by S. J. Rozan
“We?”
“Me, us, whatever.” I waved that off. “Third, if I kept away from everyone in Chinatown who hired illegals I’d have no clients at all. And fourth—” I stopped, not wanting to say what I wanted to say.
“Fourth, what?”
“Nothing.”
“What?” The way she said that, I knew she knew, so I went ahead.
“Fourth, you’re not ‘letting’ me do this and you can’t stop me.”
Mary looked away and hissed out a sputtering breath. “You’re so pigheaded—”
“I am not. But I’m going to do this the way I think it’s right. I’m upset about Peter, too, but it was Peter who wanted me to find the waiters in the first place.”
“That’s not fair.” Mary’s voice sounded uneven. She wasn’t looking at me, so I walked around in front of her to look at her. Tears brimmed in her eyes.
I hugged her, and she hugged me back, crying quietly.
“No,” I said. “But it’s true.”
My mother was still awake when I got home from the hospital. I had called once more, to tell her I was going to stay with Mary for a while, and to tell her Peter was going to be all right, and to tell her to go to bed. But when I got to the top of the stairs I heard the high-pitched wavering of Cantonese opera leaking out from behind our door, and when I got inside I found my mother on the couch under the bright light of her sewing lamp, needle flashing in and out of the embroidered shirt she was working on for Elliot’s daughter.
“How is Lee Bi-Da?” She looked up as I came in.
“He’ll be fine, Ma. But he has to stay there a while. Mary and Lee Liang are with him.”
My mother shook her head. “This union,” she said. “I knew this was a bad idea. Now you can see I was right.”
“The union didn’t plant that bomb, Ma, their enemies did.”
“If there were no union there would be no enemies.” My mother’s logic was, as usual, irrefutable, but I tried anyway.
“How could you not like it, Ma? All they want is to be treated decently, paid enough to live on. How can that be a bad thing?”
She gave me a pitying look. “Newcomers,” she said with the eternal contempt of all those who’ve just stepped through the door for the ones still outside. “Troublemakers.” Then the final insult: “Fukienese. They are too good for what was enough for your father. He worked hard, he was paid for his work. Your father didn’t need a union. He provided well for his family.”
“That’s true, Ma,” I said. Of course, my mother’s twelve-hour days in Mr. Leng’s sweatshop had helped some, too, but I didn’t say that. It was the husband’s job to provide, and my father had worked very hard at it. My mother’s pride came from having chosen a husband who could do that—and from having raised four sons and a daughter who properly revered their father’s memory. Pointing out her contribution to the family’s prosperity would only, in her eyes, have meant I didn’t appreciate his.
“But they will get what they deserve,” she said smugly.
I was momentarily confused. “The Fukienese?”
“Of course. Lee Hai-Quoon”—Peter’s mother—“has told me about unions, now I know. If they are successful, all the restaurant workers will have to join. They will all have to show their employment papers, their Social Security numbers, to get their wonderful union benefits.”
I could see where she was going; it was a conversation Peter and I had had more than once. It was the flaw in the great union dream. “They’re all supposed to have those now, to get jobs,” I said.
She shook her head. “When your father and I came here, he had papers: a work visa, a promise of a job. The Fukienese, I understand, do not.” She understood. She knew full well that many, many of the new immigrants came off of ships in the middle of the night, waded through cold, tugging waters off Long Island and New Jersey to be met by men they’d never seen, taken to rooms as crowded and dirty as the hold of the ship they’d come from, and told to report to their new place of employment first thing in the morning to begin paying off their debt to the men who’d arranged all this.
“Who will hire all these people without papers if the union wins?” asked my mother.
I didn’t want to have that argument with her, not in the middle of the night with Peter in the hospital and a big day in front of me.
“Why didn’t you go to bed?” I asked her.
She tied a knot, bit her thread off, and folded the cloth.
“Sometimes,” she said, “the telephone does not tell the truth. I wanted to see you say to me what you said to me on the telephone, that Lee Bi-Da was not badly hurt.” She stood, put her sewing in her basket, and headed to her bedroom.
“Good night, Ma,” I called after her. “Sleep well.”
“Good night, Ling Wan-ju.”
She closed her door.
I turned off the living room light and stood at the window, staring out over the city to the same stars we’d looked at from Brooklyn. Below the stars the asphalt roofs of Chinatown spread, sheltering the dreams of so many people. So many different dreams: good ones, bad ones, possible ones, ones that would never come true. It was very late; I thought about it twice, and then I called Bill.
“Smith.” His voice was hoarse and sleepy; he coughed.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Did I wake you?”
“Yeah.” He sounded more confused than anything else. “It’s close to one. Are you okay?”
“Yes,” I said. “But.”
“But what?” I heard him strike a match. He’d once told me that the first cigarette after sleep is the best of a smoker’s day.
“Did you watch the news tonight?” I asked.
“No. Did I miss something?”
“Someone bombed the Restaurant Workers’ Union office. Peter was hurt and another man was killed.”
“Jesus!” He was fully awake now; I could hear that. “Were you there? Are you all right? How’s Peter?”
“I wasn’t there. Peter seems like he’ll be okay, but he’s kind of a mess.”
“Who was the other man?”
“They haven’t identified him yet.”
“Peter doesn’t know?”
“He’s too out of it to talk yet. Maybe tomorrow.”
“One of ours?”
“You wonder, don’t you?”
“Who planted the bomb?”
“They don’t know that, either.”
“Big help they are. Are you okay? You want me to come over?”
“Yes. No. I mean, yes, I’m okay; no, don’t come over. I’m home. If you came here at one in the morning my mother would probably shoot you.”
“God Almighty, don’t tell me your mother has a gun.”
“For you, I’m sure she could dig one up.”
“What do you want to do?”
“I just wanted to talk to you. Now I feel better.” Those words came out before I could stop them. I held the phone out and stared at it. I was glad it didn’t transmit heat across town so Bill couldn’t feel my cheeks burn.
Bill’s end of the phone was silent for a moment. Then his voice came gently. “Are you sure you’re okay? I could come over, gun or no gun.”
“No,” I said firmly. “Stop asking. I’m fine. I’m sorry. I don’t know what my problem is.”
“Gee, I don’t know, either. Could it be that one of your best friends just almost got killed?”
“Oh, you know me, things like that just roll off my back. Mary thinks H. B. Yang was responsible for the bomb.”
“Hmm. Do you? Is this his sort of thing?”
“Honestly,” I said, “I don’t know. We Chinatown kids were always afraid of him, but I don’t remember anything like this. More like he could tell everyone not to hire you or buy at your shop, and everyone would listen to him, and then you’d have to leave Chinatown in disgrace. We kids thought he could have us sent back to China for being bad.”
“Did your folks tell you that?”
“No, it was so
mething kids told each other. My mother got mad when she heard it. She said this was our home and nobody could make us leave it.”
I watched the stars and the streetlights shine.
“But Mary still thinks it was him?” Bill asked.
“Chinatown logic is one thing; cop logic is another.” I explained Mary’s thinking.
“I say too obvious,” Bill told me. “He’s the only restaurant being picketed, isn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“So he’ll be the first to be suspected. The cops are bound to haul him in and grill him. Especially when a cop’s boyfriend was hurt.”
“H. B. Yang is the mayor’s pal. Doesn’t that outrank a cop’s boyfriend? And from what Warren Tan said, the union’s not such a threat to H. B. Yang since he got the East Point thing.”
“They’ll go through the motions anyway. It would look too bad if they didn’t. But assuming it wasn’t Yang, you know what I wonder?”
“What?”
“Who he thinks it was.”
“Good question. Maybe I’ll ask him.”
“Just like that?”
“Well, just like something. I’m going to work there tomorrow, you know.”
“Good God, I’d forgotten that. Maybe I’ll come for lunch.”
“If you do, you’d better eat a lot of whatever I’m selling.”
“Whatever you’re selling,” he said, “is just what I’m hungry for.”
So that conversation ended the way so many of ours do: Bill hitting on me in a kidding-around way; me telling him to put a sock in it in an annoyed-sounding way. I didn’t know about him, but my part seemed, this clear and starry evening, to be a little harder than it usually was.
Eleven
I slept badly through what was left of that night, but I got up early, showered, and put on my frumpiest black pants and white shirt. Rummaging in my bottom drawer, where I keep junk that’s already come in useful once and might someday again, I found a pair of really dorky blackframed glasses with clear glass lenses: about as much of a disguise as I could hope for today. I stuck the glasses in my pocket, kissed my mother, and didn’t tell her where I was going. I hoped, as I clattered down the stairs, that none of my brothers was planning to swoop down to Chinatown and take my mother out for a surprise dim sum lunch.
I had to report to Dragon Garden at nine; before that, though, I had another task to get behind me.
The Fifth Precinct station house is one of the old New York police stations, a white building in the middle of the block with an elaborate green-bulbed lantern on each side of the stone staircase to the iron-studded double front doors. It was built in the early 1900s, and the inside looks as though it hasn’t been painted since, although someone thought at some point that putting down vinyl tile over the original wood floors was a good idea. It’s cramped and noisy and smells like yesterday’s take-out food. It’s also full of people who don’t want to be there—a few of them cops. Usually when I’m inside, that’s how I feel, too, because I’m generally trying to explain my way out of some situation that someone else, sometimes Mary, doesn’t think I ought to be in.
That wasn’t the case today, though. I met Mary in the Detective Squad Room, on the second floor, where she had already stacked the mug shot books on her desk for me to go through.
“You look terrible,” I told her as she dipped a tea bag in and out of the cup of tea she was making for me. She had blue crescents under her eyes and her skin was dull and blotchy.
“Thanks,” she said. “Same to you.”
“Did you stay at the hospital all night?”
She nodded as she handed me the tea.
“How is he?” I asked.
“Stable. Not awake yet. Patino has a uniform over there for when he wakes up, in case he can tell them anything. Patino’s already been to see H. B. Yang.”
“Been there? Not picked him up to come here?”
Mary shook her head. “Not H. B. Yang,” she said in a voice more dispirited than I’d heard from her before. “You don’t ask him to come here.”
I wanted to reach out and hug her and tell her Peter would be all right and we’d get whoever did it, but she was a detective and this was the Fifth Precinct, so I drank my tea and asked, “What did he say?”
“H. B. Yang? He said it was a terrible thing, but not surprising. He said people who have rice for brains and disrupt a wasps’ nest are bound to get stung. Of course, he was shocked and saddened that anyone thought he might have had anything to do with this. He hoped the mayor didn’t feel that way, too; he’d have to give him a call and find out. He understood, though, that the police had a job to do and offered to help any way he could. He commended Patino on his thoroughness.”
“In other words, go bother somebody else or I’ll swat you like a fly.”
“I think that’s a fair translation.”
“But Detective Patino—he’s not letting it drop, is he?”
“He’s been told from above to tread very, very carefully.”
“Above meaning the mayor’s office?”
“In this department, ‘above’ can mean anything. One of the things above never wants you to know is who they are. But in this case if it turned out to be the mayor’s office I wouldn’t exactly fall over.”
I said, “Well, I guess that’s politics.”
“There’s something else,” Mary said reluctantly. “Remember I said I would try to get the powers interested in the waiters?”
“Yes?”
“No. I put in a call yesterday after I left you. It was a little weird, but the result was: no.”
“What do you mean, weird?”
“I talked to my lieutenant. He said upstairs knew about the disappearance of the men but they didn’t see a crime and I’d better drop it and do some real work the way he told me to two days ago.”
“Why is that weird? That sounds like what Peter told me.”
“Except why did upstairs know? Two days ago my lieutenant said no crime, no cops. So why did he tell upstairs?”
I thought about this. “Is upstairs the same as above?”
“No. Upstairs is the department; above sends messages through upstairs to us down here.”
“Because,” I said, “this could just be more of keeping the NYPD’s nose out of H. B. Yang’s problems.”
“Yeah,” said Mary wearily, “I suppose it could.”
I swore out a complaint, detailing the attack in my office. Mary called it as many crimes as she could think of: breaking and entering, assault, stalking—I thought that was stretching it, but she just glared at me—and intimidation, which is apparently, under some circumstances, illegal.
“Attempted intimidation,” I corrected, but she just glared again.
We leafed through the mug shot books but gave up after I convinced her that really, really, I hadn’t seen his face.
“Well,” she said with a tired sigh, leaning back in her chair, “I’ll see what I can do. There are a lot of gangsters running around looking for freelance work; we’ll take some up and shake them. There’s nothing else you remember at all?”
I thought hard. “There was something.” I focused my eyes on a corner of Mary’s desk, then stopped seeing it. I tried to bring back the scene in my office, to remember how it smelled, how it sounded. “He was revolting,” I said.
“Oh, no kidding. A guy grabs you, ties you up, socks you, and you don’t find him appealing? I guess that’s healthy, at least.”
“No, be serious. Something about him. About this particular guy.”
“The way he smelled?” she asked dubiously. “The language he used?”
“No. Something—his hand! His fingers!”
“What?” Mary sat upright. “What about them?”
“There weren’t enough of them! When he had his hand on my throat—something wasn’t right, and that’s what it was.” I had my eyes closed, feeling the roughness of the burlap bag as it clamped around my neck. “Too big a space between his thumb a
nd his fingers. And only three fingers squeezing. And the first one was—was pressing in a funny place. It wasn’t long enough! That’s what was revolting—his hand was all wrong. What are you doing?”
Mary, with a grim smile, was flipping back through one of the mug books. She tapped her finger on a picture, a truculent-looking young man with broad shoulders, short hair, and a wispy goatee. “Three-finger Choi,” she said. The man scowled into the camera, and then he scowled to the right for his profile shot. The lines painted on the wall behind him had him at just under six feet.
“I don’t know,” I said. “He’s big enough. Who is he?”
“Three-finger Choi,” she repeated. “Mutt-for-hire. He lost the first finger and part of the second finger on his left hand when a gun misfired. That turned out to be a lucky thing for a guy whose name I forget, who, they say, was trying to renege on a gambling debt to Duke Lo.”
“Duke Lo? One of the new guys, the one who owns Happy Pavilion?”
“Uh-huh. He came here three or four years ago. By now he’s a big somebody in the Fukienese power structure. Fast rise, and it’s too bad. He’s a pretty unsavory type, but we’ve never been able to connect him up.”
I thought about the customers Peter’s union had driven from Dragon Garden to Happy Pavilion Restaurant. “Connect him up with what?”
“Anything we can prove. Sending guys like Three-finger Choi around to beat up citizens, for example. General badness. The INS is hot to ship him back.”
“Can they do that?”
“Well, he’s not naturalized yet, so they could, but they need a crime. The NYPD likes to help out those less gifted, so every now and then we do them a favor and go hunting for him. But it gets us nowhere.”
“Why not?”
“My theory,” Mary said, “is that Duke Lo was very good in a past life, and the gods are looking out for him now.”
“If he was that good he wouldn’t have had to come back as a person,” I pointed out. “Or at least, not as a man.”
That got a smile out of Mary, the first I’d seen this morning.