by Steven Gore
“It’s never come up before. We weren’t even able to put a face to the name until eighteen months ago. It took us a long time even to get that far. He made the smartest move a heroin trafficker can make. He realized that whites, especially suburban ones, were the biggest market for heroin and the DEA’s focus on blacks and Hispanics left open territory. And they’ll pay the difference between Mexican or Afghan black tar and his China White.”
“And then he insulates himself with layers of Asian gangsters that white drug dealers are so afraid of they won’t inform against them if they get caught.”
Casey nodded. “And when we’ve stuck his photo under the nose of any of the Asian gangsters who do start to cooperate with us, all we get are thirdhand stories from what are always second-rate sources. Just say his name and these punks start squirming and forget how to speak English or Chinese or Vietnamese or whatever language they lie in. And they’ve got good reason to be scared. He puts the ‘god’ in godfather. Old Testament. A vengeful, but unseen presence.”
“That’s the tone you use when you point out a big fish rising.”
“He’s bigger than big.”
“And just out of casting distance.”
“Worse than that. It’s like shark fishing with a four-pound tippet.”
“What about leads from the robbery, something that might connect back to him?”
“Nothing. We found the U-Haul they used torched outside of Modesto. No usable forensics. It had been rented by a generic Asian female with a fake driver’s license and a forged credit card. And the gun we recovered was stolen three years ago in Des Moines. There were prints, even some on the shell casings, but they all belonged to the kid.”
“Sounds like you’re at a dead end.”
“But that’s not something the task force will admit—yet. We like to time the announcements of our failures for big news days so they’ll get lost in the noise.”
“You mean even if Ah Ming was behind the robbery, you’re not going to get him.”
Casey shook his head. “We’re not going to get him.”
ON THEIR WAY BACK TO THE ENTRANCE, Casey retrieved the rooster cape and paid for it. They walked out into the parking lot and stood next to his car. A jet rush of airplane that had just taken off from the San Jose airport passed over them, leaving a hollow silence behind.
Casey looked down at the asphalt, then up at the high scattered clouds, for the moment blocking the sun. “Man, I’d sure like to be on the river right now.” He glanced at the keychain in his hand and flipped the remote back and forth, then peered at Gage. “Are you sure you’re up for messing around in Ah Ming’s world? I mean, if he’s the guy. Whatever you’ve got seems to be taking its toll.”
Gage shrugged. “It’ll pass.”
“And that’s not the only reason. Ah Ming is old-school. You know what his nickname was when he first showed up in the States?”
“I haven’t got that far.”
“Hak Guai.”
“Black Ghost?”
“He’s not the kind of guy who’s gonna die in his sleep. When he goes, he’ll be taking people with him, and I wouldn’t want you to be one of them.” Casey wrapped his hand around his keys, then fixed his eyes on Gage’s. “About six months ago we developed an informant high up in the U.S. branch of the United Bamboo triad, I mean really high up. He was going to work off a monster heroin case by setting up Ah Ming.” He rubbed his neck on both sides of his Adam’s apple. “Remember the severed head that was tossed onto the steps of the federal building? That’s what happened.”
Gage reached out and gripped Casey’s shoulder for a moment.
“Don’t worry. I’ll keep my head. I won’t be sticking it out very far. I only need to understand enough to give the kid’s family some advice.”
“And then you’ll walk away?”
Gage nodded.
Even as he responded, Gage was thinking back on his conversation with Burch at the conference room door, remembering his anger that was long in fading and later that morning noticing stiffness in his hands from his clenched fists.
“I’m too old for this kind of thing and you’ve got youngsters in your group who—”
Casey squinted at Gage, causing him to let his sentence die unfinished.
Gage realized his face must have given away what he was really thinking and why he’d been thinking it: there was a tragedy beneath the mechanics of the crime and it was pushing up into it and into him.
“But there’s something else, isn’t there?”
“That confused kid never should’ve been in that warehouse. It’s a shame he didn’t live to figure out what brought him there, even if he had to do it in the California Youth Authority.” Gage paused as an image came to him of Peter lying on the warehouse floor. “Makes me wonder what he was thinking about at the end, and whether that was it.”
Casey didn’t answer right away, just stared at an airplane rising into the sky from the airport. Finally, he shook his head and said, “Whatever it was, I hope it wasn’t that.”
Casey unlocked his car door and climbed in. He sat for a few seconds, then said, “The warehouse security guard came by to see me yesterday. Didn’t call. Just showed up. Needed somebody to talk to who he thought might understand. He’d heard my name in news reports about that thing with Judge Meyer.”
That thing was a gunfight in a San Francisco warehouse that put an end to a massive political corruption scheme. Gage had killed a crooked former CIA operative and Casey had killed his enforcer while rescuing the judge from a conspiracy that had turned against him.
“He told me Peter was scared, terrified, jerking the gun around. He was afraid the kid was about to panic and start firing, so he emptied his gun at him first.”
“What did he want from you?”
“Something I couldn’t give him,” Casey said, now looking up at Gage. “Something nobody could give him. A time machine.”
CHAPTER 7
Ah Ming pulled down the shades over his office windows facing the warehouse floor, shielding himself from the ordered chaos of laborers and forklifts and order-taking clerks. He removed his suit jacket and loosened his tie, then looked out at the rear parking lot and at the low fog that had been oozing over the western hills and down into the flatlands all afternoon. He watched as a tendril wormed in through the driveway, furtive in its movement. He felt an amorphous threat, a vague but almost physical presence creeping up the alley, slipping along the walls and between the Dumpsters.
What were they calling that kid? Ah Pang? That’s right, Ah Pang. The kid with the crazy father.
The sense of threat faded as Ah Ming focused on the broken chain of causes and effects: Ah Pang was the only link between him and the robbery, and the kid was dead. But uneasiness remained. He knew it was only coincidence that Ah Pang had been at the safe house when the dai lo picked the crew, but he recognized it was the kind of coincidence that still might lead him to the needle end of a syringe in the death chamber at San Quentin prison.
Ah Ming turned at the sound of the light double knock of his assistant, Lew Fung-hao, and the opening door.
“The police found where the two captured boys were staying before the robbery.” Lew’s thin seventy-three-year-old face was no more expressive than if he’d announced the arrival of a container of processed garlic at the loading dock. “But otherwise they’re flailing around. Their informants have been trying to start conversations in the Vietnamese coffee shops in San Jose and the task force is chasing little fei jai around, but they haven’t identified anyone connected to us.”
Ah Ming glanced at his watch. It was 4 P.M.
Lew anticipated his next question. “The chips are already on their way. That’s the schedule Ah Tien gave me before he left.”
“I’m worried about Norbert Louie.” Ah Ming pointed at a Tsing Tao newspaper on his desk. “He’s overplaying his part, acting like the stolen microprocessors were his kidnapped children. For the two hundred thousand dollars
we paid him, he should’ve just played it straight.”
Ah Ming’s mind returned to the thoughts Lew had interrupted.
“Where’s the dai lo who fucked up the robbery?”
“Ah Tien sent him to Toronto.”
Ah Ming looked down at the newspaper again. “The prosecutor keeps talking about the death penalty. I don’t want this dai lo to roll on us if the police up there catch him.” He pointed toward the south. “Contract with someone in LA to go up and break the trail back to Ah Tien.”
CHAPTER 8
Customs broker Alan Lim was sitting at a window table when Gage arrived at the New World Restaurant near the San Francisco Airport, a lunch hangout for the import-export trade. As he shook Lim’s hand, Gage was surprised to find that Lim didn’t look much older than he had a decade earlier when Gage had cleared him as a suspect in a shipping container hijacking scheme. He was still thin and angular, forehead higher, but unlined, and his fifty-year-old shoulders remained unrounded.
Hired by a group of Silicon Valley high-tech manufacturers whose offshore subsidiaries had been victimized, Gage sent investigators to Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, and Rotterdam, each of whom had traced the conspiracy, and the tens of millions of dollars of losses, back to Lim’s company.
After greeting Gage, but before he’d sat down, Lim ordered three kinds of dim sum from a waitress passing by with a cart, then continued the conversation he and Gage had begun on the telephone a few hours earlier.
“A friend I went to school with in Taiwan referred Cheung to me, but I never dealt with him after our first meeting. Only with his assistant, Lew Fung-hao. A mainlander who learned the trade in Hong Kong.”
Lim paused, his eyes darting as he thought. It was those quick eyes that had made him seem guilty when Gage had confronted him years earlier.
“Interesting guy, Lew. He was a history professor in Guangzhou before the Cultural Revolution. Suffered one humiliation after another before he escaped to Hong Kong. He strikes me as a bitter man who submerges himself in the technicalities of the trade to try to insulate himself from a world that must still seem irrational.”
“Maybe it’s to keep from killing himself. One of my wife’s students did a study of suicides by aging Red Guard victims. The rate was the same as among Holocaust survivors.”
Lim shook his head and sighed. “If my grandparents hadn’t fled in the 1950s . . .”
Gage remembered the dead informant on the courthouse steps.
“Since he didn’t choose suicide, how about homicide?”
“Lew?” Lim’s eyes widened, then his brows furrowed as he peered over at Gage. “Homicide?”
“That’s part of what I’m trying to find out.”
“I don’t see him hurting anyone, even lashing out. He seems more defeated than angry. He’s . . .” Lim bit his lip for a moment, his eyes darting again, as though searching for a word. “He’s almost robotlike.”
Gage didn’t express the thought, but in Ah Ming’s business, a man who executed orders without thinking was an asset.
Lim looked down at Gage’s motionless chopsticks. “You aren’t eating much. You okay?”
Gage smiled and patted his stomach. “I’m trying to lose a few pounds.”
Lim made a show of surveying Gage’s body. “I think you already have.”
“A little.” Gage deflected the conversation back to Ah Ming. “Has East Wind ever had trouble with ICE?”
“No more than anyone else. A paperwork problem or a missing country of origin or phytosanitary certificate—they import a lot of ginger and garlic—and containers get held and searched. And we’re in a position to know. We’re the only customs broker he uses. Once in a while we hear that some of his people have been seen going into InterOcean, but I don’t think East Wind has ever done business with them. They aren’t big enough to handle the volume. Maybe they just have friends there.”
“You ever suspect any underworld ties?”
Lim stiffened. In that reaction Gage saw him make a connection back to the subject of homicide. He leaned across the table and lowered his voice. “A few years ago I found out that the friend who sent him to me had become a member of the United Bamboo triad. They’ve become huge in Taiwan. But I’ve never heard anything implicating either Lew or Cheung. And I think I would have.” Lim gestured toward the suited men sitting at nearby table. “These people don’t like him because he always undercuts them in higher profit items, but no one has ever even implied that he has organized crime connections.” He shrugged his shoulders. “But sometimes these things are hard to see.”
Despite his quick eyes, Lim had failed to notice the infiltration of his own company’s overseas branches by gangsters inserted by his wife’s brother.
Lim spooned a piece of ma po tofu onto Gage’s plate. “You should try this. Not too many calories.”
Gage snagged it between his chopsticks, then changed the subject. “Have you heard from your brother-in-law?”
“Last year he asked me to visit him in prison. He finally apologized for using our business—using me—as a front. For the first time he took responsibility for what he did, instead of blaming his gambling like it was a separate person making him do things.”
“Was he being honest or did he just learn in a prison therapy group what to say so you’ll give him a job and the parole board will let him out early?”
Lim smiled. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll hire you to go talk to him and find out. You were right about him last time.”
GAGE’S CELL PHONE RANG as he pulled away from the curb in front of the restaurant. It was Thomas Sheridan.
“I’m sorry about your son.”
Sheridan ignored the condolence and announced in a hammering British accent, “Burch promised me you’ll get Cheung.”
Gage knew that Burch had neither made that promise nor said anything that could be construed into that promise, but he didn’t challenge Sheridan.
“We first need to link him to the robbery and we can’t do that yet.”
“Then do it,” Sheridan said, and then disconnected.
Gage stared at the road ahead. He was tempted to call Burch to get him to back Sheridan off, but decided against it. He could absorb Sheridan’s misdirected grief for the few more days until he’d fulfilled his obligation to Burch. After that, it would be up to Burch what he did with Sheridan. Gage guessed that soon enough the balance would shift and the money Burch’s firm was making from Sheridan wouldn’t be worth the annoyance.
CHAPTER 9
Ah Ming glanced down at the beeping cell phone lying on his desk displaying a text message from Ah Tien.
Father died. Must come home.
Ah Ming texted back:
Too risky. Stay where you are.
Standing in his New York hotel room overlooking Chinatown’s Hester Street, Ah Tien felt his body turn molten in horror and anger as he read the words. A principle at the heart of his life was at stake:
Eldest sons bury their fathers.
I am the eldest son.
I will bury my father.
From the moment his grandfather died almost a generation earlier, he’d understood this obligation, and it wasn’t one he could shake off.
Although his eyes stared at the cell-phone screen, his mind saw his grieving mother and younger brother sitting at the kitchen table in their little bungalow in San Francisco, surrounded by the blue-gray smoke of incense, waiting for him to return and fulfill his duty.
Even Ah Ming, once a fugitive hiding in Thailand in the mid-1980s, had bragged that he’d snuck back home to Taiwan to bury his father.
He hadn’t left his mother to weep alone.
And wasn’t that the point—the whole point—of Ah Ming telling me the story? That duty always trumps risk?
But, Ah Tien now realized, Ah Ming had only meant duties owed to him.
The question Ah Tien asked himself as he turned off his phone was simple.
Am I my father’s son or not?
&nbs
p; Three hours later, Ah Tien answered that question by boarding a flight from Kennedy International Airport back to SFO.
AS AH TIEN STEPPED OUT OF THE TAXI in front of his mother’s house that night, he glanced over at the two young Vietnamese men down the block with their heads shadowed by the raised hood of a white two-door Acura. The scene gave him a feeling of familiarity and predictability, of normalcy. Modifying cars was so much a rite of passage in the neighborhood that the driveway of nearly every house and the pavement in front had been blackened by oil and transmission fluid.
Ah Tien paid the driver, then retrieved his carry-on and briefcase from the trunk and climbed the concrete stairs, the heaviness of his step, weary and grieving, bearing the weight of his duty.
THE VIETNAMESE MEN ALERTED TO AH TIEN as he emerged into the bright funnel of the streetlight. They watched him glance their way as he ascended the concrete steps to the front door. After he disappeared inside, Minh Duc Le slid into the passenger seat of the Acura and made a call. Moments later, a black cargo van crept up the street and stopped in front of the house. The driver signaled to Le and his partner, who then approached the front door.
When Ah Tien responded to his knock, Le pointed a 9mm at his stomach and said, “Someone wants to talk to you.”
Ah Tien knew who and he knew why, and he’d practiced what he’d say during his flight back from New York.
When he glanced down at the gun, he saw that the porch light illuminated a familiar tattoo on Le’s wrist: Tien. Money. He didn’t doubt that Le’s sleeve hid four others: Tinh, Toi, Thu, and Tu. Love, Crime, Revenge, and Prison.
Le and his partner bracketed Ah Tien as they urged him down the stairs toward the van’s open side door. Just after Ah Tien climbed in, they pushed him to the floor, then bound and blindfolded him.
Whatever fear Ah Tien felt was muted by grief and by the confidence that the loyalty he’d shown over the years would serve as a bulwark against Ah Ming’s anger.
