A Bitter Feast

by S. J. Rozan

  Joe Yee and I reached the bar I’d been heading us for, Lightning Rod’s, toward the western end of Canal Street. It’s a huge, hopping place in an old first-floor warehouse where everything, including the floor, is made of metal: the tables are zinc, the ceiling’s the old-fashioned stamped tin you find all over New York, and on the floor, welded together, are the steel plates they use to cover really big holes in the street.

  Metal is good at bouncing back sound, and the noise that came roaring out as Joe Yee pulled open the door for us was enough to knock you flat onto the sidewalk. I happened to know, though, that all the action here was concentrated toward the back, where the sinuous bar and the restaurant tables were, and that at the drink tables along the front wall you could actually hear your companion speak, provided you were willing to lean toward him. These tables had the extra added advantage of being visible from the street through the big front windows, just in case your companion had anything nefarious in mind.

  “Let me get you a drink,” Joe Yee said as I slipped into a shiny steel chair, the kind that belongs in the garden, at one of those front tables. “Unless you’re going to sneak away while I’m gone?”

  “I don’t sneak,” I said, nastily and inaccurately. “That’s you. Besides, you’d just show up on my doorstep again.”

  “That’s right, I would. What would you like?”

  I sent him to get me a seltzer with lime and watched him walk away. He blended in just fine here, a hip young Asian man in an up-to-the-minute four-button charcoal suit over a black T-shirt, with confident shoulders and a fluid walk. As soon as he was swallowed up by the crush at the bar I whipped my beeper off my hip and checked it.

  Someone had called. A number I didn’t recognize marched by in little red lights, along with the symbol that shows you there’s also a verbal message and you should call and pick it up.

  Well, not right now, I thought. Whoever you are, you’ll have to wait.

  I left the sound turned off and stuck the thing back onto my pants just in time, right before I spotted Joe Yee working his way across the floor with my seltzer in one hand and a slender glass of dark beer in the other.

  “So,” he said as he put the drinks on the table and scraped back a chair for himself, “are you ready to listen to what I have to say?”

  “I’m ready to break your nose, if you must know,” I said, leaning forward so we could hear each other. We were both speaking in voices that would have been audible two blocks away if they weren’t being smothered by the sounds of a New York hot spot Saturday night. “For someone I have no idea who he is, you have some damn nerve. Who are you?”

  “Joe Yee,” Joe Yee answered. “Please,” he said as I opened my mouth. “That’s all I can tell you. I shouldn’t even be here talking to you.”

  “Shouldn’t according to who?”

  “The people I work for.”

  “Who are … ?”

  “I need to find those waiters, Lydia.”

  I hadn’t said he could call me Lydia, but that didn’t seem like the biggest issue in front of us right now, so I let it pass.

  “Waiters?” I asked casually, pulling on the straw stuck in my seltzer. “What waiters?”

  “Oh, God, Lydia.” Joe Yee sighed. “Things will go a lot faster if you don’t try to blow smoke.”

  If I don’t? I swallowed my indignation on the principle of giving Joe Yee rope.

  He went on: “You’re a private investigator looking for four men who used to work at Dragon Garden Restaurant. One way or another you’re working with another investigator, Bill Smith. Probably you’re working for him, because he needed someone Chinese to get him inside.”

  I thought about pitching my drink across the table at him, the way I’d contemplated flinging my tea at Ed Deluca. Lydia Chin, Menace to Café Society. But Bill had once told me that being underestimated is the best thing that can happen to a P.I., so I tried to view this idiocy as a strategic mistake on Joe Yee’s part. Trying to seem innocent and even a little dumb, I asked, “Where did you get that idea?”

  “That you’re a P.I.? Will it help if I tell you?”

  “It might.”

  “Smith’s car,” he said. “After you left the office, I watched you. When you drove away in that car, I had it traced. I found him, checked him out, found out about you, and here I am.”

  That car. Bill was going to have to do something about that car.

  “Traced the car,” I said. “Checked us out. You’re a P.I., too?”

  “Forget it,” he said. “That’s off-limits. And it doesn’t matter what your relationship with Smith is.”

  Not to you, maybe, I thought as he went on: “What’s important is who he’s working for.”

  “Oh?” Gee, if you only knew. “Who’s that important to?”

  “Me.”

  I would have asked him again who he was, but I didn’t want to hear that he was Joe Yee, so instead I said, “Why?”

  He shook his head. “Lydia, you must know that one of those waiters is dead.”

  And a friend of mine’s hurt, I thought, but Joe Yee might not know about Peter, so I didn’t bring it up. “Funny, I do know that.”

  “Then you must have figured out that the others are in danger.”

  “The thought had crossed my mind.”

  “I need to find them before anything happens to them.”

  The music, which had been a pounding thump under the roar of conversation, changed to a techno-shriek above it. I thought for a minute, and said, “Assuming that any of this is true, and I even know what waiters you’re talking about, how do I know it isn’t your job to make things happen to them?”

  He helped himself to more of his beer. “Who are you and Smith working for?”

  “Why don’t I feel like that answers my question?”

  Joe Yee gave an exasperated sigh. My sentiments exactly, fella. He rubbed his forehead and stared at me. The din swirled around us like dirt in a dust storm.

  “I told you,” Joe Yee said, “I’m not even supposed to be talking to you. This thing is too big for someone like you and I’m taking a chance. But you seem like you might care about these men. Their only chance is if I find them.”

  Too big for someone like me? I hoped it was dark enough that he couldn’t see the angry color flood my face. “Their only chance for what?” I demanded. “And how do you know what I seem like?”

  Joe Yee drank from his beer and put it down again. He caught my eyes with his. I returned his look steadily and waited for what he had to say.

  It was, “Lydia, we’re both Chinese. We’re looking for three Chinese men who need help.”

  Chinese, I thought. Duke Lo’s Chinese. Three-finger Choi’s Chinese. And H. B. Yang, and Mary, and my mother, and the mailman.

  “I’ve never heard this you-all-look-alike stuff from a Chinese person before,” I told him.

  “That’s not what I meant. I’m trying to help.”

  “Is this why you came to me instead of Bill? You thought I might help you just because you’re Chinese?”

  Joe Yee shook his head. “Not me. The missing men.”

  “The missing men.” I thought for a minute. “What kind of trouble are they in?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re the only one who can help them but you don’t know what the problem is?”

  “I shouldn’t be telling you that, but it’s true. I was hoping you did.”

  I shook my head.

  “But,” he said, “whatever it is, I know no one else can get them out of it.”

  I finished my drink and settled back in my chair. Let him lean across the table to hear me for a while.

  “You know,” I said, “you keep saying you shouldn’t be telling me things I didn’t ask to hear. But you’re not telling me anything I did ask. Like who you are and why you care about these men. And what’s so big about you that you’re their only hope.”

  “Do you know where they are?” Joe Yee asked, his voice ab
out as soft as it could be and still be heard in here.

  “No,” I said. “And if I did, you’d probably be the last person on earth I’d tell about it.”

  “That would be a mistake.”

  “Maybe.” I shrugged and finished my soda.

  “What if I ask Smith?”

  I looked at him, his handsome face, his coal-black eyes. We were both Chinese, he’d said, and that, at least, was true. And Bill wasn’t.

  “He doesn’t know any more than I do,” I said, feeling suddenly the same way about Joe Yee asking Bill anything as I’d felt seeing him in my mother’s living room. “But I will tell you one thing. I’ll tell you who he’s working for.”

  Joe Yee sat up a little straighter. “Who?”

  “Me.”

  The swirling noise around us kept Joe Yee’s response from being actual silence, but it was speechlessness.

  “I’m the investigator in charge of this case,” I said. “He works for me. Legwork. Driving. Muscle. That sort of thing.” That was underplaying Bill’s part maybe just a tad, but it should serve to keep Joe Yee away from him.

  Joe Yee smiled. “Oh. Uh, sorry.”

  “Sure you are. Anyway, that’s how it is. Not only can’t he tell you anything, but if he could, he wouldn’t, unless I told him to.”

  “So he works for you. Then who do you work for?”

  I stared at him in disbelief. “You know, if I didn’t already dislike you, I might start.”

  He shook his head. “I really can’t afford to worry about your feelings right now.”

  “Who’s Ed Deluca?”

  He stared at me blankly. “Who’s who?”

  “Ed Deluca. A nasty little guy who also knows I was visiting your place in Brooklyn.”

  “I never heard of him. Who is he? He knows you came to see me?”

  “He’s a federal cop.”

  Joe Yee missed a beat. “A what?”

  “State Department Security. He wanted to know what Bill and I knew about the waiters, too.”

  “He told you he was with State Department Security?”

  “I saw his badge.”

  “When?”

  “Just about an hour ago.”

  He paused. “What did you tell him?”

  “Pretty much what I’ve told you.”

  “Did he ask you anything about me?”

  “No. Would you have expected him to?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t even know who the hell he is. But don’t you see this makes it even more important that I find the waiters?”

  “No, I don’t see that. He’s the government; the government is supposed to be the good guys. Maybe I should have told him everything I know.”

  “What do you know?”

  “Nothing.”

  Joe Yee pressed his lips together. He stared at me, not looking at all pleased. Standing, he took out a business card and dropped it on the table in front of me. JAYCO REALTY, it read. “Call me if you change your mind.”

  Yeah, I thought, sure, but I said nothing as Joe Yee turned and walked away.

  He reached the big steel door without looking back, but I sat still just in case. When he yanked the door open I jumped up from our table and pushed through the crowd after him. I was in time to see him slam the door shut in a cab heading east. I’d been hoping to be able to follow him, but on Canal Street on a Saturday night the chance of a cab is fifty-fifty. Joe Yee’s luck had been good, and mine had run out.

  Well, not completely. I found a pay phone and picked up my beeper message. The number had been unfamiliar, but the call, it turned out, was from Bill. “Call me here,” it said, so I did.

  “Yeah, hold on,” said the voice that answered, sounding slurred and uninterested. “Smith!” he yelled. “Hey! Your call. And keep it short.”

  “Thanks,” I heard Bill say, then, “Lydia?”

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hey. I got your message. You okay?” Bill’s words came quickly, the way they do when someone’s worried.

  “Sure,” I told him. “What can happen to a woman in a crowded bar on a Saturday night?”

  “You have no imagination. Is he still with you, Joe Yee?”

  “No, he’s gone.”

  “What did he want?”

  “The waiters.”

  Bill was silent for a moment. Through the phone pressed to my ear I could hear the background fuzz of TV sportscasting. He said, “A hot commodity, those guys. Who the hell is he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How did he find you?”

  “He traced your car.”

  “My car. Jesus, I’m going to have to do something about that car. Then why you and not me?”

  “I’m Chinese.”

  “And … ?”

  “That means we have some sort of mystical bond. I don’t know. The guy gave me a big pain. But you’d have been proud of me.”

  “I’m always proud of you. Why this time?”

  “Because I acted cute and stupid to see if he’d make some dumb mistake and spill his guts.”

  “Did he?”

  “No. Maybe it doesn’t work.”

  “You probably just can’t convince anyone you’re stupid, though I’m sure you were cute. What are you doing right now?”

  “Right now? What do you mean? I’m standing on a street corner wishing I were home in bed.”

  “Put it off. There’s someone I want you to meet.”

  “Now?”

  “It’s important.”

  “The last time I heard that word it was from Joe Yee.”

  “This time it’s true.”

  “It might have been from him, too. Who?”

  “A guy I know. Can you come here?”

  “Where are you?”

  “At a bar,” he said. He gave me a Lower East Side address.

  Great, I thought. Another New York hot spot. Lydia Chin, Queen of the Night. I took a look at my watch: ten-thirty. “All right. My mother would be heartbroken if I came home so soon, anyway. She’d think things weren’t going well between me and Joe Yee.”

  “As opposed to the truth. See you in a few minutes.”

  As I said good-bye I heard the other voice telling Bill in a bad tempered growl to get off his damn phone.

  Sixteen

  I had to walk three blocks north to get a cab, and when I finally did the cabbie had to maneuver us east along twisting one-way streets through the heart of New York’s late-night neighborhoods. I rolled down the window on the soft night and watched as the overcoated older crowd left their white-tablecloth restaurants to mingle on the sidewalk with leather-jacketed, pierced-lipped post-punks. Young bridge-and-tunnelers from the outer boroughs romped across the streets on their way from one hot club to another as though there were no cars at all. It was slow going until we made it into the East Village, where the clubs are cooler than cool but a little more thinly spread out. Then we were east of even that.

  The cab stopped on Third not far from Avenue C, a narrow street where in another lifetime the arched windows and lacy fire escapes might have combined with the trees’ swaying shadows to convince me life here was lived with a certain elegance, a grace that took for granted the soft spring breeze and the clear white moon rising over the rooftops. But it never was: these buildings were built as tenements, jamming in as many new immigrants as was legal then, and that’s who lives here now, too. Once, the buildings were new, and in those days even the rich didn’t have elevators or air-conditioning, so maybe it didn’t seem so bad, so different from where you wanted to be, not an unreasonable stop on the road from where you’d started to where you wanted to end up. Now, the buildings were a century older and shabbier; now, everyone understood the difference between this and the America of their dreams.

  Still, this was where you began. And for some, this was as far as you got. But the same spring breeze that wafted past the balconies of uptown high rises moved the tree branches here, and the moon still shone.

  I paid t
he cabdriver and descended a few steps to a bar with a dingy, paint-peeling sign nailed above the door: Parnell’s. A Bud Light sign reddened the window. Everything else was dark: dirty brick, cracked concrete, the steel door painted some muddy shade of green. I pulled the door open and went in.

  For a Saturday night in New York, Parnell’s was hardly hopping. The skinny, bushy-haired bartender—maybe Parnell himself—leaned on his forearms on the bar, ignoring his half dozen customers, all of them men. Only two of them seemed to know anyone else was there anyway, as they argued in a dull and bad-tempered way about the stock car race glowing from the TV over the bar. The others stared into their drinks or into space. Two turned to the door when I came in, one swiveling right back to his drink, the other moving his red-rimmed eyes slowly over me in my flowing coat and velvet trousers.

  I was wondering if he was planning to put the moves on me, and whether his liquor-soaked limbs would be too rubbery to get him off his bar stool, when I saw Bill stand up from a table in the back and head smoothly in my direction. He kissed my cheek when he reached me, and put his hand gently on my back as he moved me along, gestures I assumed were as much for the other guys as they were for me.

  The air at Parnell’s was stale with the smells of old cigarettes, old whiskey, old sweat: tired odors without the energy to get up and leave. The vinyl tile floor was sticky and scratchy. I was glad for the dim light as Bill and I headed for the back, where tables scattered the area between the bar and two blinking video games. One screen, looking to lure players, repeated over and over a drive down a highway where the scenery constantly changed, desert to mountains to glass-towered city by the ocean, to desert again.

  Only one of the back tables was occupied, by a young, scraggly-haired kid hunched over a bottle of Budweiser. He watched us approach, surrounding his beer as though he suspected we might want to seize it from him. Bill pulled a chair over for me and sat down himself opposite the kid where another Bud waited patiently. Three other bottles, now empty, stood on the table like one-armed cacti.

  Bill raised his eyebrows at me as he picked up his beer. “I didn’t ask if you wanted anything.” The look I gave him wasn’t calculated to make him grin, but it did anyway.