by Ed Lin
“I am a policeman.”
“Here’s what I have to tell you. I was coming down the block when I saw two men looking at you. One of them said to the other that you were a cop and they ducked into an establishment near the intersection with Pell.”
“An establishment?”
“Yes. I believe it’s a gambling parlor. So maybe you want to go over there and look for them.”
“Oh, so that’s the pitch.”
“What’s a pitch?”
“Let’s go back a little. As you were coming out of the gambling parlor, you noticed two guys who were looking at me and talking.”
Her face flushed. “I wasn’t gambling.”
“I’m not here to bust you or anything. Tell me more about these two guys.”
“They both were holding little leather bags, like what doctors used to carry. It seemed a little suspicious.”
“And they ducked into New Tang Dynasty.”
She crossed her arms. “Yes.”
“What did these guys look like?”
“They were both tall. Taller than you. Both of them were sort of built. Dark-skinned army guys. You know what I mean?”
“I do.”
They were either Taiwanese or ethnic Chinese from the Golden Triangle in Thailand loyal to the KMT government.
Taiwan had a mandatory two-year military service for all men and you had to do it before you could get your college degree. Most of them served out their time on one of two offshore islands held by the KMT that were close to the mainland. If the People’s Republic wanted to launch a takeover of Taiwan, those two islands would be invaded first. Such an operation didn’t seem imminent but that didn’t stop China from pounding the islands with mortar shells for the hell of it.
If the woman’s description was right, these guys could be a hit squad sent here to find Mr. Chen’s murderer. I sure hoped they were from Taiwan, because if they were from Thailand they were probably a lot more ruthless and wouldn’t hesitate to shoot a cop.
I crouched to get a good up-close look at the car’s rear license plate. It seemed to be real, and as I recalled from my talk with Mr. Yi, it likely was real.
If I went into the gambling parlor, I’d be taking a big risk. We’d been warned to stay out of illegal gambling sites not only because it would implicate us as taking bribes, but it would also jeopardize any sting operations in place.
If I waited by the car, those two men could slip away for good, leaving the car, which could be driven away later by a Taiwanese official with no penalty. Not even Peepshow was dumb enough to ticket a car with diplomatic plates.
“I’m going to go into New Tang Dynasty,” I told the woman. “I think you should go home.”
“I’m going to hide inside this doorway in case they double-back and come out before you,” she said. “I love the detective shows.”
“If you’re going to stick around, then stay out of sight. Seriously.”
“I won’t even move,” she promised.
New Tang Dynasty, like all illegal establishments in Chinatown, was sweating it out in a huge way. In the November election, New Jersey was going to vote on whether or not to allow Atlantic City to open gaming casinos and hotels in a bid to revive the area. As I understood it, the town was in such crappy shape, a couple blocks of pawn shops would improve the city center.
The Chinatown underworld fought back by improving the gambling experience. New furniture and carpeting was brought in, along with better booze and free packs of cigarettes for big-time losers.
The street-level outer entrance was open, but just down the hall two skinny guys stood on either side of the main entrance to New Tang Dynasty. I walked down to the end, the too-bright fluorescent lighting buzzing like a swarm of flies over my head.
The skinny guys looked me over and the one with spiky hair touched the one with a crew cut and said, “He’s a fucking cop!”
“Relax, guys,” I said. I recognized the one who spoke as one of the guards who had stood outside of Together Chinese a week ago. “I’m here for pleasure, not for business.”
“You can’t take your gun in,” said Spiky Hair.
“I was told it wouldn’t be a problem.”
“That’s bullshit,” said Crew Cut.
“Wait,” said Spiky Hair. “He knows Mr. Song.”
“Who’s Mr. Song?”
“The big Commie!”
“So what?” said Crew Cut. “Maybe we should we ask Little Uncle?”
“Go get him. I’ll tell him how extremely disrespectful the both of you were.”
“Hey, don’t be annoyed.” said Spiky Hair. “We weren’t told of any special guests tonight.” Still, he wasn’t sure what to do.
I opened my wallet and took out two fives. “One for each of you,” I said. “Buy something to eat.”
“He’s all right,” said Crew Cut.
“He is,” said Spiky Hair.
“Say, did you two happen to notice a pair of guys who came in here probably five minutes ago?”
“What did they look like?” asked Crew Cut.
“Shut up,” said Spiky Hair. “We don’t see anybody. We don’t even see this cop coming in. Understand?”
They opened the door for me. What idiots. No wonder these stupid kids shot each other all the time over nothing. I wished I had my camera to take their pictures for “Happy Memories.”
I found a waiting area with a small bar and three couches. Somewhere deeper inside were the gambling tables, accessible only if you checked out all right, and there’s no way I would.
Heavy curtains covered the three walls. One man flailed his way through a part to my left and entered the room. There was a door back there, but to what? Pai Gow, chuck-a-luck tables, blackjack? A blackjack to the head?
I should have remembered that entering the gambling parlor would likely put me in close contact with alcohol. Here it was, right in my face. About a dozen men of all ages, including under eighteen, sat or stood around, nursing drinks. None of them had the disciplined look of soldiers. They were on the way out and judging by the lack of conversation, they were all losers.
The smell of the cheap liquor made the roots of my hair sizzle and I could feel my scalp begin to sweat. Microscopic droplets of watered-down whiskey drifted through the air every time an old man let out an uncovered cough.
I lost track of my thoughts. I tried to breathe through my mouth and leaned against the side of the bar to give my knees a chance to steady themselves. I leaned over and gasped.
“Are you all right?” asked the bartender, the only authority figure in the room. He looked like a nice guy. He was in his mid-forties, and stood at about five feet three with kind eyes that offered sympathy and gratitude to the gambler for keeping the boss fat and rich. “How about a drink?”
“No!” I barked.
“Buddy, take it easy. I know you had it rough, but luck don’t come to negative thinkers. I was gonna offer you one on the house.”
“Two dark-skinned men, soldier types.”
“Huh?”
“Have you seen two men? With dark skin. Could be soldiers.”
He shrugged. “Sounds like it could be anybody.”
“They would have just come through. Right before me.”
“Buddy, I don’t know. I don’t have a good mind for details.”
“Over there, where that guy came in . . . what does that door go to?”
“The can.”
“How about I go over there?”
“It’s locked. You need to be buzzed in.”
“Then buzz me in.”
He put his elbows up against the counter. I could see the bottom of the tattoo of something on the top of his right wrist slide out from under his shirtsleeves. “Buddy, we’re not going to have a misunderstanding, are we? You don’t go through that door.”
I marched straight for it. I heard a chirp of white noise from a walkie-talkie behind me.
I reached the wall and tore the curtain aside. The
wall was made of cinder blocks encrusted with cement. The metal door was solid steel with only a handle on it. I pulled on it but it was like trying to tug a battleship onto dry land. I gave it all I had and I felt something in my back come apart.
The bartender was on me with his right hand on my shoulder. I could tell that he’d been working on his grip.
“Chow, is it?” he asked me. “Do you want to walk out on your own or do you want a booster kick?”
Another idea had entered my head.
That woman outside was their lookout! She had gotten rid of me so that they could hop in their car unseen and get away!
And who said there were two men? There could have been four or just one.
I broke away from the bartender’s grip and stomped through the door I had come in from.
“Good night, boys,” I said to Spiky Hair and Crew Cut on the way out.
“Come again,” said Spiky Hair.
On the street, I saw that I had been right. The car was gone and so was the woman. I walked up to the spot by the hydrant where it had been and cursed myself for not writing down the plate number.
I heard some sobbing from the shadows.
I followed the sound to a stairwell leading to a below-the-sidewalk store entrance and saw a homeless person curled up at the bottom.
It was the middle-aged woman who had spoken with me earlier.
“They pushed me down here!” she wailed. “They kicked me!”
I helped her up the stairs. She wasn’t hurt badly but was extremely shaken up. There wasn’t even any blood and she was more dirty than bruised.
“They told me to mind my own business.”
“Let me take you to the precinct,” I said.
“No no no.”
“At least let me get you to a hospital so they can check you out.”
“No hospital. I need to go home. I’ve learned my lesson.”
“There were two men?” I asked her.
“There was nobody. I didn’t see anything.”
I watched her scurry away. It was an unsettling sight. Now I knew I could be dealing with men who wouldn’t hesitate to rough up an old lady.
David Ong had tipped me off that Mr. Yi, the Taiwanese official in New York, was going to be at a dinner banquet thrown by the Greater China Association. I ambushed Mr. Yi by the escalators to the Ocean Harmony restaurant and I rode up backward and slouched to get face-to-face with him. Other members of his staff leaned on either side from behind him to get a look at me. It was a long ride for an escalator, three flights.
“Mr. Yi, I think we had visitors from Taiwan two nights ago,” I said. “They had diplomatic license plates from Washington.” I acknowledged one frowning face behind Mr. Yi. “Hello, Ms. Kung. How are you? See, I’m Robert Chow, not some maniac. Well, Mr. Yi, what do you have to say?”
“I don’t know anything about any car from D.C. coming in,” he said.
“These guys roughed up an old lady for just being a bystander.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. She should report it to the police.”
“They scared her off that.”
The first floor, crowded with loud parents and running children, slowly slipped by. In any other restaurant or building, this would be the second floor, but then that would make the top floor the fourth floor, and four was a bad number for Chinese people. So the fourth floor was Ocean Harmony’s third, and the ground floor didn’t have a name.
“Robert,” said Mr. Yi, “I don’t know what to say. If she didn’t report it, then how did you know about it?”
“I was there and I talked to her about it.”
“Did you witness the assault?”
I felt my face flush up. “No, I didn’t.”
“Then we’re talking about something that’s theoretical in nature and unsubstantiated.”
“Try this on for a theory: You could tell your man in Washington that there could be a situation in which he and his island country are extremely embarrassed. Say, a Chinatown shoot-out in which bad men carrying Republic of China identities are killed.”
“I don’t tell Washington anything, all right? I can’t warn them or advise them on what to do. It’s a one-way communication line and I’m the one taking orders.”
The second floor, which was either rehearsing or staging a wedding, drifted by.
“Have you heard anything about Republic of China agents driving around Chinatown?” I asked.
“You’re the first one to tell me, but I’m not surprised.”
“Apparently, they were spending some time gambling.” Mr. Yi shook his head sadly.
“The most rational and efficient people, unfazed by guns or torture, lose their minds and get sloppy when you dangle cards and chips in front of their faces.”
We hit the third floor, and I stepped aside. Mr. Yi slipped around to continue our private conversation and signaled his entourage to stay back.
“Robert, they don’t even tell me the full details of the dinners that I go to. In that sense, I’m in the same boat that you used to be.”
“Barbara told you about those days, I guess.”
“Well, I’ve also seen your face and your expressions in pictures in the Chinese newspapers. They help me to remember to keep a big smile on.”
“Then I did some good after all.”
“Listen. If it does come down to a shoot-out, I hope you get those guys. It would be for the best. For the future.”
Mr. Yi left me and rejoined his group. Before he entered the dining room, I saw him bow three times to a portrait of Sun Yat-sen, the claimed father of both the People’s Republic and the Republic of China.
The Confucius Plaza complex is a gigantic housing complex that sits at the intersection of three different gangs’ turfs. When the project was being built several years ago there were massive protests organized by college-educated Asian Americans to force the contractor to hire Asians. The contractor caved and the plaza was built.
The buildings of the complex sat on a triangular plot of land bounded by Bowery, Division Street, and the Manhattan Bridge approach, while Pell Street ran into Bowery from the west and pointed right at the entrance to Confucius Plaza.
Bowery, which ran northeast and southwest, had a lot of restaurants, the dirtiest of which were open twenty-four hours a day to cater to Chinese cabbies and everyone else who worked night shifts.
Division, which ran east and west, was crowded during the day with mobile stands of fruits and vegetables and the odd clothing hawker.
Pell Street, just to the north of Division, was home to businesses including travel agencies, insurance brokers, barbershops, and some more restaurants.
Bowery had a number of tourists walking up and down it because it had a wide sidewalk and was marked as being the eastern end of Chinatown in the woefully outdated tourist maps.
Only white people who were lost walked down Pell, with its forebodingly dark, narrow, and slanted walkways, or Division, with its crowds of noisy open-mouth-chewing Chinese people.
Which was fine for the gangs who considered Pell, west of Bowery, and Division, east of Bowery, as fighting grounds for territory.
Retailers on the ground level had to choose the association they wanted to be affiliated with while the kids who grew up in Confucius Plaza had to choose what gang they wanted to be affiliated with.
Kids were typically recruited by being jumped and beaten into submission. Parents were no help to kids because they were probably working sixteen-hour days and were too tired to do anything but eat and sleep. Teachers and principals were no help because they’d tell the kids to try “talking” to the “bullies.” The police were no help because the police were no help. Believe me, by the time a kid resorts to asking a cop for help, he’s been beaten up by a gang because he belonged to a rival gang.
The girls only held the guns for the boys, but they could fight better hand-to-hand. It was true that girls couldn’t throw baseballs, but they could throw punches and land them hard.
The joint-precinct Asian gang task force that was supposed to launch was put on the back burner for some bullshit administrative reason. I think the adjoining Seventh Precinct needed to replace some copier machines and some squad cars. Holding a press conference to announce that we would form a task force was deemed to be enough to address the problem for now.
I didn’t think I’d ever be put in the position of saving a kid from the gangs again, but here I was. I had been waiting to hear something, anything about the Mr. Chen case, but nothing seemed to break. Those guns from the apartment mailbox weren’t ready to talk to me, either.
So when the midget called and told me that Drew Bai had come into work at the toy store with a black eye and his face all puffy, it was something I felt I could address right away.
Drew lived in Confucius Plaza and had to cross Bowery near Pell to get to the midget’s store. But he got jumped and was told to join the gang or next time he would get his face cut. He was talking about maybe making a list for me of all the kids who had assaulted him.
Of course, in the minutes it took for me to get to the store, he decided there wasn’t a problem after all.
“I’m going to be all right,” Drew said. “Don’t worry about it.”
“You’re not going to be all right,” I said.
“Do you really want to know the names of the kids?”
“Actually, that would be pretty useless because not only are they minors, but we’d have to establish that they were present.”
“So it’s a useless situation, isn’t it?”
“Just stay prepared and be smart about where you go.”
“The next time they come, I’m going to have some help with me.”
“What kind of help?”
He didn’t say anything.
“What kind of weapon are you going to carry?” I asked.
“I’m gonna have a gun!”
“That’s great. Even if you managed to shoot someone, don’t you think they’ll come at you with two guns?”
“Then I’ll join a rival gang.”
“And then you’ll end up jumping another kid to try to force him to join your gang!”
“What else can I do? I’m not going to be scared to walk around Chinatown. This is my home. At least when you’re in a gang you have some protection. Somebody is watching your back.”
