Mary Chung seems the logical place for an early dinner. Not only because Lee is Chinese, but because the food is awesome, reasonably priced, and it’s within easy walking distance of Yuki Fuji’s office.
“Where do you think Fuji’s going?” We’ve arrived during the staff dinner, two round tables pushed together forming an 8, twice as many workers sharing their pre-shift meal off of a dozen large steaming plates of amazing-looking dishes I can’t identify and wouldn’t know how to order.
“Running or buying time.” Lee shrugs himself into a booth. “Who knows. Why do you look so excited?”
“This is the first time I’ve been to a Chinese restaurant with someone who’s legit Chinese.” I motion to the tables of workers. “Hook me up, I always get the General Tso’s chicken.”
A middle-aged waitress comes to the table with menus and Lee addresses her in Chinese. She laughs, holds on to the menus, and hollers something to her coworkers, who all raise their hands without turning in their seats and also respond with a variety of guttural greetings.
“They know you,” I say.
“Thanks to you.” Meaning Lee is the Chinese equivalent of David Ortiz in these parts. Acts of heroism. Keys to the city.
“You’re welcome,” I say.
“Let’s see if we can avoid a repeat this time.” Somehow, Lee frowns without his lips. “Why do you think I asked you to dinner—No, don’t respond, I already see the joke forming behind your eyes.”
Which reminds me. Tonight’s the last night of stand-up, the class moving upstairs at the Hong Kong restaurant at the edge of Harvard Square. It’s the late showcase, after the paid performers go on for their regular sets, which means the audience will consist of my classmates and whoever’s fallen into their Scorpion Bowls and can’t find their legs to walk out the door.
“I have to admit, Zesty, I’m at once amazed to see you in the thick of this and yet not surprised at all considering Sam Budoff’s involvement and the lengths you’ll go to protect your friends.”
“Boston loyal,” I say, flashing nonsensical gang signs across my heart.
“Save your slogans for the T-shirt. Do I have to remind you what became of your friend Gus Molten?”
“That’s a fuckin’ cheap shot, Lee, and you know it.”
“Yes. But it seems I’ve struck a nerve.” Lee lifts his eyebrows, but doesn’t apologize.
Should he? Gus had pulled me into what got him killed, his last moments, or the way I envision them in my dreams, still haunting me. Now Sam’s pulled me into something that feels just as dangerous. Maybe I just need better friends.
“How much trouble is Sam in?”
“Assuming he gets out of this alive? It depends. It could be no more than the young men you were playing poker with. The only difference being that he no longer falls under Ms. Worth’s university-sanctioned protection.”
“He graduated?” I say.
“Welcome to the real world. Where you’re actually held accountable for your crimes.”
“You mean unless you can write a check when you’re caught and come up with a new catchy slogan?”
Lee actually smiles, which is a rarity. “You know, you’ve got a lot of your mother in you, Zesty.”
“You mean fight the power?” I hold up a Black Panther fist.
“I know it’s a painful subject, so you’re apt to joke. But you’ve read your mother’s file and I’m sure your father spoke of her often before his Alzheimer’s set in. What I mean is your mother was a woman of conviction. As misguided as her expression of those convictions might have been she—”
“Was on the right side of history if you really want to look at it straight. Every goddamn thing she ever stood up for was right. Her only mistake, my dad’s only mistake, was getting into bed with people already compromised by your people. Before your time, granted, but don’t you tell me how much I’m like my mother, not by reading some fucking file.” Lee and I stare at each other for a long minute over our cups, the tea cooling down quicker than we seem capable of.
“Really, that’s where we are, Zesty?” Lee blinks first, breaking the silence.
“Yeah, that’s where we are.”
“So then, to the heart of it: Unlike most Asians, and this you already know, I’m not much of a gambler, though each time we cross paths I feel as if everything I’m working toward relies on the turn of a card, some variable I can’t control.” Lee points at me emphatically. “I’m talking about you.”
“I got that,” I say.
“The Joker,” Lee says.
“The Joker’s a throwaway card,” I say. “We don’t use it.”
“Ironic.”
“Although some people use it as a wild card,” I point out. “Though not in poker.”
“Doubly ironic then. I don’t have much time to spare here so let me tell you my thoughts, and you do your best not to interrupt. I think once again you’re neck deep in something that you don’t fully understand and in your misguided effort to help a friend, again, you’ve made matters worse and compromised something that had been up to this point contained—”
“You mean covered up.”
“I asked you not to interrupt.” Lee looks serious.
“The scope of this investigation is beyond your understanding and more important than your friend who has graduated from pharmaceutical hobbyist to aiding and abetting a wannabe cyber-crime kingpin and now, rightfully, fears for his life. Where is Sam Budoff?”
“I don’t know.”
“How did you know to infiltrate the MIT poker game?”
“Detective Wells.”
“Why is Wells sharing information with you?”
“It’s a two-way street,” I say.
“What is it that you’re sharing with him?”
The workers at Mary Chung have cleaned up their plates and spun the tables back to their original positions. I look at Lee, who has a familiar look on his face, a barely contained smoldering patience that’s about to break. But I have problems and duties of my own to deal with, an ailing father, who the more I learn about, the more layers that are peeled back, the more disappointed I am in him. And there’s absolutely nothing that I can do about that anymore.
“Nothing you don’t already know,” I finally say. “All that stolen account information.”
“Meaning you’ve had contact with Budoff.”
“Indirectly.” I explain what Budoff had dropped on me via JJ Foley’s. And I admit to having the poker chips that Sam had placed in the storage unit, but don’t tell him Zero’s taken possession of them.
“I think Roshan gave Sam the chips that Katanya was looking for when he broke into Roshan’s place. The chips and Roshan’s computer that Ms. Worth already had. I don’t know who the chips actually belong to. Him, maybe. Possibly Professor Fuji.”
“Where are the chips now?”
“I stashed them. You’re the only one I’ve told. Wells says Fuji and Roshan traveled to Vegas together. Foxwoods. Did you know that?”
“Yes.”
“They were lovers,” I say, opting for the more romantic version of “he was boning her” that I’d been given. Classy is what I am. Refined.
“She was using him,” Lee says flatly. There’s no “maybe” in his tone.
To run point on taking the cash from the hacked accounts and building up a war chest of chips to play with. If they won. If she won, cashed out, essentially laundering the money and burnishing her reputation at the same time. Teach. Don’t teach. She could do whatever she wanted.
“You think Fuji could have killed Roshan?”
“That is a question for Wells,” Lee says. “My focus is on a larger picture.”
“Why were those Cambridge Homicides so hot to catch the Roshan case that they’d salt the murder scene?”
“You can’t answer that question yourself?”
I can. I do: “Powers and McGowan picked up Katanya and then he turned up as fish chum. Maybe he was a liability of some sort either to them or his boss. Only his boss is now missing and you’ve already said you expect he’ll turn up like Katanya.”
“Not like Katanya. Katanya was the message. In a common language everybody could understand. We’ll probably never find Namestnikov.”
“Who’s everybody?” And more important, who’s sending the message?
The food comes on a tray, steaming plates of General Tso’s chicken, and beef and broccoli, rice, and scallion pancakes.
“What the fuck?” I complain when the waitress is gone.
“I like the General Tso’s. What can I tell you?” Lee starts spooning the plate with food and exchanges his ninja chopsticks for a fork.
“FBI Special Agent Wellington Lee,” I announce. “The Great Assimilator.”
“Powers and McGowan are crooked.” Lee speaks with his mouth full. “Into the Russians for something. But that is for Cambridge Internal Affairs to contend with. I assume the detectives wanted to catch the Rambir case to choke off all leads, hunt down your friend Sam. Of course, their story will be along the lines of what Ms. Worth suggested, that Katanya was a confidential informant. Whether or not there’s any paperwork to back up that claim remains to be seen; it’s doubtful Katanya’s murder will be attributed to them. Perhaps Cambridge IA will come up with something else.”
“You think Powers and McGowan are capable of doing Katanya like that or they handed him off?”
“I think they are capable of anything at this point, even Namestnikov. But the real reason I asked you to dinner has nothing to do with any of this. I need your brother to stop.”
“Stop what?” I have no idea what Lee’s talking about.
Lee gives me his hard stare again, but then remembers I just beat him at that game and pulls out a cell instead. Another cell phone. Lee’s phone has been on the table during our entire conversation, but he’s reached into his coat to pull this one out. He slides it across the table to me. “Scroll right.… Your other right.”
I shrug and reverse directions, dark but clear pictures of the Summer Street Bridge at night. Pictures of the path that runs under the bridge along the Fort Point Channel waters where the Channel nightclub used to be. I scroll and look at pictures of Sid and Zero launching an inflatable skiff off of Pier 1 beside Old Ironsides, Zero wearing the neoprene diving suit but with the helmet off and holding what looks like a rack of lights. Last, a picture of Zero tilting backward off the inflatable boat into the coal black channel waters.
“You took these?”
“Yes.”
“This isn’t an FBI phone?”
“No.”
“So this is personal,” I say.
“It seems Zero has made it so. You do know what he is looking for.”
I do. Lee’s service-issue Glock 23 that the Boston Police divers were unable to find a couple years ago. The gun sunken and lost somewhere among the estimated billion rusted razor blades Gillette had dumped in what had once been a cesspool of Fort Point waters. A gun that, if recovered, would counter the narrative fed to the Boston public through the FBI and the brass at Boston Police headquarters that painted Lee as a hero in the wake of Devlin McKenna’s return. Lee studies me studying the pictures, shaking my head.
“You didn’t know,” he says.
I think back to the wet seaweed I’d picked off my sneaker, Jhochelle’s story about the diving suit and tanks, the safe Zero had changed the combination to. Jhochelle must have known what Zero was looking for, the safe locked for her legal protection. But like my father, Jhochelle is also fluent in silence.
As to why Zero was looking for Lee’s gun is not so difficult for me to fathom; it’s the way Zero operates, his mind always searching for that slim margin that separates the house advantage from the player’s. The fact that the combination’s been changed tells me that he’s already recovered what he’d been looking for.
Having Lee’s gun would provide Zero with an ace up his sleeve any time that he felt he needed to play it, a form of insurance if his luck or machinations ever ran bad. Screw Yuki Fuji, Zero should be the one teaching at MIT. You get a failing grade, you get punched in the mouth.
I could tell Lee that it’s too late, that Zero already has his Glock, as barnacle encrusted as it might be. I could tell him that I’d given those same account numbers he and Rosalinda Worth had to Anitra Tehran at the Globe in the form of the thumb drive. And that in addition to those accounts there were files that Detective Wells was huddling to open with his BPD Geek Squad; that if all four of them would get together and share the information they had instead of just protecting their turfs and allowing their political bosses to control the narrative, they could probably solve this whole case over drinks at Cheers. But of course that’s not what I do.
“I’ll make you a deal” is what I say.