WHEN I PULLED THE TRIGGER I IMMEDIATELY SAW MYSELF STANDING in a clearing in a jungle, surrounded by smoke and fire.
The recoil from the shot bounced my wrist back like right after I had slapped an old papa-san or mama-san.
I watched men running away into the courtyard, screaming. I turned my head and saw Vandyne peering at me through a broken patch of green bamboo.
I pointed at Ng’s crumpled body and said, “Mere Gook Rule, Vandyne.” That was how we used to justify killings.
But Ng hadn’t died. I had shot him in the upper arm and the bullet had passed through without even hitting bone.
He was charged with violating several federal and state income-tax laws. We were still waiting for an indictment for conspiracy to smuggle aliens.
The big problem—for me in particular—was that Ng was suing the NYPD and looking to indict me for attempted murder and reckless endangerment.
“Shooting an unarmed man!” thundered the Brow, the C.O. of the Fifth. “Have you completely lost your already-feeble mind, Officer Chow! Or do you people find that to be acceptable conduct?” I was in a meeting in his office, which meant one of two things—trouble or big trouble.
“Sir, he could have been reaching for a knife!”
“He says he took it out and put it down first!”
“I don’t remember that. I’m a little confused about it.” I didn’t dare mention my father or the Vietnam flashback.
“If you’re indicted, you’ll have to hire your own defense lawyer, Officer Chow! The department won’t stand for a dissolute character!” He stomped his foot and raised his broken eyebrow at me.
“He was smuggling people into this country and I stopped him.”
“That will make a wondrous opening statement! Why, the jury will be leaping out of their seats—to hang you! If I had had any say in it, I would never have allowed you to take on investigative assignments. This incident proves me right!” He stomped again to emphasize his point.
“Sir, I do have Lefty in my corner. Of course, you knew him better as Jewey Jew Jew.”
The Brow broke into a hideous smile and his blue eyes sparkled. “Ah, yes! Well, we’ll see how Lefty feels about you after the witnesses are finished with their statements upstairs!”
“We have witnesses?” I asked, shocked that any Chinese—much less illegals—would make statements about anything.
“They’re upstairs with English right now,” he said, his smile breaking into rapturous joy as he sensed my fear. “They were quite anxious to be witnesses, as a matter of fact.”
“They’re willing to take the sworn word of illegal immigrants against a police officer?” I said.
“I sympathize with you, Officer Chow. Surely the worst of The Finest are more reputable than scum that floated over and washed up on our shores. But this matter is out of my hands. You’re at the mercy of the liberals now.”
I took a deep breath.
“May I leave, sir?” I asked.
“Dismissed in disgrace,” he said.
I left and shut the door behind me. I looked up and saw English coming down the stairs. I went up to him.
“How’s it looking?” I asked.
He smiled. “These three guys say they saw him coming at you with a knife.”
I recognized two men coming down the stairs as being human snakes. The third one, who was still talking with the pretty community interpreter, was the guy who looked like Woody Allen.
“What’s going to happen to them?” I asked English.
“It’s up to the INS now,” he said.
“Does testifying help them in any way?”
“It actually probably hurts them. They already had a consultation with a lawyer, but they still testified that they were smuggled here and weren’t facing persecution in China. With statements like that, sooner or later they’re going to be deported.”
I couldn’t believe these Fukienese guys were sticking their necks out for a Cantonese guy, and I say that because I was sure that they didn’t see me as an American. Either way, I had little in common with any of them and they only stood to lose by helping me out.
The three men shook my hand and I got a lump in my throat.
“Don’t worry about us,” Woody whispered to me. “When we get back to China, we’ll pay a fine, but we’ll try coming again until we make it.”
The indictment never came down for me, and Ng’s suit against the NYPD was dismissed. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough time to get an indictment against Ng on conspiracy to smuggle aliens.
Ng had been recovering in Columbia Presbyterian Hospital under a fake name and switched rooms daily, but that didn’t prevent unknown assailants from shooting Ng and two armed guards to death. The hospital’s staff hadn’t heard anything unusual but told the New York Daily News that Ng had had many laughs with several different Oriental visitors.
The D.A.’s office had tried to find Eric, the kid who had been in the hospital, as a potential witness against Ng while he was alive, but nobody was at the street address Eric had given and no one had seen him since he had been discharged.
I found her on the sidewalk outside her Midtown apartment, watching movers roll out furniture into a trailer truck.
“Winnie, I’m sorry about your brother.”
“Officer Chow!” she cried, and grabbed my arm. “Oh, I’m feeling so many different emotions, I don’t know what to say to you. I’m mad at you for shooting my brother, but I knew he wasn’t a good man. Still, I never knew it would all end like this!”
“It’s a little tough for me to believe that you had no hand in what happened to Andy.”
“I’m a girl. I don’t know anything.”
“But you must have heard a lot.”
Her expression shriveled up a bit and I got an idea of what her mom looked like.
“Look here, Officer Chow. I’ve been cleared of any wrongdoing by agencies of your federal government. I’m even negotiating a settlement for paying the back taxes on Beautiful Hong Kong.”
“I see you’re on the run, though, like a common criminal.”
“I’m leaving because this country disgusts me. I think the main problem is that you have too many different people and cultures in America. You people don’t even know who you are, mixing in with everybody.”
“‘You people’? You mean Chinese Americans?”
“Of course! The Chinese people of Singapore separated from the dark-skinned people of Malaysia and we’ve never been happier, because Chinese people are strongest when we stick together!”
“We do have a lot of problems in America—I’ll give you that. But our country is made from people who came here from other parts of the world for better opportunity here. We don’t always get it right the first time, but we believe that everybody here is equal. I’ll bet you’ve never seen so many different people as in the streets of New York.”
“This is an ugly, smelly city and it makes me sick.”
“Hey,” I said. “You can badmouth America, but shut up about New York.”
That only hardened her up even more. “I’m sorry I’m not in a good mood, Officer Chow,” she spat, “but I have to go back to Singapore to bury my dead brother.”
“Just a second, Winnie. Tell me you knew he was Brother Five.”
She looked at me hard with glaring eyes that could burn ants on the sidewalk. “You have no decency whatsoever,” she said, crossing her arms. “I didn’t love Singapore when I was growing up, but now I see how much better it is than America.”
“What are you going to do there, Winnie?”
“Well, somebody has to head the family business.”
I stopped to see Mr. Tin at the Greater China Association’s office, but I was held at the reception desk. He came down instead of letting me up.
“Mr. Tin, how is Don? The last time I saw him he was in the ambulance—”
He broke in on me. “You son of a bitch! I trusted you to look after my son and he ends up in the emergency room!”
“He was examined and released!”
“I’ve sent Don to live in a good Shanghainese community in London. It was a mistake to ever let him live among the lowly Cantonese!”
“You’re keeping Don from getting the help that he needs, Mr. Tin.”
“It’s my business, not yours!”
“Why did you pay to have those two bodies sent back to China?”
“It was a decent thing to do, so of course you wouldn’t understand why, Robert! Historically, the final duty of any association to their members was to send bodies back to China for an honorable burial in the family cemetery. I wanted to see those two men treated with respect after what they had to endure here.”
“Thanks for clearing that up, Mr. Tin.”
“Stop calling me Tin! My name is T’ien, you peasant! If you ever bother me again, you’re going to end up worse off than a dead dog with three legs!”
To confirm that I had ruined my reputation in all quarters of Chinatown, I went next to Together Chinese Kinship’s office. Mr. Song jumped out of his chair and charged me, stopping just short of my nose.
“You son of a bitch!” he yelled. “You got me roped into this snakehead bullshit! All the Chinese newspapers have hanged me along with the Fukienese community on the editorial pages! Even the Communist paper is distancing itself from me!”
“You didn’t break any laws, Mr. Song. You’re not being charged with any crimes whatsoever.”
“My reputation was torn apart by being investigated by the INS!”
“They said they didn’t find anything! You’re clean!”
“But they were here! Now everybody thinks I’m good at hiding things—and smuggling people!”
I heard footsteps overhead and glanced up the staircase.
“Don’t bother looking for Stephanie!” Mr. Song said. “I sent her back to Connecticut already to keep her out of reach from you!”
“Me? What are you talking about?”
“I saw you looking at her! Like a dog drooling after meat!”
I met Izzy for a sandwich at Katz’s on Houston Street.
After I told him about everything, he said, “It’s tough.”
“Looking back,” I said, “maybe I should have given you a call while this was all going on.”
“Why?” Izzy was the kind of guy who liked to grunt while eating, and his grunts were louder than his voice.
“So you could have advised me. I mean, I got a zero on your test, so I obviously need some help.”
“I would have listened,” he said, wiping his mouth. “Don’t know if I could have helped.”
“Well, from what I’ve told you, is there anything I could have done better?”
“Different, sure. But not better.”
“Things could have been way better! The guy didn’t have to die!”
“But you’re okay. That’s not bad.”
“Do you think you guys’ll find the guys who killed Ng?” I was referring to Izzy’s Manhattan South crew.
“Naw. Nobody talks. No media pressure. Have to nail FALN first, anyway.”
I squeezed mustard on one side of my plate and thumped out some ketchup on the other side for my fries.
“Izzy, everybody in Chinatown hates me now.”
“The leaders hate you. Not the people.” He smiled. “You helped the people and the leaders resent it.”
“I’ve basically tried to do the right thing, but I’m worried that I might be making everything worse.”
Izzy shook his head and sipped from his can of black-cherry soda. “You’re young.”
I took Vandyne to Penn Station to catch a train to Philly.
“How long are you going to stay out there?” I asked.
“Few days, I guess. Been a while since I’ve had time for my momma. Rose knows where to reach me, so she can if she wants to.”
“How’s that going?”
He threw up his hands. “You tell me. You haven’t talked to Rose, have you, partner?”
“Naw. Chock full o’Nuts was the last time.”
“It’s all right if you do.”
We slapped hands hard and hugged.
I didn’t get to see Eddie before he went back to San Francisco, but I promised to visit him sometime. He told me on the phone that he had found the guy who knew my dad from the association days. The former association hall was now cut up into a mixed-use building and my father’s old friend sold slippers on the ground floor. Eddie sent my father’s articles by Express Mail. The old man had everything in a locked box, and out of respect Eddie hadn’t gone through the contents.
The FALN thing was still going on, so I had the squad room to myself when the package came in.
I took out my keys and cut the packing tape. Eddie had put some San Francisco Chinatown postcards on top. It looked less crowded and spread out than New York. On the back of a picture of Miss Chinatown 1975 he had written MY GIRLFRIEND!
Under a layer of crumpled newspapers I found the box. It was disappointingly light. A key was taped to the plastic handle.
I unlocked it and opened the lid. There wasn’t much inside. On top was a copy of an unevenly folded certificate of identity issued to Chinese people from the Department of Labor. The picture attached to it was the same one my mother and I had burned money to. The certificate identified my father by the ridiculous name of Ah Chin Fong. It was his paper name plus a stray character.
A scrap of paper recorded everything he had eaten in a particular week. Pork in shrimp sauce, preserved bean curd, and pickles figured in many entries. This was probably why he hated pork in shrimp sauce, preserved bean curd, and pickles by the time I was around.
Under that was some sheet music that featured pictures of Al Jolson on the covers. I wasn’t aware that he had performed outside of blackface.
At the bottom was what I thought was a diary. As I flipped through the pages, it became apparent that the book was a ledger.
I turned it sideways to read the columns. It was undoubtedly my father’s handwriting, and while it was mostly numbers, small notations left no doubt as to what the book recorded.
“Paper identity $2,000, boat travel $200,” was the column head for most of the entries. The names of the people were written in code—“long fingers,” “old duck,” “Mr. Brown”—and apparently they paid weekly increments of five to ten dollars.
Most had a black line drawn through with my father’s seal stamped at the ends of the entries, running pages and years down the line. Several accounts were ominously cut short.
I shut the book and pushed it into my bottom drawer and kicked it shut. I braced myself on my desktop with slippery, sweaty hands. My father had been a precursor to snakeheads like Ng. He must have made huge amounts of money, but I was at a loss to explain why my family, when I grew up, was barely scraping by.
My phone rang. Lonnie told me the Presswire interview went great and that she thought she had the job. I don’t remember what I said.