Act of Revenge (11 page)

She sighed, for this was familiar, and asked, “So, what
are
you doing here, Uncle Tran?”

He gestured with the bag. “I come for the peanuts. The man there on the corner sells freshly roasted ones, which I enjoy. So, truthfully, it was entirely happenstance that I found you here. What is that book in which you were so abandoned as to forget your caution? Hm! A fine writer, but with no political ideas, mere decadent sensuality; also, that is not her best work. Yet, in any case, it is better than condescending oriental fantasies by Kipling.”

“I like oriental fantasies, and I don't care about condescending. Everyone condescends to someone. What I would really like is an oriental fantasy with decadent sensuality.”

“I'm sure, but then you would have something like Ouida, unreadable even by your deplorable standards. What is going on between you and your mother?”

An old interrogator's trick, slipping the zinger in among trivialities, but it struck. Lucy flushed and said, “Nothing.”

“Not nothing,” said Tran, “a great deal, I think. Will you tell me about it? No? Then I will have to use my mystical oriental arts. First, you have been angry and sullen with your mother for some time. Americans tolerate this in their children, as I have observed on the television, and it is of no consequence—fireworks on Tet, as we say: boom, boom, and it passes, leaving everything as before. But today it is much worse. Your mother visited the Chens yesterday and was turned away, quite properly, but on hearing of it, you attack her with your tongue. Also, I find you alone and aimlessly wandering instead of plotting outrages with your two friends. The two events are connected, isn't it so?”

“She ruined my life,” Lucy mumbled, staring down at a smear of old gum on the pavement between her sneakers. “I'll never be able to go to the Chens anymore—”

“What, because you think your mother has lost face and you have to because she is your mother? This is absurd. You have done nothing improper, and in this case your duty is to go to them like a good foster child and offer support. As for what your mother did, it never happened. No one pays any attention to your mother, except as they do to a thunderstorm or an earthquake.”

“Really? So you think I would be welcomed at Janice's.”

“I believe so,” said Tran. “Of course, as they are Cantonese, they may cut you up in small pieces and fry you with green onions and garlic.”

This brought a smile to her face, and seeing it, Tran felt a warm current in the place his heart used to be. His own daughter had never reached thirteen, having been incinerated by a B–52 along with his wife in 1968. He had no photographs of them anymore, and to his dismay their faces were fading from his mind. When he dreamed of his daughter now, she had Lucy's face. Pathetic and sentimental, he thought, but there it was.

“Perhaps I'll call her and go over now.”

“A fine idea, after you have apologized to your mother. In a harmonious world, parents should teach children, and it is an unfortunate thing when the child knows more than the parent about certain things. I have observed that this is more common in America than elsewhere, especially among those from foreign lands. Nevertheless, you must apologize. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” said Lucy. It had not occurred to her that her mother was in any way imperfect, and the knowledge both intrigued and appalled her.

“Now,” said Tran, “of what are you so afraid?”

Lucy's heart performed an unpleasant leap. “What makes you say that?”

“In the instant you spotted me awhile ago, before you understood that it was me playing a game, you had a look of terror on your face and in the stance of your body. Is it possible that someone is after you in earnest, my child?”

Lucy waited some long seconds before answering. “You won't tell my mother?”

Tran looked down at his devastated hands. “I believe I can keep a secret.”

“I can't tell you the whole thing because I swore not to, but . . . it might be a good thing if you watched my back for a while.” She placed her hand in his.

Tran nodded and rose, and they walked out of the park hand in hand.

“Who is Cambronne?” Lucy asked abruptly.

“Ah, Cambronne. Marshal Cambronne was the commander of the Old Guard at Waterloo. At school all of us little
mites
were taught that when the British called upon him to surrender, he said, ‘The Guard dies, it does not surrender.' ”

“What is
mites
?”

“Oh, that is just a word the French used. From Annamites. That is to say, we Vietnamese. You would say ‘gooks.' But, naturally, we also knew this expression, ‘the word of Cambronne.' ”

“You mean, he really didn't say that heroic thing, he just said, ‘
merde'
?”

“So it seems. Another thing among many that confirmed for us the absolute hypocrisy of the French. You Americans are insane, but far less developed in your hypocrisy. This is refreshing. I am proud to be an illegal immigrant in your country.”

Chapter 5

THE CHEN FAMILY EMERGED FROM SECLUSION early in the afternoon of the next day and reopened their emporium, the police having finished with it. They did a remarkably good business for a weekday, as people in the community flocked in to demonstrate ethnic solidarity and assuage morbid curiosity. Lucy Karp walked in somewhat later, and after a brief conversation with one of the checkout bag girls, put on an apron, replaced her, and started stuffing. As she had promised, she had called her mother on the car phone and offered a formal apology, and said dutifully that she was about to visit the Chens. Her mother was still sufficiently stunned by her conversation with her own mother to accept this without asking any questions. Lucy's tone had been cool and polite, which was in itself something these days.

In a break between customers, Lucy waved to Mrs. Chen, standing watchfully in her elevated glass booth, and Mrs. Chen smiled and waved back. Tran had been right, Lucy saw with vast relief. For her part, Mrs. Chen understood what Lucy was doing and understood its benefits to her daughter. As she had often before this, Lucy would take half a shift for free, so that the bag girl would work a half shift for Janice, thus giving Janice four hours of free time. Mrs. Chen had never had any free time when she was Janice's age, and if Mr. Chen had his way, neither would Janice. Mrs. Chen had heard, however, that most American children did not work twelve hours a day, every day, during school vacations, and so she was prepared to be indulgent, as long as nothing interfered with the intake of cash. Not that the Chens were greedy, not compared to those operating a quarter mile to the south of the Asia Mall in Wall Street, but they had obligations. In China a vast Chen cousinage awaited opportunity, sponsorship, transportation to Gold Mountain, so that they in their turn could prosper and achieve glory and honor and add luster to the name of Chen. A few hours of leisure for her daughter, Mrs. Chen thought, would take little enough from this enterprise.

The two girls walked in companionable silence along Canal Street, both of them inexpressibly glad that normal relationships had been reestablished after the disaster.

“You want to go listen to music at Sounds Like?” Janice asked.

“Yeah, later,” said Lucy, “but first I have to do something. Let's cross here.”

She dashed south across Canal, dodging slow-moving cars and trucks, Janice in her wake, and continued south on Mott.

“Where're we going?” Janice asked.

“You'll see.”

“I hate it when you get mysterious, Lucy.”

“That's too bad, girl, because I'm mysterious a lot.”

Janice stopped in her tracks. “Tell me this isn't about . . . you know, because no way am I . . .”

“No, this is personal. I have to open a bank account.”

They kept walking south into the heart of old Chinatown, herb shop and gambling cellar country, and other stuff, too, that the girls were not supposed to know about but did.

“Are we going to the Republic bank on the Bowery?” Janice asked.

“No, there's one in there,” said Lucy, pointing down the narrow opening of Doyers Street. Originally an eighteenth-century cart track and not much improved since, narrow and twisted as a lane in Guangdong, Doyers is the shortest street in Chinatown. The sharp bend in its middle was known around the turn of the century as the Bloody Angle, because it was there that the hatchet men of warring tongs would wait to ambush one another, and for a while more people were killed here than on any other street in the nation. The tongs were respectable business associations now, of course, and didn't employ hatchet men anymore. If you asked.

At Number 10 on this street, just across from where the original Chinese opera house used to be, stood a grimy building barely ten feet wide, fronted by a dusty glass window showing off three desiccated snake plants and bearing the legend in red characters “Kuen and Sons, Importing and Exporting.” No English translation was provided.

“This is a bank?” asked Janice.

“Kind of,” said Lucy. “Tran told me about it. The Kuens are pretty famous.”

“I never heard of them,” said Janice.

“Famous among mysterious people,” Lucy amended. She opened the door and they went in. A bell tinkled. They were in a small room lit by the streaked window and an overhead fluorescent fixture with two tubes dark and the remaining pair buzzing and flickering. A settee and two chairs in brown-painted rattan and a low lacquered table on which sat an old copy of
China Today
made up the room's furniture. A calendar from a Chinese food company and the sort of cheap framed chinoiserie prints available in any shop in the district made up the wall decor. A ceiling fan hung motionless above them.

They heard soft footsteps. An elderly Chinese man stuck his head out of a door. Reading glasses were pushed up on his freckled, nearly bald pate, and he held a Chinese newspaper. He frowned when he saw Lucy and said to Janice in Cantonese, “What do you want? I am busy.”

In the same language Lucy said, “Venerable Kuen, forgive me for interrupting you, but I wish to deposit some money with your house.”

The man's eyes opened wide at this, then narrowed. He calculated swiftly, a well-honed skill of his. Clearly this was the famous spirit-possessed daughter of the she-demon Shan-pei, and the other one must therefore be the eldest daughter of Chen. An interesting opportunity—it would not hurt to put the Shan-pei in his debt, and the Chens were also numerous, prosperous, and attentive of their obligations. He stepped back from the door and motioned them forward.

This room held a scratched table, three oak desks, with accompanying swivel chairs, one desk with a manual Underwood on it, the two others supplied with abacuses, two steel tube chairs with green oilcloth seats, several oak filing cabinets, a Barcalounger in green leatherette, a television on a metal stand, a typewriter table with a large many-keyed machine that Lucy recognized as a Chinese typewriter, and a tangerine tree in a big round blue ceramic pot. The walls were stained dark yellow-brown with decades of cigarette smoke. It smelled of boiled rice and old paper and tobacco and ink.

Mr. Kuen sat in one of the swivel chairs and favored the girls with a smile, about which the only genuine thing was the gold in three of the front teeth.

“An account, you said?” he inquired.

“Yes, Venerable Kuen. I have one hundred and ninety-two dollars.”

Mr. Kuen nodded and held out his hand. It was not a contemptible sum. Some of Mr. Kuen's clients made that every week, others every two minutes. Mr. Kuen paid no interest on deposits, nor did he pay attention to the Internal Revenue Service or to the currency regulations of the United States of America. The house of Kuen had therefore many customers. He counted the bills and placed them in a desk drawer. Then he got out a cheap pad and a ballpoint pen. Passing them across the desk to Lucy, he said in Cantonese, “Write your name.”

Lucy wrote the character equivalent to the sound
káp
in Cantonese, which means grade or rank, and then the characters for old and poetry, or teacher,
lòuhsì
. Mr. Kuen took a ledger from the desk drawer, made a notation in a three-hundred-year-old code, wrote some characters on the pad, tore the slip off, and handed it over. Lucy tucked it away without impolitely studying it. She knew very well that it would be honored for $192 or its equivalent in goods in every Chinese community from Penang to Panama. After some ritual words expressing the honor that the house of Kuen realized from her patronage and Lucy's declining of that honor, instead expressing the deep obligation she felt toward the house of Kuen (which was more nearly true), the girls left.

“Would you mind telling me what that was about?” Janice demanded.

“That guy at the med school is going to pay me big bucks, and I need a place to run my checks through without going through a regular bank.”

“Why don't you just give them to your mom to cash?”

“Because I don't want my mom to know.”

“What! Why not?” Janice was astounded. She could imagine having secrets from her mother, but not about money.

Lucy shrugged. “I don't know,” she said. Which was true; that was the problem.

Janice dropped the subject, and they walked out of Doyers and back the way they had come. They were just past Pell on Mott, weaving through the increasingly crowded streets, when Lucy picked up the tail.

“I want something to drink,” said Lucy suddenly, and grabbed Janice's arm.

“A soda? We can get one—”

“No, I want tea, and food, I want to sit down.” So saying, she hustled her friend down the short flight of stairs to one of the street's many tea and bun shops. The place was sparsely occupied, a couple of old people at the counter and a few at tables. It was not a tourist place. Lucy pushed Janice into a chair facing the mirrored wall at the rearmost table, and Lucy used the pay phone briefly. Then she sat down with her back to the wall, watching. A sullen waiter came over; without being asked, he placed a steel quart pot of fresh boiling tea in front of them and departed.

“Lucy, what's going on? Why are we in this joint?”

“We're being followed by a couple of
ma jai
. Here they come. For God's sake, don't look around. Speak in Cantonese and play along with whatever I say.”

The two
ma jai
, little horses, gang members, swaggered in and sat at the next table. They called out loudly for tea and steamed pastry. Both of them wore sunglasses and black shirts worn outside dark trousers and opened to the chest, showing bridal white T-shirts. One had a broad, pockmarked face, a beefy guy in his early twenties. His companion looked younger, a teenager, thin-faced and jumpy. Lucy could feel their eyes on her through their dark glasses. She poured tea, took a scalding sip, and said, in a noticeable voice,“. . . anyway, I'll never do that again.” She gave Janice eye signals.

“Um, no, me neither,” said Janice haltingly.

“Damn it, I was wasted! How much did you drink?”

“Oh, a lot. Four cans.”

“Four! I had six, and Mary Ma had the same. We must have finished half a case. I completely lost track of time.”

From an early age Lucy Karp had been able to make up stories, precociously sophisticated ones about little girls who slipped between the cracks in reality, and expansions of traditional fairy tales, in which Cinderella, Tarzan, and the Wolfman would visit Mars to rescue Barbie. So she had no difficulty making up a yarn in which the three of them, Mary Ma, Janice Chen, and herself, had slipped away to the West Street docks, where the bad boys and the hustlers hung out (although not in the early afternoon, as a rule) and gotten drunk on beer, and become sick, and staggered back to the Asia Mall to find there (Surprise! Horror!) the uproar of the shootings. Once Janice saw where the theme was headed, she had no difficulty embellishing the plot with many an amusing detail. The gangsters were glowering and mumbling to each other, an ideal audience for this lie. Janice was growing more nervous by the second, however, and Lucy was not confident that her friend would keep up the fiction without letting out something harmful. Janice was not a liar in Lucy's league. What was needed now was a graceful, or at least a plausible, exit.

Lucy found it after five tense minutes of stiff, false chatter. She pointed past the steamy window to the street. “Look,” she cried, “there's Warren Wang. Oh, God, how do I look? Pay the bill! No, give me a mirror.”

“Warren
Wang
?” said Janice in an astonished voice, and received a sharp kick under the table.

“My boyfriend, you idiot,” said Lucy in English under her breath, and then louder in Cantonese, “Come on, Jen-dai, let's catch up with him.” Lucy stood and, using the mirror Janice handed her (for she did not carry one herself ) pretended to primp, after which she attempted to mime the appearance of young love, in the style of
Gidget
reruns. The disgusting little squeals that issued from her throat rang absurdly false to her own ears, but she hoped they would convince a pair of Chinese nogoodniks just off the boat.

Warren Wang, an eighth grader with plump cheeks, thick spectacles and a bad haircut, a Spiderman devotee and the vice president of the math club, was a well-known dweeb, and to be considered a dweeb in a Chinese-American environment is to have achieved dweebness in its most refined form. That Janice Chen, the most beautiful girl in eighth grade, and Lucy Karp, the weirdest, might suddenly accost him on Mott Street in the light of day, gripping his arms and cooing, was not something he had ever expected outside the world of teenage boy dreams. He knew Mary Ma, another math club stalwart, and he knew that these two hung around with her, but heretofore he had only gazed at her two friends from a distance. Yet here was Lucy's bony little hip pressing in on one side and Janice's softer one on the other, their arms linked in his, the both of them chattering gaily, how you doing, Warren, want to go somewhere, Warren, listen to records, a movie? Warren had heard about dog dates, of course, and was well informed about the boundless and inventive cruelty of in-crowd girls. He stiffened, like a hen in the jaws of a fox, waiting for the punch line.

Lucy was in contrast feeling loose and on top of things. It was a Kim moment, combining as it did the yanking of wool over the eyes of vaguely defined malign forces and impressing her peers with her brilliance and mystery. And she was enjoying talking to this boy, something she hardly ever did, would never be caught dead doing as the grotesque beanpole Lucy Karp, but now, in the urgency of the situation, she was mobilizing Claudine as well as Kim, so the charm just gushed out, delightful dirty nonsense: “Warren, I know you're interested in sexual perversions. Have you been to the new place on Broome that caters to Asian sadomasochists?”

Blushing giggles. “You're the only perverted one here, Lucy,” said Janice.