Dragonfire

by Bill Pronzini

  “Kam Fong?” I said.

  He looked blankly startled at first, but when he focused on me, saw the arm sling inside my open coat, his reaction was sudden and surprising. His mouth popped open, his eyes bulged, he made an odd little noise in his throat; one of the chopsticks slipped out of his fingers and clattered against the teapot. Fear, bright and shiny, spread like a flush ever his waxy face.

  “You,” he said, and it came out half-strangled, like a belch.

  I frowned at him. “You know who I am?”

  “How you find me? How you know?”

  I got it then. It was his voice; I’d heard it before. A spasm went through my left arm and I could feel the fingers twitch. In the space of a second I was as tense as he was.

  “Well, well,” I said. “You’re the one who called yesterday to tell me about Mau Yee.”

  The mention of Mau Yee made him jerk as if I had slapped him. His fear flared up brighter; he looked around a little wildly, made a motion to get on his feet. I caught hold of his wrist with my good hand, put enough pressure on it to keep him sitting still.

  “You’re not going anywhere, Fong,” I told him. “We’re going to have a little talk, you and me.”

  “No, please …”

  “Yes, please. Just take it easy, don’t lose your head, and we’ll get along fine.”

  He was wired up so tight you could almost see him quiver. I watched him struggle with his panic, try to get it under control. His eyes rolled around for three or four seconds; then he blinked, let out a heavy breath, and used his free hand to paw his mouth out of shape. He was all right, then. He wasn’t going to make a scene.

  “How you know?” he said again.

  “I didn’t know, not until you opened your mouth and I recognized your voice. I got your name from a mutual acquaintance.”

  “Who?”

  “Inspector Richard Loo. He said you’d had some contact with Lieutenant Eberhardt in the past, given him information on certain matters. So I thought I’d look you up.”

  Fong wet his lips, slumped back a little in his chair. I still had hold of his wrist; when I released it he put both hands in his lap and glanced around again, furtively. But nobody was looking at us. They were all too busy eating and chattering among themselves.

  “You telling them?” he asked. “Police?”

  “About your call? No. I’m looking into things on my own.”

  That seemed to relieve him a little. “You not telling anyone? Not police, nobody in Chinatown?”

  “That depends,” I said. “On how cooperative you are, for one thing. Why did you call me?”

  “Lieutenant, he …” The sentence dribbled off.

  “What about the lieutenant?”

  “He treat me okay. Not like other police.”

  “Paid you well, never hassled you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you called me because I’m his friend, because I was shot too.”

  “Yes.”

  “And because you heard he’d taken a bribe.”

  “Not want police to know,” he said. “Maybe not true. I think maybe you find out.”

  “What do you know about this bribe?”

  “Nothing. Only what I telling you before.”

  “No idea who’s supposed to have given it?”

  “No.”

  “But you know it wasn’t a Chinese.”

  “No Chinese. Nobody in Chinatown.”

  “Where did you hear about the bribe?”

  “I listen, hearing many things.”

  “Sure you do. Where did you hear this one?”

  “Not remembering.”

  “You’d better start remembering, my friend. And quick.”

  He wet his lips again. “I think … Lee Chuck.”

  “Who would Lee Chuck be?”

  “Herb seller. Important man.”

  “Yes? Does he have a shop?”

  “Ross Alley.”

  “How did he know about the bribe?”

  “He not telling me.”

  “What else does he do besides sell herbs?”

  “Do?”

  “Come on, Fong, you know what I mean!”

  Hesitation. Then he said, “Gambling.”

  “You mean he runs a parlor?”

  “Yes.”

  “What kind?”

  “Mah-Jongg, fan-tan, poker.”

  “High stakes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “Room above his shop.”

  “In Ross Alley?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does the bribe have anything to do with gambling?”

  “No.”

  “Then how does Chuck know about it?”

  “He not telling me.”

  “Who told you about Mau Yee? Was it Chuck?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did he say?”

  Fong cast another furtive glance at the nearby tables. Then he leaned forward and lowered his voice a couple of octaves. “He saying Mau Yee try to eat two white pies. One big, one little.”

  “Meaning he tried to kill a couple of Caucasians.”

  “Yes. You and lieutenant.”

  “Why? What motive?”

  “Something to do with bribe.”

  “But Chuck didn’t say what.”

  “No.”

  “Did he have any idea who hired Mau Yee?”

  “He saying no.”

  “Or why an outsider would want a Chinese gunman?”

  “No.”

  “Why did Chuck tell you as much as he did?”

  “We talk sometimes. Friends.”

  Some friends, I thought. “Does he belong to Hui Sip?”

  “Yes. You know Hui Sip?”

  “I’ve heard of them. What else do they control besides gambling? Drugs, maybe?”

  “Yes.”

  “Uh-huh. Where can I find Mau Yee?”

  “You go after him now?”

  “I haven’t decided that yet. Where does he live?”

  “Hang Ah Street.”

  “What number?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “Does he live there alone?”

  “No. He having woman. Not married.”

  “All right,” I said. I got my wallet out, took one of my business cards from inside. The telephone listed on it was my office number; I scratched that out with a pen and wrote my home number in its place. Then I slid the card over in front of him, next to his cold plate of fried pork and cabbage. “I need more information, Fong,” I said. “I need to know who hired Mau Yee and why, what that bribe business is all about. See what else you can find out. You turn up anything positive, there’ll be a hundred bucks in it for you.”

  He hesitated, finally picked up the card and put it into his shirt pocket. “Hearing nothing else,” he said. “Only what Lee Chuck telling me.”

  “Nose around anyway. Maybe you’ll get lucky.”

  “Yes.” He leaned forward again. “You know Mau Yee carry puppy all time?”

  “Puppy?”

  “Pistol. All time different one—many puppies. You being careful, yes? Mau Yee very dangerous.”

  “So am I right now,” I said.

  The heat and the heavy cooking odors were making me a little dizzy. I pushed back my chair, got on my feet, told Fong I’d be in touch, and left him mopping his face with a linen napkin. When I got outside I leaned against a parking meter for a time, to let the wind cool me and chase away the dizziness.

  Up on California, the bells were ringing in the steeple of Old St. Mary’s. A wedding, probably. Or a funeral. The bells reminded me of the sign over the church entrance, underneath the big clock—a Biblical quote from Ecclesiastes. “Son,” it said, “observe the time and fly from evil.”

  Good advice for most people, I thought, but not for me. Not now.

  I had observed the time, all right, but I wasn’t flying from evil; I was flying straight at it.

  Nine

  Ross Alley was a
narrow thoroughfare between Jackson and Pacific, west of Grant Avenue. Lined with doorways that led to bundle shops, apartments, the headquarters of a couple of family associations; two sleazy-looking bars, one of which advertised “Belly Dance on Weekends”; several little shops with signs in Chinese calligraphy and opaque windows that hid their wares and their purpose from Caucasian eyes. Overhead, some of the buildings sported gilded pagoda cornices and there were fire escapes with fluttering laundry and hanging gardens and planters of black bamboo.

  Halfway along I found a narrow storefront window decorated with Chinese characters and the words Lee Chuck, Herbalist in faded black. Inside, displayed on plates, were a dozen or so varieties of exotic herbs. Each of the plates had a piece of red paper stuck to it, identifying in English and Chinese what it contained: Old Mountain ginseng, cinnamon bark, Wu Hsi lizard tea, deer’s horn, black fungus.

  There were two doors set side by side in the alcove next to the window. One of them had a dusty glass pane and opened into the herb shop; the other one, hanging a little crooked in its frame, was solid except for a peephole at eye level. That one, I thought, would probably lead upstairs to the room where Lee Chuck ran his after-hours gambling parlor. I glanced up at the second story. Three windows, each with louvered green shutters drawn tight across it.

  There would be blackout curtains on the inside, too, as an added precaution; and maybe a spotter stationed somewhere out here in the alley while the bigger games were in progress to warn against a possible police raid.

  I opened the shop door and went inside to the accompaniment of a small tinkling bell. The interior was not much larger than the living room of my flat, fairly clean, lighted by three Chinese lamps. On the left was a counter, and behind that, across the entire wall, were blue-lacquered cabinets with hundreds of little drawers. At the rear, heavy bead curtains covered the entrance to an inner room. There was nobody in the front part of the shop, but a couple of seconds after I shut the door, the bead curtains parted and a man came through to meet me.

  He was maybe sixty, average height, bald as an egg, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and Western-style clothes. If he was surprised to see a Caucasian in his shop, or if he had any idea of who I was, he didn’t show it. Nothing changed in his bland expression or in the unblinking eyes behind his glasses. This guy was the stuff of stereotypes: the inscrutable Oriental.

  “Yes?” he said politely. “May I help you?”

  “Are you Lee Chuck?”

  “At your service, sir. Have you an ailment?”

  “Pardon?”

  “That brings you to my humble shop. My tonics are all genuine, imported from China. Guaranteed effective for any ailment. You are familiar with Shen Nung, sir?”

  “No,” I said.

  “The ancient father of plants. A thousand years ago, in old China, Emperor Shen Nung examined many plants to discover their medicinal value. His wisdom, like that of Confucius, has survived the centuries.”

  I wondered if he was putting me on. His tonics might have been genuine, but his patter was straight out of Charlie Chan. He might have mistaken me for a tourist and was serving up more stereotype, tongue-in-cheek, to go with his inscrutable look. Then again, he might have recognized me and was playing games to keep me off balance.

  “I’m not here to buy herbs,” I said. Then, to see if I could shake him a little, I gave him my right name and followed it by saying, “You know who I am, don’t you, Chuck?”

  It didn’t buy me anything. His face remained impassive; there was not even a flicker of reaction in his eyes. He cocked his head to one side, birdlike, and said in the same polite voice, “I am afraid not, sir.”

  “Sure you do. My name has been all over the news lately. I got shot by a Chinese gunman eight days ago—me and a police lieutenant named Eberhardt.”

  He turned away from me, making it seem casual and unhurried, and went around behind the counter. He ran his hand over a section of the blue-lacquered cabinet, found a drawer a third of the way down. The fragrance of herbs was heavy in there, and it seemed to get even heavier when he opened the drawer.

  “Some lizard tea, perhaps?” he said. “Most nourishing, a boon to the digestion.”

  “I heard there was some kind of bribe involved in the shooting,” I said. “Maybe you know something about that.”

  Lee Chuck opened another drawer. “Mint leaves, sir? Excellent for combating fire in the human body.”

  “The man who did the shooting is known as Mau Yee. His real name is Jimmy Quon—a boo how doy for the Hui Sip tong.”

  Another drawer. “Ginseng, sir? Very fine. Ginseng soup, properly brewed, provides strength and a long life.”

  “You know Jimmy Quon, right? You’re a member of Hui Sip yourself”

  “Deer’s tail from Hwei Chung? Like ginseng, it is one of mankind’s greatest blessings.”

  “Upstairs,” I said, “right over this shop, there’s a gambling parlor. Fan-tan, Mah-Jongg, poker—high-stakes games. You run it for Hui Sip. The police might like to know about that.”

  “Sage tea? It also promotes a long life. And softens grief.”

  He was getting to me. The anger boiled up near the surface, and I had to fight off an impulse to reach over the counter and grab him by the neck. Violence would not have gotten me anything; Chuck was the kind who would absorb it stoically, without breaking, and then take his revenge later on. Like charging me with assault and battery, which was something I could not afford to have happen. My threat to tell the police about his game room upstairs didn’t carry much weight. Gambling was only a misdemeanor; even if they shut him down for a while, he’d get off with a fine and be back in business inside a week.

  “All right, Chuck,” I said, “don’t talk to me. But when you talk to Jimmy Quon, give him a message. Tell him I’m going to get him for what he did. Tell him if I have to I’m going to eat his pie.”

  “No herbs, sir? No fine tonics? There are more than one thousand prescriptions in the book of Li Shih-chen, the great physician of the Ming dynasty. Many would be of benefit, to assure you health and longevity.”

  “Don’t give me any more of that crap. You want to threaten me, do it out in the open. Like I just threatened Jimmy Quon. Like I’m threatening you. If you’re mixed up in what happened, I’ll nail your ass too. That clear enough for you?”

  Behind his glasses, his eyes were steady on my face. Snake’s eyes: it seemed they hadn’t blinked once the whole time I’d been there and they didn’t blink now. “Are you familiar with Chinese folklore, sir?” he said. “Most interesting. We have sayings appropriate to all occasions. I am fondest of the one which states, ‘Loud bark, no good dogs; loud talk, no wise man.’ “

  “There are a lot of Western sayings too,” I said. “How about ‘You’re a long time dead?’ Or maybe ‘Shit or get off the pot?’ “

  “If you do not wish to buy my tonics, sir, I must humbly request that you leave my shop. I have prescriptions to fill for others more concerned with their well-being.”

  He didn’t wait to see if I had anything else to say to him. He came out from behind the counter, in the same unhurried movements as before, and disappeared through the bead curtains. I had to curb another impulse to go after him. The fragrance of the herbs seemed overpowering now, like some sort of opiate affecting my sense of reason and control. Either I got out of there pretty quick or I was going to start busting the place up. And Lee Chuck along with it.

  I backed to the door, yanked it open. The little bell tinkled musically, and that was more irritation; I had a mental image of myself ripping it off the wall. I went out and hurled the door shut behind me, hard enough to rattle the pane of glass and set the bell tinkling all over again.

  A motorized ricksha, driven by a Chinatown tour guide and with a couple of tourists in the rear seat, was coming down the alley. I didn’t see it right away and the damned thing almost ran me down. The driver yelled something at me; I yelled something back at him, a biological suggestion that broug
ht shocked looks to the faces of the tourists. The three of them gaped at me as if they thought I might be a lunatic.

  Well, maybe I was turning into one, at that. Maybe I was becoming unhinged. I had not handled Lee Chuck worth a damn; telling him what I knew, threatening him and Jimmy Quon, had been a stupid blunder. I admitted that as soon as I got myself calmed down. Now I was vulnerable, a walking target. Chuck would talk to Mau Yee, all right, and Mau Yee would come after me. He had tried to kill a cop; I had told Chuck I was looking for him and made it clear that I hadn’t shared my knowledge with the police. Yeah, he’d come after me. He had no choice.

  A damned fool, that was what I was. Running around like a pulp detective, getting in over my head. Jimmy Quon was half my age, he had two good arms, he was a professional thug. How the hell was I supposed to challenge him? He could make a move against me any time, anywhere. Crippled up the way I was, I would not stand half a chance of defending myself.

  It’s not too late to get out of it, I thought. Go talk to Marcus and Klein, tell them—

  Tell them what?

  I had no proof that Quon had shot Eberhardt and me. And he had a manufactured alibi, according to Richard Loo, that the police hadn’t been able to shake. Tell them I had been withholding information? Tell them I had been chasing around the city, investigating an attempted homicide? They could throw me in jail for obstructing justice, for practicing without a license, while Quon and whoever had hired him got off scot-free. Tell them about the bribe thing, the stock-transfer form in Eberhardt’s safe? If I did that, the media might get hold of it—and suppose Eb was innocent? A public flap would mark him for life, just as the one a few weeks ago had marked me.

  No, damn it. Right or wrong, Jimmy Quon was my baby; I’d get him one way or another and I’d get the bastard who hired him, too. The hell with the risk. And the hell with the consequences.

  I went up Washington, taking it slow because the hill there was steep, and cut through Spofford Alley and across Clay. Hang Ah Street was another narrow alley that opened off Clay and jogged through the block past the Chinese Playground. I seemed to recall that Hang Ah meant “old fragrance” and that the alley had been named after a long-vanished perfume factory founded by a German chemist. The fragrance it had these days was a lot less sweet: garbage, animal feces, cooking odors that came from the brick tenements surrounding the playground, that were piped through ventilators from the Hang Ah Tea Room at the opposite end.