Act of Revenge

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  Sym stuck her head in. “Phone for you. Some woman named Chau. Wants to know where Lucy’s at.”

  “I’ll take it in back.” Marlene got up, stretched, yawned, and went back to her desk, located behind a bookcase full of potted plants in the rear of the big room.

  Dr. Chau introduced herself and informed Marlene that Lucy had not shown for their noon lunch date; nor had she arrived at one-thirty for her regular lab session. She had never missed one before.

  “Maybe she just forgot,” said Marlene, not believing this at all. “I mean, she’s a genius, but she’s twelve.”

  Chau seemed satisfied with this, and Marlene got rid of her as soon as she could, pressed the disconnect, and immediately dialed Tran’s pager. She waited. The torment lasted ten minutes, and then Tran was on the phone.

  “Is Lucy with you?”

  A rather long pause. “I presume she is not at the laboratory, then.”

  “No, they just called. Tran, you don’t think . . . ? I mean, those men who bothered them before . . .”

  “I very much doubt it, Marie-Hélène. However, I will find her.”

  “Where? Where is she?”

  “Do not become upset, my friend. There is no one who wishes to hurt Lucy at present. She is an impulsive child and may have gone off somewhere. I will inspect her usual haunts.” In English he added, “No sweat it.”

  “Don’t sweat it, you mean. ‘No sweat’ means a trivial problem.”

  “This is also apt,” said Tran in French. “I will call. Until later.”

  It had to be Leung, Tran thought, one of those phone calls from Li’s Restaurant had set up a lift, and they would have had to be good to have netted Lucy in daylight, in the city. The other day Leung had used his own boys, Chinese, and they had been foiled easily. He would not do that again. He would use . . . who? Local people, certainly—you wouldn’t import a group from Hong Kong to lift a little girl; they might get lost or make some stupid error out of mere . . . what was the word? Disorientation? Disoccidentation? There was no such word in any language, attesting to the cultural hegemony of the West. They would be Asian, probably; Tran couldn’t see a tong man hiring long-noses for such a job. That narrowed the field. Kidnap-capable gangs were not exactly common, even in Chinatown. Tran knew several, and he decided to start with the one he used himself, when he had need of such services.

  The business offices of the Hoi Do an-truong were located above a Vietnamese grocery on Lafayette, just off Canal, in the heart of the area that Vietnamese gangs had recently claimed for their own. Vietnamese gangs are not squeamish in their choice of names, unlike the Chinese, who prefer flowery vagueness with a “harmonious” or “benevolent” tossed in. One Viet gang of the period was called Born to Kill; Hoi Do an-truong means “the society of those with severed entrails,” aka “The Sorrow League.” In Vietnamese folklore that name refers to an association of men and women of talent doomed to a life of woe by cruel fate.

  When Tran approached the building, its doorway was decorated with the usual gaggle of black-shirted, sunglassed young thugs. Others leaned against late-model Lexus or Maxima cars, also black, parked and double-parked in the street outside. These young men had all been children during the war; most were orphans and the Hoi Do an-truong was the closest thing they had ever known to a family. Tran did not exactly approve of them, but he understood the wounds they had experienced and did not condemn their predation on the Vietnamese refugee community, many of whom had spent a good deal of energy trying to kill him back in their native land.

  Tran passed through these youths without challenge and entered the building. They looked at one another through their sunglasses and laughed nervously. There was some debate among them as to who the old guy really was. Some thought their dai lo called the man Major Pham as a nickname, as an American gangster might call an associate King Kong or Terminator. Others thought he actually was Major Pham, the unkillable terror of the Iron Triangle, whose name was used to frighten children at a time and in a place where children were not easy to frighten. In any case, they treated him, as their leader did, with vast and wary respect.

  The dai lo, or big brother, of the Hoi Do an-truong, called himself Freddie Phat. He was thirty-five, tall for a Vietnamese, and had a handsome, intelligent face. He wore fashionable tinted aviator glasses, a gray silk suit, and a dark blue shirt with a pale blue tie, open at the collar. His office was the kitchen of a tenement apartment in which many of his associates dwelt. When Tran barged in, he immediately dismissed the two men with whom he was talking and offered Tran a chair at the chrome and formica kitchen table that served as his desk. Tran remained standing. He said, “Tell me you didn’t take her.”

  Freddie Phat swallowed the insult represented by Tran’s tone of voice, and his refusal of a seat, and the implied refusal of tea and snacks and a civilized conversation before getting to business. Phat was one of four people in the United States who knew who Tran really was (the others being Lucy Karp, Marlene Ciampi, and a woman who worked in a fish-packing plant in Texas) and so he did this out of respect, rather than because he was afraid of him (although he was afraid of him, too), respect for what Tran had been through in the service of his ungrateful country.

  It did not occur to him, although he was an excellent liar, to lie in this instance. He said, “No, naturally not, although I was approached with the contract.”

  “Leung?”

  “One of his people came, a little before noon. I said no, and I suggested it was not a good idea to annoy that particular girl.”

  “Who?”

  “The word I have is that they went to the Vo brothers. The Vo would do it. The Vo will do anything, as you know.”

  Tran paused and waited for his heart to slow to its normal rhythm. It was somewhat of an effort to control his voice as he asked, “It was not a . . . water contract, was it?”

  Phat shook his head. “Not that they said, only a simple lift and hold. I believe they wished to frighten rather than harm and also to find out what she knows about certain events.”

  “I see.” Tran pulled out a chair and sat down. Phat thought he looked older than he had a few minutes ago. Tran looked across the table at the dai lo. “I will need your help to find her, all of your people, and immediately.” When he saw Phat hesitate, he added, “The usual rates, of course.”

  Phat made a dismissive gesture. “No, it is not that. We would be happy to be of service. But this is, as I understand it, a tong matter. The Da Qan Zi has been mentioned.”

  “And so you are afraid.”

  “I am prudent. We are very small here, and the Chinese are very large. We do business with our own people and so they allow it, but if we intruded in a tong matter . . .”

  “You already have, the other day. Have you forgotten?”

  “No, but at that time I didn’t know what I know now.” Phat was conscious of Tran’s gaze, that famous gun-barrel stare. He felt the first prickles of sweat start on his forehead. He said, “Let me do this. I will set my boys to watch their house in Brooklyn and that place they use on Hester Street and other places where they are known. If we see the Vo boys or the cousin, we will follow. I will call you as soon as the girl turns up.”

  After a pause, Tran nodded sharply and stood up. At the door he turned and said, “If she is found safely in this way, I will owe you a debt.”

  And what if not? wondered Freddie Phat, and shuddered, as a miasma of the old war seemed to drift through the room, and he recalled some of the stories about Major Pham and the fate of those he disliked.

  Lucy surprised herself by not being more frightened. The worst thing really about the abandoned building was when she had to go to the bathroom, and they took her to what used to be one, but there were no fixtures in it and she had to go in a smelly hole in the floor where the toilet had been.

  Being kidnapped by Vietnamese gangsters was no joke, of course, but it was also the most interesting thing that had happened to her recently, and she was fascinated
with her captors. They did not know that she could understand Vietnamese and therefore spoke freely among themselves in her presence, there in the ruined room. Early on she had learned that they were not going to harm her, but had been hired to hold her for a man they called “the Chinese.” Lucy knew whom they meant, and the knowledge buoyed her, for she also knew that Tran was watching Leung and that he would very shortly learn what had happened to her and take appropriate measures. Lucy’s faith in Tran’s powers was in the same ballpark as her faith in the Deity; in Heaven, God disposed, in New York, Tran. With respect to the former power, she had a fine sense of what sort of prayers would be most effective, and so she did not pray for release from her captivity but for courage and endurance and also that when Tran found her, he would not be too awful to her captors.

  These were two brothers, surnamed Vo and a cousin, surnamed Nguyen, and they all had adopted, in the usual way, gang nicknames. The smaller of the two brothers, a rat-face with brown teeth, was called Needlenose. The larger, beefy for a Vietnamese, and with coarse long hair and dark skin, was Sharkmeat. The cousin was Cowboy, hardly more than a boy, delicate-boned, wiry and nervous. Lucy gathered that he had been in the country for less time than the others had, and they bossed him around roughly.

  “Hey, Cowboy, we’re going to call Kenny again,” said Sharkmeat. “You watch her.”

  “Yeah,” said Needlenose, “watch, but don’t touch. We know you go for hairless pussy.”

  “He is a hairless pussy,” said Sharkmeat, and laughing, they stomped out.

  Some minutes passed. Nguyen spent the waiting time ripping a hole in the plaster wall with a large, heavy butterfly knife, but Lucy felt his eyes on her and when she turned her head, he was staring at her. She returned his gaze. Nguyen stopped his hacking at the wall and picked up Lucy’s bag. He examined her wallet, her notebook, the various odds and ends she had accumulated. He riffled through a French-English and a Vietnamese-English dictionary, and a paperback of Kim. He picked up The Tale of Kieu, studied it briefly, and then stared again at Lucy. He walked over to her, holding the book.

  “You read this book?” he asked in English.

  “No,” she answered, “I only look at the pictures.”

  “But the book has no pictures,” he replied in Vietnamese, and then did a double-take when he realized that the girl had also spoken in that language.

  “You speak Vietnamese!” he exclaimed.

  “All Americans speak a little Vietnamese.”

  He gaped at her. She said, “That was a joke.”

  “But where did you learn it?”

  “From a friend.” She indicated the book. “Have you read this?”

  He looked down, flushing. “No, I had to leave school. To work, and then . . . but I know this . . .” and here he declaimed in a singsong voice, “ ‘The breeze blows cool, the moon shines clear, but in my heart still burns a thirst unquenched.’ ”

  “Yes, that’s from where Kieu and Kim are on their first date and she plays her lute for him. It’s so beautiful. I wish I could read it better, it’s still hard for me. How old are you?”

  “Seventeen. How old are you?”

  “Fourteen,” she lied. “How long have you been in America?”

  “Oh, six months, something like that.”

  “And do you like this kind of work? Kidnapping people?”

  He shrugged. “I have no choice. My family brought me over here, and I have to do what they say.”

  They heard footsteps approaching. Lucy put her hand on his arm, which was warm and smooth. “Brother,” she said urgently, “please don’t tell them I speak your language. I think they would get angry if they knew.”

  Cowboy stared at the little white hand on his arm. He nodded sharply and moved away as the other two men came back into the room. Kenny Vo, their leader, had apparently been contacted and was on his way. They sat back against the wall, chain-smoking, and talking about women and gambling and teasing Cowboy. Lucy shut her ears to that and returned to her translating, turning, as the poem recommends, the “scented leaves by lamplight to read the tale of love recorded upon green chronicles.” She had progressed to where the sisters Van and Kieu (both beauties, but Lucy decided to forgive them that, and besides, Kieu was possessed of a deeper charm and talented as well) were lamenting over the grave of a famous beauty of the past who had been betrayed and died of it, when Kenny Vo walked in and started barking orders. Vo had a family resemblance to his brothers, bearing a version both of Needlenose’s sharp features and Sharkmeat’s muscular bulk. He moved and spoke with casual brutality, and when he looked at Lucy it was as if he were looking at some inanimate and unappealing package, a sack of elderly chicken parts in need of rapid disposal, for example.

  “Get her in the trunk,” he ordered. “Cowboy, watch the street.”

  This was frightening. Lucy had always disliked enclosed places, and the dark, and being constrained, and so her control gave way, and she fought, and having been trained in boxing from an early age, she got a few good shots in before she was slapped silly by Sharkmeat and stuffed in the trunk of a Lincoln. Her bag was gone, but she had Tran’s book shoved down her waistband. An interminable, painful ride over New York’s infamously ragged paving, and then they popped the lid and threw a stinking blanket over her and hauled her indoors. She ended up on a mattress in what looked like the finished basement of a suburban house, a windowless room, panelled in cheap pine-look sheeting, with red and black linoleum on the floors. There were two doors, one locked, the other leading, delightfully, to a tiny bathroom. She used the toilet and then checked herself out in the medicine-cabinet mirror. Bruises on cheek and jawline, and a big smear of blood down her chin and spattered on her T-shirt from where her nose had bled: a mess. She washed her face gingerly and dried off with wads of toilet paper.

  She went back into the other room, sat on the mattress, and listened. She heard the sounds of several men walking and speaking some tonal language, but could not make out what was being said. The Vo boys, she presumed, and maybe the Chinese guy. The talking became louder, turned into an argument. She heard stomping, slammed doors. From outside came the sound of car doors. A car started up and pulled away. Could they have left her here alone? No, she heard steps above. Sighing, she drew out the book and rolled over onto her belly. She translated:

  Since time out of mind, cried Kieu,

  harsh fate has cursed all rosy faces, sparing none.

  As I see her lie there, it hurts to think

  Of what will come to me hereafter

  An unpleasant thought; she wished Tran would hurry the hell up.

  Chapter 10

  KARP WAS DINING IN COLUMBUS PARK behind the Criminal Courts Building, using the twenty minutes he had to spare between his briefing of Jack Keegan and his appointment to address the incoming class of ADAs. He sat on the edge of a park bench, leaning over his spread knees, head down and slurping noisily, a position necessary if one wished to eat a sausage, fried onion and pepper hero laden with hot sauce and oozing grease without collecting souvenirs of the meal all over one’s immaculately pressed suit. An occasional pigeon darted in between his shoes to sample the dropped bits. Karp noted that the birds always dropped these after a taste, and took an odd comfort in the fact that his normal lunchtime diet would gag a New York pigeon. There appeared now in his restricted field of view a pair of gleaming faux crocodile loafers decorated with gold-colored clasps, above which were black silk socks, above which were the legs of a brown pinstripe on tan wool suit. A deep voice said, “Nice day for a picnic, Stretch. They said I’d find you out here, and here you are.”

  Karp carefully deposited the ragged and soggy sandwich on a square of waxed paper and looked up. He saw a smiling solid man in his early fifties, broad-shouldered and half a foot shorter than Karp himself, with a brush mustache and graying sideburns on his mahogany face. Captain Clay Fulton was Karp’s first and best friend on the police force. A dozen years his senior, Fulton was the first black co
llege-educated detective captain in the department’s history, highly decorated, feared and mistrusted by the department grandees, and hence left pretty much on his own. Officially, he ran the D.A. squad; unofficially, he was more or less Karp’s private police force, which amused him, and kept him virtually free of the cop bureaucracy he despised.

  “It is,” Karp agreed. “Get yourself something from the wagons and sit.”

  Fulton made a face and sat down. “I used to eat like that when I still had a stomach. You know, Stretch, when you’re a big shot you’re supposed to have lunch in a restaurant, the waiter brings you the food, the kitchen got a health permit, you bask in the admiring glances of lovely women . . .”

  “I’m practicing for when I get fired. You got any good news for me?”

  “About this Lie character? Not to speak of. The prints came back zilch. Not known on NCIS. We’re trying Interpol, but that’ll take awhile.”

  “Try the Hong Kong police.”

  “You think he’s from there?”

  “It’s a good guess. All these Chinese bad boys check in there sooner or later. Where did he go after I threw him out?”

  “Downtown, an office building. His lawyer’s place, but they didn’t stay there long. They hopped a cab back up there.” Here he jerked a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the federal building. “They went in, and about an hour later the lawyer came out alone.”

  Karp nodded. “So they did a deal. Lie probably went out of the garage in one of those black-window vans with a couple of FBI guys to keep him company. He’s eating his chow mein in a U.S. government safe house as we speak.”