A Bitter Feast

by S. J. Rozan

  “‘My man Yang.’” I shuddered. “Well, I guess I can ask him, since he hired me to stick my nose into the case. Just to satisfy your curiosity, you understand.”

  “I appreciate it. Of course, you’ll have to wait until the cops are through with him.”

  “They’re through.” I told Bill what Mary had told me that morning.

  “Okay,” Bill said. “Assuming for the sake of argument he didn’t do it, that leaves another interesting possibility.”

  “And that is?”

  The ancient waiter brought Bill’s beer and poured it down the side of his glass for him. He peered at the seltzer bottle, either to see if it needed refilling or to see if it was safe in my hands. He didn’t look convinced on either score, but he walked away.

  “That someone wants it to look as though Yang did it,” Bill said. “To make the mayor look bad.”

  I pondered that while I took in the photos covering the walls, tacked and taped-up Polaroids of customers eating, horsing around, having a good time. “I don’t think I buy it,” I said. “There must be easier ways to make the mayor look bad.”

  “Is that political commentary?”

  “No. But it seems a little elaborate. Using an ox cleaver to kill a chicken.”

  “Now that is political commentary.”

  “No, it’s something H. B. Yang would say. Or my mother. Besides, I don’t think it would work.”

  “The ox cleaver? What is an ox cleaver?”

  “You can’t really think I know. No, embarrassing the mayor that way. He’d just cut H. B. Yang loose. You know, one of those speeches: I have complete faith in my good friend Mr. Yang and I can categorically state he would never be involved in any wrongdoing, but nevertheless Mr. Yang has generously offered to resign from his advisory post in order to keep the media focus on this incident from interfering with the ability of the government of this great city to operate smoothly …”

  “You know,” Bill said when I ran out of steam, “you’re good at that.”

  I said, “I don’t think that’s a compliment.”

  “It’s not. But you may be right about the mayor. So maybe that was the point.”

  “What was?”

  “Getting him to cut H. B. Yang loose. If so, why?”

  A little lightbulb went on over my head, like in the comics. I stared at him. “You’re a genius.”

  His face assumed a worried look. “You must be lightheaded from lack of food.” He made a show of looking around for the waiter.

  “No, you are. Listen.” I gave Bill a quick rundown of the situation in Chinatown, the old guard and the new guys, the jockeying and the political games. He listened, sipping his beer, until I was done.

  “So you think these new guys think if they dislodge Yang from the mayor’s side they could get next to the mayor themselves?” he asked me.

  “Sure. There’s a lot of patronage power—in the East Point project, for example. A lot of money in jobs and contracts about to be floating around. H. B. Yang seemed like a permanent fixture when I was a kid, but he’s teetering a little now. If I were the new guys, I might be thinking this was a great time for a shove.”

  “Hmm.” Bill looked thoughtful. The ancient waiter pushed with more determination than strength through the swinging doors from the kitchen and headed over to our table. He brought with him, for Bill, a chopped liver sandwich that must have been six inches thick, with a pile of lettuce and raw onion slices on the plate beside it; and for me, what looked like half a pound of sliced meat covered in cooked tomatoes, onions, and carrots.

  “This is too much food,” I whispered to Bill when the waiter had gone.

  Bill grinned. “I’ve never heard you say that before.”

  “You’ve never seen me eat half a cow at one sitting before, either.”

  “Well, do what you can. You can take home what’s left.”

  “I’m not sure my mother would allow food like this in her refrigerator. She’d consider it a bad influence on the food she already has.”

  I cut into the first slice of pot roast, then put down my knife. The meat was so tender that it didn’t need one. As I tasted it, savoring the sweet sting of the tomatoes and the salty richness of the well-herbed gravy, Bill asked, “So we have to find out who, among these new guys, would be most interested in pulling off something like this.”

  I swallowed and said, “We may already know.”

  He stopped his sandwich halfway to his mouth. “We do?”

  “Remember the guy who came to my office? Three-finger Choi?”

  “Oh, right,” he nodded through a bite of chopped liver. “Good old Three-finger. Fine fellow. I remember him well.”

  I gave the seltzer bottle a considered look, wondering exactly where my bank account stood, whether I had fifty dollars to spare. I settled for saying, “He works for a guy called Duke Lo.”

  “And Duke Lo is … ?”

  “One of the new guys. Mary says he’s a rising star. She also says he’s no good.”

  “How do you know this, that Choi works for Lo?”

  “One of the Fifth Precinct detectives told me this afternoon,” I said, thinking it actually felt like months ago. “I was going to tell you but I got distracted when you followed me.”

  “Many women do.”

  “They can’t, you don’t follow me that often.”

  “That you know of. Sometimes I hire people to do it for me.”

  “And then by your story about the Feds,” I said, resolutely sticking to business. “And speaking of the Feds, what about them?”

  “The Feds?” Bill finished the sandwich half he’d been working on, wiped his hands on his napkin, and waved to the waiter for another beer.

  “Yes. If this theory is right, and Duke Lo’s out to get H. B. Yang, then who invited the Feds?”

  “And where are the waiters?” Bill asked, clearly not meaning the one scuffing over to our table right now.

  “Oh, I don’t know.” I sighed, suddenly deflated. “But that’s what we’re supposed to be finding out, isn’t it? Not all this other stuff?”

  “No,” Bill said.

  “No, I’m wrong, or no, I’m right?”

  “No, you’re right. Unless we have to get to the bottom of this other stuff to find the waiters.”

  I bit on a piece of potato while I thought. “Look at this,” I said to Bill. “Suppose Duke Lo heard that the waiters had disappeared. He doesn’t know where they went or why, but it’s good luck for him. It’s a chance to get H. B. Yang in trouble, because one of the disappeared guys is a union organizer. That’s why he sent Three-finger Choi to stop me from looking for them—as long as they’re gone H. B. Yang looks bad, as people get suspicious.”

  “Which could be another reason Yang wanted you to find them. Besides the money they owe him and his warm, paternal feelings for them.”

  I shot him a look, but he ignored it, and I was too caught up in the possibility that we’d found a way to untangle this case to get involved in trying to defeat Bill’s cynical approach to things.

  Not that I believe for a minute that he’s anywhere near as cynical as he wants everyone to think, but it’s not my business to unmask the Lone Ranger.

  “Okay,” I said, as the waiter finally reached us and poured Bill’s second beer. He raised his eyebrows at the seltzer bottle and me before he started to meander away. He was probably as impressed with my self-restraint as I was. “Then Lo blows up the union office,” I went on, to Bill. “And all eyes fall on H. B. Yang.”

  Bill nodded, sampling the beer. “Could be. So the union wasn’t really the target, and Ho and Peter were just unlucky?”

  “In the wrong place at the wrong time,” I said. “It happens. But look how great it is for Lo: the dead man was one of the disappeared waiters!”

  “Convenient,” Bill agreed. “And the Feds?”

  I devoured some carrots and onions to help me think. “Mary says the INS is dying to ship Duke Lo out. Maybe the State Depar
tment’s helping, trying to dig something up on him to do with the waiters.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe they owe the INS a favor. Can’t we figure that out later?”

  “Obviously we can’t figure it out now. But here’s another thought: maybe they aren’t just blindly hoping Lo had something to do with the waiters’ disappearing. Maybe they know.”

  “Oh,” I said. “You mean, like he paid them to disappear? To start this off?”

  “Could be.”

  “But that’s not what Chi-Chun Ho told Peter,” I objected.

  “All he told him was they were in trouble,” Bill said. “Maybe they realized being pawns in this game wasn’t safe.”

  “And they don’t know how to get out of it,” I said slowly, turning this idea over in my head. “That could be trouble, by anyone’s definition.”

  “You know what this means?” Bill asked, wiping his fingers on his napkin again, the other half of his sandwich having totally disappeared.

  “You outate me,” I complained, pointing to his empty plate and then to the two slices of meat and the odd potato left on mine.

  He settled back in his chair and lifted the last of his beer. “I always do.”

  “Don’t be smug. Pound for pound, we both know I’m better. I demand a rematch.”

  “Right now?”

  “Absolutely not. At a time of my choosing. And I do know what this means. It means Duke Lo probably knows where the waiters are.”

  That was what it meant. Bill agreed, “At least, it makes him worth asking.”

  So we paid the bill at Sammy’s, very maturely leaving the seltzer bottle still half full in the center of the food wreckage on our table. We took the remains of my meal with us to give to the first homeless person we saw, and went out to ask.

  Fourteen

  The first thing we needed to ask was where to find Duke Lo. I wasn’t sure whom to approach with this question, but I knew better than to try Mary.

  “Or,” Bill said, “on the other hand, we could tell her we think Lo did the bombing and may have hidden the waiters, and let the cops take it from here.”

  I gave him a quick look as we walked back down Chrystie Street toward Chinatown. The spring air felt sharp against my skin now that the sun had gone down. The same dusk that put into the air an edge you could feel also blurred the outlines of cars and buildings and people, things you could see. Making some things sharper, others more obscure; like the setting of the sun, each event in this case seemed to have the ability to do that.

  “We can’t tell the cops that,” I said. “It would be the same problem as before; Lo’s much less likely to talk to the cops than he is to talk to me.”

  “Why is he so likely to talk to you?”

  “Because I’m not a cop.”

  “Your logic is circular, but I get it.”

  “Seriously, if we’re right, the guy’s not out to get into trouble, just to get H. B. Yang into trouble. If I can hint in a roundabout and elegantly euphemism-filled way that someone suspects that, and that things will only get more difficult for him unless the waiters turn up and everything goes back to relatively normal, maybe he’ll buy it.”

  “You can do that?”

  “What?”

  “That elegant euphemism thing.”

  I shrugged. “I’m Chinese.”

  His “Uh-huh” was noncommittal. “And what are you going to do about the fact that a bomb we think he planted killed one of the waiters?” he asked.

  “I’m not going to bring it up unless he does. If that happens I’ll make it sound like I’m sure he had nothing to do with it but the cops are so much dumber than I am that they might be very irritating if they come to think he might have been involved.”

  I felt Bill’s eyes on me but I didn’t look at him, just kept walking toward Chinatown, my home.

  “Okay,” Bill said, “but I’m coming with you.”

  “No.” I heard the irritation in my own voice. “You can’t. The whole problem is, is a Chinese-white thing—”

  “The hell it is. It’s a cop-noncop thing. I’ll buy that you’re more likely to get somewhere than the cops are, but this is a guy they have on the bad guy list. He sent some creep to beat you up, and he might have killed Ho. You can say I’m your bodyguard, you can do the whole thing in Chinese, you can say I’m deaf and dumb and do it in English, but I’m going to be there.”

  “We can’t do it in Chinese. He’s Fukienese. I won’t be able to understand a word he says.”

  “Then think of something else. This is nonnegotiable.”

  “Nonnegotiable?” I stopped walking. “You’re working for me. You can’t give me ultimatums like that.”

  “I can and I will. There’s no one I’d work with that I’d let go into something like this without backup.”

  “Let?” I felt my face flush hot. “You sound just like Mary! And Peter! You don’t get to let me do things—”

  “Goddammit, Lydia!” Bill’s shout silenced me. I stared at him, my mouth open, as we stood, not moving now, on the darkening sidewalk. “Who the hell do you think I am, one of your goddamn brothers?” His voice echoed off the old brick buildings around us. “This isn’t about who lets who do what! It’s not about who’s boss and it’s not about proving how goddamn tough you are. Jesus Christ!”

  We stared at each other wordlessly for a moment. Bill rubbed his palm on the back of his neck and peered up into the sky as though searching for words. I tried to find some myself, but the ones he’d just yelled were ringing in my ears.

  Bill spoke again, his voice lower. “When I have work, and I call you,” he said, “it’s because I know I can depend on your instincts and your training and your guts. Because I know I can trust you. Why the hell can’t you give me that, too?”

  I looked at him, his face obscured by the failing light. Stars now glowed in pale pinpricks through the dusty blue sky behind him. I thought about the Feds stomping through his place that afternoon, about the worry in his voice when I told him about Three-finger Choi, about how he’d wanted to come see if I was all right but he didn’t because I told him not to. I tried to see his eyes, but they were hidden in shadow.

  “I …” I said. “I …” I lifted my hands, let them fall to my sides helplessly. “I know you’re not one of my brothers.”

  He bent his head, looking down at the sidewalk, and then looked up again, as if to see me in a different way. I could see his eyes then, and I met them with mine. We held each other that way for a few moments, trying to let our eyes tell each other things our words couldn’t manage. Then a smile started slowly at the corners of Bill’s mouth. It spread to cover his whole face. “And a damn good thing, too,” he said, and he leaned down and kissed me.

  That took a while, that kiss. I only know that because the stars were sharp and the color had gone out of the sky by the time I stepped away from the warmth of his arms.

  “Not now,” I said, trying to make my voice normal, not quavery the way it felt to me. “Not in the middle of all this.”

  “The street?” he asked. “The traffic?”

  “No.” I shook my head. “The case. Peter in the hospital, that poor man dead, those other men somewhere they don’t want to be. That. In the middle of that.”

  His look was long and still. Then he nodded. “Okay,” he said. “I know.”

  I knew he did. I squeezed his hand, then let it go. We walked on into Chinatown, to go see Duke Lo, together.

  On the way I had an inspiration. I had a feeling I’d pay for it later, but right now it seemed like the shortest distance between two points.

  I called Chester, the young detective at the Fifth Precinct.

  “Nah, he’s gone,” another cop told me, answering the squad room phone. “Can I help you out?”

  “No, I’d like to speak to him. Is there somewhere I could reach him?”

  “Doubt it.”

  “It’s important.”

  “Gotta be Chester?”


  “Yes.”

  He sighed. “Awright. Give me your number, I’ll see if I can find him, tell him you want him.”

  I gave him my beeper number and my office number, telling him to tell Chester to try the office first. I hoped he wouldn’t leave my numbers lying around for Mary to see. Then we hightailed it over to my office to wait for Chester’s call.

  Our wait wasn’t long. We’d barely made it down the hall, unlocked my office door, and turned on the light when the phone rang.

  “Lydia Chin Investigations,” I told it, and then as an afterthought repeated that in Chinese, in case the caller wasn’t Chester. But it was.

  “You were looking for me?” he asked cheerfully, his rambunctious voice almost masked by the sounds of loud jukebox rock and roll and the laughter of semisober people.

  “Yes,” I said. “What if I asked you where I could find Duke Lo?”

  “Hmm,” he said as someone yelled to someone else in the background. “I think I’d ask why.”

  “I’d say I wanted to talk to him.”

  “Oh-ho, no shit. C’mon, you gotta give me more than that.”

  I had a sudden thought. “Did you ask him where Three-finger Choi was, when you were looking for Choi?”

  “That what you want to ask him?”

  “No. But did you?”

  “Nope. Didn’t get the chance. Kee and I went over to the restaurant but he wasn’t around. We left word to call us, though.”

  “Did he?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Will he?”

  “Oh, sure. He likes to show how cooperative he is. But he won’t give us shit.”

  “Is that where I’d find him now?”

  “Where, the restaurant? Sometimes, sometimes not. What do you want him for?”

  “Some questions. About these waiters. Mary knows I’m looking for the waiters,” I added. “She doesn’t have a problem with it.”

  “Lo does,” Chester pointed out. “That’s why he sent Choi to beat the crap out of you.”

  “Choi did not beat the crap out of me,” I said, impolitely but accurately. “He was supposed to warn me off. In a way, I want to tell Duke Lo that it worked.”