Mary Ma washed dishes in the kitchen of the Golden Pheasant, a big, brightly lit, old-fashioned tourist restaurant on the second floor of a building on Mott, a few doors up from Pell. The appreciation of Chinese cuisine had recently come a long way in the city, and there were now large numbers of gwailo New Yorkers who could distinguish between the various regional cuisines and be boring about how to eat Peking duck. The old Golden Pheasant, however, catered to the tour-bus trade, terrified gaggles of ladies from Indiana shrieking with nervous laughter over chopsticks, soy sauce, and lobster Cantonese with flied lice. The Ma family was three years in the country, six years out of the PRC, beginning to make it in America in the good old way, working two jobs apiece, living like dogs in two tenement rooms, keeping their one kid in school, saving every penny. (Mrs. Ma was shocked to her soul when, a few days after her arrival in town, she observed a group of children tossing pennies against a wall. Playing! With real coins! What if they lost one?)
Aside from violating the child labor and minimum wage laws of the state of New York for eight hours a day, Mary Ma was more or less on her own. From the age of ten she had worn the latchkey necklace, that badge of striving families, and saw her parents mainly at work, where Mrs. Ma was a prep cook and Mr. Ma a waiter. Mary Ma had started school in Guangdong in the PRC, continued in Hong Kong, and had been registered in public school on the second day after the family’s arrival in New York, speaking little English, and that with a faint British accent. She was lonely, as all such children are and more than most, since she was a member of the Chinese generation that has no siblings by order of the leaders of the PRC. In the fourth grade, however, she had with uncharacteristic boldness advised the gwailo girl at the next desk, who was having incomprehensible difficulty with a math problem that Mary Ma had solved in eight seconds, and to her immense surprise the girl had thanked her profusely in Cantonese.
Thus was born her friendship with Lucy Karp, and thus was she brought into the charmed circle of the Chens and the Karps, and supplied with the role models every immigrant child needs to become American. From Janice she learned how to be Chinese and cool, she learned that thick leather boy’s oxfords are never appropriate no matter how well they wear, that iridescent blue-framed harlequin-shaped eyeglasses are a bargain for a good reason and that small wire-framed ones are better and nearly as cheap, she learned that makeup is not the unmistakable sign of prostitution, that the cheap brands of blusher are about as good as the costly ones, that it is not a sin against the ancestors to have some spending money of one’s own, that parents deserve respect and obedience but do not necessarily represent the source of all earthly wisdom.
From Lucy there came lessons more thrilling, even terrifying: about films and music—who is hip, who not; that girls are the equal of boys, and often smarter, that making a boy look a fool is not a sin but amusing; that the correct response to insult is not shame but counter-insult and aggression; that the street has its own rules, some of them not thought of by Confucius; and (this, of course, indirectly, but the most important of all) that a big part of growing up in America is the invention of the self, and there are no real constraints on this choice—not class, not race, not even sex.
And Lucy introduced the immigrant child to the bosom of the American family. (With what difficulty did Mary Ma explain to her parents what a sleepover was, and its purpose, and assure them that they would not have to reciprocate, and that there was no loss of face in this!) Used to analyzing the deeper meaning of every act for political consequences, the Ma parents were flabbergasted that their offspring was being entertained in the home of a public prosecutor (the honor!), something that could never have happened in the Red mandarin society of the PRC, but naturally they were terrified that she would let something slip about the provenance of their green cards. Mary would never have revealed to her parents that Lucy Karp knew all there was to know about this aspect of the Mas’ American journey, and that secret was one of the things that tied her most closely to Lucy and Janice. A certain amount of foolish secrecy is involved in most friendships among girls of that age, but in this case the secrets were not foolish at all, were real and dire. It made the friendship closer, more intimate, and as water to the thirst of Mary Ma, who had almost no one else to love. That was another lesson: there was American stuff that your folks could never, ever understand, even if, as in Lucy’s case, they were Americans born.
The disaster at the Asia Mall had thus affected Mary Ma’s life even more than it had that of her friends. Suddenly Janice was distant and vaguely “busy,” Lucy was practically incommunicado, and the phone conversations Mary had with both of them were brief and unsatisfying. Unlike her friends, however, Mary could not afford to sulk, her social resources being much thinner. Besides this, she was compelled by a sense of shame about the way she had lost it and blubbered in the aftermath of the killings.
On a Monday morning, then, ten days after the events in the storeroom, she left her family’s tenement apartment on Eldridge Street and strode down Canal, her round face as grim as a round face ever gets, her fists clenched, looking much like one of the girls marching boldly out of the picture plane on one of those flower-colored Maoist posters touting the Great Leap Forward. She was headed for Lucy’s home, with what in mind she hardly knew, but resolved to fight for friendship in whatever way might present itself.
She walked by the Asia Mall, looking sideways to see if she could catch a glimpse of Janice through the windows. She thought of just bursting in and demanding to know what was up, but quailed at the thought of going into that place just yet. She was cursing herself for a spineless wretch when she spotted a familiar face emerging from the glass doors.
“Hey, Wang!” she called out, just as if she were a boy, which was permitted in America.
Warren Wang looked up, saw who it was, and waved.
She continued west on Canal, and he fell in with her. He was carrying two large plastic Asia Mall shopping bags.
“Where’re you going?” he asked.
“Wherever I feel like,” said Mary Ma, and added, “The highway is my home.”
“No, really.”
They stopped to let traffic pass on the corner of Broadway. She pointed at a phone number on the side of a passing truck. “I’ll tell you if you tell me what’s interesting about that number.”
“What, 4937775?” His eyes unfocused briefly. “Um, it’s a Smith number. The sum of the digits equals the sum of the digits of its prime factorization minus one. Forty-two. So, tell me, where?”
“I’m going to Lucy Karp’s.”
“Forget it. She locked herself in a closet and swallowed the key. I’ve been trying to talk to her for a week.”
“You have? I didn’t know you were a friend of hers.”
He laughed ruefully. “Neither did I.” Upon which he related the strange incident involving Janice and the two ma jai. “I called her up as soon as I got home,” he continued, “but it was like nothing ever happened. ‘Forget it, Warren.’ Okay, I’ll forget it, and then I ask her if she wants to go hang out or something, hit the arcade or the movies, but nothing.” He sighed. “I guess it was like a scam, them being, you know, nice and all.”
Mary was silent for so long that the boy stopped and looked into her face.
“What’s wrong?” No answer. “Earth to Mary . . .”
Mary’s face had gone the color of old parchment. She forgot to breathe for a long time, and when she did it came in a strangled whoop. When her mind unfroze, she found that she was running up Broadway. At Grand she looked around wildly, but all she saw was the normal street traffic and poor Warren Wang standing there, his shopping bags drooping from his hands, his mouth open in surprise. The terror she had felt in the storeroom was back again, redoubled. There was only one reason for Janice and Lucy to be followed, which was that somebody knew they all had seen the murders. This thought, once comprehended, blasted through Mary Ma’s considerable intellect like a gas explosion, leaving behind it a singl
e bare instinct, similar to the one that drives the whooping crane two thousand miles to a tiny patch of Texas. In five minutes she was at Crosby off Grand, her finger jammed into the button for Lucy Karp’s loft, imploring Guan Yin, goddess of compassion, that Lucy might answer. Which she did, but coolly.
“Um, Mary, I’m kind of involved—”
“Wah! Lòuhsì!” Mary sobbed, and then started babbling in Cantonese, at which point Lucy, without another word, pressed the button that would send the elevator down to the street.
What Lucy had been involved in was prayer, actually on her hard little knees in her bedroom, clicking through her rosary, concentrating, hoping for an end to the fog of pain and confusion she had endured these past days, the isolation from her friends, the gnawing sense that she was letting her family down, and, barely acknowledged, the roiling pit where her feelings about her mother lurked, generating fumes of acid. Lucy prayed often. The preacher’s kid as rakehell is folkloric, but that train runs in the other direction, too. Being the child of an agnostic Jew and a heterodox semi-lapsed Catholic, raised in a society growing more secular every year, it was perhaps natural that she should couch her juvenile rebellion in such terms. She was the most religious person she knew not in holy orders, and this gave her no little pride, which rather defeated the devotion, although she was only on the outer edges of understanding that.
When Mary rang, Lucy found herself annoyed at the interruption, and then, as she waited foot-tappingly for the elevator to rise, it struck her, in a wonderful wave of understanding. She had been praying, as everyone should, not for a solution to her problems, but for moral strength and the clear light, expecting something mental, some heavenly voice perhaps, such as was vouchsafed by St. Teresa, but no, here it was in the person of poor Mary Ma, the opportunity to extend loving kindness to an unhappy friend, which she immediately saw as the perfect answer to her present spiritual need, better than any amount of angelic advice, and presenting as well the opportunity to ask forgiveness for being such a complete jerk.
Mary Ma was not used to being a sign from God, and was unprepared for the enthusiasm with which she was greeted, the kisses, the embraces, the rushing, heartfelt apologies. The two repaired to Lucy’s bedroom, locked the door, and exchanged tearful vows that they would not let anything tear them apart again. Besides being quite sincere, the whole business was very Colette, which gave Lucy considerable satisfaction. She was at the age when behaving spontaneously like someone in a book is particularly fine.
“So . . . what about Jan?” said Mary Ma after all this had been going on for a good while. She was quite over her fear, which had, after all, been ninety percent loneliness.
“Did you talk to her? I mean after.”
“Yeah, but she was still freaked. I couldn’t get ten words in a row out of her.”
“Uh-huh. She’s freaked out about her family. Janice wants everything to be a certain way, and if it doesn’t go that way she thinks if she doesn’t think about it, it’ll sort of disappear.”
“What should we do?” asked Mary.
“We should find the killer ourselves and bring him in!” said Lucy in a dramatic voice.
Mary Ma gave her a look. “That’s ridiculous. We’re a couple of kids. No, the first thing is to get Janice back together with us and find out what’s going on with her family and this thing, is she getting threatened or anything. The next thing is to make sure that none of us are on the street alone in case they try anything again. We should really hang out together like we used to. Also . . .” She paused and looked closely at Lucy, her eyes glinting behind her spectacles. “How did you get rid of those gangsters?”
“A friend of mine helped us. Why?”
“Just thinking. Have you got any money?”
“What? Why?”
“We could hire our own gangsters,” said Mary Ma.
“Mary!” cried Lucy, looking at the other girl rather as Dr. Frankenstein had at his monster when the thing first stirred.
“It’s the logical thing. But first we have to grab Janice and get her back to the real world.”
Lucy sprang from the bed. “Let’s go now!”
Mary’s face fell. “Now?” she said hesitantly, which gave Lucy some satisfaction, as signaling the retention of her leadership in action, and this was augmented when they arrived at the Asia Mall and Mary got the willies at the entrance to the storeroom.
Lucy grabbed an arm and yanked, and would not let go, presenting Mary with the choice between entering what Lucy persisted in calling the Cavern of Death and causing a face-destroying scene. Lucy kept a protective-coercive arm around the other girl as they went down the narrow aisles between the bins.
They found Janice alone in the little stock office, where she had been put to filing invoices. She yelped and tried to flee, and Lucy had to get physical with her, which was not that unusual in their long relationship. Lucy told her (into her ear, lying atop her, Mary Ma assisting with the legs) in their usual mixture of English and Cantonese that she loved her, that she was her sister forever, that her heart was breaking, and that if Janice didn’t relent, she would kill herself. Thereupon she leaped up, plucked a stapler from the desk, held it to her temple, and grimaced, her eyes shut. At which point Janice, whose own life had been as much a misery since she had walked away on Canal Street, laughed (and had missed that, too—who else made her giggle like Lucy Karp? No one), and then they were all laughing and crying, and tickling one another, until Mrs. Chen came back and threatened to beat them all with a broom, and (secretly transported with relief ) gave them all something useful to do.
Marlene got the call from Raney in her car as she was traveling back to her office from the East Village Women’s Shelter.
“It’s about time,” she said testily. She had not had a good morning.
“Do you want to hear this, or do you want to nag? You know, we’re not married yet, so I don’t have to take shit from you when I’m doing you a favor.”
She covered the mouthpiece, let out a maniacal shriek, so that pedestrians looked over at her in alarm, and then spoke softly into it. “I’m sorry, Jim, my Irish dreamboat, but I had a hell of a morning.”
“On the rag again, huh?”
“I might as well be. Men suck, Jim, you know that? You know something else? So do women. Meanwhile, what’ve you got?”
“Not a whole hell of a lot. Phil Wu caught it out of the Five. What he figures is a Hong Kong job. Gang wars type thing. He says he called the Hong Kong cops, and that’s their take on it, too. Some gang over there, they couldn’t get to these two on their own turf, they figure they wouldn’t be that well guarded in New York, so they set up the hit for here. Wu figures the shooter was on the first plane back home a couple, three hours after he did it.”
“So this is on the back burner?”
“Yeah, more like it fell off the back of the stove, it’s down there with the roach traps and the crumbs. Plus, there is absolutely no heat on this.”
“You mean from the community?”
“Right. Not like it was a couple of Germans got whacked in the Macy’s stockroom. Or some tourist got hit on Mott Street. I believe this case will be transferred from Detective Wu to Detective Can, forthwith and henceforward. Like the man said—”
“Yeah, I know, it’s Chinatown, and I’m getting so fucking tired of hearing that. Tell me something: Does anyone have any hint that there’s some local connection here? With the community, with gang activity in the city?”
“Not that I heard, Marlene.” A significant pause. She could almost hear her pal switching into detection mode. “Why do you ask? Did you hear something?”
Marlene tapped at random a couple of buttons on the handset. “Gosh, Raney, we’re breaking up. Thanks—I’ll get back to you later.”
Stopped at a light at Houston and Lafayette, she addressed her companion. “Something doesn’t jibe here, Sweets. If it was an in-and-out with some torpedo from Asia, what are they doing following Janice Chen? Why
the hell is this Leung interested in her? Maybe I should go talk with Detective Can. Meanwhile, I thought my performance this morning was flawless. Flawless, but futile. So often this is the story of my life, don’t you find? I lay the facts before the wretched woman. Brenda, darling, I say, it’s your life, but based on my very considerable experience with relationships fucked up beyond all hope of repair, it is my strong advice to you that you kiss off Chester D. And get some help for yourself while you’re at it. No licensed MSW could have put it better, don’t you agree?”
The dog, catching the tone, made a sound between a growl and a whine.
“Of course you do. You are an intelligent creature. But not Brenda Nero. Not at all, especially when I told her that I had given the very same advice to her darling. What language! Well, really, I wash my hands of her. I intend to testify at Chester’s trial, and I will advise him to plead justifiable homicide. Which reminds me, I have to shop around for a psychiatrist for my daughter, and while I’m at it one for the delightful gun moll Ms. Vivian Fein Bollano, my client. Can you do some research, Sweets? Hop on down to the various papers and pull clippings about Jumping Jerry? No, I better do it myself. In fact, I could get up to the News right now . . . oh, shit, that better not be Raney, trying his sly tricks on . . .” She picked up the buzzing phone. “Hello, Marlene Ciampi.”
The voice on the phone was, however, not Raney’s but that of an official-sounding woman.
“Hello, excuse me, but I’m trying to reach a Mr. Roger Karp. The answering machine gave me—”
“Right, this is his wife. Can I help you?”
“Yes, maybe. Do you know a Sophie Leontoff? This is Beth Israel Hospital calling. Mr. Karp’s number was listed as next of—”
“Oh, God! What happened to her? I mean, yes, she’s our great-aunt.”
“Oh, good. Sophie took a fall this morning, and I’m afraid she fractured her hip. She’s in surgery now.”
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