by Henry Chang
The white cops resented the black cops for the breaks they got on the examinations, saw them as quota promotions, affirmative-action freeloaders. Male cops disliked female officers. Black and Latino cops resented the few Asian cops who were advanced on the coattails of their struggle, ignoring that the yellows were academically better prepared.
Jack wasn’t one of them. Any of them. He was becoming the loner in his professional life that he was in his personal life. So they couldn’t figure him out; the inscrutable Oriental, Detective Charlie Chan, they joked behind his back.
The NYPD didn’t possess any more sanctity than the rest of the city. If indeed the force was a mirror of society, then racism and sexism had to be a part of the reflection, the culture of violence and racism going hand in hand, as American as a Colt .45.
The highest ranking Chinese was a captain in the 0-Seven, a hometown boy who grew up on the Lower East Side, whose promotion no doubt chafed more than a few rednecks from Staten Island to the Bronx. The old veterans didn’t care for the shine of Chinese brass. It blinded them from seeing the bigger picture of a cop’s duty: to protect, to serve.
Sergeant Murphy took Jack over to the locker room.
“Don’t let ’im bug ya, Jacky boy,” he said. “He’s so fulla shit it’s gushing out his fingernails. That’s why he got bounced out the Three-Four and the Nine-Seven. ’Tween you an me, the niggers can’t hold a candle to the Chinamen.” He grinned.
Jack’s anger flushed, spread sideways.
“Yeah, Paddy,” Jack said, pulling away, “you know it. My father and grandfather waited tables full of good laddies like yourself. And did your laundry, too. They didn’t like you, but they never spit in your food, or cursed about the small change you left on the tables. They could have, but they never did. They just went about their business. Them good Chinamen, Paddy.”
Murphy stood there speechless, the red rising in his cheeks.
Jack turned and went up the stairs, the tension at the back of his head now.
Back to work, his mind was telling him, let the work clear out the funk of Pa’s passing. His anger had been vented, and he channeled what remained of the adreno-rush toward the open-case files on the desk.
He took three breaths, centered himself, focused. The thinnest file was the most recent, labeled Chinatown Rapist using the headline slug from the Daily News. The report said that a slender Asian man in his twenties was raping young Chinese girls on the Lower East Side. Detectives from the Sex Crimes unit had officially taken over and composite sketches had gone out, and were posted throughout the Fifth and the Seventh Precincts, in apartment buildings, gung chongs—factories—bodegas, on corner lampposts. By-the-book procedure.
A week after the headlines, he’d struck again. A six-year-old Taiwanese girl this time. Forced her to the roof at knifepoint and sodomized her. Right back into the neighborhood, snatched another one right under their noses.
They had semen samples and Chinatown rumors. The Fukienese, the new ones, it must be them. One of the boat slaves. Who else could go so low but the Fuk Chow?
The Benevolent Associations respectfully pressured the police for action. The families of the victims secretly met with their tongs.
Now, there was only the waiting.
Jack went from the file to the night-shift blotter on the wall behind him. There was a notation after the shift changed that four Chinese men had been admitted to Emergency at Downtown Hospital with nonlethal gunshot wounds. All were Fukienese, and all claimed to be victims of a drive-by shooting by perpetrators unknown. Beat cops at the alleged shooting location found no evidence of any shooting.
Somebody’s lying about something, Jack thought immediately, to cover up something bigger. For a moment his mind drifted, then he caught himself. The night dicks. Their shift, and they’d caught the squeal. He’d be wasting his time.
He went back to the files.
The last file, which he’d titled Fuk Ching/Golden Venture, was thick with photographs and news articles.
Ten Chinamen had drowned in the rough and frigid chop as hundreds more jumped ship. The reports had crackled back and forth on the Fury’s radio. The Coast Guard plucked up the dead bodies, rounded up the shivering human cargo for Immigration. They were counted, declared a menace, shuffled onto buses for detention, escorted by a flotilla of police wearing surgical masks.
The backlash began almost immediately. The media painted them ugly, called them “human contraband,” “economic refugees,” the new Yellow Peril, coming to take American jobs, to take food out of the mouths of American children. The New York Post declared Thousands Feared in NY Dungeons, dragging up the Ghost of Fu Manchu, and illegal alien slaves kept prisoner by Chinese se jai, snakehead, gangsters. The tag “Snakeheads” was added to the American vocabulary.
At City Hall, the first black mayor said nothing. No black voices rose up to decry the new slave trade.
One ship a week, seven hundred workers per, thirty thousand a head. Twenty million per shipload. It wasn’t the first time Chinese people jumped ship. Grandpa had done it several times in the Forties. America didn’t want the Chinese then, didn’t want them now.
Never had a Chinamen’s chance, thought Jack, frowning at the irony.
He scanned the most recent report describing gunfire blasting the pre-dawn quiet over Teaneck, a sleepy New Jersey town near the Hackensack River. The state troopers had arrived at the rented Fuk Ching safehouse and found the bodies.
On the first floor, two Chinese men lay dead of knife and gunshot wounds. In the basement, two others, bound with duct tape, shot in the head point-blank. Outside the house, another wounded man, DOA at Hackensack Medical.
A Chinatown gang war had spilled across the river.
Stuck to the case file was a square of yellow memo on which he had written Alexandra Lee-Chow, AJA, 10 a.m.
The methods of the flesh smugglers had morphed, and suddenly Chinese boat people were detained in Honolulu, Southern California, San Francisco Bay, San Diego Harbor, Jacksonville Bay, and as close as Baltimore, and Charlotte. Now they had arrived in New York City, crashing only because a violent rift between the Fuk Ching smugglers prevented transport from reaching the mother ship Venture.
Jack took the file, turned his back to the squad room, and headed out toward East Broadway. On the street he moved past pairs of shifty eyes, came up behind groups of Chinese men huddled outside the Fukien Employment Agency storefronts, crowded around payphones, beneath the rumble of subway trains descending along the Manhattan Bridge. The men spoke Fukienese in gruff tones, their phrases weaving, punctuated, like a cross between Vietnamese and Hakkanese. They commandeered the phones to call internationally with stolen calling cards and numbers. But Jack knew better, knew you couldn’t rely on a payphone in New York City if your life depended on it. He felt the hard edge of his own cell phone in his pocket, then he was at Division Street, moving away from the crowds massing in the noonday. New immigrants, out from rent-a-bed apartments and basement subcellars.
He crossed Division to Market Street, past the Service Center, saw loitering zombies waiting to cop their methadone fixes, trade WIC coupons, food stamps, prescriptions, and then infest Chinatown seeking opportunities to steal, maybe rape. Junkie time, Jack called it, when parents were out at work, children at school, old folks in the park or buying the evening’s groceries. Any advantage. An open window, an unguarded hand truck, a car left idling, a dangling handbag, a briefcase unattended. Looking to get paid.
The low-life scum of New York City, thrown down here with the Chinese because no other community wanted them, and because the Chinese were too politically impotent to fight back.
He went east again on Market until he could see Chrystie Slip, closing his mind to the ugly politics of it all.
Knowledge
The AJA, pronounced Asia, was an activist organization that got its juice from young Asian lawyers doing pro bono time, financed by private donations and matching government grants.
Jack drifted past the junkie parks and the auto-repair garages until he came to what was once a bodega, under a yellow sign that read ASIAN AMERICAN JUSTICE ADVOCACY.
When he entered he saw her.
Alexandra Lee-Chow. She was thirtysomething, dressed downtown and wore a diamond band on her wedding finger.
The receptionist stalled him at the front desk, and watching Alexandra now, across the room, Jack began to think how uneasy women with hyphenated names made him feel. Ambitious women. The ones who wanted the fab careers, the motherhood, the perfect marriage, strung tight and fully charged.
Lee-Chow. Taking her husband’s name but refusing to give up her own, trying to impose the past upon the future. Or maybe it was a gender power thing that came with the white collar.
She reminded him of Maylee, the type she’d become.
“Alexandra Lee-Chow,” she announced to him, with a look of skeptical appraisal. “How can I help you?”
“Jack Yu,” he answered. “I’m following up the Golden Venture situation.”
“Right, that’s what you said on the phone.”
Jack saw the impatience in her eyes, and he said, “Right, a murder occurred—”
“And I told you they’re being detained in minimum-security facilities on the East coast.”
On the rag, Jack was thinking, but bit down on his tongue when she said, “Chinese people float around on the ocean for four months, get beaten, raped, robbed, sometimes killed, just to come here for freedom and a better life. You got a problem with that?”
He let a second pass, leaned back, then let the polite look leave his eyes.
“Look, Mizz Chow,” he said, watching her eyes narrow, “there’re some bad nasty guys out there. Specialists. Kidnap for ransom, torture, gang rape, home invasion. They pop out eyeballs with ball-peen hammers, break ribs with baseball bats. They slice off fingers and ears. Horrible stuff. Ugly. Chinese, our people. You got the picture?”
Her eyes dropped, a moment after her jaw. Quiet.
“I think some of the men from that ship are connected to a gang war that’s dropping dead bodies on my desk.” He spoke at the floor. “If I came at the wrong time, I apologize, but I don’t have a lot of free time and obviously neither do you.”
Her face softened and she took a step back.
Jack looked at her and said quietly, “Now, if we could start over on the right foot, I’ll try to be brief.”
“Okay,” Alexandra said, taking a breath. “Go ahead, what are you looking for?”
“Men with military backgrounds, deserters from the People’s Army.”
“You have names, pictures?” She raised an eyebrow.
“I’ve got nothing but words on the wind.”
She sighed. “Well, they’re all in lockup, but it’s minimum security so if they decide to run, I imagine they could do it.”
Jack looked across her cluttered desk. “What is their status exactly?”
She sat down. “Right now they’re in limbo until the court rules. Or if the President decides to alter immigration policy.”
“When does this happen?” he asked, sitting down.
“Could be a week, could be a year. We’ve filed a class action on their behalf, seeking political asylum.”
“You mean Tiananmen Square?”
“No. We’re filing on grounds that they would be persecuted for resisting abortions and mandatory sterilization.”
“Have you had any interviews? Are there any claims of religious or political persecution?”
“No interviews yet. They haven’t given us a schedule.”
Jack thought for a long moment and was aware of Alexandra watching him. Checking her wristwatch, she said, “Look, what difference does it make? Immigration’s got them and it’s going to be a federal problem. Let them sort it out. And no offense, but can’t the precinct find better ways to utilize manpower?”
His reverie broken, Jack said, “Excuse me?”
“Cops,” she said with professional disdain. “You’ve got gambling and prostitution all over Chinatown, and you’re arresting street vendors and greengrocers.”
“I’m working homicides, Mizz Chow,” he protested, keeping the edge on his words.
“You know what I mean.” She flipped open a file on her desk, pointed to cases on a legal docket.
“I’ve got fifty-year-old grandmothers and teenage refugees to bail out because they sold T-shirts and socks on the sidewalk.
I’ve got a police brutality rap from a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl, and a racism beef from a college student who argued a traffic ticket and got a busted head. I’ve got complaints across the board telling me how screwed up the system is.”
Jack stared at her, wondering if she was mad at cops, or men, or if it was just him at the wrong time of the month.
“You think you make a difference?” she asked. “Tell me, why is it that you can’t walk down the street in Little Italy, there are so many sidewalk cafés, but the Chinese guy with the fruit stand or the grandmother with the tray of socks rates a hundred-dollar summons and gets hauled away in handcuffs?”
Jack didn’t know the answer to that. He said softly, “Zoning or health code, probably.”
“Zoning, my ass.” She leveled her gaze at him. “You know and I know, the laws aren’t the same for everybody.”
“I’m just doing my job,” he said, tired of hearing it.
“Yes,” she answered with quiet triumph. “We all have to do our jobs, don’t we?” She paused for effect. “So what if a refugee woman gets kidnapped and sold as a sex slave? You turn a blind eye? Or do you make a difference?”
“I’m not working Vice, and besides you don’t know how the Department works.”
“I know it’s not working for us, brother.”
“Don’t get righteous, sister, it’s not becoming.”
“It’s becoming a waste of time. So, like I said, Immigration’s got them and they haven’t been very forthcoming with us. So, Detective, it’s been real, and I know you’ve got to get back on the job.”
Jack had nothing left so he extended his card to her, asked her to call with any new developments, a professional courtesy he’d appreciate. Alexandra Lee-Chow was checking her watch and punching up the telephone as he left her office.
Bags
Tuesday late afternoon was already as black as night. He didn’t have Mona scheduled for a Tuesday pickup, but outside the China Plaza, Johnny rose out of the Continental in his black leather jacket and hustled Mona into the back seat. In the dim light, beneath her makeup, he didn’t notice the blush on her cheek, under her right eye.
“I got it,” he said, secretly proud of himself. “I pick it up tonight.”
Mona blew him a small smile, counted out the handful of crisp new hundreds, fourteen of them, crinkling each one slightly so they wouldn’t stick.
Johnny watched the focused energy in her eyes.
“Cheen say,” he had told her, fourteen hundred, the Chinese words sounding vaguely like a thousand deaths. Four hundred more than Anthony “Bags” Biondo had told him the piece would cost.
Tony Biondo was a street-level goodfella, a heroin dealer for the Campesi crew that still operated out of Little Italy. They were the wiseguy remnants of the big bust-up two-year war within the Scarponelli family. Johnny knew him from the Blossom Club, where Bags liked to pick up the Malaysian hostess girls, take them to the Italian side of Mulberry Street, where he enjoyed them until daylight shone on their shame.
Johnny had met him one rainy night while waiting outside the Blossom, graciously driving Bags and a hostess the six blocks across Canal. Bags gave Johnny a twenty-dollar tip. Afterwards, Johnny noticed a glassine bag of China white on the backseat. He kept it and the next time he saw Bags, returned it to him. This act of honesty impressed Bags, and he offered his help if Johnny ever needed it.<
br />
That time had come.
Mona splayed the money evenly across the backseat. She gave Johnny a look and he knew he didn’t want to ask why—he simply agreed to run the errand, purchase the merchandise, pocketing four hundred in the exchange. Not bad for an hours’ work.
But the silencer, that was the surprise. A gun with a silencer, she’d said, seemingly cool even though he’d felt her fear running just beneath the surface. In an odd way he was impressed that she was exerting some control over her life. His risk, getting stung by undercover dogs, became his unspoken contribution to their hak, illicit, relationship.
He couldn’t say no, and when he scooped the money off the seat, she leaned in and kissed him on the soft part of his throat, gathered in the fleshiness with her lips, bit him. He gave her a long hard hug, then she exited the car and went back into the high-rise, never turning her head.
Johnny watched her go, striding faster than usual, into the elevator under the soft lights, the tidy compactness of her body forming a silhouette against the blank metallic enclosure. He watched until the elevator door snapped shut and swallowed her.
He felt the wheels hop off the curb as he drove into the horizon of dull streetlamps, thinking of Tony Bags.
And the gun with the silencer.
Johnny waited as Bags climbed into the black Lincoln, the side of the car kneeling under his hulky bulk. Bags patted Johnny on the shoulder with his hammy hand, said, “C’mon, let’s see the dollars, pana.” He flared up a cigarette, powered down the window.
The way Johnny unpeeled the Ben Franklins from the wad Mona had given him impressed the wiseguy. Bags’s hand came out of his black coat and showed the piece. He opened his lips enough to let out smoke, working the cigarette over to one corner of his mouth, speaking through the other side.
“It’s a Titan twenny-five caliber, six shots. Same type that Long Island Lolita bitch used. Less than a pound with the silencer. And I got you an extra magazine clip.” He ran a fat finger over the ivory grips, the blue-metal finish, the knurled-steel silencer.
