“Gangster?” I stared at Yuan Lee, who smirked back proudly. “What do you mean?”
“In China,” Gai-Lo Lu answered, while Yuan Lee continued to smirk. “Big lieutenant, working for big boss. Lo Da-Qi say, ‘Come to America, working for me.’”
“He knew Lo Da-Qi before he came?”
Gai-Lo Lu shook his head. “Not knowing. Lee Yuan is—” He shook his head some more, searching for the word. His face lit with inspiration. “Like union. ‘Come join with us.’” He smiled from me to Song Chan, looking hopeful.
“Recruited?” I asked. “Lo Da-Qi recruited him?”
Gai-Lo Lu nodded eagerly. “Recruited. ‘Join with us.’”
I sat silently in the cozy room, taking in the meaning of this.
Fast rise, Mary had said about Duke Lo. Usually it takes more time, kissing the right rings, recruiting your soldiers. But Duke Lo had shot straight to the top, behind men like Three-finger Choi.
Duke Lo was importing his own gangsters.
Like Three-finger Choi, about whom Mary had said that if the INS hadn’t been so willing to give him papers, making him hard to ship back, the NYPD’s life would be a lot simpler.
Duke Lo was importing gangsters with valid United States papers.
“Does he have papers?” I asked Gai-Lo Lu about Yuan Lee.
Another hurried consultation, and then Lu nodded. “Papers,” he said.
“Forged?”
“No,” Lu said. “Real.”
I nodded, too. “Provided by Yee Ji-You?”
This was translated again for Yuan Lee, and again the answer was yes.
“The other cargo,” I breathed, mostly to myself. “Not the dope. Gangsters.”
“Cargo?” asked Song Chan.
“How does it work?” I turned to him but ignored his question. “For the dissidents who come over?”
“How does—”
“Answer me!”
His eyes widened, then he said, in English, because with Gai-Lo Lu in the conversation, that’s what we were speaking now, “There is a network. People who help. If you are hiding, they help you, get you to the ship. If you are in jail, sometimes they can bribe the right people, you can get out.”
“And when you get to the ship?”
“There is a man you speak to. He knows who you are. He has been told by the man in America to look for you.”
“The man in America is Yee Ji-You? Joe Yee?”
He nodded.
“Who pays the passage?”
“The people who help. Everyone knows it is really the American government, but no one says.”
The United States government—specifically, the State Department, unless I missed my guess—smuggling out dissidents on H. B. Yang’s illegal alien ship. Deluca’s and March’s little project, the one it was their job to protect.
“What if the ship gets stopped?” I asked Song Chan. “All that work, and then they lose you?”
Gai-Lo Lu had been watching this exchange with an eager but confused look. It wasn’t the language this time, but the content, that was beyond him. Now he smiled; he had something
to add. With a helpful look, he offered, “It is lucky ship.”
“Lucky ship?” I asked.
He nodded. “Bright Morning. Name of ship,” he explained. “Everyone coming to America wants coming on Bright Morning. Nine times across ocean, never stopped by INS.”
Well, of course. If the United States government was slipping its own immigrants in among the illegals on the Bright Morning, why wouldn’t the word have gotten to the INS that this was a ship to leave alone?
I wondered in passing what the State Department owed the INS for this favor. That thought was immediately replaced by another.
“The fox,” I said. “Borrowing the tiger’s might.”
All three men, the two who spoke English and the one who didn’t, gave me identical blank looks.
“Duke Lo. Lo Da-Qi,” I translated myself. “He has his people, his gangsters, carrying his dope. H. B. Yang doesn’t know anything about it.”
Lu and Lee whispered again. Lu confirmed what I’d said, while Lee smiled, looking superior. “Ship owner knows nothing about packages. Knows nothing about gangsters, work his restaurant. Lee Yuan says, old man, stupid man. Soon, Lo Da-Qi be big boss, Yang Hao-Bing working for Lo Da-Qi.”
That’s some bragging on Duke Lo, I thought, coming from the dog who bites his master.
But the important question remained. “The man in America who arranges the gangsters’ passage,” I said to Gai-Lo Lu. “Pays for them, provides their papers. It’s Yee Ji-You also?”
The consultation and the answer: “Yes.”
“Joe Yee,” Bill said from his kitchen, pouring boiling water into a one-cup teapot for me and into the glass coffee press thing for himself.
“Joe Yee,” I said. “Working both sides of the street. Why not? The State Department already has this underground railroad thing all set up. All Joe Yee has to do is take the money
Duke Lo gives him and funnel it into the system, tell the guys in China, ‘Bring me this guy and that guy.’ The guys in China don’t know the difference between the dissidents the State Department actually wants and the gangsters Duke Lo wants.”
I answered him from his desk, where I was trying my best to do a creditable job of wrapping a concrete-block-size package in shiny red paper. I had left Chin Family Association with it—to the obvious relief of Song Chan and Gai-Lo Lu, and to the clear but impotent dismay of Yuan Lee—going out the basement door, scurrying across the rear yard and through the building behind. Not that I thought my new business associate, Duke Lo, was having me followed or anything treacherous like that. Still, the back exit route was there, developed to be employed in the occasional Chin Family Association emergency, so why not use it?
The paper ripped, for the second time. I sighed, balled it up, smashed it into the wastebasket, and cut a new sheet.
“And when they get here,” Bill said, “they become Duke Lo’s soldiers.”
“Working off their passage,” I said. “The same as anybody else.” I pulled tangled Scotch tape from my fingers.
“Except when a guy like Lee gets ambitious and steals the package he was supposed to deliver.”
I shook my head. “He wasn’t the courier. There were two of them, Duke Lo’s guys, on that ship. Yuan Lee didn’t know whose dope it was when he found it. He just thought it would make a nice nest egg to start his new life with.” I folded the new piece of paper around the package, but it was a half inch short. “When he got here, the only criminal he knew to offer it to was his new boss.”
“Some joke, eh, boss?” Bill came into the living room.
“What?”
“The Marx Brothers. You’re driving me nuts. Here. You pour, I’ll wrap the damn thing.” He took wrapping paper and Scotch tape from me. “Gift-wrapped kilos. This is important?”
“It’s an elegant touch,” I said. “He’ll be impressed. I bet the money he brings will be in a red envelope.” I went into
the kitchen and poured the tea and coffee into mugs while Bill maneuvered paper, package, and tape.
“You sure you don’t want to call Deluca and March, tell them we found the source of the cargo they don’t want?” he asked.
“We will. After we get Duke Lo. They can wait.”
“Good,” Bill said. “Just checking. Okay, there.” He stepped back, through rustling and folding. “How’s that?”
“So it’s not my strength, gift-wrapping,” I said defensively, looking at his rather beautiful package. “I’m not so used to it. My people don’t have all the centuries of Christmas practice your people have.” I brought the mugs into the living room.
“All right,” Bill said as we sat, him in the easy chair and me on the couch, to drink our tea and coffee. “Are you ready for this?”
“For what?”
“For lunch tomorrow.”
“Oh, that,” I said breezily. “Oh, sure.”
“Good. Just checking.”
“How about you?”
“Always prepared. I was a Boy Scout.”
“You weren’t.”
“That’s true. But I thought like one.”
“Don’t tell me what that means.”
“Okay, then, distract me.”
“Why, is that my job?”
“You’re the boss.”
“Oh.” I sipped my tea. “I don’t know about this boss stuff. Employees seem like dangerous things to have.”
“No question.”
“I mean, they get you all messed up with things, dogs and foxes and tigers and who knows what.”
“Undeniable, if a little obscure.”
“Maybe partners are better.”
“Well,” said Bill, after a long sip of coffee, “I wouldn’t know. I’ve never had one.”
“Me, either.”
He said nothing.
Me, either.
Finally, someone had to make a sound in this very quiet place.
I said, “Everything changes.”