by Henry Chang
It began to snow the next morning, and after a dim sum breakfast they returned south along the Interstate. The sky had turned to slate as Mona gently fingered the charm.
Earth over Thunder, it sang. Return. No troubles at home. All is well.
She took a deep breath. Welcome help. Time is on your side.
She was keeping faith, in the yin and yang.
In the balance of the universe.
Fan and Sandal
He watched the stick of incense burn down beside the figurine of Kwan Kung, God of War.
“We’ll see how clever the little whore is,” said Gee Sin, the bok ji sin, White Paper Fan, sipping at his tumbler of XO cognac. He huffed into the cell phone to Tsai, the cho hai, Grass Sandal, his liaison at the other end of the longdistance line.
Outside the high-rise picture windows, the Hong Kong night covered the panoramic sweep of Victoria Harbour, its neon lights and colors dancing off the dark water toward the Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront. Stretching out on the Kowloon side were the city lights of Yau Ma Tei and Mongkok, sparkling in the distance like a scattering of diamonds. A full moon was overhead.
Down to his right, to the mean streets of Wan Chai, and then sweeping all around, was the power and money of the waterfront districts.
Gee Sin was pleased with the information. Chinese jewelry stores. After all, she couldn’t eat the one-ounce gold Panda coins she’d stolen from Uncle Four, or the fistfuls of diamonds. She’d have to sell or trade them at some point. Then the underground money traders would expose her.
He resolved to be patient, studying his reflection in the mirror wall of the Mid-Levels condominium: a bald pate with bushy brows flecked with gray, oversaggy eyes. An old face. At sixty-three years of age, he was the triad’s number three in command, holding a 415 rank, which was a magic Chinese number. Only the hung kwun, enforcer, and the Shan Chu, Lung Tau, the Red Circle Dragon Head himself, were above him.
The Hung Huen, Red Circle Triad, had devolved from their long past nationalism and noble resolve to overthrow the corrupt Ching dynasty, and to restore the Ming era. Patriotic honor had given way, in a matter of decades, to the greed, power, and bloodlust of the modern world. The Red Circle had more than a hundred thousand members, half of them in Hong Kong and China, the others operating in overseas Chinatowns scattered across the globe. This triad organization was only one of dozens of powerful secret societies that controlled the world’s heroin trade and a cycle of dirty money, billions of dollars feeding into and out of gambling, prostitution, stock manipulation, and financial fraud that crossed the oceans and touched every continent.
In the near corner stood a life-sized terra-cotta Chinese warrior, a dusty veneer covering his armor, the sword in his hand. One of the many from the thousands of clay warriors taken from Sian by the Red Circle.
Guarding the emperor.
Guarding Paper Fan.
He remembered the first of the Thirty-six Strategies of the society: Cross the ocean without letting the sky know. He was lost in memories of his initiation until more information came over the phone.
“Her mother may have been Buddhist,” Tsai, the cho hai, continued. “She died long ago.”
Yet another direction to follow, thought Gee Sin, but well worth consideration. “Have the members check the temples,” he advised, “but do not add more people to the search. Keep to the chosen few, your discreet men. Women are even better. The monks are clever and will see through lies. But Buddha is merciful, compassionate. Tell your comrades to plead with the monks; convince them that Mona is a beloved relative who has been diagnosed with cancer. Say that she is afraid but if she doesn’t get treatment she will surely die. Your sandal ranks need to be extremely diligent. When we find her, everyone will be well compensated.”
Gee Sin didn’t want to use the 49s, the say gow jai, the dog soldiers. They’d surely muck things up, spook the prey. They were good enough as street muscle, but lacked the sophistication to carry out a quiet search for the whore. Paper Fan had dispatched only the Grass Sandal ranks to conduct the search and pursuit. She can run, he mused, but she cannot hide forever.
“It is simply a function of time,” he said to Tsai. He didn’t think she was still in Mei Kwok, the United States, but Chinese communities in the various far-flung cities of the world were connected through the secret societies, and she’d surface sooner or later.
It was almost the period of Yuen Siu, the Lantern Festival, and soon the lanterns would be hung up at Wong Tai Sin Temple and a thousand lesser temples worldwide.
The cadre of Red Circle hunters would surely find her then.
He took another sip of the cognac, feeling safe in the luxury of his condo refuge, his fortress and lair, advising Grass Sandal over the secure digital cell-phone connection. He knew it was mid-morning in Tsai’s location in New York City and took pleasure in knowing that all the Red Circle’s investments in Manhattan properties had been successful, and prices of their real estate remained steady. He commended Tsai before terminating the call.
He poured more cognac and let his mind drift to the society’s successes. The Circle had refined forgery, fraudulent credit, and identity theft into an art and a science. He reflected again on the Thirty-six Strategies and how he’d added a twist to Number Seven: Create something out of nothing, to use false information effectively. The Grass Sandals were creating false identities, welding real account numbers to paper names, breeding phantoms who would bring millions to the Red Circle.
To steal the dragon and replace it with the phoenix meant stealing account numbers and matching them with new faces. They’d manufactured bogus driver’s licenses for picture identification. The fake licenses were computer-generated and virtually indistinguishable from the real deal. Any of the mobile mills, with portable laptops and rented laser printers, could turn out acceptable forged passports and visas as well.
He took another swallow from his glass of cognac, caught his breath, and closed his eyes. He had learned quickly from past operations in Canada. Instead of selling the cards to amateurs who would get caught and call attention to their operation, he’d decided to use selected Chinese people in order to impose control and improve communication. The idea of using storage locations and closed warehouses was his way of adding mobility and volume for the operators. They would fence the scam’s products through the triad’s legitimate businesses.
Gee Sin, the senior adviser, had taken advantage of the Americans’ holiday preoccupation with gift-giving, the annual buying frenzy that overwhelmed what was originally a religious holiday. Paper Fan had quickly realized how important these several weeks were to merchants hoping to rake in sales, which, in the crazed crush of business, made them careless and blind to credit-card fraud.
They’d focused on high-end electronics that the Red Circle could sell easily through its network of merchants, expensive items like video camcorders, digital cameras, and laptop computers. Diamond jewelry and expensive watches. They’d expected to steal tens of millions of dollars’ worth of merchan-dise over the holidays. The legitimate cardholder and the card-issuing company wouldn’t detect anything amiss until weeks after the holidays, when the monthly statements arrived in the mail. By then, Paper Fan and his operatives would be long gone, leaving only a trail of smoke and shadows.
His thoughts changed again as he felt a slow throbbing at his left wrist. Occasionally, he’d feel sharp pain there, but this occurred mostly in cold climates like Vancouver or Toronto.
Time to take it off, he thought.
The psychiatric member of the rehabilitation and physical therapy team at Kowloon had suggested to him the idea of residual pain, the severed nerves remembering the moment of the chop. “It’s all in the brain,” she’d said. “You think you feel pain so you do feel pain.” Mostly it was chafing, or too much pressure at the new joint, where scar-sealed bone and muscle bumped against the silicone-padded socket of the prosthesis.
He could remove the prosthesis to relieve the discomf
ort. Painkiller medication was prescribed if necessary.
Dew keuih, fuck, he cursed quietly. He knew it wasn’t the hand. After all, it fit well and he’d trained with it, had willed it to work well. It wasn’t the hand.
It was the attack that he remembered, hazy now but still horrific even after twenty-five years; the pain of a young man revived in the stump arm of an old man. The glint of light from his left. Raising his bow arm reflexively. It wasn’t the hand, marvelously sculpted and engineered. He’d been knocked down. When he braced to get up, he saw that he had no left hand. It was the memory.
And he had survived the attack. The chop had been intended for his neck.
Gee Sin detached the elastic and Velcro band that wrapped around his elbow and slipped the hand off. He imagined it as a weapon, nestled in the sling, its holster. He set it down on the black glass coffee table.
The throbbing in the stump ebbed.
Touch
Already five years old, the bionic hand was an ultralite model, a myoelectric prosthesis with articulate fingers, an opposable thumb, a rotating wrist. It was powered by batteries inside the fake limb. Sensors there detected when the arm muscles contracted, then converted the body’s electrical signal into electric power. This engaged the motor controlling the hand and wrist, its skeletal frame made of thermoplastics and titanium for extreme flexibility. The frame was covered by a skin of silicone that was resistant to heat and flame, and custom-colored with pigmentation to match the patient’s skin. The hand and fingers were sculpted with fingernails, knuckles, and creases. At a glance, it was indistinguishable from a real hand. The hand cost eighty thousand dollars in Hong Kong and the triad had paid without question.
Removing it from his forearm reminded him of the rehabilitation course at the Kowloon Clinic, where he’d trained to use his new artificial limb. He’d continued for a year until his control of hand and finger movements became so deft that he mastered eating with chopsticks and dealing a deck of cards. He could pluck a coin off the table.
He could pull the trigger of a gun.
Aaya, he sighed, finishing off the last of the cognac, letting his thoughts return to matters at hand. He was indifferent to the murder of Uncle Four; the Hip Ching leader had been arrogant and so had brought about his own demise with his whore. His foolishness, however, had cost the Red Circle a cache of gold Pandas and brilliant diamonds, the value of which, though small compared to the billions raked in by combined triad operations, had caused a loss of face. The Hakkanese drug couriers and their Chiu Chao financiers had leaked details of the rip-off.
The Red Circle had lost face, and the whore had to pay.
Death by a myriad of swords was too simple. They’d have to make an example of her, a warning to all others who thought they could steal from the Hung Huen brotherhood. They would videotape a gang rape of her, then pimp her off, before killing her, finally making a snuff film for the porno dogs to market, completing the revenge.
The throbbing came back, a slow steady beat. Normally, he’d take a Vicodin and allow it to pass, but tonight he had special pleasures in mind, the kind he didn’t want diminished by medication. It was the one thing aging men still clung to. Desire. He closed his eyes and pictured the siu jeer, “young ladies,” who would soon arrive at his condo door, and ignored the pulsing forearm stump.
Noble Truths
“Fuhgeddaboudit,” Captain Marino said. “There’s already a cap on overtime. Unless you have something solid, like extradition, or taking custody and bringing him back, the department’s not paying for a fishing trip to the West Coast.”
No way. Not on the department’s dime.
Jack left the captain’s office and exited the Chinatown station house. He turned west on Bayard, following the scent of death and the distant sounds of grief in his head. He walked inside Columbus Park until he came to the rundown asphalt ball fields, the hard-scrabble playground of his Chinatown youth. Across the way, he could see the black cars jockeying for position on the street of funeral parlors.
The other merchants of death were known to be charitable toward the more tragic losses of life. The Chin brothers of Kingdom Caskets would discount the no-frills metal veneer boxes, and Peaceful Florist would charge wholesale for the floral wreaths. The headstone cutter might donate the engraving of the carved Chinese characters. The Family Associations would contribute toward the rest of the funeral expenses. A small group of black-clad mourners burned paper items in a tin bucket, offering up small colorful gifts for the afterlife: a lady’s slippers, a man’s tie.
Jack smelled the odor of jasmine, incense drifting in the winter air as the black Town Cars and Continentals lined up behind the DeVille flower wagon filled with wreaths of carnations and mums.
The Wah Fook Parlor had six death notices posted on their doors. May Lon Fong’s funeral was the next one. Outside the Wah Fook, eight Chinese musicians had assembled, all wearing full-length min-nop coats of brown silk with black fedoras, watching the mourners from behind dark sunglasses as they tuned their instruments: four Chinese suona horns, two mournful erhu, string violins, a bamboo folk drum, and a small harp.
Jack hadn’t seen such a large funeral band before. They tuned up to a big symphonic sound as the procession began. Normally, Jack would have attended the wakes, paid his respects, but this murder-suicide was doubly tragic, and he decided to get his closure from a distance.
Farther down the street, Harry Gong’s funeral continued behind the closed doors of the Wing Ching Parlor. The families had decided on separate funerals, unable to reconcile the memories of killer and victim. Their hands rigidly clasped together at the end of life, they were now bound for different cemeteries.
The Chinese band began playing their dirge as the pallbearers brought May Lon’s casket out, stepping in cadence toward the black Cadillac DeVille with her black-and-white photograph braced atop. A small crowd murmured their sadness in the frozen morning air as her family and relatives followed the casket. Suddenly, a harrowing cry burst from the group as May Lon’s mother ran past the pallbearers loading the DeVille and threw herself across the coffin. “Aayaaa!!” she screamed, the veins in her neck standing out as she beat her chest and tore at her hair. Other relatives rushed in, lifting her away from the coffin. She fell to the pavement, kicking, pounding the asphalt with her heels, on the edge of madness in her despair.
May Lon’s father stood speechless, ready to collapse.
They carried the mother into the lead Lincoln Town Car as the other funeral drivers pulled up along the curb, loading up the family and gently moving the procession along. The band played louder as the dark DeVille led the way toward Canal Street. The six-car procession then turned left toward the Holland Tunnel, bound for the Chinese cemetery at Sacred Oaks in New Jersey.
Jack took a few deep shaolin breaths through his nose, allowing the sadness to ease. Farther down the block, the doors of the Wing Ching swung open. With no band, no mournful dirge, the pallbearers shouldered Harry Gong’s casket as three Lincolns and a black minivan pulled up along the street.
The father wore a grim frown, carrying a smoking baton of mustard-colored incense. He narrowed his eyes as he followed the body of his only son, as if searching in a dark distant realm. Everyone loaded in quickly, quietly, eager to bring the deceased to the serenity of his final resting place. The large stick of incense poked out of the window of the first car as the Town Car led the way.
The procession turned east on Bayard, south on Mott, and paused near the Wong Sing Restaurant on Pell, where the day shift bowed their heads, then proceeded to the Bowery, where it held up Lower East Side traffic, pausing for eight seconds at the Nom San Bok Hoy Benevolent Association, before rolling onward.
The black caravan made its way through the icy daylight and took the Williamsburg Bridge on the way to the Chinese section of Heaven’s Pavilion Cemetery.
The funerals had cast a pall over Jack’s mood and he exited the park to get away from the street of mourning, unsur
e whether any closure had come for him.
Golden Star
Feeling hungry and thirsty, Jack sat in the last booth in Grampa’s, watching the television above the bar while waiting for his order of onion-smothered steak. He took a long pull from his bottle of Heineken and considered jetting out to Seattle for a long weekend, subtracting a few NYPD vacation days. He’d hang out with Alex, there to receive her ORCA award. He could touch base with Seattle PD and check the layout of Seattle’s Chinatown and the International District area.
The television displayed a press conference featuring the new Italian-American mayor, who was pitching the idea of banning fireworks in Chinatown, especially Chinese New Year celebrations. The mayor was citing fire safety concerns. It hadn’t been a concern for a hundred and twenty-five years, thought Jack, but suddenly, it was a problem. All the Chinese knew that it was the mayor covering his ass after resolving to go after the mob at the Fulton Fish Market, and the Mafia’s defiant display of July Fourth fireworks in Brooklyn and Staten Island’s Italian enclaves.
With contempt, Jack took another swallow of beer. No firewoiks for the paisans, no Chinese New Year celebration for the Chinks. Non-Chinese citizens didn’t realize the banning of fireworks in Chinatown would allow evil spirits to creep back in, into the Lower East Side and all of New York City as well.
Jack wondered if fireworks would become just a loud smoky memory, as they had in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other major Chinatowns in America.
He could smell the onions from the kitchen, the aroma pulling at his nose, spiking his appetite. The bar was almost empty except for a couple of suit-and-tie business types in the far booth near the entrance. They reminded Jack of the CADS, Alex’s legal friends, the Chinese-American Defense Squad.
Jack wondered if ADA Bang Sing was a member of their little club, if he had a connection to Alex that was other than professional. CADS? He wondered why it mattered. Was he jealous? Or was it just leftover romantic uneasiness from his party dream, the one that had featured Alex, on the night he’d gotten pulled into the murder-suicide?