Chinatown Beat (6 page)

He went past the groups of black gangsta toughs gathering in the projects, all do-rags and gold-capped teeth, and turned his thoughts to the colors of the neon lights blinking in Chinatown in the distance. In his heart, filled with hate, he was wishing he could put his hands on this cowardly unknown molester of children and slowly choke the life from him.

Tat "Lucky" Louie sat on the edge of the futon in the dark bedroom of the Bridgeview condo and gathered his clothes around him. He strapped on a gold Rolex and dressed in a hurry.

Lucky was a dailo-elder brother and leader-of the brotherhood of the Ghost Legion. In another mob he would have been a capo, maybe a lieutenant. The On Yee bigshots, rivals of the Hip Ching, gave him a piece of their two-card parlors, and he had two young crews that answered to him. One crew for the streets, a couple dozen wiry teenage toughs, all Hong Kong Chinese, guncrazy and wild-eyed. The second crew was for special jobs: kidnapping, enforcing, robbery, whatever became necessary. A dozen real warriors, refugees from hellholes across Southeast Asia: a half-breed Thai boy, two Cambodians, six Vietnamese Chinese, and Kongo, the big dark Malay who never spoke, who always had the cut-off scatter gun on his hip. When the Ghosts went out on a war party, it was this crew of hotheads their enemies feared most, his pack of crazed sociopaths.

The morning light crept in along the edges of the window blinds, and he stepped into his black Versace loafers. He left the gunmetal-gray silk jacket open, loose-fitting cover for a five-ten frame that was twenty pounds overweight. It had gone to flab, new gut hanging where muscle had given way to beer and fatty fastfood dinners. It didn't matter, he didn't need to fight anymore. He had face on the streets, and face was everything.

He slipped a box-cutter into his jacket pocket.

The Fukienese, he thought, didn't care about face, and needed to be taught a lesson. Their Fuk Ching lowboys wanted a gangbang over East Broadway, they were going to get it. He knew how, but that would come later, after he'd fixed it with Uncle Four, to keep the Black Dragons out of the way.

There was a truce on.

He was lucky. He had outlived those above him who had burned brighter, lived faster, died younger. When the Feds had cleaned out the last of the Ghost Legion's upper ranks ten years earlier, he'd inherited his position by default. The Legion had to rebuild, and he'd been all they had left.

The door slammed behind him, and he went down, watching the elevator light drop the five levels. The new day was a pale flat wash of morning, broken by clouds, a filtering of sunlight. He turned out to Mott Street and quickened his pace, wanting to get to fay por-fat lady-Fat Lily's mahjong parlor early, while the girls were still fresh and clean. He didn't like the idea of walking into sloppy fifths, behind some phlegmy Hakkanese butcher. It didn't matter how many men the girls had had the night before. Each day was new.

Although the Ghosts operated under the banner of the On Yee, the biggest, wealthiest, and most prestigious Chinatown tong, Lucky realized he had to navigate with great care the treacherous alliances with old-timers like Uncle Four, who controlled the Hip Chings. He knew the Legion had to be wary of new and formidable foes from Mainland China, Southeast Asia, and Taiwan.

He knew that when the politics shifted in Hong Kong's secret societies, the triads, the shit usually slammed into the fan on Mott Street.

The On Yee was a businessmen's Benevolent Association, the Number One high roller in America, a coast-to-coast secret society no workingman was able to join. They sneered at the ship jumpers, the waiters and dishwashers, the laundrymen, who joined the rival Hip Chings. In Chinatown, no business could open without paying deem heunqyau, bribes, to the On Yee membership.

Lucky knew their leadership was younger and more liberal, willing to take chances by working with Italians, and other to fan. He had seen elder leaders come and go, and less senior members disappear outright. On Yee membership was what he wanted, but only on his terms.

He saw the spiraling barber stripe down the street. He was almost there.

Over the years, he had developed a lumbering gait like a bear, trying to accommodate his bulk, resulting in an awkward strutting bop. He thought it was like a cool pimp roll, throwing his weight around.

He thought it intimidated his enemies.

The dirty brick building at 94 Elizabeth was a whorehouse disguised as a barbershop at street level, a mahjong club on the second floor, a massage joint on the third.

The barbershop had a backroom behind a red curtain, for that extra trim, or blow job. They played high-stakes mahjong on two, where Fat Lily Wong usually keptwatch over the premises. She was the eldest daughter of a Hip Ching officer.

The third floor had a sauna, two sofa beds, a set of massage gurneys on wheels, and four cubicles with covered mattresses. There was a condom machine on the wall.

Lucky went past the spinning candycane barber pole, pressed the bell, waited while Fat Lily checked him out via the surveillance camera. After a moment he was buzzed in.

Normally there were five girls working upstairs, Malaysians and Vietnamese. On Friday nights and weekends they added a crew of Korean girls, so they totaled a dozen in all, upstairs and downstairs. These girls serviced over three hundred men a week.

Lucky liked to rotate girls; sometimes he came here twice a week. He didn't care about the hundred a bang for the nasty sex, figured it was all part of the same dirty money circling around his life. It was like a perk, he thought, for the tension he had to deal with.

She told Lucky her name was Leena. She was a dusty-colored Malay girl with large brown nipples that cried out to be sucked. Lucky ran his tongue over the areolas in a circular motion, making tiny bites on the nipples as he went, sucking, bringing her body jerking up off the bed, her hands holding his head to her breasts, moaning now. Her body quivered on the cool sheets, her arms pulling him down into her, clutching at his lower back, floating over his buttocks, all the while moaning as he thrust in and out of her hot wetness.

He raised her legs into the air, held them by the ankles, spread them open into a V and rode his hardness into her, the wet slap of his groin against her bottom bringing sharp, loud groans, then pleading whispers.

When it got hotter, he turned her over, entered her from above. She wailed as Lucky pounded against her buttocks, begging now. He loved loving her He slipped his member out, brushed its slick hard head around her velvet lips, slipped it back inside. She gasped and he thrust hard and long, then softly, gently. He put his tongue inside her, licked around her hard little button, plunged himself back in. She just kept coming, convulsive spasms fighting for breath, coming even as he exploded, then shivering soft whispers, pleading, full of want and fulfillment.

Later he cradled her like a baby, nibbled on her ear. She turned over and took his spent member in her hand, caressing it, nestling her head into his throat, licking it.

They were two players, playing each other.

"I love you," he whispered, checking his Rolex.

"Sure," she agreed, "sure you do," giving him face.

"I'll see you tomorrow," he whispered, his tongue in her ear.

"Sure," she said, "I'll be waiting."

His hands went over her breast one last time.

She flicked up a cigarette and watched him making ready to go. When he finished dressing, he placed the crisp Ben Franklin on the bed next to her, kissed her on the head, and left the musty cool of the little room.

Confucius Towers was a forty-five-story crescent-shaped brick complex.

Uncle Four took the express elevator to apartment H, twenty stories above the heart of Chinatown. He heard the clatter of ivory tiles as he approached his door. No surprise there.

His wife, Tam tai, former Taiwanese starlet now longtime mahjong wife was holding court at the squared Wong fa lee antique table, surrounded by a much younger gaggle of siew lai lai, ladies of leisure, chatting her up over cocktails and seafood-sieve madumplings that were displayed on matching pearl-studded mahogany folding trays.

The wispy romance of Hong Kong pop music floated off a compact disk and spread throughout the spacious living room, around the carved Ming armoire, past the set of zitan-wood Imperial chairs, a ballad just loud enough so they never heard Uncle Four enter, closing the door with a pickpocket's touch. He stood behind the lacquered rosewood and inlaid jade screen that set off the foyer and pictured them.

Wife, almost fifty, her hair dyed blacker than fot choy, moss threads, and teased perfect above curved eyebrows redrawn daily. Pancake on the crow's feet at the corners of eyes blinking out from heavy shadow and liner, leaving the red gash of her mouth at a restless angle. She wore gold on one wrist, jade on the other; an aging actress in her sunset performance on the Chinatown stage.

Too much perfume, he could smell it from the door, streaming from the four women at the table. They were talking at each other in choppy, patterned phrases.

Loo je, sister Loo, was married to the treasurer of the Hip Ching, giving her the unofficial rank of daai ga je, elder sister, in their entourage. She wore clothes from The Limited, and spoke in a mannish style.

"Business has been good," she said. "Should be bigger bonuses this year."

Mak mui, her cousin, who was engaged to a senior Black Dragon, cooed, "Wonderful, another gold bracelet for me."

Shirley, which they pronounced, surly, was the oldest. "Sisters," she said, "life is good. Jade and diamonds for everyone. A toast!"

The women clinked glasses and drank, settled back into their game, slapping the mahjong tiles back and forth across the table.

Silly women, thought Uncle Four behind the screen. When he married the second time, it had appeared to be a fortunate match. Using Tam tai's connections in the Taiwanese film industry, he'd established a chain of Chinese videotape rental outlets that stretched from the Chinatowns in San Francisco to New York, from Toronto to Florida.

They had no children.

He had a teenaged daughter from his first marriage and had wanted nothing more to do with children after that. This had suited Tani tai fine. At the time they married she was already in her late-thirties, and he knew, secretly, that she was barren. He gave her a share of the video business and the skim money from the Ting Lee Beauty Salon, in which he was also a partner. She made the collections personally, every week on Monday.

Now, a decade after exchanging vows and toasts, they lived separate lives in the same apartment. Separate bedrooms, separate schedules, and separate vices. The only values left to share were money and jewelry, and never enough of either.

Pung! Mak mui shouted, grabbing the discarded tile. She splayed out her row of thin blocks and grinned.

"Mun wu," she laughed. A full house.

The others groaned and collapsed their hands, then threw dollar bills at her.

The little ivory blocks were crashed and shoved together into a large pile.

Uncle Four stepped out from behind the screen amid the racket and entered the living room. There was a short silence as the surprised women turned their eyes to him. His wife raised her chin, smiled, said nothing.

He murmured lo Dior, wife, at her and nodded at the others, turned and headed for his bedroom at the far end. Lo por drained her vodka tonic as he passed, the others watching him. When he turned to close the door, their attention shifted quickly back to the table, his wife already stacking the tiles, quietly forming a wall.

She glanced at the closing door and listened for the click of the lock that closed off the world of her estranged to gung.

Billy Tofu

The sky had drifted back to a leaden gray when Jack rolled onto Mott, parking the Dodge Fury up the street from On Yee headquarters, around the block from the stationhouse. He saw the busloads of weekend tourists deboarding into the streets, mixing with locals waking to morning errands, and the taking of tea, yum cha.

The tourists moved along in a huddling line, bought T-shirts and fake Chanel scarves, and were herded along the three blocks back to their buses idling at the edge of Chatham Square.

Jack sat in the car. His visit to Pa's apartment, the photographs, all had him thinking of those three rudderless years of his life in the Tofu King. And of Billy Bow.

Billy was the last friendJack still had in Chinatown from the old crowd. Everyone else had married, moved to the suburbs, came to town only on special occasions to visit their parents, grandparents, whoever was abandoned in Chinatown.

Billy was still there, and whenever Jack was in the neighborhood, he went by the Tofu King for a fresh dao jeong, soy bean milk, and to shoot the breeze with him.

They'd become fast friends in those years together in the back of the shop, cooking, slopping beans. The shop was smaller then, and it wasn't until Billy's grandfather renovated the upstairs and expanded into the backyard that it became the Tofu King. That was ten years ago, when Jack left. Billy was still there, thirteen years a captive in his father's business.

And since then Billy'd become hard and cynical. He was divorced, paying child support, and when he was two boilermakers deep, he'd call himself "a deadbeat Chinaman with two princess daughters and a dead-end job."

He'd wanted to be a writer, an actor, something creative, but nothing went his way. He tried college but couldn't keep up. He took the tests for civil service but they weren't hiring Chinamen with nothing on their resume except ten years in a bean-curd shop.

So there he was, drowning in bean milk, and no way out. This time, Jack had called Billy to confirm permission to post composite sketches from the SCU, which had arrived together with a note that said the girl's pregnancy test had come back negative. He'd need to post one sketch inside and one outside of the Tofu King. Some stores considered it bad luck to bring a sign of such an event, an evil presence, into their places of business.