Chinatown Beat jy-1

by Henry Chang

  The humming sound he had heard upon entering the temple turned out to be the chanting of the monks, namor namor namor, so smooth it sounded like one word, an unending om.

  He bowed three times, planted the other sticks of incense on the altar and stared at his parents yellow tag. Ommmmm, and he could feel the spirits of Ma and Pa flowing through him.

  Darkness

  Mona turned off the lights. The place was less ugly then. She undressed herself in the dark ofJohnny's flat, then scented herself with a spray mist, sat down at the edge of his bed and waited.

  Johnny stepped out of the shower, saw the blackness beyond the slit of the open door and instinctively hit the wall switch. His eyes adjusted, then he saw her clearly, seated perfectly still in the small square of moonlight that fell through the window. The only movement came from her fingers working over something hidden in her hand. He threw on a towel, watching her all the while. He heard a small humming sound coming from her as she began rocking slowly back and forth on his bed.

  Water over Heaven. Auspicious sign.

  Water over Heaven. Cross the river, move forward.

  Buddhist, Johnny thought at first, then realized it was "Taoist invocation.

  When she saw him the spell broke.

  The towel dropped as he approached her, the two of them falling together, onto the bed. She, warm and soft, and he, cold from the shower rinse, hard with desire. Yin crashing into Yang.

  He turned on a small light, showing her the pistol as she pressed her softness against him. She peered along the barrel and silencer, squinted and imagined the target in her sights. She took a breath and squeezed the trigger, heard the hammer snapping down on the unloaded pistol.

  "Don't worry," Johnny said. "You won't be shooting far and there's no kick."

  Mona watched asJohnny chambered a round for her, flicking on the safety, then ejected the round, explaining the slide action to her.

  "All you need to do is squeeze," he said. He passed the bedsheet over the Titan in a quick wipe, cursory but careful enough to remove his prints.

  Mona turned off the light on the night table, leaving the bedroom illuminated only by moonlight. She climbed on top of him and worked her body until he was hard again, inside her. Almost a half hour passed before she rolled off him.

  "Will you help me load those extra bullets, my love," her lips demanded just before sliding over the head of his hardness.

  In the dim light he groped for and found the extra six-shot magazine, never taking his eyes off her head, then felt again for the small box of bullets, spilling them across the night table. He was in ecstasy, his mind drifting, with clammy hands slipping the little bullets into the magazine.

  Her head was bobbing, eyes open, watching him, her tongue twisting inside her mouth. He tossed the loaded clip onto the night table as her lips tightened on him, her fingernails fluttering, closing on his testes. He was ready to explode, to blast himself away from Chinatown, to a sunny place far from the reaches of the mean and unforgiving city.

  Double Ten

  The Kuomintang banner of the Republic of China was a twelvepointed white sun on a dark-blue rectangle, cornered on a field of blood red. It was raised on every lamppost in Chinatown and flew along with plastic American flags over all the wide two-way avenues.

  October 10th, celebrated as Double Ten, was a political holiday, the Eighty-third Anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Republic, a break away from civil war and the clutches of warlord feudalism.

  Uncle Four wore his best gray suit, with a small red carnation in the lapel, beneath a red, white and blue Kuomintang flag pin.

  He stood on the corner of Mott and Bayard, felt the faint sun on his face and knew exactly how it was going to happen. He'd seen it every year the last thirty years. The faces changed but the routine was the same.

  He let his eyes roam over the program for the celebration. There was the Chinese Calligraphy Exhibition that the Lin Sings offered annually. Once a year the Nationalists cranked up their loudspeakers and blasted the streets with martial music, marching fanfare. In the auditorium of the Community Center there was Cantonese Opera and a Chinese Music Recital, followed by a reception-by invitation only-restricted to the big shots. They ran out the schoolchildren with candlelit Chinese lanterns and the floats with beauty queens in cheong saams.

  Scheduled for Day Two was a late afternoon series of the Lion Dance, performed by six traditional kung fu academies. Afterward, the Gala Anniversary Dinner at twenty dollars a head, hosted by the Silver Palace and the Harmony Palace, the biggest Chinatown restaurants. The Nationalists ritually issued threats to the Chinese Communists and vowed to retake the mainland. One year they drove an armored half-track with.50 caliber machine guns and camouflage netting down Mott Street and chewed up the asphalt. The following weekend featured the Senior Citizens' presentation of Cantonese Opera, and the boh lo, northerners, offering Peking Opera out in Flushing. In Queens, the Nationalists from Taiwan, the Republic's forty-five-year seat of power, provided an even greater bang-up celebration of the day. That was to be expected, Uncle Four thought, Flushing being a KMT stronghold.

  The wind gusted up and Uncle Four shielded his eyes from the dust. Double Ten drew people to Chinatown, his stronghold, and was good for business. The celebration allowed the Nationalists to blow off steam, to show off their face in the Chinatown power configuration: the alliances between Associations, the tongs, the Ian jai, punk-thugs, street gangs, the Kuomintang Nationalists and the triad secret societies.

  The sunny morning turned gray and blustery, the October wind carrying on it an edge of wet and cold that made the beauty queens wrap their slender arms about themselves, shiver, and scrunch up their made-up faces. The marching band from the Chinese School came down the street, a platoon of old veterans from the American Legion dragging along behind it.

  Uncle Four folded the program and stepped out of the wind. He'd seen it all before and none of it held any surprises for him. He turned toward the Community Center, but was thinking about the stacks of hundred-dollar bills in the plastic takeout bag, and the cache of diamonds and gold in his bedroom that Golo had entrusted to him.

  Run

  In the haziness of his sleep he imagined the distant beeping of his pager singing in his ear, but when he stirred from his pillow, the sound was more distinct, a tapping on his door that made his eyes focus on the faint sliver of light and shadow that seeped in under the door from the stairwell.

  He rolled off the bed, tiptoeing toward the door and the tiny hushed voice calling, fun Yee, Jun Yee!

  Johnny squinted through the peephole, saw it was Mona, and unlocked the double deadbolts. She brushed past him like a cold gust, saying in a rush, "You must run, the old bastard put a contract out on you." She looked desperate.

  Was he dreaming? What?and How?were all he could manage against the force of her outpouring.

  "There are loongjaai, Dragons, searching for you. Your face cannot be seen on the streets." Her body quaked in the darkness.

  "He found out about us. I don't know how. I have left the apartment. I am going to Lor Saang, Los Angeles." Breathless, talking to him in the night shadows, her words jumped out in a steely, angry chopping rhythm.

  "I need you. I want you to meet me there." A heartbeat passed. "Take the bus." She gave him a ticket folder, red, from jade Tours.

  He felt his heart hammering, a dryness blotting up in his throat, anguish and dread sweeping over him.

  "It's all there," she said, her voice expectant.

  He saw the Greyhound bus ticket, the Holiday Inn reservation, and swiveled his eyes back to her.

  "I will call you in three days," she said, the moonlight flashing in her eyes. There was silence around them, his bloodshot eyes burning questions into hers.

  "What's going to happen?" he finally asked, swallowing his fear.

  "Don't worry. I have some money. We'll be partners." Then she turned to go and he grabbed her by the elbow. She jerked it back, tear
s welling up in her eyes.

  "I'm going!" she cried out. "He's not going to hurt me anymore." She stepped toward him before he could wrap her closer and pounded her fists against his chest, angrily sobbing, suddenly pushing away. "Hurry! They're after you!"

  He watched her slip out the door, stunned, listening to her heels clatter down the rickety stairs. He went to the window and folded back the blinds. Saw nothing but night, streetlamps, and a yellow cab pulling away.

  Under the cover of night, once she was beyond viewing from Johnny's window, Mona walked to the street phone, inserted a coin. She heard the metallic rattle, then a dial tone, and tapped in Johnny's pager sequence of eights. She took a breath, waited.

  Johnny's beeper sounded before he finished buckling the belt on his jeans. In the dark of his apartment, the luminous display on his pager read 444-4444. Death numbers all across the digital display.

  The old bastard seeping him.

  Just like Mona had said.

  He reached under the nightlight, pulled his cash and a Ruger Magnum from the floorboards under the sink. Stuffed fugitive items into a duffel bag.

  He tucked the ticket folder into his pocket, stepped out into the yellow light of the stairway, moving down the steps and thinking, Goodbye to Chinatown.

  Nite cruiser

  Two A.M.

  Homeless predators and mental-hospital fugitives stalked the carbon-monoxide-infused spread of the Port Authority Bus Terminal, watched warily by the sex hustlers, pimps, and returning New Jersey johns. Two PA cops patrolled together, tense, a nervous pair of birds.

  Johnny kept the neat, flat packets of fifties inside the back game-pouch of his hunting vest, covered the vest under a loosefitting barn jacket, dark, his entire presentation colorless. The Ruger in his waistband.

  He went directly to a bank of telephone booths, which carried the stench of urine and stale ugly sex, nestled the greasy handset into the bend of his neck and punched in Gee Man's number. Held his breath for three rings, got a message machine.

  "Take care of the car," he said. "Leave me a voice message if anyone asks for me." Stepping back from the stench, he hung up and went toward the brushed-aluminum Greyhound Star Cruiser idling at Departures.

  On board he took a window seat across from the driver. The Cruiser held forty-five passengers and carried a ton of luggage in its belly hold.

  He scanned the other passengers.

  There were no other Chinese on the bus. Just as well. He didn't want company, small talk, or questions. The bus rolled out, only half full.

  There was a group of students, a club maybe. Baseball caps worn backwards. Jansport knapsacks. An old white couple carrying cane suitcases. A woman and her daughter who looked Mexican. Most of the rest were hard-scrabble working-class by the look of their clothes: whites, Latinos, farm laborers, construction dogs returning westward, ho.

  The Lincoln Tunnel snaked them through to NewJersey. A weariness settled over them inside the bus, a surrender, a resignation known by those who came hoping to conquer but ended up stealing away, back into exile in the dead night, their spirits swallowed whole by the unrelenting, unforgiving metropolis.

  Johnny saw the last of NewYork City fading into the receding urban nightscape. The Greyhound pushed along, seeking the Interstate, where it could cruise at seventy-five.

  His mind always came back to Mona, the idea that they could be partners. What business could they possibly have in common? Had she mentioned other partners? Women like her had to know some big players. He imagined a karaoke nightclub operation-something catering to an uptown clientele, until somewhere in the Pennsylvania night he realized Mona could never be more than a silent partner, and only in a legitimate business that wouldn't catch the attention of Big Uncle, or the Dragon Boys.

  His mind drifted, different cities, different state lines. America from the Interstate, rolling by in the picture-window framed night of the Star Cruiser. Somewhere they could blend in. California Dreaming. Or far enough away no one would ever think to find them there. Canada? Mexico? South America?

  But though he pondered through the night, he couldn't come up with where that might be.

  Yin And Yang

  Jack sat at the desk with the harsh daylight of the squad room window behind him, stared into the middle ground and thought of Ali Por's words, small ears. They made no sense.

  A week had passed, more than two since the first rape, and in the zone there had been no new attacks. The pattern seemed broken, the beast gone. The community was beginning to drop its guard, strengthened by the allied tongs' pledge to bring an end to the nightmare. The composite sketches began to disappear from storefronts, from the hanging pagoda streetlamps.

  Jack knew it was just a matter of time before he attacked again. He'd seen the sketch featured on an episode of CrimeStoppers, so he knew Sex Crimes was still active on the case.

  There was a commotion downstairs, then one of the uniforms ran tip and summoned Jack.

  "We got a woman downstairs asking for you. They brought her in on a D and D. Lee, she said her name was."

  Lee? wondered Jack, creaking down the stairs.

  It was Alexandra, looking disheveled, having apparently shed the Chow in her last name. A female uniform, who had her by the elbow, said, "Disorderly, Detective. She was assaulting a man who claimed to be her husband. There was alcohol on her breath when we got there."

  "The husband?" Jack asked Alexandra.

  She didn't look at him.

  "The man refused to press, but she wouldn't give it up," the uniform answered.

  Jack took a breath, flashed the female cop a look that reached out saying, Don't run her through the system.

  "I'll take it," Jack said. The officer released Alexandra's arm. Jack took her to the locker room, sat her down on one of the benches and leveled a tough look at her.

  "You know you could get disbarred in New York for something as stupid as this?"

  Alexandra broke down and explained tearfully how she had recently caught her husband cheating, and was feeling bitter and volatile, and how finally this morning, after she got back from taking her daughter Kimberly to Pre-K, she had tried to throw him out. They had fought, loud and ugly. She was throwing his clothes into the Tower's hallway when the cops came.

  "What about the alcohol?" Jack asked.

  "For courage." She sniffed into her handkerchief. "I had a couple along the way."

  "At ten in the morning?"

  "In my office." She blinked. "Leftovers from the Christmas party."

  There was a short silence. He put a hand on her shoulder, and when she got up he told her to get herself a lawyer, not herself. Then he walked her out of the stationhouse and steered her in the direction of her daughter's schoolyard.

  "Cool out," he said quietly. "Count your blessings. I know it sounds hokey, but it's never as dark as you think. Okay?"

  "Okay," she answered, gratitude and shame in her trailing voice as she hurried down the street.

  When he returned to the locker room, he noticed the handkerchief on the bench. It was Chinese silk, embroidered in red with the monogram AL. He picked it up and stuffed it into his jacket pocket, not really caring whether or not she'd return for it.

  Highway

  Johnny fell asleep at dawn, Ohio, Indiana, somewhere. When he awoke it was afternoon, the bus pushing on, the highway changing to a two-lane blacktop ribbon and back to the Interstate again. By sunset they rolled into St. Louis.

  He ate fried eggs at the Terminal Diner, washed his stubbled face in the men's-room sink. He called Gee Man again. Still no answer.

  At night he stayed awake, watching the changing of passengers on the Greyhound, saw the night lights going by at a distance from the highway. He felt safe near the driver, the Ruger nestled in his waistband holster, his cash stash flat against his back.

  The air got thin and cool as the bus climbed the pitch-black night toward the mountains. Worse came to worse, sell the Lincoln to Gee Man, make up a sweethea
rt lease or something. Wire the money out slow and easy.

  He bought a throwaway razor kit in Denver, shaved in the station's washroom, rinsed the dead taste from his mouth. When he called Gee Man he got the machine again.

  Dewwww, he cursed, fuckit, and hung up.

  Daylight came again.

  He wasn't too concerned about Gee Man now. It was Los Angeles-and Mona-that was dancing in his mind.

  In the desert everything became clear, the air light and transparent over white sand that shouldered up to the highway. The visibility was endless along the mysterious monochromatic landscape.

  The bus rolled toward the smog-clouded city, becoming one with the tangle of freeway interchanges, slogging along on swooping ribbons of concrete.

  It reminded Johnny of New York City.

  Here, three thousand miles away, he gave in to the momentary belief that he was safe from Uncle Four and his mob. They had no pictures of him. What were they going to do? Phone in a description across the country?

  Murder

  Jack lay in a dead sleep until the phone jangle bolted him, jerked his groggy head off the pillow to hear Sergeant Paddy Murphy's growl.

  "Detective Yu!" Paddy barked.

  "Yeah, it's me, Sarge." The clock showed a fuzzy high noon.

  "We had a full moon last night. Loony tunes. Captain wants ya down quick. You got a hot one on Hester, number four-fourfour. You'll see the uniforms there. Hurry it up!"

  Jack dropped the receiver, picked it off the floor, replaced it on its cradle. He rolled his neck and groaned, took five fast and deep tai chi breaths thinking, Chinatown Chinatown Chinatown.

  He pulled on his clothes, strapped on his revolver, grabbed his knapsack and before the cold splash of water dried on his face, was out the door.

  He arrived at the scene in twelve minutes, the dome on the Fury roof flashing, the siren wailing, as he sped across the Brooklyn Bridge. He arrived before the EMS crew, and the uniforms took him, jogging, up to the third floor.