A Bitter Feast

by S. J. Rozan

  “If it worked, why do you want to tell him? You stop looking, he’ll know.”

  “It didn’t work. I just want to tell him it did.”

  “And you expect him to believe you? Shit, you’re killing me. You know, Kee may be right about you.”

  “Right about what?”

  “Never mind. Listen, I don’t think this is a good idea.”

  “Chester, I can find him anyway. It will just take longer if you don’t help.”

  “So let it take longer. Kee outranks me. She gets pissed off, she’ll hand me my butt on a plate.”

  Bill had been watching and listening to my side of this frustrating conversation. I rolled my eyes at him as I tried to think up something to say that would change Chester’s mind. Before I could, Bill leaned over and pushed the speaker button on my phone. “Chester, this is Bill Smith, Lydia’s partner.”

  “Hey! How you doing?” Chester responded jovially, his voice now echoing out of the speaker phone. I took the receiver from my ear. “Kee’s told me about you,” Chester said to Bill. “You used to be a cop, right?”

  “No, but it’s in the family. Dave Maguire was my uncle.”

  I stared at Bill, eyes wide, as Chester said, “Oh, yeah, hey, that’s right. She told me that. I was just out of the academy when that happened. That sucked, man, that really sucked.”

  “That,” I knew, was the death of Bill’s Uncle Dave. Dave Maguire had been a tough, popular police captain, an instructor at the academy, a Precinct Commander. He was the one Bill had lived with when, at fifteen, he’d moved out of his own family’s place. I didn’t know that whole story, but I knew it wasn’t a good one. I did know this: Dave Maguire had died six years ago in an ambush set up by a rogue cop in the pocket of the drug dealers Maguire had been closing in on. And Bill had been there. Shot and badly hurt, he’d managed to kill one of the hit men, but he hadn’t managed to stop the other from killing Dave Maguire.

  I’d learned most of this from people who know Bill, not from Bill himself, because it’s one of the things in his life he never, ever talks about.

  And from Mary I’d also learned this: that Dave Maguire’s name was still magic around the NYPD.

  “Yeah,” Bill said now, in answer to Chester. “Listen, Chester, I’m going in with Lydia on this.”

  “Yeah?” Chester asked dubiously. “I don’t know. What’s the point here?”

  “We think we can smoke out the waiters. We think Lo may know where they are.”

  “How come?”

  “A hunch. But Mary Kee agrees we have a better chance of finding them than you guys do. We’ll try not to spook this guy Lo. And if it turns bad, we’ll get out fast.”

  “I don’t know,” Chester said again, but he sounded like he was wavering. “You’re gonna be there?”

  “Uh-huh. And we want to find him somewhere where it’s public. Just for the insurance.”

  Chester, on his end, was silent. The music behind him changed, from one screaming-guitar seventies song I couldn’t recognize to another. “Well, yeah, okay,” he finally said. “I guess she’s right, you could probably find him sooner or later anyway.”

  “Probably.”

  “All right. Check out the Zhen Rong Association. Lo hangs there. It’s like his club. But you’re going in with her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because if anything happens to her, Kee’s gonna tear me a new—”

  “Yeah,” Bill said quickly. “Thanks, Chester. We owe you one.” He pressed the button that cut the connection.

  I had been holding the receiver uselessly in my hand the whole time that conversation was going on. I replaced it now, still staring at Bill. He perched on my desk and lit a cigarette and didn’t meet my eyes.

  “Bill,” I started.

  “I know,” he said. “You don’t need that kind of help. You especially don’t need one big white guy telling another big white guy that he’s going to be looking after you. I know.”

  “No. That’s not it. I … you didn’t have to do that.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said. He took a drag from the cigarette, threw out the match. “This is important to you.” He stood up from my desk, still not looking at me. “You know where to find this Zen place he was talking about?”

  “Zhen,” I corrected automatically. “Zhen Rong. Roughly, ‘to cause oneself to grow in honor.’ Yes, it’s on East Broadway.”

  “Good. Let’s go.”

  “Bill—”

  “No.” He shook his head. “Let’s go.”

  So we went. We locked up my office and headed for East Broadway, through a spring night that had now grown chilly. It would have been dark, too, if not for the streetlights, charged with power born in roaring forest waterfalls a thousand miles from here.

  I did know where the Zhen Rong Association was, though I’d never been inside. I’ve never been inside any of the family or village association places in Chinatown except my own, Chin Family Association, and Mary’s. Chin Family Association was upstairs in a building on Bayard Street with, of course, a restaurant at street level. As kids my brothers and I played on the linoleum of the curtained front room on the second floor while Ba—my father—drank tea and debated politics with the other men, from the world’s to that of whatever restaurant they were working in at the time. The restaurant debates always drew the most heated opinions. Sometimes, surrounded by cigarette smoke, the clink of teacups, and the rising and falling tones of Cantonese talk, Andrew and I would sit at one of the folding card tables and, bamboo brushes in our clumsy fists, clunkily copy the graceful strokes of the calligraphy—one of the Five Arts of ancient China—that an old, white-haired man patiently showed us. When we did well, he would smile and give us sweets, and I remembered his glittering rimless glasses, the almond chewiness of the sweets, and my determination to practice my calligraphy harder, though I was never anywhere near as good as Andrew.

  As we inked the paper or did our homework or chased each other around the place, a steady stream of people came and went from the room in the back. These were newly arrived Chin clan immigrants looking for somewhere to stay, who would be put up for a few days in the quietly illegal bedrooms on the third floor until more permanent places were found for them; or they were garment workers, like my mother, hoping for justice in a dispute with a sweatshop owner; or parents needing a loan to send their most promising child to college. They waited their turns and went in with little gifts, a bag of oranges or a new fountain pen; most came out satisfied that, at worst, they had been heard and, at best, they might get what they wanted because someone with power was taking them seriously.

  That someone was the man—it was always a man—who, back home, would have been the village chief, the headman—the mayor, if you wanted to do it in English. Every family name and village association had a headman. Only these men weren’t elected. It was obvious to everyone who they were, and they held their power because they could. They were men who had money, successful men, men with connections and a personal presence that inspired fear as much as confidence in the people who were perfectly happy to look up to them. The ones who weren’t happy could challenge them—not overtly, of course, but by taking over some of their functions, by lending money or settling disputes—until it became clear where the power really lay.

  Chin Family Association ran that way. I was sure Zhen Rong did, too, and I was willing to bet I knew who the headman was.

  The Zhen Rong Association was housed on the first floor of a residential building on the piece of East Broadway right near the Manhattan Bridge. The building’s brick front had only two small first-floor windows, and they were curtained; but keeping track of the outside world was never the point of a family or village association, after all.

  “Is Zhen Lo’s family name, then?” Bill asked me as we approached the place. “Or Rong? Or is it the village back home?”

  “None of those, I don’t think. Zhen Rong is a made-up name.” I waited for the complicated traffic light at the B
owery to figure out when to let us through. “Village ties aren’t as strong in China now as they were when the last generation came over,” I told him. “Some of these people are coming from cities, or they were internal migrant workers before they left. And the new guys come from a wider area than my father’s people did, or H. B. Yang’s. I bet any Fukienese can belong to Zhen Rong as long as he’s willing to accept Duke Lo as his fearless leader.”

  “Or hers,” Bill added in an admonitory tone.

  “Don’t get smug with your display of feminist sensitivity,” I advised him, “because you’re wrong. At least in the old places, only the men belong. Widows of members get looked after, sort of, but these aren’t the kinds of places women hang around and gossip and gamble. We do that at each other’s homes.”

  “Chinese women gamble at home?”

  “Just being married to most men is a gamble.” We reached Zhen Rong’s door. “Maybe this place is different, though,” I added just before we went in.

  But it wasn’t.

  As soon as I pushed open the door into Zhen Rong I could see I was the only woman in the place. So could everyone else there. And they could also see that Bill was the only non-Chinese. I don’t know which confused them more, but the potential for irritation was strong and already showing itself on some of the faces that were turned to us.

  I bowed that Chinese bow that doesn’t exactly bend from the waist but isn’t just a nod of the head, either. Bill stood a little behind me, unmoving and silent. I knew he’d be running his eyes around the room, mapping and cataloging it as he always does in a new place, but I also knew he’d be trying to do it without making eye contact with any of the men, because I’d asked him not to.

  For their part, the dozen or so men seated at the scattered tables, the two sofas, and the overstuffed armchairs had fallen silent as they looked at us, teacups and Chinese newspapers and fan-tan buttons temporarily abandoned. The room wasn’t as large as the front room at Chin Family Association, but it was similarly decked out: chairs and tables, sofas and coffee tables, cigarette smoke draping the air. On the walls, where Chin Family Association had hung scrolls promising good fortune and prosperity, Zhen Rong displayed photos of Fukienese leaders in the smiling company of New York politicians. Like the ones in H. B. Yang’s office, I thought, only not going back so far.

  I bowed again to the watchful, silent men. “I’m very sorry to disturb you,” I said. “I am Chin Ling Wan-ju. I would be very grateful for a few moments with Lo Da-Qi.”

  Even though I spoke in English, I gave our names in the Chinese order, because it was polite, and politeness seemed like a minimum requirement with this crew. I got no response except a few shuffled feet and changed seating positions, mostly enabling the men who moved to see us better.

  “I won’t take up much of his time,” I promised them. “It’s a matter of some importance, and only a powerful man can help me.”

  I’d thought that might work, but still no one spoke in answer. I looked around the room at the unsmiling faces, young and old, and realized they were waiting for something else. I did what they wanted.

  “This is Bill Smith,” I said, standing aside so they could see Bill clearly. “My husband.”

  Beside me, I felt Bill nod to the group, a careful greeting.

  The expressions on the faces of the men before us softened into a mixture of recognition and contempt. A few of the younger ones smiled knowing, mocking smiles. There weren’t a lot of reasons these men would consider legitimate for a non-Chinese to penetrate their sanctuary. The point of a place like this, after all, was to let these men, amid asphalt and English, thousands of miles from where they were born, feel safe and at home. An important politician could probably come here, or a fire inspector, though he wouldn’t be welcome; and after that, almost no one’s presence was acceptable unless he was Chinese.

  But the white husband of a Chinese woman was something they understood. This would be a man smart enough to get himself a real wife, not one of those loud, demanding, sexless women of his own race; and as for me, though they resented me for it, they could see the sense in my latching on to a man much closer to the possibilities of power and wealth by the fact of his birth than they would ever be no matter how hard and long they worked.

  So, as I cast my eyes down as was proper to do when introducing my husband to a group of men, these men, their faces either derisive or carefully blank, relaxed and waited for me to ask again what I’d asked when we’d first walked in.

  “We need help on a matter,” I said, raising my eyes to them. “We would be grateful for a few minutes of Lo Da-Qi’s counsel.”

  Another few moments of silence. Then one of the older men rose, scraping back his chair. He said nothing, but he walked to and through a door in the rear wall. None of the other men moved, and Bill and I didn’t either, standing where we’d stood since we walked into the room.

  The silence and the stares were getting just a little on my nerves, making me want to do things like check that my hair was all lying flat and my socks matched, by the time the door in the back opened again and the old man gestured us through. We walked the length of the room, me with eyes once again properly downcast, Bill not looking left or right. We went through the door, and the old man, walking out, closed it behind himself, leaving us alone with the room’s occupant.

  The man before us sat on a leather easy chair in a grouping of three chairs and a coffee table on one side of the room that balanced the desk and side chairs on the other. I ran my eyes over the furniture, a mixture of department store English men’s club and department store French Provincial: maroon leather with brass studs alongside distressed white wood with curvy legs and gilding where you least expected it. The room’s single window, which faced the building’s rear courtyard and probably didn’t have any better view than the one in my office, was covered with heavy blue velvet drapes that matched the blue lattice-patterned carpet. The picture frames were curvy and gilded and eclipsed the glass-framed brush paintings in soft blues and grays that they contained.

  The man in the easy chair smiled slightly behind his tortoiseshell glasses. He was, I judged, around fifty, his skin lined as much with the deep creases that smiles bring as with age, his hair still full and black. He wore a well-made three-piece blue suit, a glisteningly white shirt, and a navy tie. Without rising he gestured us to sit. There wasn’t a lot of room to maneuver around the furniture, but we managed it. As we did, and before I could open my mouth, one of the younger men from the other room came in with a pot of tea and a plate of coconut squares. The rising steam of the tea mingled with the heavy, dead scent of stale tobacco left behind in a room where there’s too much upholstered furniture and the air doesn’t. move.

  The young man put the tea and sweets on the coffee table, smirked at me, sneered at Bill, bowed to the other man, and left.

  The suited man waited until the door had clicked shut. Then he turned to me with the broad smile his lined face had promised. “Chin Ling Wan-ju,” he said. “Lydia Chin! Please, have some tea, please.”

  His English was accented but clear. I answered, then, also in English. “You are Lo Da-Qi?”

  “Duke Lo,” he said, his smile growing even broader. “Duke Lo. I certainly am. It’s a pleasure to finally meet you. Lydia Chin! Also, your husband! I didn’t know; forgive me. Sir.” He leaned forward in his chair to shake Bill’s hand. Bill shook with him, returned his smile, gave Lo his name, and was otherwise carefully silent.

  “There’s nothing to forgive,” I said, pouring the tea into three Western-style cups with saucers and handles. The first I handed to Duke Lo, the second to Bill. “You couldn’t have been expected to know. In fact,” I said, looking straight into his eyes with a frankness I knew would be considered unacceptably forward by the men in the other room, “I don’t see why you should have been expected to know anything about me at all.”

  Duke Lo, however, didn’t seem to take my forthrightness, or my words, as an affront. He j
ust smiled again, sipped his tea, and spoke to Bill. “Oh, I find I must keep up with many things. Important to my business. Only sometimes I don’t know why, but that doesn’t matter, I always find out.” He turned to me. “Certainly, I wish someone had told me how pretty you are! I would have kept up with you sooner.”

  He winked at Bill and went back to his tea.

  Bill just sat, his hand wrapped around his teacup.

  “If you’d wanted to meet me”—I spoke into the silence, putting aside my own tea, an unremarkable pekoe—“you could have invited me over, instead of sending Three-finger Choi to try and scare me.” I emphasized the “try” maybe a little more than I had to, and kept my eyes on Duke Lo.

  “Oh, no no no!” Duke Lo protested, putting his teacup down, erasing the air with both hands. He looked from me to Bill. “Choi completely misunderstood my instructions! He is a very stupid man. I am extremely sorry for any unhappiness he caused you. Ah, the worry he must have caused you, also, Mr. Smith! No, it’s unforgivable. But Choi is a very stupid man.”

  I noticed he didn’t say, And I’ve fired him. I asked, “Really? What were his instructions?”

  Lo looked at Bill again, but Bill said nothing. Lo turned and answered me. “I’d requested,” he said, “requested, that he suggest you not trouble yourself with the tedious search for four useless men, ungrateful menial workers worth no more than the dung they wallowed in in the villages at home where they should have stayed. That was all. Yes, believe me, that was all.”

  Believe me. Trust me on this. Uh-huh.

  “That wasn’t the message as it was delivered,” I said.

  Duke Lo nodded sadly. “Choi is eager and loyal, but he is stupid. He often, yes, often goes beyond his instructions in his desire to accomplish what he believes to be my goal. But an admirable motive!” His eyes lit up. “You cannot reprimand such a man, you cannot punish such loyalty, such devotion! I am lucky enough to have a number of such devoted employees, but it is rare in this world, Lydia Chin, rare.”