“You know what I hate most about this case?” I said to Mary in the relative peace of the Fifth Precinct Squad Room, after two hours of interviews, questions, answers, more questions, and the same answers in the wake of the arrest of Deluca, March, and Joe Yee. The phones were ringing and detectives came and went, but at Mary’s desk, our own little island, Mary and I drank tea and ignored them all.
“I can think of a lot of things,” she said, leaning back in her rickety wooden chair.
“Yes, but most. Besides Peter being in the hospital and the discovery of how sleazy the human race turns out to be.”
“Well, it’s not like that’s news. Okay, what?”
“I hate most the way every man I met tried to get me to do what he wanted by telling me I should because I’m Chinese. Joe Yee wanted me to tell him where the waiters were. Warren Tan wanted me to join the revolution. H. B. Yang wanted me to tell him where the waiters were, and Duke Lo wanted me to help him take over Chinatown. Even Deluca, wanting me to thank them for killing Duke Lo! Every one of them thought I should do what he wanted just because I’m Chinese. Every one.”
“Not Bill,” Mary said.
I looked at her, my tea stopped on its way to my mouth. “What?”
“Not Bill. He didn’t ask you to do anything because you’re Chinese.”
“Well …” I said.
“In fact, if I understand it right, he asked you if you wanted him to get off the case because he wasn’t Chinese.”
“Well,” I said again, wondering if the defensive note in my voice could possibly be put down to the morning’s excitement, or tiredness, or something. “And?”
“Oh, nothing,” Mary said. “Just trying to keep all the facts straight, in case someday you want to look at them again.”
I was saved from having to answer by a detective who came by and dropped a file on Mary’s desk.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Forensics report on the Mott Street bomb,” he said. “Came in while you were busy.”
“It’s Patino’s case,” Mary said, picking up the file.
“I know. He’s going back there later—he has an appointment with that young guy, Tan, now that he’s seen this. I just thought you’d like a look.”
Mary nodded, perusing the paper stapled to the inside of the folder. “Thanks, Liebold.” The other cop walked away. Her eyes still on the file, Mary said to me, “Those three aren’t going to trial, you know. Their agency will spring them one way or another. I wonder why they’re digging in their heels and refusing to admit to the bomb, when they don’t care what else they say because they know there’s nothing we can do about it?” She dropped the folder wearily on her desk. “Nothing that tells me much. C-4 explosive—that’s some Army thing—and a time-delay detonator.”
“Nothing we didn’t know.”
“Well, the C-4. Our guys thought it was something more conventional.”
“No, you knew that. Warren Tan told me, when I was over there.”
“I don’t see how he could have. It takes them a few days. This just came back.”
“But he …”
I trailed off as Mary’s eyes met mine. “Oh, my God,” she said.
We jumped up and charged out of the Squad Room together.
It couldn’t have taken us two minutes, fast-walking the Chinatown streets, to reach the basement office of the Chinese Restaurant Workers’ Union. The door was ajar, as it had been when I’d come here the morning after the bomb, when Warren Tan had told me the explosive agent was a small amount of C-4 under the desk.
Inside, some things had improved. The furniture had been righted, progress made in organizing papers and piles of books. Fluorescent tubes blown out by the percussive force of the explosion had been replaced. Their too-generous light in the small, neatened room had the odd effect of eliminating shadows, so that everything seemed clear, open, available, but nothing was quite the way you expected to see it.
Except, maybe, Warren Tan, his face pale, dark circles under his eyes, sitting behind one of the newly reorganized desks with papers in each hand.
He looked up as Mary and I came in, and after a beat, he spoke. “I was expecting Detective Patino.”
“He’ll be along,” Mary said, her eyes staying on him. I said nothing, letting her take the lead.
“We want to ask you some questions,” Mary said. “I’d like you to come to the station house with us.”
“I’ll answer anything you like,” Warren Tan said. “But I’d like to stay here. Unless you have an arrest warrant?”
“I can get one.”
“You won’t have to. But let’s stay here for now.”
I watched Mary as, after a brief hesitation, she nodded and sat in one of the folding chairs set up across the desk. I sat in the other.
I wondered how Mary was going to begin, but she didn’t need to.
“It’s about the bomb, right?” Warren Tan asked, slipping some papers into a file folder. He reached over his hot plate,
from which a teapot gently breathed steam into the air, and placed the folder on top of one of the piles.
“Yes,” Mary said.
“When Detective Patino called to say the forensics report was in, I knew it would be soon,” he said. He looked at me. “I knew I had a problem as soon as I heard myself say ‘C-4’ when you came in that morning. I was hoping you wouldn’t catch on.”
“I almost didn’t,” I said. “Until now.”
Mary seemed about to say something else, but Warren went on. “I was desperate,” he said. “I had to find a way to back the NYLC into a corner publicly.”
“Why?” Mary asked.
He poured tea from the steaming pot into a large mug. Its flowery aroma filled the air as he sipped from it. “After the NYLC stopped talking to us, I could see our days were numbered. Once Chinatown workers got the idea that American labor wasn’t just ignoring us, but that they knew about us and actually didn’t want us, they’d lose whatever little faith they’d ever had that the union could do them any good. H. B. Yang and the old crowd would have won, just like that.”
“There must have been another way,” I said. “Something in the courts, some other kind of pressure. Peter said—”
“I know,” he said quietly, sipping more tea. “Peter said it’s not done this way anymore. Lydia, it will always be done this way.” He put the mug down. “No one was supposed to get hurt. I’d called a demonstration for that night. Everyone was supposed to be there, at Dragon Garden. And I used so little explosive. So little. I didn’t want to damage the building, you see.”
His face darkened suddenly, as if with pain, then his features slowly smoothed out again. He took a breath and sipped more tea as he sat looking at Mary and me.
“You don’t look good,” I said to him. “I think a doctor—”
“I’ve been in and out of hospitals since I was two,” he told me calmly. “I’ll know when it’s time.” He looked around the office. “Everything here’s in order,” he said. “I moved
the most important papers, tax records, things like that, to over there”—pointing at a file cabinet across the room from where the bomb had been—“so they’d be safe. Song Chan knows the filing system. So did Chi-Chun Ho.” He shook his head. “God, I’m sorry about Ho.”
“I think—” said Mary, but she was interrupted by a knock on the open door and the entrance of a tall, silver-haired man.
“Hey, Kee,” he said when he saw Mary. “What’re you doing here? I hear you had quite a day.”
“Hi, Patino. I came to talk to Mr. Tan. There’s something he needs to tell you.”
The tall man looked to Warren Tan. I had shifted in my chair when he’d come in; now I turned back.
I was just in time to hear Warren, his face paler than before, say, “I think you’ll have to tell him.” He folded slowly forward, arms pressed against his stomach. He rested his head on the neatly piled desk. For a moment nothing sounded in the room except his ragged breathing.
Then, not even that.
Mary leapt up and grabbed the phone. She gave it her name and rank, demanded an ambulance as Patino pulled Warren to the floor and pushed rhythmically against his chest, counting, pushing, counting again. He kept at it until the sound of a siren cut through the silence, until the paramedics came charging down the stairs and, pushing him aside, tried to do what he’d tried to do.
They didn’t succeed. We watched them take Warren Tan’s body from the union office, not in a hurry now, Patino and Mary and I standing aside as they maneuvered up the stairs.
“My God,” Patino breathed, the first words he’d spoken since Warren collapsed. “Young guy like that.”
“He had a bad heart,” Mary said. “Since he was a child.”
Patino shook his head. “God, what a shame. Hey, Kee? What was he going to tell me?”
Mary looked at the other detective. “I don’t know, Patino. He didn’t have time.”
“God,” Patino said again. “Listen, I’ll go back and start the report. I’d just as soon get out of here anyway. There’s
some smell, something sweet—what the hell is it?”
I moved slowly to Warren Tan’s desk. I felt the side of the teapot; it was still warm. Lifting the top, I peered inside it. Long, thin leaves lay damply among small snips of twigs.
“Oleander,” I said.
“Oleander?” Patino asked. “What’s that? Something you people make tea out of?”
“Yes,” said Mary, before I could answer.
Patino left to start writing the report at the Fifth Precinct that Mary and I would have to contribute to.
Mary stared at the teapot, then lifted her eyes to mine.
“Oleander,” she said. “All I know about oleander is that we learned in Chinese school you’re not supposed to eat it.”
I nodded. I’d learned that, too; we all had.
“Because,” I said, “it’ll stop your heart.”