Rose doesn’t even remotely acknowledge me. Her dress has little butterflies set in the gold.
Flip open the menu. Authentic. Scan it … I don’t know from Korean food, not the real thing. Stains on the laminated plastic. I get nasty chills. Close it.
My opening, in the main Korean dialect spoken in Seoul, I say: “Hard to imagine getting fresh cuttlefish. Locally, I mean. What do you reckon, miss?”
Rose sets her spoon down. She’s working on some kind of simple porridge. Dabs her lips carefully. Half turns to me. Gives me a long look up and down. Lingers on the hand. Without expression, her makeup understated.
Turns back to her food.
“Fuck off, cop,” she says, in English. With a pinch of the city in that accent.
Can’t help but smile. I dig her already. Hell, I do vibe all kinds of cop.
“Rose Hee, I presume.”
“You presume correct. Did you miss the part where I told you to fuck off?” She takes another spoonful of the porridge, pops it in her mouth.
“Let me guess,” I say. “Flushing? Elmhurst?”
Rose doesn’t respond.
“I’m not a cop,” I say.
“Oh yeah? Well, still, like I said, fuck off.”
I take the photograph out of my breast pocket. Place it on the counter. Slide it over next to her bowl.
“Song Ji-Won,” I say.
Her hand floats up to her mouth. At first I think she might be choking, my brain scrambles to dislodge my fossilized CPR skills, but she separates her fingers and says, “Put that away.”
Big knot of muscle in a do-rag and cook’s apparel comes out of the kitchen, holding a dish towel, black eyes on me. “Yo. Is there a problem?”
Rose brings her hand down, covering the photo. Says, “No, Kim, it’s cool. It’s cool.” Smiles at him.
He looks from me to her and back again to me. Tattoo on the meat of his hand between thumb and forefinger, a stylized fish. Good-looking kid. I smile too.
“Think I surprised her,” I say. “It’s been years.”
Rose nods, going with it. “Queens College. You can chill, Kim, really.”
He shrugs. Gives me a look, and disappears back into the kitchen.
Rose slides the photo back to me, palm down. I take it, she’s dabbing at her mouth with her napkin. Says, “Jesus. Not here. You better not be a cop. Or a rapist freak. Walk with me.”
She swivels, grabs her purse off the counter, and is up, heading for the door.
I follow.
The matre d’ or whoever he is bows at Rose as she exits. Simply stares at me. Likewise the soldier’s gaze swivels and tracks us out the door.
Outside, Rose is headed toward Fifth Avenue, goddamnit, a right turn and it still hasn’t gone eleven a.m., so I cheat a little, turn in place, three distinct left turns, saying to myself: left left left.
Dude still gawking through the window. Soldier trying to look unreadable. Like, what’s that funny black man doing?
African fucking dance, bitches.
Proceed east, Rose’s heels clicking up ahead.
Me, trifling with the System. Not good form. I catch up to her.
“I want to see some ID,” she says, without breaking stride. “Don’t talk to me, let’s just keep walking, but show me some ID.”
Fish out my laminate, my proper City laminate. Hand it over.
Rose frowns at the thing. “Decimal, Dewey? Is that like a … old-timey library joke?”
“My folks had a cornball sense of humor. What can I say?”
“And Class-A? Are you kidding me? You have to be some kind of cop. I don’t need this.”
She speeds up, starts crossing the street. I keep pace with her, saying, “I’m not a goddamn cop. Hand to God, ma’am. I’m a, uh, independent agent …”
Rose snorts. Granted, “independent agent,” that came off shady, delusional.
“Agent of what? See, I don’t want any drama, what makes you think it’s okay to just waltz over here and wave that photo around? What’s your damage?”
“I have information on a club, Bubble—”
“Just, no talking, let’s get off this street.”
We take the left onto Fifth Avenue, heading south. I’m trying to mentally steer her. Rose ducks into a recessed entryway, arms folded, defensive posture, saying, “All right, I’ll give you two minutes to explain what the fuck you want.”
“Listen, will you just relax?” I need to turn this around a bit and get a better position here. “I am not a cop, I have nothing to do with official law enforcement, so you gotta stop with that. I apologize if I disturbed you with the photograph, I had no way of knowing you’d respond to it, so let’s just start over fresh here. All right?”
Rose is looking down Fifth. Back toward Koreatown proper. She nods.
“Thank you,” I say. I take out the card from Enjoy. “This your place? Your name is all over the card, so I’m assuming yeah.”
Rose shifts her gaze to the card, then back to the avenue. “Shouldn’t be talking to you at all.” She readjusts her arms, hugging herself.
“And why is that, Missus Hee?”
She stares at me for a second, then returns her attention downtown. “Miss. That’s just how it is around here. This is not your neighborhood, you have no idea what goes on.”
Fair enough.
“Okay, that’s fine, you don’t have to say shit. Let me lay things out, kick it to you from my angle.”
I fetch the photo of Song, her frozen laughter. Rose flinches.
“I’m looking into the circumstances surrounding the death of Song Ji-Won. My reasons for doing so are private, and I’m working on my own. As in, yo, by myself. Now, from your response to this picture, I take it you knew this woman, am I wrong about that?”
Rose shifts her weight to her left leg, doesn’t respond. Holding herself, tight.
I press forward: “Okay, so, mixed up in the info I got on Song, I have some locations, addresses, and one of them is your place of employment, which was formerly know as quote Bubble Teen Tea unquote. Yeah? So it’s not crazy that I’m standing here, wondering what that has to do with Song.”
Rose is looking more and more uncomfortable, and has nothing to say. Focused downtown.
“I have names too, I’m going to throw them out there and get your vibe. Again, you don’t need to say shit. K-Mart.” I’m trying to recall the files … damn, should have written these names down. Maybe I did, somewhere … “K-Man. Kwon somebody.”
That’s a bull’s-eye, Rose’s eyes dart left, blinking. Not looking at me.
“Some company names, some clubs. Promise Land. Some kind of import company. Executive Comfort, another whazzat, hostess club, like your spot …”
Rose speaks, still looking south: “Enjoy is a legitimate business. You said hostess club like you’d say whorehouse. You clearly don’t understand shit. None of my girls are into anything on the side. They get caught doing dates, tricking, drugs, whatever, they’re fired. Full stop. And trust me, they need that fucking job, so—”
“Okay, Rose, I feel you, I get it.”
Turns to me. “Do you? Where are you from?”
“South Bronx. However, I’ve traveled—”
“Right, so you don’t know how people do things down here. All that goes on at Enjoy is a whole bunch of sad men binge-drinking, doing karaoke, and talking a lot of bullshit that my girls have to sit there and listen to. That’s fucking hard work, believe me.”
“Hey, I’m not a complete, uh … I’ve read a lot about the cultural function of—”
“Yeah? Oh, you have? So who the fuck are you, a sociologist who does a little cold-case murder investigation on the side? What’s up with the suit?”
I dig plucky, but Jesus, man, her attitude is a touch too much, say: “Hey, Rose. I didn’t come down here to disrespect you, or to research fucking Korean male bonding or whatever you wanna call it. I don’t care what you do, I don’t care what anybody does, I’m only concerne
d with anything relevant to Song Ji-Won, her murder, and the murder of her son. That’s it.”
Rose covers her eyes. I continue.
“So. Why do I find the address of your … fancy-ass karaoke spot amongst all this information on Song. Everything about your behavior tells me you know exactly what I’m talking about.”
Rose’s position doesn’t change. Pressing her palms into her eyes.
“Be real, Rose. Still think I’m a cop? You think the cops give a fuck about a dead Korean hooker, some small-fry gangster stuff from eighteen years back? Especially given the current state of things? Please. Think they gave a fuck back then? Be real. Plus, from their perspective, that book is closed. Forgotten. Ten-to-one there’s nobody left who ever even heard of this shit.”
Rose takes her hands away. Lids and lashes smudged and wet. Silence for a while, I ride this out.
Dig industrial noise from three directions. Closest site being the Empire State Building, which looms huge. To the west, probably Penn Station. The day revving up.
I can now make right turns.
I want to disinfect my hands. I want to take a pill.
Rose sighs. “I gotta go to work. I’m gonna look all puffy.”
Want to observe that she’s gonna look great, puffy or not. I withhold that thought.
Then she does this: she touches my tie. Reflex, I blink and step back, smashed flipper aloft.
“Easy. Jesus. Look,” she says, “maybe we could talk later. Talk about why a guy like you gives a damn about a dead Korean girl. Reintroduce ourselves.”
It doesn’t vibe flirty, honest to Jah. I should be way dubious. This screams stitchup. But life is short, apparently.
“What happened to the hand?” she asks.
“Caught it in the cookie jar.”
She looks at me sideways. After a while: “And your mouth?”
“Tried to kiss a Korean chick and she kwon-do’ed my shit.”
That buys me a laugh. Again she reaches out, rubs at a blood spot on my lapel. Then, “Come and find me?”
I say, “Yeah. I’ll find you.”
Rose nods, brisk, glances both ways. Jams her petite hands in her jacket pockets. Takes off south, toward the rigid tumult of West 32nd.
I try and fail to not watch her ass.
As she crosses over West 34th, I see the red Lexus hybrid idling on the east side of Fifth Avenue. Retro twentyinch chrome rims. Smoked-over windows. Pimp extras. Automotive bling, stands out against the drab military vehicles like a straight brother at a Barbra Streisand gig.
Good morning, Scarface. How long has the car been lurking? Wonder if I should be concerned. Too fly for Cyna-corp.
Rose clears the street and is moving down the block. My view of her is broken up periodically by the slow flow of workers in and out of the Empire. There’s another gaggle of soldiers out front too, Chinamen, looking twodimensional and robotic in their loose poop-brown getup.
The Lexus creeps away from the curb, does a surprise peel out, gunshot loud, burns it westward on 34th.
Rose starts, looks around. Looks back at me. I think. Can’t see her face clearly. She turns and I lose her completely in a sudden surge of figures in yellow spacesuits, disembarking an impossibly decrepit Fung Wah bus.
An angry black Hummer swings out from behind the bus. Cyna-corp, no doubt, what with me sleeping … I spin and head back uptown, cussing myself out for not staying sharp. Telling you, those boys will hunt me down, just sand in the hourglass, yo.
Try to look, I don’t know, less black or something. More gray. Blend into the concrete.
The vehicle speeds up and rips past me. Whew.
And I’m thinking: maybe I would be better served watching my own back than getting sidetracked by a pretty ass.
_______________
Two-stepping it north up Fifth, realizing I feel good. Back on my grind. Important to have projects, goals, even if they’re not immediately clear.
Group of Central American thugs slouching on a corner. One of them gives yours truly an eye-frisk, then returns to his can of Goya beans. Probably trying to figure out what’s next after the Chinese gave those beaners the racial high-hat.
Thugs, scavengers, and gypsies every which way. Disgruntled worker bees looking to smash and grab, and who can blame ’em?
A big crash in the sky draws my attention northward, top of the Empire State Building. Something hypnotic about the comings and goings around the tower on that iconic building …
From street level, hard to know what they’re doing up there.
I pause.
Yeah, what the fuck are they doing up there? As far as I recall, there wasn’t any major structural damage to the Empire. Just the shooting on the observation deck, a replay of the shootings at the same spot way back in 1997. Details are spotty. A lot of people got dead, but that event was overshadowed and sidelined by the larger whole of 2/14.
Reckon blowing up the Brooklyn Bridge upstaged most everything, as dramatic and sexy as a terrorist act can get, even if it didn’t quite take the structure down. Highly visual, the exacting distribution of the explosives, boom boom boom. Shit, if you’re a career insurgent, where do you go from there? How do you top it? I didn’t witness it myself but it must have been some spectacular theater.
Strikes me, concerning the Empire State. As I watch a crane heft a massive girder: they’re actually constructing something new up there. On the observation deck, however many floors up. Visible only from above. Maybe from upper floors of the Chrysler or 15 Penn.
Clock the helicopters buzzing around the spire like hummingbirds. Always with the helicopters, be they NYPD—Apaches and Super Cobras—or matte black and unmarked, vibing Roswell, “enhanced” interrogation, secret CIA prisons. The familiarity of such stuff should chill me out, I did enough time in such twilight zones. But it doesn’t.
Choppers make me nervous. Ghetto-birds. Always have. Especially now.
Catch myself standing out in the wide open, wrenching my neck backward, spacing out. Sloppy. Time to step. Pop a pill, pull up my surgical mask.
Continue north, trying to put some space between myself and freaky-deak Koreatown.
It occurs oh so obviously that I can’t return to the library, as the Cyna-corp crew would surely be up and in my ass in a poker-hot minute. Pause for a moment, unsure as to where I should be headed.
Mere blocks away but it gets quiet in a hurry as I move beyond the construction sites. Dead spooky.
And splat, something gray hits the sidewalk in front of me. Jump back, jack. It’s a dead pigeon. Wham. Make that a pair. I look up, slide back against a building.
A third. Smack.
Christ. Even the vermin can’t hang on in this void shell of a burg. What the fuck am I thinking, out in the open like this? Looking for a nook to duck into … Get shuffling again. Foot traffic is almost entirely absent. I slide closer to the walls, slip in and out of alcoves. Should get off the street.
Take a moment to sneak another pill. Psyching myself out, it’s easy to wander into that headspace. Again I think of snipers, but I have some grounding context now and don’t let myself slide down that slope.
Need to cook up a plan. Make some power moves.
Drag about my suit. Try finding a dry cleaner in this fucking beat-down ghost town. You’d think with all these Chinese … but that’s straight racist, and this brother shuts that line of thinking down.
One time I got so desperate to get my threads shiny I busted into a boarded-up dry cleaner on Grand Street, way east, disturbing a huge community of raccoons. Raccoons, in a dry cleaner’s on fucking Grand Street! Like a dozen of them. Believe it or not.
At the corner of 37th and Fifth I’m trying to determine what’s best, cutting down a side street or staying on the avenue.
It’s at this moment that I detect color and movement to my rear, and I’m turning, clock four electric motocross bikes nearly on top of me, Jesus they’re dead frickin quiet, now sliding to a stop, two jumping the
curb and flanking me, the other pair coming to a halt in a showoff-y but elegant V shape, essentially pinning me to the window of a former Citibank.
Reach around and put my hand on my gun. Hold it there as I savvy that I’m confronted with four young punks, teenagers or early twenties, Koreans, all in civilian kit save the one dude I recognize: tough-stuff from the restaurant, hand tattoo, the knuckle-dragger who popped out of the kitchen to defend Rose’s honor. He wears hospital scrubs and a hairnet.
So. Mean-looking children with colorful bikes, all of them puffed up aggro like gibbons. I let go of my gun, say: “You kids outta be wearing helmets, y’all know that much.”
I mean it. Not a helmet among them. It’s shocking.
“Kim, be chill, I think this monkey is strapped,” says one kid in Korean, hair a stark white-colored pompadour per the current fashion. The street slang sounds stilted in that particular language, old-fashioned.
The hero in scrubs ignores this, says, “Hey, guy. You know who I am?”
Push down my mask. In Korean I say, “Lemme guess. You’re either a busboy, or a male nurse in a hairnet.”
Dude flushes up, his boys give a collective ooooo … down comes the kickstand and the guy is swinging off his bike, whipping off the hairnet as he rushes me. I figure, fuck it, and pull the gun.
Up in my face, my pistol shoved into his stomach, this kid not giving a fuck. In English: “Uh-uh. I’m the man who cuts off your fucking head and fucks your skull, money. Digs up your moms and nuts on her bones.”
Ah, gangsta speak. This kid fancies himself retro-street American. Points for balls, I do have an automatic weapon jammed into his stomach. I gotta let him down easy.
Note one of his buddies has produced a Glock and has it trained on me, sideways and above his head like this is a video game, like anybody ever really shot someone from said position and didn’t wind up hurting themselves. It’s no way to hold a gun, who made that nonsense up? And it announces them as ass-clowns, as if the haircuts didn’t say it all first.
Still. A gun is a gun is a gun.
Kim breathing on me. He smells like food, cooking oil. Prods me with a finger. Note again that this is a goodlooking dude, beautiful eyes, jet-black hair cut close. Says, “You come up in my neighborhood, start sniffing around our women? Are you fuckin simple? You bring heat and point that shit at me? You must want to die. You’re gonna tell me who the fuck you are and you do it fast, best believe I am showing great restraint not ganking you right here and now.”
The Nervous System Page 8