Hey, Phu … you wanna hear something funny? I got a reporter here…. He seems like an okay guy…. The thing is, like this guy, he’s not gonna screw you around. All he wants to hear is the other side. All he’s been hearing is the Lotus crying.
—STEVEN WONG
From within the screen of the snow-covered van we watched Steven Wong’s house. It was February 15, past 4 P.M., yet we saw no footprints from Steve’s door to the street, no tire tracks from his garage to the road. The snow had kept him home.
John Collins, the cameraman, leaned over and tucked the radio mike behind the inside of my lapel. David Paperny put the headphones on for a sound check. “Give me your code sentence if you get in trouble.”
“Okay, if you hear me say ‘Life begins at forty,’ you’ll know I’m in immediate danger.”
John lowered the window six inches, hoisted the camera and zeroed on Wong’s front door, then swung the lens to the living room’s picture window. The shades were drawn.
“I’ll come up with an excuse to open the blinds,” I said.
“Just keep him talking and we’ll be happy,” said David, straightening my lapel.
I jumped out and began staggering through the wet snow, up the block to 5018 Clarendon Drive. It was a catalog-order big house, aspiring to mansionhood and typical of the tile-roofed “Vancouver specials” being built by nouveau riche Asians on the east side of town. It had tacky brick-facing on the first level and a glaring white second story with wide bay windows and balconies. The house filled the corner’s double-wide lot and went all the way back to the fire lane—room enough for parents, brothers, aunts, cousins, and a platoon of Gum Wah bodyguards.
Halfway up the block I began rehearsing the strategy I would be taking with Steve. I would open with the stock-in-trade of grifters around the world: compliment the target for possessing the opposite of his most embarrassing deficit. In the case of the eighth-grade dropout Steve, I would mention I knew people who were in awe of his intelligence. Second—and it would be important to braid this around the first—I’d casually let Steve know I was buddy-buddy with his enemies on both sides of the law, hinting I could be a help or a threat. A third maneuver would tie a bow around the other two: I would take advantage of what one of my educational-psychology professors once called “relational imbalances.” Steve was 26, I was 40. He was Chinese, I was white. He was an outsider, I appeared to be an insider. My guess was that as a Canadianized gangster and a braggart, he was not averse to recognition from the dominant culture. I suspected he would therefore respond to a white-establishment father figure who offered him respect for his underworld attainments as well as a humanist’s concern for his safety. On the face of it, I would be the street-talking schoolteacher Steve never had. In reality, for the sake of all the Bob Moienis of the world, I would be scheming gangster-style to betray him.
I crossed the street, pushed open the wrought-iron gate between brick stanchions and walked up the path to the gilded doors. I knocked on the frosted glass. I waited.
A boy of about 13 cracked open the door. That was Gerald, Steve’s nephew.
“Is Steven Wong in?” I asked, my heart thumping.
“Who?” he said, as if he’d never heard of his uncle.
“Steven,” I repeated. “Is Steven Wong in?”
He looked me up and down. In my blue trench coat, blue shirt, and blue tie, I didn’t look like a killer. I looked like a cop. That, of course, was deliberate on my part. Steve always talked to cops. Still, I wondered, what kind of gangster lets his little nephew answer the door when there’d been gunfire all over the city for months?
“Uh, yeah—hold on,” Gerald said.
At that I almost turned around and gave a thumbs-up, then remembered John and David were right there beside my heart, listening, and right up against my back with the lens.
Finally, there was Steven, just a little taller than Gerald but 50 pounds heavier. He wore a white silk shirt, black jeans, and cowboy boots with silver toes that came to spear points. He had a broad face, and terrible vision. He squinted at me through thick aviator glasses.
“Yeah.”
“Hi, I’m Terry Gould and I’ve been trying to talk to you for the longest time,” I announced, with unfeigned relief that I was finally in front of him. “I’ve been trying to pass a message to you through Harry Rankin—your lawyer?”
He turned that over in his mind for a moment, looking at a spot in front of my shoes and leaving me to study the unruly cowlick pointing at me from his thick head of hair.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said.
“I’m friends with your lawyer?” I went on, not entirely a lie, since I’d kidded around with Rankin after city council meetings. “And I was down in San Francisco over the summer?”
That did it. He looked up at me with the recollection in his gaze, his bulbous nose literally lifting to sniff this reporter who’d been leaving messages about the Wah Ching for months. You’re the guy, his magnified eyes seemed to say. He scanned the street behind me, a half-second search that took in a thousand threats. Then he made the worst mistake of his life.
“Why don’t you jump in, man, come in, man.”
“Thanks a lot, man.”
The house was purest white, quite cold, very bare, and spookily lacking the scent of a home. The foyer ceiling was 20 feet high, and from it hung a crystal chandelier dotted with little yellow bulbs. At the top of a flight of stairs at the end of the hall I saw an elderly Chinese couple eyeing me from an opened door. That was Cheung Ing and Yue Kim Wong, Steve’s father and mother. Yue wore a black quilted vest and Cheung a thin brown sports jacket. I raised my hand and smiled and they moved wordlessly back and closed the door.
Steve led me down the spartan hall and pushed open a door on the left that was flush with the wall, with no molding around it and no knob, just a brass circle for a key. He held the door for me to enter and, as he bolted us in, I found myself staring across the vaultlike living room at something I instantly recognized. Above a stone fireplace was an unfurled red paper fan, and hanging across the fan were a pair of wooden-sheathed ninja swords with lacquered hilts. I’d seen this display in a photo the police had confiscated in a house raid after Steve had returned from being initiated into the 14K in Hong Kong. In that photo a considerably skinnier, 21-year-old Steve had been posed bare-chested before the fan and swords, his finger on the trigger of a huge machine pistol, with another machine pistol holstered beneath his armpit, the twin shoulder straps nicely framing, on his pectorals, two winged-dragon Triad tattoos, and an eagle on his right bicep. Now, atop the fireplace mantel, I saw a statuette of the red-faced Triad god of war and plunder, Kwan Kung. A cluster of incense sticks burned before the god’s altar and on its back wall were the Chinese characters that stood for Hung Mun—the universal Triad order.
As I took a step towards this striking ceremonial arrangement, a white Pekingese leapt from the couch and cut me off, growling at my feet. The growling prompted a pair of canaries to begin frantically whistling in their bamboo cage in the kitchen. Adding to the hubbub was a loudly bubbling 20-gallon aquarium. Not only was the place noisy as a menagerie, but in front of the drawn blinds was the additional layer of a polished silk curtain decorated with shiny gold dragons. Now, how would I get those layers open?
Steve sat down at a black lacquered dining room table in an alcove between the kitchen and living room. Slouching back, he asked me if I was a journalist or a reporter—a distinction I found amusing.
“Uh, both,” I replied, sitting across the table and rushing to finish my opening line. “For the longest time I wanted to meet you,” I said. “Because you’re the smartest guy in the group. In Gum Wah, anyway—and I’ve had a lot to do with your cousin.”
“You mean Bill?” he asked, referring to Bill Chu, for whom the family relation was a perpetual embarrassment—one that Steve always mentioned on the witness stand.
“Yeah,” I said. “He’s giving you a raw deal.”
“Yeah, I know that,” he said, raising his arms and clasping his hands atop his cowlick.
“Now why the fuck is the guy downing on you so much. I can’t figure that out.”
“I don’t know. We’re not from the same side of the family, anyway. His brother married my cousin.”
“All I know is, of all the guys I met in the works, everyone says you’re the brightest of all of them. Thing is, you should have been able to get that gun permit you applied for two years ago. And Ditchfield got on the stand there—”
He waved his hand above his head at the mention of Chu’s colleague Peter Ditchfield, then corrected me: it was Martin Turner who had taken the stand. “He lied like shit,” Steve said.
“I know he lied like shit. But it’s on the fucking record. I mean, the papers covered it. And the way they dealt with you was unforgivable. I mean, you ran a legit business. Green Auto Body. And they so did a job on your name. What I wanna know is, why aren’t you suing them?”
“Why am I not suing them?” Steve asked. He seemed to ponder my question for a moment, then leaned down and picked up his rat dog. He scratched it between the ears. “I never got around to it I guess.”
“Because they’re putting it like Gum Wah guys are bad guys. I don’t figure that. Gum Wah guys, you help them, I figure. You got ’em jobs to begin with.”
“Oh yeah,” he said, absently lifting his dog’s paws and inspecting the nails. “They were doing pretty good until the police came into the shop and harassed them. And they got fired. Laid off.”
I shook my head in sympathy. “So they’re all gone now from Green’s Auto Body. Did they get jobs again?”
“No, because everywhere they go, they get hounded by the police.”
“Yeah, I was talking about that with Harry. And with Phil. You know Phil Rankin?” I asked, as if I didn’t know the answer. Harry’s son was a lawyer who often acted on behalf of Asian mobsters and who had been cocounsel with Ian Donaldson in the extortion trial of the Viet Ching leader Allan Keung Law. The police tended to lump the Rankins and Donaldson in the same boat: left-wing bleeding hearts who roundly attacked the credibility of meathead cops, both in court and in the press.*
“Yeah, Phil’s doing a couple of cases for me now,” Steven said. “Immigration. Not for me, for my sister. I’m Canadian. She moved to the States, she’s trying to come back now.”
“So, you take guys like Phil and Harry Rankin on the one side, and they know what’s going on,” I said, “and on the other side, you take the Asian Crime Squad.”
“They don’t know dick,” he replied, startling me by thumping the table with a stubby forefinger. “That’s what this is all about, they don’t know dick. They assume!”
“They’re assuming a lot!” I said, trying to sound just as volatile as Steve. “And one of the things that this is all about is racism. There’s an exposé here I could do on what’s going on.”
Steve mussed his already unkempt hair. “Ah, I have enough publicity already—”
“Yeah, but it’s all bad publicity.”
“Yeah,” he agreed.
“And I think it’s time for some good publicity. One of the worst things is this stuff you’re getting from Park Lo and the Lotus.”
That surprised him. “Oh, you know them too, eh?”
I kept my eyes on his, telegraphing a maximum amount of confusing innuendo as I said, “Yeah, and they started it, right?”
“Yeah.”
“And the last thing that happened at the Goldstone bakery, that’s their fault.”
“Well, the police were there, there’s witnesses there saw it happen,” he replied, drawing on what was obviously a considerable reserve of indignation. “We weren’t armed then. We went down there to eat, and we saw the guns being fired, and we stopped them from looting the place. We held them down for the police. We phoned the police, and that’s what happened.”
“You phoned the police, right!” I said. “But they’re not saying that now. The police aren’t saying you phoned the police.”
“You know how many fucking witnesses?” he dismissed the cops, disgusted at their perpetual misrepresentation of the facts. “This is four o’clock in the afternoon, Chinatown central. What are you gonna do, kill the guy? You can’t, there’s laws.”
“So you phoned the police—so why didn’t the papers phone you up and get the right story?”
Steve dropped his rat dog flat on the carpet and leaned towards me. “Okay—I’ll tell you the right story,” he said, wagging his thumb and forefinger at me. “The Lotus guys are putting a couple of my guys in jail where they don’t belong. They’re saying that our guys are taking out their guys, assaulting them. Our guys are getting all these raw deals with the police. They’re being charged and going through the court system now. I got a guy I just hung up with. He’s inside the remand center, he’s been there for the last three months. No bail. For assault. The Lotus tried to burn his house down, and he came out and caught the guy. And the guy ran away.”
“Which Lotus guy was that?”
“Ah, what’s his name,” Steve said. He bent over and placed his palm on his rejected mutt’s head, then lifted the dog to his lap again. “See, the Lotus guy admitted to us that he was the driver.” Steve hesitated, then appeared to make a decision. “Jimmy Wu is his name. His house was shot at a while back. He’s been at all the drive-by shootings.”
“Jimmy Wu. And yet he’s the guy getting away with it.”
“Yeah. They’re charging our guys because Jimmy keeps crying wolf, because the police are hard up against our guys anyway.”
“How you gonna dispel that image?”
His eyes narrowed as he appeared to weigh the options for a public relations makeover, one of which was sitting before him. “Ah, I guess it comes with the territory, eh?”
“Yeah, I guess.” I laughed. “I mean you’re doing pretty well here.” Maybe he didn’t need to dispel the image, since the territory was obviously paying dividends. “Anyway, it’s a gorgeous place,” I added, looking around at the lacquered sideboards with their gold filigree and the expensive bamboo screens on either side of them. He’d bought the place for his parents for half a million a couple of years ago.
“Ah, it keeps me alive,” Steve said to the middle of the room.
“You’re still running a business?”
He shrugged one shoulder, still looking at empty space.
“No, huh. You can’t get work?”
He swung his gaze back my way. “Ah, every time I try the police come around and tell the owners I’m using the place for a firing range,” he complained, “or it’s a headquarters for the gangs, I’m trying to siphon the gangs through there.”
I tsked in disgust, offering the opinion that Vancouver must certainly be a tough place to do business. Different from Brooklyn, where I grew up, or Hong Kong, where they left you alone.
“Yeah,” Steve concurred, “I was born in Hong Kong. I grew up in Vancouver and I grew up in New York. I just came back from there two weeks ago. We were in the Jamaica, Queens area.”
Now that was something worth knowing, I thought. In recent years pockets of middle-class neighborhoods in Queens had become New York’s second Chinatown, dominated by two gangs called the White Tigers and the Green Dragons. Over the summer they’d been involved in a number of anarchic shootings, one of which had taken the life of a white bystander in a restaurant. I pocketed that jagged-edged tidbit and returned to the subject of the Asian squad’s respect for his intelligence, which Steve seemed to misinterpret as a sign of their affection for him.
“I know, there’s some police out there do like me, because I stand up to the Vietnamese,” he said. “We started against them a couple of years ago, and that’s why they’re not that rough anymore.”
“Did you flatten them?” I asked, because I knew the Vietnamese tended to arrive at the homes of enemies in force, and with propane torches.
“Well, when I was younger. I’m not worried about it any longer.” He put his arms on the table and looked me in the eyes. “Look, I don’t need this kid stuff, this drive-by shooting stuff anymore. This is my parents’ house, eh? And I don’t want—” He paused, sighed, looking at the door, suddenly touchingly exhausted by the battles on his threshold. “The thing is, we’re Orientals, we got problems, we take them out on the streets, we don’t want to bring them home,” he went on, as if he was excluding the Vietnamese from the realm of Orientals. “And I don’t mind talking to you, it’s not gonna hurt me. I can even get you a couple of guys you think is hard-core members, they’re pussycats—but they been pushed to the limit.”
“You can get them to talk to me?”
“Sure,” he said, sitting back like a gangster don. “I tell them to open up, they’ll open up.”
“Well, why don’t we do that then? Tell the real story.”
He took off his Coke-bottle aviators and cleaned them with the front placket of his silk shirt as he thought about the possibility. “You know, we’re not keen on journalists.” He looked through the lenses at the ceiling, as if trying to see into the future, then put them back on. “I mean, you seen what happened at the pool hall, the cameraman and everything?” he asked, alluding to an incident a few weeks before, when a crew from CKVU-TV boldly entered Fraser Billiards and sandbagged Steve and half a dozen of his boys. His enforcers upended the camera and then closed in tight around the intruders. “We told them, ‘You leave quietly, or else,’” Steve said, recollecting the terror of the news crew. At that he broke into a smile, his first of the interview, and giggled. “Hee, hee, hee. They left.”
“I can’t figure why they did that,” I said. “Because you don’t harass innocent citizens.”
He giggled again. “You ever see us beat up on some innocent guy?”
“No, because I think you’re above that kind of thing. You’re a respectable businessman. There’s an organization, and the organization is fed up with being pushed around. It’s Gum Wah. By the way, why did the Gum Wah and Red Eagles split?”
“The Gum Wah’s not part of Red Eagles,” he instructed me sternly.
“But you were once part of Red Eagles.”
“Yeah, but I was a lot younger then.”
“And then you outgrew them?”
“Yeah. Gum Wah and Red Eagles are local. And most of my friends are from the Orient.”
I glanced at my watch. Nineteen minutes.
“Would you ever go on camera for us and talk about this?” I asked.
“I don’t think I would,” Steve said, “but I know a couple of guys who would. Who do you work for now again?”
“Well, right now I’m with CBC,” I said.
I stood up, trying to kill time while John changed tapes and also to draw Steve over to the window. “Hey, those are gorgeous fish!” I crossed to the aquarium by the living room curtains, knelt down and peered at a strange species of goldfish that looked like it had tumors behind its eyes. “Where can I get fish like these?”
“Those? You get ’em in Richmond,” Steve said, mentioning a suburb that is Vancouver’s version of Queens, chockablock with the international airport and serving as the city’s second Chinatown. “You gotta watch how you feed ’em or they don’t breed,” he advised. He came up beside me at the tank. “Chinese goldfish. Anything gold in Chinese means good luck, for money.”
“I don’t think you got anything to worry about when it comes to luck.” I slapped his shoulder, still examining the mutant monsters.
“I got nothing to worry about, period. What should I worry about?” He sat down on the couch and I lowered myself onto the next cushion. He suddenly seemed very much at ease. I reached up and pulled the curtain back to better admire the polished dragons.
“I mean, they’re saying you never been in jail more than a couple of days.”
“Days?” He laughed. “Hours, they mean. Hee, hee, hee, you know that song ‘I Never Picked Cotton’? Well my song’s ‘I Never Did Time.’”
“So you never been convicted of a crime—well then, why does the Asian Crime Squad cause you so much trouble?”
“I guess they have this thing about Orientals,” he cracked. “I think it’s all in their heads. We don’t hurt people. You ever read in the newspaper that I ever hurt somebody? Why should I hurt somebody? Hee, hee, hee. I could go to jail, the way the cops work.”
“That’s it, never, and I think it’s important that’s told. So you think you could get some guys in here to talk about it?”
“I just have to make a phone call and you can have all the guys in here you want. Where’s this story gonna go, on TV?”
“I’d like it to,” I said.
“Well, like I said, we get a lot of negative responses from the press, but all I can tell you is that if it wasn’t for us, this city would be a lot worse from the Asian gangs then it is right now.”
“The Gum Wah keeps the Asian gang activity down?”
“Well, who else is gonna fight them?”
“You mean the Vietnamese?”
“Well, you heard about it.” He put his arm up on a bolster and stretched his leg out on the cushion, settling in. “You know about us, Ditchfield told you about us. What did he say about us and the Vietnamese?”
“He fears the Vietnamese a lot more than he fears you.”
“Well, of course—I’m harmless to them. What am I gonna do? I’m not gonna fight the police. But the Vietnamese—they’re just like a little boy, he kills once and gets away with it, he’ll kill again. If you let them push the Oriental people around they’ll take over this city. It’s like the Goldstone bakery, the guy shot off the gun, if we didn’t do our best, who knows how many people woulda got killed? You know, I don’t want to see that happen. I cry when I see Orientals hurt, you seen them on TV. They’re my own people. They can’t protect themselves. And the press—” He paused, made his fingers into a gun above the bolster and casually, disconcertingly, pointed his forefinger between my eyes. “If I was a gang member and you weren’t, and we were walking down in Chinatown and I didn’t like the look of you, and I pulled a gun and blew your head off—” He shot me and then placed his hand into an imaginary shoulder holster. “There’s nothing you could do about it.”
“Nope,” I said.
“See? I don’t like that kind of shit. But that gives the gangs more power and face. You don’t fucking see Oriental gangs advertising in the papers for members,” he said, as if murder was the best advertisement for recruitment. “Ah, if you want the real low story of what goes on, I can get you guys to talk to you. I can even show you where we hang out. Fuck, we’re harmless.”
“Instead of that bullshit that CKVU did,” I said. “See, that’s the kind of stuff that gives all the bad press.”
“I’ll tell you one thing, okay?” he said, pushing his glasses up on his nose and pulling his leg off the cushion to lean forward. “CKVU comes in there with cameras—now the Lotus knows how we set up the pool hall.” He raised his hands in front of his chest, then opened them at 90 degrees, replicating Fraser Billiards’s double set of doors. The second pair, at right angles to the first, were locked in the evenings to prevent an unencumbered invasion during high-occupancy hours. Unfortunately, CKVU had filmed the elaborate entry procedure. “So next time the Lotus comes in there,” Steve said, “they’re gonna start shooting away. You know why? The Lotus are declining right now because of what happened down in Chinatown. Who’s gonna join them? That’s why they have to get face, that’s why they have to hit us…. Now the camera opened the doors for them. See, I don’t think I’m smart or anything, but logically the press is fueling this fire, which they shouldn’t be. Sure there’s a lot of drive-by shootings going on. You got on record there how many drive-by shootings there are, how many of our houses got hit. One Lotus guy’s house gets hit, the press is all over everybody. But our house gets hit, there’s no press. There’s two or three of our guys that got shot at—nothing, not even a word in the newspaper.”
“Why are they prejudiced against you then?”
“It’s not that they’re prejudiced against me—there’s a Southside Gang Squad in our area—”
“Who go after Los Diablos and those guys—”
“Yeah, right. So everybody knows what’s around the area. And the press gets word of it, they just go crazy over it. Something’s ten feet long, they say it’s twenty. I got a guy for you who’s accused of assaulting a Lotus guy—he wasn’t even there. He’ll tell you the story.”
“You’re great to me.” I slapped his knee.
He returned the slap and winked. “Hey, you got a job to do. I understand that. Just like a policeman, they got a job to do. But some people take their job too seriously. You understand what I’m saying?” he asked, smiling.
“Absolutely,” I smiled back.
“Ah, everybody’s trying to make a living,” he went on philosophically. “Fuck, we’re all on this earth to make a living. But the cops, they get too personal. The thing is, fuck, I don’t like the way Bill approaches me. You know, he comes up and sucks up to me and then he tells all the guys, ‘Fucking Steve,’ this and this. And then he comes up to me and says, ‘You should help me, Steve—I’m your blood. We’re cousins.’ But you know, if he approached me in a different manner—I’d help him. I tell you, there’s a lot of policemen out there that I did help in a couple of cases. I mean, fuck, I talk to ’em. A couple go out with me. But some people, they treat you like pricks, you’re gonna treat ’em like pricks, too.”
That was nice, I thought. Got him admitting to being an informant.
“I have to ask your advice on something for my own personal safety,” I said, pursuing a related subject on my mind. “I’m gonna go over to Park Lo’s place—”
“In Burnaby, yeah. He’s living in Burnaby for a while, on Hastings Street. We keep tabs on each other. But—” He held up a warning finger, and then turned it back on himself. “He don’t know where I live.”
“Uh sure. Now, I know the guy, just two months ago, he knocked two guys’ heads together in a restaurant.”
“A male and a female.”
“And there was a cop there?” I asked. I’d heard from Goathead that Steve was keeping tabs on Park through a cop he was awfully friendly with.
“Yeah, that cop’s my friend,” Steve said.
“Which cop was it?”
“I don’t wanna say.”
Suddenly Steve dropped his eyes to my jacket as if he’d noticed something revealed by the angle of my lapel. His expression changed, and the blood began to beat in my temples. His smile dissolved completely and he leaned all the way forward. “The thing that worries people here is that thing there.” He smiled coldly, lifted his finger and moved it towards the radio mike. I was about to say, Well, I guess life begins at forty, when he placed his finger against my heart, an inch from the mike, and scratched my shirt with his long silvery nail.
I looked down. “I’m wearing blue?” I asked.
“Well, it looks like a cop uniform. I mean it may be Calvin Klein, but still, you know. You just gotta be careful.”
Fuck, jeez, I thought, trying to force the terror to drain from my system.
“I’m safe to say that Park Lo would blow my head off if he got mad at me,” I casually said, because getting my head blown off was all I could think of at the moment.
“You’re safe to say that he don’t live alone. He’s got a couple of guys working for him most of the time.”
Still flustered, I cracked that maybe I should get a couple of unemployed Red Eagles for bodyguards. “Danny Win—is he an Eagle?” I asked. “Or, no, he’s a Vietnamese. I don’t know. Bill Chu mentioned him.”
“Ah, I don’t like a lot of Red Eagles. They’re scumbags, eh? They’re a bunch of lowlifes. Just a minute, I’ll find out.” He lifted his cell phone from the coffee table and punched a couple of digits.
As he stood up and paced into the middle of the room, I turned around, grabbed the cord and yanked the blinds up all the way, then looked through the window as if I was trying to better survey the falling snow in the twilight.
“Hey Phu,” Steve asked into the phone, “who’s Danny Win that’s a Red Eagle …? You don’t know him, eh …? Hey, you wanna hear something funny? I got a reporter here, and I told him about your situation, about you getting charged for a fight that you weren’t there…. Yeah, he says if you wanna talk to him, he’ll talk to you. He says that you guys are treated unfairly—so he says…. He seems like an okay guy—you wanna talk to him, or what …? The thing is, like this guy, he’s not gonna screw you around. All he wants to hear is the other side. All he’s been hearing is the Lotus crying…. Do I think you should talk to him? You got nothing to lose. You might get a girlfriend with all the publicity…. Okay, stay in touch.”
“Is he coming over?” I asked as Steve came back in my direction.
“Ah, I can get ahold of him anytime—” He stopped himself, his eyes going wide at the sight of the open blinds. “See, for your own personal safety, I’ll tell you, you have to leave this like this,” he told me, reaching behind the couch and dropping the shades with a hurried flick of the cord. “Los Diablos lives around the street—”
“I guess I shouldn’t write that, though.”
“You’re a journalist,” he said magnanimously, “you can write whatever you want—just not my address. I don’t need no drive-bys. Same with you—you write something, you don’t want some asshole know where you live, eh?”
“Sure, okay, well,” I said, in response to that. “The most important thing is that I tell what you want to be told. And if it’s Lotus that’s causing the fight, then that’s important that gets told.”
Steve sat down on the couch again and pursed his lips. “Okay, this is for your own personal reference, between you and me. The police know it already anyway. Lotus was recruiting around J.O., you know, John Oliver High School? So a couple of our guys went up to them and says, ‘Fuck off, get outta here, don’t recruit in this area.’ Because they were recruiting. So they lost face, they took off, right? That night, they went to burn this guy’s house down, which was the guy who told them to fuck off. You know who Kim Tam is?”
“Yeah, I know Kim Tam.”
“So they went to burn Kim’s house. So Kim came out and saw the car, Kim knows who they are. So the owner of the car is one of our guy’s girlfriend’s cousins. So we caught up to him the next night. So we said, ‘Look, you fuck—’ Because they poured gasoline all over Kim’s house, they were just gonna light it. So he told us who did it, who he drove, and whose idea it was. So we figured, he’s a small kid, there’s no use beating the shit out of him. So we let him go. His name’s Jimmy Wu. So we let him go, and the next day they caught up to the guys who tried to burn his house down in a hair-dressing place. And Kim went in there, with no weapons or nothing—and Kim put the guy’s head into the counter while the guy was extorting the place. So a couple of days later, this Lotus guy went and phoned the police and he started laying charges. He named all our guys that were there, plus a couple of guys that weren’t there. Okay? Now my guys are in jail, charged. And we’re down a couple. So then they move on another of our guys. Now that guy has been shot.”
“So it’s a matter of life and death now.”
“You got it. After the Lotus guys got kicked out of J.O. they started shooting at our places. So one day, we went down to the Goldstone to have coffee. That’s their hangout, right? And the guy pulled a gun, he started firing a gun. And that’s when we caught up to him and nailed him on the ground. We didn’t nail him on the ground,” Steve corrected himself, “we got him on the ground. And we called the police and the police arrived, but the guy didn’t make it. He died. He died a little after New Year’s. But whatever the case is, he pulled the gun.”
“He deserved it.”
“Yeah. The thing is, our guys were shot at, they didn’t go after him until an innocent bystander was shot. There was no weapons on our side. I got the police report. I’ll show it to you later. I get the police reports too. Hee, hee, hee.”
“Oh you do, eh?”
“Hee, hee, hee—yeah. So anyways, we had maybe six guys all together at the Goldstone, and there was maybe twenty Lotus guys. And I cut him off—he was with a friend with a gun, and I got him on the ground, and we just called the police from there. Someone said we hit him with a pipe. I got hit too. I don’t know who was doing the hitting. There was a lot of people there.”
“Where’d they get you?”
“Oh, on the side here. But I’m a big boy, I’m not gonna cry. Anyway, we went to the police, we cooperated, we went up to the police station, right away [the police] change their story, they say, ‘Look, you guys are gonna be charged with manslaughter.’ Right away we had our lawyers down there, we got out of jail that day. If the police gave us a chance to talk—we woulda told them everything, but they didn’t. But anyways, like what’s happening, these Lotus guys lost face now. So now they put Kim in jail, Kim Tam, eh?”
“So what are you gonna do?”
“There’s nothing you can do. These are new recruits, so the police don’t acknowledge they’re Lotus when things go to trial. So now you know what’s happening. Our guys are really upset. We’re the ones getting put in jail, when we’re not the ones doing shit. After Kim went to jail, there was a drive-by shooting at his house, they shot his window, and then a drive-by shooting at his parents’ house, twice. Nothing happened to a Lotus yet. Nothing! Because we stayed low. Because there’s gonna be charges pending down in the Chinatown thing. We don’t need any more problems than we can handle, so we stayed low. Finally one of our guys got pissed off. They shot at his house and they missed his parents, I guess they went for him. So he went to shoot at their house to see how he liked it. So right away the press picked up on it, the cameras went to the pool hall and everything.”
“Steve, this sounds like kid stuff to me,” I said. “And it could get you killed, too. Really. Where’s that gonna get you? You get it in the spine, you’re in a wheelchair the rest of your life.”
“Yeah,” he agreed, “the street’s at the real low level. Nothing I can do about it, ’cause they are just kids. New recruits, eh?”
“But you’re their leader,” I offered. “You just said, ‘I tell ’em what to do, they’ll do it—’”
“Well when you start out, you gotta work up to make a name. I was like that. Fuck, I been in the situation since I’m like ten, eleven. Everybody that comes through the ranks starts out somewhere.”
“And then what, they move into Triad? What’s the big one around here, by the way?”
“14K.”
“Yeah, so when you get old you become 14K Triad? You ever get over to Hong Kong and talk with 14Ks?”
“Doesn’t your intelligence tell you that?”
“I figured that.”
“They think that I’m a drug smuggler, that’s what the police probably told you,” he sneered. “They think that our group smuggles drugs because our group’s back in the Orient so much.”
“The police think that about the older guys,” I told him, “even in the Lotus, which is more affiliated with Sun Yee On Triad. And Danny Mo—You must know Danny, back in Toronto? What’s Danny’s Triad?”
“Kung Lok.”
“Yeah, Kung Lok Triad,” I said. “The cops know that the young kids are the street kids. But they’re the ones they worry about, ’cause they’re the ones doing drive-by shootings. ’cause the older ones get mature, they become businessmen. Like you.”
“I’ll tell you right now,” Steve replied, hitching his thumb over his shoulder, “no drive-by shootings happened until the spics and the Hindus came out and formed the Los Diablos gang. Before them there was no drive-by shootings. Before that, they didn’t like you they came up to you and they tried to blow you away, but they didn’t do a drive-by. The thing is, a drive-by shooting, we don’t agree with that. Because what happens if you hit someone’s brother or sister or something like that? The press is all over it and then you’re fucked. That’s bad publicity. See, say someone came by here and did a drive-by shooting, they don’t know who the fuck you are. They try and shoot me and they hit you. That’s what I mean. I don’t agree with that kind of shit. You don’t like someone, you go find him and you fucking take him out to the island.”
Meaning Richmond, I supposed, although I felt as if we were sitting in Hymie’s back in Brooklyn and he was talking about Long Island.
“You ever been initiated in 14K?” I asked, figuring it was time to ask.
“I don’t want to say it,” he laughed congenially, “but you know, you already know.”
I looked at the scarlet spread fan on the wall, and the swords, and the implacable stare of Kwan Kung. “I know you have,” I said. “Those initiations are beautiful ceremonies. They go back hundreds of years.”
Steve followed my gaze to the altar. “They go back longer than that,” he said, lowering his voice in reverence. “They go back since time began.”
“I mean their Paper Fan guy—you’ve seen his outfit.”
“Mmmhmm. Rashu. Pak tsz sin. Different ways to say it.”
I didn’t know if he meant those were the names for the outfit or the rank. “Four-twenty-six is it I think they call him?”
He shook his head. “That’s another.”
“Oh yeah, that’s right,” I corrected myself, as if I knew all about it, although I was still a little confused by the ranks and mystic numerology of the Triads. The number 426, Steve would explain to me a few days later, designated a Red Pole enforcer.
“I mean you start out as a 49,” I went on, referring to a numbered rank I was sure of, which stood for a lowly soldier. “But you’re way above a 49 now. What do they call you now, what’s your rank now?”
“I’m the only one in Canada,” he said flatly.
“You’re the only one in Canada?” I asked. “You’re the only one in Canada who’s a rashu or—”
“I won’t tell you, because if you print it, then they’ll know who it is,” he interjected, referring to the police. “That’s why I’m not worried about other people. See, someone’s gonna knock you off for that,” he pointed at me. “That’s why they ain’t gonna say something like that.”
I wasn’t sure if he meant he would knock me off if I revealed his Triad status, or someone would knock him off. I pursued the original premise for my calling him instead. The Wah Ching.
“Yeah, Wah Ching came up here,” Steve replied, “you know how fast they went back down?”
“You sent them down, huh?” I said, venturing that that was why they wouldn’t welcome him in San Francisco. “Wah Ching’s pretty powerful though. You know Vincent Jew. You can’t tell me you’re gonna handle Vincent Jew.”
“I’m not scared of anybody,” he giggled, “except my girlfriend.” That would be Laura, I thought, a gorgeous woman I’d heard about on the street who was in the real estate business.
“You gotta be scared of Vincent Jew though,” I said. “I mean, maybe in New York there’s somebody higher than him, but—”
“Well, I come from the ghettos of New York too. I’ve seen it all. Put it this way. You let someone push you, they’re gonna keep pushing.”
I agreed on that point: certainly nobody was pushing him from the Eagles now, although at one time they’d had quite the reputation for taking care of dissidents and competitors.
“See, that’s why I’m talking to you,” he told me, his aggression rising at the thought of the gang he’d successfully usurped. “Red Eagles are scumbags, I’ll tell you that much right now. All they know is ten-on-one. A real man would take you out to the alley and he’d just fucking whip your ass.”
His stupid dog jumped to the couch and Steve held a finger to its nose, making it go cross-eyed. “Okay,” I said, swinging the subject back to the Triads, “so at twenty-six you’ve gone just about higher than anybody else in the town?”
“There might be someone higher than me,” he casually replied, “but not that I know of.”
“Certainly not Triad-connected,” I said. “I mean, your guys go back to Hong Kong and then they come here, and they go with respect.”
“Yeah,” he affirmed. “See, Vincent Jew and all those guys, they go back to Hong Kong, that’s where the battlegrounds are. That’s where everything gets hammered out in the gang.”
“When was the last summit that you had with Triad guys?”
“We don’t have ‘last’ summits.” He shook his head, patient with my ignorance. “We always talk to them.”
“You’re always talking?” I asked. “Like long distance on the phone to Hong Kong?”
“Yeah.”
“Aren’t you afraid they got your phone tapped?”
“They already got it tapped,” he nodded downward to his cell phone on the table. “That’s understood.”
“So you don’t talk about important business on the phone.”
“There is no business to talk. What’s there to talk about? They’re the police. My friends are the police, you know that. They give me all the police reports. My friends in Hong Kong are the police too.”
“In the Hong Kong Triad Society Bureau?” I asked.
“Look, half the Hong Kong police are Triads,” he stated unequivocally. “That’s why no one talks to ’em. Maybe there’s always gonna be some honest cops, but fuck, they got problems. See, I’m brought up in the Old World. I came here when I was like four. I been back to the Orient at least seven, eight times. So I know both sides of the world. I speak both languages fluently. Why are people gonna trust cops when half the cops in Hong Kong are Triads?”
“They got this anti-corruption bureau, what’s it called?” I asked.
“ICAC,” he replied, using the acronym for the Independent Commission Against Corruption, set up in 1974 to combat the rampant Triad corruption and infiltration of the Royal Hong Kong Police.
“Half of them are corrupt, too?”
Steve looked at me as if I were an ignoramus. “What do you know about Triads?” he asked. “The Triads were first formed in the 1600s to overthrow a government. They did that, right? After that they was perfectly organized, there was no reason to disband it. So they went criminal. Okay, the police are already Triad members. You know who ICAC gets? The ones they throw to the wolves. Just to get them off their backs. How many retired Hong Kong policemen still live in Vancouver? I know a couple of Hong Kong police are retired here. How do they get the money to come over here?”
“Ah, they’re fuckin’ millionaires,” I said, aware he was probably referring to policemen connected to a scandal in the ’70s when a cabal of RHKP veterans, known as the Five Dragons, left the Crown Colony with their bags filled with millions they could not have accumulated on their lowly salaries.
“They’re fucking more than millionaires,” Steve said. “You just don’t know. Give you an example.” He mentioned the name of a prominent billionaire in Hong Kong, and then contrasted him to one in North America. “You guys might think, Donald Trump, he’s a rich guy. But whenever you’re that rich in the Oriental community, you’re connected.”
I asked whether that created some golden extortion opportunities when their relatives traveled here.
“Okay, I’ll tell you how the system works,” Steve said. “You’re in Hong Kong. I’m the police anyway, so I’m corrupt. You fly to New York? Great. I’ll make a phone call. It’s gonna take you thirteen hours to get over there anyways. I’ll make a phone call to all my friends, tell ’em whoever it is is flying over now. I’ll fax you a picture of him. When he comes over you pick him up. So they pick him up, they bring him to a hotel. Then they phone his parents up and say, ‘Look, we got your son, you don’t pay us the money, he’s gonna float back in a bag.’ That’s the way it works. Who they gonna turn to—the police? How the fuck they know this guy is on the plane to begin with? Because the police informed them. Immigration, everything. Everybody’s connected.”
I said there had to be some honest cops over there.
“There is clean cops,” Steve concurred resignedly. “There’s always gonna be. But you go watch a Chinese movie. The cops never win. They always get killed. Why do they always depict the police as corrupt? Very seldom do they depict the police as law-abiding.”
“Well look, you pay three taxes in Hong Kong. You pay to the government, you pay to the police, and you pay to the Triads. Right?”
“Well, the police is the Triads.”
“Okay, same thing,” I said.
“Yeah, one section of the city is run by all policemen, instead of Triads,” he explained. “Because they are the Triads. When the gang members go out they pray to a god for protection. When the cops go out, they pray to the same god. What does that show you? They belong to the same organization, that’s all there is to it. People will tell you otherwise, but they’re fucking lying to you.”
“You’re talking about Kwan Kung?” I asked, looking to the statuette over the mantel.
“Yeah. Gwang Gong is what we call him,” he said, smiling at his god.
I knew the allegiance of various sectors of society to Kwan Kung wasn’t as cut-and-dried as Steve was making out. In fact, Kwan Kung was also the sunny god of luck and of small businessmen, honored by legitimate proprietors in Chinatowns the world over. I’d also seen Kwan Kung in his green-and-gold regalia looking down on the tables in Vancouver’s gambling parlors. The memory reminded me to ask Steve about something else. When I’d gone looking for him in Chinatown a couple of weeks ago I’d found one of his favored haunts padlocked.
“What happened to the Duk Yee Gambling Club, that pai gow place?” I asked.
“Well, they closed it,” he told me, “because of the Red Eagles causing too much commotion”—a euphemism, I gathered, for extortion.
“I heard some of those pai gow places, a guy drops three or four hundred grand, they tell him, ‘You gotta pay it back or we get the house—you just visit some relatives in Hong Kong and bring back a shipment of paintings.’”
“Yeah, that happens,” Steve frankly admitted. “It happens quite often. I’ll tell you. Everything’s run by the gangs: the gambling casinos, everything. So they know. They know when you’re doing bad. They know when you’re doing good. The people in the community. They know, Oh, Freddy ‘n’ the boys, they went around to the casinos, they been to the whorehouses. ’cause they run all the places. So they know, they been doing good lately. Then one day you find out, they’re really in the shits, they haven’t been around for a long time. And I seen him, he wants to borrow money. So they get him on the next plane. Then you know. He’s not shipping no paintings. He’s shipping heroin.”
“That heroin that’s coming through, it’s going to New York, Detroit, and Boston?” I asked, turning the wheel on the conversaton so we drifted further in the white powder.
“Yeah, it’s coming through here,” Steve said. “See, most of the 14K protect the heroin trade. The big drug dealers, they come over here and we provide escort service for them. We don’t care what they do, we don’t know what they do. We’re just asked to look after them. So they don’t fucking get hauled off into a hotel room and get extorted.”
“So you just provide protection for those 14K couriers?” I casually asked, though I was floored by his admission.
“No, not the carriers,” he hedged. “The bosses. We don’t protect the carriers. We got problems with that if we do.”
“So they must have people on this side moving that heroin stuff,” I went on.
“They’re well connected all over,” Steve replied, staying in the third person. “14K is big. They have so many affiliated gangs, and so many of their own people. You understand, eh?” He pushed his glasses up on his nose again, as if debating whether to go on—and then did. “They got so many throughout the U.S. and Canada. They wouldn’t wanna know me telling you this but we probably even have twelve-, thirteen-year-olds. The thing is, we’re not proud of it. These things are going on. But life goes on. We can’t help it. We’re just like a grain in the fucking sand.”
“Yeah, I guess when you’re talking about a $300-billion trade, human life doesn’t mean too much.”
“That’s why most of our guys don’t have the insights of these guys,” he replied, referring to his new recruits, versus the veterans coming over from Hong Kong. “That’s where the insights come in. That’s what we provide for these guys, so at least they know what they’re up against. See, they look down the block, they see, ‘The guy’s got a fucking nice car, and I got dick. What are they doing that I ain’t doing?’ They join the gang, well, they’re making money here and there. Then they get caught up in the gang situation. It’s not fair but that’s life. We’re just here to struggle,” he went on. “We’re just here to survive. We’re not the majority here, we’re the minority. Everybody’s against us. The public, the press. So we’re fighting a losing battle. So we’re not gonna fight the press, we’re not gonna fight the police. But if some scumbag’s gonna get in our way, we’re gonna fight them. ’cause why should we step aside? The minute we step aside, that’s when you’re gonna see this city go chaotic. Fuck, you remember when no one fought the Vietnamese? A couple of years back they blew a guy’s fucking eye out right in the theater.”
“Yeah, Tony Hong,” I said. “He was fourteen—”
“You know what, lemme call Phu again,” Steve said, the talk of violence perhaps reminding him of his 21-year-old Chinese-Vietnamese enforcer, who’d been shot in the chest during the Woodland Drive overpass battle, and was now facing assault charges in another matter. “He’ll talk to you so long as I tell him to. I’ll get him over here with a couple’a guys. It’s just that I’d kinda like to take these guys aside first, because they get kinda tough.” He giggled. “They won’t touch you—if I say so, they won’t touch you,” he repeated, punching in Phu’s code. When Phu answered, he gave him a one-sentence order, then nodded confidentially to me to indicate Phu was persuaded.
By the time Steve got off the phone, he had warmed even further to the news angle. “Maybe me, you, and Park should get together, eh? I’ll head down there with you sometime. I’m not scared to talk with him. He told me, if his guys cause any problems, he’ll blow their heads off. That’s what he says,” he shrugged, knowing that Park was losing control of his gang. “The only thing you have to be careful of is that sometimes with him, the light’s on but nobody’s home. He’s not gonna wanna see me, I’ll know that. We’re on different streets.”
“So suppose I go down to the pool hall on my own—” I began, but he interrupted me with a royal wave.
“You’re free to go wherever you want. You go to the areas where we frequent, nothing’s gonna happen to you. Just tell ’em you’re a friend’a mine and they’ll leave you alone.” He grandly put his hand out and I shook it.
“Steve, what made you hit the street to begin with, when you were a kid?” I asked.
“Oh, I guess friends,” he sighed. “Friends go out, they wanna get in trouble, you know.” He paused, and there was something about his demeanor, his suddenly shrinking physique as he addressed this question, that made me like him. For the first time in our conversation I admitted to myself that I was feeling guilty—what I was doing to Steve could get him murdered. “I been in lotsa trouble,” he said, looking 10 years younger than his 26 years. “Lotsa trouble,” he told the rug. Steve, too, was once a recruit, in New York’s gang-ridden, tong-run Chinatown. He just got started earlier than most—his first arrest came at 11.
“You ever think of going back to school?” I really meant the question—I honestly hoped there was a way out for him, some miraculous escape from what was going to come down on his head very, very soon.
“I do think about it, but I haven’t got the qualifications,” Steve said. “I’ll tell you, I wouldn’t mind going back to school, but I wouldn’t wanna cause the school problems. It attracts the police, and, you know, they’re gonna be calling their other guys, the Squad.”
I couldn’t resist the segue. “I don’t think there’s any guys on the take on the Asian squad, do you?”
“No, I don’t think there is. Put it this way, I respect the police more than I respect any gang,” he said, surprising me. “That’s all I can say. But they’re going about things wrong. They know the theory of gangs—they have some successes breaking down some other gangs—but you know the smart groups, they ain’t touching them. I’ll tell you why,” he said, leaning forward. “The young guys start shooting at each other. That’s why you’re here, right? ’cause of all these shootings, right? What do you think the older guys are doing?”
“They’re moving heroin.”
“That’s right. They’re moving some kind of drugs or whatever. And they’re laughing. Because you guys are all over the little guys battling it out on the streets. But that’s not where it’s at.”
“You mean, because Vancouver is always concentrating on the little guys, the guys that are busting heads on the street, we’re missing the big stuff?”
“That’s right,” he nodded vigorously. “We told the cops that day at the Goldstone who had the guns. We told them! They didn’t have the fucking brains to search the people. And after the cops saw our struggle with them they didn’t give us a chance to talk, they hauled us off. We woulda told them it was the girls had the guns.”
“It was the girls?”
“See, there were three guns involved in the whole thing. All three of them were brought by Lotus guys. One guy had the balls to shoot. Two of the other guys went back into the restaurant and put the guns in the girls’ purses, and the girls walked out with them through the policemen. We woulda told them that. So Bill Chu came in and told me I was being charged with manslaughter and being held for that. What evidence do they have?”
“Okay, Steve,” I said, “if you were to see me tell this story then, should I say, ‘That stuff that happens in front of Goldstone is kid stuff, the big stuff is heroin. You’re wasting your time going after kids’?”
“It’s not a waste of time, that’s what the public’s more concerned about,” he said, surprising me again with his bizarre civic-mindedness. “It’s these drive-by shootings and murders. But the thing is, everything starts from something. Somebody older’s giving these little guys the guns. The problem lies with the younger guys and the older guys. They need each other.”
At which I thought, You’re the older guy, Steve. You’re giving them the guns to cause the police to be distracted from your heroin trade. What I said was: “But you never hear about the older guys. I mean, the big guys, I think they’re businessmen.”
“Well, I don’t know,” he said, heavy on the irony.
“You do know, you’re just not telling me! You could be famous, Steve. You could take the whole town now if you wanted to. The cops would—”
“If they knew the way Orientals think,” he interrupted, “and they stopped and asked, they would know already. Orientals are brought up differently, with more respect. It’s all face. That’s why there’s the battles.”
“You’re a brave man, Steve. You’re a marked man.”
“Yeah, but who’s marking me? The Lotus!” he said, contemptuously.
“Steve, our lives are in the hands of fourteen-year-olds.”
“Yeah, but see, the thing is, the fourteen-year-old will know what will happen when he came in to do us. Either he’d blow us all away, or he won’t walk out the pool hall. Which way would you go?”
“If they pay me enough, I might try it.”
“Yeah, but the thing is, you might have a semiautomatic, thirteen shots, fifteen at the most, maybe sixteen if there’s one in the pipe. Well, there’s twenty of us—what’re you gonna do? Last two guys are the ones who are gonna fuck you up. You may blow everybody else away—if you don’t, you’re nailed.”
“Do your guys carry at all?” I asked, reflecting on the fifteen-shot machine pistols I’d seen him packing in the photo the police had seized. Sixteen with one in the pipe.
“No,” he declared. “That’s our stronghold and we don’t have to carry. If you consider someplace your stronghold, then why do you have to carry weapons?”
The cell phone tweeted again, and I looked at my watch. I’d been here almost two hours, getting into the beginning of the work night for Steve. This time the call was from Kim Tam, locked in the maximum-security remand jail. Steve told Kim they finally got the Province newspaper to retract an article that stated Phu was at the Goldstone killing, which had brought unneeded heat down on his head. Steve then told Kim he had a reporter here who could help his case, and handed me the phone.
I was tempted to tell Kim I used to teach a couple guys connected with the enemies in his worst nightmares, but thought better of it. Instead, I shot the breeze with the poor caged kid, asking about the sleeping arrangements, and his innocence. “Yeah, I’ll be outta here soon, no worries,” he said, putting on a brave front. “So how you gonna help my case?”
“Just tell the truth,” I said. Then I added, jokingly, “Not you, me.”
It went right over his head. He asked for Steve, and I sat down and listened to their conversation range from the Goldstone to the hairdresser shop to the drive-bys and arson attempt. It had all happened in the space of a couple of days. This was their workaday routine—the kind of life they had led for years. It was only remarkable if you forgot that Al Capone was at the height of his violent reign at 26 years old.
“In the long run you never know what might evolve from this,” Steve told me when he got off the phone. “Because the Lotus is trying to get their face back. We’re not on the offensive now. We’re on the defensive. But we’re not worried. You know, Harry Rankin represents a couple of the guys that are charged.”
“All of you guys got white-collar counsel,” I said.
“Nah look, I’m just a common man,” Steve replied. “I just don’t like being pushed. Hong Kong, here, anywhere. I think Bill probably told you that. I don’t care if it’s the police, anybody fucks around with me, one way or another, I’ll catch up. We’re movin’ now. Look, these Lotus guys put this innocent guy in jail—” he bent a pinkie down. “Los Diablos fingered Tam for attempted murder—” he counted another digit. “But it wasn’t Kim. There was a gun drawn, but it wasn’t him who drew it. There was twenty Los Diablos guys. So he’ll win his cases. They’ve offered him a plea bargain for common assault. You already know the Province printed that Phu was at the Goldstone bakery—” he pulled a third finger down. “That’s why his house was shot at. He wasn’t there, so we got the Province to retract the story. We had our lawyers on it. All my guys are doing is trying to struggle through life without getting picked on.”
I stood up, feeling exhausted, but night owl Steve was just getting going: “I’m just telling you how it all started. Lotus are a bunch of babies. They tried to recruit where they shouldn’t have and so now they got their ass kicked in. So first they try and burn Kim’s house down, and now they put him in jail. What kind of justice is that?”
“Okay,” I said, “so can you arrange for a meeting with you, me, and Park?”
“Sure, I know people know him. I’ll set something up for you. Monday sounds pretty good to get together for me. You’re welcome back here anytime.”
I excused myself and went into the bathroom, where I flushed the toilet and said into the mike: “Okay, I think I might as well get you guys in here. This guy Phu’ll be here any minute.”
When I came out, Steve was over at his altar, dusting incense ashes into a pile, notelessly whistling. “Hey Steve,” I said, not believing I was going to just come out with it so casually. “I got some CBC-TV guys coming to pick me up here now.” I looked at my watch. “They’re probably in the van outside now. You mind if I go out and get ’em and bring ’em in here to meet your guys?”
“Sure, fuck! I got nothin’ to hide,” Steve said. “Bring ’em in!”
John, David, and I entered the house through Steve’s private entrance on the side street, John carrying his camera, his pockets loaded with gear. It was bizarre, but Steve didn’t bat an eyelash, so completely had I gained his trust. I was the emcee to this unusual gathering, and Steve was the only one who seemed relaxed. I made the introductions all around, as if my crew hadn’t been listening to every otherworldly word of our conversation. On the last handshake, a lean sullen fellow walked in through the open door, shaking off the snow. His hands were jammed in his coat pockets and a cigarette slanted from his lips across his chin. Steve turned to feeding his fish. “Phu, these are the guys who are gonna make you a movie star,” he said with his back to us. Phu looked me in the eye, crushing me between his narrowed lashes. Then he flipped his rooster tail back off his forehead with a jerk of contempt. He looked at Paperny.
I was familiar with that look, but there was no reason Paperny would have been. During their apprenticeship, gangsters spend hours in the mirror practicing ways to add maximum menace to the glare. Bad guys use the look all the time in a standoff or during an extortion attempt because it announces: “I am an out-of-control evil psychopath, capable of anything, and right now I want to make you watch as I pull your intestines out.” Those who are good at the look are usually prepared to deliver on its threat.
“You wanna do it here or outside?” Steve asked Phu.
“I don’t know,” he said, running the look between me, David, and John.
“Why don’t we do it right here?” I said.
“Yeah but nobody can know it’s my house,” Steve said.
“Oh they won’t, we’ll shoot it against the wall,” I said. “Or sort of just anonymously on the street.”
There were some other bodies at the door now, half looking in. Then they moved back into the snowy dark. With Steve’s door to the house bolted behind us, the crowd definitely gave the impression we were boxed in. It was obvious Phu didn’t want any part of this, and that he was coming to a boil. Paperny sensibly lowered the flame, and said it was getting late, we’d be in touch in the morning. My heart sank. I wanted to wrap the piece up that night, get the hell out of the story—Park or no Park—because I already knew the ending, and it wouldn’t be pretty. But we needed another Gum Wah to back up Steve. We needed one of his main enforcers. Now I would have to hang around Steve in order to get him to persuade an uncooperative Phu to cooperate again.
To do so, I would have to become Steve’s friend. Not have to. I would become his friend.
“I’ll see you Monday,” I told Steve. The short gangster shook my hand, patted it with his other hand.
Well, I thought, life begins at 40.
*That previous May, the vocal Phil Rankin had told me, “The gang thing has been blown out of proportion and sensationalized to aid the careers of prosecutors and cops. It’s in the interest of the police to make the problem bigger than it is, because they get budget and prestige from the gangs. But my experience and gut instinct tells me they’re full of shit. They don’t know anything about Chinese culture, and don’t admit that most gang members are unemployed, unskilled, uneducated kids drifting around without serious criminal involvements.”