Текст книги "Year of the Dog "

Автор книги: Henry Chang

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

Watch Out

Koo Jai sat upright in his bed and reached across for the lady’s watch, a gold and black Rado nestled in the soft hollows of his thick comforter, where it had landed after Tina flung it at him in a fit of jealous fury. She’d finally realized that his other girlfriends weren’t going to disappear.

Fuck that little cunt. He grinned to himself; there’d be another piece of ass soon enough, another quickie conquest. Any village girl out of the Guangjo backwater, who’d never seen better than a Timex, would surely give it all up for the diamond-speckled watch. Why do I waste my time on jealous bitches anyway? he asked himself.

He placed the Rado on the metal folding table and leaned back against the pillows. He drained the last of the bottle of Tsingtao beer and was considering opening another when there was a knock on the door.

Tina, he thought, coming back to beg forgiveness. Maybe he’d let her suck his cock if she was truly repentant.

Another knock, and then Shorty’s voice froze him

“Koo,” Shorty called, “open up.”

Strange, Koo Jai thought, pulling his pistol from beneath the pillows as he quietly stepped toward the front door.

“Shorty?” he replied. “You alone?”

“No,” Shorty answered.

“Open up!” demanded a second voice he instantly recognized as belonging to the dailo.

But here? Now? Why? Koo Jai shook off the panic, shoved the gun under the sofa cushions, then reached for the door.

Lucky smirked at the sight of Koo Jai in his black briefs.

Kongo stepped inside, tossing two cartons of cigarettes and a bag of pills onto the sofa as Shorty backed into the room, followed by Lucky.

Koo Jai moved away from the door.

Lucky spotted the butt of the pistol protruding from beneath the cushion. “Kai dai, punk.” He grinned. “You expecting trouble?”

“No,” answered Koo Jai, still confused by the surprise visit. “It’s just that no one ever comes up here.”

“Right.” Lucky snickered. “Just you and the leng nui , the pretty girls.”

Kongo stood between the sofa and Koo Jai, letting his duster hang open to show the scattergun hanging by his side. Lucky threw Shorty Ng a hard look, saying, “Take a walk. Check the park for Fuks and come back in ten minutes.”

Shorty glanced at Koo Jai, before squeezing past Kongo, relieved to escape from the overheated room.

Sensing Koo Jai’s confusion, Lucky said, “Relax. The smokes and the pills are for you boys out here. Something to keep you going while you’re watching the streets, especially near the park.” Lucky stepped to the front window, checked the view on East Broadway.

“Why? What’s up?” asked Koo Jai.

“I want you all to keep an eye on the street where the Chinese buses are parked.”

The puzzled look stayed on Koo Jai’s face.

Lucky said, “See if any Fuks are hanging around. Are they getting on the buses? Or following in their cars? Or are they just putting muscle on the street?”

“Can’t you tell me what’s coming down?” Koo Jai asked, pulling on his pants.

“Don’t ask so many fuckin’ questions,” Lucky warned. “And don’t forget, we still want the motherfuckers who been robbing our members.” He turned toward the back of the apartment. “Whaddya got back there? That the love nest?”

Koo Jai followed Lucky to his bedroom, the heavy footsteps of Kongo behind him.

“Shit, it’s hot as hell back here,” Lucky said.

“Makes the girls take their clothes off faster,” Koo Jai deadpanned.

Lucky noticed the black-faced and diamond Rado, lifted it from the folding table.

“Nice,” he said. “I know just the girl for this. You don’t mind, right?”

Koo Jai shook his head as Lucky pocketed the watch.

“It’s Christmastime, you know.”

Koo Jai nodded, keeping the smile on his face.

Lucky grinned at stone-faced Kongo. “Maybe I’ll get lucky, huh?” He laughed at his own joke, continuing, “Or maybe she’ll get Lucky.”

Kongo kept his eyes on Koo Jai as they left the apartment.

“Keep watching,” barked Lucky. “And keep that fuckin’ cell phone on.”

Koo Jai closed the door and listened to the sound of their footsteps thumping down the stairs. He sat on the sofa and retrieved his gun, suspicion in his heart about the change in the dailo ’s demeanor. He felt suddenly thirsty, and tried to find clarity in another bottle of Tsingtao.

Kongo led the way out of the tenement. Lucky squeezed the Rado in the sweaty palm of his big hand as they came onto East Broadway. They headed for the black Buick, Lucky thinking, Lee’s watches, wondering if Skinny Chin took better care of his list of serial numbers than he did of his merchandise.

White and Red

The Ecstasy sharpened his instincts, Lucky felt, but the more he took, the more he needed to get the same bounce. Now the ma huang and his instincts were bracing him up.

Gray light in late afternoon. The streets looked slippery, under a mushy white coating. He passed over the Gucci loafers, thinking how streetwise he was, and laced up the black steel-toed Doc Martens with the rubber traction soles.

Imagining himself in a fight, he raised his hands in a Wing Chun–style pose, striking a sloppy cat-stance. The loose-fitting carpenter jeans puffed up where extra pockets held a box cutter, a cell phone.

He popped another one of the red pills and washed it down with a chug of Grey Goose from a pint-sized bottle, a taste from the twenty cases they’d taken from Fook Lau Liquors.

Another gambling debt squared up and then some.

He sensed he should press the element of surprise, and ambush Koo Jai again. Kongo was holed up in a catnap with some Malay ho, and Lefty, fighting off a hangover from the free vodka, had crashed in the clubhouse.

Go alone this time, pull off a bluff, see what turns up.

He walked over to East Broadway, kept his gun hand near the nine in his pocket as he stepped up and knocked on Koo Jai’s door.

No answer.

He punched up Koo Jai’s pager, standing there quietly but heard only silence from within. He knocked again, waited another minute before going back down the stairs. At the rear of the street landing, he checked the fire escapes above him, didn’t see any movement there.

Head toward the far end, he was thinking, as he turned down East Broadway.

People on the street were hustling to buy their dinner groceries as the weather worsened. The fish vendors were barking at their customers, threatening to close shop. Lucky looked in the direction of Pike Street, intuiting that Koo Jai had gone that way. Halfway down the dark street he saw a skelly-looking white man outside the local methadone clinic, bobbing and weaving in the middle of the slushy sidewalk, forcing Chinese ah por, grandmothers, to shift their bags of choy, and walk around him.

Lucky brushed him with his shoulder as he passed.

In his junkie haze the man muttered just loud enough for Lucky to hear the words chinky shit . . .

Lucky took a few more steps and stopped suddenly, as if he remembered something, then turned, bringing his hands up as if he were adjusting sunglasses, stepping toward the man. An arm’s length away, Lucky leaned forward and drove the heel of his open right palm full force into the man’s chin. Shock crossed the man’s face, hate tearing up in his eyes as he tasted his own poisoned blood oozing from the dangling piece of tongue he’d bitten off. That froze him for the two seconds it took for Lucky to kick his heel through the man’s knee, feeling the ligaments give way like rotted rubber bands as he started to fall forward. Lucky grabbed him by his collar and twisted him so that he dove headlong into concrete and steel steps, spewing what looked like bloody kernels of corn from his mouth. Lucky swung a vicious kick with the steel-toed boot into the man’s ribs. The junkie mutt choked and started to vomit.

That good enough? Lucky roared inside his head, that enough fuckin’ chinky shit for you, hah? He wiped the slime off the Doc Martens, dragging his feet through the dirty slush as he left the scene, cursing as he went.

He could see flashing lights in the distance, too far away to tell if that meant cops, or emergency workers. At the corner, he changed direction. His Ecstasy-driven bravado was crashing.

He considered his options as the rotating lights got closer, and grudgingly turned back toward the Bayard Street condo.

It was Koo Jai, he thought, who was the lucky one tonight.

Sin

Grass Sandal had chosen the location well. The new condominium high-rise, Tribeca West, had been one of the Red Circle’s Manhattan real-estate investments, another opportunity to sai chien, to wash its dirty money. The condo stood at the edge of Hudson Square, conveniently near the Holland Tunnel and the Westside Highway if a need to escape the city arose. Since the building was only half occupied, Gee Sin’s movements would arouse little attention. He poured himself a tumbler of XO brandy and stepped out on to the dark balcony, thinking that the colorful lights across the river reminded him of Hong Kong. The Red Circle’s plans were in place, and besides the fleet of buses, other arrangements had already been set in motion.

The wind whipped up suddenly, and he went back inside, put the tumbler down. He looked around and was pleased: simple furnishings, all rented, so the triad would not be stuck, money tied up in idle property. The condo unit could be cleared on short notice and made available for sale.

All the Red Circle’s investments in Manhattan properties had been successful, and real-estate prices continued to rise.

Gee Sin went to the walk-in closet and tapped in the code numbers to the wall safe hidden there. From the safe he extracted stacks of plastic cards, then proceeded to the living room. In that quiet space, under the flood of light from a solitary overhead pendant lamp, he squared up the decks of plastic on the black-stone slab surface that separated the dining from the living areas. He dealt the cards out with his left hand, the blank plastic flashing smoothly between thumb and trigger finger, sliding out from the flick of the wrist.

Nine piles of eleven cards each. He shuffled them into neat stacks, three across, three down.

The black Visa card blanks, across the top. Black, the color of night, the shade of secrecy, the black of the hak se wui, secret societies.

The gold American Express cards. Wong, yellow, in the middle of everything.

And the Platinum MasterCard blanks.

Gold and silver, very much favored by the Chinese.

He took another swallow from the glass of brandy, caught his breath, and closed his eyes. They had learned quickly from past operations. Instead of selling the cards to amateurs who would get caught and call attention to the operators, he’d decided to use selected Chinese people in order to impose control and improve communication. The idea of using storage locations and closed warehouses was his way of gaining mobility and volume for the operators.

They would fence the products through the triad’s legitimate businesses.

When he opened his eyes, he saw the array of stacks differently. They were ghost identities, cards ready to be imprinted with a rotating selection of Chinese names: Chins and Changs, Dongs, Fongs, and Gongs, and a lot of Lees and Wongs.

Stolen account numbers would be loaded onto the magnetic strip of the blank. The Chinese name would be matched to a recruited shopper, whose picture had been taken for a bogus driver’s license for picture identification. The fake licenses, computer-generated, were virtually undistinguishable from the real deal. Any of the mobile mills, with portable laptops and rented laser printers, could turn out acceptable forged passports and visas as well.

They’d refined forgery, fraudulent credit, and identity theft into an art and a science.

He reflected on the society’s Thirty-Six Strategies. He’d added a twist to Number Seven, Create something out of nothing, to use false information effectively. They were creating false identities, welding real account numbers to paper names, breeding phantoms who would bring millions to the Red Circle. To steal the dragon and replace it with the phoenix, steal account numbers and supply them with new faces.

It had begun with the Red Circle’s number forty-nines—sai gow jai, dog soldiers—who’d kidnapped an Asia Bank One executive in Vancouver, B.C., and managed to rip off a delivery of credit-card machines. The scam operations had worked well on a small scale at first, but now they were spreading east and west via Canadian Chinatowns.

Gee Sin would introduce the fraudulent organizations to America.

He felt proud, marveled at how smoothly everything fit together, how each scam unit found its way around the Fukienese, the latest wave of Chinese immigrants. They became fodder for the ever-expanding Chinese restaurant business, suckers for Chinese loan sharks, and desperadoes to enlist in the credit-card operation. The tour buses only made it easier for all the crews to move around. Paper Fan had foreseen that the buses connecting the many restaurants among the triads’ dues-paying members, transporting the Fukienese filling in as kitchen help, deported to far-flung kitchens in this strange gwai devil land, could be the basis for a network. Hung Huen card operators trolled the Fukienese employment agencies for unemployed Chinese willing to participate in fraud. The crews of recruiters, under Grass Sandal’s instructions, also kept an eye on the Chinese gamblers, high rollers, at the casinos in Atlantic City, and at Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun as well, hunting for players who needed cash.

In addition, some of the Chinese restaurants yielded disgruntled employees who sold customer’s credit-card information to the triad, ten dollars for each account. The sai gow jai collected the information, and the tech mills manufactured the bogus driver’s licenses to match the fake cards. Underpaid salespeople at cell-phone shops and dishonest bank clerks sold clients’ personal information, too. The sweeper at a video-rental store might provide a hundred confidential application forms. There was no shortage of illegal immigrants at the ends of their ropes, convenient bodies with which to create new accounts. When the accounts were maxed out, the body would disappear to another forsaken kitchen in the hinterlands. If they got caught, Immigration gave them a free ticket back to China.

Gee Sin, the mastermind, took advantage of the Americans’ holiday preoccupation with gift giving, the annual buying frenzy that overwhelmed what was originally a religious holiday. Paper Fan realized how important these several weeks were to merchants, hoping to make sales to carry them through the year, which in the crazed crush of business made them careless and blind to credit-card fraud.

The bogus cards would be automatically approved by the retailer’s swipe-reader because the account number was legitimate. If the store required photo identification, there was the fake driver’s license that provided it. Cashiers readily accepted the machine’s approval, especially when faced with a long line of tired shoppers waiting to pay. During the holidays, credit-account spending levels normally scrutinized were relaxed, and high-end purchases were less likely to be questioned.

The Chinese shoppers had been instructed to buy certain brand-name merchandise, popular items that would be easy to move.

He took another taste of the brandy and his vision of the plastic decks changed again. Now he saw an array of Chinese communities inside American cities, each one under the influence of triad clans and tong-affiliated gangs. The three stacks on the right were Boston, New York, New Jersey. They’d partnered with the Fuk Chow on the East Coast. The three stacks on the left were the West Coast cities of Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. The Suey Ching ran the northern two, but the Viet Ching controlled the cards in L.A., and were tops in Texas Chinatowns as well. The middle decks were Columbus/ Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Richmond/Norfolk. The Sun Wo clan worked the cards in all those mid-American cities.

Besides dispatching Fukinese desperadoes to scam the local merchants, Gee Sin advised Grass Sandal to select the best English-speaking recruits to work the phones against the mail-order companies, directing Christmas gift merchandise to a series of storage facilities and shuttered storefronts. At these locations, designated triad officers with bogus identification would await the deliverymen and sign for the items. The phone-scam operators focused on high-end electronics that the Red Circle could sell easily through its network of merchants, expensive items like video camcorders, digital cameras, Walkmen and laptop computers.

They’d expected to steal several million dollars of merchandise over the holidays, all through fraudulent credit-card transactions. The legitimate account holder and the card-issuing company wouldn’t detect anything amiss until weeks after the holidays, when the monthly statements arrived in the mail. By then, Paper Fan and his operatives would be long gone, leaving only a trail of smoke and shadows.

His thoughts changed again as he felt a slow dull throbbing at his wrist, and he leaned back away from the stacks of cards. Occasionally he’d feel a sharp pain at the wrist. This occurred mostly in winter or in cold locations like Vancouver or Toronto, where he had first tested the credit-card operations.

Time to take it off, he thought.

The psychiatric member of the rehabilitation and therapy team at Kowloon had suggested to him the idea of residual pain, the severed nerves remembering the moment of the chop. It’s all in the brain, she’d said, you think you feel pain so you do feel pain. Mostly it was chafing, or too much pressure at the new joint, where scar-sealed bone and muscle bumped against the silicone-padded socket of the prosthesis.

He could remove the prosthesis to relieve the pain. Painkiller medication was prescribed.

Dew keuih, fuck, he cursed quietly. He knew it wasn’t the hand. It fit well and he’d trained on it, and willed it to work well. It wasn’t the hand.

It was the attack that he remembered, hazy but still horrific even after twenty-five years. The pain of a young man revived in the stump arm of an old man.

The glint of light from his left. Raising his bow arm reflexively.

It wasn’t the hand, marvelously sculpted and engineered.

He’d been knocked down. When he braced to get up he saw that he had no left hand.

It was the memory.

And he had survived the attack. The chop had been intented for his neck.

He detached the elastic and Velcro band that wrapped around his elbow, and slipped the hand off, placing it on the black marble. It always looked strange, removed from his arm, especially when he walked further from it, and viewed his hand in the near distance. His real hand felt like reaching for it.

He imagined it as a weapon, the sling its holster.

Touch

Already five years old, the bionic hand was an ultralite model, a myoelectric prosthesis with articulate fingers, an opposable thumb, a rotating wrist. It was powered by batteries inside the fake limb. Sensors there detected when the arm muscles contracted, then converted the body’s electrical signal into electric power. This powered the motor controlling the hand and wrist, its skeletal frame made of thermoplastics and titanium for extreme flexibility. The frame was covered with a skin of silicone that was resistant to heat and flame, and custom colored to match the patient’s skin pigmentation. The hand and fingers were sculpted with fingernails, knuckles, and creases. At a glance, it was indistinguishable from a real hand.

It cost eighty thousand dollars in Hong Kong and the triad had paid without question.

Removing it from his arm reminded him of the rehabilitation course at the Kowloon Clinic, where he’d trained to use his new artificial limb. He’d continued for a year until his control of hand and finger movements became so deft that he could eat with chopsticks, and deal a deck of cards. He could pluck a coin off the table.

He could pull the trigger of a gun.

Aaya, he sighed, remembering the first of the Thirty-Six Strategies of the society, cross the ocean without letting the sky know. Of course, he was here to oversee the tour buses and the credit cards, but—known only to himself and the dragonhead, leader of the triad—there was the matter of the missing diamonds and gold Panda coins in the wake of the Uncle Four murder, not to mention a hundred thousand in Hip Ching cash stolen from the foolish old man by his vengeful mistress. Uncle Four had been en route to a meeting with Hakka heroin dealers before he was murdered. His mistress had disappeared.This was not something they could suffer quietly, even though much of what was missing was swag. Before returning to Hong Kong, he knew he’d have to look into the situation. He took a Vicodin pill, washing it down with the last of the liquor. After a minute he lay down and let go of the progressions in his head. The room went black and he dreamed he was flying, watching the landforms below, marking his way back to the fragrant harbor of Hong Kong.