VANDYNE LURCHED THE VAN OUT AND WE SPED DOWN BOWERY and went up the wrong way on Mott. We saw some kids running in different directions.
We stopped on the sidewalk. I jumped out and grabbed a running boy.
“What’s going on?” I asked him.
“I don’t know. We were just standing in the street. I heard a gun and I just started running.” He was about fourteen and wasn’t a known gang member. Just to be sure I frisked him.
“What are you doing?” he protested.
“I’m just making sure you aren’t hit,” I lied. “Where did the shots come from?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Chow!” said Vandyne. He pointed up the street at a cook in an apron standing and smoking.
We walked up to him. The cook had come out of Jade Palace’s back doors after hearing the shots. He had seen a black car speed away to the south, didn’t get the plates.
We had just missed the car when we turned up Mott.
“Hey!” yelled Willie Gee, who suddenly popped out of a back door. “What are you doing, talking to these two cops!”
“I’m helping them,” said the cook.
“I don’t pay you to stand around and talk!” Then to us, and in English, Willie said, “Leave him alone! He doesn’t know anything! He’s a very simple man from the Chinese countryside!”
“What are you doing out here, Willie?” I asked.
“I saw that one of my kitchen staff was missing, so I went looking for him.”
“You didn’t hear gunshots?” asked Vandyne.
“Gunshots? No! I heard nothing! You guys heard a truck backfiring and it gave you one of those crazy Vietnam flashbacks!”
I pointed at the cook.
“I need to take your personal information,” I said.
Willie stomped his foot.
“If you talk to this cop,” he said, “you’re going to be investigated as a suspect even if you’re just a witness. You will put your job and your family at risk. One slipup and they’re going to deport you!”
“That’s not true!” I said.
“Are you going to pay him?” asked Willie. “What does he get out of it? Do you even guarantee him protection?”
The cook dropped his cigarette and twisted his foot on it. “Willie’s right,” he said to the ground. “I get nothing out of it and plus I bear all the risk.”
“I saw how smart you were the day I hired you!” Willie said, beaming.
“Think about the fear people have to live in,” I said. “Shootings every week now, and it’s just going to get worse.”
“I think I was just hearing things,” said the cook.
Vandyne didn’t understand what we were saying, but he knew what was happening.
“Willie,” he said. “How would you like it if you were extorted or robbed on a regular basis and nobody helped you?”
“My association has its own preventative crime measures. You two only take action when there’s already a victim and it’s already too late.”
“What sort of ‘measures’ do you take?” Vandyne asked.
“For one thing, we make sure to provide training and employment for our people. Most crime in the community stems from shiftlessness.”
“Do you happen to provide employment to illegal Fukienese immigrants?” I asked.
Willie turned to the cook. “You see this?” he said. “They are already trying to frame me for a crime and I was just standing here talking.”
The cook nodded and went inside.
“You’re hindering an investigation,” I warned Willie in English.
“Investigation into what? Nothing happened!”
“You made sure nothing happened!” Vandyne accused.
“You know what?” said Willie. “You two have no credibility in this community! An alcoholic and a black! What a team you guys make! Hunh!” With that he stormed back into the restaurant and locked the door.
“I can’t believe he called you an alcoholic,” I said to Vandyne. He made a tight smile and shook his head.
We met with Eddie a few hours later at a twenty-four-hour Greek diner on the Upper East Side by a firehouse.
“What was going on with Brian?” Vandyne asked him.
“Beautiful Hong Kong apparently is trying to put together a lion dance group of kids from all over Chinatown, regardless of political beliefs or past affiliations with gangs,” said Eddie. “Ng wants to have his lion dancing in both the October 1 and the October 10 parades. It’s rubbing a lot of associations the wrong way and they’re not afraid to make it known.”
“Where did those gunshots come from tonight?” I asked.
“Beats me,” he said. “It could have been anybody shooting at anybody. Seriously. We do have a shoot-akid-per-week quota to make in Chinatown, don’t we?”
“Don’t fucking joke about kids getting shot!” I said.
“What, are we supposed to cry instead? I don’t know about you guys, but the way I see it, most of those kids who get shot are hoods themselves. You only get pressured to solve the shootings where the tourists get wounded. Vandyne, you were looking into that kid who got shot at the Pagoda, right?”
“Don’t act like it’s over,” Vandyne said.
“That was one gang kid shooting another, right?”
“Allegedly.”
“And the shooting happened in a crowded theater and yet there were no witnesses, right?”
“Yeah.”
“You know what I say? Screw it. Let that kid get out of the hospital and go kill the guy who shot him. Save the taxpayers some money.”
“And let him get away with murder?” I asked.
“Naw. Someone from the other gang will shoot him and finish the job, this time.”
“We would have half the town trying to kill the other half in no time,” said Vandyne. “Then the whole country would all start shooting each other.”
“Let’s get it on!” said Eddie. “I’m ready!”
We all laughed. I didn’t know about Eddie, but Vandyne and I really were ready for a full-scale war at any second. Neither of us could eat a meal without our guns at our sides, even at home.
“But anyway, about Brian . . . ,” I started.
“Yeah, so, Ng has Brian training these kids in lion dancing. It’s associated with martial arts because traditionally a kung fu master can’t charge his students for lessons. The lion dances for hired entertainment were a way to make money.”
“I thought the lion dances were basically extortion schemes from the associations,” I said.
“Well, they’re that, too,” Eddie said.
“Why should Beautiful Hong Kong have lion dancers?” Vandyne asked. “They’re not a kung fu club.”
“Ng, that wonderful humanitarian, wanted to bring all Chinese people together, and the lion dancing is something that he thought combined the culture with physical activity, which is important. Kids are like dogs. They have excess energy and go fucking crazy if they don’t have a chance to burn it off. But here’s the thing: I’m thinking Brian has different ideas.”
“Such as what?” I asked.
“For one thing, he’s old-world. Brian was one of the premiere lion dancers in Hong Kong. Back in his day, they tied knife blades to their shoes so they could cut up the costumes of their rivals. He was teaching for a long time and had his own dancing group for a while, but after a business disagreement with his landlord he’s here.”
“Let me guess. He doesn’t see eye-to-eye with Ng about letting in just anybody, right?” I asked. “He wants it segregated with just Hong Kong kids, right?”
“Naw, I think he actually wants everyone willing to come in and do the work that is necessary to get it done.”
“Then where do you come in?” Vandyne asked.
“Me?” asked Eddie with a wide smile. “Oh, I’m the guy who’s supposed to get the kids guns so they can be an organized gang under Brian!”
“Does Ng know anything about this?” I asked.
“I’m pretty sure he doesn’t. Brian has a warped sense of reality. He thinks that with Ng tied up with business all day, the kids could be his personal muscle.”
“Maybe we should take that fucker down,” I said.
“Aw, just leave him alone!” said Eddie. “He’s a talker, not a walker. He’ll never do anything. Even if I got him a gun, he’d be too chickenshit to point it at anybody. Leave him alone. I got bigger fish to fry.”
“You’re watching Brian all the time, right?” asked Vandyne.
“Yeah, I am. Believe me, if he actually has the balls to make a play for anything, it’s going to be for Ng’s sister, Winnie.”
“You know, we picked up both Brian and Winnie one night,” Vandyne said.
“Yeah, Brian told me. He said that once he had his gang going, you two were going to show him respect.”
We all laughed at how stupid an idea that was.
“What kind of things was his dream gang going to get into?” I asked.
“Oh, the usual boring kind of stuff, competing with other gangs for work from the associations. Lookouts for the pross houses. Guarding the gambling dens and escorting the winners home—without robbing them.”
Eddie added that last part because one of Chinatown’s gangs had become known for mugging the people they were supposed to protect. The association who had hired them got a rival gang to take over their turf.
“What are you going to do?” I asked Eddie.
“Delay for a while, I guess. Seriously, when those gunshots rang out tonight, Brian was running like it was a fifty-yard dash. When we bust Beautiful Hong Kong, that coward’s going to be swimming across the Hudson to Jersey before we have the door kicked in. I’m actually pretty close to wrapping up the tax-evasion case on Ng.”
“How’s that going?” asked Vandyne.
“It’s sloppy, but I think we can get a case together that will stick. I was lousy at economics back in school, but that’s actually working out to my advantage. Ng was getting so fed up with trying to teach me different accounting methods that he introduced me to his finance guy. He showed me the ropes on how to cook the books. I can’t wait to put this guy away and get this thing over with.”
“What are you going to do when you’re done?” asked Vandyne. “You’re not going to stay out here, are you?”
“No way, man. The humidity sucks and I don’t want to see what winter’s like. I’m going to the beach and inspect some bikini lines!”
“How hard is it to transition from a crime empire to a legitimate enterprise?” I asked the midget. “Won’t a part of it always be dirty?”
We were sitting in the toy store. I was helping to sweep up because Paul was working late at the consulting firm.
“All businesses to some degree operate in a gray area,” the midget said, not looking up. He was flipping through the day’s receipts and marking off entries in a book. “Part of being a capitalist society is that you have to give freer rein to the businesses because they will create jobs for the people and pay taxes to the government. The more money the companies make, the more jobs they can create and the workers pay more taxes. So you have to cut them some slack. You give them tax breaks on building new headquarters and facilities in your state and you let them come clean about dirty money without penalty.”
“Then it’s like an amnesty program. If you said, ‘Hey, I was going to launder all this money I made from drug deals, but I want to pay taxes on it instead,’ then the government would be fine with that?”
“Sure they would! If Al Capone had simply paid taxes on all that bootlegging, he never would have been convicted of any crimes.”
“So when I was fighting Communism, I was basically protecting a system that favors big business over the little guy.”
The midget looked down at himself and then at me. “Who says the little guy can’t open his own business?” he asked.
Paul came in, drinking the last from a can of Coke.
“Working sucks,” he said.
“You know what sucks more than working?” I asked. “Not working.”
“So then you’re not going to retire after twenty years and start drawing your pension because it would suck to not work, right?” Paul asked me.
“If I’m not dead after twenty years, it will be a sign from God that I should retire. I never argue with God.”
“You never go to church with Lonnie!”
“I have a strong personal relationship with God, but it’s on an informal basis,” I said.
“Well, speaking of personal relationships,” said Paul with a wink, “I talked a little bit with Barbara today.”
I smiled. “How is she doing?” I asked.
“She’s busy—very busy. Anyway, I told her about Lonnie’s article about the history of the Chinese in America and she got very interested in it. She has a friend who works at a newswire service and she thinks maybe Lonnie can get a job there.”
“That would be great!” I said. I had a vision of Lonnie bagging up coffee and taro buns for sweaty Cantonese jerks during the morning rush. She was getting a college degree—something I hadn’t done yet. Lonnie deserved a better job.
“Barbara wants to meet Lonnie first before getting in touch with her friend. She was talking about dinner with the two of you.”
“Is she seeing anybody?” I asked.
“She’s too busy to date, she says.”
It was going to be an awkward meal, but I was willing to do it if it meant a potential job for Lonnie in this crappy economy. She had been sending her résumé around trying to get her foot in the doors of some newsrooms, but papers and magazines were laying people off.
The three Chinese-language newspapers were doing well but only because they were subsidized by the KMT, Communists, and the Hong Kong government.
Lonnie said it was all just propaganda and that she would rather keep the bakery job than work at any of them because it was honest work.
In reality, she made her job honest work. When I saw her drop a pastry on the floor one day she amazed me by throwing it away instead of restocking it. If her boss had seen her, it would have been a firing offense.