Neon Dragon

by John Dobbyn

  “So if they’re not afraid of the police, what?”

  “The tong has a rival. The Dai Huen Jai. The Big Circle Boys. They’re a bunch of loose-knit bands of criminals from around the southern provincial capital of Canton. In Hong Kong, that area’s called the “Big Circle” because that’s what it looks like on a map.

  “These babies are tough. They run about twenty to forty years old, and they’re seasoned fighters. Most of them are out of the Chinese military or are former members of the top-gun Red Guard. A lot of them are wanted criminals in China.

  “Their organization smuggles them out of China into Canada, then to the United States. They’re brought in specifically to commit crimes, usually robbery of everything from jewelry stores to gambling dens. When things get hot, they’re smuggled somewhere else. They’re violent enough to be feared even by the tongs.”

  “And exactly how are you going to use this?”

  “Follow this inscrutable Chinese and learn.”

  He opened the door, but I couldn’t let one question hang. I grabbed his elbow.

  “One question, Harry. How do you know all this? I mean the oaths and all that.”

  I think he wanted to be out of the car before I asked the question. I could see his lips tighten.

  “What’s the difference?”

  It came out harsher than he’d intended. He saw my expression and softened his.

  “Sometime I’ll tell you, Mike. I will. This isn’t the time. We’ve got business.”

  I nodded.

  He was out of the car with both feet on the sidewalk in around sixty seconds flat. I said a prayer that “the plan” did not call for blistering speed. I followed him, but not without grabbing and donning my Henry Osterwald hat from the back seat.

  18

  THE WIND OUT OF THE EAST was whipping twenty-one-degree air salted with snow particles into our faces. In spite of it, I could feel the beading of perspiration on my forehead and upper lip.

  We moved down Beach Street from the opposite direction of the no-name coffee shop. I was about four paces behind Harry in case they recognized us together. There was no trouble keeping up.

  I had no idea what kind of watch the youth gang would keep on a brothel at nine-thirty in the morning. There was hardly anyone in sight on the street.

  The only activity we saw was in the poultry shop that we passed on our right. Ancient wooden cages along the walls held a dusty, feathery collection of live chickens and ducks. Three old Chinese women seemed to be singing the morning gossip to each other while they waited their turn. A fourth watched a rail-thin clerk of somewhere between twenty and forty years grab the quacking duck she pointed to out of the cage and lock one wing behind the other. They were as oblivious to us as I prayed the rest of the local citizenry might be.

  When we reached the door of the brothel, I felt the same grappling sensation in the stomach that I had two nights before. Harry neither speeded up nor slowed down as he turned right and pushed open the door. I checked the street one last time. No one.

  I scuttled in and closed the door. I was a step behind Harry as we crossed through that mangy hallway to the stairs. The only light was still what fought its way through a century of grime on the door glass, but as far as I could see, there was no one inside. My observation was confirmed by the fact that no one had killed us. Yet.

  We climbed. I’ve heard steps creak, but these roared. I’m sure it was magnified in my mind, but every step was like jumping on the tail of another cat.

  Harry stopped a step from the top. I was crowding him from behind, squinting to squeeze every bit of information out of the pitiful rays of light that made it to the top of the stairs.

  There were two doors. I couldn’t remember which one we used two nights before. I remembered the story, “The Lady or the Tiger,” and thought of the clear possibility of finding “two tigers, no lady.”

  I whispered, “Which door?”

  Harry turned to make what I suppose was a guess, but instead drove an elbow into my chest so hard I had to grab for what I hoped was a rail to keep from taking the stairs backwards. He was recoiling from a blast of daylight that hit him with surprise harder than he hit me. The first door had swung open. From the gasp of the figure that stood framed in the door, Harry and I had thrown as much of a shock as we received.

  From the bulk of the black shadow, I had instant fear that we were dealing with the sumo hulk we’d run into there before. Then I saw the edges of the shadow billowing and showing light. The silhouette under the billowing was massive, but not gargantuan.

  A flood of hot Chinese poured like staccato little fireworks out of whoever it was we were looking at. Whatever it meant didn’t slow Harry in the slightest. He was a pace behind the figure that was attempting to disappear behind the door. He kicked back the door and grabbed the elbow of the Dragon Lady who had been our effusive hostess of two nights previous. Once he had her stopped, he leaned back to let the wave of pain he must have unleashed in his ribs subside. I was inside with the door shut by the time the hot lava began pouring out of her mouth again.

  In a tight sheath, she had been merely obese. In a free-flowing robe, she expanded to fill the material.

  Harry bellowed, “Silence!”

  Not “Quiet,” or “Could you hold it down?” or even “Stifle it.” Just plain “Silence!” I thought I had warped into a classic Charlie Chan movie.

  Harry knew what he was doing. She froze.

  He took off the hat and opened the coat so she could see who she was dealing with. I was sure that by that time she knew we were not immigration officers. Harry was back working from ground zero.

  “Listen to me, Old Mother. You can do yourself great good or great harm in the next few minutes. You would do well to pay attention.” He kept it in English.

  She looked stunned. At least she left a gap for Harry to speak.

  “I have information. I assume you can reach the Fu Shan Chu?”

  Whatever it meant, it grabbed her attention. She didn’t move. She didn’t answer, either.

  Harry grabbed a piece of white paper off a desk to his left. He took a pen out of his pocket and wrote in large numerals, “438.” He pushed it in front of her to emphasize the question.

  Her mouth seemed stuck. She just nodded.

  “Then tell him this. I have inside information on the Big Circle Boys. There’s a robbery planned. I know when. The high-stakes gambling den.”

  He pointed in the general direction of Beach Street. She was stone still. But her eyes flared a little when he pointed in what must have been the right direction.

  “You have two choices, Mother. You can pass the information to the Fu Shan Chu so he can set up an ambush. You’ll gain much face. They’ll be very grateful. Or …”

  She gave it a second before breaking her silence.

  “What?” Their eyes were deadlocked.

  “Or when the raid occurs, I can get word to the Fu Shan Chu that you were the one who tipped the Big Circle boys to the location of the den.” He touched her cheek. “You may not take those pretty features to an old age, Mother.”

  “Why you want to tell me about the raid?”

  Harry set the hook. “For a very low price. It has nothing to do with you. I want to see the girl, Ku Mei-Li, right now. When we’ve seen her, we leave. You won’t see us again.”

  “Why you want Mei-Li?”

  “As the price for making you a hero instead of another dead madam. That’s all you need to know. It’s time to choose.”

  “Who you really?”

  “That doesn’t affect your decision. If they ask where you got the information, you can tell them one of your customers got drunk and talked too much to one of the girls.”

  She looked from Harry to me. I was purely backup. I gave her my best Clint Eastwood stone face. In the seconds that followed, I could almost hear her brain cells searching for a third alternative. The one that occurred to me was to call out the enforcers and watch us being cut
into stir-fry.

  Time was not on our side. Harry knew it. He stuffed on the hat and headed for the door.

  “I have no time for this. You’ve obviously lived long enough, Mother.

  The thought of pleasing your employer no longer appeals to you.”

  “Wait. Come back. How I know you have good information?”

  “You don’t. But you can only win. If my information is good, you save your employer a great loss. He’ll be very grateful. If it isn’t, they’ll just think the raid was called off for some reason. They’ll know you did your best. On the other hand, if there is a raid and they hear later that you tipped off the Dai Huen Jai to the location …” He pulled down his hat for emphasis and turned toward the door.

  “Wait! Why you always run off?”

  “I have precious little time, Mother. Which way will it be?”

  The furrows in her little fat brow deepened each time she clenched her teeth. She was trying to thread a path between survival on one side and death, or at least very serious pain, on the other. I was sorry for her. I was even more sorry for poor little Red Shoes. In a way, this old woman was part of the machine that ground up little innocent Red Shoes. I left it with Harry. He grabbed the doorknob. That did it.

  “You tell me when raid. Then I call girl.”

  “You’ve got that in reverse, Mother. You call the girl first. We want to see her in private. Right here. But not like last time. This time she comes with orders from you to tell the truth. I know half the story. If she gets it wrong or holds out, no deal.”

  As Harry talked, I could see her getting squinty and cool. I was afraid Harry was losing her. The worst thing for us was for her to have time to think.

  “Maybe no deal anyway. If I yell, boys come. They make you tell for nothing.”

  Harry peeled around from the door. He grabbed the telephone on the desk and drilled in ten numbers. I knew it was for show, but it had even me on edge. Big Mama just stared. Harry held the receiver out to her while it rang.

  “Ask the man who answers what I told him to do if I’m not back in an hour. The message goes out that you betrayed the tong. When the raid occurs, there won’t be a hole big enough to hide you in Chinatown. Go ahead. Ask!”

  She stared at the thing that was making “hello” noises in front of her. She pushed it away. “All right, I do it.”

  Harry said into the phone, “The same plan is still on. One hour.” He hung up.

  “That’s it, Mother. Call Mei-Li.”

  Harry had the momentum back. She hustled through the door in the back of the room. I moved close enough to Harry to whisper.

  “Did you set that up with someone?”

  He whispered back. “That was my research assistant. I intended to tell him this morning. It skipped my mind. It’ll give him something to think about.”

  IN A FEW MINUTES, Mei-Li came through the back door. She was still beautiful, even in slacks and a blouse, but she was less perfectly composed than previously.

  She looked from one of us to the other without knowing which of us to please or how to do it. It was my turn at bat. I stepped over to her, took her hand, and brought her to a chair. I pulled a chair over to sit in front of her.

  “I don’t want to frighten you, Mei-Li. I just want the truth. Did the woman tell you to tell us the truth?”

  “Yes.” It was meek.

  “Did she tell you to answer our questions?”

  She looked over at Harry, but she said “yes” to me.

  “Then listen carefully. The girl who worked in the restaurant, the one who gave me the note I showed you, did you know her?”

  She looked confused by the question, and I realized it could have been the past tense. “I saw her yesterday in the morgue. They killed her.”

  The little gasp was the first sincere thing I had heard out of her.

  “She was killed, Mei-Li, because she gave me the note to help you. Now tell me the truth. Why did she think you needed help?”

  First the tears started, and then her face was buried in her hands. I took her as gently as I could by the shoulders and lifted her to look at me.

  “Why did she want me to help you?”

  There was gentle sobbing that almost muffled the words. “I don’t know.”

  “Mei-Li, I have to know …”

  “I am not Mei-Li.”

  I heard it clearly, but it took a second to sink in.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “They brought me here two days ago. I saw her then.”

  “Mei-Li?”

  “Yes. They were sending her away. When you came two nights ago, they told me to pretend to be Mei-Li, but to tell you nothing wrong.”

  “When you saw her, before they sent her away, did you speak to her?”

  “Only a little. She was crying. Very frightened.”

  “Frightened of what?”

  “She did not say.”

  “Did you ask her?”

  “It would do no good. She would not know she could trust me.”

  Harry and I exchanged a look that said frustration. I had little or no hope for the next question.

  “Do you have any idea where they sent her?”

  She shook her head. Harry touched my shoulder, and I leaned back to give him room. He squatted down to catch her eyes.

  “What is your name?”

  “I called Xiao-Wen.”

  “Xiao-Wen, where did they bring you from when you came here?”

  “It is place like this in a different country. In Toronto.”

  “Do you know the address?”

  “Yes. It is on Columbia Street. It is above grocery store in middle of block.”

  Harry looked at me and we were in sync. The easiest way they could get Mei-Li out of reach would be to exchange her for a girl from another brothel out of the country. That made it likely that Mei-Li was Xiao-Wen’s replacement in Toronto.

  I didn’t like the question that raised. Wouldn’t it be easier still to simply kill her? Like Red Shoes? The answer was so clearly “yes” that my heart froze at the prospect of seeing another mutilated victim in the morgue. Why go to the trouble of a double alien-smuggling just to keep her alive? On the other hand—and this was the only hand I wanted to consider—maybe, if Mei-Li was still alive, it had to do with the dollar value of an exceptional prostitute. Maybe more.

  Before we left, Harry took a piece of paper from the desk and wrote, “Raid—this Friday—9:00 PM” He showed it to me and handed it to the girl.

  “Give this to the old lady. She’ll be waiting for it.”

  In the hallway downstairs we bundled against the cold, as well as recognition, before going out into the street. I pulled Harry’s earflap up for a question before leaving.

  “What was that you asked the old lady? Did she know ‘Fu’—something or other? Then you showed her three numbers.”

  “The Fu Shan Chu. I was asking if she knew the second in command of the tong. The big boy. These tongs and triads are crazy about numbers and symbols. Every officer has a code number. The number for the Fu Shan Chu is 438. She got the point that I was not an outsider.”

  “Why the number two man? Why not number one?”

  “Nobody in the tong knows who he is. They call him the Dragon Head. Only the number two man knows who he is.”

  He started out the door, but I had one last point. “Harry, I’ve got one more stop to make. You can come with me or wait for me.”

  “What stop?”

  “There’s one more witness to the shooting. He’s the old man who runs the Chinese herbal medicine shop on Tyler Street. I’ve got to talk to him. This is as good a time as there’s going to be. I don’t want to have to come back here. We’re getting too well known.”

  I could have predicted his decision. He pulled down his earflap.

  “Let’s go.”

  19

  TUCKED AWAY DOWN six worn, stone steps beside the Ming Tree restaurant on Tyler Street, we found the anomaly of the twe
nty-first century. It was a time warp. Those steps carried Harry and me out of the age of laser surgery into the middle ages of Chinese medicine.

  This was no tourist haunt. The sign over the door was in untranslated Chinese. I would bet that mine were the first white feet to cross that threshold in a century. Dangling from a black, cloth-covered cord, a single weak bulb that wouldn’t have passed inspection in a chicken coop created shadows out of blackness.

  I was aware of bundles of unidentifiable somethings or other piled up on both sides of the narrow shop. Faded Chinese newspapers were stacked intermittently with nearly biodegraded cardboard cartons that seemed to hold old Chinese magazines.

  When we came in, I saw a shadow move in the back. It approached until I could make out an elderly Chinese man, somewhat stooped with age, but not emaciated as I would have predicted from the surroundings.

  Thin, wispy strands of white face hair, which were about as close as the old gentleman could come to a full beard, sprouted below an otherwise hairless head. He wore Chinese-style pants and top which were sewn out of coarse black material. They had long since taken the permanent press of his natural folds and bends. He padded along on black cloth Chinese slippers. I was overwhelmingly grateful to have Harry along to translate for me.

  I knew we were in a different world when Harry bowed. The old man returned it immediately. They exchanged what even I could tell were polite well-wishes in non-English. Harry must have used his full Chinese name, because I didn’t hear “Harry” in any of it.

  The first words that I recognized came when Harry held out his hand toward me and said in Chinese “Something … something … Michael Knight.”

  It seemed perfectly natural to bow. I did. He returned it graciously. I figured it didn’t matter what I said as long as it sounded polite.

  “Good morning, sir. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”