Текст книги "Chinatown Beat"

Автор книги: Henry Chang

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The Easy Score

The Yee Bot was a Fuk Ching gambling-spot setup in a tenement storefront, one of many in a long row of walk-up tenements fading to the far end of the street. Lucky knew this end of East Broadway, knew it was the Chinese frontier, where they had pushed into areas traditionally Jewish, now mixed with spics and niggers and squashed up against the East River into the Projects.

He knew the tenements connected along their backyards, like a spine running between them, some of the passageways blocked up or gated. He had broken into some of these apartments when he was younger, terrorized the neighborhood until one day he entered a place he thought was Chinese but was actually Puerto Rican and almost got shot dead. He stayed clear of that end of East Broadway until he hooked up with the Ghosts, quietly watching the neighborhood fill with Fukienese businesses.

The Yee Bot or "Twenty-eight" spot was a local hangout of the Fuk Ching gang, located on what was technically a Fuk Ching street-that is the Fuk Benevolent Association was located nearby, its entrance fronted by matching larger-than-life Foo dogs.

The Fuk Chings claimed to have thousands of members everywhere, bristling with heavy-duty weaponry and itching to do battle. On this particular end of East Broadway, however, they had only thirty-nine members, mostly Ian jai, busted boys who were the remnants of splinter gangs affiliated with the Benevolent Association's darker elements-gambling, drugs, nightclubs and prostitution. Rumor was the gang had split violently over profits.

Lucky remembered the "Twenty-eight" had big gates up front, knew lots of heavy-duty protection was there. The Fuk Chings had started frisking patrons with electronic wands, believed they could stop weapons from getting in and challenging them. So far they had been right.

But Lucky knew the tiny backyards between the tenements, where the rain gutters emptied out, were used for storage of cleaning materials. He knew the backyard, the backdoor, was the way in.

Ghost spies had brought back a diagram.

The "house," nerve center of the gambling operation, was located in a recessed room halfway down a long hall. It was protected on both sides. All of the house action, cash and dealers, came out of that big room, which could be isolated by electric rollup gates that slid up into the ceiling. Everything in the joint was stacked toward the front. Lucky saw it all with wicked clarity: the backdoor was the way in.

Lucky crossed the rooftop, scaled a short wall and dropped onto the adjacent rooftop landing below. He was confronted by a brick wall, reached in back of it and found a niche behind it. He felt around, started taking loose bricks out. Another niche. More bricks came out. Then he touched it, a bundle wrapped in plastic. He unwrapped it, revealing his favorite weapon, the Cyborg Bullpup, a nasty nine-shot twelve-gauge shotgun made up like the hi-tech tactical-assault something the SWAT guys used. It had a black-rubber stock and a top handle, black all over with front and back grips, ventilated shroud, the works.

Lucky racked it, triggered and re-racked it, in love with the sound of metal sliding and catching. Shotguns couldn't be traced, and besides, he had filed off all the serial numbers, smooth as porcelain. The Cyborg weighed ten pounds, heavy to carry, but he had it on an elastic shoulder sling that kept the monster tight to his side, under the white smock he wore, his right hand, his gun hand, inside on the trigger.

The Mossberg 590 Cyborg Bullpup. Cost him two hundred, a steal. Bought it off some Haitian junkie who said it was used in a drug war in Washington Heights, wanted to dump it, probably had bodies on it. Lucky bought it anyway, knowing he'd never leave a trace on it. Use it, discard it. One time only and that time had come. The rest of his mad-dog crazies had cheap ninemillimeter pistols they could pop and drop. Throwaways.

For ammunition, Lucky liked the Remington SPs; multi-range shot shells, it said on the box. Ten plastic shotgun shells filled with buffered, copper-plated shot. Keep out of reach of children, Lucky read with a grin. He liked the SPs because each shot shell contained different size shot, some smaller pellets to scatter the field, flush 'em out, then larger pellets to bring them down while delivering optimum energy and penetration at longer ranges, the box said. Yeah, thought Lucky, settle them motherfuckers quick. People didn't like to argue with a shotgun.

Lucky's war party carried no identification. Should they ever be caught or killed, they didn't want anything leading back to the Ghost Legion. This way, they'd divvy up the loot among themselves, instead of with the entire gang, twelve ways being a lot bigger than seventy-seven, plus a percentage to the big shots. Also, since most of the crazies were illegals, they didn't need to be ID'd and deported. They carried extra ammunition and backed up their throwaway Star pistols with hot Hi-Tecs.

A quarter-to-twelve, strike when the cops were caught between shifts. If things went good, they'd be out before midnight. The entire crew was ready now, Lucky leading them under a moonless night toward the far end of East Broadway.

It was Saturday night and the joint was rocking. The old man guard who sat in the dimly lit back space by the metal folding table, with its electric pots of coffee and tea, took in all the activity in the Yee Bot. He sat almost motionless, watching the gambling from the distance, blinking only when the smoke from the cigarette dangling from the corner of his lips curled up into his eyes. Behind him was a small doorway. Occasionally, he'd glance back to check out the sounds of kitchen clatter coming from the restaurant across the alley.

Lucky came over the top of the backyard wall, a rolling black blur over the razor wire. He sneaked across the tops of the crates piled tip there. Now, with all the crazies poised behind him, he racked the BullPup.

The old man cocked his ear to the backdoor, listened for a long second. He turned his head around and scanned the back area framing the door, dropping his right hand into his waistband, to the.38 Blackhawk under his vest. He listened and looked for another long moment. More clatter came from the restaurant kitchen. He took a deep drag on his cigarette, hissed the smoke out in a long stream, satisfied now, and turned back to the action on the floor.

The next thing he saw was a man dressed in a white smock, the kind that butchers or kitchen help wore, with a white cap down over his eyes. He had in his hands a package in brown butcher paper that indicated he was delivering goods. The old man was frozen, silent. How did he get in here? he thought. Then everything went dark inside his head as Lucky blackjacked him behind the right ear with his free hand, and watched him sag forward. The crazies rushed inside past them, backed up by Kongo, the silent one.

Lucky pressed into the side of his coat, releasing the BuliPup's safety. He took two steps inside the "Twenty-eight," brought it up toward the ceiling, and squeezed the trigger.

The first blast blew out lights in the sheetrock ceiling, froze everyone in an eyeblink, as the Ghosts laid the drop on the Fuk Chings at the tables, taking their Makarovs and revolvers. Lucky racked the BuilPup again, herded everyone toward the front as the crazies scooped money off the tables, overturning them so they blocked the rolldown gates from dropping in front of the house.

Lucky yanked the terrified manager off the floor and shoved him into the house room, where the dealers were cowering. He slipped the BullPup into its sling at his side and drew a pistol from his shoulder holster. He kicked the manager down next to the safe and smacked him with barrel of the Colt. The man whimpered and Lucky smacked him again, harder. Lucky cocked the Colt and pressed it into the man's ear, eyeballing the fallen dealers.

"Open up or die here," Lucky snarled into the terrorized silence.

Two crazies stepped forward and pistol-whipped the dealers, their blood splattering the money scattered on the floor. The manager saw death in their pinpoint eyes and spun the safe dial with shaking fingers, left, right, then yanked the door open.

Lucky's wristwatch started beeping, the four-minute warning, as the Ghosts shoved stacks of money into a duffel bag. They tossed smoke bombs as they left. Lucky slid out the BullPup and waited as the crazies made their way over the razor wire. He squeezed off a load as he stepped out back, no arguments chasing him. In a second he was over the top, following the sound of footsteps quickly retreating into the dark distance, with bloody Fuk Ching money in his pockets.

Midnight.

Driver

Johnny slept through the morning behind drawn shades, showered, rubbed mousse in his coal-black trim, and combed it straight back. He put on a turtleneck and a leather vest, drove down Eighth Avenue and out of Brooklyn. Then he ate lunch from a takeout box while waiting for the Lincoln to clear the track at the Broadway Car Wash.

The buffing gang put a glow on the black-and-chrome body, vacuumed the interior, cleared the air of cigar smells, and exchanged the odor of stale perfume for that of pine and new leather.

He booked two afternoon trips, one to Belmont, the other out to LaGuardia. Mona's pick-up wasn't until nine-thirty, so he had time to kill.

He purred the Continental toward Grand Street, skirting gridlock traffic until he could see the queues of people waiting for the van jai passenger vans-back to Queens. Pick off a few going to Flushing, he figured, and he'd set himself up for the races at Belmont.

Cheen Money

The Harmonious Garden was a cramped fast-food sit-down on Baxter Way that had a backdoor leading out to a cinder-block bunker slapped up in the courtyard between buildings. The bunker had a back exit, leading through the building in its rear to the boulevard beyond.

One of its walls featured video poker and slot machines. Opposite them, the Ghost boys sat on bar stools with their portable phones and ran a sports book next to the two thirty-inch color TV monitors flashing the Knicks, the Giants, the Rangers.

They ran three card tables featuring Chinese Poker. The On Yee covered the joint with pocket money. Twenty-four hours. They kept on hand six cases of Johnny Walker Black, eight eighths of Ecuadorian flake, and quarter-ounce plastics of sensemilla smoke for the day's customers.

Lucky went through the restaurant into the crowded bunker, where he found a seat at the card tables. Above the noise from the TV sets and the electronic ping of the video games, he picked up on the rough chatter of the gamblers:

"The cok-sooka won six thousand last week. Took four straight turns at House. Kept eating heads and tails."

"Took everybody's money."

"Big game later, the laundry boys from Boston, and that Jap high roller from Atlantic City."

"The Thailand Brothers are coming."

"They're closing two tables for the Lucky Eight."

"A hundred a section."

Some players, busted, fell out of the deal with dezv ka ma ga hei motherfucker curses, and Lucky edged up along the table. He wanted to spread some of the loot from the Yee Bot rip-off into his own joints, spur up the action. He laid his stack of U.S. Grants behind the House box, scanned the bets in the four squares, and waited for the cards to turn up. The dealer took the thirteen cards and opened them in his palm, the other bettors working their hands. Lucky set up the three sections, rearranging the suits, the pairs. The best he had was a pair of jacks, a pair of kings, and a straight flush.

The straight flush would likely win the last section, and he decided to play the jacks up front, figuring the two pairs too weak in the middle.

Lucky watched as his cards took heads and tails, raiding cash from the Thais and Malaysians betting the four boxes.

Lucky let the winnings roll.

The dealer ran through a three-hour rotation of players and before the dinner shift had taken three thousand eighty out of the squares.

When the sun set, Luckywent down to the Bowery outskirts, the desolate streets leading out beyond Chinatown where it rubbed raw against the rest of Loisaida and the Alphabets. He entered the storefront with its window gate down, next to the bodega. One of Flavio's places. Spread the dirty money among the clients. Goodwill for Flavio, a kilo-a-week buyer of Ghost Number Four heroin.

Inside, Lucky gave the mommy fifty dollars, looking over the partition to scan the Latina crikas-whores-seated on folding chairs under the sickly green-blue light of lava lamps. Some of the whores had thighs heavy with cellulite inside fishnet stockings, bean-bloated bellies under spandex, hard faces pushing the far side of forty.

The mommy gave him a playing card, a yellow jack. Men were waiting about, sexual tension leaned up against the walls, and then a few more girls came out of the back maze of cubicles, carrying baskets of mouthwash, condoms, KYJelly, and paper towels. There were Cubans, a Venezuelan, a Panamanian, a Colombian, but mostly they were Dominicans fresh off the tarmac at LaGuardia, jetting in via the Santo Domingo pipeline.

For the merciless dollar they'd surrender themselves up to desperate men they'd rendered faceless, shapeless, colorless, just a trick tube of flesh invading their vaginas, their mouths, but not their souls.

The Panamanian. Young and tall, bottle-blond. He gave her the playing card and followed her inside.

"Pon na ma?" he asked.

"Si papisito, habla espanol?"

"Poquito." He smiled.

"Chino, no?" she said as she rolled down her top. Big brown torpedo nipples.

"Si," Lucky said, undressing. "Chino."

They were naked on the mattress and she was licking him. He heard himself moaning, watching her tongue working him, then sucking him into Chinaman heaven.

"Ma mao bicho," he whispered, blow me, holding her by the neck. He got rock hard and turned her over, entered the rich brown of her, doggie style.

"Mi amor," she was whispering, his lun cock stroking her.

"Mamita," he groaned like the low growl of a dog, and came long and angrily, deep inside of her.

Memory

As was her routine on Sunday afternoons, Mona pressed the Discman's plugs into her ears, adjusted the volume, then wrapped the Hermes silk square over her head and knotted it under her chin. Shirley Kwan sang a ballad into her brain as the elevator descended, and before Mona stepped out onto Henry Street, she slipped the black Vuarnets over her eyes.

She took the side streets south, away from the China Plaza, went as far as the Seaport and turned west toward the Hudson River. She didn't know the names of the streets but followed landmarks from memory, walking distance from Chinatown recalled. The way led through the steel-and-glass canyons of the Business District, pass a gwailo American department store where she found designer lingerie, toiletries, household items. Farther down that street was a travel agency she recognized by the pictures of ships and exotic locales, and a model airliner, displayed in the show window. On one occasion she had noticed a Chinese woman inside, wearing the red uniform blazer of the agency. Lucky red, she'd thought, and jook-sing, born American, she'd guessed.

Her route took her toward the river until she reached the World Financial Center. The promenade was deserted, as she had expected. She looked out over the harbor where the rivers met and mixed into riptides.

In the near distance she could see the Statue of Liberty, and she considered the word freedom, but remembered Uncle Four's bitter remarks about the exclusion of the Chinese, especially Chinese women, from these shores. She switched off the Discman, peered out beyond the choppy expanse of water, and began to wonder about liberty, and what she would need to do to gain it.

Out on the wet blue shining, the ships and boats reminded her of Hong Kong, the fragrant harbor, and as she stroked her piece of jade her mind reeled back to lost youth and forgotten hopes.

In Hong Kong she had crowded into cousins' bunk beds until she was sixteen, when she feared uncle would come into her room at night, herself the only girl there. She remembered wanting to be a movie star.

The memories that came after were mostly about jobs she had had long before she'd managed to work her way up from Wanchai to Central, in Club Volvo, in TsimSha Cheui, the tourist sex ghetto, before she'd wound up on Nathan Road.

She'd worked component assembly at TongKai Precision, in the beauty-care industry, making devices called Beauty Facial Sauna, Eye Massager, Deep Heat Body Massager, Scalp Stimulatortouted to improve blood circulation, cleanse the skin, eliminate cellulite.

That position lasted six months, then Fat Louie Kai tried to stimulate her blood circulation against her will. She remembered working for lofeiYat "Playboy" Pang, an aging gangster and the boss of Electronix Express, stamping circuit boards, LEDs, voice programs for talking thermo clocks: Mr. Temperature. Thermo-Talk Inc. The clocks presented multilingual digital displays and humanlike electronic voices that reported time and temperature in English, Spanish, French, German, Cyrillic, and Chinese (Mandarin only). Every hour, or at the touch of a button.

Every two months, databanks and calculators.

In the fall, children's programs for Christmas toys. Talking MathQuiz Pinball, Ring Back Talking Phone, Phone Calculator Pencil Box.

In one period, she assembled flashlights for five weeks.

In Chai Wan, she'd assembled plastics for High Speed Industries, snapping together pocket digital gambling games labeled Blackjack, Slot Machine, Craps, Roulette, Poker, Baccarat, and Deuces. Miniature versions were attached to keychains.

In Tseun Wan she had attached watchbands onto digital and quartz watches, in two months rising up the production line at Best Fortune Inc. to mini-alarm clocks and electronic pedometers.

Assembly work was all the same. Girls and women slouched over their workstations under the fluorescent lights, sometimes twenty or thirty on each side of a long conveyor belt, working their goods onto the moving rubber blacktop. They were seated on backless stools, sometimes metal, sometimes plastic or cheap handcrafted bamboo.

The factories were unbearable in the humid monsoon season, a mindless drudgery always. She punched in just after the sun came up. Punched out when the moon put a bright hole against the deep blue of night.

Another time she'd been a sales rep for costume jewelry and accessories made in Mainland China and selling well at large department stores in Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, and Japan. She never got used to hotels and airports. Tak Sing Imitation Jewelry. Necklaces, earrings, bangles, hair clasps. Gold– and silverplated steel key rings, cufflinks. It didn't last.

A different man, a different product. Wholesale rep for Everrich Handbags factory. Portfolios, briefcases, clutches, purses, shoulder bags. Leather cowhide wallets, makeup cases, and organizers.

She learned quickly the play between sex and money. If sex was attached to the job, best to be paid richly for it. Seek men with power, wealth.

Always it was a man who provided a job, always a man who took it away. Always for the same reason: she wouldn't have sex with them. When the time came to fire her, it was because her work habits were unsatisfactory, or business was bad and layoffs were necessary. Or inventory turned up missing from her line.

Men. No sex. No job.

Seven jobs in two years. Along the way, dirty old men, nasty young men. Sun Tak thugs who fancied themselves playboys passed her around among themselves. Several European indus trialists who had pledged their love until they'd bankrupted their businesses and abandoned her.

The longest job lasted nine months, at Fook Inc., the island's largest watchmaker, until old man Ah Fook died and young son Fook came around wanting what all the others before him demanded.

She'd moved on.

Now the sounds of the waterfront receded and she found herself following the traffic down the side streets back toward Chinatown.