A Bitter Feast

by S. J. Rozan

“What do you mean, fast rise?” I asked.

  “Usually it takes longer for one of the new guys to build a power base. You have to get to know people. Kiss the right rings, pull some stuff that proves your worth so you can recruit your soldiers. Duke Lo rocketed to the top, behind guys like Three-finger Choi. He seems to have a loyal and dedicated following, bigger than you’d expect for someone still new.”

  “Consisting of locals?”

  She shook her head. “No, but mostly legals, newer than he is. He attracts the least appetizing of the FOBs. They seem to gravitate right to him.” FOBs, in Chinatownese, are newcomers Fresh Off the Boat. “Come to think of it, if the INS didn’t go handing out visas and green cards to scum like Choi, they wouldn’t need to be chewing their fingernails over Duke Lo. He has a record in China, you know.”

  “Lo?”

  “Choi.”

  “So why did they let him in?”

  “Because they’re the Feds, in their infinite wisdom.”

  “So,” I said, watching cops come and go, “what would be Lo’s connection to the waiters?”

  “No idea. Maybe they owe him something.”

  “He’s a money lender?”

  “I told you, he’s a general crook. No crime too big or small, as long as it’s unproven.”

  “What’s his real name?”

  “Lo Da-Qi.”

  Roughly translatable as All in Readiness. “Why does he call himself Duke?”

  Mary shrugged. “From what I hear, he sees Chinatown these days as the Old West. Wide open. Anybody’s.”

  “Wait,” I said. “And he’s John Wayne?”

  “The imagination of these guys amazes you, doesn’t it? Chester!”

  A bright-eyed young detective with a shaved head and a goatee looked up from a paper-covered desk. “Yeah?”

  “Want to come pick up Three-finger Choi with me?” Mary stood.

  “Hell, yes.” Chester threw his pen down on his desk. “Or here’s an even better idea: I’ll go do that and you stay and fill these out.”

  “In your dreams, Chester. Come on.” Mary stopped short and narrowed her eyes at me. “And we can send someone over to your office to lift prints in case there’s anything left. Why didn’t you call us before you called the locksmith?”

  “Because what were you going to do about it? When Golden Adventure was broken into last year, no one lifted any prints.”

  “No one put rice bags over their heads, either. Don’t give me that innocent stuff, Lydia. This wasn’t a B and E and we wouldn’t have treated it that way. You were just afraid I’d find out and order you off the case. Yeah, I know, I can’t order you off anything. Go away, I have work to do. Chester, come on, move it, let’s go.”

  Mary and the other detective pulled on the jackets they wear to cover the guns they carry. They conferred briefly over at his desk. I opened and closed my mouth, but the right words didn’t come. Mary didn’t look over at me again, so I left her there and found my own way out of the Fifth Precinct.

  I hustled through the sunny streets, crowded now with early-morning shoppers intent on scooping up the freshest piece of perch and the crispest cabbage to be had, for the family meal they’d be making at midday. The lo mein lady behind her metal cart was already dishing up steaming noodles to fortify those whose mission among the vegetable stands had only just begun. I was hit by the scent of the soy sauce and sesame oil she used as I hurried by, and wondered what her clothes smelled like by the end of the day. Then I wondered what mine were going to smell like by the end of this day in and out of the kitchen at Dragon Garden.

  I took a detour and went up Mott Street to the building that held the Chinese Restaurant Workers’ Union office. I had come by last night on my way home from the hospital and found the bomb-sniffing dogs gone, the homicide investigators finished, the yellow POLICE LINE, DO NOT CROSS tape still up, evacuated residents milling around wearing blankets and worried looks, and the city inspectors just arriving to do their job of making sure the building was not structurally damaged and about to collapse into the street.

  I didn’t know what I expected to find now, but I went anyway, to make the explosion more real to me, to see for myself.

  What I saw was the police tape down and the door at the bottom of the areaway stairs standing ajar. Except for plywood over the areaway windows, the building showed no sign that a bomb had exploded there last night. Even the drugstore on street level was open for business.

  I went down the stairs, stood in the open doorway, and knocked. Warren Tan knelt in the wreckage, a few wrinkled and torn pieces of paper in each hand. He looked over his shoulder and met my eyes. Saying nothing, he stood.

  “I’m sorry,” I told him.

  He looked at me blankly for a moment, as if he’d forgotten who I was, but I didn’t think that was it. Then he said, “It was only a small bomb. Something called C-4.” He gave a short, humorless laugh. “An American military product. You only need a piece the size of a quarter.” His voice was dull and his skin as ashen as it had appeared on TV the night before. “The cops said we could come back.”

  “They’re through here?”

  He nodded, looking around. The chaos of two nights ago, when I’d first come here, was nothing compared to the situation now. Chairs lay on their sides, file drawers gaped open. The bridge table Warren Tan and I had sat at tilted forward, two of its legs snapped in half. It looked like a camel kneeling in a paper oasis.

  “It was under that desk,” Warren Tan said, pointing to a file-covered patch of floor. Between the papers, envelopes, and yellow pads, I could see a shallow rubble crater in the concrete floor. I remembered a desk standing in that spot; nothing was there now.

  “Blew the hell out of it,” he said. “That’s what killed the guy Peter was meeting with; a piece of it smashed his skull. The cops packed it up and carted it away; they’re going to analyze it or something, I guess.”

  In the air I could smell something lingering and acrid, probably the explosive. “There wasn’t a fire?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  “That’s lucky,” I tried.

  His look was one of disbelief. “Lucky? Peter’s in the hospital, another guy’s dead—lucky?” Unexpectedly he gave a small, tired smile. “But maybe that proves what we said the other night—no matter how American you are, you can’t stop being Chinese. Luck has to get in there somewhere, doesn’t it? And maybe you’re right. Guess who called already this morning?”

  “Who?”

  “The New York Labor Council.”

  “They did? Why?”

  “An unofficial call. My friend over there, sort of testing the waters. Apparently I said something last night on TV about other labor groups being scared off.”

  “On the Cantonese cable channel. I saw it.”

  “I don’t remember what I said. But it seems the networks picked it up on the eleven o’clock news and the Times carried it this morning. The NYLC doesn’t like to look scared.”

  “So something good may come of this?” It seemed a silly, Pollyanna-sounding thing to say, as both of us looked around the disaster of an office again.

  “It had better,” he finally said. “Otherwise it’s just … what a waste.”

  “Did you know Peter and that other man were here?”

  “Did I—God, no! Everyone was supposed to be at the Dragon Garden demonstration. This place should have been empty.” He shook his head slowly, side to side. “There’s always someone here. But last night, it should have been empty.”

  I glanced at my watch. Speaking of Dragon Garden, I needed to be on the move. “Do you know who the other man was?”

  “No. The cops asked me to identify him, but the head wound … I couldn’t.”

  Warren Tan and I stood looking at each other another moment or two in the rubble of his office.

  “I have to go,” I said.

  He nodded and gave me another small smile. “I guess this makes joining the revolution a little less at
tractive, huh?”

  “No,” I said, looking around once again before I turned to leave. “More.”

  The help at Dragon Garden didn’t ride to work up the gleaming escalator, of course; they entered the building three doors down and climbed a steep staircase to a large room that served as both employees’ break room and, it seemed, nonfoods storage spillover space. When I pushed open the room’s door on this early Saturday morning a number of heads turned my way, a few welcoming, a few hostile, most indifferently curious. In restaurant work, people come and go all the time. Each new person or person newly gone makes the ground shift slightly, like a tug on a tablecloth, and the people who stay rearrange a little, like teacups that tip and then regain their balance.

  I stopped just inside the door, smiled shyly, and bowed to my new coworkers, hoping my dorky glasses wouldn’t slip off. Most of them tipped their heads to me with the automatic instinct people everywhere have to return a polite gesture.

  “I am Chin Ling,” I said softly, bobbing my head again, speaking Cantonese, giving them the truth, though not all of it. “This is my first day. First day,” I said again in English, mindful of the fact that probably fewer than half these people spoke the language of the Chinatown of my childhood.

  My new colleagues, most of them men, sat on the few available chairs—rejects from the dining room, with ripped seats or missing backs or uneven, shaky legs—or on cardboard cases of spare teapots, or on folded, string-tied piles of freshly laundered tablecloths. Some of them were smoking, the gray haze from their cigarettes sucked out through double swinging doors at the far end of the room by the powerful kitchen exhaust fans. One plump woman was knitting; she smiled as I came in, finishing her row, and starting the next without looking and without pause.

  A sharp-nosed man with a long red scar slicing down his jawline from ear to chin sat swinging his legs on a drum of dish detergent. He checked his watch, stubbed his cigarette out, and said to me in Fukienese-accented English, “You almost don’t make on time. Tomorrow, you come sooner.”

  I nodded quickly, apologetically. Without looking at me again he slipped off his perch and headed toward the kitchen doors. Everyone else finished their conversations and their cigarettes, stood, and followed.

  The knitting lady hooked her arm in mine as I stood looking confused. She smiled at me. “Have you worked in restaurants before?”

  She spoke in Cantonese, so I did, too. “At home,” I said. “Hong Kong. But it was different … .”

  She shook her head, still smiling. “The same. People are hungry, you have food. You offer it, they buy it. They are happy, you are happy. Come.”

  My benefactress introduced herself as Chen Pei-Hui. Arm in arm we made our way through the steamy, shout-filled kitchen, skirting the scowling chefs and their harried assistants. In the dining room, the waiters snapped tablecloths into the air and settled them on the large round tables, pinning them down with small, plump teacups, folded napkins, and chopsticks. The women chose rolling carts—Pei-Hui steered me away from my first choice, apparently well-known for a sticky wheel—from another side room and pushed them into the kitchen, where the chefs’ assistants loaded us up with dumpling-filled bamboo steamers and plates of turnip cakes and upside-down glass bowls holding mounds of eight-treasure rice. As the new kid in town, I didn’t get the premium dishes, the ones with the highest price tags; those went with seniority, though I suspected a nice smile at the right chef might not hurt, either.

  By the time our carts were all full and our phalanx came rolling out the kitchen doors, customers were streaming off the escalator, being guided to their seats by black-clad maître d’s, given their first pots of tea by maroon-jacketed waiters, and looking expectantly around for us.

  I’d eaten enough meals here and at other dim sum palaces that I knew the drill, and though the work was tiring, it wasn’t hard. I steered my cart among the tables, trying to catch diners’ eyes, calling out in English and Cantonese the names of the food I was, literally, pushing. When someone stopped me and asked for a steamer basket of pork shiu mai I tried also to interest them in some shrimp-stuffed pepper or a nice plate of chicken feet. Whatever they took got them a stamp from the chop I wore on a cord around my neck onto the bill the maître d’ had already placed on the table. Each chop told the price of the dishes the chop’s wearer was selling, and the number of chops was, simply, the number of dishes the customer had taken. The function of the waiters in this system was to clear the empty plates and bring more tea, plus take orders for things people wanted from the regular menu. Non-Chinese don’t usually take advantage of the menu when they’re out for dim sum, but Chinese people like to end a dim sum feast the way we do any major meal, with a bowl of noodles.

  The waiters sped around carrying pots of tea and plates of chow fun, adding up bills and resetting tables. The other dim sum ladies and I crisscrossed the dining room, calling out the names of our food, explaining it in halting English to the non-Chinese customers and plonking it down on the Chinese diners’ tables. When our carts were depleted we rolled them back to the kitchen, where bad-tempered chefs with big metal cleavers barked orders at their helpers and new garlic or fish or black bean scented delicacies were piled up for us.

  I was glad I’d eaten a bowl of cornflakes at home, glad for the tea Mary had made me at the station house, and glad for my crepe-soled shoes as I navigated past a rowdy tableful of Columbia fraternity boys who had just grabbed up the last of my spareribs and my lotus-leaf-wrapped sticky rice, though they wouldn’t touch the chicken feet (my mother’s favorite). The noise in the high-ceilinged room had just about hit the level where my head starts pounding, and my shoulders, which I stretch and lift weights with at least three times a week at the dojo so they’ll be prepared for anything, were beginning to tell me they hadn’t been prepared for this. I stopped briefly, straightened my aching back, and surveyed the room.

  The escalators were removing customers and disgorging replacement ones at an undiminished rate, and the other dim sum ladies and the waiters were scurrying about attending to them. In the private room off to the side, tables were being set with the good dishes and bowls H. B. Yang had used for tea with me. It had become something of a minor fad in New York for non-Chinese to hold wedding banquets in Chinese restaurants, and tonight was the banquet of a mayoral aide, Jo Ann Johnson. It wasn’t quite the mayor, but it was still a political coup, and I found myself wondering how things like that sat with the new guys, who, after all, also ran restaurants. I was also a little surprised to find myself wondering, as cynically as Bill would, what special considerations—by which, of course, I meant what break in the price—H. B. Yang had extended to the bride to secure it.

  I watched the pattern of everyone’s comings and goings, spoonings and gobblings and clearings and dishings. It was all so intricate and so smooth it might have been a Detroit assembly line for the production of full people. The full-people factory sounds were clinking silverware, clacking chopsticks, loud calls, and rumbling conversation. A hive of industry, Dragon Garden, I thought. Everyone seemed to be single-mindedly and fruitfully engaged in production, except me.

  Well, not quite everyone. As I looked around, I spotted the sharp-nosed, scarred waiter who had scolded me for being late. He glanced over the tables under his jurisdiction and spoke briefly to one of the other waiters, who nodded. He tossed his towel onto a passing busboy’s tray and headed for the kitchen doors.

  He moved like a man on a mission, with a look about him that I had seen on Bill. On Bill I knew what it meant; on this guy I hoped it meant the same.

  I peered around the huge expanse of the dining room until I found Pei-Hui. I pointed my cart and homed in on her. She smiled as I approached but didn’t stop moving, calling her wares.

  “I need a few moments of a woman’s privacy,” I told her euphemistically as I paralleled my cart with hers. “Is there a time for that?”

  “No break until lunchtime, half past three,” she told me. “But if
you need to before that, leave your cart in the kitchen. Go back to the room where you came in. What you need is on the left. Only, be quick.”

  “Oh, I will,” I promised, and veered off from our parallel course to park my cart just inside the kitchen doors. The chefs who deigned to notice me at all glared at me as I made my way through their steamy kingdom toward the room in the back. I wondered as I went whether my father had snarled at the chefs’ assistants and glared at the dim sum ladies where he’d worked.

  I reached the end of the kitchen and pushed open the doors to the break room. The sharp-nosed waiter, as I had hoped, was there; and, even better, he wasn’t alone. He was seated in a chair, legs outstretched, already halfway through the cigarette that had called him here. Straddling another chair with his arms resting across the back of it, one of the chef’s assistants was just lighting a cigarette of his own.

  I nodded, gave them a shy smile, and made my way to the bathroom. I spent the minimal amount of time there I could to be convincing, both because it was not by any definition a pleasant place and because I didn’t want the men to escape. If the point of working here was to find out what I could about the missing waiters and not just to peddle dim sum, I needed to have conversations with my co-workers. These guys were my first chance at that.

  When I came out they were both still sitting there, breathing tobacco smoke in and out.

  I smiled again. The sharp-nosed guy didn’t smile back, but the chef’s assistant gave me a wide grin that displayed shockingly few teeth.

  “This work, very hard,” I said, putting as heavy a Cantonese accent as I thought I could pull off into my words. I didn’t know about the chef’s assistant, but the waiter and I didn’t speak the same dialect, so if we were going to have any conversation at all, it was going to have to be in English. But if they knew my English was unaccented, they’d wonder what I was doing in this desperation-level job.

  The waiter shrugged; the chef’s assistant’s grin turned into a smirk.

  “Kitchen much worse,” he told me with a Cantonese accent and the disdain of the strong for the weak.