by Maureen Tan
Forgiveness for what? I wondered. And I suspected that the Benevolent Society had made the mistake of going to Tinh Vu’s rivals for counterfeit documents. I could hear the determination in Mr. Yang’s voice.
His tone angered Mrs. Yang. She hissed through her teeth, “Your pride started this. You saw yourself as a soldier leading your comrades into battle. But you are an old fool, leading foolish old men. Now see what you have done!”
And that was when Mrs. Yang stormed from the kitchen, slamming the back door behind her.
I called Beauprix. Though I had intended to outline everything in some logical manner, when he answered I simply blurted out that which had weighed most heavily on my mind.
“My God, Anthony, they hijacked a tea shipment.”
He knew the term and reacted with the same horror I felt.
I abandoned any attempt to protect Uncle Tinh. Too much had happened to shatter the trust between us.
I told Beauprix about Senator Duran Reed’s suspicions. Repeated, nearly word-for-word, the conversation between the Yangs. And then told him about Vincent’s offer the day before.
“So Vincent is an independent?”
“A middleman, a social worker. Maybe a good Samaritan, though I don’t think so. But he offered to get forged documents for me.”
“From Tinh Vu?”
“I think so,” I said, hesitating. And then I said what I believed. “Yes.”
“So you’re saying Tinh Vu is the anh hai. Number two brother?”
He’d translated the words literally, so I explained.
“It means most-esteemed brother. In a Vietnamese gang, it’s the equivalent of a mafia don. And yes, I’m saying that Uncle Tinh is the anh hai.”
The thought still made me feel ill. Uncle Duran had been absolutely right in his judgment of Uncle Tinh. How was it possible that I had been so wrong?
“Then why did he call you in? Why expose himself deliberately to an investigation?”
I’d thought about that for days, thought about it again after hearing the Yangs argue.
“It’s a war, Anthony. A rival gang—the Young Vietnamese Businessmen’s Association—moved in and attempted to destroy Uncle Tinh’s operation. By killing his forgers, I think. Maybe that’s why Mr. Yang went to the Young Businessmen for forged documents. Against Uncle Tinh’s wishes, I’m sure.
“I don’t think Uncle Tinh knows who the rival anh hai is. So he brought me in. Used me. Pointed me at the protection racket and the murders, hoping I could destroy the competition for him. Both groups, I suspect, specialize in breeder documents. Maybe in human trafficking, too.”
We talked for a while about what we would do next and, for a change, quickly reached agreement. On Sunday, if we followed Mr. Yang, we would sooner or later witness the meeting where money and documents would be exchanged.
“I’m sorry, Lacie,” Beauprix said before he hung up. “I’m truly sorry.”
I went to work Saturday because I wanted to keep an eye on Mr. Yang.
When I walked into the Red Lotus, the elderly cousin greeted me at the door. He was wearing a clean, white apron and setting up tables for Saturday’s early lunch crowd. I looked past him through the kitchen door. As I expected, Mr. Yang was busy preparing the day’s soups. But to my surprise, Tommy was in the elderly cousin’s usual spot, busily chopping onions.
“What’s going on?” I asked the elderly cousin in Vietnamese. “Why is Tommy here?”
It seemed that Tommy had somehow been co-opted into helping in this emergency. Only because, the elderly cousin rushed to assure me, it was young Tommy’s day off from his better-paying and far-more-important job at a very expensive restaurant in the Quarter. Though the cousin could not at the moment recall what the name of that restaurant was.
I knew its name, though I didn’t say that to the cousin. Still, I had no idea what was going on at the Red Lotus that morning and the elderly cousin’s meandering explanation hadn’t helped.
“What emergency?” I asked, hoping for some information that might help me make sense of the situation.
Mrs. Yang’s anger, it seemed, had prompted her to pack her bags and take the Friday train—Amtrak’s Spirit of New Orleans—to her sister’s home in Illinois. Accompanied by the twins.
Then the elderly cousin waved his hand dismissively.
“No need to worry,” he said, self-importantly. “I have arranged everything. Today, I will help you wait on customers. Tommy will help Mr. Yang and wash dishes. Of course, it will be very busy, and you and I will have to work very hard.” Then he bent in close, dropping his voice to almost a whisper, implying that what he shared next was a little known truth. “But this is an opportunity to earn the undying gratitude of Mr. Yang, who is a very important man in Little Vietnam.”
The cousin continued speaking, now in a normal voice.
“Tomorrow, Mr. Yang will go to Mass as he does every Sunday. If he is wise, he will pray for rapid return of his wife and daughters. Perhaps the Holy Spirit will guide him to apologize so that there will be no strike on Monday.”
It took me a moment to translate the unfamiliar word from Vietnamese to English and back.
“Strike?”
“Ah, yes. It would not be proper for me to work while my cousin and her daughters languish in Illinois.”
Somehow I was missing something and I wondered if chronic fatigue had slowed my comprehension. I gave my head a half shake, trying to clear it.
“But what about today?” I asked.
“Saturday is a very busy day,” was the cousin’s pragmatic answer. “On Monday, if it is necessary, I will remain at home. Thus I demonstrate solidarity without damaging the family business. On Monday, it will be up to you to help Mr. Yang carry the burden of his stubbornness.”
The cousin clapped me on the shoulder as if he were royalty bestowing an honor.
“By Tuesday, I am sure, everything will return to normal.”
I envied the elderly man his optimism.
More than twelve hours later, my feet hurt from endless running between kitchen and tables, my head hurt from the constant din of voices and the clatter of dishes, and my face hurt from smiling pleasantly.
By the time the restaurant closed and we’d cleaned up for the night, exhaustion prompted me to join Mr. Yang, the elderly cousin and Tommy eating leftovers at the small prep table in the kitchen. As did everyone, I used my chopsticks to lift morsels of vegetables, seafood and meat from an assortment of larger plates into my small, rice-filled bowl. Except for an occasional brief positive comment, usually about the flavor and quality of the food, the meal was eaten in companionable silence.
Now, all I wanted to do was walk home, soak my feet and try to get some sleep. Tomorrow, Beauprix and I would meet early and follow Mr. Yang through every step of his day.
I detoured into the kitchen, grabbed my denim purse from the hook inside the utility room and unplugged my phone from its charger. I punched in my security code and checked my voice mail. One message. Beauprix’s familiar voice.
“I’ve got some curious information for you. I’m going to spend the afternoon following up on it. I’ll call you tonight.”
Curious information.
Now that, I thought with a weary smile, was a curious choice of words. His information was apparently important enough that he had called early, anticipating that I’d leave work on time. But there was no urgency in his message, so I was content to wait for his call.
I slid my phone back into my purse, then trudged back through the restaurant to the front door, raising my right hand, waving and calling out “Good night” without bothering to look behind me.
Tommy bounded past me with the kind of energy only a teenage boy could muster at the end of a long day. He tugged open the heavy door one-handed, swept an imaginary cap off his pink-and-blue streaked hair with the other hand and managed an awkward bow. All this accompanied by the familiar tinny jingle of the tiny bell mounted above the door.
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�Ladies first,” he said.
I was tired and cranky and not feeling particularly youthful. But I smiled anyway at the special attention, as any teenage girl would have.
“I have my car,” he offered eagerly. “I can drop you off at home.”
I shook my head wearily. I had noticed the way he’d been looking at me throughout the day and I was not in the mood to fend off more amorous advances.
He might not have understood why, but I think he sensed my reservations. As the door closed behind us, he lifted his hands, palms toward me. I noticed the thickened ridges of old calluses and wondered how long he’d worked for Uncle Tinh.
“Hey, no funny stuff,” he said, his voice an odd combination of maturity overlaying adolescence, of Louisiana’s long vowels overlaying the choppy syllables of Vietnam. “Promise. I was just thinking that you looked real tired. And I have a car.”
It was an indication of how truly weary I was that I accepted.
Chapter 20
Tommy had a rusty blue Ford Escort with torn seats, a bad muffler and a loud stereo. Dangling from the rearview mirror were a silver St. Christopher medal and a colorful paper-mâché charm of Ong Tao—the long-skirted Vietnamese kitchen god—flying to heaven.
I slid into the front seat, arranging my feet to accommodate the battered textbooks, glossy cooking magazines and pieces of graph and notebook paper that littered the floor. Just before Tommy shut the door for me, extinguishing the overhead light, I had a look at the open ashtray. It held a handful of quarters, a coupon for half off a large pizza and a flat, unopened condom packet. In case of emergency, I thought.
Tommy got in behind the wheel. He started the car, turned down the radio that blared on when he turned the key in the ignition, and rolled down the windows to let in the cool evening air. Somewhere in between, he managed to slide the ashtray shut. I smiled as I tried to remember if I had ever been that young.
When he asked where I lived, I told him. Though his eyes widened and his studded eyebrow lifted, he made no comment as he pulled the car away from the curb. My house might be just over a mile away, I thought, but it was far removed from the middle-class sensibilities of Little Vietnam.
“Be there in a few,” he said, punching the accelerator.
The old car coughed, strained and edged up to thirty. The night was bright and, after the stuffy warm-food atmosphere of the restaurant, the breeze washing in through the open windows was pleasant.
Two thirds of the way to my house, low-and medium-density housing transitioned to a block of multistory tenements that lined both sides of the street. As we drove down that block, we were on the opposite side of the street from the worst of them—three dilapidated, nearly identical four-story buildings of frame construction. Each flat-fronted exterior had an entrance that opened onto a cracked sidewalk without benefit of porch, stoop or overhang. Between the tenements, weedy trees grew tall enough to rub their thick branches against the walls on either side.
From my wanderings, I knew that beyond the three entrances there were foyer doors that had no locks and steep stairwells that led to long hallways on each floor. At the far end of each hallway was a back exit. But the steps and landings at the rear of the building were mostly rotted and someone had padlocked the exit doors to keep the residents away from the hazard.
During one of my late-night surveys, I’d walked through the tenement. Just looking. So I knew that, although there were supposed to be a dozen apartments on each floor, more than half of the units had been subdivided. Unlocked and missing doors along the hallways on every floor led into a maze of short corridors and unpredictable dead ends. At every turn there was a locked door that marked a rented space—a space that had once been part of a bedroom, living room, dining room or kitchen.
Tonight, as we drove past the tenements, the moon was full and very bright. Without it, I would have missed seeing the black smoke drifting up from the building in the middle, creating a veil across the face of the moon.
“Fire!” I cried to Tommy, pointing.
He pulled to the curb.
I snatched my cell phone from my purse, dialed the fire department and gave them the address. As I spoke, Tommy killed the ignition, grabbed his own cell phone, hit the speed dial, said, “Fire!” and gave the street name. Duplicating my call to 911, I thought. Just in case.
I folded my phone, slipped it into my pocket and grabbed the door handle. From the corner of my eye, I saw Tommy do the same. Without discussion, we both bolted from the car, locking the doors behind us, and ran toward the tenement. Tommy was just half a step behind me when we reached the entrance. We entered the foyer and, side by side, raced up the stairs. On the second-floor landing, we paused briefly, catching our breaths.
“I’ll start warning people on this floor,” he volunteered.
“Sounds good,” I said. “Then work your way down to the first floor. I’ll start on the fourth, then do the third.”
“Got it,” he said.
“Be careful, Tommy.”
He nodded, looked grim.
“Squirt, there are lots of interior apartments—”
No time to have him explain what I already knew.
“Yes.”
He flashed me a smile, then turned on his heel and ran into the hall, started banging on doors, shouting “Fire!” and “Wake up!” and “Get out of the building!” in Vietnamese and English.
I took one last glance at him, then started up the stairs, climbing the remaining two flights at top speed. Somewhere between the third and fourth floor, I could feel the phone buzzing in my pocket. I ignored it, made it to the fourth floor and raced down the hall, detouring into the corridors within the apartments, yelling for people to get out, get out now.
Smoke wafted through the hallway of the fourth floor.
Those who opened their doors took one whiff of the air, looked at my face, and didn’t need any more convincing. Some grabbed their loved ones; others ran back inside to snatch up wallets, purses or possessions; some simply ran for the stairs without a look back.
Soon the sounds of shouts and cries and running feet drifted constantly from the stairwell. Tommy, I thought, was successfully rousing the residents of the lower floors.
A middle-aged woman with a café au lait complexion stepped from an apartment into the hallway in front of me. She was tall and lanky, and was dressed in a royal-blue nylon warmup suit with a hooded top that was pushed back to reveal dozens of thin, uniform braids capping her head.
“The building’s on fire,” I said urgently.
Unlike the others, she didn’t look panicked or immediately turn her attention to escape.
“How can I help?” she asked, and her voice was calm and cool.
I pointed past her, down the hall. Two doors hung open and I knew that inside was a maze of tiny apartments.
“Bang on every door,” I said. “Don’t wait for someone to answer. Not everyone will be home. Then get out of the building as fast as you can.”
“Okay,” she said.
As I made my way back to the stairwell, I could already hear her behind me, kicking at a door and shouting warnings to the occupants.
I ran down the stairs to the third floor, leaning—half-sliding—on the railing, my feet barely touching each step. As I rounded the corner into the third-floor hallway, I could see a thick layer of roiling smoke hanging at ceiling level. It was much thicker than it had been upstairs. I searched for its source, noticed that the smoke was more dense and hung lower at the far end of the hall.
I decided that there was no longer time to detour into each branching corridor and bang on every locked door. Instead, I screamed “Fire!” repeatedly as I ran down the hall, shouted it until the smoke was so thick that all I could do was manage to breathe. But I’d made it to the most remote pair of apartments.
The doors that should have marked the entry to the apartments were missing. Smoke poured out from the doorway on my left. That one first, I thought urgently.
I pressed my nose and mouth into the crook of my arm and hurried down the maze of a corridor, locating doors more by feel than by sight. I kicked at them, pounded on them, jiggled knobs trying to open them. When the smoke became so thick that I was coughing more than I was inhaling, I backed out into the hallway. The air was better, but not by much. The layer of smoke had dropped farther, now hanging about midway between the ceiling and the floor.
Between me and the stairwell, I heard another voice shouting in the hallway. Another set of feet and fists were banging on doors. For a moment I thought it was Tommy. Then I realized it was the woman from the fourth floor. I continued moving in her direction and our combined warnings echoed up and down the hall.
Finally, we met. Job done, we leaned into each other’s arms and supported each other as we began staggering toward the stairs.
That’s when we heard the cry.
Behind us.
We both turned. Listened. Hurried back down the hall, coughing and wheezing in the thickening smoke, trying to locate the sound. We heard it again. A wavering cry. Back in one of the cut-up apartments. Together, we turned into the small interior corridor. This time, we didn’t pound on doors or yell out a warning. We just listened.
The cry came again. And a single word. “Help!”
“This one!” the woman from the fourth floor said as she rushed to a door where the corridor dead-ended.
The door was locked.
My companion was more than half a foot taller and at least fifty pounds heavier than I was. She shouted an obscenity and threw her shoulder against the door. Once. Twice. The wood around the lock split with a loud crack and the door swung open.
Behind us, flames roared up in the hallway, ate their way down the twisting corridor. Smoke still hung in the air, making breathing difficult. And it stung our eyes. I looked at my companion, saw that she, too, had tears running down her cheeks and was periodically rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand.
There would be less smoke and better air down low. I dropped to the floor, grabbed the woman’s sleeve and pulled her down beside me. On hands and knees, we crawled through the apartment’s single large room, searching beneath the bed and behind furniture, listening for cries that would guide us.