Red Jade

by Henry Chang

  CADS? They were an activist group, self-starters and true believers, the kind Alex liked to run with, out to wreak havoc on a cumbersome, misguided justice system. One of the judges who was known to lean toward the Radical Left had railed about discriminatory hiring practices and police brutality toward minorities. Jack had heard that two of the lawyers were trust-fund brats, but legal warriors nonetheless. And why did any of it matter to him?

  He wondered if Alex’s impending divorce was reinforcing her involvement with CADS, as she seemed to bloom when fighting controversial cases.

  He remembered Alex at the pistol range. Combat stance. Firing in short bursts. She really was an Annie Oakley, but was she relishing the feel of actually shooting someone, symbolically? In the wake of the cop killing of the Chinese honor student, were her emotions feeding her dead-eye accuracy?

  Jack finished his beer, ordered another. You can look that shit up on the Internet, Billy had said when they were talking about Ngs in Seattle. Jack wasn’t a cop historian, but he pressed his trigger fingers against his temples, rolling little circles as he closed his eyes, coaxing out what he remembered.

  The Seattle Police Department had a checkered past. It had made headline news back in the fifties and sixties, a violent period in the American Northwest. Grand-jury investigative hearings, much like the Knapp Commission hearings in New York City, exposed corruption in the Seattle PD. Abetted by crooked politicians, the Seattle PD’s operations included gambling and police payoff scandals. Police took money, turned a blind eye. It was nothing new in the world of cops.

  The gambling problem, of course, reared its ugly head in Chinatown, and law-enforcement departments nationwide remembered the 1983 Wah Mee massacre. The Wah Mee had been a Seattle Chinatown gambling and bottle club, one of many, which was allowed to flourish because of the police payola. The Wah Mee had operated high-stakes Chinese gambling games, and on an early February morning a decade earlier, three Chinatown misfits from Hong Kong, desperate and misguided, executed a plan to commit robbery and murder there. The result was thirteen deaths, one survivor, the baring of police payola, and the castigation of the Chinese community by mainstream media. They’d tried to make it seem like it was some sort of tong war incident, hatchetmen stuff, rather than the immigrant aberration that it was. All of it reinforced the idea that the police weren’t worthy of trust.

  Jack continued rolling up the images with his trigger digits, and abruptly, Keung “Eddie” Ng, “Shorty,” came to mind. Seattle Chinatown? Jack didn’t mind playing long shots, so long as it was convenient to do.

  Someone slid softly into the booth, nudging him over, breaking his flow of thoughts.

  “Seattle, huh?” Alex grinned. “You’re kidding me.” She seemed happy about the prospect and ordered a Cosmo.

  His steak arrived with the martini, and he cut her a slice. She devoured a piece before chasing it down with the drink.

  “It’s only a week away,” she said. “The Westin’s sold out. I’m sharing a double with Joann Lee from Legal Aid because they overbooked.”

  “No problem,” Jack answered, cutting her another slice. “I’m making other arrangements anyway.”

  “Found a room?” Alex said, raising an eyebrow.

  “Soon.”

  “I hope it’s near the Westin,” she said over the martini glass. “Most of the events are there.”

  “No problem,” Jack repeated. He didn’t want to say he’d be out by the airport, the Sea-Tac Courtyard. Half the price, and a jackrabbit getaway for the return flight. He was going to check out Seattle, not just hang with Alex, and seventy-two hours was not enough time to get it done. Besides, he figured, Alex was going to be plenty busy anyway.

  Watching her as she sipped her Cosmo, Jack asked, “What kind of town is Seattle? Does ORCA have issues there?”

  Alex set her drink down, answering bluntly, “Do you want to start with glass-ceiling discrimination at Boeing Industries? Or racism at Abercrombie and Fitch? Or do you want to go down memory lane, when they burned down Chinatown and drove the Chinese out of Seattle and Tacoma in 1885?”

  “Okay, I get it.” Jack chuckled. “A few issues there.” He always marveled at how she was able to toss out facts and incidents, like neat little Molotov cocktails, from somewhere not of this time or her own experience. It was if she was speaking for ghosts, giving voice to long-lost souls. “But I meant, more like cop stuff.”

  “Oh, that.” Alex lifted her glass, took another sip. “Well, last year Seattle PD was accused of racial profiling. A couple of officers harassed and humiliated an APA youth group who were out on a day trip.”

  “No shit,” Jack said, knowing that APA stood for Asian Pacific American, an expanded and more inclusive identity than Chinese or Other. He ordered up a plate of clams casino.

  “No shit.” Alex smirked. “Threw the teenagers up against a wall, screaming insults at them. Held them for an hour. Interrogated them like they were foreign criminals instead of American citizens.”

  “Were they charged?” Jack asked, disbelief in his tone.

  “They were cited for jaywalking.”

  “Jaywalking?” Jack snapped, rolling his eyes. “You mean ‘crossing while Chinese’?”

  Alex, with a sardonic grin, ordered another Cosmo, lit up a cigarette. “So,” she concluded through smoky exhalation, words dripping sarcasm, “other than those minor drawbacks, it’s a top-ten city of a destination. High-tech jobs, great schools, excellent outdoors, wonderful place to raise a family, etcetera etcetera.” She took another puff of the cigarette. “Lots of rain, though.”

  Rain, thought Jack, remembering Ah Por’s words, her clues. Had she whispered “rain” to Eddie Ng’s juvenile photo? Or to the Hong Kong magazine likeness of Mona?

  Alex’s second Cosmo arrived with the clams casino as Jack shared the last of his steak with her.

  “I’ve got two award ceremonies to attend, one panel discussion, a silent auction, two cocktail parties. And the grand gala dinner-dance for one thousand.”

  “Can I crash?” teased Jack.

  “I’ve got connections,” she mock-boasted. “I can get you in. But you sound like you’re going to be busy.”

  “So do you,” he said quietly. “But we’ll work it out.”

  Alex knew better than to probe cop stuff, knew Jack would just talk his way around things, being professional. A real cop’s cop, but with an old-timer’s sense of honor. Jack was a Chinese-American anachronism, but she liked him because he had a good heart. And he was brutally honest.

  They’d become drinking buddies. Friends. And that was where things stood.

  They toasted, then went after the clams casino.

  Outside Grampa’s, the cold night air braced them. The chill was invigorating during the short walk to her condo at Confucius Towers. She held on to Jack’s arm, the bulk and weight of him steadying her. She was light-headed after two cocktails.

  “You know,” she said, “I don’t have to attend all the events.”

  Jack smiled, but said nothing; he didn’t want to make promises he couldn’t keep if he picked up a lead.

  The wind gusted, and he pulled her closer as they walked.

  “I feel like a hot cup of Colombian brew.” Alex shivered. “I have this coffee machine, Italian. You feel like having a wake-me-up with sambuca?”

  Jack wanted to say yes but was thinking about Lucky, about the lateness of the hour, and the walking distance to Downtown Medical Hospital. And then the trek back to Brooklyn. All that stacked against a beautiful woman and a cup of coffee that probably wouldn’t lead anywhere except to disappointment and misunderstanding.

  “I’d like that,” he said finally, “but there’s something I need to check out that can’t wait.”

  “Cop stuff, huh?” Alex sighed, shaking her head.

  “Yeah, but how about a rain check?” suggested Jack.

  “Again?” she teased. “Maybe those checks will pan out in Seattle, ha? Rain, right? And they’re
known for coffee.”

  “Yeah, right as rain,” Jack heard himself saying as they entered the Towers complex.

  They exchanged hugs and Alex walked past the doorman in the lobby. He watched her as she waited by the elevators, tossing a smile his way. He watched until the elevator swallowed her up.

  Jack could see the bright lights of City Hall, not too far from Downtown Medical. He thought about Tat “Lucky” Louie, hooked up to continuing life support. As he quick-stepped his way through the frozen half-mile of night, he wondered how it had all come to this. He knew Eddie Ng, the malo monkey, could answer some of those questions.

  Downtown Medical was quiet this time of night, already past visiting hours, but the nurse let Jack have his time with Lucky. It wasn’t like the patient was going anywhere. The room was monitored and she’d seen Jack the previous times he’d visited.

  He stared at Lucky’s gaunt, ashen face, noticed the disinfectant smell of decay, death waiting at the door; a deteriorating body connected to adhesive electrodes measuring its heartbeats.

  Jack remembered racing across Chinatown rooftops with Lucky, two hingdaai, blood brothers, leaping the gaps between buildings. There were three of them then, three teenage pals, before Wing Lee was knifed to death that seventeenth summer of their Chinatown lives.

  Jack wasn’t sure why he was in the hospital room, watching Lucky’s passing moments. He wasn’t expecting Lucky to suddenly wake up and give him all the information he needed to close the case, but he felt that being in Lucky’s presence was somehow going to provide another clue as to what had happened leading up to the shoot-out at Chatham Square. A clue to how the Chinatown troubles had brought all these cases of death across his desk. Jack hoped, in a farfetched Ah Por-the-seer kind of way, that something would come to him here: a jarred memory, a symbol, a number or an address, something. He remembered the serene setting of the Doyers Street back-alley crime scene, where an old man, ah bok, had died of a heart attack, slumped up against a wall, and where a young gangbanger lay face-down dead, reaching out his gun hand in the bloody snow, four high-velocity .22s through his back.

  Was Lucky involved?

  The blazing shoot-out near OTB on Chatham Square was something Jack could understand: a sudden gun battle, instinctive, spontaneous. Jing deng, meant to be. But the back-alley killing behind OTB seemed removed, not just physically, from the rest of the bloodshed. What did the old man witness before he’d suffered the heart attack?

  Had it involved Lucky?

  Jack knew Lucky had had an apartment somewhere in Chinatown, probably paid for by the On Yee. He’d probably also had several crash pads around the neighborhood. Nothing would be under his name, of course, so they would be impossible to trace. Only the gangboys would know all the locations. The On Yee had probably swept through all of Lucky’s places already, Jack figured. All the places they knew about, anyway. Lucky had had other hiding places, Jack remembered, tenement niches scattered across the rooftops of their childhood.

  The life-support machine continued to pump rhythmically as he leaned in toward Lucky’s face. In a whisper, he repeated what they used to say as teenagers, “Us against the world, kid.”

  Jack stepped back, trying for a moment of clarity. Here was his old friend at the far edge of a life in the shadows, a nonentity, nothing in his name, no history. A ghost ironically, the latest dailo of the Ghost Legion. Jack remembered how Tat had claimed payback against the punk hotheads who’d killed Wing. Then he’d disappeared into gangdom, born again with the nickname “Lucky,” just as Jack was getting his discharge from army Airborne. Their lives went in opposite directions after that.

  At 11PM Jack called for a see gay, Chinatown radio car, to take him back to Sunset Park. He closed the curtain to Lucky’s space and said good-night to the overnight nurse.

  The see gay took him back to Brooklyn, to an all-night Chiu Chao soup shack on Eighth Avenue, where he quietly polished off a siew-yeh, a nightcap of beef noodles and tripe. Back at home, he felt exhausted but spent the night at his window, waiting for the light of dawn to break, watching the shades of blackness fade to a new morning.

  Searching

  When Mona first arrived in Seattle, she had scoured the listings in the Wah bo, overseas Chinese newspapers, settling for a basement rental from a Chinese couple in a two-family house that was formerly Filipino-owned, and was within walking distance of Chinatown.

  Concerned about safety, the elderly pair had specified that they’d wanted a female tenant only.

  Jing deng, Mona thought. Destiny.

  She had told them that her name was Mona, a name she had taken after the Mong-Ha Fortress in Macau, where she’d gone on a gambling junket long ago. She’d paid two months in advance without question, two thousand, cash. No paperwork requested or offered.

  They were delighted when she said she’d hoped to stay the entire year.

  They’d dedicated a slot on the mailbox for her name. There were Filipinos in the neighborhood but she didn’t encounter any other Chinese in the area, which suited her just fine. Less chance of acquiring nosy neighbors.

  The street sign at the corner read JAMES STREET, the English spelling of which she’d remembered from growing up poor in British Hong Kong, near King James Road.

  Thirteen blocks west brought her to the cloudy bay. She passed through a tourist area of restaurants and quaint shops, until the waterfront opened to tracks and piers, a juncture for trains and ferries, ships and buses heading north, or south. Seven blocks south brought her to Chinatown, where she could blend in even as she purchased essential daily items and groceries, and memorized the locations of businesses, post offices, and banks.

  Bo bo lay, she thought, step by step. Proceed with caution.

  She’d learn the destinations of trains and ships soon enough.

  The basement apartment was a large studio room that included a tiny shower and toilet. There was a closet and a wall shelf that served as a makeshift kitchenette, fitted with an electric hot plate, a rice cooker, and a toaster oven, all left behind by the former tenant, a pinoy seaman who’d skipped out on the rent. The old couple had recommended a Chinese locksmith, who’d changed the existing cylinder.

  Mona had purchased new sheets and blankets for the full-size bed that came with the apartment. In Chinatown, she’d found ingredients for quick-fix meals, and had the Oriental Market deliver a hundred-pound sack of rice. It was more than she needed but would serve other purposes.

  Her bed faced the door, in proper fung shui arrangement. Seated at the foot, she sprinkled some ginseng into the Ti-Kuan Yin, Iron Goddess, before sipping from the steaming cup of tea. Scanning the room she saw the small Buddha kitchen god, a mini orange tree and a potted jade plant, a statuette of the Goddess of Mercy, and various bot gwa, I Ching charms, facing northeast and fending off evil.

  The apartment door was covered in red, the Chinese color of luck, like her new jade bangle, not expensive but lucky. The door was festooned with leftover Chinese New Year decorations she’d scooped up in Chinatown, crimson banners and gold posters proclaiming chut yup ping on, “exit and enter in peace,” and welcoming long life and prosperity. At the center of this red collage was a big fold-out lucky calendar from Kau Kau Restaurant, from which she frequently ordered takeout. Whenever she approached the door to leave the apartment, she believed she was heading into good fortune.

  She’d found a Chinese hair salon seven blocks to the southeast, a left at Wong Dai gaai, King Street, another English spelling she’d remembered from King James Road. She’d also learned to avoid certain areas near Chinatown where gwailo, white devils, joy mao, alcoholics and addicts, aggressively panhandled. A couple had followed her for blocks through the dilapidated neighborhood of men’s missions and homeless shelters. She’d heard murmured growls of “China doll” and “Suzie Wong” as they wagged their slimy tongues obscenely at her. She didn’t understand the words but felt their angry sexual intent. Men were dogs, she’d remembered from Hong Kong, an
d these were strays and mutts.

  Wong Dai gaai was the way to and from Chinatown, she’d decided, past the small park where elderly Chinese folks in their quilted jackets congregated, played chess, and gossiped away the time.

  The Way

  In Chinatown, the young man at the Wah chok wui, Chinese “service center,” had reminded her of Johnny Wong. He had been too eager to assist her, overly inquisitive.

  Fifty dollars to fill out the immigration forms.

  She wasn’t looking to get a green card or Medicare.

  Mona realized that she still had this effect on men, her beauty apparent even without makeup. The young clerk had spooked her, and she’d left the agency abruptly, but not before she’d discovered that she’d need a social security card, and non-driver’s license.

  Other identification, like a passport, would follow from there.

  She’d needed secrecy because, deep in her heart, she feared dead Uncle Four’s thugs would seek her out.

  But soon her transformation would be complete.

  She’d dumped the Manolo Blahniks and Jimmy Choos in New York, had left behind the Gucci and Chanel outfits, the thousand-dollar designer handbags, the Valentino Sunglass Collectione, the Dolce & Gabbana accessories: all gone.

  The fancy restaurants, the racetracks, all the hideaway clubs in New York, in Chinatowns along the East Coast. All gone. Those were perks that had masked her punishment, she’d realized, seeing it now with vision she hadn’t possessed earlier; the abuse she’d suffered had led to freedom.

  If I allow it to happen, she’d thought, then I deserve it …

  Because all bad things must end.

  As all good things must also end.

  The balance of yin and yang, the way of the universe.