A Bitter Feast

by S. J. Rozan

  “Probably a good idea. Very subtle, these Chinese.”

  I sighed. “Only to you big old galumphy white folks. Anyway, I’m going to head back to my office to see if the locksmith came yet to put on my bars, and then I have to see if I can find Mary.” I pushed myself up off the sofa. “Can you stay out of trouble meanwhile?”

  “Me? Nobody’s come here to threaten me lately.”

  “It’s only a matter of time.” I rinsed my mug and put it in the drainer. Bill stood and walked me to the door.

  “Seriously,” I said. “Be careful? In case it is only a matter of time.”

  “Funny,” he said. “I was just going to say that to you. You sure you don’t need a big old galumphy white bodyguard?”

  “I don’t think I’d get very far in this case with you by my side,” I said. “Though I’ll invoke your name to Mary if it seems like it might help. But I’ll be careful. The next thing I’m doing will only be inside H. B. Yang’s restaurant anyway. If that rice bag guy wasn’t his, he won’t know I’m still on the case.”

  Bill frowned. “Okay,” he said. “If you promise.”

  “Promise what?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Okay, I promise.”

  I stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. He bent down and kissed my lips, but lightly. We left it at that. I felt his eyes on me from the doorway as I trotted down the two long flights, but I didn’t look back.

  Nine

  I walked back toward Canal Street and east, ambling slowly through what was now a soft late-spring afternoon. The air was clear and the sunlight still bright. It gleamed off the cars heading west to the tunnel to New Jersey as they inched past the cars heading east to the bridge to Brooklyn; they all honked at the cars trying to work their way south to Staten Island and the ones snailing north, uptown. All these people in this one spot, I thought as I stood at an intersection waiting for my brief chance to dash across, and none of them want to be here. Where they were headed for: I wondered how much they wanted to be there, how much thought people actually gave to where they were and whether it was the right place for them.

  Oh, knock it off, Lydia, I commanded myself, you’re standing around philosophizing like an old village lady. The spot you’re headed for is your office, so call your mother now. I dutifully obeyed myself and did that, to find out if there was anything I should pick up before the shops closed. The merchants of Chinatown start and end their days early.

  “You are calling me?” my mother said in answer to my ring. “What amazing good fortune I have.” Her sarcasm was every bit as clear in Chinese as it would have been in English.

  “Amazing,” I agreed. “Can I be fortunate enough to be allowed to bring something home for dinner?”

  “You shouldn’t speak to your mother that way, you disrespectful girl,” she reprimanded me sharply. I was a little surprised; she usually just sighs and acts put upon when I’m not behaving like a good Chinese daughter should.

  “I know, Ma,” I said. “I’m sorry. Do you need anything?”

  “Need anything? What could I need? I have four sons with prosperous, respectable positions. I have a daughter who, I’ve heard, takes tea with Yang Hao-Bing. How could I be greedy enough to ask for more?”

  So that was what this was about. I’ve heard. A social coup of such magnitude—probably bigger than my mother ever expected from me, her unfeminine daughter with the embarrassing profession—and I didn’t even let her know.

  “I was just calling to tell you, Ma.”

  “You were calling to ask me if I wanted bok choy, or tofu. I also need wood ears.”

  “Bok choy, tofu, wood ears. I’ll tell you about Yang Hao-Bing at dinner.”

  “Don’t trouble yourself. Such an important personage must have a great deal on her mind.”

  “True. See you later.” I hung up. There was no point in trying to get past this one now; my mother could go on like this for another half hour without a break. There also wasn’t any point, when she was in this gear, to trying to find out how she knew about my tea party. And anyway, I needed a little time to figure out exactly what it was I was actually going to tell her about my talk with H. B. Yang.

  I checked my watch: 4:45. Mary, according to Peter, was working the eight-to-four these days. I stuck another quarter in the phone and called the precinct.

  “Detective Kee, please,” I said to the tired voice that answered the phone in the squad room.

  “Hold on. Kee!” the voice yelled. “Hey, Chester, you got any idea where Kee is? Hey, Kee! Uh, hold on,” he told me again.

  “My shift’s been over for forty-five minutes,” Mary said when, through the long waits and cop noises over the phone, she was finally found for me. “How’d you know I was still here?”

  “Lucky for me, half a cop’s job is paperwork. I figured you’d be there filling out forms.”

  She sighed. “If it was only half, I’d be grateful. I hear you’re in trouble again.”

  “I am not!”

  “Well, I didn’t really hear that, either. But Peter says he hired you and fired you and that I won’t like the whole thing. He’s taking me out to dinner at that fancy Ethiopian place in Soho, so it must be pretty serious. You’re calling because you want to take your shot first?”

  “How’d you know?”

  “The other half of a cop’s job is brainwork.”

  “Where do the flat feet come in?”

  “Through the door, ba-dump. Do you want to come up here?”

  “Oh, yeah, right. What are you doing between now and dinner?”

  “Nothing in particular, but dinner’s early; Peter has some kind of meeting tonight. You want to get a cup of coffee?”

  “I just had tea. How about a walk? Unless you really want coffee.”

  “No, I’ve been drinking this sludge they make here for so long that I wouldn’t recognize real coffee anyway. Meet me by that weird fountain with all the little statues in it at Battery Park City. We can watch the sunset.”

  “Half an hour?”

  “Sure. Can I bring my paperwork?”

  “Only if it’s cute and single. At least I could tell my mom it has a desk job.”

  I went another two blocks east to a vegetable stand on the fringes of Chinatown. I picked out two heads of crisp bok choy, deep green leaves fading to white on the top, light green again where they frilled out at the edges. The proprietor slipped two squares of silken tofu and a cup of brine into a container. I spent some time over the wood ears. Wood ears are just mushrooms that grow on trees instead of in the ground; my mother particularly likes their chewy texture. I carefully chose ones that weren’t dried out, weren’t broken, weren’t soggy, ones pretty much the same size, ones I thought would look good cooked. My mother doesn’t think I’m much of a shopper, but I did my best. Then, all my supplies together, I was ready to meet Mary.

  But before I turned around and headed west again I dropped another quarter in a phone and called Golden Adventure. Andi and Ava were pleased to tell me—and they both did—that the locksmith had come and put bars on my window: “Very good ones, strong, also a good lock, three keys. We will wait for you, Lydia; until you come back tonight, we won’t go home.” They were so serious about this they were speaking Chinese.

  “No, please don’t put yourselves to any trouble,” I said. This had to be handled delicately, because if I refused their help now, they’d think I was blaming them for the attack in the first place, because they were my landlords and therefore responsible for me. “You’ve done more than enough. I don’t know whether I’ll be back tonight.” As I said that I realized it was true; I was tired, both physically weary and mentally slowing down. A nice walk in the sunset with Mary and dinner and a hot bath at home, followed closely by bedtime, sounded like a great sequence of events, even if it did involve fencing with my mother. “Just leave two keys in my desk. Keep the other in your office, so it’ll be there if I need it.” That should satisfy them that I trusted them and
still looked forward to their help. “Thanks a lot,” I added.

  “All right,” Andi said doubtfully, but they agreed, and I was once again on my way across town.

  I hailed a cab and gave the African driver instructions to the north end of Battery Park City. Mary would be taking a cab, too, from the center of Chinatown to pretty much the same spot. Any other two people might have agreed to meet—for example, in front of Mary’s place of employment, the Fifth Precinct—and go together, but Mary and I try not to be seen hanging around in Chinatown with each other. It wouldn’t be good for business if we were generally known to be close buddies: mine, because people who come to me often do it specifically because they don’t want the police involved in their affairs; and hers, because police brass distrust P.I.S, especially ones like me who were never cops, and any cop who hangs around with one had better, at the very least, be prepared to lean on that P.I. as a source if it’s ever necessary.

  I don’t know if Mary would lean on me if someone told her to—Mary’s a good cop, and being that is important to her—but ever since I went into this business, we’ve been getting together as often as we ever did, just in other places.

  I paid off the cabdriver, strolled down the walk, and sat on a bench by the fountain where the strange little bronze statues are. Odd-shaped foot-high metal people peered into the mouths of dogs twice their sizes or grinned from the handrails of the steps leading down into the fountain area. I rubbed the head of the one that was peeking out from under my bench looking like he wanted to bite my toes.

  The breeze that blew in across the Hudson carried the salty scent of the sea. It smelled distant and wide, calling up images of places it had come from, places I’d never been to but whose pictures drifted through my mind. I thought it was a marvelous, exciting smell. But then I began to wonder: what would I think of it if I were breathing that air day after day from the deck of a ship as it took me away, maybe forever, from every place I knew?

  Familiar footsteps trotted up the path behind me. I turned, and there was Mary, her denim jacket buttoned against the breeze. She dropped onto the bench.

  “Hi.” She grinned.

  “Hi.” I grinned back.

  “So,” she said, “what bad thing happened that’s Peter’s fault?” She narrowed her eyes and gave me the once-over, looking for visible signs of trouble and injury.

  Mary’s no bigger than I am—well, okay, maybe she’s an inch taller, but barely—and she was even more of a tomboy when we were kids. Our mothers used to complain about it together, spitting out the shells of melon seeds on the sidewalk as they waited to walk us home after school, shaking their heads over our bruises and our skinned knees. Even today, while I Rollerblade and practice Tae Kwon Do, Mary lifts weights and plays soccer, outdoors in the summer, indoors in the winter. She was known to bungee-jump when that was hot, and last summer she took up rock climbing. Peter, Mr. Desk Job, who still thinks football has something to do with feet, adores her. He goes to her soccer games and cheers whenever it looks like something’s happening; he massages her shoulders when she aches and takes her out to dinner when her team wins. At dinner they talk, and talk and talk; Mary says he’s the first guy she’s dated who isn’t interested in either competing with her or changing her into the soft, gentle creature of his dreams.

  “Especially cops,” she’d told me once, a few years ago, as we were strolling through the lingerie department at Bloomingdale’s looking for a shower gift for a cousin of hers. “Never date a cop. If you never listen to anything else I tell you, listen to that.”

  “You don’t think I’m tough enough?”

  “I think you get bored too easily,” had been her answer. Then she’d asked a strange question: “This new partner of yours, was he ever a cop?”

  “Bill? He’s not really my partner, you know. But no, he’s not a cop. But he used to live with his uncle, who was. Why? Does he act like one?”

  “No.” She’d looked at me and smiled a funny smile, and we’d gone back to sifting through the silk negligees.

  Now, on the bench with the little bronze guy under it, she finished her scrutiny of my person. “Well, you look okay,” she said grudgingly. “Does that just mean I can’t see it?”

  “No, I’m fine. It’s not as bad as Peter probably made it sound.”

  “Oh, I’m sure it’s not,” she said, sounding sure of anything but. She stood; Mary doesn’t like to sit for long. “Let’s walk, okay? You probably need to walk off whatever H. B. Yang gave you for sweets, anyway.” She took off down the path, her long braid swinging down her back.

  “Wait!” I scrambled to my feet and caught up with her. “Is that all over Chinatown or something? How do you know about it?”

  “It was on the news. You didn’t see it?”

  “Mary!”

  She grinned again. “I talked to my mother this afternoon, who had gotten a call from your mother. Something about how unfortunate it was that H. B. Yang, who clearly had the rare wisdom to be able to spot quality where other people saw only willfulness and disobedience, nevertheless was—quite correctly for a man of his stature—too concerned with what was proper to consider having tea with a cop.”

  “She didn’t.”

  “Of course she did. Do you think my mom could have resisted under the same circumstances?”

  Mary’s mom and my mom have been best friends for thirty years; offspring one-upmanship is their favorite game. “I guess not.”

  “You know not. So you’d better tell: what was it about? What’s going on?”

  So Mary and I walked down the path beside the river, and as the sun lowered and striped the sky and the water with lines of cerise and tangerine and gold, I told her about the case.

  I started with Warren Tan and the revolution, then moved on to the waiters and the shell-loving landlady in Elmhurst. “Luke’s jacket? Your mom’s toolbox?” Mary’s voice was shocked but she couldn’t hide the laugh in her eyes. “You’re nuts, Lydia! Also, as a cop, I have to say—”

  “I didn’t break and enter or anything. I was invited in.”

  Mary’s look told me the official NYPD position on that.

  I continued, describing the scene in my office, which I toned down just a little in the interests of not getting yelled at, and then went on to H. B. Yang and Peter—what one wanted and the other didn’t, anymore.

  When I was through we had reached South Cove, where a waterfall gurgles into a tiny pond with cattail rushes and lily pads. We leaned on the rail looking out over the Hudson, now a dark blue with glints of yellow still riding the tops of the ripples.

  Mary frowned. “I don’t like the idea of you doing something you’ve been warned off of like this.”

  “But you can’t possibly like the idea of me turning down H. B. Yang.”

  “No, I don’t like that, either. But Peter’s right. This is a police matter.”

  “Hey, come on. The police didn’t want it just yesterday.”

  “Yesterday there was no crime.”

  “And today a punk threatens me and that changes things?”

  She looked at me in surprise. “Sure. Someone’s committed a crime—assault—to keep these guys from being found; that implies there’s something to hide. You have to come in and swear out a complaint, then we can go looking.”

  “For the waiters?”

  “No, for the guy who attacked you.”

  “What about the waiters?”

  “I’ll see if I can get the powers interested in them.”

  “What if you can’t?”

  “I’m pretty sure I can, now. And it’ll be better for you if I do.”

  “Me? How? I have to keep looking no matter what.”

  “You told Peter if we take it up, you’d stop.”

  “That’s his case. But H. B. Yang is something else. I can’t just tell him, ‘Forget it, the cops will take care of it for you.’”

  Mary nodded; that was true. “Well, we might actually find them. And at least you won�
��t be the only one looking, which might make you less of a target.”

  “The fact that I’m looking at the request of H. B. Yang might make me less of a target anyway.”

  “I thought of that. It’s one reason I’m not yelling at you the way I just know Peter wants me to. Working for H. B. Yang should carry a certain amount of immunity with it.”

  “Peter doesn’t know about H. B. Yang. Maybe if he did he wouldn’t want you to yell at me.”

  “Lydia. Of course he’d want me to. Do you know how bad Peter would feel if something happened to you that was his fault?”

  “Why would it be his fault?” My voice came out sharper than I meant it to be—after all, Mary wasn’t actually yelling at me—so I tried to tone it down. “I don’t understand this, how everybody feels that way. Like they were in charge of what I do and I don’t even make my own mistakes. If something happens to me it’s my fault.”

  She gave me a long look. “And you’re just crazy enough to get in trouble to prove that. Is Bill working with you on this?”

  “Yes. Does that make it better?”

  “You know it does. Come on, Lydia, you know people only act this way because they care about you.”

  I sighed. “I know. But it drives me up the wall. Don’t you get mad when people do that to you?”

  Mary tried a frown, but a crooked grin elbowed it aside. “You bet I do.” As I started to speak she added, “Of course, I’m backed up by the full strength and forces of the NYPD.”

  “Yeah, and all its paperwork.”

  This time she sighed. “You got that right. Listen, I have to go. If I tell you to be careful, will you bop me?”

  “No, since it’s you. But you better be careful, too, just on principle.”

  She laughed. “Yeah, okay, since it’s you. Come by the station in the morning and we’ll look at mug shots.”

  “Okay. Hey, Mary? Will you be mad at Peter that he hired me in the first place?”

  She gave me a sideways look, then straightened up from the railing.

  “No,” she said, as we started walking out of the park, me to head back to Chinatown and my mother, Mary to Soho and dinner with Peter. “I know you too well. Once you got it in your head that this was something you were going to do, the poor guy didn’t have a chance.”