Red Jade (7 page)

Touch

Already five years old, the bionic hand was an ultralite model, a myoelectric prosthesis with articulate fingers, an opposable thumb, a rotating wrist. It was powered by batteries inside the fake limb. Sensors there detected when the arm muscles contracted, then converted the body’s electrical signal into electric power. This engaged the motor controlling the hand and wrist, its skeletal frame made of thermoplastics and titanium for extreme flexibility. The frame was covered by a skin of silicone that was resistant to heat and flame, and custom-colored with pigmentation to match the patient’s skin. The hand and fingers were sculpted with fingernails, knuckles, and creases. At a glance, it was indistinguishable from a real hand. The hand cost eighty thousand dollars in Hong Kong and the triad had paid without question.

Removing it from his forearm reminded him of the rehabilitation course at the Kowloon Clinic, where he’d trained to use his new artificial limb. He’d continued for a year until his control of hand and finger movements became so deft that he mastered eating with chopsticks and dealing a deck of cards. He could pluck a coin off the table.

He could pull the trigger of a gun.

Aaya
, he sighed, finishing off the last of the cognac, letting his thoughts return to matters at hand. He was indifferent to the murder of Uncle Four; the Hip Ching leader had been arrogant and so had brought about his own demise with his whore. His foolishness, however, had cost the Red Circle a cache of gold Pandas and brilliant diamonds, the value of which, though small compared to the billions raked in by combined triad operations, had caused a loss of face. The Hakkanese drug couriers and their Chiu Chao financiers had leaked details of the rip-off.

The Red Circle had lost face, and the whore had to pay.

Death by a myriad of swords was too simple. They’d have to make an example of her, a warning to all others who thought they could steal from the Hung Huen brotherhood. They would videotape a gang rape of her, then pimp her off,
before
killing her, finally making a snuff film for the porno dogs to market, completing the revenge.

The throbbing came back, a slow steady beat. Normally, he’d take a Vicodin and allow it to pass, but tonight he had special pleasures in mind, the kind he didn’t want diminished by medication. It was the one thing aging men still clung to.
Desire.
He closed his eyes and pictured the
siu jeer
, “young ladies,” who would soon arrive at his condo door, and ignored the pulsing forearm stump.

Noble Truths

“Fuhgeddaboudit,” Captain Marino said. “There’s already a cap on overtime. Unless you have something solid, like extradition, or taking custody and bringing him back, the department’s not paying for a fishing trip to the West Coast.”

No way. Not on the department’s dime.

Jack left the captain’s office and exited the Chinatown station house. He turned west on Bayard, following the scent of death and the distant sounds of grief in his head. He walked inside Columbus Park until he came to the rundown asphalt ball fields, the hard-scrabble playground of his Chinatown youth. Across the way, he could see the black cars jockeying for position on the street of funeral parlors.

The other merchants of death were known to be charitable toward the more tragic losses of life. The Chin brothers of Kingdom Caskets would discount the no-frills metal veneer boxes, and Peaceful Florist would charge wholesale for the floral wreaths. The headstone cutter might donate the engraving of the carved Chinese characters. The Family Associations would contribute toward the rest of the funeral expenses. A small group of black-clad mourners burned paper items in a tin bucket, offering up small colorful gifts for the afterlife: a lady’s slippers, a man’s tie.

Jack smelled the odor of jasmine, incense drifting in the winter air as the black Town Cars and Continentals lined up behind the DeVille flower wagon filled with wreaths of carnations and mums.

The Wah Fook Parlor had six death notices posted on their doors. May Lon Fong’s funeral was the next one. Outside the Wah Fook, eight Chinese musicians had assembled, all wearing full-length
min-nop
coats of brown silk with black fedoras, watching the mourners from behind dark sunglasses as they tuned their instruments: four Chinese
suona
horns, two mournful
erhu
, string violins, a bamboo folk drum, and a small harp.

Jack hadn’t seen such a large funeral band before. They tuned up to a big symphonic sound as the procession began. Normally, Jack would have attended the wakes, paid his respects, but this murder-suicide was doubly tragic, and he decided to get his closure from a distance.

Farther down the street, Harry Gong’s funeral continued behind the closed doors of the Wing Ching Parlor. The families had decided on separate funerals, unable to reconcile the memories of killer and victim. Their hands rigidly clasped together at the end of life, they were now bound for different cemeteries.

The Chinese band began playing their dirge as the pallbearers brought May Lon’s casket out, stepping in cadence toward the black Cadillac DeVille with her black-and-white photograph braced atop. A small crowd murmured their sadness in the frozen morning air as her family and relatives followed the casket. Suddenly, a harrowing cry burst from the group as May Lon’s mother ran past the pallbearers loading the DeVille and threw herself across the coffin. “Aayaaa!!” she screamed, the veins in her neck standing out as she beat her chest and tore at her hair. Other relatives rushed in, lifting her away from the coffin. She fell to the pavement, kicking, pounding the asphalt with her heels, on the edge of madness in her despair.

May Lon’s father stood speechless, ready to collapse.

They carried the mother into the lead Lincoln Town Car as the other funeral drivers pulled up along the curb, loading up the family and gently moving the procession along. The band played louder as the dark DeVille led the way toward Canal Street. The six-car procession then turned left toward the Holland Tunnel, bound for the Chinese cemetery at Sacred Oaks in New Jersey.

Jack took a few deep
shaolin
breaths through his nose, allowing the sadness to ease. Farther down the block, the doors of the Wing Ching swung open. With no band, no mournful dirge, the pallbearers shouldered Harry Gong’s casket as three Lincolns and a black minivan pulled up along the street.

The father wore a grim frown, carrying a smoking baton of mustard-colored incense. He narrowed his eyes as he followed the body of his only son, as if searching in a dark distant realm. Everyone loaded in quickly, quietly, eager to bring the deceased to the serenity of his final resting place. The large stick of incense poked out of the window of the first car as the Town Car led the way.

The procession turned east on Bayard, south on Mott, and paused near the Wong Sing Restaurant on Pell, where the day shift bowed their heads, then proceeded to the Bowery, where it held up Lower East Side traffic, pausing for eight seconds at the Nom San Bok Hoy Benevolent Association, before rolling onward.

The black caravan made its way through the icy daylight and took the Williamsburg Bridge on the way to the Chinese section of Heaven’s Pavilion Cemetery.

The funerals had cast a pall over Jack’s mood and he exited the park to get away from the street of mourning, unsure whether any closure had come for him.

Golden Star

Feeling hungry and thirsty, Jack sat in the last booth in Grampa’s, watching the television above the bar while waiting for his order of onion-smothered steak. He took a long pull from his bottle of Heineken and considered jetting out to Seattle for a long weekend, subtracting a few NYPD vacation days. He’d hang out with Alex, there to receive her ORCA award. He could touch base with Seattle PD and check the layout of Seattle’s Chinatown and the International District area.

The television displayed a press conference featuring the new Italian-American mayor, who was pitching the idea of banning fireworks in Chinatown, especially Chinese New Year celebrations. The mayor was citing fire safety concerns. It hadn’t been a concern for a hundred and twenty-five years, thought Jack, but suddenly, it was a problem. All the Chinese knew that it was the mayor covering his ass after resolving to go after the mob at the Fulton Fish Market, and the Mafia’s defiant display of July Fourth fireworks in Brooklyn and Staten Island’s Italian enclaves.

With contempt, Jack took another swallow of beer. No
firewoiks
for the
paisans
, no Chinese New Year celebration for the Chinks. Non-Chinese citizens didn’t realize the banning of fireworks in Chinatown would allow evil spirits to creep back in, into the Lower East Side and all of New York City as well.

Jack wondered if fireworks would become just a loud smoky memory, as they had in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other major Chinatowns in America.

He could smell the onions from the kitchen, the aroma pulling at his nose, spiking his appetite. The bar was almost empty except for a couple of suit-and-tie business types in the far booth near the entrance. They reminded Jack of the CADS, Alex’s legal friends, the Chinese-American Defense Squad.

Jack wondered if ADA Bang Sing was a member of their little club, if he had a connection to Alex that was other than professional. CADS? He wondered why it mattered. Was he jealous? Or was it just leftover romantic uneasiness from his party dream, the one that had featured Alex, on the night he’d gotten pulled into the murder-suicide?

CADS? They were an activist group, self-starters and true believers, the kind Alex liked to run with, out to wreak havoc on a cumbersome, misguided justice system. One of the judges who was known to lean toward the Radical Left had railed about discriminatory hiring practices and police brutality toward minorities. Jack had heard that two of the lawyers were trust-fund brats, but legal warriors nonetheless. And why did any of it matter to him?

He wondered if Alex’s impending divorce was reinforcing her involvement with CADS, as she seemed to bloom when fighting controversial cases.

He remembered Alex at the pistol range. Combat stance. Firing in short bursts. She really was an Annie Oakley, but was she relishing the feel of actually shooting someone, symbolically? In the wake of the cop killing of the Chinese honor student, were her emotions feeding her dead-eye accuracy?

Jack finished his beer, ordered another. You can look that shit up on the Internet, Billy had said when they were talking about Ngs in Seattle. Jack wasn’t a cop historian, but he pressed his trigger fingers against his temples, rolling little circles as he closed his eyes, coaxing out what he remembered.

The Seattle Police Department had a checkered past. It had made headline news back in the fifties and sixties, a violent period in the American Northwest. Grand-jury investigative hearings, much like the Knapp Commission hearings in New York City, exposed corruption in the Seattle PD. Abetted by crooked politicians, the Seattle PD’s operations included gambling and police payoff scandals. Police took money, turned a blind eye. It was nothing new in the world of cops.

The gambling problem, of course, reared its ugly head in Chinatown, and law-enforcement departments nationwide remembered the 1983 Wah Mee massacre. The Wah Mee had been a Seattle Chinatown gambling and bottle club, one of many, which was allowed to flourish because of the police payola. The Wah Mee had operated high-stakes Chinese gambling games, and on an early February morning a decade earlier, three Chinatown misfits from Hong Kong, desperate and misguided, executed a plan to commit robbery and murder there. The result was thirteen deaths, one survivor, the baring of police payola, and the castigation of the Chinese community by mainstream media. They’d tried to make it seem like it was some sort of tong war incident,
hatchetmen
stuff, rather than the immigrant aberration that it was. All of it reinforced the idea that the police weren’t worthy of trust.

Jack continued rolling up the images with his trigger digits, and abruptly, Keung “Eddie” Ng, “Shorty,” came to mind. Seattle Chinatown? Jack didn’t mind playing long shots, so long as it was convenient to do.

Someone slid softly into the booth, nudging him over, breaking his flow of thoughts.

“Seattle, huh?” Alex grinned. “You’re kidding me.” She seemed happy about the prospect and ordered a Cosmo.

His steak arrived with the martini, and he cut her a slice. She devoured a piece before chasing it down with the drink.

“It’s only a week away,” she said. “The Westin’s sold out. I’m sharing a double with Joann Lee from Legal Aid because they overbooked.”

“No problem,” Jack answered, cutting her another slice. “I’m making other arrangements anyway.”

“Found a room?” Alex said, raising an eyebrow.

“Soon.”

“I hope it’s near the Westin,” she said over the martini glass. “Most of the events are there.”

“No problem,” Jack repeated. He didn’t want to say he’d be out by the airport, the Sea-Tac Courtyard. Half the price, and a jackrabbit getaway for the return flight. He was going to check out Seattle, not just hang with Alex, and seventy-two hours was not enough time to get it done. Besides, he figured, Alex was going to be plenty busy anyway.

Watching her as she sipped her Cosmo, Jack asked, “What kind of town is Seattle? Does ORCA have issues there?”

Alex set her drink down, answering bluntly, “Do you want to start with glass-ceiling discrimination at Boeing Industries? Or racism at Abercrombie and Fitch? Or do you want to go down memory lane, when they burned down Chinatown and drove the Chinese out of Seattle and Tacoma in 1885?”

“Okay, I get it.” Jack chuckled. “A few issues there.” He always marveled at how she was able to toss out facts and incidents, like neat little Molotov cocktails, from somewhere not of this time or her own experience. It was if she was speaking for ghosts, giving voice to long-lost souls. “But I meant, more like cop stuff.”

“Oh,
that.
” Alex lifted her glass, took another sip. “Well, last year Seattle PD was accused of racial profiling. A couple of officers harassed and humiliated an APA youth group who were out on a day trip.”

“No shit,” Jack said, knowing that APA stood for Asian Pacific American, an expanded and more inclusive identity than
Chinese
or
Other
. He ordered up a plate of clams casino.

“No shit.” Alex smirked. “Threw the teenagers up against a wall, screaming insults at them. Held them for an hour. Interrogated them like they were foreign criminals instead of American citizens.”

“Were they charged?” Jack asked, disbelief in his tone.

“They were cited for jaywalking.”

“
Jaywalking?
” Jack snapped, rolling his eyes. “You mean ‘crossing while Chinese’?”

Alex, with a sardonic grin, ordered another Cosmo, lit up a cigarette. “So,” she concluded through smoky exhalation, words dripping sarcasm, “other than those minor drawbacks, it’s a top-ten city of a destination. High-tech jobs, great schools, excellent outdoors, wonderful place to raise a family, etcetera etcetera.” She took another puff of the cigarette. “Lots of rain, though.”

Rain, thought Jack, remembering Ah Por’s words, her clues. Had she whispered “rain” to Eddie Ng’s juvenile photo? Or to the Hong Kong magazine likeness of Mona?

Alex’s second Cosmo arrived with the clams casino as Jack shared the last of his steak with her.

“I’ve got two award ceremonies to attend, one panel discussion, a silent auction, two cocktail parties. And the grand gala dinner-dance for one thousand.”

“Can I crash?” teased Jack.

“I’ve got connections,” she mock-boasted. “I can get you in. But you sound like you’re going to be busy.”

“So do you,” he said quietly. “But we’ll work it out.”

Alex knew better than to probe cop stuff, knew Jack would just talk his way around things, being professional. A real cop’s cop, but with an old-timer’s sense of honor. Jack was a Chinese-American anachronism, but she liked him because he had a good heart. And he was brutally honest.

They’d become drinking buddies. Friends. And that was where things stood.

They toasted, then went after the clams casino.

Outside Grampa’s, the cold night air braced them. The chill was invigorating during the short walk to her condo at Confucius Towers. She held on to Jack’s arm, the bulk and weight of him steadying her. She was light-headed after two cocktails.

“You know,” she said, “I don’t
have to
attend
all
the events.”

Jack smiled, but said nothing; he didn’t want to make promises he couldn’t keep if he picked up a lead.

The wind gusted, and he pulled her closer as they walked.

“I feel like a hot cup of Colombian brew.” Alex shivered. “I have this coffee machine, Italian. You feel like having a wake-me-up with sambuca?”

Jack wanted to say yes but was thinking about Lucky, about the lateness of the hour, and the walking distance to Downtown Medical Hospital. And then the trek back to Brooklyn. All that stacked against a beautiful woman and a cup of coffee that probably wouldn’t lead anywhere except to disappointment and misunderstanding.

“I’d like that,” he said finally, “but there’s something I need to check out that can’t wait.”

“Cop stuff, huh?” Alex sighed, shaking her head.

“Yeah, but how about a rain check?” suggested Jack.

“
Again
?” she teased. “Maybe those checks will pan out in Seattle, ha?
Rain
, right? And they’re known for coffee.”

“Yeah, right as
rain
,” Jack heard himself saying as they entered the Towers complex.

They exchanged hugs and Alex walked past the doorman in the lobby. He watched her as she waited by the elevators, tossing a smile his way. He watched until the elevator swallowed her up.

Jack could see the bright lights of City Hall, not too far from Downtown Medical. He thought about Tat “Lucky” Louie, hooked up to continuing life support. As he quick-stepped his way through the frozen half-mile of night, he wondered how it had all come to this. He knew Eddie Ng, the
malo
monkey, could answer some of those questions.

Downtown Medical was quiet this time of night, already past visiting hours, but the nurse let Jack have his time with Lucky. It wasn’t like the patient was going anywhere. The room was monitored and she’d seen Jack the previous times he’d visited.

He stared at Lucky’s gaunt, ashen face, noticed the disinfectant smell of decay, death waiting at the door; a deteriorating body connected to adhesive electrodes measuring its heartbeats.

Jack remembered racing across Chinatown rooftops with Lucky, two
hingdaai
, blood brothers, leaping the gaps between buildings. There were three of them then, three teenage pals, before Wing Lee was knifed to death that seventeenth summer of their Chinatown lives.

Jack wasn’t sure why he was in the hospital room, watching Lucky’s passing moments. He wasn’t expecting Lucky to suddenly wake up and give him all the information he needed to close the case, but he felt that being in Lucky’s presence was somehow going to provide another clue as to what had happened leading up to the shoot-out at Chatham Square. A clue to how the Chinatown troubles had brought all these cases of death across his desk. Jack hoped, in a farfetched Ah Por-the-seer kind of way, that something would come to him here: a jarred memory, a symbol, a number or an address,
something.
He remembered the serene setting of the Doyers Street back-alley crime scene, where an old man,
ah bok
, had died of a heart attack, slumped up against a wall, and where a young gangbanger lay face-down dead, reaching out his gun hand in the bloody snow, four high-velocity .22s through his back.

Was Lucky involved?

The blazing shoot-out near OTB on Chatham Square was something Jack could understand: a sudden gun battle, instinctive, spontaneous.
Jing deng
, meant to be. But the back-alley killing behind OTB seemed removed, not just physically, from the rest of the bloodshed. What did the old man witness before he’d suffered the heart attack?

Had it involved Lucky?

Jack knew Lucky had had an apartment somewhere in Chinatown, probably paid for by the On Yee. He’d probably also had several crash pads around the neighborhood. Nothing would be under his name, of course, so they would be impossible to trace. Only the gangboys would know all the locations. The On Yee had probably swept through all of Lucky’s places already, Jack figured. All the places they
knew
about, anyway. Lucky had had other hiding places, Jack remembered, tenement niches scattered across the rooftops of their childhood.

The life-support machine continued to pump rhythmically as he leaned in toward Lucky’s face. In a whisper, he repeated what they used to say as teenagers, “Us against the world, kid.”

Jack stepped back, trying for a moment of clarity. Here was his old friend at the far edge of a life in the shadows, a nonentity, nothing in his name, no history. A ghost ironically, the latest
dailo
of the Ghost Legion. Jack remembered how Tat had claimed payback against the punk hotheads who’d killed Wing. Then he’d disappeared into gangdom, born again with the nickname “Lucky,” just as Jack was getting his discharge from army Airborne. Their lives went in opposite directions after that.

At 11
PM
Jack called for a
see gay
, Chinatown radio car, to take him back to Sunset Park. He closed the curtain to Lucky’s space and said good-night to the overnight nurse.