A Bitter Feast

by S. J. Rozan

  His eyes met mine. Wordlessly, he nodded. That answered the question I’d silently asked: his temper, hard to rouse and hard to calm, was back under control. He was all right. I let out a small, relieved breath and sat back in my chair.

  “The State Department,” I mused. “What kind of thing interests the State Department?”

  “I’m not sure,” Bill said, “but it’s obviously the guys who don’t make the grade as diplomats that they use in security.”

  “Do you suppose—?” I began.

  But whether and what Bill supposed was not something I was destined to find out right then. The sharp ring of the phone cut off my sentence. I let the machine answer it, but when I heard it was Mary, I picked it up.

  “Hi. I’m here.”

  “Hi. Listen, I’m at the hospital.”

  My legs propelled me out of my chair. “Is Peter okay?”

  “Getting better. He’s conscious. He told me to call you.”

  “To tell me to be careful?” The humor in that fell flat, but it was the best I could do.

  “No,” she snapped impatiently. “To tell you the man he was meeting with, the man who was killed in the explosion, was Chi-Chun Ho.”

  Thirteen

  Once again I found myself in a cab heading over the Manhattan Bridge toward Long Island College Hospital, this time with Bill.

  “Peter wants to talk to you,” Mary had said. “Can you come right away? He asked them to hold off on the pain medication until you get here because it makes him sleep, but …” She didn’t finish.

  “I’m leaving now.” The thought of Peter in a hospital refusing to take a pain pill until I got there made me want to think about something else.

  Bill and I locked up and grabbed the first cab we saw. Luckily, it was a weekend afternoon; heading toward Brooklyn, we were going out while everyone else was coming in.

  “Why didn’t he call me?” I growled uselessly at Bill as the bridge cables flashed past the taxi windows. “Before he went there, to tell me he’d heard from Chi-Chun Ho?”

  “Maybe Ho asked him not to.”

  “Ho didn’t know about me. Unless Peter told him. And so what if he asked him not to? He wasn’t the client, he was the subject. I should have been there with Peter to meet with him.”

  “So you could have gotten blown up, too?”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  I blew out an angry breath and settled back in my seat. He was right, of course; that was exactly the point. If I’d been there maybe things would have worked out differently. What things, Lydia? I demanded. You might have smelled the bomb? Your famous sixth sense might have told you it was there, and just before it exploded you might have flown everybody to safety like Supergirl? I stared at the city beyond the bridge cables, mad at myself, mad at Bill for being right, mad at Peter for not taking his pain pill.

  The cab dropped us at the entrance to Long Island College Hospital, and I led the way to the desk, where they would give us only one pass to go up and see Peter because Mary was already up there and he was only allowed two visitors at a time. I started to argue, but Bill shrugged, told me to take it, then wandered over to the water fountain. After that he kept wandering, reading bulletin boards, until he ended up standing next to me as I waited for the elevator. The reception desk people, busy with phone calls and anxious visitors, never looked up.

  “What are you doing?” I asked him as the elevator doors opened and we both got in.

  “Have you ever known them to check those things?” he asked, nodding at the flat plastic pass in my hand. “Save your energy for fights you need to have.”

  Oh, like you did with the Feds? I asked, but silently, because that might have started a fight we didn’t need to have.

  Peter was in a double room right near the elevator. He had the bed on the window side, overlooking Brooklyn Heights, but he didn’t look as though he cared very much about the view. Thick white bandages wrapped his head, and little ones were plastered on his face. The parts of his face I could see were purple and swollen, with some stitches above his left eye. His left arm was in a cast that bent at the elbow, and I was sure that under the thin hospital blanket were more bandages and stitches and places that hurt a lot.

  From a chair by the bed Mary stood up as Bill and I came around the room’s curtain divider. Peter turned his head slowly, but it was obviously hard for him. Walking around to the side Mary was on, I gave her a quick hug and asked Peter, “Is this okay?”

  “Oh, sure,” he said in a gravelly voice. “It’s great.”

  “You don’t look so bad,” I observed, “for a guy who got blown up.”

  “You look lovely, too,” he murmured weakly but politely. “Now listen.”

  “I didn’t say you looked lovely. But I’m listening.”

  He took a few breaths, then said, “Mary told you? It was Chi-Chun Ho?”

  “Yes. Why didn’t you call me? To tell me he’d contacted you?”

  “He didn’t.”

  “I—”

  Mary gave me a quick, sharp glance, so I shut up, and Peter went on. “Someone else called. Speaking bad English. He said his name was Jimmy Loo, wanted to join the union, but he was nervous. Afraid to lose his job.” He paused to breathe again. “He asked me to meet him at the union office and talk about it.”

  “Who was he?”

  “Nobody. Just after I got there, Chi-Chun showed up. He said he’d had the other guy, one of the other disappeared waiters, call so I wouldn’t know it was him.”

  “Why not?”

  “They’re in trouble.”

  “Who? The waiters?”

  “Yeah. The four of them. Some kind of trouble.” Peter coughed, and a spasm of pain passed over his face. When he spoke again his voice was weaker. “They ran.” He paused for breath. “When they didn’t know what to do next, they decided Chi-Chun should come see me because I’m a lawyer.”

  “Why did he have the other guy call?”

  Peter looked at me, and I got the feeling he’d have shrugged if he could have. “They were afraid if I knew they were in trouble before they had a chance to explain, I might not want to get involved.”

  Very understandable, very Chinese. “Does the trouble have to do with the union?”

  “I don’t know. He never told me. The explosion came too fast. Mary?”

  “Yes?” Mary rubbed the back of her fingers lightly over an unbandaged part of Peter’s face.

  “Can you get me that stupid pill now?”

  She nodded. With a look at me I wasn’t sure how to read, she left the room.

  “Lydia?” Peter’s gravelly voice took on an urgency it hadn’t had before. I leaned forward.

  “What?”

  “Find those guys.”

  “Those guys, the three other waiters?”

  “They’re in trouble,” he repeated. “Bad enough they had to disappear.” He closed his eyes, then opened them again. “Mary’ll be mad that I’m asking you. But Chi-Chun needed help. He came to me. Now I’m … here. And he’s dead.”

  “Do you know the other guys?”

  “No. One of them is legal, Song Chan, I think. The other two, what are they going to do?” A note sounded in Peter’s voice, almost of panic. I felt a pang for him, lying helpless in a hospital bed while three scared men who had come to him for help hid somewhere in New York, worse off now than before because Chi-Chun Ho, their one link to the world of power, was dead.

  “Peter?” That was Bill, the first word he’d spoken since we’d walked into the room. Peter moved his eyes to him. “Did you tell this to the cops?” Bill asked.

  “Yes. But they won’t find them. They won’t know how to look. No one will cooperate with them, especially if these guys are in trouble. And whoever they’re in trouble with is going to be looking, too. Lydia? Please. You have to find them.”

  “Peter?” I said.

  “What?”

  “That’s ‘whomever.’” />
  “Lydia?”

  “What?”

  “Thanks for coming. Good-bye.”

  Peter’s eyes closed again. The door opened, letting in Mary, followed by a nurse. Looking first at Peter, then at me, Mary said, “Wait outside. I want to talk to you.”

  I took another look at Peter, my old friend, Mr. Desk Job, lying wrapped in bandages in a place where the air smelled of eye-watering antiseptic and the tea, when he was finally able to drink it, would be Tetley’s, brewed weak. With Bill beside me, I left the room.

  The nurse stayed inside, but Mary was out in the hall again in half a minute.

  “He looks good,” I said encouragingly.

  “Don’t try to distract me,” she ordered. “What was so important to say to you that he had to get me out of the room?”

  I looked at her innocently. “I … he …”

  “He wants us to find the other three waiters,” Bill said calmly.

  “Surprise, surprise.” Mary stood with her hands on her hips. “What are you going to do?”

  I looked at Bill, and then at Mary. “I want to do it,” I said.

  Mary nodded and said nothing.

  I waited a few seconds. “Aren’t you going to tell me no?”

  She paced up the hall for a moment, then turned back to us. “As a cop,” she said, “I have to. As your friend, I ought to. But Peter’s really upset about those guys.”

  “It may not be dangerous,” I said, seizing the opportunity. “I don’t know what trouble they’re in, but maybe it looks much worse to them than it really is.”

  “Uh-huh. That’s why one of them is dead and Peter’s here.”

  “Umm.” I switched tactics. “Well, but who else can find them? Peter said the cops won’t know how to look. I mean, nothing personal, but I think that’s true.”

  “I think it is, too,” Mary said. “Patino, who caught the case? He’s good, but can you see him trying to get some undocumented busboy to talk to him?”

  I didn’t know Patino, but the idea didn’t sound profitable to me. A thought struck me. “Do any of the non-Chinese cops at the Fifth even speak Chinese?” The Fifth had a full complement of seventy cops; ‘non-Chinese’ applied to all but ten.

  “Actually, Patino speaks a little Cantonese. And Chester speaks Fukienese and Cantonese both. So do a few of the other detectives, some well, some just barely. But all it gets them is ‘I don’t know’ in more than one language.”

  “They could give the case to you.”

  “They could. They won’t, because of Peter. But even if they did, I’m still a cop. These guys, the missing guys, are probably like my father.”

  Bill looked questioningly at me.

  “In China,” I told him, “it’s the authorities who give you trouble. Cops, soldiers, government officials, it’s all the same: they make the threats, take the bribes, control your life. They’re the enemy. People try to stay as far from them as possible. Mary’s father was upset when she went into the department. He couldn’t believe she wanted to be the enemy.”

  “I tried to tell him it wasn’t like that here, that the bad guys in America are mostly civilians, but he doesn’t buy it,” Mary said. “If he was in trouble, he’d never go to a cop.”

  “Where would he go?” Bill asked.

  Mary’s brows knit together. “To his family association, or his merchants’ organization, or someplace like that.”

  “And if a cop came to him, he’d stonewall?”

  “Definitely. Even if he had no idea what it was about. The point is to avoid anything the authorities are interested in. That’s why these guys didn’t tell Peter what was going on over the phone. They were afraid he’d turn them down.”

  “Or in,” I said.

  “Right,” she said. “Or in.”

  “But I’m not the authorities.”

  “I know,” said Mary. “That’s the only reason I’m even considering letting you do this.”

  “And,” I said, forbearing to mention that no one had actually asked her to let me do anything, “there’s another thing: H. B. Yang.”

  Mary gave me a long look, then nodded. “You mean the protection that comes with working for him.”

  “On the plus side. And on the minus side, whatever comes if I tell him I quit. After all, this is exactly what he asked me to do.”

  “He asked you to find four guys. Now one of them’s dead.”

  “And I wonder,” said Bill, “how he feels about that?”

  Mary and I both looked at Bill, and we all said nothing for a minute. “You’ll be involved in this?” Mary finally asked Bill.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Mary scowled at the “ma’am,” stuck her hands in the back pockets of her jeans, and paced the hall some more.

  “Okay,” she said, wheeling around. “You can look. But as soon as you come up with anything you have to let me know. And if anything even starts to look dangerous, you have to stop. Understood?”

  Understood, used that way, is a cop word. As Mary stood looking seriously and severely at us from down the hospital hallway, I suddenly had a vision of her twenty years from now, in a blue uniform, speaking at a news conference as Chief of Detectives or Chief of Department or something, gold braid on her jacket and silver in the braid of her hair.

  But right now she was in blue jeans and a jean jacket, and it was a good time for us to get out of here before she changed her mind. “Yes,” I said. “Understood. You won’t be sorry.”

  “I’d better not be, or you will be, too.”

  So with another quick hug and instructions to be sure she ate something and got some sleep tonight, I left, Bill beside me as we walked the short distance to the elevator. Mary turned back to Peter’s room again.

  Bill hailed a cab for us outside the hospital. I climbed in and leaned back in the seat, letting Bill give the driver instructions. I also let him put his arm around me and pull me closer to him, and I leaned against him.

  “Come on, I’ll buy you dinner,” he said.

  I leaned my head back and looked up at him. “Didn’t I just have lunch?”

  “When did that ever stop you?”

  “I see your point.” I sighed. “I guess it’s a good idea. I’m tired and confused and I don’t have any idea what to do next. Like I’m out of gas or something.”

  Bill grinned. “Well, I know where we can go to get gas.”

  I punched him meaninglessly in the ribs and leaned against him again, which is where I stayed for the rest of the taxi ride.

  The cab took us back over the Manhattan Bridge and turned north, but not very far. We rode up Chrystie Street, into the area that was once the heart of the Jewish Lower East Side, the place where Eastern European immigrants in head scarves and heavy woolen coats first came and pushed their pushcarts, baked their bread, built their synagogues, and raised their children. Some of the businesses the early immigrants established are still here, and a few of the original inhabitants, now elderly, still live in the tenements built for them. But the second generation, born here, didn’t stay. They left for uptown, the Bronx, and the suburbs, making room for the Latinos who came after them, the blacks moving up from the South, and, now, Chinese people whose character-painted shop signs are as exotic and incomprehensible to most of the people of the city as the Hebrew lettering on the original shops was a century ago.

  We U-turned and headed south for half a block, then stopped. I fumbled in my pocket for money, but by the time I found some Bill had already paid. I followed him out of the cab and onto the sidewalk. “Put it on your expense report,” I said, looking around. “Where are we?”

  “Sammy’s.” Bill crossed the sidewalk to a set of steps, went down them to a door, and held it open for me. The sign above the door did indeed say SAMMY’S ROUMANIAN RESTAURANT.

  “What do we eat here?” I asked as I went in past him. He didn’t need to answer me, though, because the air inside the small, low-ceilinged room was thick with the aromas of roasting meats wi
th bay and rosemary, stews with garlic and onions, yeasty bread, potatoes. It was early for dinner, but the restaurant was half full, mostly older people working their quiet ways through huge platters of food.

  Bill did answer me, though. “Boy food,” he said as a waiter who must have been a hundred years old came and sat us at a white-tableclothed table. I looked around; all the waiters must have been a hundred years old. I said as much to Bill.

  “It’s the food,” he answered. “It makes you live forever.”

  “What if I don’t want to live forever?”

  “Then this food will probably kill you.”

  I extracted a pickle from the bowl on the table. Next to the bowl was a seltzer squirter, the old-fashioned glass kind that you keep refilling. This one was full. I eyed it with interest. “The food knows what I want?”

  “The food here knows everything,” Bill said, running his eyes over the menu. “If you squirt me with that thing they fine you fifty dollars.” Still looking at the menu, he pointed over his shoulder to a sign on the otherwise photograph-plastered wall that said as much.

  “Me?” I protested. “Such a thing would never even cross my mind.” I gave the squirter a regretful glance. “But isn’t that what lawyers call an attractive nuisance?”

  “No,” he said. “You are what lawyers—”

  “Oh, nuts to you.” I looked over the menu myself. “Does the food here really know everything? And why didn’t we tell Mary about the Feds who came to see you?”

  “Is that a real question?”

  “The first one or the second one?”

  “The second one.”

  “No. How about the first?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then what I’m hungry for should just come to me out of the kitchen.” I closed the menu.

  “It will.” The waiter came shuffling over and Bill ordered: pot roast for me and a chopped liver sandwich for himself. He ordered himself a beer, too. I stuck to the seltzer; there wasn’t any fine for squirting it into your glass.

  “Okay,” I said, chomping on another crisp pickle while we waited. “What are we going to do?”

  “Well, I still want to know what I asked before,” Bill said. “How does your man Yang feel about one of the guys he was looking for being dead?”