by Ed Lin
“Hey, Chow,” said Peepshow. He had a copy of Cracked Mazagine opened on his lap. A brown paper bag was at his feet and the air smelled like orange peels.
“Geller,” I said to Peepshow. I made the mistake of clasping his hand, which was sticky. “Quiet?”
“It’s like I’m guarding nobody,” he said. “What are you doing here?” he asked.
“Well, I . . .” I paused, distracted by seeing Peepshow licking his sticky palm. “I think the kid might have some information relevant to this case I’m working on.”
“He’s not supposed to have any visitors. I mean, none except for his lawyer.”
“I have to see him, though. I’m sure it’s okay. Chinese people have to look after each other.”
“I guess there’s no harm. You’re not going in to kill him or anything, right?”
“That is the farthest thing in the universe from my mind!” I said, smiling.
I went in and kicked down the doorstop to give Peepshow a false sense that he was still protecting the kid, who was propped up in his bed, reading a book with one hand. It was a little dim in there. The only light was from his nightstand lamp. The ceiling fluorescent lights were off.
Eric watched me come in. He picked up his bed remote and lowered the head end until he was fully reclining. Then he snapped off his light and tossed the book aside.
“I’m sleeping,” he said. “Besides, I got nothing to say to you.”
I flipped a few switches and all the lights came on. Eric groaned and I pulled up a chair next to his bed.
“What are you reading here?” I asked. I picked up his book. It was a MAD magazine book of stupid cartoons. “Hey, you and Geller ought to get together,” I said, pointing back at Peepshow. “You’re at the same reading level—zero.”
“Look!” Eric said. “I told the black cop everything that happened. I don’t know who shot at me, but I can take care of it myself.”
“I know what you said so far—pretty much nothing. But I know your name is Eric. My name is Robert.”
“I knew that!” he spat.
I looked into his face. Eric was about eighteen years old or so, a pivotal age for gangster kids. Pretty soon he’d be killed, go to jail for a long time on an adult-sized sentence, or get serious about a girl and move far, far away.
“What are you looking at?” he demanded to know. His nose had been broken at some point and seemed to be growing a knuckle. He had scars on his forehead and his skin was oily and blotchy like a slice of pizza when the cheese and sauce slipped off. Eric’s eyes were scared and childlike. I felt a little bad that this kid probably would be laid out on a slab in the next year.
“What do you want!” he yelled. It sounds meaner in Cantonese and it shocked me into dropping any sympathy for him.
“I am so sorry to bother you, but I was just wondering if there was any chance you know someone named ‘Brother Five.’”
“A snakehead, right?”
“Yeah!”
“I did some freelance work for him.”
“Your friends, too?”
“Maybe they did. I’m not sure.”
“Can you remember for me, Eric?”
He rolled his eyes and turned his head away. “Hey, dumbfuck,” he said. “I was shot. You shouldn’t even be here, now.”
“I know you were shot. I’m here because I was worried about you. As I am worried about all the Chinese youth.”
“Well, I heard you live with a little boy. Do you fuck him up the ass?”
I scratched my right ear and stood up. I went to the door.
“Nighty night, child molester,” Eric called after me.
I kicked up the doorstop and started to close the door.
“Geller,” I said to Peepshow.
“Yeah?”
“I’m closing this door because there’s a bad breeze coming through.”
“Sure.”
“Now might be a good time for you to go over to the vending machines. Why not have a coffee break?”
“Aw, I get it,” he said, smiling. “You’re trying to get me to go down and get you a cup of coffee, huh?”
“Guilty as charged,” I said, laughing. “But hey, let me cover you, too.” I gave him three dollar bills. “If you feel like it, have a cigarette down there in the lounge, as well. I’m not really in a rush.”
“Sure, I’ll take a break. Why not, I’m going to be here all friggin’ night.” Peepshow stood up. I moved to shut the door. “Hey, wait!” he said, pushing it open.
“What?”
“How do you want your coffee?”
“Let’s keep it simple. I’ll take it the same way you take it.”
“That’s a good idea. Who could screw that up?” I could only smile and laugh a little.
I got the door closed. I locked it and turned down the blinds covering the windowpane.
“Hey!” said Eric. “What are you doing?”
I went and stood over him. “Eric, I need to know what you know about Brother Five.”
“I don’t have to talk to you. My lawyer already said I was done.”
He looked scared when I grabbed the nurse call controller and dropped it on the other side of the nightstand, out of his reach.
“If you don’t start talking,” I said, “I’m going to find some way to hurt you and then I’ll tell everyone that you tried to go for my gun and I had to subdue you somehow.”
“You’re a rotten cop.”
“You’re a rotten kid. Let’s not dwell on the personal, though. I got no beef with you, but I’m trying to catch Brother Five.”
“Okay. I helped keep an eye on some human snakes that he thought needed watching. They might have been trying to plan an escape or go to the authorities.”
“You basically just shadow them from the safe house to their jobs?”
“Yeah, like a cop.”
“No, not like a cop! Like a two-bit Nazi in fake leather!”
He squirmed a little bit in bed. “He said that they agreed to the terms of being smuggled over. We watched them to keep them honest and make sure they didn’t try to cheat him.”
“Brother Five told you that?”
“Yes,” he said. Suddenly he winced in regret. “I didn’t mean to say that.”
“That’s all right because I already knew. I wanted to hear it from you. So what would you do if you saw someone trying to get away?”
“I saw two people talk to a lawyer.”
“How do you know they were talking to a lawyer?”
“There’s a lawyer who sits in the back of the shoe store. Like how you used to sit in the back of the toy store. Oh, we all knew about you!”
“It was never a secret and it’s not like I was creeping around, doing something illegal. So what did you do when you saw the guys talking to a lawyer?”
“I told Brother Five.”
“Let me guess—those two guys are the ones who got killed, right?”
He gave me a defiant look. “Yeah, they were. But I didn’t do it! I wasn’t involved.”
“Who killed them?”
“It was three kids, all under sixteen, so they couldn’t get put away if they were caught.”
“Where are these three kids now?”
“They’re gone.”
“Gone where?”
“Boston? Philadelphia? Taiwan? I swear I don’t know.”
“You told Brother Five and he had these three kids kill those two guys.”
“Yeah.”
“What does Brother Five look like? Old? Young? Tall or short?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?” I had a quick image in my head of pushing a pillow in his face.
“I just talked to his assistant. I only ever met his assistant.”
“You have no idea what Brother Five looks like?”
“No!”
“What’s Brother Five’s real name?”
“I don’t know!”
“What does
the ‘Five’ stand for?” I was going to run through my guesses with him but decided to hold back.
“Who knows!” He crossed his arms.
“The assistant was the guy who paid your salaries, right?”
“Duh!”
“What does the assistant look like?”
“He’s a guy in a suit. Shaggy hair and sunglasses.”
“Where can I find him?”
“You don’t find him. He finds you. You feel a tap on your shoulder and then he’s right there. It’s always a different place. He walks with a limp.”
That shaggy hair and sunglasses sounded like a pretty obvious disguise. The limp could be faked. It was probably Brother Five himself.
“Why were you shot?”
He kept his mouth shut.
“Was it because you knew about the two murders?” I asked.
“I’ll take care of it. Don’t worry.”
That was as far as Vandyne had gotten with the Pagoda incident and it was as far as Eric was going to let me get. I took a step to the door.
“When you’re well enough to walk out of here, you should do yourself a favor and leave New York. Start your life over in the country somewhere.”
He looked up at the ceiling. “My life is here,” he said. “Besides, what kind of a man would I be if I left? I would look like a coward if I didn’t stay and get my revenge.”
I looked at Eric. He reminded me of another wayward Chinaboy running full tilt at a brick wall. But he wasn’t as smart as Paul. How was he going to make it?
“Eric, you have a lot of chances in this life, a lot more than your parents. Now you want to throw it all away so a bunch of jerks in the pool hall respect you. Let me tell you something. These people who you think are your friends aren’t going to stand by you when it counts. Plenty of guys like you have very lonely funerals, if they even get one.”
He still wouldn’t look at me, his eyes defiantly fixed on the fire sprinkler. Maybe I had gotten through to him. Maybe he’d see the light, eventually. At least he wasn’t dumb enough to threaten me.
He ruined my hope for him by opening his mouth.
“If I hadn’t taken a bullet, Robert, I could put you in the high dive for the East River Olympics.”
I smiled. “Shows how much you know. Both China and Taiwan are boycotting the Olympics, dumbass!”
19
DURING A COMMERCIAL, I ASKED PAUL, “HEY, SO, HOW DID YOU DECIDE to give up the gangster life?”
He sighed and slumped over like it was the thousandth time I had asked him. “I was never a gang member, not one of the core members,” he finally said. “I never had a gun.”
“But you were headed down that path, weren’t you?”
He shrugged. “Maybe.”
“More like ‘probably,’ right?”
“Well, one potential scenario is that someone I knew well could have been shot or shot somebody. That could have pushed me over the edge. I would have had to become a soldier at that point. I would have felt that sense of loyalty. But that day you came up to me and almost beat me up, my friends ran away. It showed me that I was foolish to have a sense of loyalty to them.”
“I’m glad you learned that lesson before you took a bullet yourself.” I thought about the Chinatown guys I knew who had served in Nam. They had tried to form some sort of Asian veterans group. I had showed up at the meeting, but one of the guys had a picture from Nam of him tied up with the white soldiers sticking bayonets in his face. It really pissed me off.
He told me the picture had been a joke. I told him he was the joke and left. That seemed to have busted up the group. I felt bad about it now, because we were all Asian men who had been stuck in the U.S. military—the most anti-Asian outfit in the world. But maybe it was best that the group didn’t last. Apart from talking to Vandyne about it, I was done with Nam. I didn’t need more people to complain to. The less people talked about the war, the better.
I felt itchy all over my body and not sleepy at all.
That kid in the hospital was bugging me.
Who the fuck was Brother Five?
Just a few months ago I would have started drinking beer and fallen asleep sooner or later. Instead I drank a can of Coke and told Paul I was going for a walk. He turned off the TV and turned on the CB radio to talk to his imaginary friends.
When I got to the sidewalk, I took a left and walked west on East Broadway until I was by the bridge overpass where the bodies had been found. I looked at the barren patch of ground, more glass and scrap metal than soil. The crime scene tape had ripped, and the ends fluttered in the light breeze.
If my father hadn’t kept up with his debt payments he could have ended up dead on this tiny lot of unwanted America, or kicked into a ditch in California. I thought of my father’s young and smiling face and saw it turn twisted and ugly, caked with dirt.
I put my hands in my pockets and continued west. I walked by an over-rice joint. A group of about ten teens were sitting there. Even though their food was already on the table, they weren’t eating. Their heads were bowed and their hands clasped in prayer.
Joining a Christian group was one way of staying out of trouble. The gangster kids thought of them as sissies and didn’t bother to mess with them. Same with the Boy Scouts. I’ll admit that at one point I had wanted to join the scouts, but my father told me it was just a scam to force you to buy the uniform and books.
A car honked at me. I turned and saw Winnie wave to me from her convertible. I walked into the street and came up to her side of the car.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“I like to drive around the city, but for some reason I keep coming back to Chinatown, even though I spend the weekdays here. I’m not sure why that is. Maybe everything looks more interesting from a car. Even you, Robert.”
“Isn’t it a little late for you to be out?”
“But it’s Saturday night!” she whined. “Let’s go for a drive!”
“I don’t know if I have time.”
“Well, you didn’t look too busy, staring at people in a restaurant. They might think you’re some kind of weirdo.”
“Ordinarily, I would be out with my girlfriend. But she’s studying for a test.”
“So you’re not doing anything. You look a little down, too. Get in the car. Come on, let me at least take you home. I’m wasting all this gas idling here right now. You brought me home before and now I have to return the favor.”
I came around and got in. I justified it by thinking I would ask her about her brother, but she was the one who kicked off asking questions.
“Your girlfriend is studying on the weekend? She doesn’t sound like a fun girl!”
“You should know by now that I’m not a fun guy. Just take me straight home. Let’s make a U-turn here on East Broadway.”
“Sheesh!” said Winnie, swinging the car around. “Any regular guy who got in a convertible with a cute girl wouldn’t be so anxious to leave!” Her right hand suddenly went for something and I followed it. She was only pulling down the hem of her skirt, which was bright red and short. It was tight against her black panty hose.
“You like my legs, huh?” she asked, her eyes still on the road.
“I like the color of your skirt, but in this country red means ‘stop.’”
“So red doesn’t do it for you, huh? What does?”
“Information about how your brother’s smuggling people into this country from China.”
“Humph! What makes you think he’s doing such a thing?”
“Don’t they call him Brother Five?”
“No, you’re thinking about that book, The Five Chinese Brothers. One brother can swallow the ocean.”
“That book was a piece of racist garbage! It stereotyped Chinese people as slant-eyed ching-chongs with mystical powers.”
“It had a positive message, though. It’s about brothers sticking up for each other and shows that justice ultimately prevails.”
I tapped my
hand against the outside of my door. “See that far corner there, on the right?” I asked. “You can let me out there.”
“You seriously want to go home now?”
“Unless you have something more to tell me about your brother.”
“I might have.”
“In that case, I’ll ride with you as long as you keep talking.”
She checked herself in the rearview mirror. “Say, do you think I look all right tonight?”
“Your face isn’t the problem,” I said as a puzzled look came over her. “How does Andy Ng, your brother, make a living?”
“You already know my family is pretty well-off. I feel a little embarrassed to say this, but he really doesn’t have to work if he doesn’t want to.”
“But he’s restructuring the family business, because he’s trying to clean it up instead of just taking the money and not asking questions.”
“Is that a shot at me?” demanded Winnie.
“Not at all. We’re talking about Andy. I can’t really figure him out. Does he care so much about his family name that he wants to get it out of the alleys and wash it off?”
“I guess you could see it that way. Or you could see it the way I see it.”
“How’s that?”
“He’s trying to push out the criminal elements of the family so he can have sole power. We have a number of uncles who head up various lines of business. If Andy signed away territory rights to other families, our uncles would have to go straight, too, or go back to smashing parking meters for change.”
It was the typical summer night in Chinatown—hot and smelly. Somehow being in a car and feeling a breeze made it worse than walking through it.
I regarded Winnie. This was where she came alive, in a car and hot and cruising for action. There were two minor things wrong with her, though. She slouched and she rubbed her nose too much.
Apart from that, with her hair waving in the night air, she could have been a love goddess who flew down from the moon in a convertible.
“What if these uncles,” I said, “weren’t exactly on board with the plan? What if they wanted to stop Andy?”
“They are trying to stop him! He’s been warned many times! They even tried telling him he’s walking into a setup.”
“What does he say about it?” I asked casually.
