by Max Lockhart
Some of the men sipped tea. Others nibbled on fruit while they sat quietly waiting. They didn't look like much, thought Cleary: simple clothes, polite manners, bland, kindly faces. To anyone unfamiliar with Chinatown, they looked like small shop owners. Which only proved how dangerous Chinatown could be for the unwary, because these insignificant-looking old men, greeting him respectfully with almost imperceptible smiles and nods, were the powerful tong overlords. They controlled the order of things by threat of death.
Ko-Chen Lu took a seat next to a frail old man whose skin looked translucent, like very thin sheets of ancient yellowed ivory coating his bones. The old man seemed only vaguely aware of what was going on in the room, a gentle great-grandfather on the verge of senility. Another misleading impression. Cleary knew that frail old man was the single most powerful individual in Chinatown.
Cleary bowed slightly to the old man, who made only the slightest of motions back, and not because of age. Uncle Lu was aware of his status and bowed deeply to no one, if he bowed at all. "Ni how ma, Uncle Lu," he said, and waited until Ko-Chen Lu, looking almost robust compared to the old one, whispered something into Uncle Lu's ear.
"Ni how ma, Cleary," said Uncle Lu in a voice both hollow sounding and quivering as he nodded greetings. "Would you like tea?" he asked, using Ko-Chen Lu as his interpreter:
Cleary nodded and sat down in obedience to Uncle Lu's unspoken invitation. He waited silently while the old man poured steaming tea into a bone cup and slid it in front of him.
"You are well?" asked Uncle Lu, again through Ko-Chen Lu, and Cleary wondered why the old man bothered with the pretense that he needed an interpreter, except that it was a good ploy when Uncle Lu didn't want to talk to Caucasians. Which happened to be most of the time. Still, it made for a stilted conversation.
"I am well, Uncle Lu," he finally answered, studying the old man and learning, as usual, nothing except what Uncle Lu wanted him to find.
"You have sons yet?"
Cleary felt his face redden. "No. My wife and I are no longer married."
The old man nodded in disapproval. "It is not good. A man must have a wife and sons. Who else will see to his burial?" To Uncle Lu and to most Chinese of his age and younger, an unmarried man was suspect, a deviation from the order of things.
Cleary shrugged. "It didn't work out." An image of a delicate girl in a scarlet dress flashed in his mind, and he frowned.
"She was not for you," said Uncle Lu.
Cleary didn't bother wondering how the old man could read his thoughts. "I didn't have much time to find out for myself, did I?" he asked, and knew the bitterness in his voice was out of place in this room.
"She was not for you," repeated Uncle Lu. "Drink your tea."
Cleary picked up the cup, his hatred for this old man and all he stood for making his hands tremble. He took a sip, held it in his mouth, then swallowed. He repeated the ritual several times, until his rage subsided. He just wished to hell the old man would talk to him directly. "It is good," he finally said.
"We heard about the unfortunate incident at the tables last night," said Uncle Lu, as if no other topic of conversation had been discussed.
Cleary laughed humorlessly. "Unfortunate is right."
Uncle Lu shook his head sorrowfully. "Thankfully the police have captured the boy who did it. The youth of today do not show proper respect."
"I hardly think respect is the right word to use about murder. If the kid did do it." He let his voice die and studied the faces around the table. As usual, he could read nothing from their feces. They simply stared back at him as if he were a specimen under a microscope. "I find it peculiar that the cops were able to find this Chinese kid before you did."
Uncle Lu raised his bony hand in a deprecating gesture and laughed. "I think you always overestimated our little merchants' association. We hear things—rumors, gossip—but we do not know everything that goes on in Chinatown."
"A merchants' association?" asked Cleary with a laugh. "That's a new public relations move. But call your group whatever you like, it still controls Chinatown. When I was in Vice down here, and a Chinaman committed a crime, we didn't find out about it until his body washed up in Long Beach. Your 'association' was pretty effective at crime control."
The only response he got was the sipping of tea and the reflection of overhead lights off three pairs of steel-rimmed glasses. He always wondered if these old men deliberately sat where the light would blank out their eyes if the need arose.
Looking back to Uncle Lu, he spoke directly, knowing Ko-Chen Lu wouldn't want to translate accurately and knowing it didn't matter because Uncle Lu spoke perfect English anyway. "I remember a time when the tong would never have allowed something so bad for business."
Ko-Chen Lu finally spoke for himself. "We are finally becoming assimilated."
Uncle Lu nudged him to interpret. "Let the policemen keep the streets safe," said the old man. "It is their place." He gave Cleary a small smile. "Is that not what you always wanted us to do? Now we are doing it."
"We are confident that this will be the end of these robberies..." said Ko-Chen Lu in another speech for himself. However, he didn't finish because Uncle Lu cut him off with a look that should have sent the younger man to join his ancestors.
But Ko-Chen Lu had said enough as far as Cleary was concerned. "Robberies? You mean to tell me this isn't the first? Somebody's running around knocking off your gambling dens?" He shook his head in an imitation of shocked surprise. "You guys are starting to lose your touch."
He continued shaking his head, a man deeply perturbed, disappointed, perhaps even frightened by this evidence of a crack in the order of things. The old men did not move or frown, but there was a tightening of hands about tea cups, a hesitation as fingers selected another piece of fruit, a faint tremor in the rigid posture. Cleary felt smug. For the first time since he had met these tong leaders many years ago, he had managed to make them uncomfortable.
"If these gang kids get any more confident, this place is going to be up for grabs. Then you'll have to bow respectfully to them, kids young enough to be your grandchildren, kids who'll laugh at old men like you and your talk of the order of things."
Uncle Lu smiled as Cleary's response was translated, a smile that was just a little too wide. Like a man trying to sell a house with a leaky roof. "I'm sure our troubles are over, Cleary. Now if you will excuse us." He stood up, and the rest of the Chinese men stood up with him. A polite dismissal if the private eye had ever seen one. Of course, the Chinese were always polite—even while they were killing you.
Cleary rose and bowed again to Uncle Lu, then to each of the others. "It has been a pleasure." Private eyes could be polite, too, and mean it just as little.
He stepped down from the office and stopped to light a cigarette and watch the old women perform their ginseng root ritual again. He touched one of the boxes and pantomimed his pleasure. The toothless crone decorating it covered her mouth and smiled. He felt like a hypocrite. The ginseng boxes were beautiful, yes, but he had seen a thousand just like them. He actually was interested in listening to the old men's conversation after he left.
He didn't have long to wait.
"Keep him close. Cleary may be useful to us in this matter." Cleary smiled to himself. His struggle to learn Chinese had been worth it after all. Now all he had to do was figure what 'matter' Uncle Lu was talking about.
SEVENTEEN
It was the hull of a ship of hell, thought Cleary as he and Johnny walked down a narrow flophouse hallway. His senses were assaulted from all directions: cooking smells, water running, toilets flushing, babies crying, voices shrill with anger or soft with despair. He heard more despair than anger. These people were beyond anger; it took too much energy for anger, and none of the denizens had any to spare. They used all their energy just surviving. Besides, it was not Chinese to rage against fate.
"Jesus," said Johnny. "How do they stand it?"
"No choice," replied Clear
y. "They each have their place."
"Forget that idea," said the younger man. "If I was one of them, I'd look for a better place."
"Not if you were Chinese," said Cleary, too tired to try to explain.
The dim light bulbs illuminated men coming home from hard labor, and other men just leaving, coming out of doorways, towels thrown over their shoulders, on the way to the communal toilets. They all stopped, the weary and the not so weary, pressed themselves against the walls, and watched Cleary and Johnny move past, as if they had never seen white strangers in their place before. And they probably hadn't, thought Cleary. A Chinese flophouse wasn't on the regular Chinatown tour.
"Jesus," muttered Johnny again, hunching his shoulders together under the black leather jacket, plainly uncomfortable at being somewhere he didn't belong. He stared almost rudely as they passed by rooms housing families of ten eating together in an eight-by-ten space. And not only eating, but sleeping, dressing, making love, and dying, all in that same small room. Cleary noticed him turning his head when they passed by other rooms housing men coughing their lungs out with TB,
Johnny stuck his hands in his pockets and resolutely looked straight ahead. Cleary observed that he was pale and sweating a little. "Never saw anything like it, Cleary."
Cleary nodded. "It's not what we're used to, even in the L.A. slums."
"Nah, I'm talking about the place where the guy worked, the soap factory."
"He's got a name. His name is Tao," said Cleary.
Johnny nodded, his eyes widening a little at the sharp tone in Cleary's voice. "Yeah, right. You could pass right by the building and never know what's going on underground. All these Chinese guys in the dark, I mean. Working on top of each other. I don't know, man. I come from the hills of Appalachia and I've never seen anything like this. Vats with this stuff bubbling up like some witch is cooking brew for Halloween. It burns your eyes worse than tear gas. It was hell, man. They oughta form a union, call a strike. I mean, man, nobody ought to have to work in a place like that. It's un-American."
"This is Chinatown, Johnny."
"This is hell, you mean."
"If they had a choice," Cleary said, gesturing at the silent men still watching them, "they'd pick hell. But they don't have a choice."
Johnny looked at him as if he were speaking some incomprehensible language, and Cleary guessed he was. At least to someone who didn't know Chinatown.
Johnny stopped at a doorway. "This is where he lived," he said, as if he didn't really understand why anyone would live there.
Cleary stepped inside. Beds jammed the room from wall to wall, filled with men sleeping or just lying there, their eyes vacant as they thought of a homeland halfway around the world.
"That's his 'place' over there," said Johnny, pointing to an empty bed in the corner.
Cleary edged through the room toward Tao's bed. It was different from the others, extremely neat, with a low, small bookshelf and meager belongings lying around waiting for their owner to return. A small Buddhist shrine with a photo of a younger Tao and a pretty wife and small daughter occupied one end of the bookshelf. Cleary examined the books, mostly in English, and entirely on advanced engineering. He picked up one book written in Chinese.
"Tao wrote that book," said a man's faintly accented voice.
Cleary and Johnny turned to see Frank Tang standing in the doorway, looking as trim and pleasant as always. The Chinese bar owner stepped into the room. "He was a respected man in China. He built bridges."
Cleary rubbed his hands over the book absently as he looked at Tang. "How did you know we were here?"
Tang shrugged his shoulders in an exaggerated gesture. "Everyone in Chinatown knows you are asking about this man. I knew you would come here—some time."
Johnny took the book out of Cleary's hands and looked at it as if it were magic. Cleary thought that to Johnny it probably was, engineering being as far over his head as it was to most of the others in this flophouse.
"Why would a guy smart enough to write this jump bail on a nickel-and-dime grocery store stick-up?" Johnny asked.
Tang smiled pleasantly, except Cleary noticed the pleasantness didn't reach his eyes. "Tao didn't make enough money to bring his family over. He couldn't wait any longer." His voice dropped. "He didn't have the necessary patience."
"To hell with patience," snapped Cleary, rage at the waste tightening his belly. "He was a professional man. He wrote books. What was he doing in a soap factory?"
Tang shrugged, looking at the empty bed. "He was an engineer—who made soap."
A young Chinese man came into the room, hesitated for a moment when he saw Caucasian faces, then sat down on Tao's bed. He took Tao's photo down and replaced it with one of himself taken with a pretty young wife and two older parents.
"Hey, man," said Johnny. "The other guy hasn't even been buried yet."
"His place is needed," said Tang, his pleasant smile gone.
"And his name?" asked Cleary. "Or can he at least keep that?"
Tang stiffened imperceptibly. "It is not good to speak of such things."
Cleary watched the young Chinese man leaf through Tao's books, then stack them together in a pile on the floor, like so much trash to be disposed of. "Let's get out of here, Johnny," he said, and walked mindlessly from the room. It wasn't until he climbed in the Eldorado that he realized his hands were balled into fists.
The neon lights looked subdued in the dusk, like fireflies that only danced unnoticed until darkness. Cleary felt disoriented again. Where had the day gone since he and Johnny left the flophouse? Had he been driving aimlessly through Chinatown, lecturing Johnny on Chinese customs, from midmorning until dusk? judging from the look of stupefied boredom on Johnny's face, the answer was yes.
"Sorry," he muttered. "School's out."
Johnny blinked. "Huh? Oh, yeah. Well, I haven't been listening much. I mean, it's interesting and all, but I wouldn't be caught dead living down here."
"That's right. You'd be caught dead because you don't know enough about Chinatown to stay alive," he said as he slammed the chrome lady on the Eldorado's hood to a stop only a millimeter from the candy-flaked back end of a '54 De Soto.
Johnny cracked his knuckles as the disbelieving faces of two Chinese gang members appeared out of both the De Soto's windows. "I'm not so sure, Cleary. Things are changing."
"Not in Chinatown," said Cleary, as the two gang members, wearing greased pompadours and yellow-and-black-satin dragon jackets, got out and elaborately checked to see if there was even the slightest contact between the vehicles.
Johnny flipped up the collar of his leather jacket as he stared past the gleaming chrome hood ornament at the two Chinese kids. "I'd say especially in Chinatown."
Cleary shook his head at the stupidity of the young and slid out of the car. "Come on. It's right up the street."
There was no answer, and he turned around to see a shoot-out, street-gang style. Johnny was locked into a killer-street stare down with the gang members. He clipped out of the Caddy with the loose-limbed deliberation of a gunfighter out to make his reputation.
"I'll stay with the car," he said, not taking his eyes off the gang members. He gracefully slid onto the hood, and struck a pose of such total insouciance, so cool, so right, that Cleary saw the gang members begin to doubt themselves in their own neighborhood. Johnny broke a walnut with a loud crunching and popped the contents into his mouth. The two Chinese kids surrendered and broke eye contact.
Everybody knew a guy couldn't stare down a dragon, so this Caucasian must be a dragon in disguise.
Cleary shook his head in amazement and walked on down the street. Leave it to Betts to know his place better than the Chinese kids. After all, Betts probably came from a long line of streetfighters, and tradition counted for a lot in Chinatown.
He checked out a small, simple sign on the glass window of a run-down storefront—MODERN DANCE STUDIO—and entered the building. He could hear the modern jazz playing on an i
nexpensive phonograph before he opened the door. The music was tinny sounding because of the cheap equipment, but to the line of ten-year-old Chinese girls, it was the beautiful sound of a world beyond Chinatown. He stopped in the doorway, watching the heartbreakingly beautiful, sweet-faced, wide-eyed little girls as they desperately tried to get the steps right to a dance as alien to them as his own blue eyes. Some watched themselves in the mirrored walls, intent on mastering this strange expression of art.
Kai-Lee glided in front of the line of little girls, and Cleary's breath caught in his throat. Wearing a dance leotard that molded itself against the lines of a body that was an artistic expression of its own, the fragile Chinese woman looked exquisite against the backdrop of the stark room. She demonstrated the dance step with a fluid style and grace in vivid contrast to the floor-scrubbing, pleading woman in the gambling den.
Cleary walked further into the studio and saw the students' mothers seated quietly on a bench. They watched, timeless, puzzled relics from another century, as their daughters danced to a sound of a time and a place they would never understand.
Kai-Lee walked gracefully over to reset the record, when a Chinese laborer pushed past Cleary into the room. He let loose a barrage of angry Chinese at one of the cringing mothers, and then grabbed a tiny frightened dancer by the hand and began dragging her to the door.
Kai-Lee dropped the needle on the phonograph, and it dug a groove across the plastic with a spine-shivering screech. Not even hearing the sound, she rushed to intercept the father, placing her body between him and the door.
"Mr. Hua, please," she begged, and Cleary heard an echo of this morning's pleading woman.
"No dance! No dance!" stated the laborer furiously.
"Please," she asked again, but her voice was resigned.
The laborer waved her away with disdain. "Foolish woman! No dance!"