One Red Bastard

by Ed Lin

  Chatham Square was a good place to get a look at the kids walking around because it was close to Drew’s home, Confucius Plaza, the biggest subsidized housing project in Chinatown. The project itself was to the north on Bowery above Division.

  At the square we were close to the active gang boundaries near Confucius Plaza. On top of that, Bowery was the unofficial border between KMT-affiliated Chinatown, to the west, and Communist-affiliated Chinatown, to the east. More tourists were on the west side, but the growth was on the east side, where the liberal-minded and college-educated youth bought up Mao badges from the Cultural Revolution to wear to their comparative-literature classes.

  There was usually a lot of action in this border zone. The Pagoda Theater nearby on Catherine saw shootings as regularly as the weekend matinee was changed. I also thought about poor Drew’s face.

  “The guy in the blue ski jacket,” said Vandyne. “Would you say he has a skinny face?”

  “Wait a second,” I said, as I paged through the thesaurus. “I would actually use the word ‘lean.’ That seems like the right word. Chinese people have extra fat in their cheeks so I would never say that one had a ‘skinny’ face.”

  Vandyne measured up his guy against markings on a nearby streetlamp pole.

  On Vandyne’s suggestion we used pieces of duct tape to mark out heights of four, five, and six feet on poles, signposts, and building corners. Now we could get good approximations of height to go with our otherwise abysmal descriptions.

  “There’s Mean Face,” I said, tipping my head in his direction.

  “There he is,” said Vandyne. We watched him push up his knit wool cap and scratch his forehead. “If anybody ever says a guy with a mean look on his face did something, we’re going to swing by and pick him up.”

  “He drives a car, so we should call and make him pick us up.”

  “Exactly. Why should we waste the gas? Goddamn sixty-five cents a gallon.”

  “Whoa! I’m glad I don’t have a car.”

  “If you did, then you could take Lonnie out for a weekend trip.”

  “A trip where?”

  “Well, there are some really nice gardens to go see.”

  “Gardens?”

  “Out in Pennsylvania, the guy who founded DuPont set up a huge garden that covers his estate. It’s open to the public and it’s a nice place to take a girl. I’m only mentioning it because I’m going to be taking Rose there.”

  I was so happy I nearly fell off my bench. “That’s great, Vandyne. I guess lunch went pretty well?”

  “Yeah, it did.”

  “So you guys are figuring on getting back together?”

  “Maybe, man, maybe. We’re just going to take it really slow. I think getting out of the city will help give us perspective.”

  I nodded. The last time I saw Rose it was a few months ago in a Chock Full o’Nuts and she was crying to me that she and Vandyne never talked anymore. Not too long after, she left Vandyne in Elmhurst, Queens, for her sister’s home in Manhattan, a four-story brownstone with a view of the Hudson. The sister was married to a Chinese-American doctor who probably went to Midtown for Chinese food.

  “You guys have already met up a few times in the city, right?” I asked.

  “Few times. I think the best time was going to see Labelle in concert.”

  “That must have been great. I’ve heard those three girls go crazy onstage.”

  “You should have seen the outfits they had on, it was nuts.”

  I noticed that Lincoln was walking toward us from East Broadway. When he saw us, he picked up the pace.

  “Aw, shit. This guy’s gonna give us away,” I said.

  “Shit.”

  “Hey you guys,” said Lincoln. “Thanks for following me around and harassing me.”

  “We’re harassing you?” I asked. “You came running up to us. We’re sitting here by ourselves minding our own business.”

  “I know what you’re doing. You’re taking pictures of kids. You’ve already convicted them in your minds just like how you’re trying to set me up for the murder of Mr. Chen!”

  “I’m also gonna pin a few more murders on you, Lincoln. All the cases I can’t solve.”

  “There must be a lot of those.”

  “Go back to your bong, Lincoln.”

  He pointed to the thesaurus in my hands. “Reading on the job, huh?”

  “It’s a thesaurus.”

  “Find a synonym for ‘pig.’”

  Vandyne spoke up. “Listen, Lincoln. For your information, I want you to know that it’s probably best not to give us grief. I’m a fairly rational person but my partner here can be provoked pretty easily.”

  “You’re threatening me? We’re both people of color being oppressed in a capitalist prison run by whites. You need to see things as they are, brother.”

  “Don’t you ‘brother’ me!” snapped Vandyne. “Chow’s my brother, not you!” Lincoln shook his head and walked away.

  Hearing Vandyne say that made me feel good. I hoped as hard as I could that things would work out with Rose.

  I sipped my coffee and looked for stupid gang kids that I could write lean descriptions of.

  I think I’m going to have to find a new job, Robert,” said Paul. We were at the Chatham Square Library. I was reading through back issues of Chinese-language newspapers to see if there was something I had missed that could be crucial to Mr. Chen’s case.

  “Why would you have to find a new job?”

  “Think about it. If Carter wins, then there’s going to be a big push into alternative energy. Solar energy, wind energy, and geothermal energy. We’re going to cut way back on fossil fuels, and that means less money for oil exploration. That’s going to zap the research funds for my department at the geological observatory.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. This country is always going to need oil like it needs doctors and lawyers. Your friendly local oilman isn’t going to cut back on research. He’s looking out for the next big oil patch.” I felt something hit my foot. It was a toy car. I kicked it away.

  “They won’t stop their own internal research, but they’ll cut the public research they fund. For the sake of public appearances, they’ll reallocate those funds into solar-panel research and wind turbines. The oil companies will even take out big advertisements saying how they’re actively researching renewable energy.”

  “You’re paranoid, Paul. Nobody is ever going to think a big oil company is seriously looking into something that will make it extinct.”

  “If the political tide turns against your company or your entire business sector, you don’t have to change what you do if you can change the public’s perception of your company.” He looked thoughtful. “Maybe I should be studying communications.”

  “Maybe you should be communicating less so that I can read in silence.”

  He made a face and opened another book. I wondered about Paul’s generation. He and his friends could speak Cantonese fairly fluently, but I didn’t know anybody his age who could read Chinese characters. In fact, I was the youngest person I knew who could. That meant that I was among the last of the Chinese Americans who could read the language of his ancestors.

  I guess I could try to help Paul learn it, but I had been a lousy student and that probably made me an even worse teacher.

  I read through several days’ worth of the KMT-backed newspaper and got almost nothing new. The Communist-backed paper continued its blackout on Mr. Chen’s death. The Hong Kong–backed newspaper had news only about celebrities and businessmen, and Mr. Chen had been neither.

  It was early morning and I was on my way to the precinct when I saw Mean Face a few yards ahead of me. It was too good a chance to pass up.

  I followed him down to the corner and then came around to the exit of a three-level garage where the dispatch-car companies kept their Lincolns Continentals.

  I tried not to smile. This was where my gang used to prowl, one of the best places to hack off “Continent
al” emblems. That was how we got our name, and collecting emblems was a way to solidify our collective identity.

  We were all U.S.-born kids and when the immigration laws changed in the early 1960s, all these other kids came in from Hong Kong and tried to push us around. There was nothing like beating someone up and leaving a Continental emblem shoved in their belt.

  The Hong Kong kids weren’t stupid, though. They got in good with the associations and pretty soon they had nice clothes, nice hair, and guns. The Continentals faded away because we knew, as native English speakers, that we weren’t going to be trapped in Chinatown the rest of our lives. These streets weren’t worth a fight to the death for us.

  I didn’t want to kill anybody until I was in Nam.

  I ducked into the parking garage and looked around. The stairwell was where I remembered it. My eyes fell upon Mean Face, who was sitting on a concrete bumper.

  “Hey,” I said. “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”

  “We don’t have to pretend, Officer Chow. I know who you are. You know who I am.”

  “I know who you are but I don’t know your name.”

  “Call me Lee.”

  “All right, Lee. Are you loitering here?”

  “You want to play that game?” he asked, rising to his feet. “Fine with me. I won’t tell you what I know.”

  “What do you know?”

  “Well, I don’t know where the guy with the mole is, the driver you’re looking for, but I do know someone you might be looking for even more.”

  “Who?”

  “I think I know who killed that diplomat guy from China.”

  “Who killed him?”

  “You’ve been following him around! I’m surprised you haven’t been able to shake it out of him. It’s Lincoln!”

  “How do you know? You were there with him?”

  Lee shifted his weight and crossed his arms. “You keep pushing me like this, I can stop right now.”

  “Hey, I only said that because you’re his second-in-command, aren’t you? You play backup at the Union of the Three Armies.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “We’re co-leaders of the group. Equals.”

  “Except you never killed anybody, right? The worst you ever did was throw snapper pops at tourists.” Those were the Chinatown novelty toys, crystals wrapped in paper, that made loud popping sounds when they hit the ground. A tourist would think someone was firing a gun at their feet, trying to make them dance. “You drew an assault charge from that, didn’t you, Lee?”

  “It was dropped in exchange for an apology!” He crossed his arms. “After that, I stopped protesting the tourist buses and got a real job, driving cars.”

  “I wish more of our shiftless young men followed your example. So what were you going to tell me about Lincoln?”

  “Well, it’s just that after the killing, a few of the guys in the group were sort of wondering about Lincoln. Where he was that night.”

  “He wasn’t with you?”

  “We were waiting at the usual spot. OK Noodle. You know, where you were watching us.”

  “You saw me?”

  “Naw, I didn’t. Teresa told me about it.”

  “So you guys were all sitting around, eating and waiting.”

  “Yeah, mostly waiting because it was his turn to treat. Luckily we’re regulars there, so they let us put it on a tab, but still . . .” Lee shook his head and dug his hands up into his armpits.

  You don’t screw over Chinese people when it comes to food or money, and certainly not both. You’ll hear about it every day for the rest of your life.

  “So Lincoln was AWOL,” I said. “Then what did you guys do?”

  “Everyone went home, but I was worried. This was probably two in the morning at this point. I stopped by his apartment and he wasn’t there. Teresa said he hadn’t been in all night.”

  “Then what?”

  “I waited with Teresa because she was so worried. She was freaking out, man. And that motherfucker never came back.”

  “When was the next time you saw him?”

  “Not until the next day, in the afternoon. He came to the food cart where I always get my lunch.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Division and Bowery. The old woman who runs it has Hakka food like pork and fermented tofu.”

  “Yuck. Why do you want to eat Hakka food?”

  Lee gave me a hard look. “Because I’m Hakka.”

  “Oh.”

  “And so is Lincoln, even though he can’t speak Hakka.”

  “The Hakkas have a long and proud history. You people are really hard workers.”

  Hakkas were originally a migratory tribe in central China that later settled in the southeast and in Taiwan. Of course, the people already living in the areas that the Hakkas settled in regarded them as barbarians who only happened to know how to bathe and clothe themselves.

  Hakkas seemed to have a knack for being at the forefront of political change. Sun Yat-sen and Madame Chiang Kai-shek were Hakkas. So was Mr. Chen.

  The funny thing is that the casual Cantonese observer can’t tell if someone is Hakka by appearance or even surname. Hakkas maintain their identity through their unique culture, which includes the Hakka dialect and their food. It is hidden like a secret power.

  “You know what the problem is with Hakka food?” I said. “It’s way too salty. That’s bad for your health.”

  “It’s salty because Hakkas were always manual laborers and you Cantonese forced us to live on the land that was hardest to farm on. We used to sweat so much we needed to eat salt to get it back into our system.” Lee looked me in the face. “You are Cantonese, aren’t you?”

  “I consider myself Chinese American. But let’s get back to your Hakka friend, Lincoln. You saw him at the salty food cart and then what?”

  “I asked him if he had heard about Mr. Chen. By then, it was all over the place.”

  “How did he react?”

  “Well, even before I asked him, he was looking terrible. His eyes were bloodshot and he was acting all jumpy. I asked him why he didn’t come to the restaurant and he told me to tell everyone that he was sick and spent the night at my place.”

  “Did you tell him that you were over at his place? With Teresa?”

  “I told him I stopped by. Let’s get something straight right now. I would never mess around with Teresa.”

  “Because she’s not Hakka?”

  “No. A good Communist respects personal relationships. We don’t sleep around like Chiang Kai-shek and other dissolute KMT officials.”

  I thought about all the rumors of Mao and illiterate peasant girls but I decided not to bring it up.

  “Well,” I asked, “what makes you think he killed Mr. Chen? Just because he didn’t make it home doesn’t mean he’s a murderer.”

  “He has been saying over and over that Mr. Chen should be executed for being a traitor to the Communist cause.”

  “Talk’s cheap.”

  “When I saw him he was wearing an outfit he kept at our little clubhouse. He must’ve changed clothes there.”

  “I see.”

  “And Teresa said her rolling pin was missing. Lincoln must have taken it. And used it. You should search our clubhouse. You might find some bloody clothes.”

  “I’m not sure I believe you. If I check with Teresa, is she going to say the same exact things as you?”

  “She might not want to talk to you at all.” Lee rubbed his hands. “You have a bad reputation.”

  “I wouldn’t think cops would be too popular among you revolutionary youths.”

  “You know that Teresa works at a restaurant, don’t you?”

  “I didn’t, but thanks for the information.”

  “She was a server at those big community banquets for a lot of years.”

  “Oh,” I said. I stuck my hands in my coat pockets.

  “She said that you barely seemed conscious, and your breath was practically flammable.”

 
“That was a long time ago. I’m not that way anymore.”

  “Actually, she did say that when you dropped in on Lincoln you seemed like a new person.”

  “I’m going to check in on Teresa. Thanks for ratting on your friend.”

  “I’m betraying a man but I’m true to the cause. I draw the line at violence.”

  It was almost noon when Vandyne and I got to Teresa and Lincoln’s apartment. She answered on the first ring and buzzed us up. When she opened the door, she said, “Oh! There are two of you!”

  “Are you alone?” I asked. I used English because her Cantonese was as bad as my Mandarin. Also, I wanted Vandyne in on the act, too.

  “Lincoln is at work,” she said, spitting out the words like they were candy gone bad. “Lee told me you would be coming over, but I thought you’d be alone.”

  “We have a few questions about Lincoln,” said Vandyne.

  “You talked to Lee, also?” she asked Vandyne.

  “Chow did,” he said.

  “You never thought Lincoln was cheating on you at all,” I said. “You think he murdered Mr. Chen. But I can’t figure out if you were really checking up on Lincoln or following me to warn him.”

  “What do you think?” she said.

  “I just told you what I thought!”

  “Oh. I did not think Lincoln killed Mr. Chen. Until Lee told me his story. Lincoln and his Hakka friends are out of control! They all think they are Sun Yat-sen, but they are really a bunch of irresponsible jerks!”

  “Even Lee?”

  “Lee is the least bad. At least he is in a job with some future. Someday he is going to own the car he drives and then the real money will come in.”

  “Something I wonder about you, Teresa.”

  “What?”

  “Your English is really good, especially for someone who just works in a restaurant.”

  “Take that as a compliment,” said Vandyne.

  “I work hard,” said Teresa. “I practiced English two hours every day when I got here. I listened to language tapes from the library instead of music.” To Vandyne, she added, “I really like black music.”