Текст книги "Year of the Dog "

Автор книги: Henry Chang

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

Courage

Inside the small Pell Street walk-up, Sai Go sat slumped on his sofa, considering Chat Choy’s suggestion that they embark on another gambling junket. Sai Go wasn’t hungry, and didn’t feel like visiting Choy at Tang’s Dynasty like he usually did, collecting bets from the waiters while he was there.

The battery in the bathroom scale had died, but he knew he was still losing weight. The cancer was feeding on him from the inside.

He powered on the TV, muting the sound to the Chinese cable program. The casino at Foxwoods was promoting a cabaret show with Taiwanese talent, Longshot Lee had announced, “sexy” singers and dancers in skimpy neo-mod outfits. The hom sup lo, horny bastard, coming out in him. Twenty-five dollars would cover the round-trip bus, a buffet meal at Woks to Go, and twenty dollars worth of betting coupons and store discounts. Gum Sook had countered with The Plaza in Atlantic City, also staging a Chinese floor show, featuring a troupe of beautiful Malaysian acrobats in holiday costumes. And the buffet was Chinese, not gwailo.

They’d decided on Foxwoods.

What the hell, Sai Go thought, why not go along with them? It’s only three hours up the highway. It was a gwailo holiday but he’d just as soon play a few hands of Chinese pai gow, poker, or some mini-thirteen.

Many of the casinos offered a separate space for Chinese and Asian games of chance, featuring sik bo, pai gow, poker, or dominoes, and bak ka lo, baccarat. They kept blackjack and roulette action conveniently to one side just to keep the girlfriends of the players happy.

He imagined it in his head. Drinks all around, brought out on trays by girls in gaily colored cheongsams. Asian high rollers having a hoot. Winning sometimes and playing it up, but losing, mostly.

It was the last image he saw before passing out.

Afterlife

It was the bleating of the phone somewhere that awoke him. He wasn’t sure if it was one of his cell phones, or the apartment phone. He’d left the lamp and the TV on; some Taiwanese soap opera with subtitles was playing silently.

Sai Go considered answering the phone but fatigue kept his limbs from responding. Then the answering machine came on. House phone, he heard his own hoarse tired voice on the recording.

The caller was Gum Sook, asking if Sai Go had decided to go on the trip to Foxwoods, that he could brew up some tea. “Call Longshot,” he said, “if you want to go.”

Following that, his cell phone rang, and though he turned, reaching, his legs wouldn’t respond. He grabbed for the edge of the bed with his hands and rolled his body over. The cell phone kept ringing.

He was suddenly jolted by deep knifing pain in his legs, in his bones, knees, and ankles. He gritted his teeth, heaving breaths through his clenched jaw, until he could bear the pain no more and crashed into the blackness.

Into the Light

His view slowly settled on the clock radio as he regained con-ciousness. It was afternoon, a Monday, still December. Sai Go recalled the pain in his legs and gingerly moved them. Surprisingly, they carried him off the sofa as if nothing had happened. Relieved, he went to the bathroom sink, splashed water on his face. Painkillers, he was thinking, in case it comes back. They’d surely have something at the clinic.

He thought of returning Gum Sook’s call. He resolved to jup sau may, tie up loose ends. He’d withdraw his twenty-five thousand and close his account at U.S. Asia. He’d like to collect his last debts at OTB, from Lum Kee the fish-ball vendor, and two waiters at Garden Palace.

Send a card to the chun chik, relatives, in Honk Kong. Spread the word. He, Fong Sai Yook, has passed.

Maybe place an ad in the Chinese obituaries.

Return the packs of telephone calling cards to Big Chuck Chan.

Visit Lo Fay, the all-purpose lawyer at the association’s Credit Union. He was good for immigration, divorces, and other loose ends.

He’d ask Gum Sook to call and look in on him twice a week, to report the death when the time came. He’d arrange a cash incentive for Gum Sook.

Sai Go gargled, coughed, and spat into the sink, rinsing from the faucet without looking for blood in the spittle.

He put on his cheap down jacket and went down the stairs, exiting onto the street in the direction of the health clinic, and OTB.

The Price of Freedom

Inside the New Canton, KeeKee spread open the China Post and explained the racing results to Bo. She slid her French-tipped nail down the newsprint until she came to the eighth race.

“Here,” she said, “American Freedom. Paid one hundred eighty-eight to show.”

“My horse won?” Bo exclaimed.

“No, but you won anyway. For coming in second.”

“I won by coming in second?” Bo asked, incredulous.

KeeKee laughed. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll cash it for you when I go for lunch.”

Bo thought of Sai Go, wanting to thank him, to share the lucky winnings. She considered treating him to yum cha, dim sum, or a box of Fei Dong pastries, when he showed up for his next haircut.

Dead Man Walking

Doyers Street was an icy slope and Sai Go stepped carefully over the slick compressed snow. He followed the twisting street until he came to the narrow alley that split out behind the Bowery, the same alley used by Hip Ching hatchetmen in their bloody forays against tong rivals, sixty years before. Nowadays, the alley was commonly used as a shortcut from Doyers to Chatham Square, leading out to the Bowery.

Less snow had accumulated in the alley. Sai Go exited from the gap between buildings next to OTB, a half block from the health clinic.

OTB looked crowded and he decided to stop by on the way back from the clinic.

The health clinic was closing, and Sai Go could only explain his painful episode to the technician, who apologized that he was not authorized to dispense medications. The clinic doctor would return the following afternoon.

Walking back, he saw that the vestibule of OTB had emptied.

Inside, he found the two waiters and collected from them, waiting around afterward for the street vendors. He stood at the far end of the floor, scanning the crowd milling about for the next race. In the tubercular air, he resisted the urge to cough, afraid that his phlegm would show bloody red. His thoughts strayed dizzily to a commotion on the betting floor. A curse rang out and immediately became madda focker in six dialects. A group of market workers laughed, and a construction crew cheered.

He didn’t see any street vendors and was heading toward the front of the parlor when Koo Jai, appearing frazzled, tramped through the doors.

Koo Jai immediately spotted Sai Go and came toward him angrily. Looking around, he hissed, “You fuckin’ complain to the dailo, hah?” Noticing the eyes around them, stealing glances their way, Koo Jai leaned toward Sai Go and whispered, “You watch your fuckin’ back, old man.”

Sai Go stood silent a moment watching pretty-boy Koo stomp out of OTB.

He laughed quietly to himself. Ha, threatening a dead man, the irony of it. Still, he was insulted by the threat and resolved to get his gun out of the lock box and carry it in his coat pocket. He knew he was sure to die.

But he sure wasn’t going to lose face.

Gain , No Pain

Sai Go put down the cup of guk fa, chrysanthemum tea, and opened the metal box, empty now except for his run money wad of hundreds, and the Vigilante revolver in its holster. He took the gun out of the holster, flipped the barrel out to confirm that six bullets were nesting there, then pressed the barrel back in with a click of his thumb.

He put the Vigilante into the right cargo pocket of his down jacket. He didn’t bother to take extra bullets. Whatever was going to happen wasn’t going beyond the six he had chambered.

When he finished the guk fa he decided it was late enough in the afternoon to check out the health clinic. He stretched his legs, remembering the agony he’d felt, and wished he had a god to pray to, for painkillers.

No god; the doctor would have to do.

It was all coming apart, he thought. How much more time did he have before the pain and sorrow bled out? Or was it all a dark killing shadow, spreading out behind the bitterness and despair, that no amount of time or forgiveness could cure?

Bookie man. He felt his essence shrinking, becoming like a teng jai, sampan, in a dark tossing ocean.

In the beginning, he had felt that it wasn’t a crime. He was just making a living, taking bets. Allowing the Chinese hindaai, brothers, to chase their dreams. Chinese were superstitious and loved to gamble. Who was the victim in that? The families or the associations usually resolved any problems that arose.

Now, after a dozen years, crushed by this fatal sickness, he finally saw it for what it was.

An underground life full of careless sins, chasing the dragon of good fortune. The dragon was devouring him from inside now. All part of the same evil. He was part of the trail of dirty money that travels in a circle. Money from gambling that makes its way to the pockets of gangsters. Money that translates into bak fun, white powder, and guns. Money that finances the smugglers of human cargo, feeding into slavery, prostitution. Becoming money again in the banks, the vicious cycle turning without end.

Fresh Money

Lucky left Kongo and Lefty by the front door of Number Seventeen’s basement to cover the mid-afternoon delivery of that evening’s bank; a brown envelope containing the usual denominations of dead presidents and statesmen: Hamiltons, Jacksons, Grants, and Franklins. The On Yee house manager and the courier walked past Lucky and disappeared into a back office.

Maybe it was because the new year and the new stable of whores at Angelina’s had put him in a generous mood, but Lucky had had a change of heart; he was going to play wayward Koo Jai another way.

Copping a plea on the phone, Koo had told him he’d raised nine thousand cash, but he’d admitted he had only the remaining watches to make up the balance, although he claimed their value would be greater than the twenty K the dailo demanded.

Lucky had already figured he would take the cash for himself; he would let Lefty fence the remaining watches through his cousin’s shop in Toronto. Kongo would mule the watches north. They would split the proceeds.

He heard Lefty laugh as he and Kongo popped Ecstasy pills.

Lucky had answered Koo, “Okay, bring the shit. And bring the boyz, too. Let’s have a sit-down.” He wanted to keep them away from the heart of Chinatown to cut down the chances of the other crews noticing them.

“OTB,” he said, “At four-thirty o’clock tomorrow. And don’t fuckin’ make me wait.”

Legal End

Jack spent days following the arrests of the Hong boy’s killers at Hogan Place with the assistant district attorneys, starting the numbing grind that was due process.

At week’s end, Jack returned to Cabrini where they removed his stitches. There were two small scars on the left side of his chest, in the fleshy tissue slightly above but flanking the nipple. The little .22 bullet had passed through. Further down were the puncture scars on his left forearm, rounded indentations where the pit bull’s sharp teeth had clamped on. Fuckin’ mad dog.

Pasini called, reminding him of his appointment with the department shrink. Standard procedure after suffering serious wounds in the line of duty. No, dying in some stinking hallway in the ghetto housing projects was not how he saw himself finishing out the job. The arm was one thing, but the chest wound above the heart was a warning, somehow. Yet any doubts he nursed made him less a cop, and he wasn’t looking for a disability deal.

Afterward, after trudging through the thickening snow, he’d met Alexandra at Tsunami, halfway between her Loi-saida storefront and the NoHo precinct house. They drank sake and Sapporo, picked from the sushi and sashimi on the little wooden boats that passed by on the mini-conveyor belt that ran the length of the bar.

“It’s in the hands of the prosecutors,” Jack said, “The punks basically turned on each other and implicated one another.”

Alex broke out cigarettes and they lit up together, their conversation bracketed by puffs.

“We got oral and written statements,” Jack continued, after touching glasses with Alex in a silent toast. “DNA matchups on all three,” Alex smiled sadly. “The murder weapons. Prints all over.” He was quiet a moment, his stare going long distance as he said, “The victim . . . he put up a helluva fight. Wasn’t enough. But he left sufficient evidence to hang them all.”

Alex put her hand over his, her eyes misting. She tapped her glass against his again, brought him back into the moment.

“What does your friend at Legal Aid think?” Jack asked.

“Defense,” she exhaled. “They may contend the original entry and search was illegal. No cause.”

He’d been following up a missing person . . . there had been the smell of marijuana at the door.

“Or they may request a change in venue. Say they can’t get a fair trial in Manhattan, because there are too many Chinese, Asians, in the jury pool. They may want a Bronx jury, or one from Brooklyn. A judge of color, who’s sensitive to minority defendants.”

Technicalities and racial politics hacking into the case . . .

“They can delay, file appeals, assert medical claims, demand more evidence.”

“This is going to take a while,” Jack said, finishing his sake.

“I get it.”

They shared the last of the big Sapporo over sunomono and seaweed salad.

Outside, the wind gusted up and rattled the big picture windows.

Jack paid the tab and they tapped glasses at the last swallow, with Alex saying “Happy New Year. To 1995.”

“Yeah, Happy New Year,” Jack answered with a forced smile.

They drained their glasses.

They caught a cab, and he dropped her off at Confucius Towers before going on to Sunset Park. They had traded cheek kisses and awkward looks afterward, finally shaking hands before she tiptoed through the snow and faded into the lobby of the high-rise.

Crossing the Manhattan Bridge to Brooklyn, Jack remembered the dead delivery boy. It didn’t feel like 1995 was going to be a happy new year.

Storm

The blizzard roared in overnight, an arctic juggernaut that blasted in from the northeast. Fifty mile gusts toppled tall trees onto rooftops and cars, ripping down power lines in the darkness. Half of Long Island and Staten Island were blacked out.

NYC Transit rolled out two thousand snow plows, hundreds of salt spreaders. Sanitation pressed its two thousand men into twelve-hour shifts against the blowing two-foot drifts.

The outer boroughs were flogged by the swirling whiteout.

The airports were snowbound, hundreds of flights cancelled, with thousands of travelers stranded at Kennedy, LaGuardia, and Newark.

Commuter transit from New Jersey and Conneticut came to a blinding halt.

The sub-zero overnight staggered to daylight, fifteen degrees. Wind-chill real feel was four degrees. The shrieking wind drove the thick flakes sideways. To augment Sanitation’s efforts, the city hired neighborhood kids to shovel the main streets. Still, the blizzard locked down the city: schools and businesses closed, disabled and abandoned vehicles made highways, bridges, and tunnels impassable. Frozen signals and switches crippled the subways and metropolitan railroads.

In Manhattan, coastal flooding closed the Westside Highway and the FDR Drive.

A broken water main on Delancey flooded the avenue and side streets, forming a half-mile slick of ice that further choked southbound traffic. In the Chinatown morning, shopkeepers chopped at the ice and shoveled pathways down the slippery streets, forming walls of slush-capped snow along the curb. Every so often a gap, a cutout in the wall, allowed for passage to the other side of the street. Fire hydrants were cleared; the Chinese were pragmatic to a fault.

Lunchtime was a trudging push of bundled bodies, hats and scarves wrapped around Chinese heads with watering eyes. Cars, trucks, and buses crept along, their exhaust trailing clouds of steam into the frozen air. Chinatown was digging itself out while the surrounding neighborhoods surrendered.

Death Do Us Part

They all stood around the couch in the front room, four distraught faces.

“Dailo found one of the watches here,” Koo Jai admitted grudgingly. “Long story. It was out, on the bed, and he snatched it.”

“Wha’ happen? How come?” was the best the dumbfounded Jung brothers could muster.

“It was your fault,” muttered Shorty. “You were careless.”

“How the fuck do I know he’s at the door?” bitched Koo Jai. “Fuckin’ nobody called me. I could’ve put the watch away. You messed up by bringing him. None of this would have happened.”

“Bullshit,” Shorty said evenly.

“Look, it don’t matter,” sneered Koo Jai. “He said he knew we were pulling jobs. Said he didn’t care. All he wanted was his cut. Said to bring everything we boosted.”

“Hah, everything gone. No way,” mumbled the Jungs.

“Dailo says we all gotta go.” Koo Jai was steadfast. “Meet down Bowery.”

“Where?” in a chorus.

“OTB. There’s a coffee shop next to the alley.”

“Why there?” befuddled Old Jung asked.

“Who the fuck knows? He wants a sit-down.”

“Deew!! Fucked!” moaned Young Jung.

“Just be prepared,” Koo Jai warned. “Keep your chins up, and your fuckin’ eyes open. Unless dailo asks you personally, I’ll do all the talking. If anything goes bad, we meet in Boston.” He nodded at the Jungs. “Call your cousins.”

They exited the flat, the Jung brothers jittery, as if they were going to a funeral.

Led by Koo Jai, they kept to the streets crossing Chatham Square; it was easier to walk through the dirty slush trails left by bus traffic. They came to the Bowery end of the square where access to the sidewalk was blocked by waist-high frozen drifts.

Koo Jai and Shorty were first to crunch their way through to the sidewalk, the larger Jungs behind them clumsily lumbering along in their wake.

Gusts of wind blew powdered snow off the street lamps and traffic lights.

The dailo ’s crew turned the corner of Mott onto Bowery, moving in a loose triangle with Lucky at the point. Lucky saw Koo Jai and Shorty a half-block away, thought of the nine large in cash in Koo’s pocket, imagining how he was going to drop some of it on some fine ass and pussy at Angelina’s. Peripherally, he noticed the Jung brothers plodding behind them through the snowbank. Clumsy bitches, he thought, continuing on toward OTB.

Old Jung slipped and fell to one knee, the sudden twist of his hip dislodging the pistol he carried in his waistband. The gun slid along the dirty ice but he was able to grab it and pull it back. A few steps ahead, Young Jung turned and cast an annoyed look at him.

Kongo saw Old Jung dropping to one knee. He grunted as Old Jung’s hand came up holding a pistol; it looked as if he’d pulled it out of the snow. Whipping open his trenchcoat, the Ecstasy pushing him, he went for the sawed-off shotgun dangling at his hip.

Koo Jai and Shorty both saw the dailo and his crew marching toward them. With their heartbeats spiking, they watched as Lucky drifted to one side. Behind him, the big Malaysian’s eyes were suddenly as large as don tots, egg tarts, as he drew the chopped shotgun.

Lefty saw Young Jung staring at Kongo, astonishment on his face, momentarily frozen. Each of them instinctively reached for his gun.

Lucky recoiled at the sound of the deafening blast from behind him, his gun hand automatically going inside his blazer. He glanced back to see Kongo loose another blast into the ringing air and Lefty aiming his Nine. When he swung his eyes back to Koo Jai, both he and Shorty were taking aim at him. One of the Jungs was rising up from the snow, emptying his pistol at them in a spraying arc.

Lucky drew a gun from his inside pocket as Lefty fired mechanically, methodically, ahead.

Kongo dropped the sawed-off, drew his pistol, and tried to aim at Koo Jai, but the dailo’s back blocked his shot. He saw the short guy, the little guy, jamming off little firecracker shots at them.

Lucky felt the impact like a punch in the head, his body staggering backward. Suddenly, hot metal was tearing into him, twisting through him. Fuck! he heard himself yell, as his thoughts ceased.