A Bitter Feast

by S. J. Rozan

  “Damn right,” Joe Yee said. “Thanks, Lydia. Of course, I didn’t shoot Lo. And that other thing, I know what you think, but what that is—”

  “Save it,” I said.

  Deluca looked around at all of us. He found his voice, and spoke to Mary. “I bet you have a great future,” he said, smiling. “Everyone looking forward to your rising to the top. First Chinese woman at a really high level in your department, stuff like that.”

  “At a high level,” Mary said. “Where every move the department plans related to guys like Duke Lo is relayed to the Feds out of professional courtesy.”

  My eyes widened. “It is?”

  “There’s a list,” Mary said. “Guys the INS is interested in, or the FBI. Or these guys.”

  “That answers my question, then.”

  “It also suggests,” said Deluca, “that you think hard about what you want to do here.”

  “Are you threatening me?” Mary’s voice was hard.

  Deluca shrugged. “Lo was a worm, and you people are better off without him. Yee here’s a bum, and we’ll deal with him internally. You’ll get some kind of credit in your department, I promise you. Even you two”—indicating Bill and me—“we’ll find some way to make you look good.” He spread his hands and grinned. “Everyone wins.”

  “The trouble with that plan,” I said, “is that Joe’s a little more than a bum.”

  “We’ll send them all back,” Deluca said, “the guys he brought over. He’s finished, Joe is.”

  “And the dope the guys he brought over brought over?”

  “Oh, Jesus, Miss Chin, don’t get all holy on me. It’s not the only dope in New York. Lo’s not even a big player yet. And now”—he grinned his little ferret grin again—“it looks like he’s not going to be. Being as you’re Chinese, I would think you’d even want to thank us.”

  “Well, and I might,” I said, “if one of you hadn’t planted a bomb that killed a man—not a ‘worm,’ Deluca, an innocent man in the wrong place—and put a friend of mine in the hospital.”

  “They did that?” Mary spoke very quietly.

  “They must have,” I said. “One of them. To keep the union from messing with H. B. Yang. If the union won and he had no use for illegals anymore, he’d stop smuggling them. Then whoever gives Deluca his orders would have to start all over. And Deluca would have failed. He hates that.”

  “Now you’re crazy,” Deluca said. “We had nothing to do with that.”

  I turned to Joe Yee. “Joe?”

  “What, me? Why the hell would I take a risk like that? Detailed planning, careful execution, that’s all you ever need,” Joe Yee answered. “Listen, folks, I think we all should recognize we’re on the same side here and that working together is the way to go.”

  He said that so reasonably that all I did was open my mouth to respond. Bill, Mary, and the State Department Twins were caught as off guard as I was when Joe Yee suddenly dived sideways, tackling me to the ground.

  We thumped heavily to the broken backyard concrete and pain screeched in my bruised knee. I slammed Joe Yee with my elbow. Everyone else pulled a gun on him, but when his gun pressed against my head I stopped moving, and so did they.

  Keeping me in front, he brought us to our feet. He said, as reasonably as before, “Now I’m leaving. Lydia’s coming with me. She’ll be all right as long as no one forces me to shoot her right now, which I’d probably get away with.”

  “Where can you go?” Bill asked quietly, calmly, defusing the situation, buying time. “Everyone will be looking for you.”

  Pressed up against Joe Yee, I could smell his sweat, feel his heart pound, hear his confident smile. “You don’t think I thought this would last forever? I have a dozen ways out, a hundred places to go. I’m just making this easier for everybody.”

  I didn’t agree, but I moved with him as he took me along, slowly, toward the building’s rear door. I was patient, waiting for my chance; but in the end, it wasn’t me who took it.

  It was Chester, leaping with a snowboarder’s howl of glee from a second-floor fire escape directly onto Joe Yee and me.

  Twenty-Five

  “You know what I hate most about this case?” I said to Mary in the relative peace of the Fifth Precinct Squad Room, after two hours of interviews, questions, answers, more questions, and the same answers in the wake of the arrest of Deluca, March, and Joe Yee. The phones were ringing and detectives came and went, but at Mary’s desk, our own little island, Mary and I drank tea and ignored them all.

  “I can think of a lot of things,” she said, leaning back in her rickety wooden chair.

  “Yes, but most. Besides Peter being in the hospital and the discovery of how sleazy the human race turns out to be.”

  “Well, it’s not like that’s news. Okay, what?”

  “I hate most the way every man I met tried to get me to do what he wanted by telling me I should because I’m Chinese. Joe Yee wanted me to tell him where the waiters were. Warren Tan wanted me to join the revolution. H. B. Yang wanted me to tell him where the waiters were, and Duke Lo wanted me to help him take over Chinatown. Even Deluca, wanting me to thank them for killing Duke Lo! Every one of them thought I should do what he wanted just because I’m Chinese. Every one.”

  “Not Bill,” Mary said.

  I looked at her, my tea stopped on its way to my mouth. “What?”

  “Not Bill. He didn’t ask you to do anything because you’re Chinese.”

  “Well …” I said.

  “In fact, if I understand it right, he asked you if you wanted him to get off the case because he wasn’t Chinese.”

  “Well,” I said again, wondering if the defensive note in my voice could possibly be put down to the morning’s excitement, or tiredness, or something. “And?”

  “Oh, nothing,” Mary said. “Just trying to keep all the facts straight, in case someday you want to look at them again.”

  I was saved from having to answer by a detective who came by and dropped a file on Mary’s desk.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “Forensics report on the Mott Street bomb,” he said. “Came in while you were busy.”

  “It’s Patino’s case,” Mary said, picking up the file.

  “I know. He’s going back there later—he has an appointment with that young guy, Tan, now that he’s seen this. I just thought you’d like a look.”

  Mary nodded, perusing the paper stapled to the inside of the folder. “Thanks, Liebold.” The other cop walked away. Her eyes still on the file, Mary said to me, “Those three aren’t going to trial, you know. Their agency will spring them one way or another. I wonder why they’re digging in their heels and refusing to admit to the bomb, when they don’t care what else they say because they know there’s nothing we can do about it?” She dropped the folder wearily on her desk. “Nothing that tells me much. C-4 explosive—that’s some Army thing—and a time-delay detonator.”

  “Nothing we didn’t know.”

  “Well, the C-4. Our guys thought it was something more conventional.”

  “No, you knew that. Warren Tan told me, when I was over there.”

  “I don’t see how he could have. It takes them a few days. This just came back.”

  “But he …”

  I trailed off as Mary’s eyes met mine. “Oh, my God,” she said.

  We jumped up and charged out of the Squad Room together.

  It couldn’t have taken us two minutes, fast-walking the Chinatown streets, to reach the basement office of the Chinese Restaurant Workers’ Union. The door was ajar, as it had been when I’d come here the morning after the bomb, when Warren Tan had told me the explosive agent was a small amount of C-4 under the desk.

  Inside, some things had improved. The furniture had been righted, progress made in organizing papers and piles of books. Fluorescent tubes blown out by the percussive force of the explosion had been replaced. Their too-generous light in the small, neatened room had the odd effect of elimi
nating shadows, so that everything seemed clear, open, available, but nothing was quite the way you expected to see it.

  Except, maybe, Warren Tan, his face pale, dark circles under his eyes, sitting behind one of the newly reorganized desks with papers in each hand.

  He looked up as Mary and I came in, and after a beat, he spoke. “I was expecting Detective Patino.”

  “He’ll be along,” Mary said, her eyes staying on him. I said nothing, letting her take the lead.

  “We want to ask you some questions,” Mary said. “I’d like you to come to the station house with us.”

  “I’ll answer anything you like,” Warren Tan said. “But I’d like to stay here. Unless you have an arrest warrant?”

  “I can get one.”

  “You won’t have to. But let’s stay here for now.”

  I watched Mary as, after a brief hesitation, she nodded and sat in one of the folding chairs set up across the desk. I sat in the other.

  I wondered how Mary was going to begin, but she didn’t need to.

  “It’s about the bomb, right?” Warren Tan asked, slipping some papers into a file folder. He reached over his hot plate, from which a teapot gently breathed steam into the air, and placed the folder on top of one of the piles.

  “Yes,” Mary said.

  “When Detective Patino called to say the forensics report was in, I knew it would be soon,” he said. He looked at me. “I knew I had a problem as soon as I heard myself say ‘C-4’ when you came in that morning. I was hoping you wouldn’t catch on.”

  “I almost didn’t,” I said. “Until now.”

  Mary seemed about to say something else, but Warren went on. “I was desperate,” he said. “I had to find a way to back the NYLC into a corner publicly.”

  “Why?” Mary asked.

  He poured tea from the steaming pot into a large mug. Its flowery aroma filled the air as he sipped from it. “After the NYLC stopped talking to us, I could see our days were numbered. Once Chinatown workers got the idea that American labor wasn’t just ignoring us, but that they knew about us and actually didn’t want us, they’d lose whatever little faith they’d ever had that the union could do them any good. H. B. Yang and the old crowd would have won, just like that.”

  “There must have been another way,” I said. “Something in the courts, some other kind of pressure. Peter said—”

  “I know,” he said quietly, sipping more tea. “Peter said it’s not done this way anymore. Lydia, it will always be done this way.” He put the mug down. “No one was supposed to get hurt. I’d called a demonstration for that night. Everyone was supposed to be there, at Dragon Garden. And I used so little explosive. So little. I didn’t want to damage the building, you see.”

  His face darkened suddenly, as if with pain, then his features slowly smoothed out again. He took a breath and sipped more tea as he sat looking at Mary and me.

  “You don’t look good,” I said to him. “I think a doctor—”

  “I’ve been in and out of hospitals since I was two,” he told me calmly. “I’ll know when it’s time.” He looked around the office. “Everything here’s in order,” he said. “I moved the most important papers, tax records, things like that, to over there”—pointing at a file cabinet across the room from where the bomb had been—“so they’d be safe. Song Chan knows the filing system. So did Chi-Chun Ho.” He shook his head. “God, I’m sorry about Ho.”

  “I think—” said Mary, but she was interrupted by a knock on the open door and the entrance of a tall, silver-haired man.

  “Hey, Kee,” he said when he saw Mary. “What’re you doing here? I hear you had quite a day.”

  “Hi, Patino. I came to talk to Mr. Tan. There’s something he needs to tell you.”

  The tall man looked to Warren Tan. I had shifted in my chair when he’d come in; now I turned back.

  I was just in time to hear Warren, his face paler than before, say, “I think you’ll have to tell him.” He folded slowly forward, arms pressed against his stomach. He rested his head on the neatly piled desk. For a moment nothing sounded in the room except his ragged breathing.

  Then, not even that.

  Mary leapt up and grabbed the phone. She gave it her name and rank, demanded an ambulance as Patino pulled Warren to the floor and pushed rhythmically against his chest, counting, pushing, counting again. He kept at it until the sound of a siren cut through the silence, until the paramedics came charging down the stairs and, pushing him aside, tried to do what he’d tried to do.

  They didn’t succeed. We watched them take Warren Tan’s body from the union office, not in a hurry now, Patino and Mary and I standing aside as they maneuvered up the stairs.

  “My God,” Patino breathed, the first words he’d spoken since Warren collapsed. “Young guy like that.”

  “He had a bad heart,” Mary said. “Since he was a child.”

  Patino shook his head. “God, what a shame. Hey, Kee? What was he going to tell me?”

  Mary looked at the other detective. “I don’t know, Patino. He didn’t have time.”

  “God,” Patino said again. “Listen, I’ll go back and start the report. I’d just as soon get out of here anyway. There’s some smell, something sweet—what the hell is it?”

  I moved slowly to Warren Tan’s desk. I felt the side of the teapot; it was still warm. Lifting the top, I peered inside it. Long, thin leaves lay damply among small snips of twigs.

  “Oleander,” I said.

  “Oleander?” Patino asked. “What’s that? Something you people make tea out of?”

  “Yes,” said Mary, before I could answer.

  Patino left to start writing the report at the Fifth Precinct that Mary and I would have to contribute to.

  Mary stared at the teapot, then lifted her eyes to mine.

  “Oleander,” she said. “All I know about oleander is that we learned in Chinese school you’re not supposed to eat it.”

  I nodded. I’d learned that, too; we all had.

  “Because,” I said, “it’ll stop your heart.”

  Twenty-Six

  H. B. Yang was at the mayor’s side at the press conference.

  The mayor congratulated the NYPD on breaking up a heroin ring that threatened the stability of Chinatown, a family neighborhood whose hardworking people contributed so much to the—borrowing another mayor’s phrase—gorgeous mosaic that was New York. H. B. Yang himself shook the hands of NYPD detectives Mary Kee and, balancing on crutches because of his broken leg, John Chester. The whole thing was televised, including the mayor’s thrust-jawed determination to rid the city of drug dealers, not least because of the grudges their enemies carry from overseas, like the one that motivated the mysterious man from China who shot the Chinatown drug dealer—whose name was never used—just before the NYPD was planning to close in on him. The mysterious man, also unnamed, had been, the mayor was pleased to announce, captured, again by the fast work of the NYPD, and was even as he spoke being extradicted back to China, where he was wanted for many crimes. H. B. Yang stepped to the microphone and thanked the members of the Chinatown community—also unnamed, I was relieved to see—who, through their dedication, professionalism, and courage had helped so greatly in this effort. He thanked his good friend the mayor, who shook hands with his good friend Mr. Yang, and then it was over.

  I switched off the TV as my mother rose from the sofa to go call Mary’s mother and discuss the appearance Mary presented in front of the cameras. As I put my embroidered slippers on the shelf in the vestibule, I heard the Cantonese word for “professionalism” from my mother on her telephone perch, the high stool in the kitchen. Not naming names had not fooled her. I laced up my shoes, slipped on my leather jacket, and left the apartment to the tune of my mom discussing with Mary’s mom the relative virtues of unostentatious anonymity, which enabled one to continue one’s professional pursuits, as compared to crassly televised, although unarguably well-deserved, rewards.

  The echo of the word co
ntinue, coming from my mother, gave me a warm feeling in the clear spring night. Bright white stars shone in the indigo sky and the breeze kept changing directions playfully, as though giddy from the pleasure of being able to go anywhere it wanted. I crossed Canal Street and strolled through Soho, admiring the flowered dresses in the boutique windows and the great bunches of tulips and daffodils in the fruit stands’ white buckets. I ambled up this block and down that one; then, looking at my watch, I headed downtown again.

  At the Laight Street building I rang Bill’s doorbell and he buzzed me up. As I climbed the two flights to his apartment, where he waited in the open door, the aroma of garlic, tomatoes, and meat met me and escorted me up the stairs.

  “What am I smelling?” I asked Bill, giving him a quick, light kiss. “Aren’t we going out to dinner?”

  “I thought you might be tired of restaurants,” he said. “I cooked.”

  “You cooked?” I shrugged off my jacket and tried to deal with this concept. “You cooked what?”

  “Meat loaf. Mashed potatoes, steamed carrots, salad, bread. Apple pie for dessert.”

  “You baked apple pie?”

  “Of course not,” he said, as though that idea was ridiculous but the rest of this was not. “I bought it at Greenberg’s.”

  An apple pie from Greenberg’s was not to be sneezed at. Still, I said, “I have to tell you I’m suspicious.”

  “Of my motives?”

  “Not more than usual. But of your cooking.”

  “Fear not. It’s meat loaf, food of my people.”

  So I sat on the couch and he brought me a seltzer with slices of lime and lemon, my usual cocktail.

  “How does Mary feel about Yee, Deluca, and March metamorphosing into a mysterious Chinese assassin and vanishing from the scene?” he asked.

  “She hates it,” I said, “but she can’t do anything about it. She got the runner-up prize, Three-finger Choi. Besides, it saves my Chinatown bacon.”

  “Sounds delicious. Chinatown bacon.”

  “You wouldn’t like it. Anyway,” I went on with dignity, “the really important thing is that now that it’s part of the NYLC, the union’s back in business, and H. B. Yang’s going to have to deal with them if he wants to look good on the East Point project. That makes Peter happy, so it makes Mary happy.”