A Bitter Feast

by S. J. Rozan

  “Lucky ship?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Bright Morning. Name of ship,” he explained. “Everyone coming to America wants coming on Bright Morning. Nine times across ocean, never stopped by INS.”

  Well, of course. If the United States government was slipping its own immigrants in among the illegals on the Bright Morning, why wouldn’t the word have gotten to the INS that this was a ship to leave alone?

  I wondered in passing what the State Department owed the INS for this favor. That thought was immediately replaced by another.

  “The fox,” I said. “Borrowing the tiger’s might.”

  All three men, the two who spoke English and the one who didn’t, gave me identical blank looks.

  “Duke Lo. Lo Da-Qi,” I translated myself. “He has his people, his gangsters, carrying his dope. H. B. Yang doesn’t know anything about it.”

  Lu and Lee whispered again. Lu confirmed what I’d said, while Lee smiled, looking superior. “Ship owner knows nothing about packages. Knows nothing about gangsters, work his restaurant. Lee Yuan says, old man, stupid man. Soon, Lo Da-Qi be big boss, Yang Hao-Bing working for Lo Da-Qi.”

  That’s some bragging on Duke Lo, I thought, coming from the dog who bites his master.

  But the important question remained. “The man in America who arranges the gangsters’ passage,” I said to Gai-Lo Lu. “Pays for them, provides their papers. It’s Yee Ji-You also?”

  The consultation and the answer: “Yes.”

  “Joe Yee,” Bill said from his kitchen, pouring boiling water into a one-cup teapot for me and into the glass coffee press thing for himself.

  “Joe Yee,” I said. “Working both sides of the street. Why not? The State Department already has this underground railroad thing all set up. All Joe Yee has to do is take the money Duke Lo gives him and funnel it into the system, tell the guys in China, ‘Bring me this guy and that guy.’ The guys in China don’t know the difference between the dissidents the State Department actually wants and the gangsters Duke Lo wants.”

  I answered him from his desk, where I was trying my best to do a creditable job of wrapping a concrete-block-size package in shiny red paper. I had left Chin Family Association with it—to the obvious relief of Song Chan and Gai-Lo Lu, and to the clear but impotent dismay of Yuan Lee—going out the basement door, scurrying across the rear yard and through the building behind. Not that I thought my new business associate, Duke Lo, was having me followed or anything treacherous like that. Still, the back exit route was there, developed to be employed in the occasional Chin Family Association emergency, so why not use it?

  The paper ripped, for the second time. I sighed, balled it up, smashed it into the wastebasket, and cut a new sheet.

  “And when they get here,” Bill said, “they become Duke Lo’s soldiers.”

  “Working off their passage,” I said. “The same as anybody else.” I pulled tangled Scotch tape from my fingers.

  “Except when a guy like Lee gets ambitious and steals the package he was supposed to deliver.”

  I shook my head. “He wasn’t the courier. There were two of them, Duke Lo’s guys, on that ship. Yuan Lee didn’t know whose dope it was when he found it. He just thought it would make a nice nest egg to start his new life with.” I folded the new piece of paper around the package, but it was a half inch short. “When he got here, the only criminal he knew to offer it to was his new boss.”

  “Some joke, eh, boss?” Bill came into the living room.

  “What?”

  “The Marx Brothers. You’re driving me nuts. Here. You pour, I’ll wrap the damn thing.” He took wrapping paper and Scotch tape from me. “Gift-wrapped kilos. This is important?”

  “It’s an elegant touch,” I said. “He’ll be impressed. I bet the money he brings will be in a red envelope.” I went into the kitchen and poured the tea and coffee into mugs while Bill maneuvered paper, package, and tape.

  “You sure you don’t want to call Deluca and March, tell them we found the source of the cargo they don’t want?” he asked.

  “We will. After we get Duke Lo. They can wait.”

  “Good,” Bill said. “Just checking. Okay, there.” He stepped back, through rustling and folding. “How’s that?”

  “So it’s not my strength, gift-wrapping,” I said defensively, looking at his rather beautiful package. “I’m not so used to it. My people don’t have all the centuries of Christmas practice your people have.” I brought the mugs into the living room.

  “All right,” Bill said as we sat, him in the easy chair and me on the couch, to drink our tea and coffee. “Are you ready for this?”

  “For what?”

  “For lunch tomorrow.”

  “Oh, that,” I said breezily. “Oh, sure.”

  “Good. Just checking.”

  “How about you?”

  “Always prepared. I was a Boy Scout.”

  “You weren’t.”

  “That’s true. But I thought like one.”

  “Don’t tell me what that means.”

  “Okay, then, distract me.”

  “Why, is that my job?”

  “You’re the boss.”

  “Oh.” I sipped my tea. “I don’t know about this boss stuff. Employees seem like dangerous things to have.”

  “No question.”

  “I mean, they get you all messed up with things, dogs and foxes and tigers and who knows what.”

  “Undeniable, if a little obscure.”

  “Maybe partners are better.”

  “Well,” said Bill, after a long sip of coffee, “I wouldn’t know. I’ve never had one.”

  “Me, either.”

  He said nothing.

  Me, either.

  Finally, someone had to make a sound in this very quiet place.

  I said, “Everything changes.”

  Twenty-Four

  A Chinese banquet never starts on time.

  A guest invited to a twelve o’clock feast who actually appeared at noon would be considered pushy and obnoxious, maybe even offensive, implying that he thought if he’d come later there wouldn’t be enough food. The more formal and grand the party, the more tardy the guests are expected to be.

  This little luncheon of ours was small—just the one table—and modest—just the six courses. So by my Chinese calculations I expected Duke Lo and his entourage at No. 8 Pell Street at twenty past twelve.

  For the host it’s a different matter, of course. As the party giver, it was my responsibility not to arrive too early, thereby insulting the restaurant manager and the chefs, who did this sort of thing every day and didn’t need anyone hovering, thank you; but not too late, in case the crab for the corn-and-crab soup was unavailable but the restaurant owner had snagged a small supply of shark’s fin, excellent and well worth the slight increase in price, didn’t I think?

  Which is why the breezy, bright, late morning saw Bill and me strolling along Canal Street from his place to Chinatown. I had gone for a long, early walk after eating the rice porridge my mother had made me for breakfast, plus an orange and a big pot of tea; then to the dojo, where I’d worked out hard, staying halfway through the class after the one I’d gone to take, until it was time to shower and go pick up Bill and the gift-wrapped five kilos.

  As we walked, Bill carried the kilos in a shopping bag, as though a hundred thousand dollars worth of dope—“Probably worth five times that, stepped on for the street,” Bill told me—was just another kind of baggage. Well, maybe it was.

  The sky was blue and cloudless, and despite the wind the sun was strong. I unzipped my jacket and watched the cars and trucks rolling, honking, shouldering their way east with us or west against us. They seemed boisterous and excited, impatient to get to their destinations and get things done.

  I was on the point of telling Bill that I’d never realized the walk from Tribeca to Chinatown was so long, when we crossed Lafayette Street and entered my home ground, the territory I’d been raised in.


  The noise, the smells and chaos of crowds trying to push past street vendors, of street vendors trying to outcry one another as scallion pancakes bubbled in sizzling oil, of wind-up plastic frogs kicking their legs in shallow tubs of water between trays of knockoff Rolex watches and boxes of glistening fish lined up on shaved ice, of gawking tourists staring and pointing, trying to take in all this exotic action, made me instantly calm. I was home. I knew every inch and corner of this place, understood who was here, what they did, and what to expect, even when I didn’t like it.

  Duke Lo, ha. I could take him. Me and Bill, with Mary in the background—Duke Lo and his criminal empire didn’t have a chance.

  I was still feeling that way when we got to No. 8 Pell Street, where Mr. Shen greeted us with a smile, had someone take our coats, and showed us to our table. Semisheltered in its own private alcove, it was set with crisp linen and the restaurant’s best soup bowls and teacups. Mr. Shen went over the menu with me, a formality that had to be pursued, but only because propriety called for it, not because there was anything I could do now about any changes he or his chefs had seen fit to make. He assured me everything was in order, and told me how fortunate it was that I’d ordered the sea bass, since the bass at this morning’s market was the freshest, and the largest, he’d seen this spring.

  I liked the menu. I looked over our table, and I liked it, and I liked the restaurant. This was going to work. Duke Lo, maybe even Three-finger Choi. I felt powerful. I felt clever. I felt unstoppable.

  I felt that way until I heard the shots.

  If you didn’t know, you’d think you were hearing a car backfire. If you didn’t know, if you hadn’t heard it before, if you weren’t in a business where shots get fired and people get killed and things you didn’t plan for happen all the time. Bill and I burst through No. 8’s front door together, Bill yanking me back so I stayed in the doorway, sheltered some, while, guns drawn, we took in the scene on the street.

  It wasn’t hard to figure out. At the end of the block, Duke Lo on the ground, not moving, his chest gleaming sickly crimson. Two men with drawn guns, one crouching over him to protect him from more shots, the other—tall, with a deformed left hand—standing in the middle of Pell Street, firing at the rooftop of the building next to No. 8. People screaming and running for cover. Over the shrieks, shots, and footsteps, I heard Chester, the bright-eyed NYPD detective, shouting, “Up there!”

  A shooter, on the roof. Duke Lo ambushed on the way to lunch with me. In a spectacular athletic display, Chester holstered his gun and leapt for the fire escape ladder on the front of No. 8. He yanked it down and swarmed up it, heading for the roof.

  But the shots had come, if Three-finger Choi in the middle of the street was right, from the building next door. Taller than No. 8, it had no fire escapes, on the street front or on the back, either. And no way to it from the roof of No. 8. Chester didn’t know that. But I had grown up here, and I did.

  I dashed out past Bill, who turned and followed. As we raced past the tall building, old Mr. Sun, the building’s super, charged into the street, calling me. “Chin Ling Wan-ju! Wait! No! Lo faan! Lo faan!” he yelled in Cantonese, waving his arms. A foreigner. “On the roof!”

  I stopped, grabbed him, held on to one of his arms as the other kept windmilling. “How do you know?”

  “Big man! Paid me, this morning, to let him on the roof! Big! I would not have, but he talked about taxes …” Old Mr. Sun looked abashed, and I understood: the lo faan had been taken for a tax official, and old Mr. Sun must be a tax cheat. “He said, tell no one, but now …” He peered at me anxiously.

  Bill, beside me, looked at me for a translation, but there was no time.

  “Is the door open?” I asked Mr. Sun.

  “No! He locked it!” Old Mr. Sun appeared both appalled and affronted by this behavior on the part of the lo faan.

  “Go back inside!” I ordered him, and he ran with relief to obey.

  I sped on and pushed open the door of the next building, the one on the other side of the tall one. The tiled lobby and glaring fluorescent lights raced by in a flash as I pounded up the stairs past the offices of dentists and accountants, acupuncturists and employment agencies. Bill’s footsteps clattered after mine.

  This building, six stories, was also shorter than the building the shots had come from. But I knew, from being a kid around here, from spending long summer afternoons with Mary exploring our neighborhood as though it were the ever-thrilling, untouched surface of the moon, that this building had a ladder to the roof of the taller one. It had been bolted there forty years ago by two old men, one from each building, who liked to bring their birds in their cages to visit each other in the good weather mornings.

  I was breathing deeply, evenly, focusing on it the way I do at the dojo, by the time I reached the roof door. Behind me I could hear Bill’s more ragged panting. We stopped, and met each other’s eyes. I threw the door open.

  A man was on the roof, and someone was vanishing over the parapet onto the fire escape in the back.

  Ed Deluca turned his ferret face to Bill and me and swore. He shouted, “Get the hell out of here!” and raced after the disappearing figure. Jamming his gun into his belt, he swung over the parapet.

  Bill and I charged across the roof and looked over. Two floors below Deluca was his partner, March, racing down the shaking steel fire escape, chasing Joe Yee.

  March, on the run, fired down at Joe Yee. Joe spun around and shot back up, wildly. I dived behind the parapet, scraping my hand on the tar paper roof. I looked for Bill; he was behind a chimney, peering down into the building’s yard. Another shot screamed through the air and feet pounded on steel. Bill hoisted himself over the parapet and onto the fire escape. I did the same.

  I was just in time to see Joe Yee, not bothering with the ladder, leap from the lowest fire escape to the ground. He lost his footing when he landed, rolled into a pile of old appliances and kitchen garbage. He scrambled wildly to his feet.

  But by that time Mary had stepped out from behind a garbage pail and was holding her new shiny NYPD 9mm automatic pointed at his heart.

  Jim March leaned over the railing, his weapon trained not on Joe Yee but on Mary. “Drop the gun!” he yelled at her, while Deluca ran past him and swung over onto the ladder. It lowered under his weight and deposited him on the ground.

  “March!” shouted Bill, from two stories above him, racing down. Echoing him, charging down also, I yelled, “March! Drop yours!”

  “NYPD!” Mary barked, waving her automatic to include March and Deluca in its range. “Drop all the goddamn guns!”

  Deluca, stopped on the ground a few steps behind Joe Yee, smiled at Mary. “Okay,” he said, patting the air with his hands as though reassuring a child about to throw a tantrum. “Okay, everything’s cool. We’re Federal.” He flashed Mary his gold badge. “Calm down. This here’s your shooter, but you can’t have him.”

  Mary didn’t answer. March straightened up, holstered his gun, and climbed down the ladder.

  Then Bill, then me.

  “I don’t care who the hell you are,” Mary said, not moving. Two curse words in two sentences, I thought irrelevantly as I watched them all, a record for Mary. “I want all the guns and I’m taking you all in. You can sort out whatever the hell you want to at the station.”

  Three.

  Deluca seemed to think this over. “Sure, why not?” He smiled. “I’ll end up with my man, and we’ll all get points for interagency cooperation.”

  “He’s not your man,” I said.

  Mary flashed me a look, saying both What the hell are you doing here? and Go on.

  “He shot the gent lying in the street,” Deluca explained patiently to me. One child on the verge of a tantrum, one not very bright. “That makes him my man.”

  “Jesus Christ, I didn’t shoot him!” That was Joe Yee. “He did! And then he tried to shoot me! Who the hell are you guys?”

  “I told you about these guys, Joe,”
I said. “Deluca and March, State Department Security.”

  “Oh,” Joe Yee said more quietly, after a beat. “Oh. Shit.”

  “What do you mean, you told him about us?” Deluca growled. “I warned you once about getting in our way. It’s not a good idea.”

  “I know,” I said. “It could get a person killed. It just got Duke Lo killed.”

  “Listen—”

  “Shove it,” I said. If Mary could curse, I could talk dirty. “I have a witness. March was on the roof. I just wonder how you knew this was going down.”

  March took a step toward me while Deluca said, “You can’t—”

  “I want everyone”—Mary broke in commandingly—“Lydia, Bill, that’s you, too—to put your guns on the ground. Then we’re going to wait for my backup, and we’re all going to the station, and you people can argue there about what happened here.”

  “I—” Deluca began.

  “Now!” Mary snapped. “This gun’s new and it’s heavy. My hands could start to shake any minute now.” She moved the muzzle of her weapon to point right at Deluca’s belt buckle.

  He smiled. “No,” he said. “I can’t do that.”

  No one else did, either, but no one made a move toward a gun, all of which were holstered away. That left Mary still in charge, barely.

  “Deluca shot Duke Lo,” I said to Mary, “to keep him out of your hands.” Blocked by the wall of buildings around us, the faint scream of an ambulance ribboned on the air. “They were afraid he’d spill how his dope and his soldiers get here. Joe arranges for the soldiers, sort of a sideline while he’s working on Deluca’s project: smuggling dissidents by way of H. B. Yang. Right?” I turned to Deluca but went on before he opened his mouth. “This way you eliminate Duke Lo and frame Joe at the same time. Then you take him away from the NYPD because you’re Feds, and the project goes on.”

  Mary’s face was still cop-tough, but her eyes, which I know so well, told me she had no idea what I was talking about.