble Hill. A commercial building on Baltic Street. Does Jayco Realty mean anything to you?”

  He shook his head. “Who’re they?”

  “One of the businesses in the building. One of the realtors at Jayco is Chinese.”

  Peter’s eyes lit. “Does he know our guys?”

  “He says not. But they’re weird. You have a minute to search some databases?”

  So Peter and I did from his computer what I’d been planning to do from my office before my plans were disrupted by a burlap bag.

  We found basically nothing. Jayco was a licensed real estate agency, owned by its three New York State-licensed agents: Joe Yee, Maggie Mason, and Larry Pontillo. All three agents’ licenses were fairly recent—within the last three years—but that could just mean they’d all decided to go into business together, gotten licenses, and done it. We searched a few more databases that I, as a licensed P.I., have access to—Peter scowled and muttered something about the right to privacy once or twice—but nothing irregular turned up. Finally, we gave up. Clearing away the remains of lunch, I got u
p to go.

  “I’ll let you know how things turn out,” Peter said.

  “What?”

  “If Ho turns up, I mean.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Well, since you’re off the case.”

  “I’m what?”

  “Off, the, case,” he articulated. “Isn’t that what you came to tell me?”

  “You have to be kidding.”

  “You’re not resigning?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then you’re fired.”

  “Forget it.”

  “You forget it, Lydia. I shouldn’t have let you talk me into this in the first place. Now that you’ve been warned off and roughed up, you’re over. Don’t,” he said, holding up his hand as I opened my mouth. “There’s a scratch on your neck and you make a face every time you move your knee. You don’t have to tell me what really happened, but I don’t have to let you stay on this case, either.”

  I stared at him, taken aback. “You’re really mad.”

  “Damn right I am. And Mary’s going to be even madder if I let you go on with this.”

  “But, Peter.” I sat down again, trying not to make a face as I bent my knee. “Look, the fact that that guy came to see me means there is something wrong. Somebody really has to find your waiters, now.”

  “Let the police do it.”

  “The police aren’t interested.”

  “Did you ask them?”

  “You did.”

  “Not since this guy threatened you. That may change their attitude. You didn’t report it, did you?”

  “No,” I admitted. “What’s the point? I can’t identify him.”

  “And besides, they might tell you to leave it alone, just like I’m telling you.”

  I bit my lower lip in thought. “I’ll make you a deal,” I said.

  “No deals.”

  “If the cops take it up I’ll stop.”

  “You’ll stop because you’re fired.”

  “What if I don’t?”

  Peter stared at me, as I had at him. “You’re serious,” he said.

  “Peter, someone doesn’t want those men found. That means someone’s got to keep looking. Maybe we never should have started, but now”—I searched for words—“now we’re responsible. Now we’re attached to them, connected. We can’t just walk away.”

  The trouble with being a lawyer is that you can’t deny logic, and the trouble with being a Chinese lawyer is that what I’d just said was, to Peter, logical.

  He thought, my old friend, his eyes on mine. “All right,” he said finally. “We’ll call Mary.”

  “Why are we doing that?”

  He picked up the phone. “Because she’s a cop.” He dialed, spoke, hung up again. “She’s out. She’ll call me later. Now that someone’s threatened you, it can be a Fifth Precinct case. They’ll take it up, and you’re fired.”

  “If they do.”

  “Lydia—”

  “And I’m sure they will,” I said quickly. “Listen, I have to go.” I grabbed my bag and headed for the exit. “I’ll call you, to see what Mary says. Bye, Peter. Thanks for lunch.”

  I made a fast getaway down the stairs, waved to Peter’s Uncle Lee Liang, standing in his shop door, as I sped past, and zipped around the corner before Peter could follow me out and fire me again.

  Seven

  I called Mary from the phone on the corner, in case she’d come in in the last five minutes and I could head her off before she talked to Peter, but she was still out. Oh, well. It probably wouldn’t do me much good anyway. Mary wasn’t in any position to tell me I should do something dull and safe for a living, but as a cop and as Peter’s girlfriend she was in a perfect position to order me off this particular case.

  I was about to call Bill and invite myself up to his place to talk things over, but first I called my machine, just to see if anyone was interested in talking to me.

  Someone was. The honking traffic filling my right ear had no chance against the dry, aged voice speaking into my left. “Miss Chin, this is H. B. Yang calling. I’d like to speak to you. You can reach me at these numbers.” The Cantonese accent gave me a choice of two; one had the exchange the phone company reserves for cell phones.

  My heart lurched. H. B. Yang would like to speak to me.

  H. B. Yang was a legend in Chinatown. Seventy-nine, he’d arrived sixty-five years ago, when Chinese exclusion was still a pillar of American immigration policy. He was a “paper son”—one of thousands who, for a price, had been given a detailed, intimate, and fictional account of his own growing up. The facts provided to paper sons included meticulous descriptions of the home village and family history of another man, the American citizen who, also for a price, claimed the son as his foreign-born own. Learning by heart the facts of a life he had never lived, each of these men destroyed the papers where those facts were found and recited their contents as though they were memories. Once inside the United States, they rarely met their sponsors, but they kept their sponsors’ names. They sent money home to China for parents, brothers, sisters they would never see again. They supported aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, but most didn’t marry; Chinese women in America were scarce. They gave up their ancestors; they had no descendants. Breaking thousand-year chains of family, they became new and alone.

  For some it was a tragedy. They were heartsick, bewailed their fate, did their duty, and died unhappy.

  For others, it was freedom. They’d come to this country for a chance at a prosperity they’d never have known back home. If the price of that was loneliness, loneliness was a two-sided coin. For every festival day without a family banquet, without the games and the rituals and the laughter of children, there were risks that could now be taken, opportunities that could be seized because failure would reflect badly on no one but yourself; for every worry about who would tend your grave if you died childless, there were buildings to be bought and sold, businesses to build, money to be sent home to a muddy, unpaved village where you were considered a hero, a conqueror, a king.

  H. B. Yang was one of the kings. Dragon Garden Restaurant was only one of his ventures. There were real estate deals; other restaurants, some still owned, some closed, some sold; import firms; business partnerships with suited men from Hong Kong to manufacture goods in Malaysia for sale in Europe. There was the Chinatown Businessmen’s Association, which H. B. Yang had headed for years. Another man was now the association’s president, but from political endorsements to the granting of college loans, H. B. Yang’s voice was the one that still counted more than any other.

  And now that voice was on my telephone, wanting to speak to me.

  I gulped, put a quarter in the phone, and called Bill.

  “You’re fired,” I told him.

  “Me, your Employee of the Month?”

  “Fired. Terminated. Excessed. Thank you for your years of devoted service, we’re sure you’ll find another excellent position, close the door as you go.”

  “You’re replacing me with illegal aliens?”

  “That’s undocumented workers, you insensitive member of the ruling class. And no, I’m replacing you with a machine. It smokes, drinks coffee, and drives a car. What do I need you for?”

  “Can it make bad jokes?”

  “Yes, but I had to pay extra. Peter fired me, so I’m firing you.”

  “You’re just continuing the cycle of abuse. They have programs for people like you.”

  “You want to hear what happened?”

  “Only if I’m not fired. You know I only listen to you if you’re paying me.”

  “Okay, you’re rehired, but no benefits.” I told him about my conversation with Peter.

  “So it’s possible we’re not fired, if the Fifth Precinct doesn’t want to bother with it,” he said sensibly when I was through.

  “They will. Mary will make sure. She’ll make me go swear out a complaint against this guy I didn’t even see, and then it’ll be police business an
d Peter will fire us.”

  “You seem to be taking it pretty well.” His voice was cautious.

  “I could say, ‘If the police really do take it up, then that’s okay. If there’s really something wrong here, they’re in a better position to find it than we’d be.’”

  “But you’re not saying that because … ?”

  “Because it would be complete and total hypocrisy and you know it. But we’ll have to worry about that later. Right now I have something else to worry about. I called you for moral support.”

  “First you fire a guy and then you ask him for moral support? You’re lucky I’m as dumb as I am. A lot of guys might not fall for that.”

  “What you fall for depends upon where you stand. Now, listen. H. B. Yang called me, and I have to call him back.”

  “I’m at a loss here. What’s my line supposed to be?”

  “‘You can do it, he’s nothing to be afraid of.’”

  Bill repeated back to me the words I’d given him.

  “Thanks. I’m going to do it now, while I have my courage up.”

  “You understand I have no idea what’s going on?”

  “What else is new? I’ll call you later.”

  “Mine not to reason, especially working with you. Just rub that bottle when you want me.”

  “Wrong ethnic imagery, but I get the idea. Bye.”

  “Lydia?”

  “What?”

  “Are you okay?” With that question, his voice was different: still light, but even so, with something softer behind it.

  “You mean, from before?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m fine.” Because of the way he’d asked the question, not clingy and disapproving the way my family would have been, I answered it truthfully. “I only got hurt a little, and I walked it off. Isn’t that what you would have done?”

  “I’m a hell of a role model.”

  “Yes, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. Put it on the list.”

  “Of my faults? There’s no room on that list.”