A Bitter Feast

by S. J. Rozan

  “Working together?” Bill asked. “You think they work together and the rivalry’s a front? How do you know about this?”

  “It’s a long story. Damn!”

  Bill’s voice was cautious. “Lydia? Are you okay?”

  “Why? Just because I’m swearing like a sailor?”

  “I used to be a sailor,” he reminded me. “You have a long way to go. But you sound upset.”

  “Well …” I took the phone over to my bed and plunked down on it. “H. B. Yang. Smuggling dope.”

  “That’s bad?”

  “Of course it’s bad!”

  “I didn’t mean for society as a whole,” he said dryly.

  “I didn’t, either. I meant for me, for Peter, for us Chinatown kids.”

  “Why?”

  I thought. “Because that was never him. He was scary and powerful, but he was the boss. The guy you went to instead of the police, who were corrupt, or your own boss, who was unfair, or the protection racket gangs. He was the good guys. You might not get what you wanted from him, but you could trust him.”

  Bill said, “I guess not.”

  “I guess not. But I don’t want to know this!”

  “I’m sorry,” Bill said, sounding like he really was. Then he said, “And how do you know this?”

  “It’s complicated. Can we get together and I’ll tell you? Where are you?”

  “We can, but it’ll take me a little while to get in, and that might not be what you want me to do. That’s why I’m calling. I’m in Cobble Hill.”

  “Cobble Hill?” I frowned. “At Jayco?”

  “Across the street,” he said. “At the coffee place. I thought I’d come out and look around.”

  “Yours—”

  “I rented one. So I’ve been sitting here looking through their front window, and it’s been a boring afternoon until now.”

  “What changed?”

  “Well, if I have the right guy: tall, very pointy nose and chin, scar down the right side of his jaw? Is that the waiter you told me about from Dragon Garden?”

  “Yes,” I said, propelling myself to my feet. “Cao Zhi, what about him?”

  “He’s sitting with your pal Joe Yee right now.”

  “Cao Zhi?” I yelped, then quieted down, as I heard my mother rustle in the living room. “He’s supposed to be at work!” I hissed at Bill.

  “Well, he’s not. He got here a minute or two ago. Joe Yee wasn’t here when I got here, but he’s been back about two hours. This other guy went straight to the back, Joe Yee’s desk. They’re leaning forward, lots of hand jive, like old buddies working something out.”

  “Working?” I felt my hand clenching into a fist. “Selling! He’s selling out the waiters, Bill.”

  “Isn’t that a stretch?” Bill asked cautiously. “How do you know he knows anything about the waiters? He could be looking for an apartment. I just thought it was interesting, something to tie your buddy Yang to Joe Yee, if Yang’s employees come here.”

  “No,” I said, trying to curb my impatience. “There’s no time to tell you the whole thing now, but believe me, those guys are tied together already. Joe Yee came to the restaurant today. And Cao Zhi knows where the waiters are!”

  “You know that for a fact?”

  “He told me he did!”

  “Okay,” Bill said calmly, taking this in. “Tell me the whole thing later. What do you want me to do?”

  “Stay there. Follow them if they leave—maybe they’ll go to them. God, I wish I were there!”

  “Well, you’re not, and there’s no point in your coming out. I’ll keep in touch if anything happens.”

  I spoke into the growing afternoon shadows in my room: “I have to find them.”

  “What?”

  “The waiters. I have to find them before Joe Yee and Cao Zhi get to them! Cao Zhi, that lying sneak, acting like he wanted to help them! You stay there and follow those guys. I’m going to go find the waiters.”

  “How?”

  Maybe it was the shadows in the room I’d always lived in, maybe it was the sounds of the unseen traffic or the glow of the light from the living room, where my mother sat sewing, but I had, not one of those ideas that hits you like a bolt of lightning, but one of the ones that rises like the sun, beginning so faintly you can’t really pinpoint the moment when it starts or the moment when you realize that you are seeing things totally differently now from the way you were just a short time ago.

  “I know where they are,” I said quietly to Bill, over the phone to Brooklyn. “I’m going to go find them.”

  Because, of course, they were at the restaurant; they were at Dragon Garden.

  Home, Cao Zhi had told me, gesturing sardonically around the janitor’s closet beside H. B. Yang’s office. Hurrying through the dusk-covered streets, I thought of his sneer when I’d asked if “home” was China. And home, H. B. Yang had told me, was what he offered his employees, a home they always had with him as long as they worked hard, obeyed his rules, and didn’t ask for anything more by right than he was willing to give them by his magnanimity. Four men, unsafe in their basement in Elmhurst, unsafe on the streets of Chinatown, four men whose only connection with one another was that they worked at Dragon Garden—where would they go but home?

  Getting into Dragon Garden up the employees’ back stairs was no problem; it was dinnertime, the restaurant still open. I could hear, through the door at the top of the stairs, no sound but the faint clanging of woks and pots from the kitchen beyond. I pushed the door open slowly; the break room was empty. Scuttling across it, I reached my goal: the basement door on the other side of the room.

  Cao Zhi was the man who made frequent trips to the basement, two flights down, to check his all-important nonfoods supplies, to make sure the waiting stock of linens and chopsticks was adequate for the demands of the diners. He was, Pei-Hui had told me, very assiduous about it.

  I pulled the door, slipped through it, and closed it silently after me. I crept down the concrete stairs, concentrating on silence. My shadow started out behind me, then swung around ahead as I passed the single fluorescent light in the ceiling of the narrow stairwell. At a landing, the stairs reversed direction, and there was another light, more shadows. Then I was through a door and in the underground warren that was Dragon Garden’s basement.

  The space was low-ceilinged but huge, extending the width and length of the building above. There was a sort of a hallway, and off it rooms with locked doors; but it turned and twisted and was piled with boxes and crates, lit with naked lightbulbs that mixed my shadow up with weird-shaped other ones. I could smell spices and onions and dampness; I could hear the humming whine of the motors that kept the freezers and walk-in coolers cold.

  Brushing past sagging cardboard boxes, maneuvering around tubs of who knew what, I worked my way along the basement passageway, doubling back, turning left, right, wherever it took me. My heart was pounding, but I was patient, and I was rewarded: I saw the light.

  The light was what I had been looking for. If the waiters were here, hiding in the basement under Dragon Garden, in some storeroom not made for the storage of people, it had to be, as this whole space was, a place with no windows. So I crept along the passageway, peering into the dusty dimness for a telltale line of light under a door, illumination that dish detergent or cabbages wouldn’t need.

  When I found it I stopped, stood near, and listened. First, nothing; then, voices, in the tones of Mandarin.

  I took a breath, stepped to the door, and knocked. Instantly the voices stopped and the light went out.

  “I’m Lydia Chin,” I called softly in English. “A friend of Peter Lee. Lee Bi-Da,” I added, giving them a chance to recognize Peter’s name any way they could.

  No response but silence.

  “Please,” I said. “Cao Zhi told me you were here. I’ve come to help you.”

  Rapid, hushed voices rose inside, quick-fire Mandarin and, I thought, also Fukienese; this time, an obvious argument
. The light came back on, I heard sounds of movement, and then the door was opened for me.

  I stood face-to-face with a stocky young man with muscled arms. Briefly, we met each other’s eyes in silence.

  In English, he said, “I am Chan Song.”

  Yahoo! I wanted to shout, but I didn’t. Calmly, I said, “Maybe I’d better come in?”

  Twenty

  Song Chan stood aside for me to enter his kingdom, and he shut the kingdom’s gate—a dinged wood door—behind me. I stood just inside, staring around.

  Steel shelves piled with cardboard crates of paper goods bordered the walls of this small sovereign state, leaving a cramped town square in the center. Overhead a single circular fluorescent tube shone palely like the moon among clouds. Sweat and the faint sweet odor of mold scented the air.

  On the floor three or four different, mismatched carpet remnants overlapped one another—one I recognized as the dining room pattern—and a few battered chairs held cups and dishes and were draped with clothes. Next to the chairs were three tidy blanket rolls, and next to them stood two more men.

  “Lee Yuan?” I asked, looking from one to the other. “Lu Gai-Lo?” I gave their names in the Chinese order, as Song Chan had given me his, although we were speaking English. As new immigrants, the men would not yet be used to the strange western custom of waiting until the end of your name to find out where you belonged.

  Song Chan, my guide through this foreign land, pointed first at one of the standing men, then at the other. They regarded me through narrowed eyes.

  In Chinese tradition, you travel after death to the vast caves of the netherworld, where you wait for the decision to be made by immortal higher-ups about what your next life will be. This can take days or centuries; the immortal bureaucracy is like any other. If your relatives have provided you with a sufficiency of spirit food, clothing, and money—made of paper and burned at your funeral, and then again on the annual, at a minimum, visits to your grave—your stay won’t be too bad, because you’ll be able to keep warm, eat well, and, most important, bribe the demons whose job it is to make the dead miserable in punishment for the misdeeds of their earthly lives. If, on the other hand, you’re sent into the next life without any of the still-living taking ample precautions to insure your needs, you’re likely to have a pretty unpleasant time, both because you won’t have what it takes and because the demons especially despise those who leave behind no one who cares enough to look after them once they’re gone.

  Those caves, I’d thought as a child, were probably dim and damp places, crowded and uncomfortable, with nowhere to sit or to sleep and nothing good to eat unless the still-alive people had remembered about you. I used to worry about how to make sure that happened, but I could never figure out a way.

  My eyes wandered slowly over this cramped, dank room once again, and then I spoke.

  “I’ve come to help you,” I told the men, repeating what had, evidently, gotten me through the door.

  They were not totally sold, however.

  “Cao Zhi sent you to us?” Song Chan asked. “Why?” His English, though accented, was clear and businesslike.

  I spoke carefully. “He told me you were here. I’ve come to get you away. You’re in danger.”

  The man identified to me as Gai-Lo Lu whispered in rapid Fukienese to the one I’d been told was Yuan Lee. Yuan Lee nodded but didn’t say anything. They both stood silently, waiting, apparently, for Song Chan to speak.

  He did. “Where is Cao Zhi?”

  I hesitated, while Lu whispered to Lee again. He must be translating, I realized. “I don’t know where he is,” I told Song Chan, which was technically true. I didn’t go any further; if I told them that last I heard their protector was in Brooklyn selling them out, they would distrust me for giving them such an unbelievable story before they’d distrust Cao Zhi on my say-so. “But I know you’re in danger if you stay here,” I told them. “We have to leave immediately.”

  “Cao Zhi said he would bring you here,” Song Chan said, unbudging. “He never said he would tell you where to find us or that we were to leave with you when you came.”

  So Cao Zhi had actually spoken to them about me. Why, I wondered? “I’m here, aren’t I?” I said. “How else would I have gotten here? If the danger weren’t so near,” I went on, inspired, “I would have waited for Cao Zhi. I knew you wouldn’t want to trust me on my own. But there isn’t time. You must leave with me now.”

  Yuan Lee and Gai-Lo Lu were carrying on a furiously sotto voce Fukienese conversation, Yuan Lee frowning, his tones sounding hostile and dismissive, even though I couldn’t understand him. Gai-Lo Lu turned and addressed me. “Where supposed to taking us? What place can be more safe than here?”

  “This place is only safe as long as no one knows about it,” I said. “There are people who know now, people who know what you did and are your enemies.” At “what you did,” Gai-Lo Lu turned and glared at Yuan Lee, who scowled and kicked the carpet. Song Chan remained unperturbed. “I’m working for Lee Bi-Da,” I went on. “The lawyer who was injured trying to help Ho Chi-Chun. I want to take you somewhere else.”

  Lee whispered to Lu while Song Chan asked me, “Where?”

  I hadn’t until that moment thought much about that question, I realized; but I also realized that was because there was only one answer.

  “Chin Family Association,” I said.

  Among the Chinese people—roughly one and a quarter billion of us—there are only about three hundred family names in common use, some much more common than others. When you meet someone whose name is the same as yours, written with the same character, you have met a relative. The relation may go back eighteen or twenty generations, and you might never establish exactly whose triple-great-grandfather was the brother of whose great-great-uncle; but a relative is a relative, and taken very seriously. Family name associations were set up by the earliest immigrants as self-help groups, and you don’t need any more credentials than your last name when you present yourself at the door.

  If my father had needed to help waiters being hunted by Duke Lo, he would have taken them to Chin Family Association. These men had not been here long enough to connect up with their own family name associations, or else as Fukienese they didn’t feel welcome in the established places, which were Cantonese; I knew this because if they had felt they could, they would have gone there, not to Cao Zhi, for help. But I was my father’s daughter, and the men of Chin Family Association would not turn me down.

  It took a little more, but I persuaded Chan and Lu and Lee. Partly it was my insistence that the danger was imminent; partly it might have been their lack of desire to spend very much more time in this constricted underground kingdom; and mostly it was that Cao Zhi, bless his duplicitous heart, had actually told them about me and apparently suggested that I be allowed to help. Why, I wondered? If he was intending to betray them, why mention me at all? And if he was intending to betray them, why wait until now to do it? Maybe he’d been waiting to negotiate a good price. I thought about Cao Zhi, the way he’d been described to me by Pei-Hui, and as the three no-longer-missing men got their few things together for the trip through the streets, I thought about how and why people change.

  We ran into a brief snag when Yuan Lee, in addition to his extra shirt, his underwear, and his toothbrush, hefted and hugged under his arm a rectangular plastic-wrapped package the size of a concrete block.

  My first reaction was, “No way that comes with us,” which was translated for Yuan Lee and occasioned a certain amount of sharp-toned dispute in English, Mandarin, and Fukienese, Gai-Lo Lu working very hard to bring my words and Song Chan’s to Yuan Lee and his to us. Yuan Lee, contempt clear in his eyes, seemed ready to plant himself and his package where he was, never moving again. We had no time for this, I realized; and I was just being squeamish. The package was evidence, the only thing we had. It would be safer with us than it would be if it remained behind, no matter how carefully hidden; and the waiters would
be safer with it, because it still retained its value as a bargaining chip.

  “Can’t hide it anyway,” Gai-Lo Lu told me as we prepared our exit from their hideaway. “On ship, was hidden, Lee Yuan finds it.”

  “He found it?” I said. “He wasn’t bringing it here?”

  “Bringing?”

  “He wasn’t working for Duke Lo? Lo Da-Qi?”

  “Working for Lo Da-Qi, stupid man like this?” Gai-Lo Lu gave me a wide-eyed look while Yuan Lee gave him another scowl. “So stupid, goes to man who does working for Lo Da-Qi, says, I have package, maybe your boss wants. Don’t even know belongs to Lo Da-Qi until try selling it. Find out fast, then.”

  “You found out how?”

  “He finds out.” Gai-Lo Lu jerked a thumb at Yuan Lee. “Chan, Ho, I don’t know about it. Lee comes home one day, tells that Lo Da-Qi is chasing all of us, no one will buy what he has, all must disappear. Before this, know nothing.”

  Hmmm, I thought as we crept along the subterranean passageway toward the cellar steps. So Yuan Lee wasn’t a courier, he was just a lucky guy who stumbled onto something that was going to make him rich. Better he should have bought a lottery ticket. And did this mean the human cargo on H. B. Yang’s smuggling ships didn’t know about the other kind of goods they were sharing transit with? Well, maybe that figured. If you had people to pack it on board in foreign ports and unpack it on this end, maybe you didn’t need anyone to keep an eye on it during the journey. Or thought you didn’t. Where had it come on board? I wondered. Did the ship stop in Thailand, Sri Lanka, Cambodia before or after it anchored silently off some hidden, night-shielded cove in Guangdong, running lights dark, engine off, taking on men and women who arrived from shore in rowboats? Or was the heroin transported overland to China, to be piled on board at the same time as the hull was filling with people who clambered up rope ladders and down metal ones?

  I didn’t know, and, I supposed, except to satisfy Lydia Chin’s need to know everything, the answers to those questions didn’t matter. The thing that mattered most right now was to manage the four short blocks to Chin Family Association in the company of three fugitive waiters without running into anyone who didn’t like us.