by S. J. Rozan
“Ling Wan-ju, I don’t control the Golden Dragons. They have no loyalty to me or to anyone.”
“Then why does he care about what you wouldn’t like?”
Mr. Gao looked at me for a moment, wordless in the peaceful dusk of his ancient shop.
“I cannot control their actions,” he said. “Or instruct them, or advise them. They are a mountain cataract, racing over rocks. A river is contained by its banks, perhaps more than it knows, but it does not consult them.”
I wasn’t in the mood for philosophical Chinese nature metaphors. “Three Brothers is a powerful tong,” I said. “And Trouble is afraid of you.”
He nodded. “I cannot control them,” he repeated. “But I can bring justice.”
“Justice? What are you talking about?”
“If you want, they can be punished for this attack.”
“They can?” Visions of Trouble stuffed head first into a garbage can filled my mind. “You can do that?”
“Yes. But,” he fixed his black eyes on me steadily, “you must consider carefully, Ling Wan-ju.”
“Consider? Why? I want them stomped and kicked and punched and walking barefoot on broken glass!”
“I know you want that. In your place I would want that and more.” He paused, looking into the dimness. I realized my head was hurting less, and I was warm. “I have known you all your life,” Mr. Gao mused. “I knew your father’s family in China. I think your father would be pleased at the woman you are becoming.”
“My mother says I’m causing him indescribable agonies in the afterlife.”
“Your mother is concerned for your well-being and your future. As are your brothers. The path you have chosen is unusual, and therefore, some think, unsafe.”
I shifted a little, felt my ribs ache. “Maybe they’re right,” I said gloomily.
Mr. Gao smiled, a small soft smile. “Danger can mean many things. For you, not to do this work might be even more dangerous.”
“Grandfather, don’t. I can’t think well enough to follow you right now.” Something occurred to me. “Why did you come get me? How did you know what happened?”
“A shopkeeper called me. The baker, from further up the block.”
I thought. “The bakery doesn’t open on to the courtyard.”
“He didn’t know what was happening, but he told me you were going along the block asking questions about the Golden Dragons. He had seen some Golden Dragons go into Lucky Seafood, and you had gone in also. They had come out, and you had not.”
A smart man, that baker. An astute observer. A hero. I promised to buy all my New Year’s sweets from him forever.
“Can you drink more tea?” Mr. Gao arose.
“Not if it tastes like that. Grandfather, can you really punish them for this?”
He clinked and stirred in the rear of the shop, returning with a cup of clear, golden liquid. “Yes,” he said. “But are you sure you want that?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
He handed me the tea, sat again. “Did the meeting you had requested with the Golden Dragons’ dai lo come about?”
“Yesterday? Yes.” I noticed he had delicately refrained from asking me if it was I who had been at that meeting.
“And whatever business it is that has gotten you involved with the Golden Dragons, is it concluded yet?”
“No.” Suspiciously, I lifted the tea to my lips. This one had a thin, delicate scent and a mild, sweet taste.
“Perhaps, then, the river should be allowed to flow to the sea.”
He didn’t elaborate. I drank my tea. When I’m king, I decided, nature metaphors will be outlawed. “You mean, as long as it’s cost me this much already, I shouldn’t mess up my chances of solving this case by taking Trouble out of circulation?”
He smiled. “I’m glad you’re feeling better.” Then he said, “There is another reason also. When I greet you on New Year’s Day, we will exchange oranges for luck.”
I got that one. That’s how it works, on New Year’s: You give someone an orange, and he gives one to you. That’s how it works any time. If Mr. Gao and the Three Brothers tong punished the Golden Dragons for attacking me, I would owe them. Mr. Gao was suggesting I think twice before incurring that kind of debt.
“Grandfather,” I said, “you’re a quiet man. Quiet men keep secrets, and therefore many people speak to a quiet man.”
He nodded without an answer.
“Has anyone spoken about a robbery? Three days ago, porcelains taken from the Chinatown Pride building?” Nora would kill me for telling Mr. Gao, but I’d already spilled it to Trouble—assuming he hadn’t known already—and quiet men keep secrets.
“Porcelains,” Mr. Gao repeated. “No, I haven’t heard about this. This is your case, Ling Wan-ju?”
“Yes, Grandfather. For many reasons they—Chinatown Pride, I mean—don’t want anyone to know. I thought the Golden Dragons must have been involved somehow, because it was their territory, but now I find out it’s not anymore.”
“No. It isn’t.”
“Do you know the gang who’ve taken it over? Bic, and the Main Street Boys?”
“Do you intend to continue to pursue this?” he asked.
“Yes, I do. I was hired to do a job and I haven’t done it yet.”
“Then be prepared.”
“For what?”
“For danger.”
“Are you telling me not to let the Main Street Boys bushwhack me the way the Golden Dragons did?”
His unblinking black eyes fixed on me in a way they never had before, a way that made me almost unable to continue to meet them. “I am telling you, as I told you before, that danger comes in many forms. Anyone with eyes and ears would be frightened of the Golden Dragons. Anyone’s ribs can be bruised by a kick.”
Meaning what? I asked myself wearily. Lydia Chin doesn’t have the brains she was born with?
Or meaning that some dangers are less obvious than others, and not, perhaps, dangerous to everyone in the same degree?
F I F T E E N
I ran a hot bath, according to Mr. Gao’s directions, and opened one of the square, paper-wrapped packages of herbs into it. While it was filling I called Bill.
“Hi,” he said. “How’re you doing?”
“Terrible,” I said. “Rotten lousy horrible bad terrible.”
I told him what had happened.
“I’m coming over,” he said.
“No. You can’t.”
“Watch me.”
“No, Bill, please. If you’re here when my mother gets home she’ll know something’s really wrong.”
“If your face looks like a pillowcase full of eggs she’ll know anyway.”
“I can handle it. But just seeing you upsets her.”
“That’s not my fault.”
“No, it’s not. But it’s my problem. Listen,” I said, and I swallowed. “I’d like to have you here. I would. I … but please don’t come, okay?”
There was silence on his end of the line. “Tell me you’re really all right,” he said.
“I’m really all right. Mr. Gao gave me herbs for my bath. He says I don’t have any broken bones or concussion or anything. Actually, I’ve been hurt worse than this in bouts in the days when I used to fight Tae Kwon Do tournaments.”
“Actually, you have not.”
I listened to the rush of bath water. The empty apartment felt lonely and sad. “You’re right. I’ve never been beat up like this and I hate it. I want to be all right and I want you to come over and I want to solve this stupid case so we don’t have to work on it anymore. But my head is killing me and I’m all sore and you can’t come over anyway, so unless there’s something I need to know right now I’m going to take a hot bath and go to bed. I’ll call you later, when maybe I’ll be able to think like a detective and we can work on the case. Okay?”
He agreed about as reluctantly as I’d ever heard him agree to anything.
“You’d better call,” he said. “B
ecause I’ll call you if you don’t. And you know your mother hates that.”
“I’ll call.”
The bathroom was full of rolling steam and of scents that made me think of silent stands of pine on high mountains, of mist and moss and tiny creamy white flowers and no gangsters anywhere at all. I lowered my aching self into the water tinted green with Mr. Gao’s herbs. The enveloping heat was so comforting I almost started to cry. A dried chrysanthemum blossom floated by. I brushed the surface of the water, watched the leaves and twigs bobble away.
Maybe I should give up this detective nonsense. Think of all the people I’d make happy. I could become an apothecary, studying with Mr. Gao until I knew all the Chinese medicines, all the plants and roots and ground bones and their uses and properties. Maybe knowing that would satisfy my need to know, to get to the bottom of things, to dig and dig until nothing was hidden from me anymore.
Maybe that was a good idea.
Maybe I’d think about it.
After I found the Blair porcelains, and found a way to let Trouble know he couldn’t do this to Lydia Chin.
The bath was beginning to cool, and I was aching a lot less, when I realized with a guilty start that there was one phone call I was going to have to make, now.
I dried off, pulled on a long-sleeved T-shirt and some leggings, and dialed the Fifth Precinct. I was hoping Mary wouldn’t be there, but she was.
“Hey,” she said cautiously. “What’s up?” I rarely call Mary at work. If she’d come up with anything about Bic that she thought I’d want to know—or that she could tell me—she would have called me, and she knew I knew that.
“Don’t yell at me,” I started.
“That means you did something bad.”
There wasn’t any better way to tell her than to just jump in and tell her. “I got roughed up a little by some Golden Dragons this afternoon.”
“ ‘Roughed up a little’? What does that mean?” I could almost see her propelled out of her seat in the noisy squad room. “Where are you? Are you all right?”
“I’m all right. I’m home. It’s okay, Mary. I’m only calling you because they took my gun.”
“Your gun? The Golden Dragons? What happened?” she demanded.
I gave her as short a version as I could come up with.
“God, Lydia,” she said, blowing out air with an exasperated sound. “You’re nuts. They have a dead boy, a dead Dragon in another gang’s territory, and you yell both gangs’ names all up and down the block and then you wonder why you get hurt!”
“I don’t wonder,” I said huffily. “I didn’t call you to ask why I got hurt. And I didn’t get all that hurt. And I wasn’t yelling!”
“How hurt are you?” Her voice was cold.
“I saw Mr. Gao. He sent me home with herbs.” I didn’t tell her he’d rescued me. I didn’t want her to know I’d needed rescuing.
“He says you’re okay?”
“Uh-huh.”
“All right,” she said. For Mary, as for me, Mr. Gao’s word was enough on things like this. She seemed to warm up just a little. “Now tell me why you needed to know who’s protecting which businesses on that corner.”
“I can’t.”
“Lydia! When the Golden Dragons go to all that trouble to keep you out of their business it must be important business. We have a dead Dragon in Queens and any minute now we’re expecting the streets to be littered with Main Street Boys. I want to know why.”
“They’re not yet?”
“Who’s not yet?”
“The streets. Littered with Main Street Boys.”
“The retaliation hasn’t come. But hey, it’s only been a day. These guys can nurse grudges over less for years.”
“Over less. But don’t they usually take care of important stuff pretty fast?”
“Yeah, but not necessarily this fast. Or maybe there’s something else going on here, other factors they’re considering. Like what you’re doing. So tell me about it.”
“Mary, I can’t. Too many people’s face is involved.”
“Including yours?”
“Of course including mine. If I get known as a p.i. who tells all, I’m finished, and not just in Chinatown.”
“You could be finished faster if you don’t take Trouble seriously.”
“I am taking him seriously.” Which might mean something different to me from what it meant to Mary. “But I can’t believe the dead guy is related to what I’m working on.”
“Excuse me? Which one of us has a bloody nose?”
“What I think happened,” I said, feeling my nose, “what I think is that the Golden Dragons are planning to deal with the Main Street Boys soon and they don’t want anybody pointing out the connection too loudly. That’s all.”
“Just a coincidence.”
“Right.”
“Ridiculous.”
“It is not! Oh, come on, Mary. I’m sore and I have a headache. I want to report a stolen gun and then I want to take a nap.”
“In a minute. I’ll pass you to a uniform for paperwork on the gun. You don’t want to press charges?”
“No. Why? There won’t be any witnesses, and Trouble and his boys will have a dozen respectable citizens to alibi them.”
She didn’t argue with me about that; she knew it was true. But she said, “I don’t like this, Lydia. I don’t like having to deal with you like cop and p.i.”
“I don’t either, Mary. And the minute I feel like it’s okay to tell you what my case is I will. Or the minute I feel like it’s more important that you know than that I keep my promise to my client.”
“I don’t think you can make that decision on your own.”
“I’m going to have to.”
In her silence I could hear cop conversations around her. “All right,” she finally said. “All right, Lydia. I just don’t want you to get hurt.”
“Too late. But I’m okay, Mary. I really am.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
She sighed, then said, “Look, I’m sorry about your gun. I know it meant something to you. Maybe we can get it back.”
That’s what I love about Mary. She knows what’s important in life.
“Thanks.”
“Lydia? What are you going to tell your mom?”
“I fell off a roof?”
“I think you used that last time.”
“I think you’re right. What haven’t I used lately?”
“Runaway horse? Tripped on the sidewalk?”
“Slipped on a banana peel? What do you tell your mom when you get hurt?”
“I never get hurt. I’m a cop. This is the safest job in the world.”
She transferred me to a uniform who took the information about my gun and the permit for it. When I hung up, I peeled a tangerine and wandered around the apartment eating it. The juice was sweet but it stung my lip where it was cut. Coincidence, I’d told Mary. My case and the dead boy and Trouble’s warning to me had nothing to do with each other.
Mary hadn’t believed it.
Neither did I.
But if there was a connection, I sure didn’t know what it was. I washed sticky tangerine juice off my hands and climbed into bed. I snuggled under the covers and tried to cut my mind loose from the demand for logic, to see if just free associating would help me figure anything out.
Within minutes, I was asleep.
S I X T E E N
The only real piece of luck I had that day was that my mother wasn’t home when I got there.
But she did come home. The clinking of keys—or, a single key—in four locks woke me up. I pushed the covers aside and sat up stiffly as my mother poked her nose into my room.
“Ling Wan-ju! Why are you in bed in the middle of the day? Are you sick? Let me see you.”
“I’m fine, Ma.” That wasn’t going to work, but it was a good position to retreat from. I got carefully out of bed.
“Fine? Look at you! Your cheek is swollen. You’re movin
g as though you’re made of porcelain and you’re afraid you’ll break! What happened to you?”
Made of porcelain, I thought. Very funny, Ma. “Nothing. I made a mistake. I’m fine.”
“A mistake? What does that mean?”
“It means I’m as foolish as you’re always saying I am.” I moved gingerly to my dresser, trying to keep my face from showing the clamps of pain that grabbed my ribs and back in syncopated rhythm.
“What are you doing? Get back into bed. I’m going to see Grandfather Gao.”
“I already saw him, Ma. He gave me those.” I pointed to the two kinds of square packages piled on my desk.
My mother sniffed at them. “For tea or for the bath?”
“Both.” I pulled a thick snuggly sweatshirt over the long-sleeve T, replaced the leggings with quilted trousers. I sat on the bed and stuffed my feet into heavy wool socks, stood again feeling about as warm and enveloped as I could outside of my blankets.
“What are you doing?” she demanded again.
“I drank the tea. I had the bath. I’m going out.”
“To get in more trouble? Ling Wan-ju …”
“Ma, I’m working. I’ll try to be home for dinner but don’t wait.” At the door I put my shoes on; bending down was hard, so I sat on the floor. My mother’s lips flattened into a thin line. As I worked my way into my jacket and left she was lighting three sticks of incense at the little altar in the living room. I didn’t know who she was talking to, or about what, but I could guess.
At the first pay phone I came to I called Bill’s number. I got his service, told them I was at my office, and headed there.
It was late afternoon. Neon glowed red, yellow, and blue against the purple-gray sky. The fish and five-spice smells were strong as the restaurants prepared for the dinner crowd. People hurried home with bags of groceries as I walked slowly the other way, out to my office beyond the outskirts of Chinatown.
I needed to think and, if I could find him, to talk to Bill: two things I couldn’t do at home.
The three women—two Chinese, one white—who ran the travel agency were doing end-of-the-business-day things when I got there. We all smiled and greeted each other, and no one asked about my swollen jaw. Maybe it didn’t look so bad. Or maybe their mothers had just raised them well.