Year of the Dog

by Henry Chang

  Jack put his pen to his notepad. “Tell it,” he said quietly, glancing at the old woman.

  “Grandma there gets a panicked phone call from Taiwan,” Wong began. “The in-laws are freaking out that something bad was going to happen here. They had received a letter from their son, the tenant, just today.”

  Jack looked up from his pad.

  “It sounded like he was saying good-bye,” Wong continued.

  The old woman glanced at Jack, who was running worst-case scenarios in his mind.

  “It took her a coupla hours to get here from Jersey,” Wong went on. “And then there was a delay at the front desk, the language problem, and they wanted to make sure who she was, things like that. They called upstairs, there was no answer. Then the building manager came up with the grandma and security, and used his master keys. Both locks were locked. When they opened the door the corridor detector went off.”

  “So then the fire department arrived,” Jack commented.

  “A few minutes after. So then we went into the apartment.”

  Jack stepped inside the apartment, followed by Wong. At their feet was a crumpled-up quilt, crushed against the inside of the door.

  The old woman still sat in stunned silence as they passed her. Jack scanned the room. It was very cold inside. The windows were wide open and lightweight curtains danced in the wind. Jack noticed an aquarium with eight Chinese goldfish floating belly up.

  The floors were covered with off-white carpeting throughout.

  The big room beyond, the open living room, was bathed in the dull gray morning light that flooded in through floor-to-ceiling windows, a flat wash that muted the few touches of color the room held. The modern, understated furniture consisted of a navy-blue L-shaped couch with a matching ottoman at one end, a wide-screen television, and a glass coffee table. One wall held a built-in shelf unit that displayed porcelain vases, terra-cotta figurines of Chinese men on horseback, and a miniature red, white, and blue flag of Taiwan. Everything was neat, like a deluxe hotel room after a maid had been through it. To one side was a kitchen area, set off by an island with a granite countertop that housed a sink and dishwasher. A stainless-steel refrigerator and matching cabinets lined the walls.

  At the far end of a hall were the bedrooms.

  Wong continued, “The son’s letter described some bad business deals, and told them he’d lost money in the stock market.”

  Spread across the range top and the granite counters were an array of saucepans, and two small Chinese woks. There were ashes and charred lumps in all of them. Jack saw a box of wooden kitchen matches and a small can of lighter fluid. Someone had cooked up eight containers of charcoal briquettes on the range, dousing them up with lighter fluid to keep them all going.

  “There’s an empty bag of charcoal behind the counter,” Wong said. “The son and his wife were depressed over their losses.” He continued, “The two children went to a fancy private school.”

  Jack walked into the smaller bedroom.

  “How old were the kids?” he asked.

  “Five and six,” Wong said solemnly. “Two little boys.” He was disciplined enough to brief Jack with the factual information, but smart enough to keep his opinions and personal feelings to himself.

  The boys’ room had twin beds with New York Yankees pillow shams and matching duvet covers. Between the two beds was a nightstand with a Mickey Mouse table lamp. A desk held a computer and over it were shelves full of children’s books. Stuffed animals were displayed on the dresser and a few large ones stood on the carpet: Pooh Bear and Tigger, Barney and Big Bird. Posters of Thomas the Tank’s adventures hung on the wall.

  Jack felt his adrenaline building. He was thinking, Murder-suicide, bad enough, but why take the kids? Were they staying together for the next life? He took a deep breath, took the disposable camera out of his jacket pocket, and went toward the last room.

  Heavy curtains were drawn back. The room was even colder than the rest of the apartment. The master bedroom was spacious enough so that the bodies didn’t seem to take up much room in it. A woman and two children lay on a large bed. A man was slumped over on a settee. Jack took a photo of the area, then three more individual shots as he approached the bed. He observed a bottle of NyQuil on one of the two night tables.

  The Chinese woman lay on her right side, her left arm draped across the bodies of the two boys. They were supine, their arms at their sides, dressed in school uniforms. The three of them looked as if they were asleep.

  In the far corner of the room were two large red ceramic bowls with dragon designs on them, strategically placed. Jack saw ashes in both. He leaned in closer and took some head shots of the victims.

  The woman’s eyes were sunken and shadowed. She’d been crying for a long while. She’d dressed conservatively in slacks and sweater top. Jack guessed she was in her mid thirties. Over on the settee, the man was hunched, head down, his open eyes staring at the carpet. He had vomited. He appeared to be in his early forties.

  The vomit was dark colored, and Jack guessed from the crust that had formed that it had dried for at least a day.

  Opposite the body was a large Chinese armoire that blocked off a neat home-office area: desktop with computers, a printer, and a set of filing cabinets. On top of the cabinets was a stack of books. One was entitled The Day Trader’s Bible.

  Jack used up the rest of his film, taking shots from different angles. He believed photos were a more efficient way to preserve his impressions than written notes and he wanted to take them himself before the crime scene became crowded with the coroner’s people and the crime-scene team.

  When he was in Chinatown, Jack would drop the camera off at Ah Fook’s Thirty-Minute Photo, and Fook Jr. would develop his order first while he went next door to the Mei Wah, got a nai cha tea, and watched the gangboys roll by.

  He dropped the disposable camera back into his pocket.

  Outside the bedroom, Wong said, “Sarge notified the ME about twenty minutes ago. They’re en route in the meat wagon.”

  “Okay,” Jack nodded. He knew Wong wasn’t being crude and insensitive. It was just cop talk, jargon they used to take some of the edge off of a traumatic event.

  Wong moved toward the main door and the old woman, who was now weeping quietly. Jack went to the window wall of the living room. The view swept north toward the Empire State Building and the jumbled rooftops and billboards of the big city beyond.

  The streets below were bustling, a tangle of pedestrian traffic crowding the intersection. The city was in a holiday season rush, and people poured out of the subways and buses, jamming the streets in every direction.

  The world goes on, Jack thought. An entire family offered up to the gods, gods of greed and desire, and the world stops not one second for condolences. Too bad.

  It wasn’t the first time Jack had seen dead children, but it was the first time he’d witnessed the end of an entire family. That they happened to be Chinese brought it closer to home, as he assumed it did for P.O. Wong. But as cops they instinctively protected themselves.

  Cops got paid to sop up the daily horrors and bloody atrocities that the white-collar suits and ties didn’t want to deal with. Cops became hard-hearted, kept a professional distance from the victims, and worked in a way that didn’t affect them emotionally. Deeper involvement was a real danger that could lead to overzealousness. Frontline cops became numb to the daily onslaught of unspeakable crimes that crossed the desk blotter day and night. Fifty thousand arrests a year. In a city where teenage mothers disposed of their babies in the garbage, parents were known to kill their children and themselves out of anger, depression, desperation, very often in the grip of an alcohol-and-drug-induced rage.

  The Taiwanese, like other Chinese, were obsessed with success and money. The present tragedy was the result of depression over the imminent loss of a certain lifestyle, but it was as much about shame, about losing face. Ma’s Buddhist beliefs came back to him: greed and desire. The Buddhist
s taught that wanting and having, the material world, could only lead to unhappiness. Life was suffering, and suffering came from desire, the desire for things, for hopes unfulfilled. Eliminate desire, and you will eliminate suffering.

  Suicide was not uncommon in America, Jack knew. Most were men, and they shot themselves. Then there were drug overdoses, risks taken to disguise a death wish, and, finally, assisted suicide from those who believed in the right to die.

  At the apartment door, Jack saw the ends of the packing tape that had been used to secure a quilt over the door so none of the carbon monoxide could escape.

  Eliminate desire.

  He left Wong at the scene and went down to get a statement from the building manager. He knew the follow-up paperwork at the precinct, plus the reports from the coroner’s office, the notification of next of kin, the certificates from the funeral parlor, everything, would take up his next few shifts.

  Finally, after sixteen hours on the job, with weariness pulling at his eyelids, he called for a Chinatown see gay, car service.

  * * *

  The Chinese driver spoke Cantonese, and took him straight out to Sunset Park, Brooklyn’s Chinatown, without asking directions. Exhausted, Jack powered down the window and let the icy wind slap him awake.

  He’d been thirsty long before he reached his studio apartment, but once inside he went directly to the cupboard in the kitchenette, took out a few sticks of incense, and lit them. He shook off the ash and fanned the wiggling tails of smoke as he planted them at the little shrine he’d made for Pa on the Parsons table near the windowsill, where he’d placed an old photo of his father dressed in Chinese-styled tong jong clothing.

  Pa was now seven weeks buried in the hard ground of Evergreen Hills.

  Jack’s next visit to the cemetery wouldn’t be until mid-January, on what would have been Pa’s birthday.

  This sad day reminded Jack that he, too, though only twenty-seven, was at the end of his bloodline, a solitary remnant of the Yu clan, whose ancestry retreated back through the generations.

  Eighty-eighth cop of Chinese-American descent. A lucky number, he’d thought. But it hadn’t worked out that way.

  He could still hear the old man’s words. “Chaai lo ah? Now you’re a cop?” Pa had said with derision when Jack first put on the blue uniform. “Chinese don’t become policemen. They’re worse than the crooks. Everyone knows they take money. Nei cheega, you’re crazy. You have lost your jook-sing— American-born—mind. I didn’t raise you to be a kai dai—punk idiot—so they can use you against your own people.”

  I never took any money, Jack hadn’t found the chance to say to his father.

  Jack bowed three times before the shrine, then quickly found the Johnnie Walker Black and poured a tumbler full, cracking open a can of beer to chase it.

  The whiskey had only coated his throat with fire. He told himself that the beer would chill him out, would let him sleep better, as he drained the can. He’d lost any appetite he’d had at the crime scene. Now he sat on the edge of his convertible couch nestled in the far corner of the studio. He kicked off his shoes, trying to focus, to make some sense of the days and weeks gone by since Pa’s death.

  Four months earlier, what began as a hardship transfer to Chinatown’s Fifth Precinct to be closer to his dying father, had ended up with a promotion. Then he’d been transferred to the Ninth.

  Bad memories from the period in between twisted together as the alcohol reached his brain. He drew the blinds against the afternoon light.

  When he closed his eyes, his mind drifted. He fell asleep on the couch.

  His sleep was pervaded by a restless disconnected feeling, fitful, punctuated by dreams.

  He was seventeen again, running across rooftops at twilight, with Tat Louie, and Wing Lee. Three bloodbrothers, hingdaai. Tat was throwing pebbles at the tenement windows and they were shrieking with juvenile laughter as they ran; three Chinatown boys, mad with mischief, having the time of their young lives. Then suddenly, there were the ugly, sneering faces of Wah Ying street-gang members, wielding nasty 007 knives. A swirl of images: Tat, fighting, and Wing, being stabbed. For himself, a quick blackness as he was smashed across his forehead, blood running into his eyes. Then the scene faded to a Chinatown funeral parlor. Wing in a casket, his face dead white, and Tat running out, past the pallbearers, followed by the wailing of Wing’s mother. The incense smell of death.

  He was watching his youth flash by, viewing it like a camcorder tape, the pictures harsh, unforgiving. Suddenly, Chinese cursing from somewhere, a sound he’s heard before. Pa’s voice.

  Jack felt his body quake uncontrollably. The images flashed in his brain like sparks from a live wire. Japanese soldiers charging forward, samurai swords raised, hacking at Chinese babies, lunging at Chinese women with their bayonets, raping them. The flag with the red Rising Sun fluttering violently in the gale. Butchery. A thousand Chinese heads bouncing and rolling down a blood-slicked slope. And he is sliding, falling.

  But this is Pa’s nightmare.

  There is nonstop screaming and yelling, Say yup poon jai! Pa cursing, Jap bastards! Jack is at Pa’s side then, punching away at the bayonets and swords, until he bolts upright on the couch, nearly kicking over the boom-box radio, slowly realizing that it’s his own voice barking into the shadowy dark of the small room.

  He sat up for a while, caught his breath, and after downing another shot of Johnnie Walker Black, gradually fell back to sleep.

  The final dream was short, a twisted vision of Tat, a Chinatown gangster in a black leather trench. Tat “Lucky” Louie, offering him a big bag of money which he didn’t accept. Tat, who’d become an ugly liability.

  The sound of wind chimes.

  Tat has a nine-millimeter strapped to his hip, with sneering street punks spread out behind him. Jack sees his gold police shield dangling from a 007 knife.

  He’s reaching to block the blade, to retrieve his shield, when darkness finally puts him down for the count.

  Dog Eat Dog

  Lucky gave the nine-millimeter Smith & Wesson a quick wipe along his shirt sleeve, slipped the clip back in, and chambered a hollow-point round. He flicked down the safety with his thumb and put the spare clip into the side pocket of his black leather blazer, which was draped over the recliner. His attention locked onto the television where Fukienese Chinese demonstrators marched across the big color screen, yelling and carrying signs as they surrounded One Police Plaza.

  Lucky sucked back the last of the sensimilla joint, held the smoke a moment, hissed it all out. Then he closed his eyes and thought about face, and the future. As dailo—boss—of the powerful Ghost Legion gang, he knew that without face, there was no future. He knew intuitively that changes were occurring in his piece of the underworld, especially since the murder of Chinatown’s Hip Ching tong godfather, Uncle Four. For the younger Hip Chings, the subsequent death of Golo, Uncle Four’s dreaded enforcer, signaled a movement in the ranks. Ambitious heads hinted that the old leadership was ineffectual, and that the organization should be looking toward China-based alliances with outside forces like the triad Hung Huen, the Red Circle, alliances with triad paramilitary connections in the south of China. These alliances would bring them AK-47s and grenades. But with a hundred thousand Fukienese on the other side of East Broadway, Lucky felt this might not be a good thing. It might upset the balance of power.

  On the TV, the five thousand Fukienese demonstrators were screaming for justice, protesting the shooting death of a Fukienese woman by a gang of teenaged thugs.

  A trio of black and Latino teenagers had shot and killed a Chinese woman in a botched robbery of a 99-cent store.

  Lucky thumbed down the volume and slipped the Smith &Wesson into a large gun pocket that Ah Wong the tailor had sewn inside his leather jacket. The newcomers to Chinatown, the Fukienese, were trying to gain control, to take over from the established tongs, the On Yee and the Hip Ching. Everyone was looking toward China now and the Fukienese—the Fuk Ch
ings—were leading the way.

  The earlier wave of immigrants had come from Canton, now known as Guangzhou, and had spoken Cantonese, as did their brethren from Hong Kong. They couldn’t understand the dialect of the recent Fukienese arrivals, who formed their own gangs—the Fuk Chow and Fuk Ching—that respected no one. They recruited only from the desperate dregs of their community.

  Power was shifting. On his turf, the main strongholds of Chinatown, Fat Lily’s massage joint, and Number Seventeen card house, had both been raided in the same week. The cops had come from outside the precinct, in blue windbreakers, under the direction of some unknown Major-Case task force. Someone was feeding them information, directing gwailo white cops toward Ghost Legion operations. Could be the Fuks, or maybe double-dealing by one of the other tongs. And his informants in the Fifth Precinct were all gone now. Lucky thought instantly of Jack Yu, Jacky Boy, the Chinese cop, the hero cop, his Chinatown homeboy from back in the day. Then he slowly shook his head, with a smile that mixed disdain and annoyance. Jacky Boy’s not in the Fifth, anymore; gone fishing somewhere else in cop world.

  Lucky saw other ominous signs on the horizon. The incoming mayor was a law-and-order guy, an ex-DA who’d already stated publicly that he was going to crack down on organized crime. In the past that had meant the Mafia, Sicilian guys, but now included the Russian mafiya, the Mexicans, the city’s drug gangs, and the Chinese tongs as well.

  Lucky knew to go with the flow, to roll with the blow, but he’d have to be nimble, and make the secret deals that would protect and expand his empire. He’d work out whisper deals with pro-China groups, and even with gangbangers like the Fuk Chings. The Red Circle triad, which partnered with the On Yee and had historical underworld connections to that tong, couldn’t be trusted. They were masters of the double-cross. Keep it all close to the vest, he figured, because if the other Ghost factions found out, they might think he was selling them out, getting ready to bail.

  One thing was clear: it was all over for the On Yee. Their ties were mostly with Hong Kong and Taiwan. China itself was a whole different ballgame and the Fukienese already had tight connections with corrupt mainland government officials and were rumored to have deserters from the People’s Liberation Army on their payroll.