by S. J. Rozan
“You work here long time?” I asked them, looking from one to the other.
The sharp-nosed waiter looked at me, pulling on his cigarette. There wasn’t much of it left; I wondered how far down he intended to smoke it. The chef’s assistant filled the silence. “Two year,” he said.
“Ah,” I said. “Work here longer, pay goes up?” I smiled apologetically. “I just start, pay very low. Hope can make more money, someday.”
The waiter lifted his lip in a sneer. “You want make more money, come on time, don’t stop for talk.” What about stopping for a smoke, I thought, but the chef’s assistant raised his arm in a grand, sweeping gesture.
“Or maybe, can join union. Yes, yes, union say, join with us, pay very big. You go find Ho Chi-Chun, big-deal organizer, you ask join big-deal union!” He took his cigarette from his lips and spat on the floor.
“Ho Chi-Chun? Cousin of my uncle’s wife!” I made my eyes wide. “Working here?” I looked around as though I was expecting to find Chi-Chun Ho peering out from behind a case of chopsticks.
The waiter’s eyes narrowed but he still said nothing. The look on the chef’s assistant became one of complete disgust. “Ho Chi-Chun? Your cousin?” Contempt dripped from his voice. “Used to working here. Talk union, join, everybody together. Always talk, talk.” He was waving his arms around, painting the scene in the air for me. “People listening, boss gets mad. Boss, Yang Hao-Bing, you know him? Big man, big face. Boss say, more talk, everybody lose job. Ho Chi-Chun keeps talk, everybody stay together, only way. Then Lee Yuan say, going to get rich, friends also, have big get-rich secret. Where Ho Chi-Chun now, big union guy?”
“Lee Yuan?” I asked.
At the same moment the waiter, tossing down his cigarette, said, “Chen Bao, you stop talk, start work, maybe you get rich.”
But the chef’s assistant only looked at me, cigarette dangling from his lips. “Roommate. Ho Chi-Chun, Lee Yuan, two more, live same place.”
“Get rich?” I asked eagerly. “Ho Chi-Chun, cousin of uncle’s wife, rich now?”
The waiter, rubbing the scar on his jawline, pushed to his feet and said sourly to me, “You want keep job, you go work. You, Chen Bao, also. Rich. No one rich. No one get rich. Big, stupid idea.”
He walked past me and shoved open the swinging doors into the kitchen.
Chen Bao, the chef’s assistant, rubbed his quarter inch of cigarette out against the detergent barrel and slowly got to his feet. “Ho Chi-Chun,” he scoffed. “Big union guy. Everybody stick together. Now, everybody all here, still. Boss mad for union talk. Ho Chi-Chun, Lee Yuan, roommates, gone to get rich. Sure, you want make more money, you join union. Sure.” He pushed through the kitchen doors also, and left me standing among the linens and the tableware, all alone.
Twelve
The rest of the dim sum day was not very eventful. I got a few more people, including Pei-Hui, to talk to me about Chi-Chun Ho and Yuan Lee, and Song Chan and Gai-Lo Lu also. I also got a lot of narrowed eyes and shaken heads: Don’t look at me; I hardly knew them; everyone knows the boss is mad; I have to get back to work now. Some of those eyes narrowed a little too slowly, some heads were just a touch too elaborately shaken; some people, I was sure, knew those men better than they were admitting. But I didn’t push. Water wears down rock; rock has little effect on water.
The ones who would talk all knew about Chi-Chun Ho’s union organizing, and some knew the four men roomed together. Most had heard Yuan Lee boasting about being on the road to riches, though few had taken him seriously.
“They always talk, don’t they?” Pei-Hui had smiled indulgently as we’d waited in the kitchen for a cart refill. “The men. They’re always getting rich. Tomorrow, they will all be rich.”
“What did he mean, do you think?” I tried to look wistful, as though I wished I’d been in on the deal. “What secret could he have had?”
“Oh, no secret, I’m sure.” She shook her head. “He had been here only a month. Came from China with big ideas. Going to be a movie star, maybe. Or he thinks he has found a system to beat the casinos in Atlantic City.”
“Do you think that’s where they went?” I asked. “All of them, to Atlantic City?”
“Who knows where they went? Maybe to open their own restaurant in Brooklyn. Maybe home to China. Maybe they are in Hollywood, big movie stars. I know where I am going now. You also.”
She smiled at me again and pushed her cart through the swinging kitchen doors, and there we were once more in the organized commotion of the restaurant floor.
By the time Dragon Garden closed at three-thirty the dim sum was down to the dregs. Actually, nothing new had been cooked in the kitchen since two, and the only late-afternoon customers were non-Chinese tourists who were enthralled by the exoticism of it all and probably thought Chinese food was supposed to be greasy, soggy, and cold, the way it was delivered from the lone Chinese take-out place in their hometowns. At three-forty-five, with the dining room cleared, the staff sat down to eat. The meal was plentiful, simple, and delicious: broad chow fun noodles with Chinese broccoli—a leggier, more bitter version than the bushy American vegetable—and deep-fried chicken with a hot pepper sauce. No one, I noticed, complimented the chefs, which was the polite approach, since a compliment would have required the chefs to assert that the food was unworthy of the company—something that was clearly the opposite of what they believed—but everyone shoveled it in, everyone took seconds, and the men and some of the women belched in appreciation.
For the waiters, this entire process was over in twenty minutes. They had stations and tables to prepare for the dinner crowd, and they finished their last cups of tea and stood up again in what seemed like one very fast motion. The dim sum ladies did not work dinner; what we did was clean up the staff tables before we went home, though by then we were on our own time. It was, Pei-Hui pointed out to me, generous of H. B. Yang to feed the ladies, since, unlike the waiters, our shifts were over when the restaurant closed, and he could have dismissed us. It was only fair that, in return, we should make the waiters’ burdens a little lighter.
Before I left Dragon Garden I called the Fifth Precinct from the pay phone outside the bathroom, checking to make sure I was alone. I asked for Mary, but her shift had just ended, and for once she was gone. “Like a bat out of hell,” the young detective she had called Chester told me. “I think she went to the hospital to see her boyfriend.”
“Is he okay, do you know?”
“I guess. She talked to him just before she left.”
Peter was talking on the phone? I felt like I was letting out the breath I’d been holding since I’d heard about the bomb. “That’s great,” I told Chester. “Hey, that guy you and she went out to pick up this morning, Three-finger Choi? Did you find him?”
“Nope. Vanished. Maybe he knows the heat is on. We did dig up an interesting fact, though. Kee said I should tell you if you called.”
“What’s that?”
“Word is he doesn’t work freelance anymore, that he signed on full-time with Duke Lo. She said you’d know the rest.”
The rest, I was sure, was “So be careful, Lydia.” “What do you do now?” I asked Chester.
“We have the word out. Either he’ll rise to the surface or someone’ll point us toward his trail.”
Someone should tell Chester his metaphors were a little confusing, but it wasn’t going to be me. I thanked him and hung up.
As I walked down the steep stairs with Pei-Hui, I realized Bill hadn’t come to Dragon Garden for dim sum the way he’d said he would. I was a little surprised; it wasn’t like him to miss this kind of chance, to eat dumplings and watch me speak broken English and wheel a cart through a raucous crowd. Maybe he’d waited downstairs and run out of patience before he’d been seated; a non-Chinese customer eating alone isn’t always a dim sum palace’s highest priority. Or maybe he’d found something better to do. I decided to call and find out when I got to my office and my phone.
&nbs
p; That, however, turned out not to be necessary. As soon as Pei-Hui and I stepped through the door at the bottom of the stairs I spotted Bill. He stood near the corner, just another guy browsing through a street vendor’s tray of jade trinkets, but from a position where he could see the door the Dragon Garden staff came out of. Ignoring him as he ignored me, I spoke to Pei-Hui in Cantonese.
“Thank you for helping me,” I said.
“One of the ladies helped me when I started.” She smiled. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I answered, “Yes. Unless the boss fires me.” I giggled to show I wasn’t serious about that.
“He won’t fire you if you do your work well, don’t organize for the union.” Pei-Hui smiled again and turned. I watched her walk south down the Bowery as, from the corner of my eye, I watched Bill watch me.
I headed in the opposite direction from Pei-Hui, toward Canal Street and my office. Bill trailed me but didn’t make any effort to catch up; in fact, he fell behind, and when I got to my office he was a block and a half away.
I went inside, figuring either he’d eventually follow and tell me what was going on or he’d call, or I’d call his beeper and demand to know what he thought he was doing. I headed down the hall to my office, but first I had to pass the gantlet of Ava, Andi, and Mei-Lei, who were just winding down the business day at Golden Adventure. They all, as one, ushered me down the hall and pointed out proudly the reglazed, newly barred window in my office, showing me the huge lock on the bars and demonstrating how easily they opened once you had the key. Ava seized my arm and pulled me into the bathroom, where, in a fit of inspiration, they had ordered the locksmith to go ahead and install another set of bars, though the window in there was only twelve inches wide and had been painted shut ever since I’d moved into this office four years ago.
“Thank you for helping with this.” I smiled at them all. “You’re very kind.”
“Lydia, no one comes here again, you don’t know it,” Ava declared.
“Thank you,” I repeated. “Did the locksmith leave his bill?”
“We pay,” Andi said defensively, her hands to her breast as though she were clutching the very bill to her.
“Oh, no,” I said. “I won’t allow it.”
That continued for a while, but I had no chance against the combined Golden Adventure forces. Eventually I ushered them out, maintaining I was in their debt well into the next lifetime, and closed the door behind me. I sat down at my desk and lifted the receiver off the phone. At that moment the outside buzzer buzzed.
“Who is it?” I demanded, pressing the button to hear the answer, though I knew it was Bill.
“Me,” the tinny speaker told me, and it was.
“What on earth are you doing?”
“Let me in and I’ll tell you.”
“Where were you at lunchtime?”
“Let me in and I’ll tell you.”
“What is—”
“Let me in and—”
“Oh, all right.”
I buzzed the door-opening buzzer, and he was in.
“Are you suddenly turning into the kind of man who gets his kicks following women around?” I asked as he came down the hall to my office. “Because if you are, that’s not a good thing.”
“Only you.” He kissed me on the cheek and moved past me into the room, strolling over to the window to examine the new bars. He moved easily, casually, but his voice held a tightness, a strain so slight maybe someone else wouldn’t have noticed it. I did, because I’ve heard it before. My eyes narrowed as he said, “Nice. Good work.”
“Chinese craftsmen,” I told him, “displaying an ancient skill. What were you doing just now?”
“Watching your back, same as yesterday.”
“Damn it!” I said, and his eyebrows went up. I never use that kind of language, but it seemed to me this situation needed to be nipped in the bud. “If you’re getting to be like everyone else you’re fired again. I don’t need to be followed all over Chinatown just because some punk came in here yesterday—”
“Not yesterday. Not here. And not a punk. Will you just calm down?”
“Will I—” I blinked. “What do you mean, not a punk? What do you mean, anything?”
Bill plunked his large frame onto my small sofa. “I don’t suppose a guy could get a cup of coffee around here?”
“He could get tea.”
“He doesn’t want tea.”
Reaching into the under-the-counter fridge I have, Bill pulled out a bottle of grapefruit juice, which is in my fridge for the same reason Lapsang souchong is in his kitchen cabinets. “You smell like a Chinese restaurant,” he said.
“You smell like a guy with a story to tell who isn’t telling it.” I sat on the desk chair and put my tired feet on the desk.
Bill uncapped the grapefruit juice and took a large swig. “Visitors,” he said. “Similar to yours.”
“What?” My heart lurched. I swung my legs down. “Three-finger Choi? Are you all right?”
“Three-finger Choi? What does that mean?”
“That’s who was here.”
“The rice bag guy? That’s his name?”
“It’s what they call him,” I said impatiently. “He threatened you, too? How did he find you? Are you all right?”
“He didn’t find me, or if he did, he’s developed a subtle streak and now he’s white, in a three-piece suit. I’m fine. No one laid a finger on me. What they threatened to do was pull my license.”
“Your license? It was cops?” I frowned. “But the cops know we’re working on this, at least Mary does, and her bosses. And besides, we’re not in anybody’s way. What’s their problem?”
“Not cops. I mean, not normal cops. Supercops.” He finished up the grapefruit juice and said, “Feds.”
“Feds?” I heard the incredulity in my own voice. “You mean, like the INS?”
“No. The State Department.”
“The State Department? I didn’t know they even had cops.”
“Everybody has cops. These jerks flashed badges, looked wimpy, and talked tough, so I figured they were probably authentic, but I checked them out anyway after they left.”
That funny note was back in Bill’s voice. I asked, “Did they check out?”
He nodded. “At least there are two guys in State Department Security with the names and badge numbers these guys gave me.”
“What did they want?”
“They wanted to know what I knew about the disappearance of four Chinese waiters from Elmhurst, Queens.”
My eyes widened. “How did they know you knew anything about it?”
“You know, I asked them that.”
“What did they say?”
“That that was none of my business.”
I watched him as he lit a cigarette. His movements were completely calm and controlled, his tone soft-voiced and offhand, except for the strain I had heard before, that small note that shows how hard someone’s working. He dropped his shaken-out match carefully into the ashtray I keep there for him. “You’re really steamed,” I said.
He pulled in smoke from his cigarette and let it out in a stream. He looked into my eyes. “Damn right,” he said, in a different, colder voice.
“Tell me.”
He drew on the cigarette again. “It never occurred to them,” he said, “just to ask. ‘You know something we want to know, what do you say?’”
“Would that have worked?”
“No. I’m not alone on this, I’m working for you. I wouldn’t have given them a pitcher of spit without asking you. But it might have gotten us off to a better start. Given me a warm, fuzzy feeling about them.”
I doubted the warm, fuzzy feeling part, but clearly the Feds could have used a better start. “But they didn’t?” I asked.
“No. They thought pushing me around would work faster.”
Big mistake. They should have asked me.
“Did they call you?” I wanted to know.
“No. Th
ey showed up at the door and said, ‘Let us in or else.’”
That was bad. Living alone, for Bill, is a full-time thing. Not a lot of people get to go to his apartment, and never, if he can help it, people he doesn’t like.
“Then what?”
“Then, while the little one told me how much they don’t like P.I.s, guys who’ve done time, or anyone who messes in their business, the big one strolled around the goddamn place.”
From that thin outline, the picture filled itself out in my mind, color and shape and sound. Two well-groomed, business-suited intruders; Bill’s jaw tightening, his hands curling at his sides; the air in the bright, solitary apartment ringing with angry words. A man who had not been invited walking smugly around as though the place were his. I could hear his soft footsteps, see each one land on Bill like a blow. I felt the knots in Bill’s shoulders, smelled his sweat and the aftershave of the Feds.
“The little guy,” Bill said, “finally worked around to what it was they wanted. The other one just kept walking. I asked them what their interest in the waiters was. They told me, ‘We’re the government; we can be interested in whatever we want.’”
“They sound,” I said, “pretty stupid.”
“When the big one got to the piano,” Bill said, “he picked up some music and asked the other one what kind of faggot plays Mozart in his spare time.”
“And?” I asked softly.
“I threw them out.”
I looked at him, heard his dangerously quiet voice, saw the set of his shoulders and jaw as I’d seen them in my head. “Did you fight?” I asked, almost afraid to hear the answer.
“You mean, did I punch a Fed?” He lit a new cigarette off the old and stubbed the first one out. “No. They told me to tell them what I knew, including who’d hired me. I told them to go home and get a warrant and not come back without it.”
“That was calm and rational of you.”
“I’m editing it for you.” He blew out smoke from the new cigarette and seemed, just a fraction, to settle into the sofa, to relax.
“I appreciate it. Bill?”