Neon Dragon (6 page)

I turned right and walked the half block to Beach Street. A left and one more block brought me to a well-lit coffee shop with no name on the right-hand corner of Beach and Harrison. It was smoky and heavy with the drone of mumbled Chinese coming from the clutches of both young and old sitting around the bare wooden tables.

I found a corner under a fluorescent light and took out the slip of paper that had fallen out of the fortune cookie. The way my day had been running, it was no surprise that the writing was Chinese.

I was surrounded by people who could probably translate, assuming, of course, that they could speak English. Somehow it did not seem like a good idea to ask. I tucked the note away in an inside pocket and braced for the walk outside.

I stayed in the nook of the entranceway to be out of earshot and out of the wind at the same time. I tapped a familiar array of numbers into my cell phone, and my mind ran back ten years or so.

Harry Wong was one of the best memories I had from my days at Harvard College. He was the grandson of a woman who left China to start a string of the first Chinese restaurants seen in the suburbs of Boston in the early twenties. She was a maverick with nerve and a keen sense of demography. Harry told me that she noticed that most of the
non-Chinese customers of the Chinatown restaurants were Jewish. She picked her locations by cruising the neighborhoods and checking the names on the mailboxes. Whenever she found a cluster of middle-class Cohens or Goldsteins, or better yet, a synagogue, she'd plant a restaurant. In ten years she went back to China with enough money to rule a southern province.

Harry's family migrated back to Boston around the time that Mao Tse-tung's army made capitalistic wealth a scourge to be cleansed. The family transferred its prominence from a southern province of China to the province of Brookline, west of Boston.

Harry and I met as freshmen at the tryouts for an intermural wrestling team at Holworthy House. He was tall for a seventeen-year-old Chinese American, but somehow he came equipped with more speed and strength than you'd expect from his beanpole build. He not only made the team, he managed to embarrass most of the beefy Caucasians at practice—and one particular half Puerto Rican—by pinning us like butterflies while we were still counting his ribs.

One of his victims once asked him what kind of trick he was using. He had a gentle smile and a soft voice with just enough of a trace of his parents' accent to be eligible for racial prejudice from the preppy blue bloods who made up 90 percent of the team. It was a smart-aleck question, but he gave it a courteous answer. Unfortunately, when he said that everything he did stemmed from an ancient Chinese discipline called tai chi, which he had practiced since he was three years old, he was permanently branded as some kind of mystic freak by those who finally had a means of satisfying their need to feel superior to him.

I saw a door shut in his eyes when he heard the half-hidden whispers and laughs. I didn't think I could open it again, but I caught him after practice. I asked if he'd help me. I could feel the defensive refusal in his hesitation. I told him I meant it. I needed help. He was somewhere between anger at all of us and rejection of what he took to be my pity when he snapped out, “I'll be here at five tomorrow morning. Do what you wish.”

It was painful, but I had my body at the gym at five the next morning, and every day for a year. Harry brought me into the discipline of peace through controlled patterns of body movement that was his version of tai chi. We were matched to wrestle each other at every practice, since nobody else wanted much of either one of us. I worked harder than I had ever worked at anything in my life, and by the end of the spring term, I could pin anyone in Holworthy House—except one.

THREE TELEPHONE RINGS
, and I was beginning to wonder if I could catch him at home. I hadn't seen him since Thanksgiving. But then I could say that three hundred and sixty-four days a year. After college, I went to play in the law, and Harry started devouring the alphabet. He got an MS degree in biochemistry from MIT, and hung on for a PhD in record time. He picked up a few more initials in London before becoming a resident brainchild back at MIT.

Our lives took us in different directions most of the time, but we met religiously for Thanksgiving dinner at my mother's house in Newton. She always cooked what I thought from childhood was a traditional American Thanksgiving dinner—
pollo con arroz
and cornbread.

Six rings, and I decided to try his office. That reached him. He still put an Asian twang on “Hello” and I was mighty glad to hear it.

“Harry, it's Mike. What're you up to?”

“Mike, good to hear from you. What's up?”

“I was hoping we could get together.”

“Is it Thanksgiving already?”

“Not for a little while. It's February. Actually I need your help. Could we meet?”

“Sure, Mike. How about lunch tomorrow?”

“How about coffee in an hour?”

I think he caught my urgency. If there was a pause, it was a fraction of a second to reorder his schedule.

“You name the place, Mike.”

I looked around. “I'm in Chinatown, corner of Beach and Harrison. There's some kind of a coffee shop behind me. I don't see a name. Can you meet me here?”

His voice picked up tension. “No, I can't, Mike. Listen to me. Don't hang around there. Hang up the phone and just get the hell out of there.”

“Why? What is this place?”

“Let's not discuss it at the moment. Walk to the right up Harrison. I'll meet you in the bar at the China Sea.”

I wanted to tell him he sounded like a character out of an old Fu Manchu movie, but he was gone.

I was the only one at the China Sea bar, sipping Tsing Tao beer until Harry slid onto the next bar stool.

“Happy Thanksgiving, Michael.”

“Happy New Year, Harry.”

I reached in my pocket and handed him the slip of paper that had fallen out of the fortune cookie. He lit a cigarette lighter and held it up to scan the symbols.

“You want a beer, Harry?”

He waved off the suggestion. “Where'd you get this?”

“In a fortune cookie.”

He gave me a look. “Fortune cookies are to make you Caucasians feel good about leaving a tip. Is this note serious?”

“I suspect it is. Could we share the contents?”

He relit the lighter for another look.

“It's a girl's name. Ku Mei-Li. And an address on Beach Street. You know her?”

I shook my head.

“There's more. It says literally, ‘You help her, I help you.'”

Harry looked at me in the mirror over the bar. “Help you what?”

I took another sip of beer to sort out my own questions before answering Harry's. It was an attractive quid pro quo. The
quid
was whatever in the world I could do for someone named Ku Mei-Li. The
quo
was particularly inviting if it meant that my little Red Shoes would give us a counter to Mrs. Lee's damning identification.

I took Harry by the arm and escorted him out the door and down Harrison. I'd given him a brief replay of the day's events by the time we reached the corner of Beach Street.

“So it comes down to this, Harry old pal. We find the address on Beach Street, and either I go in by myself with nothing but hand signals to communicate with heaven-knows-who, or you come with me, and we make sense of this little game.”

We stopped. He pulled me into a doorway. I thought at the time he was taking us out of the cold, but he could have been avoiding the eyes of those who were standing in the window of the coffee shop across the street.

“Michael, you have no conception of what goes on in Chinatown. You're like everyone else who comes down here. You have dinner, buy some noodles, whatever, and breeze right back out to Caucasianville. You can't see it, because you don't know what to look for.”

“See what, Harry? I'm willing to look. Tell me.”

He looked at me and just shook his head.

“It's too much to tell, and too cold to do it here. What can I say, Mike? You want me to wade into a net of organized crime so effective that it has this community almost paralyzed with fear. It's so effective that you don't even know it exists.”

I pulled the collar of my coat up around the back of my neck.

“Suppose it exists, Harry …”

“It exists.”

“Like I said. Suppose it exists. I don't have a lot of choice. I got a name, I got an address. That's a hell of lot more than I had going for me before I came down here. I've got to follow it up. I don't think time is on my side. The question is, do you go with me?”

“This place you're going is a brothel, Mike. For Chinese. Not outsiders. It's protected by a youth gang that could write the book on violence. You could at least pick a better time than the middle of the night. Alone.”

“I didn't pick the time, Harry. And maybe I'm not alone.”

I forced a goofy smile and stepped out into the street. I was walking, but I was listening hard. My heart came down out of my throat when I heard Harry's footsteps catching up.

HARRY SAID NOTHING.
I could tell by the set of his chin that the wrong word from me could break the momentum, and any word was the wrong word.

He took the lead as we passed five doorways. The sixth was chipped and grimy and hung at an angle that only time and neglect could effect. The glass was caked with decades of pollution. There was not a clue as to what was on the other side. That would not ordinarily raise the hair on the back of my neck, but that combined with Harry's gripping the doorknob for the duration of an interminable deep breath gave me the galloping creeps.

When he was mentally set, Harry stiffened his posture, gave me a nod, and pushed open the door. I could see that it led to a hallway the width of the door and just as decrepit. Straight ahead about ten feet the rutted floor bent upward in a flight of well-worn wooden stairs. The light inside was dimmer than the neon glare in the street. Harry held the door open for a second and looked back.

We caught sight of them at almost the same moment. Three of the young stone faces I had seen in the window of the coffee shop on the corner were moving down the sidewalk in our direction. Harry gave me a “you couldn't listen” look. There are times, however, when the only way to retreat is to go forward. We moved inside and closed the door.

About the time we hit the first step, I looked up to see the top landing consumed with the bulk of the first Chinese I'd ever seen who topped six feet four and a conservative two hundred fifty pounds. Whatever notion I had of making it past the top of the stairs died in a lump that I couldn't swallow.

Harry never lost a beat. He trudged up the stairs as if he were coming home from a day's work. I felt a cold draft from behind and turned around. The three faces glared up at us from the bottom of the steps behind us. They were well under twenty, and closer to the Chinese proportions I expected, but the bulges under their coats in the neighborhood of their right arm sockets kept me close to Harry's heels where the odds were better.

I stuck, in fact, close enough to Harry to be able to whisper.

“You were always a friend, Harry, but right now you're my life insurance.”

Harry's eyes never left the top of the stairs, but I could hear the whisper.

“It's the other way, Michael. You're
my
life insurance.”

I neither understood that nor found it comforting.

Harry kept climbing. I took it that the ploy was bluff, rather than fight or even cut and run. Considering that they had us boxed in like a runner between first and second base, it was the only option that might possibly not involve suffering.

I think I jumped when a burst of guttural Chinese came out of the hulk at the top of the stairs. Harry took three more steps without acknowledging the temper tantrum. He was two steps from the top, and close enough to make it possible for one swipe of the side of beef our host used for a right arm to send us both to the bottom of the stairs. Fortunately, he chose to listen instead.

Harry's nose came up to about his navel. To his credit, Harry never succumbed to the indignity of looking up. His voice was calm, deliberate, and pure business.

I couldn't imagine what he was saying in his native tongue. The
three of us seemed to hang in suspended animation. I saw those lethal arms poised for a strike that would have decapitated Harry and sent me halfway to Chelsea. I said a few words to the Lord and braced for whatever came in my direction.

When Harry finished, there was a pause for a few electric seconds that seemed longer than the bar examination while King Kong looked at me like something he could put in an egg roll. I had no idea what Harry was saying with astounding composure, but it had a most desired defusing influence. When Kong spoke again, it was with deference, and it sounded like a question. Harry gave him a few clipped words, and he backed out of our way. I heard the door behind us open, and when I looked back, the gang of three had vacated.

With Kong receding into the passageway, I could see a short, plump Chinese woman of what I guessed to be something over fifty years standing by the first door to the right. She was decked out in a green silk-brocade sheath that did not need a lengthy slit to reach her hips. Fifty pounds and thirty years previously it might have been becoming. At this point, her wearing of the uniform of the profession seemed as pointless as a baseball manager wearing cleats.

I assume she had followed the exchange, because she was all grins and welcome in English, more or less.

“You most welcome. Come in. Come in.”

Harry and I finished the last few stairs and followed her into a room that would have worked as a sumptuously decorated living room in any home in Brookline. Chinese red was the predominant color in fabrics that could have adorned a silkworm's museum. The lighting was dim, the music was lush, and the aroma would make a water buffalo amorous.