A Bitter Feast

by S. J. Rozan

  “Where did you get the idea Bill’s tied up with the Chinese guys?” asked the Chinese girl partner, congratulating herself on not flinging her tea into his little ferret face.

  Bill sat silently drinking his coffee, but I detected a grin behind his coffee cup.

  Deluca shrugged. “Okay, we’ll trade. Our people saw his car where it shouldn’t have been. We traced the car.”

  “Where?”

  He looked into my eyes, then said deliberately, “Brooklyn.”

  “Who are your people,” I asked, “who saw the car?”

  “You know,” Deluca said, “the point of this isn’t for you to ask questions.”

  “You know,” I said, “you obviously don’t have a warrant, because you’re the type who’d flash it if you did. So if I help you out, it’ll be because I’m a good citizen. I’m still deciding.”

  Deluca looked at March, then at Bill. “How come you’re letting her do all the talking?”

  Bill shrugged. “How come he’s letting you do all the talking?”

  “Shit.” Deluca turned back to me. “All right, listen,” he said. “I’m going to lay this out for you, just once. The government has some interest in certain shipments of goods coming into this country. A serious interest. We’ve recently come to believe our shipments also contain goods we didn’t order and don’t want. We want to know who’s bringing those in and we think these waiters can help us.”

  “What goods?”

  Deluca grinned and shook his head. “You go,” he said.

  I considered, finishing my tea. At this place, it wasn’t even Tetley’s; it was something so no-name the only way to make it drinkable was to brew it really weak and put milk in it. “We’re looking for them, too,” I finally said. “We haven’t gotten anywhere. Everyone says they don’t know where to find them.”

  “Who are you working for?”

  “The lawyer for the union. The man who was killed was a union organizer. His lawyer was worried their disappearance had something to do with the union.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like they’d been threatened by the restaurant owner for organizing, or something.”

  “Is that what happened?”

  “The restaurant owner says no.”

  “What brought you to Brooklyn?”

  “You mean Jayco Realty?”

  “I mean Brooklyn.”

  I was tempted to be as cute as he was being, but why? “One of the men had that address on a scrap of paper he’d left behind.”

  “What did you find out?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Which man?”

  “We just found the paper. I don’t know whose it was.”

  “Can I have it?”

  “I threw it away.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “If you get a warrant,” I said, “you can look for it.”

  “You know,” Deluca said, “you’re right. You’re not very friendly.”

  I shrugged.

  “Look,” he said. “Jimmy and me, we got a job to do here: keep this little project going.”

  “What’s the project?”

  “What’s the difference? It’s our job and we’re going to do it. I was a Marine, sister. I’m still Marine Reserves, eighteen years later. I’ve been a cop, and now I’m this. I don’t back off. I bring it home. There’s never been an assignment I haven’t completed, and this isn’t about to be the first.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Don’t get in our way, Ms. Chin.”

  I didn’t think that needed much of an answer, so I didn’t give it one.

  Deluca got to his feet. “C’mon, Jimmy. Let’s go find a judge and get a warrant.”

  March stood also. Deluca smiled, March’s face didn’t move, and they walked out, leaving Bill and me to pay for the bad coffee and worse tea.

  Bill and I sat for a while, until we were sure they’d had time to get into their car and drive away.

  “Gee,” I said, “I can see why you weren’t crazy about those guys.”

  “You want another cup?”

  “Of this stuff? Are you kidding?”

  “I don’t get it,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Why did it take them this long to find out about you? How can they have seen my car and not seen you?”

  “That’s a really good question,” I said, because it was.

  “Let’s go,” he said, standing. As we stepped out the coffee shop door he lit a cigarette and drew deeply.

  “What goods?” I wondered out loud as we started to walk.

  “And what goods don’t they want?”

  “And why didn’t they have a warrant?”

  “And,” Bill said, “why are they interested in the three remaining waiters but they don’t seem to be concerned about who killed Ho?”

  A truck rattled past us on its way to a night delivery.

  “I’m so confused,” I complained. “I can’t think.”

  Bill looked down at me. His face and voice softened. “You look exhausted.”

  “Me?” I protested. “I’m fresh as a daisy. Perky and ebullient.”

  He smiled. He had a much better smile than Ed Deluca. “I think you’re pronouncing that wrong.”

  “How do you say it?”

  He pronounced ebullient for me.

  “Well, I don’t care how you say it. I am it.”

  “Uh-huh. You need to go home and go to bed.”

  I waited, but he didn’t say anything else.

  “I don’t believe it,” I told him. “Those guys must have really gotten to you.”

  “How so?”

  “You said ‘bed’ and me in the same sentence, and you’re not going to say anything lewd?”

  “No, it’s just that I’m tired of rejection. Besides, now that we’re married I’ve lost all interest in you.”

  “I guess that’s good.”

  “Good or bad, it’s inevitable. So go home. You want me to walk you?”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, but I knew you’d say no. Just be careful, then.”

  “I thought you’d lost interest.”

  “Only romantically. You still owe me money on this case.”

  We’d reached his building, for the second time that night. He smiled, put his hands on my shoulders, and kissed my forehead. In a jingle of keys he unlocked the street door, stooped to collect his mail from the mat, and waved me good night. He started up the stairs as the door closed behind him, and I stood on the sidewalk, thinking about rejection.

  I did walk home, and I was careful, looking out for Fords as I ambled my way east again in the cool night air. Bill was right: I was tired, and getting home, taking a long, quiet bath, and going straight to bed seemed like a perfect plan. Maybe, by morning, everything would have become clear to me.

  Like how pigs managed to fly.

  It was an hour since we’d left Duke Lo’s, and it took me twenty minutes to get home from Bill’s. Still, it was early, not quite nine o’clock, when I pulled open the heavy front door and began the climb to our fourth-floor walk-up.

  My brothers—even Elliot, the fitness freak—had all been glad to move out of here into buildings with elevators or, in the case of Ted, a house; but I liked this creaky climb. It gave me time to think, to let the day recede and settle into its place, until the things that had happened today shrank in size and softened in color and began fitting in among the rest of the things in my life. These stairs and hallways weren’t like the streets, public and available to anybody to walk along and share with you, people whose paths would never cross yours again; but they weren’t like your own home, either, where no one came unless you knew who they were and what they wanted. They were for the people whose lives, by virtue of the heavy street door and these very stairs and hallways, were intertwined with yours. On these scuffed stairs and in these narrow hallways the aromas of other people’s dinners and the sounds of their music, the welcome mats they used o
r didn’t use, and the laughter and greetings as they came in and out, reminded me that lives I knew nothing about were going on ten inches below my feet or six inches on the other side of the kitchen wall. I found that idea comforting. It made me feel like even if I screwed up, maybe someone else wouldn’t. Like we were all in this together, living so close and so separate.

  I reached our apartment, the door I’d been coming home to for all of my twenty-eight years. I unlocked the locks and called, “Hi, Ma,” to the back of my mother’s head where she sat on the living room couch. I started to slip off my shoes, letting the door close behind me. In the middle of the first shoe I stopped as the scene in the living room registered on me. My mother wasn’t alone.

  Seated on the easy chair with the flowered upholstery, sipping tea from the red-and-yellow special-occasion china and holding a scrapbook of family photographs on his lap, was that paragon of salesmanship from Jayco Realty, Joe Yee.

  My mother’s smile was proprietary and broad. Joe Yee’s was quick, but his almost-black eyes, while they smiled, seemed to be adding things up, appraising, calculating. He looked ready to step this way or that, to adjust to whatever the situation turned out to be. That adrenaline edge, that dancing without a net, was what accounted, I was sure, for the sparkle in Joe Yee’s bottomless eyes.

  My mother, though, obviously thought it was the sight of me.

  I realized I was perching on one foot in the vestibule like an ambushed crane. Quickly, I yanked my slippers on and strode into the living room. Joe Yee rose and stood, photo album still in hand, as my mother said, in Cantonese, of course, “It’s good you came. I was going to call you on that foolish device to tell you your friend was here.”

  That foolish device was my beeper, which my mother loves in concept because it can let her get a hold of me at any time and place, except that in reality she’s never used it because she doesn’t believe an object that tiny could really contain all the words she wants to say.

  In this case, though, with a handsome, well-spoken Chinese man who claimed to know me sitting in her living room, I was willing to bet my mother would have galloped hell-bent for leather on the Pony Express if that were the only way to find me.

  But it wasn’t. I was here, Joe Yee was smiling, and my mother was beaming, and I pushed down my hot-cheeked anger, my bad-tempered confusion, at this invasion of my living room and evening and the meaning of it. I didn’t smile, though. I just said, “Hello,” and waited.

  Still smiling the easy smile, Joe Yee said in English, “Relax. I know this is a surprise, but don’t worry. Everything’s fine.”

  Fine, my fine Irish foot, you nervy creep, I thought, but I didn’t get a chance to say anything, as Joe Yee switched to Cantonese and continued, “I just took a chance on dropping by. Your mother’s been showing me some great pictures. You were a cute kid, Ling Wan-ju. Of course, I expected that. She’s been serving me some excellent tea, also.”

  My mother blushed and denied that her tea was at all tasty, as it would have been if she’d had any idea that Yee Ji-You would be coming over so she could have properly shopped and prepared. This was accompanied by an accusatory glance at me and a reassuringly fond smile for Joe Yee.

  I had no idea, either, Ma, believe me. I still said nothing as I processed what this visit meant. It meant I’d been right about Jayco. It meant Joe Yee, whoever he was, knew where to find me. He knew my real name. He even knew my Chinese name, though he could have learned that from my mother in the first thirty seconds he was here. I didn’t know who he was or what he wanted, but I knew one thing: I had to get him out of here, away from my mother and her home, as fast as I possibly could.

  I smiled then. “What a surprise to see you here!” I said, also in Cantonese, so my mother wouldn’t be left out. “Ma, I would have told you, except I didn’t think Joe was coming here. I thought I was going to meet you at the club,” I said to him with a quizzical look.

  “Well, I got through early at work, so I thought I’d come pick you up,” Joe Yee answered smoothly, taking my lead.

  As I’d suspected, this idea—that I not only knew this good-looking Chinese man but actually had a date with him—sent my mother over the moon.

  “Well! Then you must be going,” she said, seizing Joe Yee’s teacup, rapidly arranging the tea things on the tray to carry them back to the kitchen. “But Ling Wan-ju”—she stopped and frowned at me—“you’re not going out dressed like that?”

  “No, Ma.” I sighed. I gave Joe Yee a sweet smile and said, “I’ll just be a minute.” I ducked into my bedroom, clicked the door shut behind me, and thought, Thank you, Ma, as I grabbed up the phone. Bill’s number was on the speed dial button. I punched it and waited, chewing on my lip, but all I got was his service. That figured; he’d been home half an hour by now, enough time to have gotten comfortable and settled at the piano. He turns the phone off when he’s practicing, and though I’d never tried to beep him in a situation like that, I felt a sinking certainty he turned the beeper off, too.

  I left it a message, anyway, as I had his service, in case he checked when he was through. I wasn’t sure what good calling me back would do by the time he got around to it, but I was taking my beeper anyway—and my .22: smaller and more easy to hide than the .38, but just as useful in certain situations.

  I peeled off my shirt and slacks, clipped beeper and gun onto the waistband of a pair of deep green velvet evening trousers, which I chose because the shirt that goes best with them is a flowing white tunic that’s really good at hiding stuff. I jammed a big jade brooch onto the tunic, slipped on a pair of gold earrings, ran a comb through my hair, and, though my mother wouldn’t approve, pulled on a pair of black suede flats, because there was no way I was going to leave this apartment with Joe Yee in shoes I couldn’t run in.

  I was back out in the living room in less time than it took Joe Yee to carry the tray of tea things into the kitchen for my mother and to admire my father’s collection of mud figurines in their glass-fronted cabinet.

  “You look great,” Joe Yee said when he saw me. My mother beamed, not at me but at him.

  “Thank you.” I smiled, meaning, Who the hell asked you?

  I took my black, tent-shaped coat from the closet—alt the better to hide the tunic that was hiding the gun—and said, “Bye, Ma. Don’t wait up.” I knew she would, though, to pretend she wasn’t interested in all the details she would be trying to pry out of me about my date with this handsome man.

  Joe Yee and I descended the stairs in silence. When we reached the front door he held it open for me; when we reached the street he said, “That outfit is too good to waste. Let me take you someplace nice.”

  “You have to be crazy!” I spun to face him. I spoke in angry English; we had dropped the Cantonese facade. “You expect me to actually go someplace with you?”

  “We can’t stand here on the sidewalk.”

  “We can’t—” I sputtered. “We can do any damn thing I want to do! Who the hell are you, anyway?”

  “Joe Yee,” he said with a smile. “Which is truer than what you told me, Marilyn.”

  “So what?” I demanded. “And how did you find me, anyway?”

  “Really, can’t we go have a drink?”

  I tried to calm down and be rational. “All right,” I conceded after a few moments’ thought, not because I wanted to go anyplace with Joe Yee but because, Chinatown being what it was, if we stood here arguing for another thirty seconds my mother would be sure to hear about it from at least a dozen people.

  Chinatown being what it was, though, the place I chose was outside Chinatown. I had criteria: it had to be within walking distance—I wasn’t about to get into a cab with this man—and it had to be big, lots of people to keep an eye on me. I stalked out ahead of him, taking us the longer but more crowded way over to Canal Street, then west. In the beginning we strode along silently, Joe Yee’s long legs easily keeping up with my angry, determined, but shorter ones. After a few blocks on Canal, though
, he ventured a comment: “Your mother’s a lovely lady.”

  “My mother is none of your business!” I snapped. I sped up and cut around a group of teenage boys, who didn’t even notice me passing. Joe Yee didn’t move out of their path. For him, they parted and came back together again, like water around a stone.

  “Hey, okay, I’m sorry,” he said as he caught up to me. “I didn’t mean to upset you, but I need to talk to you.”

  “Sorry!” I snorted. “If you’d just wanted to talk and not prove how smart you are you could have called me instead of busting into my house in the middle of the night. Since you know so much about me, I’m sure you have my office number.”

  “If I’d called, would you have been willing to meet me alone? Like this?”

  “Are you kidding? Why should I? The only reason I’m on the same sidewalk with you right now is that I didn’t want to upset my mother, like by throwing you out!” Which was not true. If Jayco was just a bunch of realtors, that was one thing; but if they were, Joe Yee wouldn’t have hunted me up. And the Feds, Deluca and March, wouldn’t have had any interest in 411 Baltic Street where they’d spotted Bill’s car. If Joe Yee insisted on presenting himself to me on a silver platter, I certainly wouldn’t have let him get away.

  But I would have chosen the time and place, to control the encounter better. Thinking about that made something Joe Yee had said finally register.

  “What do you mean, alone?” I waved my hand at the crowded sidewalks around us. “We’re not alone. And you came to my house, where we were most definitely not alone.”

  “This is New York,” he answered. “Isn’t this the place where people come to be alone in a crowd? No, come on, just kidding. I meant without your partner.”

  “I don’t have a partner.”

  “Well, whatever you call him. Smith, I mean. Bill Smith.”

  So Joe Yee not only knew I wasn’t Marilyn Ko, he knew about Bill. Who, I demanded of myself, is this guy? And what the hell is going on?

  I found myself without an answer, except to point out in passing that I was using language with Joe Yee and myself that I normally resist employing. Great, I told myself. Thanks for the tip. I’ll take that up with you later.