by Henry Chang
She didn’t seem concerned about the transaction possibly being recorded on restaurant videotape. He accepted what looked like a manila jiffy bag, sealed, the size people sent paperback books in.
“From your si hing, Tat.”
She took a sip of tea to wet her lips but never touched the dim sum dishes. And neither did he. He pocketed the envelope, asked:
“You know what’s in there?”
“No.” Almost too quick an answer.
“When did he give you this?”
“A few days after. After you visited me.”
Before the rampage, Jack mused. Was Lucky Boy giving me a freebie from the grave? Like insurance or payback?
“Why now?”
“He said to wait. After his . . . passing.” She said it like it was a good thing.
“That’s what he wanted?”
“Yes.”
There was a pause, when he wondered about her connection to Lucky.
“Anything else I should know?” he asked pointedly.
“He said he considered you like a brother. Si hing.”
“That’s it?” He frowned.
“He said to ‘remember the rooftops’. Whatever that means.”
Angelina took another sip of tea and stood abruptly. Jack was caught off guard but managed to say “Thank you.” He stood as her bodyguard escorted her out, as if she needed any protection in this place.
He pocketed the envelope. Leaving the untouched steamers of dim sum on the table, he headed for Confucius Towers.
The lower level of Confucius Parking was the only place nearby—quiet and isolated—that he could think of. The Paki attendants scarcely noticed as he went down.
He sat in the Mustang, the thought buzzing in his head that Angelina could have seen the contents, repackaged it and then given the envelope to him. Whores knew all the tricks.
He tore open the envelope, pulled out a small black notebook, like a DayMinder, that could fit in your back pocket. The kind sold in any Chinatown stationery store. Protruding behind the cover was a folded piece of copy paper, a long note. Slipped inside was a faded yellowed photo of three Chinatown teenagers, a photo he hadn’t seen in years but remembered well. There were three of them then. Himself, Lucky, and Wing Lee. Now he was, once again, the sole survivor.
On the back of the photo, a scribbled Castle Keep, chimney sweep.
He unfolded the note, was surprised to see it opened with his name.
Jacky boy,
If you get this il be dead. (but you know that, haha) Anyway we had good times as kids . . .
Lucky’s grade-school penmanship and poor grammar reminded Jack of junior high school days.
Remember where we left Wing’s chain? The gold chain? (yur cross to bear now ha) You should pay respects sometimes.
Jack remembered the rooftops.
Remember we used to piss on that old guinea’s garden? Haha.
There was a gap with a small scrawled fuck . . .
Anyways, here’s the book. Goin ta fuck the On Yee, some Wo. Ghosts too. Lotsa bad police too. Turn snitch and rat out evrybody. Haha Yu gonna make Captain!
Jack was stunned. Lucky must’ve been stone drunk juiced-out to have written the note.
Good luck with life
Lucky’s last words.
He pocketed the note and photo.
The black booklet opened to a page listing names, some written in Chinese, along with dates and dollar amounts. More pages followed, the On Yee’s accounting of who killed whom, when, and for how much.
The Chinese names were nicknames in most cases, and Lucky penned in their real names in several instances. He’d coded the addresses: mo66 was 66 Mott Street, ba10 was 10 Bayard, and so forth.
He’d listed sixty to seventy Chinatown businesses paying off protection on Ghost Legion turf, Mott, Bayard, and Mulberry Streets. A million-dollar racket.
There was a separate list of cops taking bribes, badge numbers, some single entries but a few repeat offenders. Notations for which precincts, the amounts each one got, and for what purpose. They’d be coughing up every Cantonese lobster and Tsingtao beer they partied on without paying. Every Hamilton palmed for looking the other way.
More bloody triad money fueling corruption, misery, and murder.
The list of dirty cops included:
PO Joe Ryan, Sgt. Nick Morillo—5th Pct.
PO James Song—1st Pct.
PO Richard Ramirez—9th Pct.
PO Andrew Lin—108th Pct.
Sgt. Akeem Jackson—7th Pct.
The list went on. Civilian employees. Guards at the Tombs. Rikers Island custodians.
He knew the book had incriminating information and could involve other ongoing investigations from different departments, like IAD, Internal Affairs. When the OCCB and FBI and Immigration got through with it, bad cops and bad people would fall hard.
Lucky had dealt him a winning card. He was going to play that card to help take down tongs and triads that leeched off the people of the neighborhood, the community he loved, the working folks Pa had always sided with.
He figured to get a promotion, a pay raise, maybe better assignments. Any IA crusade against him would be quashed, and Hogan and DiMizzio would hate him even more, if that was possible.
He also sensed the OCCB, and the FBI, could try to recruit him. Political?
He left the Mustang, hearing remember the rooftops in his head.
The high ground was three blocks away, the rooftops on that stretch of Henry Street he hadn’t visited in a dozen years. They were kids then and the rooftops held the hard secrets and memories of their youth.
What was once the gritty hardscrabble playground had been transformed. Garbage-strewn lots and fetid alleyways had given way to supermarkets, a new church, schools, and a community center. The outward progress reminded him how the Chinatown of his father had changed, but too late for him, the son.
Death and bloodshed had driven him out to Brooklyn.
He entered 29 Henry, went to the roof. The latch on the roof door was the same and he popped it easily.
On the roof, not much had changed, just the tar cover repatched in a few places. Everything else still a jumble of air ducts, skylights, and chimneys.
By memory he went left, crossing the building lines. There were no clotheslines out, but he had to squeeze past milk crates supporting someone’s trays of home-salted butter fish.
Pay ya respects sometimes.
When he reached No. 37 he turned to the rear of the building. There was a chimney there, long since abandoned after the building had been renovated.
The flattop chimney had a wood board covering it, crudely sealed around the edges with a crusty stucco-like material. It looked like it hadn’t been touched in years.
Remember where we hung Wing’s chain?
Looking around, he found part of a metal antenna he could use to pry off the wood board. He was surprised to see how easily it lifted off. The seal was just cosmetic, to keep out little birds and critters probably.
He looked inside the hole, and where he might have seen Wing Lee’s thin gold chain was a bag instead. A weather-worn old-style zippered gym bag, like school kids used to carry, crammed into the chimney hole.
He grabbed it with both hands and yanked it out.
Pay ya respects? Not bothering to dust it off, he took a fighting breath and unzipped it.
The first thing he saw was Wing’s skinny gold chain, carefully taped onto black plastic. The black plastic turned out to be a garbage bag.
He pulled the chain free and pocketed it. Took a sustaining breath as he spread the plastic.
The garbage bag was full of money. Fat bundles of Jacksons and Grants. Some of Lucky’s dailo loot.
Glancing around to see no one had witnessed the discovery,
he quickly estimated it was a twenty-thousand-dollar stash. He closed it up, zipped the gym bag, and double-checked the chimney again. Empty.
He headed back toward No. 29, imagining three Chinese American juveniles, their younger selves, wreaking mischief on the world below. A brotherhood of Chinatown boys. He was now the sole survivor once again, the last man standing.
What to do with all the money? Lucky sure didn’t need it anymore. The money was way more than enough to cover potter’s field.
By the time he bounced down onto Henry Street, he’d decided to call Vincent Chin and visit The United National.
It was time to call in a favor.
The next morning, he was buying incense at the Temple Store, along with a cardboard miniature of a red Mercedes coupe. No death money, no paper abalone, no offerings of ritual foods. Keep it simple, Lucky had always said.
Just enough to fill a one-foot-square hole in his heart.
He was paying the monk cashier when a call jangled his phone. Alexandra calling.
He was happy to hear her voice, all the tough and tender notes there, rather than clandestinely communicating through lifeless texts and shorthand messages.
They followed each other’s sentences like there was a time limit on the conversation.
“I was awarded full custody,” Alex said. “He got supervised visits.”
“Good news,” Jack said. He was happy about her long-awaited victory and didn’t want to darken anything with news of Lucky’s death.
“And I need to get Kimberly to understand the visitation arrangements. “
“These things take time,” he said.
“And we’re going to Hong Kong for three weeks. She’ll meet her cousins for some bonding, before school starts.”
He was quiet a moment, unhappy that Alex would be away for the near future.
“Have a great trip,” he heard himself saying. “Going to miss you.”
Awww. Going to miss you too. He liked the thought of it.
“By the way,” she added. “Your friend from the newspaper came by with a donation.”
“My friend?” he feigned surprise, still drinking in her voice.
“Vincent, the manager,” she continued, “brought a red envelope.”
“A lai see?”
“Lucky money. An anonymous check for eighteen thousand.”
“That’s a sweet lai see.”
“Lucky for us, too. We just lost some state funding for the Women’s Center.”
“Anonymous.”
“Yeah, still some good people out there.” Ironic, thought Jack. He was glad Lucky’s money would be put to good use.
“You sound tired,” she noted.
“Yeah, been losing sleep.”
“Cop stuff?”
“Yeah. But also thinking of you.” It wasn’t a lie.
“Awww, we’ll get together after Hong Kong, okay?”
“That’s a bet then.”
It was all he could hope for.
Ashes and Dust
It wasn’t like there was a funeral at the Wah Fook parlor. No one else came, as he’d expected, when they gave him the box of Lucky’s ashes. He’d had to sign for it.
There were no twenty black cars in a funeral cortege, no overflowing flower wagon. There was no mournful Chinese dirge, no shiny brass casket shouldered out by weeping family.
There was just him taking out the ashes, headed for a hole in the ground.
He put the box of ashes in a bag with the incense and the little red cardboard Mercedes, let it ride the shotgun seat as he drove the Mustang out to Queens Calvary.
It was a sunny half-hour drive and he was parking in the cemetery lot when he caught the message. From May McCann.
Need to talk? You’re not alone. Make appointment. I’m available.
For a moment it seemed like an ad from a porn site. But he couldn’t help remembering her pretty face, that steel smile in her eyes. Could she have seen his Tsun Jin report in his file already?
You’re not alone.
He never felt more alone, and wasn’t sure how to explain it. His cop life intruding on his civilian life again. Not sure if he should keep a cap on his feelings, or those fleeting instants where his free soul didn’t need to be a New York City cop anymore, didn’t need to justify anything. Didn’t need to serve or protect or kowtow to anyone.
The gravestones beckoned and he tabled her message for the time being.
Goodbye
Potter’s field was a patchy brown strip that followed the rear wall, the gritty highway side of the big cemetery.
Lucky’s hole was tucked away in the far corner, past the hilly pastoral dead lands. Just where the Wah Fook drivers described—the constant roar of the highway, the soot-spewing trucks. A one-foot-square hole. Neat at the edges, the dug earth a small mound to its right. Big enough for a jade plant or a box of ashes and dressing. He imagined the spade booted in, churning up the earth, down its length a foot, a couple of times front and back.
Square it up.
The black marker was a brick-sized polished stone, included in the funerary deal, with the name tat carved into its face. His proper name. Not Lucky.
Jack took a breath, emptied the plastic bag. Keep it simple. No firecrackers, the evil spirits already scared enough of Lucky anyway.
No food offering.
No death money.
No bowing.
He placed the box of ashes into the hole, took out his lighter, and fired up three sticks of incense. Planting those by the polished brick stone, he torched the little red Mercedes.
“Here’s a cool set of wheels, Tat,” he said quietly. “Roll like you know.” He held the burning little car until its flames singed his fingers, its glowing ashes following into the hole.
Live big or die small, Lucky’s cheap advice.
He took out the pint of XO from Chinatown Liquors, Lucky’s favorite jolt, poured a big wet circle around the hole.
Here’s to you, kid.
Taking a long Buddha breath, he nudged the earthy mound back into the hole, covering up what remained of one of Chinatown’s most feared dailos.
He tamped down the earth with his boot.
The world looked small, he thought, and drained the rest of the XO.
No one saw the tears in his eyes as he walked back to the lot.
There was still much to do, and the Mustang was waiting to take him back to Chinatown.
Acknowledgments
Much love to my longtime publisher, Soho Press, for the inclusiveness, to Bronwen Hruska my Boss Lady, to my keen no-nonsense editor Mark Doten, and to the hardest working Crew in the business—Paul Oliver and Juliet Grames, Meredith Barnes, Rudy Martinez, Amara Hoshijo, Abby Koski, Kevin Murphy, Rachel Kowal, Carin Siegfried, Daniel Ehrenhaft, Janine Agro—I luv you all!
A special bow to my Chinatown hing yau—brothers, sistas, friends—you amaze me all the time.
Great gratitude to my Agents—Dana Adkins and Debbie Phillips—for cheering me on, crunching the numbers, and always having my back.
Thanks also to my friends at Hamilton Madison House, Asian American Writers Workshop, the Organization of Chinese-Americans, the Museum of the Chinese in America (MOCA), the Mystery Writers of America, and Project Reach—you know who you are.
And humble love to Doris Chong always, to Geoff Lee, Shon Chen Tyler, Shemy Koo, Andrew Chang, and Nancy Chu.
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