A Perfect Cover

by Maureen Tan

  I called him that night.

  “You didn’t tell me you spoke Vietnamese,” I said.

  “You didn’t ask.”

  Then made his reply sound less flippant by offering an explanation.

  “When I was a kid, our housekeeper was Vietnamese. And my daddy… Did I tell you he was a diplomat? Well, he speaks Vietnamese, too. I picked it up listening to the two of them. When I joined the force, that rusty language skill landed me on a beat in Little Vietnam.”

  Before I hung up, I thanked him for the candy.

  On Wednesday, two members of the Young Vietnamese Businessmen’s Association came into the restaurant. The man who’d challenged the amount of the protection payment was not with them, but I recognized one of the men as the driver of a red Toyota I’d seen on Dwyer Drive on Sunday.

  As soon as they’d taken a seat at one of the smaller tables, Mrs. Yang marched over to the cash register, pushed her unresisting husband aside and took out the hundred dollars she’d tucked into the cash drawer on Friday. I watched as, without a word, she handed it to the Toyota’s owner. He took it without comment, then went back to talking with his associate.

  I interrupted the men long enough to take their lunch requests and, not too much later, I delivered their food to their table. One order of rice-flour crepes stuffed with shrimp, chicken, sprouts and onions. A plateful of steamed buns split and overflowing with hard-cooked egg and red sausage. Though I wanted to linger nearby to eavesdrop and to snag their dirty teacups for fingerprints, the restaurant was too busy at lunchtime that day for me to do, either.

  When they’d come into the Red Lotus, I’d suspected from their small number and informal attitude that their intention was not to collect money but to eat lunch free. They confirmed that near the end of their meal by tearing up the check I gave them and letting the pieces flutter to the floor.

  On Wednesday—as on all the other days I’d worked at the restaurant—one of my jobs in the afternoon was to empty the thirty-gallon plastic barrel that was tucked underneath one corner of the restaurant’s serving counter. Throughout the day, when Mrs. Yang or I cleared the tables, it was the repository for used paper napkins and placemats, the wrappers from fortune cookies and disposable chopsticks, and the scrapings from dirty plates. By midafternoon, it was usually half filled.

  On my first day of work, Mrs. Yang had judged me too small to do the heavy job. But I had insisted, thinking that it would be good to impress the Yangs with my industry and knowing that a wealth of information often landed in the trash. During his breaks, the elderly cousin sat on a rickety chair outside the back door, smoked a cigarette and read martial arts comic books. Earlier, when I’d had to ask him a question, I’d noticed a pile of cinder blocks stacked nearby, against the restaurant’s exterior wall.

  To prove myself capable of taking out the garbage, I’d spent a few minutes in the alley restacking the cinder blocks nearer the steel Dumpster, then dragged the plastic barrel through the kitchen and lugged it into the alley. With Mrs. Yang and the elderly cousin looking on, I’d hauled the barrel up the makeshift steps, lifted it until its lip was balanced on the edge of the Dumpster, and tipped out the contents. Mrs. Yang had nodded, the elderly cousin had smiled, and the task of taking out the garbage was mine.

  I still held to the same technique I’d demonstrated that first day. Except that when no one was looking—and after that first day, no one ever was—I tipped the garbage out slowly, one clumpy layer at a time. I brought the barrel back onto the step several times in the process, sifting carefully through each newly exposed layer, watching for anything of interest.

  That was how, on Wednesday afternoon, I noticed that someone had drawn on one of the restaurant’s placemats. I picked the piece of paper from the garbage, smoothed it out against the side of the Dumpster, and discovered that it was torn. I held a ragged half, with part of a rectangular drawing ending at its torn edge.

  The drawing was done in blue ink with several lines of red paralleling the blue. Some of the red lines had arrow-tip wedges at one end. And one of those lines looped completely around a wedge-shaped blue rectangle. It was certainly a map, I thought. Directions to someone’s house? A bus route? Or something more significant? I needed the rest of the map to find out.

  Over the weeks, I’d dug many such scraps from the garbage, brushed away the clotted remains of food and discovered nothing more significant than stick figures or geometric doodles or numbers that had meaning only to the person who’d written them. Though there was every possibility that this one would be the same, I used a discarded chopstick to push through noodles and rice and limp vegetables until I found another piece of paper with similar ink markings.

  I matched the halves of the placemat and recognized the crudely drawn map for what it was—a diagram of the area’s streets, distinctive because of the catch basin and the odd, segmented residential areas created by the canals. I’d already noticed the regularity with which some vehicles drove past the Red Lotus several times each day. One of those vehicles was a red Toyota.

  As I dumped the rest of the garbage into the bin, I thought about which tables I had bused and which ones Mrs. Yang had cleared. And I remembered that several customers had come in as the freeloading Young Businessmen had gotten up to leave. By the time I’d returned to their table, Mrs. Yang had already cleared it, denying me my teacups. But now I had a map.

  That week I had moved my nighttime activities beyond the bright lights of Little Vietnam’s business district and the safety of its residential streets. Deliberately, I searched out places that were alien to most of the honest, hardworking citizens of Little Vietnam. Places where predators and corruptors could operate with impunity. Important, I thought, to familiarize myself with all the areas in the community.

  Each night, I moved through the darkness with the sensibilities of a cat burglar, knowing that if some suspicious cop frisked me and found my picklocks, Beauprix would likely have some bailing out to do. My activities centered on the industrial area south of the railroad tracks that paralleled Chef Menteur Highway. There, booming industries and abandoned factories were tied together by tall-grassed marshes, poorly lit roads and railroad sidings. A variety of tall fences were designed to make things challenging for the human denizens of the area.

  I hadn’t found the fences to be much of an impediment. Even when they were chain-link topped by barbed wire. As I walked along fenced perimeters, I found places where heavy rain had eroded the soil beneath the fence and aggressive grasses had crumbled the pavement adjacent to it. Generally, though, I climbed rather than burrowed. Around most of the factory yards I entered, Louisiana’s climate and human nature gave me that option. Thick woody vines softened the sharpest barbed wire and overhanging tree branches defeated the tallest fences. Occasionally, I found places where a section of fence had already been cut or the fence had simply sagged away from its support. But easiest of all, I was able to walk onto the grounds of one active warehouse complex because someone had neglected to lock a closed gate.

  On Wednesday night I also began searching for a building with a panoramic view, focusing my explorations on the tallest buildings in the area.

  I’d never been afraid of heights and—thanks to one of Uncle Duran’s contacts and a towering, retrofitted grain elevator in Oklahoma—I had quickly learned to free climb. Easy enough, now, for me to cling to near-vertical surfaces with fingers and toes or to support my body’s weight by wedging it into any shallow depression or outcropping that nature—or structure—allowed. But I was also more than happy to climb onto a fire escape or cling to the rusty rungs of escape ladders.

  Once up on a rooftop of a factory building, I played my flashlight through skylights and clambered down onto ledges to look into upper-story windows. Windows in a few of the buildings had been left open and I slid in through them. I dug through accessible paper files, read documents left on desks and in drawers, looked at shipping labels affixed to bales and boxes, and surveyed documen
ts on computers that were not password protected.

  I saw nothing else remarkable. Except for the perfect vantage point, which I located at 2:00 a.m. on Thursday morning.

  All day Thursday, I worked at the Red Lotus. All night Thursday, I spent up on the rooftop, using my binoculars to watch the streets below me, searching for lights on in vacant buildings and activity on loading docks that were supposed to be closed. I saw surreptitious drug deals, scabrous prostitutes plying their trade, stray dogs, weary shift workers walking home from the bus stops and homeless alcoholics who lived down by the tracks. Mostly, though, I watched for certain traffic patterns along the streets of Little Vietnam. The crude map I’d rescued from the garbage made my job relatively easy.

  I called Beauprix very early on Friday morning. His voice sounded sleepy, and as I apologized for waking him, I couldn’t help but imagining him in bed. Stretching languorously. Naked in the midst of silky tan and cream bedding. Muscles rippling beneath his smooth, olive skin. And above him, the gilt-framed painting of the U.S.S. Constitution, its large cannon pounding away….

  I told myself I needed to get a life.

  “Can you meet me tonight?” I asked, working to keep my voice absolutely steady.

  He yawned, agreed, and told me once to slow down as he scribbled notes on the location of the factory building and the route he’d need to follow to join me on the rooftop. There were iron rungs set into the mortar on the east side of the building. From there, he needed to go up and over a gently pitched corrugated rooftop, up a short ladder to an adjacent flat roof, then to the next building across the top of an enclosed pedestrian walkway.

  Beauprix didn’t object to the route. He objected to my being in that neighborhood. Day or night. And he didn’t approve of my trespassing on private property. Dangerous and illegal. As for crawling up the sides of buildings and crossing rooftops…

  “I know you’re doing what you think is right, but can’t you try to be a little safer about it all?” he asked me over the phone.

  That’s when I laughed.

  And he got angry.

  We argued about his right to tell me how to do my job. He thought he had the right. I assured him he didn’t.

  Shortly after that, we ended our conversation.

  I was so agitated by thoughts of Beauprix—some irritated, most irritatingly not—that I couldn’t get back to sleep. So I went to work early, thinking that I could catch the elderly cousin as he did the restaurant’s early morning prep work. I’d ask a few oblique questions to see if he had any interesting gossip that he was willing to share.

  The first light of dawn illuminated my walk to work. Birds sang, dogs barked, traffic was at a minimum. Peaceful. Until I heard the sound of smashing glass. I was less than half a block from the restaurant and I saw the car squeal away. A light-colored sedan. But I was too far away and the light was too weak for me to pick out any other details.

  Then I heard the elderly cousin’s angry shout.

  I sprinted the remaining distance to the Red Lotus. By that time, the elderly cousin had moved onto the sidewalk. The angry baker from across the street and the pretty florist from next door had apparently heard the noise and came running, too. We all arrived at about the same time and stood beside the elderly cousin, surveying the damage.

  Someone had thrown a brick through the restaurant’s plate-glass window. It had plowed through the towering, woody tendrils of the Crown of Thorns, leaving a few thick, ragged stems growing from the big clay pot. On the floor inside the restaurant was a scattered mess of thorny branches, tiny blood-red leaves and shards of glass the size of kitchen knives. And feathers. Crimson and black feathers. Torn from the pair of masks that someone had secured to the brick with duct tape.

  As I stood looking at the disaster with the cousin, the baker and the florist, my stomach twisted and I began trembling.

  Undoubtedly the Yangs would assume the broken window was payback for paying protection money short and late. But I knew better.

  The carrion birds had found me. But how?

  On the night of the first attack, only three people knew that Lacie Reed was in New Orleans. Uncle Duran. Uncle Tinh. And Anthony Beauprix.

  Only two knew that Lacie Reed and Squirt were the same person.

  Uncle Tinh.

  Anthony Beauprix.

  It made no sense for either of those men to terrorize me.

  But if not them, then who?

  The elderly cousin looked at me and his tight-lipped expression became a frown. He misinterpreted whatever he saw in my face, reached out and patted my shoulder.

  “Don’t worry, Squirt,” he said. “We clean it up. You’ll see. Good as new by tomorrow.”

  Of course, the police were not called.

  By the time the Benevolent Society came in for their weekly meeting, the restaurant was clean and plywood covered the window. As on the previous Friday, the meeting was conducted in French. But today, no red envelopes were passed. And Mrs. Yang was too busy administering first aid to her shattered plant to wait on them. So the job fell to me.

  One of the men said something disparaging about me in French, something guaranteed to redden the face of a teenage girl. I didn’t react. But, even with that assurance that I couldn’t understand them, the men still spoke as if they might be overheard.

  Mr. Yang announced that the shipment was in good condition, but was now in storage. Documentation had been delayed by a week, perhaps a few days more. So the shipment’s northward journey would be postponed.

  That caused a furor, with the butcher finally demanding to know if there would be additional costs. Weekly payments to the thieves had already put his business at risk. And now this had happened. Mr. Yang had assured them that everything would go smoothly. And it hadn’t. He, for one, could pay no more.

  The others around the table looked at Mr. Yang.

  “I proposed this venture,” he said. “I will bear any additional expenses.”

  Everyone nodded, though few eyes traveled in the direction of Mr. Yang’s face. Over the next few minutes, the others trailed out of the Red Lotus, leaving Mr. Yang alone. For a time, he sat unmoving, staring unfocused at the Infant of Prague in its niche on the wall. Then he propped his elbows on the table and covered his face with his hands.

  As I watched Mr. Yang, I thought about who the members of the Benevolent Society were, who they might once have been. Their postures and attitudes suggested military men. Certainly, they were the right age to have fought in the war. But more than that, I suspected they had fought side-by-side. They struck me as old soldiers and longtime comrades, as men whose bond went deeper than business or friendship.

  Mr. Yang stood, went over to the cash register. As he did at about this time every day, he checked to be sure we had enough change for the afternoon. I went into the kitchen to fetch more clean teacups.

  What shipment awaited documentation? As I stacked teacups by the counter in anticipation of the lunch crowd, I thought about the incident near the Jourdan Road terminal and found it easy to imagine the membership of the Benevolent Society pulling off an ambush, building and using incendiaries, successfully hijacking a truck. And its secret cargo.

  Any lingering thoughts I had of the stupidly violent carrion birds were banished by the real horror I now confronted. If my suspicions were correct, the immigrants who made up the Benevolent Society were more than simply innocent victims of an invading gang. They were, themselves, criminals.

  Protection payments had to be pushing their businesses to the brink of bankruptcy. Could decent men be so intent on saving the lives that they’d built for themselves and their families that they could justify the unthinkable? Could men who were themselves immigrants exploit, then destroy, the dreams of other immigrants?

  My experience told me that it had happened before. My instincts told me that it was happening now. And my heart—

  I shook my head, banishing my heart from the equation. My job—the job that I had dedicated myself
to—was stopping the exploitation of immigrants and bringing their exploiters to justice. No matter who the exploiters were. No matter how much I cared about them.

  Later, the Young Businessmen came in.

  “Redecorating?” one of them asked Mr. Yang sarcastically.

  Though Mr. Yang undoubtedly thought that they had thrown the brick, he didn’t react. I suspected he had other things on his mind.

  The Young Businessmen ate their lunch, counted the money in the envelope Mr. Yang handed over, and left without creating a disturbance.

  I rushed to clear the table, placed their teacups carefully aside and later bagged them and tucked them into my pocket.

  I spent the rest of the day taking orders, serving food, picking up dirty plates, tucking quarters into my apron pocket and thinking. I knew that finding a shipment of contraband, even human contraband, would be virtually impossible in a city the size of New Orleans. Even if they were hidden within the radius of Little Vietnam, a directionless search was unlikely to yield results. There were too many places where people could be locked in and kept alive for eventual shipment. But if I could locate the source of the delayed documents, I might be able to follow the documents to the shipment. If I could find out when the documents would be delivered, I could follow whoever picked them up to the shipment. And liberate the cargo before it left New Orleans.

  Chapter 17

  On Friday when I got home from work, I kicked off my shoes, crawled into bed and slept because I had to.

  I dreamed that a flock of crows was chasing me through the narrow, deserted streets of the French Quarter. Striking at me, over and over, until their beaks were tipped in blood. Terrified, desperate, I looked for shelter, for escape. And found a trailer abandoned, its door partly open, in the middle of the road. I dove inside as the birds blackened the sky, gathering for a final attack. But now I was sure I could save myself. The overhead door was just within my reach. I reached upward, intent on pulling it closed. And discovered that my hands had been completely pecked away.