China Trade (8 page)

Lowering the cup, I asked, “You pay your lucky money to the Main Street Boys?”

Everyone in Chinatown knows what “lucky money” is. Nora picked at something on her spotless desk, shook her head. “We don’t pay.”

I stared at her in disbelief. “You don’t pay?” I felt hot blood surge into my face. “You’re sending me out there asking questions like an idiot, sniffing around gangsters, and you don’t pay?”

Nora blinked involuntarily, as though my anger was something I’d thrown at her. “Wait, Lydia, I don’t get it. What’s one thing got to do with the other?”

“Oh, come
on
, Nora! You don’t pay, they steal your porcelains. You start to pay, you get them back. Probably tomorrow some gangster will come up here with a bagful of broken pieces. ‘Got some nice porcelain for sale. Like this, but not broken—yet.’ Nora, I don’t believe this.”

“Oh, no, Lydia!” Her voice was shocked. “That’s not what I meant.”

“What’s not?”

“Lydia, I wouldn’t do that to you! The Main Street Boys didn’t do this. Or, I mean, I don’t know, maybe they did, but not to keep us in line or anything like that. We don’t pay because they don’t come around.”

“What do you mean, they don’t come around? Trouble from the Golden Dragons said this is their corner now.”

“You talked to Trouble? How could you do that? Lydia, if I thought this had anything to do with gangs I would never have hired you. I don’t want you going near those guys—”

“You want your porcelains back? What did you expect me to do?”

She stopped short. “I don’t know. But not that.” She picked up her pen, watched it turn in her fingers. Then she put it down, poured herself a cup of golden tea. “You really think the gangs are involved?”

“I don’t know. But I think it would be crazy not to check it out.”

Nora sipped her tea. Without looking at me, she said, “I heard rumors these Main Street Boys had taken over this corner from the Golden Dragons. I waited for them to come selling orange trees,”—which means the same as “lucky
money”—“but they never did. We don’t pay because no one asks us.”

Now it was me who was confused. “How can that be? They’re paying the Golden Dragons good money for this corner. Like rent. Why would they do that if they’re not making anything on it?”

“Rent? That’s how it works?”

I gave her a brief rundown of Trouble’s entrepreneurialism.

“Unbelievable.” She shook her head slowly. “They’re not stupid, you know, those kids. God, it’s such a loss. We lose twice, the community: by what they do, and by never having what they could have contributed.”

“Trouble’s not a kid. And he’s not from the community.”

“He was a kid once. And we’re all immigrants here, Lydia.”

“Is that why you wouldn’t talk about this yesterday in front of the
low faan?
”

Her look was blank; then she said, “Oh, Dr. Browning? No, not entirely. It’s not just that he’s
low faan
. He’s also …” She tapped the pen on the desk, searching for words. “Well, he’s sort of…innocent. He’s in his own world. Porcelains are what he cares about; otherwise he doesn’t exactly know what’s going on. You should see him down there opening boxes with this little smile.” She smiled gently herself.

“You were protecting him?”

“Is that a bad thing?” she asked defensively.

“No, but Nora, it’s not your job to protect the whole world from reality. Anyway, I’m going to have to talk to Dr. Browning.”

She nodded. “I expected that, and I told him. And maybe I was being silly yesterday. Anyway, I wish I’d answered you about the gangs, because then you wouldn’t have gone and gotten involved with the Golden Dragons.”

“I might have anyway. It’s also not your job to protect me.”

“It’s not
your
job to be tougher than everyone else, Lydia.”

“My job is to get your porcelains back.” And be tougher than everyone else. “Nora, I have to ask you this. Is there any way Dr. Browning could be involved?”

“Oh, Lydia! Oh, I don’t think so. He’s so …”

“I know. Innocent. But just sort of logistically, Nora. Could he have actually done it? Did he have a key, for example?”

“No. He loses keys. I let him in in the morning and lock up after him at night. We leave together, in fact.” She smiled. “And he wasn’t carrying any crates the evening this happened.”

“Very funny. And the alarm code? Does he have that?”

“No. There’d be no point in giving him that. He can’t remember his own phone number.”

“Okay. But I had to check. You understand?”

“Of course. I’m glad you’re being thorough. I just wish you didn’t have to go near gangsters.”

I reached forward and poured myself more of the sweet tea. “And I wish I knew why the Main Street Boys took over this corner and aren’t hitting you up.”

Nora leaned back in her chair, frowned in thought. “Well, we’re not the only people here,” she reasoned. “And it’s obvious we don’t have much. Maybe they’re only bothering with people who can pay worthwhile amounts.”

“If that’s true, it would be news. But the Main Street Boys are new in town, and their
dai lo
is from the West Coast, I hear. Maybe they do things differently out there.”

“Maybe.” Nora looked uneasy. “Lydia, maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. Hiring you, I mean. If these gangs are involved—either one of them—then maybe we should go to the police.”

Tim would love that, I thought. You’re fired, baby sister. This case was too big for you. It was too hard.

“Your reputation,” I said. “Face. Your other donors.”

“Well, maybe that’s not so important.”

“Your porcelains. You said yesterday that I had a better chance of getting them back than the police have. Dr. Browning said so.”

“Yes,” she said reluctantly. “That’s true. But Lydia …”

“Give me a few days.” I cut her off before she could talk herself into the idea that she was being irresponsible by letting me go on putting myself in danger for her. “If I don’t get anywhere, you can go to the police. But maybe I’ll be lucky, and you won’t have to do that.”

“Well…”

“Thanks,” I said, standing quickly. “Good seeing you. Great working for you. Gotta go.”

And before she could change her mind, or even speak it, I went.

E
I G H T

I
Went home.

It was late, it was dark, it was dinnertime. The streets of Chinatown weren’t any less crowded, but the crowd was different: fewer families and older Chinese, because everyone was home eating. More young people in groups now, and more couples, some Chinese, some white or black—
low faan
of different kinds—and a few mixed. In front of me, a young Chinese man squired his long-haired blond girlfriend through the streets of the old neighborhood. Two white men in camel-hair topcoats, their wives in furs behind them, headed down the stairs to a famous restaurant where I’d never eaten. I maneuvered around a mixed group of young teenage boys pawing through a sidewalk vendor’s tray of watches.

The salty smell of soy sauce and herbs washed out the
door of a restaurant I passed. I hurried along, hungry for my mother’s cooking. The air was bitterly cold now that the sun had gone down. Everyone,
low faan
and Chinese and me, wore our hats pulled down to our ears and hunched our shoulders as deeply as we could into our coats.

Except for the hatless white guy in the open jacket in the doorway across the street.

I scurried down the block, turned right at the corner, toward home. At the first building, which wasn’t mine, I slipped into the shadow of an alley, and waited.

A figure sauntered around the corner, didn’t even look in the direction of the shadow I was hiding in. He crossed the street, ambled down the block to the old brick building I live in, stood in front of it for a moment. He looked at his watch, scratched his hatless head, and wandered on.

I stayed behind him for a block and a half, and I was pretty good at it, too. He shouldn’t have spotted me. But a young woman in high heels tripped off the curb, and the hatless guy—a true gentleman—turned to catch her.

As he did that he caught sight of me watching him.

Leaving the high-heeled woman in mid-rescue, he whirled and dashed away. I broke into a run, too, and made Canal Street in time to see him jump into a cab and disappear in the direction of the Manhattan Bridge. I looked around wildly, but on a freezing night at dinnertime in New York a cab is a hard thing to find. By the time the light had changed and a fresh batch of traffic, including two empty cabs, was headed my way, he was halfway to Brooklyn.

I comforted myself, as I seethed on the way home, with the hope that he hadn’t wanted to go there.

I was still seething as I stomped up the three flights of stairs to the apartment where I’ve always lived. Seeing the hatless guy in Chinatown, where white people, to Chinese, are visible and not part of the background, had brought him suddenly into focus for me. It made me remember his red-tipped ears this
afternoon crossing the street in the same direction Bill and I did on the Upper East Side, and, yesterday, dashing in front of a Jeep outside a cafe in the Village.

This guy had been following me. It had taken me two days to make him, and now I’d alerted him and lost him.

You’re an idiot, Lydia, I pointed out to myself. A total idiot, a complete loss.

I took a few deep breaths when I got to the door, to try to approach normal before approaching my mother. I stood with my key in my hand, listening to old Mr. Tam’s television across the hall. Old Mr. Tam has lived here since before I was born. He doesn’t speak English, but he watches endless hours of American television. You can hear him cackling to himself over the antics of the white-skinned ghosts any time you walk by.

When I was calm, I twisted my key in each of the four identical locks on our door in turn. “It takes a thief as long to pick the same lock four times as to pick four locks once,” my mother had declared, standing over the locksmith to insure his competence, as well as his diligence, “And this way my foolish children will have fewer keys to lose.”

None of us, in my memory, has ever lost a house key, but I’m the youngest so maybe there are things I don’t remember.

“Hi, Ma,” I called, taking off my shoes in the tiny vestibule, hopping around as I put on my embroidered slippers. “Mmmm, smells great.”

“Oh, are you here?” my mother grumbled from the kitchen. “Well, I’m so lucky. Hurry now, dinner is almost ready.”

My mother has been saying this all my life, making it sound as though if I’d been five minutes later I’d have kept everybody waiting or caused everything to burn. The fact is Chinese food is always almost ready. It’s the original fast food, everything cut small and served crisp, sauces made in advance to be added at the last minute to vegetables quickly fried, noodles rapidly boiled, fish steamed whole.

The fish—a big perch—was sitting next to a pot of simmering
water when I walked into the kitchen. My mother was at the kitchen table chopping greens. Beside the cutting board was a bowl of mung bean sprouts and bamboo. “Hi,” I said. “Have a good day?”

“You’re in my way.” She stood, wiped her hands on her apron, bustled past me. Then, theatrically, she turned. “Oh, I’m sorry, Miss. I was expecting my daughter, Ling Wan-ju. You’d know her if you saw her, she wears a leather jacket and trousers and thick clumsy shoes. I think she has a good coat like that, and even a silk suit that I made her, but she never wears them. It’s because of her job, of course—”

“Oh, Ma, give me a break.” “Give me a break” wasn’t exactly the expression I used, but I came as close as I could in Chinese. “Anyway, the suit was a hit uptown. I’m going to change now so I don’t get it dirty. You need help here?”

“I don’t think snooping helps cooking. You can set the table. But first go and change. I don’t want you to get that suit dirty.”

“Hey, good idea.” I headed for my bedroom.

“But hurry. Your brother is coming for dinner.”

This is something else my mother’s been saying all my life: “your brother,” as if in any given context it should be obvious to me which of my four brothers she’s talking about. Even if it’s Ted, his wife and three kids, or Elliot, his wife, and their two, it’s “your brother is coming to dinner.”

“Which brother, Ma?” I called as I pulled my sweater over my head. “Andrew?” I hoped it was. He’s one brother up from Tim, and he’s my favorite. He was also the most likely, since he’s single, a great eater, and, like me, not much of a cook.

My mother stuck her head around the corner of my door, turned up her nose at the chaos in my room. She smiled triumphantly. “Tien Hua,” she said.

Which, of course, meant Tim.

* * *

After I was in jeans and sweatshirt, before I set the table, I called Bill.

He wasn’t there.

I left a message with his service telling him to call me, and telling him to be careful. I didn’t know who my tail had been, or what his purpose was, but maybe Bill had one too.

Then I set the table. Rice bowls, soup bowls, teacups, chopsticks. All the Chins have a pair of chopsticks engraved with our names in red Chinese characters. My parents’ were a wedding gift from my father’s brother. Then he gave each of us a pair when we were born. My father’s and my brothers’ are ebony, black and shining; my mother’s and mine are ash, glistening white.

I straightened up the living room, which was also the dining room, not because it needed it but because I didn’t want to straighten it up for Tim because who did he think he was anyway?

“Whose idea was this, Ma?” I called, organizing the photographs next to the bowl of oranges on the shelf. Every room in our apartment already had its New Year bowl of oranges and tangerines, every door had its gold-lettered red banner proclaiming this as a place of health, good fortune, prosperity, and joy in the coming year.

“Whose idea was what?” Somehow my mother can mutter from the next room.

“Tim coming for dinner.”

“What do you mean, idea? Your brother called and said he would be in Chinatown this afternoon and he’d like to come for dinner. It wasn’t an idea, it was the right thing to do.”