Neon Dragon (7 page)

She spoke in a tinny voice, strained through a grin that suggested that she was at our service.

“How we please you, gentlemen?”

Introductions seemed out of place. Since Harry had accomplished the impossible in getting us this far, I took it from there. The object of
the moment seemed to be to get alone in a room with Mei-Li with as little explanation as possible. I came directly to the point.

“Mei-Li.”

That did it. The toothy grin opened as her head went back.

“Ah. Excellent choice. Very beautiful. And you, sir?”

For the first time that night, Harry was stuck for an answer. The best he could do was, “I'm with him.”

I have no idea what that suggested to the honorable madam. Whatever it was, it did not upset her sensibilities. The grin was a fixture, but nothing even registered in her eyes.

“So. Please follow.”

She opened a second door and welcomed us to a room that made the first room look like a freshman dorm. She closed the door behind us. I assumed that she went to hustle up Mei-Li.

I looked at Harry, but not before taking in the essence of our surroundings.

“I take it the clientele here is not off-the-street.”

He exhaled as if it were his first breath since we came out of the cold. He was smiling, but shaking his head. The message he was sending was something between conflict and frustration.

“You can't understand. There's just no way.”

I came close enough for a whisper to work below the level of the music.

“I'm willing to learn, Harry.”

Something caught in his throat that made his voice sound like gravel.

“You still don't get it. The people they serve here have more wealth and power in their own world than you could dream of.”

“Drugs?”

Harry edged closer and dropped his voice below the level of the music. His hands went up in a gesture.

“Tip of the iceberg. Drugs are big, but this empire runs on everything illegal. Extortion big time. Illegal alien smuggling. Slavery, prostitution,
those two go hand in hand. Police corruption. That's a commodity they can sell to other organizations in other states. You beginning to get it?”

“What I don't get is how you know about it. You're not into this.”

For a fraction of a second I was tempted to end that last sentence with a question mark. I decided to go on faith. It probably saved our friendship.

“You don't have to be a part of it to know about it if you're Chinese. There isn't any Chinese I know, no matter how far out of Chinatown, who doesn't have family or friends who are being victimized.”

Questions were running wild in my mind, but there was one I had to get in before that door opened. I whispered this one.

“What in the world did you say to that ape on the stairs?”

“I used the two words they fear more than death.”

“Which are?” He was dragging it out. I didn't blame him.

“Immigration Service.”

“The hell you did! You told him you're an immigration officer?”

“No. I told him you are.”

I took a deep breath while I counted the number of years following disbarment I could get for impersonating a federal officer. Then I considered what could happen if any of these bozos compared notes with the crowd at the Ming Tree restaurant where I was known as Bradley's defense lawyer. I figured disbarment and jail time would be the good news.

“One question. If this place is populated with illegal aliens, how come they let us in?”

“I told them you're a good INS agent.”

“Meaning?”

The knob turned on the door as Harry whispered the last few words.

“Meaning I told them you're on the take. They may not love you, but they sure as hell want to please you.”

The ramifications of that were beyond computing. I had about two full seconds to dwell on it before my senses were sent into overload.

There's striking. There's astoundingly beautiful. And then somewhere beyond that there's Mei-Li. The woman that came through that door carried poise, radiance, and charm to a level I'd never experienced off of a movie screen.

You could say it was the cascade of midnight hair flowing to the waist of a lithe body that moved with an almost choreographed grace. Or it could have been the exquisite facial features that expressed elegance without intimidating the male ego. It could even have been the packaging of form-fitting turquoise silk from alabaster neck to floor.

Whatever it was, it was stunning, in the literal sense of that word—until I realized that it was empty. It was a picture carefully assembled for one purpose. She was a prostitute. The whole fragile image was created to carry off a relationship no deeper than a onesided sex drive. I couldn't help thinking that somewhere beneath that perfection there must be a human being as carefully hidden as any blemish that lay beneath the makeup. If she was in there, she was the one I had to reach to keep my end of the fortune-cookie bargain with Red Shoes.

She closed the door and bowed, respectfully, from the waist. The smile she carried across the room was beautiful, but prerecorded. I don't suppose that mattered to most of the men she found waiting in that room.

If she was surprised to find my round eyes meeting her almond disks, there was no clue in her features. I met her halfway across the room. The problem was an opening move. There was no way to tell whose headset or video monitor was playing the Mei-Li and Michael Show, so a little misdirection seemed in order.

I took her hand while we locked smiles. The bed area consumed the third of the room to the left, and the “getting acquainted” area took up most of the rest. There was a dark corner of dead space off to my right. It seemed the least likely to spawn any action that would be worth recording, and probably the least likely to be the focus of any hidden camera.

I led her slowly to what I hoped would be off-camera. She followed in step. I think as long as I played the John, she'd have dutifully followed me to Taiwan. The question was how to reach the girl inside who made her own choices. I decided,
When in doubt, fly direct.

I kept my voice so low that it could only have been picked up if she were wearing a microphone.

“Mei-Li, do you read Chinese?”

Her voice was higher than I expected.

“Of course.”

I handed her the note that Red Shoes had delivered with the fortune cookie. She scanned it while I read her eyes. The best I could hope for was a flash of gratitude for the rescue she'd prayed for. The worst was what I saw. Nothing. The shell was intact.

She handed back the note without a quiver.

“What does this mean?” The little high-pitched voice gave up nothing but mild curiosity.

“I was hoping you might tell me. Do you have any idea where I got it?”

“No.” It peeped out like half a syllable, as if I'd asked if she knew the capital of Montana. I was leery about tipping too much information, and I was getting precious little in exchange.

“Mei-Li, no one can hear us. I can help you if you need it. Are you in any kind of trouble?”

She seemed perplexed by the question, but peeped out, “No.”

“Are they keeping you here against your will?”

“No.”

“Are you ill?”

“No.”

“Are you in any kind of danger?”

“No.”

Each little peep carried more of the implication, “and how stupid of you to ask.”

Considering what it cost Harry and me in lost heartbeats to get
there, plus the need to keep the only hope of help for young Bradley alive, I was beginning to swim in frustration.

Then it occurred to me that she might have tensed up because of listeners. I took her hand and mouthed the words, “If you need help, squeeze my hand.”

I could have been holding a dead mackerel.

I could feel trip-hammers pounding on the nerves behind my eyes. An overwhelming sense of defeat flooded over my mind. For some reason, it welled up into anger. I dropped her hand and got a grip on her arm. I moved her back to the far wall. I knew it was the anger driving me, but I let it. I was spitting the whispered words between my teeth.

“Listen to me, girl. If you're not telling the truth, you're playing with people's lives. The girl who wrote that note could have been killed for it. She did it for you. That man over there came through three punks and a sumo wrestler to get here. So did I. You probably won't understand this, but there's an innocent boy who could be convicted of murder if I don't get some answers. Now what's the game?”

I stopped when I heard Harry spit out “Mike!” from across the room. I realize my voice could be heard beyond our little corner. I waited for an answer.

Nothing. She was still the porcelain doll. There was no expression whatever in her eyes. She just shook her head. Her voice was dead calm.

“I'm sorry. There is no trouble. You were kind to try to help me.”

That did it. The steam was gone. I knew I was running on empty. I apologized for what had probably been an absurd scene from her point of view and motioned Harry to the door. I put a twenty in her hands for the inconvenience, although at that moment, I felt more inconvenienced than she was. Someone was playing ping-pong with me, and whether it was Red Shoes, Mei-Li, or both, I was fresh out of clues.

The corridors were empty when we made our way down the stairs. It was a relief. I wasn't up to the kind of gauntlet we ran coming in. The door creaked open to a gust of fresh snowflakes that had camouflaged the grit of one of Boston's oldest sections.

I felt ridiculous thanking Harry for risking his life on a chase for a nonexistent goose, but he understood. We wished each other a happy Thanksgiving, and he headed up toward Harrison. I offered him a cab ride, but he wanted to walk. The streets were deserted, and the snow-flakes actually felt good on the skin.

It was only a couple of minutes before a cab answered my wave. I gave the driver the address of my apartment on Beacon Street at Berkeley and then remembered that it was Monday, just before midnight. It felt like at least Thursday. I gave the driver a different address higher up on Beacon Street just above Charles. The driver acknowledged, and I started nodding off in the backseat as we headed down Beach Street.

I was drifting into neutral as I watched Harry's fresh footprints in the snow. My last impression was of the steamed-up windows of the coffee shop on the corner and the three sets of equally fresh footprints that came from the door.

IT WAS JUST PAST MIDNIGHT
when the cab pulled up outside of Daddy's Club. The cabbie gave me a gentle nudge, and the brisk bite of the snow-carrying wind brought me the rest of the way back to the outskirts of the land of the living. I was fighting the temptation to jump back in the cab and call it a night, but Monday night is Monday night, and there are some things that feed the soul more than rest.

I passed a couple of departing, slightly lubricated college kids on my way down the narrow cut-back staircase to the below-ground haunt of
one of Boston's great assets. The club draws a spate of yuppies and college types earlier in the evening, but around midnight they begin to dwindle. After the other clubs and restaurants have closed, Daddy's pulls in jazz musicians from in and out of town, as well as devoted listeners who can handle the late hours. It undoubtedly violates the city's code of closing times, but the police give it their best benign neglect.

The whole room is about forty feet by twenty, with a miniscule bandstand at the front and a bar that runs the length of the left side-wall. It is either meticulously clean or filthy enough to drive cockroaches to cleaner surroundings. I have no idea which, because the lighting, or lack of it, would make a mole feel at home.

I slid up onto a bar stool at the near end of the bar, and every muscle in my body rose up in rebellion for not taking it home. But then, this was Oz, Valhalla, Never-Never Land. When I came through that door, the world out there dried up and blew away.

One of the most serious elements of my education at Harvard came from a luck-of-the-draw roommate. My first two months with Harry Ortlieb were, if not hell itself, at least a lower ring of purgatory. Harry was a music major with an addictive penchant for modern jazz. In particular, Harry idolized that rebellious cluster of jazz musicians who took the idiom out of the bounds of comfortable, decent harmony and pushed it into the sometimes discordant world of newfound chords. He personally stocked every recording made in the fifties and sixties by the principal emissaries of that assault on the ear and central nervous system called “bebop.”

For the first two months of our freshman year, I spent every torturous moment in our dorm room at Holworthy House fighting the urge to rip whatever CD by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Mingus, whoever was fouling the air at the moment, out of his state-of-the-art player and tuck it as far up Harry Ortlieb's ass as the length of my arm would permit. My only regret in my fantasy was that CDs have no sharp corners.

Then the third month came, and to my own shock and surprise, if
not Harry's, I started to like it. I started asking for particular pieces and actually listening to Harry's explanation of what they were doing. Life became not only livable, but I started looking forward to our late nightly CD concerts with Harry playing DJ.

The effect went further than that. My father/guardian, Miles O'Connor, was, among his many other talents, an accomplished piano player. He drew me to the instrument out of sheer admiration for him. It stuck, and I found that at every stage of my life, whatever demons were haunting me could be tamed, or at least sedated, by an hour or two alone at a piano.

Enter Harry Ortlieb, and every moment I spent at the keys from freshman year on was turned to working out the intricacies such giants as Thelonius Monk had woven around the old standards. And every Monday late night in recent times was spent in that preview of heaven called Daddy's Club.