Chinatown Beat (9 page)

Lucky let the winnings roll.

The dealer ran through a three-hour rotation of players and before the dinner shift had taken three thousand eighty out of the squares.

When the sun set, Luckywent down to the Bowery outskirts, the desolate streets leading out beyond Chinatown where it rubbed raw against the rest of Loisaida and the Alphabets. He entered the storefront with its window gate down, next to the bodega. One of Flavio's places. Spread the dirty money among the clients. Goodwill for Flavio, a kilo-a-week buyer of Ghost Number Four heroin.

Inside, Lucky gave the mommy fifty dollars, looking over the partition to scan the Latina crikas-whores-seated on folding chairs under the sickly green-blue light of lava lamps. Some of the whores had thighs heavy with cellulite inside fishnet stockings, bean-bloated bellies under spandex, hard faces pushing the far side of forty.

The mommy gave him a playing card, a yellow jack. Men were waiting about, sexual tension leaned up against the walls, and then a few more girls came out of the back maze of cubicles, carrying baskets of mouthwash, condoms, KYJelly, and paper towels. There were Cubans, a Venezuelan, a Panamanian, a Colombian, but mostly they were Dominicans fresh off the tarmac at LaGuardia, jetting in via the Santo Domingo pipeline.

For the merciless dollar they'd surrender themselves up to desperate men they'd rendered faceless, shapeless, colorless, just a trick tube of flesh invading their vaginas, their mouths, but not their souls.

The Panamanian. Young and tall, bottle-blond. He gave her the playing card and followed her inside.

"Pon na ma?" he asked.

"Si papisito, habla espanol?"

"Poquito." He smiled.

"Chino, no?" she said as she rolled down her top. Big brown torpedo nipples.

"Si," Lucky said, undressing. "Chino."

They were naked on the mattress and she was licking him. He heard himself moaning, watching her tongue working him, then sucking him into Chinaman heaven.

"Ma mao bicho," he whispered, blow me, holding her by the neck. He got rock hard and turned her over, entered the rich brown of her, doggie style.

"Mi amor," she was whispering, his lun cock stroking her.

"Mamita," he groaned like the low growl of a dog, and came long and angrily, deep inside of her.

Memory

As was her routine on Sunday afternoons, Mona pressed the Discman's plugs into her ears, adjusted the volume, then wrapped the Hermes silk square over her head and knotted it under her chin. Shirley Kwan sang a ballad into her brain as the elevator descended, and before Mona stepped out onto Henry Street, she slipped the black Vuarnets over her eyes.

She took the side streets south, away from the China Plaza, went as far as the Seaport and turned west toward the Hudson River. She didn't know the names of the streets but followed landmarks from memory, walking distance from Chinatown recalled. The way led through the steel-and-glass canyons of the Business District, pass a gwailo American department store where she found designer lingerie, toiletries, household items. Farther down that street was a travel agency she recognized by the pictures of ships and exotic locales, and a model airliner, displayed in the show window. On one occasion she had noticed a Chinese woman inside, wearing the red uniform blazer of the agency. Lucky red, she'd thought, and jook-sing, born American, she'd guessed.

Her route took her toward the river until she reached the World Financial Center. The promenade was deserted, as she had expected. She looked out over the harbor where the rivers met and mixed into riptides.

In the near distance she could see the Statue of Liberty, and she considered the word freedom, but remembered Uncle Four's bitter remarks about the exclusion of the Chinese, especially Chinese women, from these shores. She switched off the Discman, peered out beyond the choppy expanse of water, and began to wonder about liberty, and what she would need to do to gain it.

Out on the wet blue shining, the ships and boats reminded her of Hong Kong, the fragrant harbor, and as she stroked her piece of jade her mind reeled back to lost youth and forgotten hopes.

In Hong Kong she had crowded into cousins' bunk beds until she was sixteen, when she feared uncle would come into her room at night, herself the only girl there. She remembered wanting to be a movie star.

The memories that came after were mostly about jobs she had had long before she'd managed to work her way up from Wanchai to Central, in Club Volvo, in TsimSha Cheui, the tourist sex ghetto, before she'd wound up on Nathan Road.

She'd worked component assembly at TongKai Precision, in the beauty-care industry, making devices called Beauty Facial Sauna, Eye Massager, Deep Heat Body Massager, Scalp Stimulatortouted to improve blood circulation, cleanse the skin, eliminate cellulite.

That position lasted six months, then Fat Louie Kai tried to stimulate her blood circulation against her will. She remembered working for lofeiYat "Playboy" Pang, an aging gangster and the boss of Electronix Express, stamping circuit boards, LEDs, voice programs for talking thermo clocks: Mr. Temperature. Thermo-Talk Inc. The clocks presented multilingual digital displays and humanlike electronic voices that reported time and temperature in English, Spanish, French, German, Cyrillic, and Chinese (Mandarin only). Every hour, or at the touch of a button.

Every two months, databanks and calculators.

In the fall, children's programs for Christmas toys. Talking MathQuiz Pinball, Ring Back Talking Phone, Phone Calculator Pencil Box.

In one period, she assembled flashlights for five weeks.

In Chai Wan, she'd assembled plastics for High Speed Industries, snapping together pocket digital gambling games labeled Blackjack, Slot Machine, Craps, Roulette, Poker, Baccarat, and Deuces. Miniature versions were attached to keychains.

In Tseun Wan she had attached watchbands onto digital and quartz watches, in two months rising up the production line at Best Fortune Inc. to mini-alarm clocks and electronic pedometers.

Assembly work was all the same. Girls and women slouched over their workstations under the fluorescent lights, sometimes twenty or thirty on each side of a long conveyor belt, working their goods onto the moving rubber blacktop. They were seated on backless stools, sometimes metal, sometimes plastic or cheap handcrafted bamboo.

The factories were unbearable in the humid monsoon season, a mindless drudgery always. She punched in just after the sun came up. Punched out when the moon put a bright hole against the deep blue of night.

Another time she'd been a sales rep for costume jewelry and accessories made in Mainland China and selling well at large department stores in Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, and Japan. She never got used to hotels and airports. Tak Sing Imitation Jewelry. Necklaces, earrings, bangles, hair clasps. Gold- and silverplated steel key rings, cufflinks. It didn't last.

A different man, a different product. Wholesale rep for Everrich Handbags factory. Portfolios, briefcases, clutches, purses, shoulder bags. Leather cowhide wallets, makeup cases, and organizers.

She learned quickly the play between sex and money. If sex was attached to the job, best to be paid richly for it. Seek men with power, wealth.

Always it was a man who provided a job, always a man who took it away. Always for the same reason: she wouldn't have sex with them. When the time came to fire her, it was because her work habits were unsatisfactory, or business was bad and layoffs were necessary. Or inventory turned up missing from her line.

Men. No sex. No job.

Seven jobs in two years. Along the way, dirty old men, nasty young men. Sun Tak thugs who fancied themselves playboys passed her around among themselves. Several European indus trialists who had pledged their love until they'd bankrupted their businesses and abandoned her.

The longest job lasted nine months, at Fook Inc., the island's largest watchmaker, until old man Ah Fook died and young son Fook came around wanting what all the others before him demanded.

She'd moved on.

Now the sounds of the waterfront receded and she found herself following the traffic down the side streets back toward Chinatown.

Tin Nee Beauty Salon was a beauty-and-fitness emporium on the second floor of the jade Building, in the middle of the noise roaring along Canal Street. Exercise machines, whirlpool. Manicure.

Mona maintained a regular appointment every other Sunday, but she was later than usual on this afternoon. Facial, sauna. A massage, the purity of innocent hands rubbing, squeezing away the poisonous touch of a piggish old man. Steam and heat purging the smell of Uncle Four from her pores.

She sank her body into the massage table, remembering Water Over Thunder, strengthen base of operations.

But how?

If she could find a woman, an accomplice, to help her secure a false passport or a new identity, she might be able to escape. But who? The secrecy of her relationship to Uncle Four forbade her any ordinary friends. And she didn't trust women anyway, especially the gossipers who cut her hair and polished her nails, always slipping in rude questions she had to evade. They never said what they knew, although she suspected they knew enough to gong sifay- spread gossip-behind her back as soon as she stepped out of the salon. So she went to several salons during the year, rotating them, thinking she could keep them off balance.

But who? Working-class women, factory women, would be suspicious of her, would misjudge her intentions. The sin lai lai, socialites, would recognize her for what she was, cheap see, mistress, and would disdain her, betray her.

The counterfeit identification business was underground traffic, and if she was betrayed, Uncle Four would surely punish her.

She pressed her fingers into the jade piece, her hand sweaty from the masseuse's artistry of pushing hands. Lake over water. Trapped. Abandoned, alone, nowhere to turn. Muscles loosening up. Sign of Sacrifice. Insight matures, resolves swells.

Help, she pleaded to herself.

Having dispatched the dailo to correct the gang boys wayward extortions at the far end of East Broadway, Colo Chuk, the oncefeared Hip Ching enforcer, returned to his one-bedroom walk-up on Pell, tossed his pack of 555s onto the bed, and undressed. In the mirror behind the door he saw a forty-nine-year-old man, sixfoot-two inches tall, bald except for the short hair graying at his temples. He looked like a waiter, an accountant, a clerk, certainly not like a Red Pole, enforcer rank, in the HungHuen Red Circle Triad.

He turned on the cable TV, kept the Chinese program low, just loud enough to add some noise to the empty space.

On the TV there was Hong Kong gunplay. He watched it from the corners of his eyes, and opened up the pack of cigarettes. He shook out an eighth of Chinese Number Three, a teak-brown powder in a glassine packet. The powder was flecked throughout with larger, rockier chunks. He pulled the foil from the cigarette pack, made a chute out of it and carefully extracted one of the tiny rocks between his fingers, handling it like bow buey, preciousness.

The little rock dropped onto the foil slide and he flicked his butane lighter under it. The grain gave off a vaporous trail that slowly made its way down the foil. Colo formed an "0" with his lips, following, inhaling the twisting, flowing trail of smoke. Shrinking as it went, the rock neared the end of the slide and he reversed it, until it was gone, all inside him. After a moment he said chasing the dragon so quietly it was almost like praying.

The Number Three was very uneven, lumpy, but better than ninety percent. Dark-skinned Hakkanese, fierce Hakka province drug runners, had told him the deal was three pounds, two kilos split in separate bricks, one-hundred-seventy-five thousand wholesale. A steal.

Uncle Four pledged a hundred thousand cash along with the warning, The price is too low but perhaps they are desperate for money. Doesn't sound like the Hakkas. They are trying to unload it for someone else, who has no distribution. Perhaps it is hijacked powder?

Golo had talked the Hakkas into accepting the balance in gold Panda coins and diamonds stolen out of TsimSha Cheui in Hong Kong by the Red Circle Triad and on consignment at the Sun Fung. At a discount, of course.

Fifty one-ounce Pandas. Two dozen diamonds, a carat each of excellent cut and clarity.

The Hakka can wash gold and diamonds better than anybody.

Golo saw it very clearly: the Triad fronting the gold and ice, Uncle Four squaring the cash end, the Number Three going to the Dragons inside the welfare projects.

He fired up a 555. Reaching under the sofa bed, he came up with a gray-metal box with a combination dial. He sat on the bed and opened it, sucking down the cigarette. What came out of the box was a big glass jar, and a Chinese pistol. When he removed the gun, the banner of the Hung Huen, unfurled red Chinese characters on black cloth across the linoleum floor. Slogans. Myths. From their original, long-ago resolve to restore the Ming dynasty, honor had given way to greed, power, and bloodlust.

Cleaning it now, the gun felt heavy to the touch. It was a Tokarev M213, a nine-millimeter Parabellum of Chinese military issue, copied from the Russians. It had a thirteen-shot magazine and black rubber grips with a red star inset. He ran an oilcloth over the forged steel and stared at the glass jar.

In the glass jar was a severed hand, the hand of a wing chunkung fu-style enforcer, tailing off into umbilicals of tendon and ligament, a shaft of bone protruding from the bloated and whitened flesh where the wrist ended and sure agony began.

Now, with the Number Three roiling his brain, he turned the jar slowly, held it up to the window's brightness. In the hard daylight, he could see with vivid clarity the details of the hand, its nails, fingerprints, fine lines, creases of the palm, calluses where the skin was thick, scarred and bunched around the knuckles, floating in the fluid formaldehyde from Wah San Funeral Home, rotating ever so slowly to accommodate his scrutiny.