by Maureen Tan
Most of the places on his list were located along Alcee Fortier, a few along Chef Menteur Highway. I memorized the addresses, then made sure that the haphazard route appropriate to a teenager unfamiliar with the area would take me past each location. I walked from shop to shop, reading any job notices—these, too, written in Vietnamese—that were displayed on bulletin boards, behind plate-glass windows or taped onto the backs of cash registers.
I needed a job I could get on my own merits. Rather, on the merits of my teenage alter ego. Preferably one with significant public contact that didn’t require skills that I didn’t have and couldn’t quickly learn. My plan was to first apply for jobs that were advertised by the businesses on Uncle Tinh’s list. Failing that, I would go into those shops and try to cajole them into hiring me for some menial task like running errands or sweeping up. If that didn’t work, I’d try to get work at an adjacent business.
I walked past a restaurant and a florist shop and, though the restaurant was on Uncle Tinh’s list, neither store was advertising for help. Beyond them was a souvenir shop that was on the list. There was a Help Wanted sign in the window.
As I opened the door, the music of a Vietnamese pop vocal group surrounded me. I listened to the lyrics, bobbed my head in time to the rhythm as I wandered through the narrow aisles, looking at the merchandise. The tall shelves were stacked from ceiling to floor with items chosen to catch a tourist’s eye. Bins of painted silk fans. Tiny paper parasols used to decorate tropical drinks. Six-inch-long finger traps woven from flexible bamboo. Hollow red seeds containing tiny elephants carved from bits of bone. Dragon flags. Piggy banks. Lacquered boxes. And masks. Lots of masks. Hanging from hooks on a section of wall covered with pegboard. Among them were two styles of feathered masks. Black. Crimson. Twenty-nine dollars and ninety-five cents each.
The price of terror, I thought. But masks identical to these were hanging in shops all over New Orleans. They were cheap, vaguely exotic and probably sold by the thousands in the weeks preceding Halloween and Mardi Gras.
A long glass display case on one side of the store was filled with figurines carved from exotic woods, gold and silver jewelry, and a clutter of items that looked and were priced as if they were antique. The cash register was located at the far end of the case and was flanked by an abacus. A wizened Vietnamese man with thin gray hair and a scraggly moustache was dusting some of the items inside the case. When I approached, he put down his feather duster and smiled politely at me.
“May I help you?” he said in English.
“I would like to apply for the job,” I replied in Vietnamese, just to let him know I spoke the language. I said the words loudly to be heard over the music. Then I continued in English. “I am a good worker.”
The shop owner seemed to find that amusing.
Smiling broadly, as if at some private joke, he walked out from behind the counter and gestured for me to follow him. A door at the rear of the store opened into the warehouse. From where the old man and I stood, I saw that sturdy shelves reaching to the twenty-foot ceiling flanked the walls and held boxes of all shapes and sizes. Shrink-wrapped pallets, also stacked high with boxes, filled the open bay. A yellow forklift was parked halfway between the shop and the large overhead door at the rear of the warehouse.
“Job is carrying boxes, driving forklift, lots of lifting,” the shop owner said in English. He patted my arm. As he delivered the sad news, he managed to suppress his chronic cheerfulness, adopting an expression that a funeral director would have envied.
“Job needs strong man, not tiny girl.”
Briefly, bitterly, I wondered what it would be like not to be underestimated because of my size or gender. The answer that came to mind almost immediately twisted my lips into a grudging smile. Potentially fatal, I thought, given my line of work.
The shop owner saw my expression, looked relieved and flashed me a toothy grin. And it occurred to me that he’d been expecting me to cry.
“Baker across street need help,” he offered cheerily as he slipped back behind the counter.
The bakery was on Uncle Tinh’s list. I waited for a lull in traffic, then sprinted to the opposite side of the street. Past the wedding cake on display in the bakery’s front window, I could see that a job notice was taped to the back of the cash register.
I went inside, pointed at the notice, and the young woman behind the counter called out for the baker. A squat, muscular man with salt-and-pepper hair and pockmarked cheeks immediately emerged from the back room, dusting his floury hands on his apron as he walked.
After the young woman explained that I wanted the job, he stared at me for an uncomfortable minute, then muttered something to the woman. She went scurrying into the back room as he came around the counter to stand in front of me. He was already scowling.
He doesn’t like my hair, I thought. I’d already discovered that my spikes of black, magenta and pink drew occasional frowns of disapproval from strangers who passed me on the street.
But the color of my hair wasn’t the issue.
“You say you’re Vietnamese?”
He spat out the question in English and I replied more moderately in the same language.
“Vietnamese-American,” I said, my accent appropriate to a girl born and raised in Louisiana. “But I speak English and Vietnamese. And I can work as many hours as you need me.”
“Your father was a black man,” he said. His tone made it an accusation. “An American GI.”
What was true for Lacie Reed was not true for the girl with brightly colored hair.
“No,” I said. “He wasn’t a soldier.”
But the baker was no longer listening. Though he was looking straight at me, his attention seemed to have turned inward. His dark eyes were unfocused and his mouth began to twist into a scowl. For a moment, I feared he would strike me.
His eyes snapped back onto my face.
“No job. Go away.”
“But—”
“You heard me, daughter of a whore. No job. Get out, bui doi.”
Impossible not to feel the pain of the childhood taunt. But that pain was Lacie’s, so I allowed nothing but surprise to show on my face.
The baker grabbed me by an arm, pushed the door open, threw me out of the shop. The door slammed behind me.
Unbalanced, I fell forward. Lacie Reed would have rolled with the momentum and sprung back onto her feet, unscathed. But a teenage runaway was unlikely to have that skill. My fall was clumsy and disorganized. Unfortunately the impact was a little worse than I had anticipated. The rough concrete sidewalk tore through the worn cotton of my jacket and scraped the skin off one of my elbows.
I got to my feet slowly, holding my elbow away from my jacket as I groped through my purse for a tissue. The pedestrians walking along the sidewalk detoured around me, their steps quickening, their eyes averted. The sight of a stranger’s blood now brought with it the specter of AIDS. And people, anyway, didn’t like to get involved.
A man’s voice speaking in Vietnamese immediately contradicted that conclusion.
“Do you need help, little sister?”
I turned to look into a male face that was fine-boned and almost pretty—smooth golden skin, almond eyes ringed by long lashes, a straight nose and full lips. He wore a tiny diamond stud in his right ear and was undeniably sexy in his white dress shirt and tight jeans. He was taller than I was by a good half foot, and I guessed that he was older than Lacie Reed by a decade; older than my current alter ego by two.
Just then, my searching fingers located a tissue and I spent a moment blotting my elbow and working tears into my eyes. When I could no longer see clearly, I looked back at the man, who promptly handed me a clean handkerchief.
“Here. Use this for your eyes,” he said.
I took the hanky, quickly wiped my eyes and handed it back to him.
“Thank you,” I said, managing to sound sullen.
Was he simply nice? I wondered. Or did he have an agenda? Like most b
ig cities, New Orleans was a dangerous place for runaway adolescents. Here, a homeless girl was a magnet for pimps and pervs.
“Tell me what’s wrong.”
It was more command than request and even someone far more secure than a runaway teenager would have had trouble ignoring him. If this pretty boy was into victimizing little Asian girls, I thought, I would sure as hell put him on the cops’ radar screen. So I kept talking to him.
“I asked for a job,” I said in English, overlaying it with a home-girl accent and allowing my very real anger to work itself in between my sniffles. “The baker called me bui doi. Like that means something to me. He said my father was an American GI. As if! My dad died working on a oil rig when I was five. That senile old man. He’s living in some other world.”
The man lifted my chin with the tips of his fingers.
“You were born here.”
I ignored the overly familiar gesture and answered him.
“Of course I was. Do I look like some refugee? Do I sound like one? People see slanted eyes, brown skin, they think foreigner. Stupid. I’m an American. Red, white and blue. Born in Baton Rouge.”
His fingers dropped away from my chin.
“I’ve never seen you around here.”
I concentrated on the pulse at the base of his Adam’s apple as I outlined the past I’d fabricated for myself.
“My new stepfather’s a stinkin’ fisherman. I hate boats. I hate fish. And I hate him. He doesn’t much like me, either. Except when my mother’s not watching. Then the bastard tries to crawl into my bed. No way I’m going to go for that. So I hopped on a bus. Ended up here. Figure I’d have a better chance at getting a job….” I let my voice waver, then pumped it up with a burst of bravado. “I’m an artist. A good one. I was going to get a scholarship. For college. Everyone says I’m creative.”
At that, the man’s eyes traveled from my eyes to the multicolored mop I’d created and back.
“I can see that,” he said, keeping a straight face.
“But leaving home pretty much screwed that,” I said. “Maybe I’ll get my GED. That’s for later. For now, I need a job. To eat and stuff. Get it? I thought, maybe, the bakery. I can count change. And I’d be good at cake decorating. Then that stupid man…”
“Have you asked for a job there?”
He pointed to the opposite side of Alcee Fourtier Boulevard, in the direction of a glass-fronted restaurant I’d passed as I’d walked to the souvenir shop.
I shook my head.
“I went past it. No sign in the window.”
“I know the owner. He needs a waitress.”
Perfect, I thought, though I wondered why he was telling me about the job. I fell into step beside him and we jaywalked across the street, standing briefly in the middle, waiting for the traffic to clear. We paused again at the restaurant’s entrance, this time because the stranger grabbed my arm.
“My name is Ngo. Vincent Ngo. What’s yours?”
“Lai Sie Johnson,” I said. “But my friends call me Squirt.”
He grinned, released my arm and held the door open for me.
“Well, Squirt, I hope we can be friends.”
Here it comes, I thought, wondering if this too handsome stranger would offer me a place to stay. Or, maybe, ask me to a party to meet some special friends. Or, perhaps, suggest a modeling gig because I had such exotic good looks. Runaway girls from bad home situations were particularly vulnerable to “genuine” suitors offering protection and love. From there, it was a fast descent into forced prostitution.
“I work down the street at the Refugee Center,” he said, “trying to find people jobs.”
I almost laughed. Not a pimp. A social worker. Who just happened to be teen-idol gorgeous. Not for the first time, I realized that over the years I’d been working for Uncle Duran I’d grown cynical and overly suspicious of any unexpected kindness.
I stood just inside the door as Vincent Ngo talked to the owner, a small man with a round face and a full head of snow-white hair. Ten minutes later I was the newest waitress at the Red Lotus Restaurant. Two-fifty an hour, plus tips. No proof of citizenship or social security number asked for or offered.
Chapter 11
The Red Lotus was a Vietnamese greasy spoon that served as many meals at its long, Formica counter as at its dozen tables. The food was decent, cheap, plentiful and definitely home cooking if you were raised Vietnamese. The blue-on-white teacups, bowls and plates were stained and chipped, and anyone who wanted to eat with utensils that were not stainless steel or disposable bamboo brought their own chopsticks. Except for occasional tourists, the customers spoke primarily Vietnamese.
The restaurant was a family affair. The owners, Mr. and Mrs. Yang, cooked, waited tables and kept the accounts. Mrs. Yang’s elderly male cousin chopped the vegetables, washed the dishes and mopped the floors. The Yangs’ twin teenage daughters worked as waitresses after school until 9:00 p.m. They also worked all day long on Saturday.
Twins, apparently, ran in the Yang family. I was the temporary replacement for a married daughter who, I was told, was the mother of a three-year-old and also very pregnant with twins. The eldest daughter, Mrs. Yang assured me, was a very hard worker. A judgment that Mrs. Yang was very well qualified to make.
The daughter’s shift—now mine—was from seven in the morning until four in the afternoon on the weekdays. On Saturdays, I worked from 9:00 a.m. until the restaurant closed twelve hours later.
I remembered that Uncle Tinh, too, had worked long hours at his storefront in Evanston. Often, I would visit his restaurant after school and, if I didn’t have homework, help with prep work for the evening’s meals. I would sit on a stool at the cleared counter and chatter with my uncle as I helped snap tough stems from mountains of pea pods or folded hundreds of thin hoanh thanh wrappers around spicy bits of meat. Uncle Tinh always took Sundays off. When I was young, he and I went to church together, driving along the lakeshore into Chicago’s near north side to attend one of the few Catholic churches in the city where Mass was said in Vietnamese.
The Red Lotus also closed on Sunday.
“The Lord’s day,” Mr. Yang told me. The Yangs, like many South Vietnamese, were devout Catholics.
Mrs. Yang, as was her custom, expanded on her husband’s cryptic statement. When she spoke, she used pudgy, energetic hands—that matched her pudgy, energetic body—to illustrate her words.
“Sunday is day of rest. We go to church…”
She folded her hands in imitation of prayer.
“…clean house…”
A sweeping motion here.
“…buy groceries and visit grandchildren.”
From her gestures, I understood that grocery bags were heavy and the grandchildren were very young.
“…and get ready for the next week,” Mrs. Yang said finally.
Rest, I thought, had never sounded so exhausting.
It wasn’t until midafternoon that I had time to think about anything besides waitressing. And that was thanks to the latest task that Mrs. Yang had assigned her new employee. As I washed the lunch counter with hot bleach water, I reviewed what I knew and what I didn’t, and considered where I was going from here.
Three people had been brutally murdered in a city where brutal murders were not uncommon. But because I had seen the bodies, I had no doubt about what Beauprix had long suspected—the same person had committed all three murders. The murderer’s rage was focused on the victims’ hands and, based on the strength required to inflict the injuries I’d seen, odds were that the killer was male.
I finished the length of the counter and paused.
Why the hands? I asked myself. That, I didn’t know.
“Lacie!”
Mrs. Yang’s voice. Again.
As I turned toward her, I suppressed a sigh. And I made Squirt’s expression wide-eyed and eager to please.
Mrs. Yang flipped her fingers at the bucket of wash water, then swept her hand in the direction of the tab
les that filled the main area of the restaurant. Finally she wiggled the first two fingers on her right hand in a gesture I’d already learned meant “move faster.”
Careful not to slop water, I shifted the bucket to the nearest table. For the briefest of moments I thought about what my hands were going to look like by the time I left Little Vietnam. Then I plunged my hands and the rag back into the steaming water and wrung it out.
As I scrubbed the tabletop, my thoughts returned to the murders.
Beauprix and Uncle Tinh each pointed to Little Vietnam as the place where information about the murders—and possibly the murderer himself—could be found. Beauprix’s suspicions had been triggered by the sudden drop in crime in Little Vietnam. Uncle Tinh reported that a criminal gang had invaded the small community. Contradictory information unless reported crime was down as a result of a gang tightening its control over the people in Little Vietnam.
I moved on to the next table.
Had the brutality of the murders been aimed at intimidating the entire community? I asked myself. Were the victims random, linked only by their residence in Little Vietnam? Or was there something they had in common that made them targets, something the police had missed? Something only an insider could know?
My job at the Red Lotus would quickly make me an insider. At the very least, I would be considered too young and too menial to be a threat to anyone.
I moved so that I was working within earshot of the only customers in the restaurant—a Caucasian couple dressed in business attire. He had paid the check and she had shaken her head when I offered to refill their teapot. Now, they were deep in conversation. I wiped the table nearest them, bent to wipe some imagined stickiness off one of the chairs and eavesdropped long enough to discover that they needed to be particularly careful because his wife was talking about divorce but had no proof…