Act of Revenge (20 page)

Her hand fell on a thick folder containing a stack of glossy photos. Sym had found a photo essay in
Life
and then tracked down the photographer's agency and paid them to generate prints, not only of the shots
Life
had used, but all the relevant shots in their negative files. She'd been sent to do the same at most of the other prominent photo agencies, because Marlene believed that almost everything you wanted to know about had been photographed by somebody, somewhere, and this was especially important in a situation where she didn't really understand what she was searching for. Again, the two big questions: First, why now? The man had been dead twenty-three years, the daughter had let it lie all that time, and then it had become desperately important. Marlene had asked, and been given the answer, not very satisfactory, that Ms. Fein had decided it was time. Clearly something to do with leaving the hubbie, divorcing in a sense from the Mob. That made some sense, but Marlene thirsted after details. The second was, why had a supreme courtroom master copped a plea to something he hadn't done? Or maybe he had done it. Something to explore with the old-timers.

She thumbed through the stack of glossies. A set of Gerald Fein in happier days: here was one of him entering a nightclub (El Morocco) with a blond woman on his arm, a beefy guy on the other side, smiling. The woman was Celia Fein, the wife, a looker, circa 1955; the guy was Charlie Tuna. Fein hung out with very bad people, and he also took his wife to nightclubs. The lady on Charlie Tuna's arm was not his wife. Other nightclub shots, Fein at a long banquette table, laughing with the scum of the earth, dancing with the wife, talking earnestly with Sal Bollano. Where was Panofsky? Not a night-clubber? Maybe he didn't like to get his picture taken. Next, some domestic shots, Fein and Celia, with little Vivian, not so little in this one, pretty like her mother, blond and delicate. It was a series of shots taken at some civic affair, all of them dressed in late-fifties high style, Fein himself in a double-breasted suit and topcoat, Celia in a fur coat, Vivian in a white fur jacket and matching hat. About fourteen, Marlene estimated, smiling shyly at the lens, while her daddy radiated love and bonhomie around him. Marlene studied the man's smiling face. Energy, was the first impression, boiling spirit, barely contained behind the smile, the glinting eyes, the jutting jaw. One of the generation impressed by the fabled insouciance of FDR, Fein had adopted the lifted chin, the upward-pointing smoking apparatus, in Fein's case a panatela rather than a cigarette holder, and he was able to bring it off too, because he was smoothly handsome in that tailored, buffed, 1940s way: wavy dark hair, large pale eyes, a noble nose, terrific even white teeth, a solid chin with a Clark Gable dimple in the center of it. Good-sized man, too, athletic, broad-shouldered. Must have been a terror with the ladies, Marlene thought, but it turns out he takes his wife to El Morocco with the bad boys. Flip to the next one. Same civic event: Dad and Vivian watching something, a theatrical act maybe, part of a well-dressed audience, but Dad isn't watching the act, he's watching Vivian, with oceans of love in his eyes. Marlene didn't think that could be faked, not in a candid shot like this. The guy loved his family, no question. So why did he do it? He killed himself for the insurance? Make a note, check the policy value.

Another set, this one of the funeral, a big one, a mob affair, all the big guys sent flowers, both Bollanos, Big and Little Sallies carrying the coffin, and was that Abe Lapidus standing there, a stricken expression making his sad face sadder? Yes, it was, and who was that short, pear-shaped man, struggling to hold up the end of the casket? Marlene rooted around and found a hand lens. Yeah, unmistakable, although she had only ever seen the man garbed in black, on the bench: Herschel Panofsky, now H. R. Paine, His Honor. The ugly little fucker, as he was often called down at the courthouse, often by the current crop of Mob lawyers, and he was, his head too large for his ass-heavy soft body, a bulging forehead fringed by sparse, crisp curls, armpit-style hair (another nickname, The Armpit), a little parakeet beak of a nose, a sloppy mouth, not much chin. No Gableoid dimple there. Another shot: the ugly little fucker comforting the grieving widow and the daughter graveside, the daughter not being all that comforted, Marlene thought, a look of actual repugnance there through the tears, which just went to show, a picture worth a thousand words—she would have to ask Vivian about that when next they saw one another, maybe this very evening.

Then a thinner sheaf, these in color, the worst ones, and who knows how Sym had wormed them out of the official files, probably the same way she had procured drugs, whining and money, but here they were, what happened when a body fell nearly a thousand feet and reached terminal velocity before striking asphalt. He'd landed facedown, although it was hard to tell from the photograph; no, there was a black patch that had been the back of a well-tailored lawyer's pinstripe, relatively untouched by the wide pool of horrors that surrounded it. Marlene made herself look, even wielded the hand lens, identifying the bits. Fein had gone out without any identification that morning—that could be a significant detail—which was why it had taken the cops some twenty-four hours to discover who the jumper had been. He'd left no note. Marlene put the lens down and gasped in some air. She'd spotted the dimpled chin, curiously blood-free, attached to a long, twisted piece of disassembled face. Well, enough of that! She put all the photographs away in their folders. She could make no connection between the robust, dashing man in the earlier photographs and the offal on Fifth Avenue. Sure, in literature they had them, Gatsby and Richard Cory, the shiny front with nothing behind it, but she doubted that Gerald Fein had been such a man. On what evidence? That look at the daughter, maybe? Panofsky was wrong; the law hadn't been his whole life. Gerald Fein had a family.

Sym stuck her head in. “Phone for you. Some woman named Chau. Wants to know where Lucy's at.”

“I'll take it in back.” Marlene got up, stretched, yawned, and went back to her desk, located behind a bookcase full of potted plants in the rear of the big room.

Dr. Chau introduced herself and informed Marlene that Lucy had not shown for their noon lunch date; nor had she arrived at one-thirty for her regular lab session. She had never missed one before.

“Maybe she just forgot,” said Marlene, not believing this at all. “I mean, she's a genius, but she's twelve.”

Chau seemed satisfied with this, and Marlene got rid of her as soon as she could, pressed the disconnect, and immediately dialed Tran's pager. She waited. The torment lasted ten minutes, and then Tran was on the phone.

“Is Lucy with you?”

A rather long pause. “I presume she is not at the laboratory, then.”

“No, they just called. Tran, you don't think . . . ? I mean, those men who bothered them before . . .”

“I very much doubt it, Marie-Hélène. However, I will find her.”

“Where? Where is she?”

“Do not become upset, my friend. There is no one who wishes to hurt Lucy at present. She is an impulsive child and may have gone off somewhere. I will inspect her usual haunts.” In English he added, “No sweat it.”

“Don't sweat it, you mean. ‘No sweat' means a trivial problem.”

“This is also apt,” said Tran in French. “I will call. Until later.”

It had to be Leung, Tran thought, one of those phone calls from Li's Restaurant had set up a lift, and they would have had to be good to have netted Lucy in daylight, in the city. The other day Leung had used his own boys, Chinese, and they had been foiled easily. He would not do that again. He would use . . . who? Local people, certainly—you wouldn't import a group from Hong Kong to lift a little girl; they might get lost or make some stupid error out of mere . . . what was the word? Disorientation? Disoccidentation? There was no such word in any language, attesting to the cultural hegemony of the West. They would be Asian, probably; Tran couldn't see a tong man hiring long-noses for such a job. That narrowed the field. Kidnap-capable gangs were not exactly common, even in Chinatown. Tran knew several, and he decided to start with the one he used himself, when he had need of such services.

The business offices of the Hoi Do an-truong were located above a Vietnamese grocery on Lafayette, just off Canal, in the heart of the area that Vietnamese gangs had recently claimed for their own. Vietnamese gangs are not squeamish in their choice of names, unlike the Chinese, who prefer flowery vagueness with a “harmonious” or “benevolent” tossed in. One Viet gang of the period was called Born to Kill; Hoi Do an-truong means “the society of those with severed entrails,” aka “The Sorrow League.” In Vietnamese folklore that name refers to an association of men and women of talent doomed to a life of woe by cruel fate.

When Tran approached the building, its doorway was decorated with the usual gaggle of black-shirted, sunglassed young thugs. Others leaned against late-model Lexus or Maxima cars, also black, parked and double-parked in the street outside. These young men had all been children during the war; most were orphans and the Hoi Do an-truong was the closest thing they had ever known to a family. Tran did not exactly approve of them, but he understood the wounds they had experienced and did not condemn their predation on the Vietnamese refugee community, many of whom had spent a good deal of energy trying to kill him back in their native land.

Tran passed through these youths without challenge and entered the building. They looked at one another through their sunglasses and laughed nervously. There was some debate among them as to who the old guy really was. Some thought their
dai lo
called the man Major Pham as a nickname, as an American gangster might call an associate King Kong or Terminator. Others thought he actually
was
Major Pham, the unkillable terror of the Iron Triangle, whose name was used to frighten children at a time and in a place where children were not easy to frighten. In any case, they treated him, as their leader did, with vast and wary respect.

The
dai lo
, or big brother, of the Hoi Do an-truong, called himself Freddie Phat. He was thirty-five, tall for a Vietnamese, and had a handsome, intelligent face. He wore fashionable tinted aviator glasses, a gray silk suit, and a dark blue shirt with a pale blue tie, open at the collar. His office was the kitchen of a tenement apartment in which many of his associates dwelt. When Tran barged in, he immediately dismissed the two men with whom he was talking and offered Tran a chair at the chrome and formica kitchen table that served as his desk. Tran remained standing. He said, “Tell me you didn't take her.”

Freddie Phat swallowed the insult represented by Tran's tone of voice, and his refusal of a seat, and the implied refusal of tea and snacks and a civilized conversation before getting to business. Phat was one of four people in the United States who knew who Tran really was (the others being Lucy Karp, Marlene Ciampi, and a woman who worked in a fish-packing plant in Texas) and so he did this out of respect, rather than because he was afraid of him (although he was afraid of him, too), respect for what Tran had been through in the service of his ungrateful country.

It did not occur to him, although he was an excellent liar, to lie in this instance. He said, “No, naturally not, although I was approached with the contract.”

“Leung?”

“One of his people came, a little before noon. I said no, and I suggested it was not a good idea to annoy that particular girl.”

“Who?”

“The word I have is that they went to the Vo brothers. The Vo would do it. The Vo will do anything, as you know.”

Tran paused and waited for his heart to slow to its normal rhythm. It was somewhat of an effort to control his voice as he asked, “It was not a . . . water contract, was it?”

Phat shook his head. “Not that they said, only a simple lift and hold. I believe they wished to frighten rather than harm and also to find out what she knows about certain events.”

“I see.” Tran pulled out a chair and sat down. Phat thought he looked older than he had a few minutes ago. Tran looked across the table at the
dai lo
. “I will need your help to find her, all of your people, and immediately.” When he saw Phat hesitate, he added, “The usual rates, of course.”

Phat made a dismissive gesture. “No, it is not that. We would be happy to be of service. But this is, as I understand it, a tong matter. The Da Qan Zi has been mentioned.”

“And so you are afraid.”

“I am prudent. We are very small here, and the Chinese are very large. We do business with our own people and so they allow it, but if we intruded in a tong matter . . .”

“You already have, the other day. Have you forgotten?”

“No, but at that time I didn't know what I know now.” Phat was conscious of Tran's gaze, that famous gun-barrel stare. He felt the first prickles of sweat start on his forehead. He said, “Let me do this. I will set my boys to watch their house in Brooklyn and that place they use on Hester Street and other places where they are known. If we see the Vo boys or the cousin, we will follow. I will call you as soon as the girl turns up.”

After a pause, Tran nodded sharply and stood up. At the door he turned and said, “If she is found safely in this way, I will owe you a debt.”

And what if not? wondered Freddie Phat, and shuddered, as a miasma of the old war seemed to drift through the room, and he recalled some of the stories about Major Pham and the fate of those he disliked.

Lucy surprised herself by not being more frightened. The worst thing really about the abandoned building was when she had to go to the bathroom, and they took her to what used to be one, but there were no fixtures in it and she had to go in a smelly hole in the floor where the toilet had been.

Being kidnapped by Vietnamese gangsters was no joke, of course, but it was also the most interesting thing that had happened to her recently, and she was fascinated with her captors. They did not know that she could understand Vietnamese and therefore spoke freely among themselves in her presence, there in the ruined room. Early on she had learned that they were not going to harm her, but had been hired to hold her for a man they called “the Chinese.” Lucy knew whom they meant, and the knowledge buoyed her, for she also knew that Tran was watching Leung and that he would very shortly learn what had happened to her and take appropriate measures. Lucy's faith in Tran's powers was in the same ballpark as her faith in the Deity; in Heaven, God disposed, in New York, Tran. With respect to the former power, she had a fine sense of what sort of prayers would be most effective, and so she did not pray for release from her captivity but for courage and endurance and also that when Tran found her, he would not be too awful to her captors.