“How sad for them,” said Marlene. They were at her doorstep. She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek; they were almost the same height.
“Thank you for this, my friend. You know, as the world judges men, you are very nearly the worst man I know, yet there is hardly a person of my acquaintance whom I like better. Why do you suppose that is?”
“It is because you are perverse, Marie-Helene,” Tran responded immediately. “You are the most perverse woman I have ever known. Whatever one expects of you, as soon as you are aware of it, you do the opposite. You act the thug among lawyers, among thugs, the lawyer. Among the liberal intelligentsia you are a Catholic mother, conservative as the pope. Should you ever be called to meet the pope, however, you would appear nude and twirling a gun. It is a peculiar way of life, and disconcerting to all around you. I wonder that you remain married or have any friends at all.”
“What a condemnation! Have I no good points?”
“Several. Shall I enumerate them?”
“Do. ‘To refuse to accept praise is to want to be praised twice over.’ ”
Tran chuckled, a rare noise. “La Rochefoucauld, maxim number 149. Very good. One of the little annoyances of fighting a war for the peasants and workers is that one must associate with so many illiterate people. Dying with you will at least be amusing. So that is the first point. One can converse with you without boredom, in French. This alone would make me your slave. Second, the esthetic appeal. A beauty, but maimed, scarred, like something out of Baudelaire. Irresistible. Were I twenty years younger and still an actual human being, I could not answer for your virtue. Third, your courage. Although unlike most heroes you have a full appreciation of the reality of death, still you behave as if you feel no fear. This is the most admirable form of courage. Finally, despite what you do, you have not amputated your moral sensibility. Therefore you suffer agonies in your deepest soul, which is above all what makes you admirable, at least to me. We Vietnamese are connoisseurs of suffering, you understand. It is our national sport and the basis of our most refined culture.”
Marlene placed her hand over her heart and fluttered her eyelids dramatically. She said, “Monsieur, you have quite overwhelmed me. I must return at once to my husband, lest I be tempted to commit an indiscretion.” Tran made a graceful stage bow, and they both laughed. In a more sober tone she asked, “Tran, will it really be so terrible?”
“Who can say? Maxim 310 bears on this. I wish you a good night, Marie-Helene.” He walked off without another word. Marlene took the elevator up to the loft, locked up, and went into the bedroom, a small room with large windows overlooking the back of the building, a lower structure, and a parking lot. Much of the room’s floor space was occupied by an enormous brass bed that would not have disgraced a New Orleans brothel, the rest of the furnishing being the white painted “Provincial” furniture Marlene had used as a child, including a little vanity table with a pink tulle skirt. Karp thought this was weird, but one of the less objectionable parts of the Marlene package. Neither of the pair was into trendy furnishing, however, and so their loft (worth over three-quarters of a million dollars and the envy of any number of trust-fund artists and Wall Street types) was full of bits of odd junk Marlene had dragged home or inherited from Queens and, as a result, was as comfortable and as childproof as an old flannel shirt.
She found her husband stretched out on the bed, which he had converted into a desk, with folders, documents, and neat piles of paper arranged in rows and columns about his long frame.
He looked up when she entered and asked, brightly, “Was that Rocco wanting another taste?”
She ignored this and said, “I knew you were married to your job, but I didn’t think that meant you actually had to take it to bed. What is all that?”
“Oh, it’s a small part of the administration of justice, my dear. Requisitions, petitions, permissions, submissions, admonitions. . I actually blew my day with some criminal justice work, so all this has to be looked at in my, ha!, spare time.”
“Should I sleep in the guest room?”
“Just a second, let me think. . is this stuff more interesting than Marlene in bed. . well, that depends. .”
“Very funny. I’m going in there to pee, wash, and change, and when I come out I don’t want to see anything in that bed but husband.”
“Yes, dear,” said Karp. “No, dear, I don’t know, dear.” She laughed and went into the bathroom.
When she came out, smelling of Jean Nate and dressed in a worn St. John’s T-shirt that descended fetchingly to just past her groin, Karp had cleared the marital deck and was making notes on a legal pad. She got into bed, snatched the pad and pencil out of his hands, and tossed them across the room, snuggling up at the same time.
“Listen, that was Tran just now,” she said. “I’m a little worried.”
“About. .?”
“Janice Chen. Tran said the girls were followed by a couple of thugs today.”
“Thugs? They weren’t hurt, were they?”
“No. Lucy used her head and called Tran and he took care of it, but. .”
“He took. . excuse me, but don’t we have all those guys in blue suits who’re supposed to-”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Butch, it’s Chinatown! I told you, Tran took care of it.”
“Committing how many Class A felonies in the process?”
“Several, if you must know, but none that are likely to come within the cognizance of the law. Do you want to talk about this or not?”
“What’re we talking about?”
“Lucy. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but she’s extremely unhappy and she’s taking this business with the Chens very hard. I think they’ve closed ranks in this crisis-family only-and she’s feeling left out. She won’t talk to me about it. Maybe you can get through to her. Also. . Tran told me a lot of stuff he picked up. The details don’t matter, but the Chens could be in a bind. It’s tong stuff, like that. Jesus! Yet another reason for her to go to Sacred Heart, the damned obstinate puppy!”
“Tong stuff? You mean for real?” Karp was incredulous.
“So it appears. I thought maybe we could slip the word to Mimi Vasquez and the cops, to the effect that there’s no point in hassling the Chens. They don’t really know anything, and the guy who did it is probably sipping a sloe gin fizz in Kowloon as we speak.”
“Go easy because they’re our friends.”
Marlene missed his tone. “Yeah. Come on, Butch, they really don’t know anything.”
“This is what they teach in Yale? You’re pals with the D.A., so you get a free one? That’s exactly the reason they can’t get special treatment, Marlene. What’re you thinking of?”
One thing that Karp could not bear was tension in the bedroom, and there was plenty at that moment, so he curled an arm around his wife and said, “Look, Lucy just needs some attention. We’re both somewhat workaholic-”
“I’m not workaholic. .”
“No, you’re worse, you’re a fanatic. We’re supposed to be having a family here. Maybe you should cut down on the Wonder Woman routine and spend some more time with her.”
“What about you? When was the last time you spent any time with her?”
“Okay, let’s not get into it right now. Let’s both spend time with her-we’ll plan something for the weekend, all of us, the boys, too. And this thing with the Chens can’t be that bad. If Lucy knew anything really bad was going on, she’d tell us.”
Marlene thought that was about as likely as Santo Trafficante confessing to the murder of Jimmy Hoffa out of remorse, but held her mouth, which in any case was being nibbled by that of her husband. Marlene thereafter gratefully abandoned her miasmic thoughts to the brief oblivion of sex, not all that brief in this particular case, because Karp, though no Lothario (and thank God that was something she did not have to worry about, him sniffing up other women’s skirts), knew all her fleshly buttons and how to push them, and Marlene, for her part, had found that, contrary to
every marriage manual she had read, screwing was better when she had something sneaky going on.
Afterward, they fell into the usual divine swoon, but at 3:10 Marlene popped awake from an unpleasant, unremembered dream, sweating, her heart thumping. She put on her T-shirt and went out of the room, stumbling as she always did on such sleepless excursions over the great dog who was sleeping across his mistress’s doorway, as mastiffs have done for three thousand years. She stifled a curse, patted the dog, went into the dark kitchen, where she filled Zak’s Star Wars tumbler half full of red wine.
She drank and tried to arrange her racing thoughts. Triads. The Mafia. The dead men from Hong Kong and the Chens. Jumping Jerry couldn’t wait. The woman in room 37. The abortion clinic. Her mother and the flying missile. Lucy. What had she mumbled? You have to be cute to be anorexic. Oh, Jesus! Oh, Mary, full of grace. Mama mia! Motherhood, an impossibility in the present age. What a tangled web we weave. She entertained vague escape thoughts (an assumed name, a trailer west of Tonapah, a job with the school board, blast away beer cans on the desert at night, fuck brainless cowboys, shoot crank, and drive her car into an abutment at ninety) and wondered how long she could sustain her current life. Perversity, its origins? Tran had got that right, the bastard. Thinking of that conversation, she chugged down the rest of the wine, gagged slightly, went through the long central hall of the loft to her little office. She looked out the window, pressing her moist forehead against the cool glass. Crosby Street was empty, lit by the nasty orange light from the street lamps. Free of danger, for now.
From her bookcase she took her copy of La Rochefoucauld’s Maximes, the purple-bound Hachette edition, and thumbed through to number 310. She translated: Sometimes in life situations develop that only the half crazy can get out of. She laughed, her laughter sounding maniacal enough in her ears, until the dog came trotting in to see what was the matter.
Chapter 7
The Chinese man in the blue suit believed ardently in the principle that contemplative thought should precede action, especially violent action, and so for several days after the incident with the Chen girl and the two White Dragon boys he sat and thought and did nothing. In his youth he had, in contrast, been a passionate advocate of violent action with no thought at all, thought itself having been rendered nugatory by the intellectual achievements of the Great Helmsman. Later, bobbing in the vast sludge of broken humanity left by the Cultural Revolution, he had discovered individualism, and for a while he imagined that the discovery was original. Later still, he met others, former Red Guards like him, without education, family, culture, or hope, who had also become individualists, and together they rediscovered feudalism, a system in which a few strong individualists become rich through the imposition of pain and terror upon the weak. This suited him very well, and it suited the leaders of his country, who had found, contra Marx, that feudalism was necessary for the operation of a communist state since, unlike communism, it worked.
He stared into the steam rising from his teacup and through the amber liquid to the leaves on the bottom, and tried to fit them into the shape of a character, although he knew he did not have the skill, if skill it was. He should have an oracle cast, he thought, although he had never found them useful in the past. Regrettably, their usefulness seemed to depend on the cultivation of self-knowledge, something he was disinclined to do, as he suspected, rightly, that it would interfere with his goal of accreting to himself as much raw power as he could. Still, he knew others believed, and that was what was important. After the brief bubble of chaos brought on by the Cultural Revolution, the dense substance of Chinese life had flowed back into its original immemorial spaces. It no longer paid to advertise disbelief. People might think you were unlucky, which was a disaster for any cooperative enterprise among the Chinese, at home or abroad.
He drank, slurping. The man in the blue suit spent a good deal of his time here, sitting on the lumpy bench of the rearmost of the four booths, facing the streaked window and the street. There were no other customers in the restaurant at this hour, understandable at ten in the morning, but there were few at any hour. Nevertheless, the tea room, a twelve-by-twenty-foot box on Bayard Street, was on paper enormously profitable. It was called Li Gwun, or Lee’s Place, that is, the Chinese equivalent of “Joe’s,” and its primary purpose, like that of a great many similar holes in Chinatown, was not the dispensing of the world’s most sophisticated cuisine but the metamorphosis of illegal cash into spendable income. It was, in fact, a Chinese laundry, and a wholly owned subsidiary of the man’s organization.
He was calling himself Leung nowadays, which did not mean much, as underworld Chinese change names nearly as often as they buy shoes. What was important was what he represented, that and the plan. When Leung thought about the plan, the two words that came into his mind were yu and bang. The first means a kind of wading bird, a snipe. The other means a clam. They are the first two words of a Chinese idiom, based on an ancient fable. The clam lies open on the shore, and the snipe grabs it. The clam closes its shell on the snipe’s bill. Neither will let the other go. The snipe holds on because of greed, the clam because it fears being eaten. A fisherman comes by and catches them both. The success of the plan depended on keeping the contending parties focused on one another and not on the fisherman creeping closer.
Thus the attack on the White Dragons was disturbing. He was supposed to be invisible in his character as a no-name Chinatown gangster, a loyal vassal of the Hap Tai tong, a nobody, the creeping fisherman. Who had ordered the interference? The men who took the ma jai off the street so smoothly and professionally were unlikely to be local talent. Most of the people Chinatown called gangsters were petty extortionists, clowns who thought that a big score was a bunch of them ordering a meal in a restaurant and not paying. The ma jai had not seen the faces of their captors, which had been concealed behind ski masks, but they claimed that the leader had spoken to them in what sounded like Viet-accented Cantonese. That made more sense. One would use a Vietnamese or a Fujianese for that sort of thing. He himself had used a Vietnamese for the business in the Asia Mall. Thinking about that, he considered the possibility that Chen had hired protection for his daughter, and then dismissed it. Chen would not dare, although he did have the temerity to complain about the killings taking place on his property, which was why the demonstration against his daughter had been necessary.
If the Chens were of no consequence, who had intervened? Leung could not imagine that the thing had any other purpose than to send him a message. As he read it, it was this: we know who you are; we are watching; we can get to your people; and we can get to you. That was the message he himself would have sent with the action on Canal Street-a daylight abduction, which meant an additional footnote: we’re tough and competent. The message could not be from the Wo Hop To triad. If they thought he had betrayed the Sings, he would already be dead in some particularly unpleasant way. His comrades in the Da Qan Zi triad might have sold him out. That was always a possibility, and he certainly had rivals enough. But he had carefully balanced the rivalries heretofore, and the promise to his triad leadership of what he intended to bring to them was more than sufficient to stifle with avarice any move against him, at least until the fisherman had the snipe and the clam firmly in hand. That left the Italians. The more he thought about it, the more he felt that this was the correct solution. He had expected something like this, but not in so subtle a fashion. That was the Vietnamese influence. The Italian had given the contract to a Viet gang, both to insulate himself from suspicion and because he wanted to see what Leung would do under pressure. He had, of course, no idea that Leung was all by himself in New York, that he was operating with only the barest toleration of his triad, on speculation, that the yu bang plan was his alone. If they penetrated this veil, he was finished.
He thought briefly about the little American in Macao, and what he had learned from him about the absurd machinations of American law. The man could talk for hours about it, introducing
strange concepts that had no Chinese equivalent. Due process. Conflict of interest. Plea bargaining. Immunity. He was a drunk and an opium addict, but he had long periods of lucidity, and Leung had listened with close attention. The man was dead now, but what he had taught Leung had fermented like a tub of soy beans in the young gangster’s head and become, after the passage of years, a part of the plan.
Leung slurped the last of his tea and rose to leave. They wanted to see what he would do under moderate pressure, perhaps expecting a tentative push in return. Instead he would advance his plan and respond with a devastating counter blow, one that would remove the Italian entirely from the board.
Mary Ma washed dishes in the kitchen of the Golden Pheasant, a big, brightly lit, old-fashioned tourist restaurant on the second floor of a building on Mott, a few doors up from Pell. The appreciation of Chinese cuisine had recently come a long way in the city, and there were now large numbers of gwailo New Yorkers who could distinguish between the various regional cuisines and be boring about how to eat Peking duck. The old Golden Pheasant, however, catered to the tour-bus trade, terrified gaggles of ladies from Indiana shrieking with nervous laughter over chopsticks, soy sauce, and lobster Cantonese with flied lice. The Ma family was three years in the country, six years out of the PRC, beginning to make it in America in the good old way, working two jobs apiece, living like dogs in two tenement rooms, keeping their one kid in school, saving every penny. (Mrs. Ma was shocked to her soul when, a few days after her arrival in town, she observed a group of children tossing pennies against a wall. Playing! With real coins! What if they lost one?)
Aside from violating the child labor and minimum wage laws of the state of New York for eight hours a day, Mary Ma was more or less on her own. From the age of ten she had worn the latchkey necklace, that badge of striving families, and saw her parents mainly at work, where Mrs. Ma was a prep cook and Mr. Ma a waiter. Mary Ma had started school in Guangdong in the PRC, continued in Hong Kong, and had been registered in public school on the second day after the family’s arrival in New York, speaking little English, and that with a faint British accent. She was lonely, as all such children are and more than most, since she was a member of the Chinese generation that has no siblings by order of the leaders of the PRC. In the fourth grade, however, she had with uncharacteristic boldness advised the gwailo girl at the next desk, who was having incomprehensible difficulty with a math problem that Mary Ma had solved in eight seconds, and to her immense surprise the girl had thanked her profusely in Cantonese.
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