by Mark Wheaton
And no one’s expecting you to actually hit the streets, so it’s all phones and e-mail.
Michael sank back into his chair. Naomi had left his door slightly ajar, and he could just see Deborah Rebenold’s office in the corner on the opposite side of the floor. It had never seemed so close.
XIV
“How did it happen that you were at Good Samaritan?” Susan asked as she drove Luis deep into the San Gabriel Valley.
“My pastor is sick,” Luis said, realizing this was the first time he’d actually said as much aloud. “He gets his chemo there.”
“How bad is it?”
“Stage Four. They don’t think he has much longer.”
“Is he fighting it?” she asked.
“That’s a good question. I think he is because of his friends. But I think his beliefs make it easier for him.”
“Ah,” Susan said, tapping the steering wheel. “He believes he’ll be on the right hand of God five minutes later.”
“If not the right hand, then he’ll at least have a few answers,” Luis allowed before changing the subject. “Have you been in touch with the CDC about the Carreños?”
“I relayed all of the relevant information anonymously,” Susan said. “But don’t think it’s because I’m afraid of getting arrested. That’s no problem. If we get raided and our records seized, however, the confidentiality of my patients could be compromised. I’m not going to inflict that on people who may already be in tricky situations.”
Luis nodded. “What about other patients the Carreños could’ve infected in your clinic?”
Susan scowled. “Wow, I’d never thought of that,” she shot back sarcastically. “Maybe we should assemble a list of at-risk patients and schedule in-home visits with them. Wait, maybe we should do the same for nurses and staff!”
“Point taken,” Luis replied sheepishly.
“Just because we’re unlicensed doesn’t mean we don’t care really, really deeply for our patients,” Susan explained. “The good news is, contrary to its popular conception, SARS is actually rather difficult to pass from person to person. If it wasn’t, the entire human race might’ve been wiped out years ago.”
“But they’re sure this is SARS? It couldn’t be something else?”
“Without question. The signature of SARS-CoV—coronavirus—is as distinctive as the Taj Mahal. This is SARS.” Susan looked Luis over for a moment, then shook her head. “The collar is too much. We’re going to have to do something about that.”
She turned around and dug through the backseat, though she was still hauling down the block at almost fifty miles per hour. Luis stared through the windshield in terror, but she was back a moment later holding a UCSF sweatshirt. She thrust it at him.
“This’ll have to do,” she said.
“Did you go here?” Luis asked as he pulled it over his head.
“For my residency,” she said. “I did my undergrad at UHK in Hong Kong and med school at Peking University Health.”
“How did you end up in California?”
“Would you believe I followed a guy? Met him as a resident, came over after I finished in Beijing, thought I was going to marry him. Turned out he already had a fiancée. I couldn’t face the shame of going home, so I stuck around.”
“I’m sorry,” Luis said.
“I’m not! I love California. Hong Kong’s expensive. Beijing’s overpopulated and way overpolluted, like, ‘if your lungs aren’t accustomed to it, you’re sick for a week after you leave’ overpolluted. But here in LA I’ve got my apartment, I’ve got my job, I’ve got my friends. It’s perfect.”
“So, you’re legal?” Luis ventured.
“Uh, technically no?” Susan said. “I was on a student visa and then an H-1B visa after that. But that one means you have to leave and reenter the country every couple of years. The last time I did it they were real dicks about it and said they wouldn’t renew it the next time. So I just stayed. That was four years ago.”
“You haven’t been home since?”
“Nope. And I don’t miss it,” Susan admitted. “It took me a while to get used to American life. Now it’d be hard to go back to China. It’d be like reverse culture shock.”
“How did you end up at the clinic?” Luis asked.
“I had the medical education but not the license, so I couldn’t work at a regular hospital. I was going to try and start the process when I heard about all the ‘medical repatriation’ that happens in California. Say you’re an illegal immigrant and you get in a car wreck and go to a hospital. There’s a chance you’d wake up back wherever you came from, with none of your money, possessions, or even family members. Happened just last year to two comatose patients in San Francisco. They were put on a medical plane and shipped. I think it discourages people from getting help when they need it, and that makes everything worse. When I heard about these clinics, I hunted one down through a friend of a friend and got a job.”
Luis didn’t know how to tell her that he admired this a great deal without sounding like a sap, so he kept his mouth shut.
“What about you?” she asked. “How did you become a priest? Were you like the third son in some landed aristocracy?”
Luis laughed, then sobered a little as he recalled the real reason.
“It was my mother’s doing. My brother was the religious one and had been training to go into the priesthood. He was killed in a random shooting near our house. Our mother went a little nuts fearing I’d be next and convinced the local bishop to let me take my brother’s place. She was just trying to keep me safe.”
“Wow. And I thought you guys were called by a higher power.”
“We are. I just didn’t recognize mine until later. Once I began learning, God’s plan, which had always been there, finally made itself known to me.”
“A miracle,” Susan pronounced.
Luis shrugged. “Are you religious?”
“It’s so, so different in China,” Susan said. “I’m into Buddhism and Taoism—which I still believe in—but it’s more tradition than a faith-based religion like you guys have. You guys go to extremes with fantasy land crap—no offense.”
“‘Fantasy land crap’?” Luis asked with a grin.
“You know, infinite fish and water into wine,” Susan said with a shrug. “Dead men returning to life. Carpenters walking on water. People turning to salt.”
“Yeah, and Taoism has yāoguài.”
“You get that from a Wu-Tang album or watching kung fu movies growing up? That’s folklore stuff.”
Luis laughed. “Didn’t Father Chang grow up in China?”
“Yeah, but whenever he talks about it—sorry, talked—he described it as he was just looking for something to convert to. When the missionaries got to him in his teenage years, it was a way of getting out from under all the Communist Party nonsense keeping him back. I kind of think he converted as a screw-you to everyone around him.”
“How so?” Luis asked.
“Christians in China are such a strange group. For a long time they were viewed almost like a kind of cult. ‘Why would you want to be Western?’ was the question, rather than ‘Why would you believe in the Bible?’ Still, Christians never rode in on horseback trying to conquer us as they did everywhere else, so maybe the modern Chinese are able to have a more prosaic, live-and-let-live view. Just in recent years Christianity’s exploded to the point that the government started to remove crosses from the tops of buildings and arrest priests. But even then, when people arrive here it’s one of the few symbols everyone recognizes.”
“That’s how we get you,” Luis explained. “We’re like the McDonald’s arches. You know what you’re going to get when you walk in our doors.”
Susan giggled so hard it almost sounded like she was crying.
“You sound like Benny,” she finally said. “He loved God, saw him as a friend, somebody to communicate with, and so on. But he thought the whole evangelizing bit was a crock. He was terrible at it. He just
tried to lead by example. The idea was that if people saw how much joy he got out of being a Christian, they might follow.”
Susan’s cell phone rang. “That’ll be Nan,” she said. “I’ll call him back. He’s having a hard time with Benny’s death. He doesn’t have many friends. Father Chang was his whole life.”
“They were that close?” Luis asked.
“Oh yeah,” Susan said. “They were together what? Three years? Four? Nan’s family practically disowned him when he came out. Father Chang and I were his new family.”
Luis didn’t know how to react to this. He hadn’t even remotely considered that Father Chang was a homosexual. Not once. When he looked over at Susan, he saw that she was scrutinizing his reaction.
“So that’s how you knew he didn’t molest Yamazoe’s daughter,” Luis said finally.
Susan’s face clouded with anger. She jammed on the brakes and spun the wheel, sending the car to the side of the road. She looked Luis right in the face, and he thought she might hit him.
“No, I knew he didn’t molest Yamazoe’s daughter because I knew Father Chang. His being gay has nothing to do with that.”
“Why didn’t you just tell the police?” Luis asked.
“You don’t think it would just make things worse? I’m not going to use something that’s none of anybody’s business to defend a man who shouldn’t need defending. Also, he’s dead. I’m not going to use that as an excuse to say anything he didn’t want said. Got it?”
“Got it.”
Susan scanned Luis’s face for a moment longer as if to assure herself he really did. Then she put on her left blinker and moved back into traffic.
Luis fell silent in the passenger seat. He now knew exactly what Father Chang had seen in Dr. Susan Auyong.
Tony arrived at Wanquan Yang’s house just after dark. He parked a couple of blocks away and walked over, always reluctant to add to the number of vehicles around a Dragon Head’s home. Billy Daai was waiting for him on the driveway, a cigarette in one hand, a cell phone in the other.
“There’s been another death,” he said. “This one all the way out in Sierra Madre. Just heard it from our contact in the sheriff’s department there.”
“Sierra Madre?” Tony asked, surprised. “That’s miles from the other cases. How on earth did it get all the way out there?”
“No one knows,” Billy said, pocketing the phone, then immediately pulling it back out to check something else. “But now the whole city’s panicked. Before, people were writing off three of the cases as being in East LA, and the little girl was some kind of anomaly or accident. But when they announce Sierra Madre in a couple of hours, people are going to know that nobody’s safe from this.”
“You’re right,” Tony agreed. “There’s going to be mass panic.”
Billy leaned in close to Tony. “You were right, by the way. The Sierra Madre case is this little old man who never left the house. Had his groceries delivered; postman and neighbors say they never saw him leave. He hadn’t taken his car out for months. Said he’d called 911. The paramedics got there and put on their masks, knowing immediately what they were dealing with.”
“How was I right?”
“The media showed up and started looking around once they realized how far he was from the other cases. You know what they settled on? There’s a Sunrise Asian Market directly behind his place. A bunch of people they talked to said it must’ve come from there. Infected food, rats, mosquitos. They told the news crews they’d call the police and ask for it to be temporarily shut down.”
“But those are just local crazies,” Tony said, lowering his voice as he nodded to a couple of his other triad brethren walking up the driveway for the meeting. “That doesn’t mean a thing.”
“It means something that the news crews put them on the air. They knew it would keep folks at home glued to their sets. They love whackjobs. It’s going to air and re-air all night.”
“They have no idea how SARS is spread,” Tony pointed out.
“Since when does that matter?” Billy asked ruefully. “But you said you might have a way to fix this.”
“I do. At least, I have begun moving us toward a solution. I am anxious to hear what our brethren think.”
“I’m sure they can’t wait to hear it.”
The pair entered the house together, old men already lining the ornate sofas in the house’s large living room. A handful of wives moved from room to room, passing out drinks and hors d’oeuvres. There was only one woman sitting with the men: Jing Saifai. Tony considered introducing himself to her but thought it would appear nakedly ambitious and refrained.
From the outset the rhetoric was all fear, particularly of harsher inspections of Asia-originating ships hurting their bottom line. Everyone’s concerns were self-centered and self-interested. Everyone thought they were the right one to deliver their grievances and fears to the mayor’s office. Everyone believed they had the right plan to see them through this or even improve their standing. Why not use this moment to get the unions to help roll a few of the tougher regulations back even? But no one had any plan that took the needs of their brethren into consideration.
Tony stood aside and let these windbags air their grievances and then deflate. He, like Beaumarchais’s Figaro, would need only to wait for his cue to save the day.
“Zhelin Qi has a suggestion.”
It was Billy who’d stepped forward. Though he was far younger than everyone else who’d spoken and only two days before made a Blue Lantern, he wasn’t ignored, out of deference to his father. Eyes turned to Tony, and he was glad he’d worn his one bespoke suit to the meeting. He looked like one of them and hoped he sounded like one.
“I have consulted with a partner of ours in the tourist business about—”
“Who?” demanded an older deputy. “Who did you consult?”
Don’t forget that the knives are out.
“His name is Oscar de Icaza,” Tony said calmly. “We were discussing another aspect of our business when this calamity came to light. Some of you know de Icaza from his auto trade with Hong Kong. He is a native to Los Angeles. He is—”
“Who does he report to?” another man asked.
“No one,” Tony replied. “At one point he was affiliated with the Alacrán street gang of East Los Angeles. But that was in his youth. Mr. de Icaza operates his dealings with our organization independently out of the auto repair centers he owns.”
“A businessman! Like us!” someone chortled. Others followed suit.
“Why are you talking to a boss? Why not one of us?” someone else said.
“As I said, it came up in conversation. Also, it was an opportune moment. I didn’t want it to pass by.”
“Okay,” said Dragon Head Wanquan Yang, fluttering his hand to suggest he’d allow these words to be spoken in his house, though mostly out of courtesy.
“De Icaza has proven to be a good and trustworthy man,” Tony explained. “And he is connected to other good and trustworthy men. If our problem is temporary and cosmetic, one solution could be to expand our partnership with him. Rather than have restaurant owners turn our deliveries away, our drivers and deliverymen will be replaced by his. Our trucks by his trucks. Maybe we even dummy up some claim about businesses having been sold. It’d be like using a shell corporation or a front. I mean, it’s only about perception.”
The room fell silent for a moment. Then a rotund onetime Red Pole named Hu got to his feet and shook his bamboo cane inches from Tony’s face.
“Give away our business to these lǎowài?” he said, spittle flying with the words. “What gives you the authority? What audacity. How dare you? We haven’t even met this man.”
Tony didn’t flinch, but he didn’t respond, either. He couldn’t break the man’s gaze to cast around for support, and Billy Daai wouldn’t be enough.
“We built these businesses,” Hu continued. “How can you expect to simply capitulate? We are not our ancestors and not filled with fear o
f, or beholden to, these local magistrates. We belong here. We have rights!”
Tony could feel the support of most in the room lining up behind Hu. But then a new voice rose over the others. Tony didn’t recognize it at first, but everyone else did and turned. A tall, thin man rose from a piano stool and moved toward Tony. Tony realized who it was and immediately bowed low.
His name was Den-yih Zeng, and though the Los Angeles triad had only limited connections to their distant brethren’s organization in Hong Kong, Zeng was an exception. An elegant gentleman of ninety who could still pass for a spry sixty-five glided from underworld to underworld, imparting his wisdom and taking tribute as he went. He was not affiliated with a single triad per se but was respected by all for his deep connection to the oldest Hong Kong triad, the 14K, which he’d been a member of since its inception in 1945. Despite his dapper appearance and affable demeanor, he’d also been a ruthless enforcer in his day. It was said that his body bore a road map of scars, from the base of his skull to the soles of his feet.
When he spoke, people listened.
“You are suggesting, Mr. Qi, that these businesses go underground?” Zeng asked. “That is correct?”
“I am, Master Zeng.”
“Pick up any Western book on Chairman Mao, and they’ll inevitably make the same paternalistic joke,” Zeng said quietly. “‘Mao’s only success, it is widely understood, was that he drove the triads out of Singapore.’ People believe this as one day they were there, the next they weren’t. And now that Mao is gone, they have returned in force. But as we know, this isn’t only untrue, it’s almost comedy. We flourished under Mao. We made more connections and did more business than we ever had before. Privation meant demand. Demand needed supply. That was us. We had merely gone underground.”
Tony knew that Zeng’s emphasis on “we” wasn’t lost on the men in the room. What they knew of street fighting came from relatively minor Chinatown turf battles in the seventies. Zeng, on the other hand, had literally crossed swords with Chinese government troops, run ships with a smuggler’s ransom in goods through blockades and into unfriendly ports, and, as a teenager, had even fought for Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Army in the final battles of the Chinese Civil War. Everyone felt like something of a paper gangster next to a man like Zeng.