Chinatown Beat (7 page)

Billy was okay with it.

Outside the Tofu King, a man wearing a white apron sold fried Chinese turnip cakes, attracting a crowd beneath the white plastic fluorescent sign that said tofu, Auto. Wholesale and Retail. Business was brisk. Inside the shop the walls were white tile all the way around. The near wall opened to a window on the street where they sold cold bean milk and hot tofu custard to passersby. Four fifty-gallon barrels of soft tofu lined the left wall, four more barrels of hard tofu on the right. Foo jook, bean curd strips, took shape in the large water tank in back, past the refrigerated counter with the bok tong go, sweet rice cakes, and the gee cheung fun, noodles.

Six workers were on the floor, three of them plastic-wrapping the white bricks of tofu for local groceries. For the restaurants, the workers packed the ivory bricks in water, fitting them snugly into ten-gallon tin cans.

It all started with the beans.

They arrived once a month, sixteen tons of soybeans via Jacky Chew, the trucker. The beans came out of Indiana in tractortrailer loads, in hundred-pound sacks, twenty-thousand beans each sack. They soaked the beans upstairs, then theywere ground down and cooked, mixed, and at different levels in the process became firm tofu, silken tofu, tofu sticks, tofu skins, and soy bean milk drink. The smell was thick upstairs, hanging in the hot air, suffocating. This went on twenty-four hours a day.

Jack looked down the street and saw the line of empty carts moving into the Tofu King. He took a roll of composite sketches of the rapist from the glove compartment and checked his watch. It was ten-thirty.

The sky darkened and a few Ghosts appeared on the street. Jack watched them, four youths with streaked hair and leather jackets, as they took up positions on the corner. Behind them, farther down the street, Jack saw a soft doughy-faced Lucky, his onetime friend Tat Louie, behind sunglasses, chatting easily with Uncle Four, making accommodating gestures with his hands. Jack narrowed his eyes at them, the Pell Street big shot, Ghost Legion gang leader. An arrogant power meeting on the streets they ruled.

A few more Ghosts came onto the street, took up space on the opposite corner. They observed all that passed, signaling to one another across the street with cat whistles, woofing at pretty girls, flexing the tattoos on their skinny arms.

The two leaders shook hands, and then the Big Uncle ambled down Bayard Street.

Jack watched the Ghosts strut off, keeping his eyes on Lucky, who turned and stared through his black glasses momentarily at the Fury. Lucky raised his middle finger and waved it loosely, sneered, then crossed the street and disappeared around the corner.

A tinge of sadness colored Jack's vision, but he pushed away the feeling it brought. Tat Louie was a stranger now, deep on the other side of the law.

Jack grabbed the roll of composite sketches and slid out of the car.

Inside the Tofu King, he saw Billy stamping about, waving a yellow paper in his hand, cursing, "niggers with badges, them motherfuckers." He slammed the paper down on the counter, turned, and sawJack. He shook his head and frowned, the corners of his mouth turning down.

Jack stood ready to listen, his face sympathetic, nodding. "The Department of Health, Wealth, I should say, came yesterday," Billy hissed. "Then this motherfucker gives me a ticket 'cause there's some papers in the street. Told 'im it wasn't my shit, must've blown down from the corner, from a car or something, you know? The kid swept this morning already. What the fuck you want me to do? Put him out there all day with a broom in his hand? Motherfucker says `Eighteen inches from the curb, bro. You got garbage, you got a violation.' Just like that, the motherfucker. I called him a spear-chucking, watermelon-eating black cocksucker. He laughs and walks away. Shit. Gonna cost me seventy-five. That's a lotta dao jeung. Damn it, City Hall makes a killing off of Chinamen. Chinatown is a goddamn gold mine to them. The traffic pricks cut tickets by intimidation. They know most Chinese don't speak enough English to argue. Health and Sanitation target the restaurants. Department of Buildings, Fire Code inspectors, they go after the construction crews. Plainclothes issues summonses to sidewalk peddlers, grocers, the gift shops. Everyone down here's paying some fine, payoffs not included. It's bullshit. No other minority group in the city pays off like the Chinese do. How come we don't have no NAACP?"

Billy paused to catch his breath. "Man, the city's got more niggers on the payroll than Welfare, and they all drop down here like the black plague, gettingpaid, busting on the yellow man."

Jack shook his head, then Billy grinned. "I'm telling you, Jack, I gotta get out of this business." He tossed Jack a bean milk.

"Write it off, Billy," Jack said. "It comes with the turf." He gave Billy a few of the composite sketches. "I need you to post these. Show 'em to your workers. See if they hear anything."

"This the guy, huh? The Chinatown Rapist?"

"That's our impression of the guy."

"What a scumbag. I'll post 'em Jack, sure, but I don't know."

"What?"

"There's a thousand guys out there look like this."

"We gotta start somewhere." Jack looked out the window, scanned the street where Lucky had been.

"Sure, I'll keep my ears open," Billy said. "What else is up?"

Jack put down the milk. "You seen Tat around, Billy?"

"Tat?" Billy's brow knitted. "That low life? Yeah, I seen him. Runs around with them punks following him."

"They ever come in here?"

"Tried to sell me one of the fucking hundred-dollar orange trees on Chinese New Year."

"What happened?"

"Dad was paid up with the On Yee and they called there off."

"Good."

"Otherwise I'd of blown them away. Tat don't fucken scare me."

Jack watched him, said, "Where's he hang now?"

Billy grimaced. "What you want that scumball for?"

"Nothing personal, Billy."

"Cops and hoods, huh?" Billy smirked. "The good turn bad, the bad gets worse. You sure like stepping in shit, Jack."

"I know it," Jack agreed. "Supposed to be good luck." He offered a dollar for the drink.

"Don't embarrass me, Jacky," Billy said sternly, andJack put his cash away.

"Try the basements on Mott, Number Nine, Number Sixty-Six," Billy said quietly.

"Okay, one more thing."

"Shoot."

"You got any cardboard boxes? I'm cleaning out the old place."

Billy read Jack's eyes. "Oh, yeah, I heard. Sorry about your old man." He paused. "He was a right guy. A standup Chinaman, Jack."

"Yeah," Jack said very quietly. "That he was."

"Come by later, I'll tell the kid, put some aside."

"Thanks."

"You okay with it?"

"Yeah, I'm okay."

They were silent a moment, then Billy's ire came back and he yelled at some of the new workers as a tractor-trailer rolled in out front.

"Damn joohies," he said, referring to the cadre of newly arrived teenage Fukienese he had working upstairs in the hot room. "They just don't get it. I told them, `Learn English. You won't have to run away every time the gwai-lo comes in. You can do better. You don't have to be stuck working here."'

He took a deep breath. "You think they listen? `How come you still here?' the wiseguy says."

A crew of the young wetbacks sauntered toward the street and the tractor trailer. Billy shook his head at them, said derisively, through his frown, "Look at 'em, clothes don't match but they perm their hair. At lunchtime they squat in the alleyway and pick their noses and spit clams on the wall. They talk too loud, and they laugh like hyenas. Refugees."

"Good help is hard to find," Jack sympathized.

"Cheap good help is hard to find," Billy countered. "If it weren't for me, they'd still be in the village, wearing them rubber sandals, gong hen, the shit still between their toes." He watched them unloading the trailer, said, "You're in America, I keep telling 'em. Be American."

"Yeah," Jack twisted, "Be like us. Misery loves company." They slapped palms and Jack added, "One last thing, I need to know about the Fuk Ching."

Just then it got busy in the shop, a sudden line of Midwestern tourists gawking at the Yellows, each buying souvenir packs of sweet tofu cake.

Jack wised to Billy's busy situation.

Billy patted him on the shoulder, tipped his chin at him and said, "Later, Grandpa's, around midnight." Then he moved off into the hubbub, toward the truck.

Jack finished the daojeungand went out the side door, past the helpers unloading the sacks of beans, past the deliverymen with their carts full of cheungfun, broad noodles. He took a last look at Billy, who was barking orders into the air, then he put on his shades, and slipped into the Chinatown afternoon.

Old Woman

Because of the nature of the crime, as well as the race of the victim and the perpetrator, Jack took it personally, felt the case needed special attention. So he carried the victim photographs and the perp sketches down the side streets, on his day off, on neighborhood time.

He came off of Mott onto Bayard, walking briskly toward the Tombs detention facility, toward the gaggle of old women gathered on the corner of Columbus Park.

The fortune-telling ladies, elderly women who would have appeared more at home in a Toishan dirt village, congregated by the entrance to the park, squatting on low wooden footstools, spreading out their charts, drawings, herbs, the tools of their divinations. Some had little umbrellas raised against the mist.

Jack sought out Ah Por, a wizened old woman wrapped in a quilted meen naafi silk jacket, her tiny feet in sweat socks and kung fu slippers. She squatted among the old women, on her footstool, quietly chatting with another ancient spirit.

The old women looked atJackwith great curiosity, though they were careful to avoid the rudeness of staring. They watched him sidewise, framing him in their peripheral vision. When he stepped tip to Ah Por, there by the fence, the old women moved aside to allow him in, then re-formed around him, all wondering what this young Chinese man wanted from their eldest sister.

Jack had remembered Pa going to Ah Por many years after Ma died. His visits were to get lucky words and numbers to play the Chinese Lottery, or to hear of good fortune. Now he was coming to Ah Por with victim photographs of young girls, Chinese girls with long black hair.

There was neither recognition nor fear in Ah Por's eyes. She simply accepted him with a sweeping graceful look, and he squatted down on one knee and held the two pictures in front of her.

"Tell me about them," he said.

She took the photographs and studied them intently, then turned them upside down, narrowed her eyes again.

Two preteen girls who looked enough alike that they might be sisters. Preppie school jackets, big smiles grinning out at the world, deep obsidian eyes.

"This one is shy," said Ah Por. "She holds back her laughter. The other is bright, a brave girl."

Ah Por took up her cup, rolled a bundle of bamboo sticks in her alm, letting them fall back into the cup, rolling them again, dropping them again. She did this for thirty seconds, did it with the practiced grace of someone telling rosary beads.

She bobbed her head in a slow rhythmic nod, closed her eyes. Tai Seung, thoughtJack, the art of reading faces.

Ah Por awoke with a shudder. When she rattled the sticks in her cup, they all seemed to rise and dance near the rim. One stick shot out and it was numbered seventeen. She consulted her red booklet with the black ink-brushed Chinese characters, the Book of Fortunes.

She stroked the pages with her long thumbnail, ran it down the columns of proverbs, tapped it on a section of fortunes.

"The first one," she said softly, "will marry a rich man and have two boys." Jack leaned in with his ear.

"The second will do well in school, make a lot of money."

Jack said nothing when she glanced at him.

"But there is something bad following them, isn't there?"

Jack said quietly, "A bad man has hurt them."

Ah Por caught her breath. "Oh dear."

She repeated it several times and then there was a long pause, her eyes looking distant when she said, "I see fire, and someone with small ears."

"The bad man?" Jack asked.

"Fire," she repeated, voice so faint it was almost gone, "and small ears."

Jack got up, gave her five dollars. He thanked her and made his way through the circle of old women.

Nothing, he thought. He had nothing but riddles and proverbs, spirit mumbo jumbo and witchcraft.

And someone was out there raping young Chinese girls.

Nothing, he groused, as he came back around the park, passing through the queues of junket buses, caravans loaded down for Atlantic City, fat with Chinatown cash.

On Canal Street, the last of the gray day was fading out around the gong chong por, factory women, slogging their plastic bags of groceries toward the subway.

Jack turned onto Mott and headed back toward the Fury. He still had Billy's boxes to get, and frustration once again fueled the need to get away from Chinatown.

He took the Brooklyn Bridge across the East River, felt the rumble leave the tires as they bit into the steel grating, the car making a blurring dull buzz-saw sound as it descended toward land.

He drove down the sloping streets south to the Forties, to Sunset Park, the newest Chinatown and his new neighborhood. He had moved out here a year ago, only the second place he could call his own, the first being the Chinatown railroad flat he had shared with Wing Lee that teenage summer before his friend was murdered.

Once a Scandinavian community called Finntown, Sunset Park had become largely Latino, but in the 1990s, the Chinese garment industry had followed low rents out of Manhattan, settled into old warehouses and factories here, blazing the way for the thirty thousand Malaysians and Fukienese who came afterward. Their food shops ran along the main streets, bringing to South Brooklyn the aroma of the Asian hot pot.