Year of the Dog

by Henry Chang

  Head toward the far end, he was thinking, as he turned down East Broadway.

  People on the street were hustling to buy their dinner groceries as the weather worsened. The fish vendors were barking at their customers, threatening to close shop. Lucky looked in the direction of Pike Street, intuiting that Koo Jai had gone that way. Halfway down the dark street he saw a skelly-looking white man outside the local methadone clinic, bobbing and weaving in the middle of the slushy sidewalk, forcing Chinese ah por, grandmothers, to shift their bags of choy, and walk around him.

  Lucky brushed him with his shoulder as he passed.

  In his junkie haze the man muttered just loud enough for Lucky to hear the words chinky shit . . .

  Lucky took a few more steps and stopped suddenly, as if he remembered something, then turned, bringing his hands up as if he were adjusting sunglasses, stepping toward the man. An arm’s length away, Lucky leaned forward and drove the heel of his open right palm full force into the man’s chin. Shock crossed the man’s face, hate tearing up in his eyes as he tasted his own poisoned blood oozing from the dangling piece of tongue he’d bitten off. That froze him for the two seconds it took for Lucky to kick his heel through the man’s knee, feeling the ligaments give way like rotted rubber bands as he started to fall forward. Lucky grabbed him by his collar and twisted him so that he dove headlong into concrete and steel steps, spewing what looked like bloody kernels of corn from his mouth. Lucky swung a vicious kick with the steel-toed boot into the man’s ribs. The junkie mutt choked and started to vomit.

  That good enough? Lucky roared inside his head, that enough fuckin’ chinky shit for you, hah? He wiped the slime off the Doc Martens, dragging his feet through the dirty slush as he left the scene, cursing as he went.

  He could see flashing lights in the distance, too far away to tell if that meant cops, or emergency workers. At the corner, he changed direction. His Ecstasy-driven bravado was crashing.

  He considered his options as the rotating lights got closer, and grudgingly turned back toward the Bayard Street condo.

  It was Koo Jai, he thought, who was the lucky one tonight.

  Sin

  Grass Sandal had chosen the location well. The new condominium high-rise, Tribeca West, had been one of the Red Circle’s Manhattan real-estate investments, another opportunity to sai chien, to wash its dirty money. The condo stood at the edge of Hudson Square, conveniently near the Holland Tunnel and the Westside Highway if a need to escape the city arose. Since the building was only half occupied, Gee Sin’s movements would arouse little attention. He poured himself a tumbler of XO brandy and stepped out on to the dark balcony, thinking that the colorful lights across the river reminded him of Hong Kong. The Red Circle’s plans were in place, and besides the fleet of buses, other arrangements had already been set in motion.

  The wind whipped up suddenly, and he went back inside, put the tumbler down. He looked around and was pleased: simple furnishings, all rented, so the triad would not be stuck, money tied up in idle property. The condo unit could be cleared on short notice and made available for sale.

  All the Red Circle’s investments in Manhattan properties had been successful, and real-estate prices continued to rise.

  Gee Sin went to the walk-in closet and tapped in the code numbers to the wall safe hidden there. From the safe he extracted stacks of plastic cards, then proceeded to the living room. In that quiet space, under the flood of light from a solitary overhead pendant lamp, he squared up the decks of plastic on the black-stone slab surface that separated the dining from the living areas. He dealt the cards out with his left hand, the blank plastic flashing smoothly between thumb and trigger finger, sliding out from the flick of the wrist.

  Nine piles of eleven cards each. He shuffled them into neat stacks, three across, three down.

  The black Visa card blanks, across the top. Black, the color of night, the shade of secrecy, the black of the hak se wui, secret societies.

  The gold American Express cards. Wong, yellow, in the middle of everything.

  And the Platinum MasterCard blanks.

  Gold and silver, very much favored by the Chinese.

  He took another swallow from the glass of brandy, caught his breath, and closed his eyes. They had learned quickly from past operations. Instead of selling the cards to amateurs who would get caught and call attention to the operators, he’d decided to use selected Chinese people in order to impose control and improve communication. The idea of using storage locations and closed warehouses was his way of gaining mobility and volume for the operators.

  They would fence the products through the triad’s legitimate businesses.

  When he opened his eyes, he saw the array of stacks differently. They were ghost identities, cards ready to be imprinted with a rotating selection of Chinese names: Chins and Changs, Dongs, Fongs, and Gongs, and a lot of Lees and Wongs.

  Stolen account numbers would be loaded onto the magnetic strip of the blank. The Chinese name would be matched to a recruited shopper, whose picture had been taken for a bogus driver’s license for picture identification. The fake licenses, computer-generated, were virtually undistinguishable from the real deal. Any of the mobile mills, with portable laptops and rented laser printers, could turn out acceptable forged passports and visas as well.

  They’d refined forgery, fraudulent credit, and identity theft into an art and a science.

  He reflected on the society’s Thirty-Six Strategies. He’d added a twist to Number Seven, Create something out of nothing, to use false information effectively. They were creating false identities, welding real account numbers to paper names, breeding phantoms who would bring millions to the Red Circle. To steal the dragon and replace it with the phoenix, steal account numbers and supply them with new faces.

  It had begun with the Red Circle’s number forty-nines—sai gow jai, dog soldiers—who’d kidnapped an Asia Bank One executive in Vancouver, B.C., and managed to rip off a delivery of credit-card machines. The scam operations had worked well on a small scale at first, but now they were spreading east and west via Canadian Chinatowns.

  Gee Sin would introduce the fraudulent organizations to America.

  He felt proud, marveled at how smoothly everything fit together, how each scam unit found its way around the Fukienese, the latest wave of Chinese immigrants. They became fodder for the ever-expanding Chinese restaurant business, suckers for Chinese loan sharks, and desperadoes to enlist in the credit-card operation. The tour buses only made it easier for all the crews to move around. Paper Fan had foreseen that the buses connecting the many restaurants among the triads’ dues-paying members, transporting the Fukienese filling in as kitchen help, deported to far-flung kitchens in this strange gwai devil land, could be the basis for a network. Hung Huen card operators trolled the Fukienese employment agencies for unemployed Chinese willing to participate in fraud. The crews of recruiters, under Grass Sandal’s instructions, also kept an eye on the Chinese gamblers, high rollers, at the casinos in Atlantic City, and at Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun as well, hunting for players who needed cash.

  In addition, some of the Chinese restaurants yielded disgruntled employees who sold customer’s credit-card information to the triad, ten dollars for each account. The sai gow jai collected the information, and the tech mills manufactured the bogus driver’s licenses to match the fake cards. Underpaid salespeople at cell-phone shops and dishonest bank clerks sold clients’ personal information, too. The sweeper at a video-rental store might provide a hundred confidential application forms. There was no shortage of illegal immigrants at the ends of their ropes, convenient bodies with which to create new accounts. When the accounts were maxed out, the body would disappear to another forsaken kitchen in the hinterlands. If they got caught, Immigration gave them a free ticket back to China.

  Gee Sin, the mastermind, took advantage of the Americans’ holiday preoccupation with gift giving, the annual buying frenzy that overwhelmed what was originally a religious
holiday. Paper Fan realized how important these several weeks were to merchants, hoping to make sales to carry them through the year, which in the crazed crush of business made them careless and blind to credit-card fraud.

  The bogus cards would be automatically approved by the retailer’s swipe-reader because the account number was legitimate. If the store required photo identification, there was the fake driver’s license that provided it. Cashiers readily accepted the machine’s approval, especially when faced with a long line of tired shoppers waiting to pay. During the holidays, credit-account spending levels normally scrutinized were relaxed, and high-end purchases were less likely to be questioned.

  The Chinese shoppers had been instructed to buy certain brand-name merchandise, popular items that would be easy to move.

  He took another taste of the brandy and his vision of the plastic decks changed again. Now he saw an array of Chinese communities inside American cities, each one under the influence of triad clans and tong-affiliated gangs. The three stacks on the right were Boston, New York, New Jersey. They’d partnered with the Fuk Chow on the East Coast. The three stacks on the left were the West Coast cities of Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. The Suey Ching ran the northern two, but the Viet Ching controlled the cards in L.A., and were tops in Texas Chinatowns as well. The middle decks were Columbus/ Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Richmond/Norfolk. The Sun Wo clan worked the cards in all those mid-American cities.

  Besides dispatching Fukinese desperadoes to scam the local merchants, Gee Sin advised Grass Sandal to select the best English-speaking recruits to work the phones against the mail-order companies, directing Christmas gift merchandise to a series of storage facilities and shuttered storefronts. At these locations, designated triad officers with bogus identification would await the deliverymen and sign for the items. The phone-scam operators focused on high-end electronics that the Red Circle could sell easily through its network of merchants, expensive items like video camcorders, digital cameras, Walkmen and laptop computers.

  They’d expected to steal several million dollars of merchandise over the holidays, all through fraudulent credit-card transactions. The legitimate account holder and the card-issuing company wouldn’t detect anything amiss until weeks after the holidays, when the monthly statements arrived in the mail. By then, Paper Fan and his operatives would be long gone, leaving only a trail of smoke and shadows.

  His thoughts changed again as he felt a slow dull throbbing at his wrist, and he leaned back away from the stacks of cards. Occasionally he’d feel a sharp pain at the wrist. This occurred mostly in winter or in cold locations like Vancouver or Toronto, where he had first tested the credit-card operations.

  Time to take it off, he thought.

  The psychiatric member of the rehabilitation and therapy team at Kowloon had suggested to him the idea of residual pain, the severed nerves remembering the moment of the chop. It’s all in the brain, she’d said, you think you feel pain so you do feel pain. Mostly it was chafing, or too much pressure at the new joint, where scar-sealed bone and muscle bumped against the silicone-padded socket of the prosthesis.

  He could remove the prosthesis to relieve the pain. Painkiller medication was prescribed.

  Dew keuih, fuck, he cursed quietly. He knew it wasn’t the hand. It fit well and he’d trained on it, and willed it to work well. It wasn’t the hand.

  It was the attack that he remembered, hazy but still horrific even after twenty-five years. The pain of a young man revived in the stump arm of an old man.

  The glint of light from his left. Raising his bow arm reflexively.

  It wasn’t the hand, marvelously sculpted and engineered.

  He’d been knocked down. When he braced to get up he saw that he had no left hand.

  It was the memory.

  And he had survived the attack. The chop had been intented for his neck.

  He detached the elastic and Velcro band that wrapped around his elbow, and slipped the hand off, placing it on the black marble. It always looked strange, removed from his arm, especially when he walked further from it, and viewed his hand in the near distance. His real hand felt like reaching for it.

  He imagined it as a weapon, the sling its holster.

  Touch

  Already five years old, the bionic hand was an ultralite model, a myoelectric prosthesis with articulate fingers, an opposable thumb, a rotating wrist. It was powered by batteries inside the fake limb. Sensors there detected when the arm muscles contracted, then converted the body’s electrical signal into electric power. This powered the motor controlling the hand and wrist, its skeletal frame made of thermoplastics and titanium for extreme flexibility. The frame was covered with a skin of silicone that was resistant to heat and flame, and custom colored to match the patient’s skin pigmentation. The hand and fingers were sculpted with fingernails, knuckles, and creases. At a glance, it was indistinguishable from a real hand.

  It cost eighty thousand dollars in Hong Kong and the triad had paid without question.

  Removing it from his arm reminded him of the rehabilitation course at the Kowloon Clinic, where he’d trained to use his new artificial limb. He’d continued for a year until his control of hand and finger movements became so deft that he could eat with chopsticks, and deal a deck of cards. He could pluck a coin off the table.

  He could pull the trigger of a gun.

  Aaya, he sighed, remembering the first of the Thirty-Six Strategies of the society, cross the ocean without letting the sky know. Of course, he was here to oversee the tour buses and the credit cards, but—known only to himself and the dragonhead, leader of the triad—there was the matter of the missing diamonds and gold Panda coins in the wake of the Uncle Four murder, not to mention a hundred thousand in Hip Ching cash stolen from the foolish old man by his vengeful mistress. Uncle Four had been en route to a meeting with Hakka heroin dealers before he was murdered. His mistress had disappeared.This was not something they could suffer quietly, even though much of what was missing was swag. Before returning to Hong Kong, he knew he’d have to look into the situation. He took a Vicodin pill, washing it down with the last of the liquor. After a minute he lay down and let go of the progressions in his head. The room went black and he dreamed he was flying, watching the landforms below, marking his way back to the fragrant harbor of Hong Kong.

  Crime No Holiday

  Pearl Harbor memorials had reminded Jack of Pa’s Japanese nightmares.

  Then the nights had run together and suddenly it was late December. Senior detectives had pulled holiday time, so he’d been reassigned to cover the four to midnight.

  Christmas Eve.

  It didn’t matter much to Jack. He didn’t have family plans or commitments like most of the other detectives.

  Coming out of the Tofu King with his steaming quart of dao jeung, bean milk, Jack headed toward the Bowery, thinking about hooking up with Billy for a few holiday drinks after his shift. There wasn’t a bus in sight, so he decided to walk north through Chinatown, hoping to catch a cab somewhere along the way back to the 0-9.

  Many of the restaurants and stores hung gaily-colored strands of Christmas-tree lights in their windows, not out of tradition but as eye candy to attract the tourist dollar. Those businesses that were heavily supported by neighborhood Chinese—the coffee shops, bakeries, barbershops, and grocery stores—didn’t bother to decorate, knowing that the real decorating time would come during the Chinese New Year, when the brilliant reds and golds of luck and prosperity would appear everywhere.

  Farther out on Fukienese East Broadway it felt even less like Christmas, no trace of religion or pretense of tradition there. On some of those streets it didn’t seem like New York, or even America.

  Like somewhere in a foreign port.

  Only the American-born Chinese, derisively referred to by “real” Chinese as jook-sings, the empty pieces of bamboo, had absorbed enough of the American Christmas tradition to put up Christmas trees in their homes, to exchange holid
ay cards and gifts. Jack remembered that Pa had refused to allow a tree into their tenement flat, saying it was a fire hazard, the apartment was too small, and the pine needles would make an unholy mess.

  Jack went past Eldridge, where the discount greengrocer’s makeshift marketplace bumped up against the coach buses at the curb, everyone hustling to make a buck. Everybody watching everybody else. At Delancey, he finally caught a packed northbound M 103 bus, and rode it the ten blocks into the Ninth Precinct. The dao jeung had chilled, but he knew he could nuke it in the stationhouse’s microwave.

  He got off on Fifth and went east into the black afternoon.

  Xmas Eve

  The news on the radio in the squad room was predicting snow and traffic delays. When Jack reviewed the blotter, he saw there was a rash of shoplifting incidents, and credit-card fraud. Blacks and Latinos boosting their gift lists. Chinese names on bogus credit cards. Merry Christmas, he thought sardonically, by any means necessary.

  He sipped the dao jeung he’d zapped in the microwave.

  Happy holidays all, as he scrolled down the listings, an unending litany of petty larcenies.

  Six hours into the shift, the foot of snow outside resulted in squad cars and scooters parked at odd angles. From the window by the restrooms, Jack could see how quickly the thick flurries were falling, heavily enough so that he could barely make out the colors of traffic lights and street signs at the intersection. A nasty night to be out.

  A call came in from the cold. He could hear the beating of the wind against the caller’s mouthpiece when he flipped open his cell phone, a dull, broken static accompanying rushing noise.

  “Sarge told me to call you . . .” P.O. Wong was saying, something about a takeout, missing persons, and just before the call went dead, deliveryman.