Year of the Dog (7 page)

This time, he needed consolation, clarity, more than a clue. Her words might exorcise the bad kharma clinging to him now.

“Ah Por,” Jack repeated, handing her the
United National,
splayed open at the dead Kung family’s photos. He pressed a folded five-dollar bill, folded square, into her ancient palm, gave her a smile, and a small bow of his head.

She ran a gnarled finger over the newsprint photos, closed her eyes. Slowly dropping her head to one side, as if straining to hear something, she said, “Fire.” She paused, then softly, “It is a sign of sacrifice.”

Her fingernails played over the text of the newspaper.

“Wind,” she said, “blows away fear.” Jack leaned in at the softness of her words.

“A
cleansing
is needed. Wash out the regrets. Sometimes it is necessary, to start anew.” Her palm passed over the school-posed pictures of the children.

“There is no fault in this.” Ah Por caught her breath, looked at Jack the way a grandmother looks at a schoolboy. “To be firm in punishment brings good in the end.” She put out her hand and whispered, “Go to the temple, say a prayer, and make a donation. Eight dollars.”

Jack palmed her another five-dollar bill, along with Jeff Lee’s business card.

She rubbed up the card between her fingers, a look of annoyance crossing her face before she closed her eyes.

She said
“Malo.”
Jack bent closer.
“Bad,”
she said. Bad, in Spanish? He was confused momentarily, until she opened her eyes, said it again.
“Ma lo,”
softening the Toishanese accent, meaning
monkey.

“A monkey?” Jack asked. “You see a monkey?”

“A
picture,”
Ah Por answered, suddenly flashing him a puzzled look. “You’ve been shot,” she said matter-of-factly.

Jack was surprised that she knew. “Yes . . .” he started to answer, when she patted his left side under the jacket, where the ribs wrap around the heart.

“It was my arm,” Jack continued.

“No,” she said quietly. “Something else.”

She’s confused now,
Jack thought.
Could be dementia there.

“It was a while ago,” he heard himself explaining.

“No,” Ah Por repeated. “Not
when
. . .” Suddenly she started stirring the congee again, spooning up some, taking a slurp.

Jack knew the session was over. He thanked her, patted her gently across the shoulders. She seemed to shiver, and he backed away, leaving her to eat in peace.

She never looked up to see him leave the cafeteria of his childhood, more burdened now with answers he didn’t understand.

Outside, he puzzled over Ah Por’s words as he walked, the smell of Big Wang’s
jook
and
yow jow gwai,
fried cruller, in the back of his mind.

Turning left on Bayard, he passed a string of tong basements that doubled as after-hours gambling dens. During the Uncle Four investigation, Jack’s presence down in the dens had compromised several federal probes. His appearance had been duly recorded by DEA, and ATF, but he’d found out a female shooter could have been involved.

Someone, from one of the tongs, Jack figured, had also dropped a call to Internal Affairs, falsely accusing him of shaking down the gambling operators. The accusations had triggered an investigation, and he’d gotten suspended.

Somewhere, there was still a woman in the wind, he remembered, as he crossed Mott.

Pa’s Jook

Big Wang, a longtime quick-food restaurant on Mott, still made congee the old Cantonese way, thick and clumpy, instead of more recent overseas styles that were watery, without substance. Jack remembered going to Big Wang’s for Pa’s favorite jook, ordering out a quart container each morning after Pa was no longer able to leave the apartment. Jack would deliver the
jook
to Pa before reporting to the Fifth Precinct, feeding his father each day of those last weeks of his life.

The congee, another reason why Pa had refused to leave Chinatown.
His
jook,
his Chinese newspapers, his particular baby
bok choy.
All his excuses to stay rooted.

When Jack’s
jook
arrived, he dipped in a piece of
yow jow
gwai,
fried cruller and let it soak up the congee, pondering Ah Por’s words:
sacrifice, a monkey, and a gunshot wound.

Hallucinations, mumbo jumbo, and witchcraft
, Jack thought, but quickly remembered that her words had proven true in previous cases.

The congee had reminded Jack of Pa, and when he finished the bowl, he decided to visit the temple across the way.

Ma’s Prayers

The gilded-wood carving above the Mott Street storefront read TEMPLE OF BUDDHA. In the window an elaborate wood carving featured the various monks and deities. A wooden statue of the Goddess of Mercy stood off to one side.

Inside, Jack heard Buddhist chanting from a tape in a boom box, saw red paper strips along the wall with black ink-brushed characters, the names of members and supporters. There was the smell of incense and of scented votive candles on pads floating in oil. In one corner, yellow plastic tags with the names of loved ones, the deceased arrayed in neat rows below the plates of oranges, the vases of gladiolas.

Imagining the death faces of the Kung family, he stepped up to the gods.

He lit three sticks of incense, bowed three times before the display of deities, and firmly planted the sticks in a sand-filled urn.

He thanked the sister monk, observing through the Buddha’s picture window how busy the morning street had gotten.

On the way out he slipped eight dollars into the red donation box, and bid his farewell to the Kungs.

AJA

He walked briskly toward Chrystie Slip, where the street turned left and ran into NoHo. He exhaled puffs of steam as he went, saw that the cold prevented all but the hardy and unfortunate from walking the streets. Once past the junkie parks, he came to a storefront that was once a bodega, but now flew a big yellow banner that read ASIAN AMERICAN JUSTICE ADVOCACY.

The AJA, pronounced Asia, was a grassroots activist organization staffed by lawyers giving back to the community in pro bono time.

Inside the open storefront was a jumble of desks and office machines. There was no receptionist at reception out front, so he went directly toward Alex’s little office in the corner.

He saw her through the small pane of glass in the wooden door.
Alexandra Lee-Chow, late twenties but could still pass for an
undergrad, going through the beginning of a divorce, at the start of
what was looking like a bad day.

She was in a foul mood as he walked in. He hesitated. She waved him on, putting up a palm to silence him.

Jack put the plastic containers of
bok tong go
on the part of her desk that wasn’t cluttered with files and legal documents. He said quickly and quietly, “Just wanted to say thanks for Hawaii. And they told me you were out all morning.”

Alex turned away, stating into the phone, “That’s unacceptable. Shen Ping bled out waiting for the ambulance.” She sat down, flashed Jack a disgusted look, and quietly hung up the phone.

“The Shen Ping killing.” She rubbed her eyes. “You know, it’s all over the news, with the protests and everything. Anyway, the family wants to sue the city, EMS, the criminal justice system.” She paused. “And the NYPD, and anyone else connected to the killing.”

Listening to her, Jack had already anticipated the complaint.

“EMS took more than twenty-five minutes to respond to the location,” she began. “Out past Allen Street. The paramedics claim that commercial traffic, gridlock, boxed them in.”

Jack listened patiently.

“Now, understand, local merchants have been complaining for months that
law enforcement—cops
,
court officers
, and other city personnel—abuse their parking permits by using Chinatown streets as their personal, long-term parking lot. DOT turns a blind eye to police parking but issues tickets to Chinese truckers who can’t get to the curb and are forced to unload in the middle of the street.”

Jack shook his head in sympathy.

She paused, only to say, “I’m sorry to blow this out on you, Jack.”

“It’s a rough day,” he said. “I had a couple bad ones myself—”

“So my parents tossed you a
luau
?” Alex interjected, jerking the conversation another way.

Alex had hooked him up, he recalled, with the Hawaiian vacation package, when he’d needed the break badly, after his troubles in the Fifth. He’d been wounded, but still brought back a perp from San Francisco to cap the murder of Chinatown tong godfather Uncle Four. There had been a promotion at the end of it all.

“Yeah.” Jack smiled, remembering. “Roast pig
,
poi,
mahi-mahi
, the works.”

She nodded, smiled, then the hardness came back into her face.

“The kid who was the shooter,” she said sourly, “had three outstanding warrants, and should have never been released from juvie. He had a history of violence and somebody screwed up.”

The phone jangled again.

Jack could see it was important and started to leave.

I’ll call you,
he mimed with his index and pinky fingers, pausing at the door.

In turn, Alex pointed at the plastic containers. “Thanks for the
bok tong go
,” she said quietly, smiling a sad smile as Jack backed away.

Day for Night

The sixteen-story mirrored glass office building at Two Mott Street was the tallest building in the area, anchored at street level by a Citibank branch and a tourist-trade gift shop. The On Yee Merchants Consortium was rumored to be one of the landlords, and they occupied the entire third floor, as well as the penthouse level. The tong made their
arrangements
in the penthouse, Lucky remembered, as he strode through the lobby.

It was the Ecstasy that was powering him through the nights, but now in the daylight, it kept him from the sleep he needed.

Lucky rode the closet-sized freight elevator to the roof landing and went to the far end. He took a deep gulp of the cold morning air, exhaled, and torched up a sensimilla joint, sucking deeply so that the tip burned a bright orange. The smoke settled him, allowed him to slow down, to see the bigger picture of the forces circling around him. When he looked out over the jumbled patchwork of rooftops, the expanse of Chinatown reached for the horizon. To the east, across the square, he saw the growing enclave of Fukienese Chinese immigrants, their Fuk Chow Native Association building flying the red flag of the People’s Republic high above its tiled pagoda balcony.

Lucky remembered a childhood time when mainland supporters, the
commies,
would never dare fly the crimson flag for fear of being attacked and having their businesses vandalized or torched. Men wearing masks would come around, guns in their waistbands, to administer a beat down or a stabbing.

Times had changed.

While the old men of the tongs dithered with their deals, the young men who contested the streets had considerations of their own: controling the dirty money flowing through their rackets.

Lucky sucked heartily on the jay, scanning the view of old Chinatown, the core streets that the long ago Chinese bachelors first called home, eking out small lives under the heels of the whites, who didn’t like them and didn’t want them here. Still, the community grew. Now, the Fukienese were driving the boundaries north and east, their numbers swelling into the tenements that had housed the WASPs, the Irish, Italians, and Jews, and the Toishanese and Cantonese before them.

The windy rooftop refreshed him, and the marijuana brought him back down. His thoughts were still scattered from the Ecstasy, but he was beginning to see a pattern forming. As street boss of the Ghost Legion, Lucky was no student of history, but he was an admirer of the Romans, and before them, of the Mongolian hordes. He’d seen the videotapes
Rise and
Fall of the Roman Empire,
with Chinese subtitles, and
The Great
Khan,
both movies left behind by some loser in Number Seventeen gambling basement.

He’d learned that the Roman Empire collapsed because it became too large to manage, and corruption from within ate at it like a cancer. This is what he feared would happen to the Ghosts. Already his lieutenants in the Boston and Philadelphia Chinatowns were complaining that new bar clubs and card parlors had opened up, but away from the main streets. These new operators were members of village and fraternal organizations that were defiant when challenged. To help these upstarts, other groups like the Ma Ching—Malaysian gangsters— had arrived from the West Coast.

The New York Ghosts had gotten fat and comfortable, the complaint went, and they were reluctant to travel the interstate to muscle up their ranks. Lucky also knew that trouble was brewing in Chicago, with rumors that a splinter group of Ghosts was threatening to break away. More locally, the threat was Fukienese, challenging all comers to the long stretch of East Broadway and the side streets that ran like tentacles from it. Prostitution rackets from the snakehead sex slaves complemented gambling spots and the white powder of the China-based groups.

The more defiance there was at the fringes, the more
face
Lucky would lose and then more ambitious factions would question his leadership.

The Mongols were a different history. They conquered all, but were eventually swallowed up, becoming one with the peoples they’d overwhelmed. Like the Mongols, the big threat to Lucky lay to the East: China, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia. Would the old-line tongs, and the Hong Kong triads fall in step and sacrifice the Legion for more powerful paramilitary alliances from overseas?

Lucky sucked off the last of the joint, and flicked the burnt roach off the roof. He didn’t like the thoughts of being sacrificed or swallowed up.
Trust no one
was the one motto he believed in. But like the Romans and the Mongols, wasn’t it all
jing deng,
destiny?
If so, was there a way out for him? Take his fat
accounts and run? Change his identity? Disappear?

He laughed at his own momentary fear.

No need to panic,
he thought.
There was plenty of time yet
. A pair of Chinese tour buses swung through Chatham Square below, bound for Atlantic City.

Lucky imagined cases of pills in the belly-holds of the coach buses stealing down I-95, a million tabs of Ecstasy rolling south from Montreal, party pills bound for clubs and dance joints all along the eastern seaboard. Tons of tax-free cigarettes from the Indian reservations. Let the Fuks ride shotgun on the deliveries.
Fuckin’ A,
he thought,
the Ghosts could skip the muleing altogether,
and just pick up the pills at the scheduled stops. They could
spend more time on distribution
.
The volume would increase and the
Legion would lessen its exposure and risk
. If the system worked well, Lucky could see alcohol, fireworks, AK-47s, and China White, all flowing down the pipeline.

Ka-ching ka-ching,
already counting the money.

Lucky had heard other stories from the streets. Rumor had it, the Hung Huen—Red Circle Triad—had some unsatisfactory dealings with the Hip Chings.

Lucky considered his new grudging respect for the Hung Huen.
Green Circle, yellow circle, fuckin’ pink circle, it was all the same
to him; Chinese secret societies.
He saw it all as Fu Manchu bullshit that the whitey
gwailos
played, impressed by that crap with the candles and incense and chicken blood with the zombie chanting. In reality though, Lucky knew the triads were huge, sophisticated Chinese gangs that were major criminal players in Europe, and in Central and South America. More recently, they’d made inroads into North America by way of Canada.

Lucky knew he needed to be careful the Ghosts wouldn’t be swallowed or sacrificed, yet he felt it was too early to set up a sit-down deal with the triads. See how the bus routes worked out first, Lucky figured. Besides, a partnership of the On Yee and the Bak Bamboo triad controlled the buses that carried junkets to casinos in Atlantic City and to Foxwoods in Connecticut. The Bak Bamboo was considering expansion of their routes to include Chinatowns within the tri-state area. He wanted to see what arrangements surfaced before he made his move.

See what happens,
Lucky smirked, slowly remembering the value of patience in the face of change. He saw the red flag in the distance, and turned away from the cold wind that whipped in from East Broadway.