Lucy paused, as she had learned to do, at a corner window and checked the reflection, and then turned east on Prince. Halfway down the block, she suddenly dashed across the street, as if attracted by the display in a gallery window opposite. She saw an oriental man in dark clothes and a cheap straw hat walk past on the north side of Prince and stop to examine some rugs on display in a window. He could see her reflection as she could see his. When Lucy moved west again, he followed, keeping to the opposite side of the street. Then, between one of her sideways glances and another, he vanished.
Lucy was impressed. She had been taught that (non-crazy) people follow other people for one of two reasons: either they wish to know where the target is going and what she’s doing there, or they wish to find her in a vulnerable position, alone, for example, in the classic dark alley, and there do her mischief. In both cases, of course, the follower must be careful not to let the target know she is being followed, while the target should perform various maneuvers when she suspects she is, so as to break the follower from cover. This Lucy had just done, and the follower, spotted, had broken off his follow.
Or maybe not. Back on Broadway by this time, she waited until the light had just turned red against her and flew across the honking street and down into the Prince Street subway station. There she did the standard drill, waiting for a downtown train, boarding it, jumping off an instant before the doors closed. The platform was empty. She crossed to the other platform, waited for an uptown local, and took it to Eighth Street. From there she walked over to Washington Square and found a bench by the chess tables.
This park was, like many another in the city, a drug market and urban squalor demo. Around the noble arch, dingy and scrawled upon, a fake cake in the window of an unprosperous baker, bored Guatemalan nannies of bond trader/ad executives’ babies alternated with crack dealers, with their zoned-out clients, with bemused Asian architecture students, with kids from the Tisch School making videos about the collapse of civilization, the soundtrack provided by folk singers encouraging people to join the coal miners’ union, their warbles competing with a half dozen boom boxes blasting salsa, ska, punk, R amp;B, and heavy metal into the innocent green canopy, echoing back, mixing strangely, assaulting the ears of those who were not yet used to the love songs of the city, hardly disturbing the slumber of the bond trader/ad executives’ babies, as the Guatemalan nannies gently rocked them to whatever transient beat penetrated, their flat brown faces closed tight against America.
For Lucy, child of the city, all this was as a wheat field to a Kansas kid, an unremarkable background, against which only a few objects had any chance of standing out. A disheveled person holding an automatic weapon might engage her interest, for example, or the guy who had been following her. Meanwhile, she sat and read Claudine en Menage. It would be hard for anyone who has never been captivated by a fictional character to comprehend the depths of Lucy’s disappointment in Claudine, or to credit that the end of the second book in the series-in which Claudine agrees to marry a man old enough to be her father-had contributed considerably to the recent explosion with her mother. In one corner of her mind she had imagined (while understanding at some level the absurdity of the notion) that Claudine would marry Kim, and somehow combine a life of intimate sensuality with exotic adventures involving a large number of foreign languages.
Her devotion to the series was such, however, that she read grimly on, and after a while found some satisfaction in Claudine’s discovery that marriage to the old fart was not what she had expected, and increasing fascination in the prospect of her lesbian affair with the delicious Rezi. Naturally these juicy parts made her think of spinning it all out to her friends in the fur room, and the recollection that all that was lost forever, and probably her friends with it, pierced her heart anew, and the pages blurred.
She dabbed her eyes and then gasped, for standing right in front of her was the oriental man in the straw hat.
“You know,” he said in French, “it does little good to make your escape so brilliantly and then to come sit here all oblivious like an eggplant on a windowsill. Would you care for a peanut?”
She took one from the proffered bag, and he sat down next to her.
“How did you do that?” she asked grumpily. “I thought I got away clean on the subway.”
“So you did, but, as you are aware, my study of the secrets of the Orient has given me certain mystic powers far beyond your puny Western abilities.” With this he slitted his eyes mysteriously and waggled his thick eyebrows. This person, who called himself Tran Vinh Din, was a medium-sized Vietnamese of unprepossessing appearance, somewhat more than fifty years old, wiry of build, calm of demeanor. Except for the shallow dent in the side of his head and the scars on his hands and the oddly twisted fingernails, he looked like someone to whom nothing interesting had happened, a schoolteacher, say, or a cook in a noodle joint. In fact, he had been a schoolteacher and a cook in a noodle joint, but between those two occupations, in the years between 1954 and 1975, he had been a member, and eventually quite a senior member, of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front, known inaccurately as the Viet Cong. After that he had been a political prisoner of the People’s Republic of Vietnam and after that a boat person and after that a fraudulent immigrant under his false name (a common enough story at the time in New York, save the Viet Cong part), and now was a sometime employee of Marlene Ciampi, as well as her daughter’s best friend over the age of thirteen.
“Merde,” responded Lucy with assurance and took a handful of nuts.
“So you respond with the word of Cambronne, and properly in this case. In fact, I meet you here entirely by accident, although you still should not have let me approach. I could have been two rough fellows with a big sack.”
“In full day in the middle of a crowded park?”
“Oh, yes, these chess players would have leaped to your defense, I have no doubt. Many unpleasant things may happen in the full light of day.”
She sighed, for this was familiar, and asked, “So, what are you doing here, Uncle Tran?”
He gestured with the bag. “I come for the peanuts. The man there on the corner sells freshly roasted ones, which I enjoy. So, truthfully, it was entirely happenstance that I found you here. What is that book in which you were so abandoned as to forget your caution? Hm! A fine writer, but with no political ideas, mere decadent sensuality; also, that is not her best work. Yet, in any case, it is better than condescending oriental fantasies by Kipling.”
“I like oriental fantasies, and I don’t care about condescending. Everyone condescends to someone. What I would really like is an oriental fantasy with decadent sensuality.”
“I’m sure, but then you would have something like Ouida, unreadable even by your deplorable standards. What is going on between you and your mother?”
An old interrogator’s trick, slipping the zinger in among trivialities, but it struck. Lucy flushed and said, “Nothing.”
“Not nothing,” said Tran, “a great deal, I think. Will you tell me about it? No? Then I will have to use my mystical oriental arts. First, you have been angry and sullen with your mother for some time. Americans tolerate this in their children, as I have observed on the television, and it is of no consequence-fireworks on Tet, as we say: boom, boom, and it passes, leaving everything as before. But today it is much worse. Your mother visited the Chens yesterday and was turned away, quite properly, but on hearing of it, you attack her with your tongue. Also, I find you alone and aimlessly wandering instead of plotting outrages with your two friends. The two events are connected, isn’t it so?”
“She ruined my life,” Lucy mumbled, staring down at a smear of old gum on the pavement between her sneakers. “I’ll never be able to go to the Chens anymore-”
“What, because you think your mother has lost face and you have to because she is your mother? This is absurd. You have done nothing improper, and in this case your duty is to go to them like a good foster child and offer support. As fo
r what your mother did, it never happened. No one pays any attention to your mother, except as they do to a thunderstorm or an earthquake.”
“Really? So you think I would be welcomed at Janice’s.”
“I believe so,” said Tran. “Of course, as they are Cantonese, they may cut you up in small pieces and fry you with green onions and garlic.”
This brought a smile to her face, and seeing it, Tran felt a warm current in the place his heart used to be. His own daughter had never reached thirteen, having been incinerated by a B-52 along with his wife in 1968. He had no photographs of them anymore, and to his dismay their faces were fading from his mind. When he dreamed of his daughter now, she had Lucy’s face. Pathetic and sentimental, he thought, but there it was.
“Perhaps I’ll call her and go over now.”
“A fine idea, after you have apologized to your mother. In a harmonious world, parents should teach children, and it is an unfortunate thing when the child knows more than the parent about certain things. I have observed that this is more common in America than elsewhere, especially among those from foreign lands. Nevertheless, you must apologize. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” said Lucy. It had not occurred to her that her mother was in any way imperfect, and the knowledge both intrigued and appalled her.
“Now,” said Tran, “of what are you so afraid?”
Lucy’s heart performed an unpleasant leap. “What makes you say that?”
“In the instant you spotted me awhile ago, before you understood that it was me playing a game, you had a look of terror on your face and in the stance of your body. Is it possible that someone is after you in earnest, my child?”
Lucy waited some long seconds before answering. “You won’t tell my mother?”
Tran looked down at his devastated hands. “I believe I can keep a secret.”
“I can’t tell you the whole thing because I swore not to, but. . it might be a good thing if you watched my back for a while.” She placed her hand in his.
Tran nodded and rose, and they walked out of the park hand in hand.
“Who is Cambronne?” Lucy asked abruptly.
“Ah, Cambronne. Marshal Cambronne was the commander of the Old Guard at Waterloo. At school all of us little mites were taught that when the British called upon him to surrender, he said, ‘The Guard dies, it does not surrender.’ ”
“What is mites?”
“Oh, that is just a word the French used. From Annamites. That is to say, we Vietnamese. You would say ‘gooks.’ But, naturally, we also knew this expression, ‘the word of Cambronne.’ ”
“You mean, he really didn’t say that heroic thing, he just said, ‘merde’?”
“So it seems. Another thing among many that confirmed for us the absolute hypocrisy of the French. You Americans are insane, but far less developed in your hypocrisy. This is refreshing. I am proud to be an illegal immigrant in your country.”
Chapter 5
The Chen family emerged from seclusion early in the afternoon of the next day and reopened their emporium, the police having finished with it. They did a remarkably good business for a weekday, as people in the community flocked in to demonstrate ethnic solidarity and assuage morbid curiosity. Lucy Karp walked in somewhat later, and after a brief conversation with one of the checkout bag girls, put on an apron, replaced her, and started stuffing. As she had promised, she had called her mother on the car phone and offered a formal apology, and said dutifully that she was about to visit the Chens. Her mother was still sufficiently stunned by her conversation with her own mother to accept this without asking any questions. Lucy’s tone had been cool and polite, which was in itself something these days.
In a break between customers, Lucy waved to Mrs. Chen, standing watchfully in her elevated glass booth, and Mrs. Chen smiled and waved back. Tran had been right, Lucy saw with vast relief. For her part, Mrs. Chen understood what Lucy was doing and understood its benefits to her daughter. As she had often before this, Lucy would take half a shift for free, so that the bag girl would work a half shift for Janice, thus giving Janice four hours of free time. Mrs. Chen had never had any free time when she was Janice’s age, and if Mr. Chen had his way, neither would Janice. Mrs. Chen had heard, however, that most American children did not work twelve hours a day, every day, during school vacations, and so she was prepared to be indulgent, as long as nothing interfered with the intake of cash. Not that the Chens were greedy, not compared to those operating a quarter mile to the south of the Asia Mall in Wall Street, but they had obligations. In China a vast Chen cousinage awaited opportunity, sponsorship, transportation to Gold Mountain, so that they in their turn could prosper and achieve glory and honor and add luster to the name of Chen. A few hours of leisure for her daughter, Mrs. Chen thought, would take little enough from this enterprise.
The two girls walked in companionable silence along Canal Street, both of them inexpressibly glad that normal relationships had been reestablished after the disaster.
“You want to go listen to music at Sounds Like?” Janice asked.
“Yeah, later,” said Lucy, “but first I have to do something. Let’s cross here.”
She dashed south across Canal, dodging slow-moving cars and trucks, Janice in her wake, and continued south on Mott.
“Where’re we going?” Janice asked.
“You’ll see.”
“I hate it when you get mysterious, Lucy.”
“That’s too bad, girl, because I’m mysterious a lot.”
Janice stopped in her tracks. “Tell me this isn’t about. . you know, because no way am I. .”
“No, this is personal. I have to open a bank account.”
They kept walking south into the heart of old Chinatown, herb shop and gambling cellar country, and other stuff, too, that the girls were not supposed to know about but did.
“Are we going to the Republic bank on the Bowery?” Janice asked.
“No, there’s one in there,” said Lucy, pointing down the narrow opening of Doyers Street. Originally an eighteenth-century cart track and not much improved since, narrow and twisted as a lane in Guangdong, Doyers is the shortest street in Chinatown. The sharp bend in its middle was known around the turn of the century as the Bloody Angle, because it was there that the hatchet men of warring tongs would wait to ambush one another, and for a while more people were killed here than on any other street in the nation. The tongs were respectable business associations now, of course, and didn’t employ hatchet men anymore. If you asked.
At Number 10 on this street, just across from where the original Chinese opera house used to be, stood a grimy building barely ten feet wide, fronted by a dusty glass window showing off three desiccated snake plants and bearing the legend in red characters “Kuen and Sons, Importing and Exporting.” No English translation was provided.
“This is a bank?” asked Janice.
“Kind of,” said Lucy. “Tran told me about it. The Kuens are pretty famous.”
“I never heard of them,” said Janice.
“Famous among mysterious people,” Lucy amended. She opened the door and they went in. A bell tinkled. They were in a small room lit by the streaked window and an overhead fluorescent fixture with two tubes dark and the remaining pair buzzing and flickering. A settee and two chairs in brown-painted rattan and a low lacquered table on which sat an old copy of China Today made up the room’s furniture. A calendar from a Chinese food company and the sort of cheap framed chinoiserie prints available in any shop in the district made up the wall decor. A ceiling fan hung motionless above them.
They heard soft footsteps. An elderly Chinese man stuck his head out of a door. Reading glasses were pushed up on his freckled, nearly bald pate, and he held a Chinese newspaper. He frowned when he saw Lucy and said to Janice in Cantonese, “What do you want? I am busy.”
In the same language Lucy said, “Venerable Kuen, forgive me for interrupting you, but I wish to deposit some money with your house.”
The
man’s eyes opened wide at this, then narrowed. He calculated swiftly, a well-honed skill of his. Clearly this was the famous spirit-possessed daughter of the she-demon Shan-pei, and the other one must therefore be the eldest daughter of Chen. An interesting opportunity-it would not hurt to put the Shan-pei in his debt, and the Chens were also numerous, prosperous, and attentive of their obligations. He stepped back from the door and motioned them forward.
This room held a scratched table, three oak desks, with accompanying swivel chairs, one desk with a manual Underwood on it, the two others supplied with abacuses, two steel tube chairs with green oilcloth seats, several oak filing cabinets, a Barcalounger in green leatherette, a television on a metal stand, a typewriter table with a large many-keyed machine that Lucy recognized as a Chinese typewriter, and a tangerine tree in a big round blue ceramic pot. The walls were stained dark yellow-brown with decades of cigarette smoke. It smelled of boiled rice and old paper and tobacco and ink.
Mr. Kuen sat in one of the swivel chairs and favored the girls with a smile, about which the only genuine thing was the gold in three of the front teeth.
“An account, you said?” he inquired.
“Yes, Venerable Kuen. I have one hundred and ninety-two dollars.”
Mr. Kuen nodded and held out his hand. It was not a contemptible sum. Some of Mr. Kuen’s clients made that every week, others every two minutes. Mr. Kuen paid no interest on deposits, nor did he pay attention to the Internal Revenue Service or to the currency regulations of the United States of America. The house of Kuen had therefore many customers. He counted the bills and placed them in a desk drawer. Then he got out a cheap pad and a ballpoint pen. Passing them across the desk to Lucy, he said in Cantonese, “Write your name.”
Lucy wrote the character equivalent to the sound kap in Cantonese, which means grade or rank, and then the characters for old and poetry, or teacher, louhsi. Mr. Kuen took a ledger from the desk drawer, made a notation in a three-hundred-year-old code, wrote some characters on the pad, tore the slip off, and handed it over. Lucy tucked it away without impolitely studying it. She knew very well that it would be honored for $192 or its equivalent in goods in every Chinese community from Penang to Panama. After some ritual words expressing the honor that the house of Kuen realized from her patronage and Lucy’s declining of that honor, instead expressing the deep obligation she felt toward the house of Kuen (which was more nearly true), the girls left.
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