A Bitter Feast

by S. J. Rozan

  “He’s a bad guy, Mary. This will wrap him up.”

  In the end, I was right—in more ways than one. It was safer for me to do this than not to do it. It was safer for me to do it under the watchful eyes of the NYPD than to do it without them. And it would net Duke Lo, and net him for Mary Kee, Detective Second Grade.

  “I’ll set it up,” she said grimly. “And when it’s over, we’ll talk.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “Sure,” she said. “You’re welcome.”

  Phone calls at an end, I stood a little dazed on the street corner. Then I gathered myself together and headed for Chin Family Association.

  Twenty-Two

  Uncle Webster was drinking tea and arguing politics with a small group of other men when I arrived. His position, as I stood respectfully listening, seemed to be that no government could be trusted—a statement with which, I noticed, no one disagreed, and in which he included the government of the host country, America—but that the current Chinese government was probably no less trustworthy than any other. This got him some cigarette-waving, teacup-clanking objections, and his final point, that therefore improved trade and political relations between China and America could only be helpful to the Chinese people, was received with a certain amount of contemptuous slurping.

  I hated to interrupt a man as much in his element as Uncle Webster talking politics, but I stepped forward and smiled.

  “I’m glad to see that you’re settling this difficult problem in this august assembly, Uncle,” I told him in Cantonese.

  “Pah.” Uncle Webster stood to greet me. “Wisdom is said to come with age, yet I hear from these decrepit specimens the same hotheaded nonsense spouted by your young friend upstairs.”

  The other tea drinkers made disparaging sounds directed at Uncle Webster and nodded or smiled in greeting to me.

  “You’ve been talking politics with the men I brought here?”

  “Only Chan Song. The others have no politics, just a desire to get rich. Chan Song, with the absolute confidence of youth, opposes the current government of China. He is positive that a large movement of the people can change it.”

  “Well, it’s happened before. Uncle, I need to see the men.”

  “Of course. I believe they’ve been waiting for you.”

  With Uncle Webster, I went upstairs to the third floor and knocked on the door he pointed me toward. Song Chan cracked it open, and, seeing who it was, pulled it wide and stepped aside.

  “Thank you, Uncle,” I said to Uncle Webster, who caught his cue.

  “I will be downstairs,” he said to me, “trying to instruct certain empty-headed fools in the ways of governments.”

  I smiled as he went off to battle.

  “Did you find Cao Zhi?” Gai-Lo Lu began anxiously in English as I stepped inside the room. It was small but clean, furnished with four beds, a few chairs, two bureaus. Mismatched though it all was, it was comfortable and cozy, with floor lamps casting soft pools of light on the scattered rugs. I was willing to bet it was hands down the most pleasant place these men had spent the night in since they’d left their homes in China.

  China. In a way, exactly what I had come to talk about. Before I began, though, Song Chan shot Gai-Lo Lu a look and said to me, “We’re grateful for your help, Lydia Chin. Before any other discussion we must thank you for that.”

  Lu nodded vigorously and apologetically, translating for Yuan Lee, who just scowled and looked away. I noticed he wasn’t able to resist a glance under one of the beds, where I assumed the missing kilos rested.

  “You’re welcome,” I said. “I’m happy that I was able, finally, to do the job I was hired for. Now we have something further to discuss, the plan I have; but first, I’d like to ask you some questions, if I may.”

  Song Chan nodded and gestured me to a chair. He settled his stocky form on one of the other chairs, and Gai-Lo Lu and Yuan Lee positioned themselves on the nearest bed.

  “I haven’t found Cao Zhi”—or looked for him, but I didn’t tell them that—“but I have a question about him.” I spoke to Song Chan. “How well did you know him in China?”

  “In China?” He raised his eyebrows. “I didn’t know him. I met him only at Dragon Garden, when I came to work there.”

  “Then when you four got into this trouble, why did he help you out? He told me he never gets involved in anything. I assumed he did this because he was an old friend of yours.”

  Gai-Lo Lu spoke up. “He did not want to. He was angry at us. But he said he has no choice.”

  Song Chan shot him a look but didn’t say anything.

  “No choice?” I asked. “Why?”

  Gai-Lo Lu looked puzzled. “Because we are workers. All together. Ask for his help, he cannot refuse.”

  Oh, right. I held him with my eyes a moment longer, then asked Song Chan, “And when you speak with him, it’s in English or Mandarin, because he speaks both well?”

  “Reasonably well.”

  “Because he was a university student in China?”

  Song Chan crossed his legs. “A student? I suppose he was.”

  “Oh, he was. He was arrested in Beijing for antigovernment activities. He spent some time in jail because he wouldn’t rat on other students, friends of his. He’d still be there except that somehow he escaped and came here.”

  “If that’s true he is a lucky man.”

  “It’s true.”

  Through this conversation my every remark, and Song Chan’s, was shadowed by Gai-Lo Lu’s whispered translation to Yuan Lee. Listening to Lu’s voice, I thought about the basement hideaway where I’d met these men, and the other basement, where only their few, poor belongings remained.

  “Chan Song,” I said, giving his name in its Chinese order as a sign of respect, “you’re a fit, well-educated young man with a wife and child. A biology student, you said. I suppose it’s possible that you decided there was more opportunity for you here than in China. But that a man with your advantages should willingly leave his family behind and start his American career as a waiter at Dragon Garden is too much for me to buy.”

  I stopped, meeting Song Chan’s eyes, which were fixed on mine. Gai-Lo Lu and Yuan Lee were frowning in confusion, one presumably because he didn’t understand the language, one even though he did.

  Song Chan spoke; to my surprise, he spoke in accented but clear Cantonese. “How do you know about Cao Zhi’s past?”

  The confusion on Lu’s and Lee’s faces grew.

  “I’m a detective, Chan Song,” I answered, also in Cantonese. “I know Cao Zhi’s story. Part of yours, also.”

  “I have no wife,” he said. “No child.”

  I smiled gently. “If you could see your face as you said that, you would understand why I don’t believe you.”

  “What are you doing?” Gai-Lo Lu demanded in English, sounding a little panicked.

  “Speaking about private matters,” Song Chan responded, in English also. “None of this concerns you, Lu Gai-Lo, or Lee Yuan, either.”

  “We are all—”

  “No, we are not,” Song Chan said. “I said I would not betray you over this theft, the problems it created. I will not. But other things aren’t your concern. I will talk privately with Lydia Chin. You will not interfere.”

  “We must—”

  “No,”

  The look Song Chan gave him, the steady look of a man who will not be persuaded no matter the circumstance or the argument, silenced Gai-Lo Lu. Except for the translation he offered Yuan Lee of that brief discussion, he spoke no more.

  “Are they well?” Song Chan asked me, in Cantonese again. Under his steady voice were the clashing notes of hope and fear. “My wife? My son?”

  “I’m sorry,” I told him. “I don’t know. I’m not a government official—of either government. I’m an investigator, an American, hired to find you by another American.”

  His brows knit together, and it was clear he had a lot of questions. “How do you kn
ow about my family?” he asked, choosing first the most important.

  “I know nothing about your family in China,” I told him, “except that they exist.”

  Song Chan’s voice softened. “My marriage, made three years ago in my village, is secret,” he said. “We told no one, to insure my family would be safe.”

  “No one will learn from me,” I assured him. “But I’m not sure you can trust all those you think you can.”

  “I trust very few,” he said. “But some have taken risks for my safety, for the safety of those like me. It is for their sake that I did not abandon this fool. Or his friend.” He gestured toward the other two men, one following our incomprehensible words with an anxious look, the other scowling at the floor.

  “I know nothing about your family,” I repeated, watching his face, “but I know that you are a student dissident, like Cao Zhi.” I didn’t actually know that, but it seemed like a very safe bet.

  “Cao Zhi,” he said, not reacting at all to my statement, which confirmed it. “Cao Zhi didn’t send you to us?”

  “From Cao Zhi I learned you were at Dragon Garden,” I said carefully. “But I was looking for you before that.”

  “Why?” asked Song Chan.

  A fair question. “When you four disappeared, Lee Bi-Da felt a responsibility. He thought your disappearance might have to do with the union, with Yang Hao-Bing. But your relationship with Yang Hao-Bing is quite different, isn’t it?”

  “We work for him,” he said simply.

  “Why? As a dissident exile I’m sure there were other paths open to you in America.”

  “In China,” he said slowly, “I dedicated my life to working for democracy. When I had to leave China, I thought, This is a tragedy, but at least I’m going to America, where there is opportunity, where everyone is equal. I arrived, and many people said, ‘Come to our university, become a doctor, get rich.’ But I see men like these”—he gestured at the confused men in the room with us—“I see how they work, how they live. This cannot be, I think, in America. I spoke often, late into the night, with Ho Chi-Chun, with Cao Zhi. If there must be justice in China, we said, there must also be justice in America.”

  “So you work for the union.”

  “To leave China, to leave my family—this must be for a reason, Lydia Chin. Otherwise, it is too hard.”

  “But you won’t join.”

  “The antiunion forces claim that the union does not represent the restaurant workers but only the ambitions of outsiders. Members of my reputation—forged in China—would only, according to them, prove their point.” He gave me an ironic smile.

  I smiled back at him, this stolid, steady man whose heart was thousands of miles away. “I have a Chinese name,” I said, and told him what it was.

  “Ling Wan-ju,” he said. “A name full of hope, full of joy. Your parents must have been very glad when you were born.”

  “I was the youngest, a daughter born after four sons. My father said four sons made him tired. In any case, sons could only grow up to be like him, irascible, foolish, nothing to aspire to. He wanted a daughter, he said, who could grow up to be like my mother: a worthy goal.”

  “I think you are lucky, Chin Ling Wan-ju, to have such parents.”

  “I agree,” I told him, and I did. “Chan Song, I must ask you something else. Cao Zhi—why did he help you? He seems so bitter, so determined to stay uninvolved.”

  Song Chan nodded. “He will not join the union. But he despises those who come to America, get rich, buy, buy, buy. He chooses to stay with those who have least.”

  “Why won’t he join the union? For the same reason as you?”

  “No. He is afraid.”

  “Of getting into trouble, the way he did in China?”

  “He is afraid,” Song Chan said, “that this time, he will not be able to withhold information, the way he did in China.”

  My stomach tightened a little as I realized what that meant.

  “We don’t do things that way here,” I said.

  Song Chan nodded and said, “Ho Chi-Chun always said that also, that things are different here.”

  There was no answer I could make to that, so I asked another question. “Did you also escape from jail to come to America?”

  He smiled again, but with no joy. “I was luckier than Cao Zhi. I was never jailed. I found the way to America, the ship others like me came here on—Cao Zhi was one—before the People’s Liberation Army found me.”

  “Yang Hao-Bing’s ship?”

  He nodded.

  “The way to America,” I said, “was paved by the American government? By our State Department?”

  Song Chan tilted his head, his look one of cautious interest, but he didn’t answer.

  “You have a visa that allows you to work,” I said. “Ho Chi-Chun had one also. Lee Bi-Da was working on Ho’s citizenship papers, but he had nothing to do with yours. Yours came from our State Department.” I said this as though it were a fact I knew as well as any other, not another piece of the theory that Bill and I had worked out. “I’ll bet Cao Zhi’s did also. Your State Department contact is Yee Ji-You.”

  Dropping Joe Yee’s Chinese name like that was really fishing, checking out the theory. I wasn’t sure what would happen, but as it turned out, two interesting things did.

  Song Chan, with a long look at me, nodded.

  And Yuan Lee, with an “Ah?” that when pronounced emphatically is understood to mean “Say what?” in all Chinese dialects, began a fierce arm-waving diatribe at Gai-Lo Lu.

  Gai-Lo Lu, after what seemed like an unsuccessful attempt to shush Yuan Lee, spoke reluctantly. “Lee says,” he told us, sounding apologetic, “he says, please, he asks you protecting him from the anger of Lo Da-Qi.”

  Yuan Lee didn’t look as though he was saying please or asking for anything, but that wasn’t what I was interested in. “Lo Da-Qi?” I asked. “Why is he suddenly concerned about Lo Da-Qi? Because of the dope?”

  Gai-Lo Lu and Yuan Lee had a quick exchange, and Lu asked, “What are you discuss with Chan Song?”

  “Nothing that concerns either of you,” Song Chan said, as he’d said before.

  Lu and Lee spoke again, and Lu, looking even more apologetic than before, said, “He doesn’t believes you.”

  “Doesn’t believe us?” I shot a look at Song Chan to keep him quiet. “About what?”

  “Lee Yuan says, if doesn’t concerning Lee Yuan, why talking about Yee Ji-You?”

  Looking at Yuan Lee, I asked Gai-Lo Lu, “Does he know Yee Ji-You?”

  A quick translation, then: “Of course, knowing him. Why else you discussing him?”

  “How does he know him?”

  “Contact person here for Lee Yuan. Supposed find Yee Ji-You, get orders. Before Lee Yuan finds package, of course.”

  “Lee Yuan’s a dissident, too?” I looked from Lu to Lee to Song Chan. Song Chan shook his head; he seemed as confused as I was.

  Lu translated for Lee, who frowned and spoke scornfully. Lu turned back to Song Chan and me. “Dissident? Lee Yuan says politics for fools only. Lee Yuan come to America for opportunity, for working for Lo Da-Qi. Lee Yuan big-time gangster.”

  Twenty-Three

  “Gangster?” I stared at Yuan Lee, who smirked back proudly. “What do you mean?”

  “In China,” Gai-Lo Lu answered, while Yuan Lee continued to smirk. “Big lieutenant, working for big boss. Lo Da-Qi say, ‘Come to America, working for me.’”

  “He knew Lo Da-Qi before he came?”

  Gai-Lo Lu shook his head. “Not knowing. Lee Yuan is—” He shook his head some more, searching for the word. His face lit with inspiration. “Like union. ‘Come join with us.’” He smiled from me to Song Chan, looking hopeful.

  “Recruited?” I asked. “Lo Da-Qi recruited him?”

  Gai-Lo Lu nodded eagerly. “Recruited. ‘Join with us.’”

  I sat silently in the cozy room, taking in the meaning of this.

  Fast rise, Mary had sai
d about Duke Lo. Usually it takes more time, kissing the right rings, recruiting your soldiers. But Duke Lo had shot straight to the top, behind men like Three-finger Choi.

  Duke Lo was importing his own gangsters.

  Like Three-finger Choi, about whom Mary had said that if the INS hadn’t been so willing to give him papers, making him hard to ship back, the NYPD’s life would be a lot simpler.

  Duke Lo was importing gangsters with valid United States papers.

  “Does he have papers?” I asked Gai-Lo Lu about Yuan Lee.

  Another hurried consultation, and then Lu nodded. “Papers,” he said.

  “Forged?”

  “No,” Lu said. “Real.”

  I nodded, too. “Provided by Yee Ji-You?”

  This was translated again for Yuan Lee, and again the answer was yes.

  “The other cargo,” I breathed, mostly to myself. “Not the dope. Gangsters.”

  “Cargo?” asked Song Chan.

  “How does it work?” I turned to him but ignored his question. “For the dissidents who come over?”

  “How does—”

  “Answer me!”

  His eyes widened, then he said, in English, because with Gai-Lo Lu in the conversation, that’s what we were speaking now, “There is a network. People who help. If you are hiding, they help you, get you to the ship. If you are in jail, sometimes they can bribe the right people, you can get out.”

  “And when you get to the ship?”

  “There is a man you speak to. He knows who you are. He has been told by the man in America to look for you.”

  “The man in America is Yee Ji-You? Joe Yee?”

  He nodded.

  “Who pays the passage?”

  “The people who help. Everyone knows it is really the American government, but no one says.”

  The United States government—specifically, the State Department, unless I missed my guess—smuggling out dissidents on H. B. Yang’s illegal alien ship. Deluca’s and March’s little project, the one it was their job to protect.

  “What if the ship gets stopped?” I asked Song Chan. “All that work, and then they lose you?”

  Gai-Lo Lu had been watching this exchange with an eager but confused look. It wasn’t the language this time, but the content, that was beyond him. Now he smiled; he had something to add. With a helpful look, he offered, “It is lucky ship.”