A Bitter Feast

by S. J. Rozan

  Rare indeed. I dropped the subject of Three-finger Choi and returned to the disappeared waiters.

  “You speak of these men, these waiters,” I said, “as though you know them, and dislike them.”

  “I? No. No no. But why would I need to know them? It’s clear from their behavior that they are nothing. The kind of men who would run out on their jobs, their responsibilities; the lowest of worms, the dust the worms crawl through.”

  “And you wanted me to stop looking for what reason?”

  “Just to save you trouble! Yes, to keep you from wasting time, when you have so many important things to do!”

  Yeah, sure. “Perhaps these men are, as you say, useless and ungrateful,” I said. “Although their families may not think so. They may be living on the money the men send home. They may be waiting right now for money that won’t come anymore unless the men return to their jobs.”

  “I suppose that’s possible,” Duke Lo agreed. “Although one of them won’t be returning, I fear.” He let his face grow appropriately solemn. “I understand he was killed last night. By a bomb.” He dropped his eyes to the floor with the sadness of it all; then he glanced up at me again. His face still wore the soft, sad expression, but his eyes, for the brief second they met mine, were icy and hard.

  “Yes, I’d heard,” I said noncommittally.

  “Not a surprising end for a man of his kind.” Duke Lo sounded detached and philosophical. He glanced at Bill, then he rested his eyes on mine. They were frank and friendly again, looking like eyes that fit with the smile crinkles around them, the way they’d looked when we’d come in.

  “Maybe not suprising,” I said. “But unfortunate.”

  “For him, yes.” Lo shrugged. “But what could he have expected?”

  “No, not just for him. For a good many people involved with him.”

  Lo cocked his head and smiled again. He shifted in his chair, recrossed his legs so that he was facing me fully now, and Bill was on the sidelines. “What do you mean?”

  “In New York,” I said, “as I’m sure an influential man like yourself must know, the police are required to investigate violent deaths. Whether the dead were useless in life or not doesn’t seem to matter.”

  “Yes, of course. An investigation will inconvenience some people, certainly.” Like H. B. Yang, I thought to myself as Duke Lo lifted his teacup and covered his smile with it.

  “The New York police,” I went on, “don’t think in a way that’s … straightforward. They expect things to be complicated. Twisted. Those men may have been useless as far as you’re concerned, but they weren’t useless to their employer.”

  “Useless to their employer?” Lo said. “No worker is. How would he have a job in that case? But also, few are irreplaceable.”

  “No, that’s true,” I agreed. “But when a man’s employees disappear, the New York police tend to look to his enemies for an answer.”

  Duke Lo cocked his head at me in a thoughtful sort of way. “That’s interesting, what you say.”

  “Yes,” I pressed on, “it’s often what happens.”

  “But one of those men—the one who was killed—was an irritation to his employer, if what I hear is true. Is this incorrect?”

  “No,” I said. “I’d heard that, too. But this employer had had other irritating workers, and they’d been fired. Not killed, and they didn’t disappear.”

  I bit into a creamy-sweet coconut square and listened to the silence. The thing practically melted its way down my throat. I said, “Do you want to know what I think happened?”

  “Certainly, very much.” Duke Lo nodded politely. I noticed his teacup was empty and filled it for him, and topped off Bill’s, too.

  “Well,” I said, “I think perhaps someone—some enemy of the men’s employer—asked the men to disappear. Possibly even paid them to. Just to embarrass the employer. Because, as you say, one of them was an irritation to him, and it looks bad.” I poured myself some fresh tea, too, now that the men had been served. “Maybe the death of the man yesterday was accidental and unrelated. But it will get the police all excited. They’ve probably started thinking all kinds of strange thoughts already, and looking for people to ask questions of.”

  I carefully didn’t mention Mary’s and Chester’s earlier visit to Happy Pavilion, although Duke Lo’s thoughtful face told me he knew about it, and he knew I knew, and he knew that it, among other things, was what I meant.

  “The police may have strange ideas, which lead them along strange pathways,” he said conversationally. “But if so, what can anyone do?”

  “The police like to solve cases,” I said. “If they’re solved, they’re over. If, for example, the remaining missing men were to reappear and tell the police that neither their employer nor their employer’s enemies had anything to do with their disappearing in the first place, I think the police would be satisfied with that.”

  “You do?” Lo asked. “But what about the man who died?”

  “If the employer and his enemies had nothing to do with the men disappearing, there’s no reason to think they had anything to do with killing one of them, either,” I said logically. “The police will probably put that down to the antiunion forces.”

  Duke Lo knew that the antiunion forces were most publicly identified with H. B. Yang, so this idea could not have been unappealing to him, but he didn’t say anything about that, and I just sipped my tea.

  “Well,” he finally said, “this is certainly very interesting, everything you say. But I cannot, no, I cannot imagine just why you have come here to say these things to me.” He smiled broadly, the benevolent headman pleased to spend some time on a lazy spring evening chatting with a villager—even from a different village—although the visit was purely social, with nothing in it for him.

  “I thought,” I answered mildly, “since you’d sent Three-finger Choi to … suggest I not waste my time on these men, that you might have some interest in them.”

  His smile grew almost abashed, as though he were a child caught playing a practical joke he was rather proud of. “No,” he said. “No. I have no interest. Men like that? Turtle’s eggs, as we say at home. Here I think you would call them little pieces of shit.” I almost flinched as he spat those words, sharp and poisonous, into the air. His mischievous smile, though, did not change, and his voice, when he spoke again, was pleasant once more. “Who could be interested in them? I must admit, yes, it amused me, the trouble their disappearance caused. I would enjoy seeing that continue, for my amusement.”

  I wondered if Duke Lo found it amusing that Peter was lying in a hospital room in Brooklyn. I looked at him, his smile lines and good blue suit, his English men’s club chair in his Chinese men’s club. I suddenly wanted to leave, to be out in the evening where there were no heavy velvet drapes or overstuffed furniture or patterned carpets, where whatever the city smelled like, it wasn’t old, stale smoke and motionless, imprisoned air.

  Before I could make a move, though, Duke Lo asked, as though it had just occurred to him to wonder, “Miss Chin—or perhaps I should say Mrs. Smith—”

  “Miss Chin will do just fine.” I cut that off at the pass.

  “Miss Chin,” he said again, nodding pleasantly, “in your search for these missing men, who is your employer?”

  There was no way he was getting the whole truth to that one. In fact, since he had to ask, let him keep guessing.

  “I can’t tell you that,” I answered, equally amicably. “I’m sure you understand. But it’s someone with a friendly interest in the men’s well-being.”

  “Yes.” He smiled. “Of course. Although …”

  “Although?”

  “Although. A friendly interest, you say. Perhaps. Perhaps not. In any case, your interest, Lydia Chin, may, it may, be different than your client’s.”

  “Do you think so? In what way?”

  “You were born and raised in Chinatown. Though you are now married”—a smile and a nod to Bill—“you retain a
n office here, am I right about that?”

  “Yes, you’re right.”

  “You retain, then, an interest in Chinatown. An interest in the future here.”

  “I do.”

  “Well, then, well, then, it might be worth your consideration: Chinatown is changing. Your client—could it be your client is part of the old Chinatown? You should think, Lydia Chin, about that. You should think about where your loyalties lie. There is the future; there is the past. Chinatown will move forward, but not everyone will move with it. Will you move forward, Lydia Chin?”

  Move, I thought. The first good idea I’ve heard since I got here.

  “I’ll consider that question,” I said, swallowing what I wanted to say. “I don’t know how to answer you, but I’ll think about it. In any case”—I stood—“we came here because I thought you had some interest in the situation of the vanished waiters. I can see, however, that I was mistaken.”

  “I’m afraid so.” Duke Lo’s words were gently apologetic, as though the mistake were his, not mine. His eyes twinkled. “Although I certainly don’t regret the error, because it gave me the chance to meet you. You also, Mr. Smith,” he said to Bill, who had stood when I had. Duke Lo, remaining seated, said, “I hope to see you both soon again.”

  Neither Bill nor I answered that. We just shook Duke Lo’s hand and walked out of his club.

  Fifteen

  “Can we go for a walk?” I asked Bill as we hit the night air. Never before had East Broadway seemed so sweet, so breezy, so easygoing and full of possibility. Exhausted and achy as I was from my dim sum day, I was also too wired to want to do anything except keep moving.

  “Sure,” Bill answered, shaking out the match to the cigarette he’d pulled out the minute we hit the sidewalk. “Where?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I’ll walk you home.”

  “That’s backward.”

  “You want to make something of it?”

  “No. Although,” he ruminated as we started west, “that’s the second time you’ve married me without telling me about it. I wonder what your shrink would say about that?”

  “I don’t have a shrink.”

  “Go get one, and find out what he’d say.”

  “She would say I’m very quick, clever, and able to think on my feet.”

  “That’s not your shrink, it’s your fortune cookie.”

  “It’s probably just as accurate. You were great in there, by the way.”

  “Me?” He sounded surprised. “I said absolutely nothing.”

  “That’s what I mean. You ought to do that more often.”

  “You hurt me to the quick.”

  “No, I don’t, because you know I don’t mean it. But in this particular case it was perfect, because it made Duke Lo talk to me. If you’d opened your manly mouth just once he would have ignored me completely and spoken only to you. He kept trying to do that anyway.”

  “I saw that. That’s why I shut up. So you think my mouth is manly?”

  “The same as the rest of you, sahib.”

  “Too many compliments and I’m going to think you really do want to marry me.”

  “That’s just like a man.”

  “I am a man.”

  “That’s your problem. But let me ask you something: why didn’t you have a cigarette in there? You usually do when you’re just sitting around, and that room’s obviously not a no-smoking zone. I kept waiting for you to light up.”

  He shook his head as he took a deep drag on the cigarette he was having now. “It was a power thing. He’s a smoker—and it’s a good thing, by the way, or he would’ve blinded us with all those toothy smiles. It would have been a mistake for me to light up before he did.”

  “Really?”

  “Absolutely. It would have meant I was less able to control my craving. Weaker than he was.”

  “Cigarettes work that way?”

  “Everything works that way.”

  I considered that for a block or two. As we waited for a light I said, “I wonder if you are.”

  “If I’m what?”

  “Less able to control it. I wonder what Duke Lo craves.”

  Bill looked over at me. “What are you thinking?”

  “Did you believe him?”

  “About what?”

  “When he said he only wanted to see the men stay disappeared because he thought it was funny. In other words, because it made trouble for H. B. Yang.”

  “Isn’t that our theory? That his power grows as your friend Yang’s shrinks, and the point of this was to embarrass Yang?”

  “My friend Yang. My mother would keel over if she heard you say that. And that was our theory, yes. But I don’t know,” I said. “Did you hear what he called them? And the way he said it?” I frowned at the memory of Duke Lo’s voice. “‘Turtle’s eggs.’ That’s a really bad thing where I come from. And ‘little pieces of shit.’” Bill raised his eyebrows to hear that word come out of me. I pushed right on. “Do you talk that way about people who aren’t anything to you, just pawns in your game? Pawns who, actually, are doing just what you told them to do?”

  “Maybe you do. Maybe you despise weak people at the same time as you’re using them.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe he’s the reason they disappeared. Ho told Peter they were in trouble. Maybe he’s the one they’re in trouble with.”

  “Could be.” Bill nodded, pulling smoke from his cigarette. “And what’s the trouble?”

  “How do I know? This is a brand-new theory. It needs to ripen. And something else.”

  But I didn’t get the chance to tell Bill what else I was thinking. Putting a hand on my arm, he stopped on the sidewalk. I stopped, too, wondering why; then two doors opened simultaneously in a Ford parked in the yellow zone in front of his building. Two men stepped out. My hand snaked to the 38 clipped to my waist, but I didn’t close my fingers on it, because Bill stood calmly, not moving as the men approached us.

  “Well,” he said, eyes on them. “Look, Lydia, it’s Mickey Mouse and his dog Pluto.”

  The big man’s jaw tightened at that, but the little one actually smiled, though it wasn’t a nice smile.

  “Smith,” he said. “And this must be Lydia Chin.”

  “Who are you?” I demanded.

  “Oh, I beg your pardon,” the small man said with sarcastic politeness. “I’m Ed Deluca, and this is Jim March.” He reached his hand into his coat as his partner did the same. That automatically made my hand want to fly back to the gun on my belt, but I forced myself to stand still the way Bill was doing. Deluca and March both came out with gold badges in little leather cases. The badges identified them as State Department Security.

  “You guys go to finishing school since this afternoon?” Bill asked.

  Deluca shook his head. “We’ve been feeling bad about that, Smith. Maybe we did come on a little strong. Let’s go on up and discuss it.” He made a move in the direction of Bill’s apartment door.

  “No,” Bill said.

  March said, “Listen, Smith,” and stepped forward. Bill turned, just slightly, to face him, and I knew from Bill’s eyes what his shoulders felt like, how the backs of his hands tingled. I wanted to put a hand on his arm, to try to bring him back to where we were and who these people were, but that would make it worse.

  Deluca watched for a moment, then he smiled and shrugged.

  “Okay,” he said in the mock-generous voice of the guy who’s got everything going his way, the guy who amuses himself giving you a crumb because he’s got the keys to the kitchen. “How about we buy you a drink?” He cocked his head toward Shorty’s, the bar downstairs from Bill’s apartment.

  “No.”

  “Don’t make this hard, Smith.”

  Bill held the smaller man’s eyes. “Coffee,” he finally said. “You can buy us coffee.” He looked at me as if to ask whether that was all right. Now I did lightly touch his arm, feeling the wire-tightness. He nodded once and stepped off the curb, leaving Deluca and March to f
ollow him up the block or not. They did.

  There are two coffee shops on that block, one Bill likes and one he doesn’t. The one he held the door at was the one he doesn’t. I figured that was for the same reason he wouldn’t let Deluca and March back up into his place and wouldn’t drink with them at Shorty’s, which is as much his home as the apartment upstairs.

  We settled in a booth and ordered three coffees and a tea. I wondered, not for the first time, how drinking bad coffee had gotten to be part of the American macho image.

  After the waitress left, Deluca took four quarters from March and fed the jukebox. Gloria Gaynor came on, singing “I Will Survive.”

  “Background noise.” Deluca smiled. “Always a good idea.” He turned to me. “I’m glad you’re here. Saves us the trouble of looking for you.”

  “I’m here,” I said.

  “This afternoon,” he said, “your buddy here told us to get lost. We just had a few questions, but he wasn’t very friendly.”

  “I’m not friendly, either,” I said.

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “What I told you,” Bill said quietly, “was to come back when you got a warrant. You have one?”

  “It’s not like that,” Deluca said.

  “What is it like?” I asked.

  Deluca sipped his coffee. “We had some questions,” he repeated, speaking to me. “We just want a little help.”

  “Questions about what?”

  “See?” Deluca said to Bill. “Already she’s nicer than you.” He smiled again at me. “About four Chinese waiters who disappeared.”

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” I said. “One of them’s dead.”

  Deluca and March looked at each other. “Bomb at the union office,” Deluca agreed. “Saw it on the news. We want to know where the other three are.”

  “A lot of people do,” I said.

  “And?”

  “What makes you think Bill or I have any idea?”

  “When we came to visit Smith today,” Deluca said, putting down his coffee cup, leaning forward with the sour smile, “we didn’t know about you. That you’re his partner. Now, you can’t tell me that a guy is tied up with these Chinese guys, and has a Chinese girl for a partner, and they don’t know anything.”