by S. J. Rozan
The sweatshop day had just ended. Women who’d been at their sewing machines since seven were haggling with vegetable sellers who’d been at their stands since eight. The women’s high-pitched voices cut through the shrieking laughter of children and the short-tempered shouts of the merchants who were only interested in How many? and Next! In the street a car drifted by with a blasting radio, the driver drinking in the sights, oblivious to the honking behind him. A wind-up plastic bird swooped, cawing, out of a street vendor’s hand and over the heads of the crowd, nosediving into a fire hydrant across the street.
By the time I reached the shop I was headed for, I was grateful for the soothing ring of a two-note chime as I opened the door, and even more grateful for the silence that followed when I closed it.
In the shop’s dim interior dark wood cabinets, built in China a hundred years ago, glowed in the light of glass-shaded lamps. Tiny brass knobs gleamed on rows of small, square drawers that ran practically to the ceiling. The air was rich with quiet scents, ginger and ginseng, honey and lotus root. Ceramic urns of various sizes sat in corners, on counters, and on top of the low, lionfooted table where old Mr. Gao would sit and drink tea with his customers when business was slow.
The shop was an apothecary, and old Mr. Gao, at the moment, was behind the counter, pouring-golden powder from a pewter scoop onto a white square of paper while an anxious woman watched. He was a tall, slow-moving man with sharp-knuckled, bony hands. Sparse threads of still-black hair ran straight back from his forehead over an age-spotted skull.
I stood a respectful distance away and listened to the quiet murmur of Mr. Gao’s voice. His fingers, deliberate and precise, folded the paper while he spoke. His words and the movement of his hands came to an end at exactly the same moment, and he handed his worried customer a perfectly square, flat little package. Thanking him, she grasped her purchase and bustled out.
Mr. Gao, a small, satisfied smile on his thin face, watched her until the two-note chime rang behind her and the door clicked shut; only then did he turn to me.
“Ling Wan-ju, what a delight.” He smiled. Speaking in Chinese, he used my Chinese name. Mr. Gao’s voice was soft; I couldn’t remember a time, no matter what was happening, that I’d ever heard him raise it. “Have you come for something to stop the young men from swarming around you like bees in the honeysuckle? Or are you here to bring me some New Year’s luck?”
“Neither, Grandfather.” I returned his smile. “I haven’t had much trouble with swarming bees lately. And I’m sure your continued prosperity in the New Year will have little to do with me.” Mr. Gao wasn’t really my grandfather: All my grandparents’ pictures have their places near the picture of my father at the little altar where my mother burns incense and spirit money to ease their lives in the next world. The title was one of respect.
“Well.” Mr. Gao turned, reached for one of the drawers. “To encourage the bees, I have a tincture—”
“I’m sure my mother’s already bought it, Grandfather. And I’m sure it would work, if the honeysuckle were willing.”
Mr. Gao closed the drawer and smiled at me again. “The bees cannot smell the nectar until the blossoms open. But flowers find their own time to seek the sunlight. With what can I help you, Ling Wan-ju?”
“Grandfather, I have the temerity to come here to ask for a favor.”
He nodded gravely. “I hope it is within my power to grant.”
“I have a friend,” I said carefully, “who would like to pay her respects to the dai lo of the Golden Dragons.”
Mr. Gao’s expression didn’t change. “Do you think,” he asked, “that that’s wise—of your friend?”
“She feels that it’s important,” I answered. “She’s trying to be wise, and also to be useful.”
“Is it more important to her to be wise, or to be useful?”
“Probably,” I said, “she’ll never be wise.”
Mr. Gao, pursing his lips, looked into the ancient shadows of his store. Beyond the clouded glass half-panel in the front door were the night streets of Chinatown. I could see shapes there, moving, blending, separating; beyond the silence I could hear muffled voices, like the dim moaning of long-forgotten ghosts.
“Wisdom comes only from experience,” Mr. Gao finally spoke. “And then only to one capable of profiting by it.” With a pencil, he stroked quick Chinese characters onto a sheet of paper, then folded it over. “The desire to be useful is a virtue, though who can tell what will come of it?” He handed the paper to me. “Tell your friend to come to this place tomorrow morning at ten. She must come alone. She will be safe.”
“Thank you, Grandfather.” I tucked the paper into my pocket. “My friend and I are in your debt.”
Mr. Gao, our business concluded, formally offered his respects to my mother and brothers, and I offered mine to his sons and his many grandchildren. The two-note chime rang behind me as I stepped from the shadows and silence of Mr. Gao’s shop into the icy scramble of Pell Street.
A cold wind was cheering on the scraps of paper that pounced on people’s ankles as I made my way up the street. I was tempted to go home, but I’d skipped karate class yesterday, and I don’t like to miss two days in a row. I subwayed up to the dojo in Tribeca and, after I’d stretched, was assigned by Sensei Chung to take the beginners through their exercises. Probably because I didn’t come yesterday, I grumped to myself. I strode up and down the rows of uneven shoulders and marshmallow fists, practicing patience, one of the virtues I have a little trouble with. Finally it was time for black belt sparring, and I got in two good bouts, practicing virtues I’m better at.
Later, flushed and invigorated, I changed my clothes and called Bill.
“I’m in your neighborhood, at the dojo,” I told him. “You have anything new?”
“At my age? But I’ll buy you a drink.”
We met at Shorty’s, the bar Bill’s lived over for sixteen years—since the days when I was sneaking off to a corner of the schoolyard with Matt Yin. Bill was there when I got there, in a battle-scarred booth with an amber drink in front of him. I waved to Shorty behind the bar and slipped in across the table.
“You look gorgeous,” Bill told me. “Violence becomes you.”
I thanked him politely, and ordered a club soda with three limes from the waitress who came by.
“I’m getting a burger,” Bill said. “Are you interested in dinner?”
“No, thanks, my mother’s cooking. Something to do with scallions and bean thread.”
“Sounds great,” said Bill wistfully. He’s a big fan of Chinese cooking, but he doesn’t get invited to my mother’s meals.
“I’ll tell you about it,” I promised. I sipped my club soda, trying not, in that after-class thirst, to gulp it all down at once. “Did you come up with anything?”
“Maybe,” he said. “Not even a lead. A suggestion. But it’s better than nothing, because otherwise all I’ve got is nothing.”
The waitress brought his burger, thick and juicy-looking, smelling of the grill. I had that after-class hunger, too.
“A guy I know,” Bill began, fiddling with onions and ketchup, salt and pepper, “who, of course, doesn’t handle stolen art himself, but knows a guy who might know a guy—”
“Of course,” I agreed. I peeled the pulp out of a wedge of lime.
“This guy says that he hasn’t—that is, as far as he knows, his friends haven’t—been offered anything that might come from the Blair collection. But if he were—well, of course, now he’d call me, since he knows I’m looking and he’s eager to cooperate. But if I weren’t looking, and he had a nice piece of Chinese export porcelain for sale—something legitimate, you understand—”
“He sounds like a pain in the neck, this guy,” I interrupted, as Bill bit into the assembled burger. It was dark red inside, just this side of purple. That’s the way I like it best.
“Just a little cautious,” Bill said. “He’s been in business a long time.”
I finished the last of my lime. It was fresh and clean-tasting, but it didn’t clear the salty scent of grilled meat from my head.
“Anyway, if he had something along those lines for sale, he himself—he didn’t know what his friends would do—but he himself would offer it to the Kurtz Museum.”
“The Kurtz? Up on Fifth Avenue? The little townhouse one?”
Bill nodded, put the burger down. “They seem to be known for an extensive collection of export porcelains. They don’t display them all, but they’re apparently still collecting. Their director is an export porcelain expert.”
“An export expert? I like that.”
“He’s also, my friend says, a very aggressive acquisitor.” I didn’t think “acquisitor” was much of a word, but I didn’t bring it up. “He makes periodic buying trips to Europe, and his collecting has singlehandedly brought the Kurtz into the museum world big-time.”
“Does your friend—or his friends’ friends—actually mean to imply that the Kurtz might have stolen the Blair collection?”
“No.” Bill took up a knife and fork, cut a large chunk off the untouched side of his burger, and deposited it on my napkin. “He means that the thieves may know what he knows and that we should find out if the Kurtz has been offered any of the stolen pieces.”
“You sure?” I pointed at the burger chunk.
“It’s those almond-shaped waif eyes. I was getting a stomachache from the guilt. Besides, maybe you were starving to death and too polite to say so. Then your mother would be grateful to me for saving your life and invite me up for a ceremonial meal.”
“In your dreams.” I stuffed stray pieces of onion back inside the roll and chomped. The burger was tender, juicy, and completely satisfying. “Mmmmmm. Okay, we’ll go up to the Kurtz tomorrow. Did your friend have a name there?”
“Roger Caldwell. He’s the director. Make that noise again?”
“What noise?”
“ ‘Mmmmmm.’ ”
“Make it yourself.”
“I don’t speak Chinese.”
I finished my piece of burger and Bill finished his. “I have a date with the Golden Dragons’ dai lo tomorrow morning,” I said.
“ ‘Dai lo’? That’s Chinese for ‘godfather’?”
I shook my head. “ ‘Elder brother.’ But I think the idea’s the same.”
“It’s all set up?”
I nodded.
“My offer still stands. I’ll go with you.”
“Thanks,” I said. “But I’m supposed to go alone.”
“If they were involved—”
“If they were involved they’ll just tell me to get lost and hint at dark things happening to me if I don’t.”
“Or do dark things right then and there.”
“No, I’m going with a guarantee of safe passage, at least for this meeting.” I told Bill about Mr. Gao. “It’s if they weren’t involved that their dai lo might help us out, if he feels like it. But I don’t think he’d feel like it for a white guy.”
Bill couldn’t argue with me, although a tiny little piece of me wished he could.
“Why did you tell Mr. Gao it was a friend who wanted this favor, and not you?” he asked.
“Oh, Mr. Gao shouldn’t be doing this, setting up a meeting between a respectable daughter of a respectable family and a gangster. If anything bad should happen to me—”
“—which of course it won’t—”
“—which of course it won’t, Mr. Gao would lose face in a big way. This gives him an out: He didn’t know it was me. If I hadn’t given him an out he would have turned me down.”
“But he knew?” Bill lit a cigarette. The shadows on his face jumped in the flickering light of the match.
“Of course he knew. Everyone always knows. But those are the rules. Everyone knows those too.”
And of course, everyone does. It’s just that not everyone always plays by the rules.
F O U R
The address Mr. Gao had given me was a Chinatown tea shop not far from CP’s building. At two minutes to ten the next morning I was there, alone, as Mr. Gao had said I must be, and unarmed, as the phrase “She will be safe” implied I’d better be.
Except for the pudgy proprietor, the shop was empty when I walked in. He lumbered off his stool at the cash register and showed me to a table; then he shouldered aside a curtain into the back of the shop and disappeared.
I took off my hat and gloves, watching myself do that in mirrored walls that reflected endless Lydias, endless chrome chairs, dingy tablecloths, fluorescent lights. They made the small, square room seem, not larger, but confusing and distorted. A single crimson-and-gold New Year’s banner hung unevenly above the door. Smudged handprints clouded a glass case displaying sweets: almond cookies, bean-paste jellies, mooncakes. I could hear the snapping of sizzling oil from the kitchen behind the curtain, ready to receive three-flavor dumplings, which a tattered sign claimed was the specialty of the chef.
The fresh cold air that had come in with me was absorbed into the damp, rancid smell of corners unscrubbed for too long. No New Year’s cleaning had gone on in here, but four brand-new calendars featuring alluring Hong Kong actresses in uncomfortable-looking poses—and varying amounts of clothing—hung on the rear wall.
I waited, my heart idling slightly higher than usual, my skin prickling a little. Chinatown gangsters aren’t cute, or courtly, like the Mafia you see in the movies. They’re nasty. And the Golden Dragons had another drawback: They were independent. The tongs are the organized crime down here, and the gangs are their foot soldiers. The men in the tongs allow the boys in the gangs a certain amount of freedom of criminal activity—from which the tongs take a cut—as long as they’re available for errands for their elders. Like murder, kidnapping, and the occasional (though rare because they scare the tourists) firebomb.
Some gangs, though, aren’t related to any tong, and have carved out turf on their own. They’re unorganized crime. Nobody controls them.
The Golden Dragons were one of those.
It had been bitterly cold on my way over, and my fingertips were still burning. I would have loved some tea, but no one came to offer me any, or to ask if I wanted something sweet to eat. The proprietor hadn’t locked the door, but nobody came through it. Trying not to tap my foot on the floor, I waited some more.
Finally, the curtain moved. A tall, wavy-haired young man, his face decorated with a sneer and a sparse mustache, sauntered out. He stood and looked at me. I looked back, taking in his leather jacket, tight black jeans, loafers without socks. Even in this weather, bare ankles. Maybe I could do a paper: Cross-Cultural Expressions of Macho.
The sneer on his upper lip grew; I guessed that made it a smile. Unhurriedly, he crossed to my table, dropped onto the chair opposite me.
“Hey.” He arranged himself in the chair, one ankle on his knee, one arm on the table, letting the single syllable hang in the air between us. I didn’t reach for it. He spoke again, with a predatory smile. “So, you pretty cute. Old Gao didn’t told me that. You Chin Ling Wan-ju, huh?” From his Chinese pronunciation of my name, I could tell he was from someplace where the dialect was totally different from the Cantonese I was raised on. From his English I could tell he hadn’t been here very long.
Keep it bland and neutral, Lydia, I told myself. Don’t look scared and don’t try to look tough. “Yes,” I answered. “Or Lydia Chin. Are you the Golden Dragons’ dai lo?”
“What, you think I don’t looking like dai lo?”
“Are you him?”
He eyed me before he answered. “Why you want meet him?”
Before I could speak, the chubby proprietor pushed through the curtain with a pot of hot tea, two cups, and a plate of black bean cakes. He put them down on the grease-spotted tablecloth and shuffled out.
“So,” the young man said after we were alone again. He poured himself tea, leaving me on my own. “What you want, Lydia Chin?”
Oh, well, why not? “I’m a private
investigator. I—”
“What? No kidding!” He laughed. “You kidding. Private eye? Got no trenchcoat, got no gun—hey, you got gun?”
“No,” I said quickly. “No, I’m unarmed.”
“Maybe I better look.” He stood, leaving the smile behind.
I stood too, took off my own black leather jacket, held out my arms while he patted me down from behind, including places I couldn’t have been carrying a gun. I gritted my teeth and let him finish.
“All right!” I snapped hotly, when it seemed to me he was past finished. I pulled away and sat again. I caught a movement in the curtain and a derisive snort; the proprietor had treated himself to a peek. I poured some tea to give myself something to do while I got my temper under control. Mr. Macho Gangster sauntered back around the table, sat in his former chair.
“Got boyfriend?” he asked.
“You got a name?” I snapped that, too. Calm down, Lydia, I demanded. Or at least learn to fake it.
“Sure.” He picked up the smile where he’d left it. “Trouble.”
“Trouble?”
“Sure. You come looking for me, but I find you.” He chuckled. It must have been an old joke.
“Okay,” I said. “That’s fine with me.” I sipped some tea. It was oversteeped and bitter, and I didn’t need to be warmed up anymore. I put the cup down.
“So,” he said. “How come you looking for Trouble?”
I wanted to answer that I did it for a living. But even more, I wanted to ask what I’d come to ask and get out of there.
“I’m investigating a burglary that happened three nights ago. I want to find out if the Golden Dragons were involved.”
He showed me all his teeth in a smile. “What make you think I say?”
“Maybe I’ll be lucky.”
“Maybe not. But sure, you ask.”
“At the old school building on Mulberry Street. Where Chinatown Pride is now. Three nights ago, two crates of porcelains were stolen from their basement.”
“Porcelains?” Derision crackled in the word. “You think I stealing porcelains? What the hell I do with porcelains?”