Chinatown Beat

by Henry Chang

  “This the guy, huh? The Chinatown Rapist?”

  “That’s our impression of the guy.”

  “What a scumbag. I’ll post ’em Jack, sure, but I don’t know.”

  “What?”

  “There’s a thousand guys out there look like this.”

  “We gotta start somewhere.” Jack looked out the window, scanned the street where Lucky had been.

  “Sure, I’ll keep my ears open,” Billy said. “What else is up?”

  Jack put down the milk. “You seen Tat around, Billy?”

  “Tat?” Billy’s brow knitted. “That low life? Yeah, I seen him. Runs around with them punks following him.”

  “They ever come in here?”

  “Tried to sell me one of the fucking hundred-dollar orange trees on Chinese New Year.”

  “What happened?”

  “Dad was paid up with the On Yee and they called them off.”

  “Good.”

  “Otherwise I’d of blown them away. Tat don’t fucken scare me.”

  Jack watched him, said, “Where’s he hang now?”

  Billy grimaced. “What you want that scumball for?”

  “Nothing personal, Billy.”

  “Cops and hoods, huh?” Billy smirked. “The good turn bad, the bad gets worse. You sure like stepping in shit, Jack.”

  “I know it,” Jack agreed. “Supposed to be good luck.” He offered a dollar for the drink.

  “Don’t embarrass me, Jacky,” Billy said sternly, and Jack put his cash away.

  “Try the basements on Mott, Number Nine, Number Sixty-Six,” Billy said quietly.

  “Okay, one more thing.”

  “Shoot.”

  “You got any cardboard boxes? I’m cleaning out the old place.”

  Billy read Jack’s eyes. “Oh, yeah, I heard. Sorry about your old man.” He paused. “He was a right guy. A standup Chinaman, Jack.”

  “Yeah,” Jack said very quietly. “That he was.”

  “Come by later, I’ll tell the kid, put some aside.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You okay with it?”

  “Yeah, I’m okay.”

  They were silent a moment, then Billy’s ire came back and he yelled at some of the new workers as a tractor-trailer rolled in out front.

  “Damn jookies,” he said, referring to the cadre of newly arrived teenage Fukienese he had working upstairs in the hot room. “They just don’t get it. I told them, ‘Learn English. You won’t have to run away every time the gwai-lo comes in. You can do better. You don’t have to be stuck working here.’”

  He took a deep breath. “You think they listen? ‘How come you still here?’ the wiseguy says.”

  A crew of the young wetbacks sauntered toward the street and the tractor trailer. Billy shook his head at them, said derisively, through his frown, “Look at ’em, clothes don’t match but they perm their hair. At lunchtime they squat in the alleyway and pick their noses and spit clams on the wall. They talk too loud, and they laugh like hyenas. Refugees.”

  “Good help is hard to find,” Jack sympathized.

  “Cheap good help is hard to find,” Billy countered. “If it weren’t for me, they’d still be in the village, wearing them rubber sandals, gong hen, the shit still between their toes.” He watched them unloading the trailer, said, “You’re in America, I keep telling ’em. Be American.”

  “Yeah,” Jack twisted, “Be like us. Misery loves company.” They slapped palms and Jack added, “One last thing, I need to know about the Fuk Ching.”

  Just then it got busy in the shop, a sudden line of Midwestern tourists gawking at the Yellows, each buying souvenir packs of sweet tofu cake.

  Jack wised to Billy’s busy situation.

  Billy patted him on the shoulder, tipped his chin at him and said, “Later, Grandpa’s, around midnight.” Then he moved off into the hubbub, toward the truck.

  Jack finished the dao jeung and went out the side door, past the helpers unloading the sacks of beans, past the deliverymen with their carts full of cheung fun, broad noodles. He took a last look at Billy, who was barking orders into the air, then he put on his shades, and slipped into the Chinatown afternoon.

  Old Woman

  Because of the nature of the crime, as well as the race of the victim and the perpetrator, Jack took it personally, felt the case needed special attention. So he carried the victim photographs and the perp sketches down the side streets, on his day off, on neighborhood time.

  He came off of Mott onto Bayard, walking briskly toward the Tombs detention facility, toward the gaggle of old women gathered on the corner of Columbus Park.

  The fortune-telling ladies, elderly women who would have appeared more at home in a Toishan dirt village, congregated by the entrance to the park, squatting on low wooden footstools, spreading out their charts, drawings, herbs, the tools of their divinations. Some had little umbrellas raised against the mist.

  Jack sought out Ah Por, a wizened old woman wrapped in a quilted meen naap silk jacket, her tiny feet in sweat socks and kung fu slippers. She squatted among the old women, on her footstool, quietly chatting with another ancient spirit.

  The old women looked at Jack with great curiosity, though they were careful to avoid the rudeness of staring. They watched him sidewise, framing him in their peripheral vision. When he stepped up to Ah Por, there by the fence, the old women moved aside to allow him in, then re-formed around him, all wondering what this young Chinese man wanted from their eldest sister.

  Jack had remembered Pa going to Ah Por many years after Ma died. His visits were to get lucky words and numbers to play the Chinese Lottery, or to hear of good fortune. Now he was coming to Ah Por with victim photographs of young girls, Chinese girls with long black hair.

  There was neither recognition nor fear in Ah Por’s eyes. She simply accepted him with a sweeping graceful look, and he squatted down on one knee and held the two pictures in front of her.

  “Tell me about them,” he said.

  She took the photographs and studied them intently, then turned them upside down, narrowed her eyes again.

  Two preteen girls who looked enough alike that they might be sisters. Preppie school jackets, big smiles grinning out at the world, deep obsidian eyes.

  “This one is shy,” said Ah Por. “She holds back her laughter. The other is bright, a brave girl.”

  Ah Por took up her cup, rolled a bundle of bamboo sticks in her alm, letting them fall back into the cup, rolling them again, dropping them again. She did this for thirty seconds, did it with the practiced grace of someone telling rosary beads.

  She bobbed her head in a slow rhythmic nod, closed her eyes.

  Tai Seung, thought Jack, the art of reading faces.

  Ah Por awoke with a shudder. When she rattled the sticks in her cup, they all seemed to rise and dance near the rim. One stick shot out and it was numbered seventeen. She consulted her red booklet with the black ink-brushed Chinese characters, the Book of Fortunes.

  She stroked the pages with her long thumbnail, ran it down the columns of proverbs, tapped it on a section of fortunes.

  “The first one,” she said softly, “will marry a rich man and have two boys.” Jack leaned in with his ear.

  “The second will do well in school, make a lot of money.”

  Jack said nothing when she glanced at him.

  “But there is something bad following them, isn’t there?”

  Jack said quietly, “A bad man has hurt them.”

  Ah Por caught her breath. “Oh dear.”

  She repeated it several times and then there was a long pause, her eyes looking distant when she said, “I see fire, and someone with small ears.”

  “The bad man?” Jack asked.

  “Fire,” she repeated, voice so faint it was almost gone, “and small ears.”

  Jack got up, gave her five dollars. He thanked her and made his way through the circle of old women.

  Nothing, he thought. He had nothing but riddles
and proverbs, spirit mumbo jumbo and witchcraft.

  And someone was out there raping young Chinese girls.

  Nothing, he groused, as he came back around the park, passing through the queues of junket buses, caravans loaded down for Atlantic City, fat with Chinatown cash.

  On Canal Street, the last of the gray day was fading out around the gung chong por, factory women, slogging their plastic bags of groceries toward the subway.

  Jack turned onto Mott and headed back toward the Fury. He still had Billy’s boxes to get, and frustration once again fueled the need to get away from Chinatown.

  Change

  He took the Brooklyn Bridge across the East River, felt the rumble leave the tires as they bit into the steel grating, the car making a blurring dull buzz-saw sound as it descended toward land.

  He drove down the sloping streets south to the Forties, to Sunset Park, the newest Chinatown and his new neighborhood. He had moved out here a year ago, only the second place he could call his own, the first being the Chinatown railroad flat he had shared with Wing Lee that teenage summer before his friend was murdered.

  Once a Scandinavian community called Finntown, Sunset Park had become largely Latino, but in the 1990s, the Chinese garment industry had followed low rents out of Manhattan, settled into old warehouses and factories here, blazing the way for the thirty thousand Malaysians and Fukienese who came afterward. Their food shops ran along the main streets, bringing to South Brooklyn the aroma of the Asian hot pot.

  Jack took a studio apartment in a renovated red-brick condominium building. It had a view of the harbor and the Bush Terminal docks and, ten minutes across the river, it felt like another world, light-years from the Chinatown he’d grown up in.

  He liked the sight of the ships, the freighters that glided across the water, nestled into their docks by the tugs bumping alongside. The way the sunsets played over the harbor was like new medicine, soothing, long overdue.

  Now, however, there was nothing but darkness spreading across the overcast horizon.

  He poured a Johnny Black into a tumbler and chased it with beer, felt an easy peacefulness settling over him as he scanned the studio.

  Even now, a year after he’d moved in, he still kept things to a minimum, mostly portable, transient, disposable items, his life in flux. The spirit of his father, the sojourner, was still in his blood. He leaned back in the recliner, taking a visual inventory of the room.

  There was the convertible sofa bed, a Trinitron TV on a plastic Parsons table, and a halogen floor lamp. At the end of the table was a compact digital clock/radio/stereo CD/tape player, and on the windowsill sat a miniature orange tree.

  Across from the kitchenette stood a black folding table bearing stacks of Newsweek, Guns & Ammo, and a disconnected beeper he’d bought so Pa could call him, but he never had. There were a few books: Wing Chun, the deadly art of thrusting fingers, and Choy Li Fut Kung Fu. Beneath all that was a bar stool; a pair of dusty Rollerblades rested against the baseboard.

  He had a Mr. Coffee, a wok, a twenty-five-pound sack of rice in a Tupperware barrel.

  The only thing on the walls was a poster he’d gotten from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Japanese one with the wave crashing.

  In the bank, he had the eight thousand dollars he’d saved. He had no outstanding payments or mortgage debt, his financial life was balanced on a cop’s salary. His was a workingman’s life, so much like Pa’s, a slave to his paycheck, never knowing the luxurious lifestyle of the people he was duty bound to serve and protect.

  His thoughts flashed wide and scattered, his mind adrift, anchorless. He ate takeout from Eighth Avenue, reloaded the black knapsack, felt he needed to finish something so he finished the Johnny Walker and fell out, puzzling over the old family photographs with the radio on.

  The Easy Score

  The Yee Bot was a Fuk Ching gambling-spot setup in a tenement storefront, one of many in a long row of walk-up tenements fading to the far end of the street. Lucky knew this end of East Broadway, knew it was the Chinese frontier, where they had pushed into areas traditionally Jewish, now mixed with spics and niggers and squashed up against the East River into the Projects.

  He knew the tenements connected along their backyards, like a spine running between them, some of the passageways blocked up or gated. He had broken into some of these apartments when he was younger, terrorized the neighborhood until one day he entered a place he thought was Chinese but was actually Puerto Rican and almost got shot dead. He stayed clear of that end of East Broadway until he hooked up with the Ghosts, quietly watching the neighborhood fill with Fukienese businesses.

  The Yee Bot or “Twenty-eight” spot was a local hangout of the Fuk Ching gang, located on what was technically a Fuk Ching street—that is the Fuk Benevolent Association was located nearby, its entrance fronted by matching larger-than-life Foo dogs.

  The Fuk Chings claimed to have thousands of members everywhere, bristling with heavy-duty weaponry and itching to do battle. On this particular end of East Broadway, however, they had only thirty-nine members, mostly lan jai, busted boys who were the remnants of splinter gangs affiliated with the Benevolent Association’s darker elements—gambling, drugs, nightclubs and prostitution. Rumor was the gang had split violently over profits.

  Lucky remembered the “Twenty-eight” had big gates up front, knew lots of heavy-duty protection was there. The Fuk Chings had started frisking patrons with electronic wands, believed they could stop weapons from getting in and challenging them. So far they had been right.

  But Lucky knew the tiny backyards between the tenements, where the rain gutters emptied out, were used for storage of cleaning materials. He knew the backyard, the backdoor, was the way in.

  Ghost spies had brought back a diagram.

  The “house,” nerve center of the gambling operation, was located in a recessed room halfway down a long hall. It was protected on both sides. All of the house action, cash and dealers, came out of that big room, which could be isolated by electric rollup gates that slid up into the ceiling. Everything in the joint was stacked toward the front. Lucky saw it all with wicked clarity: the backdoor was the way in.

  Lucky crossed the rooftop, scaled a short wall and dropped onto the adjacent rooftop landing below. He was confronted by a brick wall, reached in back of it and found a niche behind it. He felt around, started taking loose bricks out. Another niche. More bricks came out. Then he touched it, a bundle wrapped in plastic. He unwrapped it, revealing his favorite weapon, the Cyborg Bullpup, a nasty nine-shot twelve-gauge shotgun made up like the hi-tech tactical-assault something the SWAT guys used. It had a black-rubber stock and a top handle, black all over with front and back grips, ventilated shroud, the works.

  Lucky racked it, triggered and re-racked it, in love with the sound of metal sliding and catching. Shotguns couldn’t be traced, and besides, he had filed off all the serial numbers, smooth as porcelain. The Cyborg weighed ten pounds, heavy to carry, but he had it on an elastic shoulder sling that kept the monster tight to his side, under the white smock he wore, his right hand, his gun hand, inside on the trigger.

  The Mossberg 590 Cyborg Bullpup. Cost him two hundred, a steal. Bought it off some Haitian junkie who said it was used in a drug war in Washington Heights, wanted to dump it, probably had bodies on it. Lucky bought it anyway, knowing he’d never leave a trace on it. Use it, discard it. One time only and that time had come. The rest of his mad-dog crazies had cheap nine-millimeter pistols they could pop and drop. Throwaways.

  For ammunition, Lucky liked the Remington SPs; multi-range shot shells, it said on the box. Ten plastic shotgun shells filled with buffered, copper-plated shot. Keep out of reach of children, Lucky read with a grin. He liked the SPs because each shot shell contained different size shot, some smaller pellets to scatter the field, flush ’em out, then larger pellets to bring them down while delivering optimum energy and penetration at longer ranges, the box said. Yeah, thought Lucky, settle them motherfucke
rs quick. People didn’t like to argue with a shotgun.

  Lucky’s war party carried no identification. Should they ever be caught or killed, they didn’t want anything leading back to the Ghost Legion. This way, they’d divvy up the loot among themselves, instead of with the entire gang, twelve ways being a lot bigger than seventy-seven, plus a percentage to the big shots. Also, since most of the crazies were illegals, they didn’t need to be ID’d and deported. They carried extra ammunition and backed up their throwaway Star pistols with hot Hi-Tecs.

  A quarter-to-twelve, strike when the cops were caught between shifts. If things went good, they’d be out before midnight. The entire crew was ready now, Lucky leading them under a moonless night toward the far end of East Broadway.

  It was Saturday night and the joint was rocking. The old man guard who sat in the dimly lit back space by the metal folding table, with its electric pots of coffee and tea, took in all the activity in the Yee Bot. He sat almost motionless, watching the gambling from the distance, blinking only when the smoke from the cigarette dangling from the corner of his lips curled up into his eyes. Behind him was a small doorway. Occasionally, he’d glance back to check out the sounds of kitchen clatter coming from the restaurant across the alley.

  Lucky came over the top of the backyard wall, a rolling black blur over the razor wire. He sneaked across the tops of the crates piled up there. Now, with all the crazies poised behind him, he racked the BullPup.

  The old man cocked his ear to the backdoor, listened for a long second. He turned his head around and scanned the back area framing the door, dropping his right hand into his waistband, to the .38 Blackhawk under his vest. He listened and looked for another long moment. More clatter came from the restaurant kitchen. He took a deep drag on his cigarette, hissed the smoke out in a long stream, satisfied now, and turned back to the action on the floor.

  The next thing he saw was a man dressed in a white smock, the kind that butchers or kitchen help wore, with a white cap down over his eyes. He had in his hands a package in brown butcher paper that indicated he was delivering goods. The old man was frozen, silent. How did he get in here? he thought. Then everything went dark inside his head as Lucky blackjacked him behind the right ear with his free hand, and watched him sag forward. The crazies rushed inside past them, backed up by Kongo, the silent one.