The Shanghai Moon (33 page)

He glared and picked up his Coke. Discovering it empty, he slammed the can onto the table. It made a pretty feeble noise, but I nodded at Bill, who got up and came back with two Cokes and a seltzer. Armpit snapped one open, glugged some, peeled a sausage from his congealing slice, and stuffed it between slick lips. Finally he spoke. “
Dai lo
has this idea. That’s why he needs guys. We’re gonna be, like, a private army.”

“You’re what?”

“For hire.”

“You’re
what
?”

Exasperated, he explained. “Because the score, we got hired for that, too. Like, that was first, then your thing. But, so, we can be this private army, that’s what
dai lo
’s thinking. Word’ll get around. People will come to us.”

I exchanged looks with Bill. “Well, isn’t that wonderful? Ambition. Beautiful. Tell me about the score, Armpit.”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. They tell me where and when it goes down, I show up. That’s all.”

“Show up and do what?”

“Whatever they tell me! Nobody’ll get hurt. For real, swear to God. Lydia, come on, don’t fuck this up for me!”

“You don’t know where, when, or what’s going down, but you swear no one will get hurt?”
Oh, no,
I thought.
I sound like my mother
. “Let’s go at it this way: You’ve been casing jewelry shop windows. How is that sleazy activity related to the big score?”

“Wasn’t.” If he’d been trying to send the message
I’m lying,
he couldn’t have done better than the mumble and darting eyes that went with that word.

I sat back. “You’re knocking over a jewelry shop.”

“Uh-
uh
.”

“Oh, not a jewelry shop job? So you do know what it is.”

“I fucking
do not
! But it’s sure as shit not something as lame as that.”

I took a chance: “Mr. Chen’s shop? Bright Hopes?”

“No way.” His voice dripped derision, but color flared through his video-arcade pallor.

“Mr. Chen’s a friend of mine.” So what if Mr. Chen wasn’t speaking to me? “I’d hate to see anything happen to him.”

“Oh, jeez, cuz! Nothing’s going to happen to Old Man Chen! He’s not even—”

“He’s not even what?”

“Anyone I know. He’s not even anyone I know.” Armpit was visibly, pitifully proud of how he’d saved that one.

Bill leaned closer. “And this big fucking deal big fucking score you don’t fucking know anything about. It’s related to what happened at Lydia’s office exactly fucking how?”

Armpit watched Bill nervously. “Who says it is?”

“I do.”

“You’re full of—You’re wrong.” Armpit stammered, but, in an impressive display of nerve and will, he got that out.

“Armpit,” I said, “did the same guy hire you for both jobs?”

“No. That’s why
dai lo
’s so happy.”

“Why?”

He looked at me as though I were the one whose On light wasn’t lit. “Because word must be getting around already! Before we even do the first job, we get another one. The customer’s happy, he tells other people, then the second customer’s happy, he tells more people, and there you go: the Chinatown White Eagles, Soldiers of Fortune.”

* * *

“The Chinatown White Eagles,
what
?” Mary couldn’t have sounded more incredulous if I’d told her they’d all taken Buddhist vows.

“I know. But doesn’t it sound like you should be keeping an eye on them?”

“You don’t know anything about this big score?”

“No, except they’ll never pull it off if they let Armpit anywhere near it. But I don’t think it’s as simple as robbing a jewelry store.”

“You said Mr. Chen’s name got a reaction.”

“Maybe he pays his protection money to the White Eagles, so Armpit knows him. I think Armpit really doesn’t know what’s going on. He’s a bad liar.”

“And you’re not going to make him find out about your break-in?”

I sighed. “It’s too risky. He’d be as obvious to his
dai lo
as he was to me. I don’t like the guy, but he is my cousin.”

“If we break this big score, I might have to arrest him.”

“Be my guest. I just can’t be the one who gets him killed.” She wasn’t happy, I could tell, but she was Chinese, so she got it. “I did keep some leverage. He’s really scared about the fingerprints, that the tongs will come down on the White Eagles and he’ll be blamed. So I promised I won’t use them for a while, assuming he gives me something useful at some point in the future.”

“Don’t hold your breath.”

“I won’t. But it’s not a bad trade, since I don’t have fingerprints.”

“If the big score has anything to do with a jewelry shop, even if it’s not a burglary,” Mary thought out loud, “it’s
got to be one the White Eagles shake down. They wouldn’t dare cross another gang, even if they were being paid.”

“That occurred to me, too. Can you find out which real estate is theirs?”

“Patino’s up on that, the maps and charts. And maybe I can get a line on one of these customers. I’ll see if anyone knows who’s been hanging around with the White Eagles’
dai lo
. Or I could just pick him up.”

“Fishface Deng? And do what? He’d get a lawyer, you’d get nothing, and he’d know you know they have something big coming up.”

“I hate to just wait and let it happen.”

“I sympathize. But I’ll keep the pressure on Armpit. He may come through yet. And whatever it is, and even if it isn’t related to my break-in—”

“Which you’re sure it is.”

“I don’t know. Maybe not. But even if it isn’t, won’t it be great for your career when you catch the White Eagles with their hands in the rice jar?”

“Where to, boss?” I pocketed my phone. Bill and I stood in the muggy evening watching the skateboarders rattle down the Union Square steps.

“You’re the boss. I’m just the crazy, word-hating muscle.”

“I’m tired of that. I want to be the muscle for a while. Being the boss takes too much thinking.”

“Works for me. If I’m the boss, you’re fired.”

“Now you sound like Alice.”

Wouldn’t you know. As soon as I said her name, my phone tinkled the new-client song.

I threw it open and stuck it to my ear. “Lydia Chin. Alice? Is that you?”

“Lydia? Yes, it’s me.”

“Where are you?” One finger in my ear to block the traffic and the skateboards, I tried to make my voice normal. She didn’t know how much I knew, and I didn’t want to spook her.

“Lydia, I need to talk to you.”

“Yes, I think we should. Are you back in New York? I’m free right now.”

“How about later tonight? About eleven? In Sara Roosevelt Park.”

That threw me. “That park’s not the most savory place at that hour. Why not—”

“No, Sara Roosevelt Park at eleven.”

“Why?”

“It needs to be someplace unexpected. I can’t risk being seen.”

“What are you talking about?”

Then she put an end to my attempt at normal. “Lydia, it’s Wong Pan. He says he’s got the Shanghai Moon.”

“Sara Roosevelt Park at eleven?” Mary was only slightly less incredulous than ten minutes before. “Why there?”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay, we’ll be there.”

“So will we.”

“No.”

“Yes! Mary, she’ll be casing it, you know she will. She won’t show unless she sees us.”

“I’ll have someone there who looks like you.”

“
Both
of us? Even if you did, she might not buy it. Besides, we don’t know what she wants to tell me. Don’t you want to know?”

“Maybe she doesn’t want to tell you anything. Maybe she wants to shoot you.”

“Then why call? Why not just stalk me? Come on, Mary, she may give up something you can use. Or something Inspector Wei can use. Just let us talk to her. Then you can pick her up.”

“It’s dangerous.”

“Danger’s my middle name.”

“Lydia’s your middle name.” I could feel the friend wanting to protect me and the cop wanting to close her case. I tried to help out the cop.

“Remember, she doesn’t know I’m onto her.”

“How do you know?”

“She didn’t have to make contact. She could have stayed disappeared.”

Mary didn’t answer. I was right and she knew it. “And you don’t know where she is now?”

“If I did, wouldn’t I have told you?” Again, no answer. “Okay, okay, but probably I would have. Anyway, she hung up as soon as the magic words—‘Shanghai Moon’—were out of her mouth. And don’t I get a Good Citizen Award for calling you now?”

“With a gold star. And if you hear from her again before eleven, you’d better go for another one.”

“Yeah, and when you make First Grade based on my inside info, you’d better remember whose inside info it was.”

“And you remember this: if you feel at any time tonight, at any
instant,
that you’re in danger, you send me a signal.”

“I’ll scratch my head, how’s that? But come on, Bill will be with me.”

“Not the same Bill I called the other day, to suggest he call you? No, it couldn’t be that one, you were mad about that.”

Between Mary’s needling and the grin that popped up on Bill’s face when he heard me use him to reassure her, I felt like the ham in the sandwich.

“And,” Mary said, “of course you’ll be wearing your Kevlar?”

“Yes, Mom. Though if Alice wanted to do me in, I still don’t see why she’d have bothered to call and arrange a meeting.”

“To make sure you were in a dark park in the middle of the night?”

“Oh. Well, besides that.”

Closing the phone, I asked Bill, “Are you hungry?”

He toed out his cigarette. “You’re saying that after watching your cousin and that pizza, you’d ever consider food again?”

“You drank his Coke. From the same can his lips had touched.”

“That was line-of-duty. Trying to impress my boss with my dedication.”

“What, you want a raise?”

“No,” he said. “I just want to keep the job.”

I met his eyes, then turned away, not sure at all how to answer that.

We picked up vegetable dumplings, Mongolian beef, and stir-fried water spinach to take out. The place we went to is a hole-in-the-wall with three tables. Two were empty, so we could have stayed, but I had a strong urge to eat in my office, feet on the desk, takeout containers everywhere.

“Reclaiming your territory,” Bill said, hefting the bag off the counter. “If you were a dog you’d be peeing in the corners.”

“Thank you, Dr. Freud. It’s more like I just don’t want to have to deal with other people.” That’s what I said, and that’s what I thought. So when we opened my office door and everything was just as I’d left it, the relief that washed over me was a surprise. I tore off yesterday’s page from the Far Pagoda Tofu Factory calendar while Bill
extracted containers from the bag. “You know what I’m thinking?”

“I never do.”

“That I’d like to pee in the corners. No, seriously. It’s . . .” I tried to frame my thoughts. “I don’t care much about
stuff,
you know?”

“I know.”

“And this stuff”—I waved my chopsticks around—“it’s strictly Salvation Army. But it’s
mine
. Whoever the White Eagles let in here didn’t break anything and didn’t steal anything, but I’m furious anyway. Does that make sense?”

“Absolutely.”

I dipped a dumpling in sauce and made quick work of it. “You know what else?”

“What else?”

“Rosalie. Elke. All those people having to leave their stuff behind, or watching the Nazis take it or smash it and they couldn’t do anything. And people’s whole families being killed. People you loved, cousins you didn’t even know you had. It makes me think about what Joel said about Holocaust asset recovery being a religious calling. It’s not about the stuff, is it?”

“No.” Bill sat with his legs extended, just fitting alongside my desk. It was, I realized, his usual spot; years ago I’d moved the desk over to give him more room. “But it generally isn’t about the stuff. Even when it is. Even when the motivator is greed. It’s about having. Staking out your territory, making it bigger and bigger and giving yourself more corners to pee in as though more and bigger will protect you.”

“From?”

“The fact that really, you can’t control anything.”

I thought about that as I speared some water spinach. “And Mr. Chen.”

“What about him?”

“The Shanghai Moon. It was his mother’s. He lost
her,
and he’s spent his life looking for
it
. I get that, now.”

We ate in silence for a while, until finally we ran out of things to eat.

“I’m still hungry,” I said.

“I know.”

“What do you mean, you know?”

“You always eat a lot when your adrenaline’s pumping. Like when you’ve been in a fight. Or now.”

“We should have gotten roast pork,” I said.

“Uh-huh. And a
baak chit gai
.”

“You know that term?”

“I’m not as white as I look.”

Luckily, I didn’t need to answer that. A cell phone rang, but when I grabbed mine up, it nestled in my hand in innocent silence. “Smith,” Bill said into the one that was actually ringing. Glancing at me, he said, “That’s great. Can’t wait to hear it, but can you call back? We’re at Lydia’s office. We’ll put you on speaker.” He gave my office number, and in the ten seconds between one call and the other, he told me, “Professor Edwards.”

“Oh, good. But you know, your cell phone has a speaker function.” He looked at it blankly as my desk phone rang. I hit the button. “Hi, Professor. How are you?”

“Just jim-dandy,” Professor Edwards’s voice boomed.
“My researcher found you some stuff. I might have to give her an A.”

“It’s that good?”

“From where I sit. No idea whether it’s useful to you, though. Come to think of it, it was pretty much all in the same place—German war records, China division—so maybe it’ll just be an A minus. Ready?”

“Shoot,” said Bill.

“Your boy Ulrich, Gunther. Rank: Major. Sent to Shanghai 1938. Want to know why?”

“Why?”

“He was a pain in the Führer’s ass, that’s why. Now, I could have told you that without wasting this young woman’s time looking anything up. The only officers the Reich shipped to Shanghai to help out their very close allies and personal friends the Japanese were the ones they didn’t want screwing up the home front.”