A Bitter Feast

by S. J. Rozan

  And, of course, Bill.

  I mustered all my strength and pushed myself to my feet. “I have to go.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, and even I heard the regret in my voice.

  I took my mug into the kitchen as Bill headed for the closet where I’d hung my coat. The sight of the stainless steel sink, the rush of the hot water, brought a thought that jolted me awake. “My God, I have to work tomorrow!”

  “And every day,” Bill said, holding my coat for me. “Until this case is solved.”

  “No, I mean, like, work,” I said. “At Dragon Garden. I have to be behind the wheel of a dim sum cart by nine-thirty!”

  “You’re going back there?”

  “Don’t you think so?” I said. “It’s still not a bad bet for finding the waiters. At least someone there might know how they got here, which would tell us how the dope comes in. And if I don’t go, H. B. Yang will want to know why.”

  “That sounds right,” he said.

  “If you think of something better before morning, call me. Otherwise I’ll talk to you tomorrow afternoon. And,” I said, “thanks.”

  “For … ?”

  “Finding Henry. Helping me.”

  “It’s what you pay me for.”

  “Um-hmm. And I know that’s why you do it.”

  “It is,” he said. “It definitely is.”

  Bill walked me downstairs, waited with me for a cab, kissed me gently good night beside the curb. I studied the cabbie’s hack license as I told him where to take me. The rattling vehicle screeched into the New York traffic, and I hurtled through the streets toward my mother’s apartment while Bill slowly walked back up the stairs to his.

  Seventeen

  It’s a good thing I’m a morning person. Worn out, weary, and lost as I had been the night before, I bounced out of bed at seven anyway, early enough to take a hot, pounding shower, do a long series of stretching exercises, have breakfast—congee with pickled vegetables, which I found my mother making when I came out of my room wrapped in my yellow silk robe—and call the hospital to find out how Peter was. His condition had been upgraded to good, they told me, and they offered to switch me to his room, but I thought it was too early to talk to him. I might be waking him up; besides, what was there I had to say, besides to tell him what the trouble was his waiters were in, and who with? If I were lying in a hospital bed and someone called to give me that news, I’d only get high blood pressure and heart palpitations from not being able to do anything about it. I left him alone.

  I didn’t call Bill, either. No point in waking him up—he’s not a morning person—especially when I had nothing to tell him, one way or the other, except hi, and thanks for the tea.

  I did call Mary, though. It was Sunday, her day off, so she was home, in the Lower East Side loft she shares with two other women: a Korean dancer and a divinity student from Mississippi.

  “If I told you Duke Lo was dealing dope,” I asked her, “would you be flabbergasted and amazed?”

  She was silent for a moment. “Tell me you have proof. Please, please, say you have proof.”

  “No. But I’m working on it.”

  “Lydia—”

  “We think the waiters ran off with a package that was his. One of them may have been a courier. There’s a federal connection, too, we think.” I told her about Deluca, Joe Yee, the sharp-nosed waiter at Dragon Garden, and the roommate who was going to get rich.

  “You have to give me one of these guys,” she said. “Your snitch, the waiter, someone. You have to.”

  “I can’t. But I have an idea.”

  “No. You’ll get killed, Duke Lo will get away, something bad will happen. I’ll take it from here.”

  “You’ll take it where? None of these people was particularly excited about talking to me. My snitch”—Bill’s really, but I didn’t tell her that—“will run. The waiter may not know anything more than he told me already. But someone up there might.”

  “Up where?”

  “Dragon Garden. I’m going back today, and it’ll be my last chance, because there’s no dim sum tomorrow. Let me see if I can come up with anything else. Maybe we can bring the waiters in before you guys start up with Duke Lo. They’d be safer that way,” I added, then shut up and let her think.

  “You win,” she finally said. “God, I hate it when you’re right. Go ahead and see if you can get a lead on them. But after today it’s all mine.”

  “Whatever I get, it’s yours,” I said, and hung up. Which wasn’t exactly the same as “After today it’s all mine.” It meant I didn’t plan to be shut out of the grand climax here, the gift wrapping of Duke Lo, drug dealer and employer of vicious thugs.

  I hadn’t pointed out to Mary that this theory made H. B. Yang Most Likely Suspect on the union headquarters bomb for the original, boring reason: to intimidate the union. She’d figure it out, but by then I’d be out of the house and on my way to work at H. B. Yang’s restaurant.

  So I put on my white shirt, dark slacks, and sensible shoes, and headed on over to Dragon Garden.

  The Chinatown morning was fresh-scrubbed, blue and bright and sharp and shiny. I found myself lingering on the short walk over, looking at inkstands and porcelain fish gleaming in store windows, watching the teenage crews eyeing each other on street corners and the bent-over grandmothers eyeing eggplants and oranges in sidewalk stalls. The sweet, spicy scent of red bean buns came wafting from the corner bakery, and I was tempted, but I reminded myself I’d be spending the morning surrounded by food of such high quality and huge quantity as to make a red bean bun completely redundant.

  I took a few seconds to get into character at the bottom of the stairs; then, with an eager, ambitious smile and the pair of dorky glasses fitted onto my face, I trotted up to the stock-and-break room of Dragon Garden.

  As I pushed open the door, I found the aromas of steaming pork and shrimp and the hiss of sizzling oil already hanging in the break room air. They were getting ready for work, too, no doubt, just waiting to be called upon to assault the senses of the diners soon to flood the carpeted room beyond.

  Today I was early, as befitted the new person who’d been reprimanded by the sharp-faced waiter on her first day at work. A few of my fellow cart pushers and waiters were early, too, not including him. They lounged around smoking and talking; two of the busboys rolled dice on a case of toilet paper. I looked for Pei-Hui and found her knitting calmly on a broken-legged chair held parallel to the floor by the upturned soup bowl under it. She smiled as she saw me, and I crossed the room to sit by her. Luckily there was a pile of table linens next to her chair for me to sit on; a lot of the new immigrants, like I was pretending to be, can go easily into that Asian squat where you balance on the soles of your feet and your bottom doesn’t touch the floor, but I’d have fallen flat on my face and given the game away.

  “Good morning, Chin Ling,” Pei-Hui said.

  “Good morning,” I returned. “What are you knitting?”

  “A sweater.” She held it up for me to see. “For my second granddaughter.”

  “Grandchildren! You are so lucky!”

  She smiled again, agreeing with me—though not out loud, to keep any jealous ghosts that might be hovering in the stockroom from noticing she was happy. To me, Pei-Hui didn’t look old enough to have grandchildren, but that’s only a compliment in English, not in Chinese, so I didn’t say it.

  Pei-Hui and I made small talk for a while, about China and Hong Kong and Chinatown. I invented a past to tell her about, other jobs I’d had and how and why I’d come here, and she told me about other restaurants she’d worked in, about her grandchildren, and about how to get along here at Dragon Garden. I already knew the part about not organizing for the union, but she mentioned it again; and she told me the boss liked people who were reliable, who didn’t call in sick, and who got along with the other workers.

  “There was a dim sum lady working here,” she told me, “who could not say
a polite word to Cao Zhi. They argued constantly. Soon she was asked to leave.”

  “Cao Zhi?” I asked. “Who is that?”

  “The waiter with the sharp nose and chin.” With true Chinese discretion, she didn’t mention the long red scar puckering his jawline. “Sharp eyes also. He is difficult, but a very good worker. Yang Hao-Bing thinks well of him.”

  Ah, I thought, a classically Chinese indirect approach. Don’t fight with this guy, Chin Ling, or you’ll find yourself out on the street.

  “He works hard,” she repeated, blissfully ignorant, I guessed, of yesterday’s cigarette break. “He has been given extra responsibilities, to see that these items are always readily available to the dining room, so that no one, during the day, needs to run to the basement for them.” She nodded at the teapots and linens waiting their turn to serve, and at the door across the room, to the basement they would have, without Cao Zhi, otherwise have had to wait in. “It is a measure of Yang Hao-Bing’s respect.”

  Her eyes met mine. I smiled and nodded to show I understood, and nothing more was said on the subject.

  Pei-Hui and I continued to chat while the room filled with waiters and ladies. Eventually, the subject of her cautionary tale himself came up the stairs. Cao Zhi pushed open the door, stood in the doorway, and surveyed the room as though it were his personal kingdom. Maybe it was. He spotted me, curled his lip in a sneer, and went over to sit with the dice-playing busboys.

  Pei-Hui saw me following him with my eyes and reminded me, “Yang Hao-Bing thinks well of him.”

  “Does he think well of anyone?”

  She smiled again as she rolled up the soon-to-be sweater and buttoned it into her knitting bag. “Not that I have noticed.”

  The workday soon began, as hectic as the one before it. I pushed my cart and emptied it onto tables of ravenous uptown couples, college students, and extended families both Chinese and non. I went back to the kitchen for more. Then I pushed my cart again. All my attempts at conversation openers with my fellow employees came to naught. On a fine Sunday at Dragon Garden, time was money, work was all, and chitchat was in everyone’s way.

  The din of talk, laughter, clinking chopsticks, and clattering dishes flew around the room, bouncing off the walls and slicing the air next to my head until I felt like I needed to duck as the noise flew by. My shoulders ached, my feet started to hurt, and I began to wonder what I was doing there.

  I started to contemplate the idea of giving myself a break, no matter what the sharp-nosed Cao Zhi might say. Surrendering three bowls of sticky rice and my last plate of turnip cakes as I went, I wheeled my cart across the room to an alcove between a crimson-painted column and a steam table mounded with shellfish of every possible variety, including some so ugly you’d have to eat them with your eyes closed. There, temporarily out of traffic, I put my hands on the small of my back and bent backward, feeling the little hot needles of muscles stretching in a direction they’d given up hope of ever going again. I bent forward and felt the same thing in other muscles. Then, standing straight, I felt the needles again, this time in my chest, from the flood of adrenaline released by the sight of Joe Yee riding up the escalator into Dragon Garden.

  All right, Lydia, I told myself, just calm down. Maybe the guy’s only looking for lunch. But that theory was quashed immediately by Joe Yee himself, who, after a brief conversation with the maître d’, was ushered through the wallpapered door I had used myself two days ago, when I’d been summoned to speak to H. B. Yang.

  Ah! I said to myself, not to mention, Ha! Joe I’m-the-only-man-who-can-help-the-waiters Yee on his way to see H. B. I-only-want-the-waiters-to-be-safe-and-happy Yang. Tell-me-everything-you-know-for-no-good-reason having tea with tell-them-if-they-quit-the-union-they-always-have-a-home-here. We’re-all-Chinese-in-this versus we’re-all-Chinese-in-this.

  Fascinating.

  And what could it mean?

  Obviously, I had to know. Ideas flew through my head, visions of various ways I could find out what Joe Yee and H. B. Yang had to talk about. I could, of course, go charging up the stairs and, as employee of record on this case, demand to know what was going on, but that approach seemed, simply, doomed. If H. B. Yang had thought Joe Yee was any of my business he’d have told me about him.

  Or maybe H. B. Yang didn’t know Joe Yee had anything to do with the waiters. In that case my duty as a loyal employee was to tell him—later, after I followed Joe Yee out of there and saw where he led me and what that told me. But, I pointed out to myself, I’d failed at following him last night. And there was the possibility that he might not go out the way he’d come in, and I’d miss him.

  I thought of a couple of other ideas, none of them really any good, including the Spiderwoman one of clinging to the wall outside H. B. Yang’s office window with my ear pressed to the glass. The only thing left, then, was the simplest, lowesttech method: listening at the figurative keyhole. I would amble casually upstairs, stand nonchalantly in the hallway outside the office door that, to my recollection, H. B. Yang kept open whether he had visitors or not. I’d hear what I could hear—and think up some really clever excuse for being there if anyone should happen to spot me.

  I didn’t love it, but what was the worst thing that could happen? If I did get caught and my clever excuse wasn’t good enough, H. B. Yang would fire me. My mother would be ashamed of that, but I could at least tell her it was a disagreement over methodology, not my failure to do the job, that caused it. If I got caught, Joe Yee would know I was involved with H. B. Yang, but that was okay, too: it might make him approach me differently, and, in his rush to rearrange, I might find out what his interest really was. The question might have been, how to get upstairs? But there, I was in luck.

  The broad-shouldered fellow who’d been maître d’ when I’d come during the slow time the day before yesterday was not maître d’ today, but he was there at the top of the escalator, just sort of looking things over. Probably maître d’-ing and guarding the realm were jobs that had to be divided up on busy days.

  I left my cart where it was, bothering nobody, and strode purposefully across the floor to where he stood looking like a mobile brick wall. His eyes narrowed in recognition and suspicion as I approached. He took in my glasses and my dim sum lady garb with a frown as I stepped up close to him and spoke in lowered, conspiratorial tones.

  “I’m Lydia Chin, remember I was here Friday? I’m a private investigator”—figuring he already knew that—“doing some undercover work for Mr. Yang, something about a couple of the waiters he wanted to know. He told me to report to him immediately whenever I had something.” I started to move past him to the wallpapered door.

  “Mr. Yang’s with someone,” the brick wall told me, putting himself between me and the door and not looking happy.

  “I know,” I said, making myself sound surprised but patient. “Mr. Yee. He’s right on time. I was supposed to hold off until he got here, but I don’t think Mr. Yang will be happy if I don’t come up now.”

  “Maybe I’d better go upstairs and check,” he said, scowling at me for making him confused. A lot of people must see that scowl in the course of a day, I thought.

  “Well, okay,” I said, surprised again, “but I thought you were supposed to stay down here at all times. That’s what Mr. Yang said, that everyone was safe here because you were always here. I mean, I’ve counted on that, and I’m sure the others do, too.”

  “The others?” The brick wall squinted at me, thinking maybe his problem was that he wasn’t seeing me clearly enough.

  “Well, of course, I don’t know how many other investigators he’s got out there. He has us all working independently, you know.” I gave him lifted eyebrows, as though I wasn’t sure why he was having me tell him things he already knew.

  “Oh,” he said, squaring his shoulders and slowly surveying the crowded dining floor. “The others.” He nodded. “You’re right. I’d better stay down here. You sure they’re expecting you?”

  �
�Absolutely. My orders”—I emphasized the word—“were to come up when Mr. Yee got here, if I had anything to report. And, oh boy, do I,” I added with the grin you’d give your accomplice in a delicious scheme.

  He nodded again, slowly, without smiling. In fact, he scowled again. He was clearly more experienced in the ways of the world than I, not so given to finding fun in what was, after all, important and serious work. He fixed on me a patronizing, superior look, stepped aside, and let me at the wallpapered door.

  I clicked the door shut behind me before I started up the stairs, mostly so the brick wall wouldn’t see me tiptoeing. I kept as close to the wall as I could to keep the stairs from squeaking, although the fifth, seventh, and ninth steps couldn’t resist trying to give me away. After the little creak each of them made I stopped, worried that there might be another human brick wall at the top guarding the summit meeting going on up there. Well, if so, my clever excuse would just have to start sooner.

  There wasn’t, though. The hallway was empty, and it was silent, except for the quiet murmur of male voices and the clink of teacups from the open door near the end. Ah, I thought, they’re up to the have-some-tea-I-wouldn’t-trouble-you-it’s -no-trouble part. I wonder if this means H. B. Yang knew Joe Yee was coming, or just that he’s a good host, always prepared?

  I worked my way silently and slowly down the hall, intent on trying to make words out of the soft, conversational sounds coming out of the doorway. I was almost there, too, almost close enough to hear, almost near enough that I could stop and listen and find out what was going on. One more cautious step, maybe two, and that would be enough.