A Bitter Feast

by S. J. Rozan

  Fortunately, those blocks took us from the Bowery, Chinatown’s old border, to Mott Street, deep in Chinatown’s historic heart. We didn’t have to go anywhere near Duke Lo’s newer Division Street territory, and by now it was dusk.

  Exiting the Dragon Garden building made my heart pound faster, as we inched up the stairway to the ground floor landing and then, rather than continuing to the staff break room on the second floor, we followed a short twisty hall to a likely-looking service door. Slipping through it, we found ourselves back on bustling Canal Street, among people going about their urgent daily business, getting their last Sunday afternoon tasks accomplished before Sunday night fell. They paid no attention to the four of us, returning to their world from our sojourn in the anti-Shangri La downstairs.

  The urge to scurry like rats was strong, but we had decided we would draw less attention to ourselves by walking calmly and casually toward our destination. Gai-Lo Lu and Yuan Lee followed behind Song Chan and me. As we walked I spoke to him.

  “Lu Gai-Lo seems angry with Lee Yuan for trying to cheat a gangster this way,” I said quietly, not using Duke Lo’s name out loud, even if this wasn’t his turf.

  “Of course. We all were. It was a very stupid thing to do.”

  “If the rest of you thought it was stupid, why did you all run? Wasn’t there something else you could have done?”

  I’d meant, go to the police, or give the dope back, or something, but he answered the question the way he’d heard it: “The man who owns this package thinks we are all partners in this. The only way to be safe from him would be to betray Lee Yuan. Lee Yuan is a stupid man, but by the time we found out what he had done we had been sharing a home together for one month.”

  I thought about that home, another basement, in Elmhurst, and the photo of the young woman and toddler in the envelope addressed to Song Chan.

  “That was why we sent Ho Chi-Chun to see his lawyer,” Song Chan went on. “To find a way for us to correct this stupid mistake, for all to be safe.”

  We turned the corner from Bayard onto Mott. “I must ask you something,” I said. “About a theory of mine. The ship you and the others came here on: did it belong to Yang Hao-Bing? Did he arrange for your passage?”

  He gave me a sideways glance. “Is this your theory?”

  “Yes.”

  “In China, I was a student of biology,” he said. “In science, a theory is usually formulated based on data—evidence—which that theory will explain. Questions are only asked in order to confirm what one already suspects.”

  I nodded. That was Chinese for “Yes, but you didn’t hear it here.”

  “Your English is very good,” I said. “Did you study a long time?”

  “Many years, in Shanghai.”

  “Oh,” I said. “And that’s why you speak to these men in Mandarin—you’re not Fukienese. Cao Zhi also?”

  “Yes. Lee Yuan speaks no English—or Mandarin, either—but Cao Zhi speaks both equally well. And for Gai-lo Lu, his Mandarin is poor, but it is better than his English.”

  Unexpectedly, Song Chan flashed me a quick, sharp smile, which lit up his round and somber face. A well-educated Shanghainese, I thought, a biology student from the fastest-growing and most prosperous city in China, and now a waiter in Chinatown, New York, America. “Why did you come here?” I asked him.

  He gave me another sideways glance. “For opportunity. Is this not the land of opportunity?” He gestured at the crowded sidewalk, reminding me of Cao Zhi waving his arms in the janitor’s closet.

  “For someone as educated as you are, there must be better opportunities than pouring tea at Dragon Garden.”

  Song Chan looked away and said nothing else. A minute later we arrived at the building that housed Chin Family Association.

  I looked up at the old brick front for a moment, then pulled open the door and led our expedition up the stairwell. I hadn’t been inside for probably two years, and sparingly in the years before that since my father died when I was thirteen. In that time, the old man who had taught calligraphy to Andrew and me had also died. The leadership of the association had passed to different men. Most of the children I had played with on the vinyl floor had moved away, out of Chinatown, including my own brothers.

  But as I opened the second-floor door to the room where the men sat drinking tea, nothing, at first, seemed changed. General Gung still stood above his pyramid of oranges on his altar high in the corner, and the incense burning in front of him smelled the same as it always had. The scroll paintings still hung on the walls, which had been freshly painted in the same ivory color I remembered, and on the floor here and there children scribbled in coloring books or did their homework, looked after by fathers and uncles so that their mothers could cook or shop or visit their sisters. Men still sat drinking tea, talking, playing cards; but, I realized, it was they who had changed. Half of the men—there were perhaps twenty—were familiar to me; the others, mostly the younger ones, were not.

  As I had been at Zhen Rong, I was the only woman in the room; as they had done at Zhen Rong, the men looked up when we came in, to assess the new arrivals. I had a feeling we were surveyed with considerably less hostility than at Zhen Rong, maybe even welcomed with interested curiosity, but, it occurred to me, that might have been because that was what I expected to feel here. Song Chan and the others stood warily just inside the door; perhaps they were experiencing the feeling I had had at Zhen Rong, the sense of being where others belonged and you didn’t.

  One of a pair of men playing Chinese chess at a table by the window rose and smiled broadly. The skin hung looser on his pudgy face than I remembered, and he was almost completely bald, but the wide smile before me was the same as in my memory.

  “Chin Ling Wan-ju!” He grasped my shoulders and beamed as he looked me over. “How rare the sight of you here has become!”

  “The loss is mine, Uncle.” I smiled back. This was Chin Zhuang Si, a laundry supplies dealer called in English, for reasons known only to himself, Webster. He preferred his English name to his Chinese one, and everyone always used it, whether speaking in English or, as now, in Cantonese. Uncle Webster had been a great friend of my father’s and, as a bachelor, a frequent dinner guest at our home. He was one of a number of men who had taken on the job of overseeing my brothers’ and my own growing up after our father died. “I have been too concerned with the small demands of daily living to have the sense to come here and ask for the counsel of my wise uncles.”

  “You mean you’ve been solving your own problems, avoiding the meddlesome interference of a pack of old men.” He winked. “But of course I have been keeping an eye on you, Ling Wan-ju. If my meddlesome interference had ever been required, you can be assured I would have provided it.”

  The idea that Webster Chin had been keeping an eye on me filled me with an entirely different sensation than the one I’d gotten when H. B. Yang had told me the same thing. “Uncle, you are too generous, as always.”

  “Not as generous as you are polite, to say such a thing,” he replied. “Now, tell me, why have you come here this evening, after such a long time? Have you eaten yet? Who are your friends?”

  “My friends are in trouble,” I told him. “Yes, thank you, we’ve eaten, but I’ve come to ask for help for them.”

  “Trouble?” Uncle Webster, dropping his voice, eyed the three men standing uneasily by the door. “What kind of trouble?”

  “None of them speaks Cantonese,” I told him. The men’s uneasiness was probably increased by the fact that my conversation with Uncle Webster was in a language they couldn’t follow, but Cantonese was the language in which Uncle Webster was most comfortable, and using it was also a way for me to ask for his honest response to the situation without his having to worry about offending the strangers.

  “The trouble is serious,” I said. “I don’t want to mislead you. They’ve stolen something that belongs to Lo Da-Qi.” At this name the three men responded each in his own way, Song Chan with
cocked head, Yuan Lee with narrowed eyes, Gai-Lo Lu with widened ones. “Do you know him, Uncle?”

  “The owner of Happy Pavilion Restaurant.” Uncle Webster nodded. “We have met on one or two occasions.” He glanced again at the men. “These men are thieves, Ling Wan-ju?”

  “No, Uncle. One of them made a foolish mistake, a poor man’s attempt to become a rich man. The man in the middle there, he did the stealing. His friends, caught up in his error, have not deserted him.”

  Uncle Webster didn’t ask me what it was the men had stolen. It was obvious I’d had the chance to tell him and hadn’t taken it. I thought he was better off not knowing; and he apparently understood that and was willing to trust my assessment.

  He asked, “What is the help you want for them?”

  “I’m going to try to solve this problem,” I said. “I need a safe place for them to stay until I do.”

  “You are asking if they may stay here?”

  “In one of the rooms upstairs. Maybe for a day, maybe for just a few hours. I’ll be responsible for the rent, of course.” The room rates at Chin Family Association were minimal, more a matter of saving face for the guest by giving him the opportunity to pay for what he received rather than accept charity.

  Uncle Webster looked at the men solemnly. “Who else knows you have brought these men here?”

  “No one. There are people right now looking for them, but I don’t believe they’ll think to look here.”

  Uncle Webster gave me a long look. “In your attempt to solve this problem,” he asked, “what will you do?”

  “I’m going to talk to some people,” I said. “Just talk. I’ll be very careful, Uncle, I promise.”

  He smiled. “That, of course, is what I was asking. Very well, Ling Wan-ju. I’ll arrange this. You go do your work. When your task is completed, perhaps you’ll return to take tea with an old man?”

  “Uncle, I can think of nothing I’d rather do,” I said, and meant it.

  I introduced Uncle Webster to Song Chan, Gai-Lo Lu, and Yuan Lee, and explained briefly in English what the situation was.

  “It won’t be for long,” I said. “I’m going to see if I can fix things up.”

  “How?” Song Chan asked. “Will you find Cao Zhi?”

  I sure will, I thought, but not the way you mean. “I’ll try,” I told him. “I’ll let you know what’s happening.”

  All three of them seemed less than thrilled about the circumstances they found themselves in, but I imagined they’d been feeling that way since Yuan Lee revealed his illicit prize and its unintended consequences to his new roommates. They acquiesced to the deal, and, leaving them in the care of my father’s old friend, I trotted back down the stairs and set about my next errand.

  I hit the pay phone on the corner and called Bill’s beeper and then his service to make sure he knew what I had done and what I was planning to do. Then I called Mary. Not at the precinct, this being her day off, and not at home: I called the hospital and asked for Peter’s room.

  “I found them,” I told her when she answered Peter’s phone.

  “What? She says she found them!” she said, not to me, then spoke to me again. “The waiters? Lydia, you’re a genius! Are you okay? Are they okay?”

  “Everyone’s okay,” I said. “How’s Peter?”

  “Better than he was two seconds ago. Can’t you hear him? He’s practically jumping up and down. They’re okay,” she said to Peter, then to me: “Where were they? Were you right about the package?”

  The vision of Peter jumping up and down in his hospital bed was almost funny. I giggled. A very funny car drove by and turned the corner. I giggled harder. A really silly-looking man jumped back onto the curb. I laughed. A horn honked with a sound so comic it cracked me up. “Wait,” I told Mary. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and counted to ten, breathing in, out, in, out, until the urge to chortle and guffaw and cry was gone. The hysteria of relief wasn’t something I had time to give in to right now.

  “What’s going on?” Mary asked in my ear.

  “Traffic,” I said. “Nothing. Yes, I was almost right about the package. They have it, but sort of by accident. The one who came here last month, he stumbled across it on the ship and stole it.”

  “Just an innocent opportunist?”

  “Seems that way.”

  “If he’s all that innocent how did he recognize it?”

  “I—that’s a good question.” Not many Americans, where heroin is much more widespread than in China, could identify the stuff if they’d never been mixed up with it; how had a semiliterate Fukienese illegal had any idea the package was worth lifting?

  For that matter, what made him approach Duke Lo’s man with it once he got it here?

  “Where are they now?” Mary asked impatiently.

  “Chin Family Association. But it’s more complicated than that.”

  “Than what?”

  “Than you think.”

  “Not true. When you’re involved I always think it’s very complicated.” To Peter: “They’re at Chin Family Association.” Back to me: “That was a sneaky place to put them, Lydia. Where did you find them?”

  “Dragon Garden.”

  “Seriously? Peter, they were at Dragon Garden! The whole time? Where?” she asked me.

  “In the basement. Listen, Mary—”

  “I know. You want to tell me the complication, why I shouldn’t just come down to Chin Family Association and pick them up and take over from here.”

  “Well—” I was taken slightly aback. I regrouped and said, “Well, yes. Because, see, what do you have if you do?”

  “A couple of kilos of heroin that belong to Duke Lo?”

  “That’s the point: you can’t prove that. We only know that because of Bill’s—because of my snitch, who’ll deny he ever met me if you squeeze him.”

  “I’m going to pass over the issue of whose snitch the guy was,” Mary said, “although I have to tell you, the point interests me. But the waiters must know whose stuff they had, otherwise why did they run?”

  “No, you’re right. The one guy tried to sell it and heard on the street that it was Duke Lo’s missing piece and no one else would touch it. If you take these guys up now, maybe they’ll tell you that. But Duke Lo will tell you he never heard of it.”

  Mary was silent on the other end of the phone; maybe it was her turn to count to ten.

  “All right,” she said. “What’s your brilliant plan?”

  “I want to try to sell it back to Duke Lo.”

  “What?” I waited for her to repeat this bit of idiocy to Peter, but she didn’t. That, I thought, was a good sign: if she were going to let me do something really crazy, she might not want him to know about it.

  “I won’t take it with me,” I said. “So you can use it as evidence later, and so I still have a bargaining chip once I’m in. I’ll wear a wire. Just to get him on tape admitting he knows what I’m talking about.”

  There were no words from Mary’s end of the phone, though I could swear I heard the faint sound of her grinding her teeth.

  “Where?” she said.

  “Zhen Rong.”

  “With Bill? Like last time?”

  “You know about last time?”

  “You didn’t get killed, so Chester felt like it was okay to tell me. So: with Bill, right?”

  I didn’t bother to get indignant. “If he turns up in time. There’s another complication.” I told her about Cao Zhi and Joe Yee, about my theory about H. B. Yang and Duke Lo. “So the heat’s on,” I said. “I don’t want H. B. Yang or Duke Lo to know these guys have been found and lost again. I don’t know who this Joe Yee really is, but he knows H. B. Yang and that’s not a good sign.”

  “Lydia, I can’t arrange a wire and a listening post and all that in a hurry.”

  “You don’t have to. I have a tape recorder. I can go in on my own, and then I’ll testify in court where the tape was made and who’s on it. I know it’s not great, Mary, bu
t it’s better than you’ll have if you guys go in right now or if you wait to get all set up.”

  Cars turned the corner one after another, some of them heading from Chinatown, where I was, to Brooklyn, where Mary was. Silent phone to my ear, I waited for her to speak.

  “I’m coming in,” she said. “And I’m calling Chester. It’ll give him a chance to make up for telling you where to find Duke Lo in the first place. We’ll be close. If anyone at Zhen Rong sneezes loud, we’ll be there. And I want you to take Bill with you.”

  “I want to take him,” I said. “I called him before I called you. I’ll call him again after you hang up.” Which, I didn’t point out, probably wouldn’t do me any good; if Bill were in a position to talk to me my beeper would have gone off already.

  “Lydia, this is so crazy—” Mary began.

  “No, it’s not. Duke Lo thinks he’s smarter than everybody. He knows you guys have never been able to touch him. I’ll be careful to make him think I’m not a threat, just a dumb opportunist like the other guy. I’ll let him scare me into promising to return his dope, and then I’ll beat it out of there.”

  She sighed, and I knew I had her. “I think it’s nuts,” she said. “There must be another way.”

  “There must be. But if you want these guys, it’s the only way I can think of.”

  We didn’t talk much longer. She was in a hurry to get back to Chinatown, I was in a hurry to run over to my office and grab my tape recorder, and Duke Lo, I hoped as I hung up the phone and scuttled off down the street, was in a hurry to get the comeuppance he would never see coming.

  Twenty-One

  Bill was nowhere to be found. I guessed that meant he was still keeping an eye on Joe Yee and Cao Zhi, and it probably meant they were on the move, because he’d have gotten my beeper message by now and he’d have called me from the coffee place if he could have. I wondered if it also meant that when this case was over I should reopen the cell phone discussion, which Bill is against because they aren’t secure but I’m sort of for because you spend less time gritting your teeth and wondering where your partner is.