Asian Pulp

by Asian Pulp (retail) (epub)

  “You treat him with respect,” Tallmadge said to them.

  “Yes, sir.”

  When they had the dead man under a sheet and loaded into the ambulance, Tallmadge told the two young officers, “Go with them.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you tell the reporters you don’t know a thing.”

  They nodded and returned to their patrol car.

  The papers were building up the mystery. Chinese killing Chinese was not front page news for the Tribune or the Examiner, but cops murdered in Chinatown? Tallmadge didn’t care for all of the press this was generating.

  He waited for the ambulance and the patrol car to leave, then took a final drag on his cigarette, dropped it to the gravel and crushed it beneath a fine, expensive black wingtip, and asked Nick, “You ever try it?”

  “Ya p’ian?”

  “You people love it, don’t you?”

  “No. We hate it.” Now there was just the slightest hint of a threat in his own voice. “It is Lakeshore Drive. You know that, Harry.”

  This was true. Both old money and the new rich indulged themselves in this way. Their booze they got from Bugs Moran or, some of them, now, from Capone on the South Side. Their dope they got in Chinatown, and it was playtime for them, the women in their fur stoles and the men in their fine suits, driving down to Chinatown to go through the back alleys, laughing, whispering, drunk, to knock on old small doors and be led down dim hallways into the secret salons, the hua-yan jian, to be tended to as they reclined on cushions in wooden cribs, as the wick was turned up beneath the bowls, as the ancient vapors took them to where they wished to be, not here and not in their elegant mansions on Lakeshore Drive. It was better than hooch. Better than dreams. Better than anything.

  Tallmadge asked Nick Wong, “Is it worth it?”

  “Yes, Detective.”

  “Now I’m Detective!”

  “You never have?”

  Tallmadge shrugged. “I prefer my whisky. What’s it like?”

  Nick gave it a moment’s thought, then answered him. “I smoked once. Twice. It is… paradise. Which is why it frightens me. You become as sweet and free as one of the gods. It is the garden beyond all gardens. This why people buy it and kill for it.”

  “Paradise,” Tallmadge said. “I don’t believe in paradise. I’m a sensible man.” Then he said, “They call this the Dragon. Did you know that?”

  “What is the Dragon?”

  “Chinatown. That’s what some of the officers call it. The Dragon.”

  Tallmadge turned sharply and pushed out a fist, smiling, but Nick was too quick for him. He’d seen it coming before Tallmadge had even thought of it and now fell back a step and brought up his arms almost gently, but very efficiently.

  “You and your tiger movements,” Tallmadge said. “Will you just ask around again for me?”

  “I will. But someday I will ask for a favor in return.”

  “Granted. Don’t get yourself hurt, Nick. But I don’t want any more dead cops. I’m sure the judges can deal with whoever’s doing this, like they deal with Capone. It’s a simple business proposition. They should know that. There’s no need for this.”

  2.

  “If someone wants to hurt you, even I cannot stop it.”

  Kam Lung’s shop was just off Wentworth Avenue. It was a small place ornamented with a terra cotta dragon above the front door sill, facing the street. Inside, tables and shelves were filled with bolts of cloth, hand tools, kitchen utensils—all of the practical necessities—as well as board games and toys. Lung himself, in his late forties, had grayed early; rather portly, he dressed each morning in trousers and a comfortable shirt without a tie and went about his business the day long with patience and precision. Each day trucks pulled down the alley behind his shop, carrying boxes of whatever items Kam Lung’s patrons might find of interest, and each day, Nick unloaded the trucks and helped Kam Lung keep his shop orderly and clean. In return, Nick kept a small room upstairs, earned a bit of money, and ate regularly.

  Kam Lung was not a member of any tong, although he was on familiar terms with the leaders of Chinatown, even those whose businesses were not as respectable as his own. The shopkeeper was, in fact, as good a man as it was possible for him to be, given his circumstances. He was generous to his family, although it was not large; his own parents and several other relatives had been killed during the many attacks on his people that had occurred, in San Francisco and elsewhere in America, over the past few decades. He had also lost a son in the Great War and his wife to the Spanish flu. For these reasons, Kam Lung regarded Nick Wong as his nephew although their blood tie was tenuous; the young man was the son of some distant relation of Lung’s in Swatow, and whether those people of his still lived was unknown.

  The shelves and tables of the shop, piled with fabric and home and kitchen items, filled most of the floor space. Down the center of the store, overhung with bright ribbons and lanterns, the main aisle led to the sales counter, where the cash register sat that Kam Lung sometimes used. Typically, whether a customer was Chinese or American, the shopkeeper relied on his trusty abacus to figure out sales totals, as he had since working as a boy in one of his relatives’ own shops in southern China. A figure of Guan Yu, revered by merchants, sat on a lacquered altar high in the corner behind the cash register, the bowl in front of it refreshed each day with offerings of oranges and nuts.

  Behind the counter, through a door that now stood open, was the small office where Kam Lung conducted his personal business and dealt with the affairs of those in the community who came to him. As Nick walked down the center of the shop, Kam Lung now stepped out of his office with Sue Ming. Whenever Nick saw this young woman, he was reminded why he stayed in Chinatown and had not moved on to someplace else. Sue Ming was beautiful, with the clearest skin Nick had ever seen on a woman, and was as slender as the stem of a garden flower, and just as graceful when she moved. But she was no throwback to the old ways; with her bobbed black hair and bright red lips, in her colorful blouse and short crepe skirt, Sue Ming was one of the many flappers who lived in Chinatown or visited there each day.

  Now she waved at Nick as she and Kam Lung came around to the front of the sales counter and said boldly to him, “Take me dancing, Nick!”

  “Now?”

  “Right now!”

  Nick looked at his uncle, shrugged, and told him, “I have to take her dancing.”

  “We have a truck.” But he wasn’t cross; he grinned as he said it.

  “Already?” Nick said.

  “Oh, go do your job,” Sue told him. “Hard work is best!” She was quoting her father and Kam Lung and everyone else in Chinatown who had come here to do just that, work hard and make enough money to return home. “You can take me to the movies tonight.”

  “I can do that,” Nick smiled at her. “Unless we have another truck?” He looked at his uncle.

  “Hard work is best!” Kam Lung reminded him. “Then… a movie.”

  Sue Ming slapped Nick lightly on the shoulder as if she were just another young man passing him on the sidewalk and reminded him as she went, “Tonight!”

  Nick watched her go, and when she was out the door, his uncle told him, “Marry her.”

  “She doesn’t want to get married.”

  “What kind of life are you going to have without a wife?” Kam Lung complained. “What kind of life is Sue Ming going to have without a husband?”

  “She has a life now, Uncle, and she doesn’t have a husband. I’m not even her boyfriend. She doesn’t have a boyfriend. Her father chases them away. She does what she likes.”

  “Boyfriends. Girlfriends. I don’t understand this,” Kam Lung replied, but his tone changed then as he motioned and told Nick, “In my office. Talk with me.”

  Nick followed him into the back room.

  Kam Lung sat behind his desk, within the pool of light given by the floor lamp with the fringed shade that stood beside the desk. Nick sat in the wooden chair across f
rom his uncle, suspecting already what was coming.

  “This policeman,” Kam Lung said to him. “Why did you talk to him?”

  “He’s my friend.”

  “Not a friend, Nephew. Please… you are not American.”

  That stung; Nick frowned. His uncle said such things only when he wished to make a point directly, make it hurt.

  “He’s simply an acquaintance,” Nick reminded Kam Lung. “We box. This is how it is, Uncle. Is Chinatown the whole world?”

  “It is for us. Kwai Ning,” his uncle reminded him. “There is danger.”

  “Tell me about the danger.”

  Kam Lung raised his hands in a gesture of apology. “Nephew… my business is what you see. But you know about those who understand the business of everyone in Chinatown. Don’t go down this road.”

  “All he wanted was to ask if I know anything about policemen killed here.”

  “Police are killed. There is no danger in that?”

  “The tongs are at peace,” Nick said.

  “This is not the tongs,” Kam Lung told him. “I say no more. But tell the policeman with whom you box that you know nothing.”

  Nick didn’t reply.

  “Nephew,” Kam Lung told him. “If someone wants to hurt you, even I cannot stop it. Please. No more.”

  Nick sighed strongly, bowed his head to his uncle, and stood to go. He led his uncle out the door and around the sales counter into the store, where a white woman well dressed in a new coat, fur stole, and elegant pumps was looking at swatches of cloth on one of the tables. She looked up, smile ready, then tilted her head to one side as she saw Nick.

  Nick didn’t know her. She was just another of the many fashionable city women who often shopped in his uncle’s store. Medium height, brown hair, brown eyes—reasonably attractive, as all of these women strived to be.

  She kept her eyes on him as Nick approached, then said to him, “Mr. Wong? Nick Wong?”

  He stopped, somewhat surprised. “Yes.”

  “I thought it might be you. I’m Nora Tallmadge. Harry’s wife?”

  Now he was indeed surprised. He said to her, “The detective.”

  “Yes, yes!” she laughed. “I know you’re a friend of his. You two and your boxing tournaments.” She pantomimed a prizefighter with her small gloved fists.

  Nick turned slowly to give his uncle a look of disappointment. So Kam Lung had known all this time that this woman, a customer, was the wife of the policeman whom he wished Nick no longer to be associated with. What did this mean?

  Nick looked back at Mrs. Tallmadge. “You know my uncle, then?”

  “Oh, yes. Mr. Lung?” She looked past Nick. “I’m here for that order of mine. The brocade?”

  “Yes,” said Kam Lung, frowning at his nephew but moving to the rear of the store. “Nick unloaded it yesterday.”

  Nick moved past the detective’s wife, heading for the door. Behind him, he heard Nora Tallmadge say, “Thank you very much. Em goi.”

  Her Chinese was terrible.

  3.

  Anna May Wong—and a Bullet

  They’d gone to see a Raymond Griffith comedy, Forty Winks, because Anna May Wong was in it, and any picture that featured Anna May Wong was worth seeing because she was in it. Nick had seen The Thief of Baghdad, the Douglas Fairbanks spectacle, four times simply to watch her play the Mongol slave girl—beautiful and alluringly dangerous. Sue’s sentiments were more practical: Anna May Wong was Chinese-American and a movie star, and she’d done it herself because she was a new woman, modern, intelligent, resourceful—and this was the way the world should be, available for such women as well as men.

  Nick paid for the cab back to Twenty second and Archer, where they intersected with Princeton; his plan was to take advantage of the comfortable evening, warm and with no drizzle, to walk Sue the few blocks to her parents’ apartment.

  As the cab pulled away, Sue pointed northwest, up Archer, and said, “That’s where they found the policeman?”

  “Yes.”

  They began walking east on Twenty second, then turned south on Wentworth, passing the shops closed for the day and the bright restaurants dressed out in temple facades and still busy with diners from all over the city.

  After several long minutes of silence, Sue said to Nick, “I’m concerned about your safety. You were talking to that policeman.”

  “And what else have I been doing?”

  “I have no idea. But stay out of it, please. Whatever the police are doing here… better to stay out of it.”

  “It’s the opium houses,” Nick told her. “We know that, and they know it.”

  “Please stay away from it.”

  “I have no other choice. I’m not involved.”

  “People get pulled into it. There’s too much crime in Chinatown these days, anyway.”

  “There’s too much crime everywhere in this city.”

  They turned west onto Twenty fourth Street, heading toward Stewart Avenue, moving away from the shops and the loud businesses. As they were crossing Princeton, Nick heard sounds behind them, footsteps, and then a gunshot, the noise exactly like that of a loud firecracker. Just past them, he heard the bullet hit something, a wall or post.

  He immediately leaned against Sue, who gasped, and pushed her to the ground.

  She said, “My shoe!” before realizing that a bullet had just missed her—her and Nick.

  The footsteps behind them hurried away, echoing south, it seemed to Nick. He started to run that way, but Sue called to him. Nick thought better of it and gave up the chase.

  But he swore loudly—“Damn it!”—as he returned and knelt to help Sue to her feet.

  “I think I broke a shoe.”

  “Well, that’s the least of it.”

  “I got so scared. Look.” She held out a hand; it was jumping up and down.

  Lights came on in a few of the buildings around them, small businesses and some of the apartments, but the souls brave enough to open a door and look out saw Nick and Sue and no one else.

  No dead police officer.

  “Ni hai hao ma?” an elderly man called. “You okay?”

  Nick waved to him. “Fine! Thank you!”

  The old man slammed his door closed.

  “That was—” Sue was still out of breath.

  “Meant for me, I’m sure,” Nick told her. “But I don’t know why.”

  “Nick… I’m bleeding.”

  She looked up at him and, in the brightness of the streetlight across from them, Nick saw that something had cut her cheek just below her eye. A piece of glass? He’d heard no glass break.

  “Here.” He took out his handkerchief to dab the line of blood. “It almost hit your eye.”

  Sue winced and took the handkerchief to press against the wound. Nick looked behind her and walked toward the building that would have been hit by the bullet. He saw no injury to any of the bricks, but to the right of the building corner was a tall wooden post—old, and left over from what might have been a wooden gate twenty or thirty years ago. Here he found that the wood had been splintered where the bullet struck.

  “Nick?”

  “Hold on.” He dug out the folding pocket knife he carried in his pants—a beautiful ivory handle and a strong three-inch blade. He poked around the hole in the splintered post; the wood came away fairly easily. The bullet hadn’t gone out the other side of the post, but if it were buried in there, it would still be—

  He got it. Dug harder with the point of his blade, cut down and pulled back as carefully as he could. The bullet fell onto the sidewalk. It had been pushed out of shape from hitting the post, but Nick was certain what caliber it was.

  “Is that it?” Sue Ming’s shadow moved over him as she blocked the light from the street lamp.

  In Nick’s hand, the bullet was still warm from the friction of hitting the wood.

  “A .32,” he told Sue.

  “That’s the size of the bullet?”

  “Same caliber as
the one that killed the cop last night on Archer.”

  4.

  Liu Kwong

  Sue Ming’s father was the most respected physician in Chinatown, and he was not at all pleased to learn that his daughter had nearly been blinded by someone trying to murder her date for the evening.

  “Young man,” he told Nick coldly, looking over the wire frame glasses hanging on his nose, “we do not associate with the criminal element.”

  Nick could only say, “I… try not to do that, also, Dr. Ming.”

  They were in one of the doctor’s examination rooms on the first floor of his building. His wife hovered within view, wrapped in a heavy, modern robe at the height of the stairs leading to their top floor living quarters. Nick glanced at her quickly, but Mrs. Ming’s eyes were on her daughter.

  “There.” Dr. Ming fixed a bandage beneath his daughter’s right eye. “If we are fortunate, there may be no scar.”

  Nick caught a look from Sue; she was not angry with him but clearly was still shaken. He told them both, “I’ll say goodnight, now.”

  “That would be best.”

  Sue walked him to the door while her father waited within view in the hallway. She whispered to him, “I’ll try to speak with you soon.”

  Her father coughed loudly.

  Nick apologized to her again, as he had already, many times, and reminded Sue, “Let’s see what happens.”

  That remark frightened her. “Yes. Yes…”

  Nick said goodnight again to her father, then went out.

  * * *

  He was burning with anger, wild with rage that he fought to contain. He had nothing whatsoever to do with whoever was killing Chicago cops, and that should have been apparent to anyone who knew him. A detective he knows asks him if perhaps he has some information, and the next thing that happens, whoever killed cop number three takes a shot at Nick, too. What was going on?

  At least he assumed it was the same person. The .32-caliber weight in his pants pocket was sufficient to convince Nick of that fact. He wanted to see Harry Tallmadge at this very minute and shove the bullet under his nose and ask him what the hell was going on.