by S. J. Rozan
I stayed behind him for a block and a half, and I was pretty good at it, too. He shouldn’t have spotted me. But a young woman in high heels tripped off the curb, and the hatless guy—a true gentleman—turned to catch her.
As he did that he caught sight of me watching him.
Leaving the high-heeled woman in mid-rescue, he whirled and dashed away. I broke into a run, too, and made Canal Street in time to see him jump into a cab and disappear in the direction of the Manhattan Bridge. I looked around wildly, but on a freezing night at dinnertime in New York a cab is a hard thing to find. By the time the light had changed and a fresh batch of traffic, including two empty cabs, was headed my way, he was halfway to Brooklyn.
I comforted myself, as I seethed on the way home, with the hope that he hadn’t wanted to go there.
I was still seething as I stomped up the three flights of stairs to the apartment where I’ve always lived. Seeing the hatless guy in Chinatown, where white people, to Chinese, are visible and not part of the background, had brought him suddenly into focus for me. It made me remember his red-tipped ears this afternoon crossing the street in the same direction Bill and I did on the Upper East Side, and, yesterday, dashing in front of a Jeep outside a cafe in the Village.
This guy had been following me. It had taken me two days to make him, and now I’d alerted him and lost him.
You’re an idiot, Lydia, I pointed out to myself. A total idiot, a complete loss.
I took a few deep breaths when I got to the door, to try to approach normal before approaching my mother. I stood with my key in my hand, listening to old Mr. Tam’s television across the hall. Old Mr. Tam has lived here since before I was born. He doesn’t speak English, but he watches endless hours of American television. You can hear him cackling to himself over the antics of the white-skinned ghosts any time you walk by.
When I was calm, I twisted my key in each of the four identical locks on our door in turn. “It takes a thief as long to pick the same lock four times as to pick four locks once,” my mother had declared, standing over the locksmith to insure his competence, as well as his diligence, “And this way my foolish children will have fewer keys to lose.”
None of us, in my memory, has ever lost a house key, but I’m the youngest so maybe there are things I don’t remember.
“Hi, Ma,” I called, taking off my shoes in the tiny vestibule, hopping around as I put on my embroidered slippers. “Mmmm, smells great.”
“Oh, are you here?” my mother grumbled from the kitchen. “Well, I’m so lucky. Hurry now, dinner is almost ready.”
My mother has been saying this all my life, making it sound as though if I’d been five minutes later I’d have kept everybody waiting or caused everything to burn. The fact is Chinese food is always almost ready. It’s the original fast food, everything cut small and served crisp, sauces made in advance to be added at the last minute to vegetables quickly fried, noodles rapidly boiled, fish steamed whole.
The fish—a big perch—was sitting next to a pot of simmering water when I walked into the kitchen. My mother was at the kitchen table chopping greens. Beside the cutting board was a bowl of mung bean sprouts and bamboo. “Hi,” I said. “Have a good day?”
“You’re in my way.” She stood, wiped her hands on her apron, bustled past me. Then, theatrically, she turned. “Oh, I’m sorry, Miss. I was expecting my daughter, Ling Wan-ju. You’d know her if you saw her, she wears a leather jacket and trousers and thick clumsy shoes. I think she has a good coat like that, and even a silk suit that I made her, but she never wears them. It’s because of her job, of course—”
“Oh, Ma, give me a break.” “Give me a break” wasn’t exactly the expression I used, but I came as close as I could in Chinese. “Anyway, the suit was a hit uptown. I’m going to change now so I don’t get it dirty. You need help here?”
“I don’t think snooping helps cooking. You can set the table. But first go and change. I don’t want you to get that suit dirty.”
“Hey, good idea.” I headed for my bedroom.
“But hurry. Your brother is coming for dinner.”
This is something else my mother’s been saying all my life: “your brother,” as if in any given context it should be obvious to me which of my four brothers she’s talking about. Even if it’s Ted, his wife and three kids, or Elliot, his wife, and their two, it’s “your brother is coming to dinner.”
“Which brother, Ma?” I called as I pulled my sweater over my head. “Andrew?” I hoped it was. He’s one brother up from Tim, and he’s my favorite. He was also the most likely, since he’s single, a great eater, and, like me, not much of a cook.
My mother stuck her head around the corner of my door, turned up her nose at the chaos in my room. She smiled triumphantly. “Tien Hua,” she said.
Which, of course, meant Tim.
* * *
After I was in jeans and sweatshirt, before I set the table, I called Bill.
He wasn’t there.
I left a message with his service telling him to call me, and telling him to be careful. I didn’t know who my tail had been, or what his purpose was, but maybe Bill had one too.
Then I set the table. Rice bowls, soup bowls, teacups, chopsticks. All the Chins have a pair of chopsticks engraved with our names in red Chinese characters. My parents’ were a wedding gift from my father’s brother. Then he gave each of us a pair when we were born. My father’s and my brothers’ are ebony, black and shining; my mother’s and mine are ash, glistening white.
I straightened up the living room, which was also the dining room, not because it needed it but because I didn’t want to straighten it up for Tim because who did he think he was anyway?
“Whose idea was this, Ma?” I called, organizing the photographs next to the bowl of oranges on the shelf. Every room in our apartment already had its New Year bowl of oranges and tangerines, every door had its gold-lettered red banner proclaiming this as a place of health, good fortune, prosperity, and joy in the coming year.
“Whose idea was what?” Somehow my mother can mutter from the next room.
“Tim coming for dinner.”
“What do you mean, idea? Your brother called and said he would be in Chinatown this afternoon and he’d like to come for dinner. It wasn’t an idea, it was the right thing to do.”
Meaning that a good son, when in the neighborhood, can be expected to pay his respects to his mother. As opposed to a lousy daughter who, though she lives with her mother, can be expected half the time not to show up for dinner because she’s running around with the type of characters it humiliates her mother even to know she knows.
Except that, according to Nora, Tim had been at his office this afternoon, in midtown with all the other stuffy lawyers.
The sharp rat-tat-tat of knuckles came from the front door. I pulled it open, and of course it was Tim.
“Don’t you have your key?” I asked. Maybe one of the foolish children had lost a key after all.
“Of course I have it.” He pushed past me, handed me his hat while he took off his shoes. “But how do I know which of the locks you locked?”
The first half of dinner, for all that, wasn’t too bad. Tim talked about his work, which is trusts and estates and bores me but fascinates my mother. She plays the stock market and is always interested to know what Tim is recommending to his clients and why. Her record is actually better than his, but no one but me knows that because it would embarrass her deeply to outshine her son.
After the soup, however, when my mother disappeared into the kitchen to steam the fish and stir-fry the scallions, the action started. And I must admit I started it.
“You were not in the neighborhood this afternoon, Fourth Brother,” I said, spearing some bitter greens from the platter, dropping them in my rice bowl. “What’s the deal?” I said this in English, just in case the scallions weren’t sizzling very loud.
Tim flushed. “How do you know where I was?”
“I’m a dete
ctive. Is that what this is about?”
He glared. He doesn’t like to be one-upped, especially by someone who isn’t a lawyer. “All right, Lydia, yes, it is. I didn’t want to embarrass you in front of Nora and Dr. Browning, but I want you to resign from this case.”
“Lawyers resign. P.i.s quit. And I won’t.”
“Lydia, don’t be pig-headed. You’re going to embarrass Ma, and worry her, too. Think how upset she’ll be if you get hurt.” He was trying a rational tone of voice and emotional blackmail.
“I won’t get hurt. And nothing I’m doing could embarrass her, even if it got back to her, which there isn’t any reason why it should do.” I hate it when he gets me so riled up my English grammar goes. His never does.
“What if she hears you’ve been meeting with Golden Dragons? She’d be ashamed to show her face on the street. And,” he added, looking at me seriously, as though he was about to tell me something I’d probably never considered, “Lydia, they’re dangerous.”
I didn’t deny that. I also didn’t tell him that somewhere, in some place deep inside me that I don’t look into very often, I enjoy that part.
“She won’t find out, unless some low-down rat tells her,” I said pointedly. “And how do you know, anyway?”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake, Lyd, it’s all over Chinatown.”
“Then Chinatown hasn’t got anything worthwhile to talk about. Anyway, Tim, be honest. You’re not worried about Ma and you’re not worried about me. What you’re really afraid of is that I can’t solve this case. You’re worried I’m going to screw up and then everyone, not just you, will know what a jerk Tim Chin’s little sister is. Your face. That’s what this is about. Your face, not my ass.”
The aforementioned face was splotchy purple. I thought lawyers had better control than that, but maybe not.
“Damn it, Lydia, I have a reputation to protect!” he sputtered. “I’m up for partner this year. I have to be careful where I go, who I’m seen with—CP is already a little far to the left for some of the partners, and then to have my own sister running around stirring up trouble—”
“Stirring up trouble! You guys came to me because you already had trouble, because you couldn’t hold onto the best gift you’d ever gotten!”
Tim’s mouth formed a shape that was going to lead to a word, and I had a feeling that that was going to lead to disaster, but at that point two things happened: My mother came back with a beautiful perch on a beautiful platter, and my phone rang, the line in my room that rings through from my office.
I smiled sweetly and excused myself. I dashed to my room and grabbed the phone, thinking it might be Bill.
It wasn’t.
“Lydia? It’s Mary.”
“Serving and protecting, as always. You just saved Tim’s life.”
“What?”
“I was about to kill him. What’s up? Did you find something for me on this Bic person?”
She ignored that question and asked another one. “Can you meet me at Reggio’s?”
“What, now?”
“Can you?”
“Sure. Fifteen minutes. Give me a hint?”
“See you there.” She hung up. No hint.
I clipped my gun to my belt, untucked my sweatshirt so it would ride over it. I picked up my leather jacket, braced myself, went back to the dining table.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I have to go out.”
“Lydia—”
“Ling Wan-ju—”
They spoke simultaneously, in the same disapproving tone.
“Think of it this way,” I said brightly, putting on my shoes by the door. “You can visit with each other, just mother and son. That’s why Tim came, after all. Don’t wait up, Ma. I’ll do the dishes when I get back.”
At the idea of having Tim to herself, my mother visibly cheered up.
Tim did not.
I smiled and left.
N I N E
My cab dropped me at the corner, just because I like to look over the street before I get where I’m going. Most of the cab ride I’d spent looking back over my shoulder. I was pretty sure I hadn’t been followed.
Reggio’s is a old dark-wood-and-marble cafe in Greenwich Village. The walls are crowded with ornate picture frames around mediocre pictures and the music leans toward violins. Mary and I spent innumerable hours in Reggio’s in high school, before we were old enough to hang around in bars and drink, and many more while I was in college and she was in the Academy, after we had discovered that, like a lot of Asians, neither of us can drink anyway. It was in Reggio’s that she talked me through my breakup with Matt Yin, and here, years later, that I talked her through the times when being a small Asian woman in a big white man’s department was almost not worth it to her.
Mary was waiting when I got there, in the corner at a round table with a carved pedestal and a cracked marble top. She was watching the crowd, the window, and the street, with those eyes cops develop, the ones that never stop noticing.
The waiter, a slight, unsmiling young man with a haircut more asymmetrical than mine, got to Mary’s table at the same time I did, bringing her cappuccino. I ordered a pot of Earl Grey tea, shrugged out of my jacket, sat down.
“Well?” I said. “Hi, by the way.”
“Hi.” She stirred sugar into the froth, waited for me to get settled. When I did she got straight to the point. “Why were you asking about the Main Street Boys this afternoon?”
“I told you, I can’t tell you.”
“I need to know.”
“I’d need to know why.”
“I can’t tell you.”
I smiled cheerfully. “Can we skip this part?”
“It’s not funny, Lydia. There’s a problem.”
“What’s the problem?”
“The problem is …” She paused as the waiter came back carrying a tray with my tea. He set down the pot, the cup, the lemon slices, the little plate for the teabag, the napkin, the spoon. Then, because he had nothing left to do and he still hadn’t found out what the problem was, he turned on his heel and stalked away.
I let my tea steep. Mary went on. “A detective I know named Ferguson caught a homicide this afternoon. A fresh stiff. Young male Asian.”
Mary talks about death the way all cops do, words like stiff, whacked, burned. It always throws me, but I try not to show it.
I asked, “Who is it? Do they know?”
She nodded as she sipped her cappuccino. “One Hsing Chung Wah. FOB, 19.” An FOB, in Chinatown, is a new immigrant: someone Fresh Off the Boat. Some people lose the title right away, as they get into step with the dance of the community; some wear it for years. “The street says he was a wild man. Not well-liked.” She put down her cup. “He had a dragon tattooed on his right arm.”
“A Golden Dragon?”
“A Golden Dragon,” she agreed.
Holding the top of the pot down so it wouldn’t slide into my cup, I poured my sweetly fragrant tea. “But there’s more to it than just this,” I said, “because he wasn’t a Main Street Boy, and you got me here to ask about the Main Street Boys.”
“To ask why you were asking.”
“Hmmm.” I regarded Mary curiously. “Why does the death of a Golden Dragon get you interested in the Main Street Boys?”
“Are you mixed up with them, Lydia?”
“I told you, I don’t even know them. I’m looking for their dai lo.”
“Well, don’t.”
“Why not?”
Mary drank her cappuccino some more. “Hsing Chung Wah was found in Flushing,” she told me. “In an alley off Main Street. And: He was killed by a bullet through the eye.”
I said, “Executed.”
Everything has fashions; the current rage in street execution was this, a bullet through the eye.
With a spoon Mary chased the froth around the sides of her cup. “Now tell me why you wanted to know.”
I sighed. “I can’t. You know I can’t. My client came to me specific
ally to avoid going public.”
“Once there’s a homicide everything’s different, Lydia.”
“This could have nothing to do with what I’m working on,” I protested. “Gang members get in trouble all the time for being in each other’s territories.”
“When Ghost Shadows go around the wrong corner in Chinatown and the Fuk Ching blow them away I’ll buy it,” Mary said. “When Golden Dragons go all the way to Queens to turn up dead I don’t think it’s just guarding your territory. The Golden Dragons don’t share borders with the Main Street Boys.”
Mary had told me some things, just now, that she didn’t have to. Partly, I knew, it was to scare me away from the Main Street Boys and Bic; but partly, I also knew, it was in case, for whatever I was working on, it was useful. Now I was obligated; now it was my turn.
I said reluctantly, “Yes, they do.”
She looked up sharply. “They do what?”
“Share borders.” I told her about the Main Street Boys’ sublease on the corner of Mulberry Street.
She listened. When I was through she was quiet, her face thoughtful. The violins played a romantic, Russian-sounding melody.
“How do you know that?” Mary said.
“Don’t ask me, okay?”
She didn’t answer that, but said, “I’m going to have to pass it on. We didn’t know what the connection was.”
“You would have found out sooner or later.” Mary nodded in absent agreement. I wondered if Trouble would see it that way. “But that arrangement may have nothing to do with this murder,” I added.
“Maybe,” she said, “but it gives us someplace to start from. We need that, Lydia. We need to find out who killed this Hsing kid and take them up before the Golden Dragons get to them. We can’t let that get started.”
She didn’t say what she meant by “that” but we both knew. “That” was gang war, when icy, crowded streets and steamy restaurants become as dangerous as minefields, when any minute a car could whip around the corner or a door could burst open and rattling gunfire could turn a wedding banquet or a child’s birthday party into a horror of screams and blood.
